The Gravis Ultrasound had an incredible price to performance ratio back in the day and made high quality wavetable synthesis at "CD quality" available to the masses.
This is how I heard about it. I never had access to anything like that. The idea that you could load samples on to it was out of my reach. All I could do was midi programming on my Yamaha XG50. But it never sounded professional. Then I discovered the world of music trackers and that carried me until fruity loops came along.
As someone who couldn't afford it, I always felt excluded when developers have not implemented any alternative, like if someone had plain sound blaster clone.
Im not familiar of any software that would do that. If anything people who bought GUS felt scammed when it turned out its Sound Blaster emulation (SBOS/Mega-Em) was somewhere between barely working and totally broken.
GUS selling point was offloading sound engine to hardware mixer, but by the time UltraSound PnP released CPUs were fast enough for fully software GM.
Modula-2 was born into a time when 8-bit char sets with upper- and lowercase letters were common place but syntax highlighting was still not common. This caused the language to be designed with uppercase keywords because it really makes the code easier to read without syntax highlighting.
Oberon inherited this despite syntax highlighting starting to get traction in the 80s. But nowadays it places an unneeded toll on the shift and caps lock keys and makes coding a bit more tedious.
Many years ago I used Exim because it was default for my distro of choice back then. But after a few emergency patchings caused by yet another RCE in Exim I learned that switching to Postfix massively improved my sleep quality.
There's a weird folk belief that Exim is a secure 2nd-generation MTA, but it's not; it's a 1st generation MTA, like Sendmail and Smail. The two "secure" 2nd generation MTAs are Postfix and qmail. You shouldn't use those either, really; there is no reason to run a memory-unsafe MTA, or, for that matter, an MTA that isn't backed by a real database.
I run postfix in a receive-only mode to power inbound email processing. I'm very very glad there's no database requirement. It just passes the processing of inbound emails to a filter over stdin, which can do whatever it wants with databases or whatever it needs.
The problem with qmail is, everybody use a fork. No body use the real thing.
The official release is not standard compliance. It does not support anything modern spam filter need. It don't get new updates or features. It have funny license.
You can use a fork... but I need to ask: which fork?
Another memory-safe option is Haraka, which I’ve been using for several years now. I recommend it but only for people who need extreme customizability. For everyone else, the customizability is a bit of a footgun, since you can easily end up with accidental open relays and other misconfigurations (as I learned the hard way).
I fully lost three small VPS there, and their response was poor: they didn't even refund time lost, they didn't compensate for time lost (e.g. a couple of months of free VPS), I got better updates from the news than from them (news were saying "almost total loss", while them were trying to convince me that I had the incredible bad luck that my three VPS were in the very small zone affected by the fire). The only way I had to recover what I lost was backups in local machines.
When someone point out how safe are cloud providers, as if they have multiple levels of redundancy and are fully protected against even an alien invasion, I remember the OVH fire.
They handled the fire terribly and after that they improved a bit, but an OVH VPS is just a VM running on a single piece of hardware.
Quite not the same thing as the "Compute" which is running on clusters.
They use the datasenter for model training, not to serve online users. Presumably even if it will be offline for a week or even a month it will not be a total disaster as long as they have, for example, offsite tape backups.
Flooding due to burst frozen pipe, false sprinkler trigger, or many others.
Something very similar happened at work. Water valve monitoring wasn’t up yet. Fire didn’t respond because reasons. Huge amount of water flooded over a 3 day weekend. Total loss.
why build one when you can have two at twice the price?
But, if you're building a datacenter for $5M, spending $10-15M for redundant datacenters (even with extra networking costs), would still be cheaper than their estimated $25M cloud costs.
That reminds me of a specific (de)motivational video of one of my favorite comedians Masood Boomgaard, which specifically covers the rat race that prevails in todays workplace culture. While it's meant to be funny, it actually touches some deeper philosophical truths.
Thanks for the link! When it is well done comedy often covers something more profound and summarizes it in an accessible and more memorable manner just like the video you are talking about.
"The world is fucked, and you cannot un-fuck it."
"You will die one day just as confused as you are now."
"Everything you think you need to do was done before you and will be done after you."
"Whether you are fat or thin haters will hate."
"Nothing really matters."
There are some really deep insights in all of those thoughts, thanks for sharing.
PS: this remembers me of a sketch about giraffes being an animal created by a gay friend of the comedian, after the sketch I learned that giraffes engage in male-male acts more often than male-female acts and got mindblown. They have been called "especially gay" for this fact.
I've known people that 'do nothing'. The modern day equivalent of that is the pot head. It's a lot easier to do nothing when you're stoned. The other alternative is the basement dweller kid of a well to do couple that just spends his day playing video games. Due to his parent's hard work (or luck), he can probably afford to do so for the rest of his life. But still seems depressing to me to think about.
If you're playing video games you're literally not doing nothing. The point is to give yourself time to reflect and breathe. If you're stoned and that makes it easy to meditate for ages, you could probably count that as doing nothing. Although you should probably worry if you simply cannot sit still for any significant amount of time without being stoned. But yeah if you're getting stoned and like watching movies and stuffing your face then you're not doing nothing.
But that kid in your example isn't doing _nothing_, they are playing video games. That is entirely different from consciously pausing and doing nothing.
That kid is doing nothing with their life, there’s a difference between that and a nornal persob’s downtime that makes sure we don’t task out with some goal that feels like doing nothing but it’s got some agenda: no planned activity!
> There’s one key change I made to escape this cycle: I remind myself that I’m not an artist, and coding isn’t creative expression.
Unless you're into code golf or other forms of "art", a software developer is first and foremost a craftsperson, depending on the position maybe even an engineer, leader, or scienctist.
Ideally you build things you're proud of, because they're useful and maybe even beautiful and masterfully crafted.
Some devices with 13th gen Intel processors support in-band ECC. This basically hides a fraction of RAM from the OS and uses it for ECC.
Example devices are: LattePanda Sigma [0] and AsRock Industrial NUCS BOX-1360P [1].
Unfortunately they are quite expensive and enabling in-band ECC lowers performance significantly. So my next server rig will likely have an AMD PRO CPU instead.
I find it annoying that (a) this seems to be a hardware feature that is almost universally permanently disabled in firmware and (b) it's almost impossible to find out whether it is supported by any given product (neither of the two products you link provide any mention on the spec sheet).
Recently I wiped the contents of the Trusted Platform Module of a laptop. Now the laptop failed to boot as the Bitlocker key was not stored in the TPM anymore.
To my surprise it was possible to get a code from Microsoft to access the laptop's disk again, as one of the admin accounts was a Microsoft account.
I strongly suspect, Microsoft does only activate Bitlocker during the OOBE if it can set-up this kind of Bitlocker recovery mechanism, storing an (indirect) decryption key at Microsoft.
It is the primary failsafe for Microsoft 365 accounts to store the BitLocker recovery key with your Microsoft account. The other failsafes are printing the key or storing it on an external device.
One can easily obtain the recovery key on a system by doing "manage-bde -protectors -get c:" in an admin command prompt. This is not a vulnerability, it is by design.
You are going to find way more software for Linux to make your computer practically useful and pretty much all information out there is for Linux, so unless you have a reason to explicitly prefer BSD, it is much better to install Linux than any of the BSDs.
In fact chances are Linux will support your old hardware better than most, if not all, BSDs.
OpenBSD might work accidentally, but NetBSD intentionally supports old hardware.
Now why someone wants to run current software on museum-piece hardware is quite beyond me though.
So does Linux (486SX is the minimum supported CPU), there is nothing inherent to NetBSD about supporting old hardware than the developers wanting to do so.
> Now why someone wants to run current software on museum-piece hardware is quite beyond me though.
I can think a lot of reasons, e.g. keeping them useful. While there are many things that old hardware cannot do, there are things it can do as long as there is software to provide the functionality.
AFAICT the article isn't asking writing new software that runs on the old hardware, it is asking to let existing software that could run on the old hardware remain accessible.
The Gravis Ultrasound had an incredible price to performance ratio back in the day and made high quality wavetable synthesis at "CD quality" available to the masses.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FastTracker_2
Edit: The fact that quite a few games supported the GUS out of the box or received patches to do so was also a well received boon on my side.