I'll admit I wasn't a Windows user at the time, nor since for that matter. But I had been before.

I knew the history of the "Windows Services for UNIX" and thought that it was incredibly interesting to have the Windows kernel, full driver support, NTFS, and the ability to just use Windows normally, but also be able to just do UNIX-type stuff more or less normally.

Which is what I've been doing on my Mac since the early 2000s.

Then Microsoft had to make Windows a complete shit-show. Not like it hasn't happened before, but they really got themselves in deep this time.

This has always been my experience, going back I'd say at least to the early 2000s on cheap laptops, and all the way back to the earliest days of sleep and hibernate on desktops, where sleep just doesn't matter that much.

When I started dabbling in boot code around 2006, I read a bunch of the specs and one of them was ACPI, which I only scratched the surface of.

I think until then it had just not occurred to me that a modern paged protected OS would even want to call into any code supplied with the computer, vs. having it come from a driver disk, or be built in to the kernel where everyone can see it.

The whole idea of a bytecode interpreter running random code supplied by a fly-by-night system builder is a little unsettling.

I've also bought two replacement remotes off of Amazon in the past year, one Samsung and one Insignia. I think they were $15-20 each, which seemed very reasonable to me.

Generally they won't have the manufacturer's logo, but everything else on the outside looks 100% identical, and all the buttons worked.

Coke used to be mixed, bottled, and shipped out in an extremely quick timeframe. Inventory turned over fast.

I suspect the separated components wind up being equal to what a stale soda has, one that has been on the shelf. It’s like buying a soda whose sugar component has already gone stale.

Sure, the rest of the flavors are there and still fresh, unaffected by the carbonated water, but the sweetness one is off.

Whoever downvoted your comment has either never driven this stretch of the 5 or they are the reason it is so bad.

It’s the idiots in cars who insist on doing exactly 65 in the left lane next to a semi that cause the problem. Get past just one idiot holding back hundreds of cars and you will find miles of completely open road.

Normal non-tech people were ripping CDs with iTunes. "Rip. Mix. Burn." was a nationwide if not worldwide advertisement.

All of this still works, if you have a CD drive.

If you're going to bother buying a cassette player... what's the allure for that over a CD-R and a basic CD player. CD players in cars are going away, but they're still around in houses and inexpensive small boomboxes.

But then... what's the allure of that over say any old audio player that takes SD cards or just a USB stick. A lot of modern cars and also stereo receivers and TVs will take a USB stick and play files from it. These players are incredibly prevalent and very easy to use. And loading the music from a computer or even a tablet is easy.

Of these three, cassette is the absolute least likely to be available anywhere.

You can still have the experience of making a playlist and even putting the files on a USB stick for someone. Importantly, they can actually play it on their own listening device.

When you look at some of the most well-known industrial companies, their founders basically did this.

Difficulty: give away too much of the company trying to raise capital and most investors won't let you do this. Of course, you aren't really the owner then anymore, are you?

I think that's the allure of effective altruism. You founded a company or were early enough in a company to have enough shares to sell to investors. Those investors want big returns. The company is now at their mercy, but hey, they gave you a pile of cash so you can spend it on feeling good.

I imagine that whatever UEFI extension implements loading a disk image over the network probably also implements some way of knowing where the sectors are in RAM so that the OS bootloader can choose to hand off access to the memory disk to the OS.

Is such support implemented in any bootloaders? I have no idea. My guess is probably not because people would rather just have the bootloader use the available services to download the disk image itself.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preboot_Execution_Environment

The network client boot stack sends a DHCPDISCOVER as a broadcast. Any machine can be listening on UDP 67 (bootps) for this. The real DHCP server responds with the DHCPOFFER containing the IP address the client should use. Around the same time, the PXE server responds with its own DHCPOFFER that does not issue an address, but does contain the values for the requested DHCP options.

The client basically keeps broadcasting DHCPDISCOVER until it gets both, then it does the unicast DHCPREQUEST and wait for unicast DHCPACK with the normal DHCP server.

Now, that said, I've only ever seen this work with commercial PXE servers like Microsoft RIS. To my knowledge, ISC DHCPD is unable to send a DHCPOFFER with options but no address. But my knowledge is at least a decade out of date.

At home I just set the options on the main DHCP server like every other hobbyist does, but this isn't true PXE, this is just plain old DHCP+TFTP remote boot.

Let's say you do have such a server that sends DHCPOFFER with the options and no IP address. If it's on its own machine, then it can listen on port 67, same as the real DHCP server on another machine. But, if it's on the same machine as the DHCP server, it has to listen on port 4011. In this case the client behaves a little differently. For this to work, the DHCP server must send as part of the DHCPOFFER an unsolicited option 60 to indicate that the client should go ahead and accept the IP then send a second unicast DHCPDISCOVER to port 4011 and await a DHCPOFFER from that port. Option 60 is only needed, and can only be used, if the independent PXE server is running on the same host as the DHCP server.

So there's basically 3 scenarios: * Hobbyist: just configure the booting options on the real DHCP server * Real PXE, separate machine: Both real DHCP and PXE listen for broadcast DHCPDISCOVER and respond with complementary DHCPOFFER. Real DHCP server has no knowledge whatsoever about booting. * Real PXE, same machine: Real DHCP server responds with unsolicited option 60 no matter what. This is the extend of its knowledge of booting. Separate PXE server runs on port 4011 instead of 67, and everything is unicast.

There may finally be hobbyist projects that support this model, but when I last did this stuff, there were not. Learning how RIS worked was a revelation for me, and it really made me wonder why the hobbyist community of the time seemed hellbent on not doing PXE correctly, which annoyingly requires control over the options set by the real DHCP server, and often makes it impossible to do fun stuff like use different boot files for different clients.

Canada's advertisement aired during one of the World Series games, after Trump's initial tweet. As others here have commented, Reagan's position was more nuanced than "tariffs bad", which is how the ad portrays it. Krugman himself admits this in his own article.

Then Krugman goes on the usual ad hominem attack against Donald Trump, because he just admitted that Reagan was in favor of using tariffs to settle political disputes, particularly in response to countries leveling tariffs against the U.S.

Which, mind you, is exactly what Donald Trump says he is doing, raising tariffs on Canada in response to several long-standing tariffs they have had on the importation of U.S. goods. Krugman doesn't dispute this. He cleverly doesn't bring it up at all and instead calls Trump a petulant child levying tariffs for his own political purposes.

Forgive me if I can't take Krugman or anyone else parroting Krugman seriously when he hasn't been able to make a soundly reasoned argument in decades. These low-on-facts high-on-rhetoric articles are empowering Trump.

The hardware that looks for the magic packet ignores the framing.

I certainly wouldn't run a TCP discard service, but making sure that UDP packets to port 9 do not result in any ICMP port unreachable response, or any other response, is a good practice.

I think the unfortunate answer is that two if not three drivers are going to have to be written to support the differing generations. GRADD to satisfy Warp 4 (and 3 w/ FixPack) is probably the easiest and most useful.

The way I see it, if I want to have some Workplace Shell nostalgia, but with modern amenities, I'm ok being limited to at least Warp 3 + FixPack. OS/2 2.1 and 3 are hardly different. A few colors changed for the better, and you gain the application's icon instead of the circle. Warp 3 still has the floating launcher thing introduced in 2.

Having to track down all the FixPacks to make the system work on hardware even slightly newer than what was available when that OS/2 version first shipped is part of the nostalgia. Put a 28.8k modem simulator in there, and we can really party like it's 1994.

Along those lines, if I really want OS/2 version 2 nostalgia, how badly do I want modern amenities like high-res, high-depth graphics? Whereas for OS/2 version 3 or 4 nostalgia, I would like to experience what those might have been like on newer hardware.

Basically there is a linker flag to produce a .o while maintaining relocation info.

This can then be fed into another linker later, but the important point is that internal symbols can be stripped, or even just remain internal through namespacing.

On the non-GUI front it had a better command processor, CMD.EXE, which is a precursor to the Windows NT one. It had an actually decent scripting language (REXX). It had a better filesystem (HPFS).

It was also incredibly good at running DOS games of the era, while comfortably multitasking in the background, including serial port and network usage. You could be downloading something while fragging some demons in Doom. You could also pause the game at any time and switch back to the desktop, then go back and resume.

The thing that was different between OS/2 and Linux + WINE is the engineering approach. IBM had a license to use actual DOS and Windows code, at least until they cancelled the JDA (Joint Development Agreement) contract with Microsoft in 1990. Even after they cancelled, they still had rights to everything from before, which included Windows 3.0.

In order to avoid having to pay Microsoft a royalty on the Windows portions of OS/2, which they had to pass along in the retail price, they even released a variant of OS/2 version 2.1 called "OS/2 for Windows" which took your existing Windows 3.x, the one that you almost certainly already paid for as part of your computer, and binary patched it to work under OS/2. There was some grousing when Windows 3.11 came out and broke it, but IBM issued a patch.

So, in essence, they were able to market OS/2 less like a replacement OS, and more like a utility program you added on to your existing system to make it behave better. Kind of like hey, you just dropped $2000-$3000 or more on a new system, what'a another $129 to make it really sing.

And because it leveraged the fact that you already paid for Windows when you bought the computer, compatibility was top-notch: it was actually running real Windows.

In my opinion as a user at the time, what killed it was the move to Win32 software which OS/2 couldn't run but Windows 95 could. Once computers started regularly coming with enough RAM to run Windows NT 4, the nice things about OS/2 just weren't enough to justify the inability to run basically every new software package.

I've done a fair amount of research into this and I think it was technically within reach. IBM's marketing "a better DOS than DOS, a better Windows than Windows" was true until Windows 95 came out, and it would have continued to be true if they had simply offered Win95-OS/2. Not being able to run the latest Windows (Win32) software meant that OS/2 was no longer a better Windows than Windows, it was just a different and increasingly dated-looking Windows.

IBM was too self-absorbed to do this. They were going to ditch both Microsoft and Intel and make PowerPC machines running OS/2. That didn't work out too well.

Imagine a world where OS/2 Warp 3 saw a BBS-distributed or Internet-distributed update to support Win95-OS/2 released within a week of Windows 95 going to retail. It was entirely possible in September of 1995 to do this, Warp Connect adding Internet support was done this way. The "Chicago" betas were widely available so this could have easily been co-developed.

The real lesson here is that building a better runtime actually can work, if you commit to maintaining feature parity. OS/2 faltered because IBM stopped developing the features their customers wanted, like the ability to run standard Win32 software, and instead developed the features IBM wanted, like the ability to run on a different CPU architecture.

I did happen to have a machine with a monster CPU (for the time), but I knew many people with lesser CPUs. It really wasn't the CPU but the RAM. You had to have 4 MB, better to have 8 MB.

In those days, RAM was the most expensive thing on any computer. Also in those days a lot of the inexpensive clone machines like the Gateway and Dell were still using 30-pin (8-bit wide) RAM, so you had to use 4 sticks to get 32-bit width, and there were only 8 total slots (two banks). 1 MB SIMMs were at least obtainable, which means your practical limit was an 8 MB machine. 4 MB SIMMs were incredibly expensive, almost unobtainable, if your system board even supported them.

OS/2 would run very comfortably on an 8 MB machine, meaning all you really had to do was come up with the scratch for some 1 MB DIMMs and have a machine with the full 8 sockets. It was slightly upmarket for 1992 and 1993, but very far from high end. A ton of people in the BBS scene used OS/2 because it allowed you to run your own BBS in the background, or to connect to a BBS and be downloading files while still being able to use the computer, like say a word processor to write a paper.

By the time Windows 95 came out in late (September) 1995, 4 MB was considered the minimum and 8 MB was considered better. By then the Pentium had been released, but 486SX systems were pervasive and cheap. If you slapped more RAM in them, they would indeed run either OS/2 or Windows 95 just fine. Software rarely needed an FPU. System requirements between the two were basically the same.

The failure of OS/2 came down to software compatibility. The killer feature of OS/2 is that it could run all your DOS programs and all your Windows programs and unlike real DOS or Windows you could have multiple programs open at the same time without bogging-down or crashing the system. Heck, you could even run full-screen VGA games like Doom and task-switch out of them and return. You could be gaming while downloading.

But Windows 95 came out with an even better feature: the ability to run Win32 software that was formerly limited to Windows NT. And that turns out to be a way more important feature than being able to run lots of older software simultaneously. And as far as stability goes, if you only ran Win32 software on Windows 95 it was actually incredibly stable. As long as all the applications themselves are reasonably well-behaved, the inherently unsafe Windows 95 architecture of a large amount of globally shared unprotected memory hosting critical system data structures isn't a big problem.

So what did I do in 1996? Well, I got a true monster machine, a Pentium Pro 200 with I think 64 MB of RAM, and I ordered it with Windows NT 4. By then, Windows NT needed 32 MB minimum, but RAM was getting cheaper so it wasn't as much of a barrier.

So the irony of saying that you needed notably higher-end hardware for OS/2 is that notably higher-end hardware becoming the norm is what really killed OS/2 even among die hard fans.

Cheap RAM, cheap enough to run the even more stable Windows NT, was the last straw. OS/2 was mortally wounded when IBM failed to deliver Windows 95-on-OS/2. I thought at the time they should have done that, and I know now they could have done it. If they had done it, I think OS/2 could have competed with Windows 95. Instead it only limped along among die-hard fans like me. But once hardware caught up and I was able to run Windows NT, there really wan't much point in OS/2 anymore.

And this is not Facebook. There is no algorithm driving views and hot takes. This is ordinary, everyday people choosing to be irrational because self-righteousness is its own dopamine hit incentive, even in the absence of external incentives.