Posts by ThomH

Re: Burn

He's estimated to be worth more than $200bn so he can find the $1bn breakup fee if he has to, but I also wonder whether he's antagonising exactly the people who constitute the majority of his customers.

Re: Doesn't Windows 1, from 1985, have a taskbar?

> But they aren't in a special area. They are just on the desktop, and in those versions, they were the only things allowed on the desktop.

I think that's a slender distinction: they're not in a special area, but they are in an area that only they are allowed to be in.

That said:

> It's not a bar.

There it is: I lose. You can't invent the taskbar with something that isn't a bar. End of story.

Re: Holodeck

> They actually shoot the actors on green screen and use a computer to replace the green (color humans don't have)

That's clearly not what the author is referring to; suggest you learn more about modern filming processes such as filling a room with LED screens and rendering the effects to that.

Re: Commentard Bingo

> Apple isn't a monopoly, Raspberry pi exists

As said by absolutely no-one.

However, Apple isn't a monopoly. Android exists. And the EU is drafting new legislation to address the damage to this market specifically because it can't just use its existing anti-competition law, because Apple isn't a monopoly. The EU believes it is doing harm without being a monopoly, as does the author.

Because silicon fro China isn't banned?

Re: Thing is the new …errr

The MacBook Pro recently got a bit thicker, and I'll admit that it was sort of weird switching from an older model to the current. But worth it once I started typing.

Re: Where it all began...for some

There was definitely a Hisoft product, and if you had a +3 then there are a bunch of CP/M options — albeit that the options for navigating an 80-column display aren't fantastic.

Re: Deleting macOS

Maybe you're a Linux user who wants a high-performance but svelte laptop that can go 14 hours on a charge? But you're not interested in adapting your workflow to a new OS?

Re: Threadripper? Deadripper more like.

> I would be more interested if they allowed >1 monitor to connect (where the monitors use DP).

The base M1 supports two monitors. The Pro and Max support four. The Ultra supports five.

No version of the M1 is limited to a single monitor.

However, this may be the faintest praise that anybody has ever posted, and I'm happy to admit that it took several minutes of searching to navigate Apple's confusing naming. Shouldn't the 'Max' be the best one by definition? And who are the better chips for, if not 'Pro's?

Nevertheless I remain very happy with my M1 Mini.

Re: Cambridge Z88?

Pedantically: it was a CR1620, not a CR20xx. Which means it was only 16mm in diameter (and 2mm tall), and therefore even more compact than a CR20xx.

Re: Notably missing in action...

Agreed entirely; I’ve bothered to find out what the current solution is but I haven’t yet chanced my arm on using it.

Yeah, NT4 was the one where they moved the GDI, along with print and video drivers, into kernel mode — buying both a speed boost and a step backwards in stability, especially as NT drivers weren't exactly anyone's priority at the time.

If memory serves then Windows Vista introduced the current model, of putting only a tiny shim into kernel mode and doing the overwhelming majority of driver work in user mode.

Re: how long?

68000: 1984–1994, 10 years;

PowerPC: 1994–2006, 12 years;

Intel: 2006–2020, 14 years.

So by the power of numerology, I guess: 2036.

Re: Thanks!

Ugh, yeah. I have a Mac and in the past had an iPad but my Kindle was always first choice for PDFs despite the paperback-sized display with awkward panning and zooming due to the e-ink refresh rate, precisely because I can just drag and drop to it.

Well, that and not wanting to read off LCD when it can be avoided.

I haven’t had an iPad for the better part of a decade because I never really found any other use for it either.

I suspect the unwarranted linkage to preemptive multitasking may relate to the reason than Chen got involved at all — per his blog entry he was chasing up on crash reports, and SoftRAM not only didn't actually compress but also was largely based on out-of-date Windows 3.1 DDK sample code, which being for Windows 3.1 made no effort to be thread safe.

So SoftRAM would crash hard on Windows 95 as soon as a lot of processes started hitting memory issues at once.

Re: PC

This is exactly right; IBM threw lawyers at absolutely everyone making a PC clone for a long time. The breakthrough was finally achieving 100% BIOS compatibility without using any of IBM’s original code, and with the necessary legal evidence to prove that the people who wrote the new code had never laid eyes on IBM’s.

IBM’s solution to that was to double down on lawyers and create the MCA bus and the rest of the PS/2 that would be much easier to protect against clones. But the horse had already bolted.

Also:

100 - 30 + 2 = 72

… because there’s absolutely no ambiguity in the original expression.

From the little that I think I know, Flutter is built around a presumption of immutable views and complete subtree recompositions. Like functional programming, but only the bad parts, and presumably implemented by somebody with a background in video games.

Users and efficiency be damned.

Re: "$99 and 24h later"

I’m a paid-up member of the Apple ecosystem, but I strongly doubt there’s a blame-the-user angle here, whether physical or otherwise.

I give it 99% odds that a bug in the software is to blame, whether the OS itself or one of the firmware updates that Apple bundled with the OS.

If I dare jump in; Microsoft aren't doing that bad a job in my opinion.

Google also can't make a plan and stick to it, but in that case the users pay as whatever Google is abandoning simply ceases to be. Microsoft's discarded frameworks at least continue to function.

Apple can make a plan and stick to it, but that plan usually involves a large amount of technology churn and the assumption that developers will keep up. As a developer you at least never get stranded by a complete horse change, but as a user you can still expect unmaintained applications to expire.

Android 6 was first released in October 2015, a month after the iPhone 6s was launched.

In 2021 the iPhone 6s not only runs the latest version of Safari, but the latest version of the entire operating system.

UWP requires a non-standard compiler if you want to target it from C++; a non-standard C++ compiler is not required for UWP because it was always mainly for the C# crowd.

Microsoft not only could be better, but is: C++/WinRT is the standard C++17 way into WinRT, provided as a header-only library for any old compiler.

Alas, I have absolutely no idea how UWP maps to WinRT, how either corresponds to Win32 or .NET, or what WPF has to do with any of it. All I really know is: don't mention Silverlight.

I think Reunion is meant to clarify, even to idiots like me.

Re: Or, you know, you created a blank template of the project?

Here's what I usually see when a Mac user tries to create a shortcut to a network share:

They drag the network share icon to where they want the shortcut, holding down the option+control buttons, and release.

Spoiler: if they're doing something that involves connecting to a network share, in an environment that hasn't already been dummified, they probably know how to use a computer.

Re: Legal Scholars?

Check out New York Times Co v Sullivan: it establishes that public officials have a higher bar to jump to establish defamation... because of the First Amendment.

Prophets of Da City.

Re: Genuine question

If the subject were Keanu Reeves and the recipient was a movie studio then you could probably be sued for the tort of passing off.

Re: A Mixed Bag for me

Yeah, for the record: no issues whatsoever using any of QTCreator, VS Code or Xcode. Albeit that's with VS Code for server development, so builds and runs occur elsewhere. But they always did. It's still a third kind of development to which M1-or-not is immaterial.

Re: Control or Alt

macOS may be more consistent but it still has its issues.

In every standard text box across every app: command+left and command+right act as home/end do on Windows, taking you straight to the beginning or end of a line.

But, in terminal: command+left and command+right switch between active terminal windows. You've of course to remember to use the UNIX standards of ctrl+a and ctrl+e instead.

What's even more annoying is that the command+left/right terminal window switch isn't constrained by virtual desktop, unless the OS-standard command+` to switch between windows of the active application.

So forgetting that terminal has decided arbitrarily to do its own thing can be very jarring.

Re: Hmm, awkward

It's not forcing them, it's at most coercing them.

But that aside, it feels proportionate to me. Typhoid Mary lost her liberty for egregiously refusing to believe that she was highly infectious, evidence be damned.

So just losing your phone during a public medical emergency because you refuse to act rationally and are potentially endangering others is fair enough.

You know, given that it's already well-established that the liberty of individuals can be restricted for the benefit of society, and that actions should be punishable orthogonally to consequences.

Re: Staatssicherheitsdienst

... though it also sounds like an awesome idea for a cartoon.

Act one: villains invade only a small area of the globe.

Act two: everyone's like "Oh, that's just Ted's zone, who cares about Ted anyway?"

Act three: everyone remembers that they value and respect Ted, and turn up to help him save the day.

Worldwide Loyalty Team, Ho! Go go Worldwide Loyalty Team! This is Nancy from Worldwide Loyalty Team, if you guys don't stop messing around then your time is going to run out!