Me too, on the VIC-20.

It just had to turn it upside down!

I think something like the Commodore PET might qualify. Back in the day, I saw it used for everything from cash registers to accountants’ workstations, but rarely for anything else.

I think that the original IBM PC was conceived and marketed as a business machine and only grew beyond that because of Microsoft’s deep commitment to it as a platform and IBM’s uncharacteristicly open specifications and design.

If not for that combination, the PC might never have left the office and most of us would have stuck with the companies who were actually breaking new ground, Apple and Commodore.

Florida House Bill 1 would prohibit children under the age of 16 from using most social media platforms, regardless of parental approval.

The social media platforms the bill would target include any site that tracks user activity, allows children to upload content or uses addictive features designed to cause compulsive use.

How would this even work? Let’s take a closer look at the first 2 clauses of the second paragraph:

A student portal for accessing lessons and submitting assignments would require tracking activity and uploading content. If that system is accessible to students or anyone else from anywhere other than direct connection to the school LAN, then it would be in contravention of this law.

Or let’s say someone puts up a self-hosted, restricted-access system for extended family to stay in touch without using a commercial or public system (something I’m in the process of doing). Allowing teenagers to use that site would put them on the wrong side of the law.

Brain damaged authoritarian nut jobs…

That doesn’t surprise me. I have Haiku running in a VM, but haven’t looked at it in 2 years, despite the fact I used BeOS as a daily driver back in the day.

Well, if you want “compile something unstable yourself,” here is their official documentation for ARM64.

And here is someone’s progress report on porting to RISC-V. They seem to have started in 2021, so maybe they were successful.

Whenever I price something, I look at the whole package. If I like what a company is doing, I don’t mind paying extra to support them. Sometimes I win, sometimes I lose. With System76, I feel like I won.

They were the only company I found that was offering Canadians any laptop with Linux pre-installed. (I think Lenovo or Toshiba had something, but they weren’t available in Canada.) Having fought mightily with various distros on a wide range of hardware for years, it was critically important that my new daily driver not suck up my time just getting it running and keeping it that way.

Nearly 5 years later, the laptop is still going strong. On top of that, my hopes for their distro have far exceeded any reasonable expectations. I was prepared for the likelihood that I would ultimately need to switch to another distro, but their ongoing development and contributions to the Linux ecosystem have kept me on board and excited for the future.

In the end, I wasn’t buying a laptop. I was buying a system, and I’ve been extremely happy with the outcome.

That said, I suspect my next laptop will be a Framework. Again, it has less to do with the detailed specifics of hardware than in supporting a company in their attempt to do things the way I think they should be done.

Is that all? I bought my current laptop from System 76 3 or 4 years ago based on my perception that both hardware and Pop were mature enough to be the only computer in the house.

There have been some glitches along the way with the OS, but nothing to get excited about. Notably, I’ve never had to burn things to the ground and start over. :)

There are some ongoing annoyances with the track pad. I don’t know where exactly the problem lies but I do occasionally get cranky :).

There used to be a CBC Radio program called “I Hear Music”. The host discussed and demonstrated the histories of various genres and their interconnections.

One of the standout episodes for me was the relationship between operatic forms, especially Wagnerian, and certain heavy metal forms. At the time, the community band I was playing in was rehearsing something by Wagner and I was having the same problem I always had with Wagner: I couldn’t find the music. I knew it was there because the music is always there, but I just couldn’t find it. And unlike previous exposure to playing Wagner, I couldn’t get away with just being technically correct with “buried” parts because I had a quite exposed passage that had to be music, not just notes in the right places.

I had enjoyed the stuff in my son’s metal collection, so after listening to that episode, I went back to that collection with new ears. What I learned there helped me find not just the music in the piece we were rehearsing, but all the other Wagner I hadn’t understood and more besides.

When I was looking at 3D printers, my wife asked me if I thought I could make money with it. I said “not in a million years.” She asked me what I was waiting for, then. Two weeks later I was printing the test model! Sadly, I’ve made basically no progress with “real” CAD, so I do everything in TinkerCAD.

Fine woods and metals are crazy expensive, but if you keep your eyes open and aren’t afraid to ask, a lot of pretty nice stuff is available for free or close to it as long as you’re willing to put the time in on reclamation. I just got a nice Schubert chokecherry log for helping take it down and clean up. I got some sheet steel and light duty tubing from some discarded BBQs. And I’ve got more poplar than I know what to do with. Poplar is the go to tree for yards around here and there is hardly a week that goes by without someone taking down an old tree.

my hobby is finding new hobbies

Sounds a bit like me. I just retired in June and am busy setting up my workshop. The original intention was woodworking with a focus on boatbuilding. As I go, I realize that I’m actually headed more in the direction of hobby manufacturing: a variety of stuff in wood and metal with a side order of 3D printing. On top of rebooting my programming hobby of learning a new language every year from before I “sold out” to Visual Basic and Access.

Don’t sweat it. I used to feel the same way. Then, somewhere in my 50s, I realized that I actually had already been doing what I wanted: everything. “Jack of all trades, master of none”.

I did strive toward mastery of most things I tried that I liked enough to stick with for awhile. I like to think that I generally achieved competency, but I know that I had a few bosses and coworkers who would dispute that. :)

Learning new things and having new experiences is priceless. If you can find that within a particular career, that’s fantastic, but it’s not the only approach.

To answer the question a bit more directly, I would guess that demographics here skew a bit older than elsewhere. That is just a guess, based on the fact that sdf.org dates back to 1987.

Two big ones. I bought the VIC-20 shortly after introduction when I was 21.

Big memory 1: writing machine language programs without the aid of an assembler. I couldn’t afford the assembler cartridge, but I wanted to break out of the BASIC sandbox.

Big memory 2: finding a military surplus acoustic coupler modem and using the schematics to make my own connector, then writing a terminal program so I could dial in to these crazy things called BBSs.

Are you sure that rounding was broken? Many systems use “Gaussian” or “banker’s” rounding to reduce accumulation of rounding errors. Instead of always rounding to the next larger absolute value at .5, they round to the nearest even number. Although it introduces a bias toward even numbers in the result set, it reduces accumulation of error when .5 is as likely as as any other fraction and odd/even are equally likely in the source.

I was taught “banker’s” rounding in school (graduated 1974) and have had to implement it a few times to reduce error accumulation.

If you are looking for a rabbit hole, Wikipedia has a pretty comprehensive article, including an example of how the wrong choice of rounding algorithm led to massive problems at the Vancouver Stock Exchange (Canada).

I recently retired from the local volunteer fire and rescue service. Several years ago the 911 dispatch service wanted to drop paging for notifications and move to SMS. I wrote a nice little technical critique of that plan. In addition to the basic issues regarding coverage (many members have no cell service in their yards, never mind in the fields, yet pagers basically just work), I learned from my technical contacts at the telco that there were a number of service guarantee problems. In addition to the lost and delayed message problem you discovered, things only get worse when crossing providers. As he put it, it’s not so much that it works so good most of the time, it’s that it works at all.

Dispatch did go with SMS notifications, but as an add-on to pagers and “robocalls” to registered phone numbers. We tracked notification channels for several months and found that with every callout, at least one member would report getting the SMS at least 20 minutes later than the page or phone call. Note that most members can get to the hall in 20 minutes or less. A couple of times over the years, we got a flurry of SMS notifications after we were on scene.

Friends don’t let friends use SMS for urgent or critical communications.