From: muta...@gmail.com   
      
   On Tuesday, June 15, 2021 at 8:45:26 AM UTC+10, muta...@gmail.com wrote:   
      
   > In fact, one thing I could do is take my PDOS/386 hard   
   > disk image on USB stick to other PCs and zap the BIOS   
   > with software on that USB stick so that I can get INT 14H   
   > back.   
      
   Actually, this is the bottom line.   
      
   Given that I'm the one obeying the rules, by calling   
   INT 14H, I expect others to follow the rules. I don't   
   mind helping them.   
      
   In Fidonet there were people sending me non-standard   
   dates. I already had code (from someone else, Paul   
   Markham) that would auto-correct the dates, but I   
   instead preferred to run software that fully validated   
   it before passing it on to anyone else.   
      
   And then I would spend time finding out where the   
   software was that was putting out the invalid dates.   
      
   It turns out that it was mainly a problem of people   
   using a combination of BBS + tosser that was   
   causing the problem. It was OK if a BBS used a   
   non-standard date internally, but if you do that, you   
   need to combine it with a tosser that recognizes   
   that non-standard date and puts it into standard   
   format.   
      
   I can remember someone claiming I couldn't program   
   my way out of a paper bag because I couldn't even   
   handle dates. They were surprised that I had offered   
   to write software for the other person to run on their   
   system to correct the date.   
      
   One of these GNU project things, diffutils or something,   
   told me to update my C library to include the non-standard   
   header file, sys/types.h or something, but I refused, and   
   preferred to fork their non-standard software to make it   
   conform to C90 if they couldn't give a shit about   
   compliance themselves.   
      
   BFN. Paul.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)