The ones with actual users ...

These are the sort of self-generating monopolies I've seen in the past 25 years of the internet.

Effectively, everyone goes there because everyone goes there.

A bit more than herd mentality, but makes any startup something which requires large amounts of energy to succeed and then keep going. Never stop.

Twitter has self-inflicted wounds, thanks Elon, but continues to limp along. I find myself less likely to visit because -- not everyone is there any more.

Not all Venture Capital are angels, some come in and kill the fledgling company and take it's IP, others wring it dry over months or years while skimming money off the top. Never occurs to some investors a company could be the next Alphabet or Meta.

I have used ChatGPT since December; I was (and still am) impressed at what it can generate. I think you need to be careful about what questions you ask it, and how you ask those questions. If you ask ChatGPT about a bunch of "edge" cases, or questions that require a lot of inference, it will not do well. But if you ask ChatGPT about topics that are fairly well understood and researched, it can write a very coherent reply.

As an experiment, I used ChatGPT to write a programming book about FORTRAN77. I wrote it over a week in January. It took me longer to map out the book's outline and to figure out what questions to ask ChatGPT than for ChatGPT to generate its responses. You might learn FORTRAN77 by reading this book, but that wasn't the point of writing it. I was experimenting with ChatGPT to see how far I could push it. I picked FORTRAN77 as my topic for two reasons:

(1) FORTRAN77 has been around for a long time, so a lot has already been written about it. This is a well researched topic and I figured ChatGPT would have a lot to work with. And it did.

(2) I thought it was funny to ask an AI to write about FORTRAN77 in 2023. Because let's face it, I did the book for fun.

Some interesting things here: ChatGPT generates text that is of "average" complexity and sentence length. There weren't any really short sentences, nor any really long sentences. Everything was kind of "moderate" length. Also, in the 80 pages of the book, the only semicolons were in the code, or in my end-of-chapter commentary. ChatGPT doesn't seem to use semicolons in its writing.

Another interesting thing is that you need to be careful of errors. If you're relying on an AI to do the writing, then you need to fact-check it. In the book, ChatGPT boldly claimed code samples were FORTRAN77 but then it wrote something else, probably some more recent version of Fortran. (I stopped programming in FORTRAN77 as an undergraduate in the early 1990s, just as Fortran90 was starting to replace F77. So I don't know the later editions of Fortran.) Based on other experiments I've done, I think if you (a human) know a topic fairly well, you can probably catch most (or all?) of any errors that ChatGPT makes. But you need to be careful and watch closely. If you're using ChatGPT's output verbatim, that fact-checking and editing phase might outweight its usefulness. But if you're using ChatGPT as a starting point to write something on your own, then that might be okay.

I think we're still in the early days of AI. Today, you're seeing a lot of people using ChatGPT to write annual goals, or to respond to exam questions, or to write a book - and we're all "wow'ed" by that right now. If you set the clock ahead 5 or 10 years, we'll all use AI as some kind of "co-author." It won't seem weird anymore.

Congratulations to the FreeDOS people, I was given an old (P2 or P1) that will be nice to setup with FreeDOS. I have not looked at that system yet, so wish me luck :)

Thanks! And thanks for trying the new FreeDOS 1.3. It should work fine on a Pentium or Pentium-2. That's basicalliy how I have my virtual machine set up for emulation. :-)

It is a big install if you install everything. It's much smaller (about 20MB) if you install just a "plain DOS" system. You can make it even smaller if you do a custom install (boot the LiveCD and do a manual install .. or run SETUP ADV from the LiveCD for a custom install) on small systems. We also have a floppy-only version that is very small, and appropriate for low-end systems like '286 computers and other classic systems.

Yup, we still have some things on SourceForge. Our website is hosted elsewhere, but SourceForge still hosts our email lists and wiki, for example.

The news summary might have included more of the announcement to share what's new here:

This contains a bunch of great new features and improvements since the 1.2 release, including: new FreeCOM 0.85a, new Kernel 2043 and an 8086 version with FAT32 support, floppy edition now uses compression and requires about half as many diskettes, the return of networking, some new programs and games, many many many package updates, some updates and improvements to NLS, improved install process, especially with the MBR, some support to automatically set the COUNTRY.SYS information, improved CD initialization for the boot media and installed system, .. and much, much more!

And:

Check the Readme for more details. You'll need 20MB to install a "Plain DOS system," or about 275MB for a "Full installation including applications and games." You can find other optional packages on the BonusCD. For a list of everything included in FreeDOS 1.3, including what's installed and what's available to install, read the release report file.

There have been a ton of package updates here, as expected. The FreeDOS 1.3 release also has a bunch of translation and internationalization improvements. The package descriptions in the installer are also much improved.

This would then block the future as depicted in Minority Report.

"Hi there! Would you like to buy another [highly personal and embarrassing item]?"

There's a relief.

I visited Activision in the mid 1980s, when it was a shoe-string operation. Games for the C64 were coming along and quite impressive, including Little Computer People, which was running on a desk over a weekend to check for stability.

Seems it's all about IP these days.

They're coming for the upper bands which were available to Ham Radio enthusiasts. FCC doesn't care about us anymore.

Such a useless post and reflecting lack of actual knowledge of Fry's.

20 some years ago I bought my first laptop (still have it) at Fry's in Sunnyvale. It was still in the little grocery location, the shelves (and even former refrigerated goods) aisles has resistor and capacitor models sticking out of the floor. It's long since become some health club or other business after Fry's moved to a big store a couple blocks away.

In the hey day of the stores on E. Arques, E. Brokaw and E. Hamilton had about 40 or 60 cashiers, the queue moved pretty swiftly and they didn't take American Express. I tried to buy my first digital camera there and found that out. Went over to Wolf Camera to pick it up. Anyway, over the past few years I've visited the number of cashiers has dwindled down to only a handful. Few floor walkers, where once they were all over you, asking if you needed any help. Last visit I didn't see one at all.

At the end Fry's probably only had a dozen people working in each of their giant stores, a far cry from the hundreds they employed a decade or two before. The downsizing has been happening over time. Weep not for droves of employees losing their jobs, weep for the few who worked in desolate stores, with unstocked shelves who knew the writing was on the wall. They've been circling the drain for years.

The main hurt here is losing a chain which once carried just about everything the home hobbyist/maniac could ever want. That's been going on with the closure of Weird Stuff and Halted Specialties. I'll have to look to see if there's anyone left who sells components, wire, cable, solder, special tools, etc. I'd say they failed to plan well and we've known the eventual source of stuff is going to be our mailbox.

I'll add my own here: I recorded a YouTube video series about C programming on FreeDOS. It's "FreeDOS" in the title because I did this as part of my work on FreeDOS, but C runs everywhere. Almost everything from the series (except the part about console programming with conio) transfers to C programming on Linux.

I also wrote a web programming guide, which has embedded videos from YouTube. The web programming guide also contains more information than I could cover in the videos, including code samples that you can copy/paste, practice programming, and solutions to the practice programming. You can find it here:

"Writing FreeDOS Programs in C"

(There's also an updated print version of the programming guide, which you can buy on Lulu. And I'm working on an updated version for a publisher, about C programming on Linux, to be released in late Q1 2021.)

It's obviously a parody video, and pretty spot on.

Agreed. Star Wars would be more interesting if they got away from the "good vs evil" trope.

IMO, I would have preferred the sequel trilogy to expand on the "there is no Light Side or Dark Side, there's just The Force" concept that we started to explore in the animated Star Wars: The Clone Wars and explored further Star Wars: Rebels. I'm not saying bring those characters into the sequel trilogy, but I would have preferred they explore the "greyness" of The Force.

This would have brought something new to the sequel trilogy, and given me a reason to care.

As it is, The Force Awakens was a by-the-numbers "okay" story that bordered on cosplay, and The Last Jedi was boring. I have no interest in seeing Rise of Skywalker in the theaters, I'll wait until it hits rental.

I'd love to see FreeDOS on Raspberry Pi .. but unfortunately I don't see it happening. Like any DOS, FreeDOS makes certain assumptions about the system. FreeDOS requires an Intel CPU and a BIOS. The Raspberry Pi is an ARM CPU, and doesn't have a BIOS.

But that's not to say that it's impossible to put FreeDOS on a Raspberry Pi, on bare metal. Before Pat Villani contributed his kernel to FreeDOS, the predecessor kernel (DOS/NT) actually ran on the M68k. The FreeDOS kernel has seen considerable updates since then, though.

Running FreeDOS on a Raspberry Pi these days can only be done in an emulator. More info here: Running DOS on the Raspberry Pi