* Posts by Ian 55

1043 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Feb 2010

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Microsoft Publisher books its retirement party for 2026

Ian 55

Re: Serif PagePlus...

On Windows, I think it was six years from the paid for release of 1.x to the paid for update of 2.x, but quite!

That was much better than the gap between paid for updates of the PagePlus line.

Code archaeologist digs up oldest known ancestor of MS-DOS

Ian 55

Re: “Byte”

I have a memory of being told in the early 80s that IBM had used the size of a 'byte' to buy time at some point when minicomputers were biting into its market share: by announcing they were considering having a nine bit byte (can't remember if it would be eight data bits plus a parity bit or 'will support character sets with 512 characters') they ensured that enough customers would hold off buying someone else's eight bit byte kit and waste other companies' time redesigning for nine bit bytes.

When they had their new kit ready (the 360 range??) they went 'Oh, we've decided an eight bit byte is perfectly OK'.

Ian 55

Re: CP/M was (still is) Great

I did have an S100 CP/M system - given to me for free (or very very little) from someone who worked at the Fleet Street paper that used them for something or other. The BIOS was for hard sectored drives, but it could read soft sectored ones if you let it spend a few minutes working out the timings on any particular 8" floppy disk.

Alas, it was far too big to keep during a move a few years later.

I can see why they're rare: almost anything will emulate them better than they ever were.

Ian 55

Re: Seattle Computer Services and CP/M

Did we ever know the answer as to why the BDOS call to print a string used '$' as the string's terminator?

It was one of Gary Kildall's questions when they were denying just copying the API.

Ian 55

Re: Shift left, people.

FAT was fine until you swapped a floppy disk without ensuring everything necessary had been written to it.

CP/M's file system would at least detect that - the infamous 'BDOS ERROR ON B' - whereas QDOS/86-DOS and early PC-DOS/MS-DOS would happily write the info for the old disk onto the new one.

Result: two corrupted floppy disks instead of one.

Still, it would be worth it for the Unix-like pipes and multitasking we were promised for MS-DOS 2.0 ...

Infosec experts divided over 23andMe's 'victim-blaming' stance on data breach

Ian 55

Re: I just never understand

See the behaviour of various members of the UK's leading 'only important because of who they claim their ancestors were' family.

I am told that more than one senior royal declines to wear hats in food factories etc to stop anyone getting a hair sample off them.

UK officials caught napping ahead of 2G and 3G doomsday

Ian 55

Re: Going to be awkward

Have I misunderstood that the higher frequencies used mean that you need more 5G masts than 4G ones and more 4G than 3G etc?

Similarly, they'll be an 'off' period while the actual kit is swapped, won't there?

Doom is 30, and so is Windows NT. How far we haven't come

Ian 55

Re: Monopolistic stagnation

You did see that OpenAI, a company that Microsoft has given billions and billions and billions to, won't us MS Teams, didn't you?

Linux Mint 21.3 and Zorin 17 are beta buddies

Ian 55

For someone on MATE, how much change would they notice moving to Cinnamon?

Asking for some kids...

Ian 55

Re: Zorin

"FOSS programmers gladly fork existing projects to do things their own way and so need no encouragement."

It'd be funny if it weren't so painfully true.

Microsoft's bug bounty turns 10. Are these kinds of rewards making code more secure?

Ian 55

"We've paid $63m over 10 years, $60m in the past 5"

That says you were seriously underpaying in the first five or your products have become a lot worse or, most probably, both.

UK's cookie crumble: Data watchdog serves up tougher recipe for consent banners

Ian 55

Re: TANSTAAFL

The problem is that the stats are usually completely wrong because of things like click fraud.

When I used to buy advertising, I could call the print publications I wanted to advertise in, negotiate a good price and be sure that they shifted so many print copies of something I knew my targets would read and the ad would appear in just the pages they would look at.

If I bought advertising online now, I'd doubtless..

.. end up next to something praising Hitler on Twitter

.. pay for something 'seen' by the webspider bots of a Chinese search engine company

.. encourage a site whose owner doesn't have 'enabling genocide' as one of his biggest regrets, despite having done just that

.. be blocked by anyone with a clue.

Ian 55

Re: 30 days to get compliant with tracking rules or face enforcement action

In the 19th C, Punch suggested that a rash of insurance companies failing could be stopped by announcing that all the directors of the next one to fail would be hanged.

Worth trying, once updated a bit.

Ian 55

Re: Next should be non consentual email

I left NatWest after their IT failed around 2012 and customers' payments were missing for a couple of days. I was glad I had when they had similar problems again and again.

I recently took the £200 bribe to try them again, and it quickly became clear that £200 wasn't enough in exchange for the pain. The NatWest experience was bad and it's now *terrible*.

Ditch them.

First Direct's phone service is great and they'll bribe you to switch. Starling's app is great and they do not need to bribe people to switch. Other banks exist.

Revamped Raspberry Pi OS boasts Wayland desktop and improved imager tool

Ian 55

It worked for Apple...

Still does.

Linux will soon offer switchable x86-32 binary support

Ian 55

Re: "one with 32-bit support and another without"

Hmm, depends on what you want to do. Take away the games played through Steam and I don't think I have anything that needs the 32-bit libraries.

But it depends on what you think is legacy cruft, and gamers are going to want to game on their new hardware, not just their 'legacy' kit.

Ian 55

There would be a (very small) program

.. to do that in any distro worth the name.

Or have it as a GRUB option for the distro's boot options, instead of just 'yadistro' / 'yadistro (recovery mode)'.

Winklevoss twins back in hot water after NY AG sues over $1B cryptocurrency fraud

Ian 55

Re: What Becomes of the Broken-Hearted ?

The usual fault of reporting is to say "invested" when "gambled" would be more accurate, but the regulators allowed companies like these to call it an "investment".

Ian 55

Re: Crypto Currency

Not so much 'faith in government' as 'faith in the ability of government to raise income via taxes, by force if necessary'.

Mozilla's midlife crisis has taken it from web pioneer to Google's weird neighbor

Ian 55

Re: Ooh, you can access Slack via Thunderbird

Never having tried IM in Thunderbird, I was thinking that libPurple was used by it.

I'd use Pigdin but not the official app, so thanks again..

Ian 55

I was upset at losing a couple of addons when XUL was ditched

TabMixPlus was one, obviously.

But they've been replaced by others that together do more or less the same thing, and the experience of using Firefox with addons craps all over the Edge or Chrome experience I get somewhere I have no choice.

Ian 55

Ooh, you can access Slack via Thunderbird

Worth reading just to discover that.

Ian 55

Re: Self-reinforcing

I have several browsers for different things:

Opera - built-in VPN that works fine for the little region-locked stuff I want

Chromium - the handful of sites that won't work in Firefox

Firefox - everything else. NoScript + uBlock Origin + tree style tab + various other addons make this by far the best experience 99% of the time.

PhD student guilty of 3D-printing 'kamikaze' drone for Islamic State terrorists

Ian 55

Re: Not the brightest tool in the shed.

Labour have declared that, since they won't change lots of other things, Sunak will be kept on as PM should they win...

Ian 55

Application form = blackmail material?

I don't know what the dropout rate is between expressing interest in joining a jihad and starting to murder people, but I suspect it's not low.

Knowing that there is a filled out IS application form that they could, if they wanted, forward to your local anti-terrorism police must come in handy to keep the figures down.

Particularly if not actually killing people or trying launching your drone still gets you a life sentence.

Raspberry Pi 5 revealed, and it should satisfy your need for speed

Ian 55

Re: HW Video Decoding

And presumably dropping it means saving some pennies too?

Ian 55

It's slightly annoying that it's been announced..

..really not that long after individuals could actually buy Pi 4s again but apart from that, it's all good stuff.

You only used the audio port if you were desperate - having a low spec audio out was a design compromise and everyone who wanted better used the HDMI out or one of the excellent HAT audio solutions.

I'd love to know what the actual demand for two HDMI outs is vs high quality audio out via a 3.5mm jack is though.

Ian 55

Re: Lost the plot

Well, it depends on what the project is. Some things need lots of RAM, some will happily run on an Arduino Duo.

Linux Mint Debian Edition 6 hits beta with reassuringly little drama

Ian 55

Security updates?

At one point, LMDE's repositories noticeably lagged behind the upstream ones, with the result that published security updates could take days or weeks (or was it even months in some cases?) to become available.

Memory tells me that this affected things like Firefox. Oops.

Is this still the case?

GNU turns 40: Stallman's baby still not ready for prime time, but hey, there's cake

Ian 55

Re: A Complicated Man

That says quite a lot about you...

With version 117, Firefox finally speaks Chrome's translation language

Ian 55

Re: I use it everyday.

It also doesn't crash when you have five thousand or so tabs open.

Ian 55

Re: FF convert

Stop digging.

The altering of URLs to replace afliate links with their own ones was the absolute deal breaker for using Brave.

They did it once, we're caught, and did it again from memory, but once should have been enough for anyone.

USENET, the OG social network, rises again like a text-only phoenix

Ian 55

Re: _Bottom_ posted?

On every newsgroup, though?

Either he didn't or I had really good filters back then.

Ian 55

Is there anywhere giving free access to the alt.binary newsgroups

Asking for a friend, just in case they still have good stuff.

Sparkling fresh updates to Ubuntu, Mint and Zorin on way

Ian 55

Re: They could

Here the question is would Zorin say 'fine' to losing whatever money they get from the paid for versions?

Ian 55

Re: Linux developers do NOT want to acknowledge THEIR *VERY REAL PROBLEM*...

When I was using Ubuntu, the six monthly updated versions were very good - each time, things got better.

Then Unity happened.

Brave cuts ties with Bing to offer its own image and video search results

Ian 55

Re: A pity about …

Even more of a pity that it has been caught changing affiliate links in crypto URLs to its own affiliate ones. More than once.

Middleweight champ MX Linux 23 delivers knockout punch

Ian 55

Re: this shoggoth of a startup daemon

Yep.

The UK politics equivalent would be that there are plenty of people who didn't think the system was working for them. The 'solution' we ended up with was Brexit.

Arc: A radical fresh take on the web browser

Ian 55

Re: Off topic

I've probably got around five thousand tabs open at the moment.

Ian 55

Re: Off topic

Quite right! I have a number of scripts that save me plenty of time.

I also have some that didn't. Some made things worse, per xkcd 1319.

Knowing which will be the end result is - to me at least - similar to the halting problem. Most of the time, you can look at it and go 'yeah, reasonably easy' or 'nah, too many possible inputs', but especially when you're relying on someone upstream not to change their output or what input they want, you can get caught out.

Ian 55

Re: Off topic

Instead of doing sums in a spreadsheet model on a calculator and then entering the results manually* a power user wants to be able to program some macros to save 0.1% of the time in entering some figures. Unfortunately, the macros contain a fencepost error, the results are wrong, and the company risks going bust as a result..

Someone who the IT department think is a pain, but not because they have to be shown the on/off switch every day like most other pains.

That sort of person.

* I know a manager with a ten figure budget who does this for anything more complicated than summing a column of figures.

Creator of the Unix Sysadmin Song explains he just wanted to liven up a textbook

Ian 55

You'll regret it

Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of your life.

Allowing systemd onto your kit summed up perfectly.

Ian 55

Not if they're in a 16-bit program.

Musk's X tries to win advertisers back with discounts

Ian 55

Re: Watching Musk run this into the ground...

The problem with https://substack.com/app-link/post?publication_id=8982&post_id=135448974 is that it isn't rude enough about Musk.

What does Twitter's new logo really represent?

Ian 55
Thumb Up

Re: Let's hope it stops the hate comments

The tragedy is that he didn't want to see the Titanic close up...

Windows XP activation algorithm cracked, keygen now works on Linux

Ian 55

250 discs

I suspect it was a US government spec that software they buy be available in the format.

Mint 21.2 is desktop Linux without the faff

Ian 55

Re: "Pretty" Considered As Unimportant!!

It did, but for some of us it did so far too late.

Jury orders Google to pay $340M patent-infringement damages over Chromecast

Ian 55

'Stick your penis in this' toys go back further than that.

The novel step in the Fleshlight is really the material.

Virgin Galactic finally gets its first paying customers to edge of space

Ian 55

Re: Day trip

Still waiting for the revenge of a Martian civilization to start destroying various prestige projects too...

Linux Mint cuts slice of 'Victoria' as 21.2 beta lands with dash of fresh Cinnamon

Ian 55

Re: Thank you!

I find it really interesting that I don't like a vertical task bar.

Maybe the experience of Unity on a netbook has scarred me, or maybe it's having a screen that's 'only' 1920x1080 and liking that width for browser tab trees or having two documents side by side.

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