We see a post about some German government area converting to FOSS... it never seems to last, or at least catch on. The solutions rarely deliver real value causing massive integration issues when people can't just load a Word document used by just about everyone else in the world. They are trumpeted as Pioneers - nobody has ever done this before! You know - that should be a red flag in 2025... We've had these solutions for almost 20 years now. Nobody much is using them. Perhaps it's just time to realize linux on the desktop is just not going to happen without some major shift.

100% This. I use AI in everyday coding applications, and it's great for trivial stuff, and for declarative items like Terraform and basic HTML. But for anything even remotely complex and involved - it totally sucks. Like really really bad generating code that is worse than not-working, it does actively naive things that are basic on English-word interpretation of API definition often using the wrong parameters to get the outcome actually desired. We're a ways off useful yet.

If you use horribly bloated software on a small foot print machine - it works badly. And the culprit here is Apple rather than Google... Even though it was Google who made the memory hungry browser... It wasn't so long ago we were running Chrome, Safari and Firefox on 4GB of RAM. Has the web changed that much that suddenly we need 4x more RAM to visit websites? With the rise of SPAs, perhaps? But Safari works pretty fine in this situation... so apples to apples... it seems like in this particular situation, Google is more to blame than Apple. Should Apple be charging $200 for a RAM upgrade... nope. It's ridiculous. Am I still going to pay the premium for an Apple laptop - yup. I don't to deal with the hassle of Windows, and I really don't want to deal with the hassle of Linux, and I like how long the hardware keeps on working. It's just better economics long-term.

For a group of Linux enthusiasts who for years have touted the advantages of Linux was that you could run it on older smaller hardware, this post feels... like people in glass houses throwing stones a bit.

What an incredible way to read the data. Look at the data across all device types, and you can see that Linux is actually at 1.55%. Linux is only SO high if you limit to Desktop OS. And the reason for that is clear - most folks are using their laptops and desktops less and their phones more. That doesn't represent growth for linux, that represents loss of usage for desktops and gains for mobile. Linux hit 1.35% briefly in 2014 too. Clutching at straws. Clutching at straws.

I stopped using SanDisk some time ago because of this issue. They were a brand I trusted for CF and SD cards, but their SSD drives, for me, have always failed horribly and irrevocably leaving my drives unreadable. I think I went through two or three before I just stopped using SanDisk and moved to another brand. I didn't know they were owned by Western Digital - should have looked that up, based on my experience with other WD backup drives over the years that all seemed to have rather high failure rates on average, I probably wouldn't have used them. I hope he wins and we get a class action.

You've never met real users have you? These are the people that install MacKeeper and such and then wonder why their computer is SO slow. They'd blast right past that certified by Apple sign not even noticing it. It's the same reason Jobs wouldn't let Flash on his phone. It's not the Apps that get the blame by and large, it's the phone.

I'm an Apple iPhone user, and I want it this way. I like it this way, and I want to pay the premium to have it stay this way. I'm an informed consumer, and I like this walled garden thank you.

And thus demonstrating a spectacular misunderstanding of reality. The temperature doesn't "change". It is measured at a different value at one time index and another time index. For a given moment in time, the temperature _was_ the temperature. It didn't become different when indexed correctly. Your model of reality is, as with most programmers, the fundamental problem. it's missing at least one important axis. When you philosophically correct that missing axis, you end up with an immutable model. Because fundamentally, reality is a set of transitions from one immutable descriptive state to another. You can't stand in the same river twice and all that.

When you do that - reality becomes a stream of descriptive values including time the time index. This is the fundamental in a time-series database, and most big-data systems. And, a better match to reality.

The need to use PowerShell to interact with AD in the cloud sucks pretty bad, there's no "normal" APIs , it's pretty clear overall Azure isn't an API driven offering, which makes automation a total bear. Whilst Google's offering is API driven (more than AWS), it's also kinda flaky at scale, and you just kinda don't know when Google is randomly gonna decide to turn something off. We used BigTable for some analytics work a couple years ago, and randomly half way through the project the queries just started returning only 1/3 of the data in the datastore - no reason - just wasn't coming back. Almost bankrupt the start-up I was at at the time. Really awful.

I mean - both can be true. It can be the best cloud offering, and have also spent lots of money lobbying. They aren't mutually exclusive. Business people are smart like that - leave no stone unturned, win at all costs and all that. I've used AWS, Google's cloud, and Microsoft's, and overall, AWS is the best offering hands down They aren't even close. So, I think it's M$ just making sour grapes and whining. (Whilst yes, there are specific places it's not like GKE, etc. etc., there are also very big specific places like BigTable, which is flaky as shit, I wouldn't trust it with my recipe data. Need we say anything more than PowerShell and AD in the Cloud to know why M$ cloud is just a massive pain in the ass?).

Bits into bytes, bytes into words, words into structs. Structs over buses and network cables. C isn't so much the lingua franca as it is the most common and successful abstraction over the physical way hardware communicates with hardware. This author seems to forget that C isn't itself the thing, it's the structures that the hardware express that it is an abstraction over. No matter what language you're in, you ultimately are executing op-codes on a CPU. Swift, Scala, whatever high level language you choose is ultimately always going to be restricted in certain ways because that is the physical reality of computing. I don't know what else you want. It's literally how. it. works.

Any significantly good change looks like an obvious incremental improvement in hindsight. People say that about the single button on the bottom of the iPhone versus the plethora of slide-out, side-flippy, numerics-as-text keyboards that came before. It was anything but obvious until it happened, and then of course, it seemed obvious.

All of this. 100% all of this. Sometimes guard rails are useful. We regulate what you can sell in a paint can, what you can put in a mattress, and what you can label as "Food". It's absolutely idiotic to think we shouldn't regular what gets put in an "App" in exactly the same way. Unless the federal government plans on creating an FDA analog for data security and app design, I think we should allow Apple and Google to keep doing this for the safety of our users, our children, and frankly, our national security as well. Do you really want a Chinese hacker to track the location of large swaths of mobile phone users in the US? That's what side-loading could lead to if you just allow unrestricted app access. It's just one web exploit and one API exploit away, and it's not like we as humans have a stellar track record with regards to managing information security.

I mean - let's do a quick look here. I think there's different motivations for the mega-corps. I think Microsoft has/had a track record of buying competitors to swallow them and digest them whole, either stealing all their products or just closing them down to remove the competition. This is pretty clearly anti-trust competitive behaviour. Now let's look at something Amazon has done - they started their own last mile fulfillment. They did this, not to squash UPS and FedEx, and USPS but because those companies Sucked ass at service, and customers were pissed with Amazon for the failures of UPS and FedEx. Same reason Apple wouldn't let Adobe put Flash on iOS. If you're a huge company and you start a division because everyone else in that market is shit, is that really anti-competitive? It could end up squishing them like bugs, but maybe they deserve it in this case? Surely that's the entire point of competition? Same thing for Google and the Nexus phone right? Largely they bootstrapped their hardware group because the 3P manufacturers were all really bad at doing things like applying security patches and it was making google look bad (though, that isn't hard, and they're doing great at that themselves after EoLing a product after just 3 years and refusing to support it with patches). Not entirely dissimilar with Microsoft Surface too? Frankly, most of the non MS manufactured tablets were pretty bad. The surface has emerged as one of the best PCs out there.

Now I have to check every single purchase I make on Amazon to see, even if it's fulfilled by "Prime" if it's actually sold by Amazon and if I have a problem, do I get Amazon's customer services, which is generally good, or, do I get a random third-party seller's customer support which is generally pretty shit. Not sure this really is all that great for consumers at the end of the day.

To complete the thought - people who don't run an eCommerce offerings generally have no idea how high the overhead is. So many shitty customers who defraud the sellers, return products for no good reason, return broken products, returns bricks in place of a product and still expect a refund, use stolen gift cards, use their wife's credit card and then file a chargeback, whilst holding onto the goods anyway. It's not that great competing on an "even" footing with a huge multinational who has teams of engineers working on preventing abuse from shitty customers. Maybe Amazon buying direct from them and selling to customers is a pretty sweet arrangements. Not like that's exactly what WalMart and Target do anyways - if you can get a deal with them to be on their shelves.

Agreed. It's a demonstration of how statistics that are poorly interpreted can show just about anything, even things that are patently stupid. People can understand 'average', but not 'bimodal distribution'. We've done really great work on infant mortality and female mortality during childbirth, and whilst we have also decreased adult mortality with modern medicine, we've also increased it with modern living. We have many diseases today that our forebears didn't have to deal with. Many cancers are a result of modern living and modern materials (think asbestos for one). Respiratory illnesses due to pollution. Communicable diseases that ravage populations periodically like bird-flu and covid that are only that deadly because of the level of international travel in the modern world. Mental and happiness factors from stress and the modern 'always on' living. This paints a very very skewed picture of longevity in the modern world (which in the last decade I believe has actually fallen in the USA).