Posts by Mage 9271 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Nov 2007
DRM is evil and doesn't stop real pirates. It just "controls" the consumer, copyright and piracy are just thin excuses to impose DRM.
If you chose "download and transfer via PC" on Amazon, then the publisher decides if DRM is to be used. Amazon is illegally adding DRM when they deliver KFX, when the Publisher has decided to have no DRM.
In most countries certainly you can resell, give away or destroy the book. The physical copy is yours. But for lending there is the concept of rewarding the Author. Authors get a small royalty.
For digital the library buys a licence to loan a certain number of copies simultaneously and royalty has to be paid. There is no physical copy.
You'll find you can't run a library for video or audio by buying a retail copy in most countries.
"The Internet Archive is registered as a library but has asserted an untested (the publishers say “invented”) theory called “Controlled Digital Lending” (CDL), that argues libraries are not infringing copyright when they make digital copies of books they possess. "
Because REAL libraries do two things the IA has refused to do:
1) They buy a real ebook at a Library price. Can be more or less than retail.
2) They pay royalties based on how many times the book has been lent. Paper versions and audio also. The Author or whoever is the copyright holder, not the company with publishing rights, gets that.
The IA has been scanning for years and importing MS and Google scanned books. These are PDF images with OCR for search. The ebook formats are poor. Anyway, if you or I did it, we'd be in court. The stuff that's really public domain is in the regular IA archives, no "lending" even before. The claimed Education excuse is bogus as Unis have been making stuff available and most of the IA OL is fiction.
Depends on your usage and how important random read access of small blocks is vs large file sequential r/w. Also the quality of SSD. Some are basically the same chip tech as cheap USB sticks but with a different bus interface. How much warning of failure vs mechanical HDD and what backup strategy does the user really have? What is powered down archive life?
That's really too sweeping of a statement.
Urdu is more associated with Pakistan, though it's the main language in some Indian states. The 28 Indian states are very diverse. Very many languages.
"Urdu is the 21st most spoken first language in the world, with approximately 66 million who speak it as their native language" Or the 11th most spoken language. Depends on source.
"Gaelic as the display language"
You mean the menu language. as long as áéíóú and ÁÉÍÓÚ work, any Latin-Roman regional setting works. Icelandic, German, Spanish and French have more characters not familiar to USA texts.
I've known people that make notes or write in Irish, German, Polish, French and Spanish with the Menus/OS Localisation set to US or British. Comments in German in programs. The Chinese even invented a way to write Chinese in Roman-Latin characters.
This is cent-pinching by MS.
Bizarre fact: The Irish Health service can't store accented names, Might not be too bad for some from Scandinavia, Baltic states and mainland Europe, but people here that don't much speak Irish will laugh at someone's name without an accent (Fada). Loads of words in Irish have unrelated meanings depending on if áéíóú or aeiou.
Even, Brahmic languages, Chinese, Japanese, Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, Cyrillic based etc? Or just Latin-Roman? Anyone remember Wordstar, or Eudora mail or Amazon Kindles for many years?
No excuse for Eudora, it was a solved problem. Less even for the Kindle as the underlying OS had supported all of those for years.
The USA companies have a very US and English perspective. Many even seem to think only well off white adult males exist. Over 85% of the world's population is outside of North America. The average human has English as a second language, isn't white, has black hair, brown eyes and about 1/2 of them are women.
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"but they've got some very large languages on that list. They were able to afford that before, they can continue to."
Greed and Arrogance.
Unless the teacher was really good, people using Basic only learned Basic, not programming.
If you learn to program it's a few days to pickup any random language, but of course MUCH longer to learn to use the libraries, or in the case of C, which libraries not to use.
The same can be said of many courses on <insert fashionable language>, you're learning a specific language and not much about programming. Though one university course, used Modula-2 as if it was Pascal and taught nothing about co-routines, signals, mutexes, procedure variables, why it has stronger typing so only typed arrays and not anonymous arrays can be assigned, Modules, using public and private parts of modules to implement object orientated programming, doing device drivers using "magic" types. Generic procedures or functions, e.g. a Quick Sort that takes procedures as parameters so it can sort using a Compare passed in. No knowledge needed of types, or type conversion, or even take a parameters which are procedures to access a "table" or file of the data and one to store the sort indexes. Discovered this interviewing a graduate that could produce lovely looking code who had no clue how to program, despite the Honours.
But I never did. I used Z80 Assembler, Pascal, Forth, Modula-2, 8051 assembler, NEC 78HC11 assembler. I learnt QUBAL at school and Fortran at college, then my wife, who studied from CAR Hoare, taught me how to program properly, even in Assembler. Macros and Forth like use of the stack let you use assembler better than Basic.
I wrote a static colour test card in Basic on the Spectrum and looked at the Basic on Apple II and IBM PC, Didn't use them. Wife got me to put UCSD-pascal on the Apple II to learn programming. You needed Modula-2 or Turbo Pascal (more like Modula-2) on the PC for actual applications. I had Modula-2, Prolog and others on the PCW. Controlled test gear with a veroboard interface and Forth on a Jupiter Ace.
The original MS Basic for CP/M etc was um "copied" from Dartmouth BASIC, a cut down version of ForTran. It basically founded their company,
I skipped on MS Basic till VB5. I used QUBAL, Fortran, Pascal, Forth, Modula-2, Prolog, Occam, Coral-66, C++ and C all before 1988 and before VB5, obviously, (short period) then VB6. It was the Forms and ODBC with data controls made it handy for in house stuff.
The GW-Basic was a seriously obsolete idea in the 1980s.
I'd say about social media:
1: Never post photos of self, family or friends. Use email or a private channel to share to family.
2: Never use your real name.
3: Never talk about where you live any more detailed than a county or city.
Unless you are famous and attention seeking, or selling on SM.
Best to avoid it altogether. There was a similar issue with an app that used fitbit or some other fitness tracker.
Why is Google allowed to buy fitbit?
I used emacs and vi occasionally over the years. Maybe one of them first on Cromix.
I did so much dev work using embedded Linux based systems I drifted to Nano. I've gone to the dark side (GUI based): Notepad++ on windows (if I have use Windows) and KATE on Linux.
Over 20 years ago MS or Windows Services For Unix. Bought in at first.
"Although SFU includes X Window System client libraries and applications, it does not contain a native X server. Administrators may configure any of the numerous third-party Windows X servers. Fully featured free options include Cygwin/X, Xming and WeirdX. "
When you had a suitable X-Server many Linux GUI applications ran seamlessly integrated to Explorer Desktop. So 20+ years later MS finally makes it simpler.
Except running Windows in VM, if you really need it, or old 32 bit on Wine-32 on a 64 bit Linux. Or older stuff in DosBox is simpler.
Actual native Linux runs better now on more PCs and laptops and netbooks than Win10. Updates are painless.
So anyone with more than passing interest is going to boot Linux, or dual boot. This is for badly treated developers in a corporate world that wants a Linux application developed and won't allow Native Linux, Dual boot or even a VM with Linux.
This is twenty two years too late. In 1998 when MS did the "halloween" papers users of the Web encountered about 5% Linux servers. Now they encounter over 90%.
The domestic and even some small businesses are using iOS and Android on phones and tablets. PC desktop / laptop sales have stagnated. The take up of Win 10 is part inertia of corporations locked to a handful of windows programs, part most retail laptops have Windows pre-installed. Apple laptops & desktops are expensive and for the faithful.
Linux desktop/laptop is still below the Retail radar. Because it has little marketing and retail are scared of it. Android with it's Linux Kernel has more phones and tablets than anything else ever had. Now also on many so called Smart TVs (with poor GUI design compared to earlier non-Google TV GUIs, I guess mostly tested at desk with apps, not 2.5m away with dozens of terrestrial channels and hundreds to thousands of Satellite channels.
Anyone developing or running Linux is better off with a Native Linux.
Many VB6 activeX controls don't work at all on 64 bit Windows. They do on 32bits. Some VB6 programs are still maintained and distributed. Curiously the SAME non-working VB6 does work under Wine32 on 64 bit Linux even one using the RS232, but the WINE COMx mapped to a Linux USB port with a serial adaptor, though you may discover your Wine is 64 bit only and have to uninstall it, set an environment variable and re-install WINE. IMO the only point of WINE is to run some old Windows program that has no new 64 bit version. Or else you are into the VM overhead.
a) Tablets with 64 bit Atoms but 32 bit EFI. These had 32bit Win 10, but could have had 64 bit? The 64 bit version of Debian but not the Mint I tried can deploy 32 bit boot code and a 64 bit OS.
b) Lots of 64 bit Atoms could do with one more address pin at least. Insane HW limitation to 2 G byte addressing! I've had several 64bit Atom based Netbooks (Windows wiped & Linux mint install) and given them to grateful kids. The 64 Bit Windows, unlike 32bit vs 64 bit Linux, does seem to need more RAM than 2G to be useful. There seems to be no penalty installing 64 bit Linux rather than 32 bit on a low spec Intel, there does seem to be with Windows.
c) Even some 32 bit CPUs with NT4.0 enterprise could use PAE to access more than 4G, most could do 4G RAM if the motherboard allowed. But with XP MS decided to remove PAE support and even by default reduce program access to less than 2 G RAM. Linux seems to still support PAE, though some distros and applications are no longer supporting 32 bit. Waterfox was only ever 64 bit.
d) The connection between addressable memory and supposed CPU "bits"/word size is actually not inherent but a per CPU, memory controller and system decision. Obviously paging can be nasty (the 8088 / 8086 unlike the 286 was really a jumped up 8 bit 8085 with 64K paging and actual 8 bit Z80 went on to be a core in chips with up to 2 M byte external addressing.
So if the existing system is really only 32 bit there is staying with old Win7 or Win10 (or even XP) and not connecting to the Internet, or in the short term Linux (but like Windows, some applications have no 32 bit version). Or if too limited EFI, CPU or RAM, using 64 bit Linux.
Apple ditched 32 bit a while ago? But the x86-64 is their fourth Mac platform (68K, PowerPC, x86-32) and they might go ARM.
"A permanent licence costs £44.90 per year for the full version, or £24.90 per year for a (only slightly) cut-down Home version." I doubt even Mac users would be keen to rent it.
I do buy software and even contribute real money to free software. I'm not going to rent software, ever. I'll decide when and if I'll upgrade. Over the last 40 years I have bought upgrades when it was worthwhile. Rental/Subscription removes the incentive to do decent tested releases. Though that can be a problem with free software, not just Linux, but what percentage of Win 10 users actually deliberately bought the software?
I used to use MS Office, bought various versions of Office and Word from 1992 to 2002. Used Office 2002 / XP till about 4 years ago when I decided that LibreOffice was now "better". Then a couple of years ago I ditched Windows, though had a Win 10 tablet for a while, gave it away.
Maybe in the USA.
I've never seen an Internet cafe that used Apple. All far cheaper PC clones. I've travelled in the UK, Ireland, Switzerland, Israel and the USA in the original iMac era. Loads of other European countries in the 21st C.
Also it was ISPs and the creation of Web sites that boosted the Internet. A small proportion of Internet users outside of USA schools used ANY sort of Mac. Internet web usage had already boomed 3 to 4 years before the 1998 release of the iMac. Windows 98 already was selling well.
The iMac for OSX only shared the name. There is also little relationship other than the GUI with earlier Mac OS. OS X came out in 2001 and by 2003 had a small market share compared to XP. Belatedly in 2006 the Mac including the iMac changed to the x86 instead of the Power PC. Originally the Mac had used the 68000 family.
All the design studios and graphic printing places I knew used real Macs. Ones where you could choose the screen and have more I/O than a phone line two USB ports and
The All-in-one desktop including screen with almost no ports was originally the Amstrad PCW, though it was grey. You needed an add-on box for the serial port for a modem (1200/75 or 300 baud). No Websites then, though the Internet did exist. Included a rather slow DMP. A later version had an even slower daisywheel. No good for corporate work, but a cheap home office / writer solution.
Also about 1/2 the price of a IBM XT (without a printer) and an IBM AT, or an Apricot Xen or a Apple Mac were for corporates or rich people, Not to bad with CP/M for Wordstar clone, Spreadsheet and email via dialup to an X.25 pad. I didn't much use Locoscript being familiar with CP/M from 1979.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amstrad_PCW
Allegedly sold 8 Million.
September 1985, the basic PCW model was priced at £399 plus value added tax, which included a printer, word processor program, the CP/M operating system and associated utilities, and a BASIC interpreter. Easy to put a double sided 720K 3.5" floppy as the second drive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apricot_Computers#1980s
"a product launch that would indelibly change the face of computing and arguably save the firm he founded almost 22 years earlier."
MS bailed them out.
The combination of iTunes and iPod saved Apple.
The combination of large data usage and operator contracts with the iPhone made them rich.
I've worked in the Computer industry since the 1980s. I've seen regular Macs, from the original 68000 with a 3.5" floppy to the pedestal model with OS 9 and later ones. I, nor any the computer people I know, ever used an original all in one iMac. I think I've only seen them in photos. They were actually very niche and any one I ever saw doing DTP, Graphic design etc used a more regular kind of Mac. I've only even seen Mac laptops in the last 12 years.
The iMac was irrelevant to Computing.
Should really have been red and blue, but blue was an awkward shade to create a filter for, works poorer in fog and much less bright than green.
Port is red, because it is and is to the left facing towards the pointy bit because it was called Larboard in English for awhile, There may also have been a convention to use a steering oar on the starboard side and tie up to the pier in port on the port side, but I'm sceptical, The changing of larboard to port was obviously needed for shouted orders more than black -> deny.
Red and Green are still often used on machinery for stop and start, though often with differently shaped buttons. Red for an emergency stop may be a Western thing? As is red on gauges and meters for danger or empty. Possibly from typewriter ribbons. Though red, green and black ink was used for dip pens. Curiously commercial "fountain pens" with a nib rather than fine tube come after typewriters and large ballpoint pens for carton marking.
Ah, there's an INFINITE number of numbers that are not unlucky. The workers will still be renumbering the doors in Hilbert's Hotel when the Universe dies.
White = Good and Black = Bad was only later applied to people. However Allow and Deny makes more sense for access. I wish no-one could email or physical mail me unless they are on my Allowed list.
Yes. Not sure with what.
Technically the ITU which existed from Victorian times before the UN took it over in 1948 ought to look after DNS and IP allocations and approve physical communications satellites (not the FCC), not just the bands.
However the ITU is in need of some reforms.
Indeed I've always used other solutions, though I used it once I think.
Indesign: Far better solutions years ago. Ghastly for ebooks, a fudge of something meant to output fixed layout pages for print.
Photoshop: Unless someone else is paying, no.
Acrobat: Far better solutions years ago, for viewing or creation.
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