FLOSS virtualization hacker, occasional brewer

  • 14 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • So back in the days of the Atari ST we had compact disks (sic).

    Most games shipped on a single floppy disk (so 720k or 1.4Mb) and rarely used compression given the base system only has 512k of RAM. The crackers would strip the protection, repack the data and patch the loading routines to handle that. Depending on the games they could fit 3 or 4 games on a single disk.

    Nowadays the dynamics are different - games on consoles do use compression but they have to favour speed because they are streaming assets just in time. The PS5 even had dedicated decompression hardware to keep up with the data rate on it’s fast SSD.




  • I remember the old ADSL modems where effectively winmodems. I had to keep a Windows ME machine as my household router until the point the community had reversed engineered them enough to get them working on Linux.

    At least they where usb based rather than some random card. I think the whole driver could work in user space.






  • One of the things we did during the pandemic was significantly scale up or ability to sequence genomes. We were literally watching the virus evolve near real-time because a large chunk of samples could be sequenced and processed.

    While they’re are obviously data privacy concerns, for which the UK has a fairly long history of legislating for, having a full sequence for every newborn could allow for all sorts of cheaper early interventions. I’m sure the dataset would also be very useful for researchers as well.



  • I think the first proper internet I had was downloading files from FTP servers at university. The first time I had it from home was over a modem to Demon ISP running some cobbled together TCP/IP stack for my Atari Falcon.

    It was wild back then, I think even on windows you needed to install an IP stack before you could do anything because Windows didn’t have one but default because why would you?