The way I think it, it’s possible a really small number of GPUs would be enough to render the framebuffer, you’d just need an army of low-power graphics units to receive the data and render it on screens.
Having a high-power GPU for every screen is definitely a loss unless the render job is distributed really well and there’s also people around to admire the results at the distance where the pixel differences no longer matter. Which is to say, not here.
Back in 1997 I was like “Ooh, Debian is mildly easy to install (compared to Slackware). Just need to engage my brain a few times maybe.”
(The first Slackware guide I read in 1996 had an ominous warning about getting the ModeLines right in XFree86 or the monitor will catch fire. This, fortunately, was a little bit of exaggeration. Over/under refresh frequency protection was already a thing.)
Now? “Oh no I fucked up my password shit and can’t login. I’ll need 5 more minutes to completely reinstall this Raspberry Pi image. I should have engaged my brain!”
Shit, we’ve gotten to the point that your average desk jockey can probably install freaking FreeBSD on the first try. If that’s not a good sign I don’t know what is.
Not exactly boned but it probably doesn’t make practical difference to store “local time + tzinfo timezone” than just UTC time.
Even if you store everything in UTC, you may be safe… but figuring out the local time is still convoluted and involves a trip through tzinfo.
DAM as in digital asset management. Fancy word for “image library organiser”.
Oh, everything works with Affinity. Thing is, Adobe is pretty much the only software ecosystem that is subtly (or not so subtly) making people think inwards. “I’d love to try that piece of software, but if it’s not running as a Photoshop/Lightroom plug in, is it even worth trying?” Whereas when people who use other software are more likely to go “Well my favourite software package doesn’t do thing X, but I have this other piece of software that does that, it’s not even a hassle.”
Also, when I switched from digiKam to ACDSee, at no point did I have to go “but what about my Adobe-locked-in catalogue, oh no!”…
I think it’s only a good thing they’re not trying to shoehorn DAM features into their existing apps. If they made a DAM software it’d have to be an external app anyway.
I did perfectly fine with digiKam in the past, and nowadays I’m perfectly happy with ACDSee. ACDSee even shows thumbnails for Affinity Photo project files.
Not “auto trust”, of course, but rather make adding keys is a bit smoother. As in “OK, there’s this key on the web site with this weird short hex cookie. Enter this simple command to add the key. Make sure signature it spits out is the same on the web page. If it matches, hit Yes.”
And maybe this could be baked somehow to the whole APT source adding process. “To add the source to APT, use apt-source-addinate https://deb.example.com/thingamabob.apt. Make sure the key displayed is 0x123456789ABC by Thingamabob Team with received key signature 0xCBA9876654321.”
Just today I heard someone whining about how in LinkedIn and other recruitment sites there’s like five bazillion profile tag options for RDMBSes and various dialects of SQL… when in actuality the recruiters are probably only concerned if the developer can do a bloody SELECT and stuff.
I’m a Debian fan, and even I think it’s absolutely preferable that app developers publish a Flatpak over the mildly janky mess of adding a new APT source. (It used to be simple and beautiful, just stick a new file in APT sources. Now Debian insists we add the GPG keys manually. Like cavemen.)
Might as well share my weirdest proto social media thing.
9/11.
(I’m in Finland. This happened in the afternoon.)
I was leaving work. I distinctly remember a coworker being alarmed about news.
I turned to the usual news source. Slashdot. Massive bloody thread about airplanes hitting the World Trade Center.
OK, that’s pretty bad.
I finally turn to TV news. …OK, stuff is far more in flames than I expected. I think I caught one of the towers collapsing in live TV.
But the following days, my primary news source about 9/11 was, actually, IRC! There was a channel on Freenode where a bot posted headlines about 9/11 investigations. Because the actual news websites were bloody dead under the massive traffic.
Up to 2.x, GNOME used what was basically the MacOS philosophy: make things easy and simple and intuitive, but if the user wants finer control and power features, make sure it’s still possible somehow. GNOME 3 and later pretty much adopted the philosophy that there’s the GNOME path of simplicity and streamlining, and power user functionality is going to be removed from the core and relegated to extensions. And, of course, GNOME started requiring boatloads of memory to run, which to me didn’t go hand in hand with “simplicity”.
I eventually settled on using XFCE, because it didn’t have the bloat and still had enough customisability. Really good environment for old and underperforming systems. If I’m using a modern high performance system, I’m actually pretty impressed by what KDE Plasma is doing these days.
GNOME 1 & 2: The dock is in the bottom by default. It can be moved elsewhere if the user prefers it.
GNOME 3+: The dock is wherever we think the user is likely to find it. Maybe it’s in the bottom. Maybe it’s nowhere. Maybe it’s everywhere. Verily, who can even begin to understand the mysteries of the brain?
I miss my SoundBlaster Live! card. Excellent sound quality. Last used with the last computer I built, in the late-mid-2000s. That was the second computer I had that had on-board audio, and I just didn’t bother with on-board audio because I just straight up assumed it was going to be shit. Unfortunately it stopped working at some point, along with the GPU (I suspect a static electricity fuck-up on my part, or something) which didn’t matter all that much because I was mostly using the system as a server at that point.
(I’m going to build a new NAS server from ground up later this year, and I’m contemplating getting an external DAC for it for use with musicpd. Wonder if there’s still SoundBlaster branded DACs, or are they gone? …Oh they’re still around!? Good.)
I’m suddenly having flashbacks of the whole SCO fiasco. And people older than me probably have flashbacks of the BSD/System V lawsuit.
I mean, this thing is fun to argue about, until you remember people used to argue about this in court.
Debian’s Firefox is Firefox ESR, or Extended Support Release. It’s behind the bleeding edge, but gets security updates.
If you want the bleeding edge Firefox, you can add Mozilla’s own APT repository and install it. Doesn’t even conflict with Debian (firefox-esr vs firefox, it even uses a separate user profile by default). Instructions are on the Firefox download page somewhere.
I remember people joking about this just after the first LotR trilogy trailers/promo stills came out. Damn I feel old.
I mean, C is a high level language? Now, sure, C isn’t a super expressive language and every C statement compiles to very few assembly instructions comparatively speaking, but it has a whole lot of stuff that assembly doesn’t have. Like nice loops and other control structures and such, and not worry about which processor registers are used.
There’s still a few sites I deploy changes to using ssh+rsync. …which is made considerably easier by the fact that it’s just a static website generated with Jekyll.
Oh no. You know shit is really terrible when they cannot even afford to communicate at 8 bits. It’s 5 bits Baudot code. Capital letters only. They actually had to pay extra for @, #, and $. Thankfully, by 1870s, % was part of the character set. My heart’s with anyone who can’t just blast UTF-8 out wherever they can.
(Edit: In case you’re wondering why it has a weird gif attached to it: The Memelord, Musky Elon, has decreed that you can actually attach a shitty random gif FOR FREE. So of course any cash strapped institution will do so.)
When I was learning about GIMP key shortcuts I was like “Ctrl+A selects everything, Ctrl+Shift+A deselects everything. Makes sense.”
And then I went to most of the other apps. “Ctrl+D? Well it’s one less keypress, but… WHY?”
To be fair, I get it now, I’ve used plenty of image editors and I remember the keybinds wherever I am. Just that I sometimes find it annoying that The Other Software hasn’t adopted logical keybindings.
(I find it particularly annoying that a lot of image editors try to be fancy and sophisticated and Photoshop-compatible and think it’s at all appropriate to use Ctrl+NumpadPlus and Ctrl+NumpadMinus for zooming. Just use what GIMP uses! NumpadPlus and NumpadMinus. It’s not hard! What are you using the plain plus and minus for, anyway? Absolutely nothing! I just checked, I need to use Ctrl in Affinity Photo. Plain plus and minus are useless. I see you. …oh I can just rebind these. Done.)
A “hbox” in TeX is a horizontal box. In 99% cases when laying out text, it’s a line of text. “Underfull hbox” means “I couldn’t stretch the content of this line far enough, so it will look janky as f due to the increased spacing”. “Overfull hbox” means “Well, I tried my best to hyphenate and line-terminate, but this word will stick out of the margin and will look stupid as f.”
Most of the time this is caused by a word that auto hyphenation can’t deal with. You need to add a manual hyphenation exception. I can’t remember how to do that, sorry, because it’s been a while and also I’m mildly drunk, sorry.