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No thanks! The compilers were extremely slow. If you wanted to hang around all day waiting for your stuff to compile then that was fine but it wasn't a solution for most of us. Plus the majority of the market was 8-bit machines.

In the early 80s I wrote a lot of code in (BBC) BASIC and assembly. That was extremely fast to build and run, with optimisations where necessary. For example to use a CP/M machine at the time with turbo pascal, it'd take at least 10 minutes to get the machine up and compile something simple. On the BBC Micro at the time, my preferred machine, there would be working code in under a minute. That was a big gain. They were used for test automation at the time over HP-IB (IEEE-488), eventually replaced with PCs running 16-bit Visual Basic on Windows.

I don't think many people give a crap if I'm honest, at least in Europe. I'll be honest and say I don't. The whole Middle East has done a lot of repetitional damage to itself over the last 20 years by bringing its politics to us in Europe in the form of killing citizens. When it starts using those tactics in home territories against allies we're insensitive to their position.

As much as this sucks, Yemen is another Middle East shit show. And it's not a shit show we should expend anything further on other than protecting our shipping lanes.

I wish it could have been better but the damage is done. I'd rather everyone just stopped being nut jobs and blowing each other up respectively. And I don't think we should get involved in Middle Eastern politics, just distance ourselves from it.

This is going to be really good when Copilot tanks or gets ignored by 99% of the people who can't even use their PC already and it's seen as a cost not a ROI and is killed off.

It'll be filed under Scroll Lock for most people with "keys we don't know what they do"

what's up with win+c or something?

Well if it's like my cat, it licked its butt beforehand and cost me vet bills a couple of times so YMMV.

Never been locked out when I used to use it. But it got replaced with a default firewall rule to only allow SSH from my address in the end. Didn’t need it at all then!

I love places like this because I can thrive quite happily on doing fuck all and getting paid for it.

Edit: I made some logical comment about doing something useful with half that time but deleted it because it would be hypocritical.

Artists, photographers etc want colour accuracy and contrast, which is better on a glossy display (with anti glare coating).

As your entire workload is apparently developer based, knock yourself out with a matte screen but I don't want one as I do both that side of things and the art side of things...

You're talking rubbish. There are various grades of glossy screen and anti-glare coatings. The MBP is absolutely fine as is the Studio Display. Dell's stuff is NOT ok in contrast.

It's not about tolerating it but about the superior contrast possible and the quality of the coating, something Apple get spot on.

Been there. Wears off when you get to your early 40s.

Meetups are bloody amazing. I keep meeting middle aged divorced women there with loose sense of morals and a drinking problem, which is perfect :)

That's because it's not a good vision for the future, it's literally either building shit that everyone knows doesn't matter or plugging away at pointless automation on overcomplicated piles of steaming crap. Or the next fad.

People have lost the vision and do not understand the soul of the machine is to improve our state of existence not enslave us further.

Fuck 'em. I'm taking the money and doing what makes me feel good (wine, floozies and travel).

If it's like around here (London, UK) the last thing people want to talk about is the day job!

HNY to everyone here. While I don’t agree with some of you this is probably one of the finest communities left on the net. Hat tip to you all.

I didn't even know it wasn't mandatory on other platforms...

I think you need to get your eyes checked.

My abusive ex partner used to poll me to work out where I was. I divorced her. You can do that with your car too if it's prone to abusing you by proxy (get something that doesn't have any intelligence in it at all).

You're right. If I got into politics the world would be ash in 30 minutes.

People really need to actually ask the users about this. I hear lots of frustration all the time and see end users with stacks of shit that barely work but it never gets upstream because the users think that's the status quo or are so burned out that they don't care any more.

Of course various client telemetry frameworks say it sucks but if no one is complaining then of course it doesn't make business sense to optimise them and carry on making it slightly worse until someone finally does moan about it.

But everything being crap is not an excuse to keep delivering more crap.

I blame JavaScript and the deficient culture of insanity around it. The only things that are slow on any of my computers are honking great stacks of shit built on top of browsers with JavaScript. Sometimes I have three different fucking browser engines running these stacks of shit.

Yes not those classical-era legendary hybrid creatures that GNU provide on other platforms!

(Edit: old commercial Unix person. I never liked GNU stuff. Sorry!)

Pre-post edit: excuse the keyboard rant.

They're not bad. Definitely better than the soggy ass Dell and Lenovo keyboards at least. But I would still rather have a proper keyboard with some travel. But the whole laptop experience is a compromise generally so I'm willing to live with it.

My daily driver keyboard is an Apple Magic Keyboard on my Mac mini and that's fine as well. I only use it so I don't have switch back and forth between a different keyboard and the MBP when I need to.

As for the Cherry MX, not a fan either. I tried a few over the years of different switch variants (at great cost) and they actually hurt you if you have to do some serious work on them after a while. When I say serious, a lot of my existence these days is hacking out large quantities of LaTeX and switching between that and paper. The MX boards are just too high, too noisy and too expensive.

Got to say the best keyboard I've used in recent years though is a Cherry Stream TKL. That's actually surprisingly good and very cheap (£25). It'll annoy the purists here because it's a rubber dome SX switch.

Actually you can use the U there. It is Unix!

https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/brand3700.htm

Was. Despite owning one, I'd rather use my 14" M1 MBP thanks. Hell if I had to have a PC I've got a much much nicer Lenovo T14 gen 3 here!

For the MBP in comparison: Better screen, performance, battery life, OS that actually mostly works, connectivity, sound. The keyboard isn't that bad either...

As for ports, I don't need 'em. Last thing I want to do is drag a fucking drunken octopus around with me.

Even as a ThinkPad fanboy this ancient ThinkPad love is getting into self-flaggelating religious drivel territory.

I don't mind if they make sci-fi real, but can they please fuck off with the dystopian ultra-capitalist cyberpunk sci-fi.

Yeah had this with it in Iceland too. Tried to send me through a river when I had a shitty hire van. Ended up using Organic Maps instead.

Whoever is paying you is your boss. There is no escape, only a change in the illusion. If you're a sole trader, it's your customers. If you're a corporate wage slave, it's your line manager. If you're a startup it's whoever gave you capital. Even if you're CxO it's the other board members and investors.

That's the cheap hardware I'm talking about. What is in your hands is the most important thing of all because without it you can't serve your customers or increase ROI.

I've run a few businesses over the years and the return of investment of self sufficiency is barely worth it in the long run. It's very difficult to replicate the benefits of working for an SME (forget big tech) which it comes to security. You never have to worry about MRR because it's static and only increases.

Also some advice on hyper-optimising for cheap hardware. Don't. Buy something with a warranty from a respectable company. Or buy two of everything else. Downtime will cost you customers. I say that having spent most of those years running off cranky ex corporate thinkpads. They will let you down and you will need an exit plan. At this point I'd rather just buy an off the shelf MacBook config I can walk into the local Apple store and just buy another one if I break it or lose it. No waiting 4-5 days for another ebay thinkpad to turn up and hope it works ok. I run off a base model 14" M1 MacBook Pro now.

As a regular Apple defender, I don't think most of us give a shit. I mean everyone I know uses WhatsApp here. I use iMessage within my family group because we all have iPhones but there appears to be absolutely no problem whatsoever with people anywhere. It goes "hey are you on whatsapp" ... and the problem is sorted.

RCS is another one of these shit shows. As I said elsewhere on this thread, I used an Android recently for a couple of months (just so I have a right to bitch about it) and when I switched back it broke SMS for me. I was only using SMS to activate WhatsApp.

Worth noting that RCS is a similar shit show. When I opted into this when I had an Android temporarily, it broke (some) SMS for iOS when I moved back. I had to set the android handset up again, log in with my google account and deregister it, then flatten the android handset again.

This was ironic in a way because I was just trying to activate WhatsApp with SMS so I didn't have to use SMS/RCS/iMessage!