Text 12677, 55 rader
Skriven 2009-05-05 20:41:38 av Maurice Kinal (1:261/38)
     Kommentar till en text av Bo Simonsen
Ärende: when i was just a little girl
=====================================
Hey Bo!

> Dialing up a BBS is less transparent.

The result is (was?) exactly the same.

> I guess they use serial consoles several places for administrating
> servers when the network breaks down on the machines.

Yes, on very expensive equipment, and often the ONLY and PREFERRED method for
administration.  Far greater security if the only way to get a root login is
from a specially wired interface rather than over a network, especially the
internet.

> so you've been writing fortran

Not since back then.  I was thinking of picking it up again with gfortran but
haven't gotten beyond making sure it compiles when building gcc and friends.  I
did try out some distributed opensourced math fortan code and it worked great
on x86_64 in pure 64-bit but had some linking issues on 32-bit.  Turned out to
be an inline asm thing with glibc. It was a couple years ago and I don't recall
exactly how it was fixed. Offhand I think I did it with sed'ing a .c file in
the glibc source but I can't recall exactly which one and why.  I don't think
it is an issue anymore with newer binutils and glibc.  If I decide to get
adventerous I'll definetly make sure it is fixed.

> Using C libraries from Python, Perl, etc. is not new I guess.

Nope.  That functionality has always existed in Unix since day one ... or at
least day one for me.  That was what first grabbed my attention. Also at first
I was attracted to X but I got wiser later on.  :-)

> I would be very impressed if you wrote a complete Zmodem
> implementation in bash.. :)

Don't hold your breath.  I doubt I'd ever try that as there are way better
methods already available to scripts and the commandline that are far more
universal.  Nobody does zmodem! ... Do they?

> I guess you cannot power an entire system by 2.5 W

Not anything worth powering that I've ever encountered.  I need some better
equipment to see exactly how much power anything here uses. My best guess for
the 486 was under 10W but that doesn't count monitors or any other connections.
 That is why it could run for days on a single 12VDC marine battery.

> CF cards doesn't consume that much.

Measured in milliwatts!  :-)

Life is good,
Maurice

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 * Origin: Prism bbs (1:261/38)