Where can I buy a large analogue meter?...

[Peeler]

On Thu, 21 Apr 2022 16:21:58 -0600, lowbrowwoman, the endlessly driveling,
troll-feeding, senile idiot, blabbered again:

I liked the Z8000 and still have a Captain Zilog t-shirt from a Zilog
seminar.

NOOOO!!! REALLLY??? Why are all you Trumptards such GREAT guys! Eh? <VBG>

--
Yet more of the very interesting senile blather by lowbrowwoman:
\"My family loaded me into a \'51 Chevy and drove from NY to Seattle and
back in \'52. I\'m alive. The Chevy had a painted steel dashboard with two
little hand prints worn down to the primer because I liked to stand up
and lean on it to see where we were going.\"
MID: <j2kuc1F3ejsU1@mid.individual.net>

 

[Bob F]

On 4/21/2022 7:36 AM, Martin Brown wrote:

On 21/04/2022 14:44, rbowman wrote:
On 04/20/2022 09:31 PM, Jasen Betts wrote:
On 2022-04-18, rbowman <bowman@montana.com> wrote:

That\'s not a general problem. There was a period with the early Athlons
that didn\'t implement some of the new Intel instructions but I\'ve
leaned
towards AMD with no problem.

It wasn\'t AMD but I recall one processor that ran CP/M and DOS, both
rather poorly. National maybe?

 NEC V20

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NEC_V20

Right, National was mostly analog. I was surprised to find TI bought
National. I hadn\'t thought about either in a long time. I worked on a

National did have its not quite a VAX on a chip NS32k series.
Dec had its MicroVax 78032 (ISTR slightly later but better).

Zilog had its Z8000. I had the tricky job of unpicking a way out of that
particular blind alley as one of my first jobs in industry. Olivetti M20
and certain of the dedicated word processors used it.

project that used the TMS9900. It\'s claim to fame was availability in
a rad hard version. NEC seems to be rolling along.

I worked on several using its smaller 9995 and bigger brother the 99k.

I didn\'t appreciate at the time just how good at interrupt handling and
context switching it was until later when we tried to do the same real
time tasks on a notionally faster Motorola 68k series CPU.

The 8080 was so much faster than the 8008. I designed and wire-wrapped
my first computers 8080 board to replace the 8008 board it started with.
It handled the paper tape I/O much better. All the original parts came
out of a dumpster at work.

 

[Ricky]

On Thursday, April 21, 2022 at 8:39:05 PM UTC-4, Bob F wrote:

On 4/21/2022 7:36 AM, Martin Brown wrote:
On 21/04/2022 14:44, rbowman wrote:
On 04/20/2022 09:31 PM, Jasen Betts wrote:
On 2022-04-18, rbowman <bow...@montana.com> wrote:

That\'s not a general problem. There was a period with the early Athlons
that didn\'t implement some of the new Intel instructions but I\'ve
leaned
towards AMD with no problem.

It wasn\'t AMD but I recall one processor that ran CP/M and DOS, both
rather poorly. National maybe?

NEC V20

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NEC_V20

Right, National was mostly analog. I was surprised to find TI bought
National. I hadn\'t thought about either in a long time. I worked on a

National did have its not quite a VAX on a chip NS32k series.
Dec had its MicroVax 78032 (ISTR slightly later but better).

Zilog had its Z8000. I had the tricky job of unpicking a way out of that
particular blind alley as one of my first jobs in industry. Olivetti M20
and certain of the dedicated word processors used it.

project that used the TMS9900. It\'s claim to fame was availability in
a rad hard version. NEC seems to be rolling along.

I worked on several using its smaller 9995 and bigger brother the 99k.

I didn\'t appreciate at the time just how good at interrupt handling and
context switching it was until later when we tried to do the same real
time tasks on a notionally faster Motorola 68k series CPU.

The 8080 was so much faster than the 8008. I designed and wire-wrapped
my first computers 8080 board to replace the 8008 board it started with.
It handled the paper tape I/O much better. All the original parts came
out of a dumpster at work.

Did it run the same code? I don\'t remember if you had to reassemble to go from the 8008 to the 8080 or not. I have an 8008 computer. It has not been fired up in years. The serial port was 20 mA current, 110 baud. I tweaked it to work with RS-232. Still, most async serial ports are TTL through a USB cable these days. But they work fine. 110 baud is hard coded into the ROM, yes, ROM. I think the unit was designed to use 1702A EEPROMs and even has a programmer, but I don\'t know if I\'ve ever tired it.

The 8008 is a very slow CPU. It is the basis of the machine cycles on the 8080. The 14 bit address was multiplexed over the 8 bit data/address bus in two clocks and the data on a third clock, so T1, T2 and T3. Sound familiar? Even though the 8080 is not constrained by the 8 bit port (so the 8008 would fit an 18 pin package), it uses the same internal timing. Just at a much high clock rate. I think the 8008 I have is clocked at maybe 400 kHz.

--

Rick C.

--+- Get 1,000 miles of free Supercharging
--+- Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

 

[none]

In article <op.1kvtbupfmvhs6z@ryzen.lan>,
Commander Kinsey <CK1@nospam.com> wrote:

On Tue, 19 Apr 2022 07:27:39 +0100, Jan Panteltje
SNIP
I have 9 virtual desktops, 1 has some icons you can click on, one has
a browser, one has a Usenet newsreader, one has an audio mixer,
and 8 actually have a terminal.

Can\'t you afford real ones? I just have 5 monitors. I can see them all
at once.

GUI is for dummies, like going to a supermarket and searching on the
shelves for what you need from what is plonked down there.

It\'s the way the human mind works, at least normal ones. If I showed
you 50 pictures and asked you to find the widget, you could do it far
faster than finding the word widget in a pile of 50 words.

As long as you have memorized those hieroglyphs.
Eclipse comes with 50 icons. It takes a a month to memorize these
and an hour a day to refresh.
Then comes Blender, and imp and ...
Strange fact about English is that the meaning of words change much.
OTOH there seems not be a general accepted hieroglyphs for HELP!

My computah speaks English and I can just type commands.

It isn\'t English.

Much simpler and faster than mousing around in menus (if what you want
is there at all).

Menus make it easy to find things. For common stuff keyboard shortcuts
are always available.

Of course you need to know Unix...

No need to learn that shit.

There is not difficult to show commands in a list and to accept
a first letter. No need to use the mouse.

You are forced to use the mouse past insane sequences of random
characters, that are used in the url\'s.
<SNIP>

Some people read comics (like poopeye), some read datasheets, some
read code, and some just read what their computah says.

You are abnormal.

The Chinese are literate, the USAians are not.
We will see who wins.

Groetjes Albert
--
\"in our communism country Viet Nam, people are forced to be
alive and in the western country like US, people are free to
die from Covid 19 lol\" duc ha
albert@spe&ar&c.xs4all.nl &=n http://home.hccnet.nl/a.w.m.van.der.horst

 

[none]

In article <59db23eaebcharles@candehope.me.uk>,
charles <charles@candehope.me.uk> wrote:

In article <op.1kts38vgmvhs6z@ryzen.lan>,
Commander Kinsey <CK1@nospam.com> wrote:
On Mon, 18 Apr 2022 08:02:11 +0100, Jan Panteltje
pNaonStpealmtje@yahoo.com> wrote:

On a sunny day (Sun, 17 Apr 2022 14:08:22 -0600) it happened rbowman
bowman@montana.com> wrote in <jc3adkFbplkU1@mid.individual.net>:

On 04/17/2022 10:51 AM, Jan Panteltje wrote:
What\'s a modern programmer? One that uses that snake language
\'python\' or so?
I like to code in asm for Microchip PIC micros, there is a lot you
can do with 256 bytes RAM and 16 kB ROM.
http://panteltje.com/panteltje/pic/scope_pic/
http://panteltje.com/panteltje/pic/index.html

While I prefer the AVR series I definitely agree. My day job is C/C++/C#
and increasingly JavaScript with a new Angular product but when I get
home I like to keep in simple like when I could wire-wrap up a working
Z80 board.

Have dot doen wirewrap in ages...
http://panteltje.com/panteltje/raspberry_pi_dvb-s_transmitter/

soldering....


Isn\'t wirewrap what amateurs do that can\'t solder?

Wirewrap used to be the standard for GPO wiring blocks.

PDP15 backplanes were wire wrapped for a good reason. (square meters).
wire wrap is about ten times more reliable then solder joints,
and can more easily be corrected.

>from KT24 in Surrey, England

Groetjes Albert
--
\"in our communism country Viet Nam, people are forced to be
alive and in the western country like US, people are free to
die from Covid 19 lol\" duc ha
albert@spe&ar&c.xs4all.nl &=n http://home.hccnet.nl/a.w.m.van.der.horst

 

[Peeler]

On Sat, 23 Apr 2022 09:57:51 +0200, none, another mentally deficient,
troll-feeding senile asshole, blathered:

> As long as you have memorized those hieroglyphs.

As long as you haven\'t yet learned not to feed the troll, you\'d better stay
out of Usenet, troll-feeding senile ASSHOLE! Capisci, senile twit?

 

[Anthony William Sloman]

On Saturday, April 23, 2022 at 5:57:59 PM UTC+10, none albert wrote:

In article <op.1kvtb...@ryzen.lan>,
Commander Kinsey <C...@nospam.com> wrote:
On Tue, 19 Apr 2022 07:27:39 +0100, Jan Panteltje

<SNIP>

You are abnormal.

The Chinese are literate, the USAians are not.

The Chinese can read the Chinese character set or as much of it as they can memorise and keep remembered. Apparently you have to read for an hour a day to stop the recognition system from forgetting stuff.

The USAians learn to read an alphabetic character set, with many fewer symbols. It\'s not hard to get stay literate and stay literate, even when you real as little as many Americans seem to.

Chinese culture puts a great deal of emphasis on the virtues of being literate because it has to - people have to be motivated to get literate and stay literate.

> We will see who wins.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Martin Brown]

On 21/04/2022 18:36, %% wrote:

On Thu, 21 Apr 2022 23:50:27 +1000, rbowman <bowman@montana.com> wrote:

On 04/21/2022 02:21 AM, Martin Brown wrote:
On 21/04/2022 04:31, Jasen Betts wrote:
On 2022-04-18, rbowman <bowman@montana.com> wrote:

That\'s not a general problem. There was a period with the early
Athlons
that didn\'t implement some of the new Intel instructions but I\'ve
leaned
towards AMD with no problem.

It wasn\'t AMD but I recall one processor that ran CP/M and DOS, both
rather poorly. National maybe?

  NEC V20
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NEC_V20

And it ran them surprisingly well for the time. I had one. The 16 bit
V30 version was almost as fast as a 286 and had bit twiddling
instructions. V20 was certainly faster than the 8088 by ~10%.

ISTR there was a bun fight over reverse engineered/stolen microcode too.

The most impressive of the alternative chips was the Cyrix FasMath FPU
which was done by formal methods and found multiple bugs in the Intel
387 implementation of the IEEE floating point standard in the process.
It was about 50% faster and also more accurate which was very useful in
scientific circles.

Quirks of fate. IBM didn\'t believe in the PC market

That is silly. They even did the PCJr later and tried to corner the
home PC market with that and failed spectacularly with that one.

They didn\'t try very hard to make it even remotely worth having as a
home computer. Plenty of much nicer and cheaper ones with much better
graphics. Most makers understood the importance of that aspect.

> Same with the PS2 for the business market and that failed too.

PS2 was a blatant attempt at a FUD lockin and had the interesting effect
of uniting all the other PC clone makers to generate a better ISA bus.

It really upset the scientific instrument makers who had their own
series of dedicated daughter boards that plugged into IBM PCs. It even
caused Intel to go on make an OEM 386 PC clone of its own for industrial
and scientific users which ISTR still had some old style slots.

and the 8088 was the  cheapest way to go.

But was quite adequate to see the PC take off spectacularly.

Mainly because no one was every fired for buying IBM.

The main competitor at the time, the Apple II, had a similar
horsepower cpu and the same plug in card approach.

6502 punched well above its weight for the time.

> And the AT was a more viable design.

And interestingly whilst selling an IBM AT to Russia was entirely legal
at the time they came out selling a faster 8MHz Compaq clone was not!
Amazing what having an inside track on the political system can do...

--
Regards,
Martin Brown

 

[%%]

On Sun, 24 Apr 2022 20:12:08 +1000, Martin Brown
<\'\'\'newspam\'\'\'@nonad.co.uk> wrote:

On 21/04/2022 18:36, %% wrote:
On Thu, 21 Apr 2022 23:50:27 +1000, rbowman <bowman@montana.com> wrote:

On 04/21/2022 02:21 AM, Martin Brown wrote:
On 21/04/2022 04:31, Jasen Betts wrote:
On 2022-04-18, rbowman <bowman@montana.com> wrote:

That\'s not a general problem. There was a period with the early
Athlons
that didn\'t implement some of the new Intel instructions but I\'ve
leaned
towards AMD with no problem.

It wasn\'t AMD but I recall one processor that ran CP/M and DOS, both
rather poorly. National maybe?

NEC V20
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NEC_V20

And it ran them surprisingly well for the time. I had one. The 16 bit
V30 version was almost as fast as a 286 and had bit twiddling
instructions. V20 was certainly faster than the 8088 by ~10%.

ISTR there was a bun fight over reverse engineered/stolen microcode
too.

The most impressive of the alternative chips was the Cyrix FasMath FPU
which was done by formal methods and found multiple bugs in the Intel
387 implementation of the IEEE floating point standard in the process.
It was about 50% faster and also more accurate which was very useful
in
scientific circles.

Quirks of fate. IBM didn\'t believe in the PC market

That is silly. They even did the PCJr later and tried to corner the
home PC market with that and failed spectacularly with that one.

They didn\'t try very hard to make it even remotely worth having as a
home computer.

That is a separate issue to the silly claim that IBM didn\'t believe in the
PC market.

> Plenty of much nicer and cheaper ones with much better graphics.

Unsurprising that IBM couldn\'t compete on price.
They couldn\'t with the original PC or AT either.

> Most makers understood the importance of that aspect.

But because it was later, it was better than
the Vic20 and C64 which both sold very well.

Same with the PS2 for the business market and that failed too.

PS2 was a blatant attempt at a FUD lockin and had the interesting effect
of uniting all the other PC clone makers to generate a better ISA bus.

That\'s overstated on the uniting. DEC didn\'t go that route and did its own
stupidities.

It really upset the scientific instrument makers who had their own
series of dedicated daughter boards that plugged into IBM PCs. It even
caused Intel to go on make an OEM 386 PC clone of its own for industrial
and scientific users which ISTR still had some old style slots.

and the 8088 was the cheapest way to go.

But was quite adequate to see the PC take off spectacularly.

Mainly because no one was every fired for buying IBM.

Yep.

The main competitor at the time, the Apple II, had a similar
horsepower cpu and the same plug in card approach.

6502 punched well above its weight for the time.

Yes, and preceeded the IBM PC,

And the AT was a more viable design.

And interestingly whilst selling an IBM AT to Russia was entirely legal
at the time they came out selling a faster 8MHz Compaq clone was not!
Amazing what having an inside track on the political system can do...

Not convinced that that was the reason for that.

 

[rbowman]

On 04/24/2022 04:12 AM, Martin Brown wrote:

On 21/04/2022 18:36, %% wrote:
On Thu, 21 Apr 2022 23:50:27 +1000, rbowman <bowman@montana.com> wrote:

On 04/21/2022 02:21 AM, Martin Brown wrote:
On 21/04/2022 04:31, Jasen Betts wrote:
On 2022-04-18, rbowman <bowman@montana.com> wrote:

That\'s not a general problem. There was a period with the early
Athlons
that didn\'t implement some of the new Intel instructions but I\'ve
leaned
towards AMD with no problem.

It wasn\'t AMD but I recall one processor that ran CP/M and DOS, both
rather poorly. National maybe?

NEC V20
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NEC_V20

And it ran them surprisingly well for the time. I had one. The 16 bit
V30 version was almost as fast as a 286 and had bit twiddling
instructions. V20 was certainly faster than the 8088 by ~10%.

ISTR there was a bun fight over reverse engineered/stolen microcode
too.

The most impressive of the alternative chips was the Cyrix FasMath FPU
which was done by formal methods and found multiple bugs in the Intel
387 implementation of the IEEE floating point standard in the process.
It was about 50% faster and also more accurate which was very useful in
scientific circles.

Quirks of fate. IBM didn\'t believe in the PC market

That is silly. They even did the PCJr later and tried to corner the
home PC market with that and failed spectacularly with that one.

They didn\'t try very hard to make it even remotely worth having as a
home computer. Plenty of much nicer and cheaper ones with much better
graphics. Most makers understood the importance of that aspect.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Christensen

Possibly apocryphal but the rumor was Christensen tried to get his
bosses at IBM interested in PCs. A memo came down the chain of command
saying if he wanted to play around with them on his own time that was
okay but there was no future.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_5120

That was IBM\'s idea of a small computer in 1980. Despite the 51xx naming
convention it had nothing to do with the 5150. The 5100 was a \'portable
computer\', meaning it didn\'t need a forklift but it weighed about 50
pounds.

The 5120 was a strange beast since it retained the 5100\'s APL capability
with APL hieroglyphics on the keys, but also had BASIC. The idea was the
5120 was a starter set and you would eventually move to a System/34
which also had a BASIC interpreter along with RPG II. The 5120 had
BRADS, sort of a low rent RPG. It also has an assembler of sorts and a
way to get into a system monitor. That provided me with amusement when I
got tired of the inventory control system I was supposed to be developing.

A year later the System/23 came out. It looked a lot like the 5120 but
used an 8085 rather than the PALM \'microprocessor\'. The PALM was
actually a bunch of gate arrays running microcode. (Put All Logic in
Microcode) which was how they emulated the System/360 to port APL.

All this obscure history had its impact on the 5150. Boca Raton wasn\'t
completely in a bubble. System/34 BASIC went back to \'77 and the
System/23 design using a 8085 may have stacked the deck for Intel.

I\'ll admit that at the time, while I made my living with computers, when
Joe Sixpack would ask me what they should buy and what they could do
with it my answer was basically \'beats the shit out of me.\'

 

[Peeler]

On Mon, 25 Apr 2022 04:09:53 +1000, %%, better known as cantankerous
trolling senile geezer Rodent Speed, wrote:

<FLUSH the abnormal trolling senile cretin\'s latest trollshit unread>

--
Website (from 2007) dedicated to the 87-year-old senile Australian
cretin\'s pathological trolling:
https://www.pcreview.co.uk/threads/rod-speed-faq.2973853/

 

[Peeler]

On Sun, 24 Apr 2022 12:21:45 -0600, lowbrowwoman, the endlessly driveling,
troll-feeding, senile idiot, blabbered again:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Christensen

Possibly apocryphal but the rumor was Christensen

Did poor Mr. Chistensen, too, think that you were a bigmouth and braggart
who could never get his big mouth under control, gossip girl? I\'m willing to
bet that ANYONE who gets to know you, after a short time, will consider you
an embarrassing grandiloquent chatterbox who just LOVES to hear himself
talking. LOL

--
Yet more of the very interesting senile blather by lowbrowwoman:
\"My family loaded me into a \'51 Chevy and drove from NY to Seattle and
back in \'52. I\'m alive. The Chevy had a painted steel dashboard with two
little hand prints worn down to the primer because I liked to stand up
and lean on it to see where we were going.\"
MID: <j2kuc1F3ejsU1@mid.individual.net>

 

[%%]

On Mon, 25 Apr 2022 04:21:45 +1000, rbowman <bowman@montana.com> wrote:

On 04/24/2022 04:12 AM, Martin Brown wrote:
On 21/04/2022 18:36, %% wrote:
On Thu, 21 Apr 2022 23:50:27 +1000, rbowman <bowman@montana.com> wrote:

On 04/21/2022 02:21 AM, Martin Brown wrote:
On 21/04/2022 04:31, Jasen Betts wrote:
On 2022-04-18, rbowman <bowman@montana.com> wrote:

That\'s not a general problem. There was a period with the early
Athlons
that didn\'t implement some of the new Intel instructions but I\'ve
leaned
towards AMD with no problem.

It wasn\'t AMD but I recall one processor that ran CP/M and DOS,
both
rather poorly. National maybe?

NEC V20
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NEC_V20

And it ran them surprisingly well for the time. I had one. The 16 bit
V30 version was almost as fast as a 286 and had bit twiddling
instructions. V20 was certainly faster than the 8088 by ~10%.

ISTR there was a bun fight over reverse engineered/stolen microcode
too.

The most impressive of the alternative chips was the Cyrix FasMath
FPU
which was done by formal methods and found multiple bugs in the Intel
387 implementation of the IEEE floating point standard in the
process.
It was about 50% faster and also more accurate which was very useful
in
scientific circles.

Quirks of fate. IBM didn\'t believe in the PC market

That is silly. They even did the PCJr later and tried to corner the
home PC market with that and failed spectacularly with that one.

They didn\'t try very hard to make it even remotely worth having as a
home computer. Plenty of much nicer and cheaper ones with much better
graphics. Most makers understood the importance of that aspect.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Christensen

Possibly apocryphal but the rumor was Christensen tried to get his
bosses at IBM interested in PCs. A memo came down the chain of command
saying if he wanted to play around with them on his own time that was
okay but there was no future.

And after that, IBM woke up and smelt the coffee and changed its mind on
that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Personal_Computer#History

 

[Peeler]

On Mon, 25 Apr 2022 05:25:37 +1000, %%, better known as cantankerous
trolling senile geezer Rodent Speed, wrote:

<FLUSH the abnormal trolling senile cretin\'s latest trollshit unread>

--
dennis@home to senile know-it-all Rodent Speed:
\"You really should stop commenting on things you know nothing about.\"
Message-ID: <pCVTC.283711$%L2.214599@fx40.am4>

 

[Ricky]

On Sunday, April 24, 2022 at 2:10:04 PM UTC-4, %% wrote:

On Sun, 24 Apr 2022 20:12:08 +1000, Martin Brown
\'\'\'newspam\'\'\'@nonad.co.uk> wrote:

On 21/04/2022 18:36, %% wrote:
On Thu, 21 Apr 2022 23:50:27 +1000, rbowman <bow...@montana.com> wrote:

On 04/21/2022 02:21 AM, Martin Brown wrote:
On 21/04/2022 04:31, Jasen Betts wrote:
On 2022-04-18, rbowman <bow...@montana.com> wrote:

That\'s not a general problem. There was a period with the early
Athlons
that didn\'t implement some of the new Intel instructions but I\'ve
leaned
towards AMD with no problem.

It wasn\'t AMD but I recall one processor that ran CP/M and DOS, both
rather poorly. National maybe?

NEC V20
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NEC_V20

And it ran them surprisingly well for the time. I had one. The 16 bit
V30 version was almost as fast as a 286 and had bit twiddling
instructions. V20 was certainly faster than the 8088 by ~10%.

ISTR there was a bun fight over reverse engineered/stolen microcode
too.

The most impressive of the alternative chips was the Cyrix FasMath FPU
which was done by formal methods and found multiple bugs in the Intel
387 implementation of the IEEE floating point standard in the process.
It was about 50% faster and also more accurate which was very useful
in
scientific circles.

Quirks of fate. IBM didn\'t believe in the PC market

That is silly. They even did the PCJr later and tried to corner the
home PC market with that and failed spectacularly with that one.

They didn\'t try very hard to make it even remotely worth having as a
home computer.
That is a separate issue to the silly claim that IBM didn\'t believe in the
PC market.

Initially, IBM didn\'t. The PC was designed, not as an \"office computer\" or a personal computer, but as a smart terminal for using their mainframe equipment.

Plenty of much nicer and cheaper ones with much better graphics.
Unsurprising that IBM couldn\'t compete on price.
They couldn\'t with the original PC or AT either.

Yes, IBM never tried to compete on price. That was not their claim to fame.

--

Rick C.

-+ Get 1,000 miles of free Supercharging
-+ Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

 

[Commander Kinsey]

On Sat, 23 Apr 2022 08:57:51 +0100, none albert <albert@cherry.> wrote:

In article <op.1kvtbupfmvhs6z@ryzen.lan>,
Commander Kinsey <CK1@nospam.com> wrote:
On Tue, 19 Apr 2022 07:27:39 +0100, Jan Panteltje
SNIP
I have 9 virtual desktops, 1 has some icons you can click on, one has
a browser, one has a Usenet newsreader, one has an audio mixer,
and 8 actually have a terminal.

Can\'t you afford real ones? I just have 5 monitors. I can see them all
at once.

GUI is for dummies, like going to a supermarket and searching on the
shelves for what you need from what is plonked down there.

It\'s the way the human mind works, at least normal ones. If I showed
you 50 pictures and asked you to find the widget, you could do it far
faster than finding the word widget in a pile of 50 words.

As long as you have memorized those hieroglyphs.
Eclipse comes with 50 icons. It takes a a month to memorize these
and an hour a day to refresh.

I wasn\'t really talking about icons. Just a GUI so you can use a menu, full of English words.

Then comes Blender, and imp and ...
Strange fact about English is that the meaning of words change much.

I do prefer English on a washing machine, because whatever moron decided a tumble dryer is a square and an iron is a triangle needs his head read.

> OTOH there seems not be a general accepted hieroglyphs for HELP!

Question mark in a circle.

My computah speaks English and I can just type commands.

It isn\'t English.

Much simpler and faster than mousing around in menus (if what you want
is there at all).

Menus make it easy to find things. For common stuff keyboard shortcuts
are always available.

Of course you need to know Unix...

No need to learn that shit.

There is not difficult to show commands in a list and to accept
a first letter. No need to use the mouse.

You are forced to use the mouse past insane sequences of random
characters, that are used in the url\'s.
SNIP

Not sure what you\'re getting at. Windows makes it easy to find what you need.

Some people read comics (like poopeye), some read datasheets, some
read code, and some just read what their computah says.

You are abnormal.

The Chinese are literate, the USAians are not.
We will see who wins.

I hope the USA dies soon. The whole world hates them. Maybe have a word with Putin?

 

[Commander Kinsey]

On Thu, 21 Apr 2022 10:15:33 +0100, whit3rd <whit3rd@gmail.com> wrote:

On Tuesday, April 19, 2022 at 9:49:13 AM UTC-7, Commander Kinsey wrote:
On Tue, 19 Apr 2022 03:51:35 +0100, whit3rd <whi...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Monday, April 18, 2022 at 1:28:51 PM UTC-7, Commander Kinsey wrote:

Touching things cannot be as good as welded together things.

Wrong. Crimping and welding are both entirely acceptable for high reliability,
with solder just a little behind. Wire-wrap is a variable entity, because there\'s lots of
wire and lots of posts, and some combinations are just dandy, like crimping.

You have to hope those two pieces of metal are always in contact. I don\'t with solder, because they are \"the same\" piece of metal.

Crimping is done with metals that, unlike solder, don\'t cold-flow. Mil-spec
crimps don\'t fail. There\'s a lot of crimped wiring in an airplane.

Yeah squeeze it and hope. Why not just use metals that do solder? Only time I\'ve seen non-solderable metal was on a piece of shit overpriced Sennheiser headphones.

A PC power supply is always two or more circuit boards, because the required
components aren\'t reliably joined under ONE solder temperature profile, you gotta
use two or more different soldering methods to mass produce \'em. Solder,
when it works, is cheap, not excessively reliable.

Just had a look inside one, just one circuit board. Only the odd large component isn\'t on the board and is soldered on by wires.

Look inside a modern one;

It is modern.

> bear in mind, only wave solder is suitable for making all the DC power wire connections,

I don\'t call wires components.

> and then only with significant touchup afterward; one generally doesn\'t wave solder doublesided or surface mount.

How are computer MBs done then?

 

[Commander Kinsey]

On Wed, 20 Apr 2022 16:52:21 +0100, rbowman <bowman@montana.com> wrote:

On 04/20/2022 06:51 AM, Commander Kinsey wrote:
On Wed, 20 Apr 2022 04:07:10 +0100, rbowman <bowman@montana.com> wrote:

On 04/19/2022 06:31 PM, Commander Kinsey wrote:
On Wed, 20 Apr 2022 01:07:44 +0100, rbowman <bowman@montana.com> wrote:

On 04/19/2022 01:14 PM, Commander Kinsey wrote:
On Mon, 18 Apr 2022 18:08:01 +0100, rbowman <bowman@montana.com
wrote:

On 04/18/2022 08:54 AM, Commander Kinsey wrote:
11 of course. Why not take it as it\'s free? I bypassed the stupid
TPM
requirement (which only 1 of my 7 machines passed) using something
called Rufus.

I\'ve used rufus to create bootable USB sticks for Linux distros. Same
rufus?

[change of subject]

Ever fired a gun this small?
https://youtu.be/w3PHD__2wsE
FFWD to 6:10 to see a lego man being killed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eB-vaGV8wy0

Small as I need to go... A friend had one and you can get more
accuracy
than you would think. More than one human man has been killed with a
.22.

I laugh at Americans killing each other. At least it keeps your numbers
down to the same level as your intelligence.

Unfortunately it doesn\'t work that way. If you read about a mass
shooting event with many wounded and few, if any, fatalities, the
shooter(s) were black. If there were many fatalities usually the
shooter(s) were white.

The question is what colour are the dead?

Usually some shade of brown... The other clue is if the news articles
are very vague in describing the alleged shooter and don\'t run a mug
shot. If the perp was white that\'s in the lede.

If the name appears to have been created by an illiterate trying to
phonetically spell something you have another clue.

ROTFPMSL!

> https://www.statista.com/statistics/251877/murder-victims-in-the-us-by-race-ethnicity-and-gender/

That\'s the most fucked up site ever. What\'s the difference between:
Other race
Unknown race
Not Hispanic or Latino
Unknown

You\'ll sometimes see numbers like 13/55. That\'s shorthand for 13% of the
population accounting for 55% of the murders. That\'s overall. The
Chicago PD did an extensive study in 2011. About 3% of the victims or
perpetrators were white.

Glad to hear it.

 

[Commander Kinsey]

On Thu, 21 Apr 2022 15:07:22 +0100, Ricky <gnuarm.deletethisbit@gmail.com> wrote:

On Thursday, April 21, 2022 at 9:50:34 AM UTC-4, rbowman wrote:
On 04/21/2022 02:21 AM, Martin Brown wrote:
On 21/04/2022 04:31, Jasen Betts wrote:
On 2022-04-18, rbowman <bow...@montana.com> wrote:

That\'s not a general problem. There was a period with the early Athlons
that didn\'t implement some of the new Intel instructions but I\'ve leaned
towards AMD with no problem.

It wasn\'t AMD but I recall one processor that ran CP/M and DOS, both
rather poorly. National maybe?

NEC V20
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NEC_V20

And it ran them surprisingly well for the time. I had one. The 16 bit
V30 version was almost as fast as a 286 and had bit twiddling
instructions. V20 was certainly faster than the 8088 by ~10%.

ISTR there was a bun fight over reverse engineered/stolen microcode too.

The most impressive of the alternative chips was the Cyrix FasMath FPU
which was done by formal methods and found multiple bugs in the Intel
387 implementation of the IEEE floating point standard in the process.
It was about 50% faster and also more accurate which was very useful in
scientific circles.

Quirks of fate. IBM didn\'t believe in the PC market and the 8088 was the
cheapest way to go. And here we are...

The computer world can be obsessed with compatibility one minute, and completely ignores it the next. The hardware platform was all about compatibility for Windows, but Apple was happy porting, and porting again. They started with 68000 processors, switched to Power PC when that was a better choice, then switched to Intel when that was a better choice, all software compatible... well, more or less.

Meanwhile updating your Windows OS will break drivers for printers, cameras, and on the odd occurrence, applications themselves. New versions of the OS require you to verify your basic PC hardware is supported even though they still include the equivalent of the 8253 chip for the real time clock counter, even if it\'s not used.

The only consistency in the computing world is the lack of consistency, and even that is inconsistent making it consistent. Or something like that.

You fucking idiot. What makes you think Bowman is in the electronics group? Learn to use a computer there\'s a dear.

 

[rbowman]

On 04/24/2022 06:02 PM, Commander Kinsey wrote:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/251877/murder-victims-in-the-us-by-race-ethnicity-and-gender/


That\'s the most fucked up site ever. What\'s the difference between:
Other race
Unknown race
Not Hispanic or Latino
Unknown

I\'d assume other race includes Asians but the number seems low. No idea
on the two unknowns. The UCR (uniform crime reporting) system is
anything but uniform.

Then we get to Hispanic/Latino... Many forms have the category
\'White non-Hispanic\'. I check that one. Hispanics sometimes are white,
sometimes not depending on which is more advantageous. Some are actually
old stock Spanish. Others are mestizos or some other complicated mixture
of white, black, Asian, indigenous, or Klingon.

It\'s like our stellar VP who prefers to identify as black rather than
Indian.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afro-Cubans

\"A study from 2014 estimated the genetic admixture of the population of
Cuba to be 72% European, 20% African and 8% Native American\"

That\'s Cuba but may typify most of Latin America.

But we all know there is no such thing as race; it\'s just a social
construct except when it isn\'t.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2022-04-23/dingo-or-feral-dog-science-advances-genetic-sequence/101010896

I think the research dates back to 2017 but it finally hit the MSM. It
seems dingoes aren\'t quite dogs. They look like dogs, interbreed with
dogs, but aren\'t quite the same.

I like dogs but don\'t care for blue heelers (Australian Cattle Dog).
Metaphorically speaking I think they were God\'s first attempt at making
a dog. When he saw the outcome he said \"Oh shit, I can do better than
that and tried again but failed to discard the first version. Since they
were a cross between dogs and dingoes apparently my gut instinct that
they aren\'t quite a dog was correct.

Of course, this has nothing to do with humans.