Posts by Mage

Re: Alpha Micro...

Depends how much spectrum you have!

My backup internet runs 8 Mbps down and 1 Mbps up over almost 14 km.

My first smartphone had 14.4 kbps over GSM, 20 years ago. If you paid twice as much per second you could have 28.8 kbps too, only slightly slower than my landline. It also did faxes.

Re: broadcast the code

Yes.

Also there were floppy cover discs on magazines. A 7" floppy to play on the record player via the cassette interface.

Back in the 1930s home 78 rpm disc recorders did exist. The 22 line TV and also fax was broadcast on UK and USA Medium Wave (Broadcast Band) transmitters after close down, which wasn't that late at night. Baird's wasn't the only mechanical TV and was obsolete even then. Some home recorded on 78s with 22 line TV survive.

Also even cover disc 78s existed, pressed shellac or plastic on one side of a thin card base.

So loading programs from record player discs and transmissions predates the launch of the IBM PC in the UK. The Act Sirius 1, aka Victor 9000 was actually released in the UK before the IBM PC and was seriously better.

Actually wasn't the floppy originally for loading microcode if the Mainframe was turned off and Gary Kiddal founded Digital Research because no big company was interested. The original DOS being a rip off, sorry re-imagining, of his 8086 version of CP/M by a small company bought by Microsoft.

Re: There’s hope yet!

The Victorians had rechargable cars.

I went to school on an electric trolly bus and the milkman used an electric rechargeable truck.

Musk thinks big with other people's money and has a limitless ego.

Re: rules-of-grammar + random number generator + dictionary search API -->

Doomed.

Partly because all current AI is just fancy pattern matching. Decent research on language translation and understanding was ditched for the so called ML using a Rosetta stone like approach. Started with EU documents.

Also maybe an Alien Institute for Artificial Intelligence would know how to do it? I think my screen text is too small and I read Allen as AI'len and then Alien.

Re: BASIC for the 21st Century

Meh, don't they get that BASIC should NEVER have been on CP/M, AppleII, Pet, Tandy, DOS, BBC Micro? That was Microsoft's fault for Porting Dartmouth BASIC, purely a cut down ForTran as an introduction.

Beginners All Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code.

Though VB5 and VB6 with Option Explict weren't that bad if you had a C++, Modula-2 or Turbo Pascal background. Hardly Basic at all. Basic.net was such a poor replacement for VB6 that changing to C# was better. And C# is really a MS concept of Java. Certainly better than Basic and a decent rework of the Java idea.

I've not used Python, maybe it's great. But comparing it to Basic isn't a recommendation.

Re: continue the fantasy that humanity

This is where we live. We need to take care of if. Even if there were starships only a miniscule number of people could travel. No impact to Earth or Humanity at all apart from extra cost and pollution.

Moon and Mars bases are pointless compared to robot exploration and merely a massive ego trip for the elite. Just because something is fun in SF does not mean it's a sensible blueprint for the future.

Human bases on Mars or the Moon, or on one of Jupiter's moons are nice topics for fiction, but would be an ongoing drain on resources here with tiny scientific returns compared to robotic rovers.

Re: Don't assume malice here

Android is hardly new and this is not new behaviour.

Of course Google and app writers don't have my definition of malice.

Re: someone's getting ripped off

All users. What you are paying is irrelevant. This is theft of your bandwidth.

Re: Windows 10 market, I assume that Arm.

Windows use is mostly inertia and Corporate compatibility, especially older Win32 x86 applications. Apple has changed CPU platform 68K, Power, x86-32, x86-64 only, ARM.

MS concept of backward compatibility on Win10 64 bit is that you image the old computer and put the file in a VM on Win10.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/disk2vhd

The VM is "free" and included in Corporate Win10 versions.

Ironically the same file works fine in the almost same OpenBox bundled with LInux (and presumably somehow on a Mac). In addition there are legacy Windows 32 bit applications that will never be rebuilt for 64 bit and don't work on Win7 or Win 64bit (but do on 32 bit versions). In some cases the authors are dead. Many of these work on 32 bit WINE.

So I can't see Win10 ARM ever being mainstream.

Re: This puzzled me a bit

Like some other Service Vendors, there will eventually be no "buy once unless you want to upgrade" MS programs. It will all be subscription. The Windows OS though might remain free as a platform to sell the subscriptions. Pretty near impossible to buy an ordinary non-Apple laptop without Windows and there is no evidence that the big companies actually pay much for Win10. What percentage of PCs are now kitchen builds with a retail Win10?