Recent submissions

Comment · 9 days ago
Ada is measured to have 9 times less bugs in average
Comment · 19 days ago
I use Yandex search every day and did not notice any problem in search. So far I can only see automated e-mail fetcher stopped. So I check non-Yandex inboxes manually until they fix.
Comment · 19 days ago
I want Windows/KDE/GNOME whatever, to just copy Mac OS X, not the other way
Comment · 19 days ago
Mavericks Forever website has notes about goods and bads in different versions of Mac OS X. The good part of history ended in 10.9, and the author managed to port some pieces from 10.6 to 10.9
Comment · 21 days ago
IIRC SUA required recompilation. Putting the motto "Windows NT is a UNIX" to life was challenging, and introduction of incompatible SUA added multiple versions maintenance to the challenge.
Comment · 22 days ago
SFU ended in XP/2003. Vista/2008 had SUA
Comment · 1 month ago
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.

Comment · 1 month ago
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.
Comment · 1 month ago
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.

Comment · 1 month ago
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.

Comment · 1 month ago
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.

Comment · 1 month ago
Perl was popular
Comment · 1 month ago
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
Comment · 1 month ago
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.

Comment · 1 month ago
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.

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