Been doing a setup of a virtual Amstrad PCW system under CP/M Box (Joyce has emulation issues) in order to try a game development idea!

Got UIDE working. Got DR Draw installed.

Tonight was exploring the 'delights' of ed under CP/M. If you thought ed under Unix was basic and painful, you've not seen anything yet! Still, sort of getting the hang of it.

Also, it's astounding that around 1989/1990 when I had a PCW not having directories didn't seem a huge issue.

Now at the point where I'm trying to set up a C development environment, directories really would be most welcome

I can't claim innocence here, roguelikes aren't a large part of my life, and other discussion groups I follow had moved off Usenet decades ago.

Still, it's fucking depressing, and also a very clear illustration of just how incredibly low the bar is for users to give up on a service. Doesn't have an option to trivially use a web interface at zero cost? Not going to be used.

sigh, things move on. Went to see how Usenet is going, notably for roguelikes and the answer is : not well, it's all moved to Reddit.

Even with free Usenet servers (without binaries). Even with usable clients. When Google stopped updating Google Groups it appears that even though *it is perfectly possible to carry on using Usenet*, everyone did not, they moved to a corporate driven service.

rec.games.roguelike.nethack is still sort of alive, but the remainder of groups are not.

It's only a matter of time before a router or a mobile phone gains a really bad security flaw, and the manufacturer won't fix it because they're a dodgy small company who don't care after they have your money.

A flaw that allows widespread botnets or data harvesting.

The obvious overreaction is for time bombed devices, signed firmware, controlled ISP connections (non compliant devices : your Internet is shut off completely), and sector regulation to restrict who can release devices.

But no, minimum quality shitboxes matter for consumers above everything else. Then they'll cry when it goes wrong, despite all the warnings.

This definitely hardens my stance on end users. I'm mostly left wing and want people's lives to be flexible.

For products that have potential security issues and could impact other people - *straight* to an authoritarian stance.

You don't like Windows updating at inconvenient times? Fuck you. You're the problem, all you never ever click on updates crowd.

When the attitude is 'I don't care about security, or my data because the Leopard Face Eating Party would never eat *my* face' and it's not a case of 'a product became insecure' it's 'I'm going in buying this product *knowing* the product will rapidly become insecure and I don't care'

Double Fuck You.

Delightful being accused of 'puppy kicking' for criticising a kickstarter. No, puppy kicking is when you already have a nice puppy and I kick it.

*This* is, at worst, pissing on your chips. You don't even have chips, but the fryer has told you their chips are awesome despite their last four batches being substandard.

You ignore the opportunity to not buy chips or pull out your order at no cost, given a warning, despite the fact there are (admittedly more expensive) known good chip fryers out there.

'oh no, you shouldn't warn me the emperor has no clothes'

Learn from my experience : boutique mobiles phones are a non starter from anyone. The nearest it came to working was the Blackberry Priv, and a number of issues the phone had were only solved by the fact Blackberry are a large company that can throw resource at the issue.

Even then they gave up on security fixes after two years.

Sigh. Unihertz are releasing another keyboard phone in a kickstarter, so far it is doing rather well. Don't support these shysters!

I pointed out that Unihertz has a pretty much 100% track record in screwing their consumers over. They will not provide ongoing security updates and they never release GPL code.

Responders basically don't care they have no security patches and think maybe 'this time it'll be different'. Unihertz has committed to updating the phone to Android 17.

The phone comes out in October 2025, Android 17 release date is likely to be in 2026.

*That's ONE YEAR*. Wake up and smell the roses people.

Ask yourself when is the last time Windows booted up to the point you couldn't run a web browser to look at stuff other than 'probably not for over twenty years'.

Sure, there's been occasions when forced back to SVGA which sucks, but at least it provides a barely functional system.

Maybe I should just try PCBSD instead. I am fine with the command line, but when I run an upgrade I do sort of expect the standard upgrade commands to keep things working, and if I have to do something specific, for it to mention that at the end of the upgrade.

Windows : press button. Wait interminable time whilst it downloads and Does Stuff. Works.

OpenBSD :
sysupgrade. Literally *just* sysupgrade most of the time. Go for cup of tea, come back, done.

syspatch. reboot if necessary and there are patches.

pkg_add -u. Done.

FreeBSD :

freebsd-update fetch
freebsd-update install. Wait some time.
reboot
freebsd-update -r <release number> upgrade
freebsd-update install. Wait absolutely fecking ages.
reboot
freebsd-update install

pkg upgrade
(plus manually fiddling around removing the drm kmods and re-adding them)