Mastodawn

Okay, folks, gather 'round, because you are not going to believe this one. My friend who is working at NASA told me this confidential news , but i can finally spill the beans: NASA is officially running NetBSD.

Yeah, you heard that right. Turns out, when you need an OS that can literally run on a potato *and* survive the vacuum of space without a hiccup, you do not mess around. They have been working under wraps with their deep space division on something they are calling "AstroBSD."

Apparently, the Perseverance rover on Mars? Yeah, it is not just taking pretty pictures; it is crunching data with a custom NetBSD kernel.

This just proves what foundation has been saying forever: "Of course it runs NetBSD!" From your ancient router to a rover on another planet.

#NetBSD #NASA #AstroBSD #AprilFools #OpenSource #Portability #MarsRover #SpaceTech #GeekHumor

stmuk 5d ago

LittleAlex 🇺🇦🇮🇱🇩🇪🇳🇴6d ago

John Bradley, the author of XV died. Who ever had a computer in the 1990s used his picture viewer.

#rip #vintagecomputing #retrocomputing

Paul Iadonisi on Gab: 'Got some very sad news this week. For anyone who h…'
https://gab.com/markofafreeman/posts/116290669616400528

Paul Iadonisi on Gab: 'Got some very sad news this week. For anyone who …'

Paul Iadonisi on Gab: 'Got some very sad news this week. For anyone who has been in the Linux world as long as I have, it is impossible to not know about XV, an image viewer that is licensed as 'shareware', a type of license that took off in the 90s, primarily on Windows. It's basically a 'pay if you can' licenses, with some of them being nicknamed 'nagware' because they kept bugging you to pay. There were a few fits and starts in the Linux/Unix world, but shareware was mostly shunned in the Linux world in favor the GPL, BSD, and MIT licenses. But many of us, myself included, made an exception for XV. And with XV there was never any license 'key' of any kind that unlocked any features. It was just on your honor and if you look in the source code, you see one #.define in xv.h that you are 'allowed' to define with your email address saying it is registered if you paid. The fee was a mere $25 for a lifetime registration. Almost exactly 30 years ago, in a time when scanning software was nearly non-existent on Linux, I attended a Usenix/UseLinux conference and met a guy who ran a small company called http://tummy.com. He took the source of xv and patched it to provide scanning functionality. He charged $50 under the same terms as the original XV terms, and gave $25 of it to the XV author. So by way of http://tummy.com, my use of XV is 'registered', albeit under an old, defunct email address. The XV author gave up the development of XV quite some time ago, ending with the official version 3.10a. Several developers published patches to XV over the years, and he finally gave the approval in 2022 for a github repo to house XV and all the patches, lumped together into what has been termed the 'jumbo patch' for XV. (https://github.com/jasper-software/xv) Separately, I joined Vox Day's Social Galactic (SG) social media site as a side benefit of signing up at http://Unauthorized.TV where this guy named John Bradley was a member. He's a guitarist and occasional vocalist (sample: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNCir6HSJZo) who has been involved in some excellent meme warfare, largely in the form of music, against the boomer mentality and the retarded vaxx pushers. They used various band names such as Boomer Patrol, Booster Patrol, and Vaxx Traxx. For years I interacted with him on SG, but I never checked his profile. The sad news is that he died on March 20 at the age of 61 (https://voxday.net/2026/03/25/rip-john-bradley/). What makes it sadder for me is that I never made the connection. The John Bradley I knew and interacted with was someone I knew on SG who made funny parodies throughout the covidian insanity years. What I only found out after he passed is that he is the same John Bradley who is the author of XV, as well as few others in the early X Window system development world. This is his old XV website, where XVscan gets a mention (but following the links, unsurprisingly, eventually leads to an error): https://xv.trilon.com. Truly the end of an era. I think the last similar passing in the Linux world was Bram Moolenaar of 'vim' editor fame in August, 2023, which also had a unique license called 'Charityware' in support of 'poor children in Uganda'. RIP, John. You are already missed.'

Gab Social

stmuk Mar 18

Lobsters Mar 18

Rob Pike's 5 Rules of Programming https://lobste.rs/s/9keraw #programming
https://www.cs.unc.edu/~stotts/COMP590-059-f24/robsrules.html

Rob Pike's 5 Rules of Programming

1 comment

Lobsters

stmuk Mar 18

Privacy Guides Mar 17

🚨 Less than 168 days remain before Android becomes a locked down platform!

Google intends to force all software developers to register with a centralized Google service before their apps can run on the biggest mobile operating system on the planet, regardless of whether those apps are distributed via Google Play.

Find @keepandroidopen’s website at https://keepandroidopen.org for more information about this, why it’s a problem, and how you can make your voice heard.

As supporters of open platforms we have consistently encouraged developers and alternative app stores to refuse to participate in this program, and to spread this message throughout the Android community.

Read our open letter to Google’s leadership: https://keepandroidopen.org/open-letter/

#Android #KeepAndroidOpen #Google #PrivacyGuides #Privacy

Keep Android Open

Advocating for Android as a free, open platform for everyone to build apps on.

stmuk Mar 18

Lars Wirzenius Mar 18

I first learned how to program in 1984 at 14. The tech press said I'd be obsolete by 25, due to age.

About 1990 tech press said the Japanese were building fifth generation computers to make me obsolete.

In 2000, the dot com bubble bursting was said to make me obsolete.

There's been neural networks, no-code, and more, since then, to make me obsolete.

Now it's LLMs.

Excuse me while I sit here and don't panic.

#rant

EDIT: This blew up. Muting the thread for some peace and quiet.

stmuk Mar 18

Amiga Addict Magazine Mar 18

In our next issue, we get all the best stories from the man who was there - RJ Mical. With a man so full of enthusiasm for the Amiga, how can you miss it?

#Amiga #AmigaAddict

Available now at https://addict.media and in selected stores.

stmuk Mar 18

Jeremy Morgan Mar 18

Research reveals that invisible Unicode characters are being used to hide malicious payloads across hundreds of public code repositories. These attacks skip visual code reviews because the characters do not appear in most standard diff viewers.

https://www.aikido.dev/blog/glassworm-returns-unicode-attack-github-npm-vscode

stmuk Mar 13

Tom Lyon ✅Mar 12

Fresh scan: "The UNIX System - a Sun Microsystems Technical Report" (1985)

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dW6l6cFAiqTKj3bmTulynKQuOHeHMx0u/view?usp=sharing

stmuk Mar 12

Molly White Mar 12

my new keyboard layout has “caps word” functionality (think caps lock but just for a single word) and my god traditional keyboard manufacturers need to get with the times

where has this been all my life

#keyboards

stmuk Mar 12

Jeremy Morgan Mar 12

Kotlin creator's new language: a formal way to talk to LLMs instead of English

https://codespeak.dev/