User talk:Guy Harris/Archives/2021/11


The Yukon

Hey Guy, it used to be THE Yukon, then for a while it was just Yukon, and in August the government changed it back to THE Yukon: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/the-yukon-renaming-1.6136896

Locals have always maintained THE Yukon. Only in government speech was it different. For a while. However, in the interest of saving money, the government is not changing any existing webpages, signs, layouts, etc. Only when things are redone anyway, will they add the THE. So it'll be years of coexistence.

Just FYI :-) Ds77 (talk) 07:09, 2 November 2021 (UTC)

Micr

Oh, I see. I always pronounced it mick-er. I guess it’s like C I C S vs kicks. Peter Flass (talk) 03:06, 6 November 2021 (UTC)

[https://boards.straightdope.com/t/micr-pronunciation/412767 “Just wanted to point out a slight correction on the pronunciation stated in the article. I have spent nearly a decade working for one of the largest banks in the US, and everyone I’ve ever come into contact with has pronounced MICR as “Micker” (rhymes with Sticker), as opposed to “Miker” (Hiker).” Peter Flass (talk) 14:34, 6 November 2021 (UTC)

Mach a direct descendent of 4.3 BSD

Mach until version 3.0 was not a microkernel at all. It was a direct descendent of the 4.3 BSD operating system. Only with version 3.0 were the BSD Unix components removed from the kernel. Please refer to the original paper on the topic. Illustrative section:

">Work is underway to remove non-Mach UNIX functionality from kernel-state and provide these services through user-state tasks. The goal of this effort is to “kernelize” UNIX is a substantially less complex and more easily modifiable basic operating system."

That non-Mach UNIX functionality is the remainder of the 4.3 BSD kernel. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 88.97.47.162 (talk) 03:48, 6 November 2021 (UTC)

"That non-Mach UNIX functionality is the remainder of the 4.3 BSD kernel." And the Mach functionality had nothing to do with the 4.3 BSD kernel. Guy Harris (talk) 05:02, 6 November 2021 (UTC)
The paper you cite is the same paper as https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/classes/fa08/cse221/papers/accetta86.pdf, and it says nothing of the sort. What part of the 4.3BSD kernel contributed the task, thread, virtual memory, and message passing parts Mach? Guy Harris (talk) 05:38, 6 November 2021 (UTC)

The same part that contributes the virtual memory system to DragonFly BSD, or by analogy the same part that provides prolific use of libprop, IPv6 support, VKERNELs, HAMMER2, kevent, checkpointing, the cluster object cache, and serializing tokens based concurrency to DragonFly BSD. Not a single one of these was found in 4.3 BSD (one of them was found in 4.4 BSD-Lite) and some of them required substantial refactoring to the BSD kernel to be workable. DragonFly BSD now sits atop such fundamentally different low-level primitives as Mach <= 2.5 did, but anyone denying it to be a BSD would be reproached, for when you have a direct, massive inheritance of code from historical BSD making up the majority of your kernel, defining the majority of its programming interface (even if you have additional new underlying primitives or higher-level functionality), it is undeniably BSD. Phrases like "derived from Mach and BSD" make little sense - it spawns this strange misconception that NeXTSTEP was created by "mixing Mach and BSD" meanwhile Mach took years before it could run without being anything other than an abstraction layer intimately interlinked with the remainder of the BSD kernel. "The Mach functionality had nothing to do with the 4.3 BSD kernel" is untrue for the simple reason that there *was* no Mach functionality without the 4.3 BSD kernel. It was not a freestanding entity that was combined. At best, it reused some Accent code. 88.97.47.162 (talk) 12:26, 6 November 2021 (UTC)

Xilinx

So, I'm actually an engineer, and I admit that I'm a little embarrassed by all of the semantic confusion on the shift register article. Do you think it's abnormal for somebody to learn everything about hardware engineering from Xilinx? In school, all of my classes used Xilinx and their standards. CessnaMan1989 (talk) 20:21, 10 November 2021 (UTC)

@CessnaMan1989: If there are terms that aren't always used in the same sense, and somebody learns from a vendor who uses the term in one of those senses, they may not realize that the term isn't always used in that sense, so there's that risk.
I'm a software engineer, but I've had some interest in hardware both from necessity and from curiosity, and I've always seen "shift register" used in the sense of a circuit 1) that stores data (so not purely combinatorial) and 2) in which the shifting is done by moving data from one storage device to the adjacent storage device; I've never heard it used to refer to a purely-combinatorial shifting circuit or to a combinatorial shifting circuit with a latching register to capture and store its output, just as I haven't, for example, heard of an adder, or an adder with a latching register to capture and store its output. referred to as an "add register". Guy Harris (talk) 20:32, 10 November 2021 (UTC)

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"iPhone OS" and "iOS"

Hello dear !

Before iOS 4, iOS is named iPhone OS in the first version in 2007, with the 1st iPhone. Well, with the iPhone 4 and the 1st generation iPad, iPhone OS was shorted to iOS.

A NEW "iOS" FOR iPOD TOUCH ? (iPOD OS)

If the iPod touch, with iOS 16 (Later ?), the iOS logo reverts back to memories ! ^^

Best regards,

ÉOLE79000 (talk) 19:02, 24 November 2021 (UTC).