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It wouldn't surprise me if I learned that the vast majority of programming globally is in languages like Visual Basic or PHP that are utterly unfashionable on a board like this, bu…

It's a completely uncontroversial fact that NT does implement fork(). Turn to page 183 of Helen Custer's "Inside Windows NT" and you will read about it.

Solaris and Windows NT both have fork() and strict accounting by default.

The principle of a paging system is that main memory is just a cache for secondary memory, and the concept of "free memory" ideally rather means something like "memory that can be …

The general principle is that what is involved in paging should not be paged itself. Wiring the memory of that whole daemon is then a trivial solution to the problem.

Plan 9 implements some sort of "everything has a directory entry" concept. Sockets are files already in Unix. "Everything is a file" in Unix means they have a uniform treatment as …

It's rather a bit more BSD than merely having a "C API that resembles BSD" or a "BSD userland". https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/xnu/tree/main/bsd You can find there the …

https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/xnu/tree You'll find there's a great deal left. Have a look at all the fundamental datastructures (proc, vnode, tty, file to name a few) …

The pushback is motivated by the interests of the petty-bourgeois class, and those are a larger proportion of the former.

I find it interesting that this fulfills some of Dennis Ritchie's goals for what became the STREAMS framework for byte-oriented I/O: > I decided, with regret, that each processing …

> Linux won specifically because the GPL forced the "greedy" actors to collaborate. How do we know that? It seems to me that a greater factor in the success of Linux was the ideali…

Just about everything of worth in operating systems (and in software in general) was already invented in those decades.

The C standard doesn't guarantee much of anything. Windows and its drivers are using bitfields anyway because they trust MSVC to do the right thing.

Some firm called CodeThink have been instigating it for RISC-V lately: https://www.codethink.co.uk/articles/risc-v-big-endian-suppo...

If it's about "prettier code" then I think a number one candidate would be making bitfields more viable for use. It could make driver code much cleaner and safer. Windows is only t…

There's no legal concept called "tainting". Black boxing is just a means by which you try to make yourself completely irreproachable (for if you haven't seen something, then it's o…

It's just a fiction to allow something freely copiable - pure information - to be pretended to be a commodity. If the AI firms have only a single redeeming feature, then it is that…

The void type has considerable heritage, dating back all the way to ALGOL 68, and is traditionally defined as having one member: > The mode VOID has a single value denoted by EMPTY…

Usually when I hear "robbery" it brings to mind someone stealing your phone or wallet at knife-point. Certainly not training some model on some code that involves neither violence …

> you can technically look at some of the code that comes with it, but you can't modify it. This is equally true of the GPLv2. The attempt to close this loophole - Tivoisation as S…

Windows has extreme similarities with Unix, and if you would look at a really different OS like, for instance, IBM i, it becomes clear. The Windows-Unix affinity is so great that y…

> How can you implement an object capability system on WASM? It's been well known for decades that the germ of an object capability system already exists in Unix - the file descrip…

Computerised CBT is even already being delivered and by quite a bit less sophisticated systems than LLMs. Resourcing constraints have made it very popular in the UK.

Solaris achieved some kind of integration between the ARC and the VM subsystem as part of the VM2 project. I don't know any more details than that.