Technology Random Access Thoughts

[epzik8]

I've long idly wondered why these numbers always ended in 86. Was there ever a 586?

The original Pentium was the 80586. Intel ran into some legal and trademark issues by trying to trademark just numbers.

As a side note, "Pent" means 5, hence "Pentium" as it was a marketable name for Intel's 586 processors.

[Big John]

^^ Knowing that no interstate highways has those numbers.

[Rothman]

I miss 486...

[ZLoth]

[kphoger]

[youtube

[jeffandnicole]

[youtube

Colleges had courses on how to use the internet in the mid-1990s.

[kphoger]

Colleges had courses on how to use the internet in the mid-1990s.

Yes, I know.  I graduated high school in 1999.

[mgk920]

And now AOL pulling the plug on their dialup service . . . What is the World coming to?!?!

 

Mike

Gotta be honest, I would have guessed that died off years ago.

 

Mike

So no more of those way kewl startup discs in the mail . . .

 

Mike

[Scott5114]

I like the text editor vi, but it was pretty clearly built for a different era of computing and thus a lot of the commands work in ways that are kind of jank by modern standards. Like the way the arrow keys work—if you have text wrapping on and press the up and down keys, rather than going down one screen line, it goes down one logical line (i.e., to the character after the next newline). That is...not exactly what I want.

Fortunately there is a ~/.vimrc file you can edit to tweak this behavior. I found something online to remap j and k so that they do the same thing the arrow keys do in, say, Notepad, or a text edit box in a web browser. (j and k are the default up and down keys for vi because it was written before the arrow keys were invented.) But I want my arrow keys fixed. So I made a minor edit to it to remap the arrows instead of j and k.

Works like a charm...except I forgot which of j and k is up and which is down, since I never use them because why would I? So now when I press the down key on the keyboard the cursor goes up a line.

[TheCatalyst31]

I like the text editor vi, but it was pretty clearly built for a different era of computing and thus a lot of the commands work in ways that are kind of jank by modern standards. Like the way the arrow keys work—if you have text wrapping on and press the up and down keys, rather than going down one screen line, it goes down one logical line (i.e., to the character after the next newline). That is...not exactly what I want.

Fortunately there is a ~/.vimrc file you can edit to tweak this behavior. I found something online to remap j and k so that they do the same thing the arrow keys do in, say, Notepad, or a text edit box in a web browser. (j and k are the default up and down keys for vi because it was written before the arrow keys were invented.) But I want my arrow keys fixed. So I made a minor edit to it to remap the arrows instead of j and k.

Works like a charm...except I forgot which of j and k is up and which is down, since I never use them because why would I? So now when I press the down key on the keyboard the cursor goes up a line.

vi/vim are legendary both for surviving all these years and how esoteric the commands are, to the point where accidentally opening vim and learning how to quit is a rite of passage for new software developers. (:q, or :wq to write, if some poor soul finds this thread while trying to quit vim.) You can apparently be very efficient with it if you learn all of the obscure commands, but I never bothered to learn more than the basics.

Of course, real programmers use a magnetized needle and a steady hand.

[Scott5114]

vi/vim are legendary both for surviving all these years and how esoteric the commands are, to the point where accidentally opening vim and learning how to quit is a rite of passage for new software developers. (:q, or :wq to write, if some poor soul finds this thread while trying to quit vim.) You can apparently be very efficient with it if you learn all of the obscure commands, but I never bothered to learn more than the basics.

I'm competent enough to use it for minor edits to things like config files, but I've been trying to use it more for more routine tasks. In particular, I'd like to get to where I can write prose (especially things like wiki articles) in it—a full screen console with vi in it is about as close to a perfect distraction-free writing environment as you can get.

[ZLoth]

https://cheatography.com/ericg/cheat-sheets/vi-editor/

From my experience, it's helpful to have rudimentary knowledge of vi since every *nix install is going to have it. However, if possible, I try to install nano as an editor. When I worked at a ISP 20 years ago, we used ted.

[kphoger]

When I worked at a ISP 20 years ago, we used ted.

Poor Ted.

[vdeane]

I like the text editor vi, but it was pretty clearly built for a different era of computing and thus a lot of the commands work in ways that are kind of jank by modern standards. Like the way the arrow keys work—if you have text wrapping on and press the up and down keys, rather than going down one screen line, it goes down one logical line (i.e., to the character after the next newline). That is...not exactly what I want.

That might be one reason why programmers like it.  Of course, it sucks for prose (or when I'm editing a paragraph of text on my website).

[Scott5114]

I like the text editor vi, but it was pretty clearly built for a different era of computing and thus a lot of the commands work in ways that are kind of jank by modern standards. Like the way the arrow keys work—if you have text wrapping on and press the up and down keys, rather than going down one screen line, it goes down one logical line (i.e., to the character after the next newline). That is...not exactly what I want.

That might be one reason why programmers like it.  Of course, it sucks for prose (or when I'm editing a paragraph of text on my website).

Here, try my (fixed) ~/.vimrc.

Code Select Expand

set nocompatible
filetype on
filetype plugin on
filetype indent on
syntax on
set number
set shiftwidth=4
set tabstop=4
set expandtab
set nolist wrap linebreak breakat&vim
noremap <expr> <Down> v:count ? '<Down>' : 'gj'
noremap <expr> <Up> v:count ? '<Up>' : 'gk'


[ZLoth]

From PC Gamer:

'It crawls into every crevice, stains your cables, and turns teardown into a full day regret spiral.' That's what awaits you if you plan on immersing your graphics card in automatic transmission fluid for a spot of messy overclocking fun

If you're looking to come up with a different way of cooling a big CPU or GPU to get more oomph out of it, your options are a bit limited. Water loops, dry ice, liquid nitrogen, mineral oil—they've all been done before and to varying degrees of success. Enter stage left, one tech YouTuber with a cooler from a Dodge Journey SUV and a whole heap of automatic transmission fluid.

FULL ARTICLE HERE

Wait, what? And, no!

[Scott5114]

I'm surprised you don't hear of people cooling GPUs with honest-to-god refrigerant. It wouldn't be that hard to hack an old car AC unit into cooling a GPU, would it?

[ZLoth]

From Tom's Hardware:

The Intel i386 turns 40 years old — 275,000 transistors running at 16MHz changed personal computing forever
Intel's i386 brought 32-bit registers to x86 and paved the way for Windows 3.0 and Linux.

Intel's 80386 turned 40 this week. Introduced in October 1985, the third-generation x86 processor — better known as the i386 — was the first 32-bit chip in Intel's PC line, the origin point for the IA-32 instruction set, and the architectural turning point that transformed personal computing.

The i386 shipped with 275,000 transistors and ran at up to 16 MHz at launch. Internally, it brought 32-bit general-purpose registers, a flat memory model, and support for up to 4GB of address space, but the bigger change was to the system architecture. Protected mode, virtual 8086 mode, and hardware paging laid the groundwork for real multitasking and virtual memory on x86. Microsoft's early i386 development kits included demos showing multiple DOS sessions running in parallel, each in its own paged VM. That became a core feature of Windows 3.0 in 1990, under the name "386 Enhanced Mode."

FULL ARTICLE HERE

[ZLoth]

From The Verge:

TiVo has sold its last DVR

It's the end of an era for TiVo. Cord Cutters flagged that the company has removed every digital video recorder product from its website, with TiVo confirming to the publication last week that it has officially ceased making DVR hardware after 26 years in the industry. Its last DVR release was the TiVo Edge in 2019, with TiVo later merging with software company Xperi in June 2020.

FULL ARTICLE HERE

[kkt]

Hm.  If I were to characterize one type of computer's users as a cult, it would probably be Apple.

[kkt]

I miss 486...

I miss PDP-10s.  And Nexts.

I'm surprised you don't hear of people cooling GPUs with honest-to-god refrigerant. It wouldn't be that hard to hack an old car AC unit into cooling a GPU, would it?

There are some people who do that, but there are significant risks.  The refrigerant might leak, damaging the other components, and the loss of refrigerant might also result in overheating which would also damage the GPU or other components. 

vi/vim are legendary both for surviving all these years and how esoteric the commands are, to the point where accidentally opening vim and learning how to quit is a rite of passage for new software developers. (:q, or :wq to write, if some poor soul finds this thread while trying to quit vim.) You can apparently be very efficient with it if you learn all of the obscure commands, but I never bothered to learn more than the basics.

I'm competent enough to use it for minor edits to things like config files, but I've been trying to use it more for more routine tasks. In particular, I'd like to get to where I can write prose (especially things like wiki articles) in it—a full screen console with vi in it is about as close to a perfect distraction-free writing environment as you can get.

Ed.  Ed is the standard.  It is on virtually every computer system, not only Unix and its descendents but microcomputers running CP/M or MS-DOS.  And ed even works when your computer's terminal emulation is hosed so you can't use an addressable cursor.

[ZLoth]

Hm.  If I were to characterize one type of computer's users as a cult, it would probably be Apple.

Oh, the stories I could tell when dealing with some Apple end users. I didn't encounter this directly, but about a decade and a half ago, a former co-worker gave the story of a customer who color-coordinated their room to match the color of the iMac they were using, but the iMac had to the RMA-ed and came back with a different color... and the customer didn't like it.

On the other hand, the smoothest cases I had usually involved the Linux users. They had all of their details and answers I needed, and were easily able to provide logs.

[ZLoth]

Current status report at Amazon Web Services at https://health.aws.amazon.com/health/status . I'm just trying to figure out which URLs handle Alexa and set up some monitors at Uptime Kuma.

Edit: Added the status report as a PDF.