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octotoad

346 karma · joined January 14, 2012

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octotoad··on Kernel: Introduce Multikernel Architecture Support
AFAIK, Galaxy was exclusive to Alpha, with no equivalent on Itanium, or any other platform.
octotoad··on Inside the Steam Deck's APU
Close. They bought the company that made it.
octotoad··on Ask HN: How's your job search going in this current economy?
Same location, similar situation. I thought it was just me. At least twenty recruiters on my LinkedIn list, and not a peep since I toggled my 'Open to work' status weeks ago. Used to receive a fairly consistent stream of messages when I wasn't ready.
octotoad··on Long gone, DEC is still powering the world of computing
> Dan Dobberpuhl was one of the original Alpha designers before he left DEC to start a chip design firm called P.A. Semi, which Apple bought in 1998 for its talent to work on their Arm processors.

P.A. Semi didn't even exist in 1998. It was founded in 2003, and was acquired by Apple in 2008.

octotoad··on Xterm: It's better than you thought (2021)
Probably an XQuartz (or whatever it's called now) issue.
octotoad··on Inferno-OS: distributed operating system where everything is a file
Makes sense, given Rob Pike was one of Limbo's creators.
octotoad··on OpenVMS 9.2 for x86: Auto boot, licenses, PAKs, networking and SSH
IIRC VSI never got the VAX stuff in the deal with HP. I don't think HP will ever bother to bring back the hobbyist program just for VAX, unfortunately.

There are easy ways around this lack of official licenses. Ways that I can't/won't go in to here.

octotoad··on OpenVMS 9.2 for x86: Auto boot, licenses, PAKs, networking and SSH
I "registered" for an Alpha license last week (I own several systems), but all I got was an email with credentials to access VSI's SFTP server, using a shared 'ACOMMUNITY' username. I cannot access the portal with the email address I used for this, and attempting a 'Forgot password' just returns "Error 404: Email not found.". You can see 'ICOMMUNITY' and 'XCOMMUNITY' directories in the server, but I'm not able to access them.

Has anyone that has requested a license (Alpha/Itanium) in the last few weeks actually been able to log in to the portal?

octotoad··on ARM64 Linux Workstation
MacFUSE isn’t even open source anymore, so it would likely involve Apple forking a version prior to the license change and maintaining that themselves.
octotoad··on Ubuntu Is a Canonical Product
I wonder how much of Mark Shuttleworth's personal funding is still at play in keeping Canonical alive.

A quick web search returns articles claiming the company has been profitable since 2018 and that an IPO may be in the works. I can understand how something like Red Hat has managed to survive over the past twenty years, given the name it has built for itself in the "enterprise" Linux world (for better or worse), but Canonical continuing to operate off the back of Ubuntu has always baffled me.

octotoad··on New Mac Mini
The 2018 model has socketed RAM.
octotoad··on MacBook Pro featuring M2 Pro and M2 Max
Seems 96GB is only for the M2 Max model. M2 Pro just mentions 32GB.
octotoad··on Revisiting KDE
Yeah, “KDE Neon” is the key here. The problem is in the distro, not the DE.
octotoad··on The 5GHz “Problem” for Wi-Fi Networks: DFS (2018)
Ugh. No, thanks.
octotoad··on Java 18 / JDK 18: General Availability
Any good books out there on “modern” Java that somebody would recommend?
octotoad··on NodeOS – A Node.js Operating System
Unfortunately not a lot has changed since then in ServiceNow’s JavaScript situation. Still stuck on ES5 Rhino.
octotoad··on Illumos to drop SPARC Support
Illumos is from the System V family tree, as it is a direct descendant of OpenSolaris.
octotoad··on Common pronunciations of Linux directories, commands, etc. (2017)
I’ve never heard anyone say “F stab” for fstab.
octotoad··on New Linux port for the Nintendo 64
We'll surely need to pivot to a blockchain solution first.
octotoad··on Booting a macOS Apple Silicon Kernel in QEMU
Has any Darwin source release included ARM support yet? I thought they were still keeping this closed.
octotoad··on FreeBSD 11.4
DO has supported FreeBSD for years now.
octotoad··on Moving Away from Gmail
While the legislation introduced by the Australian government is certainly worrying and should never had been enacted, I've always operated under the assumption that if any government agency around the world really wants to get to my encrypted data or traffic, they'll likely be able to use/abuse some sort of loophole in their current processes and laws anyway.
octotoad··on Multics: An Ancestor of Unix
FYI for anyone confused by this: Alpha and PA-RISC are two different architectures and vendors.

I’m guessing the mention of Alpha in your comment was a slip of the tongue/brain, given the topic :)

octotoad··on Is true hacking dead? What we lost
Sounds like they’re referring to characteristics of TempleOS that may have suited the original goals of the Raspberry Pi, which was to be a tinker-friendly device for audiences like school children.

Some people lament the fact that it simply ended up with a plain, general purpose Unix-like, rather than something more low level and immediately direct (as in, drop you to a BASIC, not necessarily assembler), ala Commodore 64.

The peculiarities of the author aside, a live TempleOS was able to have its running code modified on the fly, and allowed direct low level access to what was under the hood in perhaps a more interesting hacker-ish way than your typical Unix clone/descendant.

octotoad··on The Octopus: An Alien Among Us
The scent may have alerted predators to your location.
octotoad··on Debian 10 Buster: First impressions on a 2017 laptop with an M.2 NVMe SSD
Security fixes are backported to Debian stable release packages. Any respectable, production-ready, stable/LTS distro does this.

Obviously you don't get the new features and functionality that may be introduced in an upstream major release, but security patches are covered.

octotoad··on Show HN: NextStep – Product to help SaaS companies improve conversion rates
(no snark intended)

Are you aware of, or did you consider the historical context behind this name? (the operating system, NeXTSTEP)

octotoad··on Debian 10 “Buster” Released
This leaves you with a messy, strange non-stable/sort-of-unstable installation that is likely to come back to bite you sooner or later.
octotoad··on OpenBSD Is Now My Workstation
Its standard ifconfig handles all the equivalent functionality.
octotoad··on Ask HN: What is the most unethical thing you've done as a programmer?
There's nothing wrong with developing cryptography software.
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