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lproven
8,777karma·4,928submissions·December 30, 2013
about
Tall dark black-clad atheist skeptic biker SF fan; writes, mainly about computers, for a living.
# Work
Currently the FOSS & cloud correspondent for the Register.
https://www.theregister.com/Author/Liam-Proven
Work email: lproven+hn@sitpub.com
# Personal
Comments here (or anywhere else, unless otherwise stated) are personal opinion and not on behalf of any employer.
Based in Douglas, Isle of Man.
Quick info:
https://about.me/liamproven/
Personal blog:
http://lproven.dreamwidth.org/profile
Tech blog:
http://liam-on-linux.dreamwidth.org/profile/
Socials:
https://social.vivaldi.net/@lproven
https://bsky.app/profile/lproven.bsky.social
https://x.com/lproven
https://meet.hn/city/im-Douglas
recent activity (4,928 total)
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EmuTOS is a like-for-like replacement for the ST OS, using some of the Digital Research PC GEM code that was open-sourced by Caldera around the turn of the century. So it's a single-tasking OS.…
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Oh yes. On Android, my licence still works, even on new devices. But I got an iPhone 6S+ about 3Y ago – and the last time I owned an iPhone was before iOS supported replacement keyboards. After a lot…
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Sorry to hear that. Swype was _by far_ the best keyboard for all-screen smartphones, and I miss it very much. It was markedly better than any other swiping keyboard implementation, as well as a subs…
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No, it isn't, because it was written in 1977, almost before the microcomputer – and until the Mac, Adams hated computers. It's not a binary joke, either. However, if you add together the num…
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The 3rd Hitchhiker novel, "Life, the Universe, and Everything", is also a repurposed Dr Who script: "Dr Who and the Krikkitmen".
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NFTs are very expensive URL-lengtheners (instead of shorteners), and nothing more.
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> before Firefox's extensions got gutted You might like to take a look at Waterfox. It's a fork of the last pre-Quantum of Firefox, with frequent security update releases (roughly every 8…
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I am amused to see this machine on HackerNews in 2021. I wrote the original Wikipedia article about it, 17 years ago. Some years later, I got to play with actual hardware thanks to the Binary Dinosaur…
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There is now an enhanced edition of the game for the Spectrum 128 (and of course emulators thereof). It takes higher-res graphics from other editions of the original game, for more capable computers, …
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This seems like a very simple question and I am inclined to treat it as a trick one, but I will be trusting and try to answer it. The difference is huge. A package manager installs, removes, updates e…
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Endless is a rather interesting distro. It's aimed to be suitable for non-technical users on fairly low-end hardware, with an internet connection that might be intermittent at best. Some salient …
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Not really, no. Ubuntu was broadly a continuation of the UserLinux project. A simple, easy-to-install distro, with a single example of each of the mainstream app categories. An installer that asks onl…
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IMHO, no. I give GNOME a re-assessment every time there's a new Ubuntu release, and it seldom takes more than an hour or so (if that) to find a reason why I'm glad my work boxes run Xfce and…
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Should have ...
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OK. The Spectrum +3 had true floppy disk drives -- Hitachi 3" units. They are not Microdrives, are not compatible with Microdrives, and Microdrives cannot be attached to a +3. Sinclair's sys…
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Fair. It wasn't sold, was it? I think it was given away free with every Mac. There _were_ multiple clones, as you say. I think in part it made sense in the context of the Mac as the first mass-ma…
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This is the best explanation I know: http://www.loper-os.org/?p=568 In brief: in the early 1980s, home computers were designed with the primary purpose of owners programming the machi…
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Ha! 3" or Microdrive? They were different things. The ZX Microdrive was the Sinclair stringy-floppy, released 1983, giving approx. 85-95 kB per cartridge:
https://en.wikipedia.org&#x…
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This. It's not hard. I got a copy of DEC VAX/VMS running inside SimH a decade ago, in one evening's work.
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How is it a half-way house? Genuinely interested and curious, not snarking.
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If I remember correctly, Windows 3.0 could not be used in VGA mode on an 8086 PC, because the VGA device driver used some 80286 instructions. Nobody noticed, because VGA was mostly found in '286 …
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There's a detailed history here:
https://www.wordstar.org/index.php/wordstar-history If that's too long there are several short ones, but they omit a lot of important d…
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I would guess: It's a very old, very primitive program. It predates cursor keys, printers that could use proportional fonts and a lot of other things we take for granted today. Its handling for t…
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PC-MOS/386 is FOSS now, but nobody seems to be interested. https://github.com/roelandjansen/pcmos386v501 TBH it was a 2nd string product in its prime, IME. DR's Concurr…
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WordPerfect ran natively on x86 xNix. I installed the SCO Xenix 386 version for several customers. This was a port of the text-mode codebase, roughly equivalent to WordPerfect 5 for DOS. (Generally re…
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Oh cool -- thank you! I will study the links. :-)