Ditto here. I loved their hardware from that era up until the early 2000s. I still have a few dozen systems from those years in my basement. I tried getting rid of them years ago using the Marie Kondo method, but they all SPARC joy...
It was nice to see the bit in the video about the Tadpole SPARCbook 3000XT. They are incredibly rare compared to Sun desktop workstations, but a lot of fun. I wrote about the 3000ST model: https://jasoneckert.github.io/myblog/sparcbook3000st-the-coo...
It looks like Jeff Geerling is one of the few lucky people who actually got one so far (if others did, they aren't bragging about it on the Internet).
I ordered one the same day as Jeff back in July, but Arrow just sent me an update indicating that it will likely be several more weeks before it ships:
We are excited to have received some supply of the Snapdragon Development Kit for Windows from Qualcomm/Thundercomm and we know they are working hard to provide additional units as soon as possible. At this time, we expect more units to arrive in the coming weeks and will fulfill your order as soon as units become available.
As a reminder, initial orders had the purchase price reduced by 10%. If you still wish to receive these units as ordered, you need to do nothing.
If you would like to modify shipping terms, or even cancel your order based upon these changes contact us at websupport@arrow.com. Cancellations or shipping changes will receive a full refund, if applicable. To ensure timely processing, please include your original order number when contacting our customer support team.
From the serial, it was manufactured in February 1984, so Drexel must have planned this with Apple long before the January 1984 launch as noted in the article. The D is actually dyed into the case plastic itself and not painted on (I can see it from the inside too).
I bought it on eBay in 2006 for $50 new in box, never used (and it worked like new when I booted it up for the first time). The seller said she received it as part of her tuition, but was afraid of computers and never took it out of the box or turned it on. So it was likely that Drexel automatically added or included the $1000 cost to all tuition to make it mandatory as the article abstract suggests.
TN: Tennessee. No mention of swamps on its wikipedia page. There are three bloody great major rivers mentioned and mountains, so I'm thinking hydro powered cattle prods, weights and a river.
You should be able to sell a carbon credit or two on that basis.
some of west tn is "false karst" highlands; we got ~10ac to ~1000ac patches of swamp all over. some of them have the fun floaty landscape bits that you can walk on, but not drive a tractor over. eats bulldozers with an amusing plonk sound.
5400rpm laptop hard drives were notoriously sensitive to external force because of their thin metal construction and low power motor.
I remember having a MacBook Pro with a Toshiba 5400rpm hard drive that failed shortly after I rested it on an HVAC unit in our server closet (the HVAC unit happened to be the perfect height off the floor for doing work while standing). Just to be sure that was the cause, I had the drive replaced under warranty, did the same thing again and it died again after only a short while of using it on that HVAC unit.
After Apple replaced the drive a second time, I instead used a crash cart as a laptop desk and put a sign on the HVAC unit that read "Don't put laptops on here."
Not hard drive related AFAIK, but I used to work in a media lab with about 30 mac desktops of around the powermac g4 vintage.
We noticed that the macs were rebooting unexpectedly when certain people were in the room. After a bit of observation we worked out that the call button on our walkie talkies could trigger a reboot from a couple of feet away, which turned out to be an awesome superpower if you'd had a gobful from an especially obnoxious student.
I used to enjoy the fact that Intel iMacs came with a remote control that could be used to put the mac into “media mode” but that wasn’t paired to a specific Mac to mess with co-workers in the room by putting them in media mode inexplicably.
We had that problem with computers when having the metal shielding off the cases. Every time someone in the vicinity got a phonecall on their Motorola 2880 (random model number, can't remember but one of the really old ones) the computers would bluescreen. This was at hackernights with all sorts of different computers running windows 95. If they had the metal shields off, many of them would bluescreen on phonecalls. Shields were off for having more cooling from external sources or friends helping with installing stuff or whatever, and the problems would go away when the shield was on again.
I used to work for the point of sale provider for various golf events in the US. We were having circuit breakers on UPS battery backup units trip, seemingly randomly. We soon realized that we couldn’t key up our walkie talkies when standing near one.
With an explanation why not? I feel like having that, instead of a "Here Be Dragons" note would be more helpful, so someone won't ignore the sign thinking "It'll be fine".
Also it'd be funny if the sign is still there even though all* laptops have SSDs now...
I wonder if there is a name for the phenomenon where people do something that leads to negative consequences but they technically "did everything right". I have a friend who crosses the street without looking both ways and his argument is that if a car hits him "they're in the wrong", as if an accident doesn't occur that way.
>I have a friend who crosses the street without looking both ways and his argument is that if a car hits him "they're in the wrong"
in the U.S there seems to be a hatred of pedestrians among the driver class, and a tendency for police to let even the most egregious drivers off the hook when a pedestrian gets killed (as long as it's not a hit and run), therefore this does not seem a good strategy.
However, and this is if they are in the U.S, perhaps they are mildly suicidal and thinking that if they get run over and killed it lets them off the hook for suicide and whoever ran them over gets a few problems which just serves those jerks right. The misanthrope's answer on how to ease out of life.
I worked with a group of other Americans in a part of Switzerland for a bit and we noticed that, even on relatively busy roads, if we even approached the curb from the sidewalk, cars would all come to a stop. Even if no formal cross walk area was nearby.
Life would be pretty boring if everything were explicit.
Also, sometimes explaining the rationale for a warning can backfire.
An "absolutely no smoking" sign at a fuel depot doesnt tell you _why_ you shouldn't smoke there... If it did, dumb people might think "We'll I'm not refueling at the moment so it will be fine."
I've lived in the US and UK and noticed what I think is a tiny cultural difference -- that signs giving instructions in the US tend to be brief and contain the instruction only; whereas in the UK I thought I saw more that add some text for a brief explanation or reason, if it wasn't obvious.
I remember being told why we stop at stop signs when I was learning to drive.
Regarding the sign about laptops: do you want to be right, out do you want people to not put their laptops on there? If your goal truly is to stop people putting laptops on there, then account for people who may not follow the directions if they don’t know why.
> If your goal truly is to stop people putting laptops on there, then account for people who may not follow the directions if they don’t know why.
Why? If they decide to ignore the sign, and they fuck their laptops up, that's on them.
A note of direction doesn't need to justify itself. People that think they are owed an explanation so they can decide whether or not to follow a note are the problem here.
There are just as many people who will be more likely to disobey a warning if they hear the rationale. They might think "naw that HVAC unit couldn't do that. this sign is wrong"
Sometimes simple commands are better than explanations.
My dog (who recently passed away at the age of 13) used to do something similar. When she was a puppy, she spilled her food bowl and I swept it up with a broom.
And since then, whenever we wanted her to eat her food, we'd just bring out the broom and start sweeping the kitchen floor - she'd immediately start eating her food, watching the broom nervously, because she's seen it eat her food before.
I think the main argument the author is making about why you should learn Linux is to better understand how your software is hosted in the cloud on Linux servers.
This is also why the Mobile Web Developer program at my college teaches Linux and Linux Web Hosting (including Apache and Wordpress) early on. We find this also helps students feel comfortable working within the macOS Terminal during all later courses, as well as with git commands.
> better understand how your software is hosted in the cloud on Linux servers
Since the days of Apache/PHP I don't think people (need to) host their dev work on proper servers at their local computers. So this argument is kind of invalid unless you want to set-up your dev machine as some kind of dummy server.
> Since the days of Apache/PHP I don't think people (need to) host their dev work on proper servers at their local computers. So this argument is kind of invalid unless you want to set-up your dev machine as some kind of dummy server.
True, and false
I do host the cloud software I work on on a local machine (running Debian-12) because it is easy. I do not need to, I want to and it makes me more productive
I also spend a lot of time in a terminal on a remote machine. I have to be careful to not get the two confused (I use different background colours for terminals on different machines.)
I have done the "remote terminal on cloud software" on Windows - a difficult and painful experience. Tools I take for granted, and get gratis, on Linux are not there on the Windows servers.
What ever flaws the article has it is not out of date
This has been my observation, I think people will get caught up in the details but most dev workflows I see now are either containerised (docker etc) or serve themselves (rails, node, even PHP can serve itself with no webserver)
I see less developers setting up local servers and managing them for development purposes. Containers are not the same thing, for the purposes of this commentary on how people work now.
I echo your sentiment in these regards. It is much easier to do certain tasks in Control Panel (Networking and Power Options being the two biggest examples of this in my opinion), while other things are easier in Settings.
I think the real problem is that Microsoft hasn't place enough focus on getting the Settings app correct from a UI/UX perspective like Apple did with their Settings app. There's nothing technical preventing them from offering a streamlined experience in Settings that allows you to easily configure advanced settings when necessary. It's just design effort on their part.
If they can get their Settings app to the point where nobody wants to use Control Panel anymore, then that's the right time to deprecate it.
Microsoft can’t get any lesson from Apple and its own switch because the fundamental strategy is different.
Apple completely changed its app in one go. There was no plan B, no deprecation. For this reason, the app is not has pristine as it should, with a ton of sections simply brought over without changes.
Microsoft being Microsoft, they’ve chosen to inflict decades of juggling two apps on their users, with poor results.
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