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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • I was already a dev in a small IT consultancy by the end of the decade, and having ended up as “one of the guys you go to for web-based interfaces”, I did my bit pushing Linux as a solution, though I still had to use IIS on one or two projects (even had to use Oracle Web Application Server once), mainly because clients trusted Microsoft (basically any large software vendor, such as Microsoft, IBM or Oracle) but did not yet trust Linux.

    That’s why I noticed the difference that Red Hat with their Enterprise version and Support Plans did on the acceptability of Linux.



  • CRT monitors internally use an electron gun which just fires electrons at the phosporous screen (from, the back, obviously, and the whole assembly is one big vacuum chamber with the phosporous screen at the front and the electron gun at the back) using magnets to twist the eletcron stream left/right and up/down.

    In practice the way it was used was to point it to the start of a line were it would start moving to the other side, then after a few clock ticks start sending the line data and then after as many clock ticks as there were points on the line, stop for a few ticks and then swipe it to the start of the next line (and there was a wait period for this too).

    Back in those days, when configuring X you actually configured all this in a text file, low level (literally the clock frequency, total lines, total points per line, empty lines before sending data - top of the screen - and after sending data as well as OFF ticks from start of line before sending data and after sending data) for each resolution you wanted to have.

    All this let you defined your own resolutions and even shift the whole image horizontally or vertically to your hearts content (well, there were limitations on things like the min and max supported clock frequency of the monitor and such). All that freedom also meant that you could exceed the capabilities of the monitor and even break it.


  • In the early 90s all the “cool kids” (for a techie definition of “cool”, i.e. hackers) at my University (a Technical one in Portugal with all the best STEM degrees in the country) used Linux - it was actually a common thing for people to install it in the PCs of our shared computer room.

    Later in that decade it was already normal for it to be used in professional environments for anything serving web pages (static or dynamic) along with Apache: Windows + IIS already had a lower fraction of that Market than Linux + Apache.

    If I remember it correctly in the late 90s RedHat started providing their Enterprise Version with things like Support Contracts - so beloved by the Corporates who wanted guarantees that if their systems broke the supplier would fix them - which did a lot to boost Linux use on the backend for non-Tech but IT heavy industries.

    I would say this was the start of the trend that would ultimately result in Linux dominating on the server-side.





  • Not in the EU it doesn’t, unless they got the user to review that Agreement and agree before the sale took place.

    After the implicit contract which is the sale has been agreed to by both parties (the buyer gave the money, the seller took it), one of the parties can’t force the other party to agree to a new contract before they’re allowed to get the contractual benefits of the original contract (i.e. the buyer getting to use the product they bought, the seller getting to use the money they got).

    It doesn’t matter if the seller has such power de facto - legally they most definitelly can’t blackmail the buyer by denying them their side of the contractual rights they got in the Act of Sale by blocking their use of the product they bought until they agree to a new Agreement from the seller.







  • Well, the language is generally different, which is a big barrier to moving (though you can get away with just English in a most countries, but some stuff - often public services - is only in the local language). There is also a cultural element in that people behave and expect slightly different things in different countries, which can be a bit of an adjustment.

    Even bigger than that is that most people aren’t comfortable with big changes and tend to stick to their own country - at the very least the first big move takes a significant amount of courage.

    Then if you have your own house with lots of stuff you have to arrange for the move, which will probably cost you maybe €1500 - €3000 depending on the distance and how much stuff you have.

    And finally, in my experience no country is all good or all shit - they generally have some good things and some bad things. Also, the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence until you move there, were after a while it’s the grass on the other side of the fence that starts looking greener.

    That said, some people - mainly the so-called Digital Nomads - do spend their life moving from country to country whilst working remotelly, which works especially well if you spend different Seasons in different places in Europe (some places are much better in the Summer and others in Winter). This is not new: I’ve met people whose life was working as Scuba Diver instructors in Summer in a country and as Ski Instructors in Winter in a different country.


  • EU countries are allowed to, by Treaty, expel EU citizens who moved there without the means to live there or a job.

    However it’s incredibly rare and there really isn’t any general procedure to do it: each country does it (or not) it’s own way. This tends to be used for people caught sleeping or begging on the streets.

    Further, for countries in the Schengen Area, they don’t even know you’re there unless you register, since you haven’t passed any border controls and thus aren’t in any database as having arrived but not departed.


  • I’ve literally done that inside the EU, though to the UK (back before Brexit) rather than Germany - I flew to London and stayed about a month in a hotel whilst looking for a contract there (I’m a freelancer) and more permanent accommodation.

    Years later I did the same to Germany, though I only stayed 3 months.

    The only requirement is that you either have a job or have the money to pay for the costs of living there (so you can still go without a job, as long as you have the money to pay for a place to stay, food and so on). The reason for the requirement that you can pay your way (either from a job or savings) is because people can’t just move to another EU country to do things like living on the street and begging or living of the local Social Security.

    Some countries also have a requirement that you register after 3 months there (for example, Germany), though it’s not any kind of applying to stay, it’s simply registering as living there. This is usually because there are associated obligations for residents in that country, not just in terms were do you pay tax, but in some countries (for example, Germany and The Netherlands) there are things like mandatory health insurance.

    In practice as an EU citizen, if you have the savings or the kind of job which you can do in 3 month stints or remotely, you absolutely can hop from country to country every 3 months without having to register with anybody (though I’m not sure how taxes would work - I suppose you would pay them in the last country you registered as a Resident).

    If you know the language, if it weren’t for taxes being per country and the rights and duties of Residents being different in different countries (such as the Mandatory Health Insurance for Residents in some countries but not others) hence the requirement to register after 3 months in some countries, the whole thing would be as easy as moving within your own country.




  • Already back in the 00s you could get a media player box, with a remote, that hooked to you TV and played video files from any share in your network or an HDD hooked up to it.

    Nowadays you can get an Android TV media player box with Kodi on it (or you can install it), again with a remote and hooked to your TV to do the same as that 00s media player box but looks a lot more fancy.

    Or instead of an Android TV you can get a Mini PC or older laptop, ideally with Linux, with an HDMI output which you connect to your TV, install Kodi on it and get a wireless air-mouse remote (if you get one with normal remote buttons rather than the stupid “for Google” ones, the buttons seamlessly integrate with Kodi so you don’t really have to use the air-mouse stuff).

    Alternativelly if you want to avoid Android but don’t want to spend 150 bucks on a mini PC, you can get one of those System On A Board devices like one of the Orange Pi ones, put LibreElec on it (small Linux distro built around Kodi) and do the wireless remote thing with it.

    The back end of any of this is either files on a NAS, on a share on a PC, a harddisk connected directly to the device or even something like Jellyfin running somewhere else (which can be outside your home network) or even any of the many IPTV services out there.

    It has never been this easy to put together a hardware and software solution, entirely under your control - read: just as easy to use for corporate streaming services as for “personal” media - to watch media in your living room with the same convenience as purpose built devices for that, and it has never been this convenient to use or looked this good.


  • The problem is that a lot of people, specially Americans, have interiorized “red scare” propaganda notions, even when they see themselves as Lefties.

    If you don’t just mentally go “uuh, commies” at the mere wiff of communal solutions it’s a lot easier to actually look at certain ideas and judge them on their actual pros and cons, as is spotting authoritarianism for what it is (whether it claims to want to implement leftwing notions or rightwing ones) and tribalism (of the kind that supports Fascism whilst claiming to be leftwing, and I include both Putin supporting “communists” and Zionism supporting “liberals”)