Join devRant
Do all the things like
++ or -- rants, post your own rants, comment on others' rants and build your customized dev avatar
Sign Up
Pipeless API
From the creators of devRant, Pipeless lets you power real-time personalized recommendations and activity feeds using a simple API
Learn More
Search - "portability"
-
We live in a world where portability is more important than usability.
I've got to buy a fucking adapter just to get enough USB ports to use a mouse and keyboard with a monitor, as well as ports for other things like my laptop fan.
It's also becoming evident with the lack of headphone jacks to save that 0.000001" of phone size. It's fucking bullshit that adapters are required to charge phones and listen to music at the same time.11 -
I'm the guy who posted Surface Pro photos recently, just in case you see some similarities.
=========
This, is the Microsoft Designer Bluetooth Mouse.
It is beautiful. Magnificient. Minimalistic. Fast. Accurate.
I first thought it would be my future mouse.
I thought I would use it for years.
I used for an hour, and literally threw it away.
I thought it would be comfortable, since i used cheap logitech mouse which of those were all too high in height.
But, this mouse, is so low in height. It literally puts your hand in the floor.
You, the devRant members, pointed out at my previous rant that it looks, and would be uncomfortable, and I literally said shut up!
Well, sorry about that, I regret my words.
It is piece of beautiful trash.
The click sound is very quiet, the scrolling is very good, but the height of the mouse....
If I keep using this mouse, I would probably get a carpel-tunnel disease(is this correct?).
I guess I should only use this mouse when I need to use it quickly outside, since portability is number one among all mouse in the world.
Next coming, some more Surface pro coding sessions, and Surface pen.
Anything interested about the surface pro? Leave in the comments below!26 -
I do not like the direction laptop vendors are taking.
New laptops tend to feature fewer ports, making the user more dependent on adapters. Similarly to smartphones, this is a detrimental trend initiated by Apple and replicated by the rest of the pack.
As of 2022, many mid-range laptops feature just one USB-A port and one USB-C port, resembling Apple's toxic minimalism. In 2010, mid-class laptops commonly had three or four USB ports. I have even seen an MSi gaming laptop with six USB ports. Now, much of the edges is wasted "clean" space.
Sure, there are USB hubs, but those only work well with low-power devices. When attaching two external hard drives to transfer data between them, they might not be able to spin up due to insufficient power from the USB port or undervoltage caused by the impedance (resistance) of the USB cable between the laptop's USB port and hub. There are USB hubs which can be externally powered, but that means yet another wall adapter one has to carry.
Non-replaceable [shortest-lived component] mean difficult repairs and no more reserve batteries, as well as no extra-sized battery packs. When the battery expires, one might have to waste four hours on a repair shop for a replacement that would have taken a minute on a 2010 laptop.
The SD card slot is being replaced with inferior MicroSD or removed entirely. This is especially bad for photographers and videographers who would frequently plug memory cards into their laptop. SD cards are far more comfortable than MicroSD cards, and no, bulky external adapters that reserve the device's only USB port and protrude can not replace an integrated SD card slot.
Most mid-range laptops in the early 2010s also had a LAN port for immediate interference-free connection. That is now reserved for gaming-class / desknote laptops.
Obviously, components like RAM and storage are far more difficult to upgrade in more modern laptops, or not possible at all if soldered in.
Touch pads increasingly have the buttons underneath the touch surface rather than separate, meaning one has to be careful not to move the mouse while clicking. Otherwise, it could cause an unwanted drag-and-drop gesture. Some touch pads are smart enough to detect when a user intends to click, and lock the movement, but not all. A right-click drag-and-drop gesture might not be possible due to the finger on the button being registered as touch. Clicking with short tapping could be unreliable and sluggish. While one should have external peripherals anyway, one might not always have brought them with. The fallback input device is now even less comfortable.
Some laptop vendors include a sponge sheet that they want users to put between the keyboard and the screen before folding it, "to avoid damaging the screen", even though making it two millimetres thicker could do the same without relying on a sponge sheet. So they want me to carry that bulky thing everywhere around? How about no?
That's the irony. They wanted to make laptops lighter and slimmer, but that made them adapter- and sponge sheet-dependent, defeating the portability purpose.
Sure, the CPU performance has improved. Vendors proudly show off in their advertisements which generation of Intel Core they have this time. As if that is something users especially care about. Hoo-ray, generation 14 is now yet another 5% faster than the previous generation! But what is the benefit of that if I have to rely on annoying adapters to get the same work done that I could formerly do without those adapters?
Microsoft has also copied Apple in demanding internet connection before Windows 11 will set up. The setup screen says "You will need an Internet connection…" - no, technically I would not. What does technically stand in the way of Windows 11 setting up offline? After all, previous Windows versions like Windows 95 could do so 25 years earlier. But also far more recent versions. Thankfully, Linux distributions do not do that.
If "new" and "modern" mean more locked-in and less practical and difficult to repair, I would rather have "old" than "new".12 -
Game Streaming is an absolute waste.
I'm glad to see that quite a lot of people are rightfully skeptical or downright opposed to it. But that didn't stop the major AAA game publishers announcing their own game streaming platforms at E3 this weekend, did it?
I fail to see any unique benefit that can't be solved with traditional hardware (either console or PC)
- Portability? The Nintendo Switch proved that dedicated consoles now have enough power to run great games both at home and on the go.
- Storage? You can get sizable microSD cards for pretty cheap nowadays. So much so that the Switch went back to use flash-based cartridges!
- Library size/price? The problem is even though you're paying a low price for hundreds of games, you don't own them. If any of these companies shut down the platform, all that money you spent is wasted. Plus, this can be solved with backwards compatibility and one-time digital downloads.
- Performance on commodity hardware? This is about the only thing these streaming services have going for it. But unfortunately this only works when you have an Internet connection, so if you have crap Internet or drop off the network, you're screwed. And has it ever occurred to people that maybe playing Doom on your phone is a terrible UX experience and shouldn't be done because it wasn't designed for it?
I just don't get it. Hopefully this whole fad passes soon.19 -
It’s so great to hear Apple is finally officially making the transition to rolling out their own silicon on everything... fucken fabulous. Sure there may be problems at first but this might just get the ball rolling to get more companies todo the same... we need to eliminate the silicon monopolies... ARM and rolling your own is the future... well it always use to be the standard... back in the day, until the whole modularity and lean manufacturing and order off the shelf shit came about .... but finally we have once again come full circle back to where things use to be.... pairing hardware with software fucken beautiful LOVE IT!!!
Sure this will affect portability but .... guess what folks... means more jobs for us... quit being lazy and complaining about having to work..
Love vertical integration!!!!34 -
What's the best laptop for programming?
Not looking for graphics, looking for portability, long lasting battery, good display, SSD13 -
Hello fellow coders can you help me here plz.
I'm really confused whether to buy MACBOOK PRO 13 INCH or SURFACE PRO 4. Both of i5/8gbRam/256ssd specs. Price almost same in India.
My main use is programming ( web apps/ open source) + portability.
Factors I like in macbook pro:
1) unix based
2) best service here in India ( heard from answers on Quora )
3) DURABILITY ( heard from answers on Quora ) ( will last for many years without any glitch).
Factors I like in Surface pro 4:
1) its ultraportability
2) pen & touch
3) better typing experience ( since I code/blog for long hours)
4) native bash support
5) sexier than MBP :P
I really like SP4 over MBP but I'm worried about its durability and service(in India).
What are your thoughts on this guyz?38 -
When you're developing it's very well advised to run your software locally in an environment as much as possible matching the real environment.
So for example, if you're running linux on production then you also run it locally to run your code.
Here's where people need to shut the fuck up:
No, mac is not good for linux development. Not unless portability is already a concern that you have and even then it might be counter productive. So many times when people say this, portability isn't not a concern. What runs on servers is up to them.
If your servers are going to be centos, then you develop with centos. Not with debian, gentoo, ubuntu, maxosx, etc.
Even different linux distros are a headache for portability when it's just to support a few desktops for development so don't think that macosx is going to cut it. It might not be as radical a difference as between windows and linux traditionally is but it's still not good for "linux" development. I don't think people making that statement really know what linux is now how different distributions work.
What you use for your graphical operating system doesn't matter to much but when you run your code then there's a simple solution.
Another thing people need to shut up about. It's not docker, unless you're already in Linux where docker is one of many options such as chroot or lxc.
This question always comes up, how do you developer for linux in windows? No it's not docker it's virtual machine.
It's that simple. You download the ISO for the distro you want and then install it on a VM. What does docker for windows do? It runs a linux VM that runs docker.
This may come as a great shock to developers around the world but it is possible to run linux in a VM and then any linux application your want including docker.
Another option is to shove a box in the corner, install what you need on it, share the file system and have people use that to run their code. It really is that easy.6 -
"Bu...bu..but JAVA SWING and FX are PORTABLE!"
And electrolytes are what plants crave.
I swear half the people I argue with are dinks.
IF YOU HAVE PEOPLE YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR YOU HAVE TO DO WORK PEOPLE WILL HIRE YOU FOR.
Under job listings for javafx: 2 listings within 200 miles of me.
Under job listings for C#/WPF: dozens and dozens of jobs.
Portability doesn't matter if you're broke.
My stomach owes no allegiance to "high fallutin" concepts such as openness, avoiding vendor lock in, or the high ideals of platform independence.
I'll take the microsoft gulag if it pays my bills.
I don't know whats so hard to grasp about this. Some people are completely divorced from reality.
Edit: Hello to all my peeps who I haven't talked with in a while. I hope everything is going swimmingly in your lives. May your beer forever be paid for by your employer and your code bug free!5 -
Which programming languages can create portable programs that can run on every operating system, device, etc. (and are actually intended for that)?
- Java
- Python
- I heard some things about C# maybe…?
- What else?38 -
I really hate PHP frameworks.
I also often write my own frameworks but propriety. I have two decades experience doing without frameworks, writing frameworks and using frameworks.
Virtually every PHP framework I've ever used has causes more headaches than if I had simply written the code.
Let me give you an example. I want a tinyint in my database.
> Unknown column type "tinyint" requested.
Oh, doctrine doesn't support it and wont fix. Doctrine is a library that takes a perfectly good feature rich powerful enough database system and nerfs it to the capabilities of mysql 1.0.0 for portability and because the devs don't actually have the time to create a full ORM library. Sadly it's also the defacto for certain filthy disgusting frameworks whose name I shan't speak.
So I add my own type class. Annoying but what can you do.
I have to try to use it and to do so I have to register it in two places like this (pseudo)...
Types::add(Tinyint::class);
Doctrine::add(Tinyint::class);
Seems simply enough so I run it and see...
> Type tinyint already exists.
So I assume it's doing some magic loading it based on the directory and commend out the Type::add line to see.
> Type to be overwritten tinyint does not exist.
Are you fucking kidding me?
At this point I figure out it must be running twice. It's booting twice. Do I get a stack trace by default from a CLI command? Of course not because who would ever need that?
I take a quick look at parent::boot(). HttpKernel is the standard for Cli Commands?
I notice it has state, uses a protected booted property but I'm curious why it tries to boot so many times. I assume it's user error.
After some fiddling around I get a stack trace but only one boot. How is it possible?
It's not user error, the program flow of the framework is just sub par and it just calls boot all over the place.
I use the state variable and I have to do it in a weird way...
> $booted = $this->booted;parent::boot();if (!$booted) {doStuffOnceThatDependsOnParentBootage();}
A bit awkward but not life and death. I could probably just return but believe or not the parent is doing some crap if already booted. A common ugly practice but one that works is to usually call doSomething and have something only work around the state.
The thing is, doctrine does use TINYINT for bool and it gets all super confused now running commands like updates. It keeps trying to push changes when nothing changed. I'm building my own schema differential system for another project and it doesn't have these problems out of the box. It's not clever enough to handle ambiguous reverse mappings when single types are defined and it should be possible to match the right one or heck both are fine in this case. I'd expect ambiguity to be a problem with reverse engineer, not compare schema to an exact schema.
This is numpty country. Changing TINYINT UNSIGNED to TINYINT UNSIGNED. IT can't even compare two before and after strings.
There's a few other boots I could use but who cares. The internet seems to want to use that boot function. There's also init stages missing. Believe it or not there's a shutdown and reboot for the kernel. It might not be obvious but the Type::add line wants to go not in the boot method but in the top level scope along with the class definition. The top level scope is run only once.
I think people using OOP frameworks forget that there's a scope outside of the object in PHP. It's not ideal but does the trick given the functionality is confined to static only. The register command appears to have it's own check and noop or simply overwrite if the command is issued twice making things more confusing as it was working with register type before to merely alias a type to an existing type so that it could detect it from SQL when reverse engineering.
I start to wonder if I should just use columnDefinition.
It's this. Constantly on a daily basis using these pretentious stuck up frameworks and libraries.
It's not just the palava which in this case is relatively mild compared to some of the headaches that arise. It's that if you use a framework you expect basic things out of the box like oh I don't know support for the byte/char/tinyint/int8 type and a differential command that's able to compare two strings to see if they're different.
Some people might say you're using it wrong. There is such a thing as a learning curve and this one goes down, learning all the things it can't do. It's cripplesauce.12 -
How is it possible that Microsoft Office and Open Office have less portability issues then Microsoft Office on Windows vs. Microsoft Office on Mac? It's supposed to be the same f*king programm developed by the same company! <.<2
-
It's 2022 and mobile web browsers still lack basic export options.
Without root access, the bookmarks, session, history, and possibly saved pages are locked in. There is no way to create an external backup or search them using external tools such as grep.
Sure, it is possible to manually copy and paste individual bookmarks and tabs into a text file. However, obviously, that takes lots of annoying repetitive effort.
Exporting is a basic feature. One might want to clean up the bookmarks or start a new session, but have a snapshot of the previous state so anything needed in future can be retrieved from there.
Without the ability to export these things, it becomes difficult to find web resources one might need in future. Due to the abundance of new incoming Internet posts and videos, the existing ones tend to drown in the search results and become very difficult to find after some time. Or they might be taken down and one might end up spending time searching for something that does not exist anymore. It's better to find out immediately it is no longer available than a futile search.
----
Some mobile web browsers such as Chrome (to Google's credit) thankfully store saved pages as MHTML files into the common Download folder, where they can be backed up and moved elsewhere using a file manager or an external computer. However, other browsers like Kiwi browser and Samsung Internet incorrectly store saved pages into their respective locked directories inside "/data/". Without root access, those files are locked in there and can only be accessed through that one web browser for the lifespan of that one device.
For tabs, there are some services like Firefox Sync. However, in order to create a text file of the opened tabs, one needs an external computer and needs to create an account on the service. For something that is technically possible in one second directly on the phone. The service can also have outages or be discontinued. This is the danger of vendor lock-in: if something is no longer supported, it can lead to data loss.
For Chrome, there is a "remote debugging" feature on the developer tools of the desktop edition that is supposedly able to get a list of the tabs ( https://android.stackexchange.com/q... ). However, I tried it and it did not work. No connection could be established. And it should not be necessary in first place.7 -
Finally found a use for my rpi 2 after more than a year xD
Small testing env for client server scripts and OS portability, later project buy a rpi zero W and try to use it as something probably illegal :/
Feelsgood2 -
markdown is not good enough! the tools aren't there for non-devs and there's no concordance on moving forward *compatibly* for anything other than headers and __possibly__ lists.
md has been around for years and still no consensus on comments, meta data, css, data imports, etc.
i could never in good faith recommend to a non-dev to use markdown, even though every academic and professional writer from legal to journalism should exclusively be using markdown to write and store their documents. the data portability and ease of search, retrieval, collection, distribution, etc of markdown compared to pdf or docx is enormous. markdown is the hex format of text, the perfect layer of data and visual so that the user and the computer can both operate on text as blocks of data rather than weirdly styled paragraphs that need to be reformatted BY HAND for citation-style or journal format, or paper size. FOR EACH SUBMISSION. Academics literally rewrite their 100-page papers to accommodate up to 10 different submission requirements.
They could be clicking MLA vs Chicago and/or using a journal's stylesheet to recompile for its styles.
Today there is some support from zotero et al to take away some of the pain, but it makes ZERO SENSE for writers to have to keep and store and keep up to date, multiple versions of the same document. Git pull does not exist for them. But the worst part is that git isnt the solution to their problem. They need a compiler more than they need version control. But they also desperately need vcs. They ALL literally have a million files named "dumdum.dumFINAL-3084_lastversion \2020, this one.dum".
They dont have git or anything like it, because they need a line-by-line solution like markdown for git to become effective.
All of writing is basically mired in the fact that people cant even roll up their paragraphs and see what the fuck it is theyre saying. Most writing reads like a long scroll through some nonsense that goes nowhere. Like this rant. but the point is that markdown and line-by line editing actually produces more logically sound writing. You start to think in terms of defining ideas in blocks, ... like code.9 -
I was reading a few interesting postgreSQL solutions to constrain polymorphic tables (anti-pattern, I know) when something caught my eye.
Some solutions were looked down upon (or looked favorably upon) based on their portability to other rdbms like MySQL.
Is that really so important? I get it, if somehow you decide to change from one to the other for some god-forsaken reason it will make the switch easier. But really, how often will that happen?
I feel there is a tendency to just avoid using SQL beyond the basics.5 -
So, i'm trying to get linkr (a pretty cool short link service) to work in a docker container since 4 hours now to host it on my server. There is no official container because it needs a working database connection and stuff during installation which can only be done via console and (for whatever reason I couldn't find out yet) need to be done while building the container. The problem is, I can't connect it to the database while building the container so there is no database during installation to create tables and stuff and the build will fail. ARGH.
Why the hell would you do this????? Theyre actually saying in their readme there is no dockerfile because the config options are specific to your configuration...?!?!
The thing is entirely written in python, so reading and parsing configfiles on the fly should not really be a problem.
Of course I could ssh into the container and run the installation script but that's not the point.
Docker is not about being lazy.
It's about portability.
Maybe I don't want to bloat my server with your 39579372639 npm dependencies? Or I don't want to install a freakin apache, because I have every other site on nginx and therefore wouldn't work with apache.
AAAAAAAARRRRRRGGHHGGGGG
in the end, I'm probably going to modify the thing to install tables when running the container and giving the first user admin rights instead of prompting to enter credentials for a new admin user.
And yet I didn't even speak python. -
Random thoughts on more out of the box tools/environments.
Subject: Pharo
Some time ago I had shown one of my coworkers about Pharo and he quickly got the main idea behind it but mentioned how he didn't like the idea of leaving behind his text editor to deal with source code.
Some time last week I showed the dude some cool 3d animations you can do with Pharo while simultaneously manipulating the code to change them in real time. Now that caught his attention particularly and he decided he wanted to know more about the language but in particular the benefits of fucking around with an image based environment rather than a file based.
Both of us reached the conclusion that image based makes file based dev enviroments seem quaint in comparison, but estimated that it was nothing more than a sentiment rather than a fact.
We then considered what could be the advantage/disadvantages of such environments but I couldn't come up with anything other than the system not having something like Vim or VS Code or whatever which people love, but that it makes up for it with some of the craziest IDE tools I had ever seen. Plugins in this case act like source code repos that you can download and activate into your workflow in what feels something similar to VS Code being extended via plugins written in JS, and since the GUI is maleable as it is(because everything is basically just subsets of morp h windows) then extending functionality becomes so intuitive that its funny
Whereas with Emacs(for example) you have to really grind your gears with Elisp or Vimscript in Vim etc etc, with Pharo your plugin system is basicall you just adding classes that will convert your OS looking IDE into something else.
Because of how light the vm machine is, portability is a non issue, and passing pharo programs arround is not like installing Java in which you need the JVM.
Source code versioning, very important, already integrated into every live environment and can be extended to do pushes through simple key bindings with no hassle.
I dunno, I just feel that the tool is too good to be true. I keep trying to push limits into it but thus far I have found: data visualization and image modeling to work fine, web development with Teapot to be a cakewalk and work fine, therr are even packages for Arduino development.
I think its biggest con would be the image based system, but would really need to look into how this is bad by any reason other than "aww man I want vim!" since apparently some psychos already made Emacs and VS code packages for interfacing with Pharo source trees.
Embedded is certainly out of the question for any real project since its garbage collected and not the most performant cookie in the jar.
For Data science I can see some future, seems just as intuitive and interesting as a Jupyter Notebook actually, but the process can't and will not be the same since I still don't know of a way to save playground snippets unless you literally create classes for it, in which case every model you build gets saved inside of an object, sounds possible but, strange since it is not a the most common workflow in jupyter.
Some of the environment is sometimes glitchy, but it does have continuos development and have not found many hassles.
There is a biased factor from my side: I seem to be wired to understand the syntax and simple object model better than in other languages. To me this feels natural as if I was just writing ideas rather than code, mostly because I feel that there really ain't much in terms of syntax, the language gets out of my way and the IDE feels like the most intuitive environment in the world to me. I can see why some people would find it REALLY weird of counterintuitive tho.
Guess I really am a simple dude. -
just a quick rant to express my HATRED towards java.
Today I played minecraft a bit to release some stree (plis dont tell anybody xD)
FUCKING HELL
1) Java boasts with its portability. Except it doesnt even have a proper runtime for linux
2) ITS SUPER SLOW
3) FAHCKING HELL it's so broken when you start with custom hardware (might be the fault of Gl tho)
^^ those points dont list the horrors of coding in it. I have already accomplished some coding challenges in it, and I know it to be an epitome of misery14 -
Either get some form of 'stable' release of my current gang engine or just grow a pair and finally teach myself C and go back to the drawing board and build my engine with complete portability.8
-
Us users would never accept data lock-in for photos and videos from the camera app on smartphones.
Yet, for some reason, we accepted data lock-in for saved pages on mobile web browsers.5 -
Should I get ultrabook or gaming laptop
Any suggestions
Never played much games but gaming laptop will give me overall a better hardware
Or should I choose portability over it
Experienced people please help
Do you literally feel much diff carrying gaming laptop compared to ultrabook on day to day basis16 -
Not only does every app need to have an export option, but new exports must create new, time-stamped files rather than overwriting an existing export!
A counter-example is "Battery Monitor Widget" by CCC71 or 3C71. That app creates a file in the main user directory, named "bmw_history.txt" (no relation to the car manufacturer).
When a new export is created, the existing bmw_history.txt is overwritten. This could lead to data loss if the user is unaware of this behaviour.
The developer thought of creating an export ability, but messed up at the file naming process.
Mandatory time-stamped user data exports for every app would not be so bad. This makes sure no developer would forget about it. GDPR gave us data portability for social media platforms. Let's do it for apps too. (Sorry, Samsung Internet, you can no longer lock in saved pages. Your users are sick of it.) -
One of our testers got the brilliant idea of switching the desktop environment to KDE on some debian. Response of our Qt-application: crash! - "Cannot mix incompatible Qt library"
Yeah. And we only want to support five distros in at least three different versions. -
Question for the dev community about best laptops. I'm coming from developing on frankly outrageous desktop machines for the past two years (8700K with 32 gigs of memory and Intel Optane SSDs). I'm starting a new job soon where I'll need to buy a laptop to use at work for portability reasons. Company is giving me money to pay for it, budget is $2,000. What's a fairly portable laptop that isn't going to feel really slow switching over from crazy desktop builds like that?3