Fascinating read, I had no idea they had digitized radar systems in the 1960's. Even though we look back on older systems as "outdated", "obsolete", "primitive", etc. the engineering behind them remains fresh and feels as clever as anything.
> So you're thinking about more and more corner cases, that require the stars to be just right for the size of systemd to matter.
These weren't corner cases, they were everyday reality. We had to intentionally slim down the firmware size to get it to fit comfortably since we added quite a bit of application code. Like I said before, we got a recovery firmware down to ~3MB, and the normal firmware (without our application) was ~8MB. Every megabyte counts at that point, so having a 1MB init system would be a non-starter. We were buying commodity hardware, so we did lots of shopping and there were still plenty of 16MB APs on the market 10 years ago.
You're right its not a problem if you buy new hardware, but OpenWRT is used to support older devices with limited hardware specs. Its one of the reasons people install it, to give new life to old hardware (rather than being forced to buy a new device).
By the way, I use and like systemd on full size computers. I actually know of a product that runs a full rpm based distro (with systemd) on an embedded device and it works great. But systemd isn't one size fits all.
OpenWRT doesn't use sysv init, it has something called procd (~120KB compressed). Its very reliable, and they have a large install base on mission critical devices.
> And OpenWRT abandoned this goal.
They have not. Individual devices get too old to be supported, but there are plenty of 16 MB devices they still support. Its true that basically every device now has 32MB or more of flash, but there are still plenty out there that don't.
> with a built-in planned obsolescence (what if the new update requires just a bit more space for "calibration data"?). Got it.
The calibration data is from the factory to tune the wifi radios, it doesn't change since its specific to that individual device. I really hate to reply like this on HN, but you don't seem to know what you're talking about. The kinds of constraints you deal with in embedded networking are different than that in general computing. There's a reason systemd wasn't used, and there's a reason OpenWRT devs went through the trouble of developing their own init system. Just because you can't fathom those reasons doesn't mean they don't exist.
> So you couldn't spare around 1Mb of compressed flash or 2Mb of uncompressed flash for systemd?
Absolutely not.
> That hasn't been the case in quite some while
These routers and APs still exist and are in use. Yes, they are 10+ years old, but they're still out there. One of the main goals of OpenWRT is to support legacy networking hardware that vendors abandoned.
OpenWRT is VERY sensitive to firmware size. I developed for a device with 16 MB flash that had both a normal (~11 MB) and recovery firmware (~3MB) on flash. The rest of flash was used for persistent storage, bootloaders, and calibration data. This is very common for older routers and APs which is the whole reason that OpenWRT exists.
I wonder if there's anyone here that would know what would happen if this same ad were played on broadcast television? The public backlash would of course be bad, but I'm curious about FCC stuff. Seems like there's different rules for that and internet based communications are ignored by traditional regulators. Does Section 230 cover advertisers too?
How does Netflix make money? HBO Max? Apple TV? Amazon Prime Video?
Google wants to have their cake and eat it too by having a "free" platform but also controlling exactly how people view it in their browser. If you want to actually control content you need to have a real paywall. There are ways they could implement ads that would not be blockable (with a logged in user), but they don't want to do that for some reason.
I could see the writing on the wall. Offerup I think does this. If you click through an item in a search the URL has a UID in it. Then if you click on the seller and find the item from there, its an integer (which is likely a database index).
>> The whole point of vim is that you change your mental model to become faster at editing text.
> The whole point of vi and vim was to edit text visually, instead of as lines.
My language was very imprecise here, I should know better when commenting on Hacker News. I didn't mean the original motivation for creating vi, but the main reason why someone in 2022 would learn vim with all the other text editors out there now. The main feature of vim at this point is the modal editing that requires you to change how you think about text editing. If you aren't going to accept this new paradigm, then there's no point learning vim in the first place beyond how to enter and exit insert mode, save, and quit.
> modal editing doesn’t really fit my mental model of how an editor should work
The whole point of vim is that you change your mental model to become faster at editing text. People don't come into programming with a blank slate about editors, they were introduced to wysiwyg editors from an early age because of Microsoft Word, web based text input, and now phones (with emojis too). A mental model had been impressed already, but that doesn't make it the "default" or the best.
I used notpad++ in college, then switched to vim after I saw my boss edit some code while I was looking over his shoulder. He could do complex editing tasks with just a couple keystrokes and doing them so fast that I couldn't keep up just watching. It seemed like he was editing at the same speed as he was thinking which didn't seem possible to me at the time.
vimtutor. It comes with the full vim install, at least in ubuntu. It will give you the basics, then afterward you can run :h <command> to see what the less used commands do.
You laugh, but AMD did that in the mid-2000's with the Athlon XP series: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_Athlon_XP_processo... The numbers used to match their clock speed (ex. Athlon 1000 was 1000 MHz), but that changed with the XP models (ex. Athlon XP 2400+ was 2000 MHz).
Most people seem to mention using them as an adjustable wrench, but they've been most useful to me as parallel jaw pliers. Unlike with traditional pliers, you can positively hold things with flat parallel sides while you do some work on it. Once I saw the pliers wrench it seemed so obvious, but I couldn't imagine pliers having parallel jaws. It was answering a question I didn't know that I had.
It was like at 23 years old when I saw my boss using vim for the first time. I thought notepad++ was the best I could get until I saw the speed of an experienced vim user. It didn't even occur to me that there could be a better text editor until then.
As a buyer, Ebay is still the place to find specialty used items. I've also bought some uncommon tools that were brand new (at full retail price) because I would rather not buy from Amazon. But the real reason you would use Ebay is for the used items. I've only been disappointed a couple times and I've bought probably 30 used items in the last 2 years from Ebay. Never had a problem with new items.
That's funny because when buying things from Craigslist I try to round the price to an even number since the transaction will always be cash and few people have enough small bills to make change.
For instance if the asking is $125, I'll offer $120 since I don't want to find a $5 bill or make the person find change for the extra $20 bill I'd have to use. I've even rounded up a few times to make it easy, though some people have been so insistent that they even resorted to giving me quarters.