@puppygirlhornypost2 That's a confusing syntax! I was trying to figure out what dism might look like as an OpenVMS command, and I think VMS would probably force you to put "/Cleanup_Image" first (and let you abbreviate to the shortest unique prefixes):
dism/Cleanup/Onl/Rest
VMS's command parser can be configured via tables to run different programs depending on qualifier. So "analyze/disk_structure", "analyze/audit", "analyze/crash_dump", "analyze/rms_file" likely launch 4 different .exe's.
@puppygirlhornypost2 @elly @never_released @valpackett
VSI(*) is now providing hobbyists with a .vmdk file with a preinstalled OS image with layered products installed, rather than giving us the real installer and individual packages. They also stopped Alpha and Itanium community licenses.
VMS/x86 runs on VirtualBox, KVM/qemu, VMware Workstation or ESXi, but not Hyper-V, since it's not a full PC emulation.
* the company that licensed the right to develop OpenVMS from HPE and ported it to x86
@puppygirlhornypost2 @elly @never_released @valpackett I think WSL2's graphics and sound integration is quite impressive.
Unfortunately, if you want to run VirtualBox at normal speed with all the CPU features, you have to disable Hyper-V completely, including the "memory protection" feature of Windows 11.
You're required to do that to run the new x86-64 port of OpenVMS since it needs XSAVE, so they have a good doc on turning off Hyper-V for VirtualBox.
@libroraptor @stevensanderson @ai6yr I've had good luck with Do Not Disturb mode on my iPhone when I don't want to be interrupted (and Sleep Mode which it automatically sets). My phone is pretty much always in silent mode.
With Apple Watch, notifications are a bit less obtrusive since they're more quickly dismissed, and DND / Sleep mode is easily set/cleared from the watch.
@puppygirlhornypost2 I think Mastodon hasn't really been tested yet in terms of content moderation controversies over misinformation, medical or otherwise.
@puppygirlhornypost2 @briankrebs @dalias @BucciaBuccia
I think about this a lot. So many dark patterns. I'm pretty technically savvy, and I don't always answer "don't track me for targeted ads" when an app asks me. Maybe I want to see more useful ads from this app? What if I change my mind?
The same for location data. Very rarely when running apps do people have time to leisurely consider the meaning of giving consent to the OS to send personal data to "free" apps.
@jonathankoren @puppygirlhornypost2
This is what happens when you try to use new-fangled proprietary technology instead of good old-fashioned 1970's protocols.
The new product I'm working on is really cool, and I'll be excited to see it in use when we ship it to airlines. The feature set is called AID: Aircraft Interface Device, and it talks to EFB (electronic flight bag) apps running on either an iPad or a more expensive and laggier permanently-installed tablet.
An Aircraft Interface Device provides seamless access to flight data. In this article, we'll explore what an AID is, how it works, and why it's becoming a fundamental tool for pilots.
Bytron Aviation Systems (www.bytron.aero)
@puppygirlhornypost2 @jonathankoren
"The US [FAA] has ordered Boeing 787 operators to switch their aircraft off and on every 51 days to prevent what it called "several potentially catastrophic failure scenarios" – including the crashing of onboard network switches.
The airworthiness directive, due to be enforced from later this month, orders airlines to power-cycle their B787s before the aircraft reaches the specified days of continuous power-on operation.
US air safety bods call it 'potentially catastrophic' if reboot directive not implemented
(www.theregister.com)
@puppygirlhornypost2 @jonathankoren
In my day job, I'm working on an avionics app server + Ethernet switch + cell modem + Wi-Fi. I've learned more about Ethernet than I ever wanted to know, as well as about avionics protocols like ARINC 429 and ARINC 717.
Thankfully this application doesn't need AFDX, which is the special customized version of Ethernet with guaranteed delivery and redundancy.
I believe the AFDX switches in Boeing 787's need rebooting every 51 days.
@puppygirlhornypost2 @jonathankoren
I had AT&T U-Verse fiber-to-the-curb in 2009 that was quite impressive, but that's only traveling a short distance. I didn't realize phone company DSL could go that fast.
I'm sure most people are unaware that a selling point of 10BaseT was that you could run it over two pairs of UTP that your office building installed to use for phone lines. I assume that trick doesn't work for gigabit.
Gigabit needs 4 pairs (vs. 2). I wonder if it works over phone wiring.
@jonathankoren You can get up to 33.6 kbps with analog phone lines at both ends.
I believe the downlink speed (digital to analog direction) was limited to 53 kbps in the USA due to power limits (of the analog signal, I guess).
To put that in perspective, "baud" is bits/second, but on an RS-232 serial link you have a start and a stop bit for each byte so you have to divide by 10 to get bytes/sec, not 8.
I'm just old enough to remember Commodore selling a 300 baud and a 1200 baud modem, and I was fortunate enough to have the $70 to buy the faster one. I still have it, although I'm not sure what it's good for. I have a lot of retro stuff I need to sell. I had a friend with the 300 baud one, so I know it was painful.
I can only put 500 chars in a toot on this server, but I see others posting really long toots, the bulk of which is hidden for me behind a "Read more" link, thankfully.
I'm old enough to remember the BBS days, and this is not a whole lot different than FidoNet, UUCP, BITNET, or other federated forums of years past. Of course those systems had to be store-and-forward because instant high-speed Internet from anywhere at all times was science fiction and reality was often a 2400 baud modem.
I decided not to open a #Bluesky account because I have my hands full here following a chronological feed on a variety of topics. I was able to transfer enough friends I knew from the old Twitter when I made this account to get going, and now I just follow anyone who posts anything I find interesting or insightful, to keep building a network.
#Mastodon is at heart a hobbyist platform, and that's okay. There's no imperative for growth at all costs, or even forcing consistency between instances.
The 33 state attorneys general who are suing Meta for deceptive and unlawful practices make a lot of interesting points in their 233-page complaint (PDF link in page):
OAKLAND — California Attorney General Rob Bonta today announced the public release of a largely unredacted copy of the federal complaint filed by a bipartisan coalition of 33 attorneys general against Meta Platforms, Inc. and affiliates (Meta) on October 24, 2023. Co-led by Attorney General Bonta, the coalition is alleging that Meta designed and deployed harmful features on
State of California - Department of Justice - Office of the Attorney General (oag.ca.gov)
Ed Zitron is really on fire preaching against the general malaise we're all feeling from the Rot Economy and the enshittification of everything, like this recent post:
In the last year, I’ve spent about 200,000 words on a kind of personal journey where I’ve tried again and again to work out why everything digital feels so broken, and why it seems to keep getting worse, despite what tech’s “brightest” minds might promise. More
Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At (www.wheresyoured.at)
You can't just add memory protection to AmigaOS because the architecture assumes user programs can share pointers with each other to chunks of RAM owned by each other.
Consequently, AmigaOS doesn't even attempt to compact regions of user-allocated memory because it has no idea where all the pointers might be within messages in transit, as well as in programs own memory.
I don't remember too many fragmentation issues. Running out of limited chip RAM, yes. Running out of total free RAM, yes.
As with classic Mac OS, the IIGS wants to be able to hand you chunks of RAM through a manager that it can then relocate at whim to defragment the RAM because there's no MMU to create contiguous virtual address spaces. So you have to do things through handles (pointers to pointers) and lock RAM in place at times to make sure it doesn't get moved.
Amiga OS was very fast because it had a tiny microkernel to pass messages that contained pointers to the areas of memory to manipulate to R/W directly.
If you're an Apple IIe / IIGS developer working at the bare metal, e.g. for a game or the demoscene, Apple's manuals provide you with the ROM entrypoints for 16-bit ProDOS, SANE math libs, ADB I/O (keyboard/mouse, same as pre-USB Macs), and other libraries independently of GS/OS (the GUI).
I suppose the whole package is "GS/OS", and a lot of it is in ROM, at least for the later IIGS models that doubled the ROM from 128 KB to 256 KB.
Writing GUI apps is eerily like early Mac OS, e.g. QuickDraw.
In the 8-bit world, the Apple II series and the Commodore 8-bits share a large chunk of code licensed from Microsoft in the form of the BASIC interpreter. Microsoft 8K ROM BASIC uses their own custom FP routines and 5-byte variables (1-bit sign, 32-bit mantissa, 8-bit exponent). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Binary_Format
It's not a bad set of math routines, AFAICT, but it is single-precision. The BASICs for x86 PCs, like GW-BASIC & QuickBASIC, as well as Acorn's BBC BASIC, also supported double-precision floats.
ARM had a wacky byte-swapped original floating point format and then an FP accelerator (in the Acorn days) called FPA that used that format. At some point, the ARM community switched to standard IEEE FP, and then they added the VFP FPUs that we use today. Neon is the SIMD extension added later.
RISC OS has a version of BBC BASIC compiled for software ARM FP format, another for the rare Archimedes with the FPA accelerator, and a third version using the VFP and IEEE that you see on modern ARM.
