No solvents, thank goodness. It’s a lab, but it’s an electronics lab. And no, anything with soldering or cleaning boards is done far elsewhere.

My boss printed me three LEGO bricks when he got his 3D printer (everyone here knows I am an AFOL = Adult Fan Of Lego). I have no idea what kind of printer that was, but the bricks were very detailed. Now they have totally warped out of shape. I kept them on my desk in the electronics lab, so heat or sunlight are no major issues here.

Short: Yes, of course. Long: Well, this is really a long answer, depending on your needs…

That is 100% correct. Nonetheless, the US agencies assumed that they were smarter than basically all of the security community and common sense.

IIRC the backdoor design and keys came from the agencies, not the companies.

What’s the outrage? Those backdoors were made for governmental use. The only thing is that it was not made for foreign government use, but hey, that is just due to the incompetence of those who designed the backdoor…

So the blunders of US agencies did harm to millions of people. Lawsuits, anyone?

I know. I was there, before Sanford Wallace invented the email spam and forced any sane SMTP server into password protections and whitelists.

“Low volume” vs. “A few hundred mails per month”

OK, what of the above?

You should put fixed IP addresses outside the DHCP allocation range. While a DHCP server might be smart enough to exclude a fixed address automatically, this is not a must. So better safe than sorry.

Once upon a time, gopher was actually a supported protocol. Translating from gopher to HTML is an easy job.

My first introduction to the web actually was “like gopher, but with hypertext and a gui.”

Luckily, I was not ingrained by my first programming language like that, or my coworkers would strangle me.

I started with BASIC, which allowed only two letters for variable names…

Just remove Windows. One problem less on the list.

Nothing special. It was a natural progression to move from UNIX, Solaris, SunOS, and VMS to Linux.

I just dropped Kbin from my bookmarks yesterday. I’m sad to see it gone, as it had some nice features.

Yes, but those were only two distict flavors, and both had a lot of pull. And those special instructions were only needed in special applications and drivers. With RISC-V we are talking about a dozen different flavors, all by small and mostly insignificant players and the commands that extend the basic command set are commands for quite common operations. Which is a totally different scenarion than the SSE/3DNow issue back then.

Actually, I think RISC-V is even worse than ARM. With ARM, at least you have a quite reliable instruction set on the CPU. With RISC-V, most vendors have their own extensions of the instruction set, which opens a big can of worms: Either you compile all your stuff for your own CPU, or you have a set of executables for each and every vendors flavor of RISC-V commands, or you exclusively use the RISC-V core commands. The first would be only for hardcore geeks, the second would be a nightmare to maintain, and the third would be not really efficient. Either way, it sucks.

While I have to maintain an old Windows 7 box to run some ancient software on it, I do most of my development work on a Linux machine. I use LibreOffice to read and write documents, use Inkscape for drawings in my documntation, but first and foremost, my main IDE is Linux native (although a Windows port does exist).

Same here. I was totally busy writing software in a new language and a new framework, and had a gazillion tabs on Google and stackexchange open. I didn’t notice any network issues until I was on my way home, and the windows f-up was the one big thing in the radio news. Looks like Windows admins will have a busy weekend.

Because I have to use this removedshow of a software at work because some companies use “license managers” that don’t work under Wine.

Sorry, don’t remember, that was somewhere in the 90s or 00s.