Posts by DrXym

Re: It's just fear of missing out

I suspect Apple are going to it simply because they can fab their own chips and aren't held to ransom by Intel.

But that's a business decision, nothing to do with benefiting users. And it's hard to see how it would benefit users when they're going to suffer crappier performance if they run x86 software through an emulation layer.

At least Apple are slightly better placed for the transition since they've done it twice before and make the hardware, the operating system and much of the ecosystem. So they can dictate the pace and can force the change.

Re: Welcome to Windows Phone all over again....

If Microsoft had any sense, they would have provided universal binaries and compiler support for Windows 7 / 8/ 10, i.e. you open devstudio and build an executable like usual but it's targetted to a low-level architecture neutral format. Just like what Apple already does in the iPhone with LLVM. Or what Google does with ART.

Then when that binary runs the OS compiles it natively and caches it somewhere and uses the cached copy thereafter. It means companies can ship a single binary that runs everywhere and that lessens the burdening of testing and supporting multiple versions.

But that would make too much sense. So instead Microsoft forces developers to choose what platforms to support and so one ARM device after another arrives stillborn because nobody can be bothered to support it.

Poor choice of words but presumably inside this kiosk is a CNC that grasps a blank and then mills out the grooves. Even in cheapo CNCs from Aliexpress the motors can move each axis within 0.1mm precision so there is no reason to think this kiosk would be any worse, and would be well within the tolerances of typical locks.

e.g. A Yale style lock has 7 pins, each cut to 7 potential heights that vary by 0.025 inch / 0.635mm increments. The corresponding key has 7 grooves that when inserted allows the pins to align and allow the lock to be turned.

So 0.1mm would be nothing at all and well within the tolerances that a lock would cope with.

Re: @DS999 - Whatever for?

A large percentage of contributors to the kernel have commercial interests because they work for vendors, chip manufacturers, distributions etc. If you want a kernel with no commercial interests then maybe GNU Mach would be more to your liking.

Re: Whatever for?

I have no idea if this new NTFS driver is better than the old ones, but it doesn't seem like "nothing" that someone is offering it gratis for people to make up their own minds. NTFS is a very advanced file system that has gone through many iterations and it is easy to see that a new driver might do things that an existing one doesn't.

Re: Positives and negative experiences

Bzzt no. Mobile apps these days are iterative. And even on the desktop too. So while I have huge issues with the new Firefox (that I listed) I find it the reaction to my comment to be absurd and pathetic. If the idea of change and perfection is such a big deal, then find some long LTS release of something, install it and then never whine about anything new again ever. Otherwise just deal with it and stop being such a baby. Especially when you got that software for nothing.

Re: Positives and negative experiences

"Finished" doesn't apply any more since things are iterative. I don't like some of the new behaviour but I think it qualifies as a MVP release and hope they undergo more refinement.

Re: Positives and negative experiences

And my point is that Firefox (and other browsers) already have a camera permission. It wasn't added in this release, it was there already. And the reason is protocols like WebRTC.

The permission is off by default and only turns on when you assent to turning it on. And you can turn it back off again. You can complain about this permission being there but it was already there.

Re: Positives and negative experiences

Firefox already had the permissions for camera / microphone. You can always say no when the app asks for initial permission to do it or manually turn it off if you inadvertantly enable it.

Re: Dystopia

I think the value is in being able to measure a very large number of people by age, ethnicity, location, wealth, weight, propensity, location and other demographics and sell that data. Presumably insurers in the US would love to know where their risks lie and pay handsomely. And Amazon too for that matter given how much crap they sell.

Re: Dystopia

A better question is why is the service free. The most obvious answer is there is money to be made from aggregating this data and selling it (e.g. to insurers), or using it to cross sell other things.

Just because your platform is proprietary doesn't make you a monopoly. If Apple were the only mainstream smart phone manufacturer then they'd be a monopoly. As they aren't and there is Google (and a handful of others), they aren't. Consumers are completely free to not purchase Apple products without suffering as a result - I've never owned an iPhone and felt disadvantaged from it, quite the contrary.

As for XBox and Playstation games, yes you can buy them from places but Microsoft and Sony are still getting a cut. Be in no mistake about that. And for a game like Fortnite that is a free digital download I don't think that argument even applies. Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo get a cut from sales of digital items just like with Apple & Google. If Epic pulled the same shit with the console platforms then they'd be as swift to take the game off their stores as Apple did.

Ultimately this all boils down to money. Epic wants all of it and gambled that Apple would capitulate. I don't think that seems likely. Either Epic comes back on the same terms with their tails between their legs or they're off the platform for good.

Re: Kinda sad.

Bzzt, no. You can't make up your own definition of what strongly typed means. Strongly typed languages enforce the type of a variable during declaration or assignment, either at compile or runtime. Rust is strongly typed at compile time. Just like C++.

And no you can't claim to have looked at it in depth or you wouldn't double down on such an obviously wrong statement. Or proclaim you know what causes most bugs. Look at CVEs if you are in any doubt of that. It seems you think that because no language (including Rust) can solve arbitrary application errors (e.g. halting problem) that it means it has no merit.

All of this suggests a far more likely reason you don't like Rust - you're incorrigible. No one is expecting you like Rust, but if you're going to stick your oar in it helps to have your information straight.

You don't need to develop and maintain bindings. You write code in Rust that has public C functions, build it and then invoke cbindgen (https://github.com/eqrion/cbindgen) to spit out a C or C++ header for it. It produces the headers automatically from your actual code. You can even make the cbindgen step part of the build itself.

An example of an automatically generated header shows it does a very good job.

https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/__GENERATED__/gfx/webrender_bindings/webrender_ffi_generated.h

Re: Kinda sad.

A better reason for fall through is you might have two values which have similar handling but you need to do a little extra handling for one than the other. So you structure the switch such that the little extra handling happens for one and then falls through to the next case. But it's still an edge case and hardly justifies it as a "feature" when it causes so many bugs and can be done some other way.

Re: Kinda sad.

You've said similar stuff in the past and it is wrong. Rust is a strongly typed language. It is as strongly typed as C++. In some ways, it is more strongly typed since enums are proper types unlike in C++. It is just that the compiler is very good at inferring the type. Think of "let" as you might think of "auto" in C++ except its better.

And you are wrong to say Rust doesn't do much to prevent the most common kind of error because the most common kinds of errors are null pointers, double-frees, dangling pointers, buffer overruns and data races. All things that Rust stops at compile time. It won't stop application errors, nothing will, but the fact you have half as many bugs in the first place is a seen as a GOOD THING by most people. Especially if you're talking about F-35 jets which is hardly a good example tbh.

And no one is forcing you to learn Rust, but it mystifies me why you would dismiss it when you don't even know what it does or why it might be a good thing. No one is stopping you using Ada if it works for you, but it helps to know why others might prefer another language.

Rust is designed to be very interoperable with C and C++ at runtime - the compiler spits out .o files and lib files just like C / C++ and they link together providing the function you're calling can be resolved.

There is some boundary stuff you have to do because C is unsafe and Rust is safe, and you need to generate bindings but you can easily call from one to the other.

Once you have it set up it's no more difficult to call Rust from C++ than it is any other random C library.

One of the (previously) nice things about OnePlus was the lack of bloatware. Out of the box you got a lightly skinned Android phone. This is starting to change and as an owner I find this ominous and off-putting.

What's most annoying is how unnecessary baking shit into the firmware even is. Instead they could just show a welcome page that *asks* if you want apps installed as part of setup. If you choose no then that's cool but OnePlus can charge companies to be on this list and be additionally compensated for any that the user elects to install. But no, that's too easy so they're going to ram that garbage and piss people off.