There was a BBC documentary a few years ago where they gave GPS tracking collars to a bunch of cats in a neighbourhood and tracked where they went. Each of the cats had their own territory and favourite locations.
I’ve seen in various threads that the current browser engines aren’t good, such as gecko and blink. The question is why? Why do we need a new one, and what’s stopping a new one being made? Is it just the fact that they’re a lot of work to make?
One of the main issues is the lack of competition. There are now only 3 main browser engines, Blink, Gecko and WebKit. Blink (which poses Chrome and Edge) is by far the largest, and has a the enormous marketing might of Google (and Microsoft to a lesser extent) behind it. WebKit runs Safari, which only runs on Apple platforms and arguably only has the market share it does is because Apple doesn’t allow other browser engines to run on iPhones and iPads. Gecko, the engine of Firefox, continues to slide into irrelevance (which pains me to say as a long time Firefox user).
We are in real danger of the web being trapped in a browser monoculture again, like the dark dark times of Internet Explorer’s dominance. This led to a period of stagnation in web technology Microsoft at the time put little effort into developing IE. Allowing Blink/Chrome to do the same will likely be just as damaging, albeit in different ways - particularly for privacy on the web.
For the good of the web no one company should ever be in the position to dictate web standards, which is why we need a healthy and competitive marketplace of web browsers and browser engines. The problem is that web standards have now become so complex developing an indecent browser engine is now a monumental task. Opera gave up on Presto, once the poster child for browser innovation. Microsoft, a company with far more resources, gave up on Trident. Mozilla was developing a new generation browser engine called Servo, but gave up on the project also.
We heat our house with oil (grumble grumble grumble) but our float sensor is not a very accurate measure and it’s out of the way to actually see. Has anyone come across a sensor that works with HA and has been reliable? Bonus points for something that still has an “analog” view in case of problem...
I also have an oil boiler, and a tank in the garden. The tank was fitting with an Apollo Ultrasonic oil level sensor, which sends a signal to base station with a very basic LCD display in the house via 433Mhz radio.
I use an RTL-SDR USB radio dongle, a cheap 433MHz antenna and the rtl_433 software to monitor the signals from the ultrasonic sensor, which transits roughly once an hour. The level measurement transmitted is a fairly accurate centimetre value (I compared it with manual measurements with a dip stick for a few months).
The base station only showed a vague level indication with 10 bars, but now I have more a more precise smart display of the tank level, without any extra modification to the tank system.
My theory is that they had no practical purpose, they were just a trendy knickknack that eventually fell out of fashion. A Roman equivalent of a fidget spinner or something.
In a few thousand years whatever has become of humanity will be digging up fidget spinners and wondering about them in the same way we do with dodecahedrons. It’s not as if anyone will have been preserving fidget spinner media for millennia to explain them.
macOS offers a lot of stability, it’s reliable, predictable, boring even. It works out of the box and stays that way, it survives upgrades, and rarely crashes.
The release cycle is steady, and changes are generally gradual and incremental. Mac users don’t usually have to worry about a new release breaking their system or their workflow because a developer wants to reinvent the wheel or a UI designer wants to make their mark. The only big shifts have been processor transitions.
The Mac ecosystem also allows users to have a foot in both the proprietary and open source ecosystems on a single platform. Being able to run, say, web development environments and Adobe CS for example, can be a lot easier than farting around with Wine or WSL.
Granted, there’s plenty of downsides to the Mac as well, but the platform definitely has merits.
The distributed computing explanation for purpose of the Matrix doesn’t seem to make much more sense than the power plant one.
All of the nodes are continuously occupied by living in the simulation. Unless the machines had a desperate need to understand human society circa 1999, there is nothing useful the machines could do with all the brain power.
It wouldn’t surprise me if there were still a few production Itanium systems in server rooms somewhere, running some obscure or bespoke proprietary software that can’t be migrated to anything else. There are other more arcane systems still being limped along in businesses around the world, for some frighteningly critical applications in some case.
Itanium support being dropped probably has a handful of admins panicking, but in the eyes of the kernel developers it’s a case of “put up or shut up”.
The AS/400 platform is still alive and actively maintained by IBM so I’m told, although I think it goes under the Power Systems and IBM i brands now. I know several business still using them, with development teams still coding with RPG etc. Apparently there is also reasonable ecosystem of middleware to interface with more modern systems, and some sort of *nix compatibility layer to run more modern software on the platform.
I’ve never touched one myself, but they are keeping a few greybeards I know in steady work.
"Outdoor Cat vs Indoor Cat" by Sarah Andersen (lemm.ee)
Source: Website - RSS
What's the issue with current browser engines?
I’ve seen in various threads that the current browser engines aren’t good, such as gecko and blink. The question is why? Why do we need a new one, and what’s stopping a new one being made? Is it just the fact that they’re a lot of work to make?
I love those path (lemm.ee)
Accurate/smart oil sensor?
We heat our house with oil (grumble grumble grumble) but our float sensor is not a very accurate measure and it’s out of the way to actually see. Has anyone come across a sensor that works with HA and has been reliable? Bonus points for something that still has an “analog” view in case of problem...
TELL ME YOUR SECRETS (lemmy.world)
Hella unlikely they were used to knit gloves
Just because it’s better than windows doesn’t make it good (lemmy.ml)
They are too expensive and gimicky either way (sh.itjust.works)
The four houses dads belong to. (lemmy.world)
A self-care reminder (startrek.website)
Home Assistant 2024.1: Happy automating! (www.home-assistant.io)
No take backs? (lemmy.ca)
Japan is living in the future that the 1990s dreamed of. (startrek.website)
Will Linux on Itanium be saved? Absolutely not (www.theregister.com)
Let's all be thankful. (lemmy.world)
Happy Thanksgiving!
The Netherlands (mander.xyz)
Purism Announce New 11-Inch Linux Tablet (www.omglinux.com)