And downloading updates is a good thing. Means that the fresh installation isn’t vulnerable to something that was fixed between when the USB / DVD was pressed and the time the person installed it.

Linux has made leaps and bounds with usability and ease of installation but it’s no better than any other modern OS - which is a good thing. Installing Windows from a USB stick is not difficult - the simple path is literally, pick a language, select your wifi, choose who is logging in, click install and go grab a coffee. About the only difficulty if you can call it one is that some installs will ask for a serial number because it’s a commercial product.

Also, the number of questions & buttons during installation is one thing but the certainty of a functioning system is another. Linux is better at supporting old hardware, Windows is better at supporting new hardware. Choose accordingly if that matters.

I don’t even know what this graph is even supposed to mean. Bitch about Windows all you like but the installation process is typically very simple.

People pay YouTube instead of using an adblocker?

Nvidia is worth 42bn USD and employs 30,000 people.

Nvidia’s has a market cap 30x of Intel’s. So it could issue more stock to raise capital for a buyout. It’s not the company equity but the market cap that it needs to have money to purchase. Even a controlling stake of > 50% would give them defacto control. Of course governments & regulators would probably block it or force Nvidia to divest bits of itself, and that’s probably the greatest protection Intel has against such a scenario.

But if Intel weakens further, it may well be someone else tries to acquire it. I bet a lot of companies would love to snaffle it up. It’s kind of ironic that Intel used to be the big dog in the semiconductor space but even AMD is bigger than it these days and are potentially many others who’d like buy it out. In fact, for all we know Intel might be shedding all these jobs to make it look more attractive to potential buyers.

The US and Europe has become acutely aware that too much semi-conductor manufacturing has been outsourced to China and other Asian nations and they’re trying to build some back domestically. So that’s the geopolitical reason for it.

How long before Nvdia buys them, or at least tries to. Nvidia tried to buy Arm but got stopped by the UK government.

I know tar zxf and xjf off by heart. I probably do 100x as many extracts as creates. Tar is a stupidly antiquated command though.

It doesn’t work like that. UTC goes forward always. Leap seconds are scheduled and known in advance. NTP time services will just smear time advancement a little to account for an additional second. Time never has to go backwards. This is how Google does it.

Leap seconds still make time go forwards, not backwards. NTP clients would also resolve small time discrepancies while still advancing forwards prior to the next time sync.

I didn’t say Unix time, I said UTC. And no it won’t report negative time, not unless somehow the system clock was modified while it was running…

UTC always goes forward regardless of the timezone and local time. That is why you should use it. To take my EPG situation above, I stored program start / end times in UTC so they would render properly even if DST kicked in or not during the middle of the program.

Yes as long as the rules are known, but it’s really just better to do things sanely and leave no margin of doubt.

True but so do most computers. Computers have a database of timezones and time offsets around the world. Depending on the UTC date and time, and your current timezone it will look up what offset to apply to show the local time. The database is very gnarly since rules change over time, e.g. maybe in the 70s some countries had longer DST to counteract oil shortages.

I once developed an electronic program guide for a cable TV company in New Zealand and I’d lose my mind if I had to use timezones. The basic rule of thumb was:

a) Internally you use UTC religiously. UTC is the same everywhere on Earth, time always goes forward, most languages have classes that represent instants, durations etc. In addition you make damned sure your server time is correct and UTC.

b) You only deal with timezones when presenting something to a user or taking input from a user

Prior to that I had worked for a US trading company that set all their servers to EST and was receiving trades through the system which expressed time & date ambiguously. Just had to assume everywhere that EST was the default but it was just dumb programming and I bet to this day every piece of code they develop has time bugs.

Rust isn’t really OOP like C#, Java or C++ - it has structs with functions that you could consider an “object” but there is no inheritance. Instead Rust uses traits which are a little bit like interfaces in some languages.

The way the kernel is using Rust at the moment is to produce safe bindings for modules to be written in Rust, i.e. you can create a module in Rust source which will be correctly loaded up, the code is safe by default and will have access to kernel services via bindings. I expect over time that more of the kernel will become Rust, but the biggest impediment right now is Rust relies on LLVM and LLVM only supports a subset of targets that a kernel could potentially support with another compiler like gcc.

Predominantly C. But even the kernel is beginning to use Rust as a way of avoiding entire classes of programming error.

The only reason people use JS is because it’s the defacto language of browsers. As a language it’s dogshit filled with all kinds of unpleasant traps.

Here is a fun one I discovered the other day:

new Date('2022-10-9').toUTCString() === 'Sat, 08 Oct 2022 23:00:00 GMT'
new Date('2022-10-09').toUTCString() === 'Sun, 09 Oct 2022 00:00:00 GMT'

So padding a day of the month with a 0 or not changes the result by 1 hour. Every browser does the same so I assume this is a legacy thing. It’s supposed to be padded but any sane language would throw an exception if it was malformed. Not JavaScript.

Lemmy is written in Rust. There might be bits of C at the periphery behind bindings.

Concerning logs:

1. You can still log to text if you want by configuration (e.g. forward stuff to syslog) and you can use any tools you like to read those files you want. So if you like text logs you can get them. You can even invoke journalctl to output logs on an ad hoc / scheduled basis in a variety of text formats and delimited fields.
2. Binary allows structured logging (i.e. each log message is comprised of fields in a record), indexing and searching options that makes searches & queries faster. Just like in a database. e.g. if you want to search by date range, or a particular user then it’s easy and fast.
3. Binary also allows the log to be signed & immutable to prevent tampering, allow auditing, intrusion detection etc… e.g. if someone broke into a system they could not delete records without it being obvious.
4. You can also use splunk with systemd.

So people object to systemd writing binary logs and yet they can get text, or throw it into splunk or do whatever they like. The purpose of the binary is make security, auditing and forensics better than it is for text.

As for scripts, the point I’m making is systemd didn’t supplant sysvinit, it supplanted upstart. Upstart recognized that writing massive scripts to start/stop/restart a process was stupid and chose an event driven model for running stuff in a more declarative way. Basically upstart used a job system that was triggered by an event, e.g. the runlevel changes, so execute a job that might be to kick off a process. Systemd chose a dependency based model for starting stuff. It seems like dists preferred the latter and moved over to it. Solaris has smf which serves a similar purpose as systemd.

So systemd is declarative - you describe a unit in a .service file - the process to start, the user id to run it with, what other units it depends on etc. and allow the system to figure out how to launch it and take care of other issues. It means stuff happens in the right order and in parallel if it can be. It’s fairly simple to write a unit file as opposed to a script. But if you needed to invoke a script you could do that too - write a unit file that invokes the script. You could even take a pre-existing init script and write a .service file that kicks it off.