Category Archives: News

Article note: HN apparently did not like Cory calling out the combination of monopolistic practices, B2B middlemen, patchwork legacy tech, and regulatory capture/failure that makes the exploitation engine run, but it's a great piece.

Article note: This has come up a couple times in different venues, this version links several of the earlier iterations. They seem to be so complicated no one can _exactly_ root-cause the behavior, but the gamers, and the hosters, and folks doing benchmarks and such all come to the same "there seem to be problems with Raptor Lake K-series parts that escalate over time" conclusion. I tend to believe the theory that they're slowly degrading some little chip area - likely in the memory system, probably because of localized heating and/or over-stressed power/ground routing, less likely due to some charge build up triggering migration - when run flat out near the top of the range that was supposed to be safe.

Article note: This is the most "do silly, frivolous things that serve no other purpose than making your happy" project. ARC firmware shim so you can boot NT4 on a handful of ancient PowerMacs. I love it.

Article note: Oh look, gigantic data silos that probably shouldn't be retained, held by third party vendors subject to supply chain attacks. Sprinkle on a little negligent reporting practices, and you've got a disaster.

Article note: Man The Register has produced some good wordplay over the years. I will be referring to RHEL-like distributions (Alma, CentOS, Oracle, Rocky, SLL, etc.) as RHELatives (R-hel-atives) from now on.

Article note: This is some students-evading-plagiarism-detectors shit. Embedded text that doesn't show up to a human reader but is parsed by computers. Anyone want to try to convince me academia isn't dominated by the epeen contest?

Article note: Ugh, scammers bought the domain and now they're algorithmically mangling macrumors articles and passing them off under the bylines of people who worked for TUAW decades ago.

Article note: Neaaaat. I have a restored(ish) Selectric II and have done the reading on typewriter and especially Selectric history, they're a fun chapter in technology. This serious collector found a MT/ST (Probably the first thing that could properly be called a wordprocessor. The typewriter parts are coupled to a core-and-SLT baby computer with some magnetic tape drives for storage) - which were so exotic and generally leased that no surviving examples were known to exist. Locally. The whole multi-part system with one input only recorder unit and a full IO unit and accessories. With their service manuals and records. ...At least none of my hobby projects are that big and exotic.

Article note: Oh no. Though "If you cram enough bullshit into the initramfs it can do anything" is an interesting side effect of the modern boot process that bears exploration. I'm not actually sure how much of the "immutable" type distros are working by basically just never pivoting their initramfs to a real root and instead mounting a bunch of overlays, but it sure seems like an easy way to do the thing.

Article note: Bunch of things in there I didn't know. Especially, I didn't realize how much Linux was a motivation for Larry McVoy to leave Sun and make BitKeeper as a better successor to their old internal CVS tools, and how short the BitKeeper era for kernel dev was (mostly only 2002-2005 with a few early adopters). It still wigs me that git's speed, and inertia from the Linux and Ruby folks was enough to make it the clear winner of the DCVS explosion, even arriving in the middle of the pack and being _brutally_ ugly such that there is a whole industry for add-on porcelain to try to hide how nasty it is.