vax-official

[vax-official]

i hate seeing people now making fun of those who care about privacy online. i've seen people saying things like "well they already have your data. what are companies going to do with it" and it's like, that's not the point. it's that companies /shouldn't/ be able to have my data and sell it. am i aware they probably already have my data? yes, absolutely. but i'm still going to try and keep them from monetizing it any further, why are we defending companies selling data they shouldn't have to begin with though?

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Is that an IBM System/360? That was a revolutionary series of systems, I believe it was influential in establishing the 8-bit byte as the unit of memory (prior machines were typically word addressed with 6-bit characters)

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Assembly is now ACE-emmbly, for pride month.

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Multidimensional geometry just tends to do that, just consider how even the sphere has so much free space next to it compared to a circle within its surrounding square or cube

A circle inscribed in a square covers 79% of the square.

A ball inscribed in a cube fills 52% of the cube.

A 4-ball inscribed in a hypercube fills 31% of the hypercube.

A 5-ball inscribed in a 5-cube fills 16% of the 5-cube.

⋮

A 9-ball inscribed in a 9-cube fills it up less than 1% of the way, yet there’s no room to fit a second ball of the same size without intersecting the first.

⋮

In dimensions 23 and up, you can fit a little cube in the corner of the diagram, such that the cube has a larger volume than the ball!

That's especially disconcerting because the 23-cube has 8,388,608 corners. Even if you inscribe the little red cubes in all eight million corners, your big cube will still be 99.5% empty space.

[vax-official]

Windows ad, 1992

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Altair 50th birthday - William Sudbrink

Bill celebrated the 50th birthday of one of the most influential computers of all time: the Altair 8800. He also brought along a few other S-100 derivatives like the SOL-20 and IMSAI 8080, plus a variety of terminals. Happy 50th birthday to the kit computer that sparked a computing revolution!

VCF East XX

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Platonic love is not a runner up to romantic love. Platonic love isn’t second place. Platonic love isn’t less real, less valid or less powerful than romantic love. Don’t let your platonic love take a back seat to romantic love.

[vax-official]

Tutorial - Diagnostics on the Amiga with DiagROM - Part 2 (German)

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I don't know I'm not done talking about it. It's insane that I can't just uninstall Edge or Copilot. That websites require my phone number to sign up. That people share their contacts to find their friends on social media.

I wouldn't use an adblocker if ads were just banners on the side funding a website I enjoy using and want to support. Ads pop up invasively and fill my whole screen, I misclick and get warped away to another page just for trying to read an article or get a recipe.

Every app shouldn't be like every other app. Instagram didn't need reels and a shop. TikTok doesn't need a store. Instagram doesn't need to be connected to Facebook. I don't want my apps to do everything, I want a hub for a specific thing, and I'll go to that place accordingly.

I love discord, but so much information gets lost to it. I don't want to join to view things. I want to lurk on forums. I want to be a user who can log in and join a conversation by replying to a thread, even if that conversation was two days ago. I know discord has threads, it's not the same. I don't want to have to verify my account with a phone number. I understand safety and digital concerns, but I'm concerned about information like that with leaks everywhere, even with password managers.

I shouldn't have to pay subscriptions to use services and get locked out of old versions. My old disk copy of photoshop should work. I should want to upgrade eventually because I like photoshop and supporting the business. Adobe is a whole other can of worms here.

Streaming is so splintered across everything. Shows release so fast. Things don't get physical releases. I can't stream a movie I own digitally to friends because the share-screen blocks it, even though I own two digital copies, even though I own a physical copy.

I have an iPod, and I had to install a third party OS to easily put my music on it without having to tangle with iTunes. Spotify bricked hardware I purchased because they were unwillingly to upkeep it. They don't pay their artists. iTunes isn't even iTunes anymore and Apple struggles to upkeep it.

My TV shows me ads on the home screen. My dad lost access to eBook he purchased because they were digital and got revoked by the company distributing them. Hitman 1-3 only runs online most of the time. Flash died and is staying alive because people love it and made efforts to keep it up.

I have to click "not now" and can't click "no". I don't just get emails, they want to text me to purchase things online too. My windows start search bar searches online, not just my computer. Everything is blindly called an app now. Everything wants me to upload to the cloud. These are good tools! But why am I forced to use them! Why am I not allowed to own or control them?

No more!!!!! I love my iPod with so much storage and FLAC files. I love having all my fics on my harddrive. I love having USBs and backups. I love running scripts to gut suck stuff out of my Windows computer I don't want that spies on me. I love having forums. I love sending letters. I love neocities and webpages and webrings. I will not be scanning QR codes. Please hand me a physical menu. If I didn't need a smartphone for work I'd get a "dumb" phone so fast. I want things to have buttons. I want to use a mouse. I want replaceable batteries. I want the right to repair. I grew up online and I won't forget how it was!

[vax-official]

not to be a number nerd on main but 2025 (45^2) will be the only square year most of us ever experience. the last one was 1936 and the next one will be 2116

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Oh I have never heard of the Super Cassette Vision! Apparently it was an 8-bit game console with a unique NEC instruction set?

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Heathkit H89 — Alex Bodnar

VCF East XX

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[vax-official]

You can watch a movie on your Atari 2600 now. Yes really.

MovieCart is an Atari 2600 cartridge developed by Lodef Mode that allows you to load custom movies to it and play them on your real-life, honest-to-goodness Atari 2600 console.

Even if you don't want to go through the trouble of converting and loading your own movie onto the cart via SD card, the SD card bundled with MovieCart comes with Night of the Living Dead preloaded!

Check out a demo here

They're sold out for now but keep an eye on Lodef's Tindie shop for future sales.

[vax-official]

TRS-80 Microcomputer News February 1982

The serious side of the Color Computer got on the cover of this issue, although the "hard disk information" applied to the rather more expensive Model II. William Barden's assembly language tutorial used the 6-bit analog-to-digital converter in the "CoCo" to produce sound, and Jon Shirley recommended a "monthly cassette by mail" for the computer called Chromasette. A program was included to draw the graphic on the cover, but with the note it would take two hours to draw; you could at least save the completed image to cassette and reload it later.

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