Liam on Linux - Dreamwidth Studios
[ HN again ] We are heading for 2º C global warming by 2040, possibly by 2030. And the IPCC and others already pointed out that 2º means the end of civilisation. So, it's coming anyway... but it's the nature of human fsck-ups that they come in clusters. That's why someone coined the term "clusterfsck". So, we have multiple human fsckups coming along all together in the mid-2020s, just as…
[Nicked from myself on HN .] No. No, it is not. For me, after ~25 years in the skeptics movement, I think the parallels with supplementary, complementary and alternative medicine are most useful. I choose that term intentionally: its initials are S.C.A.M. and that's exactly what it is. As Tim Minchin and Alan Kay both noted, "we have a special term for alternative medicine that's been tested and…
[Nicked from a later comment to the previous one .] Other OSes I've used with no CLI -- Psion EPOC 16 (x86, Series 3); EPOC 32 (Arm, Series 5); Symbian; PalmOS; NewtonOS; and on the desktop, Atari TOS/GEM. PalmOS is not so much from MacOS as indirectly from another Apple product: the Newton, which was architecturally totally different (a native Arm OS with no CLI and no filesystem either). Newton…
[Nicked from a Lobsters comment ...] Classic MacOS was for many of us the real MacOS. OS X is NeXTstep given a facelift to look a bit like a Mac, but it's Unix, and you can tell. It's a pretty Unix but it's an order of magnitude more complicated than classic MacOS and it is littered with ugly little "tells" like config in text files, file extensions, and weird stuff that doesn't "stick" when you…
From Reddit I learn that a new generation of LLM bots is getting really really good at finding exploitable vulnerabilities in large C codebases, and making exploits for them. Good. Maybe it will result in the destruction of the entire C-based software industry before the LLM industry self-immolates. Slight snag: it may take human civilisation with it. I am vaguely working towards some kind of…
I am risking the one full-time paid developer of Haiku popping up here and shouting at me, because he's done that a few times before and even written to my editor-in-chief to complain. Sadly for him, my former EIC was a hardcore techie -- it's how I met him, long before either of us worked there -- and he was on my side. https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/11/haiku_beta_4/ Unix is a 1960s design…
It is very odd to me to watch OStree-based distros starting to take off and win recruits. The only reason Red Hat needed to invent this very complex mechanism was because RH does not officially have a COW-snapshot capable filesystem in its enterprise distro. A filesystem with snapshots makes software installation transactional. You take a snapshot, install some software, and if it doesn't work…
I came across my name in a scan of the February 2001 Personal Computer World . Tadpole-RDI Ultra Book lli This transportable SPARC workstation is more than just a toy for wealthy geeks Today, thex86 PC architecture scales from PDAs to enterprise servers, and it's difficult to point to a line that separates PCs from RISC workstations and servers. Traditional delimiters - lots of storage, high-speed…
I think there are many. Some examples: * The fastest code is the code you don't run. Smaller = faster, and we all want faster. Moore's law is over, Dennard scaling isn't affordable any more, smaller feature sizes are getting absurdly difficult and therefore expensive to fab. So if we want our computers to keep getting faster as we've got used to over the last 40-50 years then the only way to keep…
(Repurposed HN comment. ) The BSD/Linux thing was there right from the start, but it was more complicated than a simple us-vs-them. The thing is that there were a whole bunch of competing commercial Unix-like OSes in the 1980s. But there were other prejudices as well. In Proper Grown-Up Unix terms, PCs were toys, poorly-made weird little things that were no more than office equipment. So nothing…
No, honest, it did. Windows 2 was kinda ugly. https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/win203 Windows 3/3.1/3.11 were fine. https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/win30 Muted, boring, but you could look at it all day. And we did. 95 improved it. https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/win95osr2 Tasteful greys, spot colour. NT 4 improved that a bit more.…
A tech blogger called Nemanja Trifunovic posted an enjoyable article called the History of the GEM Desktop Environment . It's a nice piece -- it's very good on the early history. It does, however, totally omit much of the later development. When Caldera released the source code, it also released the unfinished multitasking GEM/XM version . Another version was X/GEM on FlexOS [PDF], DR's…
In response to Apple vs. Facebook is Kayfabe ... He’s right, though. We are now at 25% of the way through C21. Most of C21 IT today is “kayfabe”: deliberately fake, to fool the audience. SaaS: fake corporate IT services for company directors too cheap to hire competent IT staff. The lie: it’s OK and safe to let other companies run your IT for you. The truth: if it matters,…
Apple macOS is a UNIX™. It's the best-selling commercial Unix of all time. I wonder if how many old-school Unix folks consider all Mac users in the 21st century to be their brothers-in-arms? Not many, I'd guess. When it happened, many Unix folks don't consider it a _real_ Unix. Even thought just a few years later, and AIUI after spending a _lot_ on the exercise, Apple got the UNIX™…
A response to an HN comment ... The PC press had rumours of Quarterdeck's successor to DESQview, Desqview/X, from around 1987-1988. That is roughly when I entered the computer industry. Dv/X was remarkable tech, and if it had shipped earlier could have changed the course of the industry. Sadly, it came too late. Dv/X was rumoured then, but the state of the art was OS/2 1.1, released late 1988 and…
Spent much of today getting a Live AROS USB key working, which wasn't trivial... it needed a USB 3 key, which I had to go and buy specially. But after that... I am so tired. I want to write about new stuff in software, but there feels to be no area not contaminated with "AI". I get the depressing feeling that computing is just being eaten up by bloody "AI". Virtually every press release I've seen…
Since I know there are some folks who read this but may not read my Register stuff. It's here: https://github.com/lproven/usb-dos I added a "Buy me a coffee" tip jar effort. :-) I am considering updates. Robert Sawyer was kind enough to send a list of suggestions and I should act on them. I have also received requests for PC-Write. Copies are still out there. Any other writer-oriented apps that…
It is one of the oddest things in computing that stuff to me, as a big kid of heading for 60 years old but who still feels quite young and enjoys learning and exploring, that the early history of Linux – a development that came along mid-career for me – and indeed Unix, which was taking shape when I was a child, is mysterious lost ancient history now to those working in the field.…
The personal histories involved are highly relevant and they are one of the things that get forgotten in boring grey corporate histories. Bill Gates didn't get lucky: he got a leg up from mum & dad, and was nasty and rapacious and fast, and clawed his way to industry dominance. On the way he climbed over Gary Kildall of Digital Research and largely obliterated DR. Ray Noorda of Novell was the big…
(Especially Haiku.) It may seem odd but it's not. Haiku is a recreation of a late-1990s OS. News for you: in the 1990s and until then, computers didn't do power management. The US government had to institute a whole big programme to get companies to add power management. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Star Aggressive power management is only a thing because silicon vendors lie to their…
The Zaurus SL-5500 was an early, tiny, Linux pocket computer-cum-PDA. I had one. Two, in fact. They got stolen from my house. :-( It had a CF card slot, so you could even remove your storage card and insert a CF Wifi card instead, and have mobile Internet in your pocket, 20 years ago! But if you did, you got a free extra with a wifi adaptor – a battery life of about 15-20 minutes. It was…
From a Reddit post . A very brief rundown: If you are using Microsoft tools, you need to load the 386 memory manager, emm386.exe , in your CONFIG.SYS file. But, to do that, you need to load the XMS manager, HIMEM.SYS , first . So your CONFIG.SYS should begin with the lines: DEVICE=C:\WINDOWS\HIMEM.SYS DEVICE=C:\WINDOWS\EMM386.EXE DOS=HIGH,UMB 4. That's the easy bit. Now you have to find free Upper…
I finally got round to publishing a version 1.0 of my long-running hobby project: a bootable DOS live USB image with tools for writers, providing a distraction-free writing environment. https:// github.com/lproven/usb-dos This is very rushed and the instructions are incomplete. Only FAT16 for now; FAT32 coming real soon now. comments
I learned about a new DIY machine to me, the Cody Computer . It looks kind of fun, but once again, it does make me wonder why it’s so constrained. Extremely low-res graphics, for instance. TBH I would have sneered at this for being low-end when I was about 13 years old. (Shortly before I got my first computer, a 48K ZX Spectrum.) Why isn’t anyone trying to make an easy home-build…
Someone on Reddit asked how easy it was to do "simple stuff" on 9front. This is not a Linux distribution. It is an experimental research OS. Look, all Linux distros are the same kernel with different tools slapped on top. Mostly the GNU tools and a bunch of other stuff. Linux is one operating system. Linux is a GPL implementation of a simple monolithic 1970s Unix kernel. All the BSDs are…