Author Archives: pappp

OpenPA and internet history

Source: OSNews

Article note: I've been (slowly) working on an HP Apollo 9000/735, OpenPA has been indispensable for figuring out the unfamiliar platform.

Paul Weissmann, maintainer of OpenPA, the definitive source of information on HP’s PA-RISC hardware and software, has published an article about how the state of information preservation on this topic has changed substantially since OpenPA’s founding in 1999.

The main challenges for OpenPA at the time were both finding all the available information, as search engines were still young in the late 1990s, as well as making sense of it all as it was just so much and new sources kept appearing. This went on until the mid to late 2000s, when solid and stable sources could be found and referenced, which OpenPA did.

The Internet and information on it changed since then, slowly but surely, in a profound way. Many original sources have disappeared and so much information has been lost in only two decades – making OpenPA the authoritative source for PA-RISC in some ways. A long journey from documenting complex information of the 1990s to an historic archive on the PA-RISC era.

OpenPA is an amazing resource, so if you happen to have any information worth sharing with Weissmann, please do so.

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Half of Americans now believe that news organizations deliberately mislead them

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Only half?
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The Israelis Destabilizing Democracy and Disrupting Elections Worldwide

Source: Hacker News

Article note: On one hand, this is always horrifying. On the other hand, this kind of shenanigans used to be accomplished much more easily; by the late 1800s, the same resources would let one basically have a whiskey with William Randolf Hearst for the same effect.
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John Carmack goes off about online-only games being abandoned

Source: Hacker News

Article note: That "Maybe don't build culture to suck itself into a black hole when it's financially convenient." is an unusual idea is really distressing.
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A new PDP-10 is put on the internet for free access #VintageComputing @sdf_pubnix

Source: adafruit industries blog

Article note: Neat. A Systems Concepts SC-40 running TOPS-20, online for all to poke.

The Super Dimension Fortress (SDF) is a networked community of free software authors, teachers, librarians, students, researchers, hobbyists, computer enthusiasts, the aural and visually impaired. It is operated as a recognized non-profit 501(c)(7) and is supported by its members.

They just placed a Digital Equipment PDP-10, manufactured from 1966 to 1983 onto the internet for free access. It’s ironic that the PDP-10 was responsible for creation of ARPAnet, the internet’s predecessor.

ssh sc40@hie.sdf.org and ‘login new new’ to play

See more on Twitter

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What can be done about Kentucky’s teacher shortage? Lawmakers hope to find answers

Source: Latest News

Article note: A job with poor pay relative to the required qualifications, poor stability, where you will be villainized and/or harassed by a mixture of parents, politicians, administrators, and fuckin' randos, with an internal and external cultural situation that almost entirely excludes men? A job which recently became ridiculously more difficult due to the pandemic and its after-effects? It's such a mystery why the state is having a hard time filling teaching positions. We better have some of the same politicians largely responsible for many of those issues discuss it. /s

University of Kentucky elementary education students gather for a workshop at Stonewall Elementary in Lexington, Ky., Wednesday, January 18, 2023.

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Apple should be required to let iPhone users sideload apps, Biden admin says

Source: Ars Technica

Article note: I understand that swaths of people are marginally more likely to fall for scams with side-loading, and other vendors of ecosystem-choke-point software will probably take advantage to get a bigger slice of the pie, but the "You _can't_ run software adversarial to the largest-incumbent manufacturer's interests on a device you bought" situation is not really OK. Largely because the web has become intolerable without serious ad-blocking.
iPhone home screen with the App Store icon displayed.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | NurPhoto )

The Biden administration wants major changes to the Apple and Google mobile app models, saying the companies "act as gatekeepers over the apps that people and businesses rely on" and enforce policies that "have the potential to harm consumers by inflating prices and reducing innovation."

An analysis of the market and recommendations for lawmakers and regulators were issued today in a report by the Department of Commerce's National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA). The report was required by President Biden's 2021 executive order on competition and touted by the White House today as being part of "new progress on his competition agenda."

The NTIA concluded that "consumers largely can't get apps outside of the app store model, controlled by Apple and Google," and that "Apple and Google create hurdles for developers to compete for consumers by imposing technical limits, such as restricting how apps can function or requiring developers to go through slow and opaque review processes."

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Data-Free Disneyland

Source: Hacker News

Article note: An interesting exercise in just how difficult and costly it is to evade ubiquitous surveillance now. Lots of HN commenters missing the point that it was an exercise in documenting the difficulty of not being surveilled while engaging in normal activities, probably because it's easy to not notice you're complicit in something heinous when your paycheck depends on it.
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U.S. No Fly list publicly shared on a hacking forum, government investigating

Source: Hacker News

Article note: I'm really excited for the due-process implications. It's been a "secret list so you can't have standing because you can't prove you are on the list" legal catch-22 since the early-2000s mass psychosis took over the US, now we can finally start picking the dumb apart.
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Cyclic Combinational Circuits [pdf]

Source: Hacker News

Article note: ...That is some wild shit, and it's from 2004. I do and teach digital design, and I've now skimmed through the dissertation twice, and I'm only half sure I understand the generalities of how it works.
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