Joe Breuer

That hurricane machine must not be working too well…

https://www.statista.com/statistics/203729/fatalities-caused-by-tropical-cyclones-in-the-us/

Aware, yes. Interested, no - closed source philosophy, and the way Apple implements it specifically, turn me off hard.

Which - in my considered opinion - makes them so much worse.

Is it because writing native UI on all current systems I’m aware of is still worse than in the times of NeXTStep with Interface Builder, Objective C, and their class libraries?

And/or is it because it allows (perceived) lower-cost “web developers” to be tasked with “native” client UI?

So… Considering necessary access, it’s a quarter step above “cooking a phone in a microwave oven might catch it on fire”, IMO.

Might be OT since I never was much of a distro hopper.

Got introduced to Linux with SLS, used RedHat until it became too commercial for my taste. At that time, found gentoo and stuck with it hard. It allows me to have completely custom packages fully integrated with the system package manager, that’s the top killer feature for me.

I’d guess about monthly to bimonthly, in the sense of submitting a fix for an issue that affects/concerns me/my use of open source projects.

Thank you for sharing your story!

For your kind of use case and issues, I’d recommend finding someone local with a good amount of Linux experience and do a couple of pair sessions. I find this transports a lot more (especially ‘soft’) knowledge on concepts and how to do things efficiently. Also, it helps to share frustrations ;-)

Linux does not try to be another Windows. While it’s fairly possible to treat it kinda as such especially in newer times, it won’t feel efficient or convenient that way, in my experience.

Kinda disappointed in The Register of all things adopting this faux personal life story reporting style on such a matter.

I feel most of this is a slippery slope / negative sum spiral.

See e.g. Liv Boeree’s video on beauty filters.

In my opinion (see also Dr Gabor Maté), addictions (which, I also think, can be about petty much anything) are very much mostly attempts to escape pain, when better alternatives do not seem available to a person.

So, yeah, video game addiction can be a thing, and certain game designs exacerbate that (similar to what might fuel gambling addictions and such).

But all of this perspective only distracts from whatever is causing the people/kids pain, makes them seek out games in an addicted fashion in the first place.

I’m gonna be interested how that’s supposed to work with false positives, err, collateral damage, err, plausibly deniable canceling of free speech of citizens. Nice try.

Started negotiating at 40%, agreed to 10% less “so 10% of 40 is 4, right?”

I recently came across ReaR and very much like it so far for my “fire and forget” whole system backups (working data I back up differently, typically something rsync-y).

From one perspective, it should work; from another I never thought about how SATA/IDE adapters exactly work in this regard. Would any old one work, or most, or (almost) none at all?

Just to add this idea, I’ve used internal floppy drives with USB connection in the past, to attach in systems that don’t have an old style floppy connector.

P.S.: Love the idea! I’m also a great fan of haptic/physical interfaces.

Working and well-integrated “run this on that rendering GPU”, with unused GPUs being switched off (laptop use case).

Hope this can be understood as semi-on-topic harmless fun here:

Yuki installs Gentoo

Which is kinda one of the main reasons I started to like and still like gentoo. I do understand that it’s not for everyone as a daily driver. Maybe Arch could also fit?

Ah, here it is.

The way I heard it elsewhere (Google should help), Twitter/Elon actually had the necessary and correct permits (for using heavy machinery on the street/sidewalk and redirecting traffic around it).

Unfortunately, that detail was not correctly communicated to building security, who called the police believing there was no permit.

By the time the misunderstanding could be cleared up, the workers & heavy machinery had… “vacated premises” already, leaving the work in its half-finished state.

Heh, this inspires a neat little bio.

I had access to then-usual computer-related stuff growing up as a teenager in the late 80’s/early 90’s (C16, C64, Amiga, DOS/Windows on 286/386). One of the nicer things in that environment was a PostScript capable laser (well, LED) printer. At that time struggling with PageMaker and the likes, the possibilities of a page description language fascinated me.

Later, but still in teenage years, I came across NeXT(STEP) - first through a friend who had one, and its manuals and TeX documents out that PostScript printer like nothing I’d ever seen (done in-house) before. I was hooked. ;-)

A NeXT computer then became my daily driver through “college” and university, where at the time there also were Unix workstations by HP, Sun and SGI. DOS/Windows was all happening at that time, and it always felt to me like the VHS of operating systems - the technically worst implementation taking the market share.

When Linux appeared on the scene, I was obviously interested. The first distro I remember was SLS, followed by SlackWare and Red Hat. Mostly for communication/networking (UUCP, PPP, eMail, Usenet, IP connectivity, …) I started to use Red Hat in 1996, with the NeXT keeping its place for its graphical desktop on my personal desk. At the time I started working for a software startup where we used a mix of Linux (Red Hat) and Windows (NT) desktops, and Linux (Red Hat) mostly for servers (some Sun and BSD as well, IIRC). Around 2002(?) maybe I had mostly migrated to Linux also for my home desktop, but I kept the NeXT around for a long time, most specifically because of Diagram!, a predecessor (in spirit) to OmniGraffle.

Moving to Apple/OS X never sat right with me due to its proprietary, closed-source nature. “It works great when it works. When it doesn’t, you’re even more SOL than on Windows.”

When Red Hat went EOL in 2004 I looked around for alternatives and most seriously tried out gentoo Linux. I love the flexibility of being able to use one distro with consistent paradigms all the way from (almost) embedded through various server configurations to a fully multimedia capable desktop. I haven’t looked back since, typing this into LibreWolf on a KDE Plasma desktop running on gentoo.

All the while, I’ve also been using, supporting, and developing for Windows professionally to some degree (in addition to working for/on Linux and other more Unix-y stuff). It’s such a quality of life hit compared to open source - I remember phone calls with prominent Microsoft employees over weird support cases involving DCOM permissions (or rather, bugs therein) - Microsoft’s reply certainly felt quite like de Maizière’s infamous “some of those answers could unsettle too many people” quote, hinting at security through obscurity.

Whereas in the Linux ecosystem, I can analyze to their root and facilitate taking care of even decidedly weird corner cases.

One thing I still miss a lot from the NeXTSTEP desktop is its concept of “services”: Global utilities that could/would operate on anything (of suitable data type, e.g. text, image) that is currently selected (and show up in what today would amount to the context menu of the selection, regardless of which program it’s in). In the simplest case, this could be a Wikipedia lookup of the currently selected word. But, services also had the ability to replace the selection, allowing for all manner of things like unit conversions, ‘intelligent’ expansion (what this could do together with ChatGPT!), at-the-fingertips OCR and so on and so forth.