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The man recalled the moment he captured the remains of the £189 million holy grail of abandoned exploration - a forgotten spacecraft stranded in a desert "Nothing beside remains. Round the decay of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away"
Yeah, the Mirror. Sorry about that. I just really wanted to post that poem.
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I was expecting a UFO story. Instead, this is about real Soviet era spacecraft.
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Linux Torvalds, founder of the Linux kernel, has posted in the kernel mailing list that he wants to drop support for Intel 486 (i486) processors, citing their age. Bad news for that old machine you have under the desk
You won't be able to get the latest-greatest for it!
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I guess that it also has to do with modern Linux being so resource intensive that running it on an i486 processor shows a face that Linus doesn't want to show. Make sure that your OS can run only on hardware where you can say: Look at that performance!
Reminds me of my student days: That huge Univac 1100/21 mainframe under EXEC8 could run interactive terminals at 1200 bps, but to say that it was designed for it would be a blatant lie. But it was The Great Workhorse of the university. For the 'Programming 101' course, we got three 16-bit minicomputers, each handling 20 interactive terminals at 9600 bps. The mainframe guys demanded that the line speed of the minicomputers be reduced to 1200 bps so that The Great Mainframe would not be standing in an unfortunately light next to those tiny (and unworthy?) mini-machine terminals.
(As TAs in that 'Programming 101' course, we had sufficient control over the min-machines to keep the line speed at 9600 during normal working hours, but prepared to quickly reduce it to 1200 if one of those mainframe guys came over to check.)
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33 year old processors.
I’ve given up trying to be calm. However, I am open to feeling slightly less agitated.
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I would have thought that the i486-specific parts of the kernel are stable, and haven't been changed in years. As long as Linux supports 32-bit CPUs of one variety or another; the only overhead would be regression testing. I am certain that is automated, so why remove the support?
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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The answer is simple: To push users over to more powerful processors so that they will take less notice of how resource demanding modern Linux has become.
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Kent Sharkey wrote: ...that old machine you have under the desk How did you know I had a 486 lying around?!
I think I still have an old 386 laptop with a monochrome screen loaded with Linux 0.99 in the closet, and a Pentium 90MHz (or was that GHz?) desktop, too.
If you think 'goto' is evil, try writing an Assembly program without JMP.
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Did anyone notice they called him 'Linux Torvalds'?
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I didn't, but it might be because my brain does that all the time anyway.
TTFN - Kent
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Physicists shot a laser pulse sequence mimicking the Fibonacci sequence at a quantum computer and ended up creating a new phase of matter in the process, according to a study published in Nature earlier this year. Did it make them actually work?
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Much of that article reads like voodoo to me. Two directions of time? Quasi-periodic sequence? The edge stays quantum-mechanically coherent?
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As soon as I saw "Futurism" as the source I skipped it. As far as I can tell "Futurism" is written by wanna-be science fiction writers who know zero about science.
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Analyst IDC has forecast worldwide spending on IT and business services will grow through to the end of 2023, even as a global recession looks set to take hold. "It's good to be king"
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Kent Sharkey wrote: "It's good to be king" The ones in game of thrones may differ
M.D.V.
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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Microsoft's 'Project Volterra' $599 device for developing, testing and running Windows-on-Arm apps is shipping in eight countries, starting today. ARM yourself
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A massive, malicious campaign is underway using over 200 typosquatting domains that impersonate twenty-seven brands to trick visitors into downloading various Windows and Android malware. Is that why no one answers my posts on c0dproject.com?
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A new method uses optics to accelerate machine-learning computations on smart speakers and other low-power connected devices. I'm so bright, my mother called me sonny
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So as I'm reading this ...
... requires a fiber connection to the data center where the compute is being done ...
... so not just fiber to the home - already a stretch outside of major urban areas, but also internal fiber networking to connect to IOT devices that are probably wireless today, can it get any stupider ...
... this could also be used on cars ...
... and I need to find time to draw a 🤦🏽♂️ using s
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, weighing all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
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If you have fond memories of the early days of Microsoft Windows and want a quick nostalgia fix, instead of pulling that 1995 laptop out of the attic, just download Windows 95.exe. No standing in line for the midnight launch required
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Can we get it on 13 floppy disks, for a deeper hit of nostalgia?
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Do you still have a machine that can read them?
M.D.V.
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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When I got my first PC without a floppy unit, I bought an external USB one. It was surprisingly cheap, somewhere around USD 10. It has come to use a few times, but last time is so long ago that I cannot date it.
It has one disadvantage, though: In the DOS age, lots of 'preformatted' floppies were sold, but they hadn't the format code (360kb, 720kb, 1.44Mb, ...) written into the boot sector. It really was redundant, as DOS tried to read the floppy in one format after another until it found one that worked.
At some stage of development - I think it was when going from 16-bit Win98 to 32-bit WinXP, but correct me if I am wrong - MS said: This is silliness; the boot sector shall have the format code! The standard alway said so! So we will no longer do any lengthy, repetitive trial-and-error procedure!
The result is that lots of pre-formatted floppies from before this time is no longer readable. If you formatted the floppy yourself, whether running under DOS or Windows, the format code was all right; there is a problem only with floppies bought pre-formatted. For several years, most of them were, and a great part of them without the proper format code.
The main reason why I kept a Win95 machine (with no internal floppy unit, but using my USB one) running for many years was to read old floppies that WinXP would not accept, due to a missing format code in the boot sector.
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It’s hard to learn, but your code will produce fewer nasty surprises Won't you take me to func-y town?
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Quote: Back then, this was a radical idea, and many programmers resisted the loss of a statement that they had grown to rely on. The debate went on for more than a decade, but in the end, the GOTO went extinct, and no one today would argue for its return. That's debatable. Here's some code from my Wordle solver that loops through the letters of a word, and if one of those letters matches a list of letters at that position which have been eliminated from the running it skips to the next word using a goto . I'm certain it could be done with another construct, but the time to figure out that other construct is a waste when this approach is so simple and directly mirrors the problem's solution:
foreach (string str in currentPossibilities) {
isPossibility = true;
for (int i=0; i<p1NonChar.Length; ++i) {
if (p1NonChar[i] == str[0]) {
isPossibility = false;
goto breakout3;
}
}
for (int i=0; i<p2NonChar.Length; ++i) {
if (p2NonChar[i] == str[1]) {
isPossibility = false;
goto breakout3;
}
}
for (int i=0; i<p3NonChar.Length; ++i) {
if (p3NonChar[i] == str[2]) {
isPossibility = false;
goto breakout3;
}
}
for (int i=0; i<p4NonChar.Length; ++i) {
if (p4NonChar[i] == str[3]) {
isPossibility = false;
goto breakout3;
}
}
for (int i=0; i<p5NonChar.Length; ++i) {
if (p5NonChar[i] == str[4]) {
isPossibility = false;
goto breakout3;
}
}
breakout3:
if (isPossibility) reducedPossibilities.Add(str);
}
Of course I would never go back to the spaghetti-code goto use, and don't use it often. But when it comes to mind first, and is simple, use it and get on to the next problem.
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