@sun@thendrix One of the odd things many apps expect is for the child to run first out of fork().
It always annoyed me from the standpoint of a mini-micro-unix emulation on something like 8080. Because of that nonsense you must have to have 2 processes runnable, because the parent will need to reach wait() eventually. It's not a problem on a normal computer, because you just COW everything anyway. Your fork() is actually clone() with parameters. Just a few more page faults. On the original PDP-11, fork() was a swap and un-swap, so the disk's DMA did the job of memcpy(), so that's the historic reason why.
How apps sense which one runs first is by racing it with writing into signalling pipes. Which is just stupid and bugs, bugs all around.
@sun@thendrix Red Hat looked at RT kernel for RHEL some 20 years ago. Tim Burke was supposed to lead it. But it gradually petered out as all such initiatives. They are working on "automotive RHEL" now and it's also not going far, I'm pretty sure. It's like Windows CE.
@sun@feld My answer was to resign and retreat into basic infrastructure like filesystems. They are always necessary and that will butter my toast for a few years until I die. Also, I founded a manufacturing company.
I was concerned that I was becoming obsolete by not following the latest on Kubernetes and then I realized that it was futile. I don't know squat about blockchain or LLM technologies either, and I feel fine.
@sun@feld Personally I'm having the most trouble with what we're trying to do with k8s. It is unbelievably opaque. You control the thing by writing magic YAML files, and there is basically no way to know what critical variable to set, because there are literally tens of thousands of them. The doc team is absolutely overwhelmed. If anything goes wrong, the only way to fix it is to find a guy who knows a guy who either hacked on something related or saw it resolved and wrote it down. The k8s themselves seem almost benign in comparison.
The last time I used Windows was in 2000, but I had to install Windows for a proprietary application (basically and rsync client that downloads files from the vendor's server and updates an SD card) a month ago.
The worst issue that I encountered was that the proprietary application crashed on start with a JavaScript traceback. But what actually happened was that used the so-called "VC++ runtime" (I gather it's something like Microsoft proprietary STL). Microsoft do not bundle that stuff, possibly anymore, possibly with Win11 Home, or possibly because the app wanted a 32-bit library and I installed a 64-bit Win11. Either way, I went to Microsoft website, downloaded the VC++ redistributable runtime installer (.exe of course lol), and everything was fine since then. BTW, the cue was that the JS traceback contained either c_open or dlopen, and I thought "huuuh, interesting, I wonder if a DLL is missing".
Windows seems one of those things that as long as it works, it works, but if it breaks, it's completely opaque and the only recourse is to buy a new computer. Kind of like Android, just more hassle and the computer is larger.
Linux kernel source (well actually build object code) ("ksrc") Anime episodes ("tt") General archive, mostly home photos ("arc"), source tarballs, scholarly publications, etc. Photos from my phone yet unsorted and uncompressed ("k") Git clones that I needed at one time or another ("prog") Installation images ("sw") One oddly large issue, 02488269 - logs downloaded from Jira for analysis Everything 3D printing related VM disk images and XMLs My mp3 collection - oddly enough mostly bought at Amazon if you can believe that
I was sure that videos were by far the largest consumer of disk space, kinda surprising to see Linux up there.
@sun@anonicus It can't be real. What kind of hardware supports 1TB? The biggest I've seen so far has been 192GB. It is within one order of magnitude, but still.
@sun@lanodan@Zergling_man Sadly I have to print every day. I mail a couple of parcels every day for my eBay side hustle. Every one of them needs a short letter and a documentation cum insert leaflet. My printer is a Brother 2740. It's been solid for many years. Full support under Linux. Picks paper no matter how thick the stack is, down to the last sheet. HP is generally trash in my experience. The last good printer they did was LaserJet 4.
@lanodan That's the point: there will always be smart kits who are attracted to the good ratio of usefulness to the downsides of C. But C++ is basically COBOL of 2030s.