This doesn't really un-buy it, but it hides it from the UI as if I'd done so, until you pick some kind of "show me the stuff I've hidden" control I've forgotten the location of.
The same thing works for media. This screwed me once, as I have a habit of hiding any random "featurettes" or recaps that I get, and once when doing that accidentally hid a full episode (of Downton Abbey, as it happens).
The AppleTV UI was utterly confused by me wanting to view something that some service APIs were telling it I already owned and others were telling it I didn't, resulting in me working with Apple's support folks until I had a considerably better understanding of hiding iTunes purchases than most people are ever forced to develop.
]]>My personal experience of having read Jerry Cornelius books (admittedly a looong time ago, so I may be misremembering) was, reading one of them did very little to prepare me for reading others. They were so disconnected from each other that I couldn't really go into any one with expectations beyond "someone will be named Jerry Cornelius".
Sounds like a way to "trick" publishing/marketing folks by giving them a "series", while retaining considerably more freedom than "series" usually implies.
(I happened to hate the books, myself. Not sure why I read more than one of them.)
]]>So you used Perl? How did you get realtime performance out of it? The US protocols had all sorts of specifications about what would happen after so-and-so number of milliseconds, with pretty rigorous certification processes. Heh, I can still remember finding obscure bugs in Linux and Solaris serial port drivers...
(That's why my code ended up tight enough to port to PalmOS over a three day weekend just before a conference. I'd lug around a Palm 3 and an external modem connected with a DB25 cable, so potential customers could actually see that a small piece of software could dial the bank over a copper pair, just like a POS terminal, and actually move funds around.)
If you bought porn or e-books in North America in the late 1990s, your funds very possibly went through my code. (Remember "Peanut Press"? They were a customer. So was "Linux Mall", as it happens, one of our first.)
]]>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CCVS
The one time I've been to the UK, it was to meet with Royal Bank of Scotland to try and figure out what it would take to build their transaction protocols (some APACS thing) into our product. (It proved to be very feasible, and doing so would have let us sell outside North America. But it was not meant to be, for non-technical reasons.)
(I'd open source parts of it, if I could get Red Hat to give me the rights to our source code back. Alas.)
]]>And, I home someone animates that short story some day.
]]>Oldest building I ever visited, I'm pretty sure that's the Tower of London. Did the tour, listened to the Beefeaters, watched the ravens, saw the crown jewels, tried not to think too hard about the toilets.
My wife collects ghost stories (in the sense of locally-written non-fiction folklore) from places visited by people she knows, and I got quite the score there. Also bought two copies of the game "Outrage!" from the crown jewel gift shop, because playing that game purchased from that source set my meta-sense tingling in a way I continue to find amusing to this day.
(Hm... it's possible that the bed-and-breakfast in Surrey that I slept in during that trip is older than my own nation, but I'm not sure how to follow up on that at this point. The bed was fine, but the breakfast was terrible.)
]]>What's a file on a normal Unix system? It's pretty much a simple stream of bytes attached to a filename, nothing more, nothing less. There's a little bit of metadata, but not much. If you want anything more than that, you have to implement it on top of a stream of bytes. (This is less true than it used to be, with modern support for ACLs and metadata and forks and stuff, but for decades has been the foundation.)
What's a file on a VMS system? You've got direct support for record-oriented files, ACLs, versioning, logical names, it's crazy (from my perspective). It can be powerful, but it can also get in the way if what you've got doesn't match exactly what you want to do.
A simple Unix system can be very simple (and then you can layer stuff on top of that). A simple VMS system can't really be.
]]>I use it on my non-retina MBP, to disable the Nvidia chipset, forcing everything to use the Intel chipset. The result is dramatically better battery life and lower heat (which actually lets me use the laptop on top of my lap). Almost everything works just fine with the Intel chipset, and when I run into something that doesn't (eg. multiple displays connected), I just turn the Nvidia chipset back on.
It's open source and on github, and I recommend it to anyone who has a mac with multiple video chipsets.
]]>I've got a cheap used netbook that I just loaded Ubuntu 13.10 onto, so I can keep an eye on Linux laptop interfaces. I've got a Nook Color, which is an underpowered Android tablet in most respects, except, the boot loader doesn't require signatures, so it'll boot any darned OS you load onto a microSD card, so I can try various Android distributions very easily. And, I've got an Ouya, an Android set-top box that I can sideload whatever I want onto.
The Ouya has surprised me, in that throwing a USB keyboard and mouse onto it makes a better ssh terminal and remote desktop client than I would have ever predicted. Not bad at all for $99.
The tablet versions of Android I've tried are somewhat less pleasant right now, but the thing will supposedly be able to run Ubuntu Touch soon, so I'll have to give that a try.
(My "real" work is on POSIX servers, which are overwhelmingly Linux-based these days. I'm mostly struggling with what I'll be sitting in front of in five years.)
I cut my teeth on stuff like Ultrix and SunOS 3.4. Been a Unix user since the mid 1980s. Used to work for Red Hat (they acquired my startup company).
I can't really make sense of Microsoft OSes, and haven't really been able to since about Windows 98 (or for some purposes, NT 3.51).
Right now, I haven't stumbled onto a combination that makes Ubuntu not annoying. Much of Unity doesn't bother me too much, but the crazy design where there are no system menus and you have to search to launch things... WTF? I tried xubuntu, but I think I'll have to tweak the bejezis out of it on my netbook to make it usable (1024x600 display, a bit cramped).
I should give xubuntu a try on a larger display. I can always use the netbook in text-only console mode with no X server. Most of my real work can be done that way.
I'm really, really tempted to just try it the way I used to run it in the 1990s, with no "desktop environment" (by today's standards) and just a bunch of bare apps running under twm. Not even a virtual desktop. I've archived my old config files, I could just unpack those and live with that config. I really hope Apple doesn't force me to.
]]>If so, is there anything useful you can share about that process?
]]>