You are the end result of a “would you push the button” prompt where the prompt was “you have unlimited godlike powers but you appear to all and sundry to be an impetuous child” – Zero, 2022
My ten-year-old iPod Mini still works fine despite my having dropped it several times as a teenager
Mind you, this is back when iPods still had HARD DRIVES, so there's moving parts and everything and somehow I wasn't able to fuck it up
Something odd I noticed about hard drives a while back:
Okay, so most modern hard drives are rectangular, and have a spindle end and an actuator end. For the longest time, the interface—be it ST-506, ATA or SCSI—was on the spindle end, with the actuator on the far side. It freaked me out when, in the late 1990s or so, drive makers started putting the interface on the actuator end.
A lot of the reason why they put the interface on the spindle end is because, well, they needed the space. It also make sense, at least to me, that the signal flows from one of the drive to the other, and then up into the HDA. What I didn't know (since I'd purchased new HDDs in 1996, 1997, and 1998, but not again until 2003) is that the controllers had gotten so small that they could squish the host interface, disk controller, servos and CPUs into one or two chips, and so putting the interface on the actuator end made sense.
I do notice that 2.5-inch drives still put the interface on the spindle end, though. I guess they still need the space.
The IBM is here, and I have FreeBSD 2.2.6 installed on it.
I've totally forgotten how meager FreeBSD's hardware support was back in the day. There's no USB support (not surprising; Windows didn't even support USB yet!), and the only PCI network cards supported are the Intel 8255x, DEC Tulip, SMC EPIC and 3Com 3c905 (in rough order of preference).
The latter makes sense when you realise that most people didn't have or need 100BaseTX at the time; most Ethernet users were either on college campuses or corporate environments, and so the cards were still rare.
Also: NO DMA IDE. If you wanted fast I/O,you bought SCSI like a big boy, and you bought the super-expensive Adaptec controller to go with it (the NCR driver apparently still had issues).
Luckily, I have both the drive and an AHA-29xx, but I don't want to use them unless SATA is absolutely not an option (I'll have to see when FreeBSD added Silicon Image support).
Well, fuck my life. FreeBSD shut down the old CVSup servers, and I can't fucking download Subversion because the old-ass version of Lynx packaged with 3.1 doesn't support HTTPS.
I'm going to have to NFS export /usr/src and do the Subversion checkout from the Linux machine. God dammit. :P
Oh, and it gets even worse: YOU CAN'T USE SVN OF NFS BECAUSE FUCKING SQLITE BARFS F YOU TRY AND I DON'T KNOW HOW TO FIX IT ARGGGGGGGGGGH WHY TTHE FUCK AM I STILL FOING THIS AT @:#0 AM
lee what do you think of my having to order a physical windows 8.1 disk after i bought windows 8.1 through the microsoft webstore because they dont tell you vedore you buy it that the installation media creation tool is a .exe file and they dont give you a way to just download an iso
It's stupid (I didn't think anyone still made you do that), but then, $15 isn't so bad. I remember OEMs charging upwards of $50 for the oh-so-lofty privilege of sending a couple discs out...
When I got my machine for Tech (the 75 MHz version of the one I'm fighting with now, actually), it had a buch of software preloaded...and no recovery disks. You were pretty much required to buy the 100-disk addict pack of 3.5-inch floppies and make your own. This would end up biting me in the ass eventually, as I'd been playing with the machine with the case open over Christmas break, and I ended up dropping the (big, heavy late-production Model M) keyboard on the cross-member and destroying the hard drive. :P
Well, fuck my life. FreeBSD shut down the old CVSup servers, and I can't fucking download Subversion because the old-ass version of Lynx packaged with 3.1 doesn't support HTTPS.
I'm going to have to NFS export /usr/src and do the Subversion checkout from the Linux machine. God dammit. :P
And there's no way around this, either. Even the simple svn client included in the ports tree needs OpenSSL to build, and that wasn't shipped as a matter of course until 4.0. :P
Oh well, at least make buildworld is actually building right now. Earlier, it was failing because of stray files...had to use rsync --delete to get rid of them.
I had a computer at work melt down on me again. From what I can tell, the fan failed, which made the fan controller fail, which means the machine will never cool itself correctly again. At first I thought it was just the fan (and a hard-to-get 80x80x15 fan, too, which was really irritating).
You are the end result of a “would you push the button” prompt where the prompt was “you have unlimited godlike powers but you appear to all and sundry to be an impetuous child” – Zero, 2022
This seems like a video you'd appreciate, even though I'm sure you know everything in it already :P
You are the end result of a “would you push the button” prompt where the prompt was “you have unlimited godlike powers but you appear to all and sundry to be an impetuous child” – Zero, 2022
Hey Lee, I'm curious: do you have any idea why almost all of the drivers that come with Windows have the release date 6/21/2006? I doubt that most of these have seriously gone untouched since Vista...
And regarding that OS/2 video: Yeah, I was familiar with most of what was discussed, though I do tend to forget that IBM saw OS/2 as an add-on to the PS/2 (sort of like how HP treats iLO licenses for the ProLiant now), rather than a standalone product.
Oh well, I just jury-rigged it by hooking up the SCSI drive and allocating the whole thing to swap, because shut up that's why. Swapping is slow even on modern magnetic drives, but it should still work!
You are the end result of a “would you push the button” prompt where the prompt was “you have unlimited godlike powers but you appear to all and sundry to be an impetuous child” – Zero, 2022
I don't follow your logic, Glenn. How could something that was given away for free be "more expensive than a regular watch"?
they go for about 100-150 on ebay now (some people are trying to hawk it for way more of course), which puts it solidly in the relatively cheap fashion watches price bracket
I'm thinking of Oracle for some reason. Mainly because I was also thinking about how a couple of people I know on Twitter were lamenting them buying MySQL a while back.
Which is understandable, because at least when it comes to their flagship product, Oracle is one of those companies that makes 1990s Microsoft look friendly and easy to do business with. Years ago, we were evaluating an early open-source CRM package, but the damn thing required Oracle to work, and getting a demo out of them is like buying car insurance. :P You have to go through a salesperson and reassure them that yes, really, we will be throwing 6 figures your way for a fucking huge cluster we don't need, for sure! before they'll authorize a download. And they keep bugging you about it, too.
We never even got to the point where could test that package, let alone use it; we ended up going with something that used MySQL instead.
Cisco is bad about this as well, but in their case you can usually shut them up by going over to CDW or Provantage or another reseller and buying a support contract, and basic support with no on-site is usually pretty cheap for things like 79xx phones.
You are the end result of a “would you push the button” prompt where the prompt was “you have unlimited godlike powers but you appear to all and sundry to be an impetuous child” – Zero, 2022
Oracle also killed off OpenOffice too
LibreOffice was the result of that so it worked out ok in the end but I'm still bitter
Expanding on what IO said on Twitter: Yeah, Windows 10 on a Pentium D. I am such a masochist.
The reason is because we haven't updated the hardware in the R&D area, like, since the mid-late 2000s. I intentionally keep a few old machines around for testing purposes (you never know when you're going to run into a bank in the middle of nowhere that's still nursing along a Pentium 4 with Windows XP), but for Windows 10, I don't think anyone's going to be running it that's not running at least a Nehalem or maybe a later Core 2.
It's not all bad; my main development machines are Sandy Bridge. But everything else back here is Core 2 or worse. We completely skipped over Nehalem and its tock.
Oh yeah, and the XP machine I had so much trouble with the other day was a Socket 939 Athlon 64 from sometime around 2004. The board I tried to get going in it was from 2005. I'm surprised any of it still worked, given early-2000s quality control.
Okay, I gave in and put everything on SCSI in the Pentium 100. The SATA card only halfway works (FreeBSD can see it and use it, but the system BIOS isn't mapping or booting the Silicon Image BIOS for some reason), and FreeBSD's ATA driver refuses to configure the onboard IDE to anything past PIO4, even though it's quite capable of WDMA4.
The install is already much faster...I'll be interested in seeing what software builds are like.
And since I found my Molex-to-floppy adapter, I can go ahead and put everything back together, ad put the lid on. I'm clearly going to need a 4-port PS/2 KVM soon :P
Wow, freebsd-update in upgrade mode is sloooooooow on this thing. Like, it's been running all day and it's still not done slow. I blame bzip2...any sort of compression more severe than DEFLATE is going to be hell on a Pentium.
The Pentium D is junky junky junk. It doesn't support hyper-threading, it runs incredibly hot (95 watt TDP...yes, I enjoy having an Easy-Bake oven in my PC; don't we all?), and the performance per clock is abysmal compared to even an Athlon XP from a few years earlier.
I'm attempting to run Windows 10 on one at work. With only 2 GB of RAM, in 64-bit mode. It's such a pain that I'm seriously considering moving my machines on my development rack around so I can run it on the 8-core Xeon...
Also, the SATA experiment looks like it's going to be a bust. The Silicon Image doesn't work properly, as noted previously. The Promise card works and boots, but it doesn't support El Torito boot. It looks like if I want everything to work the way I want, I'm stuck with Ultra160 SCSI for the time being.
Since I can't do much more with FreeBSD until the memory arrives, I'm going to try installing FreeDOS, then button this thing up and put it away because my room is a mess (and large, boxy things right in the middle of my floor are unbelievable clutter magnets).
In other news, I have some good news: The 486 is stable at 33 MHz with the heat sink/fan on! I figured it was overheating, since paged-mode misbehavior is a classic sign of that (cf. the Signal 11 FAQ), but I knew I wasn't going to be sure until I tried it.
However, it's still not a very good Windows 95 machine. I'm tempted to throw the 540 MB IBM I got with the PC 350 in, and run DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.1 for now.
I have the 128 MB installed in the IBM, and it makes quite a difference. I've also found that one of the things slowing freebsd-update down is /usr/src...I figure removing it will be better than having it try to update tens of thousands of files (it insists on backing them up, and gzip is still not very fast on this thing).
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Luckily, I have both the drive and an AHA-29xx, but I don't want to use them unless SATA is absolutely not an option (I'll have to see when FreeBSD added Silicon Image support).
ouch
that reminds me i should dig up some of my mom's old computer stories to share with you
It's one of Biostar's old logos. They used to use it on the seals for their BIOS chips.