@troyunrau@lemmy.ca
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troyunrau

@troyunrau@lemmy.ca

Centrist, progressive, radical optimist. Geophysicist, R&D, Planetary Scientist and general nerd in Winnipeg, Canada.

troyunrau.ca (personal)

lithogen.ca (business)

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troyunrau,
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When I was part of the KDE marketing working group, we always talked about 5% being the magic number. If we hit that, then the avalanche of ported and supported third party software starts. It’s a weird chicken and egg thing. Looks like we’re close!

troyunrau,
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I also mostly use VLC these days. I also use it on android, with a copy of my flac library on my microSD there too.

troyunrau,
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Only in a 2D world with the directions being limited to “up” and “down”. Carrying it laterally around the circumference of the hill would be equally probable.

troyunrau,
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This is a misapprehension. Springs are on hillsides, not hilltops. Basically, imagine there are two surfaces: the ground, and the water table. In some places, usually on hillsides, the water table will intersect the surface. Where that happens, a spring will exist.

But that water has to be under pressure for this to happen – this is known as the hydrological gradient. Water flows down hill on the surface, and down gradient under ground. In order for there to be pressure on the water, enough to force it out a hillside, the water table somewhere in the hill needs to be physically higher in altitude than the spring.

In other words, it rains on top of the hill, and the rain soaks into the ground. That water wants to flow downhill, so it flows out of the ground on the sides of the hills. But this means a spring will never flow from the top of a hill.

troyunrau,
@troyunrau@lemmy.ca avatar

The hydrologist in me always asks: why dig a well at the top of the hill? Surely that is more effort than digging it at the bottom of the hill where the water table is closer to the surface.

But I guess wells like this predate modern hydrology. And outhouses and such could be polluting the water as it flows down gradient. So the water at the top of the hill was likely cleaner and safer to drink…

I’d wish for clean drinking water in every well. ;)

troyunrau,
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No. DBUS has its roots in freedesktop.org and the KDE+Gnome projects. It’s basically a desktop agnostic reimplemented of KDE’s DCOP, which was itself a simplified CORBA (gnome was using ORBit at the time, if I recall correctly). DBUS was so useful that the domain spaces its been applied to soon rapidly outgrew the desktop space, and this is why it’s usually started earlier these days.

It also works on Windows.

troyunrau,
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Look into history of object brokering in object oriented environments. I was around when KDE went from CORBA to DCOP to DBUS, but not involved in the decisions. Basically: object sharing between processes with security, type translation, and a few other things. In the Microsoft world, this was called “component object model” if my memory is correct.

DBUS is pretty nice for complex interactions.

troyunrau,
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I worked in diamond exploration for years. We joked that we were turning diesel into diamonds – just not through compression. Seriously kids, buy a lab diamond if you want one.

troyunrau,
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I keep bumping my head on the roof tho

troyunrau,
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Outer Worlds 2 writing team here. You’re hired!

troyunrau,
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Missing: any sort of physicist who will tell them both that the forward model says that the sun won’t explode for a few billion years, and so far that model hasn’t been wrong.

troyunrau, (edited )
@troyunrau@lemmy.ca avatar

Too small to supernova and black hole, yes. But large enough to have a decent boom. Probably at least red giant, then a nova (explosion casting off outer layers) leaving a white dwarf remnant.

If I’m around by then, my model of medical science progress is wrong ;)

E: I’m wrong. That casting off of the outer gas envelope is not a nova. It’s just a death throe of some sort.

troyunrau,
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I’m getting old, it seems. Kids these days probably don’t even have to configure modlines in XFree86. Sheesh. ;)

troyunrau,
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Back in the day, debian used to render fonts badly to avoid a potential patent trap. Is that still a thing?

troyunrau,
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If you’re as old as I am, you’ll recall software using the term “gamma” release instead of “release candidate” for that phase. ;)

troyunrau,
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Not sure if it’s still the same as it was back in my day, but KDE’s “release candidate” nomenclature was always a bit of a misnomer. You’d never see RC1 actually released as final. What it really means is that the alpha “feature refinement” beta “bug fixing” phase is over, and it’s the final testing phase for showstoppers. However, the definition of showstopper seemed always to be very wide. Thus, a lot of bugs still get reported and fixed during this phase, and RC really means “beta, but towards the end of the pipeline”.

Which is in contrast to the Linux kernel where a RC can be declared ship-ready and simply get renamed.

Admittedly there’s a fairly large impact difference between kernel level bugs, and say a bug in Okular…

troyunrau,
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You had ChatGPT write that apology, eh? ;)

troyunrau,
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In the web interface, crossposting is handled more cleanly – both in making them, but also collapsing them. Not sure why. Nevertheless, it is one of the few shortcomings of using Connect.

Ideally, it would show the post once, and then show the comment threads for each community, so you can dive into the various comment threads from any/all of the crossposts.

troyunrau,
@troyunrau@lemmy.ca avatar

This is a marketing trick, part of the shrinkflation treadmill.

(1) Step one, make a box with three rows of cookies.

(2) Step two, make two products, one with two rows (at a slightly lower price than the three rows), and introduce a Family Size/Share Size/etc. with four rows that costs just under double.

(3) Step three, return two step one, but now with a higher price.

Repeat ad nauseum.

The thing is, as a single consumer who is trying to buy at the best price point at any given time, I’ll fall for it repeatedly.

troyunrau,
@troyunrau@lemmy.ca avatar

Geoscientist here. I concur. The names are punny sometimes (this example in particular), but usually non-descriptive. Exceptions for the super common things (quartz, pyrite) when used in a discussion where the chemistry is irrelevant in that specific context. Conversely, we generally don’t care about the chemistry when talking about “clays” in geophysics, so defining them chemically would become noise to the reader.

troyunrau,
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Well, the underpants glitch is going to get patched haha.

troyunrau,
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My hero. Thanks! I’ve been using the web interface for a few weeks because Scaled is just such a better choice. I’d even go so far as to suggest making it the default for all apps and servers. :)

troyunrau,
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Yes

troyunrau,
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Wut

troyunrau,
@troyunrau@lemmy.ca avatar

They do this gag in Babylon 5. Except it’s an alien using one of their penis tentacles…

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