There is a strategic benefit to ensure the ecosystem is healthy - for the sake of your customers. But only if you consider it a long term investment.
Posts by Stephendeg
29 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Aug 2009
WordPress.org denies service to WP Engine, potentially putting sites at risk
How Europe can force Apple to support competition
Samsung takes bite out of Apple over its mega marketing misstep
End-to-end encryption may be the bane of cops, but they can't close that Pandora's Box
Cloud vendor lock-in is shocking, but there's a get out of jail card
Head of Israeli cyber spy unit exposed ... by his own privacy mistake
Re: "9% of them do so within three days"
> “Microsoft Windows is also the only mainstream desktop OS which allows software to write into the memory of other applications running as the same user account without a simple way to prevent it”
Please tell me you’re kidding?
Search has failed me - do you have a citation ?
Microsoft unbundling Teams is to appease regulators, not give customers a better deal
Re: Don't just consider the cost savings...
Slack - and discord, which is slack for young people - has significant usability benefits for many users.
I often use Slack ‘huddle’, google meet, and Ms Teams for work. Have also used Facebook messenger, FaceTime and Jitsi meet.
While there are many differences, the deciding factor isn’t what is ‘better’, it is the need to talk to someone means using the platform they are stuck with.
GitHub struggles to keep up with automated malicious forks
CLIs are simply wizard at character building. Let’s not keep them to ourselves
Revival of Medley/Interlisp: Elegant weapon for a more civilized age sharpened up again
Re: lore
I like this new approach that doesn’t just hide the annoying parenthesis with indentation. A big improvement in readability.
> “Rhombus is a new language that is built on Racket. It offers the same kind of language extensibility as Racket itself, but using traditional (infix) notation. Although Rhombus is far from the first language to support Lisp-style macros without Lisp-style parentheses, Rhombus offers a novel synthesis of macro technology that is practical and expressive.[…]”
Rhombus: A New Spin on Macros Without All the Parentheses (SPLASH 2023 - OOPSLA) - SPLASH 2023
https://2023.splashcon.org/details/splash-2023-oopsla/52/Rhombus-A-New-Spin-on-Macros-without-All-the-Parentheses
presentation by Matthew Flatt at SPLASH’23
https://youtu.be/c7S5WPsw_gM?si=ki-PmtCSuVaGp3Eb&t=4371
Try a modern Lisp
While I’m a big fan of retro-computing, but it would be a mistake to think lisps were an evolutionary dead end. After Common Lisp was standardised in the 90’s the Scheme community continued to innovate. In that tradition I highly recommend trying out a modern lisp that is still actively developed, has a great native code compiler, a compiler to Javascript, advanced metaprogramming, is cross platform, open source, has many tools and libraries, lots of documentation and books and a vibrant community: https://racket-lang.org/
(It’s the VW Multivan of modern lisps)
How 'AI watermarking' system pushed by Microsoft and Adobe will and won't work
Bosch goes all-in on hydrogen with €2.5B investment by 2026
The wild world of non-C operating systems
Macmillan best-biscuit list unexpectedly promotes breakfast cereal to treat status
JavaScript, GitHub, AWS crowned winners in massive survey of 32,000 developers
Who knew? Hadoop is over, says former Hortonworks guru Scott Gnau
“unique” proprietary data platform.
I don’t know how unique it it, but I don’t mind sharing my limited experience (using the health integration product); it ran fast on old hardware, was easy to integrate with RDBMS, it would quite happily ‘pretend’ to be an RDBMS, years of uptime without a crash/restart, and excellent support here in the UK.
I don’t work for them and have no intentions of doing so - but I’d love to know if others fared worse.
A fine host for a Raspberry Pi: The Register rakes a talon over the NexDock 2
I just want a good rPi laptop
I just want a good rPi laptop, I’m sure the pi-top(3?) is fine if you want to do hardware stuff, but I just want to use the good educational stuff on raspbian in a cheap laptop form that is a reasonable price. Maybe this already exists. (Please don’t say chrome book - it is the closed opposite of raspbian)
FUSE for macOS: Why a popular open source library became closed source and commercially licensed

Embarrassing
It is embarrassing that I used to spend more on hosting and AWS than on donating to OSS that I use every day(not a browser). I’ve dropped AWS, switched to free hosting, and instead donate a very small amount.
If you want your favourite tool to hang about I’d suggest donating if you can afford it. Even a small amount helps. I donate to my choice of OSS via https://sfconservancy.org/ but I believe github has launched a way to do it too.
Chrome ad-blocker crackdown preview due late July. Here's a half-dozen reasons why add-on devs are still upset
It's the wobbly Microsoft service sweepstake! If you have 'Teams', you've won a lifetime Slack sub
Amazon’s Snowball snowballs as Google's clone gets real and IBM's comes to Europe
NASA dusts off FORTRAN manual, revives 20-year-old data on Ganymede
The alternatives to password protection
Security deposit or fill in a police report
Would it be wrong to ask for a £50 security deposit when issuing a password.
- If it is stolen it should be in a police report. If you lose/forget it you lose your deposit.
Nothing focuses the mind like a £50 note.
(this does mean the delivery of accounts would have to meet a similar high standard)