rbowman wrote this copyrighted missive and expects royalties:

> On Wed, 06 Mar 2024 14:49:56 -0600, chrisv wrote:
>
>> My work PC is a laptop connected to a dock, which then connects to a
>> large monitor and ergo keyboard. It does get used portably when I
>> travel on business.
>
> I was away from home for 4 days a couple of weeks ago and had forgotten
> how awkward a 14" laptop is. It's always a trade off between usability and
> being too big to hump around.
>
> I've got an Asus Eee PC 700 around here someplace.
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asus_Eee_PC
>
> It sounded like a good idea in 2007, small and cheap enough to toss into a
> saddle bag with no worries but definitely pushing the usability limit. It
> wouldn't support WPA2 which became a problem.

I saw one of those at Target when they first came out.

As for my Lenovo Flex 14" (heh heh), I use it a couple hours every day sitting
in front of the teevee watching news or Premiere League. The terminal windows,
tmux, virtual desktops, and gvim make it pleasant to work with.

--
"...The name of the song is called 'Haddocks' Eyes'!"
-- Lewis Carroll, "Through the Looking Glass"

Physfitfreak wrote this copyrighted missive and expects royalties:

> On 3/6/2024 7:20 AM, Chris Ahlstrom wrote:
>> chrisv wrote this copyrighted missive and expects royalties:
>>
>>> rbowman wrote:
>>>
>>>> https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/03/linux-continues-growing-market-
>>>> share-reaches-4-of-desktops/
>>>>
>>>> "Linux reached 4.03 percent of global market share in February, according
>>>> to data from research firm Statcounter. That takes Linux past the 3
>>>> percent milestone it reached in June 2023. While we’re still far from the
>>>> Year of the Linux Desktop, interest in Linux has somewhat grown lately."
>>>>
>>>> It might take a while longer but slow and steady wins the race.
>>>
>>> Troll! 8) You're going to make some dumb fsck very angry!
>>>
>>> --
>>> "[DFS is] a know-nothing, a liar, and a k00k. A bigot. A racist. A
>>> nasty human being. Better you should ignore his miserable misguided
>>> ravings." - Chris Ahlstrom
>>
>> I partially retract those words.
>>
>> I've mellowed with age.
>>
>
> No, you've become Sheep.

Bah!

Errr, I mean "humbug"!

--
Well, anyway, I was reading this James Bond book, and right away I realized
that like most books, it had too many words.
-- Dave Barry

chrisv wrote this copyrighted missive and expects royalties:

> Chris Ahlstrom wrote:
>
>>> "[DFS is] a know-nothing, a liar, and a k00k. A bigot. A racist. A
>>> nasty human being. Better you should ignore his miserable misguided
>>> ravings." - Chris Ahlstrom
>>
>>I partially retract those words.
>
> Why, when they are true?

Well, he's not really a know-nothing.

> --
> "I can only imagine what a nightmare it would be to go to high school
> with a bunch of dumb, loudmouth blacks eeking and ooking all day
> long." - DumFSck

Reminds me of the racist little kids at St. Mary's grade school.

--
You have an unusual equipment for success. Be sure to use it properly.

On Thu, 7 Mar 2024 11:23:24 -0500, Chris Ahlstrom wrote:

> As for my Lenovo Flex 14" (heh heh), I use it a couple hours every day
> sitting in front of the teevee watching news or Premiere League. The
> terminal windows,
> tmux, virtual desktops, and gvim make it pleasant to work with.

I've got an old Acer Aspire 11.5 that may be my next Linux experiment.
It's Windows 7 and not too bad to work with given the size.

On Thu, 7 Mar 2024 11:17:42 -0500, Chris Ahlstrom wrote:

> Although NT was not an exact clone of Cutler's previous operating
> systems,
> DEC engineers almost immediately noticed the internal similarities.

That's always a problem despite the best intentions to do a clean room
implementation. Like they say you can't unsee it. Even something like an
embedded RTOS is going to look a lot like somebody else's.

I'm surprised there aren't more conflicts in fiction and music like the
Google and Oracle suit that made it to the Supremes. Of course most
authors and musicians don't have huge legal departments and deep pockets.

It did take a while for NT to get ironed out. I can't remember the last
time I saw the BSoD but it was a frequent flyer on my 4.0 box.

On Thu, 7 Mar 2024 11:08:00 -0500, Chris Ahlstrom wrote:

> DFS whines like a 56K modem.

Back in the bad old days when people used pagers we had an interface that
would send incident notifications using the TAP protocol over a modem. It
wasn't even 56k since most of the pager companies were 2400. Every now and
then our support people would get a call that paging wasn't working. The
first troubleshooting step was 'Did a dispatcher get sick of the whine and
turn the modem off?'

There still are agencies using pagers where cell coverage is spotty.

DFS <nospam@dfs.com> wrote at 14:41 this Thursday (GMT):
> On 3/6/2024 9:20 PM, candycanearter07 wrote:
>> DFS <nospam@dfs.com> wrote at 19:58 this Wednesday (GMT):
>
>
>> Reading this gave me a laugh.
>
> I know!
>
> Yo Ding Dong Man, Ding Dong, Ding Dong Yo
> dfs says i need a User-Agent, so here it is
> guess
> no
> Fuck you asshole
>
> etc
>
>
> Since I'm obsessed with assigning posts to newsreaders to operating
> systems, I've read/visually scanned probably 10K User-Agent strings.
>
> This is what the db table looks like: https://imgur.com/a/pI7tBUI

Neat!
--
user <candycane> is generated from /dev/urandom

DFS <nospam@dfs.com> wrote at 14:32 this Wednesday (GMT):
> On 3/6/2024 7:59 AM, Joel wrote:
>> DFS <nospam@dfs.com> wrote:
>>> On 3/5/2024 4:50 PM, candycanearter07 wrote:
>>>
>>>> MS literally has to force W10 users to upgrade because of how
>>>> disliked W11 is.
>>>
>>> What is it with you lying Linux idiots?
>>
>>
>> Actually, candycanearter07 is right about this - you're supposed to be
>> able to choose if you want the free upgrade, but there are ways they
>> find of getting people to click when they aren't sure of what they're
>> getting.
>
>
> "Windows 10 is the most popular Windows desktop operating system,
> accounting for a market share of around 72 percent as of August 2023."

https://www.tomshardware.com/software/microsoft-begins-forced-updates-to-windows-11-23h2-targets-pcs-running-21h2-and-22h2
https://www.pcgamer.com/stop-windows-11-forced-update/
https://www.minitool.com/news/users-are-forced-to-install-windows-11-updates.html
https://www.howtogeek.com/765377/how-to-block-the-windows-11-update-from-installing-on-windows-10/
--
user <candycane> is generated from /dev/urandom

rbowman wrote this copyrighted missive and expects royalties:

> On Thu, 7 Mar 2024 11:23:24 -0500, Chris Ahlstrom wrote:
>
>> As for my Lenovo Flex 14" (heh heh), I use it a couple hours every day
>> sitting in front of the teevee watching news or Premiere League. The
>> terminal windows,
>> tmux, virtual desktops, and gvim make it pleasant to work with.
>
> I've got an old Acer Aspire 11.5 that may be my next Linux experiment.
> It's Windows 7 and not too bad to work with given the size.

I had a single core Acer once. With Linux. At that time our company was very
tolerant of Linux. I was able to run Solidworks on a VM on this laptop, and the
performance was quite tolerable.

I got one employee into trouble though, by suggesting she use Libreoffice.
At least it got her an official install of Crimosoft Office.

--
So this is it. We're going to die.

rbowman wrote this copyrighted missive and expects royalties:

> On Thu, 7 Mar 2024 11:17:42 -0500, Chris Ahlstrom wrote:
>
>> Although NT was not an exact clone of Cutler's previous operating
>> systems,
>> DEC engineers almost immediately noticed the internal similarities.
>
> That's always a problem despite the best intentions to do a clean room
> implementation. Like they say you can't unsee it. Even something like an
> embedded RTOS is going to look a lot like somebody else's.
>
> I'm surprised there aren't more conflicts in fiction and music like the
> Google and Oracle suit that made it to the Supremes. Of course most
> authors and musicians don't have huge legal departments and deep pockets.
>
> It did take a while for NT to get ironed out. I can't remember the last
> time I saw the BSoD but it was a frequent flyer on my 4.0 box.

Win NT 4.0 was a pile of unstable crap.

--
Tell the truth or trump--but get the trick.
-- Mark Twain, "Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar"

"Relf" <Usenet@Jeff-Relf.Me> wrote:

>Ahlstrom & rBowman say WinNT 4.0, 1996, was "a pile of unstable crap".
>
>Like an EpiPen hit, 32 bit Win95 restored my breath.

I never had NT until Win2000. But we got a computer with that
preinstalled in the year 2000. Boom, is all I can say, to leaving
Win98 behind.

--
Joel W. Crump

Amendment XIV
Section 1.

[...] No state shall make or enforce any law which shall
abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the
United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of
life, liberty, or property, without due process of law;
nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal
protection of the laws.

Dobbs rewrites this, it is invalid precedent. States are
liable for denying needed abortions, e.g. TX.

On Thu, 07 Mar 2024 16:28:16 -0800 (Seattle), Relf wrote:

> A: George Washington, a Black woman, was the Queen of Zimbabwe.

Uncle Addie must be rolling over in his grave after he found out Jessie
Owens joined the SS.

On Thu, 07 Mar 2024 15:39:17 -0800 (Seattle), Relf wrote:

> Like an EpiPen hit, 32 bit Win95 restored my breath.

It wasn't all that bad compared to NT 4.0. There some moral in the story
when the cheap consumer OS is more stable than the 'enterprise' OS.

It was educational. Rather than dealing with a SMTP server I leveraged
Outlook's COM interface to piggyback on the MAPI layer. When it hit
testing I realized the Outlook had absolutely fucking nothing to do with
Outlook Express. The gomers thought they were getting a crippled version
of Outlook.

On Thu, 7 Mar 2024 17:15:20 -0500, Chris Ahlstrom wrote:

> I had a single core Acer once. With Linux. At that time our company was
> very tolerant of Linux. I was able to run Solidworks on a VM on this
> laptop, and the performance was quite tolerable.

This is a Core i5 U470, 2 cores, 4 threads. It was competitive in the
2014 netbook market although tablets were taking over. At least it has a
keyboard; I'm not fond of virtual keyboards.

I may leave it Win 7. I'm playing around with the nRF24L01 chip and I need
another portable to test the range and so forth beyond three feet.

https://www.nordicsemi.com/Products/nRF24-series

The other option is LoRa.

https://jfrog.com/connect/post/nrf24-vs-lora-for-wireless-communication-
between-iot-devices/

That talks about the Pi but they work with the pico or the Arduino family.
That's another choice point -- pico or arduino. Of course you can mix and
match. I've got some Arduino Unos, and a couple of Nano Sense BLEs and Mr
Amazon should be dropping off a Pico care package Saturday.

I really wish I had the time to play with mathematical puzzles but I'm a
code monkey and not a mathematician. I know just enough to tell the
difference between a 10 bit and 12 bit A/D.

Then since the weather is getting better there is the Tello project which
may overlap into other projects:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDOkUHNdmKs

You can fly the Tello from an app on the phone. It will takeoff and hover
nicely but you've got to have better hand-eye coordination to fly it in
the kitchen than I do.

rbowman wrote this copyrighted missive and expects royalties:

> On Thu, 07 Mar 2024 15:39:17 -0800 (Seattle), Relf wrote:
>
>> Like an EpiPen hit, 32 bit Win95 restored my breath.
>
> It wasn't all that bad compared to NT 4.0. There some moral in the story
> when the cheap consumer OS is more stable than the 'enterprise' OS.

Heh, early on I was working with this guy who didn't understand
that you create a resource and then you make sure it is deleted.
Of course his code would go belly up on Win 95.

His solution? Convince management and "the customer" to go with
Win NT.

This was the guy who drove me to take antidepressants.

He would take his shoes and socks off in the office and pare his toenails.

He would ask me if I wanted to hear "some Rush". Not the rock group, but
that bellowing bloviator.

Mostly, though, I had good teammates during my career.

> It was educational. Rather than dealing with a SMTP server I leveraged
> Outlook's COM interface to piggyback on the MAPI layer. When it hit
> testing I realized the Outlook had absolutely fucking nothing to do with
> Outlook Express. The gomers thought they were getting a crippled version
> of Outlook.

--
You may be infinitely smaller than some things, but you're infinitely
larger than others.

On 3/7/2024 11:17 AM, Chris Ahlstrom wrote:
> rbowman wrote this copyrighted missive and expects royalties:
>
>> On Wed, 6 Mar 2024 14:24:49 -0500, DFS wrote:
>>
>>> They couldn't do the kernel part, though, and the Linux kernel came
>>> along at just the right time.
>>
>> "This is the original announcement of the GNU Project, posted by Richard
>> Stallman on September 27, 1983."
>>
>> I'm not a Stallman fan but *nix was a cluster fuck in 1983. AT&T's second
>> anti-trust suit had just been settled and they could sell Unix. They'd
>> been giving it to academic institutions, with a very arcane licensing for
>> proprietary firms. I forget what variant on the Unix name I was using in
>> 1983 but it fell off the back of a truck in Cambridge MA and ran on a
>> PDP-11.
>>
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_wars
>>
>> Hurd never got off the ground. When Torvalds wrote a kernel loosely based
>> on Tannenbaum's Minix in 1991he didn't expect it to go anywhere.
>>
>> Microsoft and SCO were also muddying the waters with Xenix. MS dropped
>> Xenix although you have to wonder how much ultimately wound up in NT.
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT
>
> Microsoft hired a group of developers from Digital Equipment Corporation led
> by Dave Cutler to build Windows NT, and many elements of the design reflect
> earlier DEC experience with Cutler's VMS, VAXELN and RSX-11, but also an
> unreleased object-based operating system developed by Cutler at Digital
> codenamed MICA. The team was joined by selected members of the disbanded
> OS/2 team, including Moshe Dunie.
>
> Although NT was not an exact clone of Cutler's previous operating systems,
> DEC engineers almost immediately noticed the internal similarities. Parts of
> VAX/VMS Internals and Data Structures, published by Digital Press,
> accurately describe Windows NT internals using VMS terms. Furthermore, parts
> of the NT codebase's directory structure and filenames matched that of the
> MICA codebase. Instead of a lawsuit, Microsoft agreed to pay DEC $65–100
> million, help market VMS, train Digital personnel on Windows NT, and
> continue Windows NT support for the DEC Alpha.
>
> Microsoft done "cadged" it! :-D

"Microsoft agreed to pay..."

How much did Stallman and other GuhNoo thieves pay AT&T?

Relf <Usenet@Jeff-Relf.Me> wrote at 00:28 this Friday (GMT):
> Candy:
>> https://www.howtogeek.com/765377/how-to-block-the-windows-11-update-from-installing-on-windows-10/
>
> WRONG !
> [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate]
> ; "AUOptions"=dword:1, "Disable 'Keep my computer up to date'"
> ; has not worked for years now, if ever.
> "AUOptions"=dword:1
> "NoAutoUpdate"=dword:1

The point was not displaying how to block updates, it's the fact
that there are *multiple articles about it*. Windows has been
doing this for quite a long time now, even back in the 8.1 days
trying to get upgrades to W10.
[snip]
--
user <candycane> is generated from /dev/urandom

On Thu, 07 Mar 2024 19:09:33 -0800 (Seattle), Relf wrote:

> rBowman:
>> When it hit testing I realized the Outlook had absolutely fucking
>> nothing to do with Outlook Express.
>
> Text messages & Twitter won the "email/USENET" wars because they were
> more expensive, less noisy.

The MAPI approach wasn't that useful so eventually most of the paging was
done by email. That easily translates into text messages since the cell
carriers have gateways, 2135551212@vtext.com for example. The message has
to be pruned from the more elaborate email version similar to the original
alphanumeric pager limitations.

On Fri, 8 Mar 2024 07:37:20 -0500, Chris Ahlstrom wrote:

> His solution? Convince management and "the customer" to go with Win NT.

We went to 'Not supported on Windows 95' in the early 2000s. I 'm running
into that with my Acer Inspire project. It has a Broadcom WiFi which was a
problem even back then. Fedora 39 Live doesn't recognize it. Supposedly
you can install a driver, which would be great if you could connect to
anything. I may have a crossover ethernet cable around someplace but I
decided putting Linux on it was a bridge too far, so Windows 7 it is.

Python 3.9 and above doesn't work on Windows 7 so I had to find an old
3.8. There will probably be other problems. I had he Arduino IDE on it and
that still works and that's all I really need. I doubt VS Code would fly
either.

Chris Ahlstrom wrote:

> chrisv wrote:
>>
>> Chris Ahlstrom wrote:
>>>
>>>> "[DFS is] a know-nothing, a liar, and a k00k. A bigot. A racist. A
>>>> nasty human being. Better you should ignore his miserable misguided
>>>> ravings." - Chris Ahlstrom
>>>
>>>I partially retract those words.
>>
>> Why, when they are true?
>
>Well, he's not really a know-nothing.

Well of course he knows *some* things. He knows that he's a shameless
liar, for example...

--
'[chrisv] literally said it was "stupid" to test the code vs relying
on compiler warnings.' - DumFSck, lying shamelessly