M_Bakhtiari

Targeting multiple architectures is a solved problem, as you said with LLVM. I don't know if that's how WASM is currently implemented, as a LLVM front-end, but I'm pretty sure most implementations in fact are proper native compiled, or they intend to be. As I said it would be silly to do it any other way.

I believe he's talking about attribution, not advertising.

Signature wouldn't mean anything if there was no warranty. In which case warranty is what they sell and the signature is just a minor technical detail. And selling warranty on software is already a thing.

Why wouldn't WASM implementations do native compilation? It's the norm for most modern language implementations nowadays, anything else would be silly.

> At this point such a contraption would be less painful than some of Apple's recent transitions (e.g. from PPC to x86).

I find that hard to believe. Apple only had to build emulators for their ISA changes, just translating instruction set into another. Doesn't sound painful at all. WINE on the other hand has good reasons for pointing out that it's not an emulator.

I can't help but think that browser vendors could have at least made an effort to make client certs and Kerberos authentication more user-friendly on the web. Perhaps not so useful for private consumers, but it would sure come in handy in enterprise.

Maybe not a good idea to use MEMS avionics on a blimp or dirigible, then.

Here's the Zeppelin NT cockpit, but I can't tell what kind of gyros they may be using: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/33/2003-07-...

Is the spawning overhead comparable to that of Erlang's BEAM?

Their sales organisation is always available to answer technical questions about the model of aircraft, but nothing of that is relevant to any of the journalists who might enquire in light of the crash, unless they are trying to play armchair accident investigators.

Would you prefer the alternative, "Sorry about the crash. Allow us to run our mouths about things we are not competent to comment on given the presently available information"?

Reminds me of the Vultures' plane in the Lucas Arts classic Full Throttle: https://lparchive.org/Full-Throttle-(Screenshot)/Update%2010...

> That's a massive, show-stopping problem.

How so?

I agree that it's a nontrivial problem to learn a piece of complex software from scratch to the point that you can offer comprehensive enterprise support for it, but how is that show-stopping?

Radical differentiation from competitors is the name of the game for entrepreneurs. Online communities in general and Hacker News in particular have every reason to push back and reject low-effort Redditisms and 4chanisms.

> "The cloud" is a set of APIs for provisioning but also a bunch of managed services that surround your instances, pub/sub, DNS, load balancers, managed SQL. All of this is almost designed to be a vendor lock-in.

A lot of it is, but I strongly disagree that all of it is. Many of these are perfectly interchangeable with the exact same software (FOSS DBMS, web server, load balancer, etc.) running on a competitor's managed service, VPS or on your own premises. As for the services that aren't, I do think the IT architects and managers who agree to use them are absolutely crazy and ought to be fired. If all of them are fired, cloud providers would be forced to provide interoperable provisioning APIs and services or perish.

> However, disregarding the vendor lock-in: How does my OS integrating with AWS's APIs help my on-prem services?

I suppose it doesn't, but why should it? If you think they bloat up your local installation, maybe you can just not install the kernel modules/daemons/libraries in question.

> Except corporate users usually want support.

What prevents anyone from offering an enterprise support program for Arch?

> I'd suggest building an auto-upgrade system on top of Arch (or Alpine), and go for immutable infrastructure as the selling point. That's stepping on CoreOS's toes a bit, but I haven't seen any progress from that crowd ever since Red Hat bought them, so it'll probably get even worse now.

In that case, why not go all the way over to NixOS? They already have a more or less complete cloud stack with NixOps, the only problem is hardly anyone knows how to use it.

> The cognitive dissonance is so strong here.

Where? Can you give an example of an expression of cognitive dissonance here?

> "the cloud" is, and always has been, antithetical to Unix (Unix being about site autonomy and simple tools working together)

Does the physical hardware being on the actual premises or not really have anything to do with "site autonomy" or the granularity of the toolchains?

In fact, can you even buy any viable physical hardware to run on your site that's not already a virtualised "cloud" with the real host OS firmly in the control of your corporate overlords, e.g. Intel ME and AMD PSP?

Where do the stars enter into the equation in this parrot astrology?

Does it say anywhere in that manual why the right margin is supposed to be so narrow? I find it very uncomfortable to read texts with very narrow margins.

Is it not possible to refer to someone by the name and pronouns they refer to themselves by not because you believe in the validity of transgenderism, but because that has simply always been the social convention? Gender identity needs to play no part in it, even if gendered language is being used. The outcome in the software should be the same whether the developer who claims to be a woman is really a man or vice versa.

Someone who isn't satisfied with that but rather requires full intellectual submission to their ideology is just as disruptive on a software mailing list as those who go out their way to "root out the trannies".

SCART is another disgusting connector that European readers will be familiar with. I like the idea of combining multiple video formats with sound as a predecessor to HDMI, but the least they could have done was put a decent D-sub or the Amphenol-style ribbon connector.

> For instance, call them by the names they use, and honor their preferences about their gender identity

That's a backhanded way of cementing the validity of the concept of "gender expression" throughout the GNU project.

I would have been perfectly on board with a guideline that simply said not to police people's gender expressions, the question being rather off-topic and disruptive in the given context. That would do the job regardless of what your political opinions on the gender question are.

Aren't those icons from BeOS?

The problem with using just one is that geosynchronous orbital periods are one sidereal [1] day, not one solar day. So depending on the time of the year, the satellite would be in position in the wrong half of the day. On the other hand a satellite in Tundra orbit spends not half but more than half of its time in the designated area. Maybe a good compromise orbit could be found.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidereal_time

> While the original Pentium, a superscalar x86, was an amazing piece of engineering, it was clear the big problem was the complex and messy x86 instruction set. Complex addressing modes and a minimal number of registers meant few instructions could be executed in parallel due to potential dependencies. For the x86 camp to compete with the RISC architectures, they needed to find a way to "get around" the x86 instruction set.

I've always struggled to understand why they didn't simply retire the x86 instruction set by the early 90s.

The best reason I've been given is an existing body of x86 software, but that's obviously nonsense as demonstrated by the Transmeta Crusoe and Apples's move from 68k to PPC to x86.

In this case a pair of satellites in a Tundra orbit [1] inclined to spend most of its time over this particular city seems like the right orbit for the job (as silly as it is to light a city by satellite), which is why I was curious to get an explanation behind the sweeping statement that geosynchronous (not geostationary in particular) orbits had to be in a line along the equator.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tundra_orbit

‎شيخ بن ريديق في فزان

I see. Thanks for the explanation. That’s a cause I can get behind, it would be handy for myself and my countrymen to be able to enter the US without a visa. Abolishing the equivalent border enforcement agency of Iran, not so much.

Normally I’d agree, but I think prolific Silicon Valley startup Twitter playing such a big role makes it very much Hacker News material.