katastic

I know you're publicly directly messaging, but as an outsider to the discussion, I don't see any actual mention in your posts why D isn't included. Just that it "used to be."

There are many of benchmark projects that include D and don't appear to be struggling under any kind of massive burden. For example:

https://github.com/kostya/benchmarks

What are your actual reasons for not keeping D... "scala... and Clojure and ..."? The results in the previous link show D as a massive competitor (sometimes 1st place beating C and C++) on both memory and speed. Wouldn't the purpose of benchmarks be... to highlight useful, highly-scoring languages? Isn't that one of the primary reasons people read benchmarks?

(The D implementations are also often smaller in lines of code, as per this benchmark project:

https://togototo.wordpress.com/2013/08/23/benchmarks-round-t...

)

When you singup for Facebook, you agree that anything you post might be shared with others on the platform.

Except you CAN'T sign away your rights in many jurisdictions, including this thing called HIPAA. So if Facebook sold people's mentions of health problems to third-parties... is that a violation?

I mean, this is the exact scenario people grilled Windows 10's spyware. But somehow, Facebook doing it, isn't an issue? What's the difference? I'm honestly asking.

This is downright silly.

HOSTS files are static. They were never designed for blocking ads or tracking. And for all we know, every connection does a linear search through the HOSTS file so the larger it gets, the more wasted time, because it was never designed to have millions of entries.

Is that why they hate Peter Thiel so much and try to smear him in the media?

ala

https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2016/06/peter-thiel-i...

(Kind of strange how they can target a gay guy for getting mad at being outed by a media company. Victim blame much?)

Meanwhile, he apparently called Uber "ethically challenged." So far, he's got 2 and 0 for good quotes.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/richkarlgaard/2014/12/10/do-jer...

"Free" = For use in Unreal Engine only.

Kind of like how that one NPM package took down like 14,000 other packages when someone took a DMCA request against an author's OTHER package and he just took them all down in protest--which took down their dependencies and their dependencies and ... "broke the world".

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/03/23/npm_left_pad_chaos/

The code in question was like 11 lines of code (with curly and spaces!!) for calculating left-hand padding for a syntax highlighting code box.

Has anyone created a service that you auth in through GitHub and it backs up all your repos to S3 or Dropbox or something? I'd pay a few bucks for something like that.

So you'd pay money for a tool that copies your data, but not simply pay the money to access said data?

This doesn't make any sense at all.

Think of it more like SQL, where you're describing a model, then a series of steps.

My problem (years ago) was that with Lattice, there just aren't as many tutorials/easy-EDA and they kind of expect you to know what you're doing.

So if you've never taken a class on FPGA's and learned how netlists work, et al, Lattice may be a harder time. I ended up buying a cheap Altera afterward just to learn.

Please tell me you've got pictures. I would very much like to see them.

And we won. The judge gave the Secret Service a tongue-lashing and ruled for SJ Games on two out of the three counts, and awarded over $50,000 in damages, plus over $250,000 in attorney's fees.

You know, this really sounds like a "win" only in the sense it's the "win" we're "allowed" to have.

Everyone's lives were ruined for years. They almost lost their business. They lost a product they had poured countless hours into. They had to pay up front for attorney's fees (even though they were completely in the right), and spent years in court.

And all the Secret Service lost was some "sharply worded comments" and a tear-drop amount of taxpayer money that wouldn't even register on their budget and had zero affect on their future budgets.

The only brightsides were indirect ones. The EFF was founded, and their case law would likely be used for future cases and possibly future government actions (before they act) since they know they wouldn't be able to get away with it.

It cost mere 2 million (of their huge budget) to serve ALL of the pages from Wikimedia Foundation for 2017.

It can't cost "that much" for someone to download Wikipedia pages. And if so, you can still buy a Wikipedia snapshot CD/DVD.

- But if Wikipedia is "too much" bandwidth (1) then what CAN you access on the internet? Why would you expect any utility from the internet at all, if a mostly text page is too much?

- Unlike Wikipedia taking on the world itself, Wikipedia should be LOBBYING people with even more money to do it for them. You know... building internet infrastructures. Think how bad our internet would be today if in 2005 they said, "Let's work on minimizing the bandwidth usage instead of complaining that our ISPs need to get faster." It's like someone who wants to get out of poverty by spending less. Yeah, that's great. But you want an easier way to get out of poverty? Make more money. Trust me, I know. We should be elevating internet quality (and incomes) around the world, not minimizing usage for one of the already tiniest bandwidth websites on the planet.

(1) BTW, there's also bandwidth reducing plugins for Chrome that have a 3rd-party convert them to black-and-white/low-res.

[edit] There's even an official Google plugin! (If you're okay having them basically store the contents every site you visit...)

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/data-saver/pfmgfdl...

I don't recall the 3rd party one I used but it definitely worked when I tested it out. It might be this one, Bandwidth Hero:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bandwidth-hero-liv...

(Basically search "Bandwidth saver" in extensions.)

I'm still waiting for someone to make a wayland compositor that compares to compiz. One super important feature I use every day is being able to invert a SINGLE window and not the entire screen.

For all the "omg it's slow" posts about compiz and x-server, it's fast enough to run on my netbook with a 5-watt processor.

Absolutely. When I was a kid, I'd skip tutorials, I'd skip text in RPGs. I just wanted to get to the ACTION.

As I'm older, I'm actually able to sit down and appreciate slower-form / long-form RPGs with lots of text that adds the real texture to the graphics--which only really form a symbolic / tactical representation of the world, and the flavors, the smells, all come from text. In many ways, the game mechanics of most games are all the same and the flavor is what sets them apart.

Exile 3: Ruined World for example. (And the two remakes Avernum 1 and 2 series.) Are legendary for their novel length text and story.

When I was a kid, I spent my time playing with character options, trying out new diseases (more diseases = less XP per level--neat idea) and skipping texts to explore. But then I'd always get stuck at some point because I missed a key piece of text when I skimmed

(That's actually one "game sin" I hate in many games. If you're going to have important text buried in tons of flavor text, COLOR or EMPHASISE IT. The last thing you want is a player who gets tired one night, skips ONE line that was important, and then hates your game because they're frustrated without information they should have had.)

That reminds me of people doing 3-D engines in MegaZeux.

http://vault.digitalmzx.net/screens2/cde248323538306a9712eb9...

MegaZeux is a ZZT successor.

https://image.dosgamesarchive.com/screenshots/zzt4.gif

And uses ASCII characters. MegaZeux up'd the ante and allowed you to edit the VGA text glyphs so you could make "sprites."

Back-in-the-day Megazeux and ZZT were like their own dedicated systems, like software console systems. It was really fun to see what people did with incredibly constrained systems.

You also could stop misusing the browser as an application frontend, and write a proper frontend with a cross-platform toolkit, and distribute that.

This is pure insanity. There are tons of applications built on the web stack now that are supposed to run on local networks. There has never been a requirement that "Network == Internet".

For example, enterprise software. Dynamics CRM? Dynamics NAV? Dynamics... anything? Sage CRM? Everything runs on the browser now.

Why would anyone pass up a gigantic, proven, powerful software stack that represents >90% of all applications in the world?

The error is in the stack, not that people would want to use the easiest, most powerful tool for the job.

We might as well be advocating to go back to FoxPro.

For the first, just tell the people to get proper devices.

It must be super nice to live in a world where you can dictate what devices the clients use, as opposed to a huge investment of pre-installed devices, or, devices users bring from home.

Whatever job you've got, I want it. Because it's completely alien to my career experience.

I absolutely agree. C++ is at least a decade behind D. Literally.

The kinds of features that eventually hit C++, D actually had for at least ten years. I think of D as a clean break. A major version upgrade with an API break. Whereas C++ has committees that move incredibly slowly, D has two architects who are decades long professionals and considered experts in their fields. It has focus, and it's not concerned with making code from the 70's compile on a modern compiler.

I simply cannot enumerate all of the features I use from D that I use every day that have become second-nature. Until I try to code in C++ again and I'm like, "The !@$@!ing order of declarations matter?! I can't make circular references without manually writing forward declarations?!" It feels like banging rocks together to make a 747.

I know this is a place for software/web developers but good god, really? It was at best a minor tech article in a car magazine in the Wal-Mart magazine stands.

What exactly did you learn?

He kept saying the i3 "life module" (agile! AGILE!) was some magical achievement. Yeah, carbon fiber is neat. They also choose the grain direction of panels for optimum efficiency.

- We've been using grain direction on wood for what, thousands of years?

- We've been made cars "strong" for century. It's called a tube frame. And it's one of the main reasons dragsters/NASCAR drivers don't die on impacts that will kill most people in consumer cars.

What's actually important these days is not how "strong" a frame is. It's how it deforms to absorb maximum energy on impact so the passengers experience the least acceleration possible. "Strong" has been solved. And crush areas have been common for decades upon decades. The only new thing here is they're using carbon fiber. And the only reason they're doing that... is 1) "marketing" and 2) weight reduction because battery cars are very heavy AND very sensitive to weight for mileage.

Automotive companies aren't on the frontline of technology. They're on the frontline of CHEAP/mass-producible technology.

Simply putting some carbon fiber on a body is not magical to us practicing mechanical engineers. But I guess it may seem like "magic" to software people, the way mechanical people see IT/software as magic.

What's actually "Cool" about this company/video is how they can tear down entire vehicles and come up with accurate cost estimates, as well as the construction order. That takes a _lot_ of work and industry experience. But the technology in those cars? It's not even remotely new.

https://www.space.com/8193-caused-apollo-13-accident.html

In October 1968, the Number 2 tank eventually used on Apollo 13 was at the North American Aviation plant in Downey, California. There, technicians who were handling the tank accidentally dropped it about two inches. After testing the tank, they concluded the incident hadn't caused any detectable damage.

The dropped tank was eventually cleared for flight and installed in Apollo 13. The tank passed all of its routine prelaunch tests. But at the end of March 1970, after a practice session called the Countdown Demonstration Test, ground crews tried to empty the tank -- and couldn’t.

The small tube used to fill and empty the tank of its super-cold contents had been damaged by the mishandling almost two years earlier.

Looks like it was two problems that came together. The heating insulation / voltage-change oversight wouldn't have triggered unless they also had to work around the jammed pipe.

Not to mention the _costs_ to society/economy to rescue risk-takers every time they get stranded or injured.

That reminds me of a slightly off-topic story.

My college library had multiple floors. They decided with their grand collective genius, to replace the entire first floor with a knockoff Starbucks "cafe", and tons of Apple computers and tablets (99% of which were just used for Facebook).

They moved the good books upstairs, but any book that didn't make the cut, was literally thrown out. They announced it and you could see a generation gap. I was almost in my 30's. The 18 year olds didn't seem to mind (though some did, I'm not bashing 18 year olds). But anyone my age or older, was appalled. They wouldn't let you buy the books. They wouldn't even let you just take them. They had to be burned. BURNED.

Some of the older students (30+) literally said "Fuck it." and went out of their way to smuggle books out of the library past the theft detectors. They all had their different (strong!) personal reasons for "protecting history" or "not being apart of burning books."

As long as people like that exist--people willing to fight stupid decisions by people at the top--I think we're going to be okay in the long run.

And that reminds me of working for Sam's Club for 5+ years. We threw out so much food that was "out of date" when there were literally homeless people half a mile away. We kept telling management it was wrong but they said "We can't give it away because of liability reasons." (Which I think is bullshit because you can make someone sign away their liability. And Good Samaritan laws exist.) But the real proof that it was bullshit was 10 years later, they now... actually give away day-old food to the local food banks. (Now I'm getting flashbacks of Elaine giving away Muffin stumps to the Foodbank. I should stop now before I derail into another dimension.)

Addendum:

Anyone remember GStreamer being a Linux vulnerability because it had a 6502 CPU emulator to run... NES music files, and hackers managed to jump outside of the VM.

https://scarybeastsecurity.blogspot.com/2016/11/0day-exploit...

It makes me wonder how easy it is to break out of a particular anti-virus vendor's VM, in a vulnerability that wouldn't exist if you weren't even running AV (outside Defender) at all.

I've actually heard many people (including one Chrome developer) that they don't even use AV anymore except Windows Defender because 99% of AV break Windows/applications by using non-standard hooks and may even introduce new vulnerabilities with their kernel drivers/etc.

https://it.slashdot.org/story/17/02/01/1334219/google-chrome...

Honestly, if they can't even stop viruses from infiltrating closed systems like Android and iOS, I don't see how an anti-virus suite could ever win the battle against a user intentionally installing a virus.

(Of course, desktop apps are a different ballpark than web apps/websites where you're merely connecting to a website vs installing a dedicated application with filesystem access.)

You're using logic again. His point is they're not logical unless you count "forest through the trees" fallacies as logic.

They want whatever is IN. Whatever is BIG. Whatever is the most POPULAR.

It's all about "big names" swirling around the community. "Have you heard of X?" Because "discovering X" and getting a big deal makes you famous.

"Driving profits up 3% over last quarter" is not what a hot shot maverick does. It's not cool.

So finding tens/hundreds/thousands of smaller (but successful!) channels isn't popular. Humans can't process that easily. And when it comes to impressing your boss in that industry, you want bite-size chunks. You want the next Macklemore, not 30 amazing electrical-engineering channels.

I am consistently impressed with the feature-set and simplicity of D. A system language that can run code with the ease-of-use of Javascript. I'd need paragraphs to describe all the features I use that I didn't have before in C++. (Modules?!)

I had no plans for trying "Fuzz Testing" before, but I'm definitely going to spend an evening trying it out. It fits well within D's natural language support for unit testing, contract programming, and compile-time function evaluation.

It should be noted that 186's aren't even remotely compatible with 286's and 386's. And implementing a 286/386/486 is actually much harder and more complex than say, an 8086. That's why most people stop their hobby project at 8086 or 286. Because it becomes much more work to accomplish and the fun/novelty dries up.

Windows 10 is still terrible in that regard. Like, laughably bad.

1. I dare you to try it on a computer with a 5400 RPM hard drive. A fresh installation will spend the majority of its time sitting around with 100% disk usage as telemetry, superfetch, defender and more all eat up the entire ~2M/s hard drive bandwidth for more than 30 minutes after boot. And then halfway through your day, it'll decide to start recompiling .NET, or some other package with zero user notification and your computer will come to a halt. But hey, you're resourceful right? Just disable those services! Nope, too bad. Every version of Windows (including creators updates) have made it harder and harder for a user to disable features that break. Services get moved to TRUSTEDINSTALLER, an account that you can't override. Those services get restarted without asking you. Some as few as a couple hours. And Windows Defender will restart itself, and the before-last creators update KNEW people were disabling it so they moved the link in Metro/settings to be more obscure.

2. I just spent Friday for a client trying to "fix" Windows for Microsoft and failed. He bought a "Windows 10" laptop with a 30 GB SSD drive. Too bad, Window alone, took 97% of the entire hard drive. I removed literally every application (including 1 GB avast) except for Chrome and Windows 10. Every time I removed space, removed the hibernation file, removed any and all disk cleanup stuff... Windows would then fill it with patches.

It also had a 2.6 GB "C:\recovery" folder. I checked online and they said "Feel free to delete it, it's from an old OS." I tried deleting it, no permissions--even as an admin. I went in, changed the owner from the glorious TRUSTEDINSTALLER and made myself the owner of all the files. I deleted some files, but one file refused to delete. The file? 2.6 GB. It said this file was open in "Windows Provisioning". I checked Windows 10 backups, restorepoints, file history, all that jazz. Zero.

I check online. Maybe I'm insane. What are the Windows 10 requirements for hard drive space? Oh yeah, 15 GB. So there are, "Lies, damned lies, and Windows hardware requirements."

Meanwhile, Windows 10 keeps spamming that "You need to free up space to continue downloading windows updates!!!"

Really? REALLY? Thanks for the update.

I download Process Explorer. They say find the open search and find the file handle of the file open. I do it. ZERO RESULTS.

I download a tool that lets you delete a file on reboot before a program will acquire the file lock. It queues it up. It runs. It fails. Still NOTHING in services.msc that has Provisioning in the name.

Okay, change gears. ALL they want, is to freakin' install Office 356 on their craptop. They've got an SD card with a 32 GB card.

By now, after clearing up at least 4 GB, C: is now down to 100MB free.

I download the 5 MB Office auto-installer. It fails with a pop UNDER error that you don't notice at first under the loading screen. Okay, instead of giving you a description, it gives you an obscure error code. Clicking it at least gives you the KB for "out of disk space." Lovely.

I load up the Microsoft website, I find an alternative downloads link. I find the offline installer.

But back to task at hand! I load up the same link on this slugger of a Windows laptop and I go "Fine, I'll download it to the SD."

But wait, sorry! Thanks to the ultra-progressive, consumer-friendly Microsoft, they're too forward-thinking to let you have a download link. No, you get a Javascript button. It goes right into the full drive and fails. Okay, control click? Nope, Javascript. Okay, load up chrome settings and change where the default save location is and point it to the SD card.

I download it for ~40 minutes. Why? Because it's 4.6 FREAKING GIG for the offline Office suite. What basically boils down to an e-mail client, and word processor, is larger than an entire Linux distro with apps. (<-Yeah yeah, there's more apps, but I'm pissed at this point so I'm taking comedic liberty here.)

So I wait, and it finally downloads to the SD card, and at 99%, it stops and goes "download failed." There must be some Chrome bug with temporary space or something.

Well! I'm not defeated yet--this is my job and I'm paid for results. I've got a USB flash drive and my Linux laptop (read: running an OS that actually works and can be configured and fixed by the end user).

I go to the same website as before with my Linux netbook. But wait, the page... it's... different?

Everything is the same except that wonderful offline installer link? They removed from the page. That's right. Go there with Windows, and then Linux, and go to same Microsoft download links and they will intentionally hide the ISO links and only give you the auto-installer link to ensure you're only going to run it on a Windows system. So customer friendly! (They do the same thing with Windows 10 ISOs, try it out.)

At that point, the client's laptop owner had to drive back 3+ hours to his office location so he had to take his laptop back.

I spent at least half a work day.. trying to (fight Microsoft) to free some space... on a machine that 100% meets Windows system requirements.

Thanks Microsoft. I wonder why do all my game and app dev on a Linux box these days. It's almost like I like feeling like I own the machine I paid for. Could you imagine having to go through all of these anti-consumer, anti-solution when doing hardware upgrades? What if you couldn't release the case on your machine without getting a "poweruser" license key from HP first? After all, they're just trying to protect you and they know how to run their hardware better than you. The more you look at that analogy, it really becomes insane how much we let Microsoft get away with bricking our own machines. The answer to a working machine should never be, "throw it out and buy a new one" when simply changing a config setting (if you were allowed to modify those registry values--sorry!) would suffice.

"I see you're trying to turn your SSD onto ACPI mode. Have you purchased an Enterprise SSD license yet?"

It's remarkable that companies can "own" things so fundamental, and obvious in computing--even if they don't actually utilize their IP's.

"Hey guys, I've got a patent for talking from one machine to another over a connection." (Don't give SCO any ideas.)

The purpose of patents was to foster innovation, not squander it.

What if Issac Newton and Liebniz had a "foundation" that owned the rights to every mathematical construct they discovered? How would the world function if we had to pay that foundation fees every time we used Newton's method, or Calculus? It'd be complete bureaucratic hell.

And further, coming from another angle, I bet you money there are prior implementations of P2P chat long before... 2005.

I think Y2K had more practical impact across the business world. There was genuine fear that it could cause an actual apocalypse with all major computerized systems failing, medical machines killing people, banks being affected and all money and debts disappearing overnight.

It wasn't that bad, because people took it seriously. But there were still tons of practical systems affected and billions of corporate dollars associated with fixing it.

So when you say "biggest mess up" you gotta define specific qualifiers. Because Meltdown/Specter is going to be solved by simply... buying a new CPU. (And retrofitting the old ones). So it consist of mostly a patch.

A BIG important patch, granted. But it's still just a patch. But some ATM's aren't going to start spewing money like they did on Y2K.

That's actually an interesting accidental point.

How many embedded CPU's with speculation might be affected? You may say "none" but there are Cortex CPUs embedded into FPGAs (either directly or form of IP cores). What if enterprise routers have them? What if TVs have them?

I know many Cortex's aren't affected. The point is, anything that needs a "fast enough" CPU to benefit from OoO scheduling is possibly at risk, right? So while most embedded devices use cheaper, less complex CPUs, there are plenty that don't--as more powerful CPUs (which offer speculation) are becoming cheaper and cheaper.

A Raspberry Pi 3 has a Cortex-A53 (because they're cheap). They're luckily not affected, but those CPUs and faster are cheap enough to throw onto a $35 retail price computer. What's running in your $800 internet-connected 4K TV?

Per the Pi 3 explaination page:

Examples of out-of-order processors include the Intel Pentium 2 (and most subsequent Intel and AMD x86 processors with the exception of some Atom and Quark devices), and many recent ARM cores, including Cortex-A9, -A15, -A17, and -A57.

https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/why-raspberry-pi-isnt-vulne...

The A9, 15, 17, and A57 are all affected and used across TONS of devices in the world. They're very popular not just in chip form (as the primary CPU), but also in IP cores (inside an FPGA), as well as "secondary CPU" systems attached to FPGAs or other CPU's.

And that's just one brand of one type of CPU. Who knows what else is out there. PowerPCs are in everything. Even your dust-covered Gamecube has out-of-order speculation!

Here's a link mentioning that PowerPC CPUs are affected:

http://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2018/01/is-powerpc-susceptibl...

So there goes all your PowerMacs. (And likely the Gamecube and Wii too!)