Posts by John Gamble 672 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Sep 2007
It's a valid complaint, but when, to pick a couple of real examples, the packages you want to download are current in Flathub and literally years out of date from the distro, I'll pick the Flatpak version every time. And given that I am currently spoiled with disk space (thank you manufacturers who briefly over-produced SSDs), I don't care about the extra file space.
I mean, just looking at the two screenshots provided and by comparison, yes, RiscOS's fonts are definitely grainier.
Neither is great by today's standards (even allowing for the bad flat icons we have today). Knowing nothing about it, I'd assume the RiscOS style was meant primarily for greyscale displays.
"Alas, it does not appear to include C."
VMS had, at least back in the day, a love-hate relationship with C. I sometimes wonder if there were someone at DEC still nursing a grudge that BLISS lost out to it.
By the time VAX C came around, the company I worked at already had quite an investment in Whitesmith's C compiler and related tools.
For those who don't have a Walgreen's (or more formally, a store in the Walgreens Boots Alliance) nearby, they started asking for your telephone number before payment a few years ago. You get a discount on some items if you provide it.
So, they have a rather extensive database on those individuals by now, I'm sure.
Better for the environment is perhaps a better statement.
People don't seem to realize just how polluting oil refining is, not to mention the enormous amount of energy oil cracking requires.
Yeah, EVs require minerals that need to be mined, but gasoline/petrol doesn't emerge from the ground with a preset octane rating.
The problem is that that attitude tends to lead to nothing being added. There are a couple of features supplied by modules that should have been in the language proper at least a decade ago, and maybe before then.
And I would be thrilled if a couple of features were eliminated (or at least transferred into a module). The reduce "reduce cognitive load" argument cuts both ways.
Yes, they were. I could have sworn the articles were from the mid or late 1980s, but apparently not:
"In 1990, William and I wrote up a document entitled “386BSD: A Modest Proposal”, outlining the basic specifications of a port of Berkeley Unix to the 386. We approached Jon Erickson at Dr. Dobbs Journal, the premiere hard technology magazine at the time, to write a series of articles documenting the process and code of the port. Dr. Dobb’s Journal focused on MS-DOS at the time but Jon felt this was an excellent opportunity to expand his readership to Unix that would run on 386 hardware."
From his obituary written by Lynne Greer Jolitz.
As an end-user and writer of DCL files? Still a lot, let me get back to using F$PARSE functions.
As an administrator? I'd need a crash course.
I wonder if the Whitesmith C compiler is still available? And of course I'd have to search down all those ZOO archives.
I voted for "Flight of the Bumblebee" (the Al Hirt version) (what, am I the only one with fond memories of The Green Hornet as a child?), but I might have voted differently if number 3 were instead "A seven-year-old yelling 'Nyyyaaaaoooowwww'".
I'd be more interested in the story of the samurai who led the 2nd Maine Veteran Infantry Unit and communicated his success via fax, thanks to the inventions of John Ericsson.
There, I think I combined enough obscure Civil War details into one sentence.
(For the alt-history types, there was only one Maine Veteran Infantry unit, and John Ericsson was the designer of the Monitor. History seems to be silent on the number of samurai who served in the Civil War.)
Mailing list mostly, although the rot goes back to the comp.lang.perl days.
Between passive-aggressive replies (which I see everywhere in coders regardless of language) and a resistance to change in the coding "infrastructure" (which is paradoxical given the changes people are willing to make in the language), reading some threads can be unpleasant. I can imagine what it's like for the actual recipients.
Note, Perl is part of my set of languages, and I've even made a couple of contributions to the included modules, though not to the language itself. But I've kept off the mailing list.
"The same PRC test that cannot distinguish between any number of respiratory diseases and will be retired from use in the United States at the end of this year after providing several more months of nearly meaningless statistics."
You fell for the RWNJ mis-information. To be fair(ish), CDC didn't provide a layman's announcement to go with the medical one, but still, this is something you could have looked up.
Julian Sanchez (from that lefty organization The Cato Institute) tweeted it very well:
"The PCR test, of course, does NOT confuse COVID with flu. CDC was saying: 'There are now better tests that can tell you if you have COVID, but ALSO tell you if instead you have the flu. They can diagnose more than one thing. Use those instead.'"
There's only speculation, but it might be that with the license change and the addition of telemetry, there was the possibility of violating GDPR rules (acquiring data, no matter how anonymized, from a minor).
But: I haven't seen a real lawyer chime in; Muse Group hasn't demonstrated a competent understanding of US or EU laws so far; they keep playing keep-away with the licensing agreements (so who knows what's going to apply next week); and honestly it just may be plain stupidity on their part.
Thank you for the link, I didn't know about that one.
But I suspect they did actually mean Vulcan, which was the hypothesized planet to explain why Mercury's orbit kept mismatching from what Newtonion laws predicted (this was before Einstein's General Relativity was shown to be a better explanation).
In Search of Planet Vulcan, by Richard Baum and William Sheehan, a very good book on the state of astronomy then, and why astronomers were so determined to find it.
I took a look at the timelines of the people who were attacking Cookie Engineer and surprise! I found the standard combination of anime and porn posts that indicate bot accounts, at least to me. So who knows who's actually on the attack here.
This is not the only Audacity fork out there, and I'm curious as to how those accounts are also being treated.
It probably doesn't have the structural properties needed for the task.
"... but is it necessary any more?"
As the sub-heading says, "For that one weird app..."
In my case, a program called Logic Friday.
I not only need to run it on WINE, I have to download it from Internet Archive now, as its creators seem to have vanished.
(Link, for those whose curiosity is piqued: Logic Friday.)
Google's mishandling of the USENET groups goes back over a decade. Looking up iconic articles became more and more difficult, until there was no point to logging on to it at all.
It would not surprise me to find that some of the "missing" groups have just been lost, and not backed up.
"There are lost of people I work with who I don't particularly like (and, I am sure, don't particularly like me) - if that is the yardstick we are using to decide on firing people then we will all be on the dole soon enough."
But that's not the yardstick, and it's disingenuous of you to frame it that way. This was someone who flat out denied the worth of his co-workers if they happened to be women. Presumably this includes anything from technical matters to management. So how can you trust his judgement if he's evaluating a colleague's (or worse, a subordinate's) work?
That was a rhetorical question by the way, the answer is that you can't.
Also the creator of the DanKam app, which enhanced certain colors for the colorblind. He created it after a Star Trek movie viewing with a friend who hadn't realized that one of the characters had green skin.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2010/12/15/security-guru-launches-iphone-app-to-hack-colorblindness/?sh=3cebcd442c2b
And on a sadder note, his family had to release a statement that he had died of complications from diabetes, to combat a particular anti-vax creep who had claimed that he had died of complications from the vaccine.
Or as another person put it, more succinctly, consent is important. The researchers didn't contact anyone and ask them if they would consent to be part of an experiment.
Deciding that other people's efforts don't matter as long as you think your ends justify your means? That makes you the bad guy.
"The people of Wisconsin got rid of him at the first opportunity..."
Second opportunity. He survived a recall election, which isn't that surprising as voters tend to resent being told they need to change their vote early. Still, it would have been nice if Governor Boot-licker had been ejected earlier.
Seriously? Okay, first of all, you don't know what redlining is (or you wouldn't have written "if it was real"), and you don't know what the rules were that were used to lessen (unfortunately, not eliminate) it. Banks were never "forbidden" to loan, they just didn't, because if you let any neighborhood have Black homeowners, then (horrors) the bankers' own neighborhoods would be next. There was always an economic incentive to not redline, but guess what? They did anyway.
So enter the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act, passed by Congress in ... 1975. Hmm, Clinton doesn't appear to enter into it.
And yeah, very much aware of bundling of home loans (how do you think my bank loan wound up with Countrywide?), which reached toxic level in... hmm, the Cheney-Bush [sic] administration. Funny that. No one forced the banks and home loan businesses to go down that path. They did so knowing that they could get away with it. No regulation forced them to make bad loans (the subject in question, despite your efforts to steer it away from that), the banks simply lied about their quality.
Here's one for you, written after the 2011 power failure (why yes, Texas has had state-wide failures before): "Why Does Texas Have Its Own Power Grid?"
Looking forward to the rent increase coupled with the pay cut.
"I'm old enough to remember LBJ's last year in office. Now that really was a scary sh*t year. This is just very high stakes political theater."
So am I. And yeah, it was beyond troubled. But you're blathering. This is in no way comparable, especially since I don't recall LBJ trying to overthrow the normal transfer of presidential power (indeed, you may recall he declined to run for re-election).
You are in the grips of fear-mongering nitwits who are eager to give up their rights as long as their preferred strong man can take control. The only thing you've shown is that you're a sucker.
It can be viewed as a warning shot (I'm viewing it this way; whether actual Supreme Court justices and scholars view it this way is a different matter).
There are eight other justices that may or may not agree though, and of course legislative action may change everything before any argument reaches the court.
"Something the US is very, very good at (on the whole) Acronyms/Bacronyms. Do US orgs and corps actually have people with the specific job of coming up with them? Is there a graduate course one can attend with the aim of having that job title?"
Yes, it's part of the MFA degree program. Required courses include "How to Use Helvetica Everywhere", and "When to Reverse the 'R' -- An Overview of Retrofuturism".
"Anyone would think that we pronounce 'private equity company' as, 'asset stripper.'"
Because we've been in this business long enough to know that that's exactly what happens.
I realize that it's not guaranteed, and that you're also using the troll icon, but I've seen this in manufacturing, software, newspapers, and theater companies, and I fully expect it to happen here as well.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
