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I think it's great that projects like this exist where people are building middleware in different ways than others. Still, as someone who routinely uses shared memory queues, the idea of considering a queue built inside a database to be "zero bloat" leaves me scratching my head a bit. I can see why someone would want that, but once person's feature is bloat to someone else.

In theory that is part of what was supposed to have been solved by CAT.

Or GIMP.

I think 5x86 had more to do with marketing than anything else, because the Pentium had already been on the market for a while when the Am5x86 came out.

What was buggy about DOS 4? I ran it for years until I switched to DR DOS 5.

I used dosshell on IBM PC DOS 4.0. I don't remember that feature. Was it added in 5?

I knew viewmax had static windows, but I always wondered why. Now I know.

I have run x11 in 16-color and 256-color mode, but it was not fun. The palette would get swapped when changing windows, which was quite disorienting. Hardware that could do 16-bit color was common by the late 90s.

I recall it playing the same ad repeatedly during commercial breaks. I think i once watched the same ad 5 times in a row.

Later I subscribed to paramount+ via amazon, and said goodbye to the glitches.

I remember noticing that a teacher in high school had used white-out to hide the marks for the correct multiple choice answer on final exam practice questions before copying them. Then she literally cut-and-pasted questions from the practice questions for the final. I did mediocre on the essay, but got the highest score in the class on the multiple choice questions, because I could see little black dots where the white out was used.

Camping is a viable strategy in many Quake levels, and it is problematic to the point that many servers will kill you if you stay in one place for too long.

Yes, Ralf Brown. I guess I'm getting old.

If I were to write an OS for a system of that era, I think I would target a game console. Compatibility is a rabbit hole (as I discovered when writing a JIT for Ruby). If you don't have to worry about whether other software runs, there is a lot of room for creativity.

Risk was minimized with the use of segmented memory. A bad pointer would generally only clobber something in the same (data) segment of memory. But there were no segfaults; a program crash means a reboot, which is why so many people optimized config.sys abs autoexec.bat for fast boot.

Come to think of it, maybe things aren't so different today -- if something goes wrong in your container/vm, many teams just wipe it and start from a clean snapshot

I remember that book! I wanted to get a copy but made do with the DOS Programmer's Reference, 3rd ed., which was also very good since beej's interrupt list wasn't available yet or I didn't know about it.

KDE got better some ways, but I would really like to be able to write an applet without learning QML and everything that goes with it. The learning curve feels higher than when I wrote my first Android app.

There was a schism anyway (wayland vs mir). I was excited about both, though I never understood the difference between the two.

That's why I wrote this: https://github.com/cout/windowfocus

I bind Alt+Shift+H to run "windowfocus left", which figures out which window is "to the left" based on some heuristics such as the direction between the center of the active window and the other windows on the screen. Since it works uses the center of the window, it works with overlapping windows (but intentionally excludes windows that are occluded).

I've used it in both xfce and kde (though not recently).

Same here. Did yours have a fan or was it fanless?

How does it compare to using icewm or fvwm95?

"You are granted permission to read, copy, modify, redistribute this software or derivatives of this software."

While Jim's more popular projects were usually MIT-licensed, Jim was once on a quest to find the world's shortest open source license. As far as I can tell, this is the final form of that license, dating to 2009.

This is the main reason I keep my PS/2 around with WordPerfect 5.1. Sure I can go browse the web with Minuet, or I used to before https everywhere, but that means saving and exiting WP. And 30+ years later I'm still waiting for a word processor with a decent Reveal Codes.

Is 49M a lot?

The best argument made against comparing lcd and crt technologies comes at the end of the article. The author points out the absurdity of discussing what it's like to read a book using a zoomed-in image of one of the book's pages.

I almost find this argument compelling, but I'm still as fascinated as when I was a kid with what makes an image on a crt look different from the pixels in my head.

I find the noise of a crt much more pleasing than the noise of a bad lcd. To me the crt is musical but the lcd is shrill.

I think hard drives are similar. There was something pleasing about the the 30MB ESDI in my first computer, but as hard drives got larger and faster, they also got more scratchy-sounding. Now I have a cheap PCIe M.2 adapter, and the sound it makes is like the newer hard drives, only less rhythmic. That alone makes it an irritant.

When I think of quirky conspiracy sites, I picture yellow-on-blue text and bright red text inside a blink element and links at the bottom to lycos and altavista.

Does watching or listening to baseball feel too fast-paced? I haven't played much attention to baseball in many years, but I agree with you, baseball is supposed to be slow.

I haven't answered on SO since someone edited my answer to say something I didn't write. It was minor, but I don't like that on principle. It adds huge personal risk to every question I answer.

SO wasn't even the first site with this phenomenon. IMO SO is way more cordial than some of the forums from the early 00s. And before that, many irc channels were known for being brutal to people coming for help. I was part of the problem there until I realized there was a problem and decided to change my approach, but it took years to unlearn what I had picked up from other channels ops.

This is a lot to chew on. Thank you.