Notices by 🇺🇦 haxadecimal 🚫👑 (brouhaha@mastodon.social)

@daedalus
The point is that if something is really dangerous, you need multiple, DIFFERENT protective measures. Each of them should be made as reliable as possible. That one of the measures is a piece of software isn't inherently a bad design. But when the ONLY protective measure is just ONE piece of software, that IS inherently a bad design.

@daedalus
I'm not even sure that most people drew the right conclusion from the Therac 25 debacle.
The previous machine had a mechanical interlock.
The real Therac 25 problem wasn't that the software had a bug. ALL software has bugs. The problem was that the redundancy of the previous machine (software check AND mechanical interlock) was removed, on the absurd assumption that the software was correct. This introduced a new single point of failure the prior machine had been immune to.

@simonzerafa @thomasfuchs
I find messing around with OLD computers to be far more useful as therapy and self-care, and FAR more interesting. Especially with machines from 1980 and earlier. Give me a nice PDP-8, PDP-10, or PDP-11 any day. Or even a Data General Nova or HP 2100. I'd kill for a System/360.

@HopelessDemigod @kilroy_was_here
Mineral oil is used for heat transfer in commercial processes, but not usually for immersion cooling of electronics, though hobbyists have done it. Pricing for industrial mineral oil in bulk is under $1 per liter. The main drawback is that the viscosity of mineral oil is about 50 to 100 times higher.

@HopelessDemigod @kilroy_was_here
Novec 7300 was good for immersion cooling of electronics, and there are third-party equivalents to them. The cost was over $400 per liter. I'm told that the equivalents from other vendors are roughly half that price.

@HopelessDemigod @kilroy_was_here
The old formilatikns were PFCs and were taken off the market years ago. The more recent stuff were segregated hydrofluoroether (HFE) compounds or fluoroketones (FK), which have much lower global warming potential. 3M got out of that market, but several other companies, like Best Technologies, still make them, and offer a variety of products that can match the characteristics of specific 3M products.

@HopelessDemigod @kilroy_was_here
And of course the replacements for that are quite expensive

@ryanc
There exist not-terrible ones?

A decade ago, I had a colo rack at Hurricane Electric in Fremont CA, and was very happy with them.

@fesshole
"You're not getting my Bud Light."

I might eventually try to get FreeBSD 1.1.5 or a tiny Linux running on it. The first iteration will likely have only about 4 MiB of fast (10 ns) static RAM.

Initially the only I/O will be a serial port or two, but I'll add an interface for an SD card if I can get as far as booting from flash into a monitor.
Has anyone written an open-source x86 (386 or newer) 32-bit protected mode boot/debug monitor for bare metal?
There won't be any secret motherboard/BIOS vendor binary blob code doing sneaky stuff in System Management Mode, and they didn't have the secret Management Engine (ME) crap back then either.
#Pentium #x86 #boot #debug #monitor

I just created EDA devices/symbols/footprints for Socket 7, as used by 90+ MHz Pentium, Pentium MMX, some Pentium Overdrive, and some other vendor's processors, based on the spec in Chapter 17 of the 1997 edition of Intel's _Pentium Processor Family Developer's Manual_ (order number unknown).
I'm thinking about making a homebrew Pentium (P54C or P55) system, by which I mean, not using a purchased motherboard or an Intel chipset.
#retrocomputing

@MisuseCase @inthehands
Thanks to globalization, now the ideal that companies everywhere strive for is to have no employees AND no customers.

People called Romans, they go the house?

@steter
The Blues ain't about feeling better; it's about making other people feel worse.
– "Bleeding Gums" Murphy

@fesshole
And?

@fesshole
Thirty days hath Septober, April, June, and No Wonder, All the rest have peanut butter, Except my grandmother, she has a little red tricycle.

@steter
So what rights are they taking away from us now?

@fesshole
Give a man a gun, and he'll rob a bank.
Give a man a bank, and he'll rob the world.

🎶 He's come undone
We didn't know what he was headed for
And when we found out what he was headed for
It was too late
He's come undone

He found an enemy who was strong within
And when he found out he couldn't win
It was too late
It's too late
He's gone too far
He's lost the war
He's come undone

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