Father, Hacker (Information Security Professional), Open Source Software Developer, Inventor, and 3D printing enthusiast

  • 0 Posts
  • 18 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

help-circle




  • You say that because you don’t realize the benefits:

    • Better support for Linux with any new PC hardware on day 1. This includes things like USB devices, monitors, KVMs, UPS, everything.
    • Better support for all commercial software in general. More software will become available and it’ll be higher quality.
    • Vendors will be forced to test all their stuff on Linux which means it’ll all become more reliable and less glitchy.
    • There will be more diversity in software and distros which means widespread attacks (aka hacking, worms, viruses, etc) will have less success and smaller impacts.
    • The more Linux users there are the more Linux developers will result. It’s also much easier to start learning how to code on a Linux desktop than it is in Windows.
    • Better security for the entire world. Linux has a vastly superior security architecture than Windows and a vastly superior track record. The more Linux users there are, the harder it will be for malicious entities to break into their PCs which translates into a more secure world.
    • It’s much easier (for experienced users) to troubleshoot and fix problems in Linux than in Windows. This will lead to support teams everywhere getting frustrated whenever they have to deal with Windows users (this is already the case for many software vendors, haha). Therefore, it makes support people happy and easy going. Who doesn’t want to reach a happy, helpful person for technical support instead of the usual defiant/adversarial support tech? 😁
    • The worst sorts of hardware vendors won’t be able to get away with their usual bullshit. For example, if there were enough Linux users HP wouldn’t be offering extremely invasive 2GB printer “drivers” because their Windows customers would know enough Linux users that they’d be rightfully pissed and not depressively submissive like they are now.
    • When you do have a problem it will be easier to find a solution because the likelihood that someone else already had it and posted a solution will be higher (though admittedly this factor doesn’t seem to do much for Windows currently because of how obtuse and obfuscated everything is in that OS).

    There’s actually a lot more reasons but that’s probably enough for now 😁


  • I’d love to see more adoption of… I2C!

    Bazillions of motherboards and SBCs support I2C and many have the ability to use it via GPIO pins or even have connectors just for I2C devices (e.g. QWIIC). Yet there’s very little in the way of things you can buy and plug in. It feels like such a waste!

    There’s all sorts of neat and useful things we could plug in and make use of if only there were software to use it. For example, cheap color sensors, nifty gesture sensors, time-of-flight sensors, light sensors, and more.

    There’s lmsensors which knows I2C and can magically understand zillions of temperature sensors and PWM things (e.g. fan control). We need something like that for all those cool devices and chips that speak I2C.





  • This is caused by your root controller’s limited bandwidth and it’s inability to handle that many 3.0 devices at the same time. Some of the newer motherboards with USB C PD have controllers in them that can do a lot more.

    It’s basically a hack on part of the company that made the root controller IC. They know they only have enough internal bandwidth to support 16 USB 3.0 devices so they intentionally bork things when you plug in more than that since their Transaction Translator (TT) can’t handle more and they were too lazy to bother implementing the ability to share 2.0 and 3.0 properly.

    I’m guessing the decision went something like this…

    “We have enough bandwidth for 16 3.0 devices… What do we do if someone plugs in more than that?” “Only a few people will ever have that many! We don’t have the budget to handle every tiny little use case! Just ship it.”

    So it’s not Linux fault in this case. Or at least, if it is (a problem with the driver) it’s because of some proprietary bullshit that the driver requires to function properly 🤷


  • Riskable@programming.devtoSelfhosted@lemmy.worldWhat's the deal with Docker?
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    81
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    4 months ago

    Docker containers aren’t running in a virtual machine. They’re running what amounts to a fancy chroot jail… It’s just an isolated environment that takes advantage of several kernel security features to make software running inside the environment think everything is normal despite being locked down.

    This is a very important distinction because it means that docker containers are very light weight compared to a VM. They use but a fraction of the resources a VM would and can be brought up and down in milliseconds since there’s no hardware to emulate.


  • Linux never ran on the Commodore 64 (1984). That was way before Linux was released by Linus Torvalds (1991).

    I’d also like to point out that we do all rely on non-proprietary protocols. Examples you used today: TCP and HTTP.

    If we didn’t have free and open source protocols we’d all still be using Prodigy and AOL. “Smart” devices couldn’t talk to each other, and the world of software would be 100-10,000x more expensive and we’d probably have about 1/1,000,000th of what we have available today.

    Every little thing we rely on every day from computers to the Internet to cars to planes only works because they’re not relying on exclusive, proprietary protocols. Weird shit like HDMI is the exception, not the rule.

    History demonstrates that proprietary protocols and connectors like HDMI only stick around as long as they’re convenient, easy, and cheap. As soon as they lose one of those properties a competitor will spring up and eventually it will replace the proprietary nonsense. It’s only a matter of time. This news about HDMI being rejected is just another shove, moving the world away from that protocol.

    There actually is a way for proprietary bullshit to persist even when it’s the worst: When it’s mandated by government.


  • This wasn’t a failure of AI. It was just a low-effort charade. If you want to put in the least amount of effort possible in such things, AI is there for you.

    If they had put in any effort whatsoever they would’ve taken the first “draft” BS generated by the AI, made some minimal changes, then fed it back into the AI for further improvement.

    Chat AIs are just that: Chat. You’re supposed to go back and forth in conversation with the AI in order to get a good result. It appears the organizers of this event put together some terrible prompts and didn’t even bother to spend an extra ten minutes refining things.

    AI is a tool like any other. This pathetic event is a textbook case of how AI can’t replace humans entirely (not yet, anyway). You still gotta put in some effort.


  • It’s because they cheaped out and used (cheap) electromechanical switches for the buttons and electromechanical rotary encoders for the knobs.

    If they used magnetic hall effect switches they’d never glitch (unless the microcontroller itself is glitching). Hall effect switches are forever.

    (And no: Even cars in Arizona don’t get hot enough to wreck rare earth magnets… They’ll lose strength slightly above 80°C but not enough to matter since the car knows its internal temp and can compensate if they didn’t get the better sensors that auto-compensate).

    For reference, hall effect switches and encoders aren’t really that much more expensive for something like a car where you’re going to be using/making millions of them. It probably saves pennies per car to use the cheap switches.



  • I read the article! It suggests in a hundred different ways that Windows 11 sucks and that sticking it out with Windows 10 is a bad idea for a dozen different reasons.

    The people here suggesting Linux nailed it. If you’re not using Linux at this point you’re just being lazy, IMHO. If you have any issues you can always just troubleshoot and fix it but based on the anecdotes posted so far it’s obvious no one claiming to have tried Linux has done much of that.

    Get off your ass and learn something new for real or stop bitching and bend over for Microsoft with your wallet ready to pay them afterwards for the privilege.

    People bitching about Windows on their personal PCs is like people who don’t vote bitching about politics.