hEy, yOu lEaRnEd A bUzZwOrD aNd rEcEnTlY dIsCoVeReD tHe sHiFt KeY!!! cOnGrAtS!?!

hEy, yOu lEaRnEd A bUzZwOrD aNd rEcEnTlY dIsCoVeReD tHe sHiFt KeY!!! cOnGrAtS!?!

hEy, yOu lEaRnEd A bUzZwOrD aNd rEcEnTlY dIsCoVeReD tHe sHiFt KeY!!! cOnGrAtS!?!

But this issue wasn’t found because of code analysis per se, but because of microbenchmarking.

Oh, we play dumb ad-hominem without any basis in reality?

I can play this too: Was your last school homework hard?

If the vulnerability is in the wild, what other security mechanisms do you have until it’s patched?

The only real downside on the open source side is that the fix is also public, and thus the recipe how to exploit the backdoor.

If there’s a massive CVE on a closed source system, you get a super high-level description of the issue and that’s it.

If there’s one on an open source system, you get ready-made “proof of concepts” on github that any script kiddy can exploit.

And since not every software can be updated instantly, you are left with millions of vulnerable servers/PCs and a lot of happy script kiddies.

See, for example, Log4Shell.

Most people I helped getting Linux to work are actually not techy at all and they haven’t touched the CLI at all so far…

I guess it differs if you use Linux because you are interested in the technology or if you use it because Windows 11 doesn’t run on your PC.

Tbh, I don’t recommend beginners to try out multiple distros in the beginning. Realistically, if you don’t have in depth Linux knowledge already, all you’ll be able to differentiate is the look of the DE and the wallpaper.

I find, too much choice tends to confuse beginners more than it helps them.

So I’d rather recommend something simple like Ubuntu and let them try out the flavours with the different DEs.

Choice is better for later when people actually understand what they are looking for.

Yeah, that’s more due to need than due to technical difficulty.

Even in 2024 it’s still common that you have to print out documents to sign them or tickets for some event or something like that. All these (quite relevant) use cases just don’t work if you don’t have a 2D printer.

As much as I like my 3D printer, and as much as I recommend everyone to have one, is not nearly as necessary.

In regards to how difficult they are to make, consider the price.

2D printers have an advantage due to their much higher sales numbers (economy of scale) and they are subsidized by the manufacturer selling expensive ink. And still, a half-decent inkjet costs €100 or more, and a color laser easily costs €300 or more.

3D printers usually have much lower sales numbers and people usually buy 3rd party filament, so the printer needs to be expensive enough to generate money for the manufacturer. And still you can get a decent Ender 3 for as low as €150.

What’s different? Basically the whole thing.

A 3D printer (talking here about FDM because SLA really shares nothing at all with a 2D printer) is basically a tiny hot glue gun being moved on three axies by stepper motors. Of course, the temperature and extrusion controls are much more accurate than a hot glue gun, but that’s the basic principle. You got a single “printing point” that gets moved around and it only extrudes filament from that single point.

An inkjet printer has one stepper motor that moves the paper and another that moves the print head from left to right. So there too are axies moved on stepper motors. A very simple trait also shared by e.g. CD and disk drives, slot machines, camera lenses and many other things. All these things are as close to a 2D printer as a 3D printer.

The real magic of an inkjet printer is the print head. A print head doesn’t have a single nozzle but an array of many nozzles. This way, a printer cannot only print one dot at a time, but instead a few lines at a time. These nozzles are much tinier that the nozzles on a 3D printer, and they also are much more complicated to operate.

A 3D printer just uses a stepper motor to push filament into the printhead, where it melts and is then pushed out of a hole.

On an inkjet printer, you need to either rapidly boil the ink, so that a single vapor bubble appears that pushes just a tiny drop of ink on the paper, or you have a tiny piezoelectric transducer that creats a vibration that then pushes out ink.

This is orders of magnitude more difficult than a 3D printer, and much tinier. You won’t be DIYing a working 2D printer from scratch, while that isn’t all that hard for a 3D printer. With access to a decent toolshop, you can make all relevant parts of a 3D printer. The same is not true for 2D printers.

To rephrase your question: Why is it that so many people build DIY desktop PCs, but nobody is making a DIY flagship smartphone? What’s the difference?

Basically everything.

And the FOSS system seems to be collapsing right now for the same reason that anarcho-communism only works short-term until someone sees commercial value in it and abuses the system to the limit.

• Big corporations initially providing exceptional services based on FOSS and after a while use their market share to excert undue control about the system (see e.g. RedHat, Ubuntu, Chrome, Android, …)
• Big corporations taking FLOSS, rebranding it and hiding it below their frontend, so that nobody can interact with or directly use the FLOSS part (e.g. iOS, any car manufacturer, …)
• Big and small companies just using GPL (or similar) software and not sharing their modifications when asked (e.g. basically any embedded systems, many Android manufacturers, RedHat, …)
• Big corporations using infrastructure FOSS without giving anything back (e.g. OpenSSL, which before Heartbleed was developed and maintained by a single guy with barely enough funding to stay alive, while it was used by millions of projects with a combined user base of billions of users)

The old embrace-extend-extinguish playbook is everywhere.

And so it’s no surprise that many well-known FOSS developers are advocating for some kind of post-FOSS system that forces commercial users to pay for their usage of the software.

Considering how borderline impossible it is for some software developer to successfully sue a company to comply with GPL, I can’t really see such a post-FOSS system work well.

Put books under it.

Python sure has changed since I last used it.

If all other executives would earn as much as the guys from Wikipedia, the world would be a better place.

Is there a reason why you ask this here and not just ask the staff at the shop?

Stuff like that can differ from shop to shop. So better ask the person who knows the answer.

Yeah, noticed that too. This is really annoying.

Actual lines of meaningful code: 3

They’ll probably have to offload that to a server farm in real time. That’s not gonna be easy.

Now guess how it feels to type German with predictive text. Most of our words can have more than a dozen different word endings depending on time and how the word is used. And that’s not taking into account that we use compound words, which word prediction pretty much cannot predict and often doesn’t even know. So spell check will mark a legal compound word as misspelled, because it doesn’t understand the concept of compound words and doesn’t know this specific word combination.

To show what I mean, the term “Danube steam boat captain’s hat” becomes “DonauDampfSchiffKapitänsMütze” (I added capital letters which shouldn’t be there to show where the next word in the compound word begins).

While this is an extreme example, it’s pretty common for compound words to consist of 4-5 words.