[Short post] Computer sleep, really ?
I was just wondering today : why do we humans have to sleep ? To get our brain back in a clean state on the morning after, and perform some heavy-duty memory clean-up tasks. But in this respect, isn’t it more akin to shutting a computer down than putting it in a low-power state ?
If we really have to use biological metaphors, shouldn’t we have used a “rest” (awake, but not doing anything), “siesta” (short nap, mind state is conserved but everything else is shut down), and “sleep” (everything is turned off, heavy maintenance is performed) terminology instead of the “sleep”, “hibernate”, “shutdown” one ?
Just food for thought.
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As you may have noticed, development and posting are going more slowly than usual around here, and I need more “filler” blog posts than the norm to keep the place alive. That is because I am in one of these important parts of my life where I have little spare time to dedicate to my hobbies, including this OS.
Long short story : I am now reaching the end of my Master’s internship, and have decided that in September, I will either be a PhD student in the lab I’m working on, or a Master’s student for one more year. I would largely prefer the former option, and for that I need to win a special kind of research grant, which will fund my salary for the next three years. So I am now preparing all the awesome material that I shall show to the powers that be in June, in an attempt to convince them to give me the money that I need.
So, apologies and all that. Things should improve somewhere around July, when I will be waiting for answers and looking for a new flat.
How to become a ninja — for free !
Since I have heard that this is kind of a tradition, here are a few interesting search engine requests through which people have ended up on this website…
Traditionally, system services have been implemented in two ways, depending on their requirements. Either people wrote shared libraries for “light” work, or they wrote daemons that were contacted using bytestream- or message-based IPC primitives (such as pipes, sockets, or D-BUS). With RPC, I have proposed another IPC method that would be more specifically tailored to the job, but how well would it fare against the old ways at a conceptual level ? Well, here is my attempt at a fair comparison.
The NPL concept
So, now that I feel a bit more awake, I guess I can expand on the software licensing concept discussed earlier. The core idea could be summed up in one question : is it possible to combine the binary redistribution freedom that freeware licenses give with the collaborative open source model of the GPL family of licenses, in a package that is more convenient for users while retaining the core advantages of the original ?
Need… sleep…
So, I was wondering about this : if I became fed up with the GPL at some point (and the more I read v3, the more I feel like this), could I write a software license that puts very separate constraints on source and binaries ?
Binaries would basically be freewares redistributed in the public domain, whereas source code would be subject to much more stringent license requirements (modified source must be redistributed, binaries generated from the source must follow a specific license, etc…)
I wonder if this is legally possible, and how well it would work.
Expect more details on this soon, if my mind accepts to step outside of the S3 state…
Filler
Looks like the slow update season is still not over. I simply am too tired to do any productive work on this OS right now (plus, I’d like to hear some news from Rudla Kudla ’bout my answers on the process properties specification post before I get further in my parser implementation anyway).
