krylon

Honest question: Is this satire?

"indefinitely" might be a better name. (But I think loop is indeed a better name.)

I run OpenBSD on an ancient laptop that I use to play videos. In about 7 years, I have had no bad experiences with it. Upgrading from release to release has been painless, hardware support is fine. Playing HD videos is out of the question, but the laptop is from ~2008, and it wasn't a high end model back in the day, so there is little OpenBSD can do about that.

I cannot say much about security, but in terms of reliability, I have only good things to say about the system.

EDIT: Once you connect a device to the Internet and possibly install third-party software on it, your own expertise is likely to have a bigger impact on security than the underlying system. I am not recommending to NOT use OpenBSD, but if you have no prior experience with it, you might have a better experience using what you know.

Back in the day, I made an attempt at LFS but gave up halfway through. In my defense, I had done a gentoo stage 1 emerge earlier that year. ;-)

I never intended to end up with a usable system, I was just in it for the learning experience. And I did end up learning a lot.

Until very recently, dot matrix printers were still common in doctors' offices in Germany (for reasons), and the sound they make always gives me huge wave of nostalgia, even bigger than hearing a fax/modem emitting its handshake sound.

A C-64 fits on your desk easily. A PDP-11 or a Cray-1 does not. This surely isn't the entire answer, but I suspect it does play a role.

I thought this was going to be about using smart geese as a deterrence, e.g. against burglars or obnoxious neighbors.

FWIW, as a mechanism for keeping the geese in check, I like it.

I have not, but I shall! Thank you!

From what I heard, the filesystem was very cool. You could attach arbitrary key-value pairs to files, and e.g. rather than store song metadata in ID3 tags or whatever, it was stored as filesystem metadata, making it searchable by any program without knowledge of a file's internals. As I recall reading, one could create a virtual folder that contained the results of a search, e.g. "all MP3 files where artist='Pink Floyd'" and use that as a playlist.

I have played around a bit with Haiku, but have not figured out how to do that so far.

I doubt it. With WordStar/WordPerfect, the original developers and vendors are no longer in the game.

If Microsoft did that, they would be admitting, basically, the last 20 years were mostly wasted on useless gadgets. Some users, of course, would argue that, yes, they were. But Microsoft's management and stockholders would not be happy about that.

Good thought. Familiarity and muscle memory are a big asset. As a long time emacs user, I feel the same about my tool of choice. It's not always about being the absolute best tool there is, but about being one that you know inside and out - you no longer need to spend a lot of time figuring out how to do something, you can just do it.

Copyright issues aside - which can be quite thorny for software this old - I imagine the people who created WordStar must take great pride in the fact that more than thirty years later, people still make good use of their creation.

Thanks to the author for making the effort! I don't use FreeBSD on my desktop myself, but I think it's important to have options.

I'm not a big fan of Windows, but I'm a bit sad that the project didn't go anywhere forever and then was cancelled. They had some pretty ambitious and interesting ideas for it.

E.g. the only public beta of Vista that had it enabled used the database as a backing store for Outlook contacts. Each contact was an object in the database. So were photos. And you could link - as I recall, I only read about it back then - people to photos. And then search on that data, of course. Like, "give me all emails, documents, and photos that have to do with person X, from 2022-2023".

But IIRC, the performance was atrocious. They might have been able to fix that, but instead it ended on the junk heap of unrealized ideas.

Sometimes you just gotta love the German language. We joyfully smash words together to make new words, like a linguistic particle accelerator. :-)

Those are pretty beefy spec for the listed price. I may be drooling a little over here.

If I was still using a Mac as my desktop, my productivity would be completely gone now. =D

Diary from the late 1990s. The original timestamps haven't survived moving across machines repeatedly, of course, but the files are named after the date I wrote them.

I am so glad I'm not the only one whose brain pulls such pranks. Thank you!

The first two times, my brain wanted to read Futamura as Futurama. Silly me.

I was about to complain that my hometown is missing, but then remembered it didn't exist back then.

I never heard of ULA before, and it sounded a bit overwhelming at first. But on a Fritz!Box with recent firmware, it's very easy to enable, and voila! - just works.

I was surprised, too. Knowing little about physics, this was a pleasant surprise, however.

My first multiprocessor system was one of those! Two Duron CPUs, "upgraded" to think they were AthlonMPs. Worked pretty well, but it used a lot of power. I burned through two PSUs in 18 months (admittedly, both were not exactly top-shelf).

None of my computers have floppy drives. :blushing-emoji:

Thank you very much!!!

Agreed. Over the past couple of years, I have stumbled across numerous indicators that a wide variety of animals have at the very least more complex inner processes and experiences than naturalists of old would have given them credit for.

Anyone who has spent any significant amount of time living with a dog or a cat will confirm that their four-legged companions behave very much as if they had emotions analogous to our own. That they remember us individually, have favorite spots to rest, individual personality traits.

Ants don't have hobbies, of course, and I doubt they spend their evenings pondering the meaning of life. But viewing them as purely mechanical automata misses a big part of their lives.

I didn't know I needed this.

Apparently Oracle has stopped caring, new Solaris releases haven't been certified in a few years, says Wikipedia.

I don't really know what the certification gets you these days other than bragging rights. I imagine in the past, government and corporate customers had check lists that included a box for "certified Posix", but I'm not sure if that is still the case.

I know of Nix, but I know little about the project itself. Can someone shed some light on the reasons for forking?