* C compilers that can target 16 bit x86 usually have support for "far pointers", which are 32 bit wide pointers consisting of both a 16 bit segment and a 16 bit offset. You should be able to use that instead of your assembly wrappers. This allows you to directly access screen memory in C, i.e. letting the compiler do the job of setting up the segment registers, which also has the great benefit of not having to push, write, and pop ES for every byte (if you copy a block into screen memory for example, the compiler only needs to set up the destination register once).

* The IVT is correspondingly also a list of FAR pointers. It's a common 16 bit x86 concept. The CPU knows about them, they are also more generally used for far jumps and far calls.

* As others have said, just pick one of the many, many available text mode font ROMs.

* I'm curious how compatible that AMD Elan is to actual PCs. Probably a lot, since by that time PCs were kind of the x86 standard, though not necessarily. The earlier 80186 with its integrated peripherals (interrupt controller etc.) was very incompatible, for example. Shouldn't impede your project, just dictates how easily you can run DOS programs overall.

And it was precisely done because the straightforward way, which would have been something like opening a sequential channel with a dedicated directory listing command and reading out from it, would have been immensely awkward under BASIC 2.0. Hence the magic “$” program.

With the notable exception of listing the directory, which was pretty easy through a trick from the disk drive’s DOS which meant you could load the disk directory “as a program” with a special name, “$”, and then just LIST it. But you see, the drive’s DOS had to sort of go out of its way to make that simple.

With just the stock tools, I can push my GeForce pretty far (relatively spoken, absolutely nowhere near what "professional" overclockers can achieve, of course), and it may appear stable for many hours, until suddenly it crashes anyway.

So what's the qualification of a "successful" overclock? Is it just passing a benchmark, and after that for all we care it can go up in flames?

Even though it's rare, I actually do use it if I want to talk to another host on a very specific interface. Sometimes there's multiple paths.

I must say, I rather enjoy both IPv6s autoconfiguration, and the fact that my non-link-local addresses are actually unique (and if I want to, routable).

I'm an avid user of IPv6 by the way, I don't share a lot of the criticism. For me personally it's a net positive. But this is a wart where I wish they went a different direction.

Just yesterday I tried to use rsync (like I do all the time, in my mind there's no reason to use scp when rsync does everything better), but this time I needed to specify an IPv6 address. On the (admittedly ancient) rsync version that comes with macOS, this doesn't work:

rsync foo 'user@[fe80::4]:/tmp'

Note already, how I had to put the second argument in quotes, because otherwise the shell tries to expand the square brackets as filename expansion.

But even then rsync just complains, because rsync itself separates host from path through colon. I think the only workaround is to do something like `rsync -e 'ssh user@[fe80::4] ...'`... but I just used an updated rsync from homebrew, which is of course the saner method. Still, just another colon/bracket-caused issue.

Source ending in “/“: You want what’s inside. Source not ending in “/“: You want the thing (i.e. directory itself). For the destination, it does not matter whether it ends in “/“ or not, but for consistency I like adding a “/“ anyway (I want to put thing inside the directory).

I remember from my friends who worked at Google at the time, that everyone’s always been told that “every new hire’s contract lands on Larry Page’s desk, he has to sign off on it”, and you can probably bet your bottom dollar that Larry Page didn’t spend a lot of time on each hiring package, if any.

(And of course the CEO can override any hiring decision anyway. The question is if they will.)

a) The potential employer vastly overstepped commonly accepted boundaries.

b) It was totally implied that the questions were to be answered in the context of work. "What was the hardest challenge you had to overcome?" in that context relates to e.g. debugging a hard concurrency problem, not your divorce.

What stood out to me is that whatever interpretation is the correct one, the candidate was willing to give (apparently) deeply personal answers. That's just something to adjust for in upcoming interviews, we live and learn.

That's vastly overstepping commonly accepted boundaries. Sure, some surface level smalltalk is normal and expected: "Any hobbies? Ah, you like hiking? Nice. Where do you like to hike? Oh, I did that, too. Might I suggest hiking there and there? I bet you'd like it. Anyway, moving on!" Common ground helps conversations flow.

But an employer asking about your personal relationships? Your needs, fears, and desires outside of any technical context? (My needs, fears, and desires from compiler toolchains are totally within scope.) Your traumata? That's a level of intrusiveness crossing into "rude" territory. They have no business of asking.

It's a chance for you to meet the actual CEO (or VP or whatever in a larger company), and also for them to get to meet you in advance, instead of effectively getting "blindsided" by a new person (to exaggerate a bit).

Usually, by the time you've gotten to that point, the decision to hire you has well and truly been made. I don't know what then would need to happen for the actually rather secondary function of giving the CEO the opportunity to veto to become relevant. I'd be curious hearing about anyone who's ever experienced it (on whatever side). I guess it can be a safeguard against vastly unaligned values, but I suspect it's very rare.

But primarily, and effectively, it's usually just a meet-and-greet. And it's hard for me to blame a CEO (or VP etc.) for at least getting to anyone who's going to enter a mutual contract to effectively become part of their company.

Maybe it was always that much obvious to me that what should have been a good night of sleep had no, or maybe even a negative, effect on my wellbeing, and therefore something must be wrong during the sleep.

But if the effects are a bit more muted and accumulate more gradually, and you've never heard much about sleep apnea, you might not directly attribute it to the sleep itself.