Star Trek TNG was a very big influence on my younger self, so this news hits rather hard. Rest in Peace, Sir Stewart, you will be fondly remembered by the many people whose lives you have touched.

Gotta admit, that is probably my favorite Wikipedia article. It reads like a conversation between two stoned teenagers (which, admittedly, a lot of cosmology and quantum physics do, to non-physicists like myself).

"Cheap" and "Alpha" would have been hard to pull of simultaneously. But it would have been really cool.

The AXPpci 33 boards were pretty cheap at some point. I had one at the end of the 90s and I think it was 100-200 Dutch guilders.

Pretty cheap and pretty slow, relative to other Alphas. The various ATX-sized PC164s motherboards were the ones that should have sealed the deal for Digital, but intel had PPro at about the same time, with similar performance, less cost and probably most importantly ran all the software people already had and vendors didn't have to port to a new arch[1].

What might have been.

[1] Yes, yes...PPro sucks on 16-bit software. My personal experience was that was a red herring by the benchmark-jockies, because it wasn't that much slower, and virtually none of the many, many PPro machines I was responsible for ran DOS/Win3 software.

Just as I was thinking to myself that it might be fun to play around with Lisp again, this shows up in my news ticker. Coincidence?

There was a repost of Peter Norvig's lisp interpreter in python a week ago too:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48619831

That came just around the time I was struggling with my "real" language, and switched to working on this lisp compiler.

Sometimes timing works out well to inspire!

Some years ago - never mind how long precisely - I also starting writing a Lisp interpreter in Python. I also called it Lispy. This time, the coincidence is less remarkable though, as the word play just sits there, begging to be played.

The blue-footed booby deserves a place in the top 10, IMHO. But I see the competition is fierce.

Rest in peace, Mister Salus.

I remember running CoLinux back in my training days ~2005-2006. It seemed a bit like black magic to me at the time, but it worked quite well for my needs.

But CoLinux - IIRC - required the NT branch of Windows. I can only imagine the level of hackery it takes to make this happen on Windows 9x.

Part of me wants to weep at the sheer perversity, part of me wants to burst into manic laughter. It is indeed a world of endless wonders.

I had the same reaction.

True, however, that has been the case for quite a while. This particular incident doesn't change that, except for the VeraCrypt developer, who is in a crappy situation now (not just regarding VeraCrypt, he mentions he was using the certificate for his main job as well, so this sucks a lot for him).

As much as I like bashing Microsoft, never underestimate people's capacity for incompetence, especially where large organizations are involved. I don't see how they would gain anything from this move.

It doesn’t help that they do that sort of shits AND mandate a microsoft account for logging in to windows. Also how much trust can you have that if you move your business to azure they will not randomly kill it. Incompetence or malice, almost doesn’t matter to the average user.

The outcome is the same, yes. With incompetence, there is at least a glimmer of hope things will get rectified. But you are correct, trust is destroyed this way, and it doesn't look like Microsoft cares much.

And never underestimate the capacity of useful idiots for defending malicious actors.