I find hosted/hybrid machines particularly fascinating, so I have a 6100/66 DOS with a Houdini II Nubus card and a Education-market LC with the Gemini-based Apple IIe PDS card that I've collected over the years.
They are ...weird... machines.
Both have a (different) extremely bespoke Y cable that are almost required, such that if you find a card separated from the cable, you probably shouldn't pay much for it.
The IIe card has a little lag in the video circuitry compared to the real thing (at least in a first gen LC host, apparently that problem goes away if you stick it in a faster machine with a 24-bit PDS slot).
Coaxing the Houdini II to boot things that are not fundamentally MSDOS is always a good way to throw away a couple hours, but it does a great job of convincing anything up to Win95 that it's a PC. Performance is absurdly better with dedicated RAM.
There are a couple other things in the family, the MacCharlie and AST Mac86/Mac286 products for bolting PC hardware onto various Macs, and the later OrangePC cards (they ended up with the IP from both Apple and ASTs offerings). The apex of "weird hosted computers you can stick in a Mac" are probably the MacIvory (LISP machine on a NuBus card) products, but those are "costly and rare," and are infamously balky even if you do get the hardware (...and I just don't enjoy Lisp).
Sun had a SunPC/SunPCi line in the same vein that will bolt a PC-on-a-card into various SPARC hosts.
Commodore had that first-party Sidecar product with a PC-XT in a box for Amigas, and there was ShapeShifter that would let you fake a Mac semi-native on a 68k Amiga. Likewise DayDream (recently updated into DarkMatter) to run a Mac environment on a 68k NeXT host, both of which "needed" Mac ROMs attached on a dongle for license reasons.
MAE is emulation, but it was an Apple-blessed way to run MacOS hosted on contemporary Unix workstations of the early 90s, which is sort of the opposite. I've managed to prod it onto a (real) PA-RISC/HPUX host, and (emulated, because my SS20 has been super balky as long as I've had it) SPARC/Solaris host just for sport - I'm pretty sure it was built out of decapitated A/UX parts and an emulator when A/UX4 didn't happen.
I'd like to round out my set with at least a IIe with a Premium Softcard IIe at some point, but I'm not willing to pay ebay prices for any of that stuff.
I see news about those, mostly from friends doing recreational things with FPGAs.
I guess also relevant since they've managed to crowdfund three (substantially upgraded from generation to generation) runs of them.
I have a copy from the kickstarter, it's the best and most expensive ($175) thing I've ever gone in on crowdfunding for.
Absolutely beautiful books. Great photography, they even worked up their own typefaces and do fun typographic things all over the place. Well written and deeply _deeply_ researched.
I have very few complaints, maybe the section on chorders is a little thinner than I'd like, but that's a pet interest of mine and I've chased down a bunch of material so my perspective is weird.
From the kickstarter updates, the original run were an ordeal to make, but I really do hope there is enough interest for a second printing at some point.
I have a long fascination with weird input devices, owing partly to a predisposition to fine joint problems, and Chorders are always both super interesting in theory and kind of weird in practice, going all the way back to the Engelbart/SRI 5-key Keyset that was carried forward to the Alto.
Of the ones I've played with, I find the 7-key kind (4 fingers and 3 thumb positions) to be the most appealing, and I don't see them mentioned in the thread. Infogrip has sadly discontinued their commercial BAT offering, the "Spiffchorder" family ( https://www.chorder.org/wiki/doku.php/start ) use the same chord-set and are designed to be cheap and easy construction - I've made a few in different physical arrangements. I'm too qwerty habituated and never got _completely_ comfortable, but I've been up to tolerable a couple times.
My "normal" typing is mostly on conventional splits (Kinesis makes make some nice off-the-shelf options that just split and tent), largely to avoid shoulder issues. I recently tried a ortholinear split and... I'm pretty convinced they really don't have meaningful benefits.
I've been using Warewulf (&co.) for provisioning bare-metal clusters for decades (back into the Perceus days between Warewulf 1 and 2), it's a solid easy-to-comprehend tool that does things in ways that are transparent and built from generic [u/li]nux tools enough that they're not hard to think about when needed, but automated enough you usually don't have to.
Definitely shows its research roots, best-tested with RHEL-alikes, reasonably well tested with Suse and Debian, and you may be in for some extra work if you need provision something else, but that pretty much covers the common cases (and it integrates with containerization tools if you need some specific environment on the nodes).
It's a nice to have when you need to spin many nodes.
I'm local, I know a ton of former Lexmark people, because they've already been all-but dead in Lexington for some time. They mostly only did R&D here for decades, and that group has been dwindling.
Large groups of Ex-Lexmark folk have ended up in other local tech companies, many ended up at OpenText (via HP via Exstream, the eventual successful startup from a local serial entrepreneur that basically makes the tools to do semi-individualized bulk mailing like bills), Badger (robots for doing retail work) was founded by folks leaving Lexmark, etc.
Amazon has been buying up their old buildings (long, long ago it used to be a sprawling IBM campus that did typewriters, printers, keyboards, compilers, EMI testing...) as they contract.
Like much of the US, Lexington has lost a bunch of manufacturing, but IBM/Lexmark as a major entity is already long gone.
It is funny that they've been bought by a cartridge cloner, and foreign private equity, and are now being bought by a competitor, they keep dying in new ignominious ways.
It certainly is a bit of a novelty, but there are a few Theremin-featuring pieces that I find pleasing, a classic example is the Theremin and piano arrangement of Saint-Saens' The Swan.
Here is Clara Rockmore performing it (I think this is a video of the recording on The Art of the Theremin) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdFSU8sn3mo . There's a very nice arrangement of La vie en rose from the same sessions.
She developed a lot of the Theremin techniques and - despite some argument about how practical vs. performative they are - is likely the best Theremin player ever. She was previously trained as violinist and an answer to why you would _play_ a theremin: her tendinitis killed her violin career but could keep playing music with the force-less theremin.
I love the Computer-Hosted-In-A-Computer products (for absolutely no good reason), I have both one of the education market Mac LCs with a IIe-on-a-chip in the PDS slot ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_IIe_Card ) and one of the slightly later PowerMac 6100/66 DOS with the first-party "Houdini II" 486 DOS card - The Houdini IIs are SoundBlaster 16 compatible (...ish) and the Is like the 610s bundled had kind of janky sound, so they're a little more "useful" (insomuch as a feeble 30 year old PC hosted in a 30 year old Mac is "useful").
The firmware is "uncanny valley" level mutant; it looks enough like a PC for DOS/3.1/95/98, and there are shim drivers to use the shared-in peripherals, but anything that does more direct hardware access will immediately notice it's not a PC and freak out ...that said, Despite claims that it's impossible, I did once get it to boot a minimal Linux system (IIRC some bullshit with a Tomsrtbt disc set and loadlin to chain load it from DOS, it was quite some time ago) - _barely_ functional, useless, but fun.
Amusingly, the vast majority of the DOS cards for Macs are lineally related, Phoenix Technologies designed the first gen cards for Apple, sold some aftermarket through AST Research, then Orange Micro bought the line from them and made most of the later aftermarket options.
...I'd love to complete the set and find a MacIvory/MicroExplorer or something, but I don't actually care for Lisp and the people who do have made the prices on working NuBus boards astronomical.
It is very likely the comment I'm replying to is not being obnoxious, but making a very deep cut reference to Orbital's song "Planet of the Shapes" from orbital2 that contains sample of the phrase in their comment, sampled from the movie "Withnail and I."
It might also be a commentary on The Guardian, but the wording is too specific.
(Sorry if I've spoiled your fun by clarifying, it was flagged when I read it, and shook loose a decades-old memory.)
Short answer: The legal situation in the early 90s made BSD unattractive right at the time where cheap microcomputers sufficient to host Unix-likes were proliferating, which allowed Linux to reach critical mass instead.
Too much detail answer:
In the 80s a lot of the commercial UNIX-likes were all or partly BSD derived, like DEC Ultrix, SunOS especially pre-Solaris, pieces of IBM/ISC's AIX, etc. and by the early 90s there were a bunch of BSD ports established or in progress for up-and-coming less expensive (..at least compared to minicomputers) workstations like HPBSD, SunOS, and the Tahoe system that fell through as the target for mainline 4.4BSD, and even commodity Microcomputers like 386BSD and BSD/386 once Intel offered a part with a usable MMU.
At this point _everyone and their dog_ derived their networking stack from BSD, because it was the reference OSI TCP/IP design and all the networking parts were permissively licensed. Even the Windows networking stack is BSD derived. That's still a thing, the Nintendo 3DS and Switch's in-house OS has a network stack that is derived from FreeBSD (though the rest of the OS isn't).
A few years later, MontaVista contributed a bunch of scalability work to Linux, and SGI and IBM who had recently bought Sequent contributed their even larger scaling and NUMA stuff to Linux as they bailed out of the Itanium Unix-brand-Unix Project Monterey (the later of which is what kicked off the SCO v. IBM lawsuit in 2003, but that was too late to kill inertia like the USL v. BSDi one did)... basically Linux got critical mass on features, vendor support, and hardware support by being in the right place at the right time and on relatively neutral ground relative to many long-standing divisions in the Unix world, and steamrolled the rest of the Unix market.
There was also a bunch of the common problem for permissively licensed stuff happening, in that the core folks got hired away by proprietary derivatives and choked the upstream. In the 80s a bunch of the core BSD folks left for Sun and built partially-incompatible partially-proprietary SunOS that was then superseded by the SVR4 based Solaris (SVR4 was _highly_ cross-pollinated with BSD, Xenix, and SunOS parts). Then a bunch of BSD folks spun BSDi to make commercial and partially proprietary releases (with squabbling about what would be proprietary), and the Jolitzes had a series of companies and... Then the Berkley CSRG that was the center of gravity for the BSD world closed up in 1995 (they had been winding down for years before that), and the post-4.4BSD community projects (FreeBSD, NetBSD, etc.) proliferated, with the usual open source squabbling keeping them not-very-unified.
As you note, the Next/Apple family has a lot of BSD code in it because the Mach folks at CMU derived most of their stack from BSD (and contributed back the BSD virtual memory system), and a lot of the people and code from that became the core of NeXTStep which became the core of OS X, and that lineage persists in nearly all of Apple's products and is occasionally re-synced with FreeBSD. You used to be able to get all the non-proprietary parts distributed as Darwin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_(operating_system) , but Apple stopped doing that almost a decade ago and none of the forks have rooted.
There _are_ quite a number of other BSD derived proprietary OSes floating around that often don't go out of their way to note their relationship. The Sony Playstation 3/4/5 system software are hacked up FreeBSD derivatives. Juniper Junos that runs on a lot of fancy routers is FreeBSD derived (though recent releases have been migrating to Linux). Force10 (now part of Dell) and some Ericsson routers run NetBSD derived stacks. Etc.
A cheap AUE Chromebook flashed with UEFI makes a good (albeit rather storage-starved) Linux beater - but you'll have trouble with Haiku or any of the BSDs because the hardware is a little "quirky." The input devices in most of the currently-cheap x86 Chromebooks are plumbed over i2c in a slightly strange way that didn't even work entirely right on mainline Linux until fairly recently, and Bay/Cherry trail style half-SOC-half-external-codec style sound hardware that only mostly works in mainline Linux right now.
Just because I was beating on it at the time, I tried Haiku and NetBSD on a Dell Chromebook 3189 2-in-1 with Mr. Chromebox Coreboot back in August, and (quoting myself from https://pappp.net/?p=59407 ) Haiku R1B4 boots but sees no integrated input devices or sound, Haiku Nightly hrev57235 sees the mouse (which is interesting because it looks like the patch adding support should have been in R1B4), but it’s constantly drifting and spamming click events, and still no keyboard or sound. NetBSD9.0 loses track of its discs during boot, while 9.3 boots but with no integrated mouse/keyboard – there are patches under review in July ’23 to add support for them.
For about the same price as bare SBC or surplus SFF box, a hacked Chromebook gets you input devices, a display, a managed battery, and a usually rather rugged portable case, but no exposed GPIOs or UARTs or the like. For 3D printer controllers, streaming media endpoints, software experiments that might screw up the host so you don't want them on a machine you care about, and that sort of thing, they're a decent choice.
I haven't gone as far as a straight razor, but I've just in the last few weeks switched to a DE razor coming from years of using cartridge razors with too many too closely spaced blades that clog then degrade and cause irritation.
I'm trying a Rockwell 6C (around $60) with its interchangeable base-plates for different aggressiveness on blade exposure/angle, and just started on a variety pack of blades to see what suits me - so far so good on the experiment, it's at very least not causing any more irritation and produces less waste. Shaving accessories _is_ a ridiculous rabbit hole of hipster consumerism, but doing better-than-default seems like it might be worthwhile.
Right now it's just for face, by my hair is rapidly approaching "Doonesbury's Old Surfer Dude" so the role might expand.
I generally hate dealing with bluetooth headphones (extra non-replaceable batteries to die then die! Extra drain on your phone battery! Run a unique ID tracking beacon all the time! Have a fight every time you want to switch sources! Pay more for inferior sound quality!), but the difference between the no-names and the mid-tier brands is shocking.
I've used a couple cheap wireless earbuds all of which were _awful_, and some over-ear TaoTronics headphones that are bluetooth-or-wired which are pretty OK, but I decided to try going up a tier and got a pair of Anker Soundcore Space A40 earbuds on sale for a bit over $50, and their ANC is _fabulous_, their pairing only rarely does something frustrating (they'll remember two different devices, which helps), they're actually reasonably comfortable despite being a larger object supported from the ear, etc.
One thing I realized the first time I had them on a flight is that the _lack_ of a simple way to hook them to a standard 3.5mm source is limiting - it means they can't take over for as many tasks from a wired pair as they otherwise could.
On the topic of headphones for loud environments: I've had mine for several years, but Plugfones (I have their Guardian model) are also a worthy object; earbuds which are also ANSI S3.19-1974 29db NRR hearing protection. Really nice for both noisy environments and working with power tools.
This will be my 12th SC, every year except the virtual one (or was it two? I've genuinely lost track) since 2009.
It's a singular experience. Enormous. Part trade show, part conference, weird mix of deeply technical people, and IT manager types and the salescritters who prey on them, so there is a lot of intensely smart people and a lot of money floating around, not necessarily in the same places.
It historically was largely built around the national labs and their purchasing and use of very large systems, and that's still a major feature.
It feels like the population ratio has shifted from "people who work on computers" to "people who run work on computers" - a lower proportion of computer engineers, programmers, and top tier IT people, and a lot more folks running other people's code on other people's large systems, often with other people's data, which is a little strange.
There are still always a lot of interesting conversations with the people who are actually doing things to be had.
Yup. The research group I work with builds a lot of custom camera parts (mostly 3D printed) for different projects, and we keep a bottle of Black 3.0 around to coat internal surfaces. We'll pick up some 4.0 shortly.
It's a quick and easy way to guarantee light-tightness and kill internal reflections.
Last I looked Microchip's Libero FPGA/FPGASoC development tools were paid, either on an expensive one-time fee for a specific version, or an expensive-compared-to-this-board annual subscription. It won't even show me current pricing without logging in, which is a bad sign, and none of the press has mentioned if these come with a comped board-locked license or something to make them tenable for hobbyists.
The big FPGA players have mostly quit that shit; AMD/Xilinx, Intel/Altera/Whatever dumb name its about to be spun back out as, and Lattice all have free versions of their dev tools for at least their parts small players can afford. They just want you to buy chips and IP.
I haven't heard of the Yosis folks making a PolarFire backend, so I don't think there's an open alternative.
Libero is even FlexLM based licensing like the bad old days of proprietary dev tools.
I suspect a lot of that now is because of niche capture as a winning academic career strategy.
If you're working in a specialist area, any kind of blind review is bogus because the primary handful of people publishing in that niche know each other and what they're working on. They are usually aligned into one or more shared-stance cabals lead by the first person or handful of people to establish themselves in that particular niche, and filled out largely by their current and former students and collaborators. Those groups are then the established experts in the area and review, consciously or not, to ensure that they and theirs get published and anything that challenges their stance/narrative/methods/choke-hold doesn't.
I think everyone who has spent much time in academia has a few pieces of "un-publishable work" tucked away, not because it was bad work, but because it would be inconvenient for someone with clout in the area and is thus not worth the hassle.
University of Kentucky too, first day of classes, no one can get into anything they aren't already logged in to with a valid cookie.
I spent 20 minutes trying to figure out what new cookie I needed to grey-list for the half dozen redirections in the M365 auth flow to not bork before I thought to check if it was generally broken.
Many (most?) state schools don't do significantly competitive admissions, and many have state mandates in the vein of "Anyone who graduated in the top half of their in-state high school gets admitted with the following terms." For most students and employers, they are largely interchangeable except for in-state tuition being cheaper (and to be clear, I think that is a good thing).
It's actually a bit of a problem in other ways though. The school I teach at gets an alarming number of students coming in as pre-engineering who have dramatic math or literacy deficits and would be better served with a year or two at a cheaper-for-everyone community college (or a not-broken highschool, but that's way harder to fix) instead of slamming into their first couple technical classes and failing because they don't understand variables and/or don't have the reading comprehension for the course materials unless/until they finish a pile of remediation. Universities have a profit motive to encourage this, since having a student take two years of high-margin large service classes while paying for room and board, then never consume any lower-margin resources, is a financial win for the university.
They are ...weird... machines.
Both have a (different) extremely bespoke Y cable that are almost required, such that if you find a card separated from the cable, you probably shouldn't pay much for it.
The IIe card has a little lag in the video circuitry compared to the real thing (at least in a first gen LC host, apparently that problem goes away if you stick it in a faster machine with a 24-bit PDS slot).
Coaxing the Houdini II to boot things that are not fundamentally MSDOS is always a good way to throw away a couple hours, but it does a great job of convincing anything up to Win95 that it's a PC. Performance is absurdly better with dedicated RAM.
There are a couple other things in the family, the MacCharlie and AST Mac86/Mac286 products for bolting PC hardware onto various Macs, and the later OrangePC cards (they ended up with the IP from both Apple and ASTs offerings). The apex of "weird hosted computers you can stick in a Mac" are probably the MacIvory (LISP machine on a NuBus card) products, but those are "costly and rare," and are infamously balky even if you do get the hardware (...and I just don't enjoy Lisp).
Sun had a SunPC/SunPCi line in the same vein that will bolt a PC-on-a-card into various SPARC hosts.
Commodore had that first-party Sidecar product with a PC-XT in a box for Amigas, and there was ShapeShifter that would let you fake a Mac semi-native on a 68k Amiga. Likewise DayDream (recently updated into DarkMatter) to run a Mac environment on a 68k NeXT host, both of which "needed" Mac ROMs attached on a dongle for license reasons.
MAE is emulation, but it was an Apple-blessed way to run MacOS hosted on contemporary Unix workstations of the early 90s, which is sort of the opposite. I've managed to prod it onto a (real) PA-RISC/HPUX host, and (emulated, because my SS20 has been super balky as long as I've had it) SPARC/Solaris host just for sport - I'm pretty sure it was built out of decapitated A/UX parts and an emulator when A/UX4 didn't happen.
I'd like to round out my set with at least a IIe with a Premium Softcard IIe at some point, but I'm not willing to pay ebay prices for any of that stuff.