"No, we can't switch to OpenOffice you weird Open Source hippie! I can't e-mail documents to other people anymore, nobody can open them. Besides, the UI is all different, I won't be able to find anything!"

Then Office 2007 happened, tossing out the waffle menu for the ribbon and people started receiving e-mails with strange docx/xlsx files that nobody could open. IIRC that was still an issue 3 years later.

But no, when Microsoft does it, it is different: "This is progress! Are you against progress, you weird Luddite?"

I remember by the time Windows 8 was released ("Kachelofen edition" - "hurr, your desktop is a tablet!"), I was discussing with a Unix graybeard friend in the cafeteria how long it will take until the complainers accept that "this is the way now". I think it was him who suggested that if Microsoft sent a sales rep around to shit on peoples lawns, it would take at most a year until they start defending it as the inevitable cost of technological progress.

No matter how slow and bloated the GitHub web UI gets, or how many nonsense anti-features Microsoft stuffs into it. People will accept it and find funny excuses (network effect will be the main one).

:-)

Let me guess, ".*@.*\..*"?

Direct3D called its variants DXTn, later rename to BCn. From what I recall, Microsoft had some sort of patent licensing deal that implicitly allowed Direct3D implementers to support their formats.

OpenGL had an extension called GL_EXT_texture_compression_S3TC[2].

Under "IP Status" the extension specification explicitly warns that even if you are e.g. shipping graphics cards with Direct3D drivers, supporting S3TC, you may not legally be able to just turn that feature on in your OpenGL driver.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S3_Texture_Compression#Patent

[2] https://registry.khronos.org/OpenGL/extensions/EXT/EXT_textu...

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Points: 3

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Down the hallway from my office used to be the management of a small hotel chain. We often had lunch together and I got to hear a bunch of interesting anecdotes over the years.

Way back when they started up and didn't yet have enough cash to actually own the buildings they operated in, they rented. One of the buildings turned out to have numerous issues (holes in the roof, gaps near exterior walls, etc...). To the point that they eventually didn't pass a fire inspection. They repeatedly asked the owner to have it fixed. Pressed for time, they themselves eventually payed someone, out of their own pocket, so it would at least be up to code for the fire inspection.

From what I was told, the owner threw a tantrum over them modifying the building, terminated the contract and sued them. Successfully.

If you are a tenant in a rental apartment, you'd probably have more leniency on the legal side (compared to a company renting a business property). But still, I'd be very careful making any assumptions about the legal situation rather than risking some sort of Kafkaesque legal mess.

Over here at least, it is very common in apartment complexes that the apartment owner is a different person/entity than the building owner and only the later has the rights to mess with stuff installed in the walls (e.g. plumbing) and especially stuff elsewhere in the building (e.g. an external intercom system). If you ask the landlord to fix it, the best they could do is forward that request to the building owner. If you pulled a stunt like the OP did, there's a good chance that the building owner will sue your landlord.

From the article: the code was broken.

The breaking bug was discovered in 2023 by syzbot, a fuzzer, and found out to have been introduced in 2016. This means that probably nobody has been using UDP-Lite (at least on a recent kernel, even LTS) for quite some time now.

It is now 2026, it has been proposed and discussed to remove UDP-Lite entirely, the patch set has gone through several iterations on the netdev mailing list. Apparently nobody complained that, actually, they do need that and it has been merged to the netdev tree, likely ending up in the next release.

There is actually an interesting question here: was '%n' always in printf, or was it added at one point?

I took a cursory look at some old Unix source archives at TUHS: https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl

As far as I can tell from the PDP-11 assembly, Version 7 research Unix (relevant file: /usr/src/libc/stdio/doprnt.s) does not appear to implement it.

The 4.1BSD version of that file even explicitly throws an error, treating it as an invalid format specifier.

The implementation in a System III archive looks suspiciously similar to the BSD one, also throwing an error.

Only in a System V R4 archive (relevant file: svr4/ucblib/libc/port/stdio/doprnt.c) I found an implementation of "%n" that works as expected.

I guess it was added at some point to System V and through that eventually made it into POSIX?

Nowadays, you have to wait for the thing to finish booting.

In the future, you have to wait for the ads to finish playing?

Or maybe, ever since you became aware of it, you started increasingly becoming aware of it?

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion

About a week ago, completely out of the blue, YouTube recommended this old gem to me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0jQZxH7NgM

A Pentium 4, overclocked to 5GHz with liquid nitrogen cooling.

Watching this was such an amazing throwback. I remember clearly the last time I saw it, which was when an excited friend showed it to me on a PC at our schools library. A year or so before YouTube even existed.

By 2005, my Pentium 4 Prescott at home had some 3.6GHz without overclocking, 4GHz models for the consumer market were already announced (but plagued by delays), but surely 10GHz was "just a few more years away".

This sentiment is not a recent thing. Ever since GPGPU became a thing, there have been people who first hear about it, don't understand processor architectures and get excited about GPUs magically making everything faster.

I vividly recall a discussion with some management type back in 2011, who was gushing about getting PHP to run on the new Nvidia Teslas, how amazingly fast websites will be!

Similar discussions also spring up around FPGAs again and again.

The more recent change in sentiment is a different one: the "graphics" origin of GPUs seem to have been lost to history. I have met people (plural) in recent years who thought (surprisingly long into the conversation) that I mean stable diffusion when talking about rendering pictures on a GPU.

Nowadays, the 'G' in GPU probably stands for GPGPU.

The closest thing that springs to mind: A friend of mine once drilled a hole into an empty Vodka bottle, stuck two wires in it (one at each end), a hose adapter for a vacuum pump, "sealed" the whole thing with a hot glue gun and hooked it up to several scavenged microwave oven transformers in series. Yes, the output was rectified and capacitors were also involved.

Here are some pictures:

https://chaos.social/@itsyndikat/107846783094589995

IIRC what he wanted to do was plasma etching.

I suppose rearranging the electrodes (using a piece of sheet metal with a hole in it; both fed through the neck of the bottle) and wrapping the sides of the bottle with 4 strips of aluminium foil could get you a beam and some crude deflection control. Not sure tough what you would coat the end of the bottle with, but I guess vacuum coating would be applicable.

If that sounds absolutely insane to you, I'd wholeheartedly agree.

At least to my ears, trying to build a CRT from first principles, combined with learning-by-doing and learning-EE-from-youtube-tutorials, sounds like a fast path to end up either dead or in a permanent care facility. Not exactly something I'd hand out in beginner-friendly kit form.

On a similar, nostalgic note, I recall boot screens for "Sinnlos 98" floating around, back when modifying the bootup logo was a thing.

Instead of futzing with wires on a breadboard you could simply designing a PCB up front, throw the design over the fence at JLC or PCBWay, insert coin, wait patiently at the mailbox, solder your scavenged Socket 7 onto the board.

The days of toner transfer and aquarium pumps are already long gone. Getting production quality, one-off, multi layer PCBs done as a hobbyist is dirt cheap these days, no government budgets required.

Both essentially built a DIY chip tester for a 286 and both built around a Harris 80C286.

If I understood it correctly, the goal behind this project seems simulating the rest of the PC, purely for the challenge and learning experience, documenting the process of building the chip tester (and getting mildly philosophical in the process).

The other project was more directly interested in the 286 itself, undocumented instructions, corner cases in segmentation behavior, instruction cycle timing, etc. and also trying to find out if there are any difference between the Harris and Intel variants.

[1] https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php?threads/286-cpu-experiment...

[2] https://github.com/dbalsom/arduinoX86

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47210824

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singularity_(operating_system)

Managed code, the properties of their C# derived programming language, static analysis and verification were used rather than hardware exception handling.

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47107529

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