Olympia at least had a good punk/indie/riot-grrrl scene in the 90s, and made its mark on music history that way

How easy is it to strip DRM from Kobo ebooks?

Removed by mod

Marching band music. Can’t get enough of it.

You say that, but…

It’s possible though less than ideal. Drivers that connect to devices are part of the attack surface, and probably the part you’d least want implemented in C when the rest of the kernel is in Rust.

There’s a Pareto effect when it comes to them, in that you can cover a large proportion of use cases with a small amount of work, but the more special cases consume proportionately more effort. For a MVP, you could restrict support to standard USB and SATA devices, and get a device you can run headless, tethered to the network through a USB Ethernet adapter. For desktop support, you’d need to add video display support, and support for the wired/wireless networking capabilities of common chipsets would be useful. And assuming that you’re aiming only for current hardware (i.e. Intel/AMD boards and ARM/RISC-V SOCs), there are a lot of legacy drivers in Linux that you don’t need to bring along, from floppy drives to the framebuffers of old UNIX workstations. (I mean, if a hobbyist wants to get the kernel running on their vintage Sun SPARCstation, they can do so, but it won’t be a mainstream feature. A new Linux-compatible kernel can leave a lot of legacy devices behind and still be useful.)

Drew DeVault recently wrote a simple but functional UNIX kernel in a new systems programming language named Hare in about a month, which suggests that doing something similar in Rust would be equally feasible. One or two motivated individuals could get something up which is semi-useful (runs on a common x86 PC, has a console, a filesystem, functional if not necessarily high-performance scheduling and enough of the POSIX API to compile userspace programs for), upon which, what remained would be a lot of finishing work (device drivers, networking, and such), though not all of it necessary for all users. Doing this and keeping the goal of making it a drop-in replacement for the Linux kernel (as in, you can have both and select the one you boot into in your GRUB menu; eventually the new one will do enough well enough to replace Linux) sounds entirely feasible, and a new kernel codebase, implemented in a more structured, safer language sounds like it could deliver a good value proposition over the incumbent.

Then “b” backwards would have to be “d”

“Hand-written assembly” is not more powerful than any other Turing-complete language (including Perl and Python), just more painfully slow and prone to human error to write. (Perhaps if you have a special case requiring speed (such as the processing being done in a tight loop in a financial trading app and the results needing to beat rival trading systems by milliseconds or something equally esoteric), it’d make sense, but in that case, a modern compiler (for, say, C/C++/Rust or similar) would yield comparable results, and if a lot is riding on those milliseconds, you’d eschew code and build a FPGA that pulls the data out of memory buffers in hardware or similar.)

So these days, the only use case for hand-writing assembly language (other than low-level OS/firmware programming or compiler development) is performative Feats Of Strength, where the challenge is the point. And in that case, you’d be trying to do something heroically challenging, like writing an Atari 2600 demake of Baldur’s Gate or something.

zee-shell or zed-shell, depending on dialect

13/10 no notes

Don’t forget that every recent Intel CPU contains an extra 486-based system on a chip running a stripped-down version of Minix (a predecessor of Linux), to implement the remote management engine.

Such a compilation is unlikely to be published. There’s a phenomenon known as the Werther effect, in that as soon as suicide is mentioned in the news or popular culture, the suicide rate goes up (presumably as the awareness of it tips those who have been on the verge). As such, news publications have guidelines to avoid mentioning suicide as a motivation (often, the only tell will be a footnote at the bottom of a story giving the phone number of a suicide hotline). If such a compilation came out, it could be expected to trigger a wave of suicides, if not a small but noticeable permanent increase in the frequency of suicide, so I imagine few publishers ok r booksellers would touch it.

Maybe some of Europe’s surfeit of demo coders had to make their money somehow, and one of them persuaded a pharmacy that paying them to make them a sign with graphics that spin in eyecatching ways would be a good idea, and the rest was history?

As Jamie Zawinski put it, it’s like a non-profit animal shelter setting up a sideline selling kitten meat to satisfy demands for hockey-stick growth. If somebody castigates them for it, they can point out that the demand for kitten deli slices didn’t going to go away, and if they didn’t sell them, someone else would step in and do it less humanely.

Needs a few earlier movements, including Art Deco/jazz moderne, Bauhaus and midcentury modern/googie

* offer not valid in Russia or the Middle East

Australia also has a Newcastle (in New South Wales, north of Sydney). Not sure if it has/had coal mines, though I wouldn’t be surprised if it did. Australians using the phrase may be referring to their Newcastle, and even unaware of the English one.

Or the fat guy in the stars and stripes shirt in Katamari Damacy. Or Bobson Dugnutt.