....I still have some OS/2 (or, rather, ArcaOS) systems running here.
Mostly for a very limited subset of things that never really migrated across to "modern" windows - I have a BBS running on there because 16 bit DOS apps on OS/2 was pretty much the best way to run them when it was 1994, and in 2024 it's still the best way to deal with them.
On the DOS side you had MS, IBM, and Digital Research.
You also had a bunch of commercial UNIXes: NextStep, Solaris, Xenix/SCO, etc. along with Linux and a variety of BSDs. There were also a ton of Sys4/5 implementations that were single-vendor specific so they could sell their hardware (which was x86 and not something more exotic) that have vanished to time because that business model only worked for a couple of years, if that.
There was of course two different Windows (NT, 9x), OS/2 which of course could also run (some) Windows apps, and a whole host of oddballs like QNX and BeOS and Plan9 or even CP/M86.
It was a lot less of a stodgy Linux-or-Windows monoculture, and I miss it.
The lovely thing with legacy architectures (6502, 68k, x86, z80, etc.) that were in use during that time is that they were very very simple: all you needed to do was put executable code on a ROM at the correct memory address, and the system would boot it.
There wasn't anything required other than making sure the code was where the CPU would go looking for it, and then it'd handle it from there.
Sure, booting an OS meant that you needed whatever booted the CPU to then chain into the OS bootloader and provide all the things the OS was expecting (BIOS functions, etc.) but the actual bootstrap from 'off' to 'running code' was literally just an EPROM burner away.
It's a lot more complicated now, but users would, for the most part, not tolerate removing the ability to boot any OS they feel like, so there's enough pressure that locked shit won't migrate down to all consumer hardware.
I'm still confused why ANYONE watches the big streamers since they're all pretty much, at least in so far as I've noticed, kind of a group of weird-ass idiots.
Not at all and I missed the vegan bit or I'd have not mentioned it, so that's my bad.
My problem is I live somewhere that essentially does not have top soil (the clay is, if you're lucky, maybe an inch down) and I'm going to have to start from utter scratch, and the internet is uh, rife? with animal-based solutions.
I'm going to have to import something, and then do something to whatever I get, since from what I can tell I'm not exactly going to get anything remotely resembling decent soil purchasing a truck full of it.
Uh, thanks for that. I was absolutely looking at 4ft beds, and now that you mention it, that's kinda obviously far far too deep for my stubby little t-rex arms to deal with.
I found a local place that provides cow shit by the ton (some benefits of living in Texas I guess?) that's willing to do smaller loads, so I think I'm going to DIY my own dirt with the local top soil and a load of cow poop.
I suspect that it's going to go the same route as the 'acting on behalf of a company' bit.
If I call Walmart, and the guy on the phone tells me that to deal with my COVID infection I want to drink half a gallon of bleach, and I then drink half a gallon of bleach, they're going to absolutely be found liable.
If I chat with a bot on Walmart, and it tells me the same thing, I'd find it shockingly hard to believe that the decisions from a jury would in any way be different.
It's probably even more complicated in that while a human has free will (such as it is), the bot is only going craft it's response from the data it's trained on, so if it goes off the rails and starts spouting dangerous nonsense, it's probably an even EASIER case, because that means someone trained the bot that drinking bleach is a cure for COVID.
I'm pretty sure our legal frameworks will survive stupid AI, because it's already designed to deal with stupid humans.
Traditional RAID5 (and others) is subject to data loss in the middle of a write that can break entire arrays if it happens.
Seen it on various LSI controllers, mdraid in Linux, and even a Windows implementation in Storage Spaces. I mean it's rare and mostly won't, but if you get unlucky and lose just enough data from just the right places, well....
Wouldn't imagine that any particular NAS appliance is using some magic sauce that prevents it from happening if you get unlucky as to a crash/power outage.
From what I understand running high bandwidth things like video streaming through cloudflare tunnels
Not at present; section 2.8 is gone.
It is true they frown very bigly on doing stuff like that through the normal cached CDN, but that's mostly because the CDN is vastly vastly more expensive than some traffic through a tunnel and is still pretty much enterprise-or-you-can't territory.
The bigger issue is the tunnels are relatively slow, and the performance for real-time stuff like streaming really sucks.
So probably won't get banned, but it's also not going to work very well.
Nothing is stopping anyone from doing that, other than perhaps the scale.
WordPress is like 40-something% of all websites: it's the most used blog/cms/whatever platform by a huuuuge margin.
If you wanted to fork it, you'd need pretty substantial resources, a lot of committed people, and the willingness to head a giant-ass project that has millions of users, all who want different things.
It really isn't a trivial undertaking, if you're serious about it.
I would, however, expect that the big providers (Flywheel, Cloudways, WPEngine, etc.) will probably make a corpo-sponsored fork sooner rather than later, since their business depends on it, and they've got the aforementioned money and people to do it.
Begun, the Borg Tribble wars have.
(Please don't hurt me.)