[-] toddestan@lemm.ee 2 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago)

Yes. Well, sort of.

Different types of graphics cards would map themselves to different areas of memory, so it was possible to have more than one graphics card so long as the memory used by the graphics cards didn't overlap. Generally, this meant one of the cards was monochrome and the other could be something like VGA. DOS itself had no idea what to do with more than one graphics card. However, both graphics cards were mapped to to the processor's address space and DOS had no memory protection so applications had full access to the hardware and could talk directly and utilize both graphics cards.

The way I saw it used was with a very old computer controlled microscope. The monochrome card/monitor was actually the main screen that the computer booted up with (which was kind of funny with a 486), and this is where you controlled the microscope in their application. The VGA card was the secondary that was used to display images.

[-] toddestan@lemm.ee 8 points 1 day ago

That's who you are to all the people who aren't your boss but think they can tell you what to do anyway.

[-] toddestan@lemm.ee 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

They have the ability to turn off the web access now. My company recently did just that - if I try to access office.com on a personal device, my log in is blocked. Works fine on a company controlled device.

I'm not sure how they tell the difference since it's through the browser. But my guess would be something to do with the lack of all their security software they load onto company controlled computers that have hooks into everything.

[-] toddestan@lemm.ee 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

I would also never let corporate IT manage a device, e. g. a laptop connected to my private network at home.

That's pretty standard for working from home. I'm expected to use the company provided, managed laptop with my internet connection.

I figured so long as I made sure of things like there weren't any open file shares and things like routers and IP cameras were password protected there wasn't a whole they could see.

If I was really paranoid I could set up a VLAN or something.

[-] toddestan@lemm.ee 4 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

The reason we have timezones is because of the railroads. Before the railroads came in, every town would have its own time, typically set so noon is the time when the sun is highest in the sky. This really wasn't a problem, as back then it didn't really matter that the time was different in every little burg.

Then the railroads came in. They needed things running on a coordinated time table out of necessity, and having every town with its own time was unworkable. I'm sure the railroads would have loved running everything off of the same clock everywhere because that would be simple. But people were too used to noon being the middle of the day, so instead we got the compromise of having timezones so that the railroads can still run on a coordinated time table, but also so that noon is still approximately the middle of the day as people were used to.

So the solution is just go back to the 1800's and convince the railroads that timezones are actually silly and that they really should run everything based upon UTC. And if people want rail service to their town, they can just deal with not having 12PM being when the sun is highest in the sky.

[-] toddestan@lemm.ee 1 points 6 days ago

That's disappointing, as one of the advantages of SPDIF is no ground loops between the PC and the receiver/amp. Maybe that's not really as much of a problem now, but it solved that for me years ago and I've used it ever since.

Then again, I don't have a surround setup, simple stereo is good enough.

[-] toddestan@lemm.ee 28 points 1 week ago

The games that are going to be the hardest to preserve may end up being many of the mobile games that are popular now.

These games are usually installed through an app store, so if the app store pulls it, that could be it for new installations of the game unless the game can be extracted off an existing device. And even if you manage to extract the game off of a device, in order to get it onto another mobile device will likely require some way to side load it.

Many of these games also depend on a server so once the server is turned off that's another way the game to die.

The mobile devices these games run on aren't built for the long term either. They are essentially disposable devices meant to last a few years and then be tossed. They aren't built to be serviced or repaired. Eventually the batteries will die, and while you can replace the battery, there's no standardization of battery packs and eventually replacement batteries won't be available either.

Even if you can get an old mobile device going, there's no guarantee that you'll actually be able to do anything with it, because the device itself may depend on some remote server just to function that could someday be shut off. There's already old phones today that if you factory reset them, it effectively bricks them since they need to contact some activation server as part of the initial setup process and that server is long gone.

Of course, many people may ask - who cares? Perhaps so, but I'd bet a lot of people said the same thing about the old Atari and Nintendo and Sega and MS-DOS games that were popular years ago and are still popular today.

It's kind of interesting that pretty much all the games I played as a kid are still accessible to me today - in many cases the original game is still playable on the original, still functional, hardware. But a lot of kids today growing up today playing mobile games on a phone or a tablet, when they are my age, could very well have no way to ever experience those games again that they grew up with as kids.

[-] toddestan@lemm.ee 29 points 2 months ago

When the US retired the F4, a number of the planes were converted into target drones. Probably the bigger hurdle would be to get these planes airworthy again.

[-] toddestan@lemm.ee 33 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

That reminds me back when some time ago, I was tired of dealing with sketchy, and often broken, websites and programs for downloading videos from Youtube. I figured these sorts of programs must be doing something along the lines of downloading the Youtube page, parsing through the massive pile of HTML and Javascript to find the stream, and then saving that to a video file. That seemed like something I could do myself with Python, so I set out to see if I could figure out how to do it.

A few minutes and a couple of web searches later, I discovered that someone else had figured that all out already and I just needed to do "pip install pytube".

[-] toddestan@lemm.ee 13 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

I did the opposite. After one of the big updates, Windows 10 decided it was no longer going to work with the Vista-era drivers for an old Core 2 Duo laptop. To be fair to Microsoft, was I pretty impressed when I initially installed Windows 10 and it accepted those ancient drivers without any complaints on a laptop that was 10 years old at that time.

So I instead installed Manjaro and everything worked just fine.

[-] toddestan@lemm.ee 22 points 5 months ago

I'd say the same thing about "Sunshine" and "Interstellar".

Some movies I might consider including, in no particular order:

  • Moon (2009)
  • 2010: The Year We Make Contact (1984)
  • Silent Running (1972)
[-] toddestan@lemm.ee 13 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Safari is holding back the web with their old, quirky, outdated engine. However, as Safari's engine is the only option for iOS, most web developers can't afford to ignore Safari because they can't ignore the iPhone. So it's IE all over again - an old, outdated browser that everyone nevertheless has to support as a significant portion of the users are using it. In some ways it's even worse, as iPhone users don't have any choice due to Apple's restrictions, but even in the darkest days of IE's stranglehold on the web Microsoft never restricted what browsers you could install on Windows.

view more: next ›

toddestan

joined 11 months ago