I'm happy to pay an annual fee for a one-size fits all approach that I don't have to think about. I read the post and I'm just saying that his blockers are not blockers for me.
I would ask you: what is the better alternative? That's not a rhetorical question; they don't have my credit card details for another two weeks.
Right. If you read what I actually said, I am not captured by Backblaze.
I said that I want a solution that I don't have to think about. I'm happy to pay for not thinking about it. If that's not Blackblaze, do you have any good suggestions?
My uncles dairy had a datamaster in a back office that they used for the books, etc. I wonder what happened that that, it's no doubt stuffed into some haybarn loft.
My uncle had a business with an IBM minicomputer: a System/36. It was the size of a large freezer. It also used 8" floppies! It took a "magazine" of 10x 8" floppies and could swap between them. It looked like the system in the top photo here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System/36
> Unfortunately for Franklin, that also meant that full compatibility comes hand and hand with trademark & copyright violations.
Franklin eventually released a couple of clones which were compatible and had a clean BIOS (the 500 and 2000). I'm not sure about full compatibility but I never encountered anything that wouldn't run on my 500. To be fair, I got the thing in the mid nineties and only ran a few programs on it...
"Copy protections" back in the day often looked for fixed strings in seemingly random places. In the worst cases, this even went outside the machine's memory addresses. Several programs I had would farm this task out to the users and ask for specific words from specific pages in manuals on particular lines. I had to hex dump the binary's lookup tables to even get older software to run many a time ;-)
I'm not sure why copy protection came up on this thread but when it came to the Apple II, one of the more effective methods was to intentionally include a damaged or unreadable sector at a predictable place on the software's floppy. A standard copy would bomb out on one of these disks, but of course special copy software could do something with a disk like that.
I assume they used clean-room techniques after those were judged by the courts to be viable. I wonder if that happened because of Franklin's efforts or because of what happened in the IBM PC clone industry.
Borland Turbo Pascal for CP/M and MS-DOS was developed by Anders Hejlsberg, who went on to develop All The Languages for Microsoft.
Perhaps more surprisingly, Turbo Modula 2 for CP/M (which was certainly surpassed by Topspeed Modula 2) was developed by Martin Odersky, who created Scala.
Throw in Robert Griesemer and his co-creation of Go, and the Wirth family tree is as influential in modern programming as it possibly could be.
The latter is lifted from “The School of Niklaus Wirth:
The Art of Simplicity,” which is a worthwhile volume for anyone with an interest in this stuff.
Spotting similarities betwen the appearance of the Oberon System and Plan 9, or Oberon syntax bits that were used in later languages, is left as an exercise for the reader.
It really is a pretty exciting project, even if I do have a few more gray hairs now (at least the ones that are left). Thanks for the Byte magazine references; I wasn't aware of these articles; very interesting to read how people experienced this technology in the nineties.
Remember that people who familiarize themselves with computing history are neither "crushing it" nor doing anything else evocative of advertising for energy drinks. Study of computing history is therefore something to be avoided.
> Therefore, here's a feature request: allow per-user killfiles.
That would be lovely. It's also an obvious feature which has existed in other contexts for a very long time, and it would be easy to implement. That means its omission was a deliberate design choice. It'd be interesting to understand why.
The Obama number is also high because the designer combined Obama's first and second terms into one figure, unlike what he did with the other presidents who served two terms.
Stuff like this is very common. For example, at the start of Trump's second term, the whitehouse history page was changed to make democrat presidents look bad -
clinton-1 and clinton-2 are distinct. I think it's more likely collected differently. The people gathering data will change. Someone with different data standards worked there for a while.
Indeed. It took me a bit to remember why. There was a clemency program for nonviolent drug offenders with otherwise clean records who had served at least 10 years in federal prison under out of date sentencing guidelines.
reply