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Argh, I want to upvote ‘The Commons Clause will destroy open source’ without upvoting Redis Labs’s action.
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Nobody is censoring you. If anything, your visibility has been boosted by being on front page with another high-visibility thread. I didn’t even know about your article until I saw it here. To avoid clutter, the admins sometimes combine posts talking about same event or topic into a group. I can see someone not liking that decision. I’m not for or against it right now.
You weren’t censored, though. A mechanism bringing your writing to my attention is opposite of censorship.
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I don’t think you have this exactly right. What happens is someone submits it as an independent post, which is freely ranked on its own merits. Then a moderator merges it with a post which is already growing stale, as a significant fraction of the site has already looked at it and has little reason to return, except to consider replies to their comments - and even then they have to notice more articles have been added. It also removes a dedicated space for discussing that particular article, which in this case is important because the second article is more about Commons than it is about Redis, making the discussions difficult to live in parallel.
The original, independent post was censored by merging it into here. On the previous occasion the new post was merged into a post which was then several days old, where I presume approximately zero people saw it. This is censorship, and a clear cut case of it too. I don’t consider myself entitled to exposure but it’s censorship all the same, and part of the reason I distanced myself from Lobsters except to participate where others have posted my content.
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The original, independent post was censored by merging it into here. On the previous occasion the new post was merged into a post which was then several days old, where I presume approximately zero people saw it.
If your story disappeared, that scenario would be censorship since it was manipulated in a way that would nearly guarantee nobody would see it. The new one isn’t censorship because censorship is about people not seeing your stuff. The combined submission is 20+ votes on front page of a site with more readers than most blogs. Your views going up instead of down is opposite of censorship at least in general definition and effect it has.
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The new one isn’t censorship because censorship is about people not seeing your stuff
“Taking measures which prevent others from seeing your stuff” is literally censorship. I don’t want to argue semantics with you any longer. All of the information is on the table in the comments here, let people read them and settle on an opinion themselves.
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“Taking measures which prevent others from seeing your stuff” is literally censorship”
I saw your stuff through Lobsters’ measures. So, it’s not censorship by your definition.
“let people read them and settle on an opinion themselves”
By all means.
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One thing about SPAs…they seemed to be really popular starting with the rise of Rails, mostly as a way of compensating for Rails amazingly slow rendering.
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Server-side rendering is a thing.
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Also, there’s (eg)
react-railswhich does server-rendering of a react SPA (so you get the HTML which your react code would generate, served by rails).
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I’d like to know why DosBox-based games are on this list, since DosBox on Linux doesn’t need things like Wine and would function the same on Linux as on Windows.
Separately, there are tons of Steam games I have that have Linux ports but the Linux port isn’t natively on Steam (eg. Quake, Unreal, etc.) I’ve never understood why this is. I end up using a custom compiled ioquake engine with assets from Steam, which works great.
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With older games that were ported to Linux, the distribution rights are often (but not always) with a different publisher.
Since Steam requires a game to have ports for different platforms of the same title under the same product ID (and thus publisher), there is no way to set up a proper revenue sharing system for the owners of the Linux ports (or Mac ports, old Mac games are in the same boat)
Steam initially required a single title to be a single product ID because they don’t want publishers to make people re-buy old titles that were newly ported, in order to boost SteamOS adoption - this way, many players would have a half-decent Steam library from the get-go on the new platform.
Many of the old porting shops for Linux and Mac have gone under, or the ports haven’t been maintained since before Linux 2.6 or even 2.4, meaning that many of the ports can no longer be trivially made to work on modern day distributions. Many games from before say 2003 used SVGA lib to render directly to the framebuffer, for example, without going through X11.
So, sadly, many of these ports are lost to the sands of time and the murky status of IP limbo.
This does not explain why DosBox titles are run through Wine, but I guess that’s just a matter of the publisher not being interested in making and testing a Linux build, given the limited revenue that comes from the platform. These re-releases are probably a very low budget and low income affair, more for the sake of IP owners being able to point to them and say “see, we still provide these products! Preservationists which are distributing our old games are plain pirates, they are not serving a higher purpose!”. But maybe that’s just me being cynical.
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I’m sure in a lot of cases you’re exactly right. I’m just frustrated because the games I’m referring to are largely exceptions. Take Quake 3 - the engine is released under the GPL, has a community maintained fork, targets OpenGL rather than Svgalib and Valve have the same distribution rights to it as to Wine or Dosbox. It’s possible this is still publisher related, for example if Valve are expecting the publisher to compile/support it and the publisher doesn’t do so. In the end it seems like a lack of economic incentive to package and distribute a thing that already exists.
Most id engine games are in this situation and a couple of those were included in the current beta. They really do use Win32 dosbox on Wine to run a DOS game (so a 500Mb download for a 10Mb game.) 430Mb of that is a Wine/Proton tarball which is then extracted (but left on disk) so Proton on disk is 1.6Gb to run a 10Mb game.
PS. I had great fun with SvgaLib on Linux for games before Steam came along. At one point I was using an a.out version of Doom on a much newer system, and it worked great because a.out had a parallel set of usermode libraries so everything was period except for the kernel, which was the only thing that needed to be compatible.
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This has annoyed me before. I got a dos game from gog a while ago and I thought it would be trivial to run on linux but it turns out gog bundles the game and dosbox together in a way you can’t split apart. I tried to get the dosbox version to run in wine but it wasn’t working so I had to find a torrent of the original dos copy
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GOG gives you a single installer that includes DosBox and the game itself; once you’ve gotten the files out you can ignore the DosBox-related ones in favour of running the original binary in your own copy of DosBox or open-source re-implementation or whatever.
To get the files out, you can run the installer in Wine, or use a tool like innoextract.
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calvin
edited
16 days ago
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VIA C3 x86 backdoor allows ring 3 code to circumvent protections to read and write ring 0
tl;dr: You have micro-op level access to the CPU, skipping the x86 decoder. It’s also documented in the processor manual and the ALTINST bit requires ring 0 to set it, so not much of a backdoor, is it?
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This blogpost is a good example of fragmented, hobbyist security maximalism (sprinkled with some personal grudges based on the tone).
Expecting Signal to protect anyone specifically targeted by a nation-state is a huge misunderstanding of the threat models involved.
Talking about threat models, it’s important to start from them and that explains most of the misconceptions in the post.
- Usable security for the most people possible. The vast majority people on the planet use iOS and Android phones, so while it is theoretically true that Google or Apple could be forced to subvert their OSs, it’s outside the threat model and something like that would be highly visible, a nuclear option so to speak.
- Alternative distribution mechanisms are not used by 99%+ of the existing phone userbases, providing an APK is indeed correctly viewed as harm reduction.
- Centralization is a feature. Moxie created a protocol and a service used by billions and millions of people respectively that provides real, measureable security for a lot of people. The fact is that doing all this in a decentralized way is something we don’t yet know how to do or doing invites tradeoffs that we shouldn’t make. Federation atm either leads to insecurity or leads to the ossification of the ecosystem, which in turn leads to a useless system for real users. We’ve had IRC from the 1990s, ever wonder why Slack ever became a thing? Ossification of a decentralized protocol. Ever wonder why openpgp isn’t more widespread? Noone cares about security in a system where usability is low and design is fragile. Ever tried to do key rotation in gpg? Even cryptographers gave up on that. Signal has that built into the protocol.
Were tradeoffs made? Yes. Have they been carefully considered? Yes. Signal isn’t perfect, but it’s usable, high-level security for a lot of people. I don’t say I fully trust Signal, but I trust everything else less. Turns out things are complicated when it’s about real systems and not fantasy escapism and wishes.
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Expecting Signal to protect anyone specifically targeted by a nation-state is a huge misunderstanding of the threat models involved.
In this article, resistance to governments constantly comes up as a theme of his work. He also pushed for his tech to be used to help resist police states like with the Arab Spring example. Although he mainly increased the baseline, the tool has been pushed for resisting governments and articles like that could increase perception that it was secure against governments.
This nation-state angle didn’t come out of thin air from paranoid, security people: it’s the kind of thing Moxie talks about. In one talk, he even started with a picture of two, activist friends jailed in Iran in part to show the evils that motivate him. Stuff like that only made the stuff Drew complains about on centralization, control, and dependence on cooperating with surveillance organization stand out even more due to the inconsistency. I’d have thought he’d make signed packages for things like F-Droid sooner if he’s so worried about that stuff.
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A problem with the “nation-state” rhetoric that might be useful to dispel is the idea that it is somehow a God-tier where suddenly all other rules becomes defunct. The five-eyes are indeed “nation state” and has capabilities that are profound; like the DJB talk speculating about how many RSA-1024 keys that they’d likely be able to factor in a year given such and such developments and what you can do with that capability. That’s scary stuff. On the other hand, this is not the “nation state” that is Iceland or Syria. Just looking at the leaks from the “Hacking Team” thing, there are a lot of “nation states” forced to rely on some really low quality stuff.
I think Greg Conti in his “On Cyber” setup depicts it rather well (sorry, don’t have a copy of the section in question) and that a more reasonable threat model of capable actors you do need to care about is that of Organized Crime Syndicates - which seems more approachable. Nation State is something you are afraid of if you are political actor or in conflict with your government, where the “we can also waterboard you to compliance” factors into your threat model, Organized Crime hits much more broadly. That’s Ivan with his botnet from internet facing XBMC^H Kodi installations.
I’d say the “Hobbyist, Fragmented Maximalist” line is pretty spot on - with a dash of “Confused”. The ‘threats’ of Google Play Store (test it, write some malware and see how long it survives - they are doing things there …) - the odds of any other app store; Fdroid, the ones from Samsung, HTC, Sony et al. - being completely owned by much less capable actors is way, way higher. Signal (perhaps a Signal-To-Threat ratio?) perform an good enough job in making reasonable threat actors much less potent. Perhaps not worthy of “trust”, but worthy of day to day business.
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Expecting Signal to protect anyone specifically targeted by a nation-state is a huge misunderstanding of the threat models involved.
And yet, Signal is advertising with the face of Snowden and Laura Poitras, and quotes from them recommending it.
What kind of impression of the threat models involved do you think does this create?
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Whichever ones are normally on the media for information security saying the least amount of bullshit. We can start with Schneier given he already does a lot of interviews and writes books laypeople buy.
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He encourages use of stuff like that to increase baseline but not for stopping nation states. He adds also constantly blogged about the attacks and legal methods they used to bypass technical measures. So, his reporting was mostly accurate.
We counterpoint him here or there but his incentives and reo are tied to delivering accurate info. Moxie’s incentives would, if he’s selfish, lead to locked-in to questionable platforms.
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We’ve had IRC from the 1990s, ever wonder why Slack ever became a thing? Ossification of a decentralized protocol.
I’m sorry, but this is plain incorrect. There are many expansions on IRC that have happened, including the most recent effort, IRCv3: a collectoin of extensions to IRC to add notifications, etc. Not to mention the killer point: “All of the IRCv3 extensions are backwards-compatible with older IRC clients, and older IRC servers.”
If you actually look at the protocols? Slack is a clear case of Not Invented Here syndrome. Slack’s interface is not only slower, but does some downright crazy things (Such as transliterating a subset of emojis to plain-text – which results in batshit crazy edge-cases).
If you have a free month, try writing a slack client. Enlightenment will follow :P
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I’m sorry, but this is plain incorrect. There are many expansions on IRC that have happened, including the most recent effort, IRCv3: a collectoin of extensions to IRC to add notifications, etc. Not to mention the killer point: “All of the IRCv3 extensions are backwards-compatible with older IRC clients, and older IRC servers.”
Per IRCv3 people I’ve talked to, IRCv3 blew up massively on the runway, and will never take off due to infighting.
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There are swathes of people still using Windows XP.
The primary complaint of people who use Electron-based programs is that they take up half a gigabyte of RAM to idle, and yet they are in common usage.
The fact that people are using something tells you nothing about how Good that thing is.
At the end of the day, if you slap a pretty interface on something, of course it’s going to sell. Then you add in that sweet, sweet Enterprise Support, and the Hip and Cool factors of using Something New, and most people will be fooled into using it.
At the end of the day, Slack works just well enough Not To Suck, is Hip and Cool, and has persistent history (Something that the IRCv3 group are working on: https://ircv3.net/specs/extensions/batch/chathistory-3.3.html)
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At the end of the day, Slack works just well enough Not To Suck, is Hip and Cool, and has persistent history (Something that the IRCv3 group are working on […])
The time for the IRC group to be working on a solution to persistent history was a decade ago. It strikes me as willful ignorance to disregard the success of Slack et al over open alternatives as mere fashion in the face of many meaningful functionality differences. For business use-cases, Slack is a better product than IRC full-stop. That’s not to say it’s perfect or that I think it’s better than IRC on all axes.
To the extent that Slack did succeed because it was hip and cool, why is that a negative? Why can’t IRC be hip and cool? But imagine being a UX designer and wanting to help make some native open-source IRC client fun and easy to use for a novice. “Sisyphean” is the word that comes to mind.
If we want open solutions to succeed we have to start thinking of them as products for non-savvy end users and start being honest about the cases where closed products have superior usability.
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IRC isn’t hip and cool because people can’t make money off of it. Technologies don’t get investment because they are good, they get good because of investment. The reason that Slack is hip/cool and popular and not IRC is because the investment class decided that.
It also shows that our industry is just a pop culture and can give a shit about good tech .
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There were companies making money off chat and IRC. They just didn’t create something like Slack. We can’t just blame the investors when they were backing companies making chat solutions whose management stayed on what didn’t work in long-term or for huge audience.
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My point was there were companies selling chat software, including IRC clients. None pulled off what Slack did. Even those doing IRC with money or making money off it didn’t accomplish what Slack did for some reason. It would help to understand why that happened. Then, the IRC-based alternative can try to address that from features to business model. I don’t see anything like that when most people that like FOSS talk Slack alternatives. Then, they’re not Slack alternatives if lacking what Slack customers demand.
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Thanks for clarifying. My point can be restated as… There is no business model for federated and decentralized software (until recently , see cryptocurrencies). Note most open and decentralized tech of the past was government funded and therefore didn’t face business pressures. This freed designets to optimise other concerns instead of business onrs like slack does.
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Right, as I said I think it’s important for proponents of open tech to look at successful products like Slack and try to understand why they succeeded. If you really think there is no meaningful difference then I think you’re totally disconnected from the needs/context of the average organization or computer user.
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That’s all well and good, I just don’t see why we can’t build those systems on top of existing open protocols like IRC. I mean: of course I understand, it’s about the money. My opinion is that it doesn’t make much sense to insist that opaque, closed ecosystems are the way to go. We can have the “hip-and-cool” factor, and all the amenities provided by services like Slack, without abandoning the important precedent we’ve set for ourselves with protocols like IRC and XMPP. I’m just disappointed that everyone’s seeing this as an “either-or” situation.
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Open, standard chat tech has had persistent history and much more for decades in the form of XMPP. Comparing to the older IRC on features isn’t really fair.
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I don’t see how Good and “good enough to solve a problem” are related here. The first is a metric of quality, the second is the literal bare minimum of that metric.
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Alternative distribution mechanisms are not used by 99%+ of the existing phone userbases, providing an APK is indeed correctly viewed as harm reduction.
I’d dispute that. People who become interested in Signal seem much more prone to be using F-Droid than, say, WhatsApp users. Signal tries to be an app accessible to the common person, but few people really use it or see the need… and often they are free software enthusiasts or people who are fed up with Google and surveillance.
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Ossification of a decentralized protocol.
IRC isn’t decentralised… it’s not even federated
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One thing I wish could be easily ported to Linux from OpenBSD is relayd. In my constant excirse for minimalism and simplicity I’ve felt in love with suckless’ ii irc client, because its interface is pure text with tons of possibilities, I don’t need to run something depending on ncurses; but ii by design lacks of SSL or TLS functionalities (I like that) so they suggest to use a proxy that makes the connection for it, in OpenBSD relayd takes care flawlessly of the job, but there is nothing equivalent on Linux land, for the moment since I’m stuck on GNU/Linux I have to use socat with a named pipe.
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I wrote one, but haven’t deployed it anywhere.
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Other important political aspect of Material Design (and some other UI/web styles that are popular now) is “minimalism”. Your UI should have few buttons. User should have no choices. User should be consumer of content, not a producer. Having play and pause buttons is enough. User should have few choices how and what to consume — recommender system (“algorithmic timeline”, “AI”) should tell them what to consume. This rhetoric is repeated over and over in web and mobile dev blogs.
Imagine graphics editor or DAW with “material design”. It’s just nearly impossible. It’s suitable only for scroll-feed consumption and “personal information sharing” applications.
Also, it’s “mobile-first”, because Google controls mobile (80% market share or something like that). Some pages on Google itself (i.e. account settings) look on desktop like I’m viewing it on giant handset.
P.S. compared with “hipster” modernist things of ~2010, which often were nice and “warm”, Material Design looks really creepy for me even when considering only visual appearance.
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Not sure if such design languages exist, but from what I’ve seen, I have feeling that every “industry” has its own conventions and guidelines, and everything is very inconsistent.
- Word processors: lots of toolbar buttons (still lots of them now, but in “ribbons” which are just tabbed widgets). Use of ancient features like scroll lock key. Other types of apps usually have actions in menus or in searchable “run” dialogs, not toolbar button for each feature.
- Graphics editors: narrow toolbars with very small buttons (popularized by both Adobe and Macromedia, I think). Various non-modal dialogs have widgets of nonstandard small size. Dark themes.
- DAWs: lots of insane skeuomorphism! Everything should look like real synths and effects, with lots of knobs and skinning. Dark themes. Nonstandard widgets everywhere. Single program may have lots of multiple different styles of widgets (i.e. Reason, Fruity Loops).
- 3D: complicated window splits, use of all 3 mouse buttons, also dark themes. Nonstandard widgets, again. UI have heritage from Silicon Graphics workstations and maybe Amiga.
I thought UI guidelines for desktop systems (as opposed to cellphone systems) have lots of recommendations for such data editing programs, but seems that no, they mostly describe how to place standard widgets in dialogs. MacOS guidelines are based on programs that are included with MacOS, which are mostly for regular consumers or “casual office” use. Windows and Gnome guidelines even try to combine desktop and mobile into one thing.
Most “editing” programs ignore these guidelines and have non-native look and feel (often the same look-and-feel on different OSes).
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I’d suggest–from time spent dealing with CAD, programming, and design tools–that the biggest thing is having common options right there, and not having overly spiffy UI. Ugly Java swing and MFC apps have shipped more content than pretty interfaces with notions of UX (notable exceptions tend to be music tools and DAW stuff, for reasons incomprehensible to me). A serious tool-user will learn their tooling and extend it if necessary if the tool is powerful enough.
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We had a great post about two months back on pie menus. After that, my mind goes to how the Android app Podcast Addict does it: everything is configurable. You can change everything from the buttons it shows to the tabs it has to what happens when you double-click your headset mic. All the good maker applications I’ve used give me as much customization as possible.
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It’s identical to the material design guidelines but with a section on hotkeys, scripts, and macros.
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Stuff like Bootstrap mentioned there, early Instagram, Github. Look-and-feels commonly associated with Silicon Valley startups (even today).
These things usually have the same intentions and sins mentioned in this article, but at least look not as cold-dead as Material Design.
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Bootstrap lookalikes?
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I’m glad they’re going with the GTK ecosystem and contributing to it, I’d love to see more people building GTK apps.
(I keep a list of GTK apps, btw. Most new apps seem to be built by elementary OS users, with Vala+Granite as the elementary “SDK” instructs them to do.)
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While there’s nothing wrong with GTK as such, Qt has always looked nicer, had a nicer API, better designer tool, better Python bindings, better documentation… and for all the issues with C++, it’s a first-class programming language with a tool/library ecosystem that Vala can never hope to match. Given that the licensing issues have been resolved years or decades ago, I do think the best thing for the community would be to get behind Qt.
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I never liked Qt. It has some advantages (native look on Windows, various options for running without any window system), but it feels very much like a “jack of all trades” thing, and it feels like a Heavy Framework.
The C++ thing makes it hard to use from other languages. While GObject has been designed for auto-generating language bindings. You can write GTK apps in Haskell, Rust, Nim, D…
Documentation… honestly, no UI toolkits has great docs.
Also, GTK 4 is bringing GPU rendering to the existing regular desktop widget system, instead of creating a new separate thing (QML/QtQuick) that’s rarely going to be used, especially on desktop apps :P
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it feels very much like a “jack of all trades” thing, and it feels like a Heavy Framework.
Given the limited state of package management in the C/C++ world I think monolithic frameworks are an advantage. Slackware gave up on packaging Gnome because the build dependencies were too complex to keep track of, whereas Qt’s qtcore/qtnet/qtui/… model is straightforward enough to make up for using bigger libraries than strictly necessary, IMO.
The C++ thing makes it hard to use from other languages. While GObject has been designed for auto-generating language bindings. You can write GTK apps in Haskell, Rust, Nim, D…
Not convinced that that’s worked out in practice. Certainly when working in Python, the Qt bindings were much nicer to use than the GTK ones. “It’s harder to bind to C++ than C” is true as far as it goes, but binding to GObject doesn’t really mean binding to C, it means binding to either a pile of preprocessor macros or to Vala, both of which seem harder than binding vanilla C++.
Documentation… honestly, no UI toolkits has great docs.
True as far as it goes, but there are definitely some with better docs than others.
Also, GTK 4 is bringing GPU rendering to the existing regular desktop widget system, instead of creating a new separate thing (QML/QtQuick) that’s rarely going to be used, especially on desktop apps
We’ll see how that works out for them. Back when I worked on a game in ~2010 I found the Qt approach to this very easy and common-sense: set the flag to enable OpenGL on the part for which it made sense (my game scene), don’t try to use it on the vanilla widgets (because why would I want to?)
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xv6?
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friendlysock
1 month ago
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ARM kills off its anti RISC-V riscv-basics.com site after own staff revolt
a chipmonger kills its webshit propogands after some employees complain
If you can easily n-gate a submission, maybe it shouldn’t be here.
Spam about ad campaigns and counterreactions is not a core value prop of lobsters. :(
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on the other hand, this story is currently on the front page with an above-median vote score, and the other riscv-basics story is the highest voted story currently on the front page, so evidently the users of lobsters found both relevant to their interests.
Yours is some low-quality gatekeeping.
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News is the mindkiller. Humans are hardwired to be really interested in new things regardless of their utility, usefulness, or healthiness–you need look no further than the 24 hour news cycle or tabloids or HN front page to observe this phenomena.
If you look at any given submission, it has a bunch of different things it’s “good” at: good in terms of educating about hardware, good in terms of talking about the math behind some compiler optimization, good in whatever. Submissions that are news are good primarily in terms of how new they are, and have other goodness that tangential if it exists at all. The articles may even have a significant off-topic component, such as politics or gossip or advertising.
This results in the following pathologies:
- Over time, if a community optimizes for news, they start to normalize those other components, until the scope of the submissions expands to encompass the formerly off-topic material…and that material is usually something that is at best duplicated elsewhere and at worst pure flamebait.
- The industry we’re in specializes in spending loads of money on attractive clickbait and advertising presenting as news, and so soon the submissions become flooded with low-quality crap or advertising that takes up community cycles to process without ever giving anything substantial in return.
- The perceived quality of the site goes down for everybody and the community fragments, because news is available elsewhere (thus, the utility of the site is diminished) and because the valuable discussion is taken up with nitpicking news stories. This is why, say, c2 wiki is still around and useful and a lot of news sites…aren’t.
What you dismiss as gatekeeping is an attempt to combat this.
EDIT:
A brief note–your example of the two ARM articles being on the front page illustrate the issue. Otherwise intelligent lobsters will upvote that sort of stuff because it’s “neat”, without noting that with everybody behaving that way we’ve temporarily lost two good spots for technical content–instead, we have more free advertising for ARM (all press is good press) and now slightly more precedent for garbage submissions and call-response (news thing, rebuttal to news thing, criticism/analysis of rebuttal). It’s all so tiresome.
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I bookmarked and often shared this post since it seemed like a nice set of guidelines. Had a lot of votes in favor, too.
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Haha. Depends on the context. They’re important for meta threads since it can determine site’s future.
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This is interesting news, it’s not just drama or clickbait. The big chip makers have maintained an oligopoly through patents on abstract math: an ISA. It’s insane that innovation can only come from a few big players because of their lawyers. RISC-V is the first serious dent that the open source movement has been able to make in this market because (unlike ARM, OpenPOWER, and OpenSPARC) it has a serious commitment to open source and it is technologically superior.
ARM will be the first player to fall to RISC-V because they have a monopoly on lower end chips. Samsung, Qualcomm, NVidia, Apple, Google, etc. are all perfectly capable of making a competitive chips without having to pay a 1% tax to ARM. We are already seeing this with Western Digital’s switch to RISC-V, there is no advantage to paying ARM for simple micro-controllers … which is a huge portion of ARM’s business.
That they are resorting to FUD tactics shows that ARM execs know this. People interested in the larger strategic moves, like myself, find this article about how their FUD tactics backfired very interesting. I would appreciate it if you didn’t characterize this sort of news as spam and the people who follow how big industry players are behaving as just being into drama.
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With respect, a good deal of your post is kremlinology.
That they are resorting to FUD tactics shows that ARM execs know this.
The ARM execs cannot be guaranteed to “know” anything of the sort–it’s more likely that there is a standard playbook to be run to talk about any competing technology, RISC-V, OSS, or otherwise. Claiming that “oh ho obviously they feel the heat!” is speculation, and without links and evidence, baseless speculation at that.
the people who follow how big industry players are behaving as just being into drama.
The people who “follow” big industry players are quite usually just people that want to feel informed, and are quite unlikely to be anybody with any actual actions available given this information. Thus, just because something is interesting to them doesn’t make it necessarily useful or actionable.
characterize this sort of news as spam
Again, all news is spam on a site with historically more of a bend towards information and non-news submissions. Further, it’s not like this hasn’t been covered extensively elsewhere, on Slashdot and HN and Gizmodo and elsewhere. It’s not like it isn’t being shown on many fronts.
Please understand that while in this specific case, you might have an interest–but if all lobsters follow this idea, it trashes the site.
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With respect, a good deal of your post is kremlinology.
I’m not allowed to infer basic information about the internal state of an organization based on its public actions?
That they are resorting to FUD tactics shows that ARM execs know this.
The ARM execs cannot be guaranteed to “know” anything of the sort–it’s more likely that there is a standard playbook to be run to talk about any competing technology, RISC-V, OSS, or otherwise. Claiming that “oh ho obviously they feel the heat!” is speculation, and without links and evidence, baseless speculation at that.
Do you understand why I might feel frustrated when someone mocks arguments defending a topic but then demands others provide extensive context to the conversation s/he inserted themselves into?
It’s not like ARM hasn’t spoken out on this subject before; a high level ARM technology fellow debated RISC-V foundation members a couple of years ago. The debate sounds a lot like an early draft of the arguments presented on the FUD website: RISC-V can’t possibly replicate ARM’s ecosystem and design services.
If you go look at the RISC-V foundation membership list, you will find a lot of ARM licensors and competitors including Qualcomm, Samsung, NVidia, IBM, Huawei, and Google. They are using RISC-V as a vehicle to jointly fund high-quality replacements of ARM’s IP, much of which consists of ISA patents and tooling. RISC-V has a very thorough patent review process, making it difficult to sue RISC-V manufacturers based on the ISA. There is a lot I don’t understand about the value ARM adds in terms of chip design and industry collaborations, but NVidia alone is worth 3x what SoftBank paid for ARM just two years ago.
If ARM execs aren’t worried about RISC-V taking market share, they should be. ARM creating a FUD website is very strong, direct evidence that this is the case.
The people who “follow” big industry players are quite usually just people that want to feel informed, and are quite unlikely to be anybody with any actual actions available given this information. Thus, just because something is interesting to them doesn’t make it necessarily useful or actionable.
It feels like you are talking down to me and other interested readers. Are kernel hackers the only people allowed to be interested in kernel development news? I don’t get a lot of actionable information based on the latest scheduler drama, but (as a UX engineer) I am interested in the outcome of these debates.
I came to Lobste.rs for a deeper understanding of the underlying technical and political factors at play here.
Again, all news is spam on a site with historically more of a bend towards information and non-news submissions.
I am open to this argument and I probably wouldn’t have perceived your comments so negatively had I not started from the standard definition of spam. Of course, I also understand that it is hard to justify the time to fit such nuance into a comment on an article : )
You clearly have thought a lot about this and discussed it with others, but new and causal readers haven’t. Perhaps you could use less incendiary language? Just say that Lobste.rs focuses on non-news submissions and that you feel industry news is offtopic.
Further, it’s not like this hasn’t been covered extensively elsewhere, on Slashdot and HN and Gizmodo and elsewhere. It’s not like it isn’t being shown on many fronts.
The technical analysis on HN and other sites is … non-existent. I would love to hear more from experts with informed opinions on chip design and manufacture and that’s what I expected of the comments here.
Please understand that while in this specific case, you might have an interest–but if all lobsters follow this idea, it trashes the site.
Well, I’m kinda peeved that the comments section of both stories turned into a slow-burn flamewar : /
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ARM will be the first player to fall to RISC-V because they have a monopoly on lower end chips.
They actually don’t. A good chunk of the chip market is 8-16 bitters. Billions of dollars worth. In the 32-bit category, there’s a lot of players licensing IP and selling chips. ARM has stuff from low end all the way up to smartphones with piles of proven I.P. plus great brand, ecosystem, and market share. They’re not going anywhere any time soon. MIPS is still selling lots of stuff in low-end devices including 32-bit versions of MCU’s. Cavium used them for Octeon I-III’s for high-performance networking with offload engines.
With most of these, you’d get working hardware, all the peripherals you need, toolchain, books/training on it, lots of existing libraries/code, big company to support you, and maybe someone to sue if the I.P. didn’t work. RISC-V doesn’t have all that yet. Most big companies who aren’t backers… which are most big companies in this space… won’t use it without a larger subset of that or all of that depending on company. I’m keeping hopes up for SiFi’s new I.P. but even it probably has to be licensed for big money. If paying an arm and a leg, many will choose to pay the company known to deliver.
From what I see, ARM’s marketing people or whatever are just reacting to a new development that’s in the news a lot. There some threat to their revenues given some big companies are showing interest in RISC-V. So, they’re slamming the competition and protecting their own brand. Just business news or ops as usual.
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ARM will be the first
player[large monopoly] tofall[lose lots of market-share] to RISC-V because they have a monopoly on lower end chips.Argh, I thought “fall” was too strong a choice of words while writing this, I should’ve listened to myself.
My line of thought was that it’s really hard to create a competitive server platform, as evidenced by the niche market SPARC, OpenPOWER, and ARM occupy in the server space. However, there are plenty of low-power, low-complexity ARM cores out there that are up for grabs. I’m hoping that Samsung, Qualcomm, and other RISC-V backers are supporting RISC-V in hopes that they can take their CPU designs in-house and cut ARM out of the equation.
I am largely ignorant of the (actual) lower-end chip market, thanks for the insight.
With most of these, you’d get working hardware, all the peripherals you need, toolchain, books/training on it, lots of existing libraries/code, big company to support you, and maybe someone to sue if the I.P. didn’t work. RISC-V doesn’t have all that yet.
The RISC-V foundation was very intentional in their licensing and wanted to ensure that designers and manufactures would have plenty of secret sauce they could layer on top of the core spec. This is one of the reasons OpenSPARC failed and why so many different frenemies are collaborating on RISC-V.
From what I see, ARM’s marketing people or whatever are just reacting to a new development that’s in the news a lot.
Their marketing people made the site, but an ARM technology fellow pitched similarly bad arguments in a debate ~2 years ago. Or maybe I’ve just drunk too much Kool Aid.
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I upvoted both submissions. I consciously bought Lobsters frontpage spot for RISC-V advertising and paid loss of technical content in exchange. I acknowlege other negative externalities but I think they are small. Sorry about that.
I think RISC-V advertising is as legitimate as BSD advertising, Rust advertising, etc. here. Yes, technical advertising would have been better. I have a small suspicion of gatekeeping RISC-V (or hardware) against established topics, which you can dismiss by simply stating so in the reply.
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Thanks for keeping up the effort to steer the submissions in a more cerebral direction, away from news. I totally agree with you and appreciate it.
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I almost never upvote these kind of submissions, but seeing as it can be hard to get these off the main page, maybe it could be interesting for lobsters to have some kind of merging feature that could group stories that are simply different stages of the same news into the same story, thus only blocking one spot.
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Now that is interesting. It could be some sort of chaining or hyperlinks that goes in the text field. If not done manually, the system could add it automatically in a way that was clearly attributed to the system. I say the text field so the actions next to stories or comments stay uncluttered.
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It would also allow it to act as a timeline of sorts. Done correctly I could even apply quasi automatically to tech release posts as well, making it easier to read prior discussions.
The main question right now would be how to handle the comments ui for those grouped stories.
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All publicity is good publicity is actually totally false.The actual saying should be something like “Not all bad publicity is bad for you if it aligns with your identity.”. Fighting OSS definitely doesn’t align with the ARM identity/ethos.
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It’s so easy to just react and click that upvote button without thinking; the score is a reflection of emotional appeal, not of this submission’s relevance. “But it’s on the front page” is also a tired argument that comes up in every discussion like this one. @friendlysock makes excellent points in his reply to you, I totally agree with him and appreciate that he takes the time to try to steer the submissions away from news. There are plenty of news sites, I don’t want another one.
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or maybe n-gate is a worthless sneer masquerading as a website that doesn’t need to be used as a referent on topical material? Especially given that literally anything posted to HN is going to be skewered there? I’m not the go-to guy on HN cheerleading (at all, in any way) but n-gate is smirky petulant crap and doesn’t exactly contribute to enlightenment on tech topics.
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worthless sneer masquerading as a website that doesn’t need to be used as a referent on topical material
El Reg could be described the exact same way!
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thats…..actually a good point.
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This thing is barely readable. What the fuck?
If you build a collaborative website, show the threads, the authors (BEFORE a new paragraph, not after), who added what and when.
This reads like a dump of opinions.
That’s pretty ironic given the subject.
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it’s worth pointing out that this is the original wiki. It’s recently been rewritten in JS, but they have stuck with their old conventions through lots of waves of stylistic changes that have influenced UX/web design. I’m sure they’d consider a pull request source code on github
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Yeah, the original was easier to read. It just had a plain, one-point-after-another style. I loved reading all the debates on there about things like LISP.
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Reminds me I should try to finish the Mono port and figure out what the heck was wrong with it. (Basically, it would run fine until you hit a bunch of different runtime termination issues….) I’m wondering if I was actually hitting bugs in Haiku….
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It’s possible. If you have some stack traces, I might be able to give some sort of tips as to how you might determine that (or perhaps I’ll recognize them as some outstanding issue.)
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Yeah, next time I will, I’ll try to bug you on
#haikuabout it ;)
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foxyjackfox
1 month ago
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There was a time when search engines were a thing. And it seems they still are
The internet search experience suffered a setback when the major browsers abandoned the separate search box for the combined address/search box. Only FireFox retains this feature, where your default search engine is the first choice in a list.
In the days before Alta Vista became better than Yahoo, and then Google crushed all other search options, there were meta-search engines that combined, filtered, and formatted results from several search engines of your choice. IIRC Magellan was one of these. I’ve toyed with the idea of reviving this idea for my own use. Google and Bing are pretty similar, but not perfectly similar, and provide different results depending on whether you are signed-in or anonymous. DDG usually provides different enough results to be important. There’s a lot of room for innovation in meta-search.
Finally there are still all sorts of specialized search options. In this category I would start with Amazon and Wikipedia. There are also sites like noodle.com, specializing in education related searches.
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I don’t know. I switched to DDG at home and I’ve always been able to find what I’m looking for. I still use Google at work so I’m able to compare and contrast. About the only place where Google is better (in my opinion) is in image search, and that may be due to how Google displays them vs. DDG.
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Here’s a concrete example. Let’s say I’m trying to remember the name of the project that integrates Rust with Elixir NIFs.
First result for me for the query “elixir rust” on Google is the project in question: https://github.com/hansihe/rustler
After scrolling through three pages of DDG results, that project doesn’t seem to be listed or referenced at all, and there are several Japanese and Chinese-language results despite the fact that I have my location set to “United States”. I will forgive all the results about guitar strings since DDG doesn’t have tracking data to determine that I’m probably not interested in those (although the usage of the word “rust” in those results is in the term “anti-rust” which seems like a bad result for my query).
That query is admittedly obtuse, but that’s what I’ve become accustomed to using with Google. These results feel generally characteristic of my experience using DDG. I end up using the
!gcommand a lot rather than trying to figure out how to reframe my query in a way that DDG will understand.-
I think you did that wrong. You were specifically interested in NIF but left that key word off. Even Lobsters search engine, which is often really off for me, gets to Rustler in the first search when I use these: elixir rust nif. Typing it into DDG like this gives me Rustler at Page 1, Result 2.
Just remember these high-volume, low-cost engines are pretty dumb when not backed by a company the size of Google or Microsoft. You gotta tell them the words most likely to appear together. “NIF” was critical in that search. Also, remember that you can use quotes around a word if you know for sure it will appear and minus in front of one to eliminate bogus results. Put “site:” in front if you’re pretty sure which place or places you might have seen it. Another trick is thinking of other ways to say something that authors might use. These tricks 1990’s-early2000’s searches get me the easy finds I submit here.
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I disagree that “NIF” was essential to that query. There are a fair number of articles and forum posts on Google about the Rustler library. It’s one of the primary contexts that those two languages would be discussed together. DDG has only one of those results as far as I see. Why? Even if I wasn’t looking for Rustler specifcally, I should see discussions of how those two languages can be integrated if I search for them together.
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There are a fair number of pages where Elixir and Rust will show up without Rustler, too. Especially all the posts about new languages. NIF is definitely a keyword because you’re wanting a NIF library specifically instead of a page about Rust and Elixir without NIF. It’s a credit to Google’s algorithms that it can make the extra connection to Rustler pushing it on the top.
That doesn’t mean I expect it or any other search engine to be that smart. So, I still put every key word in to get consistently accurate results. Out of curiosity, I ran your keywords to see what it produces. The results on the top suck. DuckDuckGo is usually way better than that in my daily use. However, instead of three pages in, DuckDuckGo has Rustler on page 1, result 6. Takes about 1 second after hitting enter to get to it. Maybe your search was bad luck or something.
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Finally there are still all sorts of specialized search options. In this category I would start with Amazon and Wikipedia.
DuckDuckGo has a feature called “bangs” that let you access them. Overview here. Even if not using DDG, their list might be a nice reference of what to include in a new, search engine.
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I thought that was clear. What I like about the old style dedicated search box is it that its is so easy to switch between search engines.
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With keyword searching (a feature I first used in Opera, and which is definitely present in Firefox; I can’t speak to any other browsers), it’s “so easy” to switch between search engines—in fact, far easier than with a separate search box. I type “g nephropidae” to search Google, or “w nephropidae” for Wikipedia, “i nephropidae” for image search, or even “deb nephropidae” for Debian package search (there’s no results for that one).
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This is not completely obvious from the user experience. Without visual cues, much available functionality is effectively hidden. You must have either taken the initiative to research this, someone told you, or you stumbled upon it some other way. This also effectively requires you to have CLI-like commands memorized, the exact opposite of what GUIs purport to do. And adding new search engines? That’s non-obvious.
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I use YubNub to get large library of such keywords that is the same on every device.
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I wonder, have you heard of Word?
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I know one author who swears by it. I know many who swear at it.
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While I could be sarcastic and say I tried ed because I like pain, Dark Souls is too easy, and going to a dominatrix would upset my wife, I actually have reasons for doing this.
- I had bought an electronic copy of Michael W. Lucas’ Mastering Ed, and figured that since he bothered to write it and I bothered to not only spend five bucks on it but read it, I might as well try actually using ed.
- I wanted to cut through all of the memes and see if using ed was really as terrible an experience as people seem to think it is. I figured that if Ken Thompson could use it to write the first version of Unix on a PDP-7, it couldn’t be that horrible.
- I want to separate composition from revision because I have trouble actually finishing shit; I tend to go back and edit when I should be writing. A line editor like ed doesn’t prevent me from going back and making changes, but it does make doing so hard enough that it’s easier to say “fuck it” and keep going.
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I figured that if Ken Thompson could use it to write the first version of Unix on a PDP-7, it couldn’t be that horrible.
How is that possible? I though he had to write it in assembler, and only later on was it re-written in C with the help Ritchie?
But seriously, by that logic we shouldn’t have advanced beyond research unix v1, since if it could be used, why bother changing it? I understand this attitude if one looks at it like a game, but otherwise I’d rather prefer a more integrated experience, at the expense of having to focus by one’s own willpower.
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It was originally written in assembly. They started turning B into C in a series of steps called “proto C’s.” They couldn’t do UNIX rewrite in them until the one with structs.
If arguing from Thompson’s actions, you’d write a modern, graphical OS in assembly (see MenuetOS). Then, you’d partner with someone who could build the best system language you could on top of the one you had available within your hardware constraints. Probably be more like Rust or Nim esp since they already exist. Could be better, like a leaner one. And then rewrite the assembly OS in that.
The result doing about the same things they did with modern tools would output something much better than UNIX and C. People trying to keep to what they did is like if they tried to keep doing what successful, number-crunching, batch-oriented computers did. Better to try to improve things.
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calvin
1 month ago
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Nebulet | More answers to questions that you may or may not have asked.
One of the OSes that Nebulet reminds me the most of is again, IBM i (but everyone old enough calls it OS/400), with its single address space and requiring applications be written for a safe VM. If it had objects, database as storage, and a single level store, it’d be very close to it!
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It’s a design that’s easy to get off the ground, for sure. Managing arbitrary user binaries with different permissions means needing to rely on hardware memory management (non-portable and one of the ickier corners of the 386 IMO).
I’ve done it on all my OS projects, on the ground that I’m lazy & don’t care about the performance & security of toys. But, with JIT and virtualization on the table, there’s plenty of practical reason to move the management of permissions to the VM and away from hardware facilities. (Plus, recent events have shown that trusting chipmakers to do complicated security-vital stuff in hardware is not any more reliable than doing it in software, & perhaps worse since it’s harder to investigate and patch.)
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Bring back LeechFTP!
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Adjacent set of unfocused rants: are we even teaching them useful programming?
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As a society, we’re obsessed with teaching “practical” knowledge by rote instead of learning how to learn. Are 1 month JavaScript bootcamps useful for people 5 years down the road? 10?
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We teach kids how to learn, but they can do nothing useful with it even if they do care. Environments like Swift Playgrounds are cute, but they can’t be used to develop applications - for that, you need a Mac (and how to use it!) and a developer license. Even on Android, for “post-PC” children, especially in the third world, what good is their programming knowledge if there’s no good environment for it?
- Likewise, nothing much can be really done with programming on device. It’s not like you can script or query Instagram - it’s all silos. AppleScript or Unix pipelines could be a model. (It seems Apple might start to resolve that a little with the Shortcuts app though.)
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There is no question it’s not possible to teach kids “useful” in the professional sense programming in a few months course. Even adults for that matter. That’s not the point however.
For all talk about “digital natives” the kids have no fainest clue about how the things that define most of their waking life work. They only have an ad hoc mental concept of networking, casual exposure to what OS is, they rightfully fear malicious software and hacking but do not understand the vectors they work through nor what they can or can not do. Computers and smartphones are magic to them, to the extent that cars, electricity or airplanes never were for the previous generations.
My son had a programming course like that, it lays a decent foundation to how computers actually work, what they can and can not do. It’s a lot easier to explain how malicious program can work when a person has a concept of what a program is. There were also a bunch of classes with Micro:bit helping demystify what’s happening in countless devices around us.
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I rolled a 20 on being in the right time to learn computers. I had Tandy 1000XLs in my kindergarden, with various educational apps, then around the 4th grade, I received a hand-me-down Commodore 64 with two cubic meters of books, wires, disk drives, disks, carts, an Atari with a keyboard, joy sticks, paddles, a koala pad, etc. I played with that a couple years, and my very next computer was a 120Mhz Pentium, Win95, no internet. After exploring almost literally every file on the thing, I got AOL, riiiiight before the web blew up.
Today, as you might imagine, I hate almost everything that is going on with computers. :/
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Did you read the article? It’s basically a response to this exact critique, saying that focusing on the end product misses other benefits, like knowing what kinds of things programs are and are not capable of. This helps them make more informed decisions around privacy, etc. thruout their life regardless of career path.
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I can’t believe there was a way to get the progress of a copy tucked away all this time, I have wanted that many times.
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This issue was tagged with ‘Implementation needed’ on August 29, 2017. Have there been any developments since then?
Unfortunately the case for IRCv3, not likely.