Comments by "Lawrence D’Oliveiro" (@lawrencedoliveiro9104) on "Brodie Robertson" channel.

  1. 6:30 I like this bit from “Halloween II”: An important attribute to note which has led to volume drivers is the ease with which you can write drivers for linux, and the relatively powerful debugging infrastructure that linux has. Finding and installing the DDK, and trying to hook up the kernel debugger and do any sort of interaction with user-mode without tearing the NT system to bits is much more challenging than writing the simple device-drivers for linux. Any idiot could write a driver in 2 days with a book like "Linux Device Drivers" — there is no such thing as a 2-day device-driver for NT This tells you why Linux has better hardware support than Windows.
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  2. 16:26 One hilarious ad I remember from this time is made up to look like a newspaper, “The Highly Reliable Times”. The “headline” was the London Stock Exchange choosing Windows NT over Linux to run their trading system. Not long after this, there was a massive failure of said system, which cost traders millions. Microsoft tried to blame it on some kind of “network issue”. Soon after that, the Windows NT system was ripped out in favour of ... a Linux-based one.
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  3. Yes, Windows source code has been leaked, I think more than once. And yes, it is just as embarrassing as you might think it is. There was some include file where the exact number of spaces on a particular line had to be kept unchanged, otherwise the build script would break. There was a comment that said “we are morons” next to it.
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  4. When infowmation is lost, it cannot be wegained.
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  5. 13:23 Bear in mind on Linux, if there isn’t an official update for, say a binary in /usr/bin, I can install my own build from source in /usr/local/bin, which will hide it. It’s easy enough to remove that later, when the official binary is fixed. Similarly for libraries (though that might have more consequences I haven’t thought through here...)
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  6. It’s not just new features being added, but some old ones dropped as well. The one that comes to mind for me is the X font server capability. Nowadays all GUI apps do their font handling client side (e.g. using FreeType and Fontconfig). There is still the concept of “X fonts”, and the display server still supports text-drawing calls. But I suspect these don’t get a lot of use these days.
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  7. Easter eggs are normally something you have to use some specific action to trigger. Like one version of old MacOS from 1993 or so had a little breakout game hidden in the “About This Macintosh” info window, that you had to press some combination of keys to activate. This way, the “leetle joke” does not impede the normal functioning of the software in any way. In fact, it becomes something “only known to a select few” (that you can feel smug about).
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  8. 1:56 Best to distinguish between the X protocol (or perhaps “protocol family”) versus XLib, which is just one implementation. Remember there is at least one other popular implementation, XCB, which gets rid of various responsiveness/performance bottlenecks in XLib, while still implementing exactly the same protocol.
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  9. 10:47 “Dismissal without prejudice” means “you can bring the case again”. “Dismissal with prejudice” means “judge says, piss off and never come back”.
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  10. Looking at their “roadmap” page, several of the issues they cite seem not to be relevant any more. Also, the irony of wanting to build new GPLv3 components on top of one of the notoriously GPL-allergic BSDs seems to have been lost on them.
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  11. Anybody remember the London Stock Exchange brouhaha? Microsoft made a big deal about the LSE choosing Windows NT to run its real-time trading system -- even put out a fake newspaper ad titled “The Highly Reliable Times” with that as its headline. And then there was this massive outage. I think the system was down for several days. Microsoft tried to blame it on “network issues”, not Windows NT itself. But not long after that, the LSE ripped out that Windows NT system and replaced it with Linux.
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  12. 5:05 Actually, any material created for payment from the 🇺🇸 Federal Government, that would ordinarily be under copyright, is legally in the public domain. It would be nice if other Governments did the same. And also nice if it could apply to patentable things as well.
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  13. GIMP is more innovative than people realize. For example, its GEGL pixel engine can natively handle images with 32-bit floating-point pixel components, which Adobe Photoshop still struggles with.
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  14. 1:43 Not coincidentally, 2004 is the year that XFree86 made that notorious change to their licensing conditions, provoking the Xorg schism and, one might argue, actually revitalizing X11 development.
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  15. 2:12 In a lot of the OS calls that take PIDs, PID 0 is understood to refer to the current process.
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  16. This is why they say, Windows is a great OS -- if your time is worth nothing.
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  17. 7:11 Remember that the Free Software Foundation explicitly recognizes many non-copyleft licences as Free licences. So even in Stallman’s terms, “Free Software” does not have to imply “GPL” or “copyleft”.
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  18. The safest Easter eggs are the ones that will not appear in normal production use -- you have to explicitly invoke some (undocumented) function to trigger it. Like, for example, on particular festival days, if you were to click on the date (which would not normally respond to clicks), then this amusing but relevant animation will appear.
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  19. Worth noting that Linux drivers are written, not for the brand name on the package, but for the chipset inside it. So for example umpteen different vendors might sell a doohickey with their own brand names on it, and also their own proprietary Windows drivers (which would likely clash with each other anyway), but on Linux there would be just one common driver, which can work with all these products, and also work with more than one of them at once.
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  20. I wonder how you can commit to any compliance requirements for a piece of proprietary software that you don’t control. At best you can commit to “being up-to-date with all vendor patches” -- I can’t see how you can do better.
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  21.  @janglestick  Lessig’s Law says “the one who writes the code makes the rules”.
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  22. 11:33 I think this “clean and minimal design” is a fashion idea promoted by Microsoft, because trying to do fancy 3D effects turned out to be such a disaster for them, in the resource-hogging Windows Vista.
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  23. Back in the 1990s, there were these things called “Unix workstations”. What made them “workstations” rather than “desktops”, besides the higher-end hardware, was that they included both client and server functionality together in one box. Somehow, Microsoft managed to persuade users that they didn’t need such a wide range of capability. Windows NT “Workstation” had its server functionality deliberately crippled (and being a bit cheaper also helped), and yet it still managed to wipe out the Unix workstations. So now what users had on their desktops was just a “desktop” OS. If they wanted server-style functionality, they would have to pay extra for a separate product: Windows Server. And not just that, but they would have to pay even more on top of that, for “CALs”, one for each user of a server function. So really the “desktop” segment could be seen as a creation of Microsoft’s marketing department, as an excuse for nickel-and-diming its customers to death. And somehow that has come to be accepted as the way things should be. Linux, on the other hand, is essentially the last standing “workstation” OS. It doesn’t play by the “desktop” rules. It offers full server-side functionality in the same box, with no “CALs” limits. Think of it as Usain Bolt, and the “desktop” market as a three-legged race; would you really complain that an Olympic-class runner would do so badly in such a pointless and trivial competition?
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  24. The whole concept of tying the GUI inextricably into the OS kernel is one that should have been left behind in the 1990s.
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  25. 9:29 Also, I tried checking out the link about the supposed Java dependency, and all it seems to say is that the Java-related documentation is still built even if you disable the Java functionality. If you turn off the Java functionality, you will end up with a Java-free build, as expected.
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  26. SSH is one of the major ones that is so widespread, you can give them a pass.
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  27. It’s not “Microsoft Office” any more, it’s now “Microsoft 365”. Except it has never managed 365 consecutive days of uptime yet. If you are going to merge documents, learn from the software developers who use plain-text formats for that. Merging binary documents does not go well.
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  28. Does Windows have a PID 1? More like it’s a “PID e10d8a4c-f756-4f2a-98f8-8d395aaadab6” or some rubbish like that.
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  29. The right to reverse-engineer is explicitly protected under 🇪🇺 law.
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  30. 6:53 This is one area where most *nix shells are deficient. I had a look at the “complete” system that was added to bash, but only because it was preventing me typing file names that I knew to be perfectly valid for those commands. So I just turned it all off. I remember some older systems that had more of the sort of thing we need. Back in the 1980s I used BTOS/CTOS for a while, and when you pressed RETURN on a command, you got a form to fill in that showed all the relevant options for that command. And then later Apple’s MPW development environment included “Commando”, that would pop up a nice GUI dialog in a similar fashion. Where do we get something like that now?
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  31. 12:28 Every time I change some config file in /etc from its default state, I like to keep a copy of the original file with the same name plus an “-orig” suffix. That way I can use a simple command like “find /etc -name \*-orig” to list all the places I have made configuration changes. Of course, this doesn’t work when adding new files.
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  32. When asked why they can’t move away from Windows, people normally say “games”. Yet the Steam Deck runs Linux with a purpose-built UI, and it’s amusing to see Microsoft trying, and failing, to adapt its Windows UI to work on that form factor.
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  33.  @MegaLokopo  Make it a modular, replaceable layer, like Linux does. That way you have your choice of GUIs, or even no GUI at all.
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  34. 2:35 And also note that they only accept plain-text emails. No HTML! This already seems a surprisingly high entry barrier to some.
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  35. Gnome is the favourite of those who like to use something and complain about it. I guess for those used to proprietary platforms, this sort of thing makes them feel at home.
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  36. But the only way Microsoft could be “innovative” to compete against Linux was to ... copy Linux. Wholesale.
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  37. What a corny joke ... 😜
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  38. Linux already runs on RISC-V. A different group at Google has been working on its own kernel, called Fuchsia. But so far it seems to be a solution looking for a problem.
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  39.  @BrodieRobertson  You can also build your own packages and replace the official ones installed on your system with them. I did this once, years ago. The Debian version of zip was lacking some (obsolete?) compression algorithm that I needed, and I was able to rebuild the package with that enabled.
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  40.  @underscore.  You mean proprietary apps? Proprietary software comes and proprietary software goes. What lives on is Open Source, and that has already mostly been ported.
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  41. I’m not really interested in vendor-specific tools. When are these vendors going to support SYCL/OpenCL? Build it on top of your vendor-specific layer if you must, but give us the option of writing to a standard API and not caring what brand lies underneath.
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  42.  @MegaLokopo  Windows 10 “IoT Edition” was a hilariously crippled version of Windows 10 that was useless without a regular PC running full Windows 10. Compare that to Linux running on the same Raspberry π, which fully self-hosts its own development and deployment stack.
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  43.  @BrodieRobertson  What GIMP is lacking is not so much functionality, but publicity/mindshare. Adobe can afford a 6-7-figure advertising budget to tell everybody how wonderful they are, no open-source project can match that.
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  44. I think an attribute bit is the wrong solution to the problem. Think about why the dot prefix exists: it gives applications a separate namespace to use for their own housekeeping, to minimize collisions with names that users might choose for their own files. Think if you had a hidden “config” folder, and the user, for whatever reason, tried to create a file or directory called “config”, they would either overwrite it, or get an error saying it already existed. The first possibility is unfortunate, the second is just mystifying, because they cannot see the item that supposedly already exists.
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  45. Imagine if just 100 Adobe users were to pool the money they would have given that company and use it to sponsor some work on some open-source project that they would like to see improved -- what a difference that could make.
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  46. Regarding that screencap playing in the closing credits, one command that may look slightly unnerving but is actually perfectly safe, is “rmdir -p”. This removes the named directory (assuming it’s empty), then removes its parent if that is now empty, and so on as far up the tree as it can go. So it always stops with an error, and it might be an error trying to remove a directory that is important to you. I did say it could be unnerving, didn’t I?
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  47. 9:29 Interesting. I tried following the link to the purported “freedom flaws” in Rust, and got a page in Hyperbola’s own wiki saying “Permission denied/Sorry, you don’t have enough rights to continue”.
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  48. “On top of the operating system is the rest of the system software. Here we find the command interpreter (shell), window systems, compilers, editors, and similar application-independent programs. It is important to realize that these programs are definitely not part of the operating system, even though they are typically supplied preinstalled by the computer manufacturer, or in a package with the operating system if it is installed after purchase. This is a crucial, but subtle, point. The operating system is (usually) that portion of the software that runs in kernel mode or supervisor mode. It is protected from user tampering by the hardware ...” -- Tanenbaum & Woodhull, “Operating Systems Design And Implementation”, third edition, page 3 That is the well-known “MINIX Book”, by the way. So you see, by that definition, Linux is very definitely an ”operating system”.
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  49. There are many levels at which you can get involved in Open Source. Coding is one thing, good documentation (including examples of use) is quite another (and often lacking). And of course there is helping out with queries from other users in online discussion forums. Right at the bottom of the chain come those who may or may not use the software, but are always ready to volunteer criticisms of why Open Source will never compete against «insert name of favourite proprietary product/company here». Things get done because people make the effort to do them, not because some armchair critic complains about them. To paraphrase JFK: “Ask not what Open Source can do for you, ask what you can do for Open Source!”
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  50. After the patch is done, you admit it was a fix for a security vulnerability, not before. The Samba project recently went through this. They had a fundamental problem involving symlinks, that took a year or more of rearchitecting the code to fix. Only when the job was done did they admit what the real purpose of those fixes was.
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