Smoothwall. I used to run it a lot back in the early 2000s for personal use and even helped set up a couple small businesses with it but I don’t hear of anyone else using it these days, people seem to love openwrt and pfsense more.

It was great for just taking any old x86 machine and making a powerful, fully featured firewall/router out of it, including a VPN server, all through a web interface. Nowadays that’s boring shit but in 2002 it was pretty cool.

DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS

Are we just going to let Ballmer walk?

Year 2070: A young man in a dirty, run down, four mile tall high-rise reaching into the smog and covered in holographic ads and QR code graffiti lays down and plugs his newly upgraded gaming system into the port in the back of his head, closes his eyes, and enters the virtual realm for some much needed reality escape. He tests his hardware by running glxgears. The toothed discs appear before him in the empty void, spinning smoothly and silently, assuring him that in a few moments, he can imagine a different life, if only for just a few hours.

Yeah you’re right.

Can’t believe they didn’t go with Edna.

How do I type something? There’s a cursor but keyboard input doesn’t work for me. You oughtta make it do some dummy commands for fun, or better yet, some real ones in a sandbox, that’d be neat, for fun user interactivity. Otherwise, looks slick. Good job.

Debian user here, something wrong with getting the maximum lifespan you can out of devices and keeping them out of landfills?

Before I upgraded last year, I was still using an i7 from 2010 with 8GB RAM and a 1 TB mechanical spinning drive. I jumped to a 12 core socket AM5 Ryzen 9 with 64GB RAM and a 4TB SSD. When I upgrade, I do it all at once and make sure it can last and actually do use the machine for a decade or more. The one before the i7 (which is now a hand-me-down Minecraft box for my kid) was an Athlon XP from 2002 (still got that one in the basement, any retro collectors wanna clean it out for me? Case comes with big Quake and Nine Inch Nails logo stickers on the front applied by yours truly in my edgier days lol). In the span of 30 years I will have owned exactly three daily driver PCs.

I am totally this meme. My vehicles seem to follow the same pattern as well. Jumping from a tape deck to a touchscreen was fun.

If Gaza is completely and utterly annihilated in the next four years, it will be the fault of dipshits like you. Not me.

AliExpress is great if you’re running like a small Etsy shop or something with stuff you make and you need like 250 metal clasps for $20. Or 3000 electromechanical relays to build a relay CPU. They have some of the most random shit in bulk.

That will match my authentic late 1800s green wallpaper perfectly.

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I’m too old to be nostalgic for skeuomorphism. But a retina-burning amber monochrome monitor, text mode, with menus and UIs built out of ASCII graphics, or at best, 640 x 480 CPU-driven graphics modes? Now you’re talking.

From my perspective, the skeuomorphic era of the early-late 2000s is still “modern”.

Maxis did something like that once in the 90s with Streets of Simcity, where you can load up a city you created and race around in it.

The zit on my ass > Tesla

Pass the Brawndo.

That’s why I went with Red hat back then. They were sort of the gold standard and everything kinda just worked. Not as well as “it just works” Linux nowadays, but it used to be pretty good and easier to use, relatively speaking, compared to the other distros of the time.

Dependency hell still sucked.

We are now seeing the results of Bush’s No Child Left Behind.

Edit: also:

For years, Gen Z has been either derided or praised for supposedly being “woke.” Its members have been called snowflakes, mocked for performative “slacktivism” and embracing trigger warnings, and described (favorably and unfavorably) as climate warriors and gun-control activists.

Pretty sure that was us Millennials. That stuff started in the late 2000s when all the Occupy shit popped off, when Gen-Z were just kids. Meanwhile we were handing them tablets and phones to keep them quiet and giving them unrestricted access to the Internet, beginning their radicalization right under our noses. Surprise, now leftist mom/dad have a Nazi son/daughter.

Man that sucks. Imagine if modern desktop PCs still had an option to just power on and run nothing except a memory resident editor/monitor, waiting until you start writing assembly code to start booting the CPU.

I have a feeling a lot of them were not American. The bot farms are quiet now because they got what they wanted.