Hacker News: philxor

New comment by philxor in "Matrox: Graphics for Professionals"

philxor — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 02:58:42 +0000

I had the original Matrox Millenium. Just threw out the old box a couple years ago when my parents sold their house. I remember driving like 50 miles to CDW will call to get it and being amazed at the 3D demo programs. I kept it for awhile but eventually got a 3DFX Voodoo card. And then a Voodoo Rush card that was a complete POS.

New comment by philxor in "Revision Demoparty 2026: Razor1911 [video]"

philxor — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 03:46:11 +0000

It is a great demo and really nostalgic. I was briefly a courier for Razor 1911 in the mid 90s. I recognize many of the handles throughout the demo and in the list at the end, and even BBS names if you slow down or pause some parts of the demo. So certainly brings back a lot of good memories. The music is great also.

New comment by philxor in "A whole boss fight in 256 bytes"

philxor — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 01:31:27 +0000

And it came in 5th place in the competition. The winner was this one which is 16 bytes...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKLhH_ANwIc

New comment by philxor in "An old photo of a large BBS (2022)"

philxor — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 23:40:01 +0000

I worked for Exec PC internet which evolved from the BBS which was the largest in the US afaik. It ran on somewhat custom PCs where there were I think four nodes per board on bread racks. No cases. Custom software. That BBS was over 250 lines at one point. I remember hearing stories the room with the modems, a lot of Couriers near the end, was so hot they would have to replace dead ones every week.

New comment by philxor in "'I found your dad': The mystery of a missing climber"

philxor — Sat, 03 May 2025 19:20:36 +0000

Read this a couple weeks ago when it came out. Great story, but yeah when having kids and a family takes another sort of person to still want to pursue those adventures. But some cannot just sit still and feel the need to push their endeavors to the highest limit.

New comment by philxor in "Overbooking – how providers divide up the bandwidth"

philxor — Sun, 29 Sep 2024 16:27:57 +0000

There is always an oversubscription ratio at pretty much every hop in the network, at least in a commercial service provider network. That doesn't mean packet loss is occurring all the time, for the most part providers monitor and plan their networks so that doesn't happen, at least during steady-state non-failure.

Utilization patterns can also vary quite a bit based on geography and the type of users being served.

US cable providers do keep track of users who consume their last mile bandwidth all the time. It's typically against their terms of use, so if you are nailing up 300Gbps 24/7, you will get a letter from them and may get your connection turned off.

New comment by philxor in "Expect – Linux tool for automating interactive programs"

philxor — Sat, 31 Aug 2024 01:49:06 +0000

Linux tool? Hate when everything Unix automatically gets categorized as Linux. Have used Expect for many years for many use cases from automating servers to networking use cases as well.

New comment by philxor in "Crafting endless AS paths in BGP"

philxor — Fri, 02 Aug 2024 12:51:01 +0000

BGP confederations are still used in some large SP networks today, mostly because it's hard to transition away from it. However, it hasn't been a recommended solution for scaling BGP for 15+ years now. I had someone approach me recently wanting to deploy them after reading a BGP book written 20 years ago. No.

New comment by philxor in "Razor 1911"

philxor — Tue, 31 Oct 2023 00:56:05 +0000

Myself and some of the original #warez folks on EFNet still hang out on a non-IRC chat platform, 30+ years later. Some of those guys were Razor members at one point in time. Lol most have grown up kids now. It's definitely a far cry from back in the day. I was briefly a courier for Razor starting on BBS but they were quite demanding. I would courier releases from their HQ at the time Mirage to a number of the member boards, but they wanted things done like the second it hit and really wanted all their couriers to have multiple lines. Certainly some colorful fellows in Razor 1911 like the TRC.