How about if it was put together some standard box, then install any operating system and connect a browser to a website [running on the box, the website printing "hello world" to the screen - and must be open for the judges to connect to].
Plenty of scope for choosing and comparing different OS, different software, etc..
Someone should enter this at one of the speedrunning conventions. I'd love to watch a stream of someone installing Win95 in front of a huge audience, complete with commentary.
"Over to IFuckedUrMom666, retired former Windows 95 installation champion, for some extra commentary."
"Thanks Jeff. Yeah, we'll have to see how this plays out, but I'm tentatively calling this one as maybe not a mistake. By leaving IPX support in, there's an extra 198 sectors to copy - but you save 39ms later from reduced install logging, as there's never any IPX check failures from the network infrastructure. He's been playing such a straight-up game here so far, so this is actually quite interesting - we might be seeing hints here of the bolder, gutsier play that he's going to have to bring to the table far more often to later stages. The Plus! installation round in particular is not for the faint-hearted."
"IFuckedUrMom666 - thanks. We'll be back for more analysis later."
Someone had a thread on Twitter trying to crash it ASAP and the key was the run dialogue box with "con\con" ... This even crashes the JavaScript Windows 95 emulators.
> While any of these special filenames would have worked, the most common one used to crash old Windows machines was con, a special filename that represents the physical console: the keyboard (for input) and the screen (for output). Windows correctly handled simple attempts to access the con device, but a filename included two references to the special device—for example, c:\con\con—then Windows would crash. If that file was referenced from a webpage, for example, by trying to load an image from file:///c:/con/con then the machine would crash whenever the malicious page was accessed.
Plus if you're using VMs you can manipulate it even further. For example, "lie" to the simulated OS about file-writes, and return files already on the visualized image.
You can speedrun PC games. For video games, better hardware can speed up things like loading times (which also happens if you put an SSD in your PS4) and increase the framerate but the actual gameplay won't become faster beyond the threshold necessary to play the game smoothly.
This particular speedrun is much more tied to the hardware, but that's part of the fun for these people. It might make more sense if you compare it to something like car racing. Both the hardware and the person matter a lot to the outcome.
Speedrunners have built tools for some games (most Valve games if I'm recalling correctly) that monitor times, while excluding loading screens. Obviously this is a separate category, and both curiously exist for games with a built-in timer (GDQ ignores in-game timers, for example).
A lot of the time, for PC games, someone will have made a plugin that integrates into both the split and the game that removes loading screen times, turning it into an "in-game time" run
Most games run a time-limited simulation, so better hardware will only reduce lag and load times, as well as let you dedicate more computing power toward graphics calculations. An in-game timer can be made to ignore all of these.
I got pretty good at this type of thing at one of my earliest jobs was as a network admin's assistant at a training place that was similar to today's webdev bootcamps, but for stuff like Oracle, VB, and Java.
Before every class began, I would go through the entire classroom of 15-20 workstations and do a clean install of WinNT4 and whatever software packages were necessary for the class.
Imaging was possible with software like Ghost, but it was still pretty clunky, and NT4 required extra work after imaging, so we just did it manually. Typically, by the time I was done a step with the last workstation, the first one was ready for me to click the next Next button.
Windows NT and newer supported unattended installs of both the OS and other software you wanted installed automatically. Not as fast as imaging, but equivalent of a manual install, just without any manual work.
That’s how we handled 100s of machines with an IT dept of just 3-4 techies at the uni I worked for.
And we loathed people who came with non-standard HW our custom boot disks didn’t handle (remember that even being a thing?).
Things have certainly changed and IMO mostly for the better.
I was recently amazed to find out that Windows 95 is still used in an industrial automation setting. The company uses the NetBEUI[0] protocol and Windows 95 is apparently the only version to support it.
In the last job I had, Win 95/98 was on a computer used to send programs to a 20-ton piece of metal working equipment. Of course, you had to drop into DOS to use the necessary software. Transfer rate was around 900 baud.
The computer that actually ran the machine consisted of a white monochrome monitor and a desk-sized cabinet full of control boards. The cabinet had an air conditioner attached to it and had trouble running on hot days.
Trivia about this machine: on the corner of one control board there was a single, green indicator LED with a broken lead. It was bent over so the broken part would still contact the solder joint and light up. If at any point it stopped making contact with the circuit, the entire machine locked up or threw random error codes until you wiggled it back into place.
The silver lining to jobs like that is after a year or two, you're the single, solitary person in the world that can keep the machine running as expected. Performance reviews become a breeze after that.
"We've been looking at your performance these last few months, and it seems you've stopped taking on new responsibilities..."
Oh, it's great when it works out like that, but this place wasn't worth staying with long term. I should clarify; I was a grease monkey/operator, not tech support. You would never break 15usd/hr even as a foreman.
The slogan was literally "Run it till it dies". The machine next to me was even older, and had a crash/down time of 1-2 hours every 9 hour day. Not kidding.
The floor offices still used terminal computers in 2014-ish. The one in my depart finally crapped out (screen flicker due to the flyback cracking a solder joint). Easy fix, I didn't say anything hoping they'd buy a damn desktop like a normal company. Nope, they special ordered a new/refurb terminal for god knows how much money (I think it was a televideo 9xx or something).
At a college I worked at a few years ago in one of the larger lecture class rooms. There was a Windows3.1 PC mounted in the podium/lecture counter. It was used primarily for controlling the levels of lights, dropping down the screen and projector, and a few other menial tasks. I don't believe it was wired into the network and don't believe it was ever replaced.
It could easily be replaced by an electron app running a QEMU in JavaScript emulating an virtual machine running Windows 3.11 on an Rasperry PI terminal connected to a cloud server located at the edge for maximum performance paid for by real-time Bitcoin micropayments.
Anecdote: back in the early 2000s, I regularly installed Windows XP on the machines of school friends and family members and got pretty fast at it. After a few months, I realized that I had memorized the original Windows XP "default" CD key (the one starting with FCKGW...) by accident. I haven't done an installation of XP in 15 years, yet you could wake me up in the middle of the night and I could tell you this damn key.
There was a thread a few days ago where someone mentioned their password was the key to "a very popular software" and someone in the replies guessed it:
Not only that, strings are easier to memorize when broken into discrete chunks, which is why it isn't too hard to accidentally memorize a credit card number, and one of the reasons phone numbers are formatted as they are (the other being classifying based on location).
The last two quintuples are switched, otherwise it is correct. The "RKT-8TG6W" is my favorite part, because it makes for a nice rhyme (at least in German, where "W" is a single syllable"):
There are a lot of numbers from my past that are still committed to my memory too, even though I haven't used them in years. Old telephone numbers, bank account numbers, long-distance calling card numbers (back when a long-distance phone call was a thing you actually paid for). It's weird.
You can use classic starcraft / brood war keys as vouchers on battle.net if you want to verify and make sure you'll always have a digital copy available :)
Story of my life too, including the 15 years part! Every once in few years, when I feel like my memory skills are fading, I recite the damn key, pat myself in the back and go back to sleep.
I just had a similar thing happening a year or two ago. My mom sent me some old backup CDs that she found while cleaning out her basement. I was very happy to find my first attempt at making a game with graphics on one of the discs. The game was written in Visual Basic so I downloaded a copy of the IDE and luckily the installer ran under Wine. When I got to the license screen, some forgotten but apparently not decayed part of my brain clicked into gear and to my surprise I just typed the 12 digit code from memory on the first try, 20 years after I last installed it.
This joke also reminds me of the "Banned%" Club Penguin speedrun. It was short-lived but people came up with various tricks to speed up the email verification subsequent banning process.
It seems it was made emulating an ancient processor using current processors and in fact creating a massively overclocked virtual processor + virtual disks. Very nice.
this is a waste of time, i just burned a custom cd with an autorun.inf and every morning before school, after installing linux the previous day, i would pop it in so my mom could use AOL.
still, 24 years after windows 95, i gotta say this is .. hilarious. ;d
I had an assembly line for setting up Windows 95 with the 21 floppy disks (and later Windows 98 with 38) at a school lab. Start one, when it asks for disk 2 move on to the next PC, and the next thing you know, you have a clean install on every PC in the "lab."
OT: can someone explain this anime/waifu thing to me, in particular why does someone record a video like this one with careful window placement so that we can see the anime? I feel like I'm missing something.
In some cases (can't speak about this specific case) it's a matter of being recognizable. Many platforms (YouTube, twitch, ..) have limited capabilities for the creator to be recognisable. With such a branding at the second video you know "it's the anime guy"
Just a playful way to mess with people. At work, I see a guy that wears a D-Va shirt every other day. He is a big guy, and the whole D-Va thing is printed full-screen on his shirt. It makes quite a funny sight.
4chan people are notorious for pulling that kind of shit. I wouldn't be surprised if the person that makes that video is from /g/.
If you don't find it funny, then you don't find it funny, like how you don't get some movies or memes that people like. I do.
creator here; That was my desktop background at the time, recorded the video with obs at 720p because I wanted to get anything watchable on youtube (480p suxx if I wanted to include a timer, also it would look way worse).
BTW, she's not my `waifu`, I just like her as a character.
Ok we need speedrun install Gentoo 2004. Speedrun install Slackware Linux 1.0 from floppies. Speedrun install perl 5 from Configure. Speedrun update all the GNU autotools and gcc from a non-root user with a non standard prefix.
As someone using Gentoo in 2004 (what was I thinking?) I would love to see how long this takes in a VM back by a CPU from 2019 and tons of RAM. I have some memory in the back of my head of compiling Gentoo on a Sun Sparc 20 (4xCPU ... I think) with max ram (32 or 128MB?!?) - because I owned one and could (it was old HW in 2004). It took a few days from stage 1. Today if I need to compile anything I ssh to a builder server with 48 cores and 256gb of RAM as the i7 laptop is to slow. Ah, memories.
What are the rules ? Since this is a largely predictable instruction stream, you know all the branch outcomes before hand. You even know the value outcomes. You can create a close to perfect branch predictor, prefetcher, scheduler etc.
94 comments
[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 162 ms ] threadI vaguely recall having to build a 486 out of a bunch of parts, install windows and get to the desktop.
Fun times
Plenty of scope for choosing and comparing different OS, different software, etc..
"Thanks Jeff. Yeah, we'll have to see how this plays out, but I'm tentatively calling this one as maybe not a mistake. By leaving IPX support in, there's an extra 198 sectors to copy - but you save 39ms later from reduced install logging, as there's never any IPX check failures from the network infrastructure. He's been playing such a straight-up game here so far, so this is actually quite interesting - we might be seeing hints here of the bolder, gutsier play that he's going to have to bring to the table far more often to later stages. The Plus! installation round in particular is not for the faint-hearted."
"IFuckedUrMom666 - thanks. We'll be back for more analysis later."
This was genius. Well done. _Golf clap_
Semi-oblig-xkcd: https://xkcd.com/284/
> While any of these special filenames would have worked, the most common one used to crash old Windows machines was con, a special filename that represents the physical console: the keyboard (for input) and the screen (for output). Windows correctly handled simple attempts to access the con device, but a filename included two references to the special device—for example, c:\con\con—then Windows would crash. If that file was referenced from a webpage, for example, by trying to load an image from file:///c:/con/con then the machine would crash whenever the malicious page was accessed.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/05/in-a-...
Rules would have to be carefully written.
This particular speedrun is much more tied to the hardware, but that's part of the fun for these people. It might make more sense if you compare it to something like car racing. Both the hardware and the person matter a lot to the outcome.
https://github.com/LiveSplit/LiveSplit/blob/master/Documenta...
Before every class began, I would go through the entire classroom of 15-20 workstations and do a clean install of WinNT4 and whatever software packages were necessary for the class.
Imaging was possible with software like Ghost, but it was still pretty clunky, and NT4 required extra work after imaging, so we just did it manually. Typically, by the time I was done a step with the last workstation, the first one was ready for me to click the next Next button.
Thanks for the memories!
That’s how we handled 100s of machines with an IT dept of just 3-4 techies at the uni I worked for.
And we loathed people who came with non-standard HW our custom boot disks didn’t handle (remember that even being a thing?).
Things have certainly changed and IMO mostly for the better.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetBIOS_Frames_protocol
Trivia about this machine: on the corner of one control board there was a single, green indicator LED with a broken lead. It was bent over so the broken part would still contact the solder joint and light up. If at any point it stopped making contact with the circuit, the entire machine locked up or threw random error codes until you wiggled it back into place.
"We'll fix it later"
"We've been looking at your performance these last few months, and it seems you've stopped taking on new responsibilities..."
"The machine is running."
"Yes but..."
"I have other offers."
"Never mind, carry on. Here's your raise."
The slogan was literally "Run it till it dies". The machine next to me was even older, and had a crash/down time of 1-2 hours every 9 hour day. Not kidding. The floor offices still used terminal computers in 2014-ish. The one in my depart finally crapped out (screen flicker due to the flyback cracking a solder joint). Easy fix, I didn't say anything hoping they'd buy a damn desktop like a normal company. Nope, they special ordered a new/refurb terminal for god knows how much money (I think it was a televideo 9xx or something).
I could go on, but you get the idea.
Other software (Vmware or Virtualbox etc.) also install drivers in the same location, although automated of course.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19298120
edit: yes it is. Checked the link in other thread.
"Arr kay tay, acht tay, gay zex vey"?
I am not a native German speaker, but the dialect I learned and my German relatives speak says "r" more like the English word "air".
/ɛʁ kaː tʰeː axt tʰeː geː zɛks veː/
Bonus: The same key also works for Half-Life. They used the same algorithm.
Guess how I figured that one out.
https://www.cia.gov/library/abbottabad-compound/61/61C5FB27A...
Here's the (not so amazing) result. Consider it a "Show HN"? https://vimeo.com/220071855
https://www.speedrun.com/cp#Banned
https://www.pcgamer.com/getting-banned-from-club-penguin-is-...
still, 24 years after windows 95, i gotta say this is .. hilarious. ;d
Assuming all disks read in equal time and it takes no time to move the disks.
4chan people are notorious for pulling that kind of shit. I wouldn't be surprised if the person that makes that video is from /g/.
If you don't find it funny, then you don't find it funny, like how you don't get some movies or memes that people like. I do.
For you
BTW, she's not my `waifu`, I just like her as a character.
1) http://www.annoyances.org/
2) https://www.litepc.com/
Good times.
https://msfn.org/board/topic/141402-windows-95-21ghz-cpu-lim...
There's various timing loops for calibrating delays, which were written at a time when CPUs were much slower. Win98(SE?) didn't have this problem.
If blind runs became more popular then maybe I could hone that skill.
In software development I think I could watch speedruns of folks building a login service/page or any component really.