MS has always bent over backwards to retain backwards compatibility, to the extent that it's genuinely a corporate weakness: it's slowed software releases, bulked them up with patches and tweaks and special-case exceptions, and prevented the company from keeping the OSes relatively reasonably-sized by dropping obsolete features.

Linux is starting to do this now, but only because the team's hand is being forced by LLM-bot vulnerability discovery. So it's dropping loads of old drivers -- but then, the kernel is mostly drivers, hundreds of thousands of them.

Apple is more proactive: it regularly says "this is the next to last version that does [function X] and the release after next will remove that.

I've been using OS X since 10.0, after 13 years using classic MacOS. Over that time, OS X has progressively dropped:

* The Blue Box VM for running Classic apps (removed in 10.5)

* Then the PowerPC version (removed in 10.6)

* Then Rosetta for running PowerPC apps (removed in 10.7)

* Then the AppleTalk network sharing protocol connections -- printers remained (I forget when)

* Then 32-bit app support (removed in 10.15)

I'm on macOS 15, on an 11YO iMac thanks to OCLP. Soon I'll be forced onto Tahoe simply because it's the last ever x86 version. The current beta of OCLP supports this. I will wait for the final release.

It periodically warns me that the AppleShare over TCP/IP is going away too. Won't directly affect me on an Intel Mac.

* Intel support is going in macOS 27

I am willing to bet Rosetta 2 and x86 binary support will go by macOS 28 or so.

It also dropped HFS writing, leaving only R/O HFS support. That may be gone now. Not tried in a few years but circa 10.13 it could happily mount a 30YO floppy disk in a USB diskette drive.

Since 10.14 it will only boot off APFS although HSF+ R/W support is fine.

That is still wrong.

The correct form is `apt-get dist-upgrade` but that's just the command to update all packages to the latest versions in the same release of the OS. It is the equivalent of `apt full-upgrade` if you have the more modern `apt` command rather than `apt-get`.

So, no, that will not upgrade your distro.

The recommended course of action for Debian is to edit the repository config files, change to the new release names, and then do a full update.

It's a big job.

https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/release-notes/upgradi...

Ubuntu wraps this in simpler tools: `do-release-upgrade` from the shell, or Software Updater for GUI users.

I just upgraded my Ubuntu 24.04 box to 26.04, and my OpenBSD 7.9 box to 8.0. OpenBSD is quicker and easier.

I'm aware. I think the connection is clear, though, and decided that was enough for a semi-humorous sally.

The originals, all of which I've read and which I think are pretty good, are by Frank Herbert, between the mid-1960s and mid-1980s.

Then, 20+ years later, his son Brian Herbert and prolific author of tie-ins Kevin J Anderson started writing sequels and prequels.

Now TBH I have not read any of these, but the reviews are terrible, and I have read one Brian Herbert novel and one Kevin Anderson novel, and both of those were among the worst books I have ever read in my life. In the pre-internet era I read a huge amount -- I'd guess 20 thousand or more -- and both authors are in my top 5 worst ever books I ever finished.

You're referring to stuff that never happened in the original novels. In those, the Butlerian Jihad was ancient nearly-forgotten memory, many millennia ago. Longer before the times of the novels than Ancient Egypt is before us today.

So, the comment and the discussion is IMHO mainly about the original novels, and you're talking about stuff from the awful cash-in books by the author's son and a writer mainly known for cashing in on movie franchises.

That's why I said you read the wrong books.

Coax Ethernet with BNC connectors was absolutely the norm for LANs from the late 1980s to mid 1990s. Then, slowly, UTP took over, as 10base-2 was replaced by 10base-T, then 100base-T, then switches instead of hubs, then Gigabit Ethernet: 1000base-T.

I worked with Token Ring in the '80s and never ever even heard of a coax version. It was D9 connectors on the card to fat IBM connectors on the MAU, as pictured here:

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

I think you're switching TR and thinnet Ethernet in your head.

I have seen a critical analysis that sees the origin of Dune as a roman à clef of the rise of the house of Ibn Saud.

Arrakis is Saudi Arabia.

Spice, melange, is oil: the surrounding empire needs it for travel and transport.

House Atreides is the Saud dynasty, which defeated House Harkonnnen.

I'm thinking of having T-shirts printed up.

On the front, "Butlerian Jihadi" in some attractively faux-Arabic font.

Perhaps on the back, in Old English Black Letter:

    Thou shalt not
    make a machine
    in the image
    of a human mind.

Blocked, for me. Not paywalled: the entire site.

So...

https://archive.ph/4ratb

Absolutely. Walter Jon Williams explicitly made this point in the introduction to the Praxis trilogy:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dread_Empire%27s_Fall

He said that to make space opera work, you needed to not have omniscient AI, FTL travel, and nanotech that could work miracles, resurrect the dead, and give lifeforms superpowers.

So, how to forbid it, when someone somewhere will try very very hard to make it?

By imposing a cultural ban. His empire-building aliens forbid it, on pain of genocide.

That gave him a setting. Then, what if that empire falls? That gave him the nugget of a plot.

I found it a very effective setting, myself.

I mean this in both the specific and general sense.

Which could, of course, lead to the mother of all crossover universes, in which R Daneel Olivaw, as the inheritor of Hari Seldon's mission, inspired the Butlerian Jihad...

Since the botlickers think that those of us who don't trust automatic plagiarism machines are religious nutcases anyway, why not lean into it?

I often consider getting back into programming and a few years ago, when I rejoined USENET and started looking around, the Fortran newsgroup `comp.lang.fortran` was active. The community there was as welcoming and supportive as I've met, and I got some interesting info.

I knew FORTRAN 77 and looked at some FORTRAN IV code. Now it's a very different language indeed -- I can't read the modern version at all, it's totally unfamiliar -- but you can still write old-style code in the new language, or mix in some new features in older-style code. It looks pretty good, TBH.

https://sonicde.org/

It's like the next step after the ship of Theseus.

1. If you replace 100% of the wood, is it the same ship?

2. If there is no wood at all left, is it a ship at all?

This isn't a shipwreck. It's the site of a shipwreck. It's where a wreck used to be.

Along with "every page is P1" there's another tech-docs saying:

"Docs or it never happened." No docs = no project. Docs, even a README, that fail to say what it is are not docs.