computergeek125
@computergeek125@lemmy.world
- Comment on The Onion buys rightwing conspiracy theory site Infowars with plans to make it ‘very funny, very stupid’ 1 week ago:
It’s on APNews too - it’s real
- Comment on Looks like the good times are over for Temu ( and Chinese sites like them) 3 weeks ago:
Just because sponsor block exists, doesn’t mean video creators shouldn’t be better.
Just like UBO and web ads.
- Comment on 10001 4 weeks ago:
Only if you’re using a sign bit rather than two’s compliment (a sign bit allows for two representations of 0)
- Comment on OpenFreeMap - a public vector tile server for OpenStreetMap 1 month ago:
Before anyone gets too deep I’d like to point out that this is just about hosting vector tiles, the actual tile gen is a separate project
- Comment on I had to install directx 9 to run gta 4 on windows 11 1 month ago:
Thanks! I learned something new today, and that makes today a good day.
- Comment on I had to install directx 9 to run gta 4 on windows 11 1 month ago:
I mean… DX 9, 10, and 11 were all released prior to Nadella being CEO/chairman.
But in software, it’s very commonplace for library versions not to be backwards compatible. This isn’t the same thing as being able to open a word doc last saved on a floppy disk in 1997 on Word 365 2024 version, this is about loading executable code. Even core libraries in Linux (like OpenSSL and Nurses) respect this same schema, and more strongly than MS.
Using OpenSSL as an example, RHEL 7 provides an interface to OpenSSL 1.0. But 1.1 is not available in the core OS, you’d have to install it separately. 1.1 was introduced to the core in RHEL 8, with a compatibility library on a separate package to support 1.0 packages that hadn’t been recompiled against 1.1 yet. In RHEL 9, the same was true of OpenSSL 3 - a compatibility library for 1.1, and 1.0 support fully dropped from core. So no matter which version you use, you still have to install the right library package. That library package will then also have to work on your version of libc - which is often reasonably wide, but it has it limits just the same.
- Comment on I had to install directx 9 to run gta 4 on windows 11 1 month ago:
DirectX 12 was released in 2015 with Windows 10, so it’s unlikely to have been ported back to 8.1 and lower
- Comment on I had to install directx 9 to run gta 4 on windows 11 1 month ago:
DirectX, OpenGL, Visual C++ Redist and many other support libraries in software programs typically require the same major version of the support libraries that they were shipped with.
For DirectX, that major version is 9, 10, 11, 12. Any major library change has to be recompiled into the game by the original developer.
Same goes for OpenGL, except I think they draw the line at the second number as well - 2.0, 3.0, 4.0, 4.1, 4.2, 4.3, 4.4.
For VC++, these versions come in years - typically you’ll see 2008, 2010, 2013, and the last version 2015-2022 is special. Programs written in the 2013 version or lower only require the latest version of that year to run. For the 2015-2022 library, they didn’t change the major version spec so any program requiring 2015+ can (usually) just use the latest version installed.
The one library that does weird things to this rule is DXVK and Intel’s older DX9-on-12. These are translation shim libraries that allow the application to speak DX9 etc and translate it on the fly to the commands of a much more modern library - Vulkan in the case of DXVK or DX12 in Intel’s case. (Note that iirc Intel has been moving their driver away from 9-on-12 implementations to faster native implementations)
- Comment on Platypuses 2 months ago:
fedora themed music starts playing
Do be do be do, bah
Do be do be do, bah - Comment on Platypuses 2 months ago:
“broken build” here likely refers to the phrase as defined by gamers to function as synonymous to “overpowered”.
As in, “the build is so broken you can’t/it is difficult to play against it”. This phraseology could be used by either an ally or an enemy, but it contextually changes connotation from positive for allies to negative for enemies.
Build is often used as a shorthand for a character’s combination of items, skills, and levels (as the various games define it).
- Comment on Audubon 2 months ago:
The reference numbers appear to be sourced from the Wikipedia article
- Comment on Some basic info about USB 2 months ago:
Oh totally. I have a pile of RS-232 adapters that you still need to program just about every modern Ethernet switch, and they’re all type-A ports.
- Comment on Some basic info about USB 2 months ago:
Not on all vendors tho - coloring was an optional part of the standard. Dell often uses grey for USB3
- Comment on Some basic info about USB 2 months ago:
If you’re trying to get Lemmy to print the backslash, you need to make it a double backslash since backslash is an “escape” character that means “ignore any special formatting meaning of the next character” (among other meanings)
- Comment on Some basic info about USB 2 months ago:
You’d be surprised. My mouse only needs 2.0, but uses a C connector for compatibility. It provides an A to C cable with only 2.0 wiring, which is a decision I assume they made to allow the wire to be more flexible as it can be charged during use or used entirely wired.
- Comment on Student dorm does not allow wifi routers 2 months ago:
Where I went to college, they probably didn’t directly have the key, that’d have to go through maintenance. But one of the things you signed on to initially was for maintenance to enter if they needed to while you were out.
Plus, at least half of the WAPs were actually in rooms and not hallways, so to service the network beyond IDF problems they’d have to get in
- Comment on Student dorm does not allow wifi routers 2 months ago:
This is true of a even some public universities in the US. I can’t remember if it was a rule where I was, but definitely most freshman did just live in dorms.
Lot of folks brought their own desktops to set up, and we were allowed Ethernet switches to hook up multiple devices - had to be wired. Wireless had two options, WPA# 802.1X or unencrypted captive portal guest. If your device didn’t support that, it had to be wired by policy.
And they weren’t wrong, I did a radio scan and they had the full sized enterprise access points about as good as they could (with a few low signal exceptions, and the air waves were still overloaded with too many people. The building uplink was perfectly fine, it was just overcrowded wireless.
- Comment on Student dorm does not allow wifi routers 2 months ago:
If it’s a dorm they have the key.
- Comment on 10 years later, Apple Pay is amazing — and about to change 2 months ago:
I’m an American android user and I’m confused too. Sure Apple Pay seemed to come to a lot of terminals first, but NFC Google wallet or whatever it is the phone does automatically I’ve only seen fail at certain terminals. In that rare case, usually someone behind me with Apple Pay often also fails, so I’d be more likely to attribute it to a system glitch rather than lack of support.
- Comment on TV with infared sensor (mac mini) 2 months ago:
Memory unlocked that’s been a hot minute ago
Didn’t apple used to make their own IR remote for that? Is the hardware onboard the Mini preset to use their hardware or is it more generic once Linux is installed?
- Comment on A cool dapp i made! 2 months ago:
I didn’t even know ETC existed until now, I thought that was a typo
- Comment on A cool dapp i made! 2 months ago:
The first fee screens look like a combination reverse job board and Coinbase. But your description says “post stuff and create tokens”, which doesn’t quite seem to line up
Why?
I don’t think Web3 contracts have tested case law yet, so who knows if it’s enforceable in court, at most it may only be as strong as a gentleman’s agreement. And the token part looks like an easy way to create rug pull coins, just on the ETH database instead of an independent database.
- Comment on Teams finally fixed the most important problem! 3 months ago:
I’d like to politely disagree
Finding alternatives to large software packages is great, don’t think I’m not saying that - but any time you have competitor X and competitor Y, be they both commercial, both F/OSS, or some combination thereof, the competitors must be cognizant of each other when setting up features.
Burying your head in the sand and ignoring Microsoft, Apple, and Google is a very solidly Microsoft-Apple-Google-style play. It’s the play of someone who believes the other side offers no competition. That’s how you get unwieldy features these tech giants implement because they know they can make a 70% effort and people won’t be annoyed enough to leave.
Every tool they make has a reason someone made it. Many tools are very important - for one example, the Microsoft Office document format is considered to be almost a universal format in presentations, spreadsheets, and plain documents for message passing between businesses.
But as we as a society design alternatives to those various monopolies (as we should), we need users to want to use the new thing. We have to take what people like and keeps them on their old platform, and best preserve the intent of what they want on the new platform. Doing so requires discussing the features those big tech companies
And as users, when we select the platforms we use, we need to weigh the cost of going with an alternative vs going with a giant. No solution is a perfect solution for everyone, and the chooser needs to weigh the maintenance cost (in hours or money) they will incur, how their users will like/dislike it, and maybe even look at a piece of software and decide “nah the vibes are off”.
I’d love a world where those three tech giants had proper competition in all fields, and I think their business practices are scummy and need improvement. But the real alternatives to each need some polish before they’re ready to be used by [arbitrary tech illiterate grandmother].
- Comment on TSMC Arizona struggles to overcome vast differences between Taiwanese and US work culture 3 months ago:
As much as I dislike how Intel works sometimes, this market does not need fewer competitors.
- Comment on My homelab had the stupidest outage ever 3 months ago:
Not on a flash based motherboard (so basically almost everything recent). On modern systems usually the only thing the battery powers is the clock, which is why they have a separate reset to defaults header/button/switch.
(The CMOS memory of old is replaced with flash memory, al la SD Card or flash drive)
- Comment on Why do so many people use NGINX? 3 months ago:
TLDR: probably a lot of people continue using the thing that they know if it just works as long as it works well enough not to be a bother.
Many many years ago when I learned, I think the only ones I found were Apache and IIS. I had a Mac at the time which came pre installed with Apache2, so I learned Apache2 and got okay at it. While by release dates Nginx and HAProxy most definitely existed, I don’t think I came across either in my research. I don’t have any notes from the time because I didn’t take any because I was in high school.
When I started Linux things, I kept using Apache for a while because I knew it. Found Nginx, learned it in a snap because the config is more natural language and hierarchical than Apache’s XMLish monstrosity. Then for the next decade I kept using Nginx whenever I needed a webserver fast because I knew it would work with minimal tinkering.
Now, as of a few years ago, I knew that haproxy, caddy, and traefik all existed. I even tried out Caddy on my homelab reverse proxy server (which has about a dozen applications routed through it), and the first few sites were easy - just let the auto-LetsEncrypt do its job - but once I got to the sites that needed manual TLS (I have both an internal CA and utilize Cloudflare’ origin HTTPS cert), and other special config, Caddy started becoming as cumbersome as my Nginx conf.d directory. At the time, I also didn’t have a way to get software updates easily on my then-CentOS 7 server, so Caddy was okay-enough, but it was back to Nginx with me because it was comparatively easier to manage.
HAProxy is something I’ve added to my repertoire more recently. It took me quite a while and lots of trial and error to figure out the config syntax which is quite different from anything I’d used before (except maybe kinda like Squid, which I had learned not a year prior…), but once it clicked, it clicked. Now I have an internal high availability (+keepalived) load balancer than can handle so many backend servers and do wildcard TLS termination and validate backend TLS certs. I even got LDAP and LDAPS load balancing to AD working on that for services like Gitea that don’t behave well when there’s more than one URL.
So, at some point I’ll get around to converting that everything reverse proxy to HAProxy. But I’ll probably need to deploy another VM or two because the existing one also has a static web server and I’ve been meaning to break up that server’s roles anyways (long ago, it was my everything server before I used VMs).
- Comment on Immich relies on a third-party service that seems shady to me 3 months ago:
A static PNG tile database for world.osm is even larger. Without a solid vector tile solution, this is the most efficient data format for disk space.
Also, there’s a post render CDN cache in front of the rendering layer to offset load, plus there’s I think some internal caching in renderd. It’s a pretty complex machine, but databases of the world are in fact huge.
- Comment on Immich relies on a third-party service that seems shady to me 3 months ago:
OSM’s core tile servers have dozens of cores, hundreds of GB of RAM each, and the rendering and looks databases are a few TB. That’s not trivial to self host, especially since one self hosted tile server cannot always keep up with a user flick scrolling.
- Comment on Alexa Is in Millions of Households—and Amazon Is Losing Billions 3 months ago:
A paywall?
WaPo the paywall??For your consideration, I present an anti-paywal-inator!!! TO THE ARCHIVES! archive.is/5VPB5
- Comment on CrowdStrike Isn't the Real Problem 3 months ago:
Virtual servers (as opposed to hardware workstations or servers) will usually have their “KVM” build in to the hypervisor control plane. ESXi, Proxmox (KVM), XCP-ng/Citrix XenServer (Xen), Nutanix (KVM-like), and many others all provide access to this. It all comes down to what’s configured on the device.
VMs are easy because the video and control feeds are software constructs so you can just hook into what’s already there. Hardware (especially workstations) are harder because you don’t always have a chip on the motherboard that can tap that data. Servers usually have a dedicated co-computer soldered onto the motherboard to do this, but if there’s nothing nailed down to do it, your remote access is limited to what you can plug in.