hapless

hang loose, young lady, i have to ask this sex criminal how best to respond to your latest message

really cringe dating advice about pursuing an affair with a student almost 40 years younger than he is

it's way beyond cringe

Arguably it had a great deal to do with what we think of as a "virtual machine."

Virtual 8086 remapped all opcodes and memory accesses to let a program pretend to be on a single, real-mode 8086 when in reality it was one of many programs running in protected mode on a newer chip

AMD-V and whatever the Intel counterpart is do the almost exactly the same thing: re-map all ia32 and amd64 instructions and memory accesses to let a program pretend to be doing ring 0 stuff on an x86 box, when in reality it is one of many programs running with fewer privileges on a newer chip

There are a few more wrinkles in the latter case -- nested page tables, TLB, etc -- but it is the same idea from the viewpoint of the guest.

People, both then and now, are fond of Hayek and Von Mises works in anti-communist polemic. At no point were they reputable economists.

One school consists of every university in the world. The other school is George Mason University, and, uh, the John Birch Society.

Ludwig Von Mises was never qualified for a university appointment.

Even today he would never have a chance at a reputable economics department -- only GMU gives any credence to that kind of witch doctor nonsense.

The EU contains about 30% more people than the USA alone. (450MM vs 340MM)

North America overall contains many more people than the EU. (340 + 129 + 40 for just USA, Mexico, Canada, plus another ~50MM in smaller countries. 560ish total)

Indigo R3000 was VME-based, a derivative of the 4D/35 and firends

Indigo R4xxx was a completely different architecture shared with the later SGI Indy

Both had GIO32 slots

Same case, same slots, totally different architectures inside

Back in 1993, a $5k SGI had ~5x as much CPU power as a $10k x86 PC. Not a joke. You could get a 100 MHz R4000PC that would happily drive a display at 1280x1024 for the price of a 33 MHz 486 that would run Windows 3.x at 640x480

They worked very hard to make IRIX a competitive advantage over other UNIX vendors, but it was never a reason to buy SGI over "commodity"

If anything, IRIX was a hindrance to adoption, because UNIX was notoriously RAM-hungry, and the early 1990s had a horrible, horrible price crunch on RAM.

The 712 was already a better NeXTstation than the actual NeXTstation at the time

It cost half as much and had considerably more CPU power

There is a reason NeXT decided to become a software company...

The 3000UX was dead on arrival

It cost as much as an early 1990s UNIX workstation but it featured the technology of the 1980s, so it was extremely slow by the standards of the day.

For the price of a 3000UX, you could buy an SGI with 10x the CPU power, or a Sun with 10x as many pixels on the display. It was a really, really bad deal. As per usual for Commodore, too little, too late.

In the 1990s none of that stuff was made in mainland China, not even the cases. A great deal was made in Taiwan. Even more was still made in the USA.

Personally I remember AST -- a PC clone vendor who specialized in vertical integration, all in the USA. USA-made accessory cards, fit into USA-made motherboards, fit into USA-made cases, run by USA-made power supplies.

All this dried up and blew away, including the parent company, as both mainland and Taiwan capacity improved and prices fell, but it was not that long ago that you could literally build an entire PC with American components. 25 years, not 50 or 70.

Indigo2 is just convergent evolution.

The Indigo2 family had EISA slots, so it was obliged to hold a full-length ISA card.

There are only so many ways to skin that cat: You want a small, thin desktop with quiet cooling that will also fit a full length ISA card. LPX and Indigo2 look similar because they were solving the same problem.

See also: Octane and Origin 200 vis a vis ATX and WATX. When SGI adopted 64 bit PCI, their desktop-sized systems started to look a bit like ATX, despite a radically different underlying architecture

-----------

The equivalent Sun and HP9000 kit could look quite different because they did not even try to offer EISA as an option

Later Sun and HP9000 kit, with PCI64 slots, started to converge on an ATX "look" for similar reasons to the I2 and LPX

Stock buybacks are substantially equivalent to dividends. You issue a dividend when you have nothing to invest in that will develop shareholder value. Buybacks work the same way. You have a stock of capital, or a great borrowing opportunity, and nothing to do with it.

Most companies always have another idea to do a new thing, that might induce growth. WW did not. WW has been in trouble for decades, because their business model pre-supposes consumers are too stupid to use a search engine. (Does "weight watchers" work? No. No it doesn't.)

The debt-for-buyback swap is a symptom, not a cause. Management had nowhere to go, no vision for growth, and when you are out of ideas and you are offered an attractive loan, you do a buyback.

Wrecking the workstation market was easy, because workstations had small numbers of CPUs, and small pools of RAM. Intel started fucking up that market in the late 1980s.

x86 wasn't competitive on the server side until K8 (AMD) and Nehalem (Intel).

So you have a real long stretch -- 1987-ish to 2008-ish -- where proprietary UNIX on proprietary architectures owns the server side, even though the workstation market is eroding the whole time.

DEC indulged an enormous number of also-rans. It is from the perspective of 2025 that we remember some of the good stuff and forget all the bizarre mis-fires.

Off the top of my head:

* Two duplicate "high-end" VAX architectures (VAX 8000 vs VAX 9000), because no one wanted to choose between CMOS and ECL

* Three duplicate systems targeted at the high-end (Alpha, VAX 9000, VAX 8000)

* Two duplicate RISC+UNIX systems, because DEC was extremely late to market (MIPS 3000/5000 series vs Alpha)

* Two duplicate UNIX software packages, because DEC was really late to market (1970s ULTRIX ported to MIPS, OSF/1 on Alpha, and the never-fucking-released OSF/1 on MIPS because DEC just could not get their shit together)

* Four duplicate low end systems (MIPS, PDP-11, NVAX, Alpha were all sold simultaneously at the same price point!)

* A dozen utterly-failed microcomputer projects (Pro/3xx, Rainbow, etc)

DEC was not a particularly well-managed company. Their approach, for decades, was "throw shit at the wall and see what sticks." This worked fine right up until it didn't work at all.

It is also worth noting that Alpha, the "good" DEC initiative, was a failure. It lost a lot of money! market share never got out of the single digits.

Azeem Azhar never has to worry about employment in an AI-obsessed world -- no executive worth his salt will ever be satisfied with an AI-based lickspittle. You need the genuine human article for that.

Fireproofing isnt mandatory, so people dont do it

People like lawns and shrubberies, and they hate spending even one dollar extra on roofing when they know a taxpayer-backed insurance policy will cover their substandard construction

Unlike prior Sun systems there was no rack-optimized direct counterpart to the SS20

the "SPARCServer 20" was a super rare badging for like, workgroup servers

the big rackmount units for the sun4m era were still VME systems: 4/670, 4/690, etc

You have it backwards. Itanium 1, which had x86 and some limited hppa compatibility, had a ton of HP input.

Itanium 2 dropped a lot of the broken ideas from Itanium 1 in favor of .... slightly better than the worst performance in the industry.

re: numerical workloads, they achieved high performance on SPECfp exactly the same way as late-generation HPPA chips -- just throw more L3 cache at it until the number looks good. Not exactly engineering genius.

By the time this PDF deck dropped, AMD K10 / Opteron was out, and that ship had sailed.

By 2004 the only thing Itanium had going for it vs a similarly sized Opteron system was the enormous L3 cache. Real good for SPECfp, I guess.

when I had "unlimited" pto, my boss took three months a year, I got two weeks at Christmas

it is a question of priorities, and every vacation you take suddenly requires review

Obviously they have a commercial incentive to complain about Chrome, but that doesn't make their complaint untrue

Sounds like it would have been textbook "honest services" fraud if Amazon hadn't worked so hard to exclude their "code of conduct" from their employment contract ;)

What Chinese IP?

They absolutely did box themselves into a corner, and also, they had no god damn money

The 1st gen products (500/1000) never caught on in the world's largest market. They were always struggling.

The ASIC-based architecture did not help

My skepticism should be quite obvious: I am still posting through an X11 system.

But, Wayland is far and away the best and most serious attempt to replace X, ever, in thirty years and more.

If there is gonna be an X11 replacement, ever, Wayland is the most credible attempt in decades

tl;dr: X11R6 is very healthy on NetBSD and has active contributors

from the same blog: Wayland is also approaching healthy on NetBSD and has active contributors

There is no reason to get bent out of shape. NetBSD as a project has commitments to desktop support and seems to be living up to those commitments very well.

X11 has been unmaintained not once, not twice, but THREE times and it's still the dominant system on UNIX-type things. Xorg is, itself, the thrice-disowned descendant of the o.g. X project.

That is what it is! It's fine! if Wayland is the future, so be it, but it won't be because X11 got deprecated again. X11 has been deprecated plenty of times before!

Wayland may very well take over the unix and most especially linux desktop story, but that is not a done deal, yet. My last two? three? jobs all explicitly required X11 as a thing, so if giant enterprises are not picking up wayland, the deal ain't done, yet, you read me?

PC98 support grew from the facts on the ground: NetBSD and friends had Japanese-language mailing lists and irc channels, for decades

If you were a Japanese enthusiast who wanted to have a "real UNIX" on readily available hardware, NetBSD and FreeBSD were relatively more accessible