Ancestors

Toot

Written by Quintus@lemmy.ml on 2024-08-17 at 19:42

"In The Beginning Was The Command Line" An essay by Neal Stephenson that talks proprietary operating systems and FOSS operating systems. Written in 1999.

https://lemmy.ml/post/19268678

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Descendants

Written by WhyFlip@lemmy.world on 2024-08-17 at 19:58

Snow Crash is one of my favorite books.

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Written by azimir@lemmy.ml on 2024-08-18 at 17:57

I’m a Cryptonomicon person. The modern timeline is dated now, but the overall information warfare themes are delicious.

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Written by A7thStone@lemmy.world on 2024-08-19 at 23:53

Anathem is my personal favorite. One of the very few books I’ve read multiple times.

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Written by azimir@lemmy.ml on 2024-08-20 at 17:29

I have it on the shelf, but haven’t gotten to it. I’ll put it in the reading queue.

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Written by jabjoe@feddit.uk on 2024-08-17 at 20:09

It’s a good read, but he then back on it all and went all Apple. So it’s a bit bitter sweat. Crash is probably better.

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Written by pbjamm on 2024-08-19 at 14:31

I knew quite a few linux fans who went with Apple laptops when OSX came out. At the time it was the best thing available that had unix under the hood which made it really powerful in the right hands.

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Written by jabjoe@feddit.uk on 2024-08-19 at 20:30

If they were more about UNIX than freedom, that could make sense back then. These days, you miss out on loads on of open stuff and are very much a third class citizen. After Linux and Windows, as the platform has neither freedom or a large user base. Macports seams to regularly have talks about how they are shunned and ignored.

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Written by Snot Flickerman on 2024-08-17 at 20:28

Lamina1 is enough to prove Stephenson is kind of full of shit.

It’s such a joke it doesn’t even have its own Wikipedia entry. It’s just a footnote on Stephenson’s.

I’m just gonna call it like I sees it:

I put Stephenson in the same camp as Orson Scott Card.

He had a single book with some really brilliant and thoughtful ideas… and that’s about it.

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Written by friend_of_satan@lemmy.world on 2024-08-17 at 22:32

Which of his amazing books is your “single good book”?

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Written by cfi@lemmy.world on 2024-08-18 at 02:02

Probably Snow Crash

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Written by zod000@lemmy.ml on 2024-08-19 at 13:35

Which is kinda silly anyway, and I love Snow Crash, but it wasn’t even close to his most interesting book.

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Written by Dwemthy (he/him) on 2024-08-18 at 14:36

Speaker for the Dead is my guess

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Written by jabjoe@feddit.uk on 2024-08-18 at 14:56

That’s the sequel to Ender’s Game. It is good, but it is Orson Scott Card.

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Written by fysihcyst@lemmy.ml on 2024-08-19 at 13:51

Anathem came to mind for me. Each reply naming a different book is pretty funny.

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Written by A7thStone@lemmy.world on 2024-08-19 at 23:55

Maybe SeveNeveS

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Written by Handles on 2024-08-18 at 13:05

Them again, “a single book with some really brilliant and thoughtful ideas” is one book more than most authors, much less internet commenters will ever put out.

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Written by jabjoe@feddit.uk on 2024-08-18 at 15:00

That’s not fair. Multiple books of his books are award winning. Even if you only like one, the critics rate him. Other writers, rate him.

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Written by araneae@beehaw.org on 2024-08-18 at 15:47

Hang on a second. Orson Scott Card is a homophobic motherfuck. What’d NS do that is so bad?

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Written by Dwemthy (he/him) on 2024-08-19 at 00:18

He’s into NFTs, if there’s something else idk about it

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Written by Beetle_O_Rourke [she/her, comrade/them] on 2024-08-17 at 21:57

cw saSexual assault is not a plot device to establish how actiony your female leads are, Neal.

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Written by UlyssesT [he/him] on 2024-08-17 at 22:13

is not a plot device

Unfortunately, for him, it totally was and continued to be.

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Written by Veraxis@lemmy.world on 2024-08-18 at 13:31

I am only a few pages in, but speaking as a Linux user in the 2020s, I am skeptical of the claim that Linux in 1999 would “never, ever break down.”

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Written by azimir@lemmy.ml on 2024-08-18 at 17:55

I was there Gandalf…

In comparison to the alternatives we had at the time, Linux was a fucking tank. Once it was up, you could expect to get 6 months to years of uptime unless you were installing new tools or changing hardware (no real USB/SATA yet, so hardware was a reboot situation).

If you got a Win98 machine up, it would eventually just hang. Yes, some could got a whole, but if you used it for general use it would crash the kernel out eventually. Same for MacOS (the OG MacOS).

The only real completion for stability was other UNIX systems, and few of those were available to the general public at a reasonable price point.

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Written by Grimpen@lemmy.ca on 2024-08-18 at 18:15

VAX/VMS was still around then, and as far as I recall, that was the king for uptime.

Linux back then supported much less hardware. I can remember even in the early aughts, there was while families of popular wireless network chipsets that weren’t supported.

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Written by azimir@lemmy.ml on 2024-08-19 at 04:52

VAX/VMS was such a beast! The hardware wasn’t readily available to the public, though.

Oh, the wireless chipsets in the 90’s into about 2005? or so…that was a bad time for anyone trying to run wireless. Hell, MS Windows didn’t even have network drivers baked in until what, WinXP? Wiring computer together in the 90’s was such a a trial, both for hardware and software fronts.

I was lucky to score a 3Com 3c905b fast 10/100 Ethernet card from a bussy in 1996. That was well supported across the board (Linux and Windows), and the IRQ settings for the PCI bus memory mapped I/O and IRQs was well documented.

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Written by gedhrel@lemmy.world on 2024-08-18 at 23:01

Netware was rock solid.

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Written by azimir@lemmy.ml on 2024-08-19 at 04:55

Do you remember the article about some university that accidentally walled in a Network server? It ran for years until they needed to put hands on it for something. They had to do the “follow the Ethernet cable” game until it went through the sheetrock into a dead space.

The Register still has the article from 2001:

theregister.com/…/missing_novell_server_discovere…

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Written by Nisaea@lemmy.sdf.org on 2024-08-21 at 05:25

How the f does that even happen ._.

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Written by BCsven@lemmy.ca on 2024-08-18 at 21:28

Daily updates with rolling distro may cause issues but a stable system that wasn’t tinkered with would run and run and run. Our Linux fileserver at work had a 2 year uptime, only broke that for some drive additions and other adjustments, otherwise it would have just kept on chugging along without interaction. My debian ARM NAS runs without incident, the only shutdowns it sees are when I move equipment to different rooms or want to reroute power cables. Otherwise it would just always be working fine.

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Written by absGeekNZ@lemmy.nz on 2024-08-18 at 22:30

Hell my home server, running on low end Xeon hardware had uptime numbers around 3 years…then there was a power cut. Next down day was another power cut a year or so later. Total around 8 years running with 5 outages, all but one due to power loss (other was Ubuntu 16.04 - 18.04 upgrade).

Just updated to Ubuntu server 20.04 so uptime is only 7 days at this point.

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Written by radamant@lemmy.world on 2024-08-19 at 02:08

Written in 1999

Never forget that in 2001 he switched to Mac OS X and has been using it since.

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Written by nilloc@discuss.tchncs.de on 2024-08-20 at 00:15

That’s when Unix (Mach kernel and FreeBSD) based OSX launched. It included command line and OOP development tools that really were a huge improvement over the previous OS 7-9.

I bought my first Mac a few years later 2003 because I needed a reliable laptop, there was no competition (anyone remember the Sony Viao?) in good laptops, unless you liked thinkpads with one nipple. Plus as a design student, I needed macromedia and Adobe products, and worked in my college’s computer lab managing Mac’s anyway.

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