giamma

On the C64 some packers used screen memory to host the code. The first was The Screen Cruncher by 1001 Crew, a Dutch group. It's mentioned in this interview by its original author.

https://web.archive.org/web/20040902191610/http://www.c64hq....

Same for me. Also, on MacOs duplicity was consuming much more CPU than Borg and was causing my fan to spin loudly. Eventually I moved to timemachine, but I still consider Borg a very good option.

I was using it in the early 90's. At that time if you wanted to port your C/C++ application to multiple platforms, one option would be: - gcc on linux - djgpp on MSDos - emx+gcc on OS/2 [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMX_(programming_environment)

The main problem for Italy is its public debt [1][2]. The debt is so big that Italy can barely pay interests to stay within the boundaries defined by EU. This means there is no remaining money to fund growth.

[1] In Italian: https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storia_del_debito_pubblico_ita... [2] https://www.economist.com/special-report/2022/12/05/why-is-i...

I tried running it on MacOS Sonoma on Intel using UTM but it always loads to a black screen, regardless of the video settings I use. Did anyone have better luck with UTM?

Well there are notable cases in which the CEO had a critical role in the product development. Larry Ellison coded himself the first versions of Oracle database and was then CEO up to 2014. Shay Banon wrote Elasticsearch and was Elastic CEO for some time.

I was not complaining at all, I am just saying that I have to sign with an hyphen because of some historical software limitation.

Now I understand, I work with some Ukranians and they often have similar but slightly different names (Oleks, Olehk, Maria, Mariia).

Hong Kong natives, even if from a Chinese heritage, have to have an English name.

And software in those countries always has the "English name" field.

Same for me. I am Italian but I always used computers with English localization because translation was often bad, especially IBM translations.

So I got used to using US keyboards also, and never using accented letters even though they are frequently used in Italian, e.g. instead of writing "Mario è alto" (Mario is tall) I would write "Mario e' alto". It helped a lot that I worked for almost two decades for companies having only non Italian clients and all communications internal and external were in English.

Now that I am working for an Italian company with Italian clients, I am slowly getting used to Italian keyboards and accented letters.

Out of curiosity, which country is that?

Sorry for the typo.

The lawyer even insisted that the hyphen had to be clearly visible in the signature. I think that in those types of documents in Italy you are legally required to use a readable signature, because I bought/sold house a number of times as family grew, and every time different lawyers always insisted on this aspect.

If I remember correctly, in 2010 or so Bank of China was using EBCDIC + a specific codepage by IBM to store successfully Chinese names in COBOL systems. Communication with those systems would happen using IBM MQ Series, a message queue system.

The codepage was very specific, it was not part of the standard Java JDK but it was included in the IBM Java JDK.

My first name in Italian is made of two words. That is not uncommon in Italy, but I usually write it as a single word otherwise non-Italians would assume that the second part is a second name, and address me with only the first part of my name, which I find somehow annoying.

Even better, when I was a kid and I got my first official document, the national healthcare card, the software in use did not allow a space character in the first name. The operator then decided to add a hyphen to enter the two parts of my name as separate words.

Fast forward many years, and I my first name shows up with the hyphen on the ID card and healthcare card, while it does not contain the hyphen on the driving license, which of course I got much later when software had improved.

Generally this is a non issue, nobody ever said that it's not me because there is a hyphen or a space in my name, however when I signed the mortgage for my house, the layer asked me to sign with the hyphen, and in the document he wrote both variants of my name with an A.K.A. clause.

Having worked for 20 years in fintech, I have seen many large European and Asian banks running on COBOL programs written 30 years ago, using EBCDIC. In many cases the sources for some of those programs are lost, due to the fact that proper version control systems did not exist at that time, and nobody dares to re-implement them because they are scared of regressions.

In Italy, in Veneto (the region around Venice) the local dialect tends to omit the last letter of a word if such letter is a vowel.

Because of that, my grand father and his sister happened to have different family name in their ID cards: when they got registered by the priest at the beginning of 1900, on a paper book of course, the priest who registered the sister added an "I" at the end of the family name as he thought that that should be the right spelling in proper Italian. At that time ID cards did not even exist so nobody bothered.

Well, my understanding is that right after Oracle acquired Sun it found itself with a free database engine it did not need because it would compete with its own "free" Oracle XE product offering.

There was a lot of uncertainty about the future of MySQL... The original authors forked MariaDB and MySQL for many months did not receive any update.

Well, the same would hold for github or any other open source container.

When I find something interesting on github, before deciding to use it, I check the number of committers and the commit history/frequency.

Anyone can do the same for Apache projects.

Thank you for pointing out, I fixed the first link.

I think this is a wrong perceptions. Projects come and go, based on adoption, community interest, technology evolution, trends...

There are still a lot of projects at Apache.

Check their last annual report [1], especially the sponsors and the statistics sections.

[1] https://apache.org/foundation/docs/FY2023AnnualReport.pdf

I think the history recap is somewhat incomplete.

I believe that the death blow which lead to the fork LibreOffice was the lack of trust in Oracle commitment to Open Office and open source in general, after Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems.

Sun indeed had largely reduced its involvement in the project in the last years, and there was the "Symphony incident" [1]. The death blow was when Oracle arrived, started the trial with Google over Java/Android, inherited MySQL and almost killed it, inherited OpenOffice and the future did not look bright anymore [2, in German]

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20130927072255/https://lwn.net/A...

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20131024094250/http://www.heise....

2:333/300.15 (or 2:333/329.15)

80 bytes was the limit in Italy.

At that time in Italy we did not have free local phone calls, every call would be billed based on its duration.

Now imagine being a Fidonet sysop who on a volunteer basis was running a computer at home 24/7, often having a second phone line dedicated to the computer (at the time even more expensive) to make sure that your users would not clog your home landline making you unreachable all day. Plus overnight your system would need to dial up and connect to your hub and exchange all data produced by your user's discussions (echomail). All the costs were on the sysop and the national hubs in Italy would then exchange with a system running in Belgium or the Netherlands, system which would in turn then exchange with USA. Flat rates did not exist (at least in Italy), and no sysop was asking (at least in Italy) end users to contribute with money or a subscription.

That is why content was moderated in the first place, to avoid off topic discussions that would waste byte and increase the bills. For this reason you would also need to limit signatures, tag-lines and so forth to 80 bytes, which IMHO are more than enough for a signature, unless you want to add ASCII ART to it.

Also, if you build everything in canvas, good luck making your UI accessible and screen-reader friendly

For the n-th time Oracle revised Java licensing terms, and like any previous iteration, the changes are for the worse.

I know a Bank in Italy that uses voice recognition but you also have to provide 2 digits from a "voice password" in addition to the voice match.

Sure, I am not against JavaScript per se (although my preference goes to strongly typed languages), my first comment had a smiley at the end, I just firmly believe that the way we build UI for the Web today is flawed.

I am not familiar with JS in GTK+, but if it's a JS binding for GTK+ it's exactly what I meant when I said that on the desktop you can implement a user interface using your preferred language as long as bindings exist for a decent widget toolkit.

And it sounds totally legit to me. If instead what you are referring to is something similar to Electron, that is something I "hate"; I understand it's a cheap way for a Web Developer to reuse the skills and build a desktop application, but the result is typically buggy, bloated, slow, and does not integrate properly with the desktop environment (fonts, colors, clipboard, accessibility are just the first things that come mind).

I think that the way we build user interfaces today on the Web is fundamentally flawed. One need to learn JavaScript/TypeScript, then HTML and DOM, then CSS. Then most likely you need to learn Angular or React or Vue or whatever, some widget toolkit like Bootstrap, get accustomed with Webpack, minification, uglification, rely on countless MIT-licensed libraries whose authors may come and go because the base runtime (=the browser) just gives you DOM, CSS and plain JavaScript.

Did you ever tried implementing a desktop UI using an object-oriented multi-platform toolkit like SWT or QT or GTK? There are good chances that all the dependencies you will need are already "there", you learn the widget toolkit bindings for your preferred programming language and you can start. It's so much more productive and fun (at least for me) and most of the time you don't need to mess up with colors, styles etc. etc. because you will want the operating system to take care of that.

On the Web you have so much more freedom, because the web page is almost a canvas, but at the same time (for me at least) it looks way less productive and everytime I think of it, I always wonder why nobody is proposing anything better for the Web and the industry keeps on building layers of complexity on top of JavaScript/DOM/CSS.

It is fully opensource, the opensource code contains also the logic to verify a serial key that you will be given if you purchase the license and if verification succeeds the code will enable the extra features.

As such you could fork it, tweak the code around the license verification to always return TRUE or whatever, and you would be running a "pro version" of the software.

The developer simply trusts that people who like the software will purchase a license, or the fact that the majority of people out there are not programmers and would not be able to rebuild the software for themselves. Besides, the product is also offered as a SaaS.