Me too, although it's been a long time since Photon.
"This environment runs as a virtual machine, using QEMU on Ubuntu. To try the image, you'll need: Ubuntu 22.04 or 24.04." So it doesn't boot on bare metal?
Maybe they're trying to get away from needing Windows. The previous recommended development environment was cross-compilation from Windows.
The big news here is that they have a reasonable non-commercial license again.[1]
The trouble is, QNX did that twice before, then took it away.[2] Big mistake. They lost their developer base. Support of open source tools on QNX stopped. As I once told a QNX sales rep, "Stop worrying about being pirated and worry about being ignored".
They'll need to commit contractually to not yanking the non-commercial license to get much interest.
QNX should be licensed like Unreal Engine. If you ship enough products using it, it gets noticed and they contact you about payments, and if you're not shipping much product, Unreal doesn't care. This has created a big pool of Unreal developers, which, in turn, induces game studios to use Unreal. Unreal's threshold is US$1 million in sales.
Apparently they opened things up a bit last year, but nobody noticed.
Usefully, there is a QNX Board Support Package for the Raspberry PI, so you can target that.
QNX would be good for IOT things on Raspberry PI machines, where you don't want the bloat and attack surface of a full Linux installation.
> They lost their developer base. Support of open source tools on QNX stopped.
Right. These days it's better to invest into Redox OS[1] as a potential substitute for it (if work on real time capability). And with real time patches merged into Linux mainline[2] QNX doesn't stand much chance today too.
> And with real time patches merged into Linux mainline[2] QNX doesn't stand much chance today too.
Correct me if I'm wrong but these and other Linux patches were always about soft real time and Linux never had hard real time capability because of its architecture.
Those videos are very impressive. This is real progress on tasks at which robotics have been failing for fifty years.
Here are some of the same tasks being attempted as part of the DARPA ARM program in 2012.[1] Compare key-in-lock and door opening with the 2025 videos linked above.
Huge improvement.
I would argue that Morse code is not only alive and well in the amateur radio hobby but actively being adopted by younger people both in and out of the hobby. I just got a holiday card from a college friend whose 6 year old has taken an interest in Morse code despite knowing nothing about the existence of amateur radio.
Ok? Just because there has been a drop in the number of licensees and the exam no longer requires Morse code wouldn't necessarily put Morse on a list of "methods of transferring information we may have lost historically that we don't even recognize".
At least in the US, ham radio is far from a dying hobby and Morse code is actively being learned by people of all ages.
> but Lisp is special, and for those times it was very special.
It was the only language available at the time suitable for embedding. Memory-safe, small interpreter, sane. Alternatives were Forth and TRAC, which would have been much worse. Pascal would have been better, but it was too hard to squeeze in.
The program and data had to fit in 640K. The program was built as a tree of overlays and code was swapped in, so less used code wasn't resident. But it was a cram job.
You may be already aware with this, but if not, Walker actually did write a small Forth (ATLAST -- https://www.fourmilab.ch/atlast/) which was used for (I think) DXFTOOL (a file converter).
It was later used by a small computer graphics studio in Tennessee for a blue/green screen matting utility and a fast roto-paint program.
The tone timing is in the audio sample is weird and out of spec. Minimum tone duration is 65 ms, and minimum pause duration between tones is 65ms. [1] That example has much longer tones than pauses, and there seem to be some back to back tones. The article says it's taking too long to send the data, and that's why.
If you send tones 100ms long with 100ms pauses, a conservative rate, you can get 5 digits per second.
That's about what "redial" on my phone clocks at.
Something that the social media industry will try hard to stop: users placing an AI agent between themselves and their social media accounts. Smarter clients that front-end a large number of social media services may be the answer to the hassles of federation. If somebody works this right, Facebook/X/Instagram could be Left Behind.
The legacy social media providers face a quandary - prevent all embedding and hide from search, or be front-ended.
When it is their own AI, encourage; anyone else's, prevent.
How do ads work when ever fewer real people are looking at them? Targetting specifically people who don't use AI is one option — I hear there's big bucks in literal fraud ads, and the big players (or at least Musk) do seem somewhat opposed to basic regulatory requirements such as "tell us who paid for these ads".
The FSF isn't here for large organisations. It's here for us, the public. You can't really expect any entity to fund something that isn't in their interest. Even if they did it would be more for a PR piece and they'd cut it as soon as they could. That's why it's important that we (the public) fund organisations that fight for us.
What I think should instead be evaluated is how effective that investment into the FSF can be.
I think we also need to think more strategically here. For instance, LibreOffice should really receive a lot more funding and support by states all across this planet. I am tired of the US monopoly (almost a monopoly) here (Microsoft).
I don't think the FSF foundation has been an effectibe organization for a long time, but giving money to the Linix Foundation is even worse. Look at where their money actually goes - a vanishingly small portion is actually used to improve Linux and its ecosystem.
The topic on whether FSF is an effective organization is too big to fit on a comment, but I'll just add my two cents on how the FSF helped me this week:
I was looking into shared key encryption, found Shamir's Secret Sharing algorithm, found a GNU implementation called ssss.
The FSF goes against the interests of companies like Amazon. For instance, they recommend AGPL for web services, big tech hates it, they will rather rewrite the thing from scratch under a permissive or proprietary license then use anything AGPL.
In fact, the trend is to move away from GNU. Clang over GCC, musl over glibc, uutils over coreutils, etc...
The FSF has an extremist position. Not only they promote free software, but they also don't want proprietary software to even be an option. For instance Debian is not up to their standards because they have optional repositories for nonfree software. I can't imagine Amazon supporting such an organization.
If you like that sort of thing, see "AGV Garden".[1]
(This is the port of Rotterdam, ten years ago. Sped up about 3x. Most big ports look like that now. Automated driving works really well when all those pesky humans are out of the way.)
"This environment runs as a virtual machine, using QEMU on Ubuntu. To try the image, you'll need: Ubuntu 22.04 or 24.04." So it doesn't boot on bare metal?
Maybe they're trying to get away from needing Windows. The previous recommended development environment was cross-compilation from Windows.
The big news here is that they have a reasonable non-commercial license again.[1] The trouble is, QNX did that twice before, then took it away.[2] Big mistake. They lost their developer base. Support of open source tools on QNX stopped. As I once told a QNX sales rep, "Stop worrying about being pirated and worry about being ignored". They'll need to commit contractually to not yanking the non-commercial license to get much interest.
QNX should be licensed like Unreal Engine. If you ship enough products using it, it gets noticed and they contact you about payments, and if you're not shipping much product, Unreal doesn't care. This has created a big pool of Unreal developers, which, in turn, induces game studios to use Unreal. Unreal's threshold is US$1 million in sales.
Apparently they opened things up a bit last year, but nobody noticed.
Usefully, there is a QNX Board Support Package for the Raspberry PI, so you can target that. QNX would be good for IOT things on Raspberry PI machines, where you don't want the bloat and attack surface of a full Linux installation.
[1] https://qnx.software/en/developers/get-started/getting-start...
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2024/11/11/qnx_8_freeware/
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