flyinghamster

It almost reminds me of the 2010s era US market, when both AT&T and T-Mobile passed off their 3G coverage as "4G" even though it wasn't. If you had a suitable phone and got onto a T-Mobile tower that supported DC-HSPA (dual carrier) it was 4G-ish, but it certainly wasn't LTE.

I'm just glad we don't have the GSM vs. CDMA games from LTE onwards. Of course, that doesn't guarantee your phone supports a given carrier's frequencies.

I'm far less ambitious, but I ripped my entire 100+-disc collection to FLAC years ago. I've set up a mutant shell script/Makefile hybrid that can transcode the entire FLAC tree to whatever format du jour makes sense (Opus these days), while doing it all in parallel and using all cores (really all but one to keep the system responsive). Album art in the FLACs gets carried over along with tags.

On the LAN, the FLACs just sit in an NFS share, while on the phone, Foobar2000 works nicely with the Opus files.

After ten years of Spotify subscriptions, you own nothing. Put that $12.99 or more per month into discs instead, and you'd have quite a nice music collection that's still yours ten years later.

In the Chicago area you had options ranging from fully-metered to unlimited throughout the metro area. In the 1990s, as more people got online, the unlimited plans went away, and the best you got was that calls within eight miles were flat-rate but pay-per-call.

> Um, we had phones before mobile phones.

True, but back in the day one had to pay for every call, sometimes at per-minute rates: always so for long distance, and in some areas even for local calls. Quite a contrast to today's unlimited-minutes cellular plans (which likely get used little enough that the providers have no trouble offering them).

A key factor in the development of dialup BBS systems in the US was that local calls were usually at least flat-rate, with unlimited service available here and there.

Bringing it back to the topic at hand, back then I recall a number of social events revolving around local BBSes in Champaign-Urbana, and Fidonet's Net 115 in the Chicago area. All that sort of thing vaporized pretty quickly once the internet opened up.

It goes back even further, to 1960s/70s-era phone phreaking. A lot of budding phreaks started out by finding miswired PBX systems and using their number-out-of-service announcement recordings as impromptu conference bridges.

Some of this is documented in audio, on https://evan-doorbell.com/ for anyone interested.

I'm thinking it would be better to go commercial/industrial, with an actual standard like BACnet [0]. Consumer tech just always seems to be whim-driven.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BACnet

Even scarier: my dad, who has been actually been getting good advice about his blood pressure issues (hair-trigger too low with his meds). It's at least coming up with citations from Cleveland Clinic and such, but still, it scares me, even if he has a good sense of how to ask it questions.

It could be an FPGA. Given enough gates, and the know-how to program them, you can make an FPGA emulate anything. Speed and efficiency could be better or worse, but if you're targeting old hardware, better is likely.

Please don't, or more specifically, don't force this on me. I'm trying to get work done, and the last thing I need is to learn an entire new desktop paradigm because CADT. As it is, any time I'm forced to interact with GNOME 3 I want to rip my eyeballs out. If I'm setting up a desktop, Cinnamon for fat systems or XFCE for lean ones do wonders for my sanity.

The one thing I lamented about the Apple II Plus (vs. the original with Integer BASIC) was that to make room for autostart, they had to rip out the mini-assembler in the Monitor ROM. That was the closest thing I ever saw to an assembly-language REPL before this. At least they were able to keep the disassembler.

Techbros just can't grasp that "No" doesn't mean "Later." It's not exclusive to Apple by any means. Android update incoming? Your choices are "yes" or "later."

I'd have to say that gcc is the unsung hero of FOSS. If you wanted compilers on your shiny new commercial-UNIX box, you either had to fork out $$$ or find a way to get the GNU toolchain into place. Even on PCs compilers tended to cost a lot, with Borland being a shining exception.

Somewhere, I still have a Red Hat 5 retail CD. I'm not sure, but I might have bought it at Borders Books rather than a computer shop. I know I bought a few CD-ROM collections at the bookstore.

> My favorite anecdote exemplifying my opinion about Solaris at the time: you log into the console of your Sun workstation, running SunOS, with your Sun keyboard plugged in, and press backspace. It echoes ^H back to you. They couldn’t even figure out how to configure their own keyboards correctly out of the box.

That's really an old-school UNIX convention that should have died with the move from teletypes to CRT terminals. The default behavior was that ERASE was # and KILL was @ (rather than backspace and Ctrl-C). It was typical for these to get set properly on logging in.

It's absolutely crazy to realize that even a Pi 400 running from MicroSD would smoke classic workstations of yesteryear, and yet by today's standards it's slow.

> Will old domains resell for premiums like low-background-radiation steel?

See also: any number of user-contributed sites that were bought by big players and basically parked. Does anyone even go to mp3.com for any real reason other than to see if anything has been done with it since the original was forced offline? I suspect they'll eventually unload it to someone who forks over enough money.

Rim brakes are even worse when you're riding a recumbent with 20" (406) wheels. Nothing like being over an hour from home and having a rim give out after hitting a bad bump. I'm very grateful that my trike has drum brakes and my MTB has mechanical discs.

My father had one as well, an old Magnecord unit packaged into a wooden case with transport and preamp, with the preamp having one of these tubes. Nevertheless, it was also fitted (perhaps by the dealer) with a proper VU meter. I learned the basics of recording on that, which served me well at a variety of times.

Naturally, his FM tuner from that era also had a horizontal magic eye tube.

The trick will be making sure that the entire room isn't also well-fried.

Not just hard, but expensive as well. That's where the net really falls down. It's trivial to reach an audience of millions with text, but when you move to audio the data transfer starts to balloon, and if you're serving video it jumps to a whole new level of insanity. And then you have to think about the cost of the infrastructure, whether you're buying it outright or renting it from the likes of AWS, Google, or Akamai.

You're not kidding. I read this in the late 70s, and it's a bit of a gut punch to revisit it now, on the very day of the story, in a world where smart homes are somewhat there and nuclear saber-rattling is once again the theme of the day.

Of course, writing about the future means you won't get everything right - especially once specific dates or years enter the picture and technologies are in use that haven't been invented (or invented and discarded) yet. Nobody predicted that World War III would last as long as it has, or be so full of utter stupidity. On the technological front, film projectors are relics in this era, and film-based storage never really caught on. On the other hand, videotape wasn't around in 1950, and even audio tape was a fairly new technology.

Until recently, I used it routinely for VMs, and it worked solidly and reliably. There is a ZFS storage backend as well, always nice to see since I've loved to use zvols for VMs, even when I did VirtualBox on OpenIndiana back before ZFS on Linux was viable.

But I found that Proxmox fit my needs much better than wrestling vanilla Ubuntu or Debian into a VM server, particularly for things like backup/restore and instrumentation, or setting up a bridge on a desktop-based installation. Since both are based on QEMU/KVM, it wasn't too hard to move my VMs (one thing you might need to look out for is changing network interface names).

I have yet to even get started with ESP32, mainly because software-defined radio is my main use case. Once you start getting into absurdly high sampling rates, you start to need a lot of horsepower, and that's where the more powerful SBCs shine.

As an example, one of my Pi 5s takes an Airspy and an RTL, extracts 11 different FM broadcast stations, then encodes each audio stream and sends all of them to an Icecast server. There's processing power for more stations, but there are none I'm interested in among the others I'm streaming. With the current 11, it's using about 75% of CPU resources with no overclock. (Edit: this is a 2GB model, and it's running in roughly 500 MB.)

I've been doing some heavy SDR lifting with a couple of my Pi 5s, and my own experience is that the active cooler works extremely well, and more often than not the fan can be shut off and it will work well as a passive cooler.

I was ranting about the demise of American manufacturing as I was entering the workforce forty years ago, and it seems that nothing has improved in that sphere. Sure, dismantling General Electric produced a supernova of shareholder value, but the problem with supernovas is that once they're done, they're done.

Back in the early 2000s, that scene was HOPPING. A whole bunch of mods were around, some of which seem to have disappeared, particularly Armored Warfare Evolved.

A couple of things happened (at least to my perception): a bug cropped up in the Apocalypse mod where hitting a small shop would cause it to burn for over a minute, disrupting multi-player game play, and on the servers there was an invasion by trolls complete with Nazi avatars, who drove players away (myself included).

Seeing all the gigantic and very-high-priced Pavement Princess Pickups clogging dealer lots, it's plain that the auto industry in general didn't learn a damn thing. It's easy to point fingers in all directions, but it always ends up that we get the worst outcomes.

I'm of two minds on this. In peacetime, I'd consider something like that to be unreasonable and harmful, not that I'd ever even consider setting foot anywhere on the Arabian Peninsula. But, if anyone has noticed, World War III is raging all around us, and when an enemy who wants to kill you is backing that up with explosive payloads, you really don't want to be handing them battle damage assessments.

It seems that way, but it's been flooded with politics for all my adult life. Steve Jackson Games, the Clipper Chip, software patent shenanigans, the public domain stolen from 1976 to 2019, endless thinly-disguised censorship and control efforts - in meatspace, nothing is new.

My high school had a /34 running RSTS/E, with roughly a dozen terminals on-campus, mostly in the lab. Even in 1980, I recall my teacher warning about Y2K, though not yet named as such. Fast forward 20+ years, and I would set up SIMH, install RSTS/E on it, and discover that version 7.0, which was what I used at the time, was not Y2K-compatible.