Posts by cdegroot

Re: Nothing new...

You mean Facebook, that company that saw its userbase growth slow down markedly and saw its stock drop by over a third after all the scandals? It seems that at least some people care.

Also - Facebook's primary product is selling data about you. Amazon's primary product is selling stuff to you. There's less of a network effect and more alternatives in the latter, and as others have remarked - outright snooping in your homes is a tad worse than Facebook figuring out what you do and showing you ads in response. I use iPhones over Android for the same reason - I'm more the customer and less the product.

I guess everybody makes their own decisions in this area. It's a fine balance between trying to protect your privacy and enjoying some of the advantages of the modern age. YMMV, etc.

Re: Why use Hyper-V or even Windows for that matter?

Docker for Windows/Mac (it really doesn't matter) is super slow. Comparable with WSL - disk access is emulated and that just puts the handbrake on things. I've tried various approaches for developing on my Win10 laptop (because games, Lightroom, and so on), and I settled on running a full-screen Linux under Hyper/V on a second virtual desktop. It's very fast.

I don't think KVM is more efficient than Hyper-V - both are, AFAIK, hypervisors rather than oldskool virtualization engines and performance should be ballpark the same. Whether you boot Win10 or Linux first shouldn't make too much difference because from the point of view of the hypervisor it ends up being just another client OS and Linux-under-Hyper-V-under-Windows and Windows-under-KVM-under-Linux both have a root hypervisor and then two OSes running underneath that. At least, that's what I understood about this whole business when I last checked how stuff worked :-)

Back on topic: I really don't like Hyper-V's management UI, so this will hopefully help.

Re: Limped after Apple II

Oh, that old Audi 100. My dad had one, just when I got my driver's license. A car from the future: affordable (compared to BMW and Mercedes), super quiet, very fuel efficient, very nice handling and, IIRC, couldn't rust because one of the first zinc-treated cars. And back then the styling was from the future as well... Lovely piece of work.

Re: Slack

IRC, Skype, Hipchat, Slack, Bluejeans, Hangouts, Zoom, ... - it all seems pretty interchangeable to me. My employer switched chat and videoconf providers a couple of times, and it's not a big deal. Which is why I think that Slack is not worth $10b but I'm sure that Goldman-Sachs will ignore my opinion and get the valuation they want anyway for an IPO ;-).

I don't think that running your own IRC server is a solution for any company - your admin hours are probably better spent elsewhere. That doesn't mean that I _like_ being forced to one chat client where IRC gave me integration wherever, however I wanted - in the CLI, in a 24x80 terminal, inside Emacs, under any GUI, and so on. But times go on and sound business reasoning precludes rolling your own if there are so many relatively cheap solutions out there that just work.

Re: Internet minimum data transfer rates for broadband.

Indeed. I don't know what idiot decided 25/3 qualifies as minimum "broadband". I'm on 5/3 on a local rural wireless ISP and I work from home full time, do video conferencing while my wife is watching Netflix, so I don't get what all the fuzz is about. My guess is that Google/Apple/... sponsored that 25/3 upgrade to make sure that people stuff more things in their clouds.

You mention the most important thing here a couple of times, but let me stress it:

"watched"

Observability by ordinary citizens is the key advantage of paper voting. It maintains trust, and maximizes the number of eyeballs verifying the ballot. I volunteered at polling stations and always had huge respect for the people who came in around closing, sat down, and just observed us counting votes. That is democracy in action - for everybody, by everybody, and people who think that this should be taken away and replaced by machines are not to be trusted. Nothing is gained, and a lot is lost.

Nothing new...

My thought as well. I've used CVS for the same in the '90s, and it worked quite well - I hated the guts of SCCS and always tried to stick with RCS instead which didn't have the anal locking that SCCS sported.

I've never gotten around unleashing git on /etc/ though (although my "dotfiles" are there and it's very nice). There's enough stuff in there to make it maybe worth a try, although these days Chef/Puppet/Ansible/Salt/... are probably more appropriate.

Nothing new...

Well, psychology is the study of how students behave under lab conditions, not?

It's all about the big numbers

The address space is not wasted, it is just vast. At my previous place, I had a fixed IP, a /64 allocated out of the /32 (I think) that my provider got assigned, out of the, say, /16 assigned to Canada. This way, anyone in the world just needs to know about the /16 to route packets for me to "roughly Canada", the (say) Toronto Internet Exchange just needs to know that 16 bits further down it went to my old provider, etcetera. It limits route tables to really manageable entries and you can still have tons and tons of top level ISPs.

The /64 in my house gets subdivided as well: privacy IPv6 addresses, MAC-based IPv6 addresses, and then a couple of DHCP ranges that for example routed between my regular network and a bunch of docker swam networks on Raspberry PIs (don't ask ;-)). I wasn't using my whole address space, but I certainly had another subdivision going on.

Having 340282366920938463463374607431768211456 addresses makes large scale routing really efficient by purposely going sparse. It's a bit of a twist from IPv4, but it makes a ton of sense. 128 bits is so mindbogglingly big (picture all of space and a sign "you are here") that it enables these sort of strategies and still be future proof, even though the allocation strategies seem wasteful at first sight.

(glad you asked. I'm on a rural PtP LTE connection now. Behind five-hundred layers of "Carrier Grade NAT". Which is how we all will end up on IPv4, with no option to, say, run a webserver on your home router).

Indeed. When I ran my own ISP, I found out the hard way that cable management wasn't one of my strengths, so I always unplugged everything at the server side in our racks and let it dangle. A replacement, new server, or whatever was bound to need these connectors anyway at some time in the future.

I'm using less and less of all this anyway...

Typing this on a MacBook Pro that I rage-upgraded to Ubuntu 17.10 after giving up on Mac OS X (specifically High Sierra). It turns out that as a developer, the list of apps I need is quite limited: a browser, a really good terminal program, Emacs and IntelliJ/IDEA. So switching for me has become simpler over the years, not harder. For mail and office stuff, Linux is bad indeed, and I can't even blame the City of Munich for dropping it. Again, as a developer, a bit of Google Docs is all I need; YMMV.

Funnily enough, for me the whole windows management stuff is actually the critical bit. I'm switching all the time, need all the screen real estate there is for my IDEs, and as such I need something that lets me run full-screen, multiple virtual desktops, and keyboard-based switching of it all. With _my_ keyboard shortcuts, thank you ;-). Ubuntu (the base edition) does a pretty nice job there, so I'm happy.

Nothing new...

I think what you describe is called a "mainframe". Which seems to me what Sillicon Valley is very busy reinventing. Now including proprietary hardware.

Also, not every language community needs/wants Stack Overflow. Reading through the blog post this is a pretty successful press release by SO, not a meaningful exercise in statistics.

(I like SO as much as the next developer because there are a lot of extremely useful answers on the site, but it does seem to me that 90% of the questions asked are by very junior people hacking away in their spare time; as such, Python might receive- probably deserved - laurels as a widespread beginner language; it doesn't say a lot about the industry, though)

Re: and the UK NHS thought this was a mature technology to pin the NHS "Spine" on?

Erlang is actually a soft real-time system, which makes it an almost perfect fit for "web-scale" systems. See for example Whatsapp. It turns out that its actor model is nice and a great fit for modern systems. A new language on the VM, Elixir, is taking off like crazy and overall the ecosystem seems to be booming.

Riak needs a ton of maintenance, and I can't wait for a community to pick it up and run away with it - I've only heard and experienced good stuff around it.

Re: Best traps

Given sufficient cats, there will be not much wildlife outside your back door. I decided that cats are indoors pets (fresh air can be obtained by our 3 cats on our catio ;-))

Re: Is it better than Cygwin?

It's better, IMHO. I have one Win10 laptop (for games) on which I've been experimenting with WSL, basically to see whether my current personal development laptop (an aging MacBook Pro) could get a Win10 successor. I like WSL a lot, so far, although some bugs have still to be worked out (Emacs in text mode backgrounds itself all the time, for example). The biggest win is that WSL (I call it GNU/Win10) is binary compatible with GNU/Linux, meaning that a WSL bash will have an apt setup pointing straight at Canonical's repositories. I never liked Cygwin's setup.exe, and that's now gone.

Pretty much the biggest thing on my wishlist is a better X server. VcXsrv does the job very well, but font management is a pain. Having an Ubuntu-integrated X server would be great. But I can totally see myself working full-time in it - for my next home system, it'd be great to have One To Rule Them All (a platform that can run games, Lightroom, _and_ all my dev tools); for my next work system, it's up to my employer - I won't pay for Apple hardware anymore as it's too locked down and the OS is crap for developers, and I can completely see me working on a work Win10 laptop. I'd prefer that over a work Linux laptop as Win10 takes care of talking to the hardware and does a way better job at it than Linux (I'm talking odd device drivers, GPU drivers, hotplugging hardware, sleep modes, etcetera - from what I'm hearing from Linux-wielding colleagues, still an unsolved problem).