4K BASIC was in ROM, not RAM.

As I recall most Disc-based OSes of the ROM Basic era required 16K of RAM to support the disc operating system...

Please, explain why that advertising campaign isn't winning over more converts? Have Linux usage numbers gone up dramatically since Win 10 went off-support?

Real people that care about security updates (a small minority of the computer using population) don't complain that their 7-10 year-old computer is no longer supported and needs to be upgraded, and people that don't care about security updates won't update their 7-10 year-old computer and happily run Win 10 a few more years.

Apple introduced a $600 iPad with a keyboard.

It's (Mac) Netbook 2.0, nothing more than that.

Kernel support for an architecture does not translate to distribution support for that architecture. Just because a Linux kernel supports a 486 CPU, but that doesn't mean the latest distribution of a given flavor of Linux will run on a 486.

For example, can Ubuntu 2024 LTS run on a 486 machine?

Hasn't this already happened? From 2025 - https://www.zdnet.com/article/...

For instance, the article mentions that the median price of a home is about $500k. This likely isn't enough to buy a studio apartment in lower Manhattan.

Manhattan isn't considered "typical" by most measures. 'Middle class' Americans don't buy apartments in Manhattan, wealthy American buy in Manhattan, middle class Americans rent.

But, but - what about the wage gap?!?! I hear it's worse than ever...

So, to be clear, that means Senators & Congressmen are "upper middle class" by virtue of earning about $175K/yr, right?

"Punative taxes" on EVs? Explain.

When the federal gov't stopped SUBSIDIZING EVs folks called that punative, it's not, it's prudent.

When states talk about assessing road usage fees on EVs to make up for lost road taxes that would normally have been collected on gasoline purchases, some call it punative, it's just prudent.

People aren't 'owed' $7,500 for an EV purchase, nor are EVs entitled to use our public roads for free - so please, don't try and claim treating EVs like ICE vehicles as "punative."

I just got the encl nastygram from our corporate IT
"We have recently noticed your use of unapproved AI tools, which creates a risk of data leakage. You must not use any AI tools that have not been officially approved when working with business-related information. This includes data such as profits, order quantities, and similar metrics, as well as MS Office files, emails, or any other content containing business information.
We want you to use MS 365 Copilot. ....Microsoft Copilot MS 365 protects our intellectual property."

(I'd asked grok for some lunar orbital data and calculations for fun...so not business-related in any case...)

What are the odds that pointing out in writing to my corporate IT that MS's own terms say "for entertainment purposes only" to say nothing of "We donâ(TM)t own Your Content, but we may use Your Content to operate Copilot and improve it. By using Copilot, you grant us permission to use Your Content, which means we can copy, distribute, transmit, publicly display, publicly perform, edit, translate, and reformat it, and we can give those same rights to others who work on our behalf." is just going to get me more nastygrams and probably on someone's shitlist?

I would guess 100%, and didn't even need Copilot or grok or gemini to figure it out!

Yeah, Via made a clone that was similar not-quite-i586 fairly recently too.

I have an old embedded box with one that has SATA 6Gbps ports on it that I thought I would use zeroing out old hard drives.

I tried Puppy, DSL, SystemRescueCD, and a bunch of others and none would finish boot. FreeDOS is fine.

It's either eWaste or I need to dig out an Infomagic CD from the attic to get Redhat 9 pr whatever. Probably need to look up when the jump from 3 to 6 happened in SATA land.

But Linus is correct that actual distros don't supoort it. There's one project for composing embedded images that I might try before it hits a shredder. Or NetBSD maybe.

I’ve got plenty of gripes about Thiel, and the 2-billion dollar valuation is the standard I-estimate-my-company-as-being-worth-all-teh-mmmoonnaayyy.

But this idea seems solid and worth pursuing. It’s a real market, for real goods, that probably could benefit from some tech. There’s use case is extremely low on buzzwords. No AI. No blockchain. No crypto. Just a solid case for a hardware/software system that could probably improve actual physical productivity in an easily measurable way. The argument for using cloud infrastructure is pretty compelling.

The kicker is if costs can be low enough to justify, that’s a LOT of fairly advanced hardware to purchase, install, and deal with wear and tear in an aggressive outdoor physical environment, in order to get my cows to grow 20 percent better. Is it worth it? I have no clue, but that’s gonna be the main question to answer. Agriculture is a very-low-bullsh&t industry.

To the people who are griping about Thiel planning to use this on humans. Your worries are 5 years too late. We’re already shackled to devices that monitor and occasionally prod us in various directions. They’re about 7cm by 14cm by 1cm and we THINK that we’re the ones in control but who are we kidding?

OK bot. There isn't even a "you".

Due to this news, I suggest we refer to it from here on out as "fauxpilot".

Uranium is not a nuclear weapon. HTH, though I know it won't.

Yes it's already written. Use a kernel with the code still there. It's not like your 486 will have any application that requires the latest kernel, if your system even manages to boot at all.

The problem with written code is that if it remains "supported" it places a burden on all other code changes made to the product. Someone needs to do regression testing to make sure it's not broken. Someone needs to do security auditing and potential bug fixing. And above all, these are not reasonable requirements for hardware that old. Hence "not supported" means "not supported" i.e. the programmer won't or in some cases actually can't support it.

Software is not hardware, you can run old software. It's still there. It's not like the network switch example above.

Could and Did are two distinct words in the English language. Very few 486 machines ever existed with more than 64MB of RAM. They were for insanely niche applications. Now we change the debate from do we support what is today an incredibly rare architecture, to do we support what is today an incredibly rare architecture for the purpose of a niche that almost certainly doesn't exist anymore on that platform?

We can keep going down this rabbit hole of "but it did support", only to find there's a single machine on the planet that actually had that hardware config, and Bob hasn't used that machine in decades.