jakedata
Re:GUI64 – GUI for the Commodore 64 running on top of the built-in ROM
on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @08:51AM (#50351966)
I used GEOS unironically in high school. I had two 1541 floppy drives which really cut down on the disk swapping and I was able to do productive work. Ultimately I used my employee discount to upgrade to a Tandy 1000 TL that would boot into DeskMate from ROM and took it to college, leaving the C64 in the dust. I still have all the stuff but not the time.
Re:Two high-speed trains collide near Toledo, Spain
on Wednesday October 28, 2026 @01:54PM (#50277975)
It is distasteful and crass that one train correctly stopped due to a signalling failure, the other did not stop due to another signalling failure, inattention or error. Had the stationary train been moving or the moving train been stationary this would not have happened or it would have been significantly less tragic. The tragedy is that the system was left in such a dangerous state. The real world doesn't obey the laws of physics you wish for, it's full of external variables including careless, inattentive and greedy people who sometimes cause a lot of harm. My pointing out the system that caused the accident is not the same as saying I'm glad they're dead. Accusing me of being crass and distasteful smacks of a holier-than-thou attitude, or nobody understands suffering like I do. In short, I wasn't laughing.
Re:Two high-speed trains collide near Toledo, Spain
on Wednesday October 28, 2026 @01:48PM (#50277846)
It was no joke here either, the headline was inaccurate. There were not "two high-speed trains". One train stopped due to a signalling failure, the other did not stop due to a to another signalling failure. Had the stationary train been moving or the moving train been stationary this would not have happened or it would have been significantly less tragic.
Re:Two high-speed trains collide near Toledo, Spain
on Wednesday October 28, 2026 @10:14AM (#50273962)
One high-speed train, one stationary train collide near Toledo, Spain. Unlike in physics class this sadly did not result in two average speed trains.
Re:Ukrainian Drones Strike Russia's Lukoil Refinery 1,700 Km Away
on Sunday October 11, 2026 @01:11PM (#50045404)
The UK and EU would like to thank you for your concern. After the recent admission that Russia interfered with the brexit voting I suspect they would be happy to let Russia reap its reward.
Re:I Could've Accessed 17T Microsoft Records
on Thursday October 01, 2026 @12:22PM (#49923739)
He could have protected that data by dropping all the tables.
Re:Hitachi to double US production of small and medium-sized power tra...
on Monday September 28, 2026 @12:38PM (#49880743)
I assumed it was a typo and they were actually referring to "cretons", a type of French-Canadian potted pork.
Re:Hitachi to double US production of small and medium-sized power tra...
on Monday September 28, 2026 @05:53AM (#49875665)
A traditional transformer doesn't use semiconductors for power conversion and chunks of metal are not "solid state" despite being solid. Call it a hybrid transformer if you want, but the name seems pretty settled. The more relevant part of my comment is that introducing semiconductors and software control into a device formerly only able to operate in a few very predictable ways will lead to both greater flexibility and also new and exciting failure modes.
Re:Hitachi to double US production of small and medium-sized power tra...
on Monday September 28, 2026 @05:03AM (#49875340)
I read about Solid State Transformers https://www.powermag.com/the-solid-state-shift-reinventing-t... with some interest. However they have some weird failure modes. At least large chunks of metal twisted around large chunks of a different metal are predictable and don't need firmware updates.
Re:Hybrid energy system cools and generates electricity and hot water
on Monday August 24, 2026 @05:13AM (#49417180)
The key feature of these technologies is passive below ambient cooling.
"Such novel technology is often based on coating materials that reflect solar energy in visible near-infrared wavelength range (0.3–2.5 μm) and send infrared heat to the universe through atmospheric transparency window". https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00323...
Any other benefit including solar water heating or photovoltaic generation is just burying the lede. 60We/m2 is just fine if it is sharing space with other applications. The fact that they are achieving this with basically doped silicone caulking rather than something like indium tin oxide is fantastic news. Dumping heat into space rather than our oceans and atmosphere is going to matter a whole lot more in the near future, and it even works when it is cloudy.
Re:DisplayMate
on Monday June 22, 2026 @09:37PM (#48639079)
That site is old enough to be Slashdotted.
Re:Nintendo Wii U games running from a 1980's Bernoulli disk [video]
on Monday June 22, 2026 @06:00PM (#48636849)
Minor nitpick - the Bernoulli 90 MB removable disk was released in 1991. The Bernoulli 44 MB was late 80s. I liked them a lot better than the SyQuest drives with their hard platters which seemed much more failure prone. I still have a stack of 90 and 150 MB disks and a couple 150 MB drives. They were considerably faster than the internal 20 MB ESDI drives in the IBM PS/2 systems I backed up.
I saved a stack of the classic IBM keyboards when we decommissioned all that stuff. Still using them too.
Re:Firewood Splitting Simulator
on Sunday June 14, 2026 @07:12PM (#48534018)
The most satisfying part of splitting wood is doing it in temperatures well below freezing. The wood is crystalline in hardness and really does tend to split as it does in this over-optimistic simulation. "Split your own wood and it will warm you twice".
CSB: I had no idea my uncle was unaffected by poison ivy. He invited me over to harvest some dead ash trees on his property. I was destroyed for a month by rashes and he didn't even know the wood was covered in urushiol.
Re:JLink JTAG Access on the Pinecil
on Friday June 05, 2026 @12:57PM (#48415249)
20v everywhere plus I made up a high power DC power cord with a barrel connector. My company’s marketing department has really nice USB-C power bricks emblazoned with our logo. I also invested in a biggish Anker battery with full USB-PD support.
Re:JLink JTAG Access on the Pinecil
on Thursday June 04, 2026 @08:35PM (#48406589)
I bought a Pinecil so I could run it off a battery. I really came to appreciate the excellent temperature control and rapid heating, and use it instead of my soldering station for jobs away from the bench.
I have felt absolutely no need to touch the firmware. I try to forget that it is more powerful than my first three personal computers combined. Plug in, turn on, get hot. It meets my needs and exceeded my expectations. I suppose I could run a website from it if I wanted to make a point but as long as it doesn't require wifi and phone home to verify the license and leak my biometric data I expect to use it until I wear it out.
Re:Gaining control of every projector and camera on campus
on Saturday May 16, 2026 @07:52AM (#48159350)
Causing a 15 minute outage campuswide is not clever at all. A DOS attack was not the goal and it drew unwanted attention. If I was responding to this outage there would have been consequences - not for doing it, but for getting caught. Perhaps a 200 KB/s rate limit on every device associated with the user for escalating timeout periods if the unclever behavior remained attributable.
Re:Dell confirms its SupportAssist software causes Windows BSOD crashes
on Thursday May 14, 2026 @09:35PM (#48143481)
We pushed out a policy to ban it forever after the disruption it caused. Caused again I mean... Huge time waster.
Re:Doctors Just Staged the Quietest Coup in American History
on Sunday May 10, 2026 @07:33AM (#48083058)
https://www.congress.gov/congressional-record/volume-172/iss...
It brings to mind the parable of the drowning man or "what do you want from me, I sent you two boats and a helicopter".
Re:Ask HN: Who wants to be fired? (May 2026)
on Friday May 01, 2026 @09:21PM (#47982356)
Paying an expensive senior (older) employee to quietly and happily go away without raising a fuss may have saved money in the long term. I am sure they did not offer the same deal to everyone.
Re:Ask HN: Who wants to be fired? (May 2026)
on Friday May 01, 2026 @08:18PM (#47982013)
I'm clever but too industrious. Clever and lazy seems to pay better.
Re:Ask HN: Who wants to be fired? (May 2026)
on Friday May 01, 2026 @06:23PM (#47981190)
My dad was offered a buyout when he was around my current age. It included 10 years seniority added to his pension and health insurance until Medicare kicked in. He never looked back.
Sadly, nobody is willing to pay me to go away.
Re:Using the internet like it's 1999
on Thursday April 23, 2026 @06:52PM (#47883273)
m.fark.com looks pretty good on my phone.
Re:Using the internet like it's 1999
on Thursday April 23, 2026 @04:55PM (#47881828)
Just go to fark.com, a lingering glimmer of light from before the dead web. They are still aggregating human curated news and hosting reasonably civil discussions.
Then buy a Totalfark subscription so they don't need to bend over backwards to show more ads just to keep the lights on. See ya there!
Re:At long last, InfoWars is ours
on Monday April 20, 2026 @02:49PM (#47838845)
"Tu Stultus Es"
"Drugs Win Drug War"
"History Sighs, Repeats Itself"
and of course...
"SICKOS"
Re:Hospital Held Woman for Months Against Her Will. SCOTUS to decide i...
on Thursday April 16, 2026 @09:42PM (#47801657)
Notes of the Justina Pelletier case here. I am still horrified by what happened to her and her family.
Re:Flock Flocked up: How a license plate camera misread unraveled one ...
on Tuesday March 10, 2026 @07:31PM (#47330111)
^f settlement
$35,000 for being attacked by a police dog, hospitalized and jailed for hours. Nope. I'd ride that to the supreme court. He is lucky he wasn't shot for a 'misread'.
Re:Giant barocaloric cooling effect offers a new route to refrigeration
on Tuesday February 17, 2026 @03:31PM (#47052890)
To get a feel for this effect, activate an instant ice pack. Mixing ammonium nitrate with water is an endothermic reaction, instantly making the pack cool down. Being able to reverse a reaction like this simply by applying pressure is fascinating.
Re:Downsides to US-Canadian dual citizenship for US resident?
on Wednesday February 11, 2026 @05:17AM (#46973211)
My US-born child qualifies for US-Canadian dual citizenship under Citizenship Act Bill C-3. I can see several upsides to having a Canadian passport but what are the potential downsides for a US citizen and resident that does not intend to relocate?
Re:I taught my neighbor to keep the volume down
on Sunday February 01, 2026 @03:15PM (#46848990)
There was a Windows 2000 bug that would allow the computer to be crashed via a malformed IrDA packet. Of course someone crafted a Palm Pilot app to zonk all the vulnerable PCs in the vicinity. It worked on servers as well. Endless fun for a little while.