Now all we need is for Apache Guacamole to add support into its RDP client for whatever old version of RDP NT 4 Terminal Server uses. Access all those old NT 4 applications through my web browser!
Readit Newsracingmars commented on How to Install Windows NT 4 Server on Proxmox blog.pipetogrep.org/2025/... · Posted by u/thepipetogrep
Maybe Sciral Consistency?
That was it, yes! Thank you!
I'm looking forward to see how this develops.
There was a program a long time ago, classic Mac OS days, and I don't remember the name of it but I think it was "<something> Consistency". I loved it because tasks in it were "loose," in the sense that something like "water the plants" didn't have to happen on a strict 7-day repeating event. It could be defined as "should be done 6-8 days after the last time I did it." So when you hit "done" on the current "water the plants" task, it automatically fuzzy-scheduled the next "water the plants" event with a target date of 6-8 days after when you clicked done. You could have the range prefer some days but be "acceptable" for a wider range of days.
Someone once told me emacs org-mode might be able to schedule recurring tasks somewhat like this. But any time I see a new calendar/to-do manager application, I hope the designers keep this "fuzzy" repeating event idea in mind!
racingmars commented on A Tour Inside the IBM Z17 community.ibm.com/communi... · Posted by u/rbanffy
You can get a software emulator for free and run it on a PC! It's quite robust and used by IBM's own developers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hercules_(emulator)
Hercules is _not_ used by IBM's own developers. Being found with Hercules on your computer at IBM gets you in trouble. I know people who work on mainframe-related stuff inside IBM and they steer well clear of Hercules. And I've heard that IBM's computer monitoring stuff (antivirus, asset protection, etc.) looks for Hercules and flags it.
But IBM _does_ have their own mainframe emulator, zPDT (z Personal Development Tool), sold to their customers for dev and testing (under the name zD&T -- z Development and Test), and to ISVs under their ISV program. That's what IBM's own developers would be using if they're doing stuff under emulation instead of LPARs on real hardware.
(And IBM's emulator is significantly faster than Hercules, FWIW, but overall less feature-full and lacks all of the support Hercules has for older architectures, more device types, etc.)
What am I getting wrong? you planted a coconut but grew a palm tree ?
Coconut trees are in the palm tree family.
All coconut trees are palm trees, but not all palm trees grow coconuts.
racingmars commented on TLS certificate lifetimes will officially reduce to 47 days digicert.com/blog/tls-cer... · Posted by u/crtasm
This naively (or maliciously perhaps) maintains that the "purpose" of the certificate is to identify an entity. While identity and safeguarding against MITM is important, identity is not the primary purpose certificates serve in the real world. At least that is not how they are used or why they are purchased.
They are purchased to provide encryption. Nobody checks the details of a cert and even if they did they wouldn't know what to look for in a counterfeit anyway.
This is just another gatekeeping measure to make standing up, administering, and operating private infrastructure difficult. "Just use Google / AWS / Azure instead."
> This naively (or maliciously perhaps) maintains that the "purpose" of the certificate is to identify an entity. [...] identity is not the primary purpose certificates serve in the real world.
Identity is the only purpose that certificates serve. SSL/TLS wouldn't have needed certificates at all if the goal was purely encryption: key exchange algorithms work just fine without either side needing keys (e.g. the key related to the certificate) ahead of time.
But encryption without authentication is a Very Bad Idea, so SSL was wisely implemented from the start to require authentication of the server, hence why it was designed around using X.509 certificates. The certificates are only there to provide server authentication.
Nice work - thanks for this! How do I play with multibrot? I couldn’t find the controls for that.
I think multibrot here refers to setting the exponent (under "Render Settings") to a value higher than 2.
racingmars commented on Some programming language ideas jerf.org/iri/post/2025/pr... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti
> Value Database
> Smalltalk and another esoteric programming environment I used for a while called Frontier had an idea of a persistent data store environment. Basically, you could set global.x = 1, shut your program down, and start it up again, and it would still be there.
Frontier! I played with that way back when on the Mac. Fun times.
But as for programming language with integrated database... MUMPS! Basically a whole language and environment (and, in the beginning, operating system) built around a built-in global database. Any variable name prefixed with ^ is global and persistent, with a sparse multi-dimensional array structure to be able to organize and access the variables (e.g. ^PEOPLE(45,"firstname") could be "Matthew" for the first name of person ID 45). Lives on today in a commercial implementation from Intersystems, and a couple Free Software implementations (Reference Standard M, GT.M, and the GT.M fork YottaDB). The seamless global storage is really nice, but the language itself is truly awful.
I would like to note that Linux is the only kernel which will allow you to do this! The Linux system call interface is stable and defined at the instruction set level. Linking against some system library is absolutely required on every other system.
I've written an article about this idea:
https://www.matheusmoreira.com/articles/linux-system-calls
You can get incredibly far with just this. I wrote a freestanding lisp interpreter with nothing but Linux system calls. It turned into a little framework for freestanding Linux programs. It's been incredibly fun.
Freestanding C is a much better language. A lot of legacy nonsense is in the standard library. The Linux system call interface is really nice to work with. Calling write is not that hard. It's the printf style string building and formatting that I sometimes miss.
> I would like to note that Linux is the only kernel which will allow you to do this!
I'm pretty sure that MVS syscalls (that is, the numbers you use with the SVC opcode) have remained backward-compatible at least as far back as MVS 3.8 in the 1970s and those binaries making those "raw" syscalls will still work on the latest z/OS releases.
There are a _lot_ more operating systems than Linux, Windows, and the BSDs... making a statement that the Linux kernel is the only kernel to do something a certain way is a risky proposition :-)
I think you're thinking of New Yorker magazine, perhaps?