Posts by Doctor Syntax

Re: 30 years on...same old same old.. no real lock in

"A large part of low end mini sales of Unix systems was just as dominated by VAR software considerations as in the workstation market."

Yes. My experience was there's be a package of H/W, O/S, (Informix) RDBMS and application. That included the company's product when I worked for a VAR or some industry-specific package which was the main reason for the purchase when I worked in admin. Even where the main application was home-grown and the original purchase stopped at the RDBMS we also bought in an accounts package to work with it.

But actually building the application for distribution would be a problem for vendors, given the number of H/W architectures they had to deal with. I certainly hosted at least one local VAR to build a version of their product on our HP-UX box (always keep on good terms with your local S/W house, you never know when you might want a job with them).

Re: No, FreeBSD lost out due to the legal issues, not the GPL

"No-one likes doing free work for other companies to take."

So no-one developed BSD? Or did somebody develop it and then have an "Oh shit!" moment when they got round to reading the licence? Or is it possible that those developing BSD knew exactly what the licence implied and were not only OK with the implications but welcomed them? Should they have gone to some random A/C on the internet for instruction on what licence they should have used?

Re: Proprietary

There's Linus's kernel, then there are the various LTS kernels which are managed by Greg K-H. Then there are the kernels which might or night not have additional tweaks. And, as I pointed out, your own kernel if you want one. But where is the non-MS Windows kernel?

I've pointed out elsewhere that the maintainer system which FOSS projects have adapted is a good solution to the problem posed in TMMM of how to coordinate multiple developers while maintaining clarity of vision. It doesn't put the maintainer in the position of a proprietor because anyone can fork it and become a maintainer without reference to the original maintainer or anyone else. It's an important aspect. Let's not obscure that, even tongue in cheek.

Re: Flatpak and Disk Space

" the packages you want to download are current in Flathub and literally years out of date from the distro"

If the packages in the distro being old upsets you, pick a different distro.

Re: Proprietary

You can download the entire source code of the Linux kernel. You can tweak any bit of it you think needs tweaking to make your very own version, not Linus's, not anyone else's. Yours. You can compile your tweaked version (assuming it's still syntactically correct after your tweaks). When/if you've compiled it you can run in (assuming your tweaks didn't make it crash).

Try to repeat that for the Windows kernel.

Now do you understand what proprietary means?

Re: Why aren't you taking notes?

"Reading it back later, it wouldn't be retained in the same way either."

Even if the scrawl could be read - which in my case it usually couldn't.

Re: On the other hand ...

"Most of that data isn't online, much of it isn't even centrally filed anywhere"

The world's rather a big place to file everything in one place but central filing of census,and BMD (births, marriages and deaths) has been instituted in many countries since the C19th.

In England and Wales, for instance, that has been done since the middle of 1837. There are crowd-sourced indexes at freebmd..org.uk. To make real progress may require purchase of birth & marriage certificates (you can click through from freebmd to the registry's online ordering site) although it's surprising what progress can be made just with such indexes and images of the census returns (useful reords startin 1841 for E&W). These would require one of the subscription services, Ancestry or FindMyPast but again quite a lot can be achieved with the free service of familysearch.org (apart from freebmd these sites cover world-wide sources).

Prior to civil registration in any given jurisdiction you would usually need to rely on religious records such as baptisms and burial regiters in place of birth and death records. These are not necessarily centrally filed although bishops' transcripts supposedly exist for the Church of England but not as complete as one would like. However local societies and individual genealogists have been transcribing and publishing these since the late C19th and a great deal of these publications can be found on archive.org and, of course, have also been transcribed by the sites I mentioned in the previous paragraph.

I have no experience with other jurisdictions except Ireland and the experience there is frustration due to the destruction of the registries in a fire in 1922. I've found it difficult to get any of my wife's lines back beyond the early C19th and one individual has proved extremely difficult.

And, of course, the occasional bastard will prove as difficult in genealogy as they do in management.

"The only people who call landlines these days are scammers in Bangalore."

SWMBO is called regularly by her sister who iives a few hundred yards away and neither of us is in Bangalore. My daughter, who lives a mile or so away. My cousin-in-law. Friends to whom I regularly give a lift as they're no longer driving because of age. SWMBO calling her sister-in-law in N Ireland. Other family members. Doctors. Pharmacists. Northern Powergrid to report power failures. We receive and make a lot of landline calls. Until the great switch-off the landline is more reliable than the mobile signal and certainly better quality. After the switch off we'll be in trouble every time the power fails. Yes, I know about battery backup but the last failure took out the DSLAM and that didn't get fixed until the next day.

Re: "coloured pencil office"

But toasted it's still more effective as shrapnel than as food.

Re: is to gradually push less

"And of course, a lower centre of gravity helps a lot"

Self or bike?

Re: It’s inconceivable to me

"Luckily, he can't be VP or POTUS"

Unfortunately they have no shortage of unlucky choices.

Re: Right

I'm old enough to remember when Japanese products were cheap junk, were continually derided as cheep junk when in fact they no longer were and eventually their producers walked all over local businesses because they improved design and quality.

I think this mistake is being repeated with China. There's certainly a lot of junk but a couple of gadgets I've bought recently seem to show good build quality and attention to detail in the BoM such as a lens cloth included with a document camera and a dual charging cable with a radio mic. Those things don't happen without somebody thinking of them and while a few years ago nobody might have given that level of thought it is starting to happen now.

Re: "focus the team on the launch of the next-generation vehicle"

The victims could come to a sticky end.

Re: FSD on old Hardware

Surely the people on the conference call should feel greatly complimented that Musk took time out to talk to them. What more could they possibly want?

Knew and admitted?

Re: No surprise

"A couple of takeovers ago the company at the time openly stated the reason they did not offer market leading salaries was because people should stay employed for a couple of years, gain experience, and then move on."

Which is an open admission, of which their customers should take note, that they only employ inexperienced people and those too incompetent to move on.

Re: Mac User Interface Guidelines, the Ribbon Interface, and Changes to Interfaces

"Money needs to be made by companies!"

That's no excuse for abusing customers by breaking interfaces at the same time as you're exploiting them by selling them what they've already bought.

Re: Torn

"There was FVWM which was vaguely like Windows 3.x, FVWM95 which was a shameless Windows95 ripoff, IceWM"

A quick check on Devuan. "Was" is only the correct tense for FVWM95.

"On the other hand, this tends to stifle innovation and is why we're still using the same basic desktop metaphor almost a half-century later."

If it ain't broke... In fact there has been innovation that doesn't break and innovation which does. The former just fits in more or less unnoticed* because it seems natural, the latter gets complains.

* Unnoticed because people don't notice it wasn't there before.

Re: ...

Also a > will indicate another level of menu.

Kate (KDE Atdvanced Text Editor) manages both an ellipsis and an arrow for Save with encoding - the arrow indicates a further menu for the choice of encodings and the ellipsis the save dialog which will follow once you've chosen the encoding. Not that I've ever had a need to use that option.

Re: Ellipsis

That was one of Liam's points.

Re: not just software

"Most programs that deal with multi-line text have some way of inserting a line break which is not an end of paragraph. Usually it's either Ctrl+Enter or Shift+Enter. In Outlook, one of those two will just send the message, ready or not."

My first reaction to that is that in plain text the notion of a non-breaking new line is nonsense so why would you need a key combination for it?

But wait, this is Outlook, the home of top-posting HTML, get as far as way from standards as possible without actually breaking email so - yes, you're right. It is odd.

Re: Unix shell and web browsing

You're right. Not since May '21. Like you, I hope he's still OK.

Re: GUI Standards?

None of which explains the fact that my car end my wife's have the wiper stalks on the same side but mine moves anti-clockwise to turn them on and hers moves clockwise. It's just sheer contrariness.

"That is how Locoscript on the Amstrad PCW handled insertion as well. It's a lot lighter on CPU than trying to move all the existing text after the insertion point up, and rewrapping, character by character."

Ah, we agree on something - on the rest we agree to differ. I never used Locoscript but it sounds as if they had the right idea.

My own trajectory was punched cards to Z-80 basically as an instrument controller to IBM-compatible as a Z-80 replacement. Overlapping that was VT100/220 talking to Unix boxes or PCs running Kermit as terminal emulation. Windows initially came along as a vehicle for running multiple terminal emulations to Unix boxes. IBM only entered that world through its Unix offerings - and without CUA.

Re: This far down in the comments

Whoosh!

Re: Motif?

I think that oversimplifies the history. OTOH W95 took a lot from HP's overlay for Windows 3 (memory says it was called New Era but I may be confusing it with something else). The early W95 and beyond included a copyright declaration for HP. New Era (or whatever) had a huge number of tiny files with character salad names defining odd bits and pieces which, I think, became the foundation of the registry when gathered into one place. It also have a better text editor than W3.