dcminter

Speccy guy back in the day here, but these days I love Linux, and you know Linus cut his teeth on the QL, right?

I feel like storage has improved slightly since microdrives were state of the art too...

:) Me too, but it seemed like the people who knew would know and for the ones who didn't "grey" was going to be close enough...

It's so interesting that the intuitive meaning of this has changed - first meaning grey, then bright blue, and now... perhaps black, perhaps nothing? What does "a dead channel" mean to kids today?

I recently re-read the sprawl trilogy and thought Neuromancer stood up very well, but the others not so much.

I was issued an equivalent Latitude 7490 at a gig in 2019 and enjoyed using it (under Linux). It's robust and easily upgraded, but a little heavier than I would like. I replaced the battery a year or two ago.

I generally haven't had much trouble with second hand Dell and Thinkpad machines; perhaps buying second hand means that the real lemons are already ewaste? Though the XPS machines bought new were fine aside from the annoyingly brief battery life.

Currently using a Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen 13 under Linux for work stuff and I like that (much lighter) so if I can get one second hand with enough memory I might choose that when/if the Dell eventually feels too slow.

They have it in one place and never ever use it anywhere else? Do you know why?

Ok, I don't know anyone at all who does that. Your friends are odd.

0. Developer

1. Dell Latitude 7490

2. As long as I can.

I think I've been on the Latutude for about 4 years now, but it's a second-hand device coming up on seven or eight years old. I generally don't need much oomph for the stuff I like to do at home (I don't game for example).

I had a series of XPS laptops, but the battery life in use was poor and they tended to need the battery replacing quite quickly (puffy batteries - possibly because they run quite hot).

Prior to that I'd been on second hand Thinkpads, with the X220s still kicking around somewhere in case the main device dies.

I reckon the current Dell has at least a couple more years in it for my purposes. It has 64Gb ram so until website bloat gets out of control I'm good I think.

I have a fairly fast mini-pc with oodles of ram on the network that I use as a sacrificial yolo machine for Claude, and an elderly desktop machine with a decent GPU for local running of LLMs. The latter is noisy and in practice it hasn't been turned on for months.

I hate Macs, but envy you the battery life and spiffy Arm CPU (yes, I know about Asahi, but until one can safely entirely wipe MacOS from the Mac I'm not interested).

Taking your puzzlement at face value...

I don't quite understand why people have laptops at home if they always use it in the same place.

A lot of people wil be using it from the sofa or generally in a shared space where it's not convenient to have a permanent computer setup.

Those who usually use it in one place may want the flexibility of occasionally using it from the coffee shop or while on vacation.

Hilariously, no.

That would be the Monster Raving Loony party who will apparently also be standing in this by-election. Count Binface has ruled out a pact with them.

Yeah, for a lot of systems it really is more trouble than it's worth - I remember enjoying this article when it came out: https://www.enterpriseintegrationpatterns.com/ramblings/18_s...

Ah, you're assuming distributed, which I wasn't. We are not at home to partition tolerance :)

Makes sense in the context of the original post though.

Is there a reason why two-phase commit can't work with a DB and a message queue? DB2 and MQ Series used to support this (though they called it "XA" transactions and you had to compile support into the drivers which felt a bit sketchy - late 90s I think). Should I have been suspicious of this?

I think my favourite aspect of the tale (at least as Harris tells it) is that Kujau was such a bad forger, and the recipients wanted it all to be true so badly that they skipped several opportunities to actually check!

I shall see if I can find Schtonk! with subtitles, sounds up my alley.

Why not both?

But that said, my understanding, very likely wrong, was that those were mostly tax records and other lists - which don't fire my imagination in quite the same way as works of philosophy and literature snatched (almost literally) from the flames of history.

Now, why should I be more interested in the mesopotamian tablets? (Not sarcasm, I'm interested)

Any time something of popular historical interest like this pops up I think about that.

If you've not read it then Robert Harris's (factual) book about the affair is entertaining, not least because such a broad sweep of dislikeable characters were undone by greed and folly!

Indeed. So far as I recall I had a greyscale monitor that couldn't do more than 800x600. I think it was a 486sx and I probably still had a 32GB MFM hard disk at that point so it was a very underwhelming machine.

I think 1MB of RAM in a simm was about £100 at that point, but it's been a while!

You could run X11 in 4Mb at one point, although I rather wished I didn't.

The City of London, aka "The City", aka "The Square Mile" is not the same thing as Greater London or even what's usually called "Central London." I don't think "Central London" has an agreed exact definition, but it's likely what you thought the parent post meant.

The City is a specific area, more or less covering the same area as the original Roman city. It's the original financial district - though a lot of that moved to Docklands at the tail end of the 1900s.

It's much more built up than even adjacent Westminster ("The City of Westminster") and definitely has far fewer trees.

The UK does, or used to, and yes, it was on the plastic wrappers on sliced bread.

Sweden has a wire encased in plastic thing that crimps the opening shut instead.

Both types are re-usable at least for the expected lifetime of a loaf of bread.

The "signature verification" in the fix being CRC32 is pretty hilariously clueless.

Have you ever encountered the atheist version IRL? Not just in internet bickering?

Maybe it was regional - I wouldn't know which region they were from off the cuff.

My family is mostly C of E and I don't recall any of them ever bringing up religious topics with third parties unprompted, so it did strike me as pretty weird.

You’re just hand waving over the question of “How did god just happen?” God just magically appeared?

See? It's a crap argument.

From the excellent "A Quarter Century of UNIX" (by the late Peter H. Salus):

Heidi would bring her dog with her to class and to her office. He was a very friendly dog, and a lot of the students enjoyed throwing a ball for him down the corridor to fetch. He even had his picture on the bulletin board with the graduate students: the legend read that he was working on his Ph.Dog. John decided to name the program after the dog: Biff. According to Heidi, John and Bill Joy then spent a lot of time trying to compose an explanation for biff - they came up with "Be notified if mail arrived." Biff, who died in August 1993, at 15, once got a B in a compiler class. According to Heidi, the story of Biff barking at the mailman is a scurrilous canard.

One of my favourite bits of trivia from that excellent book, but hardly anyone I bump into these days knows anything about that kind of multi-user Unix experience/environment these days. I barely caught any of it myself.

Why is "God did it" a better answer than "it just happened" ? If you prefer the "God did it" you then have to account for where God came from and end up with a set of answers that could just as easily be applied to the universe itself. Believe what you want, but this isn't some kind of gotcha.

I do see, mostly from Americans, self introductions of the form "I'm so and so... and I love Jesus" in contexts that have nothing to do with religion. I've never had anyone bring up their atheism or agnosticism in that way in a non-religious context.

For me at least the post wasn't loading on mobile (Firefox on Android) and looks like others had the same issue. Skimming the article just now on the laptop (Firefox on Linux) I see in the images that the author is using a trackpoint on their keyboard, but it's not mentioned in the text anywhere!

Edit: Ohhhh... I see that big box at the bottom that I just dismissed without reading as one of those "continue reading my other articles" chumbox inspired things, is actually a continuation of the article via multiple options. I guess that might be what upset my mobile browser too.

I'm still not spotting any discussion of the trackpoint though...

Fair, although I used to prefer the old chonky Thinkpad keyboards to anything else. There was (is?) a Model M style buckle spring keyboard with a trackpoint, but it had the numeric pad, so no good to you.

I guess one could do a project-keyboard and add a trackpoint to it. I don't know if you'd have to macgyver it up, or if there's something you can buy as a package for the trackpoint. That would be fun. One could even do a 40% version with it and damn the RSI :)

You're likely thinking of trigraphs - alternatives to some characters: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1234582/purpose-of-trigr...

You know the Lenovo Thinkpad Trackpoint Keyboard II is a thing, right? It would seem to meet that requirement. What's missing?

Edit: Oh, they're pricey - so that, I guess?

Occasionally it scrolls me over to a different continent...