Around ten years ago, I worked for IBM as a software engineer. The dress code at work was pretty casual, so I tended to wear jeans and a t-shirt in the office. One day, I was asked to speak at an event that would be attended by a lot of our customers. I asked my mentor, "Should I dress up? Should I wear my suit for the first time in years?" His response surprised me. He said, "These customers have come here to talk to engineers. Do you want them to think we've sent a salesman to talk to them." He made it perfectly clear that I should dress like an engineer. I confess I did get rid of the t-shirt; I wore a casual shirt with my jeans that day, and the folks that I talked to went away satisfied that they had indeed spoken with an engineer.
For me, those two points make it clear that it would be possible for Apple to port to RISC-V. But it's still not clear what advantages they would gain from doing so, given that their ARM license appears to let them do whatever they want with CPUs that they design themselves.
I hadn't considered that Google are a competitor to Twitter at this point (at least, not since Google+ went away). And I guess they are happy to host some of their infrastructure on GCP as well...
Apologies, I was assuming that lproven was talking about baremetalling it but apparently not.
Re endianness, I confess I hadn't even thought of that aspect of it. (I understand that Cortex-A processors can run in big-endian mode but I bet it's not that easy.) And I bet there are a million other things that would be hard to make work.
But I still wish EmuTOS/FreeMiNT could be made to run on a modern CPU. It makes me sad to think that the 680x0 architecture basically isn't going to go much further than the Apollo 68080 (or Coldfire...), whereas a modern ARM (or X86 or even RISC-V...) chip is stupendously more powerful and I'd love to be able to run those OSes on that. Oh well, I can dream I guess...
Got it. Thanks for explaining; I was definitely assuming running natively. I quite like the idea of running Aranym without a full OS but with something like Ultibo or Circle (neither of which I'd heard of before you mentioned them so thanks for putting them on my radar screen) but I'm not quite clear how much OS functionality it would miss in that sort of environment.
I confess I would really like to see EmuTOS and/or FreeMiNT running directly on the Raspberry Pi, though I suspect it would be a huge amount of work. Right now, if you want Atari compatible hardware, you can either pay $$$$ for a vintage machine (and replace all the capacitors), or you can get something like a Vampire V4SA and put in a lot of effort to make it work run anything.
Raspberry Pi is a really nice (and relatively simple) hardware platform that would be great for running something like this and I have thought about it myself. Something like adding ARM [32|64] support to the kernel and then using an emulator of some sort to run 68k usermode programs. But I don't think FreeMiNT has ever been ported to any other architecture and imagine it would be a _huge_ effort.
I assume you refer to BeePi, which is a fantastic thing but it doesn't run FreeMiNT as the _only_ OS on a Raspberry Pi. It basically packages up a Raspbian OS with the Hatari and Aranym emulators running on top of it, with EmuTOS/FreeMiNT running on top of that. I've got it running on one Raspberry Pi and it's quite nice; unlike Aranym on my Mac, I can actually get networking to work. But it's not running an Atari OS directly on the Raspberry Pi hardware, which is a shame.
I only recently tried FreeMiNT for the first time. It's a really weird feeling to come back to the Atari platform and see something that looks familiar but has been updated and dragged, if not into the present day then into the late 90s at least. Gone is most of the CP/M heritage of the original TOS; instead, it's a UNIX-like OS with a lot of the GNU userland. For me, using it is exciting like using Linux in the late 90s was exciting. It just leaves me feeling rather sad that Atari exited the computer market before the OS was quite ready and the community had to finish the job.
(And if you're wondering how this is relevant to EmuTOS, well, EmuTOS is used as part of the boot process.)
The reason I noticed it is that the two cities, though very close geographically, have an intense and not entirely friendly rivalry that goes back hundreds of years and continues to this day. See for example the History section of [0]. Although it's understandable that someone not familiar with the area could confuse the two places, friends from Sunderland tell that they are pretty offended when they are mistaken for Geordies. I imagine it's like accusing Bart Simpson and his friends of being from Shelbyville.
EDIT: Please forgive me for bringing this up. I appreciate it's not particularly relevant to moomin's comment about the culture of the Nissan plant, which I agree with aside from my nitpicks, nor to the original video.
Ditto the Welsh language (also a Celtic language spoken in the UK), where there traditionally weren't words for yes and no and where the words used instead depend upon tense, person and the verb being responded to.
It must be frustrating for RMS that his dream of a free software OS was realised in the form of "Linux", but I'm pretty sure that one of the freedoms that flow from a free software license like the GPL is the freedom to call the software whatever you like. Thus I'm free to distribute an operating system that contains a tonne of GNU software and then put the name Linux on it, and the license allows me to do that. If RMS had realised that the name was so important, maybe he would have added a restrictive naming clause to the GPL.
Your comment brings back long buried memories of the time that my ST mouse broke and I had to save up for a new one. Hearing the ST keypress sound repeating as the mouse slowly moved across the screen, 8 pixels at a time, and then having to do SHIFT+ALT+ARROW when you wanted to position the mouse pointer with pixel-level accuracy...
Growing Object Oriented Software, Guided by Tests by Steve Freeman and Natt Pryce. It taught me an awful lot of lessons about object oriented design and London-school TDD. It was published back in 2009 and things have moved on a bit since then but it's still worth reading if you want to understand that style of development. Reading this book changed the way that I write software, very much for the better.
I have an org-mode file open in Emacs pretty much all the time that I can write stuff down in. Emacs used to have a reputation for being bloated and resource intensive but it's one of the lightest tools that I use these days and I just have it sat there in the background.
The f**ing article. A piece of internet slang that goes back many years, possibly originating on Slashdot and referring to the article that we're discussing here.
One advantage that an Oyster card has over a contactless payment card is that I still feel uncomfortable getting my wallet out and finding a payment card in a crowded tube station. Even using Apple/Google Pay requires me to get my phone out and again, I'm not always comfortable doing that. I appreciate I might be a little old fashioned about this but enough friends have been robbed in London over the years to make me a little paranoid. An Oyster Card, on the other hand, has sufficiently little value to me that I'm a lot more comfortable using it.
One of the things that made Quentin Tarantino's early films, particularly Pulp Fiction, such a breath of fresh air is that they did this with abandon. John Travolta and Samuel L Jackson would chat away about McDonald's in France or whether or not they were prepared to eat pork and it was of no consequence whatsoever to subsequent events, other than to give characters a bit more depth. Too many films and novels have things happen for no other reason than that the plot is going to require it in the next act and it's great when a writer takes a different approach.
It was a success in the sense that it got the Western allies ashore, leading to the liberation of France a few months later and the end of the war in Europe the following spring.
More importantly than that, it meant that Nazi Germany's eventual defeat, which was probably inevitable at that point anyway, did not come solely at the hands of the Red Army. I imagine the scenario that really kept Roosevelt and Churchill up at night was one where the Soviets defeated Germany and then kept going until they reached the Atlantic, with France and the Low Countries falling under Soviet domination the way that the countries of Eastern Europe ultimately did. The success of the D-Day landings meant that the iron curtain ran down the middle of Europe and not down its Western shore.
What was it about the emergency landing that made you surprised that lap only belts are still the norm? (Apologies if I'm asking about something blindingly obvious but I've not been in an aircraft-damaging emergency landing and I'm really interested to hear more about your experience.)
Thanks very much for writing this article and for describing very eloquently something that I to have observed but hadn't been able to articulate.
The really scary thing, from my perspective at least, is that I have, in a few different places, seen a drift over time from the lean style to the corporate style. A start-up grows into a larger company. A layer of middle management is hired. The HR department becomes more than one person. Now there are processes that need to be followed... The lean management style that used to work doesn't work any more. The sort of feedback that used to be welcomed is now seen as negative. I've witnessed quite a few people get burned out and have to leave companies that they used to be successful in. I guess knowing is half the battle so thank you for writing this great piece.
Define "computer scientist". Computer science is a big field but those parts of computer science that I have learned have been heavily underpinned by mathematics, especially those parts concerned with analysing the correctness and complexity of algorithms.
Having said that, I personally waved goodbye to academic computer science after I finished my degree. I work as a software engineer and I find software engineering to be very different discipline to computer science. While mathematics has proven useful to me on occasion, I'm of the opinion that I'd be able to do much of what I do day to day without much in the way of advanced mathematics. Much, but not all. When one encounters certain types of problems, for example problems around performance, I find it helpful to be at least _acquainted_ with mathematical tools that can help, even if my mathematical chops are not as strong as they used to be.
Got it, sounds like I misunderstood the point you were making there. Makes sense (and tbh that's a problem that afflicts most of the personal computer operating systems from that era).
Using an OS with memory protection between processes doesn't make it impossible to use shared memory regions to pass messages between processes efficiently. Around twenty years ago, I worked on a project that built support for various telephony protocols on AIX. Amongst other things, we used System V IPC and shared memory to send signalling information and voice data between processes. We were able to achieve fairly low latencies using this approach; I don't remember the precise numbers but this was the sort of system where a few 10s of ms of latency would give the user a noticeably worse experience. Admittedly, this was on much more powerful hardware than the original Amiga (by this time, we had PowerPC CPUs running at hundreds of MHz) but I don't see why it couldn't have worked on older hardware.
Do you mind if I ask where you're from in the UK? I find that there's an awful lot of variation between different regions. For a few years now, I've lived and/or worked in London, where chatting to strangers is not the done thing. But travel to certain parts of the north of England, or Scotland or South Wales, and the norms are much more like what you describe in the US. My father was from South Wales and he loved visiting the States, where he found people to be open and friendly and willing to chat, just like they were where he grew up.
Who is that by and what is the precise title? A quick search didn't reveal a book called "learning microservices" but I may be missing something obvious.
Microservices Patterns by Chris Richardson is a great read. It takes the idea of design patterns and applies it to designing and implementing a microservice architecture. The idea is that you may already be doing some of the things that the book suggests but now you know the name for it and you have some pretty opinionated advice from the author about how to do it. It's a long book but it captured my attention from start to finish and was useful pretty much immediately.