Re: Not me...
32 columns? In the 19*eighties*???? I was using a small telly perfectly satisfactorily display *80* columns.
3710 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Mar 2009
A few days ago I was randomly browing information about 1980s era terminals VT100s, VT220s, and the likes, and my brain clattered to a halt when reading "....typically cost $1500..." "several thousand dollars..." etc.
WTabsoluteF???? Several *THOUSAND* dollars just for a ****ing monitor and keyboard! When you could get an actual *computer* for just a few hundred quid that could do everything a terminal could do *plus* it was an actual computer! How the actual F was this ever a viable business?
I remember back at uni in the 1980s wondering if I asked the computing department nicely about the bashed-about terminals if they'd skip one in my direction as they'd make a nice cheap monitor better than the TV I was using.... never realised the contents of the terminal rooms probably cost close to a million quid.
master
with main
across its services
In following this I've been reminded of a film that I can't remember where something similar was happening in a bank. The denumount was somebody saying in exaspertation:
It's as simple as two (cranks adding machine) and two (cranks adding machine) makes... (reads adding machine) five?
Why on earth was there no human observation of the system working in operation to pick up these flaws?
The UK doesn't have police departments, they are independent authorities in their own stead. That could actually be a source of the failings of the US states' police system, the police are a department of local government and subject to all the failings of any corrupt local government. We are in danger of following them with the ridiculous Crime And Police Commissioners where the head of the local police force is now somebody dependant on a popularity contest to keep their job.
"Antifa" WTH's that? Palistinian terrorists innit?
They even pronounce it AN-TEEFA. What the hell's a teefa, and why are you preceding it with /an/ instead of /a/? If you're speaking English use bloody English. If you're an anti-fascist organisation, call yourself something like antifash or antifascist, and damn well pronounce it ANTI-something.
Over the last month or so I've successfully had a couple of club meetings and a test Parish Council meeting using Zoom. At some point in the last few days Zoom has updated from 4.92937645631279 to 5.0078236459871235676 resulting in it refusing to run on my tablet. I went through six cycles of: You must be using Zoom version 5 -> download update -> install update -> welcome to Zoom 4.93128746572635 -> Join meeting -> You must be using Zoom version 5 -> -> -> ->.
It's also weird as it's not any multiple of pixels. Most printers and terminals could switch between 80 columns and 132 columns, and you can't even get a mathematical explanation such as something like 80x8pixels divided by 7 pixels gives 91x7 pixels, or 106x6 pixels, or 128x5 pixels. There must be some mathematical justification for 80 x K = 132. K is very close to 5/3, that would give 133 characters, but why 5/3? 800 pixels gives 80x10 and 133x6 which is a 5/3 ratio.
"Yes, it had indeed activated. But where had the beam gone?"
That's the introductory McGuffin in one of Asimov's novels. Impenatratium beam accidently passes through the test equipment, through the wall, across the city, through a passerby and transports him into the future, along with lots of small slightly tapered cylindrical bits of building and passing pigeons.
Reminds me of when I was called out to bug-fix an application in the early 1990s. On startup the screen would be drawn, then very quickly disappear and be replaced by a buffer overflow error. Couldn't work out what was happeneding as it happened so fast, and it worked perfectly on every other machine we tested it on.
I ended up just running it again and again and to see if I could use persistance of vision to see where it was bombing out. It drew a line-draw window, printed a few headings, then bombed out. Hmm. So it's managing to /start/ outputting to the display. Hmmm. Can I run the code with the text output redirected to a file? Ooo, yes.
Run application, let it bomb out, examine redirect file. It ended with:
Disk space free: Buffer overrun
Hmmm. Run FREE.
Bytes free: 102,000,000 bytes (or summut).
Chap had bought a brand spanking new shiny soopadooper huuuuge hard drive with more than 99M of free space (yes, huuuuge!) The application was trying to write a 9-digit number into a 8-digit string buffer.
Quick fix: Save some dummy files to reduce the free space to under 100M and it worked prefectly. :)
I've just pulled a book at random off the shelf, and.. it's monospaced and justified, with extra spaces added for justification between words, with a preference for inserting after a full stop.
Ok, another book. Proportional font, can't tell the difference between dot-space and comma-space, so I assume it's a single space.
As the majority of text is rendered in proportional fonts, and multiple spaces are run together and treated as a single token seperator (and in HTML is mandated), it's pointless to manually insrt extra ones. I've just fired up MSWord, and typed hello space space space space there and once it becomes a line break no matter how many spaces I type it remains displayed as hello space there.
This prompted me to wander over to Jakob Neilson's interface usability website.
Yeah gods! What's happened? The old site used to be nice and fast intuitive, clear, an examplar of recommended usability. It took about 40 seconds just to get the main page to load, sloooooooooooooowwwwwwlllyyy scrolled some crap up across the screen and then it killed my browser.
Why Zoom? Why not Skype or Team or Facetime or GoTo or CyberLink or Meet or many others.
As a public organisation they shouldn't be locking in to a particular application, they should be using a system where the participants can use whatever system they wish to chose to connect. We are long long past the time of "I've got a Brooks line for local calls and a Bell line for long distance". And the WHOLE POINT of the internet from DAY ZERO was that it is irrelevant what the client end user system is.
"hints of an early incarnation of the Microdrive software, which was later removed in production."
No, the code wasn't removed. The production ROM that went to customers was masked before the Microdrive code had been put in. This ROM is a continuation of the ROM development, putting code *in*, in the expectation that what Sinclair had been sending out was a temporary measure and would be replaced with the "real" finished version.