20 years ago:

“Hey I’ve got a great idea, let’s take all these little local decentralized things and put them all onto one centralized massive thing that needs 99.99999% uptime or the world’s fucked. Nothing will go wrong.”

Reminds me, back in like, 2007, Nine Inch Nails did a promotion for their new album where they left “mystery” USB drives with media from the “future”, themed from album, in public areas at their shows. People couldn’t wait to find them and jam them into their computers to piece the story all together.

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Sounds like Gnome.

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I remember the hardware situation being very fucked, due to driver authors not updating their shit in time and people trying to get their older stuff working which worked fine under XP, but was incompatible with Vista’s new driver model. It took a couple years until the release of 7 for most of those issues to get ironed out.

KDE because I have 64GB and I don’t care about memory usage and I like using a computer that looks like it’s from the 2010s at least.

Printing debug messages didn’t do much for me for this one time where a class was overflowing a buffer right in the constructor, and everything was fine creating an instance of it, passing it around, etc., until I actually go to use one of its methods later on in the program and it crashes. It was C++ on an ESP32 and I had to decode the stack trace and everything to find it, took me hours because I had to learn what even to do with a stack trace. The Espressif forums kinda suck balls, they are a ghost town.

For higher throughput in middle age, I recommend Edge-ing every so often, and then going back to a real browser.

On Windows CE.

Smoothwall. I used to run it a lot back in the early 2000s for personal use and even helped set up a couple small businesses with it but I don’t hear of anyone else using it these days, people seem to love openwrt and pfsense more.

It was great for just taking any old x86 machine and making a powerful, fully featured firewall/router out of it, including a VPN server, all through a web interface. Nowadays that’s boring shit but in 2002 it was pretty cool.

DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS

Are we just going to let Ballmer walk?

Year 2070: A young man in a dirty, run down, four mile tall high-rise reaching into the smog and covered in holographic ads and QR code graffiti lays down and plugs his newly upgraded gaming system into the port in the back of his head, closes his eyes, and enters the virtual realm for some much needed reality escape. He tests his hardware by running glxgears. The toothed discs appear before him in the empty void, spinning smoothly and silently, assuring him that in a few moments, he can imagine a different life, if only for just a few hours.

How do I type something? There’s a cursor but keyboard input doesn’t work for me. You oughtta make it do some dummy commands for fun, or better yet, some real ones in a sandbox, that’d be neat, for fun user interactivity. Otherwise, looks slick. Good job.

Debian user here, something wrong with getting the maximum lifespan you can out of devices and keeping them out of landfills?

Before I upgraded last year, I was still using an i7 from 2010 with 8GB RAM and a 1 TB mechanical spinning drive. I jumped to a 12 core socket AM5 Ryzen 9 with 64GB RAM and a 4TB SSD. When I upgrade, I do it all at once and make sure it can last and actually do use the machine for a decade or more. The one before the i7 (which is now a hand-me-down Minecraft box for my kid) was an Athlon XP from 2002 (still got that one in the basement, any retro collectors wanna clean it out for me? Case comes with big Quake and Nine Inch Nails logo stickers on the front applied by yours truly in my edgier days lol). In the span of 30 years I will have owned exactly three daily driver PCs.

I am totally this meme. My vehicles seem to follow the same pattern as well. Jumping from a tape deck to a touchscreen was fun.

AliExpress is great if you’re running like a small Etsy shop or something with stuff you make and you need like 250 metal clasps for $20. Or 3000 electromechanical relays to build a relay CPU. They have some of the most random shit in bulk.

That will match my authentic late 1800s green wallpaper perfectly.

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I’m too old to be nostalgic for skeuomorphism. But a retina-burning amber monochrome monitor, text mode, with menus and UIs built out of ASCII graphics, or at best, 640 x 480 CPU-driven graphics modes? Now you’re talking.

From my perspective, the skeuomorphic era of the early-late 2000s is still “modern”.