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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • I switched in 1997.

    The internet was taking off, and it was built on Linux and un*ces. It was just a lot more fun.

    Also, C-programming. M$ had just gotten protected memory in NT4.0, but a lot of applications just didn’t run on NT. It’d take another three years before protected memory hit mainstream with win2k. No novice programmer wants their computer to bluescreen every time they do a tiny little out of bounds error.


  • I worked at a niche factory some 20 years ago. We had a tape robot with 8 tapes at some 200GB each. It’d do a full backup of everyone’s home directories and mailboxes every week, and incremental backups nightly.

    We’d keep the weekly backups on-site in a safe. Once a month I’d do a run to another plant one town over with a full backup.

    I guess at most we’d need five tapes. If they still use it, and with modern tapes, it should scale nicely. Today’s LTO-tapes are 18TB. Driving five tapes half an hour would give a nice bandwidth of 50GB/s. The bottleneck would be the write speed to tape at 400MB/s.




  • Even-dimensioned cubes (4x4x4, 6x6x6, …) are harder because they introduce some parity errors. Odd-dimensioned keep their fever center piece in the right spot.

    Otherwise the size just makes it more tedious. I keep up with a 4x4x4. I had a gigaminx dodecahedron that I solved a few times, but it just made my hands tired from the weight and kept popping out pieces because of their tinyness.





  • I don’t think there has been huge issues with incompatible ISAs on ARM. If you’d use NEON extensions, for example, you might have a C-implementation that does the same if the extensions are not available. Most people don’t handwrite such code, but those that do usually go the extra mile. ARM SoCs usually have closed source drivers that cause headaches. As well as no standardized way of booting.

    I haven’t delved super-deep into RISC-V just yet, but as I understand these systems will do UEFI, solving the bootloader headache. And yes, there are optional extensions and you can even make your own. But the architecture takes height for implementing an those extensions in software. If you don’t have the gates for your fancy vector instruction, you can provide instructions to replicate the same. It’ll be slower on your hardware, but it’ll be compatible if done right.



  • I wouldn’t say I hate Windows. I’ve had Windows 2.0 through NT 4.0 installed, but it was more of an application that I rarely started because it usually just interfered with my MS-DOS programs. DESQview was a much preferable option, as it had true multitasking (yes, so did NT 4.0 - but it broke a lot of things).

    I dual booted DOS and Linux for a couple of years, but DOS box was good enough in 1997 that I rarely had to boot DOS, so I’ve been Linux only for a couple of decades.

    Sounds like I should give Windows another try.


  • Slackware and Red Hat were the two distros in use in the mid 90s.

    My local city used proper UNIX, and my university had IRIXworkstations SPARCstations and SunOS servers. We used Linux at my ISP to handle modem pools and web/mail/news servers. In the early 2000s we had Linux labs, and Linux clusters to work on.

    Linux on the desktop was a bit painful. There were no modules. Kernels had to fit into main memory. So you’d roll your own kernel with just the drivers you needed. XFree86 was tricky to configure with timings for your CRT monitors. If done wrong, you could break your monitor.

    I used FVWM2 and Enlightenment for many years. I miss Enlightenment.