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mech422

1,417 karma · joined May 2, 2017

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mech422··on An Italian farmer found some unknown seeds in his attic and planted them
LOL - I never thought of Jack and the beanstalk. I was thinking more along the lines of lil shop of horrors...
mech422··on An Italian farmer found some unknown seeds in his attic and planted them
I think I saw this movie... :-P
mech422··on US Reps Lead Democratic Resolution Opposing A.I. Bubble Bailout for Big Tech
for some reason I can't replay to jumpcrisscross below, so I'll put this here: Just cuz you can't get everything you want, doesn't mean you should have no 'hard lines' you're not willing to compromise on. So no, the past 20-30 years of 'the lesser of two evils' doesn't cut it anymore. I've voted for Dems. my whole life, but if they don't get a lot more effective, I wont be doing it in the future. When they had all 3 branches of legislature, they couldn't get stuff passed - everything got gutted or given away (remember the last shutdown when people begged them not to cave ?). Anyway, here's hoping for more independents and BrandNewCongress to pickup steam.
mech422··on StackOverflow now gets fewer than 1000 questions a month
LOL - I literally found a Storm Linux T-shirt in the bottom of my drawer a couple of days ago. Time goes by soo fast - can't believe that Storm Linux was 20 years ago already. So many 'next big things' fade soo fast...

Wonder if these AI firms will have a better run then VA Linux did ?

mech422··on Oldest GUI application that still runs on Windows 11
God, I hate copy/paste on android. tbh, I hate the whole 'gestures' thing where there never seems to be an actual 'instruction sheet' of what gestures are available. I wish they would make new apps provide a 'manifest' of gestures they support so your phone could have an up to date list based on which apps you have installed.
mech422··on Show HN: Opensidian
Hehe...thats pretty much the story of how open source came to be ... Assuming RMS is 'vibecoding' after a ton of pizza and jolt :-)
mech422··on Cloudflare acquires Deno
I thought iron bank got shutdown...Be cool if its still running! goes to look

edit: Sweet! seems to be all intact!! Thanks!!

mech422··on We're working on a new RuneScape MMO
Personally, I find Lord of the Rings online to be killer if you want the journey... I've been playing for ~20 years and still haven't hit max level (currently, I have a 138 out of 160 as my highest). Still have about half the map left to explore too - its HUGE and still gets regular updates. Freeps vs Creeps is a neat take on PVP if thats your thing too
mech422··on What Meta got right with Muse
"Format C: !" (with appologies to dragon naturally speaking) :-D
mech422··on Docker has always used microVMs (well since 2016)
Damm...thats going waayy back - but I want to say VS/VME (VM/VME) in the early 70s and vms in the mid 70s ?
mech422··on Several vulnerabilities have been discovered in the Linux kernel
and... you were responding to a human... so ... no problem..
mech422··on Several vulnerabilities have been discovered in the Linux kernel
someone did want an unreliable count from a chatbot, and did ask for it.. and they passed the information along in their comment (along with a very upfront comment about how the generated it). Feel free to come with other methods to generate unreliable summarization if you don't like the chatbot generated one. I'm sure humans and off by one errors or maybe badly formed regex's can give you a whole range of new things to complain about.
mech422··on Several vulnerabilities have been discovered in the Linux kernel
actually - they didn't...

That was a human posting a count of issues generated by an ai... not an ai generated message? Or do all the issues need to be counted by hand now ?

mech422··on Booted up in 1993, this server still runs – but not for much longer (2017)
IIRC correctly, the stratus PL/1 thing went back to the main hardware designer being big on PL/1 at IBM (PL/1 compiler group maybe?). Also, fun trivia - the Stratus was apparently the first (only?) mini/mainframe that IBM rebadged (they sold it as the model 88)
mech422··on Booted up in 1993, this server still runs – but not for much longer (2017)
Stratus 'servers' were originally 'super minis' - 19" racks full of gear with multi-million dollar price tags - looking at the picture in the article, I was surprised to see what look liked racks of desktops ?
mech422··on Booted up in 1993, this server still runs – but not for much longer (2017)
the originals ran like 3 'cpu groups' or whatever they called it... all instructions ran on all 3 and the results were compared - one of the cool things done with this was taking faulty 'cpu groups' out of service without down time
mech422··on Booted up in 1993, this server still runs – but not for much longer (2017)
Ohh...I guess I had moved off them before cpu switches. I heard they ported Unix to Stratus as well - Did you ever get a chance to play with it ? was it any good ?

I think VOS being PL/1 based pretty cool - Stratus (and Intel fab PL/M stuff) was the only time I've ever gotten to work with PL/1...

mech422··on Booted up in 1993, this server still runs – but not for much longer (2017)
yeah - the big difference was Tandem was software (+ hardware) fault tolerant while Stratus was full hardware level fault tolerant. This gave Tandem a real price edge.

Both were really popular with banks and brokerage houses (back when I worked with stratus at brokerages, HFT was just emerging and down time was umm... frowned upon :-D

mech422··on Booted up in 1993, this server still runs – but not for much longer (2017)
I started working on Stratus machines right out of high school... They took me from backwoods New England to Wall St.

The were Awesome machines - don't let those filthy hobbitsis...err..tandem users cloud your judgement. Stratus was pure hardware FT, and tandem... wasn't :-P

Vos was pretty nice too - decent macro language - not all the utils you expect with a unix box, but in terms of the core OS and shell it was pretty good machine .. 40 years later I still love those machines and the career they helped get me into :-D

mech422··on Booted up in 1993, this server still runs – but not for much longer (2017)
IIRC, Stratus was M68K (like 12 per cpu board organized into 3 logical cpu's for fault checking)
mech422··on 'We hacked the FBI:' Hackers say they have data on all FBI employees
also an mmo thing - hunting for collectibles in game
mech422··on My temporary PHP fix from 2014 has nearly 20M installs. Today I'm deprecating it
that is NOT what it says - "tell the word that depending on this project WAS a bad idea" ... 'was' - past tense, as in depending on it in the past was a bad idea
mech422··on My temporary PHP fix from 2014 has nearly 20M installs. Today I'm deprecating it
The down vote was me - I really think calling deprecating a project after a decade+ telling the world 'depending on this project was a bad idea' is tone deaf.
mech422··on Building a Linux GPU Driver for the M4 Mac Mini in One Month
there isn't ?? I sorta thought we figured all this out decades ago when SMB and DeCSS were being reversed? I think dosemu or something as well ?

I seem to recall DeCSS being the 'hot button' as it was RE'd in a 'non clean' way, the code released, and then a 'clean room' RE could be made from the 'public' info ??

edit: actually, at the time I think there was German law allowing RE for 'interoperablity' or some such. But that was a long time ago so my memory might be off.

mech422··on Muse – Meta’s personal AI agent
I think it's very common - its just what a 'normie' is depends on your particular poison... it seems to have been incorporated in a lot of hobbies/niches to refer to anyone not deep in the niche ?
mech422··on USDA recalls 30k pounds of Argentine beef sold in Texas and Florida
green cows ?
mech422··on 507 Mechanical Movements
This is great! Very interesting - thanks!
mech422··on The foundations of a provably secure operating system (PSOS) (1979) [pdf]
Never heard of HarmonyOS before - looking at the website, it doesn't seem to mention being capability based, but it is 'distributed' ??
mech422··on The foundations of a provably secure operating system (PSOS) (1979) [pdf]
I'll insert my standard plug for Genode/Sculpt OS here... Capability based, and used/maintained commercially:

https://genode.org/

mech422··on Only one side will be the true successor to MS-DOS – Windows 2.x
I mostly remember it from BBS's - it was _the_ way to run a multi-line BBS for a while.

GEOS was pretty cool too - amazing what you can fit in 64K if use a big enough hammer :-D

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