Posts by boblongii 90 posts • joined 15 Jun 2020
Vertical resolution is actually just a shade over 3K.
Yes, I know the "industry" got together and agreed to double all the numbers to look better, but I don't remember else saying that they should be allowed to decide that sort of thing for themselves.
In any case, the resolution is 218DPI, which is still less than 300, which is known in typesetting as "draft mode".
"This DB is much better than MySQL; there's effectively no chance of data loss."
"Will it handle <insert current insane level of demand from web here> requests per second on our hardware?"
"Well, no, but if MySQL goes down while handling that you're going to have a mess."
"This is web-stuff, not controlling a nuclear power plant. We can restore from last night's backup then. Transaction speed is the thing."
"But you can't just not worry about losing data!"
"The danger is the chance of losing data times the value of the data. For us, *both* those numbers are very low even with MySQL, so we can worry about it less than having the whole system go down because it can't keep up."
"Sigh."
Most computing projects don't. If they did we would still be writing assembler. The reason we aren't is because time to produce the software is important. Very important.
If you have to tell your audience that your language needs months with the help of another person to become productive then what you have built there is a concept language - looks neat, does a good turn of speed, but isn't going to ever be on the mass market.
Hopefully someone will take Rust's Big Idea and apply it to a language with a sane syntax.
Can we drop this "reinventing the wheel is a waste of time" trope, please? Reinventing the wheel is how you get better wheels.
You know that gag about how we went to the moon in 1965 but we didn't have wheels on suitcases until 1996? That's because 1965 wheels weren't up to the job. Materials have advanced. Manufacturing has advanced. And that let us invent new types of wheel.
If you don't like reinventing the wheel, then go back to cutting the end off a log when you need to drive somewhere.
And don't get me started on axels!
Don't be ridiculous. Firstly, C++ was specifically designed as "C with extensions" which is why it has no coherent object model and took literally decades to provide any sort of memory management beyond - oh, you do it yourself if you think it's important.
It was a bad language from the off and has never really improved beyond providing ever-more bizarre and abstract nonsense for the true-believers.
C++ is fast, allows sophisticated handling of data structures which are hard in C, and is a dangerous bloody chore to work with.
"without businesses like Netflix, there is not reason to pay for ISP's high speed links"
Netflix doesn't require the 180Mb connection I have, and not only because I don't have Netflix. I use it for working from home and transferring large amounts of data around to different sites and servers.
If I only wanted to watch TV shows I could do that with a tenth of my current bandwidth.
The problem here is that the Internet is a hugely inefficient way to deliver television to millions of people compared to broadcasting radio-waves, and that's not going to change any time soon.
"No, that's not the agreement the customer is paying for."
In terms of contention, it probably is. Read the small print on your agreement.
"On-demand scale without capital investment feels like deployment flexibility to me."
It sounds like until the day that MS tell you that you are going to have to wait a week for the scale you demanded.
Azure is just another layer of failure points that you have NO control over. We shovel millions at the cloud each year but when push comes to shove, MS doesn't even give enough of a fuck to get someone in Texas out of bed to talk to us about a failure before 3pm.
Three times the price of in-house for half the control. Oh, and the price can change from year to year depending on MS's business plan, not yours.
"I just don't understand why so many managers insist on going cloud "
In our case it was customer-driven. Basically, we were told that if we didn't offer a "cloud solution" then our largest clients were leaving.
Now they're on the cloud, paying 3x the price and discovering that, yes, if you ask on Monday for a bigger VM then the cloud *can* say "Sorry, we don't have any capacity; call back next week".
And all the security issues that have to be guarded against still have to be guarded against while there's a slew of new dangers and points of failure.
Our place went to Azure because of price - that price being about 3x the cost of running our existing datacentre, but MS didn't get where they are by people making rational decisions.
It very quickly became clear that the support staff know fuck all about anything, and their "engineers" have a weak grasp of Windows, let alone Linux.
Now they've revised their pricing they're not even cheap compared to AWS and when we started talking to AWS about migrating it immediately became clear that th people we were talking to actually had used a computer before and might even, gasp!, have a clue about what they're being paid to have a clue about.
I'd far rather move back in-house but that boat has sailed, struck and iceberg, and sunk.
Define OS in your world without introducing arbitrary and subjective opinions.
Your thoughts on what is an OS are simply wrong.
Moving on to GUIs, you're on firmer ground but still fairly soft. In reality the game has been changed and continues to change, but you're using the scorecard from the old game. I don't care if hardware that needs to use secret sauce to work has a problem with Linux; that's the old world and I'm happy for it to die a death.
The GPL has delivered me the computing I want, complete with a desktop I've used for 20 years while Windows and OSX failed to provide what I consider basic functionality. If you think Linux has failed because it hasn't reproduced all the same stupidity that paid-for-but-magically-not-owned software has, then there's not much I can say to you except that I hope you continue to enjoy living in your nice, expensive prison.
An OS controls higher level programs' access to the hardware. Linux does that. Bash is not an OS, it is a user program. SSH is not an OS, it is a user program.
Anything that has to ask Linux for resources or access is not part of the OS or it would do these things itself.
This is not a complicated concept.
"There's no more intrinsic virtue now in being able to recall textbooks in detail than there is in being able to use a slide rule or log tables."
I disagree. A textbook is something that someone has put effort into and has been edited, and possibly revised if it's a second edition, and probably 70k+ words of explanation. If you can read it and remember it, it's probably worthwhile doing so in most cases.
What are you suggesting is the modern alternative? The ability to use Google's half-arsed interface to Wikipedia where you can see what some unemployed moron typed in over a half-hour lunch break?
I don't bloody think so.
"What you are proposing would result in a deluge of technicians and engineers who hold little knowledge in their supposed area of expertise, thus diluting the value of a real certification."
Oh, well, that would be an earth-shattering change, wouldn't it?
"You can run tests suite against such designs just like a normal program."
Why don't Intel, then?
More seriously: to some degree you can only test for the expected. Which is why normal programs have bugs even when using TDD and other methods to limit divergence from the spec. And as for whether the spec was right...
I don't find that a particularly helpful mental model. I change files, I commit changes to files, and sometimes I tag a point in time. If the internal system is "like" a filesystem snapshot, well and good but I'm not thinking about filesystem snapshots.
As for pain, just use the Emacs Magit interface and move on.
Putting aside the issue that Jesus is a mythical figure, the character portrayed in the gospels is not revolutionary so much as apocalyptic. The two go hand in hand as clearly there's no point in obeying power structures if the world is going to end soon.
But the emphasis is much more on sorting *yourself* out in time than it is on bothering to overthrow authorities who will be dead soon anyway. Sure: render onto Caesar, if it keeps the poor fool happy, why not? Doesn't matter, does it? Drink up...
As far as I can make out someone told a joke at some convention about a clever Jew outsmarting a Gentile and a Jewish person took exception to this as a type of reverse racism. Then some harsh words were exchanged and it grew from there.
And, no, Perl was not involved in any way.
The "close" being next to the "maximise" has been a Turing Test for UI for decades now: if you put them together then I automatically know that you know nothing about UI and can be ignored, along with whatever Mickey Mouse certificates you might wave about.
Luckily, you can redefine them in older Gnomes, but you shouldn't have to.
I imagine that the law doesn't say that Kangaroos can't have patents either. Or that the colour blue isn't allowed to own a car.
The idea that the law has to exclude every negative possibility is moronic, just like this ruling.
There is no need to change the law, just to sack this incompetent judge.
"Computer assisted" is the Big Lie™ of self-driving cars. You're either aware of what's going on enough to drive at the drop of a hat or you're not, and if you're paying that amount of attention then you might as well drive the damn thing yourself.
Every manufacturer knows this and knows that their cars' passengers will not be paying attention - they'll be talking to other passengers, reading the paper, admiring the scenery, or making rude gestures to cyclists. Designating one of these passengers to be "the driver" is simply a fig-leaf for the manufacturers' insurance requirements.
"You are missing the real point: you are paying for both the software and support of said software.
Therefore there is a much larger chance that the software supplier will remain committed to maintaining the software and servicing its customers...because they have a direct financial interest in doing so."
You are not making any sort of coherent argument. There's nothing about Free Software that prevents you from supporting it financially while at the same time having much more influence over how it is developed than you ever will with something from Oracle, Apple (ha!), or MS.
I see this crap all the time: companies who fork out for licenses to use a bloody word-processor in this day and age are happy to base their whole company on a Linux-based fileserver and never consider the idea of contributing to any of the software on that box that they depend on.
The whole tenor of the argument is that the problem is with the people supplying the free software.
"Hi. I'm a parasite on your whole industry and I just want to say how disappointed I am in your attitude to continuing to work for free."
When software depends on a project thanklessly maintained by a random guy in Nebraska, maybe you should be making some effort to make sure he's happy - or to find another less random guy to do work you want done. Which you can, since you have the source!
You are dodging the question - what would you do if a closed-source vendor went bust that is any better or even no worse?
"This is the major failing of understanding to the entire OSS / Linux community: the largest majority of those who interact with computers are plain-Jane users and are NOT technically advanced. "
What a load of crap. "This is the major failing of understanding to the entire proprietary software community: the largest majority of those who interact with computers are plain-Jane users and are NOT shareholders able to dictate the company's business practices."
It's just meaningless gibberish. What do these "plain-Jane" users do when they need a feature added to or improved in Word. What do they do about the fact that Outlook is a steaming turd of an email client? How does closing the source and paying a license fee to the company improve their experience in any way?
Looking at his Twitter thread
"At the event in question, someone said something antisemitic to me, apparently thinking I’d be amused by it"
OK, so a joke in bad taste? These things happen, and not everyone judges tone correctly. The issue is intent, surely?
"I explained that to the person who’d said it; they said that “other Jewish people” had found it funny, which wasn't and isn't relevant"
Wasn't it? It seems pretty relevant to me. It shows that the intent was to amuse, not to insult.
"I’ve been accused of lying about something that happened at a Perl event in 2019. These accusations rely on using my relative silence on the matter to convince others I'm lying, which is why I'm being explicit now"
By "explicit" apparently he means talking constantly about how offended he was by a joke without telling us what the joke was.
Aaron seems to be a very self-entitled individual with a martyr complex.
I'm not convinced that the acceptability of a joke is based on the teller's ability to prove that not a single person in the world would be offended by it.
OS devs are not always better than proprietary devs, and in the case of Python generally and YAML in particular they have done a bad job. But bad jobs in IT are hardly new.
I never had a problem myself with the ini-file concept; the registry replacement (not an open source solution, of course) was far worse and the fact that systemd has replicated the same fuckup is certainly disappointing.
But, yes. YAML is complete garbage.
Rust's reputation is partly built on the fact that the unwashed have not had time to play with it and break it. It's used by people who have a, shall we say, particularly pedantic sense of coding already. It all smells like a false sense of security and liberal slapping of each other's backs to me. Life outside the ivory tower will not be gentle for Rust, given the expectations that have been hyped up for it.
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