st_goliath

The argument is not esoteric. An Apple employee working on a reverse engineered GPU driver might (intentionally or not) incorporate internal knowledge that they are contractually obligated to keep secret or write an implementation that is too close to proprietary code they had access to, to the point that it could be argued that it is a derived work.

This sort of thing has always been a concern for projects that re-implement some existing piece of software, e.g. there were concerns early on during development of the GNU project about people contributing after having been exposed to Unix source code. Similarly, it is an ongoing concern for the Wine project[1], as well as ReactOS. The later even had a code freeze and internal audit in 2006, after allegations came forward that code had been derived from disassembled Windows binaries[2].

[1] https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/wikis/Clean-Room-Guide...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReactOS#Internal_audit

> the "IDunno" of archeology - "It most likely served ritual and cultural purposes"

If all you know about archeology is from daytime television and clickbait articles, all you know about history is what you vaguely remember from school, you never met anybody working in those fields and actually don't even have a passing interest to engage with the subject, then yes, you might be inclined to believe that's how it works.

EDIT: of course this comment accumulates nothing but drive-by down votes from arrogant computer touchers, presumably before heading off to other comment sections to discuss law, macroeconomics, quantum physics and whatever else they are experts at, having watched YouTube videos. You see, only CS requires years of study and is divided into dozens of intricate sub fields, everything else is simple, straight forward and can be "disrupted".

> Then it would be possible to reuse old embedded equipment.

Unlikely, virtualization/emulation has been a thing well before this project and you can just buy USB to RS232 adapters. There are GPIO solutions for industrial PCs other than the parallel port. Or you can simply buy new industrial PCs which have those ports.

If you find an industrial appliance controlled by genuine old PC hardware that hasn't been replaced, the RS232 ports are the least of your concerns.

In my experience, such machines usually have something insanely proprietary plugging into a custom ISA card, and whatever is connected to it usually doesn't take too kindly if the bus timings are off. And neither does the accompanying bare metal software that relies heavily on timing loops and hardware peculiarities.

> Win95 can technically run on a 20Mhz 386DX

s/technically/allegedly/

supposedly with a minimum of 4M RAM even! [1] I have a machine with twice that clock and twice that RAM that a friends parents wanted to toss out[2]. I spent the better part of a day getting Windows 3.11 and Office 4.3 to run. Playing around with it for a bit, I highly doubt that Windows 95 on minimum requirements would be anything but endlessly frustrating. I was not masochistic enough to try.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_95#System_requirements

[2] https://goliath32.com/hw/machines.html#pc386

There is no such thing as an "X11 clipboard" that something can be written to. As the poster goes on to allude, X11 has a concept of a "selection" (a primary and a secondary one).

It goes roughly like this: when you select a text in a window, the X client tells the X server "I have the selection now", when you paste in another window, the client behind the other window asks "who has the selection?" and requests the selection contents from the other client, the data is then forwarded through the server. The client that claimed ownership has to properly handle some associated requests/events for the whole thing to work.

The key point is, there is no central "clipboard" style repository like on Windows, the client that does the "copy" is responsible for the data, the client that wants to "paste" has to talk to it. If I try to copy/paste and quit the source program before the paste, the data is gone. That's why modern desktop environments usually come with a dedicated daemon that immediately reacts to selection ownership changes, grabs the data for itself and then claims the selection ownership to emulate the Windows style behavior.

If we play devils advocate, it's possible the Zoom client tries to do just that, not trusting whatever desktop environment. I don't use this software, so I'm going out on a limb here, but I'd guess that the "Zoom Desktop Client" is just another browser in disguise? It might be actually Chromium or whatever underneath that does this?

> Can you translate the American for me?

I'd say "wide variance in the level of kindness" is a rather British way to describe some of the opinions that have been voiced.

> And that’s the story of how I upgraded my flat’s front door experience from depending on 0 cloud services to 5 cloud services.

Up next: How many cloud services does it take to turn on the lights?

Here's a hint: https://imgur.com/a/light-bulb-moment-hIKUI48

But hey, it could be worse. For instance, you could be trying to send an e-mail: https://github.com/0x4447/0x4447_product_s3_email#what-will-...

You might be interested in GNU poke[1][2], a hex-editor type program that can actually parse and visualize the structure of binary data (using a DSL for describing formats).

[1] https://jemarch.net/poke

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34986042

> "intrepid ibex" ... edgy skull on the desktop wallpaper

Ah, that would be 8.10 with the coffee stain wallpaper :-P

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ubuntu_screenshot.png

Given the context and your reference to Quake, I assume by "the older days" you mean the 90s, and specifically PCs and early Windows?

If you weren't previously aware of "The Old New Thing" blog, Raymond Chen has been sharing stories about Windows 95 development for decades at this point. So many in fact, he published a book under the same name (the book is essentially a best-of collection from the blog in paper form).

The os2museum[1] blog is also a gold mine. Tim Paterson at one point tried to start blogging, sharing a few anecdotes about the early days of DOS[2]

Speaking of books, you might enjoy "Showstopper!" about the development of NT, even tough it is a bit shallow on the technical side. For the technical aspects, you might want to get it together with "Inside Windows NT" (first edition) by Helen Custer.

You might also enjoy: "Another Boring Topic" [3] YouTube channel, covering (among other things) early Windows development in excruciating detail and "Old Computers Sucked" [4], actually trying to run the software on era appropriate hardware. "Cathode Ray Dude" is all over the place but often also covers hardware and software of roughly that era[5].

A sibling comment already mentioned JWZs blog, if you have fond memories about Netscape, you might enjoy "Project Code Rush" [6].

Btw. Netscape Navigator 3.0 has just turned 30.

[1] https://www.os2museum.com/wp/

[2] https://dosmandrivel.blogspot.com/

[3] https://www.youtube.com/@AnotherBoringTopic/videos

[4] https://www.youtube.com/@old-computers-sucked/videos

[5] https://www.youtube.com/@CathodeRayDude/videos

[6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Q7FTjhvZ7Y

A function call causes the return address to be pushed onto the stack, thus accessing the stack below the adjusted stack pointer address.

On compiler generated x86 code, the base pointer register will quickly follow when entering the target function.

The year is 2036, when dialed up to maximum space saving, the latest generation of smart phones now turn camera pictures to a textual description and later when you want to view them, re-generate them on the fly using a text2image model. Not that "saving space" really means something, the phones refuse to unlock if they don't have an internet connection and store all your data on multiple cloud servers anyway (one for each five eye country).

> I think you didn't understand what I was trying to say.

They don't do this sort of thing... oh wait, they do.

But we are still wrong to judge their character by their own actions, because... evil French people made them do it?

You may have heard about a little thing called MP3? Basically, Fraunhofer in Germany filed for (software) patents in the US. They made sure to wait some time for MP3 to become a thing before they started going after people and collect royalties.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP3#Licensing,_ownership,_and_...

The confusion with Plan 9 is probably part of the reason this jumped onto the front page.

Besides that name clash, it apparently competes with another terminal emulator that was creatively named "vt100".

Scrolling over the page I did a double take when I saw the benchmark. No way a vt100 can do 221 MiB/s! Who even types that fast anyway?

Up next: nuclear data center Zeppelins in the cloud!

Innovative new air cooling: instead of using lots of tiny fans to move air through the servers, we simply use 2 big fans to move the servers through the air!

And while we're at it, we'll completely disrupt the existing Zeppelin market that depends on expensive helium for some reason. We use daring, innovative hydrogen technology, enabling a massive cost reduction!

> I wasn’t particularly worried about parsing CSV files. That’s a solved problem.

> Detecting primitive types is easy. String. Number. Boolean. Date.

... the rabbit said confidently, staring down the oncoming lawn mower.

> I honestly thought the viewer would take a weekend.

> Display rows.

> Add scrolling.

Burma Shave?

If you have a few hours to kill, the Youtube Channel "Another Boring Topic" has a multi part series on the "rise and fall of the IBM PC". The comparatively short Part 1 is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Er8wcWsG7sE

The Channel has similar video series on OS/2, VisiCalc, Microsoft Excel and early Windows (far from completion). The videos are generally very detailed and well researched, often contrasting accounts from different source or even reaching out to people involved.

The already slow pace of the channel has slowed down a lot. In an update video a while back, the author has announced that the background research for the IBM PC led down an unexpectedly deep rabbit hole and his script eventually spiraled into an unfinished book that will now probably turn into a two-parter itself.

> ...on Mac, for example, it’s simply Option + Shift + Hyphen.

Fedora with XFCE here, but last I checked on Windows, it worked exactly the same over there: With a Chinese IME installed, tap shift to switch input language, shift+hyphen produces a double em-dash: ——, likewise, shift+6 a double elipsis: ……

You encounter those a lot in simple, machine translated Chinese, along with literal translations of "not X but Y", "not just ... but also" and similar sentence constructs that are common in Chinese. I suspect that's how a disproportionate amount of that ended up in training material in the first place.

While I know about the DSKY, I keep wondering if they were the first ones, i.e. inventing that way of entering data into a computer and others copied it later on, or if it was a already a more widespread and known pattern and the AGC copied it.

I know that other machines existed that used a similar system. I recall being asked, circa summer 2009 or so, to set up extensions on a quite old PABX that was configured that way.

The PABX was a huge electrical box full of giant PCBs stuck into a backplane (S-100 or maybe something proprietary?). I didn't get a good look tough, the box was mounted under the ceiling, directly above a desk with a terminal that you used for configuring it. There was a binder with laminated, typewritten cards, documenting "verbs" and "nouns" that you entered into a numeric keypad. As said, it worked like the Apollo DSKY, but the "display" was single slot that you had to squint through at just the right angle to make out faint numbers on a mirror, aimed downwards at some back projection thingy.

I guess very few around here remember the minor fuzz about this from a few years ago? The Linux Kernel Project became their own CNA (CVE Numbering Authority). A CVE is now slapped onto practically every bug fix that is back ported to a stable kernel, resulting in a flood of CVEs.

A blog post about this, published at the time: https://sigma-star.at/blog/2024/03/linux-kernel-cna/

The title is editorialized (i.e. the OP made it up), the link simply goes to the kernel CVE mailing list archive.

Your post advocates a

    ( ) technical ( ) legislative (X) market-based ( ) vigilante

approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)

    ( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
    (X) Mailing lists and other legitimate uses would be affected
    ( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
    ( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
    (X) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
    (X) Users will not put up with it
    (X) Microsoft will not put up with it
    (X) The police will not put up with it
    ( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
    (X) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
    (X) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
    ( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
    ( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

    ( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
    (X) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
    ( ) Open relays in foreign countries
    ( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
    (X) Asshats
    ( ) Jurisdictional problems
    (X) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
    ( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
    (X) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
    ( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
    ( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
    ( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
    ( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
    (X) Extreme profitability of spam
    (X) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
    ( ) Technically illiterate politicians
    ( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
    (X) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
    ( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
    ( ) Outlook

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

    (X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
    ( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
    ( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
    ( ) Blacklists suck
    ( ) Whitelists suck
    ( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
    ( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
    ( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
    ( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
    (X) Sending email should be free
    (X) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
    ( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
    (X) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
    ( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
    ( ) I don't want the government reading my email
    ( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

    (X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
    ( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
    ( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!

> But we all know that is not the typical scenario.

Back in the day, you could read a stories on Slashdot practically every other week that usually went something like this: Company/institution does something stupid, somebody finds out, tries to be a good citizen and tells them. The organization then throws a tamper tantrum in the media, fires the legal department on all cylinders, screaming "hacker!" and throwing the book at them. The most egregious cases usually happened in the US, the CFAA happens to be a particularly strong book to throw.

People eventually got the hint and either talked to the press instead, or organizations like the CCC (at least in this part of the world) and let them deal with the organization and not talk to them directly.

At least in my perception/memory, it started improving over the 2010s, but stories like this are now starting to pop up again in recent years. I guess we have a new crop of computer enthusiasts who need to learn the same lessons again.

Of the top of my head, the CTF group in Malta comes to mind who gave a talk at (last years?) CCCongress. A badly worded E-mail asking about a bug bounty resulted in several arrests, house searches and ultimately a presidential pardon (https://timesofmalta.com/article/pardon-issued-students-lect...).

Well, the angle is kind of important here. The company gets their name in the news, they have a reasonable explanation why they were scraping around, and we end up with a story about innovative tech company whiz-kids who made a funny discovery, while it was the webdevs on the other side that goofed up.

Imagine a private individual just scraped the website (or simply clicked 'view source') for no reason in particular and then told people about it... They'd be labeled an uber-haxxor, face a civil lawsuit asking for ridiculous damages while being threatened with a prison sentence over CFAA violations. Hell, that might even drive some people to suicide.

Yep. I remember a similar story as GP described from a friend back in 2008. The site he was working on that wasn't linked to yet was suddenly indexed after he checked out what it looked like in the fancy new "Chrome" browser that Google had just released, causing some moderate panic on his end.

> The next hard drive was an order of magnitude larger than the old one, and so on.

Ah yes, the good old "old PC" folder that you would find on pretty much every Windows PC that used to have another "old PC" folder inside it somewhere, possibly inside an "external HDD (old)" folder :-)

Until the PC (or the HDD inside it) died surprisingly, people didn't have backups, or the backups turned out to be burned CDs that were scratched up and/or sat on a sun illuminated shelf for years.

I was at a class reunion a few years ago where it turned out, I was somehow the only one who still had (digital) photos from early-to-mid 2000s.

> ... even more ephemeral as people started putting data in the cloud where it will eventually be wiped when the accounts stop being paid or lost when the company goes under.

Or the photos they upload gradually degrade in quality as the company repeatedly plays with re-compressing stuff to squeeze more space out.

People have observed old (10+ years) photos on Google Drive to start getting blurry, having weird artifacts, color banding, etc... IIRC there was an article posted on HN at one point with some particular egregious examples. Techmoan also mentioned this in a video some time ago, commenting that the same thing happened to old YouTube uploads of his from the 2000s.

On the 'help' page, the Cray-like machine from the film Sneakers is listed under "Honourable mentions":

https://www.starringthecomputer.com/help.html

From the site:

> The following films do not appear on the site because I believe the computers they feature are mock ups and therefore do not qualify.

> 8086 Segmented Memory Was a Good Idea.

Yet the article goes about the most ass backward way of explaining 8086 segments and constructs a convoluted mental picture of dividing memory into overlapping chunks.

It's really, really simple: segments on the 8086/88 are 64k sliding windows into an 1M address space. You can move them around at 16 byte granularity.

You need more than 64k for code + data? No problem, the CPU knows when it's fetching an instruction vs when it's fetching data, you can have two sliding windows: code (CS) and data (DS). Split them apart, and it's not much different than a Harvard-style machine and gives you access to more than 64k at a time.

Still need more? No problem, the CPU has a hardware stack with dedicated push/pop/call/ret instructions and a base pointer for stack indexing. It knows when it's accessing the stack, so we can split the data window into regular data (DS) and stack data (SS). Oh, you occasionally want to copy stuff between segments or somewhere else in memory? Well, to encode 3 segments we need 2 bits anyway, let's throw in an extra data window (ES) and some DS-to-ES copy instructions.

"Windows for WorkCubes"

Michael MJD did a video on this recently, showing off necessary modifications on a vanilla GameCube and the installation procedures: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESV3Qib8eJI

They announced it, they haven't released anything yet. There is not a single real photograph of an actual device on the site. There's a wait list where you can sign up for eventual pre-orders, with an offer that they'll ask you for slightly less money.

Also, it's not Commodore but someone playing "Weekend at Bernie's" with what's left of the brand. The real Commodore went through bankruptcy and liquidation in 1994.