Ah, but no-one would question Mac support when you’re developing new software. If you can support Mac, which is certified UNIX, then the jump to supporting Linux isn’t all that much extra, and we can prove there’s a growing install base.

Started the ball rolling, and it just keeps going faster.

We can only hope so.

I’ve suggested to my team a few times that we should start a new business developing “Atlassian, but good”. They’re up for it. So many of our wider business have never used “anything but Jira”, and they can’t see it for the steaming pile of shite that it is. Not just that it’s a bad tool for developers, QE, project management or customer support, but they couldn’t imagine anything that’s better in any way, or how it would look if it didn’t have so many issues.

I’ve installed both Arch (systemd) and Void (runit) on the same laptop as an experiment to see whether you could have them both coexisting on the same filesystem. (Which you can - main difficulty is keeping their kernel names separate in /boot.) There was very little difference between them in time-to-desktop. Arch was faster, if anything. And I run more services on a desktop than I would on a server.

Choosing init scripts over systemd is fine for philosophical reasons or if you prefer it for maintenance, but speed isn’t an issue. Init scripts are simpler, but systemd goes to great efforts to start things in parallel. Critical servers should be load-balanced and redundant anyway so that you can restart them for updates; whether they take a second longer to start-up doesn’t matter.

That space on the CPU die could have been extra cache or maybe even another core, speed up all computing tasks on the machine. But no, it’s a fucking waste of space; not flexible enough to be used for general-purpose compute, not parallel enough to be used for a GPU, not enough RAM to run a local model. Got mine switched off in the BIOS just in case it improves battery life any.

There’s some very important transatlantic cables that come ashore in New Jersey; data centres built there will have excellent links to both the Eastern US and a lot of Europe, making it quite a desirable location.

Data centres have a few constraints on their locations. Network connections, of course, and power and water for cooling. Their margins are also a bit dubious (Ed Zitron did an excellent investigation in a recent article) but they benefit from low taxes and sweetheart deals with the local municipalities. Doesn’t take much to make that deal look shaky and be rid of the DC. Well done though NJ, keep it up!

A dialogue box where it’s obvious what you can click on, all the information you need is clearly displayed, and all the keyboard shortcuts are visible? Some UX designer at Microsoft will be having a fit. Better convert that all to React and hide most of it behind a hamburger menu at once; this isn’t how things are done in Windows any more.

Which is strange, because Azure’s documentation is complete dogshit.

We were trying to solve something at work (send SMTP messages using OAuth authentication, not rocket science) and Azure’s own chatbot kept on making up non-existent server commands, rest endpoints that don’t exist, and phantom permissions that needed to be added to the account.

Seriously; fuck Azure, fuck Copilot. Made a task that should have taken hours, take weeks.

Each package has an average of 1.1 Gb of binaries? Maybe delete a few of the old versions, then. But I think the most serious ask there is the network infrastructure - lots of big downloads around the world soon add up.

The Arch linux package is about 150 Mb; they’ve a few larger ones, but most come in at a few megabytes. (Have just checked my Pacoloco shared cache - average of 773 packages is 5.8 Mb. That serves a network server, a gaming desktop, my personal development laptop and my work development laptop, so it’s a cross section.)

Nice! I switched my parents over to Firefox and OpenOffice years ago, so switching them over to Linux Mint was just a matter of showing them where the update button was now. (Their laptops are completely functional for their purposes, but couldn’t be “upgraded” from Windows 10 to 11.) Scratch another few off the MS list forever.

Audio codecs like MP3 usually do a Fourier transform to move the sound into the frequency domain, discard any frequencies that you’re unlikely to notice, and encode ‘rate of change’ for the remaining ones. So the encoding problem is usually sound with fast changes in intensity or frequency, which is basically what percussion is.

System is quite percussion heavy, so will sound bad.

Recently moved from Spotify to Qobuz, because fuck Dan Ek, and the fact that they’ve got better bitrates across the board really makes the difference for jazz and jazzy stuff. Neglected, sounds crap on Spotify. Sounds great on Qobuz. But that’s the change from ‘bad’ to ‘quite good’ bitrates; additional bits are very much a case of diminishing returns.

Yes, very happy with mine. Started it up to see the preinstalled version of Linux and then restarted it to install Arch btw instead, but it’s a great wee machine, exactly what I wanted and will be replacing it with another like it when the time comes.

It is certainly true that TempleOS won’t be identifying with one of the common browser user agents when surfing the internet.

I dunno. Oxygen Not Included looks crisp on a 4K monitor. And it makes my job easier, being able to have an absolute tonne of code on-screen and readable. I reckon I could probably use an 8K monitor for those things.

Yeah, I generally have FSR running on any 3D game made in about the last decade - even if I can run it at 4K at a reasonable framerate, my computer fans start to sound like a hoover and the whole room starts warming up. But upscaling seems a better solution than having separate monitors for work and play.

100% of supercomputers, 80% of mobile devices (as Android), 4 or 5% of desktops depending on whether you count ChromeOS. Desktop share is a few percent higher if you just count gaming PCs, eg. the Steam survey, since it’s more widely used at home than on business machines.

The rate of adoption is accelerating, too - slowly but steadily.

If you’re just wanting to play it, you don’t really need the models, do you? Couple of packets of the cheapest army men you can find in the toy shop will do it you want fancy pieces, but just folding a piece of card in half so that it stands upright and writing on it what it is will suffice.

3D printing would do very nicely for the one-off models that you don’t want to kitbash, of course. Also great for playing DnD with; another game where you’re not obliged to use the ‘genuine books’ to play either.

Interesting, but misguided, I think.

If you’ve selected Python as your programming language, then your problem is likely either to do some text processing, a server-side lambda, or to provide a quick user interface. If you’re using it for eg. Numpy, then you’re really using Python to load and format some data before handing it to a dedicated maths library for evaluation.

If you’ve selected Go as your programming language, then your problem is likely to be either networking related - perhaps to provide a microservice that mediates between network and database - or orchestration of some kind. Kubernetes is the famous one, but a lot of system configuration tools use it to manipulate a variety of other services.

What these uses have in common is that they’re usually disk- or network- limited and spend most of their time waiting, so it doesn’t matter so much if they’re not super efficient. If you are planning to peg the CPU at 100% for hours on end, you wouldn’t choose them - you’d reach for C / C++ / Rust. Although Swift does remarkably well, too.

Seeing how quickly you can solve Fannkuch-Redux using Python is a bit like seeing how quickly you can drive nails into a wall using a screwdriver. Interesting in its way, but you’d be better picking up the correct tool in the first place.

Back when I owned an XPS, one of the driver options was ‘compressed screen updates’, which only updated the part that had changed. As far as I could tell, made no difference to battery life whatsoever - turning down the screen brightness even a notch did much more.

Daily driver laptop for nearly ten years, and the part that finally failed was the CPU fan, which wasn’t easy to obtain replacement parts for, so treated myself to a new laptop entirely. Mind you, the power connection was a PoS, would have been as well keeping that on an annual reorder for how often it failed. Pretty good laptop otherwise.

A controversial take. Every new feature added to Github has made it more unpleasant to use, and a lot of that is down to Copilot, for me. Only way to get rid of it is to wait for Github to go down again, which is the only thing it does reliably at the moment.

Oh, that’s obnoxious. I thought it was another ‘button along the bottom’, but it takes up the space that should be ‘right control’? Bastards. Hopefully you can rebind it to something useful, even if the keycap symbol sucks.

Mind you, I’ve already got caps-lock rebound as ‘control’ and alt-gr rebound as ‘compose’. My laptop has the ‘penguin’ key (it’s a Tuxedo laptop, no Windows key here) used for Sway. (My desktop keyboard is a Model M from before the days of Windows keys, have had to bind ctrl+alt as the ‘Sway Key’.) I’ve already got some ‘useless keys’ that I could rebind to other things - looking at you, print screen - but one you could press with your thumb while chording would always be nice.

Those ZBooks look like fine laptops. If you installed Arch on them, obviously ;-)

The problem is that the volume of slop available completely overwhelms all efforts at quality control. Zealotry only goes so far at turning back the tsunami of shite.