“Hacker folklore that pays homage to ‘wizards’ and speaks of incantations and demons has too much psychological truthfulness about it to be entirely a joke.”
If you have a smart TV, it probably runs an ARM-architecture Linux or Android (which amounts to a bunch of extra stuff piled onto Linux) to drive the logic and ui to support connecting to the internet and downloading and updating streaming apps and other smart TV crap.
most of the time they'll run some minimal stripped-down version of these operating systems to support only features needed for the TV and it's functions. buildroot is an open source project that specializes in producing hyper slim Linux OS installation images for devices like these.
if I had to guess, they had a USB full of shows plugged in and the smart tv's solution was to just boot up the linux version of VLC in a bare x session when the user hits play on "totally_not_pirated_smallville_s01e03.mkv" on their thumbdrive. not a terrible solution, honestly: VLC just plays anything.
The old kernel is because a lot of low level hardware has available drivers written for it that are intended to be loaded into old versions of the Linux kernel (at time of release perhaps) and are then just never updated lol, at least not for ARM. sometimes there are breaking changes with kernel apis and stuff as the kernel version increases over time, so the easier solution for someone trying to make a TV, over begging and/or paying the hardware developers to update their drivers, is to just run an old kernel version.
everything is a hack. nearly all these smart devices are just general-purpose computers with ancient (predictable, cheap) software and inescapable interfaces taped over the front, and a whole lot of digital duct tape on the back.
I wouldn't really call this a hack, electronic devices would cost twice as much of every OEM had to come up with their own hardware, drivers, frontend etc. Besides, this allows hobbyists to play with their hardware much more easily
Monroe electronics now https://www.digitalalertsystems.com/products makes boxes for cable headends that handle the emergency alert systems. It runs redhat if I remember correctly. They have internet connections a couple of different radio receivers in them. Centos here though
I love that she sees a screen of text she doesn't understand, finds a few parts she does and freaks out, but turns out she doesn't understand those either.
"Below" is used as a stranded preposition in your case (the more generally accepted usage), whereas the original post uses it at an adjective. While usage of "below" as an adjective is not universal, it is still accepted by some dictionaries. I could only find the Webster English Dictionary as an example, so I suppose it's mostly exclusive to American English. So yes, your example is the more universal mode (as well as my personal preference), but American English generally accepts the above usage as proper grammar. (The sentence above, as well as this one, demonstrate the usage of "above," a relative locus, as both an adjective and a preposition in modern English).
It took me way too long to realize that all words and grammar were made up by some one at some point while they were being silly. Ever since then I came to the conclusion that people can speak however the fuck they want so long as I understand them.
There's a fine line between being understood and being misunderstood. They can't just talk however they like if they don't wanna increase the risk of the latter.
No, the equivalent would be a kernel panic that the other user had linked. This is a situation where the RAM is fully used and a program's request for memory cannot be fulfilled. This is still a very bad situation because pretty much everything will grind to a halt. The Linux kernel thus makes a decision to kill a process (or multiple) until enough RAM is available again. Usually it kills the process with the most used RAM, but there's methods to influence the decision.
Nope, this is "Your system ran out of memory and now this program isn't reacting anymore (it's trying to allocate memory but there is no free memory left). Please stop the program or try to get rid of some of its subprocesses to free up memory."
Not yet. It can lead to that point, but this is just the kernel handling an "out of memory" situation. The kernel in the screenshot is configured to run its OOM reaper / OOM killer.
The OOM reaper checks all running processes and looks for the one that causes the least disruption when killed. It does that by calculating a score which is based on the amount of memory a process uses, how recently it was launched and so on. Ideally, a Linux desktop user would simply see their video game, browser or media player close.
This smart TV is in real trouble, though, it probably already killed its OSD, still didn't even have enough memory to spawn a login shell and is now making short work of strange VLC instances that probably got left behind by a poorly written app store app :)
I'm not even at the point of processing if this is satire or not. Is the context that killing a process is offensive? I mean I get 'sacrifice child', but 'kill process'?
Translation: "HELP I JUST BOUGHT THIS THING OFF AMAZON THAT'S SUPPOSED TO GIVE ME FREE TV TO DISTRACT MY KIDS BUT NOW ITS SAYING THINGS I DONT UNDERSTAND AND IM SCARED"