OCTAGRAM's comments

Locked bootloader was making sense when PC was a huge investment, and the whole household was sharing it. Windows XP introduced fast account switching. And Windows still has it, but do you remember when was the last time you left your session active locked out and allowed someone else to log in to the same PC? Is there any other user at all on your current home PC? PC was standing for personal computer long before it was, but then it became. We don't share PC anymore in average.

Not only we don't share PC anymore, but PCs started to share us. We possess several PCs per single person, and we needed Dropbox to manage files on multiple PCs. Dropbox can be perceived as second turning point in time, and it was more than decade ago. Now it's one goal = one device era. We buy device and we sincerely don't intend to install anything else on it. We don't risk our data using NTFS shrinking tools to make spare room for another filesystem. We don't dual boot losing access to programs in another partition. There are ways to mount NTFS in other OS and vice versa, so documents may stay accessible, but programs are not runnable. This is now ridiculous. We just buy two, three, whatever devices and have all programs runnable simultaneously.

If we need something from another OS, we'll precisely buy compatible hardware without locked bootloaders or any other possible obstacle which are numerous. To name a few.

For DOS retrogaming we need DOS ISA DMA sound, and we pick PC with ISA slot and making sure motherboard chipset has DMA on ISA, which is not true on latest chipsets. For another DOS retrogaming option we consider VDMSound, but last OS to support it was Windows XP, and we choose hardware that is Windows XP compatible. Most likely UEFI-only boot will be a problem for Windows XP. For Mavericks Forever we are not going to look for random incompatible Mac. That is going to be either real compatible Mac selected from known list, or else compatible Hackintosh. On Hackintosh there was a big problem with software upgrade, but there will be no upgrades for Mavericks Forever. Tim Cook drives company away in direction we don't appreciate, and Mavericks Forever stays forever the same version.

Nowadays people are not using OS anyway. Nowadays people are using browser. I wish I could drag and drop documents in Mavericks Forever like I did in 2007. But document is now likely to be draw io, rectangular embedding for browser that cannot support drag and drop outside its rectange. And so messenger is also rectangular embedding for browser, not respecting Mac OS X multi-window paradigm, not supporting previously established gestures. In 2007 I thought that Qt programs on Mac were ugly. Those happy days I have not seen Electron yet.

People I know often report that they got rid from "dust collector", the PC. They are now all-Android. As time goes by, it is harder and harder to find someone with PC. So whatever Microsoft preinstalls or bootlocks on PCs, it goes to people less and less.

It does not behave identically.

I have MultiWAN on OPNsense. My PC IP is always 192.168.0.12. My router decides which upstream it should go. If I go full IPv6, router should derive double IPv6 from both WANs and if main upstream goes down, stop advertising IPv6 from main upstream. Or stop advertising gateway. I don't know what is the right IPv6 way of doing MultiWAN.

Not only PC may change IP, but also servers. Legacy IPv4 DNS can be extended to IPv6, but that mechanical action is not flexible enough. With IPv6 we need to be able to mass replace IPv6 /64 prefix leaving all suffixes intact. We probably need /64 prefix alias system. Software is not prepared for this. In IPv4 SNAT and DNAT were being these "aliases". If NAT is not an option anymore, then DNS must step in.

For many server software it just not possible to listen on multiple IPv6 address. Last time I tried MySQL, it just could not listen on multiple addresses. I could not make it listen on IPv4 and IPv6, specifying two addresses. MySQL server wanted just one address. This address could be [::], which means all interfaces and all protocols. And Linux implements some stupid hack to accept IPv4 connections to IPv6 socket. And Windows Vista also adopted this brainrot. But this is all wrong. Servers have to learn to listen to multiple IPs. This is normal. And for good IPv6 servers should learn to not only listen on multiple IPs, most wanted multiple IPv6, but also rebind listeners on the fly. If I got disconnected from ISP, reconnected by DHCPv6, and ISP assigned another IPv6 prefix, then DynDNS should update all my zones to new /64 prefix, and all servers in my network should rebind listeners.

Or else we may abandon all that TRUE IPv6 philosophy and do SNAT in DNAT in IPv6 just like in IPv4, but with wider address space. But then again, software (another software) is not quite ready for this. Software is expecting public IPv6 address to be just reachable. And private IPv6 address to be just unreachable.

Ada compiler does not force to use main

We used to default

Yeah. Advanced Direct Connect p2p is using TIGER Tree Hash. Gnutella2 p2p is using TIGER Tree Hash. There is BitTorrent format extension to include per-file TTH, implemented by EAD TorrentBuild. For best performance we should also get rid of pointless per-block hashes in torrent files.

TTH is universal for p2p, and yet developers choose another hashes, making their tools not ready for p2p.

My lovely Mercurial is unfortunately also not ready for p2p

git config --global init.defaultBranch default

Because Mercurial is using default as default, and if we have to resort to worse SCMs, let them behave like Mercurial anyway

Mercurial uses "default" as the default branch since the inception

I have updated and tried to run something. There are apparently three-chunk ids and two-chunk ids. two-chunk ids work. Three-chunk ids don't.

atdr.meo.ws/archiveteam/reddit-grab

I cannot install this one to Proxmox VE, for instance

UPD. Query tag fails, but fetch is successful if I write "latest" tag

I have noticed author uses values 0-255 for shades of grey. When 0-255 range is used, this is usually nonlinear scale with average gamma 2.2. And de facto there is a standard function that maps 0-31 to linear function and the rest to power 2.4. Average power 2.2. Checkmate black 0 and white 255 is equavalent to uniform grey shade 185 or 186 as opposed to 127 or 128. Proper calculations should be done in linear space, and 16 bits per channel is desired at least.

Sounds like SkyNet had a good time shopping for military upgrades on Black Friday and Cyber Monday

There was Cappucino by ex-Apple employees, and actual Apple devs had SproutCore. So where did they go? Why some unknown libraries?

How dare you shut down such a great operating system?

There is COM-like ARC in Free Pascal

Patriots of Pascal language family are expected to prefer Oxygene over C#

Also corrected in Ada: https://annexi-strayline.com/blog/posts/1

Ada is more serious than Pascal. There is Ada-to-C(++) translator called AdaMagic. It is limited to Ada 95, but Ada was ahead of time and so 95 is fine. On most platforms GCC is available, and Ada is the most interesting language in GCC, but just in case there is AdaMagic.

There was unloved informatics in school and loved informatics at home. Unloved informatics consisted of graph flow optimizations. Loved informatics consisted of EGA programming and IRQ interrupt handling for multiple keypress detection and other stuff. Both informatics were in Turbo Pascal, but in sport olympiads going to interrupts or assembler was prohibited. Not that it was going to help, but… when olympiads end, I was going those doors again, and others did not. For others my loved informatics was door remaining shut.

20 years later it is an excercize to find a device where loved EGA programming tricks work. Only unloved informatics remained

It was called CLX, forms were stored in *.xfm, and it was based on Qt

Such recallings are incomplete without fake TUIs. TUI that are seemingly text, but in graphics mode. Norton Utilities were running in text mode with altered fonts and had nice UI elements. Acronis OS Selector 5 could run in multitude of different modes: ordinary text mode with pseudographics; Norton Utilities-alike text mode with altered fonts; VGA graphics mode; SVGA graphics mode. But whatever mode, it was drawing UI in a grid. Mouse cursor was the only thing not bound to grind, but when windows were dragged by mouse, they were jumping by discrete steps, staying grid aligned at all times. I was digging in. They are Watcom C++ binaries, and Watcom can remote debug them over COM port. No sources, of course, but I can trace CPU and watch memory. So far I know that it indeed has a concept of text buffer, and each cell is 4 bytes. These bytes encode background glyphs and colors. Text can be over window title, so window title skin is encoded in background glyph. Text can be over tab title. Text can be over button. And there are icons of operating systems in the list. And there are icons on toolbar buttons.

Acronis OS Selector 5 features not much UI. There is FDISK, advanced enough for its time. It can resize FAT partitions, and there is UI for adjusting size and other stuff. There is HTML-based help system with hyperlinks. And there is some editor for AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS. Acronis OS Selector 5 is about switching OSes, and specific DOS or Windows 9x boot configurations are also "OSes", so editing of boot files is helpful. But apart from that there is almost nothing to do in this OS Selector.

I wish something more daily would be coded in such UI, but nope. And Acronis dropped that style. I don't know what happened with Selector 6 and 7, but it's like 8 is coming right after 5, and 8 UI is not grid-aligned anymore.

This was a nice trick to protect text from copying. For instance, student assignments. Students could still use digital camera on CRT display, but 20 years ago cameras were costly and students did not have them. And typing text from scratch was a tedious job. So online served assignments were not shared too fast.