About 20 years ago, Microsoft was found guilty and convicted, because they forced their browser on their users, driving out competitors by abusing their de facto monopoly on PC operating systems. These days, they are doing the exact same thing again, just on an even broader base. I don't even understand how this verdict took so long.

Writing good comments is an art form, and beginner programmers often struggle with it. They know comments mostly from their text books, where the comments explain what is happening to someone who doesn't yet know programming, and nobody has told them yet that that is not at all a useful commenting style outside of education. So that's how they use them. It usually ends up making the code harder to read, not easier.

Later on, programmers will need to learn a few rules about comments, like:

• Assume that whoever reads your code knows the programming language, the platform and the problem domain at least in general terms. You are not writing a teaching aid, you are writing presumably useful software.
• Don't comment the obvious. (Aside from documentation comments for function/method/class signatures)
• Don't comment what a line is doing. Instead, write your code, especially names for variables, constants, classes, functions, methods and so on, so that they produce talking code that needs no comments. Reserve the "what" style comments for where that just isn't possible.
• Do comment the why. Tell the reader about your intentions and about big-picture issues. If an if-statement is hard to parse, write a corresponding if clause in plain English on top of it.
• In some cases, comment the "why not", to keep maintenance programmers from falling in the same trap you already found.

50 Euros a day is insane. That's a good portion of what I pay for a whole month.

I get the joke, but in contrast to heating, you can easily just... not run demanding games while the electricity is insanely expensive for a day.

AMD and nVidia on Windows: So your GPU is still very capable and useful for almost everything including most gaming tasks, but it's a couple years old and not making us money any more? Sucks to be you, have fun hunting for unmaintained legacy drivers with likely security holes from questionable sources.

Linux: Your video card is from a long bygone era of computing, before the term "GPU" was a thing, and basically a museum piece by now? We'll maintain a long-term support version for you for the next ten years.

Sidenote:

HTTP user agents have become absolutely bonkers over the years.

Uh, what's happening here? The post shows no content for me, and clicking on the title only redirects me back to the post itself. Yet other people in the comment section are talking as if there was some specific content here, other than just the title "ravages of socialism".

Am I missing something here? Is there a malfunction, or did OP edit their post after the fact so that the actual content is just gone?

Batteries take “rare earth metals” like cobalt.

Some Lithium-Ion batteries use Cobalt, but many don't. Lithium-Iron-Phosphate, for example, is a popular variant without any Cobalt. There is a push going on to move to battery chemistries without Cobalt or to reduce the actual amount of Cobalt where it is still required.

The older I get the more I think RMS is rather full of himself insisting that this OS must be called "GNU/Linux", or even just "GNU".

Here is my own take on the situation:

GNU was a - for its time - very ambitious project in the 1980s to create a UNIX-like free operating system, that never actually succeeded in its goal (ignoring some borderline unusable alpha versions of GNU/HURD that came out long after people stopped caring), but produced some useful general purpose computing tools in its attempt. When the first Linux distributions came out in the early nineties, they took many of those tools plus many other tools from other projects and bundled it together with many tools of their own for installing, booting and managing the whole thing into an actual, complete and working OS. These days, everything single one of those components from the GNU project can be and sometimes is replaced with something else while still keeping the whole thing recognizable as a Linux system.

To say the whole package is now "the GNU system" or "GNU, just with a Linux kernel" is borderline at best. If you squint a lot you can maybe see there's a point hidden in there somewhere, but presenting this interpretation of things as a straight-forward fact is disingenuous at best. The truth is, RMS tried to make an operating system but failed. (And all jokes and memes aside, Emacs is not actually a full operating system.) Later, other people who also wanted to create an operating system took some of the pieces from the GNU project, plus the Linux kernel, plus various other pieces from elsewhere, plus some stuff they wrote themselves and succeeded. Admittedly, their success was due to, in large part, those GNU components, but that does not mean that the resulting project is the GNU system.

I was already old when those were new.

I’ve looked at Peertube, Dtube and Odyssee, but frankly, I don’t like them because there is some questionable content on those sites.

While I can understand that to a degree, keep in mind:

Any true alternative to the big sites, especially if they censor less, will always first attract the fringe and those who would get themselves banned on the big platforms. Even if it was for good reasons. These days, that seems to mean religious nutjobs and right-wing conspiracy theorists.

*perjury

Purgery would be intentionally inducing vomiting on oneself to empty one's stomach.

Using "they" when you haven't yet established the group you are referring to in context feels weird and kinda wrong, especially if it's about a group of inanimate objects. It really looks like the word should have been "there", but they just mistyped and then didn't catch the error in the editing process or didn't bother to correct it.

That's what I think is wrong here. I'm not 100% sure that this grammatically wrong, but it sure feels like it. Might depend on what the page before this one said.

It's odysee, a frontend to lbry, a sort-of decentralized alternative to Youtube. Which seems very enticing, because an alternative to Youtube is badly needed.

Unfortunately, at the moment it is completely overrun by religious nutjobs, Nazis and other assorted scum. It is not by its nature an alt-right service, but it does attract all those who would be banned anywhere else.

There is more information in there that isn't actually true and only supposed to trick some old web servers into treating it a certain way than there is actually correct information,

It mentions three different browsers, only one of which is actually true, and three different rendering engines, none of which is actually what's used.

Pipewire makes me feel like I'm a bit stupid. I keep reading about it, I read the introduction and FAQ on their website, yet I still couldn't tell you what that thing even does. All I know is it's a slightly less buggy drop-in replacement for pulseaudio, and pulseaudio is something I use because Firefox forces me to. (I would still be on plain old ALSA if it weren't for Firefox.)

Also, it definitely did not "just work" for me out of the box, I had to do quite some digging and some very non-obvious stuff to get it to a) start up and b) let me use my microphone. I still don't even know what "starting up" really means for pipewire (is there a daemon or something?), the website likes to pretend that isn't a thing, but without doing some stuff to start it up, audio just won't work for pulseaudio and pipewire applications...

Batches 4 and 5 are also sold out by now.

Meanwhile, batches 8 and 9 have been added to the list. Looks like they did not anticipate this kind of success.

In F/OSS, it is not unusual for software to stay below 1.0 version for a long time yet still get a lot of use. Just look at how long OpenSSL, for example, was at 0.9.something, while already being of crucial importance to a lot of internet infrastructure.

The reasons for this are varied, but the most important is probably simply that free software developers don't feel the pressure to call a product 1.0 when they don't believe it is ready to be called that.

#55856 cygwin hangs during installation at libzstd1-1.5.5-1

This bug report must mean that someone, somewhere, for some reason was running cygwin under wine and cared enough about that that they would create a bug report when it failed...

Not necessarily, more like GoDaddy was the domain swatter that was holding on to that domain until Musk decided to pay the ransom. We cannot tell from the screenshot what registrar he uses for that domain now.

We can, however, tell from whois, and what do you know, it's godaddy...

Aw, too bad, they were working so hard on bankrupting themselves in defiance of that endless money cheat code they've got...

FWIW, this entire comment section:

https://lemmy.world/post/1940961?scrollToComments=true

Back to the to the topic, yes, Linux is not technically Unix by pedigree. In practice, it doesn't matter that it isn't and it wouldn't matter if it were, both for this issue in particular and for most others you are likely to encounter.

The actually relevant technology here is the graphics subsystem, and MacOS's Cocoa has always been radically different from anything else in the Unix/Linux space. There is no relation whatsoever to either X11 or Wayland. The only thing worth "porting" here is the basic idea. Which is pretty neat, though. Let's hope Apple hasn't patented it.

Melania is a blatant gold digger. She might divorce him if he goes bankrupt, but only then.

That 'amp;' does not belong in there, it's probably either a copy-paste error or a Lemmy-error.

What this does (or would do it it were done correctly) is define a function called ":" (the colon symbol) which recursively calls itself twice, piping the output of one instance to the input of the other, then forks the resulting mess to the background. After defining that fork bomb of a function, it is immediately called once.

It's a very old trick that existed even on some of the ancient Unix systems that predated Linux. I think there's some way of defending against using cgroups, but I don't know how from the top of my head.

btop for bling

htop for practical utility

top for minimalism, availability, reliability

I have made it habit to put my laundry basket somewhere where I have to step over it to go to bed whenever I switch on my washing machine. Makes it easier to not forget. If I don't, I may as well wash the laundry a second time, because forgetting it in the machine over night means it starts to stink...

The title is highly misleading — which should be obvious enough to anybody who has been using Linux in the last 15 years. Of course Linux has been able to use more than 8 cores this entire time. Many of us would have noticed a long time ago if it didn't

The article is talking about a minor optimization of scheduler granularity to make better use of multi-core machines. It would increase the size of the scheduler's time slice to make use of the fact that in a highly multi-cored system, you would very likely have some core available to react to user inputs fast, even if processes are running, thereby saving on some context switches. Apparently, this optimization didn't not go as far as originally planned for CPUs with more than eight cores.

Personally, I don't expect it would have made a major difference of it had.

The headline here is frankly going past a simplified summary and well into dishonest territory. I would take everything this author says with a huge helping of salt, including his claims that all the documentation and even code comments about that mechanism are wrong.

Going by what OP thinks "Chaotic Evil" means for sysadmins, they have clearly never heard of BOFH.

Is OpenBSD seriously still using CVS for development?

I also wondered for quite some time why my Logitech C920 webcam seemed to be using much lower framerates (which could be perceived as "laggy") in Linux as compared to Windows. It turns out it was transmitting uncompressed YUV frames by default, and for that, the bandwidth of my USB port just wasn't enough. (Maybe in USB C it would be enough, but this webcam isn't USB C.)

It worked like a charm after I manually set the format to H.264 in OBS. ("Like a charm" meaning it was transmitting 1920x1080 at 30 fps.) Unfortunately, I don't know how to do that in an application-agnostic way, but maybe someone else here can enlighten us. Worst case, install https://github.com/umlaeute/v4l2loopback and pipe your webcam stream through OBS...

I think it's possible that this is the same problem that you have run into.

The KDE team has already determined that this is not a bug and that both you and me must just be imagining it:

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=481058

Is this article really a good fit for the Technology community?

Thanks for pointing that out, I found the setting on my laptop and tried it out. I do like the jiggle approach better, though, simply because that is something many people (myself included) instinctively do when losing track of the mouse cursor.

One of the advantages of being on old reddit like a hopeless geezer is not getting to see that shit.

Anyone know what he's alluding to with his repeated "catching fish in my backyard with a net nudgenudgewinkwink" remarks?

As bland and featureless as this guy is, I wouldn't be surprised if he also fails to gain literal traction when literally running.

Honestly, this should be a bigger discussion, and not limited to just games. If a software company sells a software license for perpetual use to someone, they should not be allowed to use copy protection mechanisms that prevent the licensee from using it in perpetuity.

If there's some other technical reason why the software won't run any more after ten or twenty years, that's another story. But if they just can't be bothered to keep running the licensing servers, then they need to bloody well remove the stinking copy protection.

They do, including those that are in Debian, but they also have an additional source of faster security updates developed in house, which they hold back from the free path in favor of the pro package.

Personally, I feel a bit torn about this. On the one hand, this should be, officially at least, purely an additional service on top of what's available in the baseline distro, and isn't taking anything away from that.

On the other hand, I strongly disagree with holding back security fixes from anyone, ever, for any reason. Also, the claim that it will never take away anything from the free base distro is at least a little bit suspect. I would not be surprised if the existence of the pro path were to gradually erode the quality and timelyness of the base security upgrade path over time. Also, Ubuntu is now very annoying about nagging you to upgrade to pro, and the way to disable that is fairly involved and very much non-official. The whole thing goes against what I expect from a F/OSS operating system. I don't quite understand why this topic hasn't been a much bigger issue in Linux circles yet. It certainly doesn't sit right with me...

Yepp, that's a risk.

Do you believe that law-related aspects related to this could or should just be ignored? Or that doing so would lead to positive outcomes down the road?