WWII sent a very clear message. You can annex Austria. You can invade Czechoslovakia. You can take over Lithunia. But you don’t fuck with Poland

Well, I mean, you can fuck with Poland a little bit. You just can’t take over, like, too much of Poland.

The article mentions they’ll continue making the eZ80. If you’re in the middle of making a PCB around the Z80, you’ll just have to change the pins, I guess.

Out of curiosity, did you use it as a daily driver? A friend of mine tried it out briefly, and it was pretty cool, but the lack of applications meant we couldn’t really do anything with it (other than marvel at how cool it was). Did it eventually get applications developed for them? Like did they have an office suite?

I used to run a TFTP server on my router that held the decryption keys. As soon as a machine got far enough in the boot sequence to get network access, it would pull the decryption keys from the router. That way a thief would have to steal the router along with the computer, and have the router running when booting up the computer. It works wirelessly, too!

I mean…yeah. Just because something is provably the best possible thing, doesn’t mean it’s good. Sorting should be avoided if at all possible. (And in many cases, such as with numbers, you can do better than comparison-based sorts)

To the best of my knowledge, this “drives from the same batch fail at around the same time” folk wisdom has never been demonstrated in statistical studies. But, I mean, mixing drive models is certainly not going to do any harm.

The scary thing? Define “new”. This judgment is from a lawsuit in 2014. So any car made in at least the last 9 years is doing this. Maybe newer cars are doing even worse things.

Yup, mine, too. I don’t remember which version it was, but I’m pretty sure it was still “Turbo” (not “Borland”) Pascal, in the late 1990s. Grade 10 computer science was taught on Macintosh QuickBasic and then grades 11 and 12 were “real” programming in Turbo Pascal.

If you want a good CPU design with a 16-bit address space, take a look at the PDP-11.

Which was used in home computers, just not in the west

I agree with you, though. I’m kind of the prime market for this from an educational standpoint. My oldest kid has just learned to read and write (kind of). She’s fascinated by computers. She’s only played retrogames (happily) thus far, so she wouldn’t be put off by the 8-bit era’s graphics or sound.

But even so…what would I be hoping to teach her with this? How to work around the quirks of the 6502 that are not applicable to literally anything else? That life is full of unnecessary obstacles and frustration? That she could have learned more interesting programming in an easier way if I’d got her a computer with a flat memory model? I’m kind of meh on it.

Not all of these issues have disappeared, either. Anyone remember this headline from a couple years ago? The bottom 1MiB of memory space on x86 is just a minefield. It’s impossible (like literally impossible) in general to know if certain parts of the address space are actual memory or are some weird part of your motherboard chipset or some other hardware. Windows I think still goes through the “wankery” of depending on chipset drivers to (accurately) know which parts of memory are actual memory.

Thankfully the 16-bit (though actually 20-bit but actually kind of more sometimes kind of but not totally) pains have all gone away. The move to flat 32-bit address spaces was a godsend.

RIP Bette Stephenson. In the same way that Al Gore invented the Internet, Bette Stephenson invented the ICON. She was a very stubborn politician who would not tolerate anything other than complete success from the project. Passed away 3 years ago.

I always coveted the Tandy 1000, but I never got one. Which one did you have?

The #1 defining moment for me has to be Second Reality by Future Crew. We got it an a local BBS not too long after it was released. It was kind of like the birth of a new era, like “ahh so this is what PCs are actually capable of”.

these games are guaranteed to not have any in-app purchases or ads

That’s a big plus. I also like that they have to use the keyboard, since the mouse can be a bit tricky when you’re young.

I had no idea there was a Richard Scarry game! They love the books, so maybe I should give it a shot. (Though it does look pretty mouse-heavy)

Another Oregan Trail generation here.

I’m curious about what’s going to happen with Gen Alpha. Any other moms and dads here exposing their kids to retrotech? I have two little ones that I’ve made a DOSBox installation for (Mixed-Up Mother Goose and Donald Duck’s Playground are their favourites). I do wonder how they’re going to think about old tech when they’re older. I haven’t told them that it’s “old” or “retro” yet, so they just think they’re normal fun games.

It’s a bit more complicated than that. Windows 95 used MSDOS to boot, but once it was booted, it completely removed any trace of MSDOS and replaced it with its own MSDOS subsystem. It’s more like MSDOS was a shell on top of Win95, but MSDOS was required to get the kernel loaded.

Yes, which is literally what OP is asking about. They mention system calls, and are asking, if a userland program can do dangerous thing using system calls, why is there a divide between user and kernel. “Because the kernel can then check permissions of the system call” is a great answer, but “hopefully you can’t harm your computer with userland programs” is completely wrong and misguided.

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda is a userland program, which I would say causes harm.

It’s a bit more complicated than that. System load is a count of how many processes are in an R state (either "R"unning or "R"eady). If a process does disk I/O or accesses the network, that is not counted towards load, because as soon as it makes a system call, it’s now in an S (or D) state instead of an R state.

But disk I/O does affect it, which makes it a bit tricky. You mentioned swapping. Swapping’s partner in crime, memory-mapped files, also contribute. In both of those cases, a process tries to access memory (without making a system call) that the kernel needs to do work to resolve, so the process stays in an R state.

I can’t think of a common situation where network activity could contribute to load, though. If your swap device is mounted over NFS maybe?

Anyway, generally load is measuring CPU usage, but if you have high disk usage elsewhere (which is not counted directly) and are under high memory pressure, that can contribute to load. If you’re seeing a high load with low CPU utilization, that’s almost always due to high memory pressure, which can cause both swapping and filesystem cache drops.

What kind of rube works in the same country they live in? I met a lot of WFH workers when I visited Thailand, and not a single one of them was working for a company in Thailand.