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Hey everyone! As many of you have already seen, @trogus and I are happy to announce the release of devRant++, also know as the devRant supporter program!
devRant++ is a monthly subscription ($1.99 USD) that gives you some cool extra features while also contributing to covering some of our ever-increasing server costs.
Subscribers get:
- a badge that shows up on all of their rants and comments
- ability to edit rants and comments for up to 30 minutes (instead of the usual 5)
- ability to post unlimited collabs for free (so keep an eye out for new collabs, hopefully!)
- a reserved spot on the devRant++ supporter list (you can only move up higher or stay in the same position through the life of your subscription)
- more benefits coming soon!
Why did devRant++ come to be? Basically, we have the most awesome community members and we kept getting extremely generous requests from members asking how they could help devRant stay afloat. Instead of taking donations and not giving anything directly in return, we wanted to give supporters a little extra something to hopefully make the program kind of special.
We greatly appreciate everyone who has joined the supporter program so far. We also realize not everyone has the money to spend or wants to spend, and that's perfectly fine. We also greatly appreciate everyone here who posts great rants and comments, helps spread the word about devRant, votes on stuff, or is just a valuable member of the community in general. @trogus and I value all contributions and we want to make that clear!
Another reason we decided to go ahead with the program is, as I mentioned towards the beginning, our server/technology costs are increasing and we're kind of at a point where we can't afford all of the upgrades we'd like to make. At the same time while we need more hardware, we're trying to get the app to a place where we're not losing money every month, hopefully to the point where we can break even soon.
Anyway, thank you to everyone again for the amazing support and early interest in devRant++. We would love to hear feedback and stuff you would like to see added to supporter benefits, so just let us know!60 -
Oh, man, I just realized I haven't ranted one of my best stories on here!
So, here goes!
A few years back the company I work for was contacted by an older client regarding a new project.
The guy was now pitching to build the website for the Parliament of another country (not gonna name it, NDAs and stuff), and was planning on outsourcing the development, as he had no team and he was only aiming on taking care of the client service/project management side of the project.
Out of principle (and also to preserve our mental integrity), we have purposely avoided working with government bodies of any kind, in any country, but he was a friend of our CEO and pleaded until we singed on board.
Now, the project itself was way bigger than we expected, as the wanted more of an internal CRM, centralized document archive, event management, internal planning, multiple interfaced, role based access restricted monster of an administration interface, complete with regular user website, also packed with all kind of features, dashboards and so on.
Long story short, a lot bigger than what we were expecting based on the initial brief.
The development period was hell. New features were coming in on a weekly basis. Already implemented functionality was constantly being changed or redefined. No requests we ever made about clarifications and/or materials or information were ever answered on time.
They also somehow bullied the guy that brought us the project into also including the data migration from the old website into the new one we were building and we somehow ended up having to extract meaningful, formatted, sanitized content parsing static HTML files and connecting them to download-able files (almost every page in the old website had files available to download) we needed to also include in a sane way.
Now, don't think the files were simple URL paths we can trace to a folder/file path, oh no!!! The links were some form of hash combination that had to be exploded and tested against some king of database relationship tables that only had hashed indexes relating to other tables, that also only had hashed indexes relating to some other tables that kept a database of the website pages HTML file naming. So what we had to do is identify the files based on a combination of hashed indexes and re-hashed HTML file names that in the end would give us a filename for a real file that we had to then search for inside a list of over 20 folders not related to one another.
So we did this. Created a script that processed the hell out of over 10000 HTML files, database entries and files and re-indexed and re-named all this shit into a meaningful database of sane data and well organized files.
So, with this we were nearing the finish line for the project, which by now exceeded the estimated time by over to times.
We test everything, retest it all again for good measure, pack everything up for deployment, simulate on a staging environment, give the final client access to the staging version, get them to accept that all requirements are met, finish writing the documentation for the codebase, write detailed deployment procedure, include some automation and testing tools also for good measure, recommend production setup, hardware specs, software versions, server side optimization like caching, load balancing and all that we could think would ever be useful, all with more documentation and instructions.
As the project was built on PHP/MySQL (as requested), we recommended a Linux environment for production. Oh, I forgot to tell you that over the development period they kept asking us to also include steps for Windows procedures along with our regular documentation. Was a bit strange, but we added it in there just so we can finish and close the damn project.
So, we send them all the above and go get drunk as fuck in celebration of getting rid of them once and for all...
Next day: hung over, I get to the office, open my laptop and see on new email. I only had the one new mail, so I open it to see what it's about.
Lo and behold! The fuckers over in the other country that called themselves "IT guys", and were the ones making all the changes and additions to our requirements, were not capable enough to follow step by step instructions in order to deploy the project on their servers!!!
[Continues in the comments]26 -
Finally got the last of the hardware pieces for my pi book pro in today. Figured out how I'm going to lay it out and now to make custom cables to connect it all :D This old MacBook may yet breathe new life!20
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--- HTTP/3 is coming! And it won't use TCP! ---
A recent announcement reveals that HTTP - the protocol used by browsers to communicate with web servers - will get a major change in version 3!
Before, the HTTP protocols (version 1.0, 1.1 and 2.2) were all layered on top of TCP (Transmission Control Protocol).
TCP provides reliable, ordered, and error-checked delivery of data over an IP network.
It can handle hardware failures, timeouts, etc. and makes sure the data is received in the order it was transmitted in.
Also you can easily detect if any corruption during transmission has occurred.
All these features are necessary for a protocol such as HTTP, but TCP wasn't originally designed for HTTP!
It's a "one-size-fits-all" solution, suitable for *any* application that needs this kind of reliability.
TCP does a lot of round trips between the client and the server to make sure everybody receives their data. Especially if you're using SSL. This results in a high network latency.
So if we had a protocol which is basically designed for HTTP, it could help a lot at fixing all these problems.
This is the idea behind "QUIC", an experimental network protocol, originally created by Google, using UDP.
Now we all know how unreliable UDP is: You don't know if the data you sent was received nor does the receiver know if there is anything missing. Also, data is unordered, so if anything takes longer to send, it will most likely mix up with the other pieces of data. The only good part of UDP is its simplicity.
So why use this crappy thing for such an important protocol as HTTP?
Well, QUIC fixes all these problems UDP has, and provides the reliability of TCP but without introducing lots of round trips and a high latency! (How cool is that?)
The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has been working (or is still working) on a standardized version of QUIC, although it's very different from Google's original proposal.
The IETF also wants to create a version of HTTP that uses QUIC, previously referred to as HTTP-over-QUIC. HTTP-over-QUIC isn't, however, HTTP/2 over QUIC.
It's a new, updated version of HTTP built for QUIC.
Now, the chairman of both the HTTP working group and the QUIC working group for IETF, Mark Nottingham, wanted to rename HTTP-over-QUIC to HTTP/3, and it seems like his proposal got accepted!
So version 3 of HTTP will have QUIC as an essential, integral feature, and we can expect that it no longer uses TCP as its network protocol.
We will see how it turns out in the end, but I'm sure we will have to wait a couple more years for HTTP/3, when it has been thoroughly tested and integrated.
Thank you for reading!26 -
The marketing department is right next door to my office, and to make room for their new intern, a very high end, large, and noisy printer was 'temporarily' placed in my office. I'm a reasonable person though, and didn't mind this. The salespeople figured out that it makes commercial grade printouts, so for their various presentations and whatnot, they'll print enormous numbers of pages on this thing, and basically use my office as a motherfucking water-cooler. After a few weeks of this, I logged into the printer from my computer, and set it to disallow all connections from MAC addresses other than those in the marketing department, who print far less material on their own, special, dedicated printer. Absolute fucking chaos ensued. Grown men were brought to tears, ultimatums were made, and blood was shed. The hardware guys were down here for over an hour, making up absolute bullshit as to why it wasn't working(which really surprised me).
Long story short, cut off access to printer, sit back and watch the true face of humanity emerge. Seriously, fuck those guys. They have their own goddamn printer.7 -
There is. My latest creation. A 8bit microcontroler made in minecraft.
Features:
(1.0 version without control room)
-8bit full adder + overflow flag
-8x8bit RAM
-16x8(4bit instruction, 4bit address)
program memory
-64 possible microinstructions (16 instructions with 4 step each)
-uncondintional and if oveflow jumps
(place determined using address written with instruction)
-1/3Hz clock speed 😨
New working version (2.0) has 1Hz clock and new faster instruction decoder.
In 3.0 in addition to that useless bus was replaced with 16x8bit "hardware" stack that can store adresses and data. The clock is going to be yeeted out because it is unnecesary #clocklessisbetter (WIP tho)
Might add more documentation and post it as learning model for CS wanabees 🤔. What do you think?
Picture: Old working version 1.0
(the only one with fancy diagram)
Newer version screenshots in comments.34 -
string excuses[]={
"it's not a bug it's a feature",
"it worked on my machine",
"i tested it and it worked",
"its production ready",
"your browser must be caching the old content",
"that error means it was successful",
"the client fucked it up",
"the systems crashed and the code got lost" ,
"this code wont go into the final version",
"It's a compiler issue",
"it's only a minor issue",
"this will take two weeks max",
"my code is flawless must be someone else's mistake",
"it worked a minute ago",
"that was not in the original specification",
"i will fix this",
"I was told to stop working on that when something important came up",
"You must have the wrong version",
"that's way beyond my pay grade",
"that's just an unlucky coincidence",
"i saw the new guy screw around with the systems",
"our servers must've been hacked",
"i wasn't given enough time",
"its the designers fault",
"it probably won't happen again",
"your expectations were unrealistic",
"everything's great on my end",
"that's not my code",
"it's a hardware problem",
"it's a firewall issue",
"it's a character encoding issue",
"a third party API isn't responding",
"that was only supposed to be a placeholder",
"The third party documentation is wrong",
"that was just a temporary fix.",
"We outsourced that months ago.","
"that value is only wrong half of the time.",
"the person responsible for that does not work here anymore",
"That was literally a one in a million error",
"our servers couldn't handle the traffic the app was receiving",
"your machines processors must be too slow",
"your pc is too outdated",
"that is a known issue with the programming language",
"it would take too much time and resources to rebuild from scratch",
"this is historically grown",
"users will hardly notice that",
"i will fix it" };11 -
My first job: The Mystery of The Powered-Down Server
I paid my way through college by working every-other-semester in the Cooperative-Education Program my school provided. My first job was with a small company (now defunct) which made some of the very first optical-storage robotic storage systems. I honestly forgot what I was "officially" hired for at first, but I quickly moved up into the kernel device-driver team and was quite happy there.
It was primarily a Solaris shop, with a smattering of IBM AIX RS/6000. It was one of these ill-fated RS/6000 machines which (by no fault of its own) plays a major role in this story.
One day, I came to work to find my team-leader in quite a tizzy -- cursing and ranting about our VAR selling us bad equipment; about how IBM just doesn't make good hardware like they did in the good old days; about how back when _he_ was in charge of buying equipment this wouldn't happen, and on and on and on.
Our primary AIX dev server was powered off when he arrived. He booted it up, checked logs and was running self-diagnostics, but absolutely nothing so far indicated why the machine had shut down. We blew a couple of hours trying to figure out what happened, to no avail. Eventually, with other deadlines looming, we just chalked it up be something we'll look into more later.
Several days went by, with the usual day-to-day comings and goings; no surprises.
Then, next week, it happened again.
My team-leader was LIVID. The same server was hard-down again when he came in; no explanation. He opened a ticket with IBM and put in a call to our VAR rep, demanding answers -- how could they sell us bad equipment -- why isn't there any indication of what's failing -- someone must come out here and fix this NOW, and on and on and on.
(As a quick aside, in case it's not clearly coming through between-the-lines, our team leader was always a little bit "over to top" for me. He was the kind of person who "got things done," and as long as you stayed on his good side, you could just watch the fireworks most days - but it became pretty exhausting sometimes).
Back our story -
An IBM CE comes out and does a full on-site hardware diagnostic -- tears the whole server down, runs through everything one part a time. Absolutely. Nothing. Wrong.
I recall, at some point of all this, making the comment "It's almost like someone just pulls the plug on it -- like the power just, poof, goes away."
My team-leader demands the CE replace the power supply, even though it appeared to be operating normally. He does, at our cost, of course.
Another weeks goes by and all is forgotten in the swamp of work we have to do.
Until one day, the next week... Yes, you guessed it... It happens again. The server is down. Heads are exploding (will at least one head we all know by now). With all the screaming going on, the entire office staff should have comped some Advil.
My team-leader demands the facilities team do a full diagnostic on the UPS system and assure we aren't getting drop-outs on the power system. They do the diagnostic. They also review the logs for the power/load distribution to the entire lab and office spaces. Nothing is amiss.
This would also be a good time draw the picture of where this server is -- this particular server is not in the actual server room, it's out in the office area. That's on purpose, since it is connected to a demo robotics cabinet we use for testing and POC work. And customer demos. This will date me, but these were the days when robotic storage was new and VERY exciting to watch...
So, this is basically a couple of big boxes out on the office floor, with power cables running into a special power-drop near the middle of the room. That information might seem superfluous now, but will come into play shortly in our story.
So, we still have no answer to what's causing the server problems, but we all have work to do, so we keep plugging away, hoping for the best.
The team leader is insisting the VAR swap in a new server.
One night, we (the device-driver team) are working late, burning the midnight oil, right there in the office, and we bear witness to something I will never forget.
The cleaning staff came in.
Anxious for a brief distraction from our marathon of debugging, we stopped to watch them set up and start cleaning the office for a bit.
Then, friends, I Am Not Making This Up(tm)... I watched one of the cleaning staff walk right over to that beautiful RS/6000 dev server, dwarfed in shadow beside that huge robotic disc enclosure... and yank the server power cable right out of the dedicated power drop. And plug in their vacuum cleaner. And vacuum the floor.
We each looked at one-another, slowly, in bewilderment... and then went home, after a brief discussion on the way out the door.
You see, our team-leader wasn't with us that night; so before we left, we all agreed to come in late the next day. Very late indeed.9 -
One year ago, I quit my job in order to "make life easier". And by that I mean work+home in the same city. I went from 40 minutes commute - to 3 minutes. I had a blast the first week.
Then I realized that it was actually a mistake. I did not like working with "that kind of systems" and "that kind of tasks". It was tedious, stupid, and I was angry every, single day because the previous ones had built a system on 10-15 year old hardware because "it is cheaper".
That continued for a year. I discovered new stupid "solutions" every week that was potentially dangerous for the company. It built up a huge pile of shit and I started to feel that my mental health was disappearing, fast.
And equipment such as servers, switches, routers, storage started to fail because of age. Despite my warnings from day 0 to the CEO who only kinda laughed it off and said "you can to solve that", but I never got the approval to actually buy the equipment that was needed. Because "the company did'nt have the money for it". Somehow, the company had the money to buy expensive cars for the CEO - I can't really figure out that equation.
So today, one VERY old UPS died at our office. It caused some powerspike that killed off some switches and a NAS.
"Whatever" I thought, I just have to find the backup of the files and get a new one.
Then I discovered, that the NAS that acted as a iSCSI target for VM's and document storage was backed up using VEEAM on another server - that was configured to backup everything to the same NAS. I just wanted to cry, because I could not take anymore shit.
So I picked up my phone, called my old employer and asked if I could start working for them again. My old boss got insanely happy and gave me a great offer which I immediately accepted.
So tomorrow, is the day that I am going to walk into my current boss and say that I will quit. My last day will be on Christmas day. And I will start my new year with a few weeks off, and then back to the job that I actually loved.
Life is to short to work with something you hate.13 -
So here's the new hotness... HP Envy X360.
I7
32 GB RAM
512 Gb SSD
1 TB HDD
Blows my old MacBook Pro away.56 -
So, I'm programming a control system for a prototype aerospace vehicle. You know, the stuff that needs to work to prevent falling out of the sky.
Anyway, test day was today (was -- not anymore). Wiring all the electronics, everything is actuating and works well. Except for one part, a little thruster for stability.
I spent hours - literally, fucking hours - trying to fix the problem. Wrong address? Wrong syntax? I had absolutely no clue what was wrong. Queue the hardware guy, $stupid:
$stupid: "How have you not got it working yet?!"
$me: "I don't know, everything I'm trying isn't working. I've spent hours digging through this code and nothing is fucking working."
$stupid: "Well have you set it up for the new thruster?"
$me: "What...What new thruster?"
$stupid: "Oh, the one we installed this morning, did noone tell you?"
WHY WOULDN'T YOU TELL ME THIS?! COMMUNICATION 101!6 -
Oh the joy of helping elders with their computers..
...
Client: My computer is broken.
*Me expecting some kind of hardware issue*
Me: In what way is it broken? Are you able to start the computer?
Client: Yes. I can read Windows and then there's a login. It works fine but then It's broken.
*me standing next to client while client struggles to type password*
...
*5 minutes and a coffee brake later*
/* the client is finally able to figure out the password.. What a suprise! A note in the drawers containing all passwords.. */
Me: I'm sorry but I can't see any problems so far. You are supposed to be welcomed by your desktop *points at screen*. In what way is it broken?
Client: It's not the same as before. *now the client points at the screen*. Here. There used to be a picture here. It took me to <site>. Now It's not there. Something has changed.
*realizing that the client has lost his shortcut and wants a new one*
Oh the joy of helping elders with their computers.6 -
Storytime!
This customer comes in and practically throws a computer on the counter.
Customer: This computer isn't working. I've ran the diagnostics and it says it's software. *places a dvd case with a 32 bit Windows 7 disk in it on the counter* It had Windows 10 on it, but I want Windows 7 on it.
Me: Well, you may have issues with the drivers if you put Windows 7 on it--
Customer: I don't care, I just want Windows 7.
Me: You SHOULD care. That means no wifi, no display, no mouse... Windows 7 doesn't like Windows 10 hardware.
Customer: Then... check to see Windows 7 compatibility!
Me: Alright.... *makes notes to check for Windows 7 compatibility*
Me: So has this Windows 7 been used before?
Customer: Yes, it has.
Me: On how many computers?
Customer: I've installed it on two computers and it works just fine.
Me: That's weird because Windows license keys are for one computer only. Are both of them connected to the internet?
Customer: Yes.
Me: Well, okay then... *finishes up ticket*
Customer: I work in this field and I just don't understand why they don't come with the disks anymore. How much is a Windows 10 disk?
Me: *gives price*
Customer: And do you have any?
Me: Let me check *I go to where they are, find some and come back out*
Me: Unfortunately we're out at the moment and would have to special order some back in.
Customer: OK. So then how much to fix this computer?
Me: *price of installing Windows and backing up data*
Customer: That's halfway to the price of a new one of these!
Me: Well yes, an HP at Walmart... But you do have that option if you want to take it.
Customer: Well, why does it cost that much?
Me: Well, it's $labor1 to install Windows, $labor2 to do some basic setup and drivers, and $labor3 to backup and restore data.
Customer: Oh, well I don't want data.
Me: Okay, well then it would be $total - $labor3
Customer: ...Okay, fine
Me: *updates the ticket*
When she finally left I put it on the bench and the first message said "SMART ERROR." I then did 4 different tests that said "lol, the hard drive is failing."
If you "worked in this field," you would know that a SMART error is hard drive related.
If you worked in this field, you would know that Windows is only a 1PC license, so why are you lying about installing it with no issues on other computers?
If you worked in this field, you would know you would want a 64bit Windows on your computer.
If you worked in this field, you would know how to find a Windows 10 installation media online.
If you worked in this field, you would know that HPs are not good computers to get.
IF YOU FUCKING WORKED IN THIS FIELD YOU WOULDN'T BE SUCH A FUCKING CUNT.17 -
Apple has a real problem.
Their hardware has always been overpriced, but at least before it had defenders pointing out that it was at least capable and well made.
I know, I used to be one of them.
Past tense.
They have jumped the shark.
They now make pretentious hipster crap that is massively overpriced and doesn't have the basic features (like hardware ports) to enable you to do your job.
I mean, who needs an ESC key? What is wrong with learning to type CTRL-[ instead? Muscle memory? What's that?
They have gone from "It just works" to "It just doesn't work" in no time at all.
And it is Developers who are most pissed off. A tiny demographic who won't be visible on the financial bottom line until their newly absent software suddenly makes itself known two, three years down the line.
By which time it is too late to do anything.
But hey! Look how thin (and thermally throttled) my new laptop is!19 -
Looks like Apple is the new Microsoft and Microsoft is the new Apple...
I remember when every release of Windows was a catastrophic mess and you had to wait until at least SP2 to get the OS to work in a stable way. And Internet Exploder was *the* browser that broke everything, every time. And there was the whole embrace/extend thing, where they tried to impose their vision of web standards and compatibility, and *everything* you used *had* to come from Microsoft...
And now, it's Apple who fuck up every single OS release, on mobile and desktop, and whose browsers openly shit on web standards (ever try developing anything for Mobile Safari?). Apple's stuff that only works with Apple stuff (down to things like headphone jacks - OOPS, forgot, they dropped those now).
Microsoft is making interesting, beautiful hardware (Surface machines) while Apple is pushing un-innovative, overpriced garbage year in year out. And they're open-sourcing more and more, while Apple walls itself further and further behind its walled "garden". Bleh.
Be interesting to see in 10 years what will have shifted, because it'll change again by then.15 -
Got to learn Shopware (the eCommerce thingy written in PHP) for the job.
Bought a book worth ~60$.
The author writes: "Use vagrant it's soooooo comfy and cozy and everything!".
Sure, why not.
Got to get online over my smartphone.
Cloned the repo with the Vagrantfile.
Did a 'vagrant up'.
Downloaded the Ubuntu box of around 1.5 GB (reminder: over my smartphone which has around 3 GB 'highspeed' internet connection).
Vagrant initialized and provisioned the box.
Error.
Error?
Error.
VT-X is not enabled. Hm. Strange. Wait...when it's not enabled, can it be that...
Yep.
THIS SHITTY LAPTOP SCHMAPTOP DOES NOT SUPPORT VT-X AND I PULVERIZED JUST THE HALF OF MY INTERNET DATA FOR THIS SHITTY BOX IN ORDER TO JUST DOWNLOAD THE ZIP FILE AND INSTALL IT OLDSCHOOL-SCHMOLDSCHOOL INSTALL A APACHE VIRTUAL HOST.
Time for new hardware I think.11 -
Dells XPS are made of magic. [long story, major fuckup, 10k+ damages]
It all started in December. One morning I was late to work, drove there as fast as possible. (I live like 3 minutes away so me being late really meant *late*) Parked my car in a secluded car park, grabbed my backpack and ran to work. The car park is like 100 meters away from work so I took my feet into my hands and ran. Next thing I know my heels loose all grip while I go down a small slope and I drop on my back full force. On a sharp edged stone. With only my 1700$ XPS in it. Fuck.
I paniced, but got up and ran to work. I checked on the notebook, praying it would boot. It booted! Holy shit. I flipped the notebook and saw two small dents in the aluminum shell. I was thorougly impressed. I later discovered that it left a small shadow on the display, but given what a hit that was (I am not exactly a lightweight), impressive would be a massive understatement.
Fast forward to February, I am weighing my options to get the screen replaced maybe, as damage on my hardware (even if neglectable) triggers some sort of OCD and makes me feel bad 24/7. Also my laptop tends to shut off from time to time, looked into the Event Viewer and saw kernel panic. I figured that the battery probably still took a hit and that it drops voltage from time to time and the kernel assumes a critical situation, thus shutting off.
It stayed quite snowy in Austria up until March, so occasional snowing wasn't rare. Got out of work one day, saw it snowed a bit. Whatever. I had my moms car at the time, so I tried if it would slide a bit if I donut on the now (5pm) empty parking space. Nothing. Drove done a small hill, ABS triangle lit up red (board computer can't outbalance the snow). I drove out to the main street where everything was salted and drove along towards my house. Took a turn into my street, accelerated for a bit and then went off the gas so the car would smoothly drive along with the speed slowly degrading. So I went off the gas and noticed I was a bit to the right, no wonder, centrifugal forces.
*steers left*
"Huh seems like I need a bit more"
*car still doesnt move much*
"What the- go to the left!"
*steers left hard*
"Fuck that wall is coming closer"
*Breaks*
*car doesnt break*
"FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK!!!"
Everything got quiet in seconds, me waking up to an open airbag, ripped pants, a hurting wrist, the radio somewhere on the ground and fumes that smellt like burning wires. I grabbed my backpack that was now somewhere on the floor instead of on the seat and ran outside, tears in my eyes and the phone on my ear calling my mom. I walked inside as she walked outside, hearing a weeping scream that I haven't heard from her since I am alive. While walking inside I noticed my backpack was wet on the bottom, my 2 litre water jug shattered when my backpack hit the dashboard. I tried to stay calm and act rational, knowing that every second counts when It comes to water damage. I hastely searched for some rice and a bag to put my laptop into, stuffed the bag with both and went outside. The car was totaled, my mom pissed and crying. And I was in shock, sad, angry and hurting.
I kept the laptop on my heater for a few days, bagged in rice. I dared to try a boot after a while and you wont believe me, it fucking booted. Even the keyboard backlight worked, just the screen was obviously broken in the back (no color distortion or bad pixel rows though!!) and the aluminum shell had a dent on the front. I talked with Dell Support a few days later, asking if it would be ok to open the XPS up so I could drain all of the water. She said yes thats fine, as long as I dont touch anything or screw around with it.
She said I can send it in and get it checked, but the pickup and analysis will cost 150$ and I can go from there.
I sent it in and estimated that, because battery, screen and other things probably needed changing, it will be around 900$.
Got a call a few weeks later:
"Hello beggarboy, the repair team reported back to us and said that they will have to replace everything, which will be 1700$."
"Fuck... Buying a new one is cheaper.."
"Yeah I know I am sorry about that, I can offer you a voucher so you can buy a new one for 250$ off if you would prefer that"
"Sorry but I will need some time to consider"
"I understand."
The agent clearly noticed I was bummed about it.
After going back and forth what to do I got another call a few days later.
"Hello beggarboy, we talked a few days ago. I have good news"
"Hello, yes, speak up?"
"I was able to get a special offer for you after putting in a few words..."
The next thing she said seemed unreal to me.
She was able to cut 600$ (!!!), making the new offer 1100$, instead of 1700$ or a new one for 1500$. I figured the reason she probably did that was because I am always very polite with support members. Always.
My XPS is back and healty again.
Thank you for taking the time to read this.
Dells XPS are made of magic.13 -
I'm getting ridiculously pissed off at Intel's Management Engine (etc.), yet again. I'm learning new terrifying things it does, and about more exploits. Anything this nefarious and overreaching and untouchable is evil by its very nature.
(tl;dr at the bottom.)
I also learned that -- as I suspected -- AMD has their own version of the bloody thing. Apparently theirs is a bit less scary than Intel's since you can ostensibly disable it, but i don't believe that because spy agencies exist and people are power-hungry and corrupt as hell when they get it.
For those who don't know what the IME is, it's hardware godmode. It's a black box running obfuscated code on a coprocessor that's built into Intel cpus (all Intell cpus from 2008 on). It runs code continuously, even when the system is in S3 mode or powered off. As long as the psu is supplying current, it's running. It has its own mac and IP address, transmits out-of-band (so the OS can't see its traffic), some chips can even communicate via 3g, and it can accept remote commands, too. It has complete and unfettered access to everything, completely invisible to the OS. It can turn your computer on or off, use all hardware, access and change all data in ram and storage, etc. And all of this is completely transparent: when the IME interrupts, the cpu stores its state, pauses, runs the SMM (system management mode) code, restores the state, and resumes normal operation. Its memory always returns 0xff when read by the os, and all writes fail. So everything about it is completely hidden from the OS, though the OS can trigger the IME/SMM to run various functions through interrupts, too. But this system is also required for the CPU to even function, so killing it bricks your CPU. Which, ofc, you can do via exploits. Or install ring-2 keyloggers. or do fucking anything else you want to.
tl;dr IME is a hardware godmode, and if someone compromises this (and there have been many exploits), their code runs at ring-2 permissions (above kernel (0), above hypervisor (-1)). They can do anything and everything on/to your system, completely invisibly, and can even install persistent malware that lives inside your bloody cpu. And guess who has keys for this? Go on, guess. you're probably right. Are they completely trustworthy? No? You're probably right again.
There is absolutely no reason for this sort of thing to exist, and its existence can only makes things worse. It enables spying of literally all kinds, it enables cpu-resident malware, bricking your physical cpu, reading/modifying anything anywhere, taking control of your hardware, etc. Literal godmode. and some of it cannot be patched, meaning more than a few exploits require replacing your cpu to protect against.
And why does this exist?
Ostensibly to allow sysadmins to remote-manage fleets of computers, which it does. But it allows fucking everything else, too. and keys to it exist. and people are absolutely not trustworthy. especially those in power -- who are most likely to have access to said keys.
The only reason this exists is because fucking power-hungry doucherockets exist.26 -
I have been a mobile developer working with Android for about 6 years now. In that time, I have endured countless annoyances in the Android development space. I will endure them no more.
My complaints are:
1. Ridiculous build times. In what universe is it acceptable for us to wait 30 seconds for a build to complete. Yes, I've done all the optimisations mentioned on this page and then some. Don't even mention hot reload as it doesn't work fast enough or just does not work at all. Also, buying better hardware should not be a requirement to build a simple Android app, Xcode builds in 2 seconds with a 8GB Macbook Air. A Macbook Air!
2. IDE. Android Studio is a memory hog even if you throw 32GB of RAM at it. The visual editors are janky as hell. If you use Eclipse, you may as well just chop off your fingers right now because you will have no use for them after you try and build an app from afresh. I mean, just look at some of the posts in this subreddit where the common response is to invalidate caches and restart. That should only be used as a last resort, but it's thrown about like as if it solves everything. Truth be told, it's Gradle's fault. Gradle is so annoying I've dedicated the next point to it.
3. Gradle. I am convinced that Gradle causes 50% of an Android developer's pain. From the build times to the integration into various IDEs to its insane package management system. Why do I need to manually exclude dependencies from other dependencies, the build tool should just handle it for me. C'mon it's 2019. Gradle is so bad that it requires approx 54GB of RAM to work out that I have removed a dependency from the list of dependencies. Also I cannot work out what properties I need to put in what block.
4. API. Android API is over-bloated and hellish. How do I schedule a recurring notification? Oh use an AlarmManager. Yes you heard right, an AlarmManager... Not a NotificationManager because that would be too easy. Also has anyone ever tried running a long running task? Or done an asynchronous task? Or dealt with closing/opening a keyboard? Or handling clicks from a RecyclerView? Yes, I know Android Jetpack aims to solve these issues but over the years I have become so jaded by things that have meant to solve other broken things, that there isn't much hope for Jetpack in my mind 😤
5. API 2. A non-insignificant number of Android users are still on Jelly Bean or KitKat! That means we, as developers, have to support some of your shitty API decisions (Fragments, Activities, ListView) from all the way back then!
6. Not reactive enough. Android has support for Databinding recently but this kind of stuff should have been introduced from the very start. Look at React or Flutter as to how easy it is to make shit happen without any effort.
7. Layouts. What the actual hell is going on here. MDPI, XHDPI, XXHDPI, mipmap, drawable. Fuck it, just chuck it all in the drawable folder. Seriously, Android should handle this for me. If I am designing for a larger screen then it should be responsive. I don't want to deal with 50 different layouts spread over 6 different folders.
8. Permission system. Why was this not included from the very start? Rogue apps have abused this and abused your user's privacy and security. Yet you ban us and not them from the Play Store. What's going on? We need answers.
9. In Android, building an app took me 3 months and I had a lot of work left to do but I got so sick of Android dev I dropped it in favour of Flutter. I built the same app in Flutter and it took me around a month and I completed it all.
10. XML.
If you're a new dev, for the love of all that is good in this world, do NOT get into Android development. Start with Flutter or even iOS. On Flutter and build times are insanely fast and the hot reload is under 500ms constantly. It's a breath of fresh air and will save you a lot of headaches AND it builds for iOS flawlessly.
To the people who build Android, advocate it and work on it, sorry to swear, but fuck you! You have created a mess that we have to work with on a day-to-day basis only for us to get banned from the app store! You have sold us a lie that Android development is amazing with all the sweet treat names and conferences that look bubbly and fun. You have allowed to get it so bad that we can't target an API higher than 18 because some Android users are still using devices that support that!
End this misery. End our pain. End our suffering. Throw this abomination away like you do with some of your other projects and migrate your efforts over to Flutter. Please!
#NoToGoogleIO #AndroidSummitBoycott #FlutterDev #ReactNative16 -
Well, here's the OS rant I promised. Also apologies for no blog posts the past few weeks, working on one but I want to have all the information correct and time isn't my best friend right now :/
Anyways, let's talk about operating systems. They serve a purpose which is the goal which the user has.
So, as everyone says (or, loads of people), every system is good for a purpose and you can't call the mainstream systems shit because they all have their use.
Last part is true (that they all have their use) but defining a good system is up to an individual. So, a system which I'd be able to call good, had at least the following 'features':
- it gives the user freedom. If someone just wants to use it for emailing and webbrowsing, fair enough. If someone wants to produce music on it, fair enough. If someone wants to rebuild the entire system to suit their needs, fair enough. If someone wants to check the source code to see what's actually running on their hardware, fair enough. It should be up to the user to decide what they want to/can do and not up to the maker of that system.
- it tries it's best to keep the security/privacy of its users protected. Meaning, by default, no calling home, no integrating users within mass surveillance programs and no unnecessary data collection.
- Open. Especially in an age of mass surveillance, it's very important that one has the option to check the underlying code for vulnerabilities/backdoors. Can everyone do that, nope. But that doesn't mean that the option shouldn't be there because it's also about transparency so you don't HAVE to trust a software vendor on their blue eyes.
- stability. A system should be stable enough for home users to use. For people who like to tweak around? Also, but tweaking *can* lead to instability and crashes, that's not the systems' responsibility.
Especially the security and privacy AND open parts are why I wouldn't ever voluntarily (if my job would depend on it, sure, I kinda need money to stay alive so I'll take that) use windows or macos. Sure, apple seems to care about user privacy way more than other vendors but as long as nobody can verify that through source code, no offense, I won't believe a thing they say about that because no one can technically verify it anyways.
Some people have told me that Linux is hard to use for new/(highly) a-technical people but looking at my own family and friends who adapted fast as hell and don't want to go back to windows now (and mac, for that matter), I highly doubt that. Sure, they'll have to learn something new. But that was also the case when they started to use any other system for the first time. Possibly try a different distro if one doesn't fit?
Problems - sometimes hard to solve on Linux, no doubt about that. But, at least its open. Meaning that someone can dive in as deep as possible/necessary to solve the problem. That's something which is very difficult with closed systems.
The best example in this case for me (don't remember how I did it by the way) was when I mounted a network drive at boot on windows and Linux (two systems using the same webDav drive). I changed the authentication and both systems weren't in for booting anymore. Hours of searching how to unfuck this on windows - I ended up reinstalling it because I just couldn't find a solution.
On linux, i found some article quite quickly telling to remove the entry for the webdav thingy from fstab. Booted into a root recovery shell, chrooted to the harddrive, removed the entry in fstab and rebooted. BAM. Everything worked again.
So yeah, that's my view on this, I guess ;P30 -
A quite normal Windows day:
Bios to Windows: "Go now! Get up!"
Windows to Bios: "Always slow with the young circuit boards."
"I've got something weird on screen."
Windows' answer: "Ignore it first."
Hardware assistant to Windows: "The user puts pressure. He wants me to identify this thing. Could be an ISDN card."
Windows: "Well, well."
Unknown ISDN card to all: "Will you please let me in?"
Network card to intruder: "You can't spread out here!"
Windows: "Quiet in the case! Or I'll cut both their support!"
Device Manager: "Offer compromise. The network card is allowed on Mondays, the ISDN card is on Tuesday."
Graphics card to Windows: "My driver retired yesterday. I'm crashing now."
Windows to graphics card: "When will you be back?"
Graphics card: "Well, not at first."
CD-Rom drive to Windows: "uh, I would have a new driver here..."
Windows: "What's ich´n supposed to do with it?!"
Installation software to Windows: "Leave it, I'll mach´ that already."
Windows: "That's nice to hear."
USB connection to interrupt management: "Alarm! Just been penetrated by a scanner cable. Request response."
Interrupt management: "Where are you coming from?"
USB connection: "I was in the computer right from the start. I'm joined by another colleague."
"You're not on my list." - "Say something."
Windows: "Hopefully there won't be another printer."
Graphics card: "The new driver twitches."
Windows: "We'll just have to get the old one out of retirement."
Uninstall program to new driver: "Go away."
Unwanted driver: "Fuck you."
Windows to Norton Utilities: "Kill him and his brood!"
Utilities to driver rests: "Sorry, we have to delete you."
Important system file: "Arrrrrrgghh!"
Windows on blue screen: "Gib´, the Norton Boys are over the top again."
Blue screen to user: "So, that's it for this week."
Excuse me for stealing your time
And I know it's way too long7 -
Today my manager asked me about my research into using RabbitMQ as a backup in case Azure Service Bus ever goes down.
Me: "Good. The way we designed the framework, all we have to do is drop the DLLs into the directory, update the config, and the services will start using RabbitMQ."
Mgr: "Excellent. Probably should be looking into using RabbitMQ as a permanent replacement for Azure"
Me: "What? The whole reason we moved to Azure was to eliminate the problems with having an on prem service bus. Since we've switched, there has been zero downtime."
Mgr: "That's what VP-Joe is afraid of. If Azure ever goes down, he won't know how to explain Azure to the president as to why we're not taking orders or can't ship packages."
Me: "That makes no sense. What did VP-Joe tell the president when a database goes down or a server mis-configuration?"
Mgr: "President understands internal outages, its just the whole 'cloud' thing he doesn't understand."
Me: "Um..then VP-Joe needs to explain it to him?"
Mgr: "The decision has already been made. Are you on board? Lets look at this move as a cost savings."
Me: "You mean the $10 a month? How much hardware will we need to support RabbitMQ?"
Mgr: "Yea, nobody probably thought of that."
Me: "I'm on board with whatever decision, but I'd like a little more than VP-Joe being afraid of the president."
Mgr: "I'm sure its not being afraid."
Me: "..."
Mgr: "OK, lets wait and see if VP-Joe forgets about this and moves on to something new."4 -
I was starting a new job and asked if developers had a choice between a PC, Linux or a Mac. I didn't get a response so I sent an e-mail saying I'd prefer a PC/Linux if that was allowed, or a PC/Windows. First day I get a Mac. Boss says something about how you have to have a Mac to develop on; the company doesn't have good Windows laptops with 16GB of ram.
I really do not like macOS. I wouldn't care if it wasn't for the fact that for the past three jobs, I have always been able to use a Linux machine at work (since 2012). So over the weekend I got it dual booting. It was not easy. Apple's hardware is fucking awful. The keyboard, mouse and bluetooth are all connected to the serial bus.
I got it all working though, at least well enough for my job. It feels so good to have a tiling window manager. (I know Mac does have some now, but I really love i3). I made a guide in case another developer finds themselves in my spot:
https://penguindreams.org/images/...17 -
You know side projects? Well I took on one. An old customer asked to come and take over his latest startups companys tech. Why not, I tought. Idea is sound. Customer base is ripe and ready to pay.
I start digging and the Hardware part is awesome. The guys doing the soldering and imbedded are geniuses. I was impressed AF.
I commit and meet up with CEO. A guy with a vision and sales orientation/contacts. Nice! This shit is gonna sell. Production lines are also set.
Website? WTF is this shit. Owner made it. Gotta give him the credit. Dude doesn't do computers and still managed to online something. He is still better at sales so we agree that he's gonna stick with those and I'll handle the tech.
I bootstrap a new one in my own simplistic style and online it. I like it. The owner likes it. He made me to stick to a tacky logo. I love CSS and bootstrap. You can make shit look good quick.
But I still don't have access to the soul of the product. DBs millions rows of data and source for the app I still behind the guy that has been doing this for over a year.
He has been working on a new version for quite some time. He granted access to the new versions source, but back end and DB is still out of reach. Now for over month has passed and it's still no new version or access to data.
Source has no documentation and made in a flavor of JS frame I'm not familiar with. Weekend later of crazy cramming I get up to speed and it's clear I can't get further without the friggin data.
The V2 is a scramble of bleeding edge of Alpha tech that isn't ready for production and is clearly just a paid training period for the dev. And clearly it isn't going so well because release is a month late. I try to contact, but no reaction. The owner is clueless.
Disheartening. A good idea is going to waste because of some "dev" dropping a ball and stonewalling the backup.
I fucking give him till the end of the next week until I make the hardware team a new api to push the data and refactor the whole thing in proper technologies and cut him off.
Please. If you are a dev and don't have the time to concentrate on the solution don't take it on and kill off the idea. You guys are the key to making things happening and working. Demand your cut but also deserve it by delivering or at least have the balls to tell you are not up for it. -
>>> print(whoSaid("OlderFriend"))
About 20ish years ago I was working in IT, and it was about around this time where CD-Roms were hitting the stores and becoming the newest craze. However, Microsoft did not write the drivers correctly for this new hardware.
In a nutshell, the driver would be installed and the user would lose the sound to their speaker.
How did this happen? By altering the way the interrupts worked on the computer. At the time there only existed a few unreserved IRQs or Interrupt ReQuests. The installer package would redirect IRQ 5 which is "User Selectable (Sound Cards)" to work with the CD-Rom. This was fine and all unless you wanted to listen to your speakers.
I had come up with a clever hack through rewriting a config file that would be run during bootup. So at the time of boot up IRQ 5 would be dedicated to the sound card, and IRQ7 (which was usually for the Lpt1 Printer) would be dedicated to the CD-Rom. This worked.
And because I was IT at the time, I would get a lot of calls for fixing this problem.
So, as you can imagine, I've gotten **really** good at doing this. I didn't even need to be at a computer to walk someone through the problem.
I receive a call one day, it was a problem with the CD-Rom and sound card. I walk him through the problem and he reboots his computer. I could hear him on the other side jumping with joy when he was able to put in his music CD and hear sound coming from the speakers.
He asks me, how in the hell did you figure this out!? You're a fucking Genius!
And I said, It's not rocket science it's just a computer.
There was a long pause of silence.
Uhhh... Hello? Did I say something wrong?
Sir, I work at NASA I deal with Rocket Science on a daily basis.4 -
I've been away... for too long. But today I have an announcement.
I've finally resigned from the Navy.
Little backstory: I have been thinking to resign since my last year as an Ensign, and I finally gained enough skill (and confidence) to make a CV and send it to a few companies. And lo and behold, a company actually was interested.
To be stupidly honest, maybe other factors certainly have played a part, but hey, I actually got a position in the sector I am interested and somewhat good: networks, sysadmin and security.
The CO and XO at my ship were mostly like "meh, he will retract his resignation, why would he want to leave, he is not serious". Until a few days ago, when they realised that I do not operate that way. And now panic has spread among them. I have designed and deployed quite some systems on the ship, both hardware and software, and now... history repeats again. This had happened to EVERY ship I've served before, but now, it will be permanent. And, oh boy, their faces and behaviour when the facts finally sank in... to quote a big mind of YouTube, "Not enough popcorn on Earth".
So, no more new Navy tech stories, but at least I am gaining my sanity back. I've even halved my cigarette and coffee consumption. I'll try to keep in touch with DevRant, but things are quite chaotic now (for them, anyway). But, for now, all I can think of is...12 -
I have this little hobby project going on for a while now, and I thought it's worth sharing. Now at first blush this might seem like just another screenshot with neofetch.. but this thing has quite the story to tell. This laptop is no less than 17 years old.
So, a Compaq nx7010, a business laptop from 2004. It has had plenty of software and hardware mods alike. Let's start with the software.
It's running run-off-the-mill Debian 9, with a custom kernel. The reason why it's running that version of Debian is because of bugs in the network driver (ipw2200) in Debian 10, causing it to disconnect after a day or so. Less of an issue in Debian 9, and seemingly fixed by upgrading the kernel to a custom one. And the kernel is actually one of the things where you can save heaps of space when you do it yourself. The kernel package itself is 8.4MB for this one. The headers are 7.4MB. The stock kernels on the other hand (4.19 at downstream revisions 9, 10 and 13) took up a whole GB of space combined. That is how much I've been able to remove, even from headless systems. The stock kernels are incredibly bloated for what they are.
Other than that, most of the data storage is done through NFS over WiFi, which is actually faster than what is inside this laptop (a CF card which I will get to later).
Now let's talk hardware. And at age 17, you can imagine that it has seen quite a bit of maintenance there. The easiest mod is probably the flash mod. These old laptops use IDE for storage rather than SATA. Now the nice thing about IDE is that it actually lives on to this very day, in CF cards. The pinout is exactly the same. So you can use passive IDE-CF adapters and plug in a CF card. Easy!
The next thing I want to talk about is the battery. And um.. why that one is a bad idea to mod. Finding replacements for such old hardware.. good luck with that. So your other option is something called recelling, where you disassemble the battery and, well, replace the cells. The problem is that those battery packs are built like tanks and the disassembly will likely result in a broken battery housing (which you'll still need). Also the controllers inside those battery packs are either too smart or too stupid to play nicely with new cells. On that laptop at least, the new cells still had a perceived capacity of the old ones, while obviously the voltage on the cells themselves didn't change at all. The laptop thought the batteries were done for, despite still being chock full of juice. Then I tried to recalibrate them in the BIOS and fried the battery controller. Do not try to recell the battery, unless you have a spare already. The controllers and battery housings are complete and utter dogshit.
Next up is the display backlight. Originally this laptop used to use a CCFL backlight, which is a tiny tube that is driven at around 2000 volts. To its controller go either 7, 6, 4 or 3 wires, which are all related and I will get to. Signs of it dying are redshift, and eventually it going out until you close the lid and open it up again. The reason for it is that the voltage required to keep that CCFL "excited" rises over time, beyond what the controller can do.
So, 7-pin configuration is 2x VCC (12V), 2x enable (on or off), 1x adjust (analog brightness), and 2x ground. 6-pin gets rid of 1 enable line. Those are the configurations you'll find in CCFL. Then came LED lighting which required much less power to run. So the 4-pin configuration gets rid of a VCC and a ground line. And finally you have the 3-pin configuration which gets rid of the adjust line, and you can just short it to the enable line.
There are some other mods but I'm running out of characters. Why am I telling you all this? The reason is that this laptop doesn't feel any different to use than the ThinkPad x220 and IdeaPad Y700 I have on my desk (with 6c12t, 32G of RAM, ~1TB of SSDs and 2TB HDDs). A hefty setup compared to a very dated one, yet they feel the same. It can do web browsing, I can chat on Telegram with it, and I can do programming on it. So, if you're looking for a hobby project, maybe some kind of restrictions on your hardware to spark that creativity that makes code better, I can highly recommend it. I think I'm almost done with this project, and it was heaps of fun :D12 -
Got my VisionTek Radeon 7750 today! Held my breath during the amd drivers installation on Linux (KDE Neon) but it all went well.
Rebooted, all screens (4 right now? upgrading to 6 soon) black.
Closed eyes, opened after 10 seconds and BAM, first display is working.
After some settings tweaking I've got 4 monitors up and running now, waiting for new hardware for two more.
Also waiting for a hex monitor stand ❤.
AMD, thanks for providing stable and working drivers for Linux for free!11 -
First day on new job. Hardware guy comes to my office, says "Hi, here is your computer" (no eye contact) and leaves a pile of boxes on the floor.
A few hours later I finished building the computer from scratch lol.
Not sure if it was some kind of test or just him being weird 😂3 -
Everytime I tell someone I write scripts and test security of new hardware/software, I get
"oh that's so cool, what's that called?"
"penetration testing"
*Room goes silent and wide-eyed*2 -
Half life 2 runs smoothly in a 12 year old PC with Nvidia 8500, 1 GB RAM, and a dual core.
A FPS with wavy water reflection, body physics and huge designed maps which is updates every fucking frame.
Today I can't run smoothly an IDE with 8 GB of RAM and 4 cores.
A program which only reacts to events stutters if I write at more than 3 letters per sec.
I wanna go back. Can we go back? Lets keep the new hardware and go back with the software pleeeease.20 -
My start at one of the Big Four (accounting firms).
The first two days of each month they organise "onboarding days" for the new starters of that month. (I so hate upper management buzzwords!) They sent me a formal invitation that looked like I was being invited to a ball with the royals, and they included the following super-smarty-pants line: "Dress code: would you wear jeans and t-shirt when you meet a client?"
And I thought: "I'm an effing hardware and software engineer for internal services. I will never meet a client." But I dressed formally nonetheless, and I went to the onboarding, and I hated every second I spent in those effing high heels, and don't get me started on how I managed to get a run on my stockings in the first hour.
The first day of the onboarding we sat through eight hours of general talks from senior employees who wanted to explain the "culture" and "values" of our company, but the worst of all was the three-hour introduction to IT services where they "helped us set up our new laptops" and taught us how to send e-mails and how to use the Company Portal.
On the second day, they divided us into groups depending on our speciality (assurance, taxes, legal, etc) and exposed us to further 8 hours of boredom related to our speciality. However, since the "digital services" thing was still new to them, we didn't have a category of our own, and we had to attend the introduction to one of the other categories, and I didn't understand one word of what was being said.
On the third day I finally went to my office and they provided me with a second laptop. It turns out that we engineers got different laptops and were allowed to manage it ourselves instead of letting central IT manage it for us. So I simply returned the laptop they had given me the first day and started working. However, for some reason, the laptop I returned was not registered, and two weeks later they started pestering me with emails asking where was the laptop "I had stolen". It took me 3 weeks of emails and calls to make them understand that I had returned the laptop immediately.
Also, on the two onboarding days we had to sign attendance, and since I forgot to sign the paper list on the second day, they invited me to the event the next month again. I explained to them that I had already attended the onboarding and didn't go, so they invited me again on the third month, and they threatened me with "disciplinary action" if I didn't go. After a week of lost time writing emails and calling people, I ended up going to the onboarding again just to sign the effing list.
In the end, I resigned during the probation time. That company was the worst experience of my life. It was an example of corporate culture so absurdly exaggerated that it sometimes reminded me of Kafka's Trial. I think they have more "HR representatives" than people who do actual work.6 -
Most ignorant ask from a PM or client?
So, so many. How do I chose?
- Wanting to 'speed up' a web site that we did not own, in Sweden (they used a service I wrote). His 'benchmark' was counting "one Mississippi, two Mississippi" while the home page rendered on his home PC and < 1MB DSL connection (he lives in a rural area).
- Wanted to change the sort order of a column of report so it 'sometimes' sorted on 'ABC' (alpha) or '123' (numeric) and sometimes, a mix of both. His justification was if he could put the data in the order he wanted in Excel, the computer should be smart enough to do the same thing.
- Wanted a Windows desktop application to run on an android.
- Wanted to write the interface to a new phone system that wasn't going to be installed for months. Even though we had access to the SDK, he didn't understand the SDK required access to the hardware. For several weeks he would send emails containing tutorials on interfacing with COM libraries (as if that was my problem).
- Wanted to write a new customer support application in XML. I told him I would have the application written tomorrow if he could tell me what XML stands for.4 -
The riskiest dev choice...
How about "The riskiest thing you've done as a dev"? I have a great entry for that. and I suppose it was my choice to build the feature afterall.
I was working on an instance of a small MMO at a game company I worked for. The MMO boasted multiple servers, each of them a vastly different take on the base game. We could use, extend, or outright replace anything we wanted to, leading to everything from Zelda to pokemon to an RP haven to a top-down futuristic counterstrike. The server in this particular instance was a fantasy RPG, and I was building it a new leveling and experience system with most of the trimmings. (Talents, feats/perks, etc. were in a future update.)
A bit of background, first: the game's dev setup did not have the now-standard dev/staging/prod servers; everything ran on prod, devs worked on prod, players connected and played on prod, etc. Worse yet, there was no backup system implemented -- or not really. The CTO was really the only person with sufficient access. The techy CEO did as well, but he rarely dealt with anything technical except server hardware, occasionally. And usually just to troll/punish us devs (as in "Oops ! I pulled the cat5 ! ;)"). Neither of them were the most reliable of people, either. The CTO would occasionally remote in and make backups of each server -- we assumed whenever he happened to think of it -- and would also occasionally do it when asked, but it could take him a week, sometimes even up to a month to get around to it. So the backups were only really useful for retreiving lost code and assets, not so much for player data.
The lack of reliable backups and the lack of proper testing grounds (among the plethora of other issues at the company) made for an absolutely terrible dev setup, but that's just how it was, and that's what we dealt with. We were game devs, afterall. Terrible or not, we got to make games! What more could you ask for!? It was amazing and terrible and wonderful and the worst thing ever, all at the same time. (and no, I'm not sharing the company name, but it isn't EA or Nexon, surprisingly 😅)
Anyway, back to the story! My new leveling system also needed to migrate players' existing data, so... you can see where this is going.
I did as much testing and inspection of my code as I could, copied it from a personal dev script to the server's xp system, ... and debated if I really wanted to click [Apply]. Every time I considered it, I went back to check another part or do yet more testing. I ended up taking like 40 minutes to finally click it.
And when I did... that was the scariest button press of my life. And the scariest three seconds' wait afterwards. That one click could have ruined every single player's account, permanently lost us players ...
After applying it, I immediately checked my character to see if she was broken, checked the account data for corruption or botched flags, checked for broken interactions with the other systems....
Everything ended up working out perfectly, and the players loved all of the new features. They had no idea what went into building them, and certainly had no idea of what went into applying them, or what could have gone wrong -- which is probably a good thing.
Looking back, that entire environment was so fragile, it's a wonder things didn't go horribly wrong all the time. Really, they almost never did. Apocalypses did happen, but were exceedingly rare, and were ususally fixed quickly. I guess we were all super careful simply because everything was so fragile? or the decent devs were, at least. We never trusted the lessers with access 😅 at least on the main servers where it mattered. Some of the smaller servers... well, we never really cared about those.
But I'm honestly more surprised to realize I've never had nightmares of that button click. It was certainly terrifying enough.
But yay! Complete system overhaul and migration of stored and realtime player data! on prod! With no issues! And lots of happy players! Woooooo!
Thinking back on it makes me happy 😊rant deploying straight to prod prod prod prod dev server? dev on prod you chicken migration on prod wk149 git? who's a git? you're a git! scariest deploy ever game development1 -
First time I was scared and decided not to use a ATM machine, since that piece of shit Windows device notified me about some new USB hardware detected :)8
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I stayed at a hotel called "Crowne Royal Plaza" for a work event in Denver. The TV in the room was a nice new '50 Samsung. Much to my dismay I discovered they had disabled the ability to change the input to HDMI. I called the front desk to compain and the pesent who answered the phone had the nerve to tell me that feature had been disabled because it was "illegal". I laughed histarically and explained the reason was actually to try and force customers to buy shitty pay-per-view content, to which he replied, "Probably".
We must put an end to such blantant disregard for hardware and software freedom. This is beyond uneccaptable. I am completely and utterly disgusted by such slimy business practices.
To the management of the Crowne Royal Plaza, from the bottom of my heart, fuck you and burn in the deapest, darkest part of hell, you scum sucking dick fucks!5 -
So yesterday our team got a new toy. A big ass 4k screen to display some graphs on. Took a while to assemble the stand, hang the TV on that stand, but we got there.
So our site admin gets us a new HDMI cable. Coleague told us his lappy supports huge screens as he used to plug his home TV in his work lappy while WFHing. He grabs that HDMI, plugs one end into the screen, another - into his lappy and
.. nothing...
Windows does not recognize any new devices connected. The screen does not show any signs of any changes. Oh well..
Site IT admin installs all the updates, all the new drivers, upgrades BIOS and gives another try.
Nothing.
So naturally the cable is to blame. The port is working for him at home, so it's sure not port's fault. Also he uses his 2-monitor setup at work, so the port is 100% working!
I'm curious. What if..... While they are busy looking for another cable, I take that first one, plug it into my Linux (pretty much stock LinuxMint installation w/ X) lappy,
3.. 2.. 1..
and my desktop is now on the big ass 4k fat screen.
Folks. Enough bitching about Linux being picky about the hardware and Windows being more user friendly, having PnP and so. I'm not talking about esoteric devices. I'm talking about BAU devices that most of home users are using. A monitor, a printer, a TV screen, a scanner, wireless/usb speaker/mouse/keyboard/etc...
Linux just works. Face it
P.S. today they are still trying to make his lappy work with that TV screen. No luck yet.17 -
Fuck that fucking company three way while dozens of homeless HIV crack junkies puke and shit their diarrhea on the three bosses!
I can't put it in words how stupid they are!
Let me try to tell you the latest story while I try not to get multiple strokes.
Backstory: We are three devs, all with a TCCI certification. One has been working for us for almost a year, the other one has been working for us since one and a half year. Both are good friends of mine, btw. I have been working there for almost three years.
Fortunately, I am allowed to work on a reasonable computer. The other devs work on PC's with Windows 7 and 8!
One has just 400 MB space left on his drive and has to delete every month some shit because he does not want to be able to call up websites anymore... How awful?!
The PC of the other great Dev Crashes three to six times a day and needs about 30 minutes to start up!
We can be so productive, but...
We told that in February one of our bosses and asked him to buy new hardware. His answer: yes, of course, I understand that, it's my turn (he always says that "ich bin da dran")
We got a new colleague in the middle of this fucking month. She is responsible for conception.
She works on an old notebook, but today she gets a fucking new PC to work on while the devs are trying to weld with a sparkler! Better hardware than every other Dev PC!!!
Guess what? She is the daughter of a friend of one of our bosses!
We are the only devs at this company.
Fuck that fucking company! Fuck that fucking bosses!
I think we don't go to work for that fucking company anymore!6 -
I started this new freelance project where I am building some android libraries for the client. Anyways, during meeting I was about to present my results and suddenly backend seemed to be down. I looked into the round "are your servers down?"
Team Lead: "Yeah our cto, also our only backend dev, is developing a new feature."
Me: "Okay but why is production down?",
Team Lead: "Ah dont worry we always test on production. We have a pretty solid hardware, we will even upgrade it soon!"
Me:"... How about you just separate your stage environments and have a develop environment?"
Client: "see, this is where our strength is. We dont need a develop stage we have very strong hardware and our backend is fully in PHP"
Thanks God I'm a freelancer3 -
This happend to me around 2 weeks ago. For some reason, I decied to post this now.
I won the lottery, yey! I mean, bot really, but I am <19yo student, "less than junior dev" in my office, but sonce I am the only one who is capable of working with hardware, I was working month back as a sysadmin for a few days. Our last sysadmin was really good working but really, really toxic guy, so he got fired on a spot after argument with some manager or whatever, no big deal, we could have another guy hired in a week. But, our backup server literally was on fire, all data probably dead because bad capacitor or whatever. This was our only backup of everything at the time. Everyone in full fucking panic mode, we had literally no other working HW we could use for backup, but then comes me, intern employed on his first dev job for 3 months. That day I bought some HW for my own personal server at home (Intel NUC with some Celeron, 4GB DDR4 RAM and two 240GB SSDs for RAID 1. My manager asked everyone in the office for sollution how to survive next 4 days before new server arrives. People there had no idea what tk do and no knowedgle about HW, I just came from a break and offered my components for a week, since there was noone else who can work with HW, servers and stuff like this, manager offered me $500+HW cost if I, random intern, can make it work. I installed Debian on that little PC, created RAID1 from both SSDs, installed MySQL server and mirrored GIT server from our last standing server (we had two before one of them went lit 🔥), made simple Python script to copy all data on that RAID, with some help of our database guy copied whole DB from production to this little computer and edited some PHP so every SQL request made on our server will run on that NUC too. Everything after ±2 hours worked perfectly. Untill a fucking PSU burned in our server and took RAID controller with him in sillicon heaven next night, so we could not access any data unltill we got a new one. Thanks to every god out there, I was able to create software RAID from survived HDDs on our production server and copy all data from that NUC on the servers software RAID and make it working at 3 AM in the night before an exam 😂. Without this, we would be next ±40 hours without aerver running and we might loose soke of our data and customers. So my little skill with Linux, Python, MySQL and most importantly my NUC hardware I got that day running as a backup server saved maybe whole company 😂.
Btw, guess who is now employee of the year with $2500 bonus? 😀
Sorry for bragging and log post, but I was so lucky an so happy when everything worked out, good luck to all sysadmins out there! 👍
TL:DR: Random intern saved company and made some money 😂7 -
Never thought I will be hired by Chinese software/hardware company located in NYC to code in languages I don't know so well. Instead of lying and saying I know everything about C, PHP and SQL, I said that I suck pretty much at everything, but I'm a quick learner and will study day and night to catch up with their practices. Now I see they have no regret about me, but I still suspect them in hiring me because there is another guy who is Russian too and we all communicate well. Our current squad is 17 Chinese, 2 Russians, 1 Americans. Guess what, I learn Mandarin quicker than PHP. Sometimes a small lie is OK, but sometimes honesty is better.3
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After returning back from the company we were purchasing a new phone system (hardware+software, $100K+, kind of a big deal)
VP: “I need the new phone system software integration for our CRM by next week. I need to demo the system for the other VPs”
Me: “No problem. Were you able to get their API like I asked?”
VP: “Salesman didn’t know for sure what that was, but he said all the developer software documentation is on their site.”
Me: “Did he give you a URL? Their main site is all marketing mumbo-jumbo. I assume there is another one specific for developers.”
VP: “Yea, he might have said something, but I don’t understand why you need it. The salesman said the integration would be seamless. He showed me several demos.”
Me: “No, I mean I need to know, is the API a full client install? a simple dll? is this going to be a web service integration? How will I know what to program against?”
VP: “I think I heard him say something about COM? Does that sound like an API?”
Me: “It’s a start. Did he provide you anything, a disk, a flash drive, anything with the software?”
VP: “No, only thing he told me was our CRM integration would be seamless and our development team would have no problems.”
Me: “OK..OK…I get it…he’s a salesman. Is there an 1-800 number I can call? A technical support email address? Anyone technical I can reach out to?”
VP: “Probably, but I don’t understand what the problem is. I need the CRM integrated by next week. I gave the other VPs a promise we would get it done. I do not break promises.”
Me: “Wait…when are we installing the new system?”
VP: “Well, the purchase order will be cut at the end of the month’s billing cycle, the company has about a two month turnaround time to deliver and install the hardware, so maybe 3 months from now? Are you going to be able to have the integration ready for next week?”
Me: “If we won’t see any of the hardware for 3 months, what exactly am I integrating with?”
VP: “That API you wanted or whatever it is. COM…yea, it’s COM. I was told the integration would be seamless and our developers would have no problem. I don’t understand why you can’t simply write the code to make it work. Getting the hardware installed is going to be the hardest part.”
Me: “OK, so I have no documentation, we have no hardware, no software, and no idea what this ‘seamless integration’ means. I’m afraid there isn’t anything I can do right now. ”
VP: “Fine!...I’ll just have to tell the other VPs you were not able to execute the seamless integration with the CRM.”
Which he did. When the hardware+software was finally installed, they hired consultants (because I “failed”). I think the bill was in the $50K range to perform the ‘integration’ which consisted of Excel spreadsheets (no kidding). When approached with the primary CRM integration, the team needed our API documentation, a year’s development time and $300K. I was pissed off enough, and I had the API documentation, I was able to get the basic CRM integration within 3 days. When an agent receives a call, I look up the # in our database, auto-fill the form with the customer info, etc. Easy stuff when you have the documentation.
The basics worked and the VP was congratulated by ‘saving’ the company $300K. May or may not have been bonuses involved, rumors still out on that one, but I didn't see em'. Later my manager told me the VP was really ticked that I performed the integration ‘behind his back’, but because it was a success, he couldn’t fire me.10 -
Because of hardware failure we had to move some vpns from one datacenter to another.
The team of highly untrained monkeys at my hosting provider were hired to do this. First they ran backups of all the systems. Then they started the moving process. A few hours later they were done. We got an email everything was back online.
So we restarted all our processes and no data was coming in from our Raspberry's around the country. So we start a little investigation. What did these buffons do, they changed our rsa keys.
So we kindly ask them to put the old keys back so we do not have to fix 200 changed key warnings on systems that are not remotely accesible.
Apperently something that can't be done because their back up process is automated and always makes new keys.
Holy fucking fuck, whats the point in having a backup its not an exact copy. Is this fucking normal?
Now I will be spending the next few weeks literally standing in cow shit reconnecting Raspberry's.
Thanks a fucking lot. Not!4 -
Hi,
I'm not a ranty person so I never actually thought I'd post anything here but here it goes.
From the beginning.
We use ancient technologies. PHP 5.2, Symfony 1.2 and a non RFC complient SOAP with NO documentation.
A year ago We've been thrown a new temporary project. An VOIP app for every OS.
That being iOS, Android, MAC, PC, Linux, Windows mobile. With a 3 month deadline. All that thrown at 4 PHP developers. The idea being that They'll take it, sign the delivery protocol, everyone happy. No more updates for the app needed. They get their funds they needed the app for and we get paid.
Fast forward to today...
Our dev team started the year with great news that We'll most likely have to create a new project. Since the amount of new features would be far greater than current feature set, we managed to finally force our boss to use newer technologies (ie. seperate backend symfony4 PHP7+/frontend react, rest api and so on). So we were ecstatic to say the least. With preestimates aimed at a minimum 3 month development period. Since we're comfortable with everything that needs to be done.
Two days later our boss came to me that one of our most annoying clients needs a new feature. Said client uses ancient version written on a napkin because They changed half of the specification 2 weaks before deadline in a software made not by a developer but some sysadmin who didn't know anything. His MVC model was practically VVV model since he even had sql queries in some views. Feature will take 3 days - fixing everything that will break in the meantime - 1-2 months.
F*** it, fine. A little overtime won't kill me.
Yesterday boss comes again... Apparently someone lost a delivery protocol for a project we ended that half a year ago. Whats even better at the time when we asked for hardware to test we never got any. When we asked about any testing enviornment - nothing. The app being SEMI-stable on everything is an overstatement but it was working on the os'es available at the time. Since the client started testing now again, it turns out that both Android app does not work on 8.1/9 and the iOS app does not work on ios12. The client obviously does not want to pay and we can do little with it without the protocol, other than rewriting the apps.
It will take months at least since all of those apps were written by people that didn't know neither the OS'es nor the languages. For example I started writing the iOS one in swift. Only to learn after half of the development time, that swift doesn't like working by C Library rules and I had to use ObjC also. With some C thrown in due to the library. 3 unknown languages, on an unknown platform in 3 months. I never had any apple device in my hand at that time nor do I intend to now. I'm astonished it worked out then. It was a clusterf**k of bad design and sticking everything together with deprecated apis and a gum. So I'll have to basically fully rewrite it.
If boss decides we'll take all those at the same time I'll f***ing jump of a bridge.8 -
At first I got excited about the new MacBook Air specs. Then I saw the price... It's a fucking joke to spend so much money for this trash ass hardware you get for it. I mean 1400€ for dual core 8gb ram 128gb ssd?!?!?!
Fuck you8 -
Why does almost everyone act as if the world they live in is perfect, or is supposed to be perfect?
This is about approaching IT infrastructures, but goes way beyond IT, into daily lives.
Daniel Kahneman wrote about the "Econs" - a mythical creature that behaves according to rules and rational thoughts, that everybody is guided by, as opposed to Humans, who are irrational, intuitive and emotional.
My beef is with a wider perception, beyond economical analysis, profit, investment and so on.
Examples:
Organization A uses a 15 year old system that is crappy beyond description, but any recent attempt to replace it have failed. Josh thinks that this is a crappy organization, any problem lies within the replacement of that system, and all resources should be devoted to that. Josh lives in a perfect world - where shit can be replaced, where people don't have to live with crappy systems. Josh is stupid, unless he can replace that old system with something better. Don't be Josh. Adapt to the fucking reality, unless you have the power to change it.
Peter is a moron who downloads pirated software with cracks, at the office. He introduced a ransomware that encrypted the entire company NAS. Peter was fired obviously, but Sylvia, the systems administrator, got off easily because Peter the moron was the scapegoat. Sylvia truly believes that it's not her fault, that Peter happened to be a cosmic overgrown lobotomized amoeba. Sylvia is a fucking idiot, because she didn't do backups, restrict access, etc. Because she relied on all people being rational and smart, as people in her imaginary world would be.
Amit finished a project for his company, which is a nice modern website frontend. Tom, the manager says that the website doesn't work with Internet Explorer 8, and Amit is outraged that Tom would even ask this, quoting that IE8 is a dinosaur that should've been euthanized before even hatching. Amit doesn't give a shit about the fact that 20% of the revenue comes from customers that use IE8, what's more important to him is that in his perfect imaginary world everybody uses new hardware and software, and if someone doesn't - it's their fault and that's final. Amit is a fucking asshole. Don't be like Amit.
React to the REAL world, not what you WANT the world to be. Otherwise you're one of them.
The real world can be determined by looking at all the fuck ups and bad situations, admit that they happen, that they're real, that they will keep happening unless you do something that will make them impossible to happen or exist.
Acting as if these bad things don't exist, or that they won't exist because someone would or should change it, is retarded.10 -
A PCB I designed on the job over the last weeks shipped today! A benefit of hardware is the haptic element you have at the end of the design process - you made something touchable. (I am proud.)
Also, errors made earlier in the design process are permanent now. But other than on my software my design got reviewed, so I'm optimistic it'll not contain many if any.
I'm on vacation right now for moving stuff but I'm looking forward to do the "pick'n place" on monday. Soldering manually is quite relaxing for me, you should try it, too! ;)
In other news, I'm no longer sleeping on the floor in my home-office while the paint is drying in other rooms.
I already moved the most of my stuff - books and tech equipment are the worst - and I moved my furniture yesterday.
My new roommates are considerably quieter and my sleeping rhythm is slowly shifting back to normal.10 -
I wrote in a rant here that I couldn't access my 1TB external hard-drive anymore because I refused to "Safely remove" it from my computer.
My brother sent me today an image with it, showing me that he managed to open it.
I can't tell you how happy I am!
The solution: if you encounter the same problem (it takes forever for windows to scan it and you can't open it/ on linux it tells you to go to windows and and properly eject it), just go to `Device Manager` and `Scan for new hardware`. This should find it & solve it3 -
I'll use this topic to segue into a related (lonely) story befitting my mood these past weeks.
This is entire story going to sound egotistical, especially this next part, but it's really not. (At least I don't think so?)
As I'm almost entirely self-taught, having another dev giving me good advice would have been nice. I've only known / worked with a few people who were better devs than I, and rarely ever received good advice from them.
One of those better devs was my first computer science teacher. Looking back, he was pretty average, but he held us to high standards and gave good advice. The two that really stuck with me were: 1) "save every time you've done something you don't want to redo," and 2) "printf is your best debugging friend; add it everywhere there's something you want to watch." Probably the best and most helpful advice I've ever received 😊
I've seen other people here posting advice like "never hardcode" or "modularity keeps your code clean" -- I had to discover these pretty simple concepts entirely on my own. School (and later college) were filled with terrible teachers and worse students, and so were almost entirely useless for learning anything new.
The only decent dev I knew had brilliant ideas (genetic algorithms, sandboxing, ...) before they were widely used, but could rarely implement them well because he was generally an idiot. (Idiot sevant, I think? Definitely the idiot part.) I couldn't stand him. Completely bypassing a ridiculously long story, I helped him on a project to build his own OS from scratch; we made very impressive progress, even to this day. Custom bootloader, hardware interfacing, memory management, (semi) sandboxed processes, gui, example programs ...; we were in highschool. I'm still surprised and impressed with what we accomplished.
But besides him, almost every other dev I met was mediocre. Even outside of school, I went so many years without having another competent dev to work with. I went through various jobs helping other dev(s) on their projects (or rewriting them), learning new languages/frameworks almost every time: php, pascal, perl, zend, js, vb, rails, node, .... I learned new concepts occasionally (which was wonderful) but overall it was just tedious and never paid well because I was too young to be taken seriously (and female, further exacerbating it). On the bright side, it didn't dwindle my love for coding, and I usually spent my evenings playing with projects of my own.
The second dev (and one one of the best I've ever met) went by Novo. His approach to a game engine reminded me of General Relativity: Everything was modular, had a rich inheritance tree, and could receive user input at any point along said tree. A user could attach their view/control to any object. (Computer control methods could be attached in this way as well.) UI would obviously change depending on how the user could interact and the number of objects; admins could view/monitor any of these. Almost every object / class of object could talk to almost everything else. It was beautiful. I learned so much from his designs. (Honestly, I don't remember the code at all, and that saddens me.) There were other things, too, but that one amazed me the most.
I havent met anyone like him ever again.
Anyway, I don't know if I can really answer this week's question. I definitely received some good advice while initially learning, but past that it's all been through discovering things on my own.
It's been lonely. ☹2 -
Had 2 days of vacation. Theoretically (plus weekend, plus 2 days) 6 days.
Worked today… At Saturday.
Some administrators forgot to properly check bandwidth limitations....
*rolls eyes*
We had a major version upgrade of some server software at Monday.
Guess why I got called...
Of course it MUST be the software upgrade.
It couldn't be the new hardware that was setup 2 weeks ago and on which a lot of "important" VMs were migrated.
*eyes roll inside till only white is visible*
The even more annoying thing is that it wasn't that hard to figure out.
Looking at monitoring, we had spikes on 20 Gbit/s (roughly 2.x Gigabyte/sec - Ethernet) connection of some server at roughly 1.9 plus Gigabyte/sec.
IO latency spikes that made the graph look like a heartbeat EKG with severe tachycardia...
*additionally to white eyes starts cursing in reverse latin*
Incompetent admin answer: Booboo that can only be your fault - the developers must investigate.
Me (just a tad more polite): Meep Meep mother fucker, get your shit together. If the software would eat that much, the network would be a niece chunk of charcoal. Plus the time (sending instead of links to monitoring pictures… guess the lazy fucktard who's brain is a vacuum didn't even bother to check it)...
NOTICE SOMETHING?!
Incompetent admin: It starts at the same time. Always.
After wasting roughly another hour of time discussing with him, I just hanged up the video call.
Called someone I knew from the admin department and turns out that - drumrolls please - the incompetent admin was someone who got recruited 3 months ago…
*turning into antichrist*
I then had a not so polite discussion about how the only competent people could take days off (all except incompetent admin were on vacation) and the seemingly incompetent fresh recruit - who by the way NEVER mentioned this - was the only one left of the admin department. Which would be bad alone, but no - he even got the 24/7 emergency support role for the whole weekend.
Sometimes this company and HR especially notoriously drive me insane...
Guess next week there will be some HR barbecue.
But yeah. After a lot of raging around we nailed it down to the traffic of backups and could fix it.
Roughly 4 hours of analysis, communication, raging and hatred.
Just one hour implementing shit.
*goozfraba*11 -
Atother story about PC hardware and being... Not so careful.
A friend complained about his PSU fan being too loud. I said "well, maybe bearings are dying already".
The next day he messaged me and asked to suggest a new PSU. Ok, I threw him some links.
Leter, he told me what happened:
He decided to clean the PSU, because he thought the noise could be because of dust. So he turned off his PC and removed PSU cover with a screwdriver. While doing this, he accidentally hit the circuit board itself. Then "Puff", black smoke and smell of sth burning. Turned out he didn't switched the PSU off. Luckily, the screwdriver handle was rubberized. I'm glad he is alive ._.1 -
Hardware of laptops today.
Displays: Glossy screens everywhere. "Hurr durr it has better colors". Idgaf what colors it has, when the only thing I can see is the wall behind me and my own reflection. Make it matte or get it out.
Touchpads: Bring back mechanical buttons. Haptic feedback dying with touchscreens/surfaces is a tragedy. "But we can have bigger touchpad area without buttons" ...why? the goal shouldn't be 1:1 touchpad vs. display ratio. It ain't a bloody tablet.
Docking stations: Some bright fucker figured out that they can utilize USB C. That thing keeps falling out with slightest laptop movement disconnecting all peripherals (guess why microUSB had those small hooks?). Also it doesn't have sufficient throughput, so the 5 years old dock can feed 3 full HD monitors just fine and the new one can't.
Keyboards: Personally I hate chiclet. And it's everywhere, because "apple has it so we must too". But the thing I hate even more is retardation of the arrow keys (up and down merged into size of one key), missing dedicated Home/End/PgDwn/PgUp buttons and somebody deciding the F keys are not needed and started replacing them with some multimedia bullshit.
My overall feeling is that this happens when you give the market to designers and customer demand. You end up with eye candy and useless fancy gadgets, with lowered ergonomy and worse features than previous generations of the same hardware. My laptop dying is my daily nightmare as I have no idea with what on the current market I would replace it.5 -
After 8 iTunes Testflight Beta approvals for my app ... better still, I got hte app approved for the App Store a week ago to "de-risk" our "final submission" ... That's 9 approvals for my app, and we're ready to submit version 1.0.0 and actually release on the store. We take last week approved app and "developer reject" if to make room for the final tweaked version (minor tweaks, minor bugfixes). Submit version 1.0.0., plenty of time before it needs to be released.
But, what's this? "Meta Data rejected" for v1.0.0 because some piece of shit at Apple wants to watch a video of the app working with our hardware. What about the previous 9 approvals with the demo account connected to the demo hardware?
So we send a video within 1 hour of their unexpected request about the very foundational fucntionality of our app. That was 24 hours ago and these fucking assholes haven't even responded, no sign of when they will trouble themselves to respond. Pure limbo.
All the work up to this point was to "de-risk" their infamously shitty review process and all of it was in vain because it's somehow brand new information that our app works with our hardware.
Holy fuck, what a bunch of power-tripping assholes. All I can do is pace around and review the previous 2 months in my head to figure out what I could have done better. But I could not possibly have expected that after all the Testflight Beta approvals and after the recent App Store approval, that they would suddenly doubt that our software actually works with our hardware!!!!!
FUCK YOU APPLE!!!! FUCK YOU WITH ALL MY HEART!!!!!!2 -
It happened me a few years ago. I live in the Netherlands, but I am Hungarian. My new "friends" asked me to fix their laptop. I did it for free. It turns out, it was a huge mistake. In the next half a year I've solved several issues to them and to their family members (I don't get it, how they can ruin a well working hardware and software that fast, but it is another story). It takes a lot from my free time at the end. Then I had enough and ask some money to fix the next laptop. The price wasn't high, a bit more than a half of the repair shop's price. They tried to press me to do it for free, cos "you are our friend and you are hungarian too, we have to help each other out". I said no. It is too much. I've never seen them again...9
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New computer! I named it P.E.A.C.H. which is supposed to be an acronym, but I couldn't find a satisfying meaning.
Mind the stickers. I'd love to put a devRant sticker there too.
Components:
- Gigabyte AORUS GA-AX370-Gaming 5
- AMD Ryzen 7 1700
- Scythe Mugen 5 "PCGH Edition"
- 16GB HyperX FURY DDR4-2666 DIMM CL15-17-17
- 500 Watt Cooler Master B500 ver.2 Non-Modular 80+
- 275GB Crucial MX300 2.5" (SSD)
- 1000GB Seagate BarraCuda ST1000DM010 (HDD)
- Sharkoon BW9000-W Midi Tower
- Some video card and DVD drive I removed from an old computer
It still needs a good video card and internet connection.
With the dual boot and my MacBook Pro I cover Windows, Linux and MacOS.20 -
So, a few years ago I was working at a small state government department. After we has suffered a major development infrastructure outage (another story), I was so outspoken about what a shitty job the infrastructure vendor was doing, the IT Director put me in charge of managing the environment and the vendor, even though I was actually a software architect.
Anyway, a year later, we get a new project manager, and she decides that she needs to bring in a new team of contract developers because she doesn't trust us incumbents.
They develop a new application, but won't use our test team, insisting that their "BA" can do the testing themselves.
Finally it goes into production.
And crashes on Day 1. And keeps crashing.
Its the infrastructure goes out the cry from her office, do something about it!
I check the logs, can find nothing wrong, just this application keeps crashing.
I and another dev ask for the source code so that we can see if we can help find their bug, but we are told in no uncertain terms that there is no bug, they don't need any help, and we must focus on fixing the hardware issue.
After a couple of days of this, she called a meeting, all the PMs, the whole of the other project team, and me and my mate. And she starts laying into us about how we are letting them all down.
We insist that they have a bug, they insist that they can't have a bug because "it's been tested".
This ends up in a shouting match when my mate lost his cool with her.
So, we went back to our desks, got the exe and the pdb files (yes, they had published debug info to production), and reverse engineered it back to C# source, and then started looking through it.
Around midnight, we spotted the bug.
We took it to them the next morning, and it was like "Oh". When we asked how they could have tested it, they said, ah, well, we didn't actually test that function as we didn't think it would be used much....
What happened after that?
Not a happy ending. Six months later the IT Director retires and she gets shoed in as the new IT Director and then starts a bullying campaign against the two of us until we quit.5 -
I hate buying new laptops. HATE IT. The manufacturers are always trying to do something that makes it more complicated to buy a laptop confidently.
Why not name all of the laptops with numbers? Make them really hard to differentiate. Then offer the same model number across multiple years so it is difficult to determine which year the laptop is from.
Oh. And let’s make sure every laptop has a major flaw in the form factor.
Let’a add a numpad that squishes the keyboard to the left in a weird way. Lets do something to the trackpad to make it awkward to use. Maybe the keyboard should have a weird configuration. Maybe we can put 4 spare characters of various colours on the symbol key caps. How about a battery only lasts a few hours. May we add specialized hardware so you are stuck with windows. Maybe we can make it super thick and heavy. Lets have a screen with terrible viewing angles. Since this laptop has no major flaws we should overprice it. No repairs or upgrades on this one because we filled the computer with glue. Lets double the amount of useless media keys.
It is like manufacturers are trying to design laptops like RPG game character classes. The fighter has no magic or stealth. The magician is weak and gets fatigued. The rogue is very stealthy but has poor defence and attack. The cleric can use magic but only to heal so it is useless in battle. The ranger is good at distance but has poor defence and no magic.
The only notebooks sold that are trying to make balanced character classes are MacBooks. Those cost a premium and aren’t reparable.17 -
Today a few friends got together and built my gfs new computer. I just watched because.... I'm a hardware n00b :p
Anyways, it took them about 2 hours building all the stuff together and now we're done installing Windows from via disc. The problem is, it's 2015 windows. So we're updating.
And it already takes more time to update windows than building the actual computer.
Nice!
(Btw that's me in the background, super [not] comfy codepen-ing)8 -
I've recently received another invitation to Google's Foobar challenges.
A while ago someone here on devRant (which I believe works at Google, and whose support I deeply appreciate) sent me a couple of links to it too. Unfortunately back then I didn't take the time to learn the programming languages (Python or Java) that Google requires for these challenges. This time I'm putting everything on Python, as it's the easiest language to learn when coming from Bash.
But at the end of the day.. I am a sysadmin, not a developer. I don't know a single thing about either of these languages. Yet I can't take these challenges as the sysadmin I am. Instead, I have to learn a new language which chances are I'll never need again outside of some HR dickhead's interview with lateral thinking questions and whiteboard programming, probably prohibited from using Google search like every sane programmer and/or sysadmin would for practical challenges that actually occur in real life.
I don't want to do that. Google is a once in a lifetime opportunity, I get that. Many people would probably even steal that foobar link from me if they could. But I don't think that for me it's the right thing to do. Google has made a serious difference by actually challenging developers with practical scenarios, and that's vastly superior to whatever a HR person at any other company could cobble together for an interview. But there's one thing that they don't seem to realize. A company like Google consists of more than just developers. Not only that, it probably consists - even within their developer circles - of more than just Python and Java developers. If any company would know about languages that are more optimized such as C, it would be Google that has to leverage this performance in order to be able to deliver their services.
I'll be frank here. Foobar has its own issues that I don't like. But if Google were a nice company, I'd go for it all the way nonetheless - after all, they are arguably the single biggest tech company in the world, and the tech industry itself is one of the biggest ones in the world nowadays. It's safe to say that there's likely no opportunity like working at Google. But I don't think it's the right thing. Even if I did know Python or Java... Even if I did. I don't like Google's business decisions.
I've recently flashed my OnePlus 6T with LineageOS. It's now completely Google-free, except for a stock Yalp account (that I'm too afraid to replace with my actual Google account because oh dear, third-party app stores, oh dear that could damage our business and has to be made highly illegal!1!). My contacts on that phone are are all gone. They're all stored on a Google server somewhere (except for some like @linuxxx' that I consciously stored on device storage and thus lost a while back), waiting for me to log back in and sync them back. I've never asked for this. If Google explicitly told me that they'd sync all my contacts to my Google account and offer feasible alternatives, I'd probably given more priority to building a CalDAV and CardDAV server of my own. Because I do have the skills and desire to maintain that myself. I don't want Google to do this for me.
Move fast and break things. I've even got a special Termux script on my home screen, aptly named Unfuck-Google-Play. Every other day I have to use it. Google Search. When I open it on my Nexus 6P, which was Google's foray into hardware and in which they failed quite spectacularly - I've even almost bent and killed it tonight, after cursing at that piece of shit every goddamn day - the Google app opens, I type some text into it.. and then it just jumps back to the beginning of whatever I was typing. A preloader of sorts. The app is a fucking web page parser, or heck probably even just an API parser. How does that in any way justify such shitty preloaders? How does that in any way justify such crappy performance on anything but the most recent flagships? I could go on about this all day... I used to run modern Linux on a 15 year old laptop, smoothly. So don't you Google tell me that a - probably trillion dollar - company can't do that shit right. When there's (commercialized) community projects like DuckDuckGo that do things a million times better than you do - yet they can't compete with you due to your shit being preloaded on every phone and tablet and impossible to remove without rooting - that you Google can't do that and a lot more. You've got fucking Google Assistant for fucks sake! Yet you can't make a decent search app - the goddamn thing that your company started with in the first place!?
I'm sorry. I'd love to work at Google and taste the diversity that this company has to offer. But there's *a lot* wrong with it at the business end too. That is something that - in that state - I don't think I want to contribute to, despite it being pretty much a lottery ticket that I've been fortunate enough to draw twice.
Maybe I should just start my own company.6 -
I have to confess. I'm a distro hopper. I've been a distro hopper ever since last year, and it got me tired. I spend entire hours checking distrowatch, partitioning, setting up hardware and drivers and passwords... I've tried to stop, I swear, but every time I do, there goes a new Solus release, an Openbox Debian based new branch, a forensic floppy disk that I know that I won't ever use for real. I just love assigning swap, fighting with rEFInd icons, testing modules, navigate trough different configs... Oh God, I even set up a virtual OpenBSD, just to see what it can do.
My friends have been telling me to stop, because I don't take care of our relation, that I'm becoming a monster. It's shameful and embarrassing to me when they ask me about my day and I say "you know, installing Manjaro on my desktop, and Lubuntu to that crappy old Asus I have for backups" I think I'm going to lose my head some day, this sickness is driving me straight down to the Slackware pits. I should stop it before I try Ratpoison environment but truth be told; I mean not to stop. I'm a distro hopper.
I ride my way live, unstable and restless.6 -
I miss the good times when the web was lightweight and efficient.
I miss the times when essential website content was immediately delivered as HTML through the first HTTP request.
I miss the times when I could open a twitter URL and have the tweet text appear on screen in two seconds rather than a useless splash screen followed by some loading spinners.
I miss the times when I could open a YouTube watch page and see the title and description on screen in two seconds rather than in ten.
I miss the times when YouTube comments were readily loaded rather than only starting to load when I scroll down.
JavaScript was lightweight and used for its intended purpose, to enhance the experience by loading content at the page bottom and by allowing interaction such as posting comments without having to reload the entire page, for example.
Now pretty much all popular websites are bloated with heavy JavaScript. Your browser needs to walk through millions of bytes of JavaScript code just to show a tweet worth 200 bytes of text.
The watch page of YouTube (known as "polymer", used since 2017) loads more than eight megabytes of JavaScript last time I checked. In 2012, it was one to two hundred kilobytes of HTML and at most a few hundred kilobytes of JavaScript, mostly for the HTML5 player.
And if one little error dares to occur on a JavaScript-based page, you get a blank page of nothingness.
Sure, computers are more powerful than they used to be. But that does not mean we should deliberately make our new software and website slower and more bloated.
"Wirth's law is an adage on computer performance which states that software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware is becoming faster."
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
A presentation by Jake Archibald from 2015, but more valid than ever: https://youtube.com/watch/...34 -
Alright, this my fucking rant right here. Distraction? This whole company is a distraction! Boss decided to throw us all in an open work environment doing jobs that require careful concentration. Straight outta college I'm getting handed vague ideas, (make a desktop app that helps our customers put data on the internet, make an iPhone app) with out so much as an inkling of what technologies to use, just make it work.
Ok I will but when you hit a roadblock with very little resources to draw in it's hard to stay focused.
On top of that since I worked in support for a year I'm our senior support person! But sometimes support just doesn't use their brains and I'm using my time to solve very basic problems.
That brings me to my next point, the goddamn piece of shit that is our telephone. Fuck that thing when it rings it's never good. Moreover, since I don't want to get roasted for not being responsive I have the motherfucker forward to my personal cell. So I answer every fucking call and I get so many spam calls!
Not to mention I'm mainly running the hardware show around here. Shits broke I'm the one fixing it. Need new shit I'm putting the order together.
Tried to get a new guy to be the sys admin, ordered a 6th gen board with a 7th gen proc, had to pull 3 machines apart to get that sorted. Then he left bc family issues, and has been gone for weeks.
The other devs are also slam up busy, and the main product is about 15 people's piss on a plate of garb age spaghetti. (I got a lot of shit going on but at least I'm the only one pissing in my spaghetti) it's a constant run around if who does what with a code first plan later mentality causing confusion and delay.
Nobody wants to help anybody because they are also annoyed with this setup and are getting bitched at by customers or management.
Sales is mostly composed of a bunch of crackhead yes men and women who just want a commission and only half know the shit we sell and have sold 15 new features that had not been discussed. But management always says make it happen. In what priority? It's all a priority they say! Wtf.
So yea, then it brings me to me, dealing with this much chaos at work makes it seem like a high amount of chaos in my life is normal. I'm just now learning to control this.
I've had to do a lot of growing up as a person and as a developer. I've went from being the most junior to about the 3rd most seniors and I've no doubt my efforts have contributed to the growth of the company.
I'm a big believer in coding flow, and that it takes at least 15 mins to get in that flow and about 5 seconds to break it. There is no do not disturb on the company chat, everything always on fire it seems.
So fuck a lot of this, but I've done the research and where I'm at is the best opportunity in a 100 mile radius. So I am thankful for this job. Plus I usually win the horror story contest.
So TL;DR the biggest distraction is every fucking thing in this god forsaken place.5 -
So I Bought this bio metric pad lock for my daughter. She excitedly tried to set it up without following the directions( they actually have good directions on line) first thing you do is set the "master print" she buggered that up setting her print. So when I got home I was thinking, no problem I'll just do a reset and then we cant start again.
NOPE !!! you only have one chance to set the master print! after that if you want to reset the thing you need to use the master print along with a physical key that comes with it.
What sort if Moron designs hardware / software that is unable to be reset. Imagine how much fun it would be if once you set your router admin password it was permanent unless you can long back in to change it. Yea nobody has ever forgotten a password.
Well they are about to learn a valuable financial lesson about how user friendly design will influence your bottom line. people (me) will just return the lock to the store where they bought it, and it will have to be shipped back to the factory and will be very expensive for them paying for all of the shipping to and from and resetting and repackaging of the locks and finally shipping again to another store. Meanwhile I'll keep getting new locks until at no cost until she gets it right.
poor design34 -
Best code performance incr. I made?
Many, many years ago our scaling strategy was to throw hardware at performance problems. Hardware consisted of dedicated web server and backing SQL server box, so each site instance had two servers (and data replication processes in place)
Two servers turned into 4, 4 to 8, 8 to around 16 (don't remember exactly what we ended up with). With Window's server and SQL Server licenses getting into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, the 'powers-that-be' were becoming very concerned with our IT budget. With our IT-VP and other web mgrs being hardware-centric, they simply shrugged and told the company that's just the way it is.
Taking it upon myself, started looking into utilizing web services, caching data (Microsoft's Velocity at the time), and a service that returned product data, the bottleneck for most of the performance issues. Description, price, simple stuff. Testing the scaling with our dev environment, single web server and single backing sql server, the service was able to handle 10x the traffic with much better performance.
Since the majority of the IT mgmt were hardware centric, they blew off the results saying my tests were contrived and my solution wouldn't work in 'the real world'. Not 100% wrong, I had no idea what would happen when real traffic would hit the site.
With our other hardware guys concerned the web hardware budget was tearing into everything else, they helped convince the 'powers-that-be' to give my idea a shot.
Fast forward a couple of months (lots of web code changes), early one morning we started slowly turning on the new framework (3 load balanced web service servers, 3 web servers, one sql server). 5 minutes...no issues, 10 minutes...no issues,an hour...everything is looking great. Then (A is a network admin)...
A: "Umm...guys...hardly any of the other web servers are being hit. The new servers are handling almost 100% of the traffic."
VP: "That can't be right. Something must be wrong with the load balancers. Rollback!"
A:"No, everything is fine. Load balancer is working and the performance spikes are coming from the old servers, not the new ones. Wow!, this is awesome!"
<Web manager 'Stacey'>
Stacey: "We probably still need to rollback. We'll need to do a full analysis to why the performance improved and apply it the current hardware setup."
A: "Page load times are now under 100 milliseconds from almost 3 seconds. Lets not rollback and see what happens."
Stacey:"I don't know, customers aren't used to such fast load times. They'll think something is wrong and go to a competitor. Rollback."
VP: "Agreed. We don't why this so fast. We'll need to replicate what is going on to the current architecture. Good try guys."
<later that day>
VP: "We've received hundreds of emails complementing us on the web site performance this morning and upset that the site suddenly slowed down again. CEO got wind of these emails and instructed us to move forward with the new framework."
After full implementation, we were able to scale back to only a few web servers and a single sql server, saving an initial $300,000 and a potential future savings of over $500,000. Budget analysis considering other factors, over the next 7 years, this would save the company over a million dollars.
At the semi-annual company wide meeting, our VP made a speech.
VP: "I'd like to thank everyone for this hard fought journey to get our web site up to industry standards for the benefit of our customers and stakeholders. Most of all, I'd like to thank Stacey for all her effort in designing and implementation of the scaling solution. Great job Stacy!"
<hands her a blank white envelope, hmmm...wonder what was in it?>
A few devs who sat in front of me turn around, network guys to the right, all look at me with puzzled looks with one mouth-ing "WTF?"9 -
This brings joy
https://reddit.com/r/technology/...
Bypass paywall:
A series of scandals and missteps has damaged Facebook's reputation so much that the company is being forced to pay ever larger compensation to hire and retain workers, according to industry recruiters, former employees, and data reviewed by Insider.
The company has always competed aggressively for talent, and the tech job market in general is on fire. But a deteriorating public image means the social-media giant now has to outbid other major tech companies, such as Google.
"One thing Facebook can still do is pay a lot more," said Jose Guardado, an experienced tech recruiter and the founder of Build Talent. "They can easily throw more compensation at people they currently have, and cover any brand tax and pay a little more to get people to come on."
Silicon Valley companies thrive or whither based on their ability to recruit the smartest employees. Without a steady influx of engineers and other technical experts, new products and important updates take longer to release, and rivals can quickly get ahead. Then there's the financial cost: In 2022, Facebook projected, expenses could jump as high as $97 billion from $70 billion this year, in large part because of "investments in technical and product talent." A company spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.
Other companies, and even whole industries, have had to increase compensation to overcome hiring and retention problems caused by scandal and shifting public perceptions, said Alan Johnson, a managing director at the compensation consulting firm Johnson Associates. "If you're an oil company, if you make cigarettes, if you're in cattle or Wells Fargo, sure," he said.
How well this is working for Facebook is debatable as the company has more than 4,300 open jobs and has seen decreasing rates of acceptance on job offers, according to internal documents reported by Protocol. It's also seen dozens of high-level executives leave this year, and recruiters say employees are now more open to considering jobs elsewhere. Facebook used to be a place that people rarely left, given its reach, pay, and perks.
A former Oculus engineer who left last year said Facebook could now be seen as a "black mark" on someone's career. A hardware engineer who exited in 2020 shared similar sentiments: They said they quit because of concerns about misinformation on the platform and the effect of that on children. Another employee said their department was dissolved in late 2019 by Facebook and, although the company offered another position that paid more, they left last year anyway for a different industry. The workers, and many other people who spoke with Insider for this story, asked not to be identified because of the sensitive nature of the topic.
For those who stick around and people who take new jobs at Facebook, base pay and stock grants have gone up a "sizable" amount in the past year, said Zuhayeer Musa, cofounder of Levels.fyi, a platform that collects pay data based on verified offers and compensation disclosures.
During the second quarter of 2021, the median compensation for an upper-mid-level engineer, an E5, was $400,000, up from $380,000 a year earlier. For an E4, the median pay jumped to $276,000 from $256,000 in the same period. For both groups, the increases were double the gains between 2018 and 2019, Levels.fyi data showed.
Musa, who's firm also offers pay-negotiation coaching, said previously that the total compensation ceiling for an E5 engineer at Facebook was $450,000. "We recently had a client get up to $510,000 for E5," he added.
Equity awards at the company are getting more generous, too. At the group-director and VP levels, Facebook staff are getting $3 million to $6 million in restricted stock units each year, another tech recruiter said. Directors and managers are getting on average $1 million a year. In engineering, a high-level engineer is getting $600,000 in stock and a $75,000 bonus, while even an entry-level engineer is getting $50,000 to $100,000 in stock and a $20,000 to $50,000 bonus, Levels.fyi data indicated.
Even compared to Google, Facebook's stock awards are generous and increasing, Levels.fyi data shows. While base pay is about the same, Facebook offers more in stock grants, significantly increasing total compensation. At Google, entry-level equity awards range from $20,000 to $38,000, while Facebook grants are worth $40,000 to $60,000. Sign-on bonuses at Facebook are often about $50,000, while Google gives about $20,000, according to the data.
"It's not normal, but it's consistent with the craziness that's happening in the market right now," said Aalap Shah, a managing director focused on the tech industry at the consulting firm Pearl Meyer.10 -
This freaking laptop.
The WiFi randomly stops working -- and by that, I mean the hardware is no longer detectable, let alone functional. It simply disappears on boot, even from dmesg.
The same happens with audio and bluetooth: on some boots they simply do not exist.
The power usage is also ridiculous: the battery dies in about two hours, and it gets soo hot. Toasty wrists unless I use my tiny bluetooth keyboard ☹ So I need to fiddle with powertop a bit more.
nVidia drivers are also a bloody pain, and having two graphics cards this is even more difficult to set up. I still haven't managed. (nvidia-driver, bumblebee, optimus, official driver messes, manual xorg configs, ...). So I have a beautiful 4k built-in display running at 4-18 fps, and a non-functional 4k external. That's fine for now, but >.>; frustrating.
In better news! I just managed to get the sound to work by backporting the new 4.19 kernel (yay!) -- I have never been so happy to hear an ad. but fixing the sound killed my bluetooth. (The `bluetooth` utility reports the adapter is present, but nothing else can seem to see it 🙄) So now I'm going to have burning hot wrists all day and want to cry because terrible sweaty awfulness.
Just. It's frustrating.
It's fast, though.
and ever so pretty.26 -
I haven't ranted for today, but I figured that I'd post a summary.
A public diary of sorts.. devRant is amazing, it even allows me to post the stuff that I'd otherwise put on a piece of paper and probably discard over time. And with keyboard support at that <3
Today has been a productive day for me. Laptop got restored with a "pacman -Syu" over a Bluetooth mobile data tethering from my phone, said phone got upgraded to an unofficial Android 9 (Pie) thanks to a comment from @undef, etc.
I've also made myself a reliable USB extension cord to be able to extend the 20-30cm USB-A male to USB-C male cord that Huawei delivered with my Nexus 6P. The USB-C to USB-C cord that allows for fast charging is unreliable.. ordered some USB-C plugs for that, in order to make some high power wire with that when they arrive.
So that plug I've made.. USB-A male to USB-A female, in which my short USB-C to USB-A wire can plug in. It's a 1M wire, with 18AWG wire for its power lines and 28AWG wires for its data lines. The 18AWG power lines can carry up to 10A of current, while the 28AWG lines can carry up to 1A. All wires were made into 1M pieces. These resulted in a very low impedance path for all of them, my multimeter measured no more than 200 milliohms across them, though I'll have to verify and finetune that on my oscilloscope with 4-wire measurement.
So the wire was good. Easy too, I just had to look up the pinout and replicate that on the male part.
That's where the rant part comes in.. in fact I've got quite uncomfortable with sentences that don't include at least one swear word at this point. All hail to devRant for allowing me to put them out there without guilt.. it changed my very mind <3
Microshaft WanBLowS.
I've tried to plug my DIY extension cord into it, and plugged my phone and some USB stick into it of which I've completely forgot the filesystem. Windows certainly doesn't support it.. turns out that it was LUKS. More about that later.
Windows returned that it didn't support either of them, due to "malfunctioning at the USB device". So I went ahead and plugged in my phone directly.. works without a problem. Then I went ahead and troubleshooted the wire I've just made with a multimeter, to check for shorts.. none at all.
At that point I suspected that WanBLowS was the issue, so I booted up my (at the time) problematic Arch laptop and did the exact same thing there, testing that USB stick and my phone there by plugging it through the extension wire. Shit just worked like that. The USB stick was a LUKS medium and apparently a clone of my SanDisk rootfs that I'm storing my Arch Linux on my laptop at at the time.. an unfinished migration project (SanDisk is unstable, my other DM sticks are quite stable). The USB stick consumed about 20mA so no big deal for any USB controller. The phone consumed about 500mA (which is standard USB 2.0 so no surprise) and worked fine as well.. although the HP laptop dropped the voltage to ~4.8V like that, unlike 5.1V which is nominal for USB. Still worked without a problem.
So clearly Windows is the problem here, and this provides me one more reason to hate that piece of shit OS. Windows lovers may say that it's an issue with my particular hardware, which maybe it is. I've done the Windows plugging solely through a USB 3.0 hub, which was plugged into a USB 3.0 port on the host. Now USB 3.0 is supposed to be able to carry up to 1A rather than 500mA, so I expect all the components in there to be beefier. I've also tested the hub as part of a review, and it can carry about 1A no problem, although it seems like its supply lines aren't shorted to VCC on the host, like a sensible hub would. Instead I suspect that it's going through the hub's controller.
Regardless, this is clearly a bad design. One of the USB data lines is biased to ~3.3V if memory serves me right, while the other is biased to 300mV. The latter could impose a problem.. but again, the current path was of a very low impedance of 200milliohms at most. Meanwhile the direct connection that omits the ~200ohm extension wire worked just fine. Even 300mV wouldn't degrade significantly over such a resistance. So this is most likely a Windows problem.
That aside, the extension cord works fine in Linux. So I've used that as a charging connection while upgrading my Arch laptop (which as you may know has internet issues at the time) over Bluetooth, through a shared BNEP connection (Bluetooth tethering) from my phone. Mobile data since I didn't set up my WiFi in this new Pie ROM yet. Worked fine, fixed my WiFi. Currently it's back in my network as my fully-fledged development host. So that way I'll be able to work again on @Floydian's LinkHub repository. My laptop's the only one who currently holds the private key for signing commits for git$(rm -rf ~/*)@nixmagic.com, hence why my development has been impeded. My tablet doesn't have them. Guess I'll commit somewhere tomorrow.
(looks like my rant is too long, continue in comments)3 -
Last week one of my clients asked me to visit their HQ to take a look at some report tool that has stopped to generate reports. This tool was not made by me, it has zero documentation, but WTH, I can take a look.
So I went to the HQ. When a guy that has called me told me that someone else will be here any second to talk to me, I began to be a little suspicius.
It turned out they want a new app. Not going into detail something that will read bar codes, do some stuff in a database, generate some reports etc. And he need it made in 2 weeks. I have reminded him I am involved in another project that I need to deliver in a month, and it is virutally impossible for me to develop what they want in this time. I offered them that maybe we should hire a team or at least another developer. Hi nodded and ignored what I've said. Well, he said we have maybe 2 weeks more, but that's it. Ok..
So, while working on the other project wich ramained a priority for me, I've began to do some thinking, some research on how to deliver what they want as fast as possible.
Today morning I went to the HQ again to finally take care of that report tool. But never mind that, I also had a chance to talk about the new app. So we made some Agile, wrote down epics, stories, talked about hardware etc. After two hours, it turned out, that more than this bardcode reading app the need something else! Barcode reading yes, but even more they need a scheduler for their emloyees, custom functionalities, plus some HR tools, other fancy stuff. But they don't even have a full concept yet. And it needs to be done until end of the month (9 days), maybe two weeks later.
So again I told them I will not be able to deliver this in set timeframe. That possibly we need to hire someone and even then it's questionable if this will be possible given all circumstances, time needed test, to deploy (in 14 diffrent locations all over the country). Actually if I had all software ready today the deployment, tests, training... So I offered that maybe we can figure out some temporary solution based on third party software.
At this point my requests and suggestions have been ignored again. Sadly my contract with them states I can not pass this to someone else, it all have to go trough them. And tehy don't want to spend extra money (??) etc.
Also from what I understand, this whole company's (~1000 employees) be or not to be can be affected by this project.
Sometimes I just don't understand business.1 -
5 stages of failing WIFI connectivity on Linux
This morning I woke up my laptop to start my work day. I have 2 very important meetings today, so I better get all prepared.
"Wifi connection failed"
Syslog says:
- wpa_supplicant: wlp9s0: SME: Trying to authenticate with <MAC>
- kernel: wlp9s0: authenticate with <MAC>
- kernel: wl9s0: send auth to <MAC> (try 1/3)
- kernel: wl9s0: send auth to <MAC> (try 2/3)
- kernel: iwlwifi: Not associated and the session protection is over already...
- kernel: wl9s0: send auth to <MAC> (try 3/3)
- kernel: wl9s0: authentication with <MAC> timed out
#### DENIAL #####
No biggie, let's try another AP (I have 3). All 3 failed to connect. Fine, let's try my phone's hotspot! FAILED!!!!!
w00t.... okay, let's restart the router... but failing to connect to a phone hotspot is already a worrying sign.
Wifi connection failed
wtf.. disable and re-enable wifi
Wifi connection failed
#### ANGER #####
the fuuuuuuck. Maybe my router is dead. But my phone connects to it, no fuss. My personal lappy also connects there easily.
wtf... Does that mean I'm about to lose my uptime?? Come one!! It's Linux - there MUST be something I could do! I don't see processes hanging in D state so the radio must be fine - it's gotta be a software issue!
ChatGPT – type all the log entries manually, via phone (that took a while...). Nothing useful there: update firmware, restart NetworkManager, etc.
#### BARGAINING #####
Alright... How about a USB dongle? Plug it in and wifi connects immediately! Yayyy!!! But that's only b/g/n and I'd very much like to have ac. It works well as a limping backup, but not something I'd use for the meetings.
rfkill block/unblock all the radios. No change. USB dongle connects right away but the PCIe adapter keeps throwing notifications at me with failure messages. It's annoying, to say the least.
So I've already tried
- restarting the router(s)
- disabling/reenabling the radios
- multiple APs
- suspending/waking again several times
- praying
#### DEPRESSION #####
The only thing I haven't tried yet is the most cruel one - restarting the laptop. But that's unfair... It's LINUX! How could it disappoint me. I have so many tmux sessions open, so many unsaved leafpad notes, terminal histories with oh so comfy ^r and ! retriggers all ready and waiting to be executed...
#### ACCEPTANCE #####
But I can't miss the meeting. So I slowly start closing off apps, starting with the least important ones, trying to preserve as much history and recent commands as I can. I'm gonna lose my uptime, that's the inevitable obvious truth... Linux has failed me. Or maybe it's a hardware issue... I can't be sure until I restart.
I must reboot.
#### A NEW HOPE #####
Hold on.. What if... What if before restarting I try to reload the Intel wifi kernel module? Just for the giggles. I've got nothing to lose anyway...
rmmod iwlmvm
rmmod iwlwifi
modprobe iwlwifi
modprobe iwlmvm
*WiFi Connected*
YESSSS!!!!!!!!! My uptime is saved!
403 days and counting! YEAH BABY!!!
Linux is the best!rant sysadmin 5 stages of grief wifi reboot or not reboot reboot uptime network-manager wpa_supplicant linux8 -
A classmate's earphones once stopped working, I went to go look at it. After a bit of tinkering, I said, "The speakers on these are toast, you'll need a new pair." Then, some random kid grabbed the tablet mind you, and not the earphones, played in the settings, and said "Fixed." I then told them, "This is a hardware issue, not a software issue." What's worse? Some people said "So, software and hardware are the same thing."
Mississippi is just full of computer Illiterates.19 -
Devs: Can we please get adequate hardware to do our job correctly? Please, just a new set of larger monitors.
Lower management: Sure, this is going to be easy.
Upper management: Wait what? This will cost us around 500€ times 10? Any maybe in the end other departments will want that to, so make it times 100.
We're a 4+ billion company ... but yes, please, I love scroll bars and they make my work so much faster.4 -
What was your most ridiculous story related to IT?
Mine was when I was quite small (11yo) and wanted a graphics card (the epoch of ATI Radeon 9800), looked at the invoice to know what kind of ports I had in the pc (did not open it), then proceeded to brat to my dad to get me a new GPU
So we where in Paris, we went to a shop, vendor asked me "PCI or AGP?" and said AGP.
Paris > London > Isle of Skye roadtrip followed, then as my dad brought me back home in Switzerland, we opened my pc...
And we couldn't fit the GPU in the basic old PCI port. My Dad was pissed. He frustratedly tried fitting the GPU in the PCI slot, but nope. (He's a software engineer though)
At least the GPU had 256 mb of ram :D
Gave it to my brother 6 months later at family gathering
To this day, my Dad still thinks I cannot handle hardware, although I have successfully built 10+ pc, and still cringes with a laughing smile when I talk to him about it haha
Ah well.1 -
Conspiracy Theory:
Windows 10 - suspiciously free upgrade and "pirate friendly."
Microsoft - really rolling with the hardware scene lately.
Windows 10 Updates - suspiciously destroyed the hardware in 4 laptops and a desktop I've worked on putting the owners in the market for new Microsoft hardware.
Coincidence?9 -
Oh look. The monitoring channel is in flames, smartphone is vibrating so hard it's having a seizure.
Hm. Nah it's fine. Not my...
Damn it. Incoming call. -.-
I'm actually on vacation (more like you need to trim down overtime before management get's angry).
They decided to test the new hardware / os stack I set up in the last weeks. I'd actually be happy about it If I wasn't on vacation and would be part in something that I invested a lot of time...
Well now I am. Guess what. It's running too good.
And that's not a joke. It's partly due to an upgrade in infrastructure (got rid of some last remaining 1 Gbps networks)… but also because I changed quite a lot on the OS / VM side plus we changed from XEN to Proxmox... With major tweaks, too.
The whole stack can now handle peak traffic where it would choke before, and even go beyond the old peak traffic.
Enough of introduction, the simple reason why shit burned down was because they tried out the current development branch and let it ran.
The development branch had an currently unfinished ratelimiter framework, since I didn't had time for an full burn in and didn't knew what the maxima / limits were. And since I hadn't finished that, I didn't finish the traffic shaping either.
Hm. Guess it's not good when you let a bunch of heavy parallelized data generators / analyzers run for free....
In the end, we simply shotgunned the docker development machines, because thanks to network congestion / retransmissions and feedback, they were not really cooperative via network / REST.
But hey: To infinity and beyond. XDrant darling i grilled the network it was just a test dumb ways to die never ask the guy who invented it oops2 -
A few days ago Aruba Cloud terminated my VPS's without notice (shortly after my previous rant about email spam). The reason behind it is rather mundane - while slightly tipsy I wanted to send some traffic back to those Chinese smtp-shop assholes.
Around half an hour later I found that e1.nixmagic.com had lost its network link. I logged into the admin panel at Aruba and connected to the recovery console. In the kernel log there was a mention of the main network link being unresponsive. Apparently Aruba Cloud's automated systems had cut it off.
Shortly afterwards I got an email about the suspension, requested that I get back to them within 72 hours.. despite the email being from a noreply address. Big brain right there.
Now one server wasn't yet a reason to consider this a major outage. I did have 3 edge nodes, all of which had equal duties and importance in the network. However an hour later I found that Aruba had also shut down the other 2 instances, despite those doing nothing wrong. Another hour later I found my account limited, unable to login to the admin panel. Oh and did I mention that for anything in that admin panel, you have to login to the customer area first? And that the account ID used to login there is more secure than the password? Yeah their password security is that good. Normally my passwords would be 64 random characters.. not there.
So with all my servers now gone, I immediately considered it an emergency. Aruba's employees had already left the office, and wouldn't get back to me until the next day (on-call be damned I guess?). So I had to immediately pull an all-nighter and deploy new servers elsewhere and move my DNS records to those ASAP. For that I chose Hetzner.
Now at Hetzner I was actually very pleasantly surprised at just how clean the interface was, how it puts the project front and center in everything, and just tells you "this is what this is and what it does", nothing else. Despite being a sysadmin myself, I find the hosting part of it insignificant. The project - the application that is to be hosted - that's what's important. Administration of a datacenter on the other hand is background stuff. Aruba's interface is very cluttered, on Hetzner it's super clean. Night and day difference.
Oh and the specs are better for the same price, the password security is actually decent, and the servers are already up despite me not having paid for anything yet. That's incredible if you ask me.. they actually trust a new customer to pay the bills afterwards. How about you Aruba Cloud? Oh yeah.. too much to ask for right. Even the network isn't something you can trust a long-time customer of yours with.
So everything has been set up again now, and there are some things I would like to stress about hosting providers.
You don't own the hardware. While you do have root access, you don't have hardware access at all. Remember that therefore you can't store anything on it that you can't afford to lose, have stolen, or otherwise compromised. This is something I kept in mind when I made my servers. The edge nodes do nothing but reverse proxying the services from my LXC containers at home. Therefore the edge nodes could go down, while the worker nodes still kept running. All that was necessary was a new set of reverse proxies. On the other hand, if e.g. my Gitea server were to be hosted directly on those VPS's, losing that would've been devastating. All my configs, projects, mirrors and shit are hosted there.
Also remember that your hosting provider can terminate you at any time, for any reason. Server redundancy is not enough. If you can afford multiple redundant servers, get them at different hosting providers. I've looked at Aruba Cloud's Terms of Use and this is indeed something they were legally allowed to do. Any reason, any time, no notice. They covered all their bases. Make sure you do too, and hope that you'll never need it.
Oh, right - this is a rant - Aruba Cloud you are a bunch of assholes. Kindly take a 1Gbps DDoS attack up your ass in exchange for that termination without notice, will you?5 -
Fuck you Intel.
Fucking admit that you're Hardware has a problem!
"Intel and other technology companies have been made aware of new security research describing software analysis methods that, when used for malicious purposes, have the potential to improperly gather sensitive data from computing devices that are operating as designed. Intel believes these exploits do not have the potential to corrupt, modify or delete data"
With Meltdown one process can fucking read everything that is in memory. Every password and every other sensible bit. Of course you can't change sensible data directly. You have to use the sensible data you gathered... Big fucking difference you dumb shits.
Meltown occurs because of hardware implemented speculative execution.
The solution is to fucking separate kernel- and user-adress space.
And you're saying that your hardware works how it should.
Shame on you.
I'm not saying that I don't tolerate mistakes like this. Shit happens.
But not having the balls to admit that it is because of the hardware makes me fucking angry.5 -
Today I had to explain a bit of ressource planing for the coming quarter and ahead.
Hardware ressources.
All in all I knew what I was talking about, but given our tight budget, it''s a lot of moving stuff to either put the hardware to rest or to recycle it.
Moving in sense of new hardware, migrate old to new, decommission / recycle stuff.
After roughly half an hour I stopped and asked If I really should continue, as I felt bored by myself and it's really hard to follow when the whole thing looks exactly like the guy in the nice picture under the post...
A colleague of mine answered: I can still follow, but I'm terrified.
I somehow burst into a mixture of laughing and crying cause that was exactly my thought.
It's gonna be fun... Way easier than the last time, but still. XD
Was at least a funny meeting...
We stopped after everyone calmed down and talked the rest of the time bullshit.
By the way: I look exactly like the dude during planning. :)1 -
Working at my company for one year with two old 20 inch monitors. My boss asked my what would improve my productivity. I said give me two fucking huge and nice monitors. I got the approval that he ordered for all of us new monitors.
One of the support guys told me the we will get the monitors today. Yeah but that was two weeks ago..
Now all of us are only taking about new monitors.. kinda funny that you can get excited for hardware so easy. Love the IT <31 -
About 3 years ago, my girlfriend had this laptop that she got from her University. She had to give the laptop back to get reset, but didn't want to lose all of her data on it, and a backup would be around 750GB.
So I suggested that I would backup the laptop (was thinking to just dd an image and go from there). So I plugged in my mobile USB and external hard drive, and started the imaging process. Given the amount of data and setup, the process should have taken about 5hours. So we left it there for 5h.
Please be mindful that at this stage in my life I knew very little about boot processes, oses, and hardware.
5h after. The laptop screen is black and it ain't responsive. Not sure what happened, the dd process was completed, but the laptop refused to boot into windows. Tried a number of boot tools, and spent a crazy night hacking at the machine. But the university had some of sort of fail safe to not allow anyone to boot into windows if someone opened bios without entering a password. Whatever this was, I spent over 12h trying to either open mount the windows partition with a Ubuntu usb or mount the corrupt dd image on my laptop.
Long story short, after throwing at it a number of fixes. I was able to mount the image, copy out all of her personal data, and reinstall a new version of Windows on her laptop. The university didnt understand why the laptop was already reset. She still mentions this to me anytime I want to take a "custom approach" to software lol2 -
I got my new Oryx Pro today, from System76. It came with Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. I opted not to get Pop!_OS or Ubuntu 18.10, as I would prefer to leave the OS on it for the longterm.
Even at 15.6", it's a BIG laptop. It measures 18" from corner to corner, when it's closed. It comfortably fits in my backpack, which is a bit on the small side, but it's probably about 30-50% heavier than a MacBook Pro.
But that size and weight are vindicated by the most thuggish hardware I have ever seen in a laptop. As configured, this machine has a 4.1GHz 8th gen i7, 32GB of DDR4 at 2666MHz, an 8GB GTX 1070, a 250GB nvme system disk, and a 1TB SSD for data.
The display is set by default to 4K resolution, but I cranked that down to FHD for the sake of my eyes and the battery. I will try some games at higher resolution at some point, but for desktop navigation, I get more use out of multiple virtual desktops than in massive resolution.
I will comment tomorrow or the day after with the steps I've taken to bend this beast to my will, and it's also important to say that I have not finished yet. This is just a summary, but I should have been in bed an hour ago, so I'm gonna go do that.9 -
As some of you may remember about 5 months ago I bought a Lenovo laptop, it had some hardware faults so I got a new one and it had the same faults the store didn't want to offer me a new Lenovo laptop.
I was told to pick a laptop from a selection and today the store is trying to push the product away saying they can't do a thing.
Tonight I'm meeting with a lawyer because the fight has begun.8 -
Today, I say farewell to a piece of software that has shared my professional uprising as a dev, today I let go off an old friend, today i uninstall chrome, after nearly 12 years of dedication, hard work and pain staking performance issues from time to time, you went from the child star that fixed what was wrong with browsers back in 2008, and became the abusive man child that crashes my system when I open you now, so enough with your bullshit.
Today I transfer my things to Edge(chromium) and say farewell old friend, there's only so many BSOD's you can cause just by launching a new tab without hardware acceleration before I can not stand the sight of you anymore.
I wish you a good and stable life, but your creators obviously couldn't give a fuck anymore about being the "light weight and fast" browser you once were.rant all good things come to an end chrome 11 years of freindship trading you in for a new model edge bye bye9 -
The philisophy I am following for building my new PC isn't "What can I do with this kind of hardware", it's "what CAN'T I do with this kind of hardware"
I stop shopping when my answer is "Nothing"2 -
Just got a new job at an old school hardware company. The codebase is giving me heart attack. They don't care about dev experience or code navigation at all. Every attempts to modernize the codebase is so half assed. All patches are so bloated that make the codebase even worse.
Frontend is migrated from prototype-oop-jquery cluster fuck to AngularJS, then finally angular. Holy moly, all business logics are baked into UI "classes" using prototype chain. When they migrated to AngularJS, someone simply added a wrapper to that jQuery cluster fuck class and overwrote all the prototype with a 10k +lines file. Since all the methods are hidden in either prototype, JS object, or callback function, it's impossible to trace the data pipeline using IDE when "go to definition" on update() method gives you all the update methods/string in all objects/classes. And they don't care about immutability. References are taken out, renamed, and mutated everywhere. Finding the source of a bug is fucking guessing game.
I don't know what trick they use that makes cLion static analyzer fail.
And there is no unit test or spec doc.
Fuck me dead3 -
A becomes B
B becomes C
C becomes A
D becomes B
E becomes A
Now add real hostnames... Make this list longer (roughly 15-18)
Add resource calculation, migration of VMs, organizing new hardware, removing and rebuilding hosts, etc.
I think my brain is permanently damaged and cannot be repaired.
Hardware migration finally over tomorrow.
I really won't miss the fuckton of Excel lists, constant speaking mistakes, having sore fingers from mutilating the desk calculator etc.
I'm too tired to be happy. But... It's over.1 -
!rant
How I think the process for designing a hardware-driver is like
CEO: "Alright everyone, we have designed and created this great product, now let's write a driver for it!"
PM: "Great then! We just code for Windows, create an eye-catching UI but leave the actual at the worst possible case that could work!"
Dev: "B-But isn't there other OSes, like Linux and Android that people use on their computers too?"
PM: "Shut up! We are going to JUST support Windows and f*** no absolutely other OSes!
Dev: "But what if they are also developers, and want to control and use this great product by programming it themselves? We should make the driver open-source, or at least give them some APIs!"
PM: "Nonsense! They are only going to use this product on M$ Windows, and with the program we provide to them, even if it's crappy and crashes most of the time!"
Dev: "But-but..."
PM: "No buts! That's our final decision!"
And some other consumer devs are like, "F*** it, we just reverse-engineer the codes and write a new driver ourselves!"
:|3 -
When you, being severely understaffed, ask your boss and the president of the company to hire another embedded dev and a technical QA to work with you at the minimum, with hard proof of the need, because you work alone on a project that was initially poorly designed even though it is the core business of the company and that it bottlenecks literally almost every other sphere of the company...
and instead, he propose you to find by yourself 4 offshore unpaid interns to help you develop an EMBEDDED SOFTWARE that requires specific EXPENSIVE HARDWARE to run and test...
because paying new employees or even an intern is too expensive even though we had record sales the last few months and that the government pays 50% of salaries until the pandemic is gone.
Fuck this shit I'm out! I'm tired of not being paid enough to fix other people's mistakes. Have fun with your failing business. Btw, this is all your fault.2 -
Bought a new 4TB disk for my gaming rig, pulled out the old 1TB one and plugged it back on my old machine. Installed Ubuntu Server. Instalation went well after I figured I needed the IOMMU turned on.
Later went to play some BfA on the gaming rig and... No boot disk recognized. Ahn?
My SSD is plugged in. SATA cable is well seated. Thing was working not 30min before...
After a loooong time trying to figure out if it was hardware or micro$hit's Windows 10, I finally figured it:
It seems Windows installed its EFI partition on the old HDD. So my SSD is basically a single, large NTFS volume. Now I need to download the Win10 ISO, boot up the install disk and use the cmd prompt to create a new EFI partition on my SSD. Ugh.
Fucking Windows didn't think to install its boot manager on its own disk. "Nah, just gonna use this random magnetic disk here". Why? My login queues are already huge on WoW, why must this wankstain of an OS annoy me even more?3 -
Was helping my dad with his Arduino project when I realized something beautiful about being a programmer.
I have never worked with Arduinos and I'm clueless about hardware stuff but I was still able to debug, go through documentation, example code and fix the issues.
Programming is equally about the passion, dedication and ability + curiosity to solve a new problem as is writing some piece of quality code.
I might have taken a while to realize it but it sure is a wonderful feeling.1 -
Naaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarfffffffddddd
Motherfucking shitty depression kicks me around like a fucking wet teabag.
Shit doesn't get done
Motherfuckers are annoying me
And this constant whining....
Why can't we have new hardware....
Because it's fucking 'rona and you had a motherfucking frigging shitty ticket to clean the shit up so we don't need frigging fucking new hardware that takes ages to delivered
Now I have to give a seminar thx to some special guys showing up stoned on work law....
... Getting chewed out by management and tons of laughter was exactly the extra care package I needed… thx for the nice reminder that you are all shitbags.
I love my job and the team mates close me.
But the rest of the people seemingly nuked their brain and are really grinding their teeth down my emotional barriers.
Why is everyone seemingly obsessed with stupidity since Corona began...
<deep breath>
2 more days.
Remember, just 2 more days.
Weekend is near...1 -
So our new hardware guy who is being managed by our lead embedded developer had the task of designing me an expansion board for my Linux board. The Linux board uses the 40 pin expansion like the raspberry, bananna and orange pi family and as you all know there are many different types of expansion boards for this.
I said at the start come to me and tell me what you want to connect to before deciding which pin you connect to so it is less work for me with Linux board configs and drivers.............
No no no we will sort it all... erm.....
So today they come ask me if they can use an SPI port for GPIO and I am like erm... why there is plenty of GPIO...
It turns out they have been designing the board based on the pin outs of an expansion board and not the actual connector of the Linux board.. I mean seriously WTF!1 -
Worst exp. with manager/higher-up?
Too many to pick the worst, but here are a few:
Manager demoted me because he believed I would be a roadblock to his wet dream of re-writing all the business services in WCF
https://youtube.com/watch/...
Manager spent years and wasted countless man hours retiring a single ASP.Net web service by converting the individual supporting assemblies into specific WCF services..
https://youtube.com/watch/...
Manager once berated me for 'missing' time log entries
https://youtube.com/watch/...
Manager scolded me for not fixing a 'bug' while praised another developer who re-wrote a reporting application due to a fixable hardware problem and deleting the source code files from source control.
https://youtube.com/watch/...
Manager wanted to rewrite all our code in XML.
https://youtube.com/watch/...
Manager wanted integration with a new phone system knowing the hardware+software did not exist yet ..
https://youtube.com/watch/...
Manager wanted me to 'take the lead' to speed up a web site in a foreign country we didn't control.
https://youtube.com/watch/... -
I learnt something from every single project I made, but this one... it was really different, new language, new library, new hardware.
Problem:
there's an infopoint in a place, that was really hard to use (ball mouse over a monitor)
Solution:
make the screen be touch.
Developing the solution:
- after a bit of research I find out there's a library/project called OpenCV
- there are example programs that detect hands written in C++ (which I know) and Python (which I don't know)
- the whole infopoint works on a raspberry PI, with raspbian (I'm not new to linux, but it's somehow different, plus tons of customization)
So I spend like 3 weeks trying to understand how to make it work, at first, the webcam was on the TV and you could move the mouse just by shaking your hand, but it didn't work too well, so we tried making the webcam look at the screen and then calculate the differences between "no-hands" and "user-hand", but should have been calibrated, wasn't too precise... dropped solution.
put the webcam 30cm above the screen, let it just analyse a few centimeters of sight from the screen and it worked flawlessly, BUT it could just recognise the horizontal axis => had to rework the infopoint UI to make it dumb-easy
It all finally worked, I learnt python, openCV, a bit of photography
Then hated it all and decided to never do that again -
I hate IT managers, how on earth some become ant form of manager is beyond myself.
I have a server with a hardware firewall. A client, based in the UK, with French offices is saying the server blocking their new French IP. I white-listed their IP address, still no luck.
That was a week ago.
After 4 international phone calls and nearly 30 emails I resolved the "issue".
Their so called "IT Manager" sent over the wrong IP. Instead of it starting with 46.* he sent over an IP starting 42.*, which was in fact being correctly blocked.
Suffice to say I charged the client a lot of money for the wasted time and international rate calls.2 -
When I first started my current job, 2.5 years ago, I helped write the class that told the machine how to dispense and deposit money.
When the other programmer left, I decided to refactor that section. I wrote a new class that told the machine how to dispense and deposit money.
We are integrating new hardware that has a very different protocol of communication. I am making a library that will convert universal commands into vendor specific function calls. I am writing a new library that tells the machine how to dispense and deposit money.3 -
- Launch the new version of the system I have been refactoring for 2 years and counting, then ceremoniously burn (literally) the legacy code as well as the cluster fuck of hardware it runs on.
- Decrease my stress + bus factor by bringing another up to speed on my code & the new version (his cluster fuck now).
- Pay attention to & take better care of health, my wrists in patricular.
- Find a mentor and mentor someone else.
- Get out of crisis management mode and find the time to write tuts, experiment and live a little.
- Find & join a local dev meetup, maybe make a local dev friend.
- Book leave and actually take it, preferabbly without having to take my laptop to the beach - actually, preferabbly at least have the choice to take a offline vacation.
- Sort through the drives containing ALL the code I have ever written, migrate the usefull interesting bits to Github.
Phew, that bit of self reflection was intense! I'm adding a cron to my server to sms & email me this rant in a year to remind me what hope looks like. -
I will buy myself a new notebook in around 2 1/2 months and I would like to know your opinions.
I do web development and Android app development. I will most likely put arch linux on it. It will be my main workstation and I would also like to us it for university to which I will go in 3 years.
My current favorite is the Dell XPS 15.
Do you have any other suggestions or is the Dell good?19 -
EDIT: !rant, forgot tags, sorry :(
Tfw your new laptop CPU gets the same performance as your 10y.o. desktop and is 10x more power efficient.
Ryzen 5 2500U (2018):
> 4c/8t
> 2GHz base / 3.6 turbo
> 15W TDP
Xeon W3520 (2009):
> 4c/8t
> 2.7GHz base / 2.9 turbo
>130W TDP
Running new hardware feels great.3 -
Developers are supposed to be eager to try new stuff, however most devs on devRant prefer to hate on Edge and hate who use it.
I'm not here to defend Microsoft but I bet 95% of the people that hate on Edge haven't tried the latest version.
It's really easy on weaker hardware and on battery life. Try using an old ultrabook (2nd gen i5) as I did for some time while using Chrome or Firefox as your main browser!15 -
Have to use Mac for mobile development
Have 16 GB of ram on a MacBook Pro machine from 2013.
It’s been working perfectly fine on the stack I’ve been using (Firefox, vscode, react-native, node, docker, Xcode, Android studio, simulator, chrome canary)
Apple releases new hardware with 32 GB ram and a few months later I see my is slowing down due to low ram, forcing me to close apps
I smell something fishy going on2 -
There’s a new macOS update..
-install now
-install later
Me: install now..
Os: there’s another account active, blah blah blah.. please accept our new GPL..
Me: fair enough.. accept GPL..
OS again: Hi blah blah, same message..
Me: ok I’ll try „do it later“..
Os: there’s another account active, blah blah blah.. GPL..
Me: go fuck your self, fuck your overpriced hardware, go guck your software that’s way worse than it was 5 years ago, go fuck YOU!!!
OS: I know I suck, but we don’t Care. So please accept our new GPL.
Thanks apple for becoming what Microsoft was 10 years ago..,
🖕🖕🖕🖕🖕🖕🖕🖕🖕🖕🖕🖕🖕🖕🖕🖕🖕🖕🖕🖕🖕🖕4 -
Frustration Rant!
Because old hardware means learning the hard way sometimes, I've had to purchase more goodies.
On my last update, I installed the rs232 shield which may have inadvertently been wired backwards for Tx/Rx from what im used to. I assume it is backwards to most db9 serial ports because most Arduino or other projects you would do with a pi have serial "in" connections like old routers and devices that would be "controlled" rather than the other way around. Anyway, according to a video on youtube showing a guy turning an old machine into an IRC client via raspberry pi, this shield may be swapped. That means that instead of interfacing with the old machine via a null modem crossover cable, I need a straight cable with male db9 on both ends. I unfortunately tried using the null modem crossover cable which was reversing the reversed pins all over again. I hope these next few days are more fruitful now that I've bought a straight cable and db9/25 adapter.
The good thing is that I managed to get the pi to recognize its new serial port. I also dusted off my DOS skills and my serial card in the 5150 seems to work.
I literally banged my head after nothing worked. Im hoping that the tx/ Rx is solved soon.
Oh and that AT to PS/2 adapter will allow me to use by IBM original Model M Keyboarf rather than the fun model F. -
Hey everyone!
I'm on the hunt for new and exciting languages!
I'll state the ones I already know:
Python, Haskell, C(++), C#, Java, JavaScript, Ruby, Rust, Lua, about every kind of Basic, some branches of Lisp, BrainF**k, assembly, Octo (Chip-8) and GML(basically JavaScript).
I've also learnt some styling languages:
Html, CSS, Markup and Markdown.
Some misc languages too: Regex and a runny bit of the Wolfram Language.
Also I'm kind of limited to Windows, Linux and Android, as I do not own any Apple hardware except I have access to an old iPad, so are languages like Swift still good?
Thanks!28 -
Goddamnit I am an idiot. I just fried a microcontroller because I didnt have the right power supply and I used it anyway because fuck it, right? So now I am not a single step closer to the thing I was trying to do but I fucked up my hardware and it is a huge pain in the ass until I get a new one and figure out all the problems with it. Arghn7
-
I've been a Macbook user for over a decade, after the initial disappointment of the 2016 MacBook Pro release I decided to move to a PC, against my better judgement I decided to buy a new Dell XPS 15, after reading all the reviews praising it's build quality and performance + it seems to have good hardware for Linux compatibility.
Soo much regret, I couldn't be more disappointed, it's such a piece of shit, I admit I probably got a bad egg, but dealing with Dell support is like pulling hairs from my testicle sack. If I have to pay an extra $500-$1000 on my next laptop for an "Apple Tax" to get a product that has been through proper quality control and has awsome customer service so be it, last time I try something new.
BTW I'm not a PC hater, I just wish more companies made high quality products.10 -
Working with acutal BigData. Will be ''promoted'' to a new team where I will work on a system wrote in php+mysql with literal millions of requests and database rows. We are currently seeing server crashes around once a week on peak usage. Stack is a vps 64gb ram server + i dont know how many cpu/ cores. Apache, php, mysql.Best ways to optimise and adapt in this case? Kafka? Rabbitmq?ngnix? More hardware?21
-
Not the code review itself, but having repeatedly to nag my project leader just to get a review is the worst.
I'm "only" a student and it's a project without fix deadlines so it's alright with me that it is low priority.
But - I want to learn something here, I really do, I'm new to C# and far from mastery. Apart from that my focus was mainly hardware during the last years.
I need some fucking brutal and honest criticism on my code, damnit!
That's all.5 -
So I spent over 200 hours recovering a raid array because the the business that hired the company I work for tried to do all the work in house. Now I'm to the point of trying to quote a new server setup to the company because the last one got hit by lightning. My quote $8000-$20000 in just hardware alone. If im going to do this I want to do it right. Twin servers running xenserver holding virtual machines with a high-quality Nas to hold the virtual machine. Then have the vm's being imaged to two off site backup devices in two different locations and a cloud backup. My boss comes in after me talks to the guy in charge and tells him all that is needed is one server holding all storage on it just like the last server that died and one off-site backup for $4500. How stupid can someone be who has been doing this for over 20 years? Oh btw the software running on this server will be 911 dispatch, jail records and the database for fine payments. The sheriff making the final call me and my boss are meeting with him tomorrow if my boss tries to undercut me I'm going to tell them both that if the same shit happens next time they can spend the time themselves trying to recover stuff because I done the over 200 hours in just short of two weeks.11
-
Since my first post was a success, here's another shameless hack-- in this case, ripping a "closed" database I don't usually have access to and making a copy in MySQL for productivity purposes. That was at a former job as an IT guy at a hardware store, think Lowes/Rona.
We had an old SCO Unix server hosting Informix SQL (curious, anyone here touched iSQL?), which has terminal only forms for the users to handle data, and has keybindings that are strangely vi based (ESC does commit changes. Mindfsck for the users!). To add new price changes to our products, this results to a lengthy procedure inside a terminal form (with ascii borders!) with a few required fields, which makes this rather long. Sadly, only I and a colleague had access to price changes.
Introducing a manager who asks a price change for a brand- not a single product, but the whole product line of a brand we sell. Oh and, those price changes ends later after the weekend (twice the work, back at regular price!)
The usual process is that they send me a price change request Excel document with all the item codes along with the new prices. However, being non technical, those managers write EVERYTHING at hand, cell by cell (code, product name, cost, new price, etc), sometimes just copy pasted from a terminal window
So when the manager asked me to change all those prices, I thought "That's the last time I manually enter all of this sh!t- and so does he". Since I already have a MySQL copy of the items & actual (live) price tables, I wrote a PHP backend to provide a basic API to be consumed to a now VBA enhanced Excel sheet.
This VBA Excel sheet had additional options like calculating a new price based on user provided choices ("Lower price by x $ or x %, but stay above cost by x $ or x %"), so the user could simply write back to back every item codes and the VBA Excel sheet will fetch & display automatically all relevant infos, and calculate a new price if it's a 20% price cut for example.
So when the managers started using that VBA sheet, I had also hidden a button which simply generate all SQL inserts for the prices written in the form, including a "back to regular price" if the user specified an end date, etc.
No more manual form entry for me, no more keyboard pecking for the managers with new prices calculated for them. It was a win/win :)1 -
I really lost my faith in our profession.
A Software&Hardware solution that costs more several 10.000€ is broken after every update.
The Producer even achieves to break untouched features in new releases.
No communication at all. If you report Bugs, they are your fault. The whole system has absolutely no security at all.
It is unsecure by design.
And even if they hear your Bug report you have to pray that they will fix it.
Most if the time you have to wait the whole year for a new release tio get your bugfixes.
But there are also bugs that are untouched for years.
WHY? WE PAY YOU!
I want to cry4 -
New programmer who just pick up Python be like , C is shot , is bad , python better blablabla....
Why anyone hate C so much? I personally use C for Embedded Programming, for hardware or is better compare to using python for my case.
I love python , but I love C more. Because without C the rest don't exist. Right?
So stop hating on C. Because you might use it someday.17 -
MENTORS - MY STORY (Part II)
The next mentor was my first boss at my previous job:
2.- Manager EA
So, I got new in the job, I had a previous experience in other company, but it was no good. I learned a lot about code, but almost nothing about the industry (project management, how to handle requirements, etc.) So in this new job all I knew was the code and the structure of the enterprise system they were using (which is why the hired me).
EA was BRILLIANT. This guy was the Manager at the IT department (Software Development, Technology and IT Support) and he was all over everything, not missing a beat on what was going on and the best part? He was not annoying, he knew how to handle teams, times, estimations, resources.
Did the team mess something up? He was the first in line taking the bullets.
Was the team being sieged by users? He was there attending them to avoid us being disturbed.
Did the team accomplished something good? He was behind, taking no credit and letting us be the stars.
If leadership was a sport this guy was Michael Jordan + Ronaldo Nazario, all in one.
He knew all the technical details of our systems, and our platforms (Server Architectures both software and hardware, network topology, languages being used, etc, etc). So I was SHOCKED when I learned he had no formation in IT or Computer Science. He was an economist, and walked his way up in the company, department from department until he got the job as IT Manager.
From that I learned that if you wanna do things right, all you need is the will of improving yourself and enough effort.
One of the first lessons he taught me: "Do your work in a way that you can go on holidays without anyone having to call you on the phone."
And for me those are words to live by. Up to that point I thought that if people needed to call me or needed me, I was important, and that lessons made me see I was completely wrong.
He also thought me this, which became my mantra ever since:
LEARN, TEACH AND DELEGATE.
Thank you master EA for your knowledge.
PART I: https://devrant.com/rants/1483428/...1 -
Linux or Windows - still a problem for inexperienced computer users.
I was an IT professional for 35 years but haven't looked at a line of code for 10 years. And it certainly looks different today -
I have trouble using my smart Phone. I have always disliked the intimidation tehniques practised by Microsoft over the years. When
I was running OS2 in the 90's I couldn't get any software for it because MS had persuaded the developers not to release any OS2 versions until Chicago (AKA WIN95) was released. I was forced to use Windows for years until I finally decided to try Linux. Linux
is a great answer but unfortunately unless you are a current programmer there seems to be some situations that force you to maintain a version of Windows (setting up devices, Printers and developed software). Now that UEFI has been introduced as the standard in new PCs it is very difficult just to install and run Linux. So as WIN10 (the most invasive and slow running Windows to date) is the only "Valid" OS - MS is still dictating what we can and can't do. I decided to sell my new PC and pick up an old BIOS PC so that I could run linux and Win 7 to accomplish
my needs. How long can this go on? When will Linux be a "valid" Operating System. And when will a non-programmer be easily able to setup his hardware and find necessary software to run on Linux.9 -
[DISCLAIMER : Potential Troll Topic here] I am self taught python and js (not considering myself as a real developer as I don't push much on github and work in a complete other field than anything related to CS right now) and would be interested to learn another language, with another paradigm. So, as I love you all, I would be interested In your highlights as I am currently considering either C, C++, Rust or Go.
with C, I know I could interface it with python. With C++ (despite Linus considering it evil) I know I could interface it with Node. I don't know currently what to do with Go, but some people seem really enthusiastic about it (not really relevant I know) and Rust seems like the C of today, with a bunch of new cool kid stuff. My main goal, after all, is to learn something new, to have another sight on programming. Either understanding more about hardware or learning another way of coding (like different from oop).
I know it sounds like a troll, but I promise it's not, just a serious genuine question (hopefully it won't be closed here like on SO)
So what do you think devranters ?
Being eternally grateful to all of you, I wish you a good night.10 -
As many here might be aware, the new RTX series dropped! With this, a lot more performances… and a lot more power consumption
At this rate you'll soon need a dedicated grid to power this shit. This is pissing me off, as we're not living in times of energetic abundance. Prices of fuel skyrocket due to the situation in Eastern Europe, and we need more than ever to find alternative energy sources that don't mess our planet further up. So the last thing we need is some piece of computer hardware that chugs near as much as a fucking vacuum cleaner
There's a petition treating of that with more details, if you agree this is a problem, it would be awesome if you could sign it and share it everywhere you can
https://chng.it/hGkcvHpdY87 -
I made a bit of a tradition of building a list of hardware that's superior to whatever Crapple is releasing whenever Crapple releases something - and for the first time, I decided to make it public instead of just sharing it with some coworkers.
Making it public however took some time (luckily, yesterday was a holiday here, so I got it done now) - at least, making it looking "not like shit" took some time.
So enjoy my (very basic) bootstrap templated, yet possibly useful list of builds superior to the Crapple Rag Mini (which is a completely fictional entity not resembling any existing company in the world. Promise. Totally. Penguin's swear.)
The list can be found here - expect to see an update anytime Crapple pushes new shit to the market:
http://il-pinguino.com/superiortocr...
(possibly not safe for work, children, catholics and SJWs). Yeah, no SSL cert, currently. Hell, it's a private server, it doesn't process any of your info and it doesn't offer downloads... I might add one in the future.
I hope you can forgive my shameless self-promotion, it's not a commercial site, there are no ads/shitcoin miners on it and i don't get a share/cut/whatever - just a small humorous joke project. For now.
BTW: I didn't attempt to build any of those. It should work, but please don't sue me if it doesn't.5 -
We are so fucked up at our company:
While the support for our client hardware is running out, our operation departement has just found out that Windows 7 is no longer supported on new HW. Well, that for itself is not bad, but we have a really old tool for reporting our daily work. And because that mo*fu*ing piece of customized software still runs in 16bit mode, it will not run on Win 10 anymore.
Alternative solutions are too expensive, so I see that we will have to port that crap somehow from 1997 to 2017 ourself 😲 Replacing is not an option because there are a ton of Excel sheets connected to the database, even the company balance is made with that data (and also in Excel). At least it is our CEO which has built that crap. So he has to pay for his twenty year old sins!4 -
!dev
Hello there!
I'm going insane...
For years, ever since she's had a Laptop and a smartphone, my grandmother complains that they're slow.
Every few weeks she's like "yeah transfer all my photos from my phone to the laptop"
Okay, sure...
Laptop: windows 10, 500GB HDD, I3-2330M, 4GB DDR3...
It's constantly maxed out with everything. Booting up takes >4 minutes, transfer rates from her fuckPhone are around 2.4MB/s if you're lucky.
I keep telling her, for years now, to invest in a new laptop and phone, since her smartphone has only got 8GB of usable space, most of which (>5GB) are used by her fucking apps and partly by the OS.
She's, what I like to call "Beratungsresistent", roughly translates to "Resistant to suggestions/counseling/trying to genuinely help her".
I'm seriously getting sick of it.
I told her in December of last year to make a budget plan and I'll get her a well-performing laptop and phone with it.
"Ughhh, everything will be so different..."
HOLY SHIT I KEEP TELLING YOU I'LL PUT WINDOWS 10 ON IT, THE SAME OPERATING SYSTEM AS ON YOUR CURRENT PIECE OF SHIT LAPTOP AND YOU'RE NOT GONNA HAVE TO RE-LEARN USING AN ANDROID!
She's not stupid, but fucking lazy. She genuinely doesn't give a flying fuck about her devices until they start getting slow. I TOLD HER A BILLION TIMES THAT THIS IS WHAT SHE'LL HAVE TO LIVE WITH IF SHE DOESN'T UPGRADE HER HARDWARE OR GET A NEW DEVICE!!! LIKE HOW ARE YOU SO FUCKING DENSE NOT TO UNDERSTAND THE IMPLICATIONS OF AN HDD VS AN SSD AFTER I EXPLAINED IT A THOUSAND TIMES!
IT'S ALWAYS THE FUCKING SAME, I AM SUPPOSED TO MAGICALLY MAKE HER DEVICES FAST AGAIN, BUT I CAN NOT, FOR THEY NEVER WERE!!!
I feel like I'm about to explode at some point. It's the same thing every couple of weeks right after I come home from work and want to have a relaxed evening from a stressful job.
Rant over, have a good day.8 -
1. It's gonna be more and more specialized - to the point where we'll equal or even outdo the medical profession. Even today, you can put 100 techs/devs into a room and not find two doing the same job - that number will rise with the advent of even more new fields, languages and frameworks.
2. As most end users enjoy ignoring all security instructions, software and hardware will be locked down. This will be the disadvantage of developers, makers and hackers equally. The importance of social engineering means the platform development will focus on protecting the users from themselves, locking out legitimate tinkerers in the process.
3. With the EU getting into the backdoor game with eTLS (only 20 years after everyone else realized it's shit), informational security will reach an all-time low as criminals exploit the vulnerabilities that the standard will certainly have.
4. While good old-fashioned police work still applies to the internet, people will accept more and more mass surveillance as the voices of reason will be silenced. Devs will probably hear more and more about implementing these or joining the resistance.
5. We'll see major leaks, both as a consequence of mass-surveillance (done incompetently and thus, insecurely) and as activist retaliation.
6. As the political correctness morons continue invading our communities and projects, productivity will drop. A small group of more assertive devs will form - not pretty or presentable, but they - we - get shit done for the rest.
7. With IT becoming more and more public, pseudo-knowledge, FUD and sales bullshit will take over and, much like we're already seeing it in the financial sector, drown out any attempt of useful education. There will be a new silver-bullet, it will be useless. Like the rest. Stick to brass (as in IDS/IPS, Firewall, AV, Education), less expensive and more effective.
8. With the internet becoming a part of the real life without most people realizing it and/or acting accordingly, security issues will have more financial damages and potentially lethal consequences. We've already seen insulin pumps being hacked remotely and pacemakers' firmware being replaced without proper authentication. This will reach other areas.
9. After marijuana is legalized, dev productivity will either plummet or skyrocket. Or be entirely unaffected. Who cares, I'll roll the next one.
10. There will be new JS frameworks. The world will turn, it will rain.1 -
Aren't you, software engineer, ashamed of being employed by Apple? How can you work for a company that lives and shit on the heads of millions of fellow developers like a giant tech leech?
Assuming you can find a sounding excuse for yourself, pretending its market's fault and not your shitty greed that lets you work for a company with incredibly malicious product, sales, marketing and support policies, how can you not feel your coders-pride being melted under BILLIONS of complains for whatever shitty product you have delivered for them?
Be it a web service that runs on 1980 servers with still the same stack (cough cough itunesconnect, membercenter, bug tracker, etc etc etc etc) incompatible with vast majority of modern browsers around (google at least sticks a "beta" close to it for a few years, it could work for a few decades for you);
be it your historical incapacity to build web UI;
be it the complete lack of any resemblance of valid documentation and lets not even mention manuals (oh you say that the "status" variable is "the status of the object"? no shit sherlock, thank you and no, a wwdc video is not a manual, i don't wanna hear 3 hours of bullshit to know that stupid workaround to a stupid uikit api you designed) for any API you have developed;
be it the predatory tactics on smaller companies (yeah its capitalism baby, whatever) and bending 90 degrees with giants like Amazon;
be it the closeness (christ, even your bugtracker is closed and we had to come up with openradar to share problems that you would anyway ignore for decades);
be it a desktop ui api that is so old and unmaintained and so shitty, but so shitty, that you made that cancer of electron a de facto standard for mainstream software on macos;
be it a IDE that i am disgusted to even name, xcrap, that has literally millions of complains for the same millions of issues you dont even care to answer to or even less try to justify;
be it that you dont disclose your long term plans and then pretend us to production-test and workaround-fix your shitty non-production ready useless new OS features;
be it that a nervous breakdown on a stupid little guy on the other side of the planet that happens to have paid to you dozens of thousands of euros (in mandatory licences and hardware) to actually let you take an indecent cut out of his revenues cos there is no other choice in a monopoly regime, matter zero to you;
Assuming all of these and much more:
How can you sleep at night with all the screams of the devs you are exploiting whispering in you mind? Are all the money your earn worth?
** As someone already told you elsewhere, HAVE SOME FUCKING PRIDE, shitty people AND WRITE THE FUCKING DOCS AND FIX THE FUCKING BUGS you lazy motherfuckers, your are paid more than 99.99% of people on earth, move your fucking greasy little fingers on that fucking keyboard. **
PT2: why the fuck did you remove the ESC key from your shitty keyboards you fuckshits? is it cos autocomplete is slower than me searching the correct name of a function on stackoverflow and hence ESC key is useless? at least your hardware colleagues had the decency of admitting their error and rolling back some of the uncountable "questionable "hardware design choices (cough cough ...magic mouse... cough golden charging cables not compatible with your own devices.. cough )?12 -
I need new mobile hardware because my old netbook from 2010 just doesn't cut it anymore.
I've ordered this fellow here: https://tuxedocomputers.com/en/...
AMD 4700U (TDP 15 W), iGPU only, 2x16 GB 3200 RAM, 2 TB Evo 860. Delivery in November because APU-only laptops are totally hot RN.
Maybe I can install Mint on that if I go for a 5.8 mainline kernel. At least it has Intel wifi, not Broadcom.12 -
Today I Fucked Up. I tried to do something involving hardware.
I tried to fix my mechanical keyboard by myself with no thought towards how electronics work. My first time using a soldering iron and trying to fix something myself.
I went from needing to replace one key to burning some plastic, failing to get new solder onto the parts to attach the new key to the PCB and getting solder where I didn't want it to needing a new keyboard because I think I've fried some stuff so badly half the bottom row of keys no longer works.
Fucking wonderful.
Guess it's time to buy a new keyboard.
Sigh.4 -
When Everybody Is Digging for Gold, It’s Good To Be in the Pick and Shovel Business
- ai is just another squeeze of money to cloud from our pockets, no matter what you do as long as you’re not selling/renting hardware or have high profit customers your product will die
I don’t believe in any ai product right now that can’t be self hosted and opensource and many of them are not.
I use mac, like 64GB m1 mac book pro so I can host load of things like llama, wizzard-lm, mistral, any yolo, whisper, gpt, fucking midjourney or other stable diffusion for me is no drama.
I’d say there is no consumer product for ai right now. OpenAI is scam given what we got from mistral.
We are very early in this new but old technology and my worries are that we are not there yet. We will need to wait for another iteration that is approximately 10 years to achieve what we have in mind because current hardware is 10 years behind software.
We don’t have an affordable computing power to go for our dreams.
Sad but true.5 -
How often do we come across IT managers who don't plan their work properly?
I teach software development and programming at a vocational school. Our IT manager said that we got a certain budget influx and that he can procure new computers for our teaching facilities. I happily agreed and hinted that i would really like some new hardware with proper graphics cards so i could do a few small projects with Unreal engine, Unity3d or use adobe products without hardware lag. The new computers arrived about a week ago and then the "fun" started.
He had ordered some PCs with proper graphics cards and processing power and talked about putting them to up in my classroom, so wheres the "fun" i meantioned? He only ordered half a classroom worth of them - i guess the budget didn't allow for more. A week later i was supposed to move to a new room and was waiting for my new computers to be installed and yet the IT manager said that my computers would be moved along with me. I was appalled - what had happened to the new PCs he promised?
Turns out he had put em up in another building without notice, a teacher there wanted to do an extracurricular movie making activity (that included a bit of video editing at some point). That classroom is always in use so me getting more than 1-2 hours a week in there is nigh impossible.
In the end i got no new computers, hardware or software.... he didnt even bother to switch out the 2 "temporary" laptops i had in my classroom since 2 years ago due to a small shortage back then and even these have an old image that didnt include a third of the software i normally use.
PS. He had about another 2-3 classrooms worth of new PCs but those were promised to the other IT teachers back then....2 -
I have a really old Toshiba NB200-10P notebook with Intel Atom CPU and 2 gigs of RAM and 32 bit architecture... It was made for Windows XP, and now it barely runs Windows 7... So I'd like to give new life to this old piece of hardware with Linux (for basic tasks like Office, and maybe coding with Notepad++)...
I really like Manjaro, but after they ditched 32 bit support, the Manjaro-32 community project seems a bit unstable...
So, could you devs please recommend some reliable - and somewhat good-and-simple-looking - Linux distros?20 -
C++ might be very good in memory management but it's an absolute pain in the ass. When the src has thousands of lines of code it's clos3 to impossible to manage the memory. The errors are so vague.
And porting the code to a new hardware is an absolute nightmare.1 -
At work we have to split a potentially large ID into 2 10-digit long parts that will be passed to an outside system that will later return them with some more data to us.
A colleague had implemented it using regular expression, it passed code review, everything was ok, until he noticed a potential problem. For some cases, because the outside system stores them as int and therefore will remove any leading zeros, there will be no way to reconstruct the number.
So we brainstorm and I propose ether a modified regex, or to just use math like part1 = id % 10^10 and part2 = floor(id % 10^10) and then we can reconstruct it simply by: part2 * 10000000000 + part1
Colleague: - Well, the regex will be faster, there won't be any calculations
Me: - :| I disagree but ok..
We do some more brainstorming and testing and find a case where the proposed new regex fails as well
So I bring up my previous proposal, I explain what exactly it does.
Colleague: - I don't like the math, it has calculations, which won't be needed before we reach the 11th digit
Have I missed some major development in computer hardware? When did they become bad/slow at doing math? :|8 -
Android, the development side.
First it was cool to put stuff together and then i wanted to actually use the phone hardware and realized that the api is terrible and abstracted away in the worst way possible.
Like every java dev would make something like new Camera().photo("penis.jpg") and let the gc take care of the rest but nooooooooo you need persisted objects and datastreams and special permission checks.4 -
The VPS where I host my owncloud instance has had its service tier upgraded since I spun it up. Opening a new one for the same price give you much better hardware stats now. Also, it's running Debian 8, which no longer gets updates from the owncloud repo. So yesterday I took this opportunity to make a new VPS, and try out nextcloud with it. I am floored. It is so much simpler for me. I'm not locked into whatever backend nextcloud chooses-- I have a choice.
Also, I can set up Apache to work however I want. I assume it'll work fine with nginx too.
Once it was installed and ready to go, I noticed I have much more granular and controlled access to my settings.
Happy camper!3 -
Modern technology is absolutely bullshit
I can't even
Now my keyboard on my phone is even too broken to complain about it
I wanted to look at someone's post history on a forum
To do so the forum wants an account. Ok. So I gave it my old junk Hotmail account during sign up for it to send me an email confirm so I can make the account so I can search. Well I'm refreshing this account for this confirm account email through the Gmail app on my phone because who even checks emails on computers anymore
Turns out, aside from this Hotmail spam email account having a lot of junk emails (it is my junk email account), there's this little pop-up that happens SOMETIMES claiming that it can't sync. I checked inbox and spam and the email isn't in there. So 1 out of 10 times I refresh there's this little "cannot sync" message that pops up and I click it. It claims my storage on my phone is too full to sync. Ok.
So I go try to find storage through the settings in my phone. It doesn't exist as a category anymore apparently. Thankfully phones have a search feature now -- because we can't have sane settings anymore so here's a search feature. First result it gives me is just device info. That's useless. It's just the hardware specs for my phone
Second it shows storage. 90% full apparently. That's odd. I have 132 gb. Thankfully it subdivided it by what's taking up space but it doesn't make much sense and a bunch of the categories don't open to anything
Apparently the fucking android operating system is 32 GB now? Well you're fucked if you wanna remove that. Apparently years of photos and videos is 20 gb, I can back those up and delete them. Similarly I have downloads in folders, and that's about 20 gb
Why are there 20 GB of apps? I literally have no apps!
Part of apps? Wtf is Gboard and why is it a gig
Why is my WEATHER APP using a gig of storage?
And none of the apps can I remove the storage they're using. The cache is like 600kb, and I can delete all data and it's using like 60 MB. So the fucking weather app executable itself is a gig of space? Wtf?
I deleted the data for Gboard and turns out that's the keyboard. So now all my keyboard settings are fucked.
Thankfully I wrote syncing scripts ages ago to sync various folders from my phone to my external HDD. I just had to connect it to the laptop and run the script on the external HDD. Problem? Well turns out no matter what I do I can't get the laptop to connect to the phone if it's USB file transfer mode. I can do photos. But this is gonna be more than photos.
So I do my sync backup script from the laptop to the external HDD. This will sync the camera, since I have sync thing sync my laptop and phone all the time, so I can just sync the laptop to the external HDD and then delete the older photos and get 20gb. Quick fix for now
Why do I need this quick fix?
Well
Get this
I've been having issues with my Gmail client for ages. It just won't display new email notifications which is really annoying because I need to know when emails get sent to me.
Now I'm thinking, maybe I can de-sync older emails and have more storage space maybe? But that's not an option anywhere. Actually, I can't even unconnect an email address from my phone. Gmail doesn't even let you do that
What the flying fuck is the state of modern technology
Now I have to go figure out what my fucking settings were for my stupid phone keyboard
The 90s were much fucking saner than this garbage. I don't need a 32 GB operating system on a phone. Is this fucking windows 8? And let me fucking tell YOU how many fucking emails you should sync to my phone. Holy shit what the fuck is all this
At least my Linux scripts fucking work like I wrote them9 -
Coding chalenge.
So... Spent almost two hours to put this little device to work with the keypad.
The device is a arduino micro, special one that can work as mouse /keyboard or any kind of input on most devices (pc, Android phone,...)
The objective is to make a macro keypad to:
- Fast insert text
- Play sounds in games over voice chat.
Think of it like this, you start a new html file, press one key and all the base code is inserted.
So... Why so long? Tought was the hardware, tought the keypad could be set differently that most, code mistakes...
My error was all here, masked from the debugger by a if:
char keys[ROWS][COLS] = {
{'1','2','3','4'},
{'5','6','7','8'},
{'9','10','11','12'},
{'13','14','15','16'}
};
Easy to figure right? Only saw it after reading all the code twice.9 -
So few of you will know that I was a bit wasted last night (Monday night). Few of you will also know I was having trouble with my new linux installation. (POP!_OS)
After troubleshooting this and that, I gave up. I believe my hardware just doesn't wanna pop. So I installed manjaro xfce.
This morning I woke up with my laptop beside me with a locked screen. I entered the password I remember I setup. Wrong. I entered all usual passwords I normally use. All wrong.
😖 😖 😖5 -
(Warning: This rant includes nonsense, nightposting, unstructured thoughts, a dissenting opinion, and a purposeless, stupid joke in the beginning. Reader discretion is advised.)
honestly the whole "ARM solves every x86 problem!" thing doesn't seem to work out in my head:
- Not all ARM chips are the same, nor are they perfectly compatible with each other. This could lead to issues for consumers, for developers or both. There are toolchains that work with almost all of them... though endianness is still an issue, and you KNOW there's not gonna be an enforced standard. (These toolchains also don't do the best job on optimization.)
- ARM has a lot of interesting features. Not a lot of them have been rigorously checked for security, as they aren't as common as x86 CPUs. That's a nightmare on its own.
- ARM or Thumb? I can already see some large company is going to INSIST AND ENFORCE everything used internally to 100% be a specific mode for some bullshit reason. That's already not fun on a higher level, i.e. what software can be used for dev work, etc.
- Backwards compatibility. Most companies either over-embrace change and nothing is guaranteed to work at any given time, or become so set in their ways they're still pulling Amigas and 386 machines out of their teeth to this day. The latter seems to be a larger portion of companies from what I see when people have issues working with said company, so x86 carryover is going to be required that is both relatively flawless AND fairly fast, which isn't really doable.
- The awkward adjustment period. Dear fuck, if you thought early UEFI and GPT implementations were rough, how do you think changing the hardware model will go? We don't even have a standard for the new model yet! What will we keep? What will we replace? What ARM version will we use? All the hardware we use is so dependent on knowing exactly what other hardware will do that changing out the processor has a high likelihood of not being enough.
I'm just waiting for another clusterfuck of multiple non-standard branching sets of PCs to happen over this. I know it has a decent chance of happening, we can't follow standards very well even now, and it's been 30+ years since they were widely accepted.5 -
Hopefully, you already know that the company controlled by the alledged reptiloid subhuman and olimpic testicle juggler formerly known as Mister Zuck My Tits is not to be trusted.
But as is always the case in this bitch, I've been forced into cowjizz flooded swamps' worth of stinking shit platforms for the sake of avoiding isolation.
And so, I've just found yet another way in which Facebook **THUNDERSTRIKE** ... the company, not the geriatric ward, is one of the CROWN ACHIEVEMENTS of human civilization.
Let me tell you something: some people are fucking broke. Hell, some people sleep on the streets, live on scraps, and willingly engage in acts of public defecation when provoked. But I'm not even talking about them no, just plain *broke*.
And so imagine being that guy who doesn't really use his phone much, except maybe for sharing cat pictures with mom because that's what being an absolute chad is all about. You don't get a new phone, because money is a __little__ bit tight. But THEN...
The dreaded CAPITAL strikes, and requests of you to bend and fall onto your knees so as to provide intense, intimate and manual -- as well as oral -- PLEASURE to the [NOT SO] METAPHORICAL PENIS of the """SYSTEM""".
Oh, what an abominable, drooooooling revenant that lies before you!
"Gimme your ass... " he says, menacingly, as you wail about in a futile attempt to guard and preserve the very last vestiges of your own anal virginity.
And so you fight, and kick him in the NADS with everything you have, down to the final shreds of vigor. Victory! Or so you thought...
"You must... " he mutters, mortally wounded "update WhatsApp... "
"Still you breathe?!" you exclaim, suddenly transformed into a heroic, sexy moustachoed arquebusier "After I'm done ~OILING~ my VICTORIOUS CHEST, I *shall* bestow DEATH uppon you!".
But as you rip open your shirt to apply sensual oiling to your marvellous frontal assets, your nemesis reveals it's portentous Portugal: "this new version of Android... " he gasps as he perishes "is incompatible with your device... "
"Ughh! Sacrebleu!" you shriek out in pain, realizing that you are now unable to ACCESS THE FUCKING DATA THAT IS IN YOUR OWN FUCKING HARDWARE BECAUSE OF A STUPID FORCED BINARY INCOMPATIBILITY.
That's right. Now even if I *do* get a new phone, I can't do shit about losing all of the family memes. And contacts and all of that shit, but the stickers are more important. A minor inconvenience, yes, and it didn't need all of this preamble but I was doing the dramatic fight scene bit inside my head as I was writing and I got into it.
Because the only documented way to transfer all of that data is to OPEN THE APPLICATION and scan some code, but everytime I go to do that, IT TELLS ME I NEED TO UPDATE. And every time I GO TO UPDATE, it says that MY PHONE is TOO FUCKING OLD!! AAAAAAAGHGHGHGHGHGHGHG!!!!
And you too, might be a dashing french man from centuries past, with both balls and tits down to your fucking knees, folding your arms in a position that exhumes smugness in a disgustingly irreverent and self-aggrandizing way, looking at me as a mere plebeian who cannot wrap his head around the mystical art of interacting with Google's black deuce box.
And you would be somewhat right in your judgement! But just having to fiddle about with these fucking pocket Elmo screens is such a traumatic experience for me that I'd rather lose my stickers.
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:~11 -
So earlier my Windows 10 machine decided to crash to blue screen on me. First time I have seen a blue screen in 4 years. I thought, this sucks. I waited for it to reboot. I logged back in and saw it was busy doing "stuff". Then I heard the hardware attaching noise.
This is what I think happened. I think because I did an update the other day that it had installed new drivers. I think there may be some sort of driver A/B testing going on. So the blue screen gave Windows enough info to know which driver. Then when the machine restarted it either reverted to a known "good" driver or switched to an alternate.
I don't know if this is true, but it is a cool feature if it is. Do other OSes do stuff like that?6 -
You cannot completely delete a windows service, as long as the services panel is open. The service stays undead and prevents any reinstallation until the services panel is closed.
Thanks Microsoft.
Separation of GUI and business logic does not apply here, because it's kernel logic, right?
But at least you're consistents, there is a similar issue with not installing USB drivers if the new hardware dialog is open.4 -
Imagine a web way ahead of our time where its size goes beyond our imagination...
This is my first rant, and I'll cut to the chase! I don't like how web currently stands. Here's what makes me angry the most altough I know there's a myriad of solutions or workarounds:
- A gazillion credentials/accounts/services in your lifetime.
- Everyone tries to reinvent the wheel.
- There's no single source of truth.
- Why the fuck there's so much design in a vision that started as a network of documents? Why is it that we need to spend time and energy to absorb the page design before we can read what we are after?
- What's up with the JS front end frameworks?! MB's of code I need to download on every page I visit and the worse is the evaluation/parsing of it. Talk about acessibility and the energy bills. I don't freaking need a SPA just give a 20-50ms page load and I'm good to go!
- I understand that there's a whole market based on it but do we really need all that developer tools and services?
- Where's our privacy by the way? Why the fuck do I need ads? Can't I have a clue about what I wan't to buy?
Sticking with this points for now... Got plenty more to discuss though.
What I would like to see:
A unique account where i can subscribe services/forums/whatever. No credentials. Credentials should be on your hardware or OS. Desktop Browser and mobile versions sync everything seemlesly. Something like OpenID.
Each person has his account and a profile associated where I share only what I want with whom I want when I want to.
Sharing stuff individually with someone is easy and secure.
There's no more email system like we know. Email should be just email like it started to be. Why the hell are we allowing companies to send us so much freaking "look at me now, we are awesome", "hey hey buy from me".. Here's an idea, only humans should send emails. Any new email address that sends you an email automatically requests your "permission" to communicate with you. Like a friend request.
Oh by the way did I tell you that static mail is too old for us? What we need is dynamic email. Editing documents on the fly, together, realtime, on the freaking email. Better than mail, slack and google docs combined.
In order for that to work reasonably well, the individual "letter" communication would have to be revamped in a new modern approach.
What about the single source of truth I talked about? Well heres what we should do. Wikipedia (community) and Larry Page (concept) gave us tremendous help. We just need to do better now.
Take the spirit of wikipedia and the discoverability that a good search engine provides us and amp that to a bigger scale. A global encyclopedia about everything known to mankind. Content could be curated from us all just like a true a network.
In this new web, new browser or whatever needed to make this happen I could save whatever I want, notes, files, pictures... and have it as I left it from device to device.
Oh please make web simple again, not easy just simple and bigger.
I'm not old by the way and I don't see a problem with being older btw.
Those are just my stupid rants and ideas. They are worth nothing. What I know for sure is that I'll do something about or fail trying to.12 -
When I was younger I had a decision to go into hardware or software. I chose software and have loved it.
Recentily I just spent 5 hours trying install a Linux distro on an old server. I made no progress.
I made the right decision. Hardware freaking sucks! You spend hours working on outdated pieces of crap and find that to fix your problem you need to sell you kidney to finance your project. Not to mention you have to wait for literally everything! It's like gradel builds everywhere! Want to install a new distro on your USB? Bam, 5min gone. Want to boot into bios and change one setting? BAM! more time wasted...
A note to the sysadmins out there: thank you. I love you. I am so happy you do this kind of work so I don't have to.3 -
DataDevNerd (ofc down to hardware bits)
Briefly blending amoung holiday tech consumers at Micro Center waiting for key-holder assistance @SSDs.
Rando: "they finally have a sale on *X, rebranded, price++* for my *ref'd only by part names* setup! What are you getting?"
Me: "replacement SSD, laptop's finally failing"
Rando: "Yeah, I totally get you, I hate that. How old is it? Hopefully you got a couple years outta it?"
Me: "over 7yrs old."
Rando: "Wow! Mustve not used it too much, still that's pretty long."
Me: "Actually, it's been my primary device, heavily used, as I'm a dev. I just know what/when to use SSD vs the HDD."
Rando: "Duuude, that's awesome!...wait...why haven't you just bought a new laptop yet?"
Me: "I'm not for hardware abuse or burning money"
I was quickly reminded why I tend to avoid typical consumer tech stores.2 -
I will not miss you bitch. See screenshot. I received new hardware. I will use a laptop with good specs as server. My dad bought it from his previous employer because he went for retirement. It has an ultrabook-grade 11th gen processor and he only bought it for 350,- euro. His former employer was a school, they don't give a fuck about money like a commercial company would do in such case. It's originally bought with tax money anyway.
https://llm.molodetz.nl is currently online but not for long, i hope to have smth running at end of the weekend. Probably a 7b model. I have plans with it that require some performance so I won't use the heavy ones.
Retoor1b currently is 0.5b or 1.5b. I forgot. The models with lower parameter count are a bit more naive and trainable like a kid. They're also not very biased yet. So, that will be my main new challenge. How to make a chat bot unethically human. No political correctness under this roof.
Would be nice if i could make it a bit like bratgpt. Sounds like a joke, but that model is expensive as fuck. You'll be shocked. But i would like to implement some sarcasm in it. A bit unpredictable. But normally such configuration escalates into very weird behavior.
My 'server' has a freaking 4K screen and i'm working on a decade old laptop. But seriously, the keyboard of the new one sucks. Nothing beats a x270. * tik tik tik * rakketakketak *. My previous x270 missed four keys. The three x270's i had, all had familiar experience but still different. The other two would never lose a key I guess. I configured the new 'server' that it safes battery, configured for mostly on AC.
I'm living on limited amount of cash (and will work again when i will run out). That's why i normally don't spend money myself on such things. So i'm now very happy. Fuck, this was about to be rant about how much my AI sucks but it ended in happy stuff. Oh well...
If you're still reading, you're the best!
Edit:
Images uploading broke again. Here is link: https://devrant.molodetz.nl/llm.png9 -
Can anyone recommend some android alternatives?
I'm not looking to move away from android permanently but I'm just curious, I enjoyed my time with UBports (fuck QT) and seeing projects like the PinePhone and Librem 3 just get me curious what is actually out there.
Currently rocking a pixel 2 XL but not shy on buying new hardware to test stuff out as long as it's within reason.
Currently had a look at PureOS (not available) and Sailfish, any others to give a whirl?6 -
Holy mother of butts. Two weeks. Two weeks I've been on and off trying to get hardware rendering to work in xorg on a laptop with an integrated nvidia hybrid gpu.
I know the workarounds and it's what I've been using otherwise. Nouveau without power management or forced software rendering works fine. I also know it's a known issue, this is just me going "but what the hell, it HAS to be possible".
The kicker is that using nvidias official tools will immediately break it and overwrite your xorg.conf with an invalid configuration.
I've never bought an nvidia gpu but all my work laptops have had them. Every time i set one up I can't resist giving this another shot, but I always hit a brick wall where everything is set up right but launching X produces a black screen where I can't even launch a new tty or kill the current one. I assume it's the power management tripping over itself.
The first time I tried getting this to work was about 3 or 4 years ago on a different laptop and distro. It's not a stretch to say that it would be better if nvidia just took down their drivers for now to save everyone's time.5 -
So this happened some years ago:
The phone rings and as soon as I pick it up some fast talking sales rep begins his spiel.
"Good afternoon my name is [don't remember, calling him 'jigglybum'] and we have a device that you plug into your phone line and it will allow you to make free international calls over the internet. It's real easy to set up and you can have it on us for the first three months absolutely free, if you could just confirm your address..."
"Don't want it."
"I'm sorry sir but I think you're throwing away a massive opportunity here we're offering you free international calls."
"No you're not. You're offering me a free trial of some sort of VoIP hardware."
"We yes, but it's free for the first three months and..."
"We also don't make international calls."
"That maybe true sir but with this box you could."
"I'm really not interested in your product."
"I don't think you fully understand all the benefits..."
*there's a clicking noise followed by a dial tone for a second and a new voice*
"Hi, I'm the supervisor for 'jigglybum' and I think perhaps he is having difficulty explaining what it is that we are trying to give you here..."
"Listen to me, from what I have understood you are offering to send us a VOIP hardware device that directly connects to our broadband and facilitates international calls, and presumably any calls for that matter on a three month trial which after will presumably have a subscription fee, have I had any difficulty understanding the nature of the device and terms of use?"
"Well, no sir, that's a very accurate description, so if you could just confirm your address for me..."
"NO! As you have just admitted there was no misunderstanding about what your product is or what it does. There seems to be a real misunderstanding on your part on the concept of 'no'. We don't want this product, we don't need the product and if we want to make VOIP calls, we have Skype!"
"Ok sir, goodbye."
This is, to my knowledge the only and only time that a supervisor in a call centre has wanted to talk to ME.2 -
A new system developed at CSAIL was shown to have stronger security guarantees than Intel's existing approach for preventing so-called "timing attacks" like Meltdown and Spectre, made possible by hardware vulnerabilities.
Image courtesy of Graz University of Technology7 -
The number of scripters and 'data scientists' that call themselves developers will increase, the true art of development will become sidelined and the world's code will become progressively more bloated and inefficient as the rift between hardware and software widens to an echoey chasm.
Then quantum processors will come along, requiring new logic, languages and practices, and once again the true developers will rise up and pave the way for a bunch of entitled, know-it-all and self-promoting QuarkaScripters to come along decades later and pretend like they invented programming. -
Got myself a new work computer. Aside from setting everything back up, it's been an absolute treat. I didn't even have to move to Windows 11.
Why Dell feels the need to put 7TB of garbage, including literal adware that spews notifications, escapes me. All it does is hurt their reputation.
I would have been allowed to build my own from scratch, but I didn't even ask since it's been so long since I built my last machine and I don't even know where to start hardware wise these days.
12th gen i7
GTX1080 that has all the video memory I could need
RAM just pouring out of the thing
I'm living the life.15 -
I'd like to ask: What's trending at the moment instead....
Either I'm old and senile and missing something, or there is not really sth new.
Okay, JS might be crapping out new frameworks in their common "Not invented here" diarrhea....
But otherwise? What's really new?
I don't really know. I'm not only thinking about languages and stuff, but even in hardware there ain't really a big thing going on in my opinion.
Hab ich wat verpennt?
(Have I overslept?)
We had an interesting and frightening discussion regarding NGINX, as it is russian software today and that a new trend of a true, actively developed webserver is severely lacking... Apache looks semi dead and most other niche webservers, too.
That's all I've seen as a "trend" discussion in the latest time4 -
Last night I looked at an Android app.
Going to put it bluntly, I don't like java much.
But Android takes it to a whole new level.
I was talking to our (SlimRoms) framework dev about how the database transactions used to take 400ms, and it was cut down to 10ms by, changing to xml with some kind of a reflector (so xml would be saved in the background).
This is atrocious. As a web developer, I live in a world where you can do thousands of transactions in that time (albeit on faster hardware).
So how is it that all of the abstractions in Android add up to a single read/insertion in Android (and I'm talking about an app written by Google) takes 400ms?
Every time I go in that channel to talk to them, I find something screwed up. Gah.4 -
So, I worked away from our software teams and directly with engineers for a few months to examine the capabilities of a new piece of hardware we expected to integrate with. It wasn't necessary that I be shut out from all the other software projects, but my boss decided that I shouldn't go to them. When pressed, he said he didn't want the meeting to be too full.
I studied this hardware thoroughly, and even know the engineers who designed it personally. This is, in every sense of the word, my project.
... So when the product owner asks to meet to discuss another feature around it, my boss decides he should invite the rest of my software team to meet with the engineers. There's some non negligible engineering background behind the tool and associated workflow.
When asked why he invited them, despite me being concerned about lack of focus in the meeting, he said he "didn't want anyone to feel left out".
This is the same man that cost me an entire week of work (and is now costing me my time with the systems experts) because he doesn't want to hurt the feelings of my junior colleagues. He's shown repeatedly that he's just fine excluding me, but heaven forbid my junior colleague feel junior.
I don't think he'll ever realize how much he's playing favorites here. Ugh. -
Fk you Google!
My Samsung note 10 screen went dead near a week ago... it's a secondary line so waiting for parts wasn't the end of the world.
Ofc the screen (curved and incl a fingerprint reader thatd be a major pain to not replace) was integrated to the whole front half... back panel glued, battery, glued immensely and with all other parts out, about 6mm space only at the bottom to get a tool in to pry it out.
New screen (off brand) ~200... all genuine parts amazon refurb ~230... figured id have some extra hardware for idk what... i like hardware and can write drivers so why not.
Figured id save a bit of time and avoid other potentially damaged (water) components to just swap out the mobo unit that had my storage.
Put it back together, first checked that my sim was recognised since this carrier required extraneous info when registering the dev... worked fine... fingerprint worked fine, brave browser too...
Then i open chrome. It tells me im offline... weird cuz i was literally in a discord call. My wifi says connected to the internet (not that i wouldn't have known the second there was a network issue... i have all our servers here and a /28 block... ofc i have everything scripted and connected to alert any dev i have, anywhere i am, the moment something strange happens).
Apparently google doesnt like the new daughter board(i dislike the naming scheme... its weird to me)... so anything that is controlled by google aside from the google account that is linked to non-google reliant apps like this... just hangs as if loading and/or says im offline.
I know... itll only take me about the 5-10m it took to type this rant but ffs google... why dont you even have an error message as to what your issue is... or the simple ability to let me log in and be like 'yup it's me, here's your dumb 2fa and a 3rd via text cuz you're extra paranoid yet dont actually lock the account or dev in any way!'
I think it's a toss up if google actually knows that it's doing this or they just have some giant glitch that showed up a couple times in testing and was resolved via the methods of my great grama- "just smack it or kick it a few times while swearing at it in polish. Like reaaaally yelling. Always worked for me! If not, find a fall guy."7 -
I have been using Windows for decades. Recently got a Macbook Pro. In just a week, I realise that I have been working in such a slow paced environment. Constant updates, background tasks, internet chewing, more load and build times. I don't know about other stuff, but for programming and development, I have completely replaced Windows with this new machine.
Btw, this PC has better hardware than the Macbook Pro.8 -
I work at a research institute (part of probably the largest research body in whole Europe). And it's driving me nuts. Forget about the lack of interest to improve yourself in terms of software skills or basic digital hygiene so that others don't have to pick up the mop and clean after you. The ancient mindset is what is making me curse everyday. Only a few years ago we switched to GitLab. Before that versioning, if at all a known term, was done explicitly via email messages - code snippets in the message's body, versions in the subject of message attachments...A freaking nightmare. Constantly broken links to files and folders on our NAS since some people have never heard of relative paths or writing even the tiniest bit of support for configuration files in their software so that a tool does not completely brake the moment you transfer it onto another system or - God forbid - the person leaves and there is no information whatsoever what's where. Everyone is complaining about the clutter on our servers but no one is willing to actually clean their own (not someone else's) crap. If you mention to someone something like "Can you please pack your stuff in this GitLab repo with this folder structure, so that I have an easier time integrating it into the main software that we need to ship to our customers in a few days?" all you get as a response is a blank facial expression and the occasional "I have my own processes. Don't bother me with this!". I have been trying for almost 4 years now and its budging a little bit but the lack of support is abysmal. My boss, as enthusiastic as it is, is incapable of putting his foot down. The fact that I have two heads of my team (one not really but acting like it) does not improve the situation at all especially since both are pulling in a completely different direction. We are literally wasting hundreds of thousands of euros of taxpayers' money to buy new hardware that people are either inadequate to use to its fullest potential (think buying the latest GPU to play Minesweeper) or not having even the smallest clue on what they need it for. And we are always complaining about our budget! You don't invest a couple of hours to investigate how PyTorch can work in a distributed manner on multiple CPUs, GPUs and even systems, yet demand you get a new server for 80K with a more powerful GPU and CPU to run your crap models on so that you can publish a half-ass paper that nobody cares for let alone will ever bother reading (beside the AI reviewers).3
-
Received a new HP Probook 640 G2 laptop for work, everyone else has theirs as 64bit machines. Yet the idiots who handle hardware and software installs installed windows for a 32bit machine. Well at least I get waste half a day and do nothing while they redo everything and then I have to still get shit done later.
-
The project that we spent one freaking year on, researching, developing our own hardware and software just got cancelled and I ain't getting paid shit...
https://youtu.be/Dv3eduzcZxc
This is a fucking nightmare! All this motherfucking work for nothing! I think I am going to cry... I mean we still have all the hardware and stuff but we can't do anything with it because is was build for one fucking task and noone would probably buy it because how specific the task that it's made for is. I mean I technically only own the software... anyone interested in buying an Android app that connects to a sensor (that counts stuff) via BLE, processes data from the sensor and uploads it to a database? It can also upload new firmware to the sensor, set basically any parameter and get all kinds of telemetry from it... can't really say what does this sensor count or anything about the hardware (I am not sure if I am allowed to brcause I don't own it - I only got to work on the firmware and the app)3 -
I know that not everyone here is Mac friendly; but my job just helped me purchase a new MacBook Pro, and it will be arriving tomorrow. It's the new one with the AMD 560 x 4GB, and touch bar. I'm literally shaking I'm so excited!!11
-
Helped an elderly neighbour to fix his landline connection, since it broke down.
Somewhat an emergency, cause he don't have a mobile phone.
It seems, this got around and another neighbour asked if I could plug in his new printer and install the drivers.
Gosh, RTFM and don't buy hardware you can't handle.
No, I won't fix your computer. -
## building my own router
I hoped things would go more smoothly :)
Anyway, my new miniPC easily accepted CentOS 8 - no fuss here. And I've got to say - I love CentOS8 so far! Shell has amazing nifty tricks, UI (gnome3) is also snappy, video/audio/ethernet,.. everything works.
What I did NOT expect is hardware being off. Well okay, the price was low - it was obvious smth is not right. But still.. I decided to build my own router so that I could swap wifi card whenever I want. So that I could run my own network services in there. Turns out - the card swapping is not as easy as one might think.
I got the AX200 WiFi6 card for that very purpose. But once plugged in the OS can only see it's bluetooth module. Weird... What's even weirder is that even though the card is PCIe, the OS uses btusb module to talk to that device. What? USB?? emm.. What??
And there it is. After opening it up again I noticed that the mPCIe area is marked with a label: "USB WIFI / WWAN". USB? Does that mean this PCIe slot is wired into the USB bus? Not impossible I guess.
Googling for a "pcie wifi over usb" or smth like that brought me to one reddit (I think?) where someone wanted to build a DIY wifi mPCIe -> USB adapter and someone else adviced hime that (for some reason) at best he could only get bluetooth working (hey! just like me!). It's got to do smth with pcie channels and USB being too weak to handle all that load, or smth.. IDK, I'm not a HW guy.
Well that sucks then! I have a mPCIe slot that does not work as a PCIe. Shit! So I guess the best I could do is to plug back in the same wifi card that came with the device. It smells like 2003 - supports only g protocol. Fine, let's try that. Maybe I'll find a way to work around this mPCIe limitation later on (USB adapter or smth... except there are no USB WIFI6 dongles yet :( ). So I plug it back in and start turning it into a router. Disable NetworkManager, configure static NCs' settings, install dhcpd, hostapd, bind and others. Looks like all is done! Now it's time to start it all. systemctl start hostapd --> FAILED. wtf? journalctl says it could not initialize a driver. umm okay? Why? Forums say I should airodump-ng check and kill whatever's using that device. Fine. airodumo reveals avahi and wpa_suppl are still using it. kill, kill, GOTTA KILL 'EM ALL!! Starting hostapd again -- same shit... wtf?
iw list
My gawd... That shitty network card does not even support AP mode :( I mean.. My USB wifi dongle for 2€ supports 2x more modes, is faster, has better range and is easier to work with than this old tart!
Yeah. That was an interesting day. When enfironment engineers break my testing environments at work I'm glad I have where to spend my time now.
BTW any ideas how to bypass this mPCIe nonsense? Come on, there are USB GPUs out there.. Why can't they make a USB (or dual-USB if they really need to) mPCIe adapter?8 -
Okay then, ex-android user there.
It started with Xperia TX - it was flagship Sony phone back then. It blew my mind when I touched it for the first time. You know, exploring android for the first time in my life was amazing.
It ran just well for about a year. Then it started to fall apart. I need to clarify that I kept it non-rooted, full stock. I'm not into that customization things.
At first, I noticed significant lags. They were everywhere. The longer I used smartphone, the more lags I encountered. I did factory reset, but lags haven't gone anywhere.
Year 2. Front camera stopped working. Battery became unreliable as fuck, going down to 40% and then instantly to zero. What?
Year 3. Camera broke. It refused to start, just giving me "Camera is not available" error.
I tried factory reset again. It helped at first, but month have passed and all that issues came back. And it also became sluggish as fuck.
Got Meizu m3s year ago. The exact same story. Long story short, in one year I got this:
1. Black spots on every picture I take. Much likely a matrix issue.
2. Camera also became slow as fuck, requiring about 10 seconds to even start.
3. Vertical stripes all along the screen. I never dropped my phone, it just appeared once and became brighter and brighter every day I used the phone.
4. Two huge yellow spots on screen. I think it happened because phone's cpu heat up the screen and it broke.
But the most important thing is that fucking lags chased me in every app, they were everywhere. Fucking tiny-ass lags. And they're not going anywhere, they're become more and more significant with time.
Don't say me about oneplus, samsungs and other top android phones. They are conceptually the same, the only different thing is hardware.
That's why I switched. IPhone has its downsides, but it's silky smooth. And my friend's iPhone 4 (not s) feels just as smooth as my brand new se.
I'm not going to jailbreak it. I don't need customizing the hell out of it.
I just needed quick and reliable phone, and SE seems to be exactly what I wanted.
Peace to android folks tho✌️17 -
What I learned about C# this weekend:
1. I am shit at C#
2. There is a nice selection of libraries both from Microsoft and third party.
3. I like a lot of the design decisions to not make foot guns. Like you can't use an int as a bool. You must be explicit so you don't have hidden type conversions.
4. WPF isn't terrible, but it took me a bit to figure out how to make sure the front end can see changes by triggering events when a property changes. I knew this was a thing, but it took forever to figure out how. The new terminology for things is tripping me up.
5. I am shit at C#.
So what do I get out of 1.5 days of banging my head against the wall? An https server that simulates a hardware device and exchanges json messages back and forth. It does what my python code is doing now.
I found a nice library for https:
https://github.com/chronoxor/...
I learned quite a bit reading the code from this library.8 -
So, even as a long-time Apple user, overall there really wasn't too much exciting in the announcement last week.
That said, seeing the Mini get a spec bump caused the ears to prick up a bit. My 2014 is running fine, so it'd be a bit capricious to upgrade, but it does have one very annoying limitation:
It *will* *not* allow me to run 3 monitors at once.
Found this out for certain when I first got it and plugged one into each Thunderbolt port, and then another into HDMI, producing a courteous notice that I needed to remove one of them due to GPU limitations.
Anyone who knows more about hardware than me able to speculate if the new one might be able to support said extra monitor?14 -
Not a whole lot. But when I was 9 I started trying to fix an old Compaq computer that my parents replaced. I never actually got it to work but I did tear it apart and put it back together. Eventually a friend's parent gave me a a Dell that didn't work. Figured out it just needed a new HDD. Around that time my dad (who is literally the textbook definition of technically challenged) got a old textbook about computer hardware from a friend of his that was a bit of a hobbyist. This was in maybe 2006. The book was from 1988. I don't remember the name but it's somewhere in my parents house still. I didn't get much out of the book. Time passed and I started building computers. For myself, the local library, my friends. I ended up going to college for business while building computers on the side. I was making pretty good money for the amount of time I put into it. Eventually I ended up switching careers. My parents didn't really help me get into software but they offered encouragement. And a book from 1988 about computer hardware... So that's something.
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Acer vs MSI Laptops.
Five years ago I bought an acer aspire vn7-591 laptop in Redcoon. It was the expensive laptop I bought ever in those days. My experience at the beginning was really bad because the battery laptop crashed after few months and the screen had some vague/dead pixels, but the worst was the imminent bankruptcy of Redcoon. So I couldn't use the warranty. Anyway, It didn't bother so much I have been enjoying this laptop and still doing it. However, last year the screen put me on alert since it started to fail with vertical bars and color changes.
It was time to buy a new computer and due to the problems with some of the components, I've decided to buy a laptop from a company with a better reputation than Acer in aspects as the reliability of the components.
My choice was a Msi Prestige 15 because of the thunderbolts, since the rest of specs are 'more or less similar', although it has more updated hardware, it is lighter, battery holds up to 4-5 hours etc... But... It is really noisy compared to my Acer computer. 2 CPU fans are around 3000 rpm in idle state... Acer seems to be working without using the fans if you are doing intensive work. I google it as I thought it was a factory problem, but it seems to be not a malfunctioning... In fact I found other users complaining about the same and the community proposed to reduce the fan speed through software.
Right now I have both laptops working and since the new boy is in house, Acer is working flawlessly. I am preparing the Acer for my girlfriend as a gift, otherwise it is a pitty to shut it down and store it in a wardrobe.
So, this is my impression about ACER and MSI. I m still experiencing with the new laptop, but I find weird things like the fan speed or how hot it gets in idle despite it uses a new generation of intel i7 cpu with lower consumption... I should monitor the power consumption...8 -
Seriously guys, how do you deal when remotely collaborating with lets say not the most motivated and competent devs?
Our scrum team got formed about 6 months ago from leftover devs of other teams, choosing a couple competent devs at the core and other devs who were kinda gotten rid of by their old teams, and after 6 months of working together I can see why.
Situation is that we are 7 devs in our team and 4 of devs are not pulling their weight. They are seniors on paper, but in reality not really.
They rarely take something complex to work on and even if they do, they make sure they take as much time as possible. Two of them are contractors who I imagine decided to treat the job as a paycheck and nothing more. There is no initiative, no push to make things better and in general attitude is to do bare minimum: only what is being asked and then delaying the hell out of tasks.
Im not exaggareting: Im talking about every possible way of dragging out the tasks: delaying communication, sitting around for a few days while not asking for new tasks to work on if they are blocked, also avoiding standups. Working for days on very basic comments in their MR's. Getting "sick" for a couple days on deadline when things get tough, so that someone else would come in, refactor and save the day. Once or twice it could be a coincidence, but nowadays I can already guess ahead of time what kind of trick they will pull now.
Our project is an android app where we have to support few different tablets, so the most recent new trick that I witnessed is devs avoiding hardware delivers, sometimes for months. Idea seems to be if you dont ping your team that you dont have hardware, then you can avoid working on related tasks with that hardware.
Worst part is that they get away with it. Our teamlead is a senior dev who is first time teamlead, doesnt code anymore and doesnt want to rock the boat. He is the type of teamlead who sets arbitrary deadlines, makes it sound that they are urgent and takes a few days off in the middle of chaos just before deadline. Restrospectives don't help at all and if I try to bring up stuff directly to him he tells me to bring it up during retrospectives. We discuss issues, rant a bit ant then continue carying on like nothing happened and nothing changes.
So little by little in the past 6 months we came to this point where 2-3 devs are carrying the weight of the team and are in a constant crunch mode, while others are allowed to slack. Its becoming ridiculous.
Problem is that this is starting to affect our morale. Only way that is left to keep my sanity right now is to pull away sometimes and also slack. Then I come back at full capacity, give my best for a couple weeks until I have to go and fix some basic leftover task that has been purposefully dragged out for 2 months and left unfinished, then I just want to scream and I know that its time to disconnect again.7 -
So today my company was removing most workspaces with USB 2 connections, DP cables and magsafe 2 power cables. This means that my MBP mid 2014 can't connect to the keyboard and monitors anymore. It already struggled with 4K, so my 2K options were already limited, but now the last few spots are mostly gone. In short: I'm being forced to upgrade.
But tell you what: I don't want to. It feels like a waste to recycle my laptop (even if it's company paid and owned) while it's perfectly acceptably fine. And mind that I will get the latest and greatest i9 for free. Yes, that overheating, throttling failure of hardware design piece of shit. 2 coworkers already own the beast and confirm that it gets really hot really quickly. One of them even has daily crashes (the laptop just turns off) and random reboots. A total waste of money. And my future time. As if it's not enough work to migrate to a new laptop (even with Time Machine).
So, fellow ranters, what do I do? I hope I can leverage the second best MBP (CPU-wise) from this situation, unless there already is a bunch of i9s in the office ready to be used. I really, really don't want one. And I think my current computer is great for what it is, even if it's old. It's a really pro machine for my needs (I'm very efficient, except for Android Studio).
I even consider asking for a Linux machine, but then a whole new world opens to me that may be a step too big (since I barely have hands-down experience).
Enlighten me with your ideas, muggles!5 -
Customer complains about an issue after a software update. The head of department himself tested the update and got an error message.
Me looking at the logs. Ok, that's an issue, but based on hardware failure, customer should fix his hardware, no relation to the new software.
But surprisingly close to the software update, which piques my curiosity.
Me looking at older logs ... same issue. EVERY FUCKING DAY. For months. The corresponding error message only appears if a user is logged on, so quite a few people have seen it. Obviously nobody cared. Maybe we just ditch error messages, it'll save lots of work. -
I'm currently working as a full stack web developer.
Now to my situation. Me and my team partner are part of a bigger dev department. My department lead now wants to split his responsibility into smaller groups. All groups get a new lead out of the group of devs except mine... No let's put together web and hardware development. It's not like I already coordinate all web and app related stuff. But hey let's hire a new guy for this... Hopefully someone with the same knowledge of the web as my current lead... Like none... -
More network/hardware than dev but anyway: I use OPNsense as a firewall at home on an embedded system. Had everything set up nicely and appearing to be working fine, quite a lot of things set up (static leases, VLANs with various firewall rules etc. - a fair bit of stuff involved). I noticed my remote system was failing to back up to my local one. Turned out port forwarding wasn't fully working (initial packet got through but nothing else). I noticed this at midnight.
Ran an update to see if that helped - nope. Reboot time then! It made its shutdown noises and I waited 15 minutes before giving up (no noises, no ping response). Took SD card out. Copied a fresh install onto it, thus wiping all settings. Booted up fine, set up my internet connection, all good. Proceeded to configure it. Noticed I couldn't access the internet from my PC, but could from the firewall itself. Rebooted the firewall. It didn't come back up. Argh!
Reinstalled AGAIN. Attached a serial cable and it was complaining about something which sounded like it couldn't read the SD card. Tried another. Nope. Looked online (using phone): known issue to do with boot delays.
Gave up and went to bed at this point (4am).
Next day: Installed it in a VM instead. Still no internet from my PC! Another known issue to do with default gateway not being the PPPoE interface. Got into shell, manually changed the default route. Was then able to update to the latest version which fixes the gateway issue. Rebooted the VM. All good.
Put all my settings back in, this time taking a backup afterward.
Only to discover....
....port forwarding wasn't working properly. Back to square 1.
Poked around with some NAT settings (outbound ones), made no difference, undid those changes and suddenly it started working.
WTF? /waves arms in the air
OPNsense folk were very helpful, producing a new build for me to try within a couple of hours of me asking about the problem.
But days like that, I start to question whether I really enjoy technology as much as I thought I did... -
Fuck this dieing pice of cheap chinese android crap. Sure it was anly 250 bucks, but holy hell... I could deal with the software side... Android 6 isn't the newest but eh...
But now the fucking hardware is failing too... To be more precise the buttons seam to randomly fire, which is really fucking annoying. Sometimes when both back and the other button fire the touch screen even joins the party of triggering touches in the right upper corner... Why the fuck ever.
Just ordered a pixel 3a, your days are counted fucking piece of trash!
Had to order the new one to a mailbox in germany though, as google doesn't ship them to switzerland (and the few retailers who import them charge like 130 bucks more, so paying the 5€ pickup fee will be a lot cheaper...)5 -
I'm at my Community College as a member of the engineering club requesting funds for a software and hardware-related physical project.
The code was mostly pre-written in Python from a university already, but we needed to build essentially a gaming-level PC to run it, do some welding and metalwork for the hardware, cables, et citera. I don't want to get too detailed in case anyone involved is reading this story.
To get funding, we needed to go before the student senate. I didn't go the first time, but later when we needed more funding for the project to do expansions, we attended.
I came in with a few pages of documentation explaining how the project operated, it's scope, and why we needed the additional $500 on top of the previous $1000 or so spent. I went in woefully behind the times on what a student senate meeting was like.
For starters, I thought this would be somewhat formal, being "Student Senate" in Week 8, and prepared to defend my project fully. Instead, we spent the first 15 minutes going around the table explaining what animal we would be and why, if we had to turn into an animal. It just kept going hilariously, painfully downhill from there.
They did ask some questions about what my project was and how it operated (as not many had seen it), and they wanted explanations even though it was clear absolutely nobody else in the room understood anything. My partner virtually shut down and let me do all the talking for my project and his because he couldn't take the ignorance of some of the questions and the assorted nonsense spread throughout the meeting.
Amazingly, we got funding. We had to sit for the rest of the meeting though, which (among other things) included a segment about whether we should create a new committee called the "Fundamental Insecurities committee" to help out with, well, "Fundamental Insecurities." There was only one member on this proposed committee.
When I brought up the question on why we were making a one-person committee alongside the, like, three one-person committees already in existence, they congratulated me for asking good questions and said I should come more often. They then said the exact same thing again when I pointed out there were better names than "Fundamental Insecurities." It's such a reality check that you are trying to impress people to get funding, when you can't help but feel that everyone is an utter idiot in the back of your head.
Almost a year later, I had to go back with a list of parts we needed. I wrote a whole complex list of things we needed for the project. Even though they tried to ask questions about what certain parts were (to appear like they weren't totally incompetent), and despite asking questions about a bunch of the items, nobody cared about what the $10 for "C418" was (google it if you don't get this joke). I spent about 30 minutes talking with them and succeeded in getting $600 more in funding. We then, to my surprise, spent less than 5 minutes debating whether to send 2 students on a field trip for $700. 30 minutes for $600, for a permanently installed project. <5 minutes for a $700 one-time thing.
And, because this is already a long rant, here's one more thing: The Student Senate's voting rules initially gave everyone who showed up 1 vote. We're all students, we all get a say, right?
Well, I soon put together that Student Senate had fairly low attendance. Engineering Club had high attendance. Student Senate and Engineering Club took place at the same date and time. I then, of course, asked why we couldn't bring the whole Engineering Club into Senate one day, and then proceed to pass an order by simple majority saying that all Student Life funding goes to us.
They then said that the administrators (the heads of Student Senate) could override that, but I pointed out that kind of defeats the purpose of voting in the first place. They then switched script and said they wouldn't do that and would honor such a vote. Shortly after, they changed the rules saying that you only get a vote on your 2nd consecutive visit; and again said I should visit more often because I was brilliant.
You can't make this stuff up.3 -
Surprise surprise, Atari is gonna be back in the hardware business with a new gaming console...
https://www.ataribox.com/1 -
Today spent 20min in a senior android dev interview debating an ex backender CTO about the importance of final classes where he tried to pull out some sort of perfect answer from me about it. Ironically this is the same CTO who failed managing a previous android contractor who was supposed to rewrite old app and ended up with an even shittier new app in 6 months of time. Now they are insecure and are looking for a new contractor who will be micromanaged this time.
But hey I guess he knows the importance of final classes. Some CTO's need a reality check and at least some business training, because your perfectly written app is useless if it doesnt fulfill business needs.
Their app is based on heresdk and built around navigation. The biggest bottleneck is that it works shitty on low end devices so their competition solved this problem by using a whitelabel rooted tables with a custom ROM wher u have full control over hardware, permissions and battery management. However this startup thinks they can build a perfect navigation app which will work perfectly on all devices while at the same time while also relying on a poorly optimized navigation sdk. Poor initial strategy I'd say and they didnt learn from previous 2 failures, now they are searching for the next savior android contractor who will have to solely implement evrything. -
everytime i get a new, slightly better hardware i think to myself "how was i living until now, and how could i ever go back", which means I'm spending more money on stuff as time progresses. I'm not complaining tho, the audio in this phone is ridiculous
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I got my new(to me) MacBook Pro last week, provided by work. I've got all my setup and config done, for the most part, and I've noticed something.
Performance is shit. Has anyone else noticed this about the 2017 and later models? The 2015 model I had before was much, much smoother. Just zooming windows, a previously butter-smooth experience, is noticeably choppy. I/O performance is garbage too. I have a small iotest script that just writes a string a couple hundred times to disk, deletes it, and repeats this activity 100,000 times. On my Linux machine at home with six year old hardware, this takes about three seconds. On my new system76 laptop it takes just over a second. On the 2017 MacBook Pro, it takes about forty seconds.
The 2017 and 2018 models are a direct downgrade in performance. Why isn't anyone talking about this?10 -
Holding back so hard on getting a new laptop.
We are so close to getting the hardware i want at the price I can accept.1 -
That one time the management du jour asked devs to quantify why they needed new machines after five years on third-rate hardware...
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My work product: Or why I learned to get twitchy around Java...
I maintain a Java based test system, that tests a raster image processor. The client is a Java swing project that contains CORBA bindings to the internal API of the raster image processor. It also has custom written UI elements and duplicated functionality that became available in later versions of Java, but because some of the third party tools we use don't work with later versions of Java for some reason, it's not possible to upgrade Java to gain things as simple as recursive directory deletion, yes the version of Java we have to use does not support something as simple as that and custom code had to be written to support it.
Because of the requirement to build the API bindings along with the client the whole application must be built with the raster image processor build chain, which is a heavily customised jam build system. So an ant task calls out to execute a jam task and jam does about 90% of the heavy lifting.
In addition to the Java code there's code for interpreting PostScript files, as these can be used to alter the behaviour of the raster image processor during testing.
As if that weren't enough, there's a beanshell interface to allow users to script the test system, but none of the users know Java well enough to feel confident writing interpreted Java scripts (and that's too close to JavaScript for my comfort). I once tried swapping this out for the Rhino JavaScript interpreter and got all the verbal support in the world but no developer time to design an API that'd work for all the departments.
The server isn't much better though. It's a tomcat based application that was written by someone who had never built a tomcat application before, or any web application for that matter and uses raw SQL strings instead of an orm, it doesn't use MVC in any way, and insane amount of functionality is dumped into the jsp files.
It too interacts with a raster image processor to create difference masks of the output, running PostScript as needed. It spawns off multiple threads and can spend days processing hundreds of gigabytes of image output (depending on the size of the tests).
We're stuck on Tomcat seven because we can't upgrade beyond Java 6, which brings a whole manner of security issues, but that eager little Java updated will break the tool chain if it gets its way.
Between these two components we have the Java RMI server (sometimes) working to help generate image data on the client side before all images are pulled across a UNC network path onto the server that processes test jobs (in PDF format), by reading into the xref table of said PDF, finding the embedded image data (for our server consumed test files are just flate encoded TIFF files wrapped around just enough PDF to make them valid) and uses a tool to create a difference mask of two images.
This tool is very error prone, it can't difference images of different sizes, colour spaces, orientations or pixel depths, but it's the best we have.
The tool is installed in both the client and server if the client can generate images it'll query from the server which ones it needs to and if it can't the server will use the tool itself.
Our shells have custom profiles for linking to a whole manner of third party tools and libraries, including a link to visual studio 2005 (more indirectly related build dependencies), the whole profile has to ensure that absolutely no operating system pollution gets into the shell, most of our apps are installed in our home directories and we have to ensure our paths are correct for every single application we add.
And... Fucking and!
Most of the tools are stored as source bundles in a version control system... Not got or mercurial, not perforce or svn, not even CVS... They use a custom built version control system that is built on top of RCS, it keeps a central database of locked files (using soft and hard locks along with write protecting the files in the file system) to ensure users can't get merge conflicts by preventing other users from writing to the files at all.
Branching is heavy weight and can take the best part of a day to create a new branch and populate the history.
Gathering the tools alone to build the Dev environment to build my project takes the best part of a week.
What should be a joy come hardware refresh year becomes a curse ("Well fuck, now I loose a week spending it setting up the Dev environment on ANOTHER machine").
Needless to say, I enjoy NOT working with Java. A lot of this isn't Javas fault, but there's a lot of things that Java (specifically the Java 6 version we're stuck on) does not make easy.
This is why I prefer to build my web apps in python or node, hell, I'd even take Lua... Just... Compiling web pages into executable Java classes, why? I mean I understand the implementation of how this happens, but why did my predecessor have to choose this? Why?2 -
!rant
Just wondering what did I miss.
I missed this place a lot. My poor netbook from last post is on its final few moments. Got new hardware, finally. Now, I'm learning more and more.
printf("Hello World!");2 -
Ok I'm going to jump in on the new iPhone shit, yes they are expensive, yes they are pale in comparison to flagship android devices (no I'm not an apple fan at all but I like Mac) but you don't buy an iPhone for the hardware, you buy it for the software and custom silicon.
iPhones will probably out perform android in synthetic tests for ever, they are working with custom designed hardware, custom software where as android will run on a multitude. Can't have 1 size fits all without compromise.
I will still say that iPhones are 110% to the power of 100 not worth the money in any way, but I'm sick and tired of seeing people compare iPhone to android when it's like comparing apples to oranges -,-3 -
!rant
It's Friday. Today I'll be soldering and testing (I really should come up with some tests now) my new hardware all the way to the weekend. Woooo!3 -
After two years of being in (metaphorical) jail, I once again was given the a privilege of unlocking and rooting my phone. Damn. Frick Huawei, never coming back to that experience.
I gotta say, rooting... Feels a tad less accessible nowadays than when I last practiced it. All this boot image backup, patch, copy, reflash is crying to be automised, only reason I can think of why that changed and magisk can no longer patch itself into the phone's initrd is that it's somehow locked? Was it a security concern? Or can sideloaded twrp no longer do that?
Oh, and the war... The war never changes, only exploits do - fruck safety net... Good for Google that they now have an *almost* unfoolable solution (almost). The new hardware-based check is annoying af, but luckily, can still be forced to downgrade back to the old basic check that can be fooled... Still, am I the only one who feels Google is kinda weird? On one hand, they support unlocking of their own brand of phones, but then they continuously try to come up with frameworks to make life with a rooted or unlocked phone more annoying...
On the other hand, I do like having my data encrypted in a way that even sideloading twrp doesn't give full access to all my stuff, including password manager cache...
Any recommendations what to install? I do love the basic tools like adaway (rip ads), greenify (yay battery life!), viper4android (More music out of my music!) and quite honestly even lucky patcher for apps where the dev studio practices disgust me and don't make me want to support them...2 -
My favourite bug fix was actually IT based and it was the first time my Eastern European, critical of my skills, family not only praised me but claimed that I was smarter than them.
My grandfather had changed from a telecom to a VOIP device for his landline. For some reason after installation, he could hear the other person on the line but they couldn't hear him. Me and my mother were away during this time so they called in the other family IT guy. This guy is no joke, he's one of the top in his company and makes a sweet six figures and lives in a mansion.
So he started looking things up, googling forum, etc. Couldn't find anything. Started calling the tech support and tried to deduce what it was and their tech support had never heard of such a problem. He takes his lunch breaks to help out my gramps. Keeps escalating, escalating and nothing. His conclusion is that they need to send him a new VoIP stick and they're not giving it to him. At this point, he's so frustrated that he screams at my grandfather to go back to paying 60 bucks a month for landline and to stop bothering him.
At this time me and my mother return and they have concluded that they need a new stick. My mom is great at intimidating people into free stuff so she and I go over to do so. At this point everyone is convinced of the problem and even I don't think I could fix it. But I decide to check if that's the case because I don't want my gramps to get a new stick and it still doesn't work.
I go through the typical forum hunting and there's Nada on the problem. I look at the stick and all the lights seem to be working, no error lights. And I wonder maybe the problem is not the stick, because usually you can't do anything at all if the hardware is broken. So I start thinking, maybe my gramps accidentally muted his handset while talking or something dumb like that. That wasn't it.
Then I decided to see if the problem was recreated on the other handsets. I tried one out and my mom could hear me but I couldn't hear her. What?! That's different! It was the opposite with the other phone. I conclude that it's working and there's something up with the handsets. So I go and do a reset on all of the handsets to make sure.
Lo and behold, the problem is fixed. It took me 25 minutes to solve. That guy gave up after a week of trying. My mom who assumed my IT skills were on par with other kids and nothing special had finally seen me up against an opponent, and not any opponent, a six figure high ranking IT specialist. And I didn't even use any secret, complex software knowledge that wasn't accessible to her or any other normal user.
That's when she finally said that I was smarter than her, that I just used my common sense. She would've needed some kind of prompting, hint or direction to solve the issue but I did it without any.
It was a very satisfying bug to fix. -
Me: Ok I'm not going to bother upgrading my PC, just going to use it and buy a whole new system later on...
PC: Yo' bro, remember when you had no clue at what you were doing and you didn't buy an 80 Plus certified PSU and used stock intel cooler? Yeah man you're going to need to replace both of these things, that'll be $280!
Of course this fucking happens, knew I should have waited till I actually knew what I was doing with PC hardware!5 -
Why do I always forget how much work it is to get a new linux machine running? One minute I'm happy with my new Hardware the next I'm cursing it because I need to get my wifi drivers from some github account.3
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Can anyone help me with this theory about microprocessor, cpu and computers in general?
( I used to love programming when during school days when it was just basic searching/sorting and oop. Even in college , when it advanced to language details , compilers and data structures, i was fine. But subjects like coa and microprocessors, which kind of explains the working of hardware behind the brain that is a computer is so difficult to understand for me 😭😭😭)
How a computer works? All i knew was that when a bulb gets connected to a battery via wires, some metal inside it starts glowing and we see light. No magics involved till now.
Then came the von Neumann architecture which says a computer consists of 4 things : i/o devices, system bus ,memory and cpu. I/0 and memory interact with system bus, which is controlled by cpu . Thus cpu controls everything and that's how computer works.
Wait, what?
Let's take an easy example of calc. i pressed 1+2= on keyboard, it showed me '1+2=' and then '3'. How the hell that hapenned ?
Then some video told me this : every key in your keyboard is connected to a multiplexer which gives a special "code" to the processer regarding the key press.
The "control unit" of cpu commands the ram to store every character until '=' is pressed (which is a kind of interrupt telling the cpu to start processing) . RAM is simply a bunch of storage circuits (which can store some 1s) along with another bunch of circuits which can retrieve these data.
Up till now, the control unit knows that memory has (for eg):
Value 1 stored as 0001 at some address 34A
Value + stored as 11001101 at some address 34B
Value 2 stored as 0010 at some Address 23B
On recieving code for '=' press, the "control unit" commands the "alu" unit of cpu to fectch data from memory , understand it and calculate the result(i e the "fetch, decode and execute" cycle)
Alu fetches the "codes" from the memory, which translates to ADD 34A,23B i.e add the data stored at addresses 34a , 23b. The alu retrieves values present at given addresses, passes them through its adder circuit and puts the result at some new address 21H.
The control unit then fetches this result from new address and via, system busses, sends this new value to display's memory loaded at some memory port 4044.
The display picks it up and instantly shows it.
My problems:
1. Is this all correct? Does this only happens?
2. Please expand this more.
How is this system bus, alu, cpu , working?
What are the registers, accumulators , flip flops in the memory?
What are the machine cycles?
What are instructions cycles , opcodes, instruction codes ?
Where does assembly language comes in?
How does cpu manipulates memory?
This data bus , control bus, what are they?
I have come across so many weird words i dont understand dma, interrupts , memory mapped i/o devices, etc. Somebody please explain.
Ps : am learning about the fucking 8085 microprocessor in class and i can't even relate to basic computer architecture. I had flunked the coa paper which i now realise why, coz its so confusing. :'''(14 -
I am on a forum that is mainly professional developers. The forum is specific to one library that is owned by the company that runs the forum. The participants are mainly volunteers as the project is open source. Most of the time it is great place to exchange experiences and help new comers to the library. However lately there has been a rash of shit posts about needing help with shit unrelated to the library.
I get it on some level, but come on people try to understand what the forum is about first. Don't bring your OS and hardware issues that have nothing to do with the library. Also, go fucking read the GPL/LGPL and any other license you have questions about. Seriously, if you want to be a developer you need to at least have an idea of what you can and cannot do. Software is an IP field. Learn what IP is and the rules to follow.
I was feeling like a jerk yesterday and started giving bogus answers to obviously unrelated questions. I know, not very pro like, but come on people! The guy was asking about monitor resolutions and changes since he updated his window manager. It was his first post on the forum. He was kind of sassy too. At least my state of mind at the time interpreted it that way...1 -
Skimming through some new commits in a hardware related project I'm following, I stumbled over a function Stack.overflow(). Hereby I confess that it took me way too long to realize that this wasn't a joke but a real check for a stack overflow. 🙈😂
-
My OnePlus 5' fingerprint scanner stopped working after lunch today. After a few test, found that it was a hardware issue. Fuck.
Now I have to open my phone like a pleb. I have to close and reopen the phone to open new apps.3 -
I am looking at replacing my Dell XPS 15 from 2019, but because I work 100% remote I am considering building a desktop developer rig instead of getting a new laptop. I have only had laptops since early 2000s, but thought it would be fun building something from scratch again. The problem is I have fallen tragically behind on everything hardware, and therefore looking for some pointers.
I don't want an RGB rainbow unit with 6 loud fans requiring a noise cancelling headset to work on. I want a top spec, stealthy thing that has all the goodies but also runs quiet. A decent graphics card that can run the latest games at a decent frame rate, but not the top of the line either.
Any tips on cases, motherboards, RAM, drives, fans and grahpics cards appreciated. The budget is roomy, comparable to a top spec Dell XPS 15 or ThinkPad X1 Extreme.12 -
Hardware dying again as of last night. Tried each RAM stick individually and my two original ones seem to be the cause so far. If it dies again with the extra sticks I had in, them I'm going to assume motherboard is packing up. Already tried a spare PSU and ruled that out.
Memtest died midway at random points several times and once it tried to boot around 10 times and died at various points along the way.
I just wish there was a more reliable way to test motherboards and power supplies on the PC itself. Also, I'll be stuck with only 4GB RAM from me new sticks 😭 -
Here's a few:
What could be improved about devRant?
Best dev insults?
Your dev machine setup (from office space, hardware, to OS stack etc)?
Dream setup of the above?
Or we could go back to previous topics and do them again, since there are new members on devRant and new stories from old members. I particularly want to do wk30 (Best prank) again -
Dumb mistake from when I was still working:
My work laptop’s SSD went haywire, and I/O would spike every 10 minutes or so for ~50 ms. The hardware guy said he could replace the SSD right away, or I could endure it for a few weeks and get a new laptop instead. Obviously, I agreed to wait. The stutter noticeably affected screen rendering, but I didn’t notice any other issues. Little did I know that every time it happened, all input was ignored (as in: not queued). Normally it wouldn’t matter, because hitting a random ~50 ms window is hard. How-the-f×ck-ever…
A few days later — without getting into “why” — I was forced to apply a patch in production. So I opened an SSH session to prod in one terminal, spun up a dev environment in another, copied the database schema from prod to dev, and made sure to test everything. No issues, so I jumped to prod, applied the patch, restarted services, jumped back to dev, and cleaned up the now-unnecessary database. Only to discover that my “jumped back to dev” keystroke didn’t register.15 -
After brute forced access to her hardware I spotted huge memory leak spreading on my key logger I just installed. She couldn’t resist right after my data reached her database so I inserted it once more to duplicate her primary key, she instantly locked my transaction and screamed so loud that all neighborhood was broadcasted with a message that exception is being raised. Right after she grabbed back of my stick just to push my exploit harder to it’s limits and make sure all stack trace is being logged into her security kernel log.
Fortunately my spyware was obfuscated and my metadata was hidden so despite she wanted to copy my code into her newly established kernel and clone it into new deadly weapon all my data went into temporary file I could flush right after my stick was unloaded.
Right after deeply scanning her localhost I removed my stick from her desktop and left the building, she was left alone again, loudly complaining about her security hole being exploited.
My work was done and I was preparing to break into another corporate security system.
- penetration tester diaries2 -
Hey Linux users!
I have successfully convinced a friend to change from MacOS to a Linux based system (because she needs new hardware).
Now I am asking myself which distribution would be most qualified for her. She is a relatively old lady and only knows Mac (no Windows or Linux knowledge), so it should be easier for her if the new system would look similar to the Mac environment she knows. (Using console is no problem.)
Another point is compatibility: She needs some (commercial) software (like GitKraken and design stuff), so it would be cool if the Linux versions of them would work on the distro (for one or two programmes Wine is needed).
After my own reasearch I came up with Elementary OS or Gmac.
Because I have no experience with Mac I want to ask you: Has anyone here some experiences with these two systems and/or with a change from Mac to Linux and could recommand a distribution or desktop environment?
Thank you!10 -
Just finished upgrading my company to windows 10 and latest Mac OS. The company opened a new bank account and the required hardware works ONLY on Windows 7 and no virtual machines...
-
grrrr
last week my laptop died out of nowhere. it stopped recognizing the one drive in it. I lost a bunch of files, code. evidently ssds fail out of nowhere unlike hdds which slow down and error all the time before ultimate failure
my warranty for this 4k$ laptop expires in 12 months and this was month 13. nice. I don't like warranties anyway, and the site said they would replace things with "comparable hardware, sometimes refurbished" wtf no thanks
so I found some guides of people upgrading the drive in this laptop. seemed easy enough, unlike older laptops from back when I was in school where you had to take out 12 things first to get to anything
unfortunately I needed a specific screwdriver. I walked several miles to the nearby hardware store thinking they would have said screwdriver. the old guy in the basement said there was a kit where it started from t4 (I needed t5), but he had just sold out his last one. I checked their online store with a friend for a while on my way back home and we kept finding torx screws but the wrong sizes. fuck.
he said screwdrivers this small are only used for electronics, asked if there's any other hardware stores and there aren't near me
however it occurred to me this strip mall has a lot of suspicious computer stores on it. so I walked back up the street looking for one.
found one with a suspicious poster, saying it was an internet cafe but the last point on their poster said they do repairs. walked in. nobody is in there, suspiciously 2 desks with old computers all empty, then you go forward in this dark cave, with plastic wrapped implements on the walls, you finally find a glass shield and behind it was a meek Asian man that took me a moment to notice
I asked him if he had t5
he handed me a plastic baggy full of tiny screwdrivers, for me to take one
I asked if they're t5
the shape looked right, but I can't tell the size
I took one out and tried to find size marking, but nothing
he didn't seem to know what I was asking when I asked about its size
he said if it's wrong I can come back and trade what I took for another. lol
I asked him if I can buy it, since that wasn't evident to me due to how sus this random bag of screws is being thwarted on me lmao
he said 5$ cash
I gave him a fiver
this sus shop literally avoiding taxes lmao
walked back home, ate food cuz starving, tried the screw and FUCK, it's too big. put laptop in a bag and hauled ass fast, checked on maps the store I got this from closes in a few minutes so I really wanted to make it there because what if the receptionist changes and they don't know I took this screw. I got no receipt
got there right before closing, put my laptop down, said it was too big. he used a few screws until he found one that fit, said I could try it and I did (so scam aware!). bingo bango. now I got a screwdriver that fits the laptop.
walked home, sat down and took apart the laptop. been a few years since I did so. the hardware inside looks entirely unrecognizable to me. started cycling through YouTube videos of laptops of the same name as mine, but their insides don't look like mine. is this ram? is this the NVMe? what the fuck is anything?
finally found a video guide where the guy was quite informative. not the same laptop but he's informative enough I figure it out. ram and drives are so different and weird now. took parts out, put them back in, rebuilt laptop, tried to boot, same problem. jiggling parts like this works with desktops often, guess not with a failed NVMe
so I'm screwed. get on Newegg and bought a new NVMe. should arrive in 3 days via Purolator
yesterday was day 3. it was at a sort facility near me, then out on delivery, but nobody ever came. then it went back to sorting. now it's out on delivery again. I'm sitting here thinking that's a little weird, wasn't Purolator the delivery company that had me go 2 hours outside of town to pick up a 15lb desktop case once?
... and then I looked up Reddit comments... then reviews on the purolator facility it's at... I am screwed. last time iirc they were out for delivery for 3 days, never tried delivery, then on the last day at the end of day they stated they attempted delivery but no go. that was bullshit. then it ended up at that facility. which takes 2 hours to fucking reach.
the reviews are so bad... the facility has 1.2 star reviews with thousands of them. they won't leave even a stub, then seem to not know where your package is at the facility, or they deny you have the right to pick it up despite ample IDs, or someone ELSE picks it up and it's not there. they also ship your package back after 5 days, so if they don't leave a note and you miss it tough luck...
fucking hell
also rumours that they just hire "contractors" in normal cars to drop off packages? wat? lol
AND EVERY REVIEW HAS A BOT COMMENT. THEIR SUPPORT IS JUST A CHATBOT
I thought this was just a small hiccup
I think I might not have a drive for weeks now
fucking hell
now I'm sitting on my porch2 -
Look... As much as I want to believe this... We all know it won't happen...
The tie between iOS and the in house ARM chips is something you can't replicate with just a new piece of hardware...5 -
I used to be an iPhone user since iPhone 3, every year switching to the new model, always complaining about limitations and jailbreaking it with the concerns this brings up to the table, anyway, I also tried other cellphones like Samsung Galaxy XXX, worse shit ever, and those annoying Samsung apps you cannot uninstall, pfff, worst of the worst.
I started with pure Android phones some years ago, first with pixel 2, holly shit, software is amazing, I was amazed an happy with my phone, "infinite cloud storage for free" yes please!!!
The problem comes after 5 months of use, battery drains in less than 3 hours, even with the cellphone screen off and not using it, it was under warranty and got a new battery for free, well, no that bad. Suddenly the apps start blocking each other and takes a lot to open or switch between apps. I bought also the famous PIXEL BUDS, worst purchase ever, you never know if they are charging or still connected, no matter how hard do you try, it randomly connects, I tried all the possible solutions, didn't work, one random day, the buds went off, got new ones thanks to the warranty, now they are starting to fail again.
Bought the pixel 3, same exact shit as before, same errors, same shitty hardware, battery drains in hours, and I am a regular user, I do not have games or use it in an intensive way.
Conclusion:
- Google: Shitty hardware, great software, no limitations(I can send you one of my songs through Whatsapp and copy anything form my computer as a file), but god, why your hardware is so bad?
Also, a lot of free apps, but very bad designed, just look for any app to listen podcasts, you have to waste 10secs every fucking time to listen your shit, freedom comes with a price no doubt.
- Samsung: I have no idea who want that shit and why, , not satisfaction at all
- Apple: Fucking expensive, have to pay for everything, but quality is much better, hardware is flawless, I have to admit it, my GF has a freaking iPhone 7 and her phone is fine the whole day, on the downside, well, costs and limitations relative to sharing and use
So, I will switch again to fucking Apple, best of the 3 bad evils14 -
Thanks google for creating the illusion of an option to change the shipping address for a repair order. You even mention the new address in your notification email, but when I click on UPS tracking, I can see that you sent the shipment to the old address, which is in a different city where I can't quickly go to pick up my repaired phone. After charging an extra 95,- Euros for additional damage supposedly not covered by my warranty. Lucky you that my old phone had connection problems with the shitty Vodafone station wi-fi router, which is one of the few reasons that I still even want to use a google hardware product. Thanks google for just being slightly less wretched and mediocre than your competitors, that might grant you some more years before you will be buried in history forever. Pixel phones are just like Macbooks: high quality product and good marketing, good enough to make your customer accept everything else being bullshit. Google search is even worse, but based on the same concept: just suck a little less than your competitors but don't waste any effort trying to actually be really good at anything.3
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TL;DR; I need your advice regd. a new workhorse of a laptop and ARM/MS Surface10/Laptop6 for this purpose
So my hi-end dell XPS (9350) keeps annoying me with its screen flickering. And it's an 8 year old ultrabook with 16G of RAM that I'm using extensively for development, devops, researching and whatnot. 16GB RAM is also becoming...not enough for all of it.
So I'm passively looking for an upgrade. I like the 13" profile (ultrabook style) and battery life, so I'd like to stay away from gaming laptops.
There have been talks about ARM being the new thing. I always saw ARM as a consumer-grade CPU arch (browsing, movies, music, docs, etc.), but the internet says that the new MS Surface devices will have ARM/Qualcomm built in and can compete with MB Pro in terms of performance (ref.: https://windowscentral.com/hardware...) and they are allegedly released this spring.
I'm not much of a hardware person, I prefer staying on the logical level of things, so I want to ask you, people smarter than me, what do you think? Is it a feasible upgrade for an XPS13 (i7 Skylake/16G RAM/4k touch)? I'll be running code and image builds A LOT, using JetBrains IDEs and doing similar resource-intensive tasks. I don't care at all about GPUs - I don't use them (integrated graphics has always been sufficient).
What else should I consider?
Any alternatives?
P.S. while I can't stand Windows, I actually like MS's hardware. They are good at making it.14 -
First and foremost, students should be carefully taught the logic and mentality behind programming. Most of the time I see that the introductory programming courses waste so much energy in teaching the language itself. So students kinda just get fucked cause many people end up ending the course without having actually gained the "programming perspective".
Stop teaching pointers and lambdas and even leave the object oriented stiff till later. If a student doesn't know why we use a For loop then how can they learn anything else.
I believe once that thing in your brain clicks about programming, everything goes smooth from there... kinda :P
Second of all, and this pertains mainly to the engineering and science disciplines.
We need a fundamental and strong mathematical foundation. And no I don't mean taking fucking double integrals. Teach us Linear Algebra, Graph theory, the properties of matrices, and Probability theory.
One of the things I suffered from most and regret in university is having a weak foundation in math and having to spend more time catching myself up to speed.
It's so annoying reading a paper on a new algorithm or method and feeling like an idiot because I can't understand what magic these people did.
Numerical Methods...
Ok this is more deeper, maybe a 2nd year course.
But this is something we take for granted.
Computers don't magically add and subtract and multiply.
They fuck up.
And it'll bite you in the ass if you're not even aware that the computer we all love so much isn't as perfect as we think
Some hardware knowledge.
Probably a basic embedded systems course with arduinos
just so you can get a feel for how our beautiful software actually makes those electrons go weeeeeeeee
And finally
Practice practice
Projects projects
like honestly
just give me the internet and some projects
Ill learn everything else
Projects are the best motivation
I hate this purely theoretical approach
where we memorize or read code and write these stupid exams
Test what we are capable off
make us do projects that take sleepless nights and litres of coffee
And judge our methods, documentation, team work, and output
Team work skills and tools (VCS, communicating, project management, etc.)
Documentation and Reporting
Properly
:)
maybe even with LaTeX :D
Yeah that's the gist of whats on my mind at the moment regarding an ideal computer science education
At least the foundations
The rest I leave it to the next dude. -
N64 emulation possible on Nintendo hardware? Are you SUUUUUUURE???
According to GBATemp:
Wii:
CPU: Single-core PPC, 729MHz
GPU: 243 MHz single-core
RAM: 88MB
Possible? Yes (always full-speed)
New 3DS:
CPUs: 2, Quad-core ARM11 (804MHz), Single-core ARM9 (134MHz)
GPU: 268MHz single-core
RAM: 256MB
Possible? No
Switch:
CPU: Octa-core (2x Quad-core ARMv8 equivalent), 1.02GHz
GPU: 307.2MHz-768MHz (max. 384MHz when undocked)
RAM: 4GB
Possible? Barely (5FPS or less constant, only half the instruction set possible to implement)
this all makes total fucking sense7 -
Googled for about 2 hours now and can't get this shit working. Trying to launch the Android Wear Emulator through Android Studio using KitKat 4.4 API. I created a new device within the device manager using 512 MB RAM and 128 MB VM. Square Display.
I am running on osx 10.11 El Capitan on Software Acceleration (because hardware doesnt even boot to the android logo). I get the following error when running using ./emulator:
Error while connecting to socket '127.0.0.1:1970': 61 -> Connection refused
emulator: ASC 127.0.0.1:1970: Retrying connection. Connector FD = 25
What does it mean? I couldnt find an asnwer on the net.2 -
When you eventually get a 10yr old hardware to talk with the new pc104 stack!
Has to be the most complex set up I have ever seen!
Only taken me a month to understand what was needed from mutex's to knowing the address registry to read from...
To then only find out it's only a small cog in a much bigger system 😢2 -
It seems like very version of Ubuntu I use at work has jank. Ubuntu 18.04 would have file managers that just die. After locking/unlocking the screen it would move windows between monitors. One window would seemingly cause other windows to have discoloration and I would see phantom objects text overlaid with what looks like transparency. This was all Gnome. Lots of little quirks that I just got used to.
Now I am running 22.04 and while a lot of jank went away I am getting new jank. Every once in a while if I move a window or bring a window up after hiding the window. The window will oversize across the screen like I zoomed in. Noticing this with Firefox. It goes back to normal size real quick. But it is kind of wild. Jank that stayed is my external monitor I have attached through hdmi takes its sweet time to reactivate after being asleep. This might actually be a weird hardware issue. This is also Gnome.
I just find it wild that this jank is there and we are like: "Oh well. At least it ain't MS Windows jank..."5 -
Electronic companies nowadays are no different than ranchers that force their slaves to earn money to buy new stuff cause people can’t repair old electronics or fix software bugs cause it’s not theirs or it’s not maintained and source code is not existent.
Damn you software and hardware corporations.
You tell everyone that you care about environment, yet you don’t fucking support your software and hardware as long as people use it. When you stop support you don’t make everything open source but keep it on your private repositories as intellectual property and fuck your clients.
Literally all electronics and software should be mandatory made open source to the people who purchased product so they can use it as long as they want not as long as corporate assholes want. This is insane law that is splitting our world and making it burn. If I could fix my laptop in nearby shop I wouldn’t have to purchase new one.
If it won’t change we will end up with <10 corporations that would rule world economy, everyone who will work for those corporations will be rich and happy and everyone else will be poor and unhappy . Mind me if this is not already happening and this planet slowly becomes Elysium movie nightmare.
Stop buying new stuff you stupid people cause this make things worse.
If it won’t change in 10 or so years there will be connected to cloud robots all over the world guarding us and some dick shit rich John Conor kid will hack them to exterminate humans by executing order 66. After that there will be big power outage that will put us into the role of battery and we would be closed in the barrel full of pink shit connected to matrix.
Get me out of here you asshole.1 -
iPhone alarm clock suddenly stopped playing sounds this week (again), fortunately my wake up time is not critical.
After every major osx upgrade I feel that I need to restart macbook more and more often cause system suddenly hangs.
Yesterday I spotted that after each restart there is information that if system hangs on login screen for a while I should restart computer again ( well thanks for advice that I don’t have to wait till I die ).
Cursor randomly disappears after I connected microsoft usb mouse ( microsoft mouse eating cursor from apple windows ).
Why I use microsoft mouse you ask ? That’s the best thing microsoft made, it’s literally indestructible. I dropped and kicked that mouse hundred times, still works perfectly fine.
I think also somehow osx forced minor bug fix upgrade once without my permission so they’re slowly going the forgotten microsoft path that is always forcing updates you don’t want to install in this particular moment.
Because their engineers know better when and why I want to update.
Looks like Apple engineering is slowly degrading or QA care less about older hardware users.
I am not used to buy new shit when old works just fine, those shiny little things are my work tools not something I show around to impress people how cool I am.
That’s all disappointing but still better then windows experience cause didn’t reinstalled osx from scratch since almost 5 years and it’s working at the same speed like it was new ( not impressed linux users here but from my previous experience with windows “registry” that means something and this hardware already paid for itself).6 -
Bought a laptop off my friend for $100 so he can get rid of it since he no longer uses it, and he can use the money to get more fans for his desktop to help that with it's overheating issue.
I took it home and for some reason didn't want to turn it on immediately. i decided to first take it apart and see if there's any internal issues just in case. As soon as the back cover is off I see that 1 out of the three segments on the lithium ion battery expanded. yep gonna order a new one of that tomorrow. I'm not the most hardware savvy but I'm pretty sure an expanded battery can cause an explosion1 -
Ah the fun part of linux. Patching all these hardware specific bugs after installing a new system xD Well at least I got rid of all the visible ones so far.
-
Hi 👋
Is there a good alternative to using a MacBook Pro?
I'm in the process of getting new hardware for work.14 -
Hi
i'm going to buy a new laptop in couple of days and i want to install ubuntu on it.
i'm worried about the hardware compatibility.
do you have any advice for choosing hardware?
thanks7 -
What's with the updates in our technology ? has it always been this situation that Computer manufacturers stop providing upgrades after a few time?
Like android tries hard, but no device older than 3 years is going to get the latest android . i phone guys say they get the latest ios on iphone 6 plus, but isn't that also like 6 generations later device?what about iphone 4s or iphone 3g or iphone1 ?
So far i guess microsoft and laptop manufacturers are winning at this area... i believe i could find some peeps with their 10 yo fatass pc running win 10 . Or maybe iot, i am not sure but i wonder if those microwaves won't be compatible with the latest version of whatever OS they are using (if there is a mechanism to update one)
I was actually reading about the operating systems. My point regarding this post was that the OS's have been architectured to be modular and h/w independent for years . Nearly every OS has this HAL layer which literally has the function to abstract hardware and give apis to system such that whatever the hardware there is down below, the system would not have to worry.
So why does new updates to the os not pushed to older devices? why do manufacturers give the reasons that we don't push updates because the hardware is incompatible with the os?13 -
Microsoft announced a new security feature for the Windows operating system.
According to a report of ZDNet: Named "Hardware-Enforced Stack Protection", which allows applications to use the local CPU hardware to protect their code while running inside the CPU's memory. As the name says, it's primary role is to protect the memory-stack (where an app's code is stored during execution).
"Hardware-Enforced Stack Protection" works by enforcing strict management of the memory stack through the use of a combination between modern CPU hardware and Shadow Stacks (refers to a copies of a program's intended execution).
The new "Hardware-Enforced Stack Protection" feature plans to use the hardware-based security features in modern CPUs to keep a copy of the app's shadow stack (intended code execution flow) in a hardware-secured environment.
Microsoft says that this will prevent malware from hijacking an app's code by exploiting common memory bugs such as stack buffer overflows, dangling pointers, or uninitialized variables which could allow attackers to hijack an app's normal code execution flow. Any modifications that don't match the shadow stacks are ignored, effectively shutting down any exploit attempts.5 -
Advice on great hardware for Linux kernel? I'm going to get myself a new laptop, my current one gave me great headaches due to the Realtek network card (no jeffing driver). I'd like to avoid this sort of things this time around: what should I get/avoid?2
-
!dev
I need some help with advice regarding getting new headphones, as my current ones are quite literally about to fall off my head. Thing is that I have a hard time finding what I want, and even then be able to determine stuff based on reviews.
My current ones are a pair of Turtle Beach Ear Force Z60, which is my first headset to have surround sound. They also sit very comfortably on my head without really pressing on my ears at all, and the audio when playing games is nice and clear. Unfortunately that has now set the bar pretty high when trying to find a new pair.
I tried out a pair of HyperX Cloud II, but I can't configure the settings and the surround sound doesn't seem to work at all (there seems to be a "gap" between one o'clock and three o'clock, so to speak, as well as between nine o'clock and eleven o'clock). I tried listening to a 7.1 audio clip, but the only ones in the right positions were center front and left and right fronts. The left and right sides, and left and right rears were all at the center point. And besides that the audio is unbalanced and just... not quite muffled, but not clear as with the old ones.
Thing is also that I don't know crap about audio stuff, like if it's got to do with me doing something wrong in terms of drivers or hardware or something, or if it's actually got to do with the headphones themselves. I've tried to find info but there's just none to be found, it seems, at least nothing that works. :(
Currently I'm considering trying out another pair from Turtle Beach, but it's so hard to trust the reviews. I mean, like the Z60 has pretty halfassed ratings, but I personally like them a lot. :/
Does anyone have any advice at all? Whether it's recommendations of headphones, or ideas on things I could try on my end to make things work.
AND, side note; I don't care for any comments along the line of "surround sound is bullshit, just stick with stereo, it's better", because 1) I don't agree nor do I care, and 2) it's unconstructive as shit.
I'm thankful for any ideas or advice you guys may have. :/11 -
Working code?
Or fake compiler?
Fix a problem?
Or buy a new computer?
Bring a flash drive?
Or bring a hard drive?
Use water cooling?
Or use an ice cube on top a processor and memory?
Drink some coffee?
Or eat a healthy breakfast?
Do you make hardware?
Or software?
These are the problems programmers face from old people as employers or relatives trying to find something to relate to. -
Hello, I'm looking for a new machine but since I'm not very good with hardware, I'd like to ask for help:
I have a 7yrs old lenovo ideapad Y580, and even though I don't really play anymore on pc, I still would like the machine to last.
At first I was thinking about a ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 7 - Intel 10th Gen, but maybe I should go with a gaming laptop for the sake of the good specs? But then, which one? MSI, alienware ...?
And I'm a front-end, so I still need to be able to open graphic files.
TIA!3 -
Bought a new Small Netbook recently.
Wanted to install Linux, because Yeah, working with Linux All the time and I'm " in love" with it ;)
But ... it's not working properly.. No Sound, some keys aren't supported and some other Shit that arent working as expected.
Shit. Tried everything, multiple times, the Hardware is not really compatible with Linux. Damn, this is the only shit about Linux..
Yeah, I'm now so desperated, that I've Just installed Windows 10.
My only hope - the new bash/Power Shell. Does anybody has made some (good) experience with it?9 -
I kind of need to replace my ThinkPad T430 soon. I bought it for about $200 3 years ago, and I love it and it just works and does it's job. But the fan noise is getting annoying, the battery is pretty much dead and yeah well, the screen does suck.
I've been thinking about replacing said parts, which would cost me about $150. Which is almost what I paid for the device back then, but I don't know I don't really want a new one. The T430 is a sexy old lady, just needs some polishing.
Now to my questions..
Would you say it's worth it?
Is there a big noticeable difference from a glossy 1366x768 LCD screen to a matte 1600x900 LCD screen?
Would you pick matte over glossy?
Do LCD screens always suck?
In case you would just buy a new notebook, can you give me any recommendations? The notebook market is huge and I have no idea what to look for.
I'm not a big Hardware guy as you can see, I have honestly no idea about screens and panels and such.16 -
We're supporting hardware for a new client now. A guy on my team has been working directly with the client to set up access for us all. He sent us all an email yesterday, asking us to update a ticket with our, "domain name and passphrase."
He meant user id and ssh public key, but he doesn't know enough about Linux (which he supports for a living) to know what it was called. -
More of a question regarding hardware and software than a rant..
Anyone here running Skylake and Linux? Mostly intrested in Arch and debian!
I need a new laptop and Skylake is all they are selling, and Windows is not an option!3 -
I keep asking inconvenient questions in meetings. Because I'm supposed to just be the "hardware" guy I guess it's unexpected?
Piggybacking off the low gain vs high gain omnidirectional antennas question from yesterday I asked today if our wireless issues at another branch could be due to the NICs on the tablets.
802.11n is great if you have hardware capable of MIMO. If not that fancy new AP may not be such a sound investment.2 -
New Year's goal: find out if linux vulkan/mesa drivers work on my desktop as there's no real reason to not switch now other than maybe that.
Proton, DXVK and Gallium Nine support like 80% of games now (suck it, nvidia users, we get the good ones!) and i've seen performance improvements after switching from Windows builds on Windows to Windows builds on Proton using the same hardware.
Question is: how the hell do I carry over almost 2TB of shit to the new partitions? Also, Virtualbox is a bitch on Linux as if my kernel updates it's fucked and Boxes is trash...11 -
Background: Got a macbook, A external HDD(2TB) of which +- 1TB was used.
Yesterday i moved all my personal projects from my work laptop to my external, to move to my macbook.
One of my clients(Freelancing) calls asking me to install new hardware, install software and fix OS(Windows 8.1).
I leave work and go directly to said client and he hands over his Lenovo S20 Touch(No CD/DVD Drive).
I install windows 10 and other software from my flash(Already on there)
Good, Everything is ready to go. I go home and finally get to sit down with my baby(MacBook)
Me: *Plugs in external*
...
nothing.
Opens Finder, can't find flashdrive
Check MacKeeper
MacKeeper: VirusDetected
Me: *Pissed*
Client calls.
Client: Hey is everything ok with the laptop, no viruses no nothing. Because everytime i insert a flashdrive it gets a virus and i have to buy a new one.
Me: I installed windows 10 on it, it should be fine with defender now.
Heart: *shattered* YOU COULD'VE TOLD ME THAT BEFORE FUCKER!!
i never knew people like this still exist1 -
So as a personal project for work I decided to start data logging facility variables, it's something that we might need to pickup at some point in the future so decided to take the initiative since I'm the new guy.
I setup some basic current loop sensors are things like gas line pressures for bulk nitrogen and compressed air but decided to go with a more advanced system for logging the temperature and humidity in the labs. These sensors come with 'software' it's a web site you host internally. Cool so I just need to build a simple web server to run these PoE sensors. No big deal right, it's just an IIS service. Months after ordering Server 2019 though SSC I get 4 activation codes 2 MAK and 2 KMS. I won the lottery now i just have to download the server 2019 retail ISO and... Won't take the keys. Back to purchasing, "oh I can download that for you, what key is yours". Um... I dunno you sent me 4 Can I just get the link, "well you have to have a login". Ok what building are you in I'll drive over with a USB key (hoping there on the same campus), "the download keeps stopping, I'll contact the IT service in your building". a week later I get an install ISO and still no one knows that key is mine. Local IT service suggests it's probably a MAK key since I originally got a quote for a retail copy and we don't run a KMS server on the network I'm using for testing. We'll doesn't windows reject all 4 keys then proceed to register with a non-existent KMS server on the network I'm using for testing. Great so now this server that is supposed to connected to a private network for the sensors and use the second NIC for an internet connection has to be connected to the old network that I'm using for testing because that's where the KMS server seems to be. Ok no big deal the old network has internet except the powers that be want to migrate everything to the new more secure network but I still need to be connected to the KMS server because they sent me the wrong key. So I'm up to three network cards and some of my basic sensors are running on yet another network and I want to migrate the management software to this hardware to have all my data logging in one system. I had to label the Ethernet ports so I could hand over the hardware for certification and security scans.
So at this point I have my system running with a couple sensors setup with static IP's because I haven't had time to setup the DNS for the private network the sensors run on. Local IT goes to install McAfee and can't because it isn't compatible with anything after 1809 or later, I get a message back that " we only support up to 1709" I point out that it's server 2019, "Oh yeah, let me ask about that" a bunch of back and forth ensues and finally Local IT get's a version of McAfee that will install, runs security scan again i get a message back. " There are two high risk issues on your server", my blood pressure is getting high as well. The risks there looking at McAfee versions are out of date and windows Defender is disabled (because of McAfee).
There's a low risk issue as well, something relating to the DNS service I didn't fully setup. I tell local IT just disable it for now, then think we'll heck I'll remote in and do it. Nope can't remote into my server, oh they renamed it well that's lot going to stay that way but whatever oh here's the IP they assigned it, nope cant remote in no privileges. Ok so I run up three flights of stairs to local IT before they leave for the day log into my server yup RDP is enabled, odd but whatever let's delete the DNS role for now, nope you don't have admin privileges. Now I'm really getting displeased, I can;t have admin privileges on the network you want me to use to support the service on a system you can't support and I'm supposed to believe you can migrate the life safety systems you want us to move. I'm using my system to prove that the 2FA system works, at this rate I'm going to have 2FA access to a completely worthless broken system in a few years. good thing I rebuilt the whole server in a VM I'm planning to deploy before I get the official one back. I'm skipping a lot of the ridiculous back and forth conversations because the more I think about it the more irritated I get.1 -
Holy crap, Meta Developer Connect keynote. Amazing innovation. This is what Apple **used to be**
Granted, the hardware is not as elegant as Apple but the cost is 1/10 and the capabilities are close, same, or exceed (Llama) what Apple is offering.
Now here is the gut punch, they figured out that the mobile app build system needs to build AR/VR/MR apps. That was Apple's edge.
As a developer, I am not enamored with Swift and it is pretty clear that if I have to change and use a niche language like Swift or change and do dev on Android, to target new Meta hardware and AI... well... lets just say I think Swift is crap from a language standpoint and I suspect it is the reason Apple's hardware uses so much more memory, battery and storage than it should. At the same time Meta's Orion runs on a god damn battery in the early piece of glasses. My AVP's have a huge brick.
#define kApple kGigaBloat
If I were Apple I would be shitting my pants watching this Meta presentation.6 -
I work as a developer where I mainly work on internal solutions. The worst fucking part about this, is how we're basically always the fallback for fucking everytging. Sales dept are constantly selling services without knowing if it's even possible, not checking if we need new hardware and shit like that.
Fucknuggets. -
One reason I hate working on hardware and prefer software. Spent all weekend trying to get this Canon photo printer to work with a raspberry pi for a photo booth project. Tried multiple cables, compiling the latest cups and gutenprint, etc. Only could get it to print via wifi. Finally, I go to the store and buy a new micro USB cable and it works right away. 😠2
-
After reading through an article by EFF about Google's new FLoC technology, I finally woke up and realized that Google isn't any different from the other huge organizations, and that it isn't here to fight for greater user privacy and rights... As such, I made a switch, going from Google to DuckDuckGo.
Sure, I still use YT, but other than that, I don't have a gmail address that'd be of importance, don't use their search engine, and now...
Got any tips on how to minimize tracking potential of an android-based rooted smartphone? (Stock rom, Xiaomi Mi 10T Pro). I know using a custom rom is an option, however, Lineage isn't officially supported for this model of phone, and I still value functionality over anything else, so... Unofficial daily drive OS is sub-optimal.
Alternative hardware solutions like PinePhone, although nice in theory, are way too behind the commercial brands in terms of technology and features, so that's a no go.5 -
So I love what Apple is doing with the new Macs, great hardware, streamlined optimization, blistering performance.....great stuff.
But here's the thing. I think I'm gonna get a ThinkPad and just install fedora on it. It's far cheaper and outside of only going up to 16GB of ram it meets all my needs.
But between you and I a big factor in why I'm finding it hard to go Mac is the system settings. Like why is it like that? Why when I click something a separate window opens.....odd.6 -
Hi!
Need to get some of your opinions about computer. I have always been using IBM/Lenovo or HP with Windows as operating system, due to work needs and policies. But, this weekend I purchased a new apple MacBook Air, and I want to know what you think about my choice. It is just for personal use, so I will continue to use my hp with win10 at work (needed for the erp system I'm consulting).
I choose MacBook Air as my personal computer because I think the hardware and chassi is a bit more premium to a pretty low cost, looking on hp or Lenovo with the same class of chassi and build is at least 150% more expensive. Let me know your comment :)2 -
Design in Motion: Real-Time Rendering's Impact on Architecture
Architecture, a discipline that once relied heavily on blueprints, models, and lengthy render times, has undergone a revolutionary transformation in recent years. The advent of real-time rendering technology has fundamentally altered the way architects visualize, present, and interact with their designs. This paradigm shift has not only enhanced the creative process but has also empowered architects to make more informed decisions and create immersive experiences for clients and stakeholders.
Real-time rendering, a technological marvel that harnesses the power of high-performance graphics hardware and advanced software algorithms, allows architects to generate photorealistic visualizations of their designs in a matter of milliseconds. Gone are the days of waiting hours or even days for a single rendering to complete. This acceleration in rendering time has not only expedited the design process but has also encouraged architects to explore multiple design iterations rapidly.
One of the most significant impacts of real-time rendering on architecture is the ability to visualize a design in various lighting conditions and environmental settings. Architects can now instantly switch between daytime and nighttime lighting scenarios, experiment with different materials, and observe how their designs respond to different seasons or weather conditions. This level of dynamic visualization offers insights into how a building's appearance and functionality evolve throughout the day, contributing to more holistic and thoughtful design solutions.
Moreover, real-time rendering has transformed client presentations. Architectural concepts can now be communicated with unprecedented clarity and realism. Clients can virtually walk through spaces, observing intricate details, exploring different angles, and even experiencing the play of light and shadow in real-time. This immersive experience fosters a deeper understanding of the design intent, enabling clients to provide more targeted feedback and make informed decisions.
The impact of real-time rendering on collaboration within architectural teams cannot be overstated. Traditionally, architects and designers would need to wait for a rendering to complete before discussing design changes or improvements. With real-time rendering, team members can make adjustments on the fly, observing the immediate effects of their decisions. This seamless collaboration not only enhances efficiency but also encourages interdisciplinary collaboration as architects, engineers, and other stakeholders can work together in real-time to refine designs.
The integration of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) into the architectural workflow is another transformative aspect of real-time rendering. Architects can now create VR environments that allow clients to step inside their designs and explore every nook and cranny. This not only enhances client engagement but also enables architects to identify potential design flaws or spatial issues that might not be apparent in 2D drawings. AR, on the other hand, overlays digital information onto the physical world, facilitating on-site decision-making and construction supervision.
Real-time rendering's impact extends beyond the design phase. It has proven to be a valuable tool for public engagement and community involvement in architectural projects. By creating virtual walkthroughs of proposed structures, architects can offer the public an opportunity to experience the design before construction begins. This transparency fosters a sense of ownership and allows for constructive feedback, contributing to the development of designs that resonate with the community's needs and aspirations.
The environmental implications of real-time rendering are also noteworthy. The ability to visualize designs in various environmental contexts contributes to more sustainable architecture. Architects can assess how natural light interacts with interior spaces, optimizing energy efficiency and reducing the need for artificial lighting during the day.
In conclusion, real-time rendering has ushered in a new era of architectural design, propelling the industry into a realm of dynamic visualization, immersive experiences, and enhanced collaboration. The ability to witness designs in motion, explore different lighting conditions, and interact with virtual environments has redefined how architects approach their craft. From facilitating client presentations to fostering sustainable design solutions, real-time rendering's impact on architecture is profound and multifaceted. As the technology continues to evolve, architects have an unprecedented opportunity to push the boundaries of creativity, efficiency, and sustainability in the built environment. -
Anybody like to rip up CTF (or similar)? I've honestly never done a CTF before, I'd like to give jt a shot. I'll get my ass handed to me because I'm not back up to par on OpSec yet, but I adapt well and when I get into a nice groove I can make shit happen! (I like to think so, anyways haha!!)
I've been in full on dev mode lately and haven't had any time to Hulk Smash for a while... I went to fire up a new Kali live USB today and I couldn't run through the updates like I always have- they changed sooo much and I was pissed because I didn't have ethernet with me. That'll be another day for sure, but I still have my machine with Manjaro armed to the nutsack and back with the BlackArch rep. I def could use a break from the chaos, and getting my ass handed right to me sounds like an awesome time because learning is my favorite thing next to a possible chance at getting to destroy shit.
It's weird, because I'm sort of a n00b but also at the same time I've had computers ripped apart/jammed in my face since every day since I was 9 and Y2K was about to hit the fan lmao!! My hardware/network/layering knowledge is fuckin mint titties, I just can't code like a fuckin madman on the fly. I don't have a "primary" language, because I've been having to work with little bits of several languages for extended periods of time... I can at least find my way around all the dox without much of an issue and have no issue solving the probs I come across which is neat, but until the day comes where I can fuck a gaping hole through my keyboard on the fly like George Hotz during one of his lazy Sunday OpenCV SLAM/Python code streams all jacked up on Herba Mate hahahahaha!!!!
The dude uses fucking VIM and codes faster than anyone I've ever seen on levels of science/math so challenging I almost shit myself inside out when I catch one!!!! The level of respect I have for all my fellow red pills in here is as high as it gets, and that's one of the best parts about being a code junkie- sometimes ya get to cross paths with beastly, out of this world people that teach you so much without even having to explain shit.
If anyone's down, or maybe has some resources for me to check out so I can get my chops up let's make it happen -
Guys please tell me a good linux distro ? Which provides the most suite suiteable dev env and I can play on all linux stuff there as well? I'm new to linux have tried elementry os didn't liked it was full of bugs.
Have just started installing ubuntu and its setup is crashing on my machine.. I have core i3 dell inspiron don't know if os's setp are causing issue or this laptop's hardware sucks3 -
I don't understand those rants about problems that can be fixed by just googling some keywords..or even the slightly harder ones where you could just tinker with the device for a bit and get closer to a solution/workaround... i mean if it's not a hardware problem then it can clearly have a solution.
my reasons:
1- you use your knowledge for good
2- you learn something new
3- you don't let the tech guys get bothered by small tedious problems -
Dear provider, COULD YOU PLEASE SENT ME YOUR DSL INSTALLATION CODE BEFORE YOU TURN A COMPANYS INTERNET DOWN??? SRSLY this is the biggest bs. No phone no mail since 8am, new hardware won't work without this fkking code.
-
!rant
I don't like how the hardware industry is so far ahead than the software industry. Almost all new hardware invented these days are a massive overkill for any software that is out there.
Qualcomm Snapdragon has 8 Gen 2 chips out but there aren't any android games that need more than Snapdragon 888.
NVIDIA has RTX 4090 out but there aren't any games that need more than RTX 2070 to run with good FPS.
PS5 and Xbox Series X have a very little library of games that can't run on a previous gen console.11 -
I am moving next weekend into my new apartment. Already shopping for network parts :D
Has anyone worked with ubiquiti's UniFI PRO hardware? (Router/switch/ap) -
Disclaimer: I'm surprisingly bad with hardware.
Bonus will come in soon and its time for a new laptop. Had my xps13 since ~2016 and I absolutely loved it - the keyboard is amaaazing.. But the display is broken and as its a touch, its ridiculously expensive to replace so that's not an option..
Want to keep it around 1k$ and mostly care about the keyboard being nice, robust case (not plastic), size (no bigger than 13") and storage (at least 1TB SSD).
Ideally it would have an integrated SD slot and at least 1 USB-A...
Any suggestions? I'm gonna put Linux on it anyway so performance just has to be medium.
Thinking about getting another xps but they got a good bit more expensive and I know there's other devices our there nowadays that check the boxes, like thinkpad for example.
Just looking for some opinions, advice and suggestions.
Thanks in advance1 -
!comforting
TL;DR - I’ve done some thinking about operating systems and sticking to one
Mk
so I, like many of you, have seen far more than my fair share of “X operating system is perfect for it all, so don’t use Y operating system because it’s just awful” posts.
Over this week i’ve really done some thinking and experimenting with multiple devices and OSes and programs for various tasks. People coming from windows over to linux (like myself) tend to diss windows (rightfully so for the most part, but still). I’ve also noticed that the android vs. apple debate can get heated among users.
Listen guys,
iOS has its shortcomings obviously, UI being kinda a big one; but no one can deny that apple shoves some of the nicest hardware into their devices. Yes, this stuff is pricey as hell obviously, but the new macs come with an i9 and quite a bit of memory as well. Apple devices tend to have longer lasting batteries too - i cant count the times where i’ve just turned on my mobile hotspot, and stuck my android in my pocket to use my iphone (its a wifi-only 5s). the applications run nicely on apple hardware.
i couldnt learn even half as much programming as i do on my android though; Termux is a godsend, and im able to run and test scripts right there in the palm of my hand. can’t get that on an iphone.
Some of my favorite game developers only develop for windows; I’m dual booting for that sole reason (warframe and the epic games launcher don’t properly run through wine).
Just boil it down inside for a second; You might have come from a more “user friendly” operating system, to learn on one that is less so - wether you wanted the freedom and wiggle room for customization, or just a more developer friendly working environment (God bless conky and its devs) - so you didn’t have to be locked down into one way of seeing things. Putting a previously used OS down directly violates that thougjt process, and at that point you’re just another windows hater, or arch junkie, or whatever. I think we need to be open to appreciating the pros of every system, even if we almost never use some of them, and we should try not to put down other devs-to-be or csci/sec enthusiasts down because of that either.2 -
migrating servers to new hardware in vmware...
project manager: I don't want to log in to do 15 minutes worth of work on Sunday during the scheduled maintenance window. can you stay late on Friday? I'll have someone shutdown the servers at 515.
so you want me to waste my time to save your time?.... fine.... -
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Work Hours: Mon-Fri: 9:30AM-4:30PM-Sat:10AM-2PMrant kitchen remodeling bathroom remodeling kitchen desinger kitchen cabinet contractors bath remodeling -
Ok, there is one good thing. I've reached 333 +1's. Thank you all guys!
Sooo... a few days ago my Power supply from my home pc died. It was a good one, but I don't know.. it just burned nearly..
Today I've received a new one.
Plugged everything in. PC runs - or not?? WTF! Windows (yeah, at home still Windows ) isn't booting anymore. Hardware changes detected. I think, through the broken Power supply something got damaged.. shit.. and know what - don't have any Backup. Shit. At least some important data is on another hdd, which hopefully is fine. Now I'm trying to rescue the data with another hdd installing a fresh Windows.
Whish me luck!
PS: No, the power supply wasn't from Samsung, even when it exploded nearly :P1 -
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Located at 1856 NE 101st Ave #102, Beaverton, OR 97006, Mark Brightman Handyman Services is your go-to source for all things home improvement in Beaverton and the greater Portland area. Let’s take a closer look at how our services can improve your home and life.
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At Mark Brightman Handyman Services, we are a reliable handyman near me who brings professionalism, attention to detail, and a strong work ethic to every job, no matter how big or small.
Why Choose Mark Brightman Handyman Services?3 -
Any gift recommendations. My birthday comes up in a few days and he asked what I wanted as a birthday gift(gifts are supposed to suprises but being able to choose is good still).
However I cannot ask for electronic gadgets. That knocks a lot of stuff of. The exception is that if something does not make me spend more time on the computer that is allowed. Kinda weird. For example I can ask for a printer or medical equipment like oximeters since that wont make me spend more time on the computer. Both of these examples were given by my father. I could ask for a new printer however we still have a printer but it is currently in the shop since it is not being used and the shops printer broke and is hell to replace since they need chips to verify toners and you need to get those chips separately from what my father told me and the shops printer should be repaired in a few months since lockdown was lifted a few days ago and I won't need to print something since everything is online and they don't need to show student projects yet.
Thia knocks a lot of hardware off since by definition if I am using hardware I still need to code it to do something which is more time on computer which is not allowed. So no fiddling with aurdino or rasberry pie or whatever is the most used hardware kit.
I can buy some course or a book to learn something but I already have problems with consistently learning c# with a good book which will lose value in November and that most topics I would like to learn like computer networking or some new language are practical which is more time on computer which is not allowed.
So the only thing I can buy are some books to enjoy reading for fun or some school books like a science digest book like Together with or the ultra popular maths reference book RD Sharma
So what things should I ask which comply with the rules my father has laid or just skip this thing1