| --- Log opened Tue Aug 17 00:00:01 2021 |
| --- Day changed Tue Aug 17 2021 |
| 00:00 | <&Reiver> | (It's funny how that formfactor is now so exclusively corporate, it used to be a perfectly sensible shape for a computer) |
| 00:00 | <&Reiver> | Yup, and I was the fella that got to haul them out and faff around with them |
| 00:00 | <&Reiver> | The Linux Towers were always a bit interesting because, somewhat true to sterotype, not only was the OS a fiddle but the *hardware* was so inevitably bespoke |
| 00:00 | < Mahal> | I'm in camp "pick the best tool for the job", and sometimes that's linux, sometimes it's not |
| 00:01 | <&Reiver> | ... mostly because it was being bought in ones and twos as the years went along, instead of "Here is the three hundred PCs for this year", but |
| 00:01 | <&Reiver> | It did cause me some small amusement and no shortage of phone calls of the "Hey, uh, so what /do/ you want me to do with this suspiciously unusual card I found in your PC?" "OH SHOOT YES I NEED THAT can you put it in the new one please I forgot"~ |
| 00:02 | <&Reiver> | (The people who warned me in advance got the hardware swapped as part of the full service. But at least I checked if I found an extra set of ports on the back!) |
| 00:02 | <&Reiver> | And thus, as a young hardware lad, I learned the magic of The Most Fearsome Port To Find On A Custom PC: |
| 00:03 | <&McMartin> | Yeah. An interesting time because when you can drop capital investment by NINETY PERCENT that does mean that you are more willing to accept a certain increase in labor costs |
| 00:03 | < Mahal> | ISA? |
| 00:03 | <&Reiver> | ... a single Paralell, or occasionally even Serial, port. |
| 00:03 | <&Reiver> | On an expansion card. |
| 00:03 | < Mahal> | heh heh heh |
| 00:03 | < Mahal> | those were generally linked to Expensive (TM) equipment |
| 00:03 | <&Reiver> | That is when you go "...ah fuck" |
| 00:03 | <&Reiver> | Yyyyup |
| 00:03 | <&Reiver> | And finicky drivers! |
| 00:03 | <&McMartin> | That's why the C64 fell out of industrial use way before the Apple II did~ |
| 00:04 | < Mahal> | I don't miss those days |
| 00:04 | <&McMartin> | The Apple II had completely bespoke peripheral ports |
| 00:04 | <&Reiver> | McMartin: Exactly so, and why I was, in fact, the Hardware Monkey |
| 00:04 | <&Reiver> | I didn't get to do anything complicated or bespoke |
| 00:04 | <&McMartin> | The C64 had The Wrong plug but it spoke RS-232 like everything else so you could swap them out whenever |
| 00:05 | <&Reiver> | But it was my job to swap the various Corporate PCs to keep them current, wipe their shit, re-image the copy of Windows they came with, refurb whatever needed refurbing, etc |
| 00:05 | <&Reiver> | It wasn't a bad job, all told, if definitely A Student Position |
| 00:05 | <&McMartin> | But yeah, I'd say that after the big disruption the big corp players decided that Linux was going to be here to stay in some form and set about putting fences around enough of it that they could go back to "buy three hundred computers in one lot and have it all ready to go" |
| 00:05 | <&Reiver> | McMartin: How ironic that embracing standards worked out worse for htem >_> |
| 00:05 | <&Reiver> | Yup |
| 00:05 | <&McMartin> | Standards benefit the downstream, like they should, imo |
| 00:06 | <&McMartin> | ("What's that, you say? Apple locking in customers with totally incompatible bespoke hardware? Why, I never") |
| 00:06 | <&McMartin> | To be fair, that hardware was old enough that they started out sold as electronics kits |
| 00:06 | <&McMartin> | But it sure set a trend! |
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| 15:42 | <@sshine> | Yossarian, I installed RedHat around 1997 and Gentoo around 2003. Slackware somewhere in-between. these days I'm trying to configure some virtual networking in Linux and I realize how dumb I've gotten; the major reason I ever considered myself "good at Linux" is because you had to deal with so much tardiness just for basic functionality; today it comes out of the box. |
| 15:43 | <@sshine> | Yossarian, for example, spending three days fixing your XFree86 config. |
| 15:43 | <@sshine> | Yossarian, so that you can have graphics. |
| 15:44 | <@sshine> | Yossarian, or... spending a full day learning the OpenBSD partition editor, because you can't write a partition table without knowing how harddisk cylinders and their arithmetic work. |
| 15:45 | <@ErikMesoy> | for me it was researching/discovering the correct "iwconfig eth0 -abc --abracadabra --hocuspocus" incantation to get wireless internet working on Linux |
| 15:45 | <@sshine> | Yossarian, I've had so many days-on-end sessions getting basic drivers working. there was some point in the mid-late 00s where driver support started getting better in Linux than in Windows. now when I'm in Windows I'm amazed at how little Just Works. |
| 15:46 | <@sshine> | ErikMesoy, ah yes. the days I've spent writing PPP dialer scripts for my modem, because the tutorials online aren't specific to your ISP. |
| 15:46 | <@sshine> | today I don't have the patience to learn things this way. 😅 I'm like "bah, this tutorial doesn't work! the software is broken!" |
| 15:48 | <@sshine> | getting sound to work was another hurdle. |
| 15:48 | <@sshine> | honestly, getting anything to work. |
| 15:50 | <@sshine> | Yossarian, I think I one time ran Linux From Scratch, to get a feel for how the system was built up. but installing Gentoo was the same experience. |
| 15:50 | <@sshine> | Yossarian, I think you can recreate whatever part of that experience as you have the patience for. |
| 16:16 | <&ToxicFrog> | I know I was tinkering with Red Hat 6.2 in 2000 (in my high school's not entirely authorized secondary computer lab), and we moved from SCO OpenServer UNIX to RH at home sometime between 2000 and 2002. |
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| 16:17 | <&ToxicFrog> | My dad handled most of the migration, though, so he was responsible for porting our bespoke quintupleheaded XF86 config, getting sound and printers and print sharing working, etc |
| 16:18 | <&ToxicFrog> | As an end user it was not significantly different from SCO UNIX except that the software was significantly more up to date and the window frames looked different. |
| 16:18 | <~Vornicus> | re: the "tardiness" - back in the day I had to figure out how to automate some CD burning |
| 16:19 | <~Vornicus> | I had this huge document that described how to configure a whole bunch of things |
| 16:19 | <~Vornicus> | I went through it step by step to discover that literally 99% of what the document needed me to do had already been configured |
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| 16:20 | <~Vornicus> | but the specific details I needed to set up for my particular situation were not exactly frontloaded or whatever |
| 16:20 | <&ToxicFrog> | This was still pre-package-manager (or at least, pre-useful-package-manager), so everything had to be downloaded as source and then built and installed, but that was the status quo ante anyways |
| 16:20 | <@sshine> | ToxicFrog, your had five monitors back then? |
| 16:20 | <~Vornicus> | this was ... 2005ish |
| 16:21 | <&ToxicFrog> | sshine: we had one monitor with five X servers |
| 16:21 | <&ToxicFrog> | One for each family member, and one with exclusive GPU access for gaming |
| 16:21 | <@sshine> | ToxicFrog, oh, haha. |
| 16:22 | <@sshine> | the new sysadmin at work shared a vim war story; he'd basically max out his virtual terminals every time he accidentally entered vim and didn't know how to get out. |
| 16:23 | <&ToxicFrog> | It seems like the solution there is to open a new vt and then `pkill vim` |
| 16:23 | <@sshine> | you'd think |
| 16:23 | <~Vornicus> | so instead of quitting vim he detached them? |
| 16:23 | <@sshine> | he just switched to the next virtual terminal until he ran out, then rebooted |
| 16:23 | <~Vornicus> | lol. |
| 16:24 | <@sshine> | recently I've been getting a lot of EDITOR="joe" on remote servers, and I don't know how to exit joe, and it feels like it's actually faster to close the window and open a new session than google how to exit joe. :D |
| 16:24 | <&ToxicFrog> | Is that related to jove? |
| 16:25 | <@sshine> | apparently not |
| 16:25 | <@sshine> | Joe = Joe's Own Editor. Jove = Jonathan's Own Version of Emacs. so they have some similarity in acronym construction. |
| 16:25 | <&ToxicFrog> | Aha. |
| 16:25 | <&ToxicFrog> | (jove was my dad's preferred tty mode editor; I'm more of a nano girl) |
| 16:26 | <@sshine> | Joe is apparently also based on Emacs, so maybe there are more similarities than they advertise. |
| 16:27 | <&ToxicFrog> | IIRC jove was more inspired by than based on -- it's meant to be (mostly) ui-compatible but has no code in common and lacks elisp support. |
| 16:27 | <@sshine> | makes sense |
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| 17:08 | <~Vornicus> | camera... uh ... shoot, gotta get all that madness in. (0,0,0,1) goes to (400, 500, 0), (0,0,1,0) is ... (40, 20, -20), (1,0,0,0) is (40, -20, 20), (0,1,0,0) is (0, -50, 0). ...that's the whole thing, no more math involved. |
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| 23:18 | < Yossarian> | 16:30 <Yossarian_> Since modern music mostly sucks, do you reckon modern recordings will be released as soft-mixed works with the ability to change EQ response and other things per track? It leaves room for people to yank your stuff and isolate it but it sounds interesting. Imagine alternate takes, too, if alt drum take matches main mix, ability to change to the alt drum take instead |
| 23:18 | < Yossarian> | of |
| 23:18 | < Yossarian> | 16:30 <Yossarian_> having a seperate song as a recording / file. |
| 23:20 | < Mahal> | I can't imagine that ever happening |
| 23:25 | <~Vornicus> | https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/474705430434807819/877309726432567296/unknown.png behoooold |
| 23:27 | <@sshine> | Vornicus, a hexagon height map? |
| 23:27 | <~Vornicus> | yes |
| 23:28 | <&Reiver> | hey, nice! |
| 23:28 | <@sshine> | very cool. I struggled to get a plain hexagonal map :P |
| --- Log closed Wed Aug 18 00:00:58 2021 |