zabzonk

101 ms·

151.
by zabzonk 6mo ago
> AOL and compuserve were not even available outside the USA in the late nineties yes, they were, in the UK at least. speaking as a compuserve user.
152.
by zabzonk 6mo ago
When I read Stross's book I was reminded that Cordwainer Smith in the novel "The Planet Buyer" had a somewhat similar scheme, with the value of something being dependent on where it was. Of course, this being Smith, the conce
153.
by zabzonk 6mo ago
>it turned out to be extremely hard to prove who had committed these murders Particularly when the troops could say "Charlie must have snuck in and done it".
154.
by zabzonk 6mo ago
s/adjust/adult/
155.
by zabzonk 6mo ago
> my personal litmus test is if you'd let your 13 year kid explore Manhattan alone during the day My parents let me (14) and my brother (9) explore central Paris on our own when my Dad was working at the Paris air show for the RAF.
156.
by zabzonk 6mo ago
In a similar vein: https://calumchace.com/favourite-relevant-sf-short-story/
157.
by zabzonk 6mo ago
In this LLM age, I guess that would be Gas Town :-( https://steve-yegge.medium.com/welcome-to-gas-town-4f25ee16d...
158.
by zabzonk 6mo ago
Spotting a problem is relatively easy. Coming up with a solution, not so much. But it is still worth pointing out that there is a problem.
159.
by zabzonk 6mo ago
The BBC actually has an official "Pronunciation Unit", which tells people like newsreaders the "proper" way to pronounce words and placenames. Unfortunately, particularly in the latter case they often get it wrong. For
160.
by zabzonk 6mo ago
Microsoft actually provide an ODBC CSV data source out of the box.
161.
by zabzonk 6mo ago
> Imagine in steampunk fashion See The 8-bit Guy regarding what the world would be like if we were still limited to vacuum tubes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEpnRM97ACQ (video)
162.
by zabzonk 7mo ago
Don't think so. It's not a games engine, and (as far as I remember) any graphics are just a wrapper round GDI. You would be much better off with unreal et al.
163.
by zabzonk 7mo ago
Well, that takes me back! There are other well-produced books in the same series - anyone remember "Undocumented Windows"?
164.
by zabzonk 7mo ago
The US did it all the time in Vietnam.
165.
by zabzonk 7mo ago
Come and live in the UK :-(
166.
by zabzonk 7mo ago
> nobody knows the name I didn't have to google for it to know - Mike Collins. I also knew the the name of the third guy to walk on it - Pete Conrad, and what he said getting out of the LEM (perhaps not precisely): "That may be
167.
by zabzonk 7mo ago
Yep, I know about all that - I had big cupboard full of the damn things in my flat in london [various ataris (6502 and 68k based ones), dragon 32 (coco lookalike), peculiar IBM pc clones, and other stuff] A few years ago I got my nephew to
168.
by zabzonk 7mo ago
But there weren't too many Lisas (working or otherwise) when the thing came out!
169.
by zabzonk 7mo ago
You can do a lot of horrible things with setjmp and friends. I actually implemented some exception throw/catch macros using them (which did work) for a compiler that didn't support real C++ exceptions. Thank god we never used them
170.
by zabzonk 7mo ago
> WordPerfect beat them all. It was certainly popular, but I hated all the function keys (I still hate function keys) and my favourite was WordStar (not for Windows), for both word processing and as a programming editor, up until I switc
171.
by zabzonk 7mo ago
> As I recall, there were tons of books about GEM for the Atari ST, at least in Europe. Yes, there were, but compared with the Windows textbooks and Microsoft-supplied documentation for Windows, they were really not good. In the UK, they
172.
by zabzonk 7mo ago
Whoo, has anyone actually got a working Lisa? Or is this emulation?
173.
by zabzonk 7mo ago
Hmm, just looked up WP on Wikipedia - I didn't realise it was ported around so much. Particularly to the ST, who's keyboard was frankly Not Very Good, which is not what you want for word processing. But it did have a nice mono dis
174.
by zabzonk 7mo ago
I remember using a Z80 assembler on a CP/M 1.x machine, way back when. If it wasn't by DRI could it possibly have been (shock, horror) Microsoft??? We did have a Microsoft Fortran compiler, which was crap, but that was mostly down
175.
by zabzonk 7mo ago
> But the bigger problem was software piracy. Piracy was common on the ST, and that made developers less enthusiastic to continue ST development Not so sure about this. The Atari/GEM combination was very popular with musicians for M
176.
by zabzonk 7mo ago
I do get lockscreen wallpapers, but in general I find them quite pretty and interesting. I've never tried changing to a fixed lockscreen wallpaper, though I I do have a fixed, custom desktop one. I can't think that people are obse
177.
by zabzonk 7mo ago
Oh, I thought this was going to be about the old trackball arcade game. Or perhaps it is? Same sort of rules? The maths is going so far over my head I can't hear the whoosh.
178.
by zabzonk 7mo ago
> pick a specific wallpaper image you interest me strangely - which one?
179.
by zabzonk 7mo ago
> injected advertisements into the Windows 11 Start menu's "Recommended" section. These showed up labeled "Promoted" and pushed apps like Opera browser and some password manager nobody asked for. And the Start m
180.
by zabzonk 7mo ago
I really liked working in the NL, but their food and drink I could not get used to. I did a bit of consultancy at KLM, and what was offered for lunch in the cafeteria turned my stomach - artificial meat, artificial bread. I complained about

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