Posts by 9Rune5 554 posts • joined 19 Sep 2013
About two years ago I watched a Swedish documentary that covered several hypothesis as to why so many fish has disappeared from the Baltic sea.
One of the concerns raised were that the fleet of smaller fishing vessels were being replaced by large factory trawlers that were a lot more efficient. They fished so much fish that a lot of it was sold as feedstock to salmon breeders.
They confronted one of the ship-owners and he argued that if you looked at CO2 emissions (per ton of fish caught), their fleet was actually _better_ for the environment -- climate change and all that.
I thought that was quite illuminating. I am not entirely convinced yet that we as a society are solving the right problems. I think we can all agree on that we need to sacrifice such jerks into the nearest volcano to appease the Climate Gods (Ruffin and Pussface).
Someone once claimed that the reason they do this is to effectively demonstrate how insanely expensive it is to solely rely on renewables when you do not count nuclear as a renewable.
Those hippie protesters will then have to face angry mobs who very much like their hospitals and jobs supplied with reliable electricity.
OTOH that would be one helluva expensive lesson to learn. Hopefully they will see reason ere long.
Even when you get past this, expect to be asked what you’ve been doing, and the response of a blank look and mumble gives the impression you’ve been watching daytime reality TV.
My ex-boss (incidentally the best manager I have ever worked for) had such an interview once. The candidate exclaimed he did not want to discuss his gap year, which of course put our imagination into high gear.
The sad bit is that my ex-boss is a very nice and understanding person and I believe she would have accepted a "yeah... spent a year in the joint" reply. The non-answer was worse.
Microsoft has added a lot of tooling over the recent years. Much of it is geared towards supporting multiple platforms, since most developers share your concerns.
My latest project at work will most likely run exclusively on Windows boxes, but its CI tests are run using docker and linux. That is despite using a package called "Microsoft.Extensions.Hosting.WindowsServices", which as you guessed is very Windows-centric. There is still no #ifdef involved or "if (runningInWindows)" in my code. It just works, regardless of platform.
In the end I can deliver something that fits my customers' environments, both now and in the future. I believe many of them will adopt containers (and Linux) hand over fist in the coming years, so that is where my projects are moving as well.
So please be specific which walls you're seeing.
Is the whole team remote or just new hires?
I think they are leaning towards 'the whole team'.
What you are describing sounds more like bad mgmt to me. I try to avoid those type of environments.
But --it happens everywhere. A year ago I basically accused my then manager of sabotage. He was extremely incompetent and rather nasty. And he was of the opinion that tech leads and architects must work on-site. Fortunately my view was shared by others, so that manager got replaced by somebody much more qualified.
A friend of mine is relocating to a big house (almost the size of a mansion) that comes with its own tennis court (roughly the size of his old apartment). His employer is about to announce that they will now hire people regardless of where they live.
I have long been thinking that people should be less accepting of having to live someplace they are not happy.
I did that myself a few years ago. My location is not perfect (no tennis court! :) ), but more than good enough.1.5 km to the beach (in any direction) and a fiber connection to the rest of the world.
I was firmware updating a new Lenovo the other week at User level privilege
Hopefully the firmware file was signed and the driver first verified that the signature checked out okay.
Either way, it would not have hurt them to require elevation so that we won't have to question their implementation.
There was probably customer demand to do it the way they did. After all, an elevated process can spin up drivers as needed. So the driver is pre-installed to allow user-mode apps to initiate the flash. But it certainly does not feel like this approach will be found on any 'security best practices' lists.
You weren't 100% wrong, but you weren't 100% correct either.
One could easily butt heads with various limitations. E.g. debugging .net memory leaks was problematic, because the debugger could easily conclude that any memory dump bigger than a couple of gigabytes was simply a bridge too far.
Now, they rectified that problem to some extent (spawn off a separate process for the debugger I think), but it was unnecessary to begin with. Had devenv.exe been 64-bit to begin with, it would've just worked.
There is also a performance angle here. Back in the day, it wasn't uncommon to harvest at least 7% performance gain from going 64-bit. I do not believe 32-bit code caught up with that. The extra registers alone is worth the price of admission.
I suspect once VS2022 has matured through a major patch or two, it will be noticeably better than what we have now. I expect refactoring improvements on par with jetbrains' reSharper product. (I suspect the 32-bit limitations made such improvements difficult)
all occupy about 500MB of RAM during normal operation
If only that was all they did...
Epic's game store currently burns a steady 1% CPU on my 8 core ryzen (16 logical cores). And if I switch to the store view, it burns 3-4% CPU. That does not sound too much, until you realize that it is burning about 20-25% of one core. And it is just sitting there: I'm not even using it. Starting the thing is a monumental task, but I'm guessing a lot of that is spent firing off several http requests to do whatever it needs to do. It is a far cry from Steam and perhaps the reason they have to give away a game every week to persuade punters to not jump ship.
Cræpware.
if I need to build a desktop application
How likely is that? Enterprises seem to shy away from desktop apps in any shape or form? The lure of zero-deployment web apps is very strong. I believe our industry just took a giant step back.
I thought they would end up sitting in an electric wheelchair while manning a conveyor belt spot welding parts to other parts (like a robotic arm).
Kinda reminds me of that episode of "Silicon Valley" where all their cool technology ended up as "the box" that got stuck in a rack someplace nobody could see it.
If you buy something that normally lasts for maybe a decade (or more) and part of it fails after a couple of months, and then the replacement also fails... etc...
Then yeah, I say 'sue!'.
However, when you buy a 30 year old car, then I do not think you can expect much. Or when you buy a VW, famously known for fudging their numbers a lot. Or when you buy a French car.
This statement took me a bit by surprise, because the oil price was low last year and has barely recouped. I suspected that perhaps because the demand for gasoline dropped, the refineries had reduced their production which in turn affected other areas.
But according to https://www.wsj.com/articles/one-week-texas-freeze-seen-triggering-monthslong-plastics-shortage-11615973401 the shortage in chemicals is due to the Texas freeze.
The February freeze that triggered mass blackouts in Texas led to chemical plant shutdowns that are disrupting global supply chains, causing a shortage of the raw materials needed for everything from medical face shields to smartphones.
Hopefully this is a short-lived shortage.
I have a DS918+ which has served me quite well for the past two years.
Synology's software is easy to use, but lately I've realised I am slowly (but surely) moving away from Synology's own packages and over to docker. One problem is with runtime versions. Synology's own packages use older runtimes (I think I had three different versions of python at one point) and it struck me that docker was just easier and felt a lot cleaner.
I enjoy their filesystem though. I've already replaced two drives in order to gain a bigger volume, and I was able to do that without offloading anything. I'm keeping an eye out for alternatives though (https://serverfault.com/a/272835/ is one thread I'd love to see some more in depth answers to).
Its caching strategy looks a bit cumbersome to me. I have a few things running that would benefit from the m.2 drives I added, but Synology enforces those to be designated for its own caching purposes. I suspect I could do better and actually help the thing hibernate during the night.
The way it handles its volume baffles me. I believe that I have to create shares off its root. I can't create my own hierarchy and share something deeper down.
Another quirk is the lack of WireGuard support. There are some workarounds, but nothing official at this point AFAICT. Isn't their OS based on Linux? Why does it feel like they're lagging behind?
I suspect I, at this point, might be better served by FreeNAS. Assuming I could still get a dynamic RAID like SHR up and running.
If you had been watching Dave's garage regularly you would realize just _why_ the comments were stripped (albeit temporarily) and why your post looks foolish.
That said, if the code is well written, with meaningful function names, comments are not all that important. Those who use JET are better off now than they were only a week ago.
My first thought was "there was probably a reason why that device was disconnected in the first place".
I.e. it was already broken, but hadn't quite let out all of the magic smoke yet.
A little googling suggests that power cables used in 110V environments have a beefier wire gauge (because apparently there is only a single hot lead?). So it should have worked better than the cable it replaced.
But yeah, some of these stories sometimes feel like someone is blowing smoke up our .... :)
I bought a TV two years ago.
FWIW, don't bother too much with the "smart" TV features. You are going to end up with some kind of box that replaces the built-in shite anyway. (I use an nVidia Shield).
Also: They still have not landed on a standard, so you either get DolbyVision or HDR10+. And if you get a panel that is bright enough to do HDR some real justice, you'll probably not have low enough latency to play games on it.
TL;DR: Planned obsolescence is still a thing.
I started getting irritated at the rich, whining idiots during the '87 season.
From an outsiders POV, I find it fascinating how much money is tied up in professional sports. And though part of me is jealous of the overpaid athletes, I'm even more jealous at the team owners who rake in even more money.
I completely fail to see the value in anything those guys (be it owners or athletes) are doing. I get that it is a fun pastime activity (I too love playing various sports with friends), but to have that as a job? And an insanely well-paid job at that? wtf... (and then there are people who spend their time watching other people have fun? Some form of voyeurism? Or is it 'monkey see, monkey do'?)
This world is nuts.
This is not the first time The Reg has linked to Dave's youtube channel, and over the past couple of months I've become a fan.
His deep-dives into the sordid world of LEDs is fascinating and I fear I will eventually have to pick up some LEDs myself one day. I am not stupid however, and I realize I will probably end up electrocuting myself, but I will hopefully have some fun before I get to that point.
There are various gold nuggets to find as well. Even something mundane as Windows' format drive dialog becomes interesting when Dave covers it and explains why (oh why!) the thing is limited to 32GB when faced with FAT32.
The outro to each video ("this chair is for someone who likes to rock") doesn't fully make sense to me though, but makes me smile nonetheless.
Well worth a visit.
As does the internal reaction to working with an arm of the world’s largest fossil fuel company.
Isn't that a good news scenario if you're a fervent believer in the CO2 climate knob hypothesis?
A fossil fuel company that is now looking for other business areas would suggest that said business is looking for alternatives to keep operating when their main business fizzles out.
Or is the expectation here that we the citizens should make this company pay for their folly? Run them into the ground as it were?
Personally I'd be more concerned with any human rights violations perpetrated by the Saudis, but that is just me.
Why ...not?
The US is currently waging a cold war on both nations.
...but... I think China consider Biden to be a weak candidate that they can push a lot when it comes time to sit down and negotiate a new trade deal.
Russia's problems are less recent and they fare badly no matter who controls the white house. They might find it a fun exercise to spike the election enough to cause a stir, but I do not see them gaining anything by doing so. Except perhaps in Syria, seeing as the Democrats were getting ready to wage a war there. (it mystifies me why the media thought that was an okay thing to do)
But sure... The russian hacker(s) left some sort of Putin thumbprint, found by the same idiots who couldn't keep their systems secure in the first place.
And hey, Dominion is probably not using any SolarWinds software, nor are they susceptible to that level of hacking. Besides, every Dominion software release is heavily scrutinized and compiled by a trusted third-party. It is only the other guys who fell victim to this attack.
Never mind that Christine Fang was in bed with one of the most vocal proponents of "Russian collusion" Eric Swallwell. Maybe she was really a russian?
"Fingerprints" is very vague and hand-wavery. An example or two would go a long way... I do understand that an individual hacker may reuse old tricks and there might be a red thread to follow in one way or another, but that a whole nation of hackers would act in uniform does not quite compute. For one thing, hacking involves a lot of outside the box thinking. If every russian hacker thought outside the box in the same way, then there would be no russian hackers, because it is easy to protect against group think, but not not so easy to protect against every insane idea that someone bounces around.
Hackers that are smart enough to infiltrate SolarWinds, yet stupid enough to get caught by their own government.... Something of an oxymoron I would have thought, but okay, I'll take your word for it.
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