These days the world is amazing. Oracle Cloud gives you a ton for free. But perhaps there's some niche where this is useful. I have to say that this shared screen comms system is outrageously crazy, hahaha.
>shared screen comms system is outrageously crazy,
Thats Freston idea. I remember our typically chat begins with something like "Hey Laks, Can you see me typing!" ;)
somtimes the "wrong" / "old" tool for some job is exactly right for you if you really understand it. UML is old but fits here.
15 years is long enough to call memory about a lot of things.
The ZX Spectrum that followed, with its huge 48K of RAM was night and day. The programs were so much more complicated.
Even echo on linux these days takes 38K of disk space and a baseline of 13K of memory to execute, before whatever is required to hold the message you're repeating.
https://youtu.be/XXBxV6-zamM?t=1694
RAM was so tight on those 8-bit machines that many games used tricks like hiding things inside the viewable area of the screen to eck out just a little bit more.
Of course, there's far more money in really fancy shared hosting that wastes resources, so that's the current model. Then you market to C-level folks that "real companies" host on AWS or Azure, and that all others options are "unserious." If your opex for compute isn't a million, you're wrong.
Even spinning up a VM can be enough friction for beginners. A browser shell is kind of “good enough” for that.
Probably why tools like this keep sticking around. Wanna try.
How many users can this support simultaneously? It says 256MB RAM per user, 8GB total on server? But it's probably more than 32 simultaneous users?
A year ago I bought a Intel N100 Mini PC with 16 GB DDR5 RAM and a 512 GB SSD for $170.
Maybe it could have hosted the site too. It's certainly a lot faster than Azure VMs with 4 "vCPUs".
Oh man, what a blast from the past. I have fond memories of learning linux networking with netkit (based on UML).
UML was a really really cool piece of technology.
If anybody is wondering, User Mode Linux lets you boot a Linux kernel as a normal linux process, and then run an userspace, still in a linux process. This is from 2001. Super cool.
It turns out that if you run a uml kernel and point its root at the root of the disk the host Linux is running on, there's a hell of a turf war between the two and no-one wins.
very easy to use. almost instant.
Great work giis.
I haven't used it, I didn't know it existed until now, but I'm happy it exists and has been providing service to those who need it. There should be more of this.