Correct. I have no idea why people are freaking out over drinking water. We constantly eat and drink things that have wildly different osmolarity than our cells and yet here we still are. Our stomach and intestinal mucosa cells are not going to burst if we accidentally drink a milkshake (a hyperosmotic solution).
On that Windows 95 anecdote, by the way, beyond gaming that’s also one of the advantages of wine. Pretty sure their software would run perfectly on Linux with wine.
Not usually. The main thing for lab equipment is that it is controlling hardware. So you are often using proprietary drivers for custom hardware. Wine can’t handle drivers and for security reasons can’t get low level hardware access.
Not really I’m afraid. ReactOS is focused on implementing the old APIs which allows software that used those APIs to function.
But my experience with old proprietary software from that era is that they were trying to do something which was hard at the time. So they wrote their software with lots of clever tricks and hacks, to make the thing do the thing. This can be as simple as manually invoking interrupts and using undocumented APIs, to setting up non protected memory and communicating with the hardware directly.
I’ve seen cases where the software would only run with a specific version of Windows 95 and only with specific chipsets. Even changing the cpu from an Intel to a Cyrix for example could cause issues.
I was involved as an intern with a project to fix something like this a long time ago. We chose to simply reverse engineer the hardware interface, put in a custom controller to handle it and write modern software. It took a lot of doing and we lost some features, but the original system was beyond saving.
As time went on more and more hardware abstraction is applied, so I would hope this issue would be fixed in the future. But the whole of the 90s and early 2000s is a big issue.
Ah yeah, drivers are another thing entirely. Especially for what I imagine is very proprietary undocumented hardware. The only thing that can help there is a reverse engineer / kernel module dev.
Guys, the trick is to get it partially built and then cancel funding. Then scientists will never trust you to fund anything ever again, and you get to act like science is a waste of money while you’re spending ridiculous sums on fighter jets.
That project put my dad out of business. Government gave him (part of) the contract, he did a bunch of work for years and then poof, project gone, not gonna pay you for it.
I would have loved for the SSSC to have been built as well. It probably wouldn’t have found the highs boson till 2010 or maybe as early as 2009. The computer technology of the 90s would have severely limited the things ability to be understood. CERN creates GB of data per second. I can’t imagine what that thing would have done, and then we need to be able to process that much so we can filter out the noise.
I was 12 when it was announced that they weren’t gonna finish buildt it, and even though I was just a kid in IN, something shattered for me that day. That was almost as bad as watching Challenger.
Having the corpse of the Supercollider Superconductor in my backyard growing up (not literally) makes me wonder what could have been if the US wasn’t so shortsighted.
With all the development around Waxahachie, Midlothian, and Ennis, There's a very good chance that many backyards are now built over the loop's proposed path.
The feds give the states more than $16b per year to build and run shitty, custom made IT systems for their Medicaid programs. It’s basically a subsidy to IT companies. There are thousands of examples like this, where spending money on fundamental science is clearly a better investment.
Yeah everything’s been kinda fucked ever since, hasn’t it… i mean… it was 2008 right before obama being elected and i really don’t think the “correct” path of the future would have involved r-money or mccain winning so at least SOME shit would be the same, but still…
LHC didn’t start seriously smashing shit (beyond previous energies done by other colliders) until after 2010 though. I think everything went tits up about 2012, tbh - the year they found the Higgs Boson. I kind-of jokingly subscribe to the idea that the world ended. I mean, it just checks so many boxes to me, it truly seems that the universe as it stands right now is fundamentally different than it should be after the passing of one single decade.
okay i can DEFINITELY agree with you about 2012, shit’s been super fucking weird since SPECIFICALLY that year.
the worst day of my life was December 22nd 2012 and I remember it very clearly because I couldn’t figure out WHY.
I just felt awful to a degree i have NEVER felt before or ever again since. Not even once. Not even a little.
It was a distinct watershed moment that divided my entire life into “before” and “after”.
I figured it was just some freak hormonal imbalance that walloped me out of nowhere but it’s weird that that was the only time and that it coincided with such a distinct … difference in how the world was between ‘before that’ and ‘after that’.
now, the higgs boson event was on a different date, certainly, but that day… i will never be able to forget it.
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