News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

eashman

How about some of the PC “clones” that used older dumb terminal components and ports, probably to ease upgrades on accessories for some corporations.

Our computer lab in college had these NEC/AT&T 386 desktops that had RJ-11 keyboard ports that didn’t work anywhere else.

Re:Is Pinboard.in Down Again? on Thursday October 24, 2024 @02:28PM (#41938190)
I have noticed the problem on a few different days this week including right now (Oct 24 @ 14:25 EST).

From what I see, the issue is the API url (https://api.pinboard.in) timing out.

The web interface seems working, albeit a bit slow.

However, on mobile iOS Safari there’s no standard way to trigger a tooltip that I’m aware of.
Re:Web fingerprinting is worse than I thought on Wednesday March 22, 2023 @10:50AM (#35261918)
Same at my University in the mid-90s. I was the CS department network admin and we had an entire /24 to use as we liked.

At least it taught me how to detect attempted hacks early because every machine had to be monitored for attacks.

I just looked and they still have a /16 (65k public addresses). This is for a school that has maybe 15k students, not all of them living on the campus. And I’m sure most of the computing takes place in the cloud now anyway.

I know there are a lot of places who were on the Net early besides the military that have excess address capacity.

I think basically it’s the Scientific Method in action. Use the best evidence until even better evidence is presented.
Re:Tell HN: I interviewed my dad before he died on Saturday August 06, 2022 @12:08AM (#32364747)
“If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.” - Neil Peart, Rush, “Freewill” 1980.

Sorry.. as a fan I couldn’t resist.

Re:CP/M is really open-source now on Thursday July 14, 2022 @03:05PM (#32100199)
Same here. Trying to type anything on that thing (especially copying the code out of magazines) was just horrible.

Edit: just remembered something that made it even worse than just the awful keys - all reserved words for BASIC were tokenized in some way where you had to use a control-key sequence to tell it PRINT, for instance, instead of being able to type P,R,I,N,T <enter>.

Re:Vitamin D and Depression (2020) on Tuesday May 10, 2022 @01:43PM (#31329990)
I assume you looked into Accutane treatment? It has worked wonders for multiple people I know.
Back in the day I upped the RAM and put a set of virtual machines on our VP of Marketing’s laptop with copies of our staging server, db, data… the works. He just started it up and browsed away.

He loved doing demos without a network connection etc. Back then WiFi was always restricted and hot spots too slow.

Re:Abandoned railroad routes in North America on Friday April 22, 2022 @11:48AM (#31123131)
This actually can become a problem in the future. Here in Montgomery County, Maryland there was an old rail line converted to a bike path but always with the intention of adding light rail to a portion of it.

20 years later, they started the project and the local cycling groups are upset because their path has to be split and rerouted in places to support the new line. Delayed the thing many years as a result.

I often point out an anecdote from my early e-commerce days in the late 90s where a customer wanted in-store pickup like everyone else they saw on the web doing. But they just had purchased an already outdated (but IBM so nobody got fired) Point Of Sale system for 40 stores which did inventory management as a batch at the close of business each day over Frame Relay lines or even dialup. The concept of a VPN was alien to them.

Since they were selling some limited edition high priced items that were allocated to each store, there were often only 1 or 2 at a given location of what would be a popular item.

So you can imagine when I explained that the huge investment in the legacy system just a few years before was a big blocker for ‘pick up in store’.

I think we had to hardcode something that would remove an item for sale online if there were less than 2 left or some awful hack like that to reduce customer complaints.

Re:Horrible edge cases when dealing with music on Tuesday April 05, 2022 @12:17PM (#30920918)
Yeah I was starting to use PCs during the Apple II era so we didn’t have 8 inch disks anymore by then in my house. But I do remember seeing them in labs with VAX systems.

But those specialized music workstations all were custom designed so the parts etc. used were based on older standards I’m sure. Pre-ISA bus too I would guess.

Nowadays, even a lot of embedded devices like IOT things are running effectively a Linux OS on them so the economies of scale are enormous compared to the early 80s music gear.

I imagine Roland and other similar companies had their own OS or base platform they used on those earlier workstations that eventually had screens you could attach.

Re:Horrible edge cases when dealing with music on Monday April 04, 2022 @10:20PM (#30914617)
Oh please tell this old Genesis fan some more. Gabriel was a very forward thinking musician from a technology perspective. See this clip for his demonstration of an early sampler [0]

[0] https://youtu.be/7Xfj5n1kYXY

Re:The campaign to shut down YouTube-dl continues on Tuesday March 08, 2022 @06:10PM (#30608617)
This is similar to how they would broadcast film on television in the early days - using a Kinescope.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinescope

Re:From Node to Ruby on Rails on Friday December 17, 2021 @10:19AM (#29593303)
I would love to see how you’re doing this. Could help a lot with Docker builds as well.
Re:I started a paper website business on Wednesday December 15, 2021 @10:21AM (#29567103)
See if you can find a mirror of Yahoo from 1996.
Re:Workers quit jobs in droves to become their own bosses on Wednesday December 01, 2021 @11:27PM (#29412566)
Add me too. Let me know if you go ahead with it in the US.
Re:DESQview/X: Forgotten mid-1990s OS from the future on Wednesday December 01, 2021 @11:01PM (#29412431)
I was in the BBS scene in Baltimore in the mid-to-late 80s and totally relate. I think about some of the things I used to pull off on an Apple //e and then a 286 PC along with school and a job and wonder how I had time to do it.

Youthful energy? Or maybe the limitations of the tech made us work cleverly and thus made us prouder of the result.

Re:The case of the 500-mile email (2002) on Monday November 15, 2021 @12:38PM (#29230047)
You obviously didn’t have a Novation Apple Cat modem that could wardial random 5 digit calling card codes for 3rd party long distance carriers.

I really hope there are a few other people here who know what that sentence means or I’m officially ancient :(

Re:Get started making music on Monday November 01, 2021 @12:31PM (#29069055)
Where are you studying Music Tech? What was your undergraduate background? I’m curious if you found a formal tech education is as important in what today is often more an applied art compared to when these tools were so expensive and esoteric.
I would suggest that giving religious institutions tax-free status in the US is a form of subsidy. That’s why it’s such a problem when they begin to preach in a partisan manner.
Re:Time Travel Theoretically Possible on Sunday September 27, 2020 @04:50PM (#24610041)
Am I missing something but if the paradox effect cannot occur, then there would be no point to trying to change the future if one goes back in time. Thus destroying the plot lines of thousands of sci-fi episodes....
Re:Ask HN: Solo devs, how do you plan your development? on Monday December 30, 2019 @08:47PM (#21918342)
I will second Clubhouse as a great tool. It’s far better thought out than Jira and attuned to software life cycles unlike Trello.
I’ve been using Inbucket[1] for a few years as a self hosted temp mail service. I wouldn’t use it for permanent addresses but for testing and burner-like uses it works well.

[1] https://www.inbucket.org/