watersb

38 ms·

511.
by watersb 4y ago
“Even though I seem to have terrible luck with x86-based computers, that doesn’t mean I have to take it lying down. I can go out there and cause even worse things to happen to me.” :-)
512.
by watersb 4y ago
IIRC, @cstross (who is on the HN here at times) had his first published work in contributions to the AD&D Monster Manual. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monster_Manual Legit. https://news.ycombinator.co
513.
by watersb 4y ago
There is, however, at least one nasty incident of souls sucked away by PowerPoint. You have been warned. :-)
514.
by watersb 4y ago
How funny! Just a few hours ago, I finished reading through Charles Stross' "The Laundry Files" sci-fi/fantasy series. https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2020/10/the-lau...
515.
by watersb 4y ago
I'm a bit surprised at the nostalgic reactions. For me, the reaction is still that twitching from the stress. Apple had less than 90 days of payroll in the bank and becoming irrelevant. A notebook computer that could do office work cos
516.
by watersb 4y ago
Was CLIPPER the hardware that would allow The Government to snoop on all encrypted traffic, or was it the hardware that would allow a remote kill switch on unlicensed digital "media"? I still get it confused with the previous CLIP
517.
by watersb 4y ago
Possibly the Chile Works or El Parasol? El Parasol: https://elparasol.com/ Google Street View of the sign to the Chile Works, off Trinity Drive: - https://www.google.com/maps/@35.8796938,-106.3006991,3a
518.
by watersb 4y ago
A friend of mine invented a new way of teaching English vowel sounds. There's a card-game version of this method that adults, kids can play. We tried the card game version with a room full of native "American" English speaker
519.
by watersb 4y ago
"Hit F10 to Save Changes" I worked in an office at the advent of the Windows era, in those last years of DOS WP 5.1 dominance. Friends of mine were making steady money, writing printer drivers for the crazy range of laser printers
520.
by watersb 4y ago
:-) Megabytes. Yes. Oops. I just bought some old Xeon CPUs on eBay that have 32 MB of cache. They cost rather less than $750.
521.
by watersb 4y ago
I ran Windows NT 4.0 on a DX2/66 -- with 32GB of RAM. The RAM cost about $750 from a Silicon Valley importer. 1994. That was during a crisis in worldwide memory availability, caused at least in part by a fire that destroyed the only fa
522.
by watersb 4y ago
Astronomy, probably. JWST can't see the same wavelengths of light. There's some overlap in near-infrared, but JWST doesn't see shorter wavelengths. Lots of astrophysical processes will still be better explored with Hubble. Ev
523.
by watersb 4y ago
An experienced gyroplane pilot shows off some remarkable moves. Stall/spin recovery demo was educational... I hadn't considered that a gyroplane would spin at all; I guess I assumed you'd get it flat and auto-rotate, where th
524.
by watersb 4y ago
Homestar Runner :-) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestar_Runner
525.
by watersb 4y ago
? My M1 MacBook Air is passively cooled, but has a heat pipe that feeds into a heat sink that's at least as large as the M1 system heat spreader. - Detail image: https://valkyrie.cdn.ifixit.com/media/2020/11&#
526.
by watersb 4y ago
One design goal of Philips screw drive is to prevent stripping the screw head. The gradual taper allows the screw driver to cam out before excessive torque damages the work. On good days. Then there's Uncle Jimmy.
527.
by watersb 4y ago
I am in the middle of an Intel Xeon build and I happen to agree. Searching for a simple answer to question: "does this CPU + chipset + this particular motherboard actually support ECC DRAM" is infuriating. Thousands of words on th
528.
by watersb 4y ago
"Tenfourfox" is a fork of Mozilla Firefox that the author maintained to support PowerPC Macs for a decade. Towering genius for anyone interested in how systems work.
529.
by watersb 4y ago
This is wonderful to see! Wow. Reminds me of that era, when office computers didn't support TCP/IP at the system level: applications had to implement their own stack. 1990s-me used NCSA Telnet on the Mac every day. https:/&#
530.
by watersb 4y ago
FWIW, OS/2 is actively developed, maintained for a price. I gather it's mostly for industrial control and ATMs these days. I used OS/2 Warp 4.0 for a bit, when researching for my book on Windows NT. It's certainly not &q
531.
by watersb 4y ago
Glue that breaks down over time, into something that can conduct electricity. A forum member on that RedFlagDeals.com post says that they've seen the same epoxy compound on various electronic items from 1970s, 80s, 90s.
532.
by watersb 4y ago
Summertime: refrigeration is nowhere, so kefir is everywhere ... Good times.
533.
by watersb 4y ago
Useless anecdotes, but I have seen specific product lines with problematic thermals that was a result of incorrect application of thermal compound. I've seen way too much thermal paste on Mac laptop boards. Not just Apple; for a while
534.
by watersb 4y ago
FWIW, No Starch Press is running a "30% off" sale over the USA holiday, July 4. It's running now, but I don't know if it is USA-only.
535.
by watersb 4y ago
Sparkfun Electronics vs Fluke, over a yellow multimeter: https://www.sparkfun.com/news/1430 Fluke uses a specific Pantone 123, and I can't see a significant difference between this yellow and construction machiner
536.
by watersb 4y ago
The Slab Allocator for Linux keeps an object tag for each slab, which can be of different sizes. Then we get the ZFS extent allocator, written mostly by the same programmer (Jeff Bonwick). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki&#x2
537.
by watersb 4y ago
Apple didn't own the eWorld infrastructure, and at the time they couldn't afford the bill they were getting from GE Information Systems. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/EWorld In reading that Wikipedia articl
538.
by watersb 4y ago
I initially read this as "People Isolated from Otters..." Made me want to go out and find an otter.
539.
by watersb 4y ago
Apparently, the new baseline Mac is built with a NAND flash chip that's twice as dense as the previous model. The M1 256GB SSD has both channels populated, each with a 128GB NAND stack. The new M2 has only a single channel populated. S
540.
by watersb 4y ago
Thanks, that explains it quite nicely. 1990s AppleTalk networks could work over a single pair. I ran a network with hundreds of Macs for a tech company. Ten buildings in a small campus. Still remember the day the fire-alarm techs punched do

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