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.
1043 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Feb 2010
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'.
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.
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 ...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
..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.
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?
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.
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.