controversial97

Is there a modern equivalent of rentacoder?

A dozen years ago, rentacoder was 99.5% people wanting impossible things for $50 but there were some worthwhile "I want a visual basic app that does this clearly defined task and can be created in two days" jobs. (rentacoder got sold and stopped being useful)

Twenty one years ago, there was announcement that service pack 7 for windows NT 4.0 had been installed on computers on the ISS.

NT users on earth had to install service pack 6a then manually install a load of hotfixes to be up to date. NT 4.0 did not have the automatic updates that we are used to.

Microsoft never released SP7. It is my opinion that they chose not to because they wanted everyone to buy windows 2000. I'm still pissy about it.

https://www.theregister.com/2001/04/27/nt_4_0_sp7_available/

I mostly either go use the big nice printer at my hackerspace or use a website that usually gets documents to me in the mail two days later, printed perfectly at up to A0 size.

Print by mail works out cheaper than printing at home for my very occasional use.

I have been reliably informed by someone who has spent too much time building up credit on private torrent sites that downloading torrents is often slow through NordVPN.

Also, NordVPN does not support incoming connections to a listening port, so commonly can't download from two thirds of the seeds on a torrent. It is not unusual for there to be one to five seeders on a torrent, none with a port open for incoming connections, so people behind many commercial VPN's can't download the torrent.

There are other VPNs that support incoming connections, such as Mullvad, which are much more effective for torrents, if the users makes the effort to configure it.

Except for Lord Howe Island in New South Wales, Australia, where local time changes by 30 minutes.

With 32GB of RAM, I can have roughly around 3000 tabs open in firefox and 3000 in Chromium at the same time before things go unrecoverable wonky.

I have a low-capacity obfs4 tor proxy, it has been running for a few months and isn't blocked in Russia yet.

It has about fifteen users each day, all connecting from Russian ISPs.

I set it to only be announced by the telegram bot and only for a few weekends.

A combination of capacitance that has to be charged, crosstalk and characteristic impedance discontinuities.

The signals move between the cpu and the ram at about one nanosecond per foot. A nanosecond is one full cycle of a 1GHz clock.

The characteristic impedance of the connection is set by the physical size of the pcb track and the dielectric constant of the pcb material.

As the signals move between the cpu and ram at nearly the speed of light if they hit an impedance discontinuity some of the energy is reflected back. That messes up the signal.

Making a connector with hundreds of pins that works reliably and does not cause a significant impedance discontinuity is hard.

The lower the impedance of the connection, the more power is required to drive data through it.

A bit error rate of one in a billion would corrupt data or cause a software crash daily so signal integrity is a hard problem.

When Orkut was operational as a google project, I kinda liked it but there were two things that were an annoyance.

1) The servers appeared to be overloaded and about 25% of page loads showed an error page where pressing F5 did not try to reload the page you wanted, it just refreshed the error page. If I used open-in-new-tab trying the link again meant going back to the page with the link.

2) People who tried Orkut in the early days got control of pages such as "electronics" or "growing tomatoes" then stopped using Orkut.

There was no mechanism to appoint a new moderator to popular topic pages where the moderator had not logged in for a couple of years so pages for popular topics were full of spam.

I was not bothered that half the discussion on pages for many popular topics was in Portuguese.

100MHz logic was amazing in the year 1974.

In 1975, Cray made their first supercomputer, clocked at 80MHz, with freon-cooled ECL NOR gates.

It would be nice if there was an option to type in text with one character per grid square.

I would like to see a 3D version of the ZX spectrum games Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy.

I will never pay $60 for a game and don't own any consoles or a powerful GPU but I'd like to see it done.

I might be totally wrong; It seems likely to me that, due to capillary action, if a hollow undersea fiber gets physically cut then seawater would flow into the hollow center.

The ends of the fiber might be at different depths with a pressure difference that could move water a long way into the fiber. I imagine the length that water got into would be ruined even if the water was pushed out again.

I conjecture that undersea hollow-core might end up being expensive to maintain.

A tp-link UB500 is a small USB bluetooth device, the kind of thing you would buy to connect a bluetooth mouse or headset to a computer that does not have built-in bluetooth.

This appears to apply to UB400 devices as well.

Here is a tp-link page where they say that it is not possible to use two of the same UB devices in the same place, but a UB400 and a UB500 will work.

https://www.tp-link.com/latam/support/faq/2744/

For people in the UK who would like something similar:

Dunstable Downs Radio Boot Sale, 22nd of May 2022, Luton

http://www.ddrcbootsale.org/

If things that require client side software other than a standard browser count, then there is the Yagdrasil network and Hamachi.