Rubenerd

Tedium discussed a new social network in May

Today in Tedium: One thing I’ve noticed with the recent social media diasporas that have emerged in the wake of Twitter’s decline is that the people who make up those diasporas don’t really seem to be pulling in new groups of people so much as giving the types of people that are already addicted to Twitter a new place to go.

We are not bringing in new members of the club, for the most part—we are instead doing the social media equivalent of a ’90s revival night at the local hipster dance club.

I don’t think that’s true. I’ve seen people attempt to “revive” their circle elsewhere, but there are social and technical reasons why it usually doesn’t happen, and why new communities invariably have a different mix of people.

The Network Effect is the one we all know about. It’s unusual to lift and shift an entire community or group wholesale onto another platform, even if the tech is there to make it happen. This underscores the hidden truth to so many of our problems: they’re not technical. As long as entrenched platforms exist, it’s rare to move an entire community intact.

But even if everyone in your extended group lifted and shifted elsewhere,the far more interesting reason why you don’t end up with a revival is that every social network has its own dynamic. Again, this is as much to do with social trends as it is technical features or limitations.

Mastodon is a useful case study here. The system bears a superficial similarity to Twitter, but its architecture, lack of advertising, longer character limits, content warnings, optional search and RSS, and the ability to self-host yield a fundamentally different experience. I have many former Twitter friends in my Mastodon circles, but there are plenty of new people too that have sprung up without my active involvement.

Different sites attract and retain different groups of people. I consider that a positive, especially if you’re coming from a sinking ship like Twitter.

Have you ever heard a phrase that hit your nostalgia centre with such devastating force that you had to pause the video or conversation just to get your bearings again? This often comes in the form of an advertising jingle from my childhood, embarrasingly enough for me.

It happened again recently. It would shock you to know I was watching a video about a 486 motherboard restoration, when the host expressed relief that it had “real cache memory, not those fake chips”. The words sent me back to Sailor Moon, iMacs, and Seinfeld. I hadn’t thought of this issue for years, and likely would have forgotten completely.

While most of our CPUs today contain their own L2 and L3 caches on die, it was common on early 32-bit x86 architectures for this cache to reside on the motherboard. You could get a nice performance boost by adding additional cache memory, or replacing existing ICs with better timings.

You can probably see where this is going. Disgraced former manufacturer PC Chips released a series of cheap motherboards at the tail end of the 486 era that were found to contain… Seinfeld bass guitar riff… fake cache chips. They didn’t have the capacity or silicon reported on their shells, and offered no cache whatsoever.

Casual Retro Gamer on YouTube did a video in which he desoldered and snapped a fake cache chip on his board, and found they were literally hollow plastic with metal legs! They didn’t even try to hide this scam.

CRG: Replacing fake cache in the 486 build

Worse than even the physical trickery, the BIOS ICs on these boards were even doctored to deliberately misreport the amount of available memory! CRG was able to demonstrate this by using a third-party cache check tool on boot, which reported a complete lack of L2 cache.

This is why I don’t buy the caveat emptor argument that buyers should have known they were being scammed from a cheap board, as I’ve read on certain forums. It’s one thing to be given a board lacking certain features, but there’s zero excuse for lying about them. It fascinates me how certain people will always place the burden of responsibility on the customer, and not the businesses engaged in deceptive, unethical, or irreseponsible behaviour. But I digress.

Along with those Newtronics read head issues plauging certain Commodore 1541 disk drives, I see these sorts of boards for sale on auction sites and I want to tell people to avoid them! It’d suck to spend all this money on a retrocomputer build, only to realise your parts aren’t what you expected. Or I suppose you could do what CRG did and take it as a challenge to swap them with real cache chips.

This post is dedicated to Benedict Reuschling, who encouraged me to write about this again! Danke :).

I saw this question floating around the socials recently, and it got me thinking where I started. It was tricker to answer than I thought, though I was able to trawl through the archives to find some info.

My first BSD was Red Hat Linux. You read that right: practically every Linux distribution has BSD-licenced code, and they depend on tooling like OpenSSH from the OpenBSD project for secured administration. I like to point out examples like this whenever a GPL advocate claims their licences are necessary to ensure freedom. Pity that importing into a GPL’d project is a one-way transaction.

2009: Installing Linux for the first time

Taking a step closer to what the question really meant, my first BSD-like OS was Darwin in its Aqua clothing. Like FreeBSD upon which its userland was based, early versions of Mac OS X defaulted to tcsh(1) for user shells. I got pretty good at scripting in it, despite the indignant suggestions such actions were considered harmful! I’ve been on oksh(1) for the last few years, but I still harbour tremendous affection for the C Shell family.

2010: tcsh telling me DING!

ksh(1) is a nice seque into NetBSD; I believe 2.0? It was the first BSD OS I installed myself from scratch, because their PowerPC port was so easy to get running on my iBook G3. It’s where I also learned about pkgsrc, which I still run to this day on systems I administer. NetBSD remains a staple on my vintage computers, including a SPARCStation and my beloved Pentium 1, the first PC I built myself as a kid. It also runs a cloud server I maintain for personal projects.

2009: Trying pkgsrc on my MacBook Pro
2010: My HiME NetBSD desktop background whatnot

The first FreeBSD version I ever tinkered with was 6.1, when I got it running in a series of Parallels and VMware Fusion VMs on my then-new Intel MacBook Pro. Much of the early history of my blog detailed my adventures learning about open source desktop environments, window managers, Xorg, and building a FreeBSD desktop. It was a lot of fun.

2006: Parallels Desktop FreeBSD issues
2006: Haruhi dancing on FreeBSD?
2007: FreeBSD boleh!

Funnily enough, it wasn’t until the FreeBSD 7.x branch when I first installed it on a server, at the time an old Athlon XP I used as a Netatalk box. Am I the first person to come to FreeBSD in serverland via desktops instead of the other way round? Not sure!

I’ve tinkered and build Dragonfly BSD and OpenBSD systems out of curiosity since, though I’ll admit I’ve spent more time on the OpenSolaris-derived illumos since. It’s long time I give them a proper try too.

Read or watch any advice about choosing a GPU, and you’ll likely be given one of the following pieces of advice:

• AI-written spam with a vague comparison table, concluded with choose one that’s right for you. People don’t know what’s right for them, that’s why they landed on your article!

• Those who say you should always buy the best graphics card you can for your budget. It’s the part of any build that will make the most difference to gameplay or graphics workstation tasks.

• Those who say it’s important to find the best bang for the buck to not be gouged on price/performance. Diminishing returns eventually kicks in, making the added price unjustifiable for the added performance. On the other side, not much extra can often lead to huge leaps in performance.

It’s the latter I find most interesting, because it has the allure of being rational. Frames per second per dollar is quantifiable, testable, and devoid of marketing or other influences, so it’s the one you should go with, right?

Hardware Unboxed’s podcast, and benchmark misconceptions

Well, not so fast. As I wrote on my recent post about benchmarking, these sorts of comparisons come with their own implicit assumptions that may not hold true for certain use cases. Lies, damned lies, and statistics! For example, what about:

• Power use? If electricity is expensive in your area, any money saved upgrading to a more power hungry card with more frames per dollar will be quickly eroded. This basic fact completely eludes certain US reviewers, and it baffles me!

• Heat? If you’re building a mini-ITX computer, the card that delivers the most frames per dollar may be a thermal dead end for you. A card with a blow-through or impeller cooler design might also be necessary depending on the configuration of your case, which might not be available on the most cost-effective card.

• Physical size? The best card for frames per second per dollar might not fit, which unless you’re handy with an angle grinder or nibbling tool, is a clear deal breaker.

• Operating environment? I use a 4K panel for working at home, and I don’t have space for another. The 3060 Ti was touted as the best bang for the buck in the previous generation, but the 3070 delivered just enough of a performance improvement to make games viable on that 4K panel.

• Features? If your rendering workload uses an AMD or Nvidia API, claiming an Arc GPU has the best performance per dollar is meaningless. This is the same as open source people saying Mac users who need Illustrator and Office should switch to a Linux desktop.

My advice for anyone looking to buy a GPU would be to use bang for the buck charts as a starting point, but to not get hung up on them. They’re but one metric in a sea of others.

Welcome to Suntember! I saw a few people mention this on Mastodon, and I thought it was a great idea.

View all posts tagged SPARCStation 5

We’re starting this series here with this gorgeous Sun SPARCStation 5 which has taken pride of place under the monitor on my retrocomputing table. I took it outside for some better SUN light. AAAAAAAAAAH! Thank you.

This machine was graciously given to me by Mike here in Australia, one of the sweetest people I’ve ever met. I made a remark that I adored pizzabox computers and used one of these machines in the Sun lab at university, and he literally drove up from Melbourne to Sydney to give me one. I still can’t believe it all these months later.

Bremen Saki
social.chinwag.org/@mike

I’ve had a proper history of this beautiful box in my drafts folder for a while; I’ve been waiting on some better lighting kit to detail the internals properly. In the meantime I want to show this specific connector located on the back in the first slot:

This is a 13W3 (or DB13W3) video connector, with my ISA OAK card above it for comparison. It’s clearly larger than the 9-pin CGA/EGA D-Sub connector, and it has far more prominant pins than VGA!

13W3 connectors were ubiquitous on high-end workstations from the likes of Sun and SGI… another company who’s machines I badly wanted as a kid. The prominant RGB pins almost act as mini coax connectors, which reduced colour signal interference at the higher resolutions professional demanded. I do remember seeing a professional monitor with BNC connectors that broke out standard VGA signals into separate colours and chroma/luma, but 13W3 was certainly more elegant.

Shortly after receiving this box from Mike, I scoured my tubs of components and found a SGI DB13 to DVI-A connector. The latter carried analogue signals, which meant I could daisy-chain a passive DVI to VGA connector to it, and connect it to my NEC LCD. It didn’t work alas, because as I learned after the fact, Sun and SGI used subtly different pinouts. I since sent this connector to long-time reader Rebecca for one of her SGI Octanes.

This leads us to where I am today.

What has since proceeded is a comedy of errors with regards to shipping. I found a store that had one official Sun adaptor left, which I bought and had lost in the post. I found a store selling an aftermarket one, which I was soon refunded for because they couldn’t find it in their warehouse. A third connector also never arrived, though fortunately that time I learned to pay for insurance. Eventually I found a seller on AliExpress offering a new adaptor, which I’ve just ordered. I expect this to be eaten by a sea monster.

Mike graciously preloaded NetBSD onto this machine for me, so I can SSH in! But I can’t wait to see it too. When I do, it’ll be in a post :).

People are scrambling for alternatives with the downfall of Twitter. The service pioneered the concept of brief, concise posts which every other social network soon copied. In a world of short attention spans and instant gratification, the format seemed all but inevitable.

Out of this spawned a new type of writing, dubbed microblogging. Like Twitter, they consist of short posts without titles, or much metadata at all beyond a date. There are a few indie services offering these, or in a pinch you can turn a blog like WordPress into one.

But the phrase microblog implies the existence of a macroblog, and that’s what I miss the most. Back when people used to write more than a sentence or two about their day, the flowers they saw, the problems the solved, the people they talked with, the places they travelled.

This is why I’ve started writing more about my travels and life of late, because its what I miss seeing from other people. It used to be that you could subscribe to your friends’ blogs and see what they were up to. Now we only get fragments on a social network that will end up deleting them.

Microblogs have their place, but they make me a bit melancholic. It’s time to bring back the macroblog!

This post is dedicated to the lovely Paul Traylor, whom I amuse when I dive into retrocomputing topics :).

This discovery has shaken me up in ways I didn’t expect. While we all remember what colour the Apple II+ was, and the IBM 5150, and the Atari ST, I’m not not sure all C64 fans do… myself included.

There are a couple of reasons for this. The legendary machine came in so many permutations over its long production run, and even machines within the same generation had cosmetic and technical differences. It was Commodore’s way!

I don’t have every version of the 64—probably for the best—but I think I have a representative sample to perform a visual experiment. I’ve taken these photos in direct midday sunlight at the same time.

Compare the pair

This first example is a PAL Commodore 64C, the later version and my personal favourite. It uses the same sleek design language as my beloved adopted C128, and the later Argentinian Drean 64C. Mine shows the later cost-reduced keyboard with the PETSCII characters printed on top, which admittedly I love for the font.

An earlier example below is this “Aldi 64” case, so named by fans for the chain that sold it in Germany. The breadbin design is shared with the earlier VIC-20, and has the same colour as other C64s if we’re to believe web forums. The most obvious difference is the beige double-shot keycaps in lieu of chocolate brown from earlier C64s.

Variants of this included the Drean 64 in the same colour scheme, and a later beige 64G, ostensibly sold in Europe for peripheral compatibility.

I think we all agree the first machine, and the keycaps on both machines, are beige. But looking at this second machine for a moment… what do you think the colour is? Brown? Tan? To me, I’d even call it milk coffee, though that might be on account of not having caffeine yet.

Most modern reproductions of the C64 are designed to mimic this colour, and I suspect most people remember these machines being a shade of brown. I’m too young to have been around when these machines were new, so I’ve only ever known them by this colour.

Grey matter

But here’s where things get interesting. Aldi 64s all shipped with serial number labels on the side, which offered some protection against UV yellowing. Check out the patch where this label would have been:

I don’t know about you, but this looks grey to me, not beige, and certainly not brown. Likewise, the inside of the case is the same grey colour throughout. Fascinating!

There are a few possibilities here. People who claim the Aldi 64 had the same breadbin colour as the original C64 are wrong. Commodore may have played as fast and loose with their pigments and plastic formulations as other components, so batches of cases might not be consistent. Maybe all C64 cases started grey, before yellowing to the brown everyone now recognises. Or, by some fluke, mine has a manufacturing defect or difference on account of Commodore’s loose QA.

Conclusion

Just when I think I’ve started to understand an aspect of Commodore computer history, something like this comes along to shake it up! I lived my whole life thinking the classic C64 breadbins was brown, and now you’re telling me some of them weren’t!?

If you have a C64, let me know what colour it is. I can’t be the only one with a secretly grey one.

From their revised Terms of Service

p. ii. Unless explicitly permitted, you may not use web scraping, web harvesting or web data extraction methods to extract data from the AI services.

They’re so close to being self aware! Next they’ll admit they want to prevent the very behaviour that made their datasets possible.

Emil Oppeln-Bronikowski

Rule for thee…

If Australian travellers among your friends have expressed a mixture of excitement and relief recently, it’s likely a response to the latest news surrounding Australia’s de facto flag carrier Qantas. The controversial managing director left two months early this week; the official reasons were vague, but it was well-understood his position had become untenable.

Alan Joyce was appointed CEO of the low-cost subsidiary Jetstar in 2003, before becoming CEO of the Qantas Group in 2008. The less said about Jetstar the better in my (fortunately limited!) experience, so we’ll focus on the flying kangaroo here.

The stock market rewarded his handling of the airline’s finances during his directorship, from Covid to the global financial crisis. The flying public didn’t agree, suffice to say. The consensus on the ground was that Mr Joyce had cashed in on the good will and reputation of the airline, and left it profitable but fractured.

Qantas is a big company, and many of us know people who work directly or indirectly for them in a variety of roles. I know second-hand that Joyce fostered a toxic work culture, developed an icy relationship with his ground and cabin crews, and pilots were known to widely despise him. I read a few reports of captains using the PA systems on flights to announce their excitement at Mr Joyce’s departure, which says it all really.

Robert Myers: VH-ZNJ with 100th anniversary of Qantas’ livery

I won’t list here the litany of issues and government inquiries surrounding Qantas during his tenure. It’s also unclear how much of a difference removing the top will make if his board remains intact. I’m sure industry insiders will have far more to say about this in the coming weeks and months.

What I can say is that I’ve actively avoided Qantas for years, and not just because of my affinity towards Singapore Airlines. Qantas used to stand shoulder-to-shoulder among the great airlines of the world, with their impeccable safety record and quality of service. It’s fall from grace, particularly in the latter, has been tragic. If United breaks guitars, Qantas sends them to whoop whoop, to use the local vernacular.

I happen to think Qantas is vital enough a national asset that it should be re-nationalised. Whether you agree or are wrong (cough!), let’s hope Vanessa Hudson is able to revive the kangaroo in whatever form it takes next. I would love to have a bit of pride in them again.

I’m enjoying the new Hardware Unboxed podcast. You can subscribe using the link below, or you can watch on YouTube:

YouTube channel
Podcast RSS feed

I thought they raised a good point about benchmarking:

I don’t want to make it sound like its rocket science, but benchmarking today is significantly more complex and difficult than it used to be. I don’t mean that “it’s very difficult to run a benchmark” … I mean making sure that the test system is up to date and operating as it should be.

Before you even go to test a GPU, you need to make sure the system itself is behaving as it should be, so it doesn’t throw off your comparative data […] Does a new patch introduce a new kind of bug or problem?

There are so many things you have to look into now, from configuring the system, to making sure its giving you the numbers you need, to making sure the [software] is configured the way it needs to be.

There’s so much work you need to do just to make sure and validate you can actually start benchmarking.

This was in the context of graphics cards, though it broadly applies to other hardware, networks, and software as well. Heck, even kitchen appliances, camera gear, you name it.

The core issue with benchmarks is expectations. People without a technical background, or those who have enough to be dangerous, intuitively expect that one device can be meaningfully compared to another, often times with a simple number. Meaningfully being the operative word.

This is a computer, and that’s a computer, so which one is faster and therefore “better”? It’s almost never that easy.

As I mentioned on Mastodon, this is already one positive thing I’m seeing come out of the Linus Tech Tips fallout. I think more enthusiasts appreciate now how good benchmarks are difficult. There’s a science to approaching tests, from:

• Selecting appropriate parameters
• Sourcing the appropriate equipment and software
• Designing thorough and reproducible testing methods
• Controlling for externalities (as best you can)
• Understanding what’s meaningful or an outlier
• Figuring out clean states to perform the next tests

And most importantly of all, asking if the test itself is useful to the target audience, and presented in a way that accurately describes what the test demonstrated.

A large part of my $DayJob involves comparing prices and performance between various providers for clients, and between different infrastructure types. One of the first things you realise is how many people place blind trust a single number, as though it’s complete, accurate, relevant, timely, and actionable. Aka, lies and statistics. Half the battle isn’t even doing the test, it’s explaining why one set of benchmarks is erroneous, or might not be doing what they think, or doesn’t account for something, or has lead them to an error in judgement.

Unfortunately, at least in my experience, too many people interpret such cautions as obfuscation, as though you’re trying to fudge or hide the truth by buttressing a result with a wall of caveats. The more truthful you get, the more asterisks you add, which marketing has taught people to distrust.

The best a benchmarker can do is be transparent about their process, and be open to correcting mistakes; whether it be a graphics card or coffee maker. Anything less is where real dishonesty lies.

Get it… dishonesty lies? Shaddup.