It this show & tell for the FBI???
Readit Newssys_64738 commented on I Hacked McDonald's (Security Contact Was Harder to Find Than Secret Recipe) bobdahacker.com/blog/mcdo... · Posted by u/Improvement
Nice one. That's the year before I bought my first.
I thought it was a superb deal up against things like the Amiga and ST, because it was much faster and more capable for a hobby programmer.
And in the first job I had, my 2nd hand A310 cost £800. It had 1MB RAM, a 20MB hard disk, and a colour monitor. So probably half its new price.
The fastest machine that the VAR I worked for offered was an IBM PS/2 Model 70-A21:
http://www.walshcomptech.com/ps2/70A21.htm
A 25MHz 80386DX with a tiny L1 cache on the daughterboard. Our demo one had a 80387DX and 2MB of RAM and a 120MB HDD, the first 3.5" HDD I ever saw.
It retailed at about £10,000 for the base model, without "optional" extras like keyboard, DOS, or a monitor.
Tricked out like the display one with an 8514 XGA display, something like £15,000 or £16,000.
I tested it. My Archimedes was 4x to 8x faster in integer benchmarks. And it had a GUI -- the PS/2 didn't, this was before Windows 3.0 -- and it multitasked, which the PS/2 also didn't.
Overpriced my left kidney. It had astonishing industry-beating price:performance. It stomped all over the fastest x86 kit in the world: it ran a usable pure-software emulation of an x86 PC on which I could run work apps.
It's great having a superfast computer without any useful software. Sure there were things like Pro Artisan but it was no good compared to DPaint on the Amiga. I didn't want to run PC software but did want to run Mac software. So when you mention emulation, the Amigas of the time were faster with emulating of the Mac than the hardware Macs themselves for a period. When RISC OS came along it was nice but had that horrible error dialogue that restricted mouse movement. The memory allocation needing to be manually set was also wacky. The Amiga also had a BBC BASIC emulator coded in 68K assembler so even that wasn't an advantage anymore. Side by side, you got more value from using an Amiga. The Arch might be great for running benchmarks though.
> It just works. One thing I noticed lately is that sometimes a shortcut breaks, or something is not working anymore. This is also because Omarchy is just brand new, and I’m inexperienced running Linux as my main OS. But for the last 5 years with the M1, hardware-wise, things just worked.
My experience over two decades has been that running Linux is like having a car you need to spend every weekend in the garage tinkering with to keep running well. MacOS is lower effort. I haven't run Windows in a long time, but compared to Linux, it also doesn't require constant tinkering.
While I also think Linux user experience becomes more and more "it just works", the incentives are such that a commercial experience like macOS is likely to always be a few levels above.
> My experience over two decades has been that running Linux is like having a car you need to spend every weekend in the garage tinkering with to keep running well. MacOS is lower effort.
Is it this or that you have the Linux skills to tinker so just do. Giving Linux laptops to non-techies yields self-sufficiency in people I've not seen with other OS platforms.
sys_64738 commented on Our Response to Mississippi's Age Assurance Law bsky.social/about/blog/08... · Posted by u/Kye
All arguments about age checks themselves aside, why can BlueSky implement age checks in the UK, but not Mississippi? Seems to me like the only difference would be Mississippi requiring everyone to log in, whereas currently I assume UK requires a login just for age-restricted material. (Although I don't use BlueSky in the UK, so shrugs)
I'd prefer all businesses impacted by the draconian Brit legislation block the Brits geo completely.
> The Amiga and ST wiped the floor with it.
And yet... Do you own a smartphone of any kind?
It has an Acorn-compatible CPU inside it. In fact, if it isn't 20+ years old, it has several: it has a multicore main CPU with several different Arm cores, and there are more in the Wifi controller, and more in the Bluetooth controller.
There is a pretty good chance that if you own an x86 machine with wifi, it includes multiple Arm cores too. Whatever OS you run, from Windows to BSD, if you were to search your SSD, you will find BLOBs of Arm code on it.
Is there any Amiga or ST derived tech in them? Not that I know of. But a company with "A" for Acorn in its name is in very nearly every device with a microprocessor.
I first used an Archimedes back in 1988 running Arthur 1.2.
sys_64738 commented on In the long run, LLMs make us dumber desunit.com/blog/in-the-l... · Posted by u/speckx
thats kinda embarrassing
How much of your coding time do you spend writing mundane, repetitive code that should just instantly appear? I think there's a dual benefit of removing the drudgery of that but also gives you more time to write new, interesting code to achieve your goals and priorities sooner.
Yep, Acorn competitor to the Amiga and ST would was the Archimedes (followed by the A series and Risc PC).
The Archimedes was powered by a 32-bit ARM 2 and it was awesome. :D
The Archimedes was too expensive and not very well supported. The Amiga and ST wiped the floor with it.
A BBC micro was my first computer. Americans had Amegas or something, but I had a BBC and a big book with example BASIC programs.
The BBCs were niche products in Britain where they were mostly used in education. They were too expensive so parents bought Sinclair Spectrums and Commodore 64s. Even the cheap BBC Model B, the Electron, was a poor seller.
Kind of ironic that the last UNIX company standing is Apple.
sys_64738 commented on AOL to discontinue dial-up internet nytimes.com/2025/08/11/bu... · Posted by u/situationista