Posts by DexterWard

52-year-old data tape could contain only known copy of UNIX V4

Re: The work of giants

W Richard Stevens wrote the first edition of Unix Network Programming using vi and troff. There was a true Unix Guru

Windows 11 update breaks localhost, prompting mass uninstall workaround

I rather liked Clippy, or rather, the cat which you could install as an alternative. It slept, washed itself, scratched the sides of the windows, and chased the mouse every so often. Cute. It was no use for anything productive, but at least it didn’t walk across the keyboard or shred the paper as it came out of the printer.

People find amazing ways to break computers. Cats are even more creative

One of our cats managed to turn on the feature which reads out websites for the blind. So then I had to google how to turn it off while the computer helpfully read out everything I was doing. I still don’t know what the bizarre key combo to turn it on is.

iRobot may be iDead in iYear

Our very old, not web connected Roomba still works fine. best thing for getting the cat fur out from under the beds; and the cats cats if they happen to be under there when it starts up

Apple quietly admits 8GB isn't enough in 2024, M4 iMac to ship with 16GB as standard

I’m always a bit puzzled when people talk about having 20 or more browser tabs open. isn’t that what bookmarks are for? I don’t think I’ve ever needed more than about three open at once

50 years ago, CP/M started the microcomputer revolution

Re: @AC - CP/M Gets AC From Idiot To Mostly Competent!!!!

W Richard Stevens wrote the first edition of “Unix Network Programming” using vi, and typeset it using troff. That’s pretty hardcore

CrowdStrike file update bricks Windows machines around the world

Re: Waiting For this....:)

Surely only a matter of time before Cloudstrike becomes part of systemd, if it isn’t already

systemd 256.1: Now slightly less likely to delete /home

Re: Too complex!

OSX, unless you have an irrational aversion to Apple products

Version 256 of systemd boasts '42% less Unix philosophy'

Re: How can the rot be stopped?

Use OSX. No systemd there

I stumbled upon LLM Kryptonite – and no one wants to fix this model-breaking bug

Re: So,

This isn’t actually true. Chinese script is mostly phonetic

Starting over: Rebooting the OS stack for fun and profit

Re: Eumel/Elan, developed by Jochen Liedke of L4 fame

A machine which resumes where it left off is fine until some hideous software malfunction renders it inoperable. I recall this being quite easy to do by accident on Smalltalk machines by redefining a method that you shouldn’t have. You still need some way to reload the OS and your software in a working state after something goes tits up. Where does that data come from? Backing store of some kind. And you need a big red button to allow you to reload it.

Forcing AI on developers is a bad idea that is going to happen

Re: Software Development != Coding

I recall in one job being hassled by a manager for not having started writing code for a project for which the customer had not yet provided any requirements. There was however a penalty clause in the contract for being late; but apparently not a clause saying the contract didn’t start until the customer actually said what they wanted.

Apparently the sales team had done all the hard work and got the sale, and now it was engineering holding things up by wanting to know what they were supposed to do.

What is Model Collapse and how to avoid it

Re: Recursive pollution is the number one LLM risk

ML systems should not eat their own output just as mammals should not consume brains of their own species.

So eating ancestor's brains is bad?

There's a book "The Ghost Disease" about how the habit in some parts of New Guinea caused Kuru - a type of Creuzfeld-Jakob Disease.

It's interesting that the same applies to AI

The Land Before Linux: Let's talk about the Unix desktops

Re: Meet the New War....same as the Old War

I thought the evangelicals were in the pro systemd crowd?

For a moment there, Lotus Notes appeared to do everything a company needed

I have bad memories of Notes being desperately slow with a terrible mail client, and a tendency to eat all available memory.

Good document sharing, but that was about its only good point.

We only used it at all because there was a Notes evangelist; after he left, it was ditched ASAP

Digital memories are disappearing and not even AI or Google can help

Re: You have HUNDREDS of browser tabs???

I don’t understand why you would have more than one or two tabs open at a time. Why not just bookmark stuff?

I also don’t understand this obsession with hanging onto everything. Who cares if a 30 year old file isn’t readable any more?

If the information is important, print it out. Paper will last much longer than any digital medium.

HP exec says quiet part out loud when it comes to locking in print customers

Re: Since then it has banked double-digit revenues.

Also quite happy with my HP printer plus instant ink. About half the price of buying cartridges, and I have hobbies that need colour printing, although not in big volumes.

User read the manual, followed instructions, still couldn't make 'Excel' work

Cats are very good at activating such things by walking over the keyboard. A few years ago one of ours turned on the option to read out the text of all websites on the Mac. Took ages to find out how to turn it off, with the computer helpfully reading out all the google results.

Re: Been there, Done That. will do that again...

Not every modern OS. It’s one of the nice things about OSX on the Mac that it doesn’t do this. The app icon jumps up and down to let you know it wants attention, but it doesn’t pop up a cursed modal dialog. The Linux thing of moving focus with the mouse pointer is even worse, but at least you can turn it off.

Switch to hit the fan as BT begins prep ahead of analog phone sunset

Re: “Roads? Where We’re Going, We Don’t Need Roads” (Doc Brown)

This may be news to you, but large swathes of the rural UK have no mobile signal. Or fibre broadband, or in some cases any broadband at all.

So there is no alternative to a landline for some.

Until that is fixed, this scheme isn’t going to work

GCC 13 to support Modula-2: Follow-up to Pascal lives on in FOSS form

Designed and wrote a system using networked PCs in the late 80s all written in Modula 2 using the TopSpeed compiler. Worked very well as the well defined module interfaces allowed easy team working, and the multi tasking features allowed the system to work in real time controlling a radio system

UK government set to extract hospital data to Palantir system without patient consent

Re: Hidden backlog

May not work for all surgeries, but for ours, hitting the # key stops the pre recorded message and connects you

Rust is eating into our systems, and it's a good thing

Re: I'm getting rusty

C++ template error messages are so obscure that they have introduced a new language feature in C++20 purely to make the template errors comprehensible. ‘Concepts’. I like C++ but it is now so huge and complex that I can’t believe anyone can know all of it. Rust strikes me as more a replacement for C than C++ anyway. Much less expressive power than C++ but it tries to do one thing well, which is not a bad idea at all.

Liz Truss ousted as UK prime minister, outlived by online lettuce

Re: Please help me here

‘Liz Truss’ is a failed AI experiment. Hence that strange way of talking

HP pilots paper delivery service for Instant Ink subscribers

The instant ink thing is good. I reckon it works out at about half the cost of buying cartridges, and they get delivered automagically whenever your old ones are getting low. For £48 per year I think it’s good value. Laserjets still work out cheaper, but I use colour a lot, and colours lasers are not cheap.

Heresy: Hare programming language an alternative to C

Re: No moving targets

Move semantics let smart pointers work properly, which is a big deal.

ZX Spectrum, the 8-bit home computer that turned Europe on to PCs, is 40

Re: Z80 vs 6502/6510 for games

I thought the Z80 was more powerful than the 6502 until I had written games for both. Then I realised the 6502 is much better than it looks; the zero page is effectively 256 (slow) registers. It’s actually easier to write fast efficient code on the 6502; in many ways it was the first RISC machine.

In terms of speed a 1 MHz 6502 and 2 MHz Z80 were pretty much the same, but 6502 code tended to be more compact.

Not the only one. I had an Exidy Sorcerer, then a NewBrain. Taught myself assembly programming on the Sorcerer writing a Galaxian-like game. Happy days

Saving a loved one from a document disaster

Re: Cats do that too

One of our cats managed to hit the key combo which makes the Mac read out everything on the screen aloud. Of course, had no idea what the combo was to undo it, so had to search while enduring the computer helpfully reading everything out.

Car radios crashed by station broadcasting images with no file extension

Re: GIGO for the goddesses sake!

It’s not an unreasonable expectation that the OS would do the conversion if you changed the extension. Then the machine file format and human readable extension would be in sync.

I realise no current OS does this, but it’s certainly not a bad idea.

(Didn’t the original MacOS do something like this with its resource fork?)