Boss: I need to demo our product but it looks smaller on my laptop.
Me: That is because you have a 1920x1080 monitor and your laptop is 1280x800
Boss: Is that something you can fix?
Me: No you will need a new laptop, but the company has a sales laptop with that resolution.
Boss: No just get the company credit card and buy me one today!
*Bosses son hears*
Bosses Son: Here take the sales laptop
Boss: Will that be quick enough
Bosses Son: It has a 8 core i7 Processor, 16GB ram and a dedicated GPU
Boss: *looks at me confused*
Me: Your demoing a web browser, that will be more then ok. But were using chrome so 16GB of ram will be pushing it.
*me and bosses son laughs*
Boss: Can we upgrade it?

After listening to two of our senior devs play ping pong with a new member of our team for TWO DAYS!
DevA: "Try this.."
Junior: "Didn't work"
DevB: "Try that .."
Junior: "Still not working"

I ask..
Me:"What is the problem?"
Few ums...uhs..awkward seconds of silence

Junior: "App is really slow. Takes several seconds to launch and searching either crashes or takes a really long time."
DevA: "We've isolated the issue with Entity Framework. That application was written back when we used VS2010. Since that application isn't used very often, no one has had to update it since."
DevB: "Weird part is the app takes up over 3 gigs of ram. Its obviously a caching issue. We might have to open up a ticket with Microsoft."
Me: "Or remove EF and use ADO."
DevB: "That would be way too much work. The app is supposed to be fully deprecated and replaced this year."
Me: "Three of you for the past two days seems like a lot of work. If EF is the problem, you remove EF."
DevA: "The solution is way too complicated for that. There are 5 projects and 3 of those have circular dependencies. Its a mess."
DevB: "No fracking kidding...if it were written correctly the first time. There aren't even any fracking tests."
Me:"Pretty sure there are only two tables involved, maybe 3 stored procedures. A simple CRUD app like this should be fairly straight forward."
DevB: "Can't re-write the application, company won't allow it. A redesign of this magnitute could take months. If we can't fix the LINQ query, we'll going to have the DBAs change the structures to make the application faster. I don't see any other way."

Holy frack...he didn't just say that.

Over my lunch hour, I strip down the WPF application to the basics (too much to write about, but the included projects only had one or two files), and created an integration test for refactoring the data access to use ADO. After all the tests and EF removed, the app starts up instantly and searches are also instant. Didn't click through all the UI, but the basics worked.

Sat with Junior, pointed out my changes (the 'why' behind the 'what') ...and he how he could write unit tests around the ViewModel behavior in the UI (and making any changes to the data access as needed).

Today's standup:
Junior: "Employee app is fixed. Had some help removing Entity Framework and how it starts up fast and and searches are instant. Going to write unit tests today to verify the UI behaivor. I'll be able to deploy the application tomorrow."
DevA: "What?! No way! You did all that yesterday?"
Me: "I removed the Entity Framework over my lunch hour. Like I said, its basic CRUD and mostly in stored procedures. All the data points are covered by integration tests, but didn't have time for the unit tests. It's likely I broke some UI behavior, but the unit tests should catch those."
DevB: "I was going to do that today. I knew taking out Entity Framework wouldn't be a big deal."

Holy fracking frack. You fracking lying SOB. Deeeep breath...ahhh...thanks devRant. Flame thrower event diverted.

More sysadmin focused but y’all get this stuff and I need a rant.

TLDR: Got the wrong internship.

Start working as a sysadmin/dev intern/man-of-many-hats at a small finance company (I’m still in school). Day 1: “Oh new IT guy? Just grab a PC from an empty cubicle and here’s a flash drive with Fedora, go ahead and manually install your operating system. Oh shit also your desktop has 2g of ram, a core2 duo, and we scavenged your hard drive for another dev so just go find one in the server room. And also your monitor is broken so just take one from another cubicle.”

Am shown our server room and see that someone is storing random personal shit in there (golf clubs propped against the server racks with heads mixed into the cabling, etc.). Ask why the golf clubs etc. are mixed in with the cabling and server racks and am given the silent treatment. Learn later that my boss is the owners son, and he is storing his personal stuff in our server room.

Do desktop support for end users. Another manager asks for her employees to receive copies of office 2010 (they’re running 2003 an 2007). Ask boss about licensing plans in place and upgrade schedules, he says he’ll get back to me. I explain to other manager we are working on a licensing scheme and I will keep her informed.

Next day other manager tells me (*the intern*) that she spoke with a rich business friend whose company uses fake/cracked license keys and we should do the same to keep costs down. I nod and smile. IT manager tells me we have no upgrade schedule or licensing agreement. I suggest purchasing an Office 365 subscription. Boss says $150 a year per employee is too expensive (Company pulls good money, has ~25 employees, owner is just cheap) I suggest freeware alternatives. Other manager refuses to use anything other than office 2010 as that is what she is familiar with. Boss refuses to spend any money on license keys. Learn other manager is owners wife and mother of my boss. Stalemate. No upgrades happen.

Company is running an active directory Windows Server 2003 instance that needs upgrading. I suggest 2012R2. Boss says “sure”. I ask how he will purchase the license key and he tells me he won’t.

I suggest running an Ubuntu server with LDAP functionality instead with the understanding that this will add IT employee hours for maintenance. Bosses eyes glaze over at the mention of Linux. The upgrade is put off.

Start cleaning out server room of the personal junk, labeling server racks and cables, and creating a network map. Boss asks what I’m doing. I show him the organized side of the server room and he says “okay but don’t do any more”.

... *sigh* ...

yesterday my boss called me to his office.
(him) - Please close the door
(me thinking) - My God, this is gonna be serious. He never closes his doors
(him) - It's a common practice here that we buy a new laptop for new colleges. What kind of laptop do you have?
(me relieved and excited) - Well it's 4 years old shit, 8 Gb of RAM, slow
(him) - Great we'll buy you this i7, big SSD, 32 Gb of RAM + new monitor, mouse and keyboard.

I was excited as fuck.

Until he sent me what he bought. It's much worse laptop than that I have 😑 Only thing that is better is it has 16 Gb of RAM.
I guess I'll just take that RAM off it and put it in my machine (if it is DDR3, God please may it be DDR3)

Storytime
A story about an Android TVbox which decided to become an iPad

Several years ago we've bought an android tv-box. 

It served me and my family well for several years.

Specs are not that important in this story, but there they are:

Android 4.4 
1GB RAM
Amlogic quadcore 1.4HGz
8GB memory.

This device served us well - online TV, browsing, music, file sharing and so on. But recently cheap Chinese memory deciteed to take a break and damaged ROM. Because of that device won't boot. The only option was to take it apart and "short circuit" certain legs on memory chip and make it boot from SD card and install new firmware. After such operations tv-box worked well again. 

Hoverer, memory glitched again and again and this algorithm was repeated for several months.

But that is not what is this story about.

One day memory went completely crazy and there was no way to install new firmware on it. It just hanged on install. (BTW, it was official firmware for this device)

But after countless attempts it finally worked! It installed the firmware and booted into launcher and connected to WiFi! 

But now comes the most interesting part. 

It was not android anymore.

It decided to became an iPad.

My dad logged in to his Google account via tv-box and got mail that someboby connected from our IP via iPad (we don't have an iPad) and using safari browser! Stock browser is not safari browser.....

"Ok, nvm, crazy glitch." - we thought.

But preinstalled play marked wont launch. Because he told us, that we're trying to connect from iPad.

And Google chrome page suggested to download chrome for iPad

And everything was acting like it is an iPad.

OK, downloaded iTunes, why not??? ._.

Tried to install elixir for android via apk from flash, but then memory glitched one more time, everything went black and tv-box had damaged ROM again...

After that we decided to not torment it anymore...

That's it. Poor Android TVbox that all his life dreamed to become an iPad. Rest in peace.

First day of work. I would think that the company would have prepared a bloody workstation for me but hey, didn't think much of it. Only spent about 15 fucking minutes finding the right computer to give me.

Next, I had to open visual studio 2013 to set up (I meditated the night before for this). It then gave the usual "This may take a few minutes" bullshit message. That message appeared at 0900. It is now 0930. 30 BLOODY FUCKING MINUTES!! At the 15th minute mark, I decided to check the computer's properties, wondering why it was taking its sweet ass time. I couldn't believe my bloody, fucking, god-given eyes. 4GB OF FUCKING RAM INSTALLED ON A FUCKING 32-BIT WIN7 OS! AND ONLY 2.99GB IS USABLE!! HOW DO THEY EXPECT ME TO DEVELOP WITH THAAAAAT???? CHROME TAKES UP LIKE ALL OF THAT!! &#;?@,×&@@&*×,×&;÷*÷, EID MWMALWMDNLWKSNSKSKDKKEMSKAKASLSMDBDNSNMSM

I SWEAR IF I DONT GET A CHANGE IN COMPUTERS, I WILL PUNCH A MOTHERFUCKING BITCH!

The tech stack at my current gig is the worst shit I’ve ever dealt with...

I can’t fucking stand programs, especially browser based programs, to open new windows. New tab, okay sure, ideally I just want the current tab I’m on to update when I click on a link.

Ticketing system: Autotask
Fucking opens up with a crappy piss poor sorting method and no proper filtering for ticket views. Nope you have to go create a fucking dashboard to parse/filter the shit you want to see. So I either have to go create a metric-arse tonne of custom ticket views and switch between them or just use the default turdburger view. Add to that that when I click on a ticket, it opens another fucking window with the ticket information. If I want to do time entry, it just feels some primal need to open another fucking window!!! Then even if I mark the ticket complete it just minimizes the goddamn second ticket window. So my jankbox-supreme PC that my company provided gets to strugglepuff along trying to keep 10 million chrome windows open. Yeah, sure 6GB of ram is great for IT work, especially when using hot steaming piles of trashjuice software!

I have to manually close these windows regularly throughout the day or the system just shits the bed and halts.

RMM tool: Continuum
This fucker takes the goddamn soggy waffle award for being utterly fucking useless. Same problem with the windows as autotask except this special snowflake likes to open a login prompt as a full-fuck-mothering-new window when we need to open a LMI rescue session!!! I need to enter a username and a password. That’s it! I don’t need a full screen window to enter credentials! FUCK!!! Btw the LMI tools only work like 70% of the time and drag ass compared to literally every other remote support tool I’ve ever used. I’ve found that it’s sometimes just faster to walk someone through enabling RDP on their system then remoting in from another system where LMI didn’t decide to be fully suicidal and just kill itself.

Our fucking chief asshat and sergeant fucknuts mcdoogal can’t fucking setup anything so the antivirus software is pushed to all client systems but everything is just set to the default site settings. Absolutely zero care or thought or effort was put forth and these gorilla spunk drinking, rimjob jockey motherfuckers sell this as a managed AntiVirus.

We use a shitty password manager than no one besides I use because there is a fully unencrypted oneNote notebook that everyone uses because fuck security right? “Sometimes it’s just faster to have the passwords at the ready without having to log into the password manager.” Chief Asshat in my first week on the job.

Not to mention that windows server is unlicensed in almost every client environment, the domain admin password is same across multiple client sites, is the same password to log into firewalls, and office 365 environments!!!

I’ve brought up tons of ways to fix these problems, but they have their heads so far up their own asses getting high on undeserved smugness since “they have been in business for almost ten years”. Like, Whoop Dee MotherFucking Doo! You have only been lucky to skate by with this dumpster fire you call a software stack, you could probably fill 10 olympic sized swimming pools to the brim with the logarrhea that flows from your gullets not only to us but also to your customers, and you won’t implement anything that is good for you, your company, or your poor clients because you take ten minutes to try and understand something new.

I’m fucking livid because I’m stuck in a position where I can’t just quit and work on my business full time. I’m married and have a 6m old baby. Between both my wife and I working we barely make ends meet and there’s absolutely zero reason that I couldn’t be providing better service to customers without having to lie through my teeth to them and I could easily support my family and be about 264826290461% happier!

But because we make so little, I can’t scrap together enough money to get Terranimbus (my startup) bootstrapped. We have zero expendable/savable income each month and it’s killing my soul. It’s so fucking frustrating knowing that a little time and some capital is all that stands between a better life for my family and I and being able to provide a better overall service out there over these kinds of shady as fuck knob gobblers.

Okay lets write this before i go mad...

I'm one of those guys who says "use the os which suits you the most, or you're most familiar with", and i'v always been a windows guy, didn't really have any reason to use linux, because for school stuff, or programming (java and android and c) windows was great enough...

BUT MOTHERF@CKERS at microsoft, i'v had enough...
First my handheld computer goes nuts, because windows is eating 80% of processor, and if i fix it, then some other kind of windows related thing eats up that much, and you know what? I've been okay with that, because thats only a handheld computer, but boy, didn't my main computer start to do the same?!?
I cannot do anything, basically i start something trivial up (by trivial i mean trivial, like idk, a texteditor not even a browser, or an ide or anything that would take a bit of more ram) and my computer cant do shit....

I'm so mad.... Currently installing elemantary os... F@ck this shit i'm out...

(And lets not forget the hours of 'updates' which dont do shit....)

Google chrome

Plz come on

Just take the whole c drive for ur cache and stuff...

Dont take my whole ram

I like memory hungry desktop applications.

I do not like sluggish desktop applications.

Allow me to explain (although, this may already be obvious to quite a few of you)

Memory usage is stigmatized quite a lot today, and for good reason. Not only is it an indication of poor optimization, but not too many years ago, memory was a much more scarce resource.

And something that started as a joke in that era is true in this era: free memory is wasted memory. You may argue, correctly, that free memory is not wasted; it is reserved for future potential tasks. However, if you have 16GB of free memory and don't have any plans to begin rendering a 3D animation anytime soon, that memory is wasted.

Linux understands this. Linux actually has three States for memory to be in: used, free, and available. Used and free memory are the usual. However, Linux automatically caches files that you use and places them in ram as "available" memory. Available memory can be used at any time by programs, simply dumping out whatever was previously occupying the memory.

And as you well know, ram is much faster than even an SSD. Programs which are memory heavy COULD (< important) be holding things in memory rather than having them sit on the HDD, waiting to be slowly retrieved. I much rather a web browser take up 4 GB of RAM than sit around waiting for it to read the caches image off my had drive.

Now, allow me to reiterate: unoptimized programs still piss me off. There's no need for that electron-based webcam image capture app to take three gigs of memory upon launch. But I love it when programs use the hardware I spent money on to run smoother.

Don't hate a program simply because it's at the top of task manager.

- If I buy x amount of ram | hard drive space | cpu power I will never need more.
- No need for version control | Tests. This is a small project
- git commit -m "changes" (its a small change. I will remember why I did it)
- It is too obvious that I put a lot of personal time in this so my boss will definitely notice!
- Why comment this simple method? Anyone should know what it does. Especially me!
- "this should never happen"
- This call can't be from work. Everyone knows I am on vacation.
- I will back up next week. It's not like it is going to crush today.
- It’s 11:30 already? I will work on this for only a half hour more and then I will definitely go to bed!
- This project will take x amount of time!

I have a whatsapp group with my friends, none of which are techies. A while ago one of them was looking for a phone to buy, so he started looking at models, specs and all that, but got pretty confused and asked a pretty well-informed question to the group:

"Guys, what is that quad core thing?
And what is a RAM? Is it something like the processor of the phone or what? "

OK, pretty typical stuff up until this point. The guy knows nothing about this sort of things, I wouldn't criticize him or insult him or anything like that. No, that's not the problem. The problem is the person that responded to him. This... This melted my brain so much I will never forget:

"Don't worry about that, you only have to look at how many gigahertz does the processor run at. Don't worry about the number of cores or ram. The GHz are the result of the amount of ram and cores, so the more the gigahertz, the better the phone."

PD: "Also take a look at how many megapixels does the camera have if you want to take photos".

Some people just talk out of their ass and pretend like they're experts on any topic they've read about for 5 minutes on the Internet

Gets run over by truck. Laptop in peaces. Insurrance needed to be sure it was actually broken. Sends laptop to a repair center. They tell me its broken. Repair center asks if I want my laptop back. I said: yes pls. Get laptop back. RAM stolen SSD stolen. Reee! They forgot to send it back..... I mean, you did not have to take out those parts to see it i broken.

This rant is particularly directed at web designers, front-end developers. If you match that, please do take a few minutes to read it, and read it once again.

Web 2.0. It's something that I hate. Particularly because the directive amongst webdesigners seems to be "client has plenty of resources anyway, and if they don't, they'll buy more anyway". I'd like to debunk that with an analogy that I've been thinking about for a while.

I've got one server in my home, with 8GB of RAM, 4 cores and ~4TB of storage. On it I'm running Proxmox, which is currently using about 4GB of RAM for about a dozen VM's and LXC containers. The VM's take the most RAM by far, while the LXC's are just glorified chroots (which nonetheless I find very intriguing due to their ability to run unprivileged). Average LXC takes just 60MB RAM, the amount for an init, the shell and the service(s) running in this LXC. Just like a chroot, but better.

On that host I expect to be able to run about 20-30 guests at this rate. On 4 cores and 8GB RAM. More extensive migration to LXC will improve this number over time. However, I'd like to go further. Once I've been able to build a Linux which was just a kernel and busybox, backed by the musl C library. The thing consumed only 13MB of RAM, which was a VM with its whole 13MB of RAM consumption being dedicated entirely to the kernel. I could probably optimize it further with modularization, but at the time I didn't due to its experimental nature. On a chroot, the kernel of the host is used, meaning that said setup in a chroot would border near the kB's of RAM consumption. The busybox shell would be its most important RAM consumer, which is negligible.

I don't want to settle with 20-30 VM's. I want to settle with hundreds or even thousands of LXC's on 8GB of RAM, as I've seen first-hand with my own builds that it's possible. That's something that's very important in webdesign. Browsers aren't all that different. More often than not, your website will share its resources with about 50-100 other tabs, because users forget to close their old tabs, are power users, looking things up on Stack Overflow, or whatever. Therefore that 8GB of RAM now reduces itself to about 80MB only. And then you've got modern web browsers which allocate their own process for each tab (at a certain amount, it seems to be limited at about 20-30 processes, but still).. and all of its memory required to render yours is duplicated into your designated 80MB. Let's say that 10MB is available for the website at most. This is a very liberal amount for a webserver to deal with per request, so let's stick with that, although in reality it'd probably be less.

10MB, the available RAM for the website you're trying to show. Of course, the total RAM of the user is comparatively huge, but your own chunk is much smaller than that. Optimization is key. Does your website really need that amount? In third-world countries where the internet bandwidth is still in the order of kB/s, 10MB is *very* liberal. Back in 2014 when I got into technology and webdesign, there was this rule of thumb that 7 seconds is usually when visitors click away. That'd translate into.. let's say, 10kB/s for third-world countries? 7 seconds makes that 70kB of available network bandwidth.

Web 2.0, taking 30+ seconds to load a web page, even on a broadband connection? Totally ridiculous. Make your website as fast as it can be, after all you're playing along with 50-100 other tabs. The faster, the better. The more lightweight, the better. If at all possible, please pursue this goal and make the Web a better place. Efficiency matters.

What an absolute fucking disaster of a day. Strap in, folks; it's time for a bumpy ride!

I got a whole hour of work done today. The first hour of my morning because I went to work a bit early. Then people started complaining about Jenkins jobs failing on that one Jenkins server our team has been wanting to decom for two years but management won't let us force people to move to new servers. It's a single server with over four thousand projects, some of which run massive data processing jobs that last DAYS. The server was originally set up by people who have since quit, of course, and left it behind for my team to adopt with zero documentation.

Anyway, the 500GB disk is 100% full. The memory (all 64GB of it) is fully consumed by stuck jobs. We can't track down large old files to delete because du chokes on the workspace folder with thousands of subfolders with no Ram to spare. We decide to basically take a hacksaw to it, deleting the workspace for every job not currently in progress. This of course fucked up some really poorly-designed pipelines that relied on workspaces persisting between jobs, so we had to deal with complaints about that as well.

So we get the Jenkins server up and running again just in time for AWS to have a major incident affecting EC2 instance provisioning in our primary region. People keep bugging me to fix it, I keep telling them that it's Amazon's problem to solve, they wait a few minutes and ask me to fix it again. Emails flying back and forth until that was done.

Lunch time already. But the fun isn't over yet!

I get back to my desk to find out that new hires or people who got new Mac laptops recently can't even install our toolchain, because management has started handing out M1 Macs without telling us and all our tools are compiled solely for x86_64. That took some troubleshooting to even figure out what the problem was because the only error people got from homebrew was that the formula was empty when it clearly wasn't.

After figuring out that problem (but not fully solving it yet), one team starts complaining to us about a Github problem because we manage the github org. Except it's not a github problem and I already knew this because they are a Problem Team that uses some technical authoring software with Git integration but they only have even the barest understanding of what Git actually does. Turns out it's a Git problem. An update for Git was pushed out recently that patches a big bad vulnerability and the way it was patched causes problems because they're using Git wrong (multiple users accessing the same local repo on a samba share). It's a huge vulnerability so my entire conversation with them went sort of like:

"Please don't."
"We have to."
"Fine, here's a workaround, this will allow arbitrary code execution by anyone with physical or virtual access to this computer that you have sitting in an unlocked office somewhere."
"How do I run a Git command I don't use Git."

So that dealt with, I start taking a look at our toolchain, trying to figure out if I can easily just cross-compile it to arm64 for the M1 macbooks or if it will be a more involved fix. And I find all kinds of horrendous shit left behind by the people who wrote the tools that, naturally, they left for us to adopt when they quit over a year ago. I'm talking entire functions in a tool used by hundreds of people that were put in as a joke, poorly documented functions I am still trying to puzzle out, and exactly zero comments in the code and abbreviated function names like "gars", "snh", and "jgajawwawstai".

While I'm looking into that, the person from our team who is responsible for incident communication finally gets the AWS EC2 provisioning issue reported to IT Operations, who sent out an alert to affected users that should have gone out hours earlier.

Meanwhile, according to the health dashboard in AWS, the issue had already been resolved three hours before the communication went out and the ticket remains open at this moment, as far as I know.

Hello devRant, a question for you.

I'm looking to redisign/setup my server 'infrastructure'.

It'll exist out of:
7 vps's (6+gb ram/500gb+/100mbs up/down per vps)
2 dedicated servers running as virtualization servers. (16gb/4tb/1gbit up/down and another one but let's leave that one out for now because it's gonna take a shit ton of time to solve that clusterfuck)

One server will function as an entry point for all websites I run, multiple database servers and multiple backup ones.

Any advices/tips/ideas?

Just a very serious hobby thing :)

So, today for my SO's father who is already over 70 and wants to try Linux. However, he doesn't want Linux on his main PC for now, rather on the old one so that he can take his time to get familiar, which is a reasonable plan.

But holy crap, what a machine! Intel Core2 Duo 4400, 2 GB DDR2(!) RAM, 250 GB IDE(!) HDD, DVD RW drive. Graphics, sound and LAN integrated on the mobo chipset. It's half a miracle that it doesn't run on steam. The machine had been delivered with Vista and has always been painfully slow.

It doesn't even support booting from USB, but I had prepared a DVD just in case. Surprise: it booted from DVD without issues and with full HW support!

Partitioned and installed, deleted Vista in the process (felt good). I went with the full blown Mint 20 Cinnamon edition because XFCE isn't as beautiful. Also, having XFCE now and then Cinnamon looking different on the other PC would be confusing.

Installation took some time, but worked. Cinnamon's RAM usage is at 750 MB idle, and at 1.1 GB with Firefox started. Once the PC is booted, it runs pretty OK with reduced swappiness and noatime on all file systems, plus unnecessary startup applications disabled. Updates took long, but ran through successfully. Installed LibreOffice and some small games, Firefox got uBlock Origin, Youtube worked OOTB.

That PC somehow had escaped disposal several times - and now has a proper OS for the first time in its miserable existence. It runs so much better than it ever has. Just wow, a "big" Linux desktop from 2020 blows a contemporary Vista out of the water on such an old machine!

Dear fuckface,
Fuck you and your Electron gobbling up RAM like it's free food at a all-you-can-eat buffet. It's not. Please take your Electron and fuck the fuck off from my computer.
Sincerely, with a double middle finger and double middle toes,
PTH

So recently I did a lot of research into the internals of Computers and CPUs.
And i'd like to share a result of mine.

First of all, take some time to look at the code down below. You see two assembler codes and two command lines.

The Assembler code is designed to test how the instructions "enter" and "leave" compare to manually doing what they are shortened to.

Enter and leave create a new Stackframe: this means, that they create a new temporary stack. The stack is where local variables are put to by the compiler. On the right side, you can see how I create my own stack by using

push rbp
mov rbp, rsp
sub rsp, 0

(I won't get into details behind why that works).

Okay. Why is this even relevant?
Well: there is the assumption that enter and leave are very slow. This is due to raw numbers:
In some paper I saw ( I couldn't find the link, i'm sorry), enter was said to use up 12 CPU cycles, while the manual stacking would require 3 (push + mov + sub => 1 + 1 + 1).

When I compile an empty function, I get pretty much what you'd expect just from the raw numbers of CPU cycles.

HOWEVER, then I add the dummy code in the middle:

mov eax, 123
add eax, 123543
mov ebx, 234
div ebx

and magically - both sides have the same result.

Why????

For one thing, there is CPU prefetching. This is the CPU loading in ram before its done executing the current instruction (this is how anti-debugger code works, btw. Might make another rant on that). Then there is the fact that the CPU usually starts work on the next instruction while the current instruction is processing IFF the register currently involved isnt involved in the next instruction (that would cause a lot of synchronisation problems). Now notice, that the CPU can't do any of that when manually entering and leaving. It can only start doing the mov eax, 1234 while performing the sub rsp, 0.

----------------

NOW: notice that the code on the right didn't take any precautions like making sure that the stack is big enough. If you sub too much stack at once, the stack will be exhausted, thats what we call a stack overflow. enter implements checks for that, and emits an interrupt if there is a SO (take this with a grain of salt, I couldn't find a resource backing this up). There are another type of checks I don't fully get (stack level checks) so I'd rather not make a fool of myself by writing about them.

Because of all those reasons I think that compilers should start using enter and leave again.

========

This post showed very well that bare numbers can often mislead.

I've never used Windows in my day-to-day life. No kidding.
When I got my father's first computer, I used an old distribution called BBC Linux. I didn't have any computer knowledge, it was my first contact with a computer, so I went to a friend's house and asked for a CD to install on my computer. I don't know if this friend ended up making a "gotcha" and thought I'd give up, but I just read the manuals and fell in love. That was year 2000.
Then I used Conectiva Linux, then I went to Red Hat 9, then Slackware, then in 2007 I started using Solaris. And I stayed on Solaris (Solaris 10, Solaris Nevada and OpenSolaris) until 2011.
In 2011 I bought a Mac. I stayed at Apple until 2020, when I couldn't stand Apple forcing me to buy new computers (I still don't understand how a 2011 iMac, i5 (4 Hyper Thread cores) with 16GB of RAM, 1TB SSD only runs up to High Sierra).
Then I bought a Dell. It came with Windows 10, the first thing I did was install WSL2. I could not stand it, the system is bad, sorry. I installed OpenSuse and have been using it for two years.

It's just that every day someone tells me "how can you use this"? "There is no alternative to Windows, do you want to be different?"

I know that my story was the reverse of the "mainstream", so I'm going to talk about my vision of Windows, that in my brain it is actually the "alternative".

- Having a file explorer without "tabs" in 2022 is unthinkable for me.
- I love terminal. And the Windows terminal is very limited. "ps ... | awk ... | xargs ..." is a must for me. "find ./ -name '...' -exec ..."... these things on Windows are totally "different" and have the "powershell way" while all other operating systems keep the same form. And cygwin is not an option. As Wine for serious work is also not.
- Dragging a file into the terminal, and having it write its path, is so natural, that when Windows didn't do it, I was dismayed.
- I've always used StarOffice, OpenOffice and now LibreOffice. All the people in my story received my documents and reports as a PDF and no one complained. Until a coworker saw me editing in LibreOffice and said "oh I want it in word format". As long as he didn't know, everything was fine, right?
- Windows is paid. And is there advertising? I don't understand. And I refuse. If you want to display advertising, then excuse me. I have no problem paying, I'm not an opensource shiite. It's just that paying and not working bothers me much more than an opensource that I can fix or expect a fix knowing the good will of the people involved.
- Hyper-V is a joke. QEMU/KVM is better, and Bhyve on FreeBSD which is a very young project, is already a million times better than Hyper-V.
- Developing in C/C++ for Windows is only possible in two ways: Either you've always lived in Windows and your brain is conditioned, or you compile with MSYS2 (CLang or GCC).
- There is no significant evolution of the windows desktop since 95.
- Multiple workspace support with multiple monitors, not ready. It's another joke.
- REGEDIT does not need any comment.
- The system loses performance over time. I still don't know how Windows achieves this.
- I've seen people complain about desktop fragmentation on Unix and Linux. Many DEs end up leaving applications with different themes (like running a Qt application in Gnome and GTK in KDE), but to be quite honest, the lack of Windows standard bothered me much more. Even Microsoft's own software is completely different: Control Panel, Calculator, Paint and Office, To-Do, and Settings, have horrible style differences and look-and-feel fragmentation.
- Dark mode has not been implemented. It's another joke. Many applications are white while everything else is dark. Sorry, even on Linux which is a mess, this has been resolved. And well resolved.
- NTFS? Serious?
- C:, D:.. It doesn't convince me since DOS.
- Bloatware.
- News "biased" in the search bar is a lack of respect for those who use the computer to work.

And that. For me, Windows is the alternative operating system. I can't take Windows seriously, for me it's an experimental one like Haiku or ReactOS. It's good to play.

About market share, it doesn't convince me to use it. But convinces me to sell. I've always developed applications to run on Windows. And when I need it, I turn on a VM to compile the project. But in everyday life? Impractical.

The Cloud Of Bullshit

Every day I wake, and I think of my one true mission in life. To mock and ridicule paint huffing idiots. Something recently that drew my ire, like the hemorrhoids on my ass is this idea of 'the cloud', THE CLOUD and the buzzword lingo-bingo bullshit that providers use to hype and sell it.

For example, airtable is an amazing service. I love that I can insert just about anything into a row, create any of my own row datatypes, that it's flexible as all hell.

I love it.

And I hate that I'm essentially locked in to the cloud.
I fucking hate how if my internet goes down (thanks you pie eating inbred dipshits at comcast) I have no access.
If the company is bought, they'll shut down like all the rest , to be "relaunched at a later time" (or never).
I hate that if the company doesn't make enough money, or it's investors change their mind, woopsie, service is shut down.
I hate that the cloud is synonymous with massive data leaks and IOT-levels of stupidity in security practices.

Every time someone says "but its in the cloud! Isn't it amazing!"

I always think 1. YEAH IF IM AN INVESTOR I GET TO MILK LOW BROW FINGER PAINTING FUCKWITS EVERY MONTH like Adobe sucking the blood from infants who are still in college.

2. Why? So I can get locked into their platform, have them segment off previously free features (fucking youtube and the 'subscribe so you can continue playing audio with your screen off' bullshit), and then have fees increase month over month?

3. Why, so every four years during the presidential selection, if I piss off some fuckstick braindead lemming literally sucking his girlfriends BFs cock, they can potentially shut me out from my own data completely?

The Cloud is built on shit-colored hype sold to knob gobbling idiots, controlling idiots, profiting at the expense of idiots, and later fucking them for buyout payola. The Cloud is a Cloud of Bullshit shat out by huckster messiahs straight into the lapping mouths of fanatics worshiping slavishly like toilet drinking scum at the porcelain alter of a neon god, invisible, untouchable, and like a spigot, easily shut off without anyone noticing. And when it happens, I'll be there, shouting "WHERE IS YOUR CLOUD NOW?"

Native any day. 100% native or I don't fucking want it
None of this node.js-gone-native bullshit either with notetaking apps taking up hundreds of megabytes of ram, where everything is bootstrap or react, in a browser, in a window container, because people are so fucking incompetent we have to hold their hand WHILE they give themselves a reach around.

Native or nothing.

For my favorite notetaking app, I use Microsoft OneNote. "OH god, a heathen, quick, stick his body up on a stake!"

But hear me out. I'll be the first one in a crowd to kick bill gates in the nuts (not because I particularly hate microsoft, just because I think hes kind of a cunt).

So when I say onenote is good, I really fucking mean it. Sure they did some cunty things like 'dumbed down' the interface, and cut out some options. But you know what they can't do?
Shut down the damn service (short of a system update completely removing the whole app, which, frankly, wouldn't surprise me).

It's so god damn good it waxed my balls, cured my cancer, fixed my relationship with my father, found my long lost brother, and replaced ALL my irl notebooks.

It's so good that if it was cocaine I'd be hospitalized for overusing it.

So god damn good it didn't just replace all my notebooks, it even replaced and sped up my mockup process three to five times. Want layers?

Built in. Just drag an image on to the notebook to import instantly.

Want to rearrange layers? Right click select "send forward/back/bring to front/send to back".

Everything snaps to grid by default and is easily resizeable.

I had all the elements for a UI sliced and diced. Wanted to try a bunch of layouts. Was gonna take me two damn days.

Did it in three hours with the notebook features of onenote.

After I started using onenote, me and my bodypillow finally conceived even.

Sweet marries mammaries I just fucking jizzed. Thank you onenote.

P.s. It really did speed up my UI design, allows annotated images, highlighted text. Shit, it can even do kanban.

And all I can think is "good job microsoft making an awesome product for free, being dumb as fuck for not charging for it, and then not marketing it at ALL."

It was sheer fucking luck that I discovered it while was I was looking for vendor STD bloatware to blast off my new install.

OneNote: Worth a try even for the kick-gates-in-the-nuts fan club.

The cloud can suck my balls.

In my day off I was eager to try overclocking in my pc and this is how it went:

- Fucked up overclocking parameters for cpu and ram speed.

- BIOS is broken, had to take out gpu to do a reset taking out the bios battery.

- BIOS is up again, default values loaded, bla bla

- Did not try to fuck off anymoar with overclocking, just kept playing star wars and went to sleep safe and sound like a baby.

- Gotta work now. docker does not start, closes itself after tried to start, docker panic, I panic, tried to uninstall, tried to update. nothing works

- Then I remember bios default values leaves virtualization off. enables it again, docker still not working. I panic again, restarted pc like 10 times between disabling/enabling hyper-v in windows.

- Docker dies. not gonna change my overclock options again. silly me 🤦‍♂️

I had spent the last year working on a online store power by woocommerce with over 100k products from various suppliers. This online store utilized a custom API that would take the various formats that suppliers offer their inventory in and made them consistent. Now everything was going swimmingly initially, but then I began adding more and more products using a plug-in called WP all import. I reached around 100k products and the site would take up to an entire minute to load sometimes timing out. I got desperate so I installed several caching plugins, but to no avail this did not help me. The site was originally only supposed to take three to four months but ended up taking an entire year. Then, just yesterday I found out what went wrong and why this woocommerce website with all of these optimizations was still taking anywhere from 60 to 90 seconds to load, or just timing out entirely. I had initially thought that I needed a beefier server so I moved it to a high CPU digitalocean VM. While this did help a little bit, the site was still very slow and now I had very high CPU usage RAM usage and high disk IO. I was seriously stumped the Apache process was using a high amount of CPU and IO along with MYSQL as well. It wasn't until I started digging deeper into the database that I actually found out what the issue was. As I was loading the site I would run 'show process list' in the SQL terminal, I began to notice a very significant load time for one of the tables, so I went to go and check it out. What I did was I ran a select all query on that particular table just to see how full it was and SQL returned a error saying that I had exceeded the maximum packet size. So I was like okay what the fuck...
So I exited my SQL and re-entered it this time with a higher packet size. I ran a query that would count how many rows were in this particular table and the number came out to being in the millions. I was surprised, and what's worse is that this table belong to a plugin that I had attempted to use early in the development process to cache the site. The plugin was deactivated but apparently it had left PHP files within the wp content directory outside of the actual plugin directory, so it's still executing scripts even though the plugin itself was disabled. Basically every time I would change anything on the site, it would recache the whole thing, and it didn't delete any old records. So 100k+ products caching on saves with no garbage collection... You do the math, it's gonna be a heavy ass database. Not only that but it was serialized data, so when it did pull this metric shit ton of spaghetti from the database, PHP then had to deserialize it. Hence the high ass CPU load. I had caching enabled on the MySQL end of things so that ate the ram. I was really desperate to get this thing running.
Honest to God the main reason why this website took so long was because the load times made it miserable to work on. I just thought that the hardware that I had the site on was inadequate. I had initially started the development on a small Linux VM which apparently wasn't enough, which is why I moved it to digitalocean which also seemed to not be enough, so from there I moved to a dedicated server which still didn't seem to be enough. I was probably a few more 60-second wait times or timeouts from recommending a server cluster to my client who I know would not be willing to purchase it. The client who I promised this site to have completed in 3 months and has waited a year. Seriously, I would tell people the struggles that I would go through with this particular site and they would just tell me to just drop the site; just take the money, just take the loss. I refused to, this was really the only thing that was kicking my ass. I present myself as this high-and-mighty developer like I'm just really good at what I do but then I have this WordPress site that's just beating the shit out of me for a year. It was a very big learning experience and it was also very humbling as well, it made me realize that I really don't know as much as I think I might. It was evidence that there is still so much more to learn out there, I did learn a lot from that experience especially about optimizing websites the different types of methods to do that particular lonely on the server side and I'll be able to utilize this knowledge in the future.
I guess the moral of the story is, never really give up. Ultimately things might get so bad that you're running on hopes and dreams. Those experiences are generally the most humbling. Now I can finally present the site that I am basically a year late on to the client who will be so happy that I did not give up on the project entirely. I'll have experienced this feeling of pure euphoria, and help the small business significantly grow their revenue. Helping others is very fulfilling for me, even at my own expense.

Anyways, gonna stop ranting. Running out of characters. If you're still here... Ty for reading :')

I needed a new laptop to work/study and found a suitable one on Lenovo's website...
25th of july :
- "your order has been placed... blablabla.. it will take approximately from 1 to 2 weeks to prepare and 3-5 days shipping.."
- hum... Ok.. seems long to just put RAM and SSD inside my laptop but alright..

31st of july :
- "unfortunately your order has been delayed, the new shipping date is estimated for August, 14"
- Fuck ! Ill be patient then.. hopefully it'll be ready earlier than that..

10th of August :
- "unfortunately your order has been delayed, the new shipping date is estimated for september, 7"
- WHAT THE FU.. ?!? YOU DENSE MOTHERFUCKER, HOW LONG DOES IT TAKE TO PUT 8 FUCKING GIGS OF RAM AND AN SSD PLEASE TELL ME ?!? IS IT A JOKE OR WHAT ?! I FLY ABROAD THE 17TH OF SEPTEMBER YOU BETTER SHIP MY LAPTOP IN TIME !!

I'm really mad now and thinking of cancelling the order.. I might have no time to test the laptop before flying.. FUCK !!

imagine having kernel memory leaks in 2020

AT&T or Huawei, whichever, pushed an update for my already-struggling-to-exist phone that made the kernel memory leak go from 480KB/hr avg to 22.5MB/hr avg. When my free RAM is never under 50% of 2GB after the kernel starts loading other shit and i'm able to express free RAM, at any time in use, in megs, with 8 bits... this means my phone crashes, with no apps running aside from a trimmed list of stock apps, every 3-4 hours due to running out of RAM. The only usable (read: not R/O because unrooted) swapfile is located on a tmpfs, so it's completely fucking useless (and eats another 100MB of RAM that I could be using for LITERALLY anything else, that's like another 3 hours of full idle between crashes) and I can't unlock the bootloader to fix any of this as Huawei no longer hands out keys and it'd take 7 years or so to brute (32-bit @ 10/sec)

tl;dr: fuck

NewLifeNewHope update No.2 / Day 5

My Server Is finally opened and i installed 2x8 TB WDC Harddrives and SATA 128 SSD. I know this server is freaking garbage, but i got this PC for free, and have somewhat good-ish upgrade path, so heres the spec :
-Gigabyte H110m-S2 LGA1151
-Intel i3-6300
-8GB DDR4 single channel RAM
-128 GB SSD
-2x8TB Harddrives
-TP-Link 1000mbps NIC

so the plan is to make this server as the Main Repository -- yes no offsite backup plan for now -- and also i want to make this server as an Email Server and for hosting my company's website. I've already asked for static IP from my ISP and will take effect tommorow.

I need help for choosing the Operating System (i like centOS) for my server. and to setting this Server to work like what i planned but i don't know where to start, Any help and/or References will be great !

Ah, developers, the unsung heroes of caffeine-fueled coding marathons and keyboard clacking symphonies! These mystical beings have a way of turning coffee and pizza into lines of code that somehow make the world go 'round.

Have you ever seen a developer in their natural habitat? They huddle in dimly lit rooms, surrounded by monitors glowing like magic crystals. Their battle cries of "It works on my machine!" echo through the corridors, as they summon the mighty powers of Stack Overflow and Google to conquer bugs and errors.

And let's talk about the coffee addiction – it's like they believe caffeine is the elixir of code immortality. The way they guard their mugs, you'd think it's the Holy Grail. In fact, a developer without coffee is like a computer without RAM – it just doesn't function properly.

But don't let their nerdy exteriors fool you. Deep down, they're dreamers. They dream of a world where every line of code is bug-free and every user is happy. A world where the boss understands what "just one more line of code" really means.

Speaking of bosses, developers have a unique ability to turn simple requests into complex projects. "Can you make a small tweak?" the boss asks innocently. And the developer replies, "Sure, it's just a minor change," while mentally calculating the time it'll take and the potential for scope creep.

Let's not forget their passion for acronyms. TLA (Three-Letter Acronym) is their second language. API, CSS, HTML, PHP, SQL... it's like they're playing a never-ending game of Scrabble with abbreviations.

And documentation? Well, that's their arch-nemesis. It's as if writing clear instructions is harder than debugging quantum mechanics. "The code is self-explanatory," they claim, leaving everyone else scratching their heads.

In the end, developers are a quirky bunch, but we love them for it. Their quirks and peculiarities are what make them the creative, brilliant minds that power our digital world. So here's to developers, the masters of logic and the wizards of the virtual realm!

Man wk89 awesome... bringing back a lot of memories. The one thing really stands out to me though is the software.

I see a lot of rants about people shocked that turboC is still in use or other DOS programs are still in production. A lot can of bad be said here but I think often it's a case of we truly don't build things like we did in the good old days.

What those devs accomplished with such limited resources is phenomenal and the fact that we still haven't managed to replicate the feel and usability of it says a lot, not to mention just how fucking stable most of it was.

My favourite games are all DOS based, my most favourite of all time Sherlock is 103kb in size. When I started coding games I made a clone of it and to this day I am still trying to figure out what sorcery is in the algorithm that generates/solves puzzles that makes it so fast and memory efficient. I must have tried 100+ ways and can't even come close. NB! If you know you can hint but don't tell me. Solving this is a matter of personal pride.

Where those games really stand out is when you get into the graphics processing - the solutions they came up with to render sprites, maps and trick your eyes into seeing detail with only 4-16 colours is nothing short of genius. Also take a second to consider that taking a screen shot of the game is larger than the entire game itself and let that sink in...

I think the dramatic increase in storage, processing power and ram over the last decade is making us shit developers - all of us. Just take one look at chrome, skype or anything else mainline really and it's easy to see we no longer give a rats ass about memory anywhere except our monthly AWS/GCE bill.

We don't have to be creative or even mindful about anything but the most significant memory leaks in order to get our software to run now days. We also don't have constraints to distribute it, fast deliver-ability is rewarded over quality software. It's only expected to stay in production 3-4 years anyway.

Those guys were the true "rockstars" and "ninja" developers and if you can't acknowledge that you can take ya React app and shovit.

Was playing fallout 4 a couple days ago. About 20 minutes in. The computer just shuts off. Like no power at all. I start up the computer again. Try fallout 4 again. It shuts off at the beginning video. WTF... I try Skyrim wondering if video card is busted. Skyrim runs perfectly fine. I startup Fallout 4 again. It runs. WTF...

Next day I try fallout and bout 20 minutes in power off again. Now I am assuming cooling issue and I am trying to see temps with programs. Cannot really tell.

So today I take apart my laptop and vacuum every cooling orifice out. Vacuum any dust looking crap I can see. There was dust in the fans. All clean. I run a memory test for a couple hours. Memory passes (it was brand new memory, thought maybe flaw in ram). Now I run fallout 4. Runs fine, zero issues for about an hour.

Me to myself: CLEAN YOUR DAMN COMPUTER MORE OFTEN! Okay...

In between I read about Fallout 4 causing system reboots and shutdowns due to loading and heating. Apparently something about Fallout 4 causes this more than other games. Wild... Pretty sure it was thermal shutdown protection going on.

Is it just me or does 16GB RAM feel like overkill on Linux?
I've only seen the RAM usage go up to 6GB at most.

Kinda wish I could just take that 8GB card and stick it into my desktop.

I will soon move to Belgium for a few months due to my wife's job and I will go back to Germany once in a while for a few weeks. Of course I'll need a computer and I can't take my tower back and forth all the time, thus I'll need something more mobile. Since most notebooks <1000€ are shit and I'll also need at least two external monitors, I went for a small (USFF) PC instead; for about 350€ I got a HP ProDesk 400 G5 with a i5-9500T, 8 GB RAM (to be upgraded), 256 GB NVME (also to be upgraded), B360 chipset. I would have liked a Ryzen, but then I could only get the predecessor with a 2400GE...

Hopefully Linux (Qubes OS in particular) will work fine.

I really love my mother but.

A couple of weeks ago she asked me for advice regarding a laptop. She wanted something cheap for office and stuff.
Since I know her I exactly knows she needs extreme fast boot and responsiveness. She'll go all hulk rage if the laptop doesn't boot in less than 30 seconds.

Told her to get something with ssd since storage is no issue and 4gb ram with an decent older I5. Took a whole day going through stores in my area and online to find good deals. Send her everything I found. Really good laptop for under 500€ I would've killed for.

Fast forward. She bought some 300€ shit laptop because it had 1tb memory. She didn't ask for advice just bought the cheapest that would read decently description wise.

Now she is raging all day and bitching about it being so slow and I should fix it for her since I'm an it guy etc.

Looking at the specs I nearly started to vomit. She seriously bought a laptop worse than she already had. Old i3 2gb ram 5200rpm HDD.

I told her she should return it because it is shit. But no. She insists that since it's newer it is better and I am only a lazy fuck who doesn't want to be bothered to do her a favor.

Offered the best thing I could think of. Told her I'd install Linux on it for her and teach her how to use it.
Explained it would run more smoothly since she refused to take that shit laptop back. But no. Of course she insists on using windows 10....

FUUUUUUUCK. I love my mother but seriously I'm about to explode.

What the fuck is this steaming shit!?
You fucking background apps, chrome and Firefox take all my resources to fucking open my Google drive?!

AND WHY THE FUCK ARE THERE 19 INSTANCES OF CHROME RUNNING!!!!

WHY THE FLYING FUCK DO YOU NEED TO DO THIS! LET THE FUCK LOAD!

I HATE WINDOWS! BUT THEN THERE ARE APPS WHO ARE FOR WINDOWS AND MAC ONLY!

I'M DYING NOW!!!!!!!!

FINE! EAT ALL MY 12 GB RAM AND FUCK YOURSELF IN THE CORNER BUT PET ME DO MY WORK!

Needed my Windows 10 vm for parallax propeller development again. Should be pretty straightforward:

Start VM. Very unresponsive and Interface glitches with 2GB RAM so I give it 4GB to get on the desktop. Bruh, off to a good start.

Turns out that there are a few updates. So I try to install them. After two fucking hours Virtualbox screams at me for being out of storage. FFS Window$ updates managed to take up like 20GB extra.

Had to install it from scratch since my drive is full. Now my key won't activate because it is already activated. 15min support hotline, because 6*8 characters are necessary for a f*cking Phone activation.

Damage assessment:
1h of my life I will never get back, a barely viable operating system and I'm not even sure if USB passthrough works.

PSA:Gnome-Boxen has a superb unattended installer.

I wrote a parody of Sound of Silence based on the struggles of cleaning up people's shit in the shop

============

Hello problems, my old friends
I've come to talk with you again
Because a driver softly creeping
Left its seeds while RAM was leaking
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sound of crashing

In restless dreams I walked alone
Narrow bands of networking
'Neath the halo of a burned-out fan
I turned my collar to the hot and spinning
When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of an LED light
That split the night
And touched the sound of crashing

And in the naked light I saw
Ten thousand tasks, maybe more
Programs malloc with no swap
Programs writing with no space
Programs writing bits that voices never play
And no one dared
Disturb the sound of crashing

"Fools, " said I, "You do not know
Malware, like a plague, it grows
Hear my words that I might teach you
Take my tools that I might help you"
But my words, like silent raindrops fell
And echoed in the wells, of crashing

And the programs bowed and prayed
To the malware god they made
And Windows flashed out its warning
In the words that it was forming
And Windows said, "The words of the prophets are written in the event log
And dumped over COM"
And whispered in the sounds of crashing

Oh look, postman has a "native" app.

When I was 7, my dad bought me a pc. (in 2007). It had some sort of pentium processor and 2 gb ram. I had that pc until I turned 18. We changed the power supply some ports and mouse / keyboard but that's it. I learned all the programming basics, design even animation on that pc. It would take days to render a simple 2D animation. When I finally got the chance to go to a university and move overseas, I bought my own pc. As a full fee paying student, I still couldn't afford the latest and the greatest tech. I somehow bought a core i7, and with 8 gb ram, no bells and whistles. And now I'm almost 21. So when my friends recommend me killer games, I'm sorry fam, call me maybe 10 years later.

Ok, so: I have a macbook for work. And for the most part, I love it. Its a good looking device that has a fast cpu, enough ram to run stuff locally for testing, even multiple services / environments at the same time without getting overly sluggish.

And, the best thing: It isn't Windows. I have a good, working shell (zsh), so I can use all the command line tooling I could wish for, I have a somewhat working package manager and everything.

But there are just some little things I really can't wrap my head around. And since everything is so locked in by Apple, there are no sensible ways to fix those things without having a bunch of extra programs / services running all the time, introducing overhead, configuration for things I neither want nor need, and so on.

First of all, why the hell did you think the normal way of typing "@" on a german iso keyboard is the key combination for closing the currently focused application? I am a daily user of macos for over 2 years now, and I still keep quitting applications regularly, almost every day.

Or, scroll direction: I use a mouse (g pro wireless) and not just the touchpad, but when I am in a meeting or something (or when I take my macbook with me to configure a switch that isn't accessible over the network), I don't want to take the mouse with me, the touchpad is pretty good, it is big, precise and everything. But for some dumb reason, they decided to reverse the scroll direction for the mouse by default, so if you change that to use the mouse like a normal person, it also changes the scroll direction for the touchpad. And, the worst part is: there doesn't seem to be ANY easy way to separate those two settings, or to automatically set the scroll direction when a mouse is connected.

So every time I use my laptop somewhere else, wich also happens regularly, the scroll directions is wrong, which means I have to go into the settings, change it, then change it back when I am at my desk again.

It just doesn't make any sense, stop trying to "know what our customers want", and please, dear Mr. Tim Apple, give your customers the freedom to know for themselves what they want.

Thanks for listening to my TED Talk.

Having ram problems with my x299 system. When ever i put 2 8gb sticks in my pc just bluescreens on startup. But if i just put one in, in the b1 slot then it works just fine. But if i put the 2 8gb sticks in one in b1 and one in a2 then take out b1, then the a2 works. This works with both of the sticks so i dont think either one is dead. They are compatible, but blue screens whenever installed together. My bios is updated. Any ideas how to fix?

I really need to but a new laptop, my current 2012 MacBook Air with 4gb of ram can’t take the workload anymore. But it’s so hard to find a good alternative ! The new MacBook Pro sucks and it’s so fucking expensive (and I don’t want the silly touch bar). The competition isn’t much better, most laptops with the same quality doesn’t allow you to upgrade the ram and are about the same price range than the MacBook. Really , I miss the days we had good, affordable, upgradable choices (RIP MacBook Pro 2012).

My laptops ram gave up one me on Monday, will take me 2 weeks at least to get back from warranty service !

I started smoking because of this...

FUCKING WHY ?

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. :'''(

I'm a full stack developer, I have been using windows all my life but I purchased a new laptop recently, it has only 4gigs of RAM and I will upgrade it in the future but that's gonna take a while but mean while its running windows and its a pain in the ass! Memory is always almost full, disk(HDD 5400rpm) usage is 100% when I don't expect it to be. Chrome and VSCode hogs my memory and the laptop lags like crazy because of that webstorm and pycharm are all out of the question. I'd like to switch to a Linux distro, dual boot it since my windows is a genuine copy. Which Linux distro would be the best for me?

Using grafana together with tinc+promotheus, has been a blast.

Initially I wanted to get into ELK with Kibana and all that, but that required 8G of ram, the instructions to get it running in the open source "mode" was nearly non-existent, together with all the ready docker compose stacks out there simply not working or the images being broken.

I'm sure I could've managed around most of those issues, but the fact it is as hungry as gitlab, made it a literal no-go for the usual server resources my clients host or my own scaled down server recently.

Thankfully I remembered that there's grafana and me having experimented some time ago with tinc, so I can have very lightweight beat'esque prometheus agents deployed listening on tinc local net only, with the typical nginx auth and some whitelists to all of the servers I host and all those of my clients.

The dashboard creation was especially great in grafana (tbf promotheus does actually most of it), literally what I always wanted out of those "complicated" solutions, that do it all, but have no proper query language, complex documentation, heavy collectors with no properly named data points, expensive resource runtimes, ..

with grafana I can just easily put dashboards into folders, create users to look only at certain stats or even dashboards (opened up some interesting contracts actually, because now I can also offer proper monitoring for all things delivered), easily drag and drop around stuff to fit more information (most others fix you to a small 3x2 grid, a too big grid for a TV or simply non resizable tiles, making that one counter take up an entire row) and resize to my hearts desire

tinc of course allows me to easily create private networks that are resistant to failure across any region and the routing is done for me, so I don't have to run around it all that much either

P.S: a damn tiny fly went into one of my now 4 monitors and died right in the middle, because I thought it's just some dirt and I pressed it in while trying to wipe it off, so that monitor now serves as the top most on a vesa mount

My computer has gone to repair so for the meantime I'm computer-less. Which sucks big time because I have projects and tests coming up (not to mention personal projects and other stuff I've been asked to do) and I kinda have to leech off my friends and I don't like doing that, but, for now, it's what I'm doing. My old toshiba couldn't handle whatever I have to do, damn thing should be going through menopause or something. I wasn't a good owner LoL
I never really know if it'll boot during the first minute after I turn it on or if'll take it hours to do so, so I don't wanna risk it taking it with me to uni 😬 Not to mention it's still running Vista 😅
So my brother left to go to a friend's house until sunday so for the today and tomorrow I have access to the beast that is his computer ☺
I don't mean beast as a bad thing, it's a good computer, but it has an almost full SSD and I need to install a couple things so I can work on it :') (I'll uninstall them later and try to leave it as I found it LoL)
I can finally take a bit to play as well 😥 as I haven't been able to do so, as not only my PC is on repair, but I've been leaving uni late (after midnight - I valour my sleep OK). Luckily one of my house mates lets me use her PC after she goes to bed or her bf arrives to our house. The other day I managed to install steam and play a bit (she gave me permission to do so and I uninstalled them later) 😂 her computer almost died on me, it only has 4GB of RAM :') poor thing was over working to keep up LoL
Now, my brother's computer has a mechanical keyboard and besides the macro keys (they're on the far end of the keyboard, where you'd expect the shift/ctrl/caps lock/etc keys to be), I'm loving it tbh. It's a cheap keyboard, my mom didn't want to buy anything too fancy for him, but I like the sounds it makes 😅 may get one for myself (a mechanical keyboard I mean LoL. I really liked one I saw here on devRant that looked like a typewriter but it's WAY out of my league for now HaHa)

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 porch

Try to upload ipa archive to iTunes. Service is interrupted. Again. Fuck you apple! I was trying to upload that fuck for six damn u punk ass times. Why apple? Fuck you! I'll put the archive on a stick an ram it right into your ass you shitty fuck! JUST TAKE MY BINARY RIGHT NOW!

Don't take it to serious. I'm okay 😎

I just completed this heartfelt and sincere little cry for help on another ste but it wasn't verified because I'm not special enough to format it like a PAD, whatever that means. I cannot seem to simply burn music files anymore. I'm using a Samsung laptop Device name DESKTOP-AII2T2S
Processor Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-2675QM CPU @ 2.20GHz 2.20 GHz
Installed RAM 8.00 GB
Device ID D766A89B-5671-4D9F-B6F9-2D884E9EA309
Product ID 00326-10000-00000-AA880
System type 64-bit operating system, x64-based processor
Pen and touch No pen or touch input is available for this display
Edition Windows 10 Home
Version 20H2
Installed on ‎09/‎08/‎2020
OS build 19042.928
Experience Windows Feature Experience Pack 120.2212.551.0

The music is a combination of commercially relased material as well as bootleg recorded material.

I am not looking for a "This is Why We Can No Longer Burn Our Music Files" Intro. All you need to tell me is the corporations that eat the world are protecting their copywrighted music and I must be up earlier and eat bettter breakkie than those individuals. That I can handle. Although I'm not a dev, I'm sure you can understand the feelling after you have worked for hours on attempting something, only to discover your effort has been in vain (much like my former relationships). Again, if you can give me any direction aside from hanging it up and attempting to find happeniness elsewhere, sock it to me. I deserve it. Thanks.
11 years ago when I used a Macbook putting together a playlist, inserting a blank CDR, and burning the file onto the CDR was very easy. I\'m am now faced with hurdles I sometimes scale, only to fall on my face.
I\'m not stupid, or uneducatated about flac, blah blah. I learnt it all myself. I\'m now using a windows operating system. Afew weeks ago I was able to burn what ever I pleased and it was OK.
Then one day, it just wouldn\'t do it. I was following no altered procedures. Since then it\'s been misery. I remember that ocenaudio once burned music files for me.
I don\'t know how to go about retrieving an instruction manual that will take me step by step as to how to do this.

You help would be appreciated.

Cheers,
Jonno

I've been lurking here since 2017 when my Macbook died. I've always enjoy the level of sanity and have attempted to add my jaded, distant and nihilistic spin on a few threads. It won't destroy me if I can't burn files anymore, I'll just go back on heavy tranques and change my name to Ben Zo. Dia Za P.een

How much ram do you generally need in a Linux server? I'm already using 70% out of 2GB on my LAMP stack, and I'm planning to deploy my website prototype to show off in interviews next year. Is 8-16GB of EEC RAM a better option for future proofing? The only thing holding me back is I don't plan to make money on this server in the immediate future so I'm trying to weigh the pros and cons. 🤔

This CentOS server runs on CLI only so the GUI isn't a factor. Eventually I'll have it host Java Spring API's which will easily take up what RAM I have left. On top of that I have 10 db on mySQL so that's another likely culprit.

Doing my work regularly on my 4Gb Ram + 160G HDD given by my supervisor on the company I work.. seriously.. well.. it's my fault for giving my precious pc too much stress. now I'll take care of this little guy here..

It's just a small company with <50 workers. And everyone is friendly. :')

TL;DR: Embedded software guy needs to create a multi-instance sandbox environment in Jenkins for testing and not sure what good solutions are out there. Looking for suggestions.

So at work, we have these really cool integration tests that validate our system for flight safety. What's not so cool is that due to factors outside of my control, each test has to be run serially and the entire test suite can take many many hours. This is mostly due to a hardware limitation (not enough physical NICs), but there are other SW factors as well.

What I would like to do is somehow be able to wrap up all the resources into a neat little package and then deploy that package into some kind of virtual environment that can be instantiated on a Jenkins job. The NIC issue would be replaced with a virtual one and *theoretically* I should be able to spawn as many instances of this virtual environment as my CPU and RAM can handle. In short, I want to pseudo parallelize our test suite and drive down our testing time. Somehow I would need to be able to control this entire thing from a script of some sort.

Does anyone know of something out there that would satisfy these kinds of requirements? Double internet points if it's open source.

I'm fucking tired of my computer having random
2 seconds latency on any basic action and being slow as fuck regardless of powerful processor, ssd and 32GB RAM. Music via bluetooth is basically unusable since every few seconds the music stops for a 0.2s then plays again. I installed this system (opensuse tumbleweed) in February this year and it's just sad that I have reinstall again (any ideas for distro) ?

I made a dummy mistake of buying a CPU without internal graphics and this resulted in having to buy a GPU. So I got myself Nvidia(another mistake) since i though i would be using CUDA on the university. Turnes out CUDA cannot be installed for some retarded reason.
With Nvidia GPU the screens on my two monitors are swapping every time I use a hdmi switch to use other computer. On AMD GPU this problem does not exist. AMD GPU pro drivers are impossible to install. Computers barely fucking work, change my mind. Shit is breaking all the time. Everything is so half assed.

The music player that i use sometimes swaps ui with whatever was below it like for example the desktop background and i need to kill the process and start again to use the program. WTF.

Bluetooth seems to hate me. I check the bluetooth connected devices on my computer, it says headphones connected. BULLSHIT. The headphones are fucking turned OFF. How the fuck can they be connected you dumbass motherfucker computer. So I turn on the headphones. And I cannot connect them since the system thinks that they are already connected. So I have to unpair them and pair them again. WTF. Who fucking invents this bullshit?
Let's say i have headphones connected to the computer. I want to connect them to phone. I click connect from the phone settings. Nothing happens. Bullshit non telling error "could not connect". So I have to unpair from computer to pair to phone. Which takes fucking minutes, because reasons. VERY fucking convenient technology.
The stupid bluetooth headphones have a loud EARRAPE voice when turning them on "POWER ON!!! PAIRING", "CONNECTED", "DISCONNECT". Loudness of this cannot be modified. The 3 navigation buttons are fucking unrecognizable so i always take few seconds to make sure i click the correct button.

Fucking keyboard sometimes forgets that I remapped esc key to caps lock and then both keys don't work so i need to reconnect the keyboard cable. At least it's not fucking bluetooth.

The only reason why hdmi switches exist is because monitor's navigation menus have terrible ui and/or infrared activated, non-mechanical buttons.
Imagine the world where monitors have a button for each of it's inputs. I click hdmi button it switches it's input to hdmi. I click display port button - it switches to display port. But nooo, you have to go through the OSD menu.

My ~ directory has hundred of files that I never put there. Doesn't feel like home, more like a crackhead crib.

My other laptop (also tumbleweed) I click on hibernate option and it shuts down. WTF. Or sometimes I open the lid and screen is black and when i click keyboard nothing happens so i have to hold power button and restart.

We've been having computers for 20 + years and they still are slow, unreliable and barely working.

Is there a cure? I'm starting to think the reason why everything is working so shitty and unreliable, is because the foundations are rotten. The systems that we use are built with c, ridden with cryptic abbreviated code, undefined behavior and security vulnerabilities. The more I've written c programs the more convinced I am, that we should have abandoned it for something better long ago. Why haven't we? And honestly what would be better? Everything fucking sucks. The rust seems to be light in the tunnel but I don't know if this is only hype or is it really better. I'm sure it can't be worse than c or c++. Either we do something with the foundations or we're doomed.

I have a laptop with 8gb ram, 1Tb HDD, i5 7th gen running windows 10 and Ubuntu. Right now I'm using windows 10 as my primary OS, I'm simply addicted to the gestures especially the four finger swipe to switch desktops. I have been thinking of adding an SSD to the mix and my budget only permits a 120gb M.2 or a 250gb normal ssd.

The advantage with m.2 is that I can keep my HDD and boot my OS from the ssd and maybe install my IDEs on there but with the other ssd I'm gonna have to take my HDD out and use it as an external.

I read somewhere that 250gb above SSDs are the ones worth spending money on and that the 120 and 250 doesn't justify the price or life.

So my question is, should I go for an SSD? and if I do which one to go for m.2 or the normal one?

Finally purchased my t480s for university after mooonths of reading reviews and reddit posts. I hoped that the mbp refresh wouldn't be so expensive :( I've got a mid 2009 from work which no one used so they let me take it home and yeah to be honest i like it very much. i wanted learn programming for ios & android, but honestly paying 2,3K€ (student price for the 13" i5 16gb ram 512gb ssd) and having the risk of a (maybe or maybe not) failing keyboard and no chance of upgrading it is too risky for me and my wallet :( I paid 1,5K€ (again student price) for the thinkpad (i7 16gb ram 512gb ssd and the mx150) and i think i'll love it :)

Just wanted to share with you guys :) (i hope i didn't start a pc vs mac fight haha)