Posts by Lunatic Looking For Asylum

Why bother with a big lump of concrete ?

Make bricks out of the stuff. Add a surface solar cell and use wall ties to wire everything up. Whole house becomes one giant solar battery.

If they're aiming for a car battery sized lump in a few months, a brick should be done by last week.

My latest project

I could have done the work in C or C++* but I wanted something different - purely for the sake of it, I'm comfortable with them so why not try something else.

I started at GO (where else) but didn't like the enforced style and funny brace rules, then went to Rust and spent a lot of time reading the book and trying different things and tutorials, felt quite good and happy with how it was going then went to write my first bit of code for the project and started getting warnings and compile fails that I'd never had before so back to the tutorials and experimenting.

In the end I got fed up and found D (https:://dlang.org) and it's really quite nice, there are a couple of minor issues with it but the community is very helpful and it's not been that difficult to get up and running with it. It certainly fits my brain wiring better than Rust.

I had my first module written after about four hours and while not complete, it's workable for what I want at the moment and will grow as the project grows.

& there's no evangelism either denigrating other languages and telling you how D's going to take over the world.

It's just quietly good.

This is where I think Rust is really getting it wrong - it's being rammed down our throats and pushed but it just ain't a better mousetrap.

*I used to like C++, but C++ as it was in the early days, it's now a bit of a dogs breakfast with C++11 or C++17 etc flavours and new ones coming every few years and each new one getting more arcane (and still not trapping IDIV0 exceptions) & (or && if you will) constantly changing the spec says to me that they haven't got it right.

Beware Obvious Click Bait articles - I should know better

Who cares really. I've been using Linux for almost three decades and can honestly say I've never wanted to write to an NTFS volume. I think NTFS write is an edge case. The existing read only NTFS driver is more than adequate, if you want to write something to an NTFS volume then go and buy a Windows licence. If a project says it has to use NTFS I doubt very much it will say it also has to use Linux. Right tool for the job etc.

I'm struggling to think of a case where you would need NTFS write with Linux as well or even where there is a need for write to co-exist. Just read the data and store it on ext4 etc. or as mentioned in a previous post use SMBFS or NFS. NTFS really is a non issue. If NTFS is the solution, you have been asked the wrong question.

We then come to the politics. M$ will _NEVER_ release NTFS source code. They could release a kernel module or blob so that anybody that wanted write functionality could have it but why would they bother, almost nobody would use it so it's a lot of effort for nothing really.

Releasing the source code isn't as simple as dropping a tarchive out and it's done. There will be a lot of work needed to modify the low level calls to the drivers, problems with endianness, sector translations etc. They would also have to visit every line of code and check that everything is perfectly formatted, logically correct and well written and they would probably have to strip the comments out as well then make sure that it all compiles cleanly on GCC and LLVM and performs in a native Linux environment. They will then release it and some poor OS developer will have it land on their lap and try and make sense of it, make sure that there are no hidden nasties in the code (intentional or unintentional) and then test it thoroughly before letting it free to the community.

Once it's out there, you'll get the sad people poring over the code and criticising every line of it - "oooh look they've used camelCase on line 454 here and CamelCase on line 427 - that's BAAAD...." and even if it's perfectly written, as soon as one bug is found the whole thing will be spread all over the net as M$ flusterCluck and nobody will use it again ever...

I'm still struggling to think why we need it and what the positives are for M$ - as I said click bait article.

Let there be smug....

Cue the Conservative & Unionist party chortling away until next week when it happens to them....

Diversification Needed by Apple

M$ have effectively re-invented themselves over the last few years. Almost nobody buys their stuff anymore, they rent it and effectively make M$ a none state tax entity, HMRC where the M is for Microsoft. Apple are currently exploiting their monopoly position i.e. locking every apple user into the system, but that is all they have. If you take away the iPhone name, there is very little of substance for them to fall back on. They got lucky with the phones, M$ got lucky with the desktop, M$ have moved on and are reaping the 'rewards' (AKA screwing the gullible in another manner) Apple are sitting on their laurels.

Sadly while we have a brain dead corporate model that favours OPEX (lets give our money to somebody else) over CAPEX (lets innovate and do stuff ourselves) these two corporations will continue to prosper and laugh all the way to the bank.

Could this also be the end for Dead Rat ?

It's over complex, over priced, under supported and TBH making M$ Windows look good.

I'll not be crying if DeadRat is dragged down the same sewer as IBM - even if I do get paid to manage it.

Before long we'll be just running several apps on the server, get rid of the dock overhead as well.

Fashion repeats.

To quote his Bobness, parphrasing Dr J I think

"They say that patriotism is the last refuge to which a scoundrel clings"