MarkusWandel

7 ms·

31.
by MarkusWandel 6mo ago
When I see numbers like that ($38 billion) thrown around I always wonder: Where did that money go? In the best case, it stayed in the economy in the form of salaries and such. In the worst case, it goes directly into an offshore pile of
32.
by MarkusWandel 6mo ago
Steamrollered by PC compatibles obviously. At the time it wasn't clear yet that for 8086/8 you needed register level hardware compatibility, not just BIOS call compatibility (as in the CP/M days) to stay in the market. And
33.
by MarkusWandel 7mo ago
In general, a good strategy is just staying a little bit behind. Let the new fads play themselves out. Some have staying power. Bitcoin never did turn into a usable currency, just another speculator's toy. Luckily I am - so far - i
34.
by MarkusWandel 7mo ago
The way I see it, there is very little creativity in big business. Fund an interesting new concept, or fund a formulaic sequel? Same thing every time. So the makers of tired old PC operating systems look enviously upon the success of smar
35.
by MarkusWandel 7mo ago
Just a crazy idea, but could it be that they don't dogfood their own stuff? I have Ublock Origin Lite on by default (RIP full Ublock Origin) and a lot of sites look clean . I'm often not even aware that if I send a link to an a
36.
by MarkusWandel 7mo ago
My Honda family car has a CVT and electric parking brakes. "Driver's Car" mattered more when the low-price option was a stickshift and cars weren't so heavy.
37.
by MarkusWandel 7mo ago
Well, all those years ago, my testbed for installing and trying out FreeBSD was a 486 with 8MB of memory. That was a heck of a machine compared to the ones BSD grew up on, and it ran great. No GUI on that setup of course, but all the Unix
38.
by MarkusWandel 7mo ago
Cameras? I suppose the world still has some weird cameras that need proprietary/weird drivers, but for all intents and purposes: USB cameras are UVC and work with a generic driver, and IP cameras are OnVIF and work with ffmpeg. I ca
39.
by MarkusWandel 7mo ago
Early in my Unix-ish at home journey (26-ish years ago) I tried FreeBSD. It was so Unix because, well, it is. An operating system, not a collection of parts. I found at the time in Linux land Debian felt similar. But there is always
40.
by MarkusWandel 7mo ago
That sounds like a classig igNobel Prize candidate!
41.
by MarkusWandel 7mo ago
It still doesn't cease to amaze me what can be done with modern ultra-cheap electronics. $1 for the accelerometer. $17 for four servos. But as DIY cheap weapon development? Only if the ultra-cheap electronics pipeline will keep f
42.
by MarkusWandel 7mo ago
"It's a real Mac" - I get that! I remember a whole slew of inexpensive netbooks and the like that were technically Windows XP or Windows 7 machines, but came with a dumbed-down "starter" OS, not enough RAM, only a
43.
by MarkusWandel 7mo ago
Fully lit, these would be blindingly bright, and would need tens of amps of power supply (source: I have a strip of 100 WS2813s (I think, anyway the 12V ones) and the 3A supply I have would be fully loaded if they were all on full bright w
44.
by MarkusWandel 7mo ago
Anyway would love to play this payphone game, if only as an excuse for bike outings, but it's only for California and I don't live there.
45.
by MarkusWandel 7mo ago
Another cool "just get out there" thing is the Degree Confluence Project. Just checked, and even the web site is still old school. https://confluence.org/ My personal contribution: https://confluence.
46.
by MarkusWandel 7mo ago
Bike after work! (own latitude - 45.4N). In the summer the days are long enough that, with daylight saving time, you can be an office slave and still have time for a significant bike ride after work (having biked to work in the first pla
47.
by MarkusWandel 8mo ago
More recent alternate universe is where everyone cooks everything in an Instant Pot, and even more recent is where everyone cooks everything in an air fryer. Every new cooking appliance is a revolution, until it isn't, and only a hand
48.
by MarkusWandel 8mo ago
Fabrics? I'm old enough to remember my mom making clothes from scratch, because buying fabric by the yard and sewing from patterns was cheaper than buying ready made clothes. That no longer being the case, how many people less than 5
49.
by MarkusWandel 8mo ago
It took a bit of time to get used to this in our first car that has it. As an engineer, I hope they made the (completely ordinary ring and pinion) starter system to last the distance and not wear out prematurely from 10-100x as many star
50.
by MarkusWandel 8mo ago
Thinking more practically though. Why wouldn't there be "narco drones", with drone technology becoming so ubiquitous and cheap? And what would their operators care about airspace restrictions? The practical ones, as in &qu
51.
by MarkusWandel 8mo ago
The phone batteries weren't a high load kind of affair. They merely needed to change the varying resistance of the carbon microphone into an audio voltage - on the order of milliwatts of power - to send down the line. A more modern p
52.
by MarkusWandel 8mo ago
If you look in vintage Sears catalogs - easily found online - I have a printed copy somewhere of the 1908 one and it's definitely in there - aftermarket phones had a bit of a "contraband" aspect to them, and were offered to b
53.
by MarkusWandel 8mo ago
The chassis (the bottom black part) was always made out of metal. But all the white part above, on the very first PETs (the ones with the rectangular keyboard) it was made out of metal, and on all subsequent ones (with normal keyboard and
54.
by MarkusWandel 8mo ago
Except that after the initial model, the PET's case was plastic, or rather, structural foam, with no shielding applied to it all.
55.
by MarkusWandel 8mo ago
Am I courting disaster by reviving won't-charge pouch cells by just manually running a bit of current through them until they're nonzero volts and then a normal charger will do the rest? So far, in the maybe half dozen times I&#x
56.
by MarkusWandel 8mo ago
I honestly didn't know that! And even better, being old (>54 years) don't even need to take a (Canadian) citizenship test. This may finally get me motivated.
57.
by MarkusWandel 8mo ago
My only experience with Linux secure boot so far.... I wasn't even aware that it was secure booted. And I needed to run something (I think it was the Displaylink driver) that needs to jam itself into the kernel. And the convoluted pr
58.
by MarkusWandel 8mo ago
Until recently? Honest question, what is the rule now? Source?
59.
by MarkusWandel 8mo ago
So LLMs can't do that? Every LLM-written historical or pseoudo-historical (i.e. made up) thing that comes up in my Facebook feed does start with a "hook" like that. Doesn't make them great articles but obviously you ca
60.
by MarkusWandel 8mo ago
That's insane. If the CPU has enough fuses (which according to the wiki it does) why the h*ck can't they just make it impossible to reflash the >= minimum previously installed version of the OS after preventing the downgrade?

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