I stopped using these long ago because every other app you install puts something there so it becomes a landfill automatically.
Just create an additional partition and put all your non-OS files there. This is a classic idea people have been using since the DOS days, still working great.
I loved the Amiga, but it was basically dead by 1995. Commodore had gone bankrupt, the hardware had stagnated for years, and it was impossible to add modern features like memory protection to the OS.
Dunno about the others, but I heard OS/2 was amazing... if you had the hardware for it. Which was notably higher end and more expensive than what DOS and Windows could run on.
I was an avid OS/2 user from 2.1 (1993) through Warp 4 (1996). This is sort of accurate and sort of not. It depends on what point in time you are referring to.
I did happen to have a machine with a monster CPU (for the time), but I knew many people with lesser CPUs. It really wasn't the CPU but the RAM. You had to have 4 MB, better to have 8 MB.
In those days, RAM was the most expensive thing on any computer. Also in those days a lot of the inexpensive clone machines like the Gateway and Dell were still using 30-pin (8-bit wide) RAM, so you had to use 4 sticks to get 32-bit width, and there were only 8 total slots (two banks). 1 MB SIMMs were at least obtainable, which means your practical limit was an 8 MB machine. 4 MB SIMMs were incredibly expensive, almost unobtainable, if your system board even supported them.
OS/2 would run very comfortably on an 8 MB machine, meaning all you really had to do was come up with the scratch for some 1 MB DIMMs and have a machine with the full 8 sockets. It was slightly upmarket for 1992 and 1993, but very far from high end. A ton of people in the BBS scene used OS/2 because it allowed you to run your own BBS in the background, or to connect to a BBS and be downloading files while still being able to use the computer, like say a word processor to write a paper.
By the time Windows 95 came out in late (September) 1995, 4 MB was considered the minimum and 8 MB was considered better. By then the Pentium had been released, but 486SX systems were pervasive and cheap. If you slapped more RAM in them, they would indeed run either OS/2 or Windows 95 just fine. Software rarely needed an FPU. System requirements between the two were basically the same.
The failure of OS/2 came down to software compatibility. The killer feature of OS/2 is that it could run all your DOS programs and all your Windows programs and unlike real DOS or Windows you could have multiple programs open at the same time without bogging-down or crashing the system. Heck, you could even run full-screen VGA games like Doom and task-switch out of them and return. You could be gaming while downloading.
But Windows 95 came out with an even better feature: the ability to run Win32 software that was formerly limited to Windows NT. And that turns out to be a way more important feature than being able to run lots of older software simultaneously. And as far as stability goes, if you only ran Win32 software on Windows 95 it was actually incredibly stable. As long as all the applications themselves are reasonably well-behaved, the inherently unsafe Windows 95 architecture of a large amount of globally shared unprotected memory hosting critical system data structures isn't a big problem.
So what did I do in 1996? Well, I got a true monster machine, a Pentium Pro 200 with I think 64 MB of RAM, and I ordered it with Windows NT 4. By then, Windows NT needed 32 MB minimum, but RAM was getting cheaper so it wasn't as much of a barrier.
So the irony of saying that you needed notably higher-end hardware for OS/2 is that notably higher-end hardware becoming the norm is what really killed OS/2 even among die hard fans.
Cheap RAM, cheap enough to run the even more stable Windows NT, was the last straw. OS/2 was mortally wounded when IBM failed to deliver Windows 95-on-OS/2. I thought at the time they should have done that, and I know now they could have done it. If they had done it, I think OS/2 could have competed with Windows 95. Instead it only limped along among die-hard fans like me. But once hardware caught up and I was able to run Windows NT, there really wan't much point in OS/2 anymore.
1992 ram situation was bad, but not that bad. There was no single most expensive component, it was always a contest between CPU, RAM, HDD and monitor :). 1992 30pin Simm prices:
1MB $30-50.
4MB $150 January 1992, lowest in went would be $100 in December 1992, and back to $130 in December 1994.
Sane combinations were 4x1, 8x1, 4x4, and quite insane 8x4. 1992 was also when non IBM vendors started using 72pin SIMMs, for example Dell Precision 386DX/33 4x72pin while 25MHz model shipped with 8x30pin simm sockets. Edit: Looks like DELL started switching to 72pin simms in early 1990 with 325P/333P/433P models, and in 1992 committed unconscionable abomination by releasing 333s/L 386SX with 72pin simms :o
Trying to find a technological fault is what people did at the time. There were long threads on Usenet trying to ascribe things anecdotally to hypotheses that even then did not hold water.
It's sad to see looking for technological reasons happening here in the replies to your question, because that means that subsequent history has been forgotten. The technology turned out later in the decade never to have been the deciding issue, when things like the "Halloween documents" came to light. It was business agreements and marketing that sunk such products (albeit that one can argue that one can find traces of NeXT around even to this day), not technology. There were exclusionary pre-loading agreements with Microsoft, infighting inside IBM between two divisions, some utterly self-destructive litigiousness by some companies, and a whole bunch of Apple politics.
EU is just rushing into bullshit dystopia scifi with its useless and harmful anonymization and chat control ideas. These just ought to fail and be rolled back. Imagining these succeed seems nearly as wild as waking up in the world where people do yakuza-style thumb cut to every naughty kid who fails to do his homework.
Yet it is wrong for a government to deny the people to access foreign services over the Internet when they want. That is wrong in the same sense as disallowing them to travel overseas, read untranslated books and consume services of vendors right there is.
It can be sorta okay to require local ISPs stop providing necessary connectivity readily but if the users find a way, punishing them for this or actively attacking the ways they do it is wrong.
> Yet it is wrong for a government to deny the people to access foreign services over the Internet when they want
"Services" here can be replaced with "control". I'm not super conservative, but social media sometimes do take control over our kids, and ourselves. If they could have offered a better way to content moderation, or ability to tune algorithms, that would be a great thing.
I wish there is a law that allows parents, and individuals to have control over some social media and their algorithms. For now all they do is just prevent themselves from scraping and automation
"Yet it is wrong for a government to deny the people to access foreign services over the Internet when they want."
It would be wrong to deny access if there was no good reason to do so. However, if those foreign services are (a) harming citizens of a sovereign country and or (b) they act in ways that violate laws of that country then its government has every right to take action against said services, and one of the few means available is to block access to them.
As those services are outside the jurisdiction of the country it cannot take action to stop them other than to ban them from the country—they can do that because they have jurisdiction within their own country.
If a citizen of that country wishes to use those foreign (banned) services then he/she can do so as long as he/she moves outside the country to a jurisdiction where those foreign services are deemed to act in a legal manner.
Banning access to foreign services within the jurisdiction of a country is not the same as banning freedom of movement (to leave the country, etc.).
By you insisting that citizens ought to have a right to access foreign services from within their country would mean that you would automatically deny that country the right to protect its citizens from harm from that foreign service—for if everyone had access the government could not protect its citizens. QED! That's nonsense, that's not how the laws of countries work.
The other way of reading your point is that you consider that those foreign services cause no harm. There's solid evidence that these services are causing harm, it thus follows that a country has a right and a duty to protect its citizens therefrom.
The crux of this debate is about granularity—how much harm do these foreign services inflict on a country, and of course every country has a different value system which leads each to implement different rules.
> Yet it is wrong for a government to deny the people to access foreign services over the Internet when they want.
And when those services push propaganda, or shadowban some politicians while boosting others [1,2]? We can all panic about foreign interference, until some other country does something about it.
Ruling is all about balance and drawing lines. Why is alcohol and tobacco banned for people under 18? Why are heroine and cocaine banned? Aren't these two cases examples of liberties that the government is cutting?
The government draws a line when the age to vote is 18, or when the age to drink is 18, or when it prevents you from owning an ak-47. There is no escaping drawing lines, it is inherent to life. Even when not seemingly drawing any line, you are just drawing a line somewhere due to inertia, a sort of implicit default.
Some lines are popular, such as the drinking age, others are impopular, such as tax rates, but both are necessary.
A society drunk on liberty is an evil too, as ancient philosophers already exposed, as there is no balance.
The role of the rulers of a people is not only to enforce the collective will of the people, but to go beyond it to the position of a leader. No one wants to pay taxes or a tax hike, but if there are no taxes, a state cannot be run. Here, the leaders are going beyond the collective will to protect the collective itself.
There are also plenty of cases where the collective is misguided, such in the case of the entertainment industry (and I'm including trash and sloppy TV and online content here), which is idiotizing society. Should people be throwing themselves into an abyss of hedonism instead of following the value of temperance and seeking wisdom? Yes, but many do not. The state of our current societies reflect our current values. "Got what I voted for", right? Disfruten lo votado, as we say in Spanish.
Here is where the imperative of the leader to do what is good and right is most obvious. The leaders are supposed to be the best among us, and while they often are not (again, a reflection of the values of society), this legitimizes them to make unpopular choices, up to a certain degree. The degree of power to invest in a leader is also a line that the collective draws. (As a note to this, bad leaders like Trump are both a reflection of the values of society, and the result of good leaders failing to do what is right and good. There are other factors, but these are the most important ones.)
When governments decide to ban social media (which is different from censorship, if only the medium is banned and not the message), a line is being drawed, and in my opinion, it is a good line to draw.
Notice how banning social media solves none of these problems. It just makes us blind to the problems and unable to speak about them.
They banned Signal too, that's not social media.
While it's true that lines have to be drawn to maintain any semblance of order in society, I wish we'd be more critical of who's actually drawing the lines, by what means, and for what purpose.
When those foreign companies are from [western] countries where massive unequal exchange against them happens, the moral focus should be on that. Universal individualized liberalism isn’t inherently good.
Facebook and X are whatever. Nobody cares if they get blocked.
But YouTube is such an incredible learning and knowledge sharing asset that I think you only hurt yourself and your own society by blocking it. Literally throwing the baby out with the bath water.
I do not like Facebook and X either, but this "I hate X and Y so it is OK to ban them but not Z because I like it" is a horrible argument, if you could even call it as such.
Yeah this would be the only one I sweat. Heck, I live in Canada and haven’t been on Facebook or Twiter in like 3 years. Don’t miss them. But YouTube I go on every day lol.
Blocking Signal or Reddit sounds bizarre for a civilized democratic country. What sense can that make other than denying people the right for privacy of personal communications or uncensored information access? I am very surprised Nepal goes this way.
Nepal is classified as a Hybrid Regime [0] in democracy rankings.
Following the end of the civil war, power has largely consolidated amongst 3 players - KP Sharma Oli, Sher Bahadur Deuba, and Prachanda - who play a game of musical chairs.
Ofc, both China and India are constantly interfering in Nepali politics and building random coalitions with permutations of these three along with smaller parties.
Whenever India feels Nepal is leaning too pro-China, some crisis happens, and whenever China feels Nepal is leaning to pro-India, some crisis also happens.
Indian state politics also plays a role, because the states of Sikkim, Uttarakhand, Bihar, and Uttar Pradesh have significant ethnic ties in Nepal (eg. Bihar's CM Nitish Kumar's family are Maithili with family ties across the borders, and his opponent Lalu Prasad Yadav has backed Yadav political movements in Nepal as well; UP's CM Yogi Adityanath is a Garhwali Rajput who used to lead a Hindu sect that was patronized by the Nepali royal family and still has significant pull in Nepal; and Sikkim's former CM Pawan Kumar Chamling was part of a ethno-tribal movement amongst Janjatis/Tibeto-Burman tribals who were at the bottom rung of the Nepal during it's monarchical rule; KP Sharma Oli grew up in a village barely 20 miles from Naxalbari right when the Naxalite/Maoist insurgency began in West Bengal), which adds another layer of complexity, because state level politics often leaks across both Nepal and India.
I’m assuming that ranking has countries like China as not democratic while countries like the US as democratic. When most people in China are happy with their govt/they correctly believe the govt is working in their interest. Meanwhile the majority in America are usually not happy with their current regimes and most certainly the govt does not represent the people.
America is ranked as a flawed democracy within the EIU - just like Israel, South Korea, and Italy - which I would say is a fairly accurate take about the state of American democracy.
> When most people in China
It's hard to tell whether Chinese think one way or the other, as these kinds of polls are tightly held. That said, protests are fairly common in China, and the rate of labor unrest within China has risen dramatically compared to the past 10 years [0]
> When most people in China are happy with their govt
You don't seem to have seen the videos of people being shoved into vans when they try to exercise their right to lodge grievances about government corruption.
The difference is that people are protesting against ICE, writing op-eds openly across various forms of media and a prominent governor is trolling Federal govt's actions in public.
Good luck trying to do any of that in China. US and other democratic societies may have warts, but there is a huge gap between those systems and China.
I consider banning it uncharacteristic to such. I can hardly consider a state where people are not allowed to access Reddit (as well as HN, Wikipedia or StackExchange) freely and anonymously a healthy civilized democracy. It can still be a very civilized society in general but tightening control on the people like this indicates the government is going slippery slope.
Many national subreddits are taken over by power hungry mods who now have behind the scene help from nation-states. Despite ample evidence and other subreddits highlighting consistent systemic biases there is no way to remove mods or change policies. I understand it is difficult to make it completely unbiased as subjectivity and a lot of other factors will influence what counts are right or wrong in that scenario, and mods are not even paid either. But then this always made it ripe for influence from other areas as a part of information warfare and here we are with the outcome
Sure - the reason is the want more control over their people, they want to surveil them (hence blocking Signal), they want them to only read or express "correct" texts and prevent them from participating in open loosely-moderated discussions (hence blocking Reddit).
What we need is stop fighting robots and start welcoming and helping them. I se zero reasons to oppose robots visiting any website I would build. The only purpose I ever tried disallowed robots for was preventing search engines from indexing incomplete versions or going the paths which really make no sense for them to go. Now I think we should write separate instructions for different kinds of robots: a search engine indexer shouldn't open pages which have serious side-effects (e.g. place an order) or display semi-realtime technical details but an LLM agent may be on a legitimate mission involving this.
Let my site go down and then restart my server a few hours later. I'm a dude with a blog I'm not making uptime guarantees. I think you're overestimating the harm and how often this happens.
Misbehaving scrapers have been a problem for years not just from AI. I've written posts on how to properly handle scraping and the legal grey area it puts you in and how to be a responsible one. If companies don't want to be responsible the solution isn't abdicate an open web. It's make better law and enforcement of said law.
> What we need is stop fighting robots and start welcoming and helping them. I se zero reasons to oppose robots visiting any website I would build.
Well, I'm glad you speak for the entire Internet.
Pack it in folks, we've solved the problem. Tomorrow, I'll give us the solution to wealth inequality (just stop fighting efforts to redistribute wealth and political power away from billionaires hoarding it), and next week, we'll finally get to resolve the old question of software patents.
It's time to stop blocking crawlers and using captchas and start building web sites that are intentionally AI-friendly by design. Even before the modern LLMs, anti-scraper measures apparently were primarily befitting Google whose scrapers were the most common exception.
Britain tried that. Network Rail, a unit of the Government, owns the tracks, and 28 or so Train Operating Companies run the trains.
The UK started out with railroads in private ownership. They were nationalized in 1948, as British Rail. Then they were de-nationalized in the 1980s and 1990s. Now, they're being re-nationalized.
When one company controls both the trains AND the infrastructure, it results in an unfair advantage over anyone else wishing to use the rail. Commuter trains needing to pull over to let cargo trains from the parent company through, for example.
Which doesn't seem like a particular issr with commuter rail (or Northeast Corridor) in general. It is an issue on long distance rail as I understand it especially when passenger trains get off schedule which is often.
Having ridden the Northeast Corridor end-to-end the entire route, by far the worst section to traverse on Amtrak is western Connecticut. Which also happens to be the only bit of the NEC that Amtrak doesn't own--it's owned by Metro North instead.
Unfair? How is that unfair? If I built the track, then I own the track, and I decide what runs on the track. Anybody else thinking they have the right to run on it can get lost. A private railroad line is not an open-access situation. They'll carry your railroad car, but they'll do it in their train. Any argument otherwise is an argument against private ownership, which I view extremely skeptically.
(It's a little different in the case of commuter rail, where there's a contractual arrangement.)
You are willfully ignoring the reality that building a competing rail network that services the same area is wildly impractical given the land requirements.
This is the same argument behind having multiple providers to share one set of power lines, telephone cables, etc. Duplicate copies of physical infrastructure are pointless, wasteful, and unlikely to occur in practice, so there’s rarely competitive pressure.
How much government funding went, directly or indirectly, into building the track? What sort of deals where put in place to facilitate building them? Where did all that land come from? What sort of special rights (e.g. the ability to build level crossings) have railways been granted?
By buying it. Even the land-grant railroads bought the land, in the form of carrying the US mail at reduced rates for the next 80 years. (During World War 2, when the government was desperate for money, they let the railroads buy themselves out of the reduced mail rates. So it worked out to payments for 80 years with a balloon payment at the end.)
Things get complicated with a common good like land. It's not particularly just that just because someone purchased some natural resource a hundred years ago people who weren't even born at the time are screwed. Presumably every generation should have a say in how society operates.
No, they're suggesting something more along the lines of Standard Oil being required to refine anyone's oil in their refinery, or carry it in their pipelines. But the one suggesting it didn't offer to let anyone stay in their house, and to me that's the same issue. Does the owner of private property get to control access and use, or not?
You say that the railroad is a business, not a private residence. All right, does Home Depot have to let Lowe's use part of their floor space? No, they don't.
Property owners generally don't have complete freedom to control access, hence easements.
Even if those weren't a thing, there's a coherent political view (which I'm not arguing for) that "resolves" the issue: nationalizing the infrastructure and licensing access back like the UK.
It's a strawman though. There's no reason anyone needs to hold identical political views on the property rights of private houses, home improvement stores, and rail infrastructure. They're different things.
I stopped using these long ago because every other app you install puts something there so it becomes a landfill automatically.
Just create an additional partition and put all your non-OS files there. This is a classic idea people have been using since the DOS days, still working great.