The Question Nobody Asked (But I’m Answering Anyway) I have an IBM POWER8 server from 2014. It has 160 hardware threads. It draws 400W at idle. It sounds like a jet engine warming up. I compiled .NET 8 from source on it, then built Jellyfin 10.11 in nine increasingly desperate attempts, and now it’s streaming movies to my living room. My wife thinks I have a problem. She’s correct. But that’s not the point. ...
You Need a .NET SDK to Build a .NET SDK That’s the first thing you learn when you try to compile .NET from source. It’s a beautifully circular problem — like needing a car to drive to the dealership where you’re buying your first car. Microsoft ships pre-built SDKs for x86_64, ARM64, and s390x. But POWER? IBM’s legendary architecture that runs half the world’s banking systems? Sorry — you’re on your own. ...
A Tale of Two Philosophies: When 160 Threads Meet Modern Silicon I have a problem. I see weird computer hardware on eBay, and I buy it. Last year’s victim: an IBM POWER8 S822LC server from 2015. Cost: $50. Shipping: $200. The look on my partner’s face when it arrived: priceless. Everyone told me it was a relic, a curiosity, basically e-waste with RGB lights (okay, it doesn’t have RGB, but it should). But staring at those specs—160 hardware threads via SMT-8—I couldn’t help but wonder: could raw, embarrassing parallelism compete with modern single-thread supremacy? ...
For fifty bucks, I got myself a time machine. Ray — the older gentleman who sold it to me — was equal parts amused and confused that someone like me still existed. For the price of a dinner out, I walked away with a brushed-aluminum tower that once symbolized Apple’s peak desktop performance. Now it sits proudly next to my daily driver (“Study”), humming away like a jet engine preparing for takeoff. I hit the power button, braced for the famous chime… and there it was: Mac OS X 10.5.8 Leopard, dual 1.8 GHz G5 CPUs, 4 GB of RAM, and a 500 GB Maxtor spinning drive that sounds like a diesel generator. Inside? Comcast invoices from 2012 and a still-configured iChat account. The ghost of broadband past. ...
The Dream Back in the early 2000s, teenage me was obsessed with the iBook G4. That sleek white clamshell with its PowerPC CPU and AltiVec engine felt like the future. I couldn’t afford one then — but now, two decades later, I finally scored one: a 1.33GHz model for $67 on eBay, original box and all. Reality hit hard. The 60GB hard drive was dying The RAM was maxed at 1.5GB (after some firmware trickery) I destroyed the power button during an SSD upgrade This is the story of how I brought it back to life — and turned it into a (surprisingly capable) development machine in 2025. ...