#miserable computer pedantry

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Dropping a Vintage Macintosh by Ai Weiwei

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I love you and your strange brain disease about servers and DVD players

Thank you.

Also, does it cause me physical agony to know that 40,000 tumblr users liked my incorrect interpretation of a joke picture? Absolutely.

OK, real talk, could it play a DVD? Despite having a DVD drive and video output, everyone buying a Sun server would be running Solaris, which didn't include DVD playback (remember how DVDs needed a licensed decoder?). Your third party options would be the (arguably illegal) libdvdcss, which as a Solaris user you'd never do, or you could wait until 2009 to purchase a licensed player from Fluendo (remember Fluendo???).

In practice, these are really noisy servers that nobody would ever use as a desktop. So, probably, nobody ever played DVDs on them. But I guess you could still call it a DVD player if you want to be obtuse but technically correct (understandable).

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checking in on my favorite wikipedia page, a 20 year campaign to rename the article from "Czech Republic" to "Czechia", recently surpassing 250,000 words

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the winrar purse is cute, but as a linux user—

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human spinal cord has lower bandwidth than a PCIe 4.0x16 link or a QSFP56 Ethernet connection, and much worse latency

modern tanks use fiber instead of copper connections for weight savings

in conclusion, while it may not be practical on a human scale yet, I think you could get significant performance improvements on, say, a giraffe, by replacing half of its nervous system with an optical network

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in 2006, Debian and Mozilla had a disagreement over licensing of non-free assets, packaging/customization processes, and trademark usage, causing Debian to rebrand Firefox as Iceweasel. They came to terms in 2017 and went back to using the Firefox branding.

This is useless, trivial bullshit that will occupy part of my brain for the rest of my life. I do like the Iceweasel logo, though (by Ricardo Fernandez Fuentes).

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why modern computers are bad: they stopped making the CPUs purple

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if you see a post from a software guy about his amazing hardware journey with a successful kickstarter describing "supply chain," how he outsourced all labor to china, "hardware is hard," made a million bucks, don't get mad

you can just report him to the fcc because he didn't do unintentional radiator testing (maybe even intentional radiator! imagine the fines)