This approach is so much nicer than the threading/queuing approaches we used to have. One async showed up, a ton of the work go pulled out of protocol handing and distributed subsystem sync efforts.
Long lived the multi threaded C++ server buffer! Today, async beging to rule the roost.
At one point my 1GB disk was the “big one” in the dorm. It was the windows share of some random media. I had room for the whole 40MB videos “Jesus vs Frosty” (The Spirit of Christmas) and “Jesus vs Santa Claus”. It was before South Park became an actual show, but people watched those 100’s of times off my hard drive.
When I bought a 3GB from Fry’s it was an open question how we’d fill it. Of course, that was just as the mp3 codec started to gain traction… Problem solved.
I have it on the shelf, but haven’t gotten to it. I’ll put it in the reading queue.
There was also a competition (long ago) to see who could build a computer that would successfully boot Windows 95. The goal was to boot the slowest possible time (no arbitrary delays allowed).
The winner wrote a shim that emulated a floating point unit of the i486 so it would boot on a i386 (no floating point). The result was… booting after many weeks. They won big time.
I did some similar stuff on a Raspberry Pi. I had to NFS mount my desktop and make a swapdisk on the NFS mount to have enough RAM to build. It wasn’t fast, but it did eventually work.
We used a RPi 4 for a Plex server for a while. It was fine except it couldn’t do any live transcoding or handle h265 worth beans.
I upgraded to an OrangePi 5. I’m on a sata drive for the OS and a external USB disk for media. The thing is amazing!
No, it’s not a $50 computer. Yes, it works great.
I love RPi boards, but their hardware limitations are quick to be found as you move past simple hobbyist projects.
I use Intel NUC boards for desktop systems. The form factor is nice and compact. The only limiting factor would be the volume limits the GPU, but that’s not a requirement for me.
Do you remember the article about some university that accidentally walled in a Network server? It ran for years until they needed to put hands on it for something. They had to do the “follow the Ethernet cable” game until it went through the sheetrock into a dead space.
The Register still has the article from 2001: https://www.theregister.com/2001/04/12/missing_novell_server_discovered_after/
VAX/VMS was such a beast! The hardware wasn’t readily available to the public, though.
Oh, the wireless chipsets in the 90’s into about 2005? or so…that was a bad time for anyone trying to run wireless. Hell, MS Windows didn’t even have network drivers baked in until what, WinXP? Wiring computer together in the 90’s was such a a trial, both for hardware and software fronts.
I was lucky to score a 3Com 3c905b fast 10/100 Ethernet card from a bussy in 1996. That was well supported across the board (Linux and Windows), and the IRQ settings for the PCI bus memory mapped I/O and IRQs was well documented.
Edit: buddy, not a hussy, though he kinda was… Your call in how you want to read it.
I’m a Cryptonomicon person. The modern timeline is dated now, but the overall information warfare themes are delicious.
I was there Gandalf…
In comparison to the alternatives we had at the time, Linux was a fucking tank. Once it was up, you could expect to get 6 months to years of uptime unless you were installing new tools or changing hardware (no real USB/SATA yet, so hardware was a reboot situation).
If you got a Win98 machine up, it would eventually just hang. Yes, some could got a whole, but if you used it for general use it would crash the kernel out eventually. Same for MacOS (the OG MacOS).
The only real completion for stability was other UNIX systems, and few of those were available to the general public at a reasonable price point.
Way back in the day we’d download Britney Spears and My Little Pony™ distros. Times change, I guess.
There was some way to either steal a “dirty” magazine, buy one from an older teenager, or check out the one you found at your friend’s house that his dad had in a drawer somewhere.
If all else failed, there was always the Sears catalog.
Pitching your desire to block pornography against the collective sex drives of the whole populace is a recipe for you losing and look stupid doing it.
I ran Storm Linux for a short while in about… 2001-2002. Got it on a CD in a misc pack of disks from some Linux distro vendor.
It was supposed to be a server oriented distro, secured more than others, and ran Enlightenment for a desktop. Overall, it was a reasonable distro, but didn’t gain enough general support and devs to keep it up and running. The group behind it folded after a short while.
The hiding of the control panel is just extra pain for the fun of it. I know it’s the same tool they’ve had for many generations now so they’re hiding it because it’s ugly, but it’s the real way to get things done. Hiding it is just making everyone’s life harder, which is basically the Microsoft approach to OS design.
If the PoE is stable, then it’s a nice and relatively unique board. Not sure about the NPU support. There’s a ton of boards and chips coming out with those claims, but I’d like to be able to get clearer info on drivers and library compatibility.
Tom’s Root Boot.
One floppy disk, one Linux machine!
Discord does provide a .deb, but I’ve never found a repo that carries updated versions. I’ve found plenty of hacks that download the latest one and install it every night, but for whatever reason, it’s not kept in the various Debian repos out there.
The kids mostly use Mint with one Ubuntu machine (driver issues that worked on Ubuntu, but not Mint).
I’ve only barely used steam myself (no time for games: see having many kids), but I know the kids often do have to do various tweaks for games at times. I let them have full sudo on their own machines with a scorched earth policy if something goes wrong. Mostly, it seems to work and they don’t bug me much.
Thank you. I’m very proud of all of my kids (even the Windows user).
I haven’t put anyone on the Arch path yet. So far, apt, video drivers, and Steam have been giving the crew enough trouble.
If nothing else, just keeping Discord patched is getting them lots of experience with sudo and dpkg tools. Why doesn’t Discord have a repo?
Yeah, those durn data size fields. At first you’re like “why would you do this? It’s specified in the spec, right?” Then you start consuming the data stream and go “oh, yeah need this”.
I was doing some driver work for a real time location tracking board. The serial stream protocol was very well documented and designed. Plenty of byte length count fields, though.