Posts by BinkyTheMagicPaperclip 1494 publicly visible posts • joined 11 May 2012
It's not just the cost, it's the disruption. The main road near me was closed repeatedly for weeks to install a few high voltage cables for six EV charging points in a nearby service station.
I'm hoping for greater power requirements it doesn't scale the disruption, and that more is from digging up the road than actually working on cables and associated infrastructure.
Played it again recently, it's incredible how much things changed between Wing Commander II and III
Flying is still fun, but it's definitely the age of 'we've found FMV' and *boy* do they want to use it at every opportunity. Conversations, walking between areas, etc etc
Still for all the faults of Chris Roberts' games, at least he's trying to tell a story and improve the technology.
Some of it. It depends. They're all using the 'BSD license' but there are still subtle differences of opinion in pulling in certain third party code (one reason ZFS is in FreeBSD, but not OpenBSD).
If the OS architectures are compatible enough, the BSD projects will absolutely take work from another project where possible - all of them need more resource. There can still be significant differences in driver models, despite parts of the userland looking very similar.
The highest praise I can give for OpenBSD, is that it's possible to install it on a system such as a pcengines APU4[1] via serial console, & once installed use serial or SSH, and it's not at all uncomfortable. Serial console is easy to get working, installer is text based and very fast to use. Base system includes the tmux terminal multiplexer, userland commands are decent. Sure, some specific Linux distributions could do the same thing, but OpenBSD feels designed.
It's also the only BSD where I'd trust running CURRENT, it's rare that it breaks things, although obviously STABLE may be a little safer. FreeBSD's current isn't horrendous when I tried it but was a little irritating at times. NetBSD current was definitely more Here Be Dragons, but that was a number of years ago. I still haven't used DragonFly BSD.
[1] RIP PCEngines, such decent hardware.
:) You know, it actually might? I've never tried. It's from 2007 so it doesn't require Steam, sure I have it on CD. NetBSD's graphics support isn't amazingly up to date, but it definitely supports as late as the Vega 56, should be complete with 3D acceleration, so it can handle Crysis with one hand tied behind its back.
Which just leaves the question of whether sufficient APIs are emulated. An exercise for someone with a suitable system.
OpenBSD has an excellent track record introducing new security technologies and focusing on that above pretty much everything else. That does not necessarily mean that for a given area it is the premier example.
When it was discovered data could be extracted from processes on a hyperthreaded 'core', the eventual response by Linux was a very complicated work around that had at least one failure along the process of fixing it properly that still permitted data to be extracted. OpenBSD's response? Disable hyperthreading by default. Game over.
OpenBSD has made real efforts in process separation, and also in memory management, enabling some extremely old bugs to be finally squashed. Not to mention The OpenBSD project doesn't just create OpenBSD, they're also responsible for OpenSSH, LibreSSL, OpenBGPD etc (see the OpenBSD Foundation page).
The *real* advantage of OpenBSD is that it's quite well documented, has a well thought out user land, consideration for embedded or remote systems, and a lean easy to use install. It did take it a bit too long to streamline the upgrade procedure beyond booting from an install ramdisk and upgrading, but sysupgrade has now been out for a number of years and it's usually as simple as running it, going for a cup of tea, and coming back to find a rebooted and upgraded system.
I wouldn't use it as a desktop. It's decent as a firewall and for other networking purposes, but it isn't designed as an end user system.
TLDR : If you want to run Windows apps under Not Windows with less hassle, use Linux.
Define 'work'. If you mean 'can you throw a modern game at NetBSD and expect it to work?', then no. You'll run into issues doing that on FreeBSD, and FreeBSD is in a much better state.
NetBSD has zero closed source display drivers, so you're stuck with Nouveau and AMD drivers, and they'll be behind those available on other OS.
There is WINE available, but it's an older version, and critically WINE under Linux is very different from other platforms. Although there is some commonality of APIs in Unix, there's still a lot of per platform customisation, meaning windows API coverage in anything other than Linux will be significantly worse.
Will Steam work? Almost certainly not. Some older games will probably run just fine.
I'd use it for the above, but wouldn't bother as a desktop - you're letting yourself in for a world of pain if you do.
I feel the talk under sold NetBSD - as a general purpose OS it is far below FreeBSD in usability (and FreeBSD itself needs to be better), but it's available on a lot of platforms, and should be able to be customised for an embedded system. It's all under a BSD license so you can use it without worrying about licensing concerns.
It's a very classic Unix with some modern parts and experimental bits, probably the easiest Unix OS to hack on, but there's far more bit rot than FreeBSD, or OpenBSD (who will ruthlessly prune functionality if they think it isn't being maintained). There's a number of gotchas - when I tried FreeBSD 9 with ZFS used for some of the non home partitions an extra config parameter was needed to allow it to work early in boot. Then, whilst ZFS may 'work' the underlying storage system and drivers might not support functions you'd want, such as hard drives not being present on boot, but redundancy still operating.
There's an awful lot of embedded devices out there, and I was going to try and shoe horn NetBSD on one for fun and as a cheap and easy serial to network server. I think I got it as far as a partial kernel load via TFTP, but without the compression that it should have supported, and then became distracted by other things. It's still on the list of things to complete, and creating an ultra customised boot environment that fits in a small amount of flash seems easier with NetBSD than trying other things.
It's true that security as an overall discipline is hard, but some things are really easy, the important issue is businesses and developers don't like the answer
Pulling in 50K packages, any of which could have an exploit? Your entire design is broken. Want to fix it? You should be obtaining with Actual Real Money or developer code review of each new change, a set of libraries that are very likely to be secure. These are the only libraries that you use. That also means as a logical consequence you're probably not following the bleeding edge, as developer time to review everything is expensive and slow.
You're *definitely* not automatically just pulling the latest version of things from the public web for builds or systems, either[1], it's all hosted locally. If the design 'needs' to automatically pull the latest version of a component to build, again, it is fundamentally broken.
So the question is how secure things need to be, and where money is involved the natural answer is 'not very'.
I realise this becomes difficult or expensive, especially when open source is involved, but it is abundantly clear most people only care about speed of development and security is a vague afterthought.
[1] Unless it's Saas, which is certified and again, you are paying for it to be maintained and secure
Depends how you measure it. Last Wii U physical game was 2020, eShop game 2022. eShop stopped new purchases in 2023, Nintendo Wii U gaming servers turned off only this week. The eShop still remains available for downloading previously purchased content.
Lovely console, despite the flaws[1], and a spotty line up of games in its lifetime.
[1] The number of cables to use it to its full extent is excessive. Power cable for the console. Power cable for the gamepad. *Another* power cable for the gamepad because the first one is plugged into a gamepad dock, but the battery only lasts three hours and if you want an extended play session another power source is required. Power cable for external USB storage because internal fills up fast. Cable for sensor bar. Power cable for USB hub, because the built in wireless is awful so you need USB Ethernet, but also want to run a USB based Lego Dimensions pad, and the USB based external storage without using the front USB ports
I didn't say the architectures were all dead - just mostly. There's Raptor Computing Systems who will sell you a reasonably priced (for POWER, but still not particularly cheap) POWER9 based completely open source system, and it's certainly the closest thing to a non x86 system performing at roughly the same level.
Sometimes I do wish I have one, but it's a lot of money for a system I probably wouldn't use enough.
It was never good enough to use in a commercial setting (except for a very specific set of workloads), and a pain in the arse to fiddle with at a hobbyist level. The price and form factor of second hand kit never reached the level where it would be anything other than a noisy, slow, power hungry rack mount system sat in the corner of your room.
It speaks volumes that some open source lists offered free itanium systems to people willing to develop and no-one was bothered.
I suppose in a way it's really quite sad. There was Windows itanium which is vaguely interesting as is the early use of EFI, but if you look at other architectures such as POWER, Sparc, PA-RISC (prior to itanium), Alpha, ARM, and MIPS they all have something more interesting or different systems based upon them.
No viable NetBSD port, which is saying something - the Sharp Zaurus and PReP platforms are better supported! No OpenBSD port. FreeBSD port that worked somewhat better but never supported beyond a VGA console.
It was Intel's new architecture failure moment of the 00s. IBM tried vainly to switch the market to Workplace OS and POWER based PReP in the mid 90s and crashed and burned, taking OS/2 with it. Intel didn't learn from this and decided that developers would just switch to itanium, honest. Precisely how many historical precedents does it need to prove that unless your new platform has an order of magnitude improvement over the old one, incremental improvement is better, and that even an order of magnitude may not be sufficient.
I used to travel to Cork quite a lot and to be fair the company I did business for treated me extremely well, and were lovely people. Long days though - 10 hours+ was the norm.
This was prior to Easyjet, so BA was the only option. The one occasion I traveled Club Class because it was an entire tenner extra, providing a much nicer meal than the standard fare.
We did once get the option of doing training in somewhere a bit isolated in east Asia, but the travel was horrendous - over a day to get there, a training course of a day, and then another day or more back. No one volunteered, and it got canned.
Nowadays I'm a large fan of remote working and all the remote support systems in use. So much of business travel is overrated, the only real benefit is a few lovely meals.
Mind you, technically I can do my job anywhere inside Europe/UK, there's always the possibility of staying somewhere else for a few weeks.
If it was a grown up service it would be designed to be a user centric design, with capabilities configured by the end users. Instead, even and especially on the business offerings, you get what Google deigns to decide is available. Oh, you didn't want that feature to be removed? We've decided it's better for you, so you don't get a choice.
I have a number of legacy business domains, for non commercial purposes. It's annoying enough for free, I'd be highly irritated if I was paying actual money for it. Thinking of moving to Mythic Beasts.
Actions on large amounts of messages simply do not work. Got 20,000 messages in a filter that need deleting? Set up the rule. Tell Gmail to delete them. It says it has been actioned. Has it? No. Repeat and repeat again until it's actually removed the messages.
Unilateral changes of attachment settings. Irritating login dialogs and security. Spam filters that whilst not bad still consistently filter messages away from particular mailing lists. Not to mention the moderately well known issues with Oauth support that basically make gmail non open standards.
For free for consumers this might be livable. For business I wouldn't touch it with a barge pole.
If you separate Amazon's predatory business practices (which obviously is a big IF) from their implementation, on the whole their service is good, and their logistics are excellent.
However, there is no doubt service quality is decreasing and prices are mounting. Search used to be excellent, but now they frequently push products other than the one wanted. No doubt this is due to promoted links or margins. It's not just the flood of dodgy Chinese products and fake reviews that are the problem.
Example today : went to check if the Samsung SN850X 4TB is on deep discount (at one point it was around 220 quid at various stores, a complete bargain). Checked Scan first, then tried Amazon out of interest. 'SN850X' does produce two SN850X models in the beginning of the search (1TB, 2TB models), it then moves off Samsung on to other manufacturers. The 4TB version is nowhere to be seen unless an explicit search for 'SN850X 4TB' is made.
This isn't a one off. The search is obviously sophisticated enough to know exactly what is being searched for, that's why it finds other NVMe sticks, but it very deliberately does not prioritise the given search terms.
Whilst that is irritating Amazon are (last time I checked) very good at refunding, provided no orders have been made. Use of Prime Video didn't prevent me from cancelling Prime with a full refund, when the adding adverts to Prime Video information arrived, and I had unfortunately auto renewed for a year a week earlier.
These are in copyright books for a book club, and I want to give the authors money for their work. It's just a pain that DRM has to exist, and even more so that specific devices are needed for different types of DRM.
Before the inevitable 'buy it in paperback' comment arrives : I don't want to. I enjoy using ebooks, and paperbacks require yet another regular spree of donating, selling, or them taking up space.
Price, range, convenience, and delivery speed.
I'm actively trying not to buy from Amazon this year, and cancelled Prime following their decision to add adverts. So far I've only used it once as I needed an item next day and it was a hassle to source it elsewhere.
ebay is pretty much the only other site with the same sort of range, and it's not really the same thing. Other online shops and physical stores have limited their ranges in order to maximise profit, so if what you're looking for is a bit unusual Amazon is usually the easiest choice.
Other stores may stock the items, but having to order from five different sites rather than one is less convenient.
I know Amazon's delivery estimates can sometimes be inaccurate, but on the whole they're pretty decent. Almost every time I go out for a walk there's a Prime van delivering.
There's also the Amazon devices tied into their infrastructure. I don't particularly want to buy another ebook reader to replace my Kindle. I successfully managed to avoid buying an ebook from Amazon and bought from Kobo instead, but their books are similarly DRMed and tied to Kobo apps and infrastructure, so it was a matter of fiddling and removing DRM in order to transfer it manually to my Kindle.
PCs of the time were just fine running multiple copies of DOS in a VM, they were just using OS/2 to do it instead of NT 3.51, and needing less memory. It's possible Desqview and Desqview/X could also have been options, but I've never used those.
OS/2's VM capability isn't perfect, but is pretty decent and reasonably fast. NT's DOS capability isn't quite as horrific as you might recall, but is quite considerably slower (twice as slow or more than a DOS VM under OS/2 in some cases, on the same machine).
Whilst installing various OS/2 versions and NT 3.51 on the same 486 PC I had the chance to compare them. They're early to mid nineties OS, so really nothing comes out smelling of roses. OS/2 has various neat features that work to different degrees - interface, compatibility, scripting,multimedia. NT had solid win16 support, good networking, OpenGL that largely just worked (and 3D accelerated in some cases which is more than OS/2 ever managed) - DOS was slow though, good luck if you didn't know the installation requirements back to front as it'll happily fail with no apparent errors, and a very basic interface.
You're mostly correct, but there's a few other factors.
Vista, regardless of its benefits, was rather buggy until SP1 - but by that stage it was too late.
XP was out for five years prior to Vista, the longest time between releases, at least until the gap between 10 and 11 (which probably doesn't count, given the number of revisions of 10). People got used to a mature infrastructure, despite its disadvantages.
Aero was an advantage but it's an issue when people can't use their old drivers, and it took time for driver quality to equal that of XP, in the same way XP/2K drivers initially were variable in quality. Also, IIRC, the WDDM version in Vista kept two copies of the display in video memory at the same time, drastically increasing VRAM usage. This was an issue with many cards available at the time, until 7 kept only one frame buffer in VRAM.
The limitations of the IGP were one issue, but that could be solved by disabling Aero. Unfortunately many 'Vista Capable' systems also had inadequate RAM, and that really impacted on performance.
The improvement in security was not welcomed, especially by many application writers who had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the new world where they couldn't run as administrator all the time.
Multi language support was *much* better in Vista than prior releases. I was daft enough to buy the Ultimate edition of Vista for the multi language support.
Once it reached SP2 Vista was rather nice. It supported 64 bits properly, the driver situation wasn't as moribund as running XP x64, it still featured components such as the Removable Storage Manager, and security could be configured to be improved even over defaults by switching to the secure desktop when displaying prompts. Gadgets were quite cool too.
There haven't really been any poor NT based releases. 8 comes the closest with its substandard mobile first interface that was never fixed, but technically was an improvement over 7 underneath. 11 is certainly usable, albeit with niggles, too much movement away from user centric computing, and unnecessary default hardware requirements, but it's stable and usable.
The 'worst' NT release is quite possibly NT 4, the first Windows OS I used as my primary system after migrating from OS/2. A lot of that is due to rapid technology changes between 1996 and 2000 and a slow release cycle; by the time 2000 was released the limited Direct3D support in NT4 and the complete absence of USB support were becoming real hindrances to using consumer focused applications or games.
You might be surprised. Did Amstrad ever *really* push the boundaries? Perhaps not, but they built functional systems down to an acceptable price.
Their early PC offerings were seriously competitive, if a little lacking in build quality. The CPC compared well with equivalent 8 bit micros at the time.
Now, for CP/M, it's probably not hyperbole to say they were and are one of the premier providers of affordable systems, although not always intentionally.
The PCW was, and is, the most accessible of CP/M systems. Plenty of memory, high resolution screen, disk drives. Many addons. Lots of native software in addition to the CP/M library. Printer and keyboard quality leave something to be desired but you can't have everything. Go looking for a CP/M system on ebay these days and you're limited to kits (needs add on serial console, keyboard, monitor), older expensive systems, add ons for more conventional home computers[1], and the PCW at the most affordable integrated end.
The NC100 & NC200 filled a very specific niche at the time and were not exactly high powered. Nevertheless they're compact portable Z80 systems that have decent battery life and can be coerced to run CP/M (this does require a reasonable degree of fiddling). The few alternatives in that form factor are Epson's fairly obscure PX-4/8, or older bulky systems such as the Kaypro that require mains power.
[1] Such as the Amstrad CPC 6128, with 128KB RAM, 80 columns, and colour. Also the Amstrad Spectrum +3, but that only had a 51 column screen. Next up in mass market accessibility is likely to be an MSX2 system of some type, a Commodore 128 (slow), or a wide array of either less common systems or more common systems with additional addons to provide 80 columns and a disk drive (often rare and expensive)
If that's the same as early monochrome laptops then it's readable, the problem lies when motion is attempted.
I recently tried to use an Amstrad NC200 (early to mid 90s Z80 based sub laptop capable of running CP/M) to connect to a BBS using a serial wifi modem. All was fine until the screen scrolled. Huge amount of blur.
I seem to remember Palm based devices being a bit better but not eliminating this, but I'm too lazy to charge and start one at the moment. They did have the lovely green backlight though.
My memory was that NT 4 *never* supported FAT32. It definitely didn't on release, and I didn't think it ever supported it.
However it did support FAT16 partitions up to 4GB in size, which no other OS did.
Course, in 96 NT4 lacked USB support too, and the USB sticks and flash media that slowly followed definitely needed more than 32GB FAT32 for various devices.
Writing an operating system is never a trivial endeavour, but it's only moderately rare rather than truly remarkable.
What's remarkable is not writing an OS, it's gathering the surrounding infrastructure. At the time Linux became vaguely usable for a clued up end user, NetBSD and FreeBSD were close to release, 32 bit OS/2 was out, and Windows NT was also near. NeXTStep was already out, and would be shortly available for i386 - it'd have minimal impact until the turn of the century when Apple adopted it in the form of OS X for their PowerPC systems. BeOS, WebOS and others would also come and go.
It's also true that what was expected from an operating system in 1992 was radically different to that in 2002, or in indeed 2022. In 1992 you could get away with releasing a consumer OS without built in networking! Now, if your operating system doesn't include widevine to play DRM content from streaming providers, most people won't touch it. 3D cards didn't exist in the consumer space in 1992, now they're a necessity just to get Wayland running.
Linus continues to be an excellent shepherd of the product, but did get a large leg up from the existence of GNU and XFree86. Whatever the faults of X, a lot of credit is also due to the large commercial companies that sponsored its development.
It's very debatable whether being paid is a reasonable expectation. Yes, if it's benefiting more people than yourself morally the correct thing to do is contribute money or resource to improve the project. If you're a company, and making money from free labour, you should definitely be contributing. However this is yet another case of 'someone should do the right thing' yet no-one wants to be 'someone'.
It's not particularly different from volunteering in other areas. Volunteering provides benefits to other people, occasionally also to people who make money. It can become equivalent to a job. At some point ultimately if what you're putting in isn't matched by a vaguely equivalent output (which can be being involved in a community, it doesn't have to be in income or products) it's wise to quit. I volunteered long term, it was providing a benefit to other people, but for far too long there was minimal return or consideration for me, so I quit. Should have done it before..
If you're in a situation where people are either taking advantage or providing minimal benefit, get out! You will not be appreciated until people are reminded there is a cost to your services.
I feel you're misunderstanding. You're not providing the opportunity to make an offer based on a protected characteristic of the nurse. Whilst there are possible reasons for the NMC to store the information, anyone requesting if the nurse has a valid registration shouldn't be provided with that data.
If the nurses registered doesn't provide a reasonable match to the distribution of the general population, it's worth asking why.
Leaving aside possible GDPR implications, diversity monitoring. Given the difficulty in recruiting nurses you want to be sure the number of reasons limiting recruits aren't more than the pay and conditions on offer.
Personally I'd be reasonably certain that a comparison of sexual orientation diversity in nurses vs the average population would actually show the numbers of non straight nurses are higher than average, but you don't know how well you're doing if you don't measure it.
Some paranoia is a good idea, salt water is a tad over the top if you're just an average user. By the time you've drilled the device you're into professional data recovery, government security services, or a really really motivated individual territory.
If the data are important enough, it'd probably be far more effective to use a sander on a platter rather than a drill.
If you're saying that your data are in any case fairly worthless, why are you going to this effort? A standard multi phase wipe is more than good enough, and enables the device to be safely used by someone else.
No, it isn't. It's the average person on the street. Mostly they're quite happy with short mobile phone contracts, and they enjoy New Shiny.
Whilst 'the rich' disproportionately contribute to emissions on planes, there aren't enough of them to affect the market of phones unless you're classing 'rich' as 'the global rich' aka very average people living in non third world countries.
That's the real problem with climate change. To effectively counter it requires substantial change to an average first world lifestyle, and few people are prepared to compromise.
There's a lot that can be pinned on large wealthy companies, and their excessive influence on politics, but not all of it can be blamed on them.
Much easier to blame someone else though, because then you conveniently don't have to do something, or feel guilt for being part of the problem.
There would still be substantially fewer orders each year if phones could be guaranteed to last 5-10 years, and the whole setup of some companies is based on a short renewal cycle.
Nevertheless, to take climate change and recycling seriously, that impact on companies and supply changes is exactly what should be happening.
On their own they work better than nothing, but yes, battery storage is better. The complexity and implications (such as sticking a load of lithium ion in close proximity) is higher though, so I decided that was really the next step after making the panels a reasonable price.
What's the payback on your system, though?
If you read the linked piece a few of the projects are very definitely 'we're mates of someone important, or just very good at writing pitches' given the amounts involved. Some others sound quite reasonable in terms of forecasting, it's all about adding up the smaller wins.
Having said that as usual the government are trying to do this on the cheap, 2M is naff all. They won't do anything serious.
They could (hobby horses ahoy.. clip clop)
Try and mandate mobile phone lifespans or even a (paid - you expect consumers to give their old phones away for free?) recycling scheme to recover precious metals, to prevent so much unnecessary wastage. You don't need a fancy phone every two years.
Subsidise heat pumps and electricity long term. Why are they pushing heat pumps? Lower emissions than gas fired systems.
Why are consumers not going for heat pumps? Because they cost more upfront *AND* on an on-going basis and have lower performance than gas. Recent claims about higher base temperatures in heat pumps (mostly) seem to involve the efficiency reducing, so aren't particularly credible from what I can see. Tell me I'm wrong with actual references, please, my boiler does need replacing in the next few years.
Ahh, but if heat pumps are more expensive to run than gas, this could be offset by low cost solar panels to reduce the energy cost. That'd be a great idea wouldn't it. Hey minister, how about a mass production and subsidised panel offering? Wait, wait, stop running..
I'm not sure how you reach that conclusion unless your only criteria is 'it has to be usable as a desktop'.
FreeBSD, I could agree needs more resource. Currently attempting to use FreeBSD to switch away from Windows and boy is there a *gulf* between FreeBSD and either Windows or Linux. Not to mention Firefox breaking in latest ports (and quarterly if I remember), VScode breaking, WINE breaking the 32 bit port on 64 bit platforms (fixed in December). Then, once you run WINE, the API coverage is substantially below that under Linux - which shouldn't be a surprise really, but it's disappointing.
On the bright side ZFS is still great, and bhyve is 'good enough' if still rather bleeding edge and not really average end user turnkey. There's enough functionality and compatibility to achieve most aims and look at it improving in the future.
Illumos - has it ever really hit popularity, I'll give you that one.
NetBSD is the same it has been for a long time. A very slow increase in base functionality, extremely varied per platform support, some gems among a lot of cruft. It's an OS for research, tinkering, and embedded systems, not a general purpose OS unless you enjoy a great deal of pain and are prepared to hack a lot.
OpenBSD is the same, it maintains its focus on security and a userland that is readily accessible from the command line. Provided you fit its use case, it's a pleasure most of the time.
What you're missing is that there are legion 'edge cases' of processing data in Excel. Word processors? Presentation programs? There's usually viable alternatives for those.
Excel? Not so much. It's not good at formatting, but gets used for that. It's not good at databases, but gets used for that. It's not even particularly good for writing formulae because it's quite easy to output a sensible sounding (but wrong) result if used incorrectly.
However the alternatives generally require spending more money, take longer, need increased learning, or all three. Additionally, if despite the fact that spreadsheets are fundamentally good at quickly throwing together a compromise solution, Excel does something and Calc does not then Excel is the better package at least for that purpose, and perhaps full stop. It does not matter it could be architected in Python or R, with greater effort (but a better solution) on the user's behalf
A word processor isn't supposed to be a desktop publishing tool, with sophisticated flow and colour control options but it *should* be able to handle basic layout and tables without resorting to a proper DTP package or LaTeX.Maybe Word itself can't do this, but it really isn't unreasonable to expect a word processor should.
I've written some reasonably complex documents in LaTeX including tables, auto routing diagrams, and embedded documents (for PDF output). It's good for free, but as friendly as a cornered rat, with lots (and lots) of edge cases and opaque error messages. *This* addon works here, but not *there* and not with that other addon. If you want to do that, you should use *that* instead, but there's no obvious curated list that says 'do not use this addon except in exceptional circumstances'.
(and before anyone points it out - yes I know CLion needs (Open) java, and things such as LibreOffice also use Java, or at least they used to). However, my first choice these days would either be Python or .NET/Mono for pretty much everything from web development to scripting. If I had to do cross platform desktop client development, I doubt I'd look at Java first, but (Open) JDK would be on the list.
You could buy the Oracle JVM based on the open source code, and pay $180 for each and every employee, every year
orrrrr you could pay *nothing* and use the open source version, that everyone else will be using. Certainly the (fairly large) company I work for stripped Java from practically all systems as the licencing cost was significant. Am I missing something amazing ('support' ?) about the Oracle release?
On a vaguely related point I looked at CLion recently, which is also 'subscription based', but if a year's subscription is purchased you retain a 'perpetual fallback licence'. That's the way to do it.
Haven't used Java for years. When it came out it was useful, and cross platform. Used it in Jython, a few Java only programs, created a moderately complex Java object called by Coldfusion. The Enterprise APIs were interesting, if a bit slow.
Now there's a lot more cross platform frameworks, web development options, Python, Powershell, and others.
If I unlock my front door and stick a sign on it that says 'front door broken, do not steal anything' and you walk in and steal something, I presume you'd also claim that it's unfair if there's police round the corner?
I do agree that whistle blowing often does not work out well, but suing for discrimination is hardly bad faith, when the obvious way to avoid this 'trap' is to act ethically and legally.
Intel's previous high end consumer CPU doesn't have a convincing lead over AMD's offerings, and the turbo is only on a limited number of cores as has been the case for years. As the article says, it really does depend on your workload. Why bother with all this hassle until you're truly desperate for performance in specific applications?
Still, both Rzyen 9 and the i9 support ECC with the appropriate chipset, so that's good. The Performance and Efficiency cores seem an interesting idea too, but it looks like the number of applications that explicitly specify they want to optimise efficiency is quite low.
If I was looking for a new system, I'd definitely consider Ryzen. There's a lot of second hand Xeon systems on ebay though..
Yes. They can like it, or write the code themselves.
OK, I'm deliberately being a bit contentious here. I do agree that Wayland is not finished, offers less user choice than X, and users (and particularly non Linux platforms) are increasingly not considered over developer and commercial interests. It also doesn't help there is almost no commercial non Linux Unix, so the perfect storm of X being funded by large companies and having to compromise to work on multiple platforms simply did not happen with Wayland.
However, it has always been that way to some extent. Pick a less popular configuration and you'll have issues with application support. It's also what a lot of Linux users want - functionality NOW! Forget catering for BSD or whatever, which limits functionality and slows development, but is also very likely to incorporate compromise and flexibility into a design.
Certain oft quoted benefits such as support for old hardware are also flat out wrong. If you've old, popular hardware it's very likely it still works, but this is only because of ongoing work from developers. There are at least *three* (four?) different display driver models in X, and maintaining old hardware support relies on drivers being re-written each time, it is not automatic.
Not really, that's one thing you can't blame Microsoft for - at least until Windows 11. Let's take a decent PC from 2008, it's still capable of web browsing and productivity even today.
It comes shipped with Vista. In 2009 Windows 7 is released, followed by 8, 8.1, and 10. With a suitable graphics adapter and a large enough hard drive/SSD the system could be usable from 2008 until right now.
Upgrading to Windows 11 wouldn't be possible without workarounds because the CPU would be too old, and so would the TPM (if it even had one, back in 2008).
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