How to create bootable USB thumb drive with iso file

[Liam Proven]

On Fri, 1 May 2020 at 03:44, Sheemon Lists <sheemon.lists at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Dear Liam;
>
> You make for a tempting conversationalist ;-)

Heh! Thank you. This is probably not the place, though.

My recent talk at the FOSDEM conference in Brussels in February might
interest you. A video, notes and slide deck are here:
https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/69099.html

That's a good place to comment -- any OpenID will do to log in.
Livejournal invented OpenID.

> In years past I served in a major computer manufacturer.  Questions about efficiency were poohpoohed.  All the while, an illegal activity was conducted on a regular schedule.  At one time it evolved around the strcmp(3) library call.  An undocumented instruction was utilized where a string comparison could perform (if I recall) about 5-6 times faster.  The illegality was in revealing this to one software vendor but not to another.  I was tasked with measuring how fast could fast be, and what the impact on RDBMS engines would be (they do a lot of comparisons ;-).  What I was doing, on company time, was establishing the value to these vendors.  What the market will bear, was the popular term.  I resigned.

That saddens me to hear, but it does not surprise me.

> Nowdays, performance and efficiency are really orphans. My telephone has 6GB of RAM, 256GB storage and 8 CPUs running at billions of instructions/second.  Oh, I have a cheap "Chinese" telephone (which one is not?)

I just ordered such a device to replace my aging, battered iPhone 6S+,
which is already on its 2nd battery. I do not want a newer iPhone,
because I want a headphone socket, and I prefer fingerprint ID to
facial ID.

> I really turned my career towards kernel work, or standalone code. In the past 15 years I did not even own a computer.  My life was going along no better, no worse.


> I am dipping my toes in that cold, fast flowing river, just to discover it is really a lukwarm, barely moving swamp.  The scenery is fascinating, tempting and amusing.  Much more middle age, full of bureaucracy, complicated, but still;  no new concept was created past 1972.
> Challenge me on that, and a much longer letter will come your way :-))

You know, I really wish I could, but I can't. In fact that was a theme
of my talk: in the early 1990s, once 32-bit x86 became affordable, we
turned our backs on all tech development since the mid-1970s and went
back and raided the _previous_ generation of minicomputer OSes.

It is the "worse is better" principle:
https://www.dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html

Unix was _good enough_ so we have not moved forwards.
Windows NT in some ways closely resembles VAX/VMS. This is no
surprise; they have the same lead programmer. It was good enough.

So all developments since then have gone away. Smalltalk, Oberon, Lisp
Machines, Plan 9, Inferno, Taos/Intent/Elate, microkernels -- all
ignored and now forgotten.

Instead, as you say, we have grotesquely bloated early-1970s OSes.

One interesting post-Unix project is alive and well in a tiny, tiny
niche. Prof Niklaus Wirth's Oberon language and OS. It may interest
you. I am trying to learn it.
http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2009/04/22/oberon/

I have a collection of links here:
https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/46523.html

> Live long and prosper my friend.  Your name sounds familiar.

I used to write for a lot of magazines and websites. They are almost
all dead now. Today, I do manuals for a Linux distribution instead.

-- 
Liam Proven – Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk – gMail/gTalk/gHangouts: lproven at gmail.com
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