I don't mean this to be funny. But given that this is running the actual drivers. Would it be possible to take a standard PC floppy drive, and have it read at Amiga OS disc?
The IBM PC floppy controller, however, normally cannot: While it has a debug raw read operation, it only reads once it finds a triple sync word in the floppy; Amiga track format uses double sync words.
However, if there is another floppy drive, it is possible to start the read on the other drive, with a standard IBM PC formatted floppy in it, and then poke a register to switch to the drive with the Amiga floppy.
Thanks for the note, we will try to make the install instructions clearer. The desktop app is available via a download button on the homepage: https://autotab.com
This could get interesting in light of recent changes to California law. A similar program designed to "normalize" rent. Is now illegal. Even the FTC has agreed that price fixing by algorithm is still price fixing. https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog/2024/03/price-fix....
I would agree, I would also add that generally programmers today are not used to dealing with the memory limits of '80s computers. What is now considered an embedded device, back then was a desktop. My smartwatch likely has more memory than a PC Jr.
No idea what smart watch you have but the latest (series 9) Apple Watch has (up to) 2 GB of RAM and 5 Tflop of computing power, while the PC junior had 256 kilobytes of ram and .33 megaflops of computing.
nodejs' main binary on my laptop is 44 MiB.
The Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) we put a man on the Moon with could do 4 kilo instructions per second and 0.43 megaflops and had 2KB of RAM. Apple watch is roughly 900x as fast as the AGC while being being .67 x as large and less than 1% of the weight.
Vs the PC Jr, it's almost 2000x the size of an Apple watch and like 150x heavier.
Isn't it the same thing? CS has other priorities. Answer to the original question is "No, early 80s computers could not have had better software, because today's CS focuses on SaaS income, tracking users and having the tallest Jenga tower of dependencies."
Based on the way you were troubleshooting it. You can tell you're a programmer first. You went to your code, you went to your logs. Both reasonable, both potential causes of the problem. Both ignore the primary clue that you had. It worked on localhost.
As an SRE/devops/platform engineer or whatever the title of the day is people want to give. I would have zeroed in on the difference between the working system. And the non-working system. Either adding and then removing, or removing and then adding back the differences one at a time. Until something worked. What I see is two things.
1) you have an environment where it does work.
2) the failing environment was working, then started failing.
Is my method superior to yours, no. It just is being stated to highlight the difference in the way we look at a problem. Both of a zero in on what we know. I know systems, you know code.
many years ago, i was working as an electronic technician. we had a stack of processor boards (from a Perkin Elmer 7/32) that were removed from service. broken.
many different revisions, and only schematics for one revision of each board.
i thought it was hopeless. an older wiser tech taught me how.
plug a good board on an extender. run a diagnostic that fails in a loop. using a scope, look at every pin on the connector. write down what you see.
replace with a bad board. repeat.
which signals are different? chase them back. if the schematic does not match, get out a voltmeter and your eyes and draw a schematic that reflects how the board is wired.
he called this "good card - bad card".
and it worked. not going to make any claims about cost effectiveness, but we fixed every board. and my troubleshooting skills in digital electronics were greatly improved.
this was a 'fireman' kind of job. waiting for the system to break, so it didn't matter if 2 techs put a week into 1 circuit board.
I'm curious if they're proposal will be capable of handling multi-os boots. I know grub can, I can have Linux and windows and possibly even a third OS if I want. I am concerned that red hats solution the well-intended, may be rather myopic, and be commercial only. What I failed to understand, is what problem this solves for systems that I probably only reboot once or twice a year. (Given that it only works with Linux only systems)
The issue it solves, according to the talk, is that grub presents a fairly big attack surface for something that is sparsely maintained and that could be done in the kernel, which has a lot of active devs.
Yeah, look at Windows 10 if you want to see how this can be done poorly. Its boot menu works by booting Windows 10 first and then restarting the computer if you choose another OS. This includes going all the way through POST again. Took something like two minutes end-to-end to get to Windows 7.
Not sure, there might have been a fast path if you were booting to another Windows 10 install. The old legacy Windows Boot Manager also doesn't have the issue since it's much simpler and it executes in faux text mode before the OS boots.
If you Bcdedit, that is known as "Standard" bootmenupolicy, which is touch-screen compatible and it has to reboot in order to reach an alternative OS selection other than the current bootmgr default.
If you bcdedit to be "Legacy" bootmenupolicy, you can select any OS from its simple non-touch text-based NT6 multiboot menu and it will boot right away without need for repost.
99.9% of the problems you spoke to, which are very real. Could be solved if people building the software would just understand one thing. A container is not a mini VM. It is not in any way shape or form a virtual machine. If what you need is a lightweight virtual machine. Build that. Do not build a container because it's the latest and greatest buzzword. But instead I see large monolithic applications, shoved into a container, and then I hear a multitude of complaints about performance issues ETC. You may be able to drive a nail with a screwdriver but it's not a good idea.
This is scary. It hides in boot sector and can compile tiny C apps to bootstrap malware. Wipe system, rebuild, blackhat is soon back in, rinse and repeat. Th end solution ... destroy the box.
I don't see what makes a compiler in the boot sector scarier in malware terms than any other program… would you elaborate?
Like, how does the malware benefit shipping its own source code and a tiny compiler at boot time, over just booting directly into the compiled malware?
Some viruses intercept the interrupt handler, detect if you're trying to write to the boot sector, then either fake a write or change the sector. I believe some forms of ParityBoot (B?) did this. So you need to be sure you're booting from a clean medium, which in the case of some of these boot viruses might not be that easy since a lot of your disks and floppies might have been infected already.
Some viruses also used extra space at the end of the partition table or the end of the disk to store themselves so they wouldn't be limited to the 512 byte limit (minus the metadata in the boot sector).
AI induced reactive Observability. What if we could (ok we can just haven't) create a system that based on past solutions looks for a specific condition and then, when that condition is met, takes specific actions immediately and then reports to the human rather than reporting to the human and waiting for them to take a known set of actions. Beyond just "container died restart" but getting into "Container 2 is exhibiting performance that indicates it is suffering a very slow memory leak. Capture logs and readings to prove this, restart the container and report findings to a human"
I'll ask, in the corporate world. Why even allow them to know their password. To login to their device a Yubi Key or Door key could be used (or similar) then once logged into their laptop they have an app the works like 1password or lastpass that inserts their passwords, updates their passowrds etc. for everything the company uses. (If they have a reddit account that is non corporate they could use their own pw manager.) This would also solve the "shared password" issue where a company that has a corporate Twitter account, they control access to the credentials and the credentials. Also gives you a paper trail in that you now know who used the credentials at the time of a post.
