avhception

It definitely resonated with me as a kid, and I've had this fascination for the Unices of yore ever since!

"Ah, that's Rev. B, yeah, known problem..." Like I could somehow buy by PCB rev. Sometimes they even swap entire controllers within the same Rev.

This is my favorite version of this dynamic, intentionally buying the crap because they cheaped out on the antifeatures.

Well, of course there is the "buy cheap, get trash, duh!" talking point. But if I pay more, who's to say I'll get a better product? The OEM or some middleman or whoever might just pocket the difference and push crap anyway. Well-known brands have done this as well, either intentionally or because they got shafted by their supplier as well.

A friend of mine recently moved to a modern apartment, built only a few years ago to a very high isolation standard (Germany). I stayed over night and slept on his couch, the air got really really dry and stuffy. It was really uncomfortable.

While the article does have its shortcomings, it drives me crazy that we'd have to build 3 or 4 fiber lines to each house individually here in Germany. Imagine we'd have done it that way with water or electricity. It's completely braindead. Just one town over, there are houses that had the street dug up 3 times to lay fiber. But only to connect the neighborhood 2km down the valley. No internet for them. It's absolutely stupid.

It's also just a ginormous hunk of metal. Which also makes the long range kinda moot, strapping a bigger battery will of course result in a bigger range. I'm guessing the car doesn't make any improvements on the efficiency?

To be fair, it's also much easier to start a company in Germany if you choose a simpler legal form. It's probably still easier in the Netherlands or Sweden, but the authors pain is at least partially self-inflicted.

Well, I totally get the benefits that made those people choose Kubernetes. It's just that those benefits could be had w/o running a massively complicated piece of machinery that is mostly engineered to solve problems I don't have.

Long term funding for the Linux desktop, especially those areas that don't lend themselves very well to the bazaar model.

We have a lot of old pi3 stock at $work. We keep using them. The pi3 was the newest model when we imagined and built the applications we're using them for. It was perfectly capable back then. Why would that have changed? The application hasn't changed and it's still perfectly capable now.

This could be mostly due to the fact that China has been on the rise, economically. So people mostly see the system working, and mostly in their favor. We'll see the real oppression once that changes.

My family operated a business on exactly these razor thin margins. You always live on the razors edge. You're unable to invest into the future, unable to improve your processes, and god forbid there is even a minor disruption. I don't think it's sustainable. We've since faltered, as have our many of our competitors and suppliers.

To add a bit of context: I'm not even romanticizing the actual implementations, which may or may not have had horrible bugs and errata. Rather, it's the abstract concept, the ability to have a reasonable expectation that, for example, the firmware would be completely operable, scriptable and so on and so forth from a serial line. Stuff like this.

I want to be able to buy ARM boards like I'm buying ITX PC boards. I don't want a special build of Linux from the SBC OEM, I don't want weird bootloaders, firmware and other embedded-like stuff. I just want an ARM-based PC board for my desktop and server closet (so Ampere stuff is out of the picture unfortunately).

While individual implementations may or may not have had horrible bugs or consisted entirely of hacks, I think just carrying forward the expectation of having a proper, all-powerful text prompt into the firmware that can easily be made accessible remotely would have been a real boon to the foundations of server hardware. With time, the bugs could have been fixed and the hacks replaced with proper implementations.

As someone who mostly gets my retrocomputing kick from running modern software on old RISC hardware, I'll try to explain why that's my thing.

Typically, these venerable beasts come from a more "civilized" era of computing, at least that's how I feel. I wasn't around to actually experience it, coming up when real UNIX™ was already pushed to the fringes. I'm completely aware that I'm romanticizing, but for me, there is something about these machines that a PC just still can't exactly match. Trying to move a mouse and typing with broken keyboard layouts through a buggy-as-hell IPMI interface that was somehow bolted to a machine that, from it's inception, never was meant to be operated remotely, just feels like a hack. It might get the job done, and it's cheap, but it most certainly isn't elegant. The PC as a whole just isn't elegant.

But these old SUN and IBM machines, they're something different. Tools from professionals, for professionals. With remote management built into the machine from the inception! No stupid GUI with whacky translations in sight!

Of course I'm also fascinated by Solaris, AIX and HP-UX and whatnot. But running modern software on these machines has it's own appeal to me. My retrocomputing itch is to show off these machines, experience them. And what better way to do that than to actually use them to host modern software, impress people by showing how capable they still are, maybe as a glimpse into a future that never was.

I agree with you that "enshittification" has a more specific meaning than just "make worse". Yet, the enshittification of Windows doesn't really follow the mold you described, even though I'd also call it enshittification.

Are you actually going to wear this to your graduation? Heck no.

What? That would have been so much fun!

I'm sure that other countries also have plenty of similar services for ID and age verification

laughs in Bundesdruckerei

I've only ever read about VMS in an historic context, like Wikipedia articles and blog posts. DEC and VMS are not well known. That's a shame, considering how much influence they had, especially on WinNT.

Ha, that's very close to my story as well. I had a 166Mhz Pentium and it was all PCI cards and 100mbit by then. That was essentially the start of my career.

From a CPU / GPU standpoint? Yes. From a "I need to constantly replace SD cards or netboot the weird firmware" standpoint? I'd rather not.

At work, we needed a PC for a Linux-based Webkiosk the other day. The computer proposed by the colleague who actually orders stuff comes with a Windows license. I said we don't need that. A fruitless, lame effort was made to locate a substitute w/o a Windows license. I renewed my protest, but the feeling that the problem is me was already floating in the air. I gave up. We purchased a Windows license to run Linux. For the umpteenth time. It's like a Microsoft tax on PCs.

Many of them offer that option, so there is a grey zone. But you're right - should have been more clear about that.

Maybe that is the case for some places, but this is rather rural Germany. Not sure when I've last seen a tourist here.

We usually order by phone, then drive by and pick up the food. Can't do that w/o a menu. The solution is usually to take a printed menu with you when you're there. But that's a chicken-and-egg problem!

For many local places here, the only way to get the menu online is if a customer posted a photo of the menu on Google maps or something.

And 1/3 of the time, that photo is too blurry and off-angle and whatnot to even read properly.

Website? Ha, with local restaurants here you're in luck if the photos of the menu posted by customers on google maps or FB or where ever aren't too fuzzy to read.

Yet, living in Germany, the problems I hear about our healthcare system from friends or in the media are an absolute far cry from the insanity that I hear about the US system. Maybe some of it is sensationalism, but I very much doubt that would account for the whole story.