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

  1.  @terrydaktyllus1320  I’m sure this will become relevant the day you can show us a microcontroller running an appimage.
    2
  2. The FSF site has a detailed comparison of different licences.
    2
  3. 6:38 FYI Sign changes like that are not minor.
    2
  4.  @BrodieRobertson  Getting the sign wrong on a term in a formula may be simple to fix, but it could have quite major consequences.
    2
  5. You mean there was a whole millisecond of silence at the start?!? UNACCEPTABLE !!
    2
  6. Much lower overhead. Also simplicity.
    2
  7. If you want a Linux distro built around that philosophy, you know what you can do.
    2
  8.  @thomasqsa  Sounds like HandBrake is built wrong, then. It’s generally a bad idea to fork an upstream project as active as FFmpeg, unless you want to take it in a different direction. Which they clearly didn’t.
    2
  9. “Enforced”, he said. As though they’re police or something.
    2
  10. Windows is an albatross around the neck of Microsoft. Even they are having trouble keeping it viable.
    2
  11. The crazy thing is this parameter controls the number of separate vm areas your process can have, not the size of an area. The Linux kernel docs mentions the example of a malloc debugging tool which creates a new area for every single memory object your program creates -- now there’s a way to chew through your vm-area limit quickly ...
    2
  12. I don’t understand what you mean by “dog whistle”, unless you are trying to virtue-signal or something. It’s pretty obvious where this will lead, regardless of whether it’s Microsoft’s conscious plan or not.
    2
  13. This “Pamela Jones” described herself as a “paralegal”. There is some doubt as to whether such a person actually existed. Certainly Groklaw appeared very knowledgeable and well-researched, so there could have been an entire legal team behind that name. Funded by IBM, of course.
    2
  14. Microsoft’s attempt to stem the haemorrhage of developers away from the Windows platform. Too little, too late.
    2
  15.  @BrodieRobertson  Why, though?
    2
  16.  @JoeBot21  Why did they feel the need to introduce gratuitous incompatibilities into their different kernels?
    2
  17. No way those additional things will be needed for the Linux kernel. Just as the C code does not require glibc, the Rust part will have to be just as self-contained.
    2
  18. Is “Eris” taken? (She’s the goddess of discord, by the way.)
    2
  19. I don’t believe that story about it being an inadvertent bug for a moment. The programmers concerned were much too smart for that.
    2
  20. Sherlock Holmes’s older brother.
    2
  21. I don’t understand the bit about the developer having control over quality-control groups. Sounds like a hint at something that happens within Meta or some other large organization.
    2
  22. 10:01 This is really only an issue with coredumps. And you probably don’t bother with those.
    2
  23. 3:24 Aaah, but why was that interpreted as “00∶30” rather than “12∶30”?
    2
  24.  @Proferk  That’s reinforcing my point, not refuting it.
    2
  25. And the current spat between ARM and Qualcomm is not helping matters.
    2
  26. 8:34 Access to OpenGL and Vulkan might one.
    2
  27.  @UKprl  X2go is very easy to get going.
    2
  28. I still have an old Asus Eee 701 literally within arm’s reach.
    2
  29. There are notes for a proposed “X12”, which you will find on the xorg site somewhere. That’s been knocking around for years ... decades. The trouble is, X is full of legacy baggage (like graphics rendering calls) that needs to be dumped. At one time it even provided a font server, but luckily they were able to get rid of that. Once you remove this stuff, you realize the basic architecture of X, which allowed for having such things in the first place, is over-complicated.
    2
  30. The whole “Unix philosophy” bit is such a red herring. The example small components they mention invariably depend on much larger monolithic components underneath (e.g. the shell, the kernel, the X server). But they never want to mention that. Similarly, systemd may be a large piece of software, but it also lets you write small components -- service files can be very small.
    2
  31. Elden Ring was the one that initially had some trouble on Windows, back in February. But Valve was able to offer a fix that worked on the Steam Deck, so it worked fine there.
    2
  32.  @mskiptr  Trouble is, that “stability” has been rocked a bit by the ARM-versus-Qualcomm suit.
    2
  33. You could say that Groklaw was on the side of the Good Guys in the SCO lawsuit. In the TurboHercules one, on the other hand, they were pretty firmly on the side of IBM.
    2
  34. The whole “Unix philosophy” bit is such a red herring. The example small components they mention invariably depend on much larger monolithic components underneath (e.g. the shell, the kernel, the X server). But they never want to mention that. Similarly, systemd may be a large piece of software, but it also lets you write small components -- service files can be very small.
    2
  35. Multiple CPUs, yes. What’s the difference between a “CPU” and a “core”?
    2
  36.  @Bob-of-Zoid  GPU ≠ CPU.
    2
  37.  @Bob-of-Zoid  Quote: “some have GPUs”.
    2
  38.  @Bob-of-Zoid  CPUs and GPUs are different kinds of PUs.
    2
  39.  PhoenixRising  This would be a great way of reducing the bloat.
    2
  40. GIMP’s internal architecture is already structured that way. If you look at the plugin API, you see this thing called the “PDB” (procedure database) -- this is a registry of all GIMP’s operations, both builtin and provided by plugins. Not only can you invoke these operations from a plugin (that includes calling operations in one plugin from another plugin!), you can also type commands directly into the scripting console. Another nice thing is, this is scripting-language-independent. GIMP 2 provided an API for Python 2, but Python 2 is dead now. But I found a way to rewrap the API in Python 3 (see my pylibgimp2 project), and GIMP itself neithers knows or cares about the difference.
    2
  41. Funnily enough, Al’s Geek Lab did a feature on Xenix just a few days ago.
    2
  42. Let me guess: Microsoft Windows users?
    2
  43. Does a “free market” mean you don’t pay for things? And yet that is the essence of Capitalism.
    2
  44. I think there are several GUI desktop apps that could do with a bit more help. GIMP 3, for example, has been very slow in coming. I think Inkscape could also benefit from more contributors. And also various video editor projects. Just some off the top of my head.
    2
  45. Netware may have been a complex and fiddly product to set up, but I think its performance and reliability (and the third-party ecosystem that developed around it) made all that worthwhile. Which is why it took Microsoft several attempts to dethrone it from market dominance. Interesting to see people point to WSL and remind us of “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish”. My response is to look back at the Ballmer days and say that Microsoft already tried “Extinguish”, with every resource at its disposal, and failed miserably.
    2
  46. Microsoft is increasingly providing patches that either don’t properly fix the problem, or cause new problems requiring further patches. Basically, the strategy of “wait for Microsoft to fix it” is getting harder to reconcile with the needs of mission-critical production systems.
    2
  47. But Linux has no 16-bit ABI. How do you write a “16-bit binary” that runs under it?
    2
  48. Sounds like Linux kexec.
    2
  49. There is already an XDG standard, the .desktop file. This lets you define menu items, icons, even document templates. All the major open-source GUIs understand them. They even share common standards for letting you customize things. That’s why you can switch GUIs on a Linux distro and see all the same apps, icons, everything.
    2
  50. I set up Gitolite for a client a while back. It was easy enough for their staff to use to share in-house code.
    2