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I agree, and for the only thing that I'll want to add to this, please let me quote myself, from correspondence with Ed Jaffe on Twitter (~2018):

Does anyone here use the SysV binary compat layer? I know it exists, but I don't know if anyone here uses it for anything.

There are many interesting discussion points here. First, while it is true that the "instruction set architecture" of the Z series is not Power, the actual CPU chip in a Z is actually very closely related to the highest-end PowerPC chips. The two...

Eh, as long as it's paid for I don't think the vending machine should care about quantity purchased if it's in stock :p Yeah 100 tacos might sound odd, until it's a fun late night in a packed car with a credit card; suddenly it's a quick idea...

Excuse me, but my ZX Spectrum had an excellent keyboard! Please see All countries are different, tell me a fact about your country #113

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple–FBI_encryption_dispute

Someone saw what is done in China, and now Russia, and started yelling for the same. Because, security agencies/police/... can't, and have never been able to, work without the tools and the right to look at everything you do. (Ok, that is over...

So now mother apple is all knowing and all seeing...hmmm... True security is not having to trust ANY 3rd party entity.

It is not because I typed editors instead of www. Finger trouble. My error. The fact remains that the libreoffice package has been absent for weeks, and the iridium browser has joined the list of absentees. The FreshPorts details for...

It was not. The great advantage of Unix in today's world is that it happened to be there at the right time, when PCs became affordable. Although there were operating systems "early enough" with V10 UNIX and – later – Plan 9, which took something...

It's been discussed before here. I consider AI, as used in your example, to be a search engine. It helps gather facts and non-facts from sources already on the internet into one digestible document. Just like any internet search, these facts must...

That's because it is www/iridium.

The time I would need to prompt a meaningful answer out of a chatbot (with my Kagi subscription I could now use some of them virtually for free), I believe I can invest much more meaningfully by spending 2-3 minutes searching the web for the...

It depends. Apple has now proven several times that they do not give in to governments' surveillance demands. Nevertheless, most of the data is, of course, on my own servers; in iCloud, I only store completely insignificant things.

I use them in the same way I would use any search engine. They might point me in the right direction but I have to verify everything they point me to in the same way I would handle a Google search.

One of the many, indeed. There are reasons why I upgraded to an iPhone six years ago.

Apple recently rejected a UK gov request to give them a backdoor into icloud https://www.idnfinancials.com/news/56021/apple-rejects-uk-request-to-open-icloud-backdoor-access

The "Amy" was a game changer. I have seen a lot of amazing innovations on Amiga over the years.

What I (being from Atari tribe) always appreciated about Amiga WSs is how upgradable they were. For example, 2000 could be used comfortably even in the late '90s if it had few consecutive upgrades. That's rare for any other machine that I know...

WhatsApp has never been a secure messenger anyway. According to that link, there is no mandatory governmental software involved: "As per its first version, all messaging software providers would be required to perform indiscriminate scanning of...

I still read usenet with slrn. There's still some people talking on there. Although nothing like it used to be

That's what you're paying for .... zero downtime...

There is an interesting video (from ~9 years ago) on SHARE YT about young guy Connor Krukosky who bought IBM z890 for ~ $250 from university auction ]View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45X4VP8CGtk[/media]

Yeah, no, won't happen. Can I see the source for this claim? Because, while the whole EU surveillance story (Britain leaving the EU was a good thing!) is not entirely new to me, this additional rule is.

Z actually uses its own architecture that is not POWER. Also, I think they (at least the single-frame versions) are small and cheap enough to count as a mini. It is the difference between Ludicrously expensive and Ludicrously expensive + 1 ;)

Ah, could be, I may be mixing it up with rs/6k which do use POWER. I actually thought the Z cores were based on the power architecture too, or perhaps they used to be, but I'm no expert on this stuff. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Z Their...

As the comments on the video said, it had a bit of unexpected dark poetry. Not quite what I'd call uplifting.

In the US, at least, it's a common way to make a general reference to your work. In the same way a typical bash environment variable uses $ALLCAPS, it's just referring to one's job, without specifically mentioning the job. For example, maybe...

I think you don't understand how encryption works. Try scanning encrypted stuff on a client.

I remain highly satisfied with Usenet and IRC and will wait and see what happens, while the Web 2.0 old-timers are still fighting amongst themselves over which form of "IRC with pictures" will truly be the definitive one. In any case, Reddit has...

Erm... Z is massively multi-core mainframes nowadays. Not a mini, you're thinking of DEC or HP. There are people who collect and rebuild old mainframes. Yeah you need a lot of wad to buy one. You can check out what Dave Jones made of this old...

Z/Architecture is Mainframe, nothing mini nor midrange about them. If you want your own mainframe, you can do it like Moshix did in this video, stick S/370 control panel sticker on Rpi case, install emulators/hercules, use TK5 for MVS, or if you...

I have been waiting for the packages for 13.5-RELEASE to settle, with editors/libreoffice not being available for several weeks Sadly, things are getting worse, with editors/iridium now disappearing: [gunsynd.176] $ uname -r 13.5-RELEASE...

We had more ability to travel to the West, so it was easy to smuggle in computers, few companies had license deals with DEC and Honeywell-Bull, and we were better at stealing – even our school computer TIM011 was actually copy of Steve Ciarcia's...

Are you getting useful things out of LLMs (AI chatbots)? I spent some time making a serious run with both web-based (ChatGPT and Claude via Github copilot) and local ones (ollma). The main reason is that they do things that I wouldn't have...

well most of the warez here came from ex Yugoslavia. for ST and PC. ex YU was ages ahead of us in home computing.

https://arstechnica.com/google/2025/09/in-court-filing-google-concedes-the-open-web-is-in-rapid-decline/ I consider classic forums like this one a part of the open internet. It is indexable by search engines, visible to everybody without login...

There is a difference? :-/ 🤣

Ah well, a privateer had a license from the king to go and attack spanish gold galleons sailing back from the mines in south america, capture the gold, give a share to the king and keep the rest. Whereas a pirate like 'blackbeard' was completely...

Oh I remember them, no worries. And my kids are indeed out tonight. But - do you have anything better? Then, please show.

A huge one! Privateer pays share of his loot to the Crown (Communist Party in my case), therefore considered legal, and Pirates keep all loot for themselves, so therefore illegal and criminal.

The PS/2 was actually a baby compared to the larger machines like the AS/400 or RS/6K's. They don't make 'em like that any more! 😅 You see, that's quite a clever and humorous advert. The machine sits quietly in the corner, doing it's work...

I don't know the details-I just know everybody (but me) was using a black copy of AutoCAD at my U.

well in eastern europe software was all free back then. the copyright law was unclear and mostly not enforced until mid 90 or something i used to crack dongle protected software "on contract". mostly engineering stuff which was not popular on the...

I started my first registered business at age of 15 ('85), selling software, games and manuals for ZX Spectrum. Since there was no law to prevent "illegal" copying of foreign software, and I was paying my due to the state, I considered myself to...

AFAIK AutoCAD was dongle protected from v2.1, and (at least here, in Serbia) every professional had to include their AutoCAD sn on the plotted drawing if wanted it legally accepted. But there were ways around that, and many used same serial on...

I'll just drop this here... View: https://youtu.be/sCfAk7E1E4g?si=MZmk4i_KYmVwLDS2 Have fun.

Had some time to test REAPER and it runs perfectly. Just follow the previous steps to get the audio system and the compat mode fully set up, and then install REAPER from within the chroot. It needs one additional package: chroot /compat/linux...

You got to stop thinking of it as a 'computer' and start thinking of it as a business machine... Trust me the hardware on that generation was top notch, like the AS/400's and the RS/6000's. Completely different grade from the ST or amiga. And...