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Comment Re:How do you know? (Score 2) 279

It's possible to remount a file system with new permissions. See the details here:
https://www.gnu.org/software/l...
Or to mount it in a other folder with different permissions.
Or to directly access the partition under /dev/sda1.

To make a read-only file system work as expected you have to use a hardware way to prevent writing to the memory. For example NOR SPI flash memory usually have a write protection pin. Of course that pin must be protected against unwanted operation that could drive it. In that case you can expect having a clean state after a boot. Secure boot is an other method to give the same kind of clean state after boot.

You still have issues that can live in the SDRAM as long as the device will run...

Comment Re:Why is Windows 10 the benchmark? (Score 1) 205

Maybe you should realize that every SDcard, eMMC, WiFi, or Bluetooth chip, contain a processor (generally 32 bits this days) to offload your main CPU.
Seriously, if a main processor with a RTOS will be able to do all by itself, then all peripherals would be virtual with just AFE to convert to/from analog signals.

The reality is that toady even small controllers contain DMA engine, interrupt controller and peripheral state machines good enough to offload the core from most of the communication fast low level details. Look at the implementation details of a Ethernet MAC and PHY for example. Good luck to recreate something like that with just a CPU and a AFE...

Dedicated peripherals are nothing different. Depending of there complexity and performances, a extra CPU/DSP/FPGA could be a far better design than trying to do the same thing with a RTOS on a central processor and a AFE. Not counting that the vast majority of the industry is going more and more toward highly integrated peripherals chips that integrate there own processor, and all of that for a very low price due to the massive production scale.

Even if your smartphone PCB let you think that there is just a single processor chip with his main cores because of the marketing, in reality it probably have something like a half dozen of extra dedicated CPU or DSP running all the peripherals fast low level details, not counting all the DSP like cores of the GPU itself...

Comment Re:Theory vs. Practice (Score 1) 391

And this is also very clear:

sub foo {
        $var = 22;
        $anothervar = 23;
        if ($var == $anothervar) {
                return $var1;
        }
}

While wasting a line for each open brace is not so a problem for the functions, this make code really annoying to read if there is a lot of consecutive if-then blocks. K&R coding style is widely used for a reason.

Comment Re:Theory vs. Practice (Score 1) 391

"At lest one study" is nowhere near to be an argument. You can probably find "at least one study" that claim whatever you wants on a so width subject as the style used by individuals. I can either say that at least 3 well known projects (Linux, Git, PHP) uses 8 spaces tabs for indentation.

Now the cool stuff about tabs is that it allow to be very easily adjusted in a perfectly reliably way by the user editor without touching the file content.
I will add that 8 spaces tabs make code with too many indentations look wrong faster, and I found this a good feature in my experience.

Comment Re:Collusion is illegal (Score 1) 585

Probably true from the technical point of view, but not completely certain as the deeper integration into the CPU chip of the features that was before into the north/south bridges or peripheral chips could be implemented in a way to no longer support some legacy compatibility features required to support old OS drivers.

Well, as long a I can run recent Linux on them, it's probably on good thing in the long term as the original PC architecture is really out of date. But new processors will not just run Windows, OSX or Linux. There is a good chunk of specialized OS (many for realtime embedded systems) that will need to run on them. I doubt that there all have the drivers ready for a such big change.

Comment Why a poll ? The browser tell this already. (Score 1) 599

There exists many ways to query the operating system from the browser using Javascript. I am in fact surprised if there is not already integrated into the Slashdot code. So basically there no need for a poll to query this.

Maybe the poll real subtle goal is to verify how many users respond honestly...

Comment Re:Looks like the first two posters... (Score 1) 55

What two pieces of information ?

There are many others ARM based kits that brings comparable capabilities and also run Linux (with open source compilers) for a fraction of the Intel price.

For most embedded projects, especially those running Linux, the instruction set architecture weight as much as a photo in the design decision. I myself run many armhf and arm64 architecture based embedded boards with the exact same Debian distribution that I run on my amd64 architecture workstations, laptop and servers.

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