Notices by Vertigo (vertigo@mastodon.social), page 19

Delicious!
https://cybre.space/media/VGguO_FgK1Le6Zx9yno

@gdkar @djsundog I need to apply a patch to my abacus, thanks to a Meltdown vulnerability. It seems if you speculatively execute math close enough to an exposed flame, information leakage can occur, often in the form of melted plastic and/or metal rods.

A conversation popped up asking if I knew about the Jupiter Ace. It in fact is one of the primary influencers behind the original Kestrel-2 design (the one with the S16X4A CPU).

But, I have many influences on the Kestrel's overall design. Here's several: http://kestrelcomputer.github.io/kestrel/2013/11/19/of-shoulders-and-giants

@djsundog It's true. With sufficiently clever hardware, any Forth environment that implements *only* @ and ! is now Turing complete.

Not even joking.

My S16X4 family of CPUs implemented 12 instructions originally: NOP, # (literal), @, !, AND, XOR, ADD, and ZGO (jump if zero), C@, C!, GO (unconditional jump), and NZGO (jump if non-zero). That's it.

The Steamer16 (from which S16X4 is based) implemented only the first 8 instructions listed above. ;-)

@jjg Me too. General purpose hardware is great and fantastic, and I think we need more of it. But, the *packaging* of such capability really has an impact on usability for certain kinds of tasks.

I really appreciate and enjoy using my Android device. Yet, I still miss the Palm Pilot's simple UI/UX. It feels decidedly more snappy, and the visuals are much cleaner and oriented towards real-world use, less like trying to emulate People magazine.

YES. Loading from block storage works!

Today I learned that someone ported a minimal version of AmigaOS to a custom DSP board built around the 68302 chip. See http://a1bert.kapsi.fi/BOAR/

I recall saying, a few days ago, that all you need to make a viable operating system is a port of exec.library and dos.library. I'm happy to see that I was right, and that prior art exists as proof.

BOAR does not include graphics.library, intuition.library, or other components of AmigaOS. But, that's fine if all you run is command-line tools.

@clacke @lobsters Back in the days of 2 MIPS processors running C code (e.g., 68000, 8086), this sort of byte-order-specific code made a real difference, especially when pushing pixels around (e.g., as in GUI code).

Today, not so much. Accelerated graphics hardware takes care of endian issues for you, OSes have abstract views of the screen anyway, and so the only thing to really worry about is file and network stream I/O.

@djsundog If anyone has Z80000 programming reference material online, get that shit up on Github sooner rather than later, so that it's preserved. That's history! Wikipedia's link to Z80000 material is broken.

@drpeeper @jjg Some thoughts:

1. Rust isn't OO, although it has OO-like capabilities. Code bloat mostly comes from parametric polymorphism.

2. You can build binaries without the standard library, just as you can in C.

3. I find rust pretty compelling even as an "expert-level" C coder (been using C since 1985). It catches mistakes that I still make in C today. In fact, I'd explicitly state that rust is *not* for beginners.

So, it's occurred to me that "vlogging" my work on the Kestrel-3 on Youtube may be a thing, but I seem to recall some sites that cater to Libre-projects. Anyone have recommendations and experience using them?

OK, so far, two votes for FOSS/FOSH hardware, 0 for Altera DE-1 board. So far, the cheaper solution is losing out. :)

This somewhat relieves me, because I really don't feel like downloading 20GB of garbage to my workstation. :)

@djsundog Oooh, a Citadel BBS? ;) Citadel has a traditional SSH interface reminiscent of ye olde BBS days, but it also supports a contemporary web-based interface too which is not unlike phpBB, I think.

@djsundog ALSO, if/when I do start posting videos, I intend on doing so with comments DISABLED. I do not like comments; they are invariably toxic and cannot be policed for obviously bad behavior. What alternatives would folks recommend for giving constructive feedback? Mailing lists is always an option, I suppose.

@djsundog So, I leave this decision up to you guys. You'll be watching the videos, reading the posts, and perhaps buying gear and playing along. I can go either way; it doesn't matter to me. What say ye, community?

@djsundog I'm telling you, nano-scale triode tubes... ;)

So, I think I'm going to lose my job; either they will lay me off, or I will walk from it, next fiscal half.

Anyone looking for a 40+-year old *programmer* (please PLEASE do not mistake me for a "software engineer")?

Le sigh.

https://groups.google.com/forum/m/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer#!topic/riscv-boom/yxDwmpjtQrE

As I predicted, BOOM core CPUs *are* affected, but not as badly as Intel or ARM. Still, caveat utilor.