Turns out that, contrary to a whole bunch of web links and search results, you go here and select “Thunderbird Beta” from the “Release Channel” pop-up menu: https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/download/ Good thing all of the links to download/beta/ just take you back to the top page instead of there!
Whoa. The new Coffeezilla covers how the company behind the “Rabbit R1” was originally an NFT scam promising to let you use your brain to enter the metaverse. #RabbitR1
There were a bunch of different systems in DEC’s PDP line, many mutually-incompatible (e.g. the PDP-1, 6, and 10 were somewhat compatible, the PDP-8 and PDP-11 were each their own complete universe, and then there were the 5, 9, 12, and 15, etc.) but they were all very well-designed.
My friend @fvzappa has a listing up on eBay for a PDP-8/m, which is a complete PDP-8/m minicomputer: https://www.ebay.com/itm/116163448173 This is an excellent turnkey system for joining the 12-bit world!
@eschaton@fvzappa That brings back some memories. I spent a lot of time on a PDP-8 and taught computer science at Colby Commuity College using Basic and Fortran. I was pretty good with the teco editor.
Jason Scott is stirring up some drama on the eve of #VCFEast because he donated some stuff to #VCF but doesn’t actually understand how “donation” and “archiving” work. He’s also taking at face value that someone was “driven out” of the organization when they actually ragequit rather than work within proper governance.
VCFed is a decent organization, especially now, and the VCF events are great. This drama is a tempest in a teapot, and absolutely not a reason not to participate or attend.
Ugh, iTerm2 doesn't have sufficiently good VT200+ emulation to use with VMS full-screen applications, and Terminal only supports VT100. Is there another native macOS terminal emulator that has good support for, say, VT240 or VT340?
If it surprises anyone that “the Marquess of Chumley” has stolen Chinese antiques in her home, you should really look into the contents of the UK’s museums.
Are there any straightforward guides to setting up an SSH “jump server” for an old system? Let’s say I have a VAX VMS system I want to provide access to. People would ssh to cmhvax@mysite with a password I share, and each would produce a telnet connection to the VAX that they’d then have to log into with their real login and password. The past couple times I’ve looked into it, I got pretty lost in a forest of documentation… #retrocomputing#openvms
@eschaton There's a way to lock an SSH account into a specific shell - it's usually used for chrooted SFTP-only accounts. I can dig up how I did it, I expect you can change it to telnet in to the respective machine.
Chroot jailing it should mean that if someone manages to escape the sandbox, they shouldn't be able to do much as they won't have access to system binaries. In theory. No guarantee.
@philpem Hmm, a shell that does a chroot (and traps INT/HUP/QUIT might be useful. Right now I just have a user with /bin/sh as their shell and this as their .profile to prevent breaking out:
trap "" 1 2 3
telnet -E vax-ip-address
exit
This still has a tiny race, unless the shell actively fails upon a signal between sourcing .profile and executing its contents. Maybe I should just write a couple lines of C…
Does anyone have a straightforward containerized toolchain that includes at least gcc, binutils, and gdb, targeting 68000 ELF? I’ll be running it under podman on my MacBook, for the embedded stuff I’m doing for fun, so I don’t have to do everything in an SSH session to Linux. #m68k#embedded#retrocomputing
@rhempel@me_ VMs will be involved anyway since I prefer to work on macOS, but podman takes care of that for me. gdb should definitely still support m68k, after all gcc and binutils do… :)
@Lobrien@dgoldsmith I’d say that depends how accurately they actually represent that knowledge and how amenable they are to actual introspection. People engage in reasoning because they’re taught to, and expect because of the “conversational” nature of LLM tools that this is also what an LLM is doing, but it’s doing nothing of the sort. (Otherwise the training would look a lot like an educational curriculum that covers early childhood through graduate school…)
@Lobrien@dgoldsmith Something like Cyc on the other hand is performing the kind of reasoning that the layperson might expect, but without (necessarily) the conversational interface.
I’ve been playing around with creating a new ROM from scratch for an existing 68K system and I’m excited to see MAME has a “gdbstub” debugger. I don’t have space in the ROM for debug symbols, and it’s a raw binary anyway (produced by a linker script). How do I tell gdb how to map the .o files with symbols to the ROM image so I get source level symbolic debugging? #mamedev#retrocomputing#gdb#embedded
@eschaton OK thanks - I was trying to figure out what level you were at to tune my response :-)
Your GDB stub will need a way to insert a SWi (software interrupt) at your breakpoints (or pause poi ts) to do anything useful - and therefore your code needs to run in RAM and be linked to live there.
Your GDB stub can live in the ROM so that it's available at boot time - and you can use it to load the program into RAM.
Does that sort of match your plan? Or am I missing a key bit of information
@rhempel Yeah, the GDB stub is part of the emulator and manages breakpoints itself, so I don’t need to worry about copying the code to RAM before running it. So what I expect I need to do is:
Use a linker script to generate an ELF file with everything at the right addresses, plus symbols.
Use objcopy to make a ROM image form it.
Attach gdb to the emulator’s stub and tell it to look to the ELF file for symbols.
If a rental property is vacant for more than six months, and doesn’t have permits for (confirmed) renovations scheduled beyond that time, rental decisions should revert to the city: The landlord should be required to submit paperwork detailing the fixed and projected maintenance costs, and the city can run a “rental auction” where the highest bidder above that rate gets to rent the property for the next five to ten years—with sublet rights at up to 15% profit margin.
This ensures that a landlord still gets to make money (or at least break even) on their property while preventing them from being allowed to create blight in order to score points in bullshit accounting games.