My Internet is awesome

[jgreco]

Mmm M68k...

Yes, oh, yes, I fondly remember the sheer joy of having all to myself a machine that was something like 5 times faster than the VAX 11/750 that we had used for undergrad work in college... 50 people beating on a poor little VAX at a time was miserable.

 

[jgreco]

Good Times!

And I can't beat that one. The oldest thing I ever worked on was a mid-1970's Ballistic Missile System back in 1982 on the USS Von Steuben SSBN 632 but even that system was upgraded from core memory, but for decades it still retained hydraulic operated magnetic disk drives with read/write heads about 1" in diameter and I use to teach how to troubleshoot the system to the flip-flop level (all the components were discrete parts) as repairing it could take some time if you're just Easter egging it...

Wasn't meant as any sort of competition. More a fond recollection of those days when you could actually look at a computing system and you were encouraged to code for efficiency (after all, punched cards...!) plus you could actually look at all the circuitry in the thing and figure out how it worked. Remember back in the '70's when the hobbyists were creating their own computers out of discrete parts? "This is my CPU card..."

I love that people still do this.

Modern computing gear has a lot going for it, but the sheer complexity factor is kinda unfortunate. An entire generation has now grown up in this "era of code," where it is now easier for people to implement control logic on an embedded CPU or SoC than it is to design a simple circuit to implement it. I expect that almost anyone who ever had to troubleshoot flip-flops understands what I mean.

 

[Bidule0hm]

I love that people still do this.

My favorite is probably this one: http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~harry/Relay/ (more infos here: http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~harry/Relay/RelayPaper.htm very useful for anyone who want to understand how CPUs work at the logic level and how an instruction is executed as his paper start from the basics of the basics) :D TTL is fun but relays are even more fun :D

 

[joeschmuck]

I love that people still do this.

I would have done something like that if I had been exposed to that when I was young. I really enjoyed electronics. Eh, times have changed and everything can fit on a single chip these days.

 

[Ericloewe]

Eh, times have changed and everything can fit on a single chip these days.

The fun part of that is that you can do a lot of cool stuff on an FPGA. Less fun assembling things, but also less annoyance with wires.

Unfortunately, you do have to learn Verilog or VHDL... Xilinx used to have a graphical programming environment, but it was notoriously unstable. It would crash at the slightest thing - randomly and inconsistently. All the dev work went towards the most spectacular error recovery system I've ever seen. Despite hundreds of crashes, I never lost a single action (besides the one that caused the crash) on that thing. It would literally open exactly where you were, your data intact.

 

[gpsguy]

Looking at the link, reminded me of a father/son project, circa 1970. We built a binary adder. We did everthing from circuit design, incorporating large format (4"x5") photography to create a mask, printing and etching a printed circuit board and assembly. As I recall the front of it, had 2 rows of toggle swiches (0/1) and below it were a row of lights to display the results.

Sadly, I lost it and a lot of my childhood memories in a basement flood a few years ago.

I love that people still do this.

 

[Black Ninja]

Ah, Win10 isn't so bad. Once you bludgeon Cortana to death, wipe out all the crApps, and start stripping out as much of the system as possible, then you mess with the telemetry stuff to cause it to FOAD, then the biggest objectionable bit becomes the forced updates, which I'm ambivalent about, but I've seen so many end user machines that never get upgraded, that I'm not too sure I actually view the strategy as anything more than a necessary evil.

To many thing to fight against. Does anybody opt out for the metro interface ? Answer: Of course not it was not optional cause it was not meant to convenience you. They are really to many things wrong, including all of those you mention that are wrong with the state the whole windows went , and Windows 10 as latest and worst of all.

You are paying for the software, you shouldn't have to tweak it and fight it like a virus to remove so much stuff you don't want. If people were not begging so much to get the start button back, they wouldn't even have that, That's wrong.

I been buying Windows since 3.0, to serve my purposes not to be advertising, info stealing blob of software that's even harder to use for anything productive. And as a bonus it needs horse power to run this horseshit. It's their software alright but It's MY computer and MY data. This concept is the way virus operates. I stop doing updates long time ago , but by the time people realize that it's not always good to upgrade will be to late - you won't have that option anymore.

Stoping updates on windows 10, are you kidding me ? The whole idea of windows 10 is based on that. Their idea is to be like a live platform that will change and upgrade to anything they decide to be. You no longer will have to upgrade to next windows, windows 10 will constantly change on a fly like it or not.

The rent model that Photoshop and others are using now will soon come to windows to - you no longer buy the software , install and you use it till end of time, you will have to pay monthly to use it , you can't just buy it installed offline. That's the new way software companies are selling their software , you can't actually buy it , you rent it. Like a Netflix for software - You can use it as long a you pay your monthly fees, software will change to anything they like in mean time and this will work till they loose interest in supporting it. So if your login don't work tomorrow, you have no software.

I never like the rent model in general, I rather have less of my own than much more for renting. I was from the first Netflix users when they were small company and long before streaming became a thing from being a supporter now I am totally the opposite way. My large movies collection is based only on blu-rays and dvds I purchased. And the picture quality is another very important reason too.

P.S. I hope I am not to much ahead in this and other people are seeing too. There many smart people in this forum unlike most forums and that's the reason I mention it.

 

[jgreco]

To many thing to fight against.

In more ways than one. I have certain specific things that unfortunately only run on Windows. The laptops only really work well with Windows. I find that I have better things to do than fight the good anti-Windows fight, and I'm perfectly fine with strangling a virtual wench to death and lobotomizing other bits of the system until I wind up with a fast moron that approximates XP (quite possibly the height of Windows usefulness, especially when it is in Win98 "lookalike" mode) in functionality.

Does anybody opt out for the metro interface ? Answer: Of course not it was not optional cause it was not meant to convenience you. They are really to many things wrong, including all of those you mention that are wrong with the state the whole windows went , and Windows 10 as latest and worst of all.

I don't actually care. What I want is to be able to move around and click my mouse on things. Again, XP was a fine UI in most ways. I don't really want "gestures" or Snap or Snap Assist or anything that tries to guess at some deeper meaning than what is actually being presented. I didn't care too terribly much about Metro as long as there's a big fat icon that says "Desktop".

You are paying for the software, you shouldn't have to tweak it and fight it like a virus to remove so much stuff you don't want. If people were not begging so much to get the start button back, they wouldn't even have that, That's wrong.

Yes, but the Start button's a load of crap too. Microsoft's hardly the only guilty party here in the game of Useless OS Crap Bloat. Look at OS X, or Ubuntu. I don't want or need my OS chatting with your retard cloud services, Microsoft, Apple, Ubuntu, etc. I have my own servers. I have my own e-mail. I have my own file storage and backup. I have my own CalDAV and CardDAV. I have my own Jabber. I'm happy with it all.

I been buying Windows since 3.0, to serve my purposes not to be advertising, info stealing blob of software that's even harder to use for anything productive. And as a bonus it needs horse power to run this horseshit. It's their software alright but It's MY computer and MY data. This concept is the way virus operates. I stop doing updates long time ago , but by the time people realize that it's not always good to upgrade will be to late - you won't have that option anymore.

Stoping updates on windows 10, are you kidding me ? The whole idea of windows 10 is based on that. Their idea is to be like a live platform that will change and upgrade to anything they decide to be. You no longer will have to upgrade to next windows, windows 10 will constantly change on a fly like it or not.

It's a problem, but I see why they're doing it. Have you looked around at how many of your friends and family are still running XP? Do you know how hazardous that is?

The rent model that Photoshop and others are using now will soon come to windows to - you no longer buy the software , install and you use it till end of time, you will have to pay monthly to use it , you can't just buy it installed offline. That's the new way software companies are selling their software , you can't actually buy it , you rent it. Like a Netflix for software - You can use it as long a you pay your monthly fees, software will change to anything they like in mean time and this will work till they loose interest in supporting it. So if your login don't work tomorrow, you have no software.

Yes, that can be a problem. I don't like the whole cloud model either. Making something that could be your problem someone else's problem merely makes you reliant on their generosity and their business plan, which probably doesn't count you as a customer but rather as a product.

I never like the rent model in general, I rather have less of my own than much more for renting. I was from the first Netflix users when they were small company and long before streaming became a thing from being a supporter now I am totally the opposite way. My large movies collection is based only on blu-rays and dvds I purchased. And the picture quality is another very important reason too.

P.S. I hope I am not to much ahead in this and other people are seeing too. There many smart people in this forum unlike most forums and that's the reason I mention it.

Many years ago, there were some people who kept large archives of music on their computer, and spent some significant sums to do so. Today, I keep ~2500 songs on my phone and it doesn't even take all that much space (~21GB of 128?).

Today, that frontier seems to have moved on to video. Years ago I was a TiVo hacker with a 980 hour TiVo (back when 40 was standard). Today, my video archive is "only" 7TB but that is over 200 *DAYS* of content. Storage is cheap enough to do that.

In another ten years I may be able to haul a year's worth of video content around with me on my phone. And at a certain point I'm going to have collected more video than I can watch before I die.

 

[Black Ninja]

On the points we agree I am glad. On the one we differ I wont say much further.
Just to clarify on Windows part that I am not a preaching for Windows XP. It was a good Windows for it's time , few thing I never got the way I wanted but anyways I am saying that Windows 7 is the best Windows for desktop use. I wouldn't go back to XP , but wouldn't go further than Windows 7.


My answer to this "And at a certain point I'm going to have collected more video than I can watch before I die." is this:

That's perfectly fine. You don't have to what everything. What is more important is that you'll have the choice to watch anything you like to watch, not just whatever the streaming service give you.

P.S. Despite their large collection I don't see anything that I would fine interesting to watch , neither has the quality I would desire, but this is just me.