Recent submissions

Comment · 3 years ago
People actually benefit from both low-intensity and high-intensity exercise. One is not a substitute for the other. Endurance athletes know this.

Low-intensity exercise conditions aerobic energy pathways (mitochondrial respiration) in ways that high-intensity exercise cannot.

Comment · 6 years ago
Its not just about the code though. Somehow that code needs to keep up with the latest standards and magically be delivered to my client device. To think that a project as complex as the Firefox ecosystem can be maintained with less than 50 engineers doesn't match my experience working on large product teams.

Here's my estimate:

* A dozen build engineers to support development and builds for X client platforms

* A dozen engineers for the Javascript VM

* Dozens of engineers to support ongoing javascript and CSS standards

* A dozen engineers or more to support the firefox core

* Dedicated teams for Android, MacOS, Windows and Linux targets

* Dozens of Team/Programme/Project managers to _enable_ devs to do their best. These folks aren't optional.

* UX designers

* Graphical design artists

* Technical writers

Comment · 6 years ago
If you think Firefox has stagnated you clearly aren't aware of the substantial and complex improvements that have been made to the firefox core over the last couple of years:

* Faster Quantum Engine (multi-process architecture, etc)

* Faster CSS rendering with Stylo

* GPU-based rendering with WebRender

Any Moz engineer who worked on the above will have boosted their CV's substantially. They don't need to work on tangential greenfields to do that.

Sure so extensions had to be rewritten for Quantum, but sometimes that's the price to pay for deep architectural/security improvements.

Comment · 6 years ago
Just a reminder that enabling Hyper-V (needed for WSL2) will make your computer boot your current Windows install inside a VM too. This might makes a slight performance impact.

That doesn't sound right. Hyper-V is a Type-1 hypervisor, so by definition the Windows installation would not be running in its own VM (for some definition of VM).

And its pretty much exactly the same for Qemu/KVM on Linux, where Intel VT-x or AMD SVM hardware extensions are used to implement Type-1 virtualisation.

Comment · 6 years ago
Comment · 6 years ago
I'm a techie living in Cape Town and I love it. I have no plans to emigrate. We have problems down here yes, but they've been no impediment to my career.

Both Amazon AWS and Oracle OCI have satellite development offices in Cape Town, and if anything they are hiring more and more.

Comment · 9 years ago
I'll add one - I immediately ignore any job ad that contains anything along the lines of "Work in an exciting/agile fast-paced, dynamic environment", which pretty much signals that only youngsters need apply.

Of course, if the job really is chaotic and high-stress, then that signal should probably stay in the job ad.

Comment · 9 years ago
Comment · 9 years ago
For me, its not just about the sound. I can easily lose focus by being visually over-stimulated too, and there's no way to fix that except for cubicles.
Comment · 9 years ago
> Do you really want an init system that replaces a ton of functionality poorly like dns, ntp, syslog, xinetd, etc etc etc?

SystemD is not just an "init" system. You have to look at the larger vision for it being a set of building blocks for Linux system and service management.

I think this is a very good thing. Its about time that Linux had a unified and self-consistent approach to system management and configuration.

Comment · 9 years ago
The second major issue is it growing way out of the bounds of being just an init replacement, thereby violating the so-called Unix Philosophy of doing one-thing well.

I keep on hearing this overly worn "Unix Philosophy" argument against systemd, which in the absence of any non-religious technical justification, basically boils down to "its different".

All of this adds up to a storm of controversy that the systemd people mostly brought upon themselves. Had they just been more humble about their creation and waited until it was mature and well-tested and did all the wonderful things they claim it could and should do instead of stuffing what was widely seen as a broken-by-design piece of garbage down everybody's throat, maybe much of the Linux community wouldn't have been nearly so outraged by it.

Nobody shoved anything down anyone's throat, least not the SystemD developers. And the same goes for PulseAudio, DBUS, and all the other projects on freedesktop.org.

Anyway, in reality, software does not become mature and well-tested without early exposure to real users and systems. Chicken-and-egg problem there.

I feel absolutely no sympathy for those who are outraged. There are many distributions out there (including Devuan) which align with their particular vision of an OS should be.

Comment · 9 years ago
Comment · 9 years ago
I don't think the author missed the mark. He does elaborate on the other factors, such as social adaption:

> I don’t see this mindset shifting, so my advice to youngsters has remained: you need to adapt yourself. You need to find the right way to speak to different people, at different times in different contexts. This is not compromising who you are, but rather adapting to the relevant surroundings.

Comment · 9 years ago
I rather like the clean aesthetic of Windows 10, and am now using it as my main OS. Sure, it's by no means perfect, and there is still work to be done. But by and large I am happier with Windows 10 than with MacOS, Ubuntu, GNOME, and so on.

Oh, and the whole "spyware" trope is becoming overworn. User analytics is here to stay, and practically every website and browser does it anyway. At least you can disable it in Win 10 if you are so inclined. Me - I would gladly give Microsoft my data to they can prioritize features for windows 10.

Comment · 10 years ago

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