I decided to take a look and my current CPU has the same L1 as my high school computer had total RAM. And the L3 is the same as the total for the machine I built in college. It should be possible to run a great desktop environment entirely in L3.
Not that long ago I was working on TI’s C2000 DSPs. They have a 16 bit word size, which would make this a convenient way to pack three characters into a single word. Ther ewould then be a single leftover bit which could be used for signaling, parity, or something else.
You might have been using dd to burn an ISO image onto a USB stick or some such, but sincerely doubt that you were writing just the kernel to the first sector of a 3.5" floppy disk and then booting off of it, while it found your ISA hard drive.
Look at this guy with their fancy RAM caches.
Hannah Montana Linux, or HM/Linux as I’ve taken to calling it, is the sign of true civilization.
4GB to run well… I remember happily running linux on 4MB of RAM, complete with X and web browser. I also remember running BeOS on a machine with 64MB of RAM and having one of the the best desktop experiences I’ve ever used.
I’ve been using Linux since you created a boot floppy by using dd on the kernel. I use Ubuntu because I just want something that works, is stable in the LTS sense of the word, and I don’t have to futz with. I’ve heard enough about Mint now that I’ll probably switch over to it when I build my next machine in several years.
A single line comment would make it as easy to understand, and much more flexible if you wanted to add handling upper case letters or digits. Or even remap the values to a more standard 6 bit encoding.
Oh god that switch statement. Here, let me come up with something better:
if (pChar >= 'a' && pChar <= 'z') {
return pChar - 'a' + 10;
} else if (pChar == ' ') {
return 36;
} else if (pChar == '.'){
return 37;
}
return 0;
Google has done studies and experiments with their hiring process and determined that after three interviews you aren’t getting any more signal about candidate quality. Their internal interview training talks about this, I’ve read their reports and the methodology seemed pretty sound. Yet for some reason they still usually do five interviews. Why? I never did get a good answer for that.
I feel like every time I have changed jobs the number of interview sessions has gone up by one. My first job didn’t even have a coding session, just a single conversation with the boss and another engineer.
I’m job hunting right now and it is so ridiculous how many interviews I have for each place. The last one I went through an hr phone call, a manager phone call, a remote coding session, a presentation, a whiteboard coding session, a schematic review, a general C++ quiz/architecture conversation and a follow on remote coding session. I ended up not getting it because the whiteboard guy didn’t like that I didn’t remember the formula for an n-dimensional plane off the top of my head.
Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/378/
I’m on Ubuntu because last time I built a computer I was doing a lot of ROS development. I’m pretty uninterested in experimenting with distros and just want something with LTS releases that lets me work and play some games. If I ever decide to move off Ubuntu it will probably be to Debian.
Oh! Came up with a new one, though it’s more of a unixism than a Linux specific thing.
I really wish that the core utils and other cli tools had a standard structured output option, like yaml, json, or toml so that it would be easier to parse rather than all of the random regular expressions needed when piping output around.
Edit: And it would be great if we also picked that same format for config files instead of all the bespoke stuff in /etc.
Honestly, not much.
The first would be that the webcam in my work laptop goes in and out of working pretty regularly. It happens to the whole team so I know it’s not just mine. I end up using an external one pretty regularly. Mostly I’m annoyed at Dell for not providing proper driver support.
The second is that there are a very small number of applications that I occasionally use where I need to fire up a VM. But even that is more of I’m annoyed at the organization that forces me to use an obsolete proprietary file format once a quarter.
I had a GUI on a computer with 256kB RAM on no hdd.
Honestly, between Lutris and Steam it’s now pretty easy to run most things from windows in Linux. There are some exceptions, such as Office, but the majority of my Steam library runs great. It’s come a long way, even in the last year. The frontends really simplify things.
By series:
Edited for formatting
How old was the oldest bug that you discovered that you also wrote? Mine was six years old, a null pointer dereference that worked fine on the original architecture but caused a reset when moving to Cortex-M.