fernandofig @ fernandofig @reddthat.com

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2 yr. ago

As I grow old and struggle with the break up of a marriage of ~19 years: Both Sides Now, from Joni Mitchell

It's a bit long to paste here, so just Google it if you care.

~19 years of marriage ended late last year due to mental health issues + NPD. I'm still trying to get over it, but it's tough; she just won't leave me alone.

Same here. In fact, I bought my Legion (which btw I feel like it was a good choice on OPs part because I believe Lenovo's laptops tend to have better cooling engineering in general, for whatever laptop category, compared to other brands) to serve first as a work laptop, and then some gaming on the side, which I'm not too picky about because I don't really play on PC that often anyway. My reasoning for that is that the business laptops I had been looking before going with the Legion were frankly overpriced crap with limited expandability, shoddy components and build, and full of built-in bloatware pre-installed. I find that gaming laptops tend to have higher quality components and slightly better expandability, so it was a win all around.

Probably never. The dev seems intent on keep drinking the reddit kool-aid and push subscription to users. It's too bad, there is a gap for an app with the same polish for lemmy (although I have yet to try Sync)

Yeah, but then we're not talking about social media anymore, but brand and company names in general.

When you want a brand name to be part of people's everyday vocabulary, as is the case with social media, it needs to be succint and easily referred to. Hell, sometimes people even turn those names into verbs (tweeeting, facebooking, etc.), how do you do that with Mastodon without compounding the problem? (E: I know about "toots", but now that's coming up with unintuitive jargon for the platform - which is fine, but shouldn't have been necessary in the first place if more thought had been put into the brand)

Because this looks and feels pretty much identical to the arcade.

Probably because it shares a lot of the hardware of the original arcade, so the porting probably was straightforward.

My point was more about pronunciation, not necessarily a hard count of syllables (which would be just an easier guideline). Your example and "Amazon" are kinda the exceptions that proves the rule. 🙂

Marketing-wise, I believe it's very hard to make a name for a product/service/platform/app/whatever that has (or sounds like having) more than 2 syllables catch on. I mean, mas-to-don doesn't quite roll off your tongue like face-book, twit-ter, you-tube, lem-my, etc.

In that sense, I agree with the OP in that "Mastodon" was a poor name choice (and as opposed to him, even if there is an explanation for it), and may well contribute to hurt its adoption by the general public. It's the kind of name you sometimes see FOSS enthusiasts come up who can write great software but has poor knowledge (or downright disdain) in marketing, product management, and other business aspects.

Did you read the tweet from Brendan Eich linked in the OP? According to him, Brave already is a fork, and he provides a link to a (surprisingly) extensive list of things that are removed / disabled from chromium on their browser.

Chromium-based browsers still trounces Firefox on the Jetstream benchmark. I mean, I realize the Speedometer benchmark is supposed to test real-world scenarios, while Jetstream is more synthetic, but whatever work mozilla did to improve performance I'd expect to scale in other benchmarks too, so I'd expect Firefox to at least be bit closer to Chromium, even if losing a little.

Fair enough! FWIW, I also think your stance on the matter is fairly level-headed and well thought out, even if I'm more or less on the other side of the fence.

While I personally do not think that all Chromium browsers (especially since there are projects like ungoogled-chromium) transmit your personal data, I can't verify this myself because the Chromium codebase is far too much of an undertaking for myself to review.

Don't you think that, with so many contributors and projects having eyes on it (arguably more so than on gecko), if there was foul play wouldn't anyone have sounded the alarm?

I heard the same - over a decade ago.

Not disagreeing with you, although that information might be outdated. But the fact that you don't see, e.g. , applications that use gecko to embed web content, speaks volumes. I get the feeling that their codebase is very monolithic.

I would really like to hear from a current or former contributor though.

The closest thing to an explanation I could find online just said “legal issues”, but didn’t go into details.

I don't think that makes sense, or at least it doesn't properly qualify the problem. BIOS is a set of baked-in software routines that mediate certain operations between software and hardware. In theory it could be reverse-enginereed and thus emulated just like the rest of the hardware is. In fact, many of the more simple systems (like 8 or 16-bit consoles) have their BIOS emulated. But for more advanced or poorer documented systems, there are, in my view, two problems with that:

• If your reversed engineered version of the BIOS has bugs (and during early stages of development, it would have a lot), the ways in which these bugs could present themselves makes the situation ambiguous, because it may be hard to know, from the symptoms, whether the bug is on the BIOS or on the hardware emulation. So developers just use the official BIOS because then if you see bugs, you know for sure the problem is on the hardware emulation. And also, reverse engineering the BIOS would require a lot of effort that developers would probably rate as low priority given they could use a perfectly functional BIOS and avoid a whole lot of other technical problems as per above. I mean, for many systems, hardware emulation is a problem already complex enough;
• Depending on the system, the BIOS code could be so simple that a reverse engineered version of it could conceivably be so close to the actual official code that it could, yes, trigger a copyright suit from the creator.

Sorry, but no. Putting that on the users is a no-go.

I agree that Linux is generally stable - when it works (i.e. hardware well supported and the pains of installing and initial setup is gone). But the experience to get to that point is still far from polished, and that don't usually has anything to do with user expectations on how the OS should work.

I've been using Linux on the desktop on and off since 1998 aproximately - way before it was "cool" - and that has always been the case - it was always "almost there, but not quite". That's not a knock on developers either (I'm a developer myself, just not on Linux) - Linux for server stuff is excellent and I've always used it for that, but user experience for desktop stuff always had wrinkles, and I understand how many user experience problems can be hard to solve for developers (who more often than not are volunteers) for many reasons, just let's not put that on the users: things are the way they are for reasons that, at heart, often go beyond users or developers - market, business politics, etc.