sillywalk

There's a good series of articles on WebForce by the person at SGI who had the idea.

Starts here:

https://therealmccrea.com/2014/01/09/january-1994-a-very-goo...

"Musk promises". Sure.

"SpaceX policy regarding data retention.

It is actually helpful for debugging issues if we can retain some amount of data, so allowing this would be appreciated, but your privacy settings are always respected."[0]

[0] https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/2076737992689914215

one of the few games that supported the non-standard sound card on my parents IBM PS/1. Actually think it might have been bundled with that PS/1

It was.

https://pixelatedarcade.com/tech_attributes/overview/ibm-ps-...

Silpheed by Sierra On-Line for the PC — ported from the Japanese PC-8801 — was similarly good, possibly the first game I played with a proper sound card.

I had a similar experience, as it came bundled[0] with the soundcard for my IBM PS/1 286, and it even had speech(!) during the introduction.

[0] https://pixelatedarcade.com/tech_attributes/overview/ibm-ps-...

Link to the 14 page report[0].

The fact that they refused to release the un-redacted report is troubling for many reasons. The most probable on reason they didn't was because the predictions were too dire.

Australia had a similar situation a few years ago[1], and refused to even say when the report was completed.

[0] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/696e0eae719d8...

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/aug/30/offic...

After Compaq bought Tandem, they said they were going to port NonStop from MIPS to the Alpha[0], but then cancelled that for Itanium[1]. I'm not sure if NonStop was ported/expanded from 32bit to 64bit when it was running on MIPS.

[0] https://www.scmp.com/article/256948/compaq-port-himalaya-alp...

[1] https://www.informationweek.com/it-leadership/compaq-to-aban...

As a lucky kid, I remember watching in awe, a postage stamp size video from a CD-ROM encyclopedia on my 486SX. Around the same time I got to see some Sun SPARCstations with an insane 32MB of RAM!

As a side-note, it's interesting that all of the released versions of NT on Alpha were 32 bit.

Raymond Chen has a blog post[0] about using Alpha to develop 64bit Windows before Itanium hardware was available.

Virtually Fun has some more excellent background on finding a compiler for 64bit Windows[1], finding a copy of Windows 2000 64bit for Alpha AXP[2], and a detailed article about making an ISO from the found copy.

[0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/technet-...

[1] https://virtuallyfun.com/2023/05/05/hiding-in-plain-sight-th...

[2] https://virtuallyfun.com/2023/05/15/windows-2000-64-bit-for-...

[3] https://virtuallyfun.com/2023/06/26/axp64-2210-installation-...

It was supposed to make porting PC games easier - Windows CE had DirectX, I'm not sure if it was a subset.

I ~~can't~~ won't use the new ( decade+ old? )reddit.

From the Reddit Post announcing this, :

"In case you are wondering . . .

Q: Is Reddit shutting down Old Reddit? A: Not right now! We can’t promise it will be around forever, but u/spez himself has said we’ll keep supporting it while folks are still using it. That said, it doesn’t have the same modern security tech stack reddit.com has so we need to tighten security on old reddit to keep it viable."[0]

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/1ujtebf/logging_in...

those big SUNs

I'm pretty sure all the big Sun boxes were SMP, not NUMA, at least during the dot-com era. Not sure about later UltraSPARC T or M Series systems.

Previous Discussion about QSOE:

QSOE: QNX-inspired OS with dual-kernel architecture (qsoe-dev.blogspot.com)

44 points by ymz5 3 days ago | flag | hide | past | favorite | 27 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48630085

Nitpick: Facebook bought WhatsApp, it didn't make it.

It's amazing how many different, incompatible computer systems IBM had back then.

The WSJ has a decent article about why it takes so long to build Patriot missiles and increase their production. (It wasn't paywalled for me).

https://www.wsj.com/world/why-does-it-take-years-to-get-a-pa...

"From the archives, a bit of info on AltaVista:

The Hardware Behind AltaVista

AltaVista: AlphaStation 500, 256 MB memory, 6GB disk. AlphaStation 500's handle all external traffic to the site. They run a custom multi-threaded Web server which sends queries to the Web indexer and News indexer.

Web Indexer: AlphaServer 8400 5/300, 10 processors, 6 GB memory, 210 GB RAID disk. This model is the most powerful computer built by Digital. These servers run the query engine. The Web index is larger than 40 GB, but most requests take less than a second.

Scooter: AlphaServer 4100 5/300, 1.5 GB memory, 30 GB RAID disk. The super-spider runs from this machine. It fetches pages from the Web and sends them to Vista, our primary web indexer.

Vista: AlphaServer 4100 5/300, 2 processors, 2GB memory, 180GB RAID disk. This machine indexes Scooter output and serves as a central distribution point for new index data.

News Indexer: AlphaServer 600 5/333, 896MB memory, 13 GB disk. This machine keeps an up-to-date index of the news spool: since new articles appear and old articles expire all the time, it is in fact quite busy, even though the index it serves is much smaller than the Web index.

News Server: AlphaServer 600 5/333, 896MB memory, 24 GB RAID disks. It maintains a current news spool for the News Indexer. It also serves the articles via http to those of you who don't want to know about news servers but want to read news."[0]

[0] https://groups.google.com/g/comp.unix.tru64/c/aB_z5YXwNMI

Why is the latter worse than the former ?

I'm not sure about worse, but think one of the differences would be the size of the 'kill zone' and the cost/availability. 10 quadcopters "cover[ed] between 3 and 5 kilometres ". That would take a lot of bombs and a multiple aircraft sorties with to kill everything there. e.g. During the Vietnam war, a group of 6 B-52 bombers modified for carpet bombings could bomb an area around 1Km x 3Km. Only the US and Russia have heavy bombers that can do that. It could be done with smaller fighter aircraft, but that's more sorties.

That's vs. 10 quadcopter drones.

I'm curious what model of PS/1? My first PC was a PS/1 model 2011, with a 286@10Mhz.

Also, there's an emulator for PS/1 machines at https://www.ibmulator.org/

I was immediately reminded of the fake VHS line artifacts for Stranger Things - A Bad Lip Reading[0], which I assume are sort of a bit about the fake film grain things during the opening titles in the Stranger Things show.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-4rhjO6xYg

1. Get rid of Liquid Glass. Fire everyone who approved it.

2. In the Calendar Inbox, allow select all, or have the "OK" button at the same location so I don't have to click 400 different times at 400 different screen locations to empty the thing. I just ignore it now, it's less than useless. Also show a sidebar with event details in Week/Month view.

3. Make Reminders a Real Desktop App vs. a horrible iOS. port. At least drop the tiny little (i) info icon, and show all the info for a reminder on a sidebar to the right.

3. Get rid of the Apple Music app. Fire everybody who approved it. Bring back iTunes. It was a bloated mess, but somehow better than the horror-show that is Apple Music. At least put the controls back at the top of the screen, and allow me to have playlists default to list view. Also, get rid of the "Cover Art Area" that takes up half the screen, and I don't want, and has redundant playback controls. Make the text in the what's playing be adjustable size so I can read it. Maybe obey the System Accessibility settings?

4. Get rid of the System Settings app. Fire everybody who approved moving that garbage to macOS. Bring back System Preferences.

5. In Software Update, drop the tiny little (i) info icon and just show the what updates are going to be installed inline.

Apparently there is supposed to be a bunch of "bunker stuff" underneath it, either new or upgrades to existing ones.

https://www.twz.com/news-features/the-white-house-ballroom-i...

Tandem's NonStop

I'd second this. Of course, there would need to be 3 emulators - the original proprietary CISC systems, the tightly-lockstepped MIPS systems, and the loosely-lockstepped Itanium systems.

HPE still sells NonStop on X86-64 systems now, including virtualized NonStop as a Service "cloud" offerings.

I'd like to see movie versions of the original "sequels" - the Thrawn Trilogy.

The core idea, tag memory with unforgeable access tokens at the hardware level instead of leaning on software-defined access control lists, is finally getting real implementation, forty-plus years later.

The IBM System/38 did this around the same time, along with its successor - the AS/400. When the AS/400 switched to POWER (or PowerPC AS), they started using standard RAM, but are still able to have a tag bit for each 16byte(?) pointer using ECC, but the instructions to do that aren't privileged. The AS/400 or "i" as it's now called is still around.

It was ported from the Mac version, along with Illustrator, using a set of libraries called Lattitude that implimented the Mac toolbox on Unix systems.

http://preserve.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.13/13.06/Ju...

Previous discussions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47392084

    Bill C-22, the Lawful Access Act: Dangerous backdoor surveillance risks remain (michaelgeist.ca)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48111531

Canada’s Bill C-22 Is a Repackaged Version of Last Year’s Surveillance Nightmare (eff.org)

378 points by Brajeshwar 4 days ago | flag | hide | past | favorite | 133 comments

Tune Tracker is sill(?) around, they moved to Haiku a long time ago.

Why * * do we have to have a modal dialog to save a file when there's a perfectly good file manager?

At least for me, when I tried RiscOS, it was annoying and more work to have to switch to the file manager and then open more window(s) just to save a file. That could also be with RiscOS not having(?) Alt-Tab. I do sometimes use the macOS "proxy-icon" (which I think was disabled by default a few versions ago) to save/move files into finder windows if I already have them open.

"Some people have told me they don't think a fat penguin really embodies the grace of Linux, which just tells me they have never seen a angry penguin charging at them in excess of 100mph. They'd be a lot more careful about what they say if they had." Linux 2.0 announcement, Jun 9, 1996 [0]

[0] https://groups.google.com/g/comp.os.linux.announce/c/yLMIRkr...

the main thing that killed the 3DO was the price

I believe this was because 3DO didn't make the consoles themselves, they licensed the design to others who made it. The console had to be profitable, rather than be sold at a loss and be subsidized by game sales.