In the case of houses, I would think in most cases there's less conflict between prettiness and efficiency, for things like furniture there's much less space for the aesthetics to make a given piece more or less functional or efficient. However the tension isn't entirely gone, Juicero and 'McMansions' spring to mind as possible counterexamples.
I don't think paragonating email clients to houses makes all that much sense. Unless you use them for personal stuff (but most people use mobile phones or webmails for that these days, that to manage 1 personal account it's fine) email clients are a professional tool, used at work.
So it's more correct paragonating them to a factory, where furniture doesn't need to look good but it needs to be functional, safe and reliable.
The SmallInteger limitation is probably because as an optimisation they stored them as immediate values rather than generic objects, and Squeak shares this limitation (the newer Spur format extends this to one or more additional types depending on image bitness).
Related to references and the above, Eliot Miranda's blog may be informative as it provides both details and sometimes code for many of the changes that have happened in the Squeak (and now OpenSmalltalk) VM, e.g. http://www.mirandabanda.org/cogblog/2013/09/13/lazy-become-a...
There have been very extensive changes since 2002, yep, such as a much improved interpreter, a JIT, a replacement of the original object memory format which incidentally supports faster become and most recently a new bytecode set.
Even broader is the one in the drafted repeal of the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act, the scope of (b) being particularly worrying - what exactly counts a related purported decision?
'A court of law may not question— (a) the exercise or purported exercise of the powers referred to in section 2,(b) any decision or purported decision relating to those powers, or (c) the limits or extent of those powers.'
My take is that this means the courts may not question any legal exercise of those powers sure, but if the exercise of the powers is found to be contrary to law then it is void and subject to judicial review. And that’s fine, there shouldn’t be any way to bypass judicial review.
Perhaps but the mother of all ouster clauses still survives and is likely to be effective (and should be, in my view): the section of the 1689 Bill of Rights which reads "That the Freedome of Speech and Debates or Proceedings in Parlyament ought not to be impeached or questioned in any Court or Place out of Parlyament."
It would be even better if Kallithea or RhodeCode adopted the UI style shared by GitHub/Gogs/Gitea and friends. Then we could have the best of both worlds - good, well-known UI but with software that isn't as closely coupled to Git as some others are (and is lightweight with requirements)
Not the author, but the kernel is Multiboot compliant. See: https://sortix.org/man/man7/installation.7.html 'If you wish to dual boot, you need an existing operating system with a multiboot compliant bootloader such as GRUB.'
The kernel(7) is a multiboot compatible binary that can be loaded by any multiboot specification compatible bootloader such as GRUB. You need to use such a bootloader to boot the operating system. You will be offered the choice of installing GRUB as the bootloader."
Allowing the user to choose their own bootloader makes this particular small project a rare find, IMO.
I use another multiboot specification compatible bootloader that I prefer over grub.
I also like how he offers both 32 and 64bit.
I guess this project has been posted to HN before. Perhaps at that time it still did not yet have networking.
Author here. Yep, I don't want to force a particular bootloader on anyone. The bootloader is a piece of software owned by the system administrator, not necessarily by any of the several operating systems installed side by side. If I force a bootloader on the user, that makes dual boot configuration harder, and it's important to allow that. I happen to follow GRUB's multiboot specification, which has the advantage that a lot of bootloaders implement it. It's not perfect though and I'll probably invent and adopt my own bootloader protocol in the future, but the sysadmin's choice of bootloader continues to be important on my mind.
