Posts by cdegroot 168 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Dec 2014
Second life also showed that the human brain is more than happy to make up the missing bits when were staring at a 3d rendering on a flat screen and by the time Meta started burning cash, it was clear that people don't even want to wear polarizing glasses to increase 3D fidelity (see the massive continued success of 3D TV and Movie theaters, not)
I still want a VR headset, for games and flight sims it is rumoured to be fun. But that's a tiny marked, comparitatively.
That rendered to a resolution much lower than what's on your wrist today, of course.
Still, we.can - and should if we ever want to take the term."software engineering" seriously - start by stating what a reasonable amount of CPU and memory is for a CAD system that renders true color on 4K. I think that current systems are bloated by at least two, if not three orders, of magnitude.
Rust is a reasonable answer for when you really need low level safety. Issue is: 99% of the time, you dont need that. There are many, many languages much better suited for application writing (heck, C# could probably be close to self-hosting) but somehow "rewrite to Rust" is this decade's craze. its just as bad a choice as C, C++, and Golang were.
But yeah, it's clear that pot is legal in Washington state. They're partaking of it a lot in Redmond.
"Worse is better". It always wins, as its just simpler to learn the ropes by cobbling something up in your browser than installing a runtime for a properly designed language.
People often say that the web would have looked much better if Netscape had stuck with their original plan (Scheme or Lua, I dont recall, some decent language instead something homebrew that got pushed put too quickly) but no, someone would have implemented something sloppy on top and everybody would have pivoted to that.
In the absence of software engineering with quality and safety standards, the easiest solution will keep winning.
There are in the order of 10E12 SQLite databases on the planeet. There's a large addressable market for support jobs, I'd say.
Not with a relatively niche product like anything Kuberbetes, used by corporations and cloud providers.
But yes, they need to figure things out. Good for the NGinx Ingress maintainers. The hardest and most important part of maintaining Open Source is saying "No" .
My couple of jobs were mostly Mac first companies. Usually peeps in finance got the exception, as they need "real" Excel.
I guess El Reg hasn't asked "Silicon Valley" because that's where I work and all you see is Macs.
(Alas because I dont like macOS at all so I have to install a Linux VM on the thing. MacOS is not good at virtualization so VMs need to be left smaller than under Window or Linux which get by with less CPU and RAM for the host OS and thus more for my VM)
> GitHub and, more sporadically, Visual Studio Code I have had to keep using because they're monopolies in a way even Windows isn't
It's a sad day when developers can't manage to properly choose their tools anymore. Yes, I'm an old fart. Maybe I lost out insisting to use the same ol' IDE since version 18.54. There's alternatives out there, and certainly VSC is avoidable (GitHub not, but that does not mean you need to actively contribute to the problem. I migrated to Source Hut when this nonsense got too bad, which is excellent).
Its investor valuation. I give you 10 guilders for 25% of your company, which means I think your company is worth 40.
Note, too, that these investors aren't collectively crazy. Theyre just gambling on that one of these shops may be the next Google and that is pretty much their job. Place a lot of bets and if only one pays off, you can show your backers a positive return on investment. Also, the FOMO is real. A VC fund won't often be asked why they did invest in something - that's their job - but eyebrows will be raised if an opportunity walked by, they said no, and then that opportunity exits at an eyewatering amount of money.
In other words, things are mostly working as intended.
Dont worry, that will happen in Chrome at some point. Google is slowly building their own walled garden called "formerly known as The Internet". And indeed with the protection racket that is formerly known as the US Government, they will do that unchallenged and unharmed. Then the Big Monetization can begin.
I was able to work four days at my previous job and it was awesome for everyone involved. However, a day less... Not so sure. Too much weekend interfering with work and trying to cram everything in just three days sounds stressful.
Anyway, we will all be displaced by AI real soon now so what are we on about. Zero day work week it is (without pay, of course).
Eyeballing Aurora RDS and regular RDS, my myself experience says you get around four nines for free. Which is pretty awesome, frankly. I mean, backups, point in time recovery, encryption, automatic minor version upgrades, a lot of stuff you'd need to have proper skills for in-house otherwise.
The fifth nine? Probably doable but that's not something you can just buy. Now you need expertise and probably the level of control that cloud databases can't give you. IOW it will cost real money, like it always has.
Still, working mostly at startups, I take that win.
Ubuntu keeps trying but I feel they've bet on the wrong horse (GNOME). I've briefly used KDE and came away very impressed, more unified than my Win10 laptop even,which still shows me grey oldskool cobtrol panels now and then.
If course, I quickly reverted to my comfy niche customized desktop :)
Another good reason not to accept Open Pen office jobs.
Typing happily away on my super loud mechanical keyboard while WFH...
(Canadian Mattias makes their own brand of mechanical switches including a silent one for said employee holding areas but I like the loud Gateron switches on my Keychron Q11 better)
Some linguists argue that, given that hoi is a definite article, the phrase "the hoi polloi" is redundant, akin to saying "the the masses". Others argue that this is inconsistent with other English loanwords.[12] The word "alcohol", for instance, derives from the Arabic al-kuhl, al being an article, yet "the alcohol" is universally accepted as good grammar.[13]
(Wikipedia)
A twenty-high stack of these was the first Linux distro i installed. Someone at a local uni dumped it on tape for me (I had no internet) and at work the QIC went into the IBM RT, the through Kermit to my PC, then i finally got to go home with my stack of floppies to install, I think it was SLS where it quickly became the main OS for my Fidonet BBS and I never looked back since.
Does the kernel fit on twenty floppies these days?
AGPL is fine. If you host AGPL softwate to the public, you jeed to share your changes, no big deal. It was tailor made for Redis and Elastic and whoever else has gone "source available" since then.
I see it as a litmus test of sorts. Does a company want to actively be a member of the commons or just profit? In the latter case, yes, you will find reasons to reject the AGPL.
A buddy of mine got contracted to write license key code in the early '90s and did that by implementing it in a mini programming language that he implemented in a homebrewn Forth and mixed with various obfuscation techniques everywhere.
We did a lot of reverse engineering back in the day and it was the first time I gave up.
One of the unexpected benefits of me switching to NixOS is that even kernel patching is declarative.
My motherboard wants a version of the it87 driver that exposes more ports than the kernel bundled driver allows; I forgot the details but the solution was to have a custom built it87 driver and disable the kernel-supplied one.
Both driver build and kernel change are relatively simple to express in some Nix code, which I added to that machine's NixOS configuration, and since then - well over a year now, three NixOS releases and numerous kernel version bumps - that code just does the right thing. If a Nix upgrade comes.with a new kernel, it gets patched, the custom it87 driver gets built, and all I ever notice is spinning fans while the kernel compile happens.
It's magic, frankly. I've been using Linux since pretty much day one and this is the first time that something like this actually works.
I have both BEV and PHEV, and our PHEV has 95% electric use and zero range anxiety. The BEV is for fun but I'd never consider it as a first car. I think our driving patterns are fairly typical - lots of short trips within PHEV battery range and the occasional longer one where the ICE kicks in,so to me it smells like a good solution to drastically decrease burning dino juice.
I guess the biggest issue is that the hybrid stuff only works for larger cars. I'd like to see an Aygo PHEV.
Frankly, just installing Steam seems enough these days. The only game with a work around in my library is ffxiv where I just installed the custom launcher (the square enix one is shit anyway), imported it into my steam lib, now I can remote play that as well.
Assuming of course you have am AMD card. Nvidia still is intent on making Linux users' lives hard,but that goes for windows as well with their stupid geforce all.
13% is a reasonable auction fee. I mean,double digit percentage commissions have always been accepted for the service of marketing, etc.
The egregious bit is that this is after the deal. Users have found Patreon, have downloaded the app, and now just for running transactions, where everybody is already fuming at MC and Visa (bloody amateurs with their 4%), they take a third.
This company needs to be regulated into oblivion.
Nonsense.
What has happened is that we went from a handful of artisanal craftsmen, who had to make their own tools, to millions of tool users and it has led to the extreme success of "software eating the world".
Of course if you buy a DeWalt cordless set at Home Depot you gave a different relationship with that tool than if you carefully constructed a bow drill, having to take into account exactly the one purpose the drill is to be used for, learning about the material you need to drill into, the quality of the cutting materials at your disposal, etc. The DeWalt, you pop in a drill bit and plunge it into whatever and now you have your hole and move on.
Moxie then contradicts himself by noting that these artisans still exist and make useful contributions.
I'd say, move on, nothing to report here. We are an industry now. Film at 11.
The whole point of malware detection is to get the detecting code out faster than the baddies can use new avenues of attack. That's why there is a clock ticking and thus that level of automation.
The question is of course why we're collectively at sea in leaky buckets. System design has constantly preferred speed and features over security, we're paying a price for that trade off.
The question is whether that price is (too) high. I'd focus though on, say, the constant effects of ransomware over this very press-friendly single event to decide that.
Rust does not need mainstream acceptance. Heck, it should not even be necessary to write coreutils in such a low level language.
There's plenty of excellent languages where the stack takes all thinking of memory management away from you, and a low level language like Rust (or C) can be used to bootstrap such a language but that's where you should stop using it. Maybe in some performance critical plugins andproba ly there are some oddball use cases, probably in fintech, where this level of control is required.
That won't stop the unwashed masses from jumping on this bandwagon, like with C or C++, and use it everywhere, appropriate or not.
But let's not pretend that that is how things should be.
Rust should be a niche language used by a couple of specialists. The other 99.99% of coders should stick with high level languages, with a runyime with garbage collection and all that jazz.
My hybrid seems to be able to run both oaraklek and serial but I've only ever seen it in the former.
I have both. The EV gives me constant range anxiety here in Canada but is great for the medium trips to famy etc. The PHEV with 60km battery range is used for the short and the long trips.
We fuel up maybe once every other month. I think that that is a step forward from keeping two gas guzzlers alive, so I really don't understand all the hate by the treehuggers. If everybody could switch to a PHEV gasoline usage and thus co2 emissions would plummet.
The reason,of course, that everybody is rolling their own rather then pay the somewhat silly fees for TF Cloud is that a) the fee structure is silly, and b) TF Cloud's functionality isn't all that hard to emulate (I once did a passable imitation in three days). Note, too, that one of the reason that this open source stuff is so popular with the admins is that the senior ones have all been bitten hard by the commercial stuff at some point. Not worth $6b IMO.
To be fair to IBM, they were a very early corporate Linux supporter. I still remember when the iconized "IBM loves Linux" started to appear everywhere, and the $1b pledge sounds like peanuts today but was enormous back then.
I have no clue why they did what they did to RedHat, but let's hope they don't make the same mistake twice and revert the BSL. It'd be good for everybody.
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