flyinghamster

It almost reminds me of the 2010s era US market, when both AT&T and T-Mobile passed off their 3G coverage as "4G" even though it wasn't. If you had a suitable phone and got onto a T-Mobile tower that supported DC-HSPA (dual carrier) it was 4G-ish, but it certainly wasn't LTE.

I'm just glad we don't have the GSM vs. CDMA games from LTE onwards. Of course, that doesn't guarantee your phone supports a given carrier's frequencies.

I'm far less ambitious, but I ripped my entire 100+-disc collection to FLAC years ago. I've set up a mutant shell script/Makefile hybrid that can transcode the entire FLAC tree to whatever format du jour makes sense (Opus these days), while doing it all in parallel and using all cores (really all but one to keep the system responsive). Album art in the FLACs gets carried over along with tags.

On the LAN, the FLACs just sit in an NFS share, while on the phone, Foobar2000 works nicely with the Opus files.

After ten years of Spotify subscriptions, you own nothing. Put that $12.99 or more per month into discs instead, and you'd have quite a nice music collection that's still yours ten years later.

In the Chicago area you had options ranging from fully-metered to unlimited throughout the metro area. In the 1990s, as more people got online, the unlimited plans went away, and the best you got was that calls within eight miles were flat-rate but pay-per-call.

> Um, we had phones before mobile phones.

True, but back in the day one had to pay for every call, sometimes at per-minute rates: always so for long distance, and in some areas even for local calls. Quite a contrast to today's unlimited-minutes cellular plans (which likely get used little enough that the providers have no trouble offering them).

A key factor in the development of dialup BBS systems in the US was that local calls were usually at least flat-rate, with unlimited service available here and there.

Bringing it back to the topic at hand, back then I recall a number of social events revolving around local BBSes in Champaign-Urbana, and Fidonet's Net 115 in the Chicago area. All that sort of thing vaporized pretty quickly once the internet opened up.

Even scarier: my dad, who has been actually been getting good advice about his blood pressure issues (hair-trigger too low with his meds). It's at least coming up with citations from Cleveland Clinic and such, but still, it scares me, even if he has a good sense of how to ask it questions.

It could be an FPGA. Given enough gates, and the know-how to program them, you can make an FPGA emulate anything. Speed and efficiency could be better or worse, but if you're targeting old hardware, better is likely.

Please don't, or more specifically, don't force this on me. I'm trying to get work done, and the last thing I need is to learn an entire new desktop paradigm because CADT. As it is, any time I'm forced to interact with GNOME 3 I want to rip my eyeballs out. If I'm setting up a desktop, Cinnamon for fat systems or XFCE for lean ones do wonders for my sanity.

The one thing I lamented about the Apple II Plus (vs. the original with Integer BASIC) was that to make room for autostart, they had to rip out the mini-assembler in the Monitor ROM. That was the closest thing I ever saw to an assembly-language REPL before this. At least they were able to keep the disassembler.

Techbros just can't grasp that "No" doesn't mean "Later." It's not exclusive to Apple by any means. Android update incoming? Your choices are "yes" or "later."

I'd have to say that gcc is the unsung hero of FOSS. If you wanted compilers on your shiny new commercial-UNIX box, you either had to fork out $$$ or find a way to get the GNU toolchain into place. Even on PCs compilers tended to cost a lot, with Borland being a shining exception.

Somewhere, I still have a Red Hat 5 retail CD. I'm not sure, but I might have bought it at Borders Books rather than a computer shop. I know I bought a few CD-ROM collections at the bookstore.

> My favorite anecdote exemplifying my opinion about Solaris at the time: you log into the console of your Sun workstation, running SunOS, with your Sun keyboard plugged in, and press backspace. It echoes ^H back to you. They couldn’t even figure out how to configure their own keyboards correctly out of the box.

That's really an old-school UNIX convention that should have died with the move from teletypes to CRT terminals. The default behavior was that ERASE was # and KILL was @ (rather than backspace and Ctrl-C). It was typical for these to get set properly on logging in.

It's absolutely crazy to realize that even a Pi 400 running from MicroSD would smoke classic workstations of yesteryear, and yet by today's standards it's slow.