EvanAnderson

Blast from the past here-- it's ewwhite! I hope life has been treating you well, sir. It's hard for me to believe it's been so long.

We had it. Reddit should have just been NNTP. You can't "monetize" NNTP though.

I didn't do much community stuff on Stack Overflow, but Server Fault suffered from a certain class of user who was more interested in curating and rules-lawyering the "quality" of questions than actually helping people. It was hard work to keep those people in check, and the Stack Exchange metaphor seemed to draw those kind of people like moth to flame.

I refused to make a Reddit account. I knew my personality would lead me to wasting entirely too much time on the site if I could reply. (Like here... >sigh<)

When they killed "old.reddit.com" for non-logged-in users I stopped reading it at all. It's completely useless to me now. The "new" UI is garbage and makes me enable JavaScript.

I suppose I was never their target market anyway.

On the more-and-more rare occasion that I end up on Stack Overflow as a result of a search I find myself losing excessive time to following the random links to other communities. The other communities really are good stuff.

I miss Server Fault-- more the time in my life, I suppose, than the site itself.

I enjoyed the hell out of answering questions on Server Fault for a few years. It came along around the time my teaching gig at the local community college transitioned to online-only classes (which, oddly enough, I couldn't find enthusiasm to teach). I feel like the Server Fault community tried to make it a more hospitable place than Stack Overflow, FWIW, back in the day.

When Stack Exchange added the realtime chat system I got into interacting with members of the community more than could be done in questions or comments. There were even a couple people who ended up being IRL acquaintances. There were also wacky hijinks, too: https://meta.serverfault.com/a/1854 (I'm agog that those things happened 15 years ago, too... Yikes!)

Then we had our daughter and my time to dedicate to the site became scarce. I knew it was in the cards for me to lose the top spot on the leaderboard so I decided to just pack it in and quit cold turkey. I think I'm still fairly high on the leaderboard but, other than occasionally getting search engine results that point me to the site, I've stayed away. I don't live there anymore, as it were.

Edit: My favorite part of the site was having friends and Customers tell me about times they'd search-engined a question and found themselves using one of my answers to solve their problem. At least one Customer was amused to discover I'd fictionalized their particular situation as an example in an answer.

Tons of fun. Yep-- I miss that community.

The acquisition of OpenNT / Interix / Services for Unix (SFU) gave MSFT a really solid POSIX compatibility offering but it was too late-- Linux was already ascendant by that time. The no cost nature of Linux, as compared to the per-client client licensing for server versions of NT, can't be understated, though.

> Well, yes, it was designed and it also was a reimplementation of an existing thing, this being VMS.

My nitpick with the "reimplementation of VMS" statement would be that it didn't target source portability of VMS applications like Linux (and the GNU C library running on top of it) does with Unix/POSIX applications. I see it as Cutler and his team taking lessons learned from VMS and building something new incorporating those lessons in a different requirements framework.

Server Core is sort of that. The GUI is still there. You can run full Win32 GUI programs if you bring over the dependencies. There's less bots there but it's not analogous to a lightweight Linux distro that has no windowing environment.

A fever dream of mine is a "distribution" of NT that ships with the Interix subsystem and boots to text mode (or serial console) by default.

> Also, the NT kernel is criminally underrated, and pretty much unknown to hobbyists. It had features that Linux took years and years to come up with its own design for...

A person after my own heart. NT was actually designed, versus being a reimplementation of an existing thing.

Good catch. I wouldn't want people to get that impression. My reference to being a current Motorola Customer was a statement about liking their build quality (and their not being Google).

It's not a banking app, but there are definitely apps that don't work on GrapheneOS that can't be made to work. A friend of mine is "required" to use Microsoft Authenticator for his work MFA, which won't run. He's looking at having to carry another phone.

I have to use the awful thing, too, so if I go to GrapheneOS next year when, hopefully, a non-Google phone supports it, I'll have to carry two phones. Ugh.

I'm already a Moto phone user so assuming GrapheneOS becomes available on a Motorola phone next year I probably will switch.

Edit: I have at least one app that won't run under GrapheneOS (Microsoft Authenticator) so I'll be stuck with a two-phone carry, too. >sigh<

There have been a ton of scams my Customers have reported over the years that I've traced back to users clicking bad ads.

Google may care a lot, but if my experience is any indicator they don't care enough.

I moved to Android in 2022 from the iPhone ecosystem. I've been thru one phone replacement cycle and it was glorious. I got by without ever using Google Play and never had to tie my phone to any "ecosystem".

I had "sideloaded" all the APKs for the software I used on the old phone and saved the APKs. Moving to a new phone was just a matter of loading all the software and copying my rsync'd backups onto the new phone. It was wonderful. Just like moving to a new PC.

I guess I'm happy I got to have this experience for a little while.

Edit: I've found a few apps I can't used because they require Play attestation. Eventually I'll hit one of those that I need and I'll be at an impasse irrespective of this particular power grab.

> We have come a long way.

Except for all the legacy systems and embedded devices I have to deal with that have no certificate automation functionality and are still within their budgeted lifetimes. Those dumb things still require manual enrollment (or, at the very least, ugly one-off scripting to hand-puppet their stupidity) and the decreasing certificate lifetimes makes the problem that much more excruciating.

When I heard "carbon-fiber" and "pressure vessel" in the same sentence I thought: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_submersible_implosion

This would be the opposite of that, though.

If a company is willing to continue maintaining a piece of code their monopoly should continue. If they choose to stop (because they can't come up with a sustainable business model, can't find somebody to sell the monopoly to who will, etc) it should become, at minimum, source available (if not out right Open Source).

This should be the case, especially, for software that drives long-lived hardware devices in infrastructure roles (public works, manufacturing, etc).

There was an American Crow at a local wildlife rescue who could speak and mimic sounds. He would do a ringtone sort of sound, said "caw, caw" in a very human voice (presumably mimicking people mimicking crows), and sometimes would say "American Crow" (as he was identified by the sign on his enclosure).

I managed to get a recording once: https://drive.google.com/file/d/109wzdIsVW7hZwX1-8M3IioUMr49...

TIL. We hear and see the blue jays on our property frequently. We occasionally see a hawk but yet we hear hawk calls fairly frequently too. I always assumed I wasn't seeing the hawk. It never occurred to me another bird mimic the hawk calls. That's really interesting.

My local hospital system (Premier Health) was all-in on IBM and token ring. I remember being chagrined when they built a new hospital in 1998 and wired everything for token ring. The writing was clearly on the wall for token ring by 1998 but their IT department bled IBM blue.

Fast-forward to 2013, when my wife was giving birth to our daughter in one of their hospitals, and I noticed an unused type-1 token ring wall jack in our room right beside some occupied 8P8C (aka RJ-45) jacks.

I saw the title and thought "pykrete". Here's the aircraft carrier in question: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Habakkuk

I loved QWK! I was a Silly Little Mail Reader person.

The Computer History Museum collected an oral history[0] of John Backus[1] and there's some discussion about what computing was like when Fortran was created.

I really enjoy CHM's oral histories. I'm slowly working my way thru all of them and there are some real gems in there (Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Margaret Hamilton, Gordon Moore, Fred Brooks, John Warnock, etc).

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDsWTyLEgbk

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Backus

Wow-- I'd forgotten that Levy called Margaret out by name in the book. I also got the machine wrong-- it was the PDP-1, not the TX-0.

> Cycle accurate emulation helps little with this era PC demos, because back in 1993 PC hardware performance variation was already massive.

Absolutely

"How much of the sword emerged from the water" in Second Reality was a good measurement of CPU speed and video card performance, for example.

I remember seeing stuff in demos on my friend's Pentium Pro machine that I never saw on my 486SX-25 because routines ran faster and you could see more of the effect (since some demos were sync'd to the music and would move on irrespective of the progress of the effects). Heck-- just replacing my video card made a huge difference with some demos.

Check out starting on page 10: https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20...

Edit; It looks like I misremembered the machine. Seems like it was the PDP 1.

It's fascinating she was at the intersection of so many foundational points.

There is a very nice oral history the Computer History Museum produced: https://computerhistory.org/blog/margaret-hamilton-in-her-ow...

In Levy's "Hackers" there is a story about late night hacking on the TX-0 that fouled-up some weather simulation code an academic user of the computer was running. After hearing this oral history I believe Margaret was the programmer and the code was for Prof. Edward Lorenz.

Definitely worthy of a black bar. She was a pioneer of making software quality into a formal discipline.