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You can still pay Microsoft a one-time-fee instead of a yearly one. You can even go to a physical store and get a physical box with Office (granted, it doesn't contain anything inside it anymore )

The difference is that IRL establishments don't sell off that data to anyone else, nor do they have the ability to collate that data with data from other establishments to make a profile of you.

(at least not yet)


If you think the nightclub that scans your driver's license magstripe isn't selling your data off, when they could be making money off of it? Between PatronScan,Intellicheck, Scantek, and TokenWorks, yeah a dingy bar where it's a dude visually checking isn't it, but a nightclub and quick swipe totally is.

What's the story with Eric Raymond?


If I understand correctly it's just a reflection on different governing styles where Eric Raymond was a bit louder (pro gun libertarian) while Guido's strategy was more consensus-orentied and pragmatic which turned out be the winning one. PSF got IRS non-profit status etc and became incredibly successful.

Maybe someone else can fill in more but there's nothing particularly dramatic here that I could find other than Eric has become more political in culture wars era. Also see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_S._Raymond#Political_beli...


Guido is not racist like ESR is, and it would have been a disaster to have somebody as racist and obsessed with dragging the organizations he leads into the pro-racism side of political culture war battles that have absolutely nothing to do with their mission, as ESR has a track record of trying to do: He threw down the gauntlet and attempted to drag OSI into supporting Russ Nelson after his infamous "Blacks are Lazy" blog posting that caused him to resign for the good of OSI, who ESR wanted to spend their resources and reputation fighting his culture war against (dog whistle alert:) "thugs" who don't want to follow a racist leader. That kind of blatant racism and totally non-python-related racist culture warfare bullshit political battles would have been extremely detrimental to the python community, just as his other antics and his and Russel's racist rants were detrimental to the open source community. OSI has enough problems attracting women and minorities that they don't need white male leaders telling black people they're lazy and accusing people who disagree of being "fools and thugs".

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

"Blacks are lazy" -Russ Nelson

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Russ_Nelson#Blacks_are_la...

New OSI President Steps Down

https://www.eweek.com/servers/new-osi-president-steps-down/#...

>“The people who knew Russ as a Quaker, a pacifist and a gentleman, and no racist, but nevertheless pressured OSI to do the responsible thing and fire him in order to avoid political damage should be equally ashamed,” Raymond said. “Abetting somebody elses witch hunt is no less disgusting than starting your own.”

>“Personally, I wanted to fight this on principle,” Raymond said. “Russ resigned the presidency rather than get OSI into that fight, and the board quite properly respected his wishes in the matter. That sacrifice makes me angrier at the fools and thugs who pulled him down.”


Oh wow TIL, thanks for expanding

'MZ' has been confirmed to be the initials of Mark Zbikowski, there's no question about it. It's not "Memory" + "Last".


Given the MZ magic bytes in the EXE format header - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOS_MZ_executable, I would have assumed an association with Mark Zbikowski as well.

The ARR is probably Aaron R Reynolds (also associated with the AARD code for detecting non-MSDOS environments), but you can't ask for his opinion since he passed about 20 years ago - https://www.reed.edu/reed-magazine/in-memoriam/obituaries/no....

Also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code and a Raymond Chen story involving aaronr - https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20190924-00/?p=10... and a pic of him with the Windows team - https://web.archive.org/web/20191014055254/https://community...

from another os2museum.com article about MS-DOS, https://www.os2museum.com/wp/dos/dos-3-0-3-2/

  The development of DOS 3.0 was led by Mark Zbikowski and *Aaron Reynolds*, both experienced DOS 2.x programmers.


Confirmed by a Hacker News rando. Seems legit.


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!


There's no 0x80-0xFF in the UTF-8 encoding. Only up to 0x7F (127) it's the same.


UTF-8 is not technically a character set (because it has way more than 256 characters). Characters 32-127 in UTF8 are the same as ASCII, which is the same as the OEM/CP437 and the ANSI/ISO-8859/CP1252.

The characters in CP437 (and other OEM codepages) actually come from the ROM of the VGA (and EGA/CGA/MCGA/Hercules before them).

What you are referring to is those (visually), right? I'm missing some characters in the first line, because HN drops them.

    0123456789abcdef
   0...♥♦♣♠•◘○◙..♪♫.
   1►◄↕‼¶§▬↨↑↓→←∟↔▲▼

As far as I know, the equivalent control characters (characters 0-31) don't have any representation in CP1252, but that's also dependent on the font (since rendering of CP1252 is always done by Windows)

As to their origin, originally the full CP437 character set was taken from Wang word processors. I don't know where Wang took it from, but they probably invented it themselves.

EDIT: There's a more complete history here: https://www.os2museum.com/wp/weird-tales/

EDIT 2: The CP437 character set didn't seem to come directly from Wang; it's just that they took some (a lot) of characters from Wang word processors character sets. The positions of those "graphic" characters was decided by Microsoft when they made MS-DOS (at least according to Bill Gates).


In my screen there is indeed about thirty icons. When I executed the program on xterm, they were different and when I pasted them on LibreOffice they were again different. And now it seems this shit is also different in every country.

The world is broken.


ASCII 60-63 is just <=>?

You probably mean 28-31 (∟↔▲▼, or ␜␝␞␟)

Unless this is octal notation? But 0o60-0o63 in octal is 0123


The character "μ" itself is called μι or μυ (both pronounced "me"), and is the exact equivalent of Latin "m". For some reason, English speaking countries tend to pronounce it "mew" (they also pronounce "π" as "pie"). But English speaking countries mispronounce so many words it's par for the course anyway.

Pet peeve: I really hate when they replace "μ" with "u". Completely different letters. Of course replacing capital Latin "E" with capital Greek sigma ("Σ") is even worse.

As to the μlauncher: It's anyone's guess as to how the author meant for it to be pronounced. I'd call it "me"launcher or "micro"launcher (micro is also pronounced wrong in English BTW, it's not MY-crow, it's more like mee-CRAW )


"u" has the advantage of correctly rendering basically everywhere, which"μ" does not. My initial attempt to share this was automatically corrected to "Mlauncher" for example. I'm pretty sure this is the reason the one symbol is used so often where it should be the other.

The solution is just to stick to the Latin alphabet, but you can't deny that mixing in a little Greek every now and then is fun.


Android 15/16 does allow you to control notifications even lower, at the level of notification category, but indeed the app must have chosen to use them.


Most apps that are in need of notification control either:

a) bundle everything in one category, from critical notifications without which the app can't fulfill its purpose to "HEY YOU HAVEN'T USED ME IN A DAY, USE ME NOW" spam

b) create a new category for spam every time they feel enough users have turned off the previous one, which is often


Companies do it with email unsubscribe categories to, which is skirting laws for sure.


I wish app review checked for this. It's hostile anti user behavior.


OEMs like Samsung turn off that ability by default unless you toggle it in "advanced settings". Thank you Samsung!


Yeah the problem is a lot of apps dump their ads in the wrong category if they even use categories :(


3.5" floppies are still floppy. The case may be hard, but the floppy flops.


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