Posts by stephanh 472 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Sep 2014
That seems a very optimistic take on things.
IBM is by far the dominant partner here. Fat chance for RH corporate culture to make much inroad.
IBM's track record on handling big mergers is not exactly stellar. Statistically speaking most such mergers fail (reduce value).
So enterprises are going to buy RHEL because "nobody got fired for buying IBM"? Well perhaps. If so, be prepared to see Microsoft buy Canonical.
To put this in another way: if your closed-source NVidia driver decides it needs access to /dev/mem (aka the entire system memory), then there is little choice as to have xserver start up as root.
Some drivers are better behaved (the open source ones, typically) but in general startup as root is unfortunately a requirement.
Apple itself doesn't seem very interested in macos and Macs lately. As a result their market share has also slipped. It's iOS where the money is.
Mac enthousiasts pray for some relief on the 30 October event. I suppose this would be a good time to snatch some market share from Windows, if they can show something compelling.
I took actually a look at the GitHub repo, it seems the most pointless "open sourcing" ever.
First of all, you need the $$$ Jamf Pro to do anything with it. Then the build instructions start thus:
"Make sure your build targets all have proper signing certificates assigned in the Build Settings/General tab."
Ok, so *what build tool* would that be, IBM? Code repo has no obvious clues like an Xcode build file.
Yeah I wonder what kind of setup all those people who "cannot deploy" have.
So they don't have a local copy of their git repo? Even though git makes this dead easy? Or they have hardcoded all github references so they cannot deploy from their local repo?
I mean, I understand that they cannot access "Issues" and file "Pull requests", but that must be manageable for a single day.
FWIW, I could just pull and push from my Github repo, so it seems only the front-end is facing issues. Not the actual backend git storage. As already mentioned in the article.
Compilers already deal with tons of variants on ARM. Note that the Raspberry Pi has its own peculiar flavor of instruction set which means RPI binaries generally don't work on other ARMs.
ARM is trying to clean up this mess a bit in the 64 bit instruction set, but if Apple wants to add custom instructions then there is little ARM can do. It is not if you can run macos binaries on other oses anyway so who will care?
It may be a simple recompile, but often it won't. I expect something like Photoshop to contain an amount of hand-optimized assembly, for instance.
Even after you have the port building, you need to set up arm machines for testing, in parallel with your x86 infrastructure. All doable but it costs money.
Final build needs to be tested and validated on multiple platforms. These are on-going costs; there is a reason software companies try to limit the number of platforms they support.
Please note that there seems to be a common misperception that LLVM bitcode is portable across architectures - it is not. There is "ARM bitcode" and "x86 bitcode".
Applications will need to be compiled from scratch to work on ARM. Of course Apple has "fat binary" support which will make it possible to ship a single executable for x86 and ARM.
So if you are stuck with Windows, and you have a Home SKU, you may want to get a Pro SKU, OEM versions of which can be bought cheaply through sites such as kenguin.net.
Catches: you need to reinstall Windows from scratch and OEM version gives you no tech support.
But now you can postpone updates until, presumably, they are really ready.
Of course this means you are effectively paying MS for their incompetence but that is SOP in IT.
Microsoft fired most of their Windows testers back in 2014. Since then it has been relying on "Windows Insider" for lot of testing, i.e. the fanboys. Code quality has been due south ever since, who could have imagined.
On Thurrott the conclusion was that the issue was actually reported by the Insiders but apparently swamped by "feature requests" for all kinds of silly stuff.
https://www.thurrott.com/windows/windows-10/187407/microsoft-has-a-software-quality-problem
This is fairly well documented. MS-DOS 2.0 added a bunch of Unix-like features, most importantly directories. However / was already in use to start command-line options. Which was, by the way, compatible with CP/M and various IBM OSes, so it is not as if Microsoft invented use of / for options.
So ultimately it was decided to use \ rather than Unix / as a directory separator. HOWEVER DOS and Windows have always supported / as an alternative directory separator in the API, so usually / works equally well in a context where a command-line option cannot appear (i.e. open file dialog).
(For the true pedantic: using / instead of \ will NOT work with the \\?\ path prefix.)
I like bash for quick once-off one-liners but would recommend against it for production scripts. The quoting rules are hell, see all the bash scripts which break if a path contains a space.
Suggest Python instead, it has a great abstraction of common operations across Posix and windows.
I recall it was a buggy, crashtastic mess, but with some "cool" screenshots. Fine if you didn't actually have to use it for anything, I suppose.
Seems others have noticed the bugginess too.
https://what.thedailywtf.com/topic/15001/enlightened
This one best left on the compost heap of history.
After 15 years of working as a C++ developer, I still haven't encountered a code change I couldn't do in Vim.
In contrast, IDEs... First they take a minute to load, then they show a postage stamp-sized code window, engulfed with button bars and tabs and tabs containing button bars (which should be a shootable UI offence). Then you need to fill in pages of red tape about your "project" before it lets you do anything. My "project" is to fix the bug in this file, you stupid thing! And then, perhaps, it lets you use it built-in editor with all the functionality of Notepad (except for the speed) to make your code change. If it hasn't crashed by now.
Blech. No thanks. I am not sure what problem IDEs try to solve but I am glad I don't have it.
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