bboard

Posted by wertigon

Posted by desudesu

Posted by tomman
$349,99. Oh, you DO live at Eurozone? That will be 349,99€ for you then!

PAL Moment.
The same bullshit happens in the UK too.

Except it's not quite that easy, US prices are 9% VAT (a.k.a sales tax) exclusive, EU/UK prices are 25% VAT inclusive.

While EU has 25% VAT the US has only 9% VAT though, so, an apples to apples comparison is $381.49 vs €349.99 vs £349.99 - or, in dollar terms, $381.49 vs $392.20 vs $468.99. UK is getting price gouged, true, but the EU really isn't.

Posted by tomman


> ES2022

Yeeeeeeeah, nope. Not happening anytime soon on our "non-mainstream" (BUT NOT OLDER EITHER!) browsers.

Posted by tomman


While I'm glad Japan is finally leaving the 1997 web behind, the replacement is even more horrible (Googleisms and cellphones), and very un-Japanese to me.

Posted by wertigon
There is no Linux heaven where 72 attractive, young virgins in penguin costumes are waiting for you to serve your every need if you just stay enough Linux-y.

Posted by creaothceann

Posted by tomman
This phone is FAST. It boots far faster than ANYTHING ELSE in this house, including computers and dumbphones!

So you don't have a C64 in your house. :) But seriously, maybe they just use hibernation?

Posted by tomman
... you won't see one outside of an auction catalog!

Posted by tomman
Heh, so Miku went from selling Corollas in 'murica to... selling train tickets to otakus?

Posted by tomman


I guess those fairy tales of "Linux damages hardware" might be real. Or I simply found another case of "old hardware often dies". Whatever...

Posted by wertigon
I am now in a position where I'm doing embedded web development.

E.g. doing text parsing in C on a machine with 1 MB of RAM and 256 kB of storage total, that is supposed to serve HTML5-compliant and ECMAScript 6 compliant webservers. On a machine that, in all likelyhood, will never ever directly connect to the Internet. But a smartphone is supposed to connect to the device and download a PWA from it over a local network.

I'm convinced this is a pretty accurate simulation of programmer hell. :D

Posted by tomman
Today I got "blessed" by the Gods of Incompetent Utilities once again: one of those Soviet Venezuelan Special Massive Power Surges™ just zapped my metal. AGAIN.

Victim count:
- Every single surge protector on the upper floor of the house. At the very least, exploded fuses.
- My last APC UPS. When those things go boom, there is no hope to recover... unless you still have some warranty left on your gear. While I've had nothing but great service from APC distributors in Venezuela, they can do nothing (except expensive off-warranty repairs?) when your 3-year warranty ran out in 2019 :/
- A LED bulb that literally became artillery shell! The bulb internals EXPLODED and the cover got shot out during the surge event! Like, WTF, this is my room, not frickin' Ukraine!
- The charger from my nx9010. Forget about reading email or playing old VNs, I guess (and this was a beefy 90W brick!)
- And of course, Saki, my beloved routerbox. She just stalls at boot without POST, and all keyboard LEDs on. No amount of fiddling helped this time. Apparently the motherboard (that M535/8 AKA PCChips least sucky mobo ever) got shot. Tried swapping every single component (PSU, RAM, CPU, expansion cards), but nothing, no dice. A minute of silence for that awesome girl that served me well through my eager college years towards the hyperinflationary hellscape of last month (if we believe the bullshit of paperboard "lolconomists" here). You'll be REALLY missed! :(

BUT!

In the middle of darkness, there is always a shining beacon of hope. As any of my retroboxes will testify, Soviet Venezuela is a no-fly zone for retrocomputing enthusiasts. You can't simply go into MercadoLibre and order a random Socket 7 mobo, so instead you need to grab the first thing you can find in your way and run. I did had a spare Socket 7 mobo (a PCChips M571) but it was dead too (IIRC it died when I tried testing a 6x86MX - it never booted again since then), so instead I went looking around and found that one of my uncles was trying to get rid of his old Celeron box.

It was a Compaq Presario. YUCK! With a hideous fatass front cover, very yellowed and with stupid Xpress-On swappable faceplates. It screamed "supermarket deal" everywhere (and indeed it was - he had bought it at a big-chain hypermarket 20 years ago). But hey, it booted, and it was from a slightly newer vintage than my Socket 7 gold, so what I have to lose? And it was FREE™ (not unlike the $100 from my emergency fund that I had to spend on a new noname UPS and new surge protectors... although those will do nothing for fixing the ticking time bomb known as "my house was built without grounding at all, just like 90% of homes in Venezuela")

Here is what I got now:
- Compaq Presario 5000LA chassis. The service manual is a pathetic joke.
- Craptacular Compaq Socket 370 mobo (codenamed "BMW" according to the service manual)
- Celery 766 (66MHz bus). What a weird speed!
- 64MB PC133. Yes, SIXTY FOUR MEGABYTES. And unfortunately there is a wide gap on my RAM stash between "late era SIMMs" and "early DDR1".
- Integrated Intel graphics sewage. There is no AGP slot, and even if you add a PCI videocard you can't stop Intel's MCH stealing already scarce main RAM
- Integrated ESS Maestro soundchip that I absolutely do not need.
- Absolutely useless BIOS setup program that (unlike IBM) doesn't let me disable hardware I don't need, or set sane IRQ settings.
- Quantum Fireball Low Cost Airline Technology, the signature of SUCK by Compaq™.
- Four USB 1.1 ports (amazingly, all of them behind a USB hub chip on the motherboard, as Intel's early ICH1 USB controllers only had two ports)
- LG 48x CD-ROM drive.

But not everything is that horrible - a Socket 370 means that I could actually run non-EOL'd Debian on this thing! But not with 64MB RAM, sadly: I tried plugging Saki's boot drive, and while it tries to boot, it quickly dies after the kernel runs out of RAM while decompressing the initial ramdisk (WTF, talking about bloat!). Incredibly enough, I still held another backup HDD with a even older setup (Wheezy), and this one boots fine (albeit quite slow) on such a constrained RAM setup! So welcome back to 2018, and please don't hack me where I get my shit sorted out ;)

Will Saki live on in its new body? Oh hell no. It's time to move on - fortunately PC133 SDRAM sticks are not hard to find, so once I boost RAM on this thing (will try going with 256MB, can't find the real limits for this Compaq hellstew), I'll start from scratch. Watch this space...