jtotheh

I have emails going back > 20 years in IMAP folders. They've survived numerous email server migrations and personal email address changes. For a while I was running my own email server. I find Apple's iCloud has hung on to things for me for quite a long time too.

I used to use Linux on the desktop and periodically lost things that were saved to it. A lot of early photos are lost due to that.

I had a web page about my daughter starting when she was born in January 1998 and my employer, who I left, promised it would "always" be preserved. They deleted it about a year or two later and I wish I could somehow get it back.

https://web.archive.org/web/20240810153028/https://www.theat... Algorithms may be allowed to facilitate price-fixing among landlords in ways that would not be allowed if done by humans.

The course is free BTW.

I went through this course, the Yale Course on Happiness, a couple years ago. I think it is really valuable for understanding what will bring us happiness and/or inner peace. I was told I was very smart when I was young and as it has turned out, at least at programming, I'm not that great. (I retired a year and a half ago). I think a lot of people are working as hard as they can, and trying to act like they're not. The people you're comparing yourself to may be working as hard as you are. I think the happiness course is really good though, here's the link: https://online.yale.edu/courses/science-well-being

I worked on an app that was using Java Web Start still, as of January 2023. It was a problem, because JWS was not included in the parts of Java that were open-sourced, and was not available as part of recent OpenJDK versions of Java. Some open source JWS implementations exist, when I left that job though, the situation had still not been resolved in terms of finding a JWS replacement. It was imperative that we get off Oracle Java because of their expensive upcoming licensing changes. I wonder what ever happened..........

Miles Davis "Jazz at the Plaza" is pretty much the band from Kind of Blue, live. It's a good record.

There's another Miles record that is very meditative, "In a Silent Way" but it's quite different. Electric pianos and organ and John McLaughlin on guitar.

Kind of Blue is sort of an its own level, though.

UNIX etc has all file access start from /. DOS/Windows has separate trees starting with different letters. I think having it all in one tree structure has some advantages. All paths can be expressed as relative paths, for instance.

MS-DOS didn't exist prior to PC-DOS, initially. "IBM's implementation of MS-DOS (PC DOS)" was the gold standard.

all of it came from QDOS, a CP/M-like OS M$ bought based on hiding their plans, and that IBM made PC-DOS from. PC-DOS shipped with the original IBM PC.

MS-DOS only became a thing once there were "IBM PC compatible" clones. It was very smart of M$ to see that coming. They kind of rode IBM's coattails into dominance in the market. Back then, personal computers were oddities and when IBM entered the game, their reputation gave them credibility.

I know, but when did you last see a floppy disk?

I've seen some discussion of this, I believe that DOS got some ideas from a DEC OS (not VMS) that they were familiar with from using PDP-10s. Or something like that. Also, they had started using forward slashes to signify options to commands. Although I was a card-carrying Linux stan and Windows hater, starting with NT they have done a good job, overall. M$ makes backward compatibility a priority, and thus will not dump bad ideas that have become entrenched. I do think Jobs was right that M$ has "no taste". I am helping teach Intro to CS to HS students (ironically, through a M$ program) and even the teacher did not know why the C: drive is the letter that it is. AFAICT we're all condemned to live with choices made in a cheap clone of CP/M.... Of course other technologies have their bad choices as well (UNIX/C null-terminated strings, maybe, for instance?)

My local library gives access to O'Reilly Safari. You have to click around a bit more than if you had a full price account but I think it's a great resource.

I tried this (or something like it) and there were a few oddities. I found I've gotten used to Cmd-Tab for switching apps and Cmd-` for switching windows within an app. Now I don't feel the need to modify the stock behavior.

Well, that would be beyond me. Thanks for the info!

I wish rust supported openbsd. Not sure if I am blaming the right entity, but rust on openbsd is lame.

A big part of what makes a phone platform competitive is the apps for it. In the Netscape/ie days, Netscape ran on many platforms and made the underlying OS less important.this led to Microsoft going to great lengths to make windows/ie a walled garden. I saw this in working developing intranet apps. Things that “just worked “ on windows/ie didn’t work for Mac/linux/unix users. The “super app” part of this lawsuit seems to me to describe a sort of layer that allows smaller apps —- “mini programs”— to program to that layer instead of to android/ios, and makes the app the same on either OS. It seems apple is being anticompetitive in its actions to prevent this.its sort of like QT letting you have one code base for various os’s. I think apple can try and make the native apps for iOS be better through innovation, but anticompetitive behavior is not ok.

From page 29 of the lawsuit: “Apple did not respond to the risk that super apps might disrupt its monopoly by innovating. Instead, Apple exerted its control over app distribution to stifle others' innovation. Apple created, strategically broadened, and aggressively enforced its App Store Guidelines to effectively block apps from hosting mini programs. Apple's conduct disincentivized investments in mini program development and caused U.S. companies to abandon or limit support for the technology in the United States.”

If apple has capabilities on iPhones that androids don’t have, then native iOS apps that use them will be more desirable . That would be beneficial competition. If apple makes it hard to write cross platform lowest common denominator apps, that is anticompetitive.

I did a lot of Pascal programming on I think a CDC6300 (?) at the university. If you could get to a terminal you could submit a compile job and wait for the operator to hand out your printed output. The system was case-insensitive and some terminals were all uppercase (of course monochrome, I guess 80x24 or so). So even minor typos took like 20 minutes to be reported. I recently got curious about running a PC from floppies and found out I could get an external USB 3.5" floppy drive and boot a (I think) 2013 or so Thinkpad into DOS 3.3, with some doing. Managed to edit Lotus 1-2-3 with DEBUG.COM to remove copy protection. Of course much useful info to do this was on the web.

That was nostalgia also, but the old days with the terminals and line printer output were really something.

Good report on the various hazards of "AI".

I had a CSF leak caused by a bone spur on my spine poking a hole in my dura.long story short, spinal surgery to remove the spur and seal the dura , which involved fusing three thoracic vertebrae. The “positional headaches” were horrible(when I was leaking). I consider myself lucky that it was treated as successfully as it was. This was over five years ago.

I have heard that :

if you avoid exposure to equal temperament (western compromise tuning that allows 12 keys with equal deviation from the Pythagorean (integer) ratios) , and only listen to "just intonation" - various tunings that adhere to the integer ratios, you get used to the just intonations and find equal temperament "out of tune". I don't get the impression this study tried to use subjects who weren't still hearing "regular" music.

Your information is much more detailed and specific. I was just giving an example of the loss of support for old software/formats. I didn’t mean that postscript support was involved in this particular case.

Tragically, Postscript support has been largely removed from MacOS now. Apparently the language was weird enough that supporting it made some (in)security hacks possible. I guess I'm old ! I remember first finding out about it in 1986 when is very "leet". Postscript printers were big $.

I say tragically because Postscript was pretty key in making DTP as compelling as it used to be, which kind of saved the Mac in terms of being the "killer app" for it.

I think you may be able to run some kind of postscript support in some tool from Adobe, or even Ghostscript. And probably, the newer software is better, but it's sad that you can't view a postscript file on macOS out of the box now.

I have an M1 MacBook Pro 16" I've had for almost two years and it's great. I recently got a minimal M1 Mini to replace an ancient iMac that died. the mini is really good as well. For my money these are the best computers I've had. Overall very happy with the Apple ecosystem (phone, watch, TV, etc). I do think their fees for upgrading memory and disk are crazy. I use an external SSD as the disk for the mini. I also have an OpenBSD Thinkpad (very old), an old desktop with Arch Linux, and a newer desktop with Windows 11. The MacBook is 95% of my computing time though.

I wandered around New Guinea for a month in 1984. It was fascinating. This article, though brief, makes good points about the human tendency to put stock in rituals. It makes me wonder about some of my own rituals.

Abort/Retry/Fail

I've been using UTM, it seems to work OK. I use arm64 images, I haven't tried x86_64 images. Works for Windows and Debian.

I first had this kind of experience with a BBS in about 1987. Email has been around for a lot longer than that, for some people. I think smartphones really transformed things though, and now I think half the world's population has one. For me, there is a chain of events that led to my marriage of 28 years that can be traced back to that first BBS I was on....

I think this is good. people should read this and share it with management/suits.......

This is really good!

essentially the computer I'm typing this on is $1829 at B&H - I know it's an M1 not an M3 but it's a very nice machine.

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1668189-REG/apple_mk1...

I have an M1 MacBook pro and the screen (16") is wonderful. I have an external 4K monitor that was only 400$ and it is not as nice a screen, I'm not sure why-refresh rate? underlying technology?

Anyway, I mostly use it with no external monitor and find it very nice, including Xcode. You can also always plan on getting a monitor later when you can afford it. Maybe think about 16" instead of 14"? Possibly deals can be had on apple silicon machines that are not the latest?