tosti

Claude, when the machines broke.

    > it wasn’t called a computer then, because the word “computer” back then meant big mainframe systems that ran batch calculations

PDP being a minicomputer (at the time), it could do that too and cheaper. What I heard the reason for this was to circumvent procurement restrictions. The word "computer" meant a high level of scrutiny, but obviously a "Programmable Data Processor" isn't a computer because it doesn't have the word "computer" in it (duh). So just a sales / marketing trick.

The whole point of NetBSD is that it's portable. The intel architecture is just one of many (albeit the most dominant one).

As a matter of fact, I've not been using it for a long time. I think the difference is that I value every OS on their own. For instance, I don't expect it to run 3D games well so I'll not try to do that. The minimum I want from an OS is compatibility with the CPU and basic peripherals such as a serial port and at least a realtek NIC, multitasking, IPv6, a reasonable shell (korn is good enough), stability, online help (not online as in the Internet, but retreivable interactively, from the shell), reasonably sane defaults, good utilities and probably a few others I forget to mention.

All of the BSDs fit that definition. Though what I'm actually using depends on what I want. Nothing beats openBSD in the firewall/network appliance department. Nothing beats Linux in the speedy performance department.

I'm sure if NetBSD was your first OS, you'd have much fewer problems with it. It's a great OS for learning. The manual pages go in great depth to explain what to do and how. If you want it to replace a proprietary OS on your latest shiny brand new computing device, good luck with that. Can't really blame the OS for that, they weren't invited.

Picard out.

That's the thing. They know it was built poorly and can't handle pretty much anything, so they don't trust the hardware and get a few extra days off as an added convenience.

    > more GNU-oriented userspace, preferring e.g. GNU make over BSD make

How are you going to build that kernel?

IDK what went wrong. Last time I installed netBSD (a year ago or so), it was a breeze. I loved it and the manual pages were top notch. It felt like what Debian could've been if systemd didn't exist.

The first time I installed netBSD was almost 20 years ago and it worked even back then, but it was rather limited. IIRC they were (one of) the first to have Xen, that was pretty cool imho.

Not just when computers fail. When union negotiations fail, when it's too cold, when it's too hot, when it snows, when nature drops a leaf on the railroad tracks, or whenever they come up with a new excuse.

In the unless-you-bring-the-development-machine-along-with-it kind of way.

There's no text/binary difference. The I/O streams are effectively always in binary mode.

Bring back the auth.warn paper trail!

Browsers already accept PDF. TeX files aren't portable.

They don't know that. It's the hypocracy of not using their service to infringe on someone elses copyright. The only way Compaq could legally have a PC BIOS is by having one team reverse engineer the original and describe what it does and another team reimplement it.

Yes, it's completely hypocritical because of how LLMs are built. That doesn't change the fact that if you're offering a service online, you'd try to prevent abuse in order not to be held liable.

That's awful on multiple levels. Software in use should be easy to grab from the SAN shelf, and multi-terabyte was impressive 2 decades ago.

I guess it depends on your view of "easier". You may prefer a scripting language that has everything under one roof (even a compiler!), while I very much prefer the pipeline approach (which has many different compilers).