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"Not bigger than databases. Different from databases.

It's not a website you go to — it's a little spirit that lives on your machine.

Not a chatbot. A tool that reads and writes files on your filesystem.

That's not a technical argument. It's a values argument."


- Ctlr + ABCVYXZ

Yes, different computers have different keyboards. Macs have had Mac conventions since 1984, and if you're not used to it you're not used to it. Instead of sticking to "the thing I'm not used to is wrong", I would suggest trying to be objective about which is the better UX.

I spent the first 25 years of my computer use being a Linux and Windows user and barely ever touching a Mac, so I've had to adjust, but to be honest, the truth is that Apple was always right and Microsoft made the wrong call.

Ctrl is meant to send control characters. This has been well defined since the birth of ASCII. In macOS, cmd-C is always copy, cmd-V is always paste. It does not matter what mode or program you are in.

Windows was designed for an IBM PC where the keyboard only had Ctrl and Alt, and when they copied Apple conventions (like cmd-X, C, V for cut, copy, paste) they made the wrong decision in using Ctrl for it. We've paid for this debt ever since. GNOME, KDE, XFCE, [...] devs continued this travesty by copying Windows, and so now on Linux Ctrl-C is copy in GUI apps, unless it's a terminal, in which case Ctrl-C will break out of your process, and copy is Ctrl-Shift-C. This is insane and bad UX.

The correct choice for a Linux DE would have been to use the "super" key ("Windows logo") for copy/paste etc, but of course they couldn't do that because 1) not everyone had that key and 2) it would confuse Windows users.

- Select with touchpad?? You must physically press its button like WTF

System Settings -> Touchpad -> Tap to click

- Mouse with backward/forward button?? Good luck!!

This is stupid. I will agree that Apple's insistence to not really support anything other than their own severely limited input devices is boneheaded. I recommend installing SensibleSideButtons.


It's the same in all three cases: using HDD space, money and RAM for good purposes (disk cache) is useful, wasting it (Electron) is bad.

(Weird side question: are you by any chance the Jason Farnon who wrote IBFT?)


This rules. What a good, sensible, sober post.

PS. Wonder why they didn't use A19 in this? Imagine they thought "yeah, that A18 will do for an entry-level laptop", but the entry-level iPhone 17e with A19 needed more kick? What for, our social media apps and mobile websites? This is soooo absurd!

You have to be able to get enough of the things made, too. A19 and A18 Pro are made on different TSMC processes, and most likely it's easier to get production capacity on the older N3E process.


Yeah, that's fair point.

How about "confirmed by Mark Zbikowski himself in a video interview"? Does that sound better?

https://youtu.be/c6yPoWrdjkU?si=hxvXTE6ZsdvJs5U9&t=1266

(roughly 21:06 into the video)


That's talking about the MZ signature at the start of every DOS EXE executable (and therefore every Windows EXE as they have DOS stubs), not this additional use as markers in the DOS memory management code. Which probably is also Mark Zbikowski using his initials, but doesn't seem to be confirmed.

OK, fair enough!

MEMMAKER. It was okay, but it was so invasive in modifying your CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT that I never really trusted it. I preferred hand-optimizing.

> I preferred hand-optimizing.

Same here.

But then, it was my job, it wasn't for gaming or anything. I don't play games much and I had an Acorn Archimedes at home.

I could usually get 620 kB free by hand with no problem, even with a mouse, a CD, and a network stack.

That was enough for 99% of work business apps.

Being able to get ACT! for DOS running alongside a Novell Netware client on Sony laptops won me a senior job in the City of London in about 1992. (I didn't like it and quit a few years later, after a major motorbike crash made me re-assess life priorities.)

In that job I rolled out 10base-T and desktop Windows for Workgroups 3.11. That specific version, WfWf 3.11 (and not WfWg 3.1 or Windows 3.11, which were both different) contained the first version of what became VFAT, which led the way to FAT32 and Long File Names on FAT. It was a prototype of the 32-bit driver subsystem that enabled Windows 95.

And Win95 not only made the Win3 GUI irrelevant, it made DOS memory optimisation irrelevant too.

In the same City job, I also rolled out Windows NT 3.1 in production. Of course, a decade later, that rendered Windows 9x irrelevant.


> And Win95 not only made the Win3 GUI irrelevant, it made DOS memory optimisation irrelevant too.

Unless you wanted to play a DOS game. Then the fighting between DOS and Win 95 for the 640k began.


I am not a gamer and never really was, but a default config of Win95 made a lot of RAM available for DOS apps, as I recall. (And I was a serious expert in this area, 30-35 years ago.)

I used to do very basic memory optimisation on my Win95 boxes, just because I could with minimal mental effort, and then my DOS sessions had 630 kB or so free.

What I confess I did not investigate was DOSSTART.BAT and optimising what RAM was left when Windows was in "DOS mode".

https://smallvoid.com/article/win9x-dosstart.html

Too much effort for too little reward, for me.


And how often do you work a full day with no access to a charger?

Every other day if you like to travel and/or work from coffee shops

I loved the Amiga but I loathed all the XT/AT segmented memory bitplaned VGA 16-bit stuff. That to me is the deep dark ages.

I get the sentiment, but I have to nitpick the details ;)

VGA isn't bitplaned. It's chunky -- to put a pixel on the screen in 320x200x8 VGA mode 13h you literally just write a single byte to the VGA memory. The Amiga, on the other hand, does use planar graphics.

(Maybe you're thinking of EGA, which is planar and a pain to program for)


VGA was still fundamentally planar, just like EGA. It was just mode 13h that presented a chunky API. IIRC the other modes were all planar.

Honestly, if you need this, just extract NOTEPAD.EXE from a Windows 95 (or NT 4) installation.

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