I tried Haiku recently on a not-super-old PC and was impressed by the speed and the reasonable availability of software. I then wished I could run this on my old Powerbook G4 because nothing else seems to run there anymore with ease, and this seems like the perfect desktop OS for such old machines. And it turns out there is now a fork for PPC: https://github.com/ActionRetro/Tabby-PPC !
(Why a fork? Because it's primarily vibecoded and Haiku won't take the patches upstream. But hey, I'm gonna give it a try anyway.)
Somehow the clicking around reminded me of Windows RG. Go check this old relic if you have never seen it: https://www.jamesweb.co.uk/windowsrg . Turn the volume up!
That's not surprising. The page says the kernel is multiboot compliant, which means it can be loaded by existing boot loaders. Whether the kernel later provides a floppy driver is a separate story.
This is also pretty common even if you don't use multiboot. The I/O services exposed by the BIOS or firmware during boot may not be usable once the kernel has started, and thus the kernel has to provide its own drivers.
I've been blogging for 22 years now. At the beginning I could tell I had a relatively steady audience based on frequent comments (when comments on blogs were a thing). These died off over the years. Then, in 2020, I implemented my own unobtrusive subscription mechanism and email distribution to try to regain such an audience. And... it's pretty disappointing. I've gotten less than 200 subscribers that way; conversions just don't happy.
Then I "switched" to Substack 3 years ago and the audience growth is real. I'm approaching 2000 subscribers (some of which are paid, which always surprises me and I appreciate), and these keep growing organically although I'm sure a large portion of which are fake. It's hard to say it doesn't work or isn't worth it.
Now... spoiler: I never "switched" to Substack. I continue to write all of my content on my website _first_, with all of the features it had before, but now I copy/paste the content into Substack and distribute it that way. It's painful, but I have scars from when I moved off of Medium and want to ensure I "own" the originals.
Very neat implementation! I freaking love how nice Rust makes this!
Any plans to support structures in the language? I know that's not a typical Basic feature, but it would be awesome. Also, be a rebel: add block comments.
Yeah, structs (records) is something I've been wanting to add and that became reasonably easy with the full rewrite of the compiler I did in 0.13. Probably in the next update!
Two years ago, I spent time studying the Windows NT kernel internals and ended up writing a comparison against Unix here: https://blogsystem5.substack.com/p/windows-nt-vs-unix-design . What I came out of that exercise with is that NT is actually well-made and was very ambitious and advanced at the time it was designed (although free systems have caught up by now).
But what I also came out thinking was: none of that shows. The kernel is great, sure, but all of the crap that has been built on top doesn't let it shine, and that's what people interact with. Take Windows 11 with is dog-slow file manager and the overall feeling that everything is bloated and designed to annoy you. I wish there was a simpler edition... but it ain't gonna happen.
> Only the very first few models of Intel Macs had strictly 32-bit processors (the 2006 iMac and Mac minis with Core Solo/Core Duo processors), and none of them were realistically capable of playing Half-Life 2.
What? First, those chips were plenty powerful to run HL2 (the game predates them). And second, all x86_64 chips can run older x86 32-bit code unmodified.
The reason macOS stopped supporting 32-bit code has nothing to do with the processors but more about them wanting to remove support for 32-bit binaries from the kernel and from all user-space libraries. To run a 32-bit binary, you need itself and all libraries it depends on to be 32-bit too, including the syscall boundary, which is "fine" (both Windows and Linux do this just fine, so it's really on Apple to have removed this). And I suppose Apple removed those because it was building towards a 64-bit-only world to simplify the Apple Silicon transition.
The CPUs were powerful enough, sure. The GPUs (Intel GMA950) absolutely weren't. Even on Windows with better drivers, Half-Life 2 is a slideshow on that class of hardware.
E.x. notebookcheck indicates that FEAR (released a yearish later) could get 20-30ish FPS at 640x480 but chokes at 1024x768 (at numbers matching the HL2 lost coast demo slideshow at 1024x768).
Gotta remember a lot of mac people were just happy to play something more modern than Marathon or Giants CK
There were also MacBook Pro models with dedicated GPUs that were capable of running HL2 decently. The 2006 MacBook Pro 15-inch had a 32-bit only Yonah Core Duo and a Mobility Radeon X1600.
I got my gaming start on one such machine - the Mobility Radeon was fine for HL2/Portal at 1024x768. Good memories.
> It's a little bit sluggish, isn't it? And takes quite a bit of time to boot, right? It's certainly usable, though, not worse than your average website these days. I intend to use this setup for next Advent of Code.
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> But here's the kicker: This is Windows 2000 SP4 running on a Pentium 133 with 64 MB of RAM and a spinning harddisk
I'm curious... why are people (this thread, but there are several independent others) replying to "Is anyone still using emacs?" ? I don't see that sentence anywhere in the article!
Sure, and I'm not arguing that the answers are uninteresting, but I found it odd that this is being double-quoted several times as if it was taken out of the article.
(Why a fork? Because it's primarily vibecoded and Haiku won't take the patches upstream. But hey, I'm gonna give it a try anyway.)
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