Viewing profile — NovaPenguin

This could be a good location, at least personally I think so. My time on here is maybe 15-20 minutes a time. Usually once or twice a week although the last week has been a bit mor…

Something that I always admired about Apple (at least in the past) was that they were willing to make old stuff obsolete even when it was wildly successful. iPhone killing iPod is …

That and just having a software base that was different from everyone else. It was funny, back when MS announced the change, here I was, a big Free/Libre software guy defending Mic…

Always reminded that Nokia had one of the largest R&D budgets for mobile technology and got blind sided by iPhone and subsequent smart phones. Doesn't matter how ahead of the curve…

I hadn't realized this was something that was happening. My Oppo A53 (?) still has FM radio via head phones. Same with the Nokia 2710 flip. Being someone that usually lives in the …

There are some hacky ways of getting a little distance on modern OS's, like using terminal based browsers. I'm thinking Links/Elinks but that will only get you so far and so long a…

I cut my initial programming teeth on an 8Mhz (Maybe?) 8086 with 512KB RAM. Had the luxury of a 20MB HDD. At the time it felt like an ocean of storage. Nowadays it can be transferr…

I guess nowadays it is a choice, back then it was all we had! :D But good to know that we can still 'Hyper-mile' our OS.

I did not know that! There was about a 6-7 year gap between 1997-2004 where I didn't really do much with Mac's. But your timeline seems spot on, it was 10.3 when they introduced Ex…

Yeah, that is unfortunately a big part of it. Via NoScript I generally run the web very lean but there is only so much one can do.

Oh yeah, I consider them some of the peak of case design. As much as it is cool to run these as a G5, keeping the case is a neat homage to what they were.

"How much computing power do I really need on a day to day basis?" I guess this is a kind of Computational Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. Basic needs can be covered by the vast major…

It is kind of neat just how little power some of these older systems used. A big part was it was cheaper to make processors that used non-ceramic caps on them - but it limited the …

It is an interesting question. Apple hyper-optimized the OS for PPC when it was still relevant. Even modern PPC OS's with a good 20 years of additional compiler optimizations don't…

These are always handy to have around. The first day with one is like the first day with a label maker. You test everything! Some figures from around my house. Lenovo Tkinkpad T400…

My White Whale... the Dual 2Ghz PowerMac G5 I bought for $50. Sure it took months until I finally figured out how to get the OS to install properly. Having to delve into the patch …

This is why I argue that one of the best things that the Free/Libre software developer community can start doing is optimizing for lower spec machines. Microsoft and Apple are eith…

I think I first saw it running on a Geforce with 64MB of RAM. Even then it was smooth as butter. Now that I think about it, Mac OSX was doing GPU compositing back in 2000/2001 and …

My go to on this was I remember running Debian on a Pentium 166 with 32MB of RAM back in 98/99. It would boot to the desktop only using 6MB. It wasn't flash but it could handle the…

It seems like this is something that happens in every high school. Our School was a Quake 1 map however.

I completely forgot about the open USB/SD card stuff even though I use it all the time. Yeah that is pretty cool. I am more projecting onto a potential of things like Linux Phones.…

While I post occasionally here, in terms of long term writing projects it is fascinating seeing how my own works have progressed over the decades. I must have initially written abo…

Teams is one of those things that feels like we should have solved this like 10 years ago. Same thing with online payment systems - how is it that we didn't have that stuff complet…

It is true. If it wasn't for the side loading of Apps and app stores on Android - I would give it a hard miss!

Frank Zappa said that when he first heard Bob Dylans "The times they are a changin" on the radio, Frank believed that he didn't need to get into the music industry because the chan…