duncesplayed

@duncesplayed@lemmy.one

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨After 48 years, Zilog is killing the classic standalone Z80 microprocessor chip⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The article mentions they’ll continue making the eZ80. If you’re in the middle of making a PCB around the Z80, you’ll just have to change the pins, I guess.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What do you use to mount encrypted drives on boot?⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I used to run a TFTP server on my router that held the decryption keys. As soon as a machine got far enough in the boot sequence to get network access, it would pull the decryption keys from the router. That way a thief would have to steal the router along with the computer, and have the router running when booting up the computer. It works wirelessly, too!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Gen Z is hopping on to some ... worrying trends⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Here’s the source for it. Since this is PCM, you should quote the bottom part of that page, too, for maximum lulz. 7% of Biden voters vs 4% of Trump voters. 10% registered Democrats vs 6% Republicans. 14% urban vs 3% rural.

  Clearly the problem is young, urban Democrats.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Can I use two different drives?⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  To the best of my knowledge, this “drives from the same batch fail at around the same time” folk wisdom has never been demonstrated in statistical studies. But, I mean, it’s certainly not going to do any harm.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Beavers - a community to show off your cutest and funniest SFW beavers⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Thank you!!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Beavers - a community to show off your cutest and funniest SFW beavers⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Subscribed! My daughter is super into beavers. Though I don’t want to get into a conversation about what “fucking” means yet, so maybe I’ll be selective which posts I show her.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨US judge rules: if you can't prove damages, car-makers can continue to intercept and record customers' mobile phone activity.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  The scary thing? Define “new”. This judgment is from a lawsuit in 2014. So any car made in at least the last 9 years is doing this. Maybe newer cars are doing even worse things.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Let's take a quick look at how software was built in the MS-DOS era: Borland Pascal 7.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Yup, mine, too. I don’t remember which version it was, but I’m pretty sure it was still “Turbo” (not “Borland”) Pascal, in the late 1990s. Grade 10 computer science was taught on Macintosh QuickBasic and then grades 11 and 12 were “real” programming in Turbo Pascal.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨‘People have no idea’: How smart devices spy on us and reveal information about our homes⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  I, too, am curious if there’s an advertising bubble. I hope so.

  I’ve noticed something about my wife, though. She’s not a “mindless capitalist zombie with the sole goal of owning more stuff”, but she does pay attention to advertising a lot. We need more diapers? Well, it just so happens there’s some new startup app that’s advertising a free first month, so if she signs up for that up, we could get free diapers, and we’d only have to keep the membership for another two months, and they have deals on peanut butter, and we’d get access to their free streaming service and they have Disney, so it’s probably worth it overall.

  And so it goes, with a million of these deals. The thing is, each “deal” is so complicated that it’s extremely difficult to know which ones we’re actually saving money on. The cynical would say “you’re never saving money: everything’s rigged”, but that’s clearly not true. Some of these deals clearly do work out for us (and some of them cause the startup to immediately go bankrupt). But most of them aren’t clearly better or worse for us: we’d have to spend several hours going through hypothetical scenarios to do the full CBA, which we don’t do.

  I do wonder, on balance, how much it’s costing us. I also wonder how many of these deals are specifically (personally) targeted at my wife because they know what she needs and what her habits are.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The 8-bit Guy - My Dream Computer is Finally on Sale! (Commander X16 update)⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  If you want a good CPU design with a 16-bit address space, take a look at the PDP-11.

  Which was used in home computers, just not in the west

  I agree with you, though. I’m kind of the prime market for this from an educational standpoint. My oldest kid has just learned to read to write (kind of). She’s fascinated by computers. She’s only played retrogames (happily) thus far, so she wouldn’t be put off by the 8-bit era’s graphics or sound.

  But even so…what would I be hoping to teach her with this? How to work around the idiocies of the 6502? That life is full of unnecessary obstacles and frustration? I’m kind of meh on it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It seems Gen Z is just fine with parents knowing where they are all the time⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Article reads as propaganda

  More like advertising. I’d put down a pretty big bet that Life360 sponsored this article and probably wrote a fair chunk of the copy, too.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It seems Gen Z is just fine with parents knowing where they are all the time⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Not quite. By the most common definitions, they’re born between 1997 and 2012, so 10-26.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Chickens for KFC⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  The usual Islamic flag/Jihadist flag is white-on-black.

  The Taliban flag is black-on-white and I haven’t seen any other group use the same black-on-white flag that the Taliban uses.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨People really need to stop listening to the two idiots in this war. Especially the media...⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Who are “the two idiots” here? Kylie Jenner and Mia Khalifa?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Political Compass Fetishes⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  sex positions besides missionary

  Lol good one. Next you’ll try and tell me women can have orgasms.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Who knew Stirner was a racist?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  I hadn’t heard of it, but apparently it was briefly used as a racial slur? etymonline.com says:

  The derogatory racial sense of “black person” is attested from 1945, perhaps from the notion of dark skin being difficult to see at night. Black pilots trained at Tuskegee Institute during World War II called themselves the Spookwaffe.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  You’re not wrong, but there’s a kind of irony in it when you talk about ending humanity because of it. There’s a lot to hate about humanity if you have humanity and have human values. There’s nothing objectively wrong about being cruel or destructive or dishonest or greedy or abusive or murderous and I imagine most hypothetical alien species would look at those things and say “what’s wrong with any of that?”

  But because humans evolved as social creatures and our survival depended upon trusting one another, we’re constantly trying to judge ourselves against values that can’t actually be met. So we look at ourselves and say we’re a really horrible species, but that statement only makes sense because ironically we’re a really glorious species that’s fabricated these completely irrational things like love and compassion and empathy and honesty and sacrifice that no other species has (though many other social species do have bits and pieces of them).

  And we’ll forever hate ourselves for not being able to live up to our own values.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Let's peek at the arcane ways of MS-DOS memory management.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Not all of these issues have disappeared, either. Anyone remember this headline from a couple years ago? The bottom 1MiB of memory space on x86 is just a minefield. It’s impossible (like literally impossible) in general to know if certain parts of the address space are actual memory or are some weird part of your motherboard chipset or some other hardware. Windows I think still goes through the “wankery” of depending on chipset drivers to (accurately) know which parts of memory are actual memory.

  Thankfully the 16-bit (though actually 20-bit but actually kind of more sometimes kind of but not totally) pains have all gone away. The move to flat 32-bit address spaces was a godsend.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[META] What are the demographics of this community?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  RIP Bette Stephenson. In the same way that Al Gore invented the Internet, Bette Stephenson invented the ICON. She was a very stubborn politician who would not tolerate anything other than complete success from the project. Passed away 3 years ago.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[META] What are the demographics of this community?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  I always coveted the Tandy 1000, but I never got one. Which one did you have?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are your defining memories of computing in the old days?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  The #1 defining moment for me has to be Second Reality by Future Crew. We got it an a local BBS not too long after it was released. It was kind of like the birth of a new era, like “ahh so this is what PCs are actually capable of”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[META] What are the demographics of this community?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  these games are guaranteed to not have any in-app purchases or ads

  That’s a big plus. I also like that they have to use the keyboard, since the mouse can be a bit tricky when you’re young.

  I had no idea there was a Richard Scarry game! They love the books, so maybe I should give it a shot. (Though it does look pretty mouse-heavy)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[META] What are the demographics of this community?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Another Oregan Trail generation here.

  I’m curious about what’s going to happen with Gen Alpha. Any other moms and dads here exposing their kids to retrotech? I have two little ones that I’ve made a DOSBox installation for (Mixed-Up Mother Goose and Donald Duck’s Playground are their favourites). I do wonder how they’re going to think about old tech when they’re older. I haven’t told them that it’s “old” or “retro” yet, so they just think they’re normal fun games.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Let's talk about the curious and ingenious DriveSpace, an MS-DOS program promising to double the available disk space.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s a bit more complicated than that. Windows 95 used MSDOS to boot, but once it was booted, it completely removed any trace of MSDOS and replaced it with its own MSDOS subsystem. It’s more like MSDOS was a shell on top of Win95, but MSDOS was required to get the kernel loaded.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Threads' New Terms and Conditions Affects the Fediverse⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s come up in interesting cases. I can’t remember which package it was, but there was one package that was distributed under the humourous “Don’t Be Evil License”, where you could “use this software for anything that’s not evil” or something like that. This technically does not qualify as free software (freedom 0 must allow anyone to use it for evil), so Red Hat (I think it was?) had to get their lawyers to contact the developer and get him to give them an exemption to the licence, just in case one of their users used it for evil.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Threads' New Terms and Conditions Affects the Fediverse⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Indeed. Licensing usage of something is antithetical to free software culture anyway. It would violate the Free Software Foundation’s Freedom Zero, that you should never have to accept a licence to use something. (This is why free software cannot ever, by definition, have a EULA, for instance)