RE: https://post.lurk.org/@emenel/117034555015914159

"so far i prefer the trade offs and frustrations of the broad linux world over the more or less helpless rage i feel for apple/ms/google."

It all boils down to that: every system has problems, but in the corporate systems you will *forever* be helpless to solve them.

RE: https://mastodon.de/@ErikUden/116981656512270929

I wonder what a world without planned obsolescence would look like, I have difficulty picturing it.

Imagine if all the light bulbs in the world were made with 100year lifespans, as we know they could have been. There would have been massive sales growth at first, and then eventually market saturation. What happens next for a light bulb company, after everyone in the world has all the bulbs they need?

The most profound secret to programming:

Doing less work is better than doing more.

In particular, to implement the fork() syscall, the same program code is used by two processes, but they each need their own copy of the data. In Minix, "shadow copies" were used. In a context switch from process A to process B, all of A's heap+data+stack are copied to a shadow buffer, and then B is run. On the next switch back to A, the same happens again: all of B's data is copied to another buffer, and all of A's data is copied back in place. This made forking incredibly slow in ST-Minix.

So two different programs may be linked with a starting address of e.g. 0x100000 but they can't both be loaded there at the same time. One or both of them must be relocated at runtime by the OS loader.

But if the *same* program is run multiple times, you ideally only want to load one copy of it. In that case you can share the code with different processes, but they still each need their own separate data. An MMU would handle mapping data addresses transparently, but without that, it's tricky.

Without an MMU to remap virtual to physical addresses, all processes must share a single address space. While a program is linked to run at a particular default address, it may be loaded at a completely different address for execution. So the linker also writes a relocation table containing a list of all absolute address references in a program, and when the OS loads the program for execution, it uses this table to change each reference to its actual address in RAM.

A Memory Management Unit (MMU) is an essential part of a CPU these days, it's what makes VM possible. But it was possible to build a multitasking OS even on machines without an MMU, like the Atari ST with Motorola 68000. ST-Minix was like that https://mastodon.social/@hyc/116800477156910615

An overview of Virtual Memory (VM), a fundamental concept in modern computing https://dev.to/sangyog2058/csapp-chapter-9-virtual-memory-deep-reference-e46

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Frankly, if your religion is the foremost aspect of your identity you want to present on a first meeting, that already says a lot negative about you. But at least make your religious choice interesting, like emacs vs vi.

I don't introduce myself to people as "Hi I'm Howard, a Chinese heterosexual Agnostic male".

Sometimes I say I'm a musician but the time I most often meet people is when I'm playing in a pub, so it doesn't even need saying.

This old article just popped up as updated within the past 10 hours. Looks the same to me. Anyway, if you were looking for my bio, here you go:
https://www.donegaldaily.com/news/from-the-west-coast-to-west-donegal-420913

Pro tip: software is written to solve particular problems. But all proprietary software is written to solve the same problem: how to extract maximal profits from consumers.

If it's not open source, it's not worth running.

@aral just out of curiosity, are you familiar with this team? https://gazayoufirst.org/ they seem to have vanished since last year. Are they still around at all?

@iryna writes vividly about other human costs of the war in Ukraine. You should buy a subscription to her posts. https://www.patreon.com/c/IrynaVoichuk/posts