How it works is, if you have two files foo.gz and bar.gz, and cat foo.gz bar.gz > foobar.gz, then foobar.gz is a valid gzip file and uncompresses to a single file with the contents of foo and bar.
It’s handy because it is very easy to just append stuff at the end of a compressed file without having to uncompress-append-recompress. It is a bit niche but I have a couple of use cases where it makes everything simpler.
I know, but I've been always confused why a gzip file would have a filename field in its header if it's supposed to contain only one file. Obviously it's good to keep a backup of original filename somewhere, but it's confusing nonetheless.
My story is similar. I loved playing video games and all, but after I wrote my first program, I became obsessed with computers. The infinite canvas for interactive human experience and problem solving felt out of this world.
Also it's good for people to realize that all of the built-in scheduled Windows tasks are itemized down the folders in this console, and some can be individually disabled if you are careful.
For people that are tweaking Windows, if you're not looking into Task Scheduler it might help.
I haven’t experienced that yet, but that’s a good point. Perhaps I need to keep a script of Unregister-ScheduledTask calls like a replayable delete log.
Love that. Has GUI caught up with the technical capabilities though, or do we need to resort to command-line and editing configuration files to schedule a task?
There isn't a GUI that i know of, but the files are very basic text files that don't really need much of a GUI. Creating a service and setting it's timer is maybe 10 lines total. For monitoring the services and seeing how long they take and all that i'm sure there are GUIs but none i know of ottomh.
> Has GUI caught up with the technical capabilities though
on Windows ?
On linux, there is crond. On Windows there was, once upon a time, a Task Scheduler in Accessories. Now it seems to be gone, though, inspecting with Autostart from Sysinternals seems to imply that there still is a Task Scheduler in E
Windows 10.
I actually disagree: that's the road taken. NAT is practically this. When you're behind a NAT, you're effectively using a 64-bit address space. Two more layers of NAT, and you can have 128-bit address space. "The first part" of the address is a globally routable IPv4 address, and the rest is kept by the routers on the path tracking NAT connection states.
And NAT needed zero software changes. That's why it's won. It brought the benefits of whatever extension protocol with existing mechanisms of IPv4.
IPv6 isn't an alternative to IPv4, it's an alternative to all IPv4xes.
Very much so if you don't care about gaming. x86-64 emulation has already been great, and 99% of popular apps have native ARM64 versions. The only exception was Discord for me for a long time. I used to use an unofficial wrapper called "Legcord" instead. But, now even Discord has a native Windows version. I mostly use my laptop for software development + browsing.
I haven't tried gaming, but I feel like it'll suck for almost anything that's not natively ARM64. Steam doesn't have an ARM64 based client yet, AFAIK.
Your question is essentially "why do Electron apps exist?" and the full answer would be quite long.
The most important one is that an app's lifecycle can be different than a web browser. You don't always keep a web browser open, but you might want to keep Discord open regardless of what you do with the web browser. That kind of lifecycle management can be tedious and frustrating for a regular user.
Discord's electron app has many features that its web app doesn't such as "Minimize to system tray", "Run at startup", "Game/media detection", "In-game overlays" etc.
Even PWAs can't have most of these features, so that's why we have to deploy an entire browser suite per app nowadays.
If you want IPv6 without dynamic allocation you end up rewriting half the stack anyway so probably not what most embedded engineers are itching to spend budget on. The weird part is that a lot of edge gear will be stuck in legacy-v4 limbo just because nobody wants to own that porting slog which means "ubiquitous IPv6" will keep being a conference slide more than a reality.
It's just not worth it. the only thing keeping it alive is people being overly zealous over it. if the cost to implement is measured as '1', the cost to administer it is like '50'.
To start with it requires support v4 as a separate network, at least for internal networks, since many devices don't support ipv6 (I have several AP's, IoT devices,etc.. bought in recent years that are like that). Then the v4->v6 nat/gateway/proxy approaches don't work well for cases where reliability and performance are critical. You mentioned NAT, but lack of NAT means you have to configure firewall rules, many get a public ip by their ISP directly to the first device that connects to the ISP modem,exposing their device directly to the internet. Others need to do expose a lan service on devices (port forwarding) which is more painful with v6. DHCP works very simply, v6 addressing can be made simply too (especially with the v4 patterned addressing - forgot its name) but you have multiple types of v6 addresses, the only way to easily access resources with v6 is to use host names. with v4 you can just type an IP easily and access a resource. Same with troubleshooting, it's more painful because it is more complex, and it requires more learning by users, and if you have dual stack, that doesn't add to the management/admin burden, it multiplies it. It's easier to tcpdump and troubleshoot arp, dhcp and routing with v4 than it is ND,RA,anycast,linklocal,etc.. with v6.
For mobile connectivity, ipv4 works smoothly as well in my experience, but I don't know about your use case to form an opinion. I don't doubt IPv6 makes some things much easier to solve than ipv4. I am also not dismissing IPv6 as a pointless protocol, it does indeed solve lots of problems, but the problem it solves is largely for network administrators, even then you won't find a private network in a cloud provider with v6, for good reason too.
there keep arising more solutions, public ip usage hasn't been increasing as it did in past decades either. most new device increase is on mobile where cgnat works ok.
that's great, but when you have a networking issue, you have to deal with two stacks for troubleshooting. it would be much less effort to use just ipv4.
You're not paying for IPv4 addresses I'm sure, so did ipv6 solve anything for you? This is why i meant by zealots keeping it alive. you use ipv6 for the principle of it, but tech is suppose to solve problems, not facilitate ideologies.
But that's slow, and it's one more thing you have to setup and that could fail. What is the benefit to me if I used ipv6 and those nat services? what if I run into a service that blocks those nat IPs because they generate lots of noise/spam since they allow anyone to proxy through their IP? Not only does it not benefit me, if this was commercial activity I was engaging in, it could lead to serious loss of money.
At the risk of more downvotes, I again ask, why? am I supposed to endure all this trouble so that IPv4 is cheaper for some corporation? even then, we've hit the plateau as far as end user adaption goes. and I'll continue to argue that using IPv6 is a serious security risk, if you just flip it on and forget about it. you have to actually learn how it works, and secure it properly. These are precious minutes of people's lives we're talking about, for the sake of some techno ideology. The billions and billions spent on ipv4 and no one in 2026 is claiming ipv4 shortage will cause outages anytime within the next decade or two.
My suggestion is to come up with a solution that doesn't require any changes to the IP stack or layer3 by end users. CGNAT is one approach, but there are spare fields in the IPv4 Header that could be used to indicate some other address extension to ipv4 (not an entire freaking replacement of the stack), or just a minor addition/octet that will solve the problem for the next century or so by adding an "area code" like value (ASN?).
Eh. IPv6 is probably cheaper to run compared to running large scale CGNAT. It's well deployed in mobile and in areas without a lot of legacy IPv4 assignments. Most of the high traffic content networks support it, so if you're an eyeball network, you can shift costs away from CGNAT to IPv6. You still have to do both though.
Is it my favorite? No. Is it well supported? Not everywhere. Is it going to win, eventually? Probably, but maybe IPv8 will happen, in which case maybe they learn and it it has a 10 years to 50% of traffic instead of 30 years to 50% of traffic.
That's a beautifully written post. Almost like a book. I love it. Also, it made me notice that how much I missed the artistry of computer magazine ads. There was something magical with the experience of reading a computer magazine that I don't experience on any media anymore. Beautiful ads was part of that experience. How the tables have turned now.
That said, DOSBox's TrueType fonts threw me off. It looks great of course, but it's similar to listening to Synthwave: there are some familiar elements from the era it represents, but it still feels alien.
I first learned about spreadsheets on a TV show in Turkey[1] that I believed demoed Lotus 1-2-3, and my 10 year old mind was blown! What an elegant, unique, and flexible way to model computation! We take spreadsheets for granted today, but I think it's one of the greatest inventions in computing history.
> There was something magical with the experience of reading a computer magazine that I don't experience on any media anymore. Beautiful ads was part of that experience. How the tables have turned now
I think that’s a combination of information underload and longer lead times.
Information underload: back then, you have a new magazine, at best, every week, if you could afford to buy multiple or had access to a good library. That meant you were willing to spend time looking at ads, and they didn’t even have to look nice. Old Bytes had many more or less type-written ads, for example.
Longer lead times: if you published in, say, Byte or Dr Dobbs, which appeared monthly, your sales department had a month to prepare the looks of each ad (pricing for hardware likely would be filled in at the last moment). Nowadays, they could take that time, too, but they also could have one published in a few hours, create another tomorrow, pull the poorer performing one the day after tomorrow, etc.
If live is that frantic, can you afford to spend a week on an advert?
The lead time on a national magazine ad was usually longer than a month and they generally weren’t tied to a specific magazine’s publishing schedule— they were probably parts of longer thematic/strategic campaigns. They probably also appeared in trade rags for other tech-heavy (mechanical engineering) or tech-adjacent (finance) publications.
The real reason ads look shittier now is the marketing world shifted their investment from the ads themselves to ad targeting. You just don’t need to make great ads if you can shove them in the face of the most receptive people at the right time. It’s also not feasible to make a few great ads when your marketing team has 8 different approaches tailored to specific demographics in multiple languages.
>> back then, you have a new magazine, at best, every week, if you could afford to buy multiple or had access to a good library.
For me the lead time on my subscription was measured in months. My grandparents gave me an annual subscription from a very young age until they passed, that progressed chickadee -> owl -> popular mechanics -> compute's gazette. You used to have to wait maybe 6-8 weeks for your first issue, but at least you (typically) got the second issue in less than a month!
Thank you, I'm glad you enjoyed it so much. I do try to make the posts more than just "here's what the software did" otherwise someone could just crack open a manual and get the same impact.
I flip-flop on using TrueType in DOSBox-X for the blog. I know there is a "purity" element to retrocomputing in certain corners, and I do appreciate that. But since I'm confined to emulators, I guess I feel like I might as well take advantage of what they have to offer.
I really like that Turkish video. Do they mention the name of that particular spreadsheet?
> I know there is a "purity" element to retrocomputing
A sibling comment mentioned that TrueType fonts resembled old made-up screenshots, so it might hit a different retrocomputing purity in that sense. :) I wouldn't worry too much about it.
> Do they mention the name of that particular spreadsheet?
They call it "Çizelge" (pronounced "chi-zelle-geh") on the TV show. It's just Turkish translation of "spreadsheet" so, they probably use that name to avoid advertising the brand. I checked out the screenshots, it doesn't look like 1-2-3 or VisiCalc, so, Multiplan maybe? I couldn't find any Multiplan screenshots that looks exactly like it though, but it also has a command bar below the sheet. On top left, it says the Turkish translation of "BUFFER" which also seems characteristic feature of the app, but I couldn't find an exact match. On top right, it says "OTOHESAP" which means "AUTOCALC" which might be a clue perhaps?
I don't recall any Turkish spreadsheet software from the era, so I guess that must be one of those.
Does DOSBox allow you to swap between TrueType and "natural" without rebooting the VM? If so you could screenshot both options and have a toggle in the post.
The TrueType fonts might not look like the screen fonts, but weirdly, I think it works for this use because it reminds me of "screenshots" in books and manuals from the era which weren't in general literal screenshots but were often typeset mockups of screens from the programs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_age_verification_...
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