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Comment Re:Not a 486 thing, but... (Score 1) 78

The software is already written.

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.

Comment Re:Pray tell, what modern desktop runs in 64MB of (Score 1) 78

and even 486 could go beyond 64M of RAM.

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.

Comment Re:Typical Stupidity (Score 1) 78

Almost all IoT devices work by phoning home. They call some remote server, and do some API stuff, send some message poll for new messages / instructions. They tend to have very little if anything listening.

Are you talking about professional well made IoT devices designed for corporate management? Because holy shit are you wrong about general consumer IoT devices doing no listening. There's a reason for the running joke that the S in IoT stands for security.

In fact much of the community driven IoT interfaces for tinkerers rely on the fact that someone has hacked a device almost universally via an active open listening port to force it to work with something other than it's Cloud service.

Your best beat at security: Isolate them on your network and firewall your inbound connections.

Comment Re:Typical Stupidity (Score 2) 78

From the most current OS/2 release:

"Hardware Requirements
Intel Pentium Pro or higher, or an AMD Athlon or higher. 64 Bit CPUs are supported (however ArcaOS will run in 32-bit mode). Computers with ARM CPUs are not supported. Apple Computers are not supported (regardless of CPU). The Vortex86 CPU is not sufficiently compatible to run ArcaOS and is not supported."

i.e. minimum hardware requirements are a 686 instruction set.

Comment Re: Hubble out of support (Score 3, Informative) 78

Linux isn't suitable as a real-time OS now either strictly speaking. In fact that one of the top hits from a search on Linux RTOS is a paper from NASA (from a comparatively recent 2019) discussing the performance of Linux with every RTOS relevant kernel feature set into the most ideal position. Their conclusion was... well you probably will hit your event deadline if you throw fast enough hardware at it, but it is still nothing like a true RTOS.

Comment Re:54 Years to Do Less (Score 3, Insightful) 46

What changed is everything around the physics.

You almost figured it out. It's almost like when we use a completely different vehicle where everything including all technology inside is different that you want to test things slowly before jumping feet first down on the moon.

Comment Re:Wow (Score 2) 59

Yes, I agree, but the last 6 years in particular has seen the shit added to the show exponentially.

You have a short memory. This shit show isn't worse than the past. MS very much pushed out colossally fucked up updates, even back in the XP days. Heck back then, before the days of automated recovery processes shit was MUCH worse. There were actual updates that may have forced you to go looking for your Windows XP install disc to fix.

Comment Re:"Force-updating" (Score 1) 59

Now tell us how many similar bugs are in Windows, and will be found even without the obscurity of closed source. You don't know, because you depend on Microsoft to tell you when they fuck up, but you're declaring this a victory for Microsoft anyway? Do fucking tell.

Your comment fails for the same reason. By your reasoning you don't know anything about Microsoft's process but you're declaring victory for Open Source. The reality is that everything who makes this an open vs closed issue is very ignorantly missing the underlying fact that security update affect all platforms and all practices for releasing code, open or closed. Just in different ways.

Comment Re:"Force-updating" (Score 1) 59

Seems to work fine for Linux.

It does not. Zero-days are a thing on Linux. EOL is a thing on Linux, and many modern distros very much will force auto-update packages marked as a security risk.

I update only when I choose to on all my machines.

Congrats, you so clever. All users did this in the 90s. It was a security nightmare, especially when people were proud of running out of date buggy software. You may be an expert and capable of curating your update process (I'll give you the benefit of doubt, generous of me since you think this concept is OS related) but that doesn't mean what you do is even remotely appropriate for 99% of users out there, regardless of what OS they use.

Comment Re:Anwser: No (Score 1) 101

And yet the answer is actually yes. Unless all you do is Linux command line stuff or browse static webpages using a browser that last was standards compliant in the early 2000s, 4GB is not longer a viable minimum for anyone who doesn't also spend their evenings self-flagellating. It's masochistic to use an underperforming computer.

Comment Re:Lazy loading images sucks when you're offline (Score 1) 40

The internet is dynamic. Lazy loading is an optimisation technique that makes the browser experience better for the 99.99% of people currently *not* sitting at the airport about to board a flight.

What you really want to do is save the page. Chrome has that function, though I suspect it will have other problems, but it very much does load all images and make the page static (many webpages have an expiry / timeout period so even if you pre-loaded the tab, activating it 30min later will cause it to attempt to reload). There's a shitload of things preventing you doing what you want to do, you really need to find another solution.

Print to PDF may work too?

Comment Re:Absolute Shit (Score 1) 40

So, cntrl-f search is broken because it's not loaded. I can't scroll down quickly because it does the constant stop-and-buffer routine.

Continuous scrolling content has nothing to do with this article. This article is about Chrome, and Ctrl+F works fine for all loaded content, you are misdirecting your anger in a comment to the wrong article. Also you can't load infinitely. You can't Ctrl+F the second page of Slashdot while on the first page either.

This is another symptom of shitty programmers using 100 different pre-made libraries all of which are shitty and bloated to begin with, along with oversize graphics and hundreds of links to third party ad servers all using bandwidth that's utterly unrelated to the actual content I want to read.

This has nothing to do with anything. You are making a completely off-topic rant. Continuous scrolling pages are not a symptom of using a pre-made libarary. It's a choice for displaying content. An admittedly shitty and anti-consumer choice, but a choice none the less. They may use a pre-made library to do it (and they should, too many programmers baking their own recipe is the reason why some continuously loading pages just end up as a ginormous memory leak. If they were *good* programmers they'd understand the value of using a tried and tested library using DOM-reuse or some other efficient way of doing their anti-consumer task. But none of this has anything to do with lazy-loading of video / audio.

Comment Re:No auto load/play, period (Score 2) 40

Disagree heavily. You should absolutely load. Autoplay absolutely is a cancer and entirely within the control of the user, but when the user hits that play button that video better play instantly and not sit there buffering or loading. Lazyloading is a good thing that makes the internet appear far more responsive.

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