OCTAGRAM

Some assumptions of holographic principle either do not match with standard model of cosmology or predict yet another consequences. This model acknowledges expansion of the Universe, observed via Hubble in 1990s and since then only more facts. Information limit of volume is measured by how much information (written into matter) can be put into volume before it becomes black hole and forcibly occupy as much volume as required to preserve area limits. But that expansion of the Universe, how does it interact with black holes?

If the space expands, that helps escaping black hole. And effective horizon of black hole should be smaller than without accounting for space expansion. And it is possible to put little more information than area permits. This is hard to verify since distances where space expansion starts being noticeable, are orders of magnitude bigger than radius of known most massive black hole. But consistent description of reality should combine them somehow.

There may be alternative solution. Area limit may turn out to be more fundamental than space expansion, and big radius black holes will have stronger gravitation to overcome space expansion.

> With gravity, mass plays the role of charge. It bends space-time around it, and it is always positive. There is no negative mass

Equations have not just mass, but also pressure, and space expansion is theoretically described by dark energy that has positive mass and negative pressure overcoming its positive mass.

Book 386 is a ready notebook. It mainly targets gaming, so it has speaker, OPL3 sound and MIDI/GamePart port. But also ISA as yet another "port" on its outer side.

DOS emulation is available more widely than Win32 emulation, and there is HX DOS Extender. I would try sticking to Win32 dlls runnable in HX DOS Extender. rundll32 or some other exe host. HX DOS Extender has no paging support and has problem loading multiple exe having no relocation info to the very same 4Mb base address they all usually pretend. DLL should have relocation.

I thought "but what is the problem to generate EXE with relocation?" and tried GCC GNAT (from 2017), and GCC said no. EXE and DLL formats are very much the same, but GCC is completely unable to generate relocatable EXE. A very suprising discovery. More recent toolkits became aware that adding relocation to EXE is not a rocket science, just do the same like in DLL. But these recent toolkits may call APIs that HX DOS Extender does not support yet.

The funny thing happened and verified this promise. There were several architects working on IBM System Object Model (SOM). In 1996-1997 many good things ended, and SOM was terminated. But the work was so good that two architects did not stop and wrote the book: Putting Metaclasses to Work (1998). That book has got reference implementation in Java. So we have IBM SOM as closed source binary and we have Java source codes.

IBM SOM executes on Windows 10. I have checked Visual Age for C++ Direct2SOM extensions, OpenDoc for Windows. Very good. 32-bit i386, but otherwise runnable, usable.

And Java is hard to build, hard to execute on modern Java toolkit. Java seemingly had no List, and authors made their own List, but when Java also got its List, that breaks the build. When building problems are resolved, runtime problems come. Original Java was seemingly fine with Property key being object, but modern Java only wants strings. And Property-based dictionaries are all around. PMtW is about building VMT, and there is multiple class inheritance in PMtW model, not matching Java's comparably limited OOP. So PMtW is building dictionaries for methods to support what is described in book, and foundational Java class is malfunctioning.

I did not finish this road, don't know so what does it take after all to run Java code from 1998 on modern Java toolkit. So far looks pathetic compared to Win32 programming.

C is very different C. There is C where programmer rushes to call fork(), just because he likes the idea of entering room once and exiting room twice. And this program has got excuse for his behavior. He has fork() in POSIX standard. So programming is using fork() here and there even if not strictly needed. Using fork()/exec() instead of more portable posix_spawn(). Using fork()/accept() instead of multithreading.

Then it becomes impossible to introduce database connection pool. Well, probably possible, but in single-process multithread server this is BSc grade job, and in multi-process server this is PhD grade job. libmysqlserver and others maintain some context near to the socket, in opaque way. Hard to pass context between processes. At least, hard to return used connection back to pool in main process. Proxy is also not an easy walk.

On client side although Windows NT had POSIX layer, and XP/2003 still had Interix SFU. But Windows Vista broke SFU. But then Vista has got SUA. But SUA was not binary compatible, required recompilation. And as of Windows 10 there was surely no SUA. Was it dropped in Windows 8? Windows 10 has got WSL eventually, but there was a gap between SUA and WSL. And deploying Windows application with SFU, SUA or WSL part is not easy walk. Writing installer is MSc grade job.

Then comes iPhone OS and Android. They are POSIX OSes. Kind of. But spawning external processes is prohibited or not desirable. This is what was blocking LaTeX adoption on mobiles.

Perl was popular

I recently found "free" version of Lossless Scaling on GitHub. The release installer is definitely malware. It took GitHub 3 days to shutdown malware distribution. Category of my ticket was malware report, not copyright infringe

Being an owner of Apollo V4 ITX UEB, I wondered what about 68080. With 64-bit and AMMX vector extensions. But the website briefly mentions "and on today's accelerator hardware". MiniMig is also not mentioned, but at least PiStorm is.

With regards to 68080, the toolchain that can make use of all features of 68080, is based on some old GCC and currently hosted on Linux amd64 which is a shame. And if original Amiga target is desired, this toolchain can do it too, and it is told to be more optimal than other compilers, especially self-hosted ones. GCC first lost ability to run on Amiga, then lost ability to generate m68k code.

I presume this Xcode 27.1 beta will not want to launch on our Mavericks Forever, the last Mac OS we actually like and use.

Developers should know that built-in stack is something like arena, aka dynamic region. And alloca() or VLA is using built-in stack as arena. If neither alloca() nor VLA is available, then additional arena can do the trick. Portable programs should have such fallback. Requires additional management for cleaning on exit, but that's it. I have seen malloc fallback in portable programs, but arena can be better.

That loosely resembles research about economic impact of adopting PC. Which was not as great as could be imagined. Increased competition sets prices lower, increased data flows are not compatible with manual labour. Like in running faster in "Through the looking glass"

It became a good tradition to release version of software with my favorite number in such a way everybody will hate it. Delphi 8, Windows 8

Will you happily pay for Ada IDE? Another part of your proposal is already true. Ada has free compiler and libraries. Paid IDE is all that remains, that's how things work, right?

One can legally use Community Edition until income hits some limit. Paid edition can be bought and just used without updates.

> use .NET, which is $0

But tracing garbage collection needs 5x more available RAM than used RAM. Native conservative applications introduce memory fragmentation, estimated as 2:1 available:used. That gives 2.5x smaller memory footprint of native apps, and RAM prices matter lately.

Delphi.NET was so much central project that 8 only supported .NET. Nothing else was ever needed as it seemed. Delphi.NET was 8, 2005, 2006 and 2007, then dropped. It was hosted in common RAD IDE and language was close match.

Delphi Prism was bundled somewhere between 2009 and XE2, a 3rd party product, hosted in Visual Studio IDE and language was resembling, but not quite. Enough divergence to not make it possible sharing source text with native Delphi.

Pascal was comparably clean, but Delphi library is quite messy. SysUtils is about local time, exceptions, floating number formatting and OS error handling. SyncObjs are about synchronization which is very good. But TThread resides in Classes, together with streams, serialization, base components, lists and other containers. Rapidly created form controllers are implementation of god object anti-pattern.

> And calling win API was a horror

This is not easy matter in any language. And I called Android API from Delphi. Still quite an adventure

Lazarus does not support BPL. Android and iOS support are under question. Free Pascal devs for many years did not look into Ada, and looked into C++ more, and that made Free Pascal ugly. Delphi did not look into Ada either, but they looked into .NET instead, and that made Delphi not as great, but better than Free Pascal. Anything is better than C++. Delphi delivered controlled types, that was IIRC for many years in top 10 feature requests on Quality Central, until QC was purged. They call it "managed records".

Delphi has got inline const syntax. They talk about inline var, but from my Ada programming experience inline const is the real game changer. When there was only local variable block, some stuff was assigned inside loop. This stuff was assigned once per iteration, but since variable is declared outside the loop, it is considered variable. Now, when inside loop, it can be assigned once and made read-only. I have some doubts that Free Pascal is up-to-date with these changes.

Hi-DPI. Did not test, but questionable that Free Pascal got it right.

I recall I was using Dropbox on Windows 2003 and Mac OS X 10.4. I was student and actively writing Office documents, AutoCAD, NanoCAD, LabVIEW, plenty of cryptic formats. Eventually Dropbox stopped working on Mac OS X 10.4. And I was not student anymore, I was not dealing with folders. As developer I worked with TortoiseHg and BitBucket, Mercurial repositories and reStructured Text wikis. And returned to neither Dropbox nor similar alternatives. By inertia I synchronized with Dropbox, but when Dropbox stopped working on Mac OS X 10.4, it stopped at all. Eventually I've got OS upgrade, but Dropbox already gone and never returned.

There are retrocommunity sites. DOS, OS/2 (eComStation, ArcaOS), Amiga (Apollo Vampire), Mavericks Forever. Amiga is quite alive community. If I am to write game, I consider this platform. Steam game will be lost in 100.000 games, and Amiga game will be noticed.

There is I2P. They have been disabling scripts for ideological reasons, so there were many websites without scripts. I have used quite exotic Charon web browser from Inferno OS in I2P. That was 15 years ago. Don't know how it's now.

There is RetroNAS and plenty of other software to enrich home network.

For many years GNAT Community Edition has used GPL, including its library. That greatly boosted Ada programming language domination over planet and is a good reference for everyone else to also choose GPL for everything if they struggle at dominating. Tears of joy when programmers got to know that standard library in GNAT CE was licensed under GPL.

What do you think about ClockworkPi uConsole Kit R-01, ClockworkPi DevTerm Kit R-01, OrangePi?

Indeed, I excuse

> The whole system runs on a low-cost development board (Xilinx Spartan-3 by Digilent, with 1 MB of static RAM)

If somebody wants their FPGA work to be available, they better choose MiSTer FPGA from the beginning. Costlier, but way more likely to be found around.

Just go two routes at once

Steam has some backup feature. I do backups of my games. Compressed to slow HDD dedicated to backups. Faster to install than downloading again from network. Don't know though how much will that help

I have not seen good web apps like native apps on Mac OS X of period let's say up to Mavericks. Web apps often forced single rectangle. I can group my chats in iChat and Adium into different windows as I want, but WhatsApp and WeChat force all chats into single rectangle.

There is a program for Windows called StarDock Groupy, it can group windows into tabs. It could be useful, but not as much because of horrible rectangular design. I cannot extract several WhatsApp chats from rectangle, to group them with office document we discuss. There are multiple desktops in Windows, but rectangular programs do not permit sorting different chats to different desktops.

If web app permits opening in several windows at once, then drag-n-drop does not work between windows as good as it works in native apps like iChat and Adium.

I often see that applications pretending to be native, are in fact based on browser, and inherited all constraints, and are forcibly rectangular. Such quasiapplications, of course, no much benefit to install natively on desktop.

Where have you seen Amiga in "all places" of ex-USSR? Amiga is quite unknown computer here. Hard to find anyone aware of Amiga at all. OS/2 and Classic Mac awareness is not that rare.

Many people knowing the difference between A600 and A1200, and being from ex-USSR, sounds like wonder

That's something many did not have. 85% sales were Amiga 500 and not upgradeable. IIUC possible to put Motorola 68060, but AGA required full replacement. And it remained something unseen. Something too late to crave for after bankrupcy. Something like unicorn. Like Roland for DOS gamers. We had SB clones on ESS chips, and they only had AdLib music. We were entering game configuration tools, and there was a choice of Roland. Supaplex had especially visible Roland choice. But nobody knew what is that Roland.

As far as I can tell, non-AGA graphics is also charming enough. For many years I only had EGA and many games were not runnable, they demanded VGA. AGA does not feel like much anticipated upgrade like VGA was. There are hardware clones like MiniMig that lack AGA support and it is passable. IIUC MiSTer FPGA has MiniMig core with same lack of AGA.

"There is only yes and all other answers"