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My first job: The Mystery of The Powered-Down Server
I paid my way through college by working every-other-semester in the Cooperative-Education Program my school provided. My first job was with a small company (now defunct) which made some of the very first optical-storage robotic storage systems. I honestly forgot what I was "officially" hired for at first, but I quickly moved up into the kernel device-driver team and was quite happy there.
It was primarily a Solaris shop, with a smattering of IBM AIX RS/6000. It was one of these ill-fated RS/6000 machines which (by no fault of its own) plays a major role in this story.
One day, I came to work to find my team-leader in quite a tizzy -- cursing and ranting about our VAR selling us bad equipment; about how IBM just doesn't make good hardware like they did in the good old days; about how back when _he_ was in charge of buying equipment this wouldn't happen, and on and on and on.
Our primary AIX dev server was powered off when he arrived. He booted it up, checked logs and was running self-diagnostics, but absolutely nothing so far indicated why the machine had shut down. We blew a couple of hours trying to figure out what happened, to no avail. Eventually, with other deadlines looming, we just chalked it up be something we'll look into more later.
Several days went by, with the usual day-to-day comings and goings; no surprises.
Then, next week, it happened again.
My team-leader was LIVID. The same server was hard-down again when he came in; no explanation. He opened a ticket with IBM and put in a call to our VAR rep, demanding answers -- how could they sell us bad equipment -- why isn't there any indication of what's failing -- someone must come out here and fix this NOW, and on and on and on.
(As a quick aside, in case it's not clearly coming through between-the-lines, our team leader was always a little bit "over to top" for me. He was the kind of person who "got things done," and as long as you stayed on his good side, you could just watch the fireworks most days - but it became pretty exhausting sometimes).
Back our story -
An IBM CE comes out and does a full on-site hardware diagnostic -- tears the whole server down, runs through everything one part a time. Absolutely. Nothing. Wrong.
I recall, at some point of all this, making the comment "It's almost like someone just pulls the plug on it -- like the power just, poof, goes away."
My team-leader demands the CE replace the power supply, even though it appeared to be operating normally. He does, at our cost, of course.
Another weeks goes by and all is forgotten in the swamp of work we have to do.
Until one day, the next week... Yes, you guessed it... It happens again. The server is down. Heads are exploding (will at least one head we all know by now). With all the screaming going on, the entire office staff should have comped some Advil.
My team-leader demands the facilities team do a full diagnostic on the UPS system and assure we aren't getting drop-outs on the power system. They do the diagnostic. They also review the logs for the power/load distribution to the entire lab and office spaces. Nothing is amiss.
This would also be a good time draw the picture of where this server is -- this particular server is not in the actual server room, it's out in the office area. That's on purpose, since it is connected to a demo robotics cabinet we use for testing and POC work. And customer demos. This will date me, but these were the days when robotic storage was new and VERY exciting to watch...
So, this is basically a couple of big boxes out on the office floor, with power cables running into a special power-drop near the middle of the room. That information might seem superfluous now, but will come into play shortly in our story.
So, we still have no answer to what's causing the server problems, but we all have work to do, so we keep plugging away, hoping for the best.
The team leader is insisting the VAR swap in a new server.
One night, we (the device-driver team) are working late, burning the midnight oil, right there in the office, and we bear witness to something I will never forget.
The cleaning staff came in.
Anxious for a brief distraction from our marathon of debugging, we stopped to watch them set up and start cleaning the office for a bit.
Then, friends, I Am Not Making This Up(tm)... I watched one of the cleaning staff walk right over to that beautiful RS/6000 dev server, dwarfed in shadow beside that huge robotic disc enclosure... and yank the server power cable right out of the dedicated power drop. And plug in their vacuum cleaner. And vacuum the floor.
We each looked at one-another, slowly, in bewilderment... and then went home, after a brief discussion on the way out the door.
You see, our team-leader wasn't with us that night; so before we left, we all agreed to come in late the next day. Very late indeed.9 -
Although this is gonna sound like bullshit, this happened to me for real. Since that moment I use even more backup services AND I regularly check EVERYTHING.
Had a backup of my important data (still used mainstream services back then) on:
- Hotmail email attachments
- Google Drive
(Both link to another email account).
- A few data backup services
- DVD
- USB
- External HDD.
I wanted to copy some backup data over again:
1. Walk to my staple of HDD's, tried to grab it, somehow missed and knocked the whole fucking pile over. HDD broken.
2. Well fuck, let's go put some of my clothes in the washing machine for clean clothes at study/monday. After this shit being in the washing machine for just a few minutes, I realized my backup USB stick was in one of my pockets, in the washing machine. FUCK. Couldn't stop it so I waited till the end, tried it and well, it wasn't working at all anymore.
Fuck my fucking life slightly right now.
3. *remembers about the backup disc*. I forgot to keep it in its case, very deep scratches and so on, unreadable. FUCKING FUCK.
4. Right, I still have those online services! *tries to login to all of them (including hotmail/gdrive) but forgot the password. Well, let's login to my backup account then (hadn't used that one in years). Account was suspended for some reason.
Started to get really anxious because every online backup service was linked to that email address.
Contacted customer support. They really couldn't restore it because of some issues they weren't allow to tell me. Sorry but I couldn't retain access.
5. Well this is fucked up. Couldn't get into any of the backup/hotmail/gdrive accounts anymore.
I tried contacting their support but never got any replies.
This was the moment I realized I fucked up big fucking time because damn, this stuff at this level hardly happens to anyone.
FUCK.37 -
One:
Had a stack of harddrives with my important data, two USB drives and a 4.7gb disc, two or three cloud storage accounts.
Needed a restore:
Knocked the stack of hard drives onto the floor (all broken), stood on one of the flash drives, found the other one in a pocket of a pair of trousers which just came out of the washing machine, dvd too scratched to read and couldn't verify my cloud storage account because I lost the password to the connected email account and the backup email account to verify that one didn't exist anymore. Fucking hell.
Two:
Production database with not that much yet but at least some production data which wasn't backupped.
Friend: can I reboot the db machine?
Me: yup!
Friend: what's the luks crypt password?
Me: 😯😐😓😫😲😧😭
End of story 😅
For the record, the first one actually happened (I literally cried afterwards) and that taught me to update my recovery email addresses more often!9 -
!dev
If you ever feel like having a good laugh, just watch a flat-earthers video/live-stream.
I can't understand how something like this can even happen, it's so insanely ridiculous.
HOW THE FUCK CAN A HUMAN BEING LIVING IN 2018 BELIEVE THAT THE EARTH IS A FLAT DISC WITH A GLOBE ABOVE IT.12 -
Had a rough time. Dropped out of college twice. Got sent by a shrink to be tested for ADHD. Investigation dropped after phone interviewing my scientology parents. Depressed and admitted to the ward twice. Homeless for a month.
But come Monday I'll start my employment as a COBOL developer. My first qualified job! Code and all resources for learning online has really saved me.8 -
A : "what the funk is wrong with git ! why there are conflict!!"
Y: "let me see, hmm .. just press ctrl + disc.."
A : "what are you doing ?"
Y : "discard! they are gone. now you can try again in different branch"
A : "I didn't commit !! this my work of two weeks!!!"
Y : " ..... "
Y : *sneak away*7 -
To any fellow Linux sysadmin out there, is it true that 32 bits systems can handle a max of 16gb ram?
Running a 32 bits CentOS live disc in my dedi which shows 16gb ram available while the BIOS shows 32gb installed...
😅12 -
~ Freelancer.com Week #1 ~
Project: I need someone to debug an application's code and review it. Budget 30 bucks.
Bid: I am an experienced developer I can probably review it in an hour.
client: Hi, need you to check if app is contains virus [link to scam website]
me: sure, download supposed "social Bitcoin miner" and run some AV tests...8+ positive flags for a Trojan virus.
>Me: It's a Trojan virus mate it's not legitimate😟
>Client: Can you remove the Trojan virus so that the legit not stays?
Me: Umm there is no bot mate it's just a virus 😕 I wouldn't open it outside a sandbox
Client: But here it says Bitcoin faucet bot [links shitty how-to youtube video]
Me: 😒 it's not real dude you are about to get scammed, I can test it in a VM if you. . .
Client: I opened it already, it's working
Me: 😮 r u sure?
Client: yes, can you install VM for further testing?
Me: sure, in your computer?
Client: yes
Me: just download the windows image and text me when it's done
Client: My disc is full! Only 3 gb left
Me: 😑 call me when you clean it
Client: [ offline ]5 -
When I was like 8 years old or so, I had Nero installed on my older sister’s PC. Nero is a software for burning CDs.
Nero had a button called “Create CD” and 8yo me thought “what if I create CDs and sell them” 😂 I thought a fucking disc will materialize inside the drive 😂 big brain time
Interestingly enough I’d already built one PC from scratch at that age, but optical drives that can write discs were so rare to me that I didn’t even understand them. And physics. And common sense.1 -
!dev
To anyone suffering from chronic pain, especially lower back pain: Don't get fooled by shitty doctors. And don't expect doctors to magically heal you. If you want to stop your suffering, you need to be proactive.
What? But my herniated disc from 10 years ago... bla bla bla. So what? It's not going to get better when your only exercise is putting on your socks. Chances are 99% that your spine has shit to do with your pain. Go to a proper chronic pain therapy instead of downing opiods and getting sick notes.
Note to self: Do your sports every day you lazy bastard. Eat healthy, sleep regularly, don't stress out over every damn thing and don't forget to fucking relax!22 -
Yesterday evening I'd been to Lenovo service center to get a battery for my personal laptop.
Sales guy: Sir, I can see that your laptop had Windows 8 when you purchased it. If you want I can give you a one key recovery disc for that.
Me: Thanks a lot sir, but I run Ubuntu on my laptop. And if you are insisting, I can take that recovery media and install it on my uncle's laptop.
Sales guy: I'll get back to you on this.
*End of conversation* 😂5 -
!rant
So the other day, my mother came to visit me after a while of not seeing each other. And one thing we used to do together was go searching through old weird junk stores. We go searching through one, and there was a box of floppy discs. I was excited, because I haven't seen one since I was a little kid. I brought it to her attention, and she said, "Wow. A floppy disc!" I laughed and read the disc aloud, "Oh man. Only 1MB." Then proceeded to laugh even more. And she said "I remember thinking 'theres no way anyone would ever take up that much space!'"
That just absolutely blows my mind haha.1 -
Today a few friends got together and built my gfs new computer. I just watched because.... I'm a hardware n00b :p
Anyways, it took them about 2 hours building all the stuff together and now we're done installing Windows from via disc. The problem is, it's 2015 windows. So we're updating.
And it already takes more time to update windows than building the actual computer.
Nice!
(Btw that's me in the background, super [not] comfy codepen-ing)
8 -
Cracking old recovery CDs for the 9x/2000/XP era shines some light into how companies operated and when concepts came to be in that time:
Packard Bell: An EXE checks that you're running on a Packard Bell machine and reboots if it's not. How do we bypass it? Easy: just fucking delete it. The files to reinstall Windows from scratch come from...
...
C:?
Yup. Turns out Packard Bell was doing the recovery partition thing all the way back to the 9x era, maybe even further. Files aren't even on the restore disc so if your partition table got fucked (pretty common because malware and disk corruption) you were totally fucked and needed to repurchase Windows. (My dad, at the time, only charged at-cost OEM prices for a replacement retail copy. He knew it was dumb so he never sold PB machines.)
Compaq:
Computer check? Nope, remove one line from a BATCH file and it's gone.
Six archives, named "WINA.ZIP" through "WINF.ZIP" (plus one or two extras for OEM software) hold Windows. Problematic? Well... only because they never put the password anywhere so the installer can't install them. (Some interesting on-disc technician-only utils, though!)
Dell:
If not a Dell machine, lock up. Cause? CONFIG.SYS driver masquerading as OAK (the common CD driver) doing the check, then chainloading the real OAK driver. Simple fix: replace the fake driver with the real one.
Issues?
Would I mention this one if there weren't?
Disc is mounted on N:. Subdirectories work, but doing anything in them (a DIR, trying to execute something, trying to view shit in EDIT.COM) kicked you back to the disc root.
Installer couldn't find machine manifest in the MAP folder (it wanted your PC's serial before it'd let you install, to make sure you have the correct recovery disc) so it asked for 12-digit alphanumeric serial. The defined serials in the manifest were something like "02884902-01" or similar (8-2, all numbers) and it couldn't read the file so it couldn't show the right format, nor check for the right type.
Bypassing that issue, trying to do the ACTUAL install process caused nothing to happen... as all BATCHes for install think the CD should be on X:.
Welp.
well that was fun. Now to test on-real-PC behavior, as VBOX and VMWare both don't like the special hardware shit it tries to use. (Why does a textmode GUI need GPU acceleration, COMPAQ?????)4 -
tl;dr:
The Debian 10 live disc and installer say: Heavens me, just look at the time! I’m late for my <segmentation fault
—————
tl:
The Debian 10 live cd and its new “calamares” installer are both complete crap. I’ve never had any issues with installing Debian prior to this, save with getting WiFi to work (as expected). But this version? Ugh. Here are the things I’ve run into:
Unknown root password; easy enough to get around as there is no user password; still annoying after the 10th time.
Also, the login screen doesn’t work off-disc because it won’t accept a blank password, so don’t idle or you’ll get locked out.
The lock screen is overzealous and hard-locks the computer after awhile; not even the magic kernel keys work!
The live disc doesn’t have many standard utilities, or a graphical partition editor. Thankfully I’m comfortable with fdisk.
The graphical installer (calamares) randomly segfaults, even from innocuous things like clicking [change partition] when you don’t have a partition selected. Derp.
It also randomly segfaults while writing partitions to disk — usually on the second partition.
It strangely seems less likely to segfault if the partitions are already there, even if it needs to “reformat” (recreate) them.
It also defaults to using MBR instead of GPT for the partition table, despite the tooltip telling you that MBR is deprecated and limited, and that GPT is recommended for new systems. You cannot change this without doing the partitions manually.
If you do the partitions manually and it can’t figure out where to install things, it just crashes. This is great because you can’t tell it where to install things, and specifying mount points like /boot, /, and /home don’t seem to be enough.
It also tries installing 32bit grub instead of 64bit, causing the grub installer to fail.
If you tell it to install grub on /boot, it complains when that partition isn’t encrypted — fair — but if you tell it to encrypt /boot like it wants you to, it then tries installing grub on the encrypted partition it just created, apparently without decrypting it, so that obviously fails — specific error: cannot read file system.
On the rare chance that everything else goes correctly, the install process can still segfault.
The log does include entries for errors, but doesn’t include an error message. Literally: “ERROR: Installation failed:” and the log ends. Helpful!
If the installer doesn’t segfault and the install process manages to complete, the resulting install might not even boot, even when installed without any drive encryption. Why? My guess is it never bothered to install Grub, or put it in the wrong place, or didn’t mark it as bootable, or who knows what.
Even when using the live disc that includes non-free firmware (including Ath9k) it still cannot detect my wlan card (that uses Ath9k).
I’ve attempted to install thirty plus times now, and only managed to get a working install once — where I neglected to include the Ath9k firmware.
I’m now trying the cli-only installer option instead of the live session; it seems to behave at least. I’m just terrified that the resulting install will be just as unstable as the live session.
All of this to copy the contents of my encrypted disks over so I can use them on a different system. =/
I haven’t decided which I’m going with next, but likely Arch, Void, or Gentoo. I’d go with Qubes if I had more time to experiment.
But in all seriousness, the Debian devs need some serious help. I would be embarrassed if I released this quality of hot garbage.
(This same system ran both Debian 8 and 9 flawlessly for years)15 -
I keep my laptop clean, stickers are for the bag. Noticed I can email devrant for stickers since my last post got 20+
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long rant;
How did I got into CS?
When I first got my laptop, I put on a password and forgot it. Nobody knew those things at that time around me (most of them, still don't) so I had to pay ₹350 (~$5) for formatting (OS reinstallation).
After a week, I again forgot the password and had no guts to ask more money from my family, because of the fear of getting scolded.
So, I took out the manuals that had shipped with the laptop, read them all. Found nothing.
But, on a very small page, a single line was written, "Insert the disc. Press F12 after pressing the power button".
I intuitively tried it and it worked (I had the OS DVD and no internet).
And I spent the next year experimenting with the windows OS (Vista).
Then tried all the other OSs.
Those were some times..2008..I guess.
Learnt OS without the internet. Nowadays people can't do it even with it.
What's your story?5 -
*packing for a school-hosted graduation celebration with friends*
let's see, first rule of packing for a trip, count on every slim chance happening...
List of things now in backpack:
3 changes of clothes (1-night trip for an all night party in <100-MILE-AWAY MAJOR CITY>)
Laptop
3DS
3x 4-port USB Hubs
10-port power strip (not fully in bag, but mostly so.)
Extra pair of shoes
3.5" external floppy drive
First aid kit
SAK
precision driver set
soldering set
multitool
pliers (1x farmer's, 1x bent needlenose)
multimeter
empty laptop HDD (250GB)
magnet in Altoids tin (can't have it trashing the HDD!)
VGA to RGB (Composite ends) adapter
Composite/S-VIDEO USB capture card
Portable USB chargers (1x 30k mAh 2-port, 1x superslim 3k mAh 1-port)
Enough phone chargers to replace all chargers within 30 miles
Smelling salts
2x 16GB thumbdrives
Boot disc set
$200
School IDs (for bag's ID slot)
3 pairs of decent earbuds (no el cheapo $1 ones because they break trying to get them out of the package)
Serial to USB adapter
Rehydration salts
Magnesium fire striker
Plenty of pens and pencils
Emergency radio locator beacon
Emergency cellular locator beacon
SD/eMMC/CF/TF/MCP(D) USB reader
external HDD reader (2.5" IDE/3.5" IDE/SATA, external power)
am i missing anything?11 -
Non-techie friend: Does Blu-ray Compact disc will be blue in color or contains blue films ( In India we use blue films to refer porn movies ) ?
Me: :/6 -
My grandpa thougt me assembler when i was 7, I modded an hard drive with him (multiple write heads on one disc). Then i learned pascal. As my fathel work at sap, i got a free webdew course. And now, im "learning" c++ (rather sharpening my skills than learning)4
-
Update on my previous rant -
Mac restart after upgrade got stuck due to a fucking corrupted kext file, had to switch between recovery and safe/verbose mode to isolate that bastard, move him out of the folder and then do a clean restart.. Then, after 7 hours, it said 15 minutes remaining to complete installation...
Finally, it came up fine, doing healthy :)
Dear Mac, You, Sir, gave me a scare during a restart and are becoming like Windows (note: bsod) :(
3 -
! random story
Today i was cleaning my laptop and on right side of it i suddenly touched a button... !!!
!!!!SURPRISE !!!!
DVD player popped out.. and it's dusty as hell.. I was like what ?? How long this has been in laptop.. It's weird.. I never used it.. Why the heck we need it.. I didn't saw anybody holding dvd disc nowadays .. Man nobody uses those shit's anymore.. we have pen drives and External HDD's now. Why the heck manufacture's still keep these dvd player in Laptop's..
But it brought my childhood memories back though.. !!2 -
>Be me
>Decided to annoy a friend somehow
>???
>Found a VBScript on the Internet
>VBScript runs, waits for 30 minutes, and then ejects the disc drive every 5 minutes
>Sneakily hide and execute the VBScript on friend's laptop before class
>*Patiently waits*
>It begins
>Friend casually closes the disc tray the first time
>See him gradually get annoyed and descend into madness before I tell him what in tarnation is happening
>Such fun5 -
When you make the whole damn game using c++ but you copy one tiny bit of code to use the mouse in graphics mode but they catch you and make you explain it to them and you can't...
This was back in high school when I was younger and dumber. -
Follow up to previous rant:
Now after I realised that I'm a stupid motherfucker, today was release day. Or so it was planned.
Because turned out my colleagues/supervisors didn't tell me to test the app on Android 6 devices and I was sure that if it ran on the device they gave me (which I assumed was the only device of our clients) it'd be sufficient.
Now it was tested on an android 6 device and crashed constantly.
Wow... I mean... Just wow... Now because I don't have a working android 6 device (a colleague of mine is on vacation and locked our development devices for a different app into a drawer) I have to get the emulator working which took me about 2 hours because that dumb shit face of a laptop first didn't have the android-sdk-root set (took me a good hour to realise) and then the kernel for the avds was missing.
Also: windows updates.
FUUUUUUUUUUUU....
(PS: yeah I should have tested it on various devices and made sure it worked on at least most of them without being told so. Another example for my stupidity.)
EDIT: Now I don't have enough disc space for the kernel I need to install. Absofuckingfantastic1 -
Here's the changes I propose to the world:
– Every grave should display the formal death cause. Like "asphyxia", "cardiac arrest", etc, not like "was shot dead".
– Every member of a firing squad that performs an execution should have real ammo. There should be no moral escape such as "at least I could be the one with fake ammo so I'm not guilty". Yes you are.
– The word "disk" is deprecated and replaced with "disc" everywhere.
Everything else in this world is fine.14 -
New CTO.
New CTO pushes policy change to all browsers to open Facebook Workplace on every new tab and as start page.
Locks option to change it.
This also kills restoring tabs from past session.
New CTO handles the complaints
'It's fine to complain, we don't even have to agree. If this is important to you, then come up with a suggestion on how to solve this for all our employees. Business equirement is that one page is shown at startup, that's it. This has nothing to do with Workplace.'14 -
I work as pharmacist, but code as hobby and recently change job. Have far more options to improve work enviroment, but IT guy sucks balls so much.
Better no password, because you have to remember them.
Some users don't have privilages to do some things, but everyone knows boss password with all privilages.
It guys connects via teamviewet whn I check prescriptions with quite vulnerable data and after my step in he responds that he creates this Pharmacy store and has deal with boss to access database and others.
Due lack of controls there is working against law all the time
Small city so everyone knows everyone and you have to be ultra polite to doctors and after my little unpleasent situation doctor starts to be mad at all employers.
It guy was asked to change disc space on OS drive, but he replies that it will takie at least 2 hours and he doesn't have time, but it takes me 15min top and he was mad at me.
Ffffff.... -
Everytime you tell yourself "This time I'm going to make them stop putting the cart before the horse again!!! No more forced shit implementations!!! NO MORE ! I'm strong!!"
The last hour in the next week:
- Selinux: off
- Firewall: Any-Any
- Application data: Everything installed on OS disc.
- Documentation: At best, someone remembers the server supposed-to-be dns record
- Service Accounts: Your domain admin account and sysadmin for databases.
- Patching: DON'T EVER THINK ABOUT IT..AND NO REBOOTING! I have set very important runtime variables.
- Backup: Maybe someone else will set this up.
- Monitoring: Not needed since clients will create tickets if system fails.
- Production Status: vague at best. Sort of silently transitioned to production.
- Handover status: Probably, but I quit before the project closed.
! -
Not just as a dev.. but as a person who does anything - getting over the mental block which keeps stopping you from taking up actual projects or completing them without abandoning them... the struggle is real... and I'm still struggling😅1
-
1) Learning little to nothing useful in formal post-secondary and wasting tons of time and money just to have pain and suffering.
"Let's talk about hardware disc sectors divisions in the database course, rather than most of you might find useful for industry."
"Lemme grade based on regurgitating my exact definitions of things, later I'll talk about historical failed network protocols, that have little to no relevance/importance because they fucking lost and we don't use them. Practical networking information? Nah."
"Back in the day we used to put a cup of water on top of our desktops, and if it started to shake a lot that's how you'd know your operating system was working real hard and 'thrashing' "
"Is like differentiation but is like cat looking at crystal ball"
"Not all husbands beat their wives, but statistically...." (this one was confusing and awkward to the point that the memory is mostly dropped)
Streams & lambdas in java, were a few slides in a powerpoint & not really tested. Turns out industry loves 'em.
2) Landed my first student job and get shoved on an old legacy project nobody wants to touch. Am isolated and not being taught or helped much, do poorly. Boss gets pissed at me and is unpleasant to work with and get help from. Gets to the point where I start to wonder if he starts to try and create a show of how much of a nuisance I am. He meddle with some logo I'm fixing, getting fussy about individual pixels and shades, and makes a big deal of knowing how to use GIMP and how he's sitting with me micromanaging. Monthly one on one's were uncomfortable and had him metaphorically jerking off about his lifestory career wise.
But I think I learned in code monkey industry, you gotta be capable of learning and making things happen with effectively no help at all. It's hard as fuck though.
3) Everytime I meet an asshole who knows more and accomplish than I do (that's a lot of people) with higher TC than me (also a lot of people). I despair as I realize I might sound like that without realizing it.
4) Everytime I encounter one of my glaring gaps in my knowledge and I'm ashamed of the fact I have plenty of them. Cargo cult programming.
5) I can't do leetcode hards. Sometimes I suck at white board questions I haven't seen anything like before and anything similar to them before.
6) I also suck at some of the trivia questions in interviews. (Gosh I think I'd look that up in a search engine)
7) Mentorship is nigh non-existent. Gosh I'd love to be taught stuff so I'd know how to make technical design/architecture decisions and knowing tradeoffs between tech stack. So I can go beyond being a codemonkey.
8) Gave up and took an ok job outside of America rather than continuing to grind then try to interview into a high tier American company. Doubtful I'd ever manage to break in now, and TC would be sweet but am unsure if the rest would work out.
9) Assholes and trolls on stackoverflow, it's quite hard to ask questions sometimes it feels and now get closed, marked as dupe, or downvoted without explanation.3 -
Finally, I got my laptop back after 4 gruelling days of separation with a new disc and more RAM!!!
I can't wait to finish up installing all the programmes I need to start writing code!!!7 -
Last rant was about games and graphics cards (admittedly not received too well), time for a rant about game development houses.. especially you EA.
So yesterday a friend of mine showed me in one of our Telegram chats that he'd modified some cheats in an old FPS game by editing these scripts (not Lua for some reason) that the game used as a.. configuration language I guess? He called the result a tank cemetery 🙃
Honestly the game looked a lot like Medal of Honor to stoned me at the time, so I figured, well why not fire up that old nx7010 I had laying around for so long, get a new Debian installation on that and rip the Medal of Honor: Allied Assault war chest that I still had, and play it on one of my more modern laptops? Those CD's are now very old anyway, maybe time to archive those before they rot away.
So I installed Debian on it again, looked up how to rip CD's from the command line, and it seemed that dd could do it - just give /dev/cdrom as the input file, and wherever you want to store your copy as the output file. Brilliant! Except.. uh, yeah. It wasn't that easy. So after checking the CD and finding that it was still pristine, and seeing another CD in that war chest fail just the same, I tried burning and then ripping a copy of Debian onto another CD.. checksummed them and yes, it ripped just fine, bit for bit equal. So what the fuck EA, why is your game such a special snowflake that it's apparently too difficult to even spin up the drive to be copied?
So I looked around on plebbit and found this: https://reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/... - the top comment of that post shattered all my hopes for this disc to be possible to rip. Turns out that DRM schemes intentionally screw up the protocols that make up a functioning disc, and detecting those fuck-ups is part of the actual DRM.
"I also remember some forms of DRM will even include disc mastering errors/physical corruption on the actual disc and use those as a sort of fingerprint for the DRM. The copied ISO has to include them at the exact same place in the ISO as on the IRL disc and the ISO emulator has to emulate the disc drive read errors they cause."
So yeah. Never mind that I already own this goddamn game, and that it's allowed by law to make one copy for personal use, AND that intentionally breaking something is very shady indeed.. apparently I don't really own this game after all. So I went onto the almighty search engines, and instantly found a copy of this game for download. You know EA.. I wanted to play nice. You didn't let me. Still wondering why people do piracy now? Might take your top suits that suggested these fucked up DRM schemes another decade to figure out maybe.. even given the obvious now.
But hey I wouldn't even care that much if the medium these games are stored on wouldn't be so volatile (remember these discs are now close to 20 years old, and data rot sets in after 30 years or so). You company decided to publish these on CD. We've had cartridges in many forms before, those are pretty much indestructible and inherently near impossible to duplicate. And why would you want to? But CD is what you chose because you company were too cheap to go to China, get someone to make some plastic molds and put your board and a memory chip in that. Oh and don't even get me started on the working conditions for game devs.. EA and co, aren't you ashamed of yourselves? No wonder that people hate game development houses so much.
Yay, almost finished downloading that copy of Medal of Honor! Whatever you say EA.. I've done everything I could to do it legally. You are the ones who fucked it up.7 -
This is the worst possible thing that can happen, when you setup a new computer.
I live for about a decade on ubuntu. I got an invite for a LAN where games are being played that I cannot run with wine or are not ported to linux.
Fine I get an old harddrive and setup a fresh Windows 7. I have a little update script that takes care of updating and restarting.
BUT I CAN NOT DO ANY UPDATES.
As you can see in the picture the original Windows 7 installation disc that was part of my computer did not carry the matching NIC drivers.
A friend of mine gave me a spare WiFi dongle. That did not bring its drivers on the USB dongle but on disc that he lost.
WHY?! HOW?! This is not plug and play. This is a part that SHOULD be plug and play.
After I got an other WiFi dongle that was plug and play, I could finally download the right drivers.
Why can the Windows 7 disc that was part of the computer setup not contain the right drivers, but a ubuntu 12.04 live disc can?!
ARGH
3 -
Why the fuck is Seagate's official bootable HDD/SSD toolkit 32-bit??? It's bad enough that it's TinyCore, but it's 32-bit, so even while booting it tells you to fuck off if a drive has >2TB worth of LBAs, but it's meant for ALL their drives! Their Twitter support was predictably useless, too, and was just "we don't support running the bootable disc off of anything larger than 32GB" and "we don't officially support Linux formatted disks in our tools" (neither of which were even remotely close. The first one I can understand, it was an untrained knee-jerk reaction to a number they recognize, but the other one...)6
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!rant
Had to build an app using Cordova because... well, I am a web dev and know a shitload of PHP and a good part of JS, but no Swift or Java or whatever.
So there is a deadline set to like half a year after we had the initial talk with the customer. 6 months to build a relatively easy and small app.
So yeah, I procrastinated like one would do when he's got that kind of time left and not much else to do.
And yeah, I did work, but also procrastinated some more. The development was as expected, and I was well in the anticipated time frame.
Then I got a really bad disc prolapse and was sick at home and the hospital for (all together) 5 weeks.
After that, I came back to work for a week, then leaving for a (previously planned) vacation with my little family.
On my first day back at work after the vacation, I quit my job with a 6 weeks notice, of which I have to work 3 weeks.
I know it sounds like I'm a real prick, but it was never planned this way. I never searched for a new job. It just came to me.
I am still finishing the app, though :)
Why am I telling you this?
Well, I do that to show that there still are great bosses out there. My boss has NEVER spoken a bad word to me, even after I quit my job. He's always been kind, fair and understanding.
I just wanted to show that between all these rants about bad bosses and colleagues (which I have had my fair share of in the past), there still are some real gems out there.
Gotta my my boss - he's been one of the best I have had so far.
Peace out folks. Good night... -
> Rental agreement ending this summer
> Sign up for apartment in rent controlled country with 10+ years in queue
> Be told I might have to relocate anyway because dropped clients
> Say yes, that'd be cool
> Apply for apartments in new location
> Get offered one in this city
> Get offered one in other city
> Have <1 week to sign
> Declining would mean no first hand contract ever in that city
> Contact boss man to know where I can work
> On vacation until end of June
Nnnnnnnggggggghhhhhhhhhh -
Fuck... This is not how I wanted my Saturday to go..
My Mac restart after update took more than an hour (check my previous rant), went into not responding mode, then got aborted, ultimately ending up with a corrupted disc. Now, not booting up at all...
Into recovery mode now and trying all other options..
Hope my time machine did a good job, else this is gonna be a heartbreaking day !!!2 -
Bought myself a new graphics card as my old one died. After i got my system runnning again ( Linux Mint 17), by fixing the video drivers i concluded that i may want to get into gaming again.
I have a free Windows 10 Pro licence lying around so lets try to get dual boot running.
Hmm seems like i cant install windows after linux without installing grub2 again through a recovery disc. Well okay wanted to try out mint 19 anyway.
Downloaded both Isos. Linux mint is 1,5Gb and Windows 10 is 4,3Gb. MS what are you doing ?!
Only have a 4GB USB-Drive and dont want to buy a new one. GOD FUCKING DAMNIT MICROSOFT.
So at a forum i found a software to remove packages from windows isos and now i'm sitting here removing windows bloatware for 4 FUCKING HOURS, JUST TO INSTALL WINDOWS.
Ofc that tool was only windows specific so i had to install windows in a vm first.
Fucking tired of this shit.3 -
It's always amazing to fire up a PS2 game and go "Wow... this PS3 game looks great!" an hour later before realizing it's still a PS2. Take Final Fantasy 12, for example: the environments are massive and gorgeous, all the textures look nice, and it's a MASSIVE GAME. Sure, in some areas the environment flavor stuff has really noticeable draw-in and there's no AA and some of the area textures (buildings, floors, the like) are noticeably low-res on close inspection and it's only running at 480i, but when playing, lack of AA and resolution are basically invisible and in most areas the env flavor draw-in is still really far off. It *feels* like a mid-life PS3 game, which the creators deserve mad props for. (I have yet to try upscaling via homebrew, when I get a hackable PS2 i'll see if it looks any better at 720p or 1080i.)
This isn't the only game like this, I have at least 4 that look like PS3 games on-disc, and like 12 more waiting for a hacked PS2, this isn't uncommon. They crammed so much flavor and life into 40MB of total VRAM and it's absolutely fucking nuts.10 -
A friend of mine who wants to learn about Linux has a stronger will than me, as I think installing Linux in 2020 is gonna break me but he's still stoked as shit. I'm fucking serious. He asked me to install several distros, in order of interest (because they all fucking failed, because of fucking course they did) on a USB HDD he was using just for this.
We tried, in order:
Arch: initramfs wiped his Windows HDD when it crashed. IDFK how, but it zeroed the top 32KB of the drive. It wasn't even the right HDD...
Linux Mint: nvidia drivers refused to see his GPU after install. No matter what we did. Live media saw it fine until it was installed on the external drive, too.
Debian: Installer couldn't see the external HDD, ever. No matter what we did. It had a /dev entry, lsblk and fdisk saw it, I could format and mount it, but the installer crashed when it refreshed the device list when it was present. Every goddamn time.
Fedora: Installer broke halfway through as an executable (or 70) were corrupted, but the disc matched the ISO and the ISO sums correctly, so this is apparently how it was packed and shipped.
CentOS: Refused to boot. Just entirely. GRUB would go to load the kernel and it'd hang.
All ISOs and discs were verified as matching provided sums using MD5 and SHA256. How the fuck is Linux so fucking hard to get working on older hardware in 2020? Worked great in 2008, worked great in 2018, why is 2020 such a goddamn issue?11 -
I feel like writing or telling people about the time I jumped from Windows 7 Ultimate and jumping to Windows 10. (I'm not against 10, but I'm never updating after what had happened to me)
It all starts when none of my games will play due to a possible issue with my graphics card. I look up "3D source game bug" and not many results pop up. I go on Microsoft's Qna areas and ask this question but to my surprise nothing they say would make sense. "Clean the pins of your graphics card, make sure you verify the games on Steam". I verified the games and they checked out as perfectly fine. I don't have access to my graphics card because this is a laptop, sadly not a tower.
Two months pass and my computer is already showing signs of stress, like it didn't want to live in a sense. It was three times slower than when I was on Windows 7 and it was unallocating areas of my main hard drive where I could make virtual hard drives.
Instantly I start looking up Linux distros and find Linux Mint. 17.3 was the current version at the time. I downloaded it and burned it onto a DVD-rom and rebooted my computer. I loaded into the disc and to my surprise it seemed almost like Windows 7 apart from the Linux part. I grab my external hard drive and partition it to hold the Linux distro and leave it plugged in incase Windows 10 does actually fail.
On December 19, a few months after Windows 10 had released. I start my laptop to try and continue my studies in video game development. But to my surprise, Windows 10 had finally crashed permanently. The screen flickered blue and black, and an error box saying Loginui.exe failed to start. I look at it for a solid minute as my computer had just committed suicide in a sense.
I reboot thinking it would fix the error but it didn't. I couldn't log in anymore.
I force shutdown the laptop and turn it back on putting it into safe mode.
To my surprise loginui.exe works and I sign in. I look at my desktop, the space wallpaper I always admired, the sound files, screen shots I had saved.
I go into file explorer and grab everything out of my default hard drive Windows was installed on. Nothing but 400gb got left behind and that was mainly garbage prototypes I had made and Windows itself. I formatted my external hard drive and placed everything on it. Escaping Windows 10 with around 100GB of useful data I looked at the final shutdown button I would look at.
I click it and try to boot into normal Windows 10. But it doesn't work. It flickers and the error pops up once more.
I force it to shutdown and insert the previous Linux Mint disc I made and format the default hard drive through Linux. I was done. 10 gave me a lot of shit. Java wouldn't work, my games has a functional UI but no screen popped up except a black abyss and it wouldn't even let me try to update my graphics card, apparently my AMD Radeon 5450 was up to date at the AMD Radeon 5000's.
I installed Linux Mint and thinking the games would actually play I open steam and Launch Half-Life 2 to check if Linux would be nicer to me than Windows 10 had been.
To my surprise the game ran. The scene from Highway 17 popped on screen and the UI was fully functional. But it was playing at 10-15fps rather than the usual 60-70fps. Keep look at my drivers and see my graphics card isn't in use. I do some research and it turns out I have a Hybrid Laptop.
Intel HD Graphics and an AMD Radeon 5450 and it was using the Intel and not the AMD. Months of testing and attempts of getting the games to work at high frame rates pass and the Damn thing still functions at a low terrible fps. Finally I give up. I ask my mom for a Windows 7 disc and she says we can't afford it. A few months pass and I finally get a Windows 7 installation disc through money I've saved up. Proudly I put it into my optical disc drive and install it to my main hard drive deleting Linux completely. I announced to all my friends my computer was back in working order and I install everything I needed, Steam, Skype, Blender, and Unity as well as all my games. I test Half-Life 2 and it's running exceptionally smoothly, I test Minecraft at max settings and it's working beautifully. The computer was functioning properly once again and my life as a developer started as I modeled things and blender, learned beginners C# and learned a lot of Batch. Today the computer still runs at a great speed and I warn others of what happened to me after I installed Windows 10 to my machine if they are thinking of switching from 7 or 8 on an older machine.
Truly the damage to my data cannot be undone. But the memory of the maintenance, work, tests, all are a memory of how Windows 10 ruined me and every night before the one year anniversary of Windows 10's release, I took out the battery of my laptop and unplugged it from the a.c. power, just so Windows 10 doesn't show it's DLLs, batch scripts, vbs scripts, anything on my computer. But now, after this has happened and I have recovered, I now only have a story to tell5 -
Rough night yesterday for my coworker who has forgotten we can't write code past column 72 and that col 80 is the end of the line.
3 -
I feel that people give more importance to good portfolios and projects rather than college degrees in this day and age. I've come across many professionals (in different fields) who are self taught and who I feel have a deeper understanding that others who have degrees or Ph.D s. Does one still necessarily need to go to uni to get employed?2
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I know your code is great and that you learned about scrum a month ago. But I didn't know the scrum training had to say you don't assign yourself tasks, mark them as done and be surprised when other team members haven't done them, two minutes to five the day before a national holiday (yesterday).
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I swear it's been over a year since I've used a optical drive on a computer.
Hell my personal rig has no optical drive.
Disc is dead!!!! -
I got my current job in the most standard manner,
1. Saw an ad for the job in the local newspaper.
2. Called the boss and had a chat with him. He sounded nice and the job sounded interesting.
3. Submitted my application and resumé
4. Boss called and we set up an appointment for an interview.
5. Met with boss and HR, had a cup of coffee and an interview.
6. Boss called and told me I'm one of two, and that he would like me to do a DISC personality analysis.
7. Met with HR and did the analysis, a bunch of questions that I answered as thoroughly as I could.
8. Boss called and said, congrats! Can you start next month? Yes, I could and it's been more than three years since :)
To make a boring story a bit more funny: Half-way through my first day, I noticed my zipper was open =:O And today I'm wearing two exactly identical socks...save for the colour, different shades of grey on left and right foot. Hush, don't tell my colleagues, maybe they won't notice ;) Well, I guess it's alright as long as I'm not wearing nothing but underwear, or being butt naked, like in some nightmares.1 -
When white space isn't that significant.
disc=b*b-4*a*c;if(disc<0){
num_sol=0;}else{t0=-b/a;if(
disc==0){num_sol=1;sol0=t0/2
;}else{num_sol=2;t1=sqrt(disc/a;
sol0=(t0+t1)/2;sol1=(t0-t1)/2;}}2 -
Finishing up a two week, four person, project in COBOL. Wondering if the same could be done in Java by one person before lunch on one day.1
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Talk to your smarter friends. Just listening to them tell you about all the productive things they've done while you've just slept around should you shake you up a bit.2
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first contact was with games. There are actually 2 events I connect with that, but I cant remember which one was first - so here you have both:
Both happened on the Computer from my dad - Windows 95 with Boost button - which of course was always active to make everything super fast :D (yeees, now I now that it actually made it 'slower')
1) Playing Lemmings from 2 Floppy’s (3.5inch 1.44bm)
Until my dad kept Disc 1 in his Jacket for whatever reason I cant remember (maybe because I played to much) and my mother had the great Idea of washing the jacket... bye bye lemmings :( never played it again since then, but still remember the music and soundefects. still love them :)
2) Trying to install AoE on the PC. But since HDDs where cheap (not) and had a ridiculously amount of space (not) (sth. ~250MB) and AoE needed ~150MB, my young and smart me came up with the amazing solution to delete the largest folder on disk, which was C:/WINDOWS. I do not have to mention that my dad was not amused ^^ -
Company paying tons for retired old mainframe devs to come teach basic z/OS and to give a hands-on. Third try and they still sent a guy showing off their windows based mainframe replacements without terminal connections.
I set an pirated z/OS up and now I have to deal with 10 coworkers who apparently can't unpack a 7zip, follow basic instructions or failed to open the .torrent with files i distributed 14 days ago. Losing the will to live (in legacy tech)4 -
concept: a PCI/PCI-e/SATA/IDE device allowing for booting from a "HDD" which is, in reality, EPROM. Not EEPROM, EPROM. For purposes of, say, having an uninfectable copy of HBCD 15.2 or HBCD 10 PE you can insert and forget about without consuming a USB slot or disc drive.2
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1987 at seven years old. Dad bought me an Atari ST. It came with a Language Disc, containing the ST Basic program. Didn't know what it was, but dad learned from the guy in the shop it was for making your own programs.
So along with a manual, together we wrote our first program:
10 PRINT "ST";
20 GOTO 10
RUN
In the corner window, the results unravelled. I was so excited. Never looked back. -
20 min until the showing of our finals project and the only guy who has all the code refuses to make a build that we can try out beforehand. Ah ffs. Had to go to the bathroom cause I feel ill and need a breather.3
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Need music for... actually, whatever you want? https://youtube.com/playlist/...
Coding, disc ripping, compiling, gaming, driving... Fits most everything. -
Spent all afternoon and night, trying to get Windows reinstalled on my old college laptop because my dad needed another pc since I'll be using his personal laptop to wfh.
1. DVD Drive is faulty, slow/faulty reads
2. I don't have product keys (they're all stores on a USB disk, I should make a backup... that I didn't bring back to their place) except for Vista and Win 8 but Win 8 key already used by another PC. I have a burned Win 7 disc
3. Apparently it had a virus which was never removed, fresh reinstall never done. It hides the DVD drives and kills the internet and makes the installers think there's only 400MB.
4. I followed some wiki that said to Mark the C drive as Active... Which fixed the issue but then I decided to do the full install from boot... Except on reboot, apparently this fcked up the MBR
5. Tried googling how to fix the MBR, eventually found some USB app that supposedly fixes it. Create a USB boot disk, not recognized
6. Finally try the DVDs and release it recognize them somewhat when booting... Win 7 one kept hanging on the load screen
7. Somehow Vista got thru and actually installed...
Now IE and Chrome both complain about HTTPS issues and how they don't support Vista...
But at least my dad now had a laptop he can use to do non-work stuff while he uses his company laptop to do work.12 -
I miss one day because of doctors visits and now every multi-word filename in the project and all their references contain spaces. Fml
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PC component idea: a component that has build in memory that you can load up with a disc image file and have a software or hardware switch that you can use to have your BIOS detect whether it is in a DVD drive mode or Floppy risk drive mode so you can virtually mount ISO images for example and boot off of that device...
Niece but pls someone make7 -
I think I was around the age of 11, and got a brand new C64 with 1541 floppy. The manual of the included floppy disc with some programs described the program startup with 'load "name",8,1'
So I typed (exactly that) 'load "name",8,1' and got '?FILE NOT FOUND ERROR', did it again, same error.
After half an hour of reading the manual and trying it several times, I gave up and went to a friend with a C64. I told him the disc doesn't work, if he could help me out.
He put the floppy disc in and typed 'load "frogger",8,1' and seeing the command I realized what a tremendous idiot I was.
Surely it worked, he could play frogger.
Went home desperate and broken with my disc and from that day on I could operate that machine.
I soon started to play around with basic and a bit of assembler. -
I think i was like 7 or 8 yo. When school vacation started, my mom joined me in this computer centre near her workplace.
I belive it was a Windows 95 system powered probably by Pentium 2 and i remember playing Aladdin, mario and a fun racing car game.
I remember i liked a lady teacher there and being scared of the male teacher from whom I learned about basic computer peripheral terms like CPU, floppy disc drive etc. -
Get back into regularly maintaining OS projects I used to actively maintain.
And resume the daily Disc Golf Strong exercises/stretches. -
Wow. Windows is the silliest OS ever. The repair disc does not find my Windows Installation. I only have one HDD.
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I became familiar with basics after my mom bought a PC and disc with software which included FirstPage. She wasn't *that* angry getting a $100 receipt for the month of Internet I trafficked - oopsie, thatta large price, even after inflation.
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So a few months ago a broke screen of my laptop, currently I quite broke so I can't change screen and for some time I was using TV as screen, but ofc. Windows have to crash or do similar shit and know it doesn't send signal via HDMI, probably it's showing some info, but signal is only send when it boots windows or something.
So my girlfriend give me her old laptop (4gb RAM and I3 processor, bit touchscreen :/) and windows aren't updated for quite a long (it was still windows 8) and I tried to update it. Ofc it has to be problem, DISM doesn't work, downloading iso doesn't work, fml. I guessed I have to live with that, but later disc usage starts to be around 100% and freeze for few minutes (shitty Win2k PC at uni was more responding). Then I try to refresh windows, DISM starts working, updates semi-working. I left with 21 updates with error and there starts conversation:
Me: install 21 updates
Win: kk. Or actually no
Me: please
Win: the best what I could do is 8.
Me: it's something
Win: actually fuck it, only 4
Me: I'm done *typing Manjaro xfce*
So now I have dual boot with Manjaro which use 40% ram with Firefox open, when windows has 30% alone. I can't play anyway and DF is on Linux so fuck Windows.
I am noob when it comes to Linux and everything actually, but it makes me want to learn and improve.16 -
Yeah, I chickened out a little bit when someone had asked me about my project. Yeah, you covered a little bit for me and I'm thankful for that.
But for heaven's sake you broken vinyl disc I don't have to listen to your accusations for a whole day. Your hypocritical behavior put me in that stressful situation in the very first place.
There's a perfectly fine reason why the teacher occasionally tells you to simply shut the fuck up and I guess you already know that.
Nobody. Wants. To. Fucking. Hear. It.
And I sure as hell hope I won't ever have to -
NINE Methods _IN A ROW_ look like this. I can't bring myself to search for more. They are called 100+ times and after each call we check if they returned success.
VERIFY_XYZ SECTION.
V_010.
MOVE RETCODE$FAIL TO RET_CODE.
CONTINUE.
MOVE RETCODE$SUCCESS TO RET_CODE.
V_100.
V_EXIT.
EXIT. -
I just wanna be at the point in the future where I can play drinking sports like disc golf and smoke fat doinks for an entire week if I want to. I want to become a God.1
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Alright, so i'm making an MS-DOS 6.22 box on a modern laptop: 80GB HDD (SATA 2), 2GB RAM (rip 9x, smallest stick I got,) AMD x64 CPU (they stuck a single-core 1GHz CPU in a laptop meant for Win8.0, with age it's slowed to around 600MHz effective, so it's more suited to being an XP box but I have no XP drivers...)
I'm not strapped for space at all (I could make 4 2GB partitions with no issue) but should I use DRVSPACE? I've never used DOS-era disc compression (and won't fucking touch DoubleSpace, for those that remember that and its issues) and i'm wanting to fuck with it some.
EDIT: fuck CSM, gotta use GRUB to load DOS...2
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