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wewbull @feddit.uk
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Comments 796
Linux during the mid to late 90s (Windows 95 and 98 era)
  • Weirdly, I think it all got me my first job. I interviewed at a graphics card manufacturer and the interviewer placed one of their cards on the table and said "tell me what's on that card".

    I picked it up and pointed out all the components because I knew them all by their part numbers that were written on them. I hadn't seen them before, but I knew they were options in XFree86. Then add in that the regular array of chips was likely VRAM and the chips with the same logo on them as was above the door where the companies own video processors.

    I didn't know how any of it worked, but he didn't know that. All he saw was a fresh graduate that just effortlessly identified some quite esoteric components of a design he'd personally made.

  • Linux during the mid to late 90s (Windows 95 and 98 era)
  • The thing that sticks with me is video card support. Back then (before Nvidia, 3dfx, etc) you had VGA cards that had one of a number of chipsets on, but it would be paired with a video timing chip and a RAMDAC. Buying a card required knowing which combination of parts it used and which combinations had support in XFree86. Then writing the configuration required knowing the video timings supported by your monitor. Not just frequencies, but blanking periods and such like.

    EDID solved that last problem.

  • Keir Starmer: 'There will be no return to austerity under my government' | Big Issue
  • Increasing taxes is just taking a larger and larger slice of a shrinking pie. You have to make the pie bigger. We have to grow.

    Austerity hurt us. Brexit hurt us. We need to repair those things and accelerate growth.

  • Labour manifesto missing pledge on abortion law vote to stop women being jailed
  • What a weird article. It talks as if abortion is illegal in the UK. It is not illegal.

    I think it's talking about at what point in the pregnancy abortion is allowed. I think most would agree that there is a point at which elective abortion should be off the table (e.g. would anybody argue for an abortion to be allowed the day before birth?). So the debate is about when that point is. A fair debate, but articles like this don't help.

  • Why we don't have 128-bit CPUs
  • If the 8088 had used all but one 256 8-bit values as legal instructions, all your new instructions after that point would need to start with that unused value and then you can add a maximum of 256 instructions by using the next byte. End result is 511 instructions can be encoded in 16-bits.

  • South Korea: Exploding lithium batteries spark deadly factory fire
  • In other news. A factory fire in Hull, England received nothing more than local news coverage this week. Their product? Hand sanitizer. Turns out that 99% alcohol is really flamible.

    https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/fire-breaks-out-at-hull-factory-and-spreads-to-area-holding-1000-litres-of-hand-sanitiser/ar-BB1oyRi8

    I wonder why there's such a huge disparity in news coverage between these two stories. I guess it's because the building was evacuated successfully, right?

  • Why we don't have 128-bit CPUs
  • So "instruction encoding length".

    I don't think that works though. For something like RISC-V, RV64 has a maximum 32-bit instruction encoding. For x86-64 those original 8-bit intructions still exist, and take up a huge part of the encoding space, cutting the number of n-bit instructions to more like 2^(n-7)

  • Reform UK candidates' offensive remarks uncovered by BBC
  • Trouble is that people pointing at this as evidence to show that Reform can't be given power fail to realise that it doesn't play as a negative to those that vote for them. Some Reform voters see this and think "they're not afraid to be honest". Trump's comment played positively to a large number, as awful as that is.

    Digging up a little bit of misogyny on these people isn't worth the effort.