Posts by K Cartlidge 57 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Jul 2009
Loved Z80 assembly. Mostly done on a ZX Spectrum and an Amstrad CPC464. Moved onto 8086 for the original PC (well a PC compatible, also an Amstrad, this time the PC1512).
I know x86 is not considered particularly elegant now, and didn't always feel it back then with its segment register, but it was amazing what you could accomplish with surprisingly little code (and the BIOS). Happy days.
A greatly underrated machine.
I had a 464 and it was superb (though the family could only afford the green screen monitor). Built-in tape deck and dedicated screen. Decent sound and graphics plus a huge collection of software and games. And the best 8-bit home computer versions of Elite (sorry BBC) and SpinDizzy.
The 6128 was also a very good upgrade.
I totally understand.
My shelves are overflowing with books and there is something about reading a paperback rather than a device that for me acts very much like a context switch into a different mode.
That said, I also have over 1,800 ebooks (all legal, from various stores or direct from author sites, with normalised metadata and consistent covers, and managed with Calibre). For a while I found it was so easy to get new books that I had become a collector and not a reader. Having realised and got over that, my main ereader use (a side-loaded Kobo) is for avoiding having to wear glasses when I read.
That's the biggie in my late middle age - on an ereader, every book can be a large print edition.
I'm on the H20 (left the Kindle ecosystem many years ago and never missed it). Every now and then I check the Kobo site for new hardware as I'm wanting a larger screen, USB-C, and a faster UI. The Sage meets that criteria but it's expensive, making it feel like I'd be overpaying because they've chosen to include stylus support (which I'd never use).
Having made the leap yourself (and appreciating tastes differ) does the cost feel worth it as the H20 is pretty good anyway?
It's a matter of balancing priorities but, for me, yes it is.
And whilst it is a personal choice on priority, it isn't at all subjective. It's science. With tablets and phones you are reading directly from a light source. With an ereader it's like reading ink on paper.
Personally it isn't about form factor, convenience, size, cost, performance, or anything else. It's about not spending years destroying my vision by staring at a light source for hours on end.
That all depends on your approach to your local system. And I've been in IT since the late 1980s.
I switch between Windows and Linux quite regularly, almost depending on my mood, and sometimes I even switch twice in a week - a one hour coffee break whilst it installs is totally fine.
The secret, and the reason why I'm trying Windows 11 without any worries whilst knowing I can reinstall Windows 10 (or Mint etc) at any time, is to be in the situation where your machine can be formatted at a minute's notice without losing anything that matters.
Code is in git (commit often), and data (including music) is synced to PCloud - which works cross-platform. You can literally sneak up and reformat the drive and I don't care.
To be in such a situation means that provided you have Windows 10 installation media available there is no reason not to try the new shiny pretty much straight away. It's a very freeing and low-stress way to compute.
I did an OEM Windows 10 Pro install yesterday evening from a recovery image and during the install it offered me Windows 11 Pro as a free upgrade (I'm not on any preview channels; this is standard retail). It installed automatically with me barely even seeing a Win10 desktop. Caught me by surprise as I was expecting to wait a while for a roll-out.
Anyway, I'm using a Lenovo ThinkPad E14 Gen 2 which is a Ryzen 7 Pro 16GB and Vega graphics. I don't do games so can't comment on that, but can say that it is running totally fine in everyday use including Visual Studio and other dev tools. Faster and nicer than Windows 10, I've no regrets. Various editors and tools open snappier than ever, and whilst there are indeed fewer customisations there are no show-stoppers for me.
As an aside, under the Pro edition it was more obvious than with Windows 10 how to install with only a local account (Home won't allow it I hear) and BitLocker still works fine under that local account.
YMMV but I just thought I'd balance comments out a little and say (admittedly after only one day's usage) that (for me at least) AMD and Windows 11 are totally fine together.
For those saying the OS data should be free, it largely is. To quote their site directly: "Develop with free OS OpenData downloads and APIs. For any use including commercial."
See https://osdatahub.os.uk/
I don't know if it is still available in physical form too, but a few years ago I was able to order (for free) a set of the OS data and map tiles at various resolutions, with gazetteer, on a comprehensive set of DVDs.
Even their paid plans go out of their way to say the actual base data is free - there is a premium data API behind a paywall, but the base tile data and the standard API remains free.
Whenever I read about Google killing something off, what strikes me isn't the death of a service/product - after all it's theirs, probably free, and they can do what they want with it. The thing that catches my attention is how long you get to mitigate the fallout.
These days I don't bother ranting about it, as Steve Yegge put it quite well (keep reading past the anecdote):
https://steve-yegge.medium.com/dear-google-cloud-your-deprecation-policy-is-killing-you-ee7525dc05dc
I've been using C# since around 2001 (alongside Go, Python, Ruby, Delphi, etc) and love it. But Microsoft is braindead when it comes to the UI area. It's bad enough they have so many 'technologies', but then they make it even worse by renaming them - it's reached the point that there are now more names than platforms/frameworks (!) and you can't rely on *any* of them lasting.
All I want is C# and Core (both very good) with the ability to compile native code against native or near-UIs (eg Cocoa, GTK, GDI+, whatever). I'd even settle quite happily for long-term supported native compiles of WinForms in Core (not the old full fat Framework).
As it is, my go-to for desktop apps is now Delphi. Well, to be honest, even with their community edition the Delphi value proposition sucks so it's actually Lazarus and FreePascal. Why can't the billions of dollars at Microsoft match what the people at Lazarus/FreePascal (and similar stacks) have done? Instead they waste their time reinventing the same thing or (worse) trying to force everything into a browser rendering engine.
C# is good. Core is good. I even prefer Windows 10 over my M1 Mac. So how do they still get this UI development tooling aspect so messed up?
RE: My guess is that as North Virginia (us-east-1) is the original AWS region, it has more such hacks running than in other regions so it is more inclined to be unstable.
And us-east-1 is also treated as a bit of a special snowflake. There are things existing in that region even when running in EU regions. It's also the default region for EC2 endpoints that don't have one.
The worrying thing about platforms is that no matter how good their techies, or their software, or their infrastructure, or their testing, or whatever else, all it takes is for one little thing to go wrong in an entire stack of interconnected software and hardware and suddenly there are issues. There is often no such thing as genuinely safe data (even when it is encrypted, as the platform still needs to be able to decrypt it).
How happy would the public be if they *really understood* that the difference between their information (with it's myriads of public/private settings, two-factor, encryption, and so forth) and a breach could be nothing more than a single bit/byte flag somewhere being incorrectly set.
They naively imagine that private stuff is kept separate, as if the digital version of a vault is somehow similar to a physical one. Years of private social media use, porn habits, banking records, the whole lot is as fragile as one bad line of code or dodgy cache or misconfiguration slipping through the net.
Our future privacy is extremely fragile, even when entrusted to the best of the platforms (not specifically meaning Airbnb here).
Employ more people. Rely less on automation.
It's a bit radical for them, I know, but their businesses should only scale if their staff scale alongside them.
- Too many web store submissions to check? Employ more people.
- Too many YouTube videos to check? Employ more people.
- Too many app store submissions to check? Employ more people.
- Too many potentially dodgy ads to check? Employ more people.
I think you see where I'm going with this. If you can't scale, then don't scale. Otherwise accept the costs of your business.
Opinions vary on these things, obviously, but whilst the ThinkPads are no longer IBM I personally still find them (mostly) excellent. To be fair to Lenovo, they've not broken them like I expected them to.
I have three Lenovos, an ancient T420, a two year old ThinkPad 13, and an 8th gen i7 Yoga S730 (I know, not a ThinkPad) and there isn't one I have any regrets about (unlike the Surface Pro 6 I sold on, the 2020 MacBook Air I'm about to sell, and the work HP ProBook which is good but has a really strange keyboard with phantom keystrokes).
If you haven't tried a recent ThinkPad because they are now Lenovo not IBM, perhaps give them a look.
These things are down to perception and preference where UX and UI are concerned, so I fully respect your opinion.
To offer balance, I have a paid personal licence to PyCharms, Goland, Rider, and RubyMine, so I have no axe to grind as I've repeatedly spent my own money with them. They are superb for their refactoring and their understanding of a codebase, but I still prefer and use VS Code wherever possible as, for me, the UX/UI works great. More importantly (and surprisingly) it runs leaner and faster.
I still have TopSpeed Modula 2 and occasionally crank it up. Having learned Pascal on a Dec Vax and a Sirius, I bought my own copy of TopSpeed Modula 2 for my Amstrad PC1512 and never had a moment's regret.
I've got decades of experience with C#, Python, Delphi, PHP, Node, Ruby, and Go (obviously not all of them over those decades), and when I think back to what JPI achieved with TopSpeed on 8086 boxes with floppy drives it's stunning by comparison. The language is a dream to work with too.
I also don't think the windowing text mode IDE they produced has been beaten for productivity even now.
I've used Lazarus and Free Pascal and they're great, but the TopSpeed IDE building Modula 2 to modern boxes with modern libraries would be a thing of beauty (I've tried Excelsior and am not yet convinced).
Yeah, sorry, I meant "own" in a more IP-related way rather than physical ownership.
The fact that when you stop paying registration fees for booking.com you lose the domain name booking.com implies you never owned it to start with and were probably actually renting its use - and can you trademark something you rent from someone else?
Your point may well still stand, I genuinely don't know - it's tricky using analogies from the real world in the virtual one. It would be interesting to see what the legalities are.
They knew. They always knew.
VCs and their ilk are one huge con, an immoral pump and dump Ponzi scheme. Valuations on not-yet-listed companies are determined almost entirely by the amount and percentage at which investors buy in. Institutional investors and successive rounds pay more not because they believe the finances (who would?) but because each such investment bumps the final IPO valuation.
At every stage the aim is to increase the valuation so either (a), you can sell your shares privately at a newly-inflated rate, cashing out, or (b), you can attract more investors at a higher rate which increases the valuation, or (c), the end game, an IPO at a huge premium on what you paid yourself.
Everybody wins except those who join the game last. The problem here is not that Softbank figured it out. They knew. They were playing the game. The issue is that Softbank have realised that the outside world have figured it out. The eventual IPO is not going to be the massively overvalued payout offloaded onto society (pensions, small investors) that Softbank were expecting. So they want out.
The problem here is that every job that has been switched to home-working is a job that manglement is more likely than before to see as an offshoring opportunity.
If a worker is not needed in the office, why pay relatively expensive first world salaries?
(I'm aware there are good reasons, I just don't expect upper bods to share that knowledge)
TBH regular expressions are great at solving tricky text manipulation issues, but they suffer from (at least) 2 main issues:
1. The expressions *can* quickly become read-only.
2. They can never match custom-crafted (good) code for a specific usage.
In the case of point 2, I have to question whether introducing a regex into a system under such heavy load without testing the performance characteristics at scale was a little foolish and a little more kraftwerk (sic) might be more appropriate.
Note that this is not to say that a regex would not be fine, just that sometimes they aren't and you need to check.
The 4GB limit (and similar limits from that era) is not usually due to concerns about physical storage capacity (primarily).
On a 32 bit architecture, the highest value you can store as a native integer is 4GB, assuming you don't store negative values. Allowing higher numbers involves either using more bits to represent them or switching to non-integers. Both of these would be less memory efficient and slower (and less accurate in the case of floating point values).
The practical outcome is that if the highest number your code stores is 4GB then that becomes the effective maximum file size - as you could never store the location of any data past that point in a file.
These days, systems are either 64 bit or are performant enough to take the hit of not using native 32 bit integers, so the "addressable locations" in the memory store rise and files can be larger.
"An ancient, single-purpose analog connector doesn't make sense because that space is at a premium," Schiller reasoned.
The extra space is only required because apparently a phone being really thin is the most important factor. It's amazing the way things work in a three dimensional world - a little more thickness means a fair chunk more volume, and suddenly you have all the space you need for your fancy features (I hesitate to call most of any smartphone's features "benefits").
I'm a reasonably content iPhone 6 user (also comfortable with Lumia, Moto G etc) and have never once stopped and though to myself about any smartphone "wow, this is ridiculously thick, they should compromise elsewhere and do something about it".
You may be right, I'm no expert on these edumacation thingies.
It does strike me as possible, though, that given how asset-heavy and comparatively logic-light a textbook-style app is there should be a reasonably straightforward route to a web-based app or an offering via a publisher portal (I speak as a web/app developer) if there were a sufficient market to bear the costs?
Nice idea if it were all about price, but the fact they were prepared to pay for iPads shows that initial price is only one factor. I'd suggest ongoing support, maintenance and 'managing' costs/issues are pretty relevant and the Chromebook (to a lesser extent also the iPad) beats a Windows machine hands down in that regard.
If you do Windows-based technical support for your family, extrapolate that experience into a school population and you may reconsider :)
I noticed the increased drain and went to the Settings > Background option to see what was running. Only there's no longer such an option.
So I lived with it for a day, then did a quick search and found the (not obvious) equivalent in the Battery Saver. The list of apps in the Usage area there shows a small message against those you can change, detailing if they are allowed to run in the background.
I went through the list and realising that a whole heap of previously blocked apps had gained permission to run in the background I turned them off again.
The battery life is still not quite as good as it was, but notably better than just after the upgrade.
Also on the topic of battery life, if (like me) you have Cortana activated you'll no doubt be aware that regardless of what you intend using it for you *must* have location settings turned on. That's a bg drain in itself, so personally I'm in the habit of using the new toggle in the notification area to switch location on or off as needed.
One other little thing I find helpful that nobody really mentions is in the WiFi settings. When you switch off your WiFi you get the option of having it switch back on automatically after an hour, 4 hours and so on. When I commute or pop out at lunchtime I can switch off the WiFi (continual network searching hurts the battery) and not need to remember to reactivate it.
Azure is actually quite good for .Net website hosting. That's the limit of my experience with it as the PHP/MySQL option sucked (due to persistent timeouts caused by limited connections to the third-party database hosting they use for MySQL). Availability, performance and pricing is, as ever, a matter of lies, damned lies and statistics depending upon how you look at it and who you ask.
It's a shame, really. Dropping 'Windows' from the name makes sense in that 'Windows' is a dying horse with a pretty bad smell in these days of OS/server/form factor alternatives, but replacing it with 'Microsoft' won't help until the automatic mental association with 'Windows' in the public consciousness has gone.
It's a necessary step but only the first of a large number needed as they 'pivot' (yes, I too hate that word but for this it seems appropriate).
Personally, I get the feeling that Nadella is embarrassed with Windows and if it weren't for support life-cycle expectations and residual revenue he'd like to phase it out. They have enough other billion-dollar businesses to survive quite happily, and the dead-weight of Windows is dragging them down.
In fairness, I guess it's difficult to turn your back on a product that brings in billions - especially if you have shareholders - even if you know the association is losing it's lustre.
Yes the Amstrad PCs were crap.
However, the extremely cheap (for the time) Amstrad PC1512 allowed me to own my first IBM compatible PC and begin development for it (in education we did Pascal on DEC Vax).
In other words, and to over-simplify it somewhat, the Amstrad PC1512 is what enabled my career - and despite being underwhelming was a game-changer for many I knew at the time.
It also ran Elite and Leisure Suit Larry fine ;)
There are a few comments about the irony/cheek of Apple complaining about overcharging, the point being that Apple themselves overcharge.
There is, however, a big difference.
Apple's customers have a choice. If they choose to pay Apple's prices then by very definition they are not being overcharged - they are paying what they are willing to pay and Apple are pricing accordingly.
You may not agree with their pricing, given that other vendors charge less, but their customers do.
This court-appointed gentleman however is simply billing what he/his company chooses on the assumption that Apple have no choice at all.
I'm not a great Apple fan, but there is a very big difference between the two situations. Where there is a genuine alternative it is not overcharging to ask what the market will bear. In this case, there is no choice at all and so Apple are not being hypocritical challenging it in court.
Downvote at your leisure.
Regardless of the rights/wrongs in this instance, I have to disagree with your statement that Apple would be first in the queue if Google were stiffing the competition.
Apple is not a threat to Google. It has no expertise in search (96% of Google's profits) and is a single competitor. Microsoft has the (distant) second place (English language) search engine, and will licence it's phone OS to any competitor interested.
Apple has also shown that it is content to live on high-margin low-volume sales and so is not really competing with Google, whereas Microsoft has shown historically it's desire to dominate a market at all costs. Regardless of the likelihood of that happening in phones, it makes them more of an enemy to watch for than Apple.
Over the years I've used most versions of Microsoft OS'es from DOS 3.2 onwards. Hated Windows 95, 98 and ME. Liked 2000 and XP. Hated Vista. Bought full Windows 7 Ultimate as I felt MS had finally done good and wanted to vote with my wallet. I do tech for a living (web/desktop/mobile) and moved reluctantly to Windows 8 because of all the negative comments/reviews.
I usually run Linux Mint as well, plus ChrUbuntu on my Samsung Chromebook, so I'm not a Microsoft fanboy. Nevertheless Windows 8 is, finally, the first version of Windows that I'm happy enough with to not even bother updating the Mint partition or looking for an alternative.
It's fast, stable and reasonably good looking. I certainly don't miss the Start menu. For system stuff Windows-X is ideal. For other stuff pressing the Windows key, typing a few letters then pressing Enter is far quicker than the old Start menu was.
The Metro/Modern UI/TIFKAM aspect is personally pointless but to be honest other than clicking the Desktop tile upon booting it has no impact and I really don't get the fuss.
I'm sure you'll be delighted to hear that said Chromebook is a superb device ;) especially with CloudHQ and Cloud 9 for easy backup and development if you want to avoid Windows bloat for a while.
Seriously though if you are in the UK it may be worth trying a physical store. I did a 40 mile round trip to get one from Coventry PC World where they have a Chromebook dedicated area (I know, I know, PC World ... but given the online availability sometimes needs must, and they can confirm availability and reserve it).
Speaking as an owner of a Kindle 3, Sony PS-505 and the Kobo being reviewed, it wipes the floor with all of them.
The major gripe in the review seems to be the ghosting on some books due to the fact that it only refreshes fully every 6 pages - but that is an option in the menu which *can be changed* !
No mention was made of the Kobo's Shortlist feature. Add a handful of books you want to read to the shortlist (all on the device). Browse the shortlist rather than the full list of books, read one then remove it and repeat. Brilliant.
For PDFs the screen refresh is quick enough that I can double-tap the screen to zoom in then using the touchscreen simply drag the page around. Again, superb. And the Kobo also lets you install your own TrueType fonts.
A reasonably fair review, but the above alone would bump it up 10% for me.
A couple of people have stated the Kindle is not a lock-in, but in both cases have cited how easy it is to get other formats ON to the Kindle.
That's not dealing with lock-IN but lock-OUT and, fair enough, they are right on that basis.
The lock-IN is true though. Buy from Amazon, which you do if you buy from on the Kindle device itself, and the book you get will work on all Amazon devices and in all Amazon reader software. That's it. And that IS lock-in.
There's talk of Calibre and, true enough, it converts formats. Unless you want to crack the DRM though you still won't get your Amazon-bought ebook onto a Sony, Nook or Kobo. That's lock-in.
I can't say they are the best, having only tried a half dozen or so, but for the last few years I've been using Moniker and never have any issues. Fast, relatively cheap, and the admin interface feels like it was written by a developer not a designer so it just gets out of the way. Also has good filters and no adverts for their products every time you click something.
I used GoDaddy for a few months and I dreaded signing in. Their UI sucks big time. Slow (from the UK at least), clunky and festooned with attempts to sell me stuff.
I'd recommend Moniker.
It won't sort the problem, but it could help a fair bit.
They have instituted a policy (and started actually enforcing it) that they will not accept multiple (they don't mention the limit) editions of undifferentiated public domain works.
Way back when, I was looking for a copy of Hunger (the Knut Hamsun work) and there was no decent one, so I put one together and listed it myself. It has a brand new cover, table of contents, line-breaks fixed and chapters/paragraphs reformatted and re-flowed. Pretty good edition actually, with 2 nice reviews from satisfied readers. I have recently received an email from Amazon saying that under the aforementioned policy it is to be de-listed.
To qualify to remain, I had to add something new or unique to the edition. I haven't and it will be removed (and I applaud Amazon overall for taking the step, even though in this case mine is by far one of the better editions).
It won't solve everything, sure, especially with PLR stuff, but if it is applied across the board it could vastly reduce the crap to wade through.
It's true that those who don't want to pay (and it's not good value, so there will be many) can just get their news from one of the free competitors - but if eventually every news provider has to give their stuff away, who will then provide the news?
I don't like most of the papers (and never buy them, oooh the hypocrisy) but I acknowledge that without an income journalists won't work and over time the free news sources will either dry up or be forced to reduce the variety of their output even more due to the restricted original content out there.
Content may want to be free, but that doesn't pay the reporter's food bills.
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