Boss: I need to demo our product but it looks smaller on my laptop.
Me: That is because you have a 1920x1080 monitor and your laptop is 1280x800
Boss: Is that something you can fix?
Me: No you will need a new laptop, but the company has a sales laptop with that resolution.
Boss: No just get the company credit card and buy me one today!
*Bosses son hears*
Bosses Son: Here take the sales laptop
Boss: Will that be quick enough
Bosses Son: It has a 8 core i7 Processor, 16GB ram and a dedicated GPU
Boss: *looks at me confused*
Me: Your demoing a web browser, that will be more then ok. But were using chrome so 16GB of ram will be pushing it.
*me and bosses son laughs*
Boss: Can we upgrade it?

devrant community is so great. May all of you get more RAM on your servers.

There is. My latest creation. A 8bit microcontroler made in minecraft.
Features:
(1.0 version without control room)
-8bit full adder + overflow flag
-8x8bit RAM
-16x8(4bit instruction, 4bit address)
program memory
-64 possible microinstructions (16 instructions with 4 step each)
-uncondintional and if oveflow jumps
(place determined using address written with instruction)
-1/3Hz clock speed 😨

New working version (2.0) has 1Hz clock and new faster instruction decoder.

In 3.0 in addition to that useless bus was replaced with 16x8bit "hardware" stack that can store adresses and data. The clock is going to be yeeted out because it is unnecesary #clocklessisbetter (WIP tho)

Might add more documentation and post it as learning model for CS wanabees 🤔. What do you think?

Picture: Old working version 1.0
(the only one with fancy diagram)
Newer version screenshots in comments.

Mom: "I need simple computer to browse the web with chrome"
Me :

So I visited my aunt's house a few days back.
They heard I write code (read: Google and copy-paste from Stack Overflow), and wanted me to help repair their computers.
Saw my cousin playing Battlefield 4 at sub-20 fps with a GTX 750 Ti on the lowest settings. His fucking CPU fan was bust, and judging by the amount of dust in his system, I literally thought he was cramming dust in there on purpose.

After a heavy dusting, another stick of RAM (4GB -> 12GB), a new heatsink (CoolerMaster T400i), and a fresh copy of Windows 10 (along with Office, etc.), he could play games at 60+ fps again.

What do I get? Not even a fucking thank you. Just a "you done yet? I want to play video games."
I mean... Gee. Your cousin flew all the way to a new continent, spent his precious vacation time helping you out, and all he gets is a cold-ass shoulder.
Even my fucking ex gave me more than that.

Did know you could use more than 100% of your ram

Me: you should not open that log file in excel its almost 700mb
Client: its okay, my computer has 4gb ram
Me: *looking at clients computer crashing*
Client: the file is broken!
Me: no, you just need to use a more memory efficient tool, like R, SAS, python, C#, or like anything else!

I'm getting ridiculously pissed off at Intel's Management Engine (etc.), yet again. I'm learning new terrifying things it does, and about more exploits. Anything this nefarious and overreaching and untouchable is evil by its very nature.

(tl;dr at the bottom.)

I also learned that -- as I suspected -- AMD has their own version of the bloody thing. Apparently theirs is a bit less scary than Intel's since you can ostensibly disable it, but i don't believe that because spy agencies exist and people are power-hungry and corrupt as hell when they get it.

For those who don't know what the IME is, it's hardware godmode. It's a black box running obfuscated code on a coprocessor that's built into Intel cpus (all Intell cpus from 2008 on). It runs code continuously, even when the system is in S3 mode or powered off. As long as the psu is supplying current, it's running. It has its own mac and IP address, transmits out-of-band (so the OS can't see its traffic), some chips can even communicate via 3g, and it can accept remote commands, too. It has complete and unfettered access to everything, completely invisible to the OS. It can turn your computer on or off, use all hardware, access and change all data in ram and storage, etc. And all of this is completely transparent: when the IME interrupts, the cpu stores its state, pauses, runs the SMM (system management mode) code, restores the state, and resumes normal operation. Its memory always returns 0xff when read by the os, and all writes fail. So everything about it is completely hidden from the OS, though the OS can trigger the IME/SMM to run various functions through interrupts, too. But this system is also required for the CPU to even function, so killing it bricks your CPU. Which, ofc, you can do via exploits. Or install ring-2 keyloggers. or do fucking anything else you want to.

tl;dr IME is a hardware godmode, and if someone compromises this (and there have been many exploits), their code runs at ring-2 permissions (above kernel (0), above hypervisor (-1)). They can do anything and everything on/to your system, completely invisibly, and can even install persistent malware that lives inside your bloody cpu. And guess who has keys for this? Go on, guess. you're probably right. Are they completely trustworthy? No? You're probably right again.

There is absolutely no reason for this sort of thing to exist, and its existence can only makes things worse. It enables spying of literally all kinds, it enables cpu-resident malware, bricking your physical cpu, reading/modifying anything anywhere, taking control of your hardware, etc. Literal godmode. and some of it cannot be patched, meaning more than a few exploits require replacing your cpu to protect against.

And why does this exist?
Ostensibly to allow sysadmins to remote-manage fleets of computers, which it does. But it allows fucking everything else, too. and keys to it exist. and people are absolutely not trustworthy. especially those in power -- who are most likely to have access to said keys.

The only reason this exists is because fucking power-hungry doucherockets exist.

I have been a mobile developer working with Android for about 6 years now. In that time, I have endured countless annoyances in the Android development space. I will endure them no more.
My complaints are:

1. Ridiculous build times. In what universe is it acceptable for us to wait 30 seconds for a build to complete. Yes, I've done all the optimisations mentioned on this page and then some. Don't even mention hot reload as it doesn't work fast enough or just does not work at all. Also, buying better hardware should not be a requirement to build a simple Android app, Xcode builds in 2 seconds with a 8GB Macbook Air. A Macbook Air!

2. IDE. Android Studio is a memory hog even if you throw 32GB of RAM at it. The visual editors are janky as hell. If you use Eclipse, you may as well just chop off your fingers right now because you will have no use for them after you try and build an app from afresh. I mean, just look at some of the posts in this subreddit where the common response is to invalidate caches and restart. That should only be used as a last resort, but it's thrown about like as if it solves everything. Truth be told, it's Gradle's fault. Gradle is so annoying I've dedicated the next point to it.

3. Gradle. I am convinced that Gradle causes 50% of an Android developer's pain. From the build times to the integration into various IDEs to its insane package management system. Why do I need to manually exclude dependencies from other dependencies, the build tool should just handle it for me. C'mon it's 2019. Gradle is so bad that it requires approx 54GB of RAM to work out that I have removed a dependency from the list of dependencies. Also I cannot work out what properties I need to put in what block.
4. API. Android API is over-bloated and hellish. How do I schedule a recurring notification? Oh use an AlarmManager. Yes you heard right, an AlarmManager... Not a NotificationManager because that would be too easy. Also has anyone ever tried running a long running task? Or done an asynchronous task? Or dealt with closing/opening a keyboard? Or handling clicks from a RecyclerView? Yes, I know Android Jetpack aims to solve these issues but over the years I have become so jaded by things that have meant to solve other broken things, that there isn't much hope for Jetpack in my mind 😤

5. API 2. A non-insignificant number of Android users are still on Jelly Bean or KitKat! That means we, as developers, have to support some of your shitty API decisions (Fragments, Activities, ListView) from all the way back then!

6. Not reactive enough. Android has support for Databinding recently but this kind of stuff should have been introduced from the very start. Look at React or Flutter as to how easy it is to make shit happen without any effort.

7. Layouts. What the actual hell is going on here. MDPI, XHDPI, XXHDPI, mipmap, drawable. Fuck it, just chuck it all in the drawable folder. Seriously, Android should handle this for me. If I am designing for a larger screen then it should be responsive. I don't want to deal with 50 different layouts spread over 6 different folders.

8. Permission system. Why was this not included from the very start? Rogue apps have abused this and abused your user's privacy and security. Yet you ban us and not them from the Play Store. What's going on? We need answers.

9. In Android, building an app took me 3 months and I had a lot of work left to do but I got so sick of Android dev I dropped it in favour of Flutter. I built the same app in Flutter and it took me around a month and I completed it all.
10. XML.

If you're a new dev, for the love of all that is good in this world, do NOT get into Android development. Start with Flutter or even iOS. On Flutter and build times are insanely fast and the hot reload is under 500ms constantly. It's a breath of fresh air and will save you a lot of headaches AND it builds for iOS flawlessly.

To the people who build Android, advocate it and work on it, sorry to swear, but fuck you! You have created a mess that we have to work with on a day-to-day basis only for us to get banned from the app store! You have sold us a lie that Android development is amazing with all the sweet treat names and conferences that look bubbly and fun. You have allowed to get it so bad that we can't target an API higher than 18 because some Android users are still using devices that support that!

End this misery. End our pain. End our suffering. Throw this abomination away like you do with some of your other projects and migrate your efforts over to Flutter. Please!

#NoToGoogleIO #AndroidSummitBoycott #FlutterDev #ReactNative

!(short rant)

Look I understand online privacy is a concern and we should really be very much aware about what data we are giving to whom. But when does it turn from being aware to just being paranoid and a maniac about it.? I mean okay, I know facebook has access to your data including your whatsapp chat (presumably), google listens to your conversations and snoops on your mail and shit, amazon advertises that you must have their spy system (read alexa) install in your homes and numerous other cases. But in the end it really boils down to "everyone wants your data but who do you trust your data with?"

For me, facebook and the so-called social media sites are a strict no-no but I use whatsapp as my primary chating application. I like to use google for my searches because yaa it gives me more accurate search results as compared to ddg because it has my search history. I use gmail as my primary as well as work email because it is convinient and an adv here and there doesnt bother me. Their spam filters, the easy accessibility options, the storage they offer everything is much more convinient for me. I use linux for my work related stuff (obviously) but I play my games on windows. Alexa and such type of products are again a big no-no for me but I regularly shop from amazon and unless I am searching for some weird ass shit (which if you want to, do it in some incognito mode) I am fine with coming across some advs about things I searched for. Sometimes it reminds me of things I need to buy which I might have put off and later on forgot. I have an amazon prime account because prime video has some good shows in there. My primary web browser is chrome because I simply love its developer tools and I now have gotten used to it. So unless chrome is very much hogging on my ram, in which case I switch over to firefox for some of my tabs, I am okay with using chrome. I have a motorola phone with stock android which means all google apps pre-installed. I use hangouts, google keep, google map(cannot live without it now), heck even google photos, but I also deny certain accesses to apps which I find fishy like if you are a game, you should not have access to my gps. I live in India where we have aadhar cards(like the social securtiy number in the USA) where the government has our fingerprints and all our data because every damn thing now needs to be linked with your aadhar otherwise your service will be terminated. Like your mobile number, your investment policies, your income tax, heck even your marraige certificates need to be linked with your aadhar card. Here, I dont have any option but to give in because somehow "its in the interest of the nation". Not surprisingly, this thing recently came to light where you can get your hands on anyone's aadhar details including their fingerprints for just ₹50($1). Fuck that shit.

tl;dr
There are and should be always exceptions when it comes to privacy because when you give the other person your data, it sometimes makes your life much easier. On the other hand, people/services asking for your data with the sole purpose of infilterating into your private life and not providing any usefulness should just be boycotted. It all boils down to till what extent you wish to share your data(ranging from literally installing a spying device in your house to them knowing that I want to understand how spring security works) and how much do you trust the service with your data. Example being, I just shared most of my private data in this rant with a group of unknown people and I am okay with it, because I know I can trust dev rant with my posts(unlike facebook).

More sysadmin focused but y’all get this stuff and I need a rant.

TLDR: Got the wrong internship.

Start working as a sysadmin/dev intern/man-of-many-hats at a small finance company (I’m still in school). Day 1: “Oh new IT guy? Just grab a PC from an empty cubicle and here’s a flash drive with Fedora, go ahead and manually install your operating system. Oh shit also your desktop has 2g of ram, a core2 duo, and we scavenged your hard drive for another dev so just go find one in the server room. And also your monitor is broken so just take one from another cubicle.”

Am shown our server room and see that someone is storing random personal shit in there (golf clubs propped against the server racks with heads mixed into the cabling, etc.). Ask why the golf clubs etc. are mixed in with the cabling and server racks and am given the silent treatment. Learn later that my boss is the owners son, and he is storing his personal stuff in our server room.

Do desktop support for end users. Another manager asks for her employees to receive copies of office 2010 (they’re running 2003 an 2007). Ask boss about licensing plans in place and upgrade schedules, he says he’ll get back to me. I explain to other manager we are working on a licensing scheme and I will keep her informed.

Next day other manager tells me (*the intern*) that she spoke with a rich business friend whose company uses fake/cracked license keys and we should do the same to keep costs down. I nod and smile. IT manager tells me we have no upgrade schedule or licensing agreement. I suggest purchasing an Office 365 subscription. Boss says $150 a year per employee is too expensive (Company pulls good money, has ~25 employees, owner is just cheap) I suggest freeware alternatives. Other manager refuses to use anything other than office 2010 as that is what she is familiar with. Boss refuses to spend any money on license keys. Learn other manager is owners wife and mother of my boss. Stalemate. No upgrades happen.

Company is running an active directory Windows Server 2003 instance that needs upgrading. I suggest 2012R2. Boss says “sure”. I ask how he will purchase the license key and he tells me he won’t.

I suggest running an Ubuntu server with LDAP functionality instead with the understanding that this will add IT employee hours for maintenance. Bosses eyes glaze over at the mention of Linux. The upgrade is put off.

Start cleaning out server room of the personal junk, labeling server racks and cables, and creating a network map. Boss asks what I’m doing. I show him the organized side of the server room and he says “okay but don’t do any more”.

... *sigh* ...

Please Android studio eat more RAM, u peace of ..... 😡

So I finally got my head out of my ass and decided to install some OS on that 500MB RAM legacy craptop from earlier.

*installs Tiny Core Linux*

Hmm.. how do I install extra packages into this thing again? *Googles how to install packages*
Aha, extensions it's called.. and you install them through their little package manager GUI, and then you also have to dick around with some TCE directory, and boot options for that. Well I ain't gonna do that. Why the fuck would I need to dick around with that? Just install the fucking files in /bin, /var, /etc and whatever the fuck you need to like a decent distro. I'll fucking load them whenever I need them, BY EXECUTING THE FUCKING BINARY. But no, apparently that's not how TCL works.

Also, why the fuck is this keyboard still set to US? I'm using a Belgian keyboard for fuck's sake.. "loadkeys be-latin1"
> Command not found.

Okay... (fucking piece of shit) how do I change the fucking keyboard layout for this shit?!
*does the jazz hand routine required for that*
So apparently I need to install a package for that as well. Oh wait, an EXTENSION!! My bad. And then you can use "loadkmap < /usr/share/kmap/something/something" to load the keyboard layout. Except that it doesn't change the fucking keymap at all! ONE FUCKING JOB, YOU PIECE OF SHIT!!!

That's fucking it. No more dicking around in TCL. If I wanted to fuck around with the system this much, I'd have compiled my own custom Linux system. Maybe I can settle with Arch Linux, that's a familiar distro to me.. I can easily install openbox in that and call it a day. But this is an i686 machine.. Arch doesn't support that anymore, does it?

*does another jazz hand routine on Arch Linux 32 and sees that there's a community-maintained project just for that*

Oh God bless you fine Arch Linux users for making a community fork!! I fucking love you.. thank you so much!! Arch it'll be then <3

About two years ago I get roped into a something when someone was requesting an $8000 laptop to run an "program" that they wrote in Excel to pull data from our mainframe.

In reality they are using our normal application that interacts with the mainframe and screen scrapping it to populate several Excel spreadsheets.

So this guy kept saying that he needed the expensive laptop because he needed the extra RAM and processing power for his application. At the time we only supported 32 bit Windows 7 so even though I told him ten times that the OS wouldn't recognize more than 3.5 GB of RAM he kept saying that increasing the RAM would fix his problem. I also explained that even if we installed the 64 bit OS we didn't have approval for the 64 bit applications.

So we looked at the code and we found that rather than reusing the same workbook he was opening a new instance of a workbook during each iteration of his loop and then not closing or disposing of them. So he was running out of memory due to never disposing of anything.

Even better than all of that, he wanted a faster processor to speed up the processing, but he had about 5 seconds of thread sleeps in each loop so that the place he was screen scrapping from would have time to load. So it wouldn't matter how fast the processor was, in the end there were sleeps and waits in there hard coded to slow down the app. And the guy didn't understand that a faster processor wouldn't have made a difference.

The worst thing is a "dev" that thinks they know what they are doing but they don't have a clue.

Remember the days when 8GB of ram was more than enough? Hahahah...hah.

Today, I was told to investigate why the software doesn't work on "some" computers. I had no previous experience with that particular software but I just had to make some tests... easy, right? As soon as I ran the software, my computer crashed (I literally had to restart the pc). I asked my colleagues if I did something wrong but the set up seemed ok.

Later, in a random discussion about the software I found out it does "a little memory allocation". I opened the performance tab in task manager and ran the software again. In an instant, the RAM went from 1.3GB to 7.66GB (my pc has 8GB of RAM).

In an attempt to find how such a monstrosity was creater, I found out the developer that made the software had 16GB of RAM on his pc.

I have found something that eats RAM more than Chrome... brace yourselves.

Friend: I bought a new phone.
Me: nice!
Friend: It's really fast coz it has 3gb ram!!
Me: okay... Other specs? Cpu? Camera?
Friend: 13 MEGAPIXELS!
Me: yeah but other specs?
Friend: doesn't matter! The photos are of 8mb!
Me: yeah. Best phone ever. 😑😓

When the IT guy tells you that your pc needs more RAM and you think "I can hendle this!"

My first internship was unpaid. "For the experience" and shit. My first task was to clear out an entire office full to the literal ceiling with the phones of people who had been laid off or quit. There were now just three old guys in the entire office. And me. Go figure. I need to find that picture, it's truly unbelievable.
My next task was to sort cables in the store room. Mind you, this was supposed to be a software dev internship.

I consistently had to ASK for work to do. If I didn't, I would just sit in my new office all day doing homework and playing with linux liveCDs and nobody cared.

So the third task they gave me was to try to restore a very old (like XP old) computer that had a broken hard drive, literally broken. Said they wanted to "repurpose it." As busy work I guess.

So I scrounged around the cleptomaniacal cesspool of dated and neglected tech and found a hard drive. Pop it in, chkdsk, fdisk, good to go. Spend hours installing XP while sorting more random cables and doing my homework because honestly writing a history paper is more valuable to my dev career than this complete bullshit. Finally get the thing working and go to report the miracle of rebirth to my higher-up. He says "oh cool," doesn't smile, and hands me a list of software to install.

I come back 20 minutes later - "Hey, most of these require corporate licenses."

Guy says "yup" and goes back to ignoring me. Never gives me a company card to buy licenses, or a list of ones already bought. I've revived the computer equivalent of Moses from the computer equivalent of permadeath just for this asshole to completely disregard that and give me an(other) impossible task, just to get me off his back. Excuse me for imposing with free (then-child) labor, you ass.
I spend maybe another week there doing homework in the office I cleaned and contemplating stealing everything of value. I guarantee they wouldn't have noticed though, which somehow made the idea less appealing.

I quit by texting my boss.

He never replied.

I wish I had stolen their laptop RAM.
It's probably still sitting on boss's shelf collecting dust and being a miserable, outdated fucking waste of space, just like him and his two remaining coworkers.

Use SSDs.

It's not hard. They've been around for a while, small ones are cheap now and are more than enough for at least 90% of developers. The rest can probably afford 2TB NVMe.

Why waste 60$ on a worthless 500GB HDD that will load the OS in the time that's enough for you to make scrambled eggs?
Instead, use 60$ on a 128GB SSD. Sure, it's smaller, but if speed is important for you, you can forget a bit about saving all of the porn you see online, or about installing every free game from Steam.

SSDs are cheap already. And the performance advantage they give is ENORMOUS. You can have a core i9, 64GB of fastest RAM bla bla bla, but if you don't have an SSD, a Celeron with an SSD will seem faster.

Get one, and NEVER again cry about long loading times of IDEs, unless you feel like 30 seconds for the longest load time is too much. If your time is THAT valuable, then you can afford NVMe SSDs in RAID 10 (which can be done easily in software with btrfs if you're on Linux).

Seriously!
Every day I see posts like "Visual Studio is crap because it installs for 6 hours", or "Android studio starts in 30 minutes", or "Visual Studio Code sucks because it loads for too long compared to vim".
It's as if you only have access to budget 10 year old computers.

Heck yes!

I implement a stack trace in my embedded systems!

Whenever a device crashes, it makes a stack dump in an unused part of ram.
After it has rebooted and is connected to the server again, it uploads the stack dump.

The server then opens the correct firmware elf file, walks the stack and associates the debug info from the elf.

The result? A beautiful stack trace with file names, function names and line numbers.

No more guessing where random crashes come from.

More RAM and couple of HDD ordered, my homelab is growing :)

Half life 2 runs smoothly in a 12 year old PC with Nvidia 8500, 1 GB RAM, and a dual core.
A FPS with wavy water reflection, body physics and huge designed maps which is updates every fucking frame.

Today I can't run smoothly an IDE with 8 GB of RAM and 4 cores.
A program which only reacts to events stutters if I write at more than 3 letters per sec.

I wanna go back. Can we go back? Lets keep the new hardware and go back with the software pleeeease.

--- SUMMARY OF THE APPLE KEYNOTE ON THE 30TH OF OCTOBER 2018 ---

MacBook Air:
> Retina Display
> Touch ID
> 17% less volume
> 8GB RAM
> 128GB SSD
> T2 Chip (Core i5 with 1.6 GHz / 3.6 GHz in turbo mode)
Price starting at $1199

Mac Mini:
> T2 Chip
> up to 64GB RAM
> up to 2TB all-flash SSD
> better cooling than previous Mac Mini
> more ports than previous Mac Mini - even HDMI, so you can connect it to any monitor of your choice!
> stackable - yes, you can build a whole data center with them!
Price is 799$

Both MacBook Air and Mac Mini are made of 100% recyled aluminium!
Good job, Apple!

iPad Pro:
> home-button moved to trash
> very sexy edges (kinda like iPhone 4, but better)
> all-screen design - no more ugly borders on the top and bottom of the screen
> 15% thinner and 25% less volume than previous iPads
> liquid retina display (same as the new iPhone XR)
> Face ID - The most secure way to login to your iPad!
> A12X Bionic Chip - Insane performance!
> up to 1TB storage - Whoa!
> USB-C - Allow you to connect your iPad to anything! You can even charge your iPhone with your iPad! How cool is that?!
> new Apple Pencil that attaches to the iPad Pro and charges wirelessly
> new, redesigned physical keyboard
Price starting at 799$

Also, Apple introduced "Today at Apple" - Hundreds of sessions and workshops hosted at apple stores everywhere in the world, where you can learn about photography, coding, art and more! (Using Apple devices of course)

Storytime
A story about an Android TVbox which decided to become an iPad

Several years ago we've bought an android tv-box. 

It served me and my family well for several years.

Specs are not that important in this story, but there they are:

Android 4.4 
1GB RAM
Amlogic quadcore 1.4HGz
8GB memory.

This device served us well - online TV, browsing, music, file sharing and so on. But recently cheap Chinese memory deciteed to take a break and damaged ROM. Because of that device won't boot. The only option was to take it apart and "short circuit" certain legs on memory chip and make it boot from SD card and install new firmware. After such operations tv-box worked well again. 

Hoverer, memory glitched again and again and this algorithm was repeated for several months.

But that is not what is this story about.

One day memory went completely crazy and there was no way to install new firmware on it. It just hanged on install. (BTW, it was official firmware for this device)

But after countless attempts it finally worked! It installed the firmware and booted into launcher and connected to WiFi! 

But now comes the most interesting part. 

It was not android anymore.

It decided to became an iPad.

My dad logged in to his Google account via tv-box and got mail that someboby connected from our IP via iPad (we don't have an iPad) and using safari browser! Stock browser is not safari browser.....

"Ok, nvm, crazy glitch." - we thought.

But preinstalled play marked wont launch. Because he told us, that we're trying to connect from iPad.

And Google chrome page suggested to download chrome for iPad

And everything was acting like it is an iPad.

OK, downloaded iTunes, why not??? ._.

Tried to install elixir for android via apk from flash, but then memory glitched one more time, everything went black and tv-box had damaged ROM again...

After that we decided to not torment it anymore...

That's it. Poor Android TVbox that all his life dreamed to become an iPad. Rest in peace.

There is no planet in this multiverse where chrome should be using more ram than an ENTIRE VIRTUAL MACHINE. WHILE ITS COMPILING OPENCV!!! Seriously!?!?

Made a program to list primes until stopped. I got to about 2 billion when it took 8 GB of RAM and I more or less had to stopped it.

Only took 10% of CPU though.

Yesterday I realized that with the improvement in 3D printing, soon we will probably be able to download more RAM.

!rant & story_time
This happend to the startup I was working for at ~2011. I was a junior Android dev, working on a very popular app.
During experiments for a new feature, I discovered that the system AlarmManager has a serious bug - you can set a repeating alarm with interval=0ms. If your app takes more then 1 ms to handle the Intent, then the AlarmManager will start to fill up the intent Queue, with unexpected results to the OS. causing it to slow down, and reboot when it ran out of Ram. Why? my guess was that because the AlarmManager was part of the OS, then any issues caused by it caused the system process to ran out of ram, crashing it, and the whole system with it. the real kicker was that even after a reboot, the AlarmManager still had Intents queued, causing the device to bootloop for a while, untill the queue was cleared. My boss decided to report the problem to google, as this was an issue in the OS. I built an example app, that caused the crash 10-30 seconds after starting, and submitted to Google. Google responded later that day with "not an issue, no one will ever do this".
Well... At this point I decided to review the autoupdate feature in our app, to make sure this will not happen to us. We just released a new feature where a user can set an update schedule option in the app settings - where you could setup a daily, weekly, or hourly update for the app. after reviewing it, It looked good, and the issue was not triggered in the manual QA I did. So, it was all good. And we released an updated version to the store.
After we did an update-install, we discoverd that, there was a provlem reading the previous version SharedPrefs value for the update schdule settings, and the value defaulted to 0...
the result was, our app caused all our users to go into a bootloop, and because the alarm was reset when the devices booted up, the bootloop could only be solved in a factory reset, or removing our app, before the device rebooted, and then waiting a few reboot cycles.
We lost 50 places in the market, and it took us 6 months to get back to where we were.

It was not my fault, but it sucked big time!

A small bug is found.

Chad dev:
😎 *Exists*
> Writes a simple ad hoc solution in a few lines
> Self documenting code with constant run time
> No external dependencies needed
> Fixes the bug, easy to test and does not introduce any new issues

That guy nobody likes (AKA. regex simp coder):
🤡 'This can be "simplified" into oNE LiNe'
> Writes a long regex expression that has to line wrap the editor window several times
> Writes an essay in the comments to explain it's apparent brilliance to the peasant reader
> Exponential run time (bwahahah), excessive memory requirements
> Needs to import additional frameworks, requires more testing that will delay release schedule
> Also fixes bug but the software now needs 2x ram to run and is 3x slower
> Really puts the "simp" in simplified, but not the way you would expect

Okay lets write this before i go mad...

I'm one of those guys who says "use the os which suits you the most, or you're most familiar with", and i'v always been a windows guy, didn't really have any reason to use linux, because for school stuff, or programming (java and android and c) windows was great enough...

BUT MOTHERF@CKERS at microsoft, i'v had enough...
First my handheld computer goes nuts, because windows is eating 80% of processor, and if i fix it, then some other kind of windows related thing eats up that much, and you know what? I've been okay with that, because thats only a handheld computer, but boy, didn't my main computer start to do the same?!?
I cannot do anything, basically i start something trivial up (by trivial i mean trivial, like idk, a texteditor not even a browser, or an ide or anything that would take a bit of more ram) and my computer cant do shit....

I'm so mad.... Currently installing elemantary os... F@ck this shit i'm out...

(And lets not forget the hours of 'updates' which dont do shit....)

I like memory hungry desktop applications.

I do not like sluggish desktop applications.

Allow me to explain (although, this may already be obvious to quite a few of you)

Memory usage is stigmatized quite a lot today, and for good reason. Not only is it an indication of poor optimization, but not too many years ago, memory was a much more scarce resource.

And something that started as a joke in that era is true in this era: free memory is wasted memory. You may argue, correctly, that free memory is not wasted; it is reserved for future potential tasks. However, if you have 16GB of free memory and don't have any plans to begin rendering a 3D animation anytime soon, that memory is wasted.

Linux understands this. Linux actually has three States for memory to be in: used, free, and available. Used and free memory are the usual. However, Linux automatically caches files that you use and places them in ram as "available" memory. Available memory can be used at any time by programs, simply dumping out whatever was previously occupying the memory.

And as you well know, ram is much faster than even an SSD. Programs which are memory heavy COULD (< important) be holding things in memory rather than having them sit on the HDD, waiting to be slowly retrieved. I much rather a web browser take up 4 GB of RAM than sit around waiting for it to read the caches image off my had drive.

Now, allow me to reiterate: unoptimized programs still piss me off. There's no need for that electron-based webcam image capture app to take three gigs of memory upon launch. But I love it when programs use the hardware I spent money on to run smoother.

Don't hate a program simply because it's at the top of task manager.

"If you ever run out of memory during compiling, get more ram"

No I'm not joking

- If I buy x amount of ram | hard drive space | cpu power I will never need more.
- No need for version control | Tests. This is a small project
- git commit -m "changes" (its a small change. I will remember why I did it)
- It is too obvious that I put a lot of personal time in this so my boss will definitely notice!
- Why comment this simple method? Anyone should know what it does. Especially me!
- "this should never happen"
- This call can't be from work. Everyone knows I am on vacation.
- I will back up next week. It's not like it is going to crush today.
- It’s 11:30 already? I will work on this for only a half hour more and then I will definitely go to bed!
- This project will take x amount of time!

Best strategy for getting unstuck for me is downloading more RAM so that I can open more chrome tabs

My Google Chrome Browser is using more RAM then Adobe Photoshop while it's rendering a photo.

I have a whatsapp group with my friends, none of which are techies. A while ago one of them was looking for a phone to buy, so he started looking at models, specs and all that, but got pretty confused and asked a pretty well-informed question to the group:

"Guys, what is that quad core thing?
And what is a RAM? Is it something like the processor of the phone or what? "

OK, pretty typical stuff up until this point. The guy knows nothing about this sort of things, I wouldn't criticize him or insult him or anything like that. No, that's not the problem. The problem is the person that responded to him. This... This melted my brain so much I will never forget:

"Don't worry about that, you only have to look at how many gigahertz does the processor run at. Don't worry about the number of cores or ram. The GHz are the result of the amount of ram and cores, so the more the gigahertz, the better the phone."

PD: "Also take a look at how many megapixels does the camera have if you want to take photos".

Some people just talk out of their ass and pretend like they're experts on any topic they've read about for 5 minutes on the Internet

Around 27 hours at new customer location.

They had a server failure due to incompetence.

They had fired their own IT guy and called us 6 months later because the server stopped responding.

First diagnostic. 2 drives are dead in a raid 5 with one hot spare. Raid controller then proved to be broken once the disks was replaced.

Waiting for new raid controller and installing.

Backup non existing, no one changed dat tape during the 6 months without IT. The tape was just a transparent plastic band, no media left.

Raid config is stored in static ram on controller, no backup!

Several hours in tech support to find out how to rebuild raid config from existing disks.

Proves to be impossible to rebuild raid set due to some checksum failures.

More hours with support to enable some diagnostic read only mode to mirror low level content to external drive.

Then many more hours to copy parts of the tree until it gets an error, restart after that and go on.

In the end we got around 70% back.

During this time I manage to be in contact with the raid manufacturers all support centers, one in europe, one in the us and one in Taiwan, switching each time one if them closed for the night.

The customer later declined a steady support contract due to us being to expensive ;)

Some just don’t want to learn.

Continuation of the story with Linux Mint 20 Cinnamon on the old Core2 Duo with 2 GB RAM and HDD. The guy has had that PC under Linux for 1.5 months now, had never had Linux before, has no IT background, and is over 70.

Upon visit, I checked how the machine was doing. OK, he had forgotten to apply the updates, so I highlighted paying attention to the red icon in the tray. Launched the updates, all ran through.

Otherwise, he had managed to install Skype all by himself (network effect because of his family...) and had bought a webcam plus a microphone. Linux had just recognised everything without any fuzz. Even his Skype buddies were impressed, he said.

On top of that, he likes how much faster that PC is compared to his much more current Win 10 laptop and actually uses the old Linux PC more than the laptop.

He also enjoys that Linux doesn't do weird things all by itself all the time. That's not his experience with Win 10.

I love Linux, but its community can be so full of incompetent assholes..

Just now I asked in Freenode ##linux how to get the process ID of my current running process in bash. I got my answer - it's a shell built-in called "$$".

Then people start to nitpick some more - why do you need it? How is that different from an exit? - to which my response was.. well I know the whole idea behind exit codes, and I'd use it whenever possible, in all defined behavior that allows my program to terminate itself whenever it can. This pidfile however would be used to exit itself and provide diagnostic information whenever the program enters undefined behavior - a segfault in C language. Scenarios in which I don't have full control over the script's behavior anymore, such as the system entering an unworkable state where the system stalled, still got some binaries in RAM but the rootfs got unwritable, such as now - very helpfully, thanks HP! - when my laptop likely overheated and shat itself. I issued sudo reboot into it, but even that wouldn't issue properly anymore due to the /sbin/poweroff binary becoming inaccessible too. I had to issue a hard power cycle.. one of the few times in which I'm thankful to HP for actually causing shit like this, lol.

Point is, that undefined behavior is what I'm trying to mitigate against. I certainly can't let any files other than diagnostics remain in nonvolatile storage like that, especially when their state should be predictable in order to ensure good operation (like files expressing whether the script is already running or not, i.e. lock files).

Back to that IRC chat. Aside from the answer, I got ridicule from people who probably don't even know how to properly compile a kernel. Ubuntu users, overconfident scum. Sometimes I feel like I should ask questions in channels like #archlinux only, where such incompetency is ridiculed on its own.

am I only one who thinks that ≥6GB RAM for phones is just too much as most of the time the unused RAM gets wasted for no goddamn reason but the only one being that the companies want their product(s) to look more compelling in `spec sheets` and it's a competitive market so it ok for them to do so...

Yesterday (or the day before that depending on your timezone and day-night schedule - this Friday) my OnePlus 6T arrived. After only 2 days of time between placing the order and actually getting the phone, quite impressive!

The DHL guy asked me upon receipt - is it the OnePlus 6T? - Yes it is!! - "An amazing device it is!", he said. And honestly.. he couldn't be more right.

I might be a bit biased on this because after all I did just spend €630 on this phone. But it feels so snappy, high quality, the 8GB of RAM is just.. it blows my mind. But I'm sure that the other reviews did this sort of jazz already.

The things that set this phone apart for me though were the following.

When I get a new phone or tablet, usually the first thing I do is rooting it. This one was no different, about an hour after receipt it was successfully rooted and loaded with Magisk. Currently I'm still in the phase of "getting to know the phone", wherein fuckups are usual. This time again being no different - I removed some apps and apparently did something to it that the search engines - both Google and DuckDuckGo - didn't quite like, as both of them would crash upon application launch. Me in full panic mode of course, desperately trying to find the stock ROM (which doesn't seem to be present in its usual form) or a new set of GApps (which didn't resolve the issue). OnePlus does seem to offer its OTA updates in zip archives though. So I downloaded its latest update (same as what was on the device) and applied it.

That's when the nerdgasm happened.

The "update" was simply a matter of going into the settings, tapping this and that and applying the update. No recovery, no unrooting, no nothing. The update just went like that despite the phone being rooted and just having had TWRP flashed to it. I always wanted this sort of thing, which even the Nexus couldn't offer - having the cake and eating it too. Being able to root the device and muck around with it while still being able to update the device timely without too many hurdles. This fucking thing does it!!!

That is to say, after my initial nerdgasm I did find that it bulldozed over my su binary (effectively unrooting the thing), custom emoji I've set (iOS 12 because fuck Google's most recent emoji set) and some other things. But those are easy to install back, much more so than it would've been to download a whole Android release and dirty flash it, as it was on the Nexus.

Other than that, battery life, dash charging (edit: on that topic, it does remain cool like a cucumber despite getting 15-20W of power jammed into it, quite impressive!), snappiness, the usual jazz.. eh, as I said earlier that's the usual reviewer stuff. But this feature of being able to upgrade the phone while it's modified, that's something which seems to be severely underrated by those.

Oh and during kernel builds, I couldn't quite get the source to work - probably due to my lack of experience with builds of Android kernels - but I did find that this phone actually exposes its kernel config through /proc/config.gz as it should. None of my MediaTek devices do this, so that's something that I found really appealing. Always nice to see when a manufacturer exposes this information to give you a stock sort of config that you can be rest assured will work configuration-wise. And it allows you to see what the stock kernel is actually built with, which again is really nice. I quite like this! It really encourages further development.

Not just another Windows rant:

*Disclaimer* : I'm a full time Linux user for dev work having switched from Windows a couple of years ago. Only open Windows for Photoshop (or games) or when I fuck up my Linux install (Arch user) because I get too adventurous (don't we all)

I have hated Windows 10 from day 1 for being a rebel. Automatic updates and generally so many bugs (specially the 100% disk usage on boot for idk how long) really sucked.

It's got ads now and it's generally much slower than probably a Windows 8 install..

The pathetic memory management and the overall slower interface really ticks me off. I'm trying to work and get access to web services and all I get is hangups.

Chrome is my go-to browser for everything and the experience is sub par. We all know it gobbles up RAM but even more on Windows.

My Linux install on the same computer flies with a heavy project open in Android Studio, 25+ tabs in Chrome and a 1080p video playing in the background.

Up until the creators update, UI bugs were a common sight. Things would just stop working if you clicked them multiple times.

But you know what I'm tired of more?

The ignorant pricks who bash it for being Windows. This OS isn't bad. Sure it's not Linux or MacOS but it stands strong.

You are just bashing it because it's not developer friendly and it's not. It never advertises itself like that.

It's a full fledged OS for everyone. It's not dev friendly but you can make it as much as possible but you're lazy.

People do use Windows to code. If you don't know that, you're ignorant. They also make a living by using Windows all day. How bout tha?

But it tries to make you feel comfortable with the recent bash integration and the plethora of tools that Microsoft builds.

IIS may not be Apache or Nginx but it gets the job done.

Azure uses Windows and it's one of best web services out there. It's freaking amazing with dead simple docs to get up and running with a web app in 10 minutes.

I saw many rants against VS but you know it's one of the best IDEs out there and it runs the best on Windows (for me, at least).

I'm pissed at you - you blind hater you.

Research and appreciate the things good qualities in something instead of trying to be the cool but ignorant dev who codes with Linux/Mac but doesn't know shit about the advantages they offer.

Windows 10 update: no more wifi, no more trackpad, 60MB more RAM usage when idle.
Thanks Microsoft!

Sandev. The santa dev.

If you are a nice dev, he makes your code work... If you are a naughty dev, he fills it with bugs.

If you are an immensely naughty dev, he disables all browsers except for an older version of IE, rm -rfs your linux distro, and magically makes android studio eat up more ram than usual.

This rant is particularly directed at web designers, front-end developers. If you match that, please do take a few minutes to read it, and read it once again.

Web 2.0. It's something that I hate. Particularly because the directive amongst webdesigners seems to be "client has plenty of resources anyway, and if they don't, they'll buy more anyway". I'd like to debunk that with an analogy that I've been thinking about for a while.

I've got one server in my home, with 8GB of RAM, 4 cores and ~4TB of storage. On it I'm running Proxmox, which is currently using about 4GB of RAM for about a dozen VM's and LXC containers. The VM's take the most RAM by far, while the LXC's are just glorified chroots (which nonetheless I find very intriguing due to their ability to run unprivileged). Average LXC takes just 60MB RAM, the amount for an init, the shell and the service(s) running in this LXC. Just like a chroot, but better.

On that host I expect to be able to run about 20-30 guests at this rate. On 4 cores and 8GB RAM. More extensive migration to LXC will improve this number over time. However, I'd like to go further. Once I've been able to build a Linux which was just a kernel and busybox, backed by the musl C library. The thing consumed only 13MB of RAM, which was a VM with its whole 13MB of RAM consumption being dedicated entirely to the kernel. I could probably optimize it further with modularization, but at the time I didn't due to its experimental nature. On a chroot, the kernel of the host is used, meaning that said setup in a chroot would border near the kB's of RAM consumption. The busybox shell would be its most important RAM consumer, which is negligible.

I don't want to settle with 20-30 VM's. I want to settle with hundreds or even thousands of LXC's on 8GB of RAM, as I've seen first-hand with my own builds that it's possible. That's something that's very important in webdesign. Browsers aren't all that different. More often than not, your website will share its resources with about 50-100 other tabs, because users forget to close their old tabs, are power users, looking things up on Stack Overflow, or whatever. Therefore that 8GB of RAM now reduces itself to about 80MB only. And then you've got modern web browsers which allocate their own process for each tab (at a certain amount, it seems to be limited at about 20-30 processes, but still).. and all of its memory required to render yours is duplicated into your designated 80MB. Let's say that 10MB is available for the website at most. This is a very liberal amount for a webserver to deal with per request, so let's stick with that, although in reality it'd probably be less.

10MB, the available RAM for the website you're trying to show. Of course, the total RAM of the user is comparatively huge, but your own chunk is much smaller than that. Optimization is key. Does your website really need that amount? In third-world countries where the internet bandwidth is still in the order of kB/s, 10MB is *very* liberal. Back in 2014 when I got into technology and webdesign, there was this rule of thumb that 7 seconds is usually when visitors click away. That'd translate into.. let's say, 10kB/s for third-world countries? 7 seconds makes that 70kB of available network bandwidth.

Web 2.0, taking 30+ seconds to load a web page, even on a broadband connection? Totally ridiculous. Make your website as fast as it can be, after all you're playing along with 50-100 other tabs. The faster, the better. The more lightweight, the better. If at all possible, please pursue this goal and make the Web a better place. Efficiency matters.

"I. Need. More. RAM."
~my computer

My neighbor brought me her smartphone because it was too slow. Not only it was an old model with low RAM, but it also wouldn't allow her to install more apps due to that shitty thing of having to install them in the phone storage.

Now you will be asking, what is abnormal about this that I'm writing it here? IT WAS FULL OF BIBLE APPS, JUST WHATSAPP, FACEBOOK AND BIBLES.

What an absolute fucking disaster of a day. Strap in, folks; it's time for a bumpy ride!

I got a whole hour of work done today. The first hour of my morning because I went to work a bit early. Then people started complaining about Jenkins jobs failing on that one Jenkins server our team has been wanting to decom for two years but management won't let us force people to move to new servers. It's a single server with over four thousand projects, some of which run massive data processing jobs that last DAYS. The server was originally set up by people who have since quit, of course, and left it behind for my team to adopt with zero documentation.

Anyway, the 500GB disk is 100% full. The memory (all 64GB of it) is fully consumed by stuck jobs. We can't track down large old files to delete because du chokes on the workspace folder with thousands of subfolders with no Ram to spare. We decide to basically take a hacksaw to it, deleting the workspace for every job not currently in progress. This of course fucked up some really poorly-designed pipelines that relied on workspaces persisting between jobs, so we had to deal with complaints about that as well.

So we get the Jenkins server up and running again just in time for AWS to have a major incident affecting EC2 instance provisioning in our primary region. People keep bugging me to fix it, I keep telling them that it's Amazon's problem to solve, they wait a few minutes and ask me to fix it again. Emails flying back and forth until that was done.

Lunch time already. But the fun isn't over yet!

I get back to my desk to find out that new hires or people who got new Mac laptops recently can't even install our toolchain, because management has started handing out M1 Macs without telling us and all our tools are compiled solely for x86_64. That took some troubleshooting to even figure out what the problem was because the only error people got from homebrew was that the formula was empty when it clearly wasn't.

After figuring out that problem (but not fully solving it yet), one team starts complaining to us about a Github problem because we manage the github org. Except it's not a github problem and I already knew this because they are a Problem Team that uses some technical authoring software with Git integration but they only have even the barest understanding of what Git actually does. Turns out it's a Git problem. An update for Git was pushed out recently that patches a big bad vulnerability and the way it was patched causes problems because they're using Git wrong (multiple users accessing the same local repo on a samba share). It's a huge vulnerability so my entire conversation with them went sort of like:

"Please don't."
"We have to."
"Fine, here's a workaround, this will allow arbitrary code execution by anyone with physical or virtual access to this computer that you have sitting in an unlocked office somewhere."
"How do I run a Git command I don't use Git."

So that dealt with, I start taking a look at our toolchain, trying to figure out if I can easily just cross-compile it to arm64 for the M1 macbooks or if it will be a more involved fix. And I find all kinds of horrendous shit left behind by the people who wrote the tools that, naturally, they left for us to adopt when they quit over a year ago. I'm talking entire functions in a tool used by hundreds of people that were put in as a joke, poorly documented functions I am still trying to puzzle out, and exactly zero comments in the code and abbreviated function names like "gars", "snh", and "jgajawwawstai".

While I'm looking into that, the person from our team who is responsible for incident communication finally gets the AWS EC2 provisioning issue reported to IT Operations, who sent out an alert to affected users that should have gone out hours earlier.

Meanwhile, according to the health dashboard in AWS, the issue had already been resolved three hours before the communication went out and the ticket remains open at this moment, as far as I know.

Fucking cloud providers always trying to steal your shit and spy on your things, fucking prying eyes. That's why i've decided to go back hosting my own private cloud from home. Running on some very energy efficient shit: dual core intel atom cpu (so slow that it can't fucking run windows normally), 16gb of ram, because why the fuck not? and 1tb 2.5"hdd, along with unlimited data - 100/100 Mbit/s internet connection with a server response time less than 95ms just to backup my shitty Iphone selfies and cat pics, host some very important files and regularly back up my contacts. This shit runs CentOS, Nginx, https, bitch! This platform is more trustworthy than your shitty dropbox or whatever other shit they offer you. I can choose whether i back-up my shit from local network or over internetz, Costing me no more than 25€ annually(just to keep the machine on 24/7/365).

Chrome's like that spoiled child that refuses to share with anyone

The more depressed you get over the current state of software is how you know you made it.When you start making your own opinions and say"wow these people are full of shit"

Primary example, the web development overblown bullshit. Fuck me dude, you really don't need that full featured react, vue, angular framework to make sense of shit. You are going over the top for fucking ajax functionality and state management that you could do by yourself without needing to learn a full framework, by the time you finish learning react you probably would have been better served with standard vanilla af JS and server side rendering.

Our world is full of fads and many talented people that perpetrate them. Its fine, it is a the nature of the beast. But a lot...A LOT of software is very POORLY written. And adding levels of abstraction over a very broken paradigm (web in this case) does and will not make it better.

Basically I am fucking hating being a web developer and want to go back to a time in which we cared about how much memory consumption our applications made as well as not worrying about the fucking frontend having the ability to implement machine learning.

I want to run sublime.exe and being sure that it is a native application to my system and not using a fucking contained web browser to implement my fucking text editor. With 20mb of ram at most instead of 500mb WTF.

I knew I made it when I could read comments on Hacker news and reddit and say "this idiot is full of shit", I knew I made it when I would sigh heavily at the idea of having another project rather than having a fan girl attitude towards it.

I knew I made it when people writing about software development meant shit to me rather than the wonder of what the fuck they were talking about.

I knew I made it when getting laid was more important to me than fucking around with code.

pussy > code
Fuck you.

Old story, and yeah, it's all true, I shit you not!

So here I am at about age 11 (more or less). At the time, I had an almost brand new 333MHz beast, with 8 MB RAM, 2 (!!!) MB video card and (I think) about 300 MB of storage (yeah, I'm old :)) ).

Connected to this monster was sitting a 14" CRT monitor, mechanical keyboard and a 2 button, ball "powered" mouse.

There was no optical tracking tech at the time.

One evening, I notice my mouse starts lagging. Test it to see if Win95 is stuck. Nope, just mouse problems...

Fiddle with it a little, and at some point it stops working at all.

My room was dark now, so I got up to turn on the lights, sat down in front of the PC, and moved the mouse by instinct.

Surprise! It's working again!

My brother comes in and turnes off the lights. Mouse non responsive.

I tell him to turn them on again, mouse works again.

At this point, we were both scratching our heads at this mystery...

I decided to confirm it again using a desc light.

Conclusion: my 2 button, ball tracking, non light sensitive mouse was working only if light was shining directly oh it AND on my 14" crt monitor at the same time!!!

To this day I have no ideea why.

I kept them both for posterity, and they are still there in my parent's attic.

Fin.

I hate that trend of making things more lax in terms of implementation quality while writing it off with a simple but stupid "oh computers are faster now, users have the RAM, yadda yadda". Yeah but back in a day things were actually running pretty damn fast in comparison while doing it on hardware that is totally potato in comparison to what's used now. This trend eats away ANY gains we get in terms of performance with upgrades. It deprecated the whole notion of netbooks (and I kinda liked them for casual stuff), since now every goddamn one-page blog costs you from several megabytes and up to tens of megabytes of JS alone and lots of unnecessary computations. Like dude, you've brought in a whole Angular to render some text and three buttons, and now your crappy blog is chewing on 500 MB of my RAM for whatever reason.

Also, Electron apps. Hate them. Whoever invented the concept, deserves their own warm spot in Hell. You're doing the same you would've done more efficiently in Qt or whatever there is. Qt actually takes care of a lot of stuff for you, so it doesn't look like you'll be slowed down by choosing it over Electron. Like yeah, web version will share some code with your desktop solution but you're the whole reason I'm considering your competitor's lack of Electron a huge advantage over you even if they lack in features.

Same can be said pretty much about everything that tries to be more than it should, really. IDEs, for example, are cancerous. You can do 90%+ of what you intended to do in IDE using plain Vim with *zero* plugins, and it will also result in less strain on your hands.

People have just unlearned the concept of conscious consumption, it seems.

Sorry, but I gotta go with the inevitable. Apple.

Of course, their older slogan is ironic now. Used to be does more, costs less. Now you can't even upgrade the RAM in most devices and legally can't repair their shit without their permission. The only reason people love Apple is because of the ecosystem. Everything Apple works great with everything else Apple, plus it's very trendy to have that logo plastered everywhere. It's too convenient to leave.

Not sure which is more painful for a dev machine - 13" screen or only 8GB of RAM

Either way, I have both 😢

Asked my boss if I could have more ram. He laughed at me .. we have 4gb..

My phpstorm freezes all the time while the page file catches up...

Waiting for the perfect browser :

1. It's not Safari or IE and without their shitty problems.

2. It's not a RAM gobbler like Chrome. But has its minimal UI.

3. Has Chrome like dev tools or Firebug and nothing less than those.

4. Does not have ads.

5. Cross platform. On both desktop and mobile.

6. Web extensions only

7. Everyone loves it. Even fanboys who swear by Safari

8. Blocks annoying pop ups on some sites.

You're open to contribute more points!

Now Chrome has a new competitor..

I just started using VIM + TMUX instead of VScode and so far I love it :D

Our college has PC's with Pentium Core 2 Duo processors and 1 GB RAM. We are made to code Java on windows using default notepad and cmd. There's nothing more infuriating than that.

Me: Ma'am, can we use any IDE for our mini project or finals?

She: No kid, you can't just use that. This is code you have to write it.

Me: Wut?

Stuck on windows for a bit more now after my little Arch fuckup and holy shit I forgot how terrible running android studio on windows is...

*Opens project, waits for windows to unfreeze*

*Waits for gradle to load lets windows unfreeze*

*Opens AVD and watches RAM usage go to 100%*

*Sips now cold coffee that was made when opening Android Studio*

Ugh, I miss Arch...

PS. Yes I know this is an android studio thing and not a Wndows problem

Electron is a plague, MSN in 2009 had far more features than Discord today but was able to run like a champ on Pentium 4 PCs with 1GB of RAM.

I doubt it’s using more than 4GB of RAM

A: How do I increase the speed of my computer?

B: "download more RAM at downloadmoreram.com"

Save more ram

Went back to KDE over the weekend from i3wm. I was getting tired of having to configure my setup manually everytime I wanted to change a setting, and having things break, and having to bug fix said breaks, while also trying to handle Java MVC and node.js dev work.

Nope. Too much. I want the macOS experience but with the control of Linux. Much happier with KDE. It does use about 720MB more RAM on an average session but when you have 8GB does it really matter?

Now to figure out how to get Firefox to play nice with Plasma, or give Konqueror a spin.

This is the state of desktop computing: When a web browser uses twice more RAM than a full virtual machine.

To be fair, I did have 5 windows with >10 tabs each, but still...

Finally got ceph up and running, so far it does look really great!
At the moment we have 45 TB in the cluster, but we are able to expand it extremely easy.

Two servers with 256 GB RAM and 24 cores, three more with 32 GB and 12 cores.
Dedicated gigabit WAN connection.

The project is going forward strong, I'll let you know when it is time for beta testing.

I wanted an Android phone with latest Oreo version, atleast 4gb RAM, 32gb or more with good processor supporting 4G dual SIM with a resolution of 1440 pixels by 2560 pixels at US$ 100.

Well got for all of it for US$125.

I went to LineageOS site, exported and filtered all supported devices with my relevant device attributes.

Got LeEco LeMax 2 for US125$ on eBay. Installed latest LineageOS 15.1 with Android 8.1.0. got 25gb free space.

Using the phone for last 10 days, flawlessly.

What kind of person doesn’t install Windows 10 for a free pre-installation of Candy Crush Soda Saga thrown into the mix? I really enjoy it when my Operating System comes preloaded with bullshit. It’s almost as if I’m losing rights to choose what I want installed on my operating system. It’s really enjoyable when Candy Crush Soda Saga appears in the background in task manager despite never opening this “””game”””. I find it amazing that after building such a powerful computer I can know that my fast 16gb ram is being used to keep bloatware running in the background. Every night I dream of the people who buy new computers with a fresh copy of Windows 10 pre-installed on it to find it has a copy of Candy Crush Soda Saga already waiting to be played! The joy and tears that must come to such a persons eye to know that Bill Gates was kind enough to bless the world with every middle-aged persons favourite game, Candy Crush Soda Saga, to be the first app that appears on their start menu. The thoughts running through every developers mind at Microsoft as they pre-load a copy of Candy Crush Soda Saga onto every copy of Windows 10. They must really feel alive and definitely would not consider doing anything else for a living but copying the files of Candy Crush Soda Saga across onto Official Windows 10 Installations. The rush of blood into their mind as they know that thousands, if not millions, of users from around the world open their brand new computer for the first time to see that King managed to bribe Microsoft with more money that you’ll ever get your hands onto into making them add a free copy of Candy Crush Soda Saga onto their computer. As thousands of those users move their mouse over this work of art, right click it and press uninstall without a second of doubt in their mind, rendering Kings investment to be a waste of time, money and effort. This is a story we will tell for generations and generations in the future of how the worlds most popular Operating System was not preloaded with a free copy of McAfee, but instead a copy of Candy Crush Soda Saga for the entire world to rejoice. Good day to you all.

Noticed my RAM usage was around 41% when just browsing internet. So, getting more RAM was a good move, until I saw the usage shoot to 52%.

And you already know who eats that much RAM.

PS: Maybe it's some extension, because I just have 2 tabs open and killing that process didn't kill any tab.

Wtf bs is this? Can't governments just stop trying to control the internet?

It's literally the closest thing we have to a free and fair society on the planet and that's with all the tracking and abuse of information going on. I think we need to start applying our minds to creating a decentralised network with p2p discovery routed through our phones if we want to keep any semblance of freedom of speech or privacy around for our kids. Routing traffic wouldnt use more than 50-100mb of ram and would probably use a lot less battery than Google does listening to our conversations or transmiting our location data so we wouldn't even notice. If only we could find a cable free decentalized way to get data across the ocean no one would be able to control it again, I doubt we would be able to shut it down either.

Happened last semester, due to lack of admin rights to us students on our computer in OS Lab, a friend wasn't able to start a program. So the OS teacher came and instructed the lab helper to install more RAM on the computer, so that programs cam run without admin access.
We lost all hope of ever understanding OS in class.

Can ppl stop bitching out about their ides not running smoothly with 8gb+ ram? I mean 8gb ram wise is enough, unless you have 20+ browser tabs open, watching some casual porn, downloading some more porn in the background and maybe running some benchmarks just for the sake of not letting your dollars go to waste...

downloading more RAM is so old-school
now you can download more battery!!

"My app uses more RAM than yours, which means my app is better than yours"

Anyone care to explain why programs nowadays use so much bloody RAM? We went to the moon on what amounted to a bunch of potatoes wired to each other, Linux (a whole bloody OS) with a graphical interface consumes only a couple hundred MB of RAM, but my IDE needs 1+GB?

Seriously, unless you're handling very large amounts of data (like a high res image or doing some insanely crazy math, I doubt there's any need for such high usage. I get it, 8/16GB is commonplace, but that doesn't mean more should be used for shits and giggles...

I do not like the direction laptop vendors are taking.

New laptops tend to feature fewer ports, making the user more dependent on adapters. Similarly to smartphones, this is a detrimental trend initiated by Apple and replicated by the rest of the pack.

As of 2022, many mid-range laptops feature just one USB-A port and one USB-C port, resembling Apple's toxic minimalism. In 2010, mid-class laptops commonly had three or four USB ports. I have even seen an MSi gaming laptop with six USB ports. Now, much of the edges is wasted "clean" space.

Sure, there are USB hubs, but those only work well with low-power devices. When attaching two external hard drives to transfer data between them, they might not be able to spin up due to insufficient power from the USB port or undervoltage caused by the impedance (resistance) of the USB cable between the laptop's USB port and hub. There are USB hubs which can be externally powered, but that means yet another wall adapter one has to carry.

Non-replaceable [shortest-lived component] mean difficult repairs and no more reserve batteries, as well as no extra-sized battery packs. When the battery expires, one might have to waste four hours on a repair shop for a replacement that would have taken a minute on a 2010 laptop.

The SD card slot is being replaced with inferior MicroSD or removed entirely. This is especially bad for photographers and videographers who would frequently plug memory cards into their laptop. SD cards are far more comfortable than MicroSD cards, and no, bulky external adapters that reserve the device's only USB port and protrude can not replace an integrated SD card slot.

Most mid-range laptops in the early 2010s also had a LAN port for immediate interference-free connection. That is now reserved for gaming-class / desknote laptops.

Obviously, components like RAM and storage are far more difficult to upgrade in more modern laptops, or not possible at all if soldered in.

Touch pads increasingly have the buttons underneath the touch surface rather than separate, meaning one has to be careful not to move the mouse while clicking. Otherwise, it could cause an unwanted drag-and-drop gesture. Some touch pads are smart enough to detect when a user intends to click, and lock the movement, but not all. A right-click drag-and-drop gesture might not be possible due to the finger on the button being registered as touch. Clicking with short tapping could be unreliable and sluggish. While one should have external peripherals anyway, one might not always have brought them with. The fallback input device is now even less comfortable.

Some laptop vendors include a sponge sheet that they want users to put between the keyboard and the screen before folding it, "to avoid damaging the screen", even though making it two millimetres thicker could do the same without relying on a sponge sheet. So they want me to carry that bulky thing everywhere around? How about no?

That's the irony. They wanted to make laptops lighter and slimmer, but that made them adapter- and sponge sheet-dependent, defeating the portability purpose.

Sure, the CPU performance has improved. Vendors proudly show off in their advertisements which generation of Intel Core they have this time. As if that is something users especially care about. Hoo-ray, generation 14 is now yet another 5% faster than the previous generation! But what is the benefit of that if I have to rely on annoying adapters to get the same work done that I could formerly do without those adapters?

Microsoft has also copied Apple in demanding internet connection before Windows 11 will set up. The setup screen says "You will need an Internet connection…" - no, technically I would not. What does technically stand in the way of Windows 11 setting up offline? After all, previous Windows versions like Windows 95 could do so 25 years earlier. But also far more recent versions. Thankfully, Linux distributions do not do that.

If "new" and "modern" mean more locked-in and less practical and difficult to repair, I would rather have "old" than "new".

I've never used Windows in my day-to-day life. No kidding.
When I got my father's first computer, I used an old distribution called BBC Linux. I didn't have any computer knowledge, it was my first contact with a computer, so I went to a friend's house and asked for a CD to install on my computer. I don't know if this friend ended up making a "gotcha" and thought I'd give up, but I just read the manuals and fell in love. That was year 2000.
Then I used Conectiva Linux, then I went to Red Hat 9, then Slackware, then in 2007 I started using Solaris. And I stayed on Solaris (Solaris 10, Solaris Nevada and OpenSolaris) until 2011.
In 2011 I bought a Mac. I stayed at Apple until 2020, when I couldn't stand Apple forcing me to buy new computers (I still don't understand how a 2011 iMac, i5 (4 Hyper Thread cores) with 16GB of RAM, 1TB SSD only runs up to High Sierra).
Then I bought a Dell. It came with Windows 10, the first thing I did was install WSL2. I could not stand it, the system is bad, sorry. I installed OpenSuse and have been using it for two years.

It's just that every day someone tells me "how can you use this"? "There is no alternative to Windows, do you want to be different?"

I know that my story was the reverse of the "mainstream", so I'm going to talk about my vision of Windows, that in my brain it is actually the "alternative".

- Having a file explorer without "tabs" in 2022 is unthinkable for me.
- I love terminal. And the Windows terminal is very limited. "ps ... | awk ... | xargs ..." is a must for me. "find ./ -name '...' -exec ..."... these things on Windows are totally "different" and have the "powershell way" while all other operating systems keep the same form. And cygwin is not an option. As Wine for serious work is also not.
- Dragging a file into the terminal, and having it write its path, is so natural, that when Windows didn't do it, I was dismayed.
- I've always used StarOffice, OpenOffice and now LibreOffice. All the people in my story received my documents and reports as a PDF and no one complained. Until a coworker saw me editing in LibreOffice and said "oh I want it in word format". As long as he didn't know, everything was fine, right?
- Windows is paid. And is there advertising? I don't understand. And I refuse. If you want to display advertising, then excuse me. I have no problem paying, I'm not an opensource shiite. It's just that paying and not working bothers me much more than an opensource that I can fix or expect a fix knowing the good will of the people involved.
- Hyper-V is a joke. QEMU/KVM is better, and Bhyve on FreeBSD which is a very young project, is already a million times better than Hyper-V.
- Developing in C/C++ for Windows is only possible in two ways: Either you've always lived in Windows and your brain is conditioned, or you compile with MSYS2 (CLang or GCC).
- There is no significant evolution of the windows desktop since 95.
- Multiple workspace support with multiple monitors, not ready. It's another joke.
- REGEDIT does not need any comment.
- The system loses performance over time. I still don't know how Windows achieves this.
- I've seen people complain about desktop fragmentation on Unix and Linux. Many DEs end up leaving applications with different themes (like running a Qt application in Gnome and GTK in KDE), but to be quite honest, the lack of Windows standard bothered me much more. Even Microsoft's own software is completely different: Control Panel, Calculator, Paint and Office, To-Do, and Settings, have horrible style differences and look-and-feel fragmentation.
- Dark mode has not been implemented. It's another joke. Many applications are white while everything else is dark. Sorry, even on Linux which is a mess, this has been resolved. And well resolved.
- NTFS? Serious?
- C:, D:.. It doesn't convince me since DOS.
- Bloatware.
- News "biased" in the search bar is a lack of respect for those who use the computer to work.

And that. For me, Windows is the alternative operating system. I can't take Windows seriously, for me it's an experimental one like Haiku or ReactOS. It's good to play.

About market share, it doesn't convince me to use it. But convinces me to sell. I've always developed applications to run on Windows. And when I need it, I turn on a VM to compile the project. But in everyday life? Impractical.

So, I decided to post this based on @Morningstar's conundrum.

I'm dissatisfied with the laptop market.

Why THE FUCK should I have to buy a gaming laptop with a GTX 1070 or 1080 to get a decent amount of RAM and a fucking great processor?

I don't game. I program. I don't even own a fucking Steam library, for clarification. Never have I ever bought a game on Steam. Disproving the notion that I might have a games library out of the way, I run Linux. Antergos (Arch-based) is my daily driver.

So, in 2017 I went on a laptop hunt. I wanted something with decent specs. Ultimately ended up going with the system76 Galago Pro (which I love the form factor of, it's nice as hell and people recognize the brand for some fucking reason). Matter of fact, one of my profs wanted to know how I accessed our LMS (Blackboard) and I showed him Chromium....his mind was blown: "Ir's not just text!"

That aside, why the fuck are Dell and system76 the only ones with decent portables geared towards developers? I hate the prospect of having to buy some clunky-ass Republic of Gamers piece of shit just to have some sort of decent development machine...

This is a notice to OEMs: yall need to quit making shit hardware and gaming hardware with no mid-range compromise. Shit hardware is defined as the "It runs Excel and that's all the consumer needs" and gaming hardware is "Let's put fucking everything in there - including a decent processor, RAM, and a GTX/Radeon card."

Mid-range that is true - good hardware that handles video editing and other CPU/RAM-intensive tasks and compiling and whatnot but NOT graphics-intensive shit like gaming - is hard to come by. Dell offers my definition of "mid-range" through Sputnik's Ubuntu-powered XPS models and what have you, and system76 has a couple of models that I more or less wish I had money for but don't.

TBH I don't give two fucks about the desktop market. That's a non-issue because I can apply the logic that if you want something done right, do it yourself: I can build a desktop. But not a laptop - at least not in a feasible way.

This isn't as much of a rant as the story of my worst abuse of computer knowledge.

This happened a couple years ago. When I was in high school, I had this friend/enemy relationship with this guy, lets call him Thomas. He loved to pull pranks on people. He had a similar firend/enemy relationship with my brother, and after one prank, my brother decided to get revenge. And by revenge, he meant asking me to make a virus.

I knew the guy, and I agreed. We thought about what type of virus we could make that would be funny, and not too damaging. We decided on a program that would play annoying sound effects every few minutes. Short enough to be noticable, long enough that Thomas would give up and not try to investigate.

I won't bore you with the details of the program. It was a very simple C app, very small, named "Counter-Strike-Global-Offence-Free-Download-Totally-Legit.exe". It was clearly visible in task manager, but since it was so small and barely used CPU or RAM it would stay near the bottom. I tried loading a custom sound effect, but it turned out the windows default "invalid sound effect" was much more annoying than any custom sound I could find.

The "Infecting" portion consisted of moving the .exe to the start menu startup folder while Thomas left his laptop unattended. My brother handled this part.

I unfortunaly left the country soon after and never actually saw the effect the program had on Thomas. I assumed my brothers laughing would give it away rather fast and he could simply remove it from his startup folder. However, my brother told me he still complained about it for months, before finally bringing the laptop to a repair center that found the totally legit CS:GO exe. My brother ended up telling him soon after, but this was still the best prank I ever pulled.

To her friend: "I downloaded myself a lot more RAM last night, my laptop is so much faster!"
...
No, person on the bus, you did not download extra RAM. Sorry.

I am building a PC for my first time and thought about every step more than twice. This is going to be my build:

Processor: AMD Ryzen™ 7 2700
Mainboard: X370
RAM: Corsair DIMM 8 GB DDR4-2400
Video card: Zotac NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti
SSD: Samsung 960 EVO 250 GB
HDD: Seagate ST1000DM010 1 TB
PSU: PURE POWER 10 | 300W
Case: Aerocool Cylon RGB Midi-Tower - black

What are your opinions on this build?

Let me just get right down to it.
FUCK YOU Hewlett-fucking-Packard FOR YOUR SHITTY LAPTOPS! Don't you even keep your customer's needs in mind when you design these things? Besides all the bloatware you stuff into the Windows you ship it with, at least make the quality of your shit better. These flimsy screens and loose hinges, I've had to get that shit replaced multiple times in just the past year.
Want to upgrade to an SSD or plug in more RAM? Guess what! I've to tear the whole thing apart! Keyboard, palm rest, all if it! What even happened to just popping a cover at the bottom to swap out the hard drive!? I have to fucking congratulate you, you fucking cunts, for making an easy process as difficult as it can fuckin possibly get. You guys deserve an award for this, preferably presented to you, shoved up your asses.

!rant

Hello dear fellow devs, I got some more nice ram and don't need those ram bars anymore. Write why you should receive them and they are on the way. For people outside germany you (unfortunatly) have to cover the shipping costs.

Current lappy got about 4GB RAM and not enough cores. I can't even run krita without it slowing down more the more I work on a file.
It would be frustrating if only I wasn't so depressed.
So yeah, due to being broke and lack of nerves, I'm gonna completely stop working on the comic for now.

Intel core i3 4th generation laptop

3 years old.

Plays csgo at 70fps lowest resolution 800x600

Thinks of upgrading laptop

Sad, only one memory slot

More sad, maximum 8gb ram support

But happy,

This fucking piece of shit lasted way too long than time itself xD

i'll download more ram

TL;DR: a dude thinks good graphics make a game good.

so every day when the school ends, me, a dude and another girl walk home. as expected we have lots of time to talk about anything. I wanted that day to tell that dude about what I am going to buy on steam summer sales with just 15$.

me: I am going for this summer to play lots of games so I saved some money for this summer sale. do you want to hear what awesome games I am about to buy with just 15$?
dude: yeah, sure thing.

he wasn't expecting much

M: this summer I am going to buy 5 games and maybe keep more for some others. they are so awesome!
D: ok, let's hear those 'awesome' games!
M: the first game is devil daggers, maybe you don't kno...
D: of course I do. is that game
M: I want to get that game just to improve my aim, but maybe I will have some fun.
D: yeah yeah, I know that game
M: *poker face*

I KNEW he doesn't know this game and anything about pc games because of the followings...

M: ok then... I also want to get Half-Life 2 : Episode 1 & 2. they have pretty rich story and I already have both Half-Lives.
D: holy shit but the graphics... ok, one more 'awesome' game of yours.
M: there are 2 episodes, 2 separate games. I really don't care about the graphics, I love the story.
D: continue with your 'awesom' games...

that dude didn't even knew about half-life and said that game is bad.

M: another game I want to get is Battlefront 2, the one from 2005 and...
D: 2005!?
M: yeah, the new one sucks, and the gameplay in the original is way better and...
D: *starts laughing* 2005!? I thought you were getting the new one. I imagine the graphics being like this car. *points to a fucking car, yeah that kind of comparasion, I know*

after this I was so fucking pissed off. he doesn't even know about some cult classics that are meant to be played. he doesn't even have a pc nor console and he is stating his opinion on fine air for fucks sake!

M: ok, what about getting the facts and then make an opinon.
D: yeah yeah *making fun of me at that point*

I didn't tell him that I wanted to buy the binding of isaac, cause it was enough for me. I told him to watch some reviews on these games and blog posts about them and I am sure tomorrow he will say that he 'wathced' the reviews and that those games are garbage. it's his style to underestimate things. I fucking hate him, not becuase of the games, but because he underestimates everything that is not on his list of 'good games'. that list consists of new games with great graphics(3D only).

sorry if I exaggerate saying that those games are cult classics but I really look forward into buying them.

if you have another indie game to run on this potato machine(2gb ram, pentium dual-core 2.1ghz, gtx 525m) that I should or at least try comment, I am open to suggestions!

I spent the last three weeks+ (literally THREE full weeks, weekends too) building something I thought was really cool, powerful, and useful. Made a blog post, posted a giant thread on the company Twitter.

Literally one person gave it a like.

I don't know why I give shit anymore, cuz nowadays if it isn't about getting rich quick, cHaTgPt, or some other made up hype, no one cares. Apparently I shouldn't either...

Meanwhile my 16 GIGABYTE RAM MAC, yes 16 GIGABYTE RAM can't even hold power while plugged in, and I'm still clowning around with an ancient iPhone 6 (actually one of my mom's old iphones) that barely stays above 20% battery for more than an hour...

And FINALLY, my FUCKING ISP is for sure screwing me, since I've been doing some hard core data streaming and broadcasting, even though I pay $60+ month for that shit it, keeps dropping out, shit doesn't load.... I mean wtf this isn't 1990 dialup AOL anymore

When I step back I just feel like the worlds biggest loser, maybe the world's biggest 🤡

I had spent the last year working on a online store power by woocommerce with over 100k products from various suppliers. This online store utilized a custom API that would take the various formats that suppliers offer their inventory in and made them consistent. Now everything was going swimmingly initially, but then I began adding more and more products using a plug-in called WP all import. I reached around 100k products and the site would take up to an entire minute to load sometimes timing out. I got desperate so I installed several caching plugins, but to no avail this did not help me. The site was originally only supposed to take three to four months but ended up taking an entire year. Then, just yesterday I found out what went wrong and why this woocommerce website with all of these optimizations was still taking anywhere from 60 to 90 seconds to load, or just timing out entirely. I had initially thought that I needed a beefier server so I moved it to a high CPU digitalocean VM. While this did help a little bit, the site was still very slow and now I had very high CPU usage RAM usage and high disk IO. I was seriously stumped the Apache process was using a high amount of CPU and IO along with MYSQL as well. It wasn't until I started digging deeper into the database that I actually found out what the issue was. As I was loading the site I would run 'show process list' in the SQL terminal, I began to notice a very significant load time for one of the tables, so I went to go and check it out. What I did was I ran a select all query on that particular table just to see how full it was and SQL returned a error saying that I had exceeded the maximum packet size. So I was like okay what the fuck...
So I exited my SQL and re-entered it this time with a higher packet size. I ran a query that would count how many rows were in this particular table and the number came out to being in the millions. I was surprised, and what's worse is that this table belong to a plugin that I had attempted to use early in the development process to cache the site. The plugin was deactivated but apparently it had left PHP files within the wp content directory outside of the actual plugin directory, so it's still executing scripts even though the plugin itself was disabled. Basically every time I would change anything on the site, it would recache the whole thing, and it didn't delete any old records. So 100k+ products caching on saves with no garbage collection... You do the math, it's gonna be a heavy ass database. Not only that but it was serialized data, so when it did pull this metric shit ton of spaghetti from the database, PHP then had to deserialize it. Hence the high ass CPU load. I had caching enabled on the MySQL end of things so that ate the ram. I was really desperate to get this thing running.
Honest to God the main reason why this website took so long was because the load times made it miserable to work on. I just thought that the hardware that I had the site on was inadequate. I had initially started the development on a small Linux VM which apparently wasn't enough, which is why I moved it to digitalocean which also seemed to not be enough, so from there I moved to a dedicated server which still didn't seem to be enough. I was probably a few more 60-second wait times or timeouts from recommending a server cluster to my client who I know would not be willing to purchase it. The client who I promised this site to have completed in 3 months and has waited a year. Seriously, I would tell people the struggles that I would go through with this particular site and they would just tell me to just drop the site; just take the money, just take the loss. I refused to, this was really the only thing that was kicking my ass. I present myself as this high-and-mighty developer like I'm just really good at what I do but then I have this WordPress site that's just beating the shit out of me for a year. It was a very big learning experience and it was also very humbling as well, it made me realize that I really don't know as much as I think I might. It was evidence that there is still so much more to learn out there, I did learn a lot from that experience especially about optimizing websites the different types of methods to do that particular lonely on the server side and I'll be able to utilize this knowledge in the future.
I guess the moral of the story is, never really give up. Ultimately things might get so bad that you're running on hopes and dreams. Those experiences are generally the most humbling. Now I can finally present the site that I am basically a year late on to the client who will be so happy that I did not give up on the project entirely. I'll have experienced this feeling of pure euphoria, and help the small business significantly grow their revenue. Helping others is very fulfilling for me, even at my own expense.

Anyways, gonna stop ranting. Running out of characters. If you're still here... Ty for reading :')

After a few weeks of being insanely busy, I decided to log onto Steam and maybe relax with a few people and play some games. I enjoy playing a few sandbox games and do freelance development for those games (Anywhere from a simple script to a full on server setup) on the side. It just so happened that I had an 'urgent' request from one of my old staff member from an old community I use to own. This staff member decided to run his own community after I sold mine off since I didn't have the passion anymore to deal with the community on a daily basis.

O: Owner (Former staff member/friend)
D: Other Dev

O: Hey, I need urgent help man! Got a few things developed for my server, and now the server won't stay stable and crashes randomly. I really need help, my developer can't figure it out.
Me: Uhm, sure. Just remember, if it's small I'll do it for free since you're an old friend, but if it's a bigger issue or needs a full recode or whatever, you're gonna have to pay. Another option is, I tell you what's wrong and you can have your developer fix it.
O: Sounds good, I'll give you owner access to everything so you can check it out.
Me: Sounds good

*An hour passes by*

O: Sorry it took so long, had to deal with some crap. *Insert credentials, etc*
Me: Ok, give me a few minutes to do some basic tests. What was that new feature or whatever you added?
O: *Explains long feature, and where it's located*
Me: *Begins to review the files* *Internal rage wondering what fucking developer could code such trash* *Tests a few methods, and watches CPU/RAM and an internal graph for usage*
Me: Who coded this module?
O: My developer.
Me: *Calm tone, with a mix of some anger* So, you know what, I'm just gonna do some simple math for ya. You're running 33 ticks a second for the server, with an average of about 40ish players. 33x60 = 1980 cycles a minute, now lets times that by the 40 players on average, you have 79,200 cycles per minute or nearly 4.8 fucking cycles an hour (If you maxed the server at 64 players, it's going to run an amazing fucking 7.6 million cycles an hour, like holy fuck). You're also running a MySQLite query every cycle while transferring useless data to the server, you're clusterfucking the server and overloading it for no fucking reason and that's why you're crashing it. Another question, who the fuck wrote the security of this? I can literally send commands to the server with this insecure method and delete all of your files... If you actually want your fucking server stable and secure, I'm gonna have to recode this entire module to reduce your developer's clusterfuck of 4.8 million cycles to about 400 every hour... it's gonna be $50.
D: *Angered* You're wrong, this is the best way to do it, I did stress testing! *Insert other defensive comments* You're just a shitty developer (This one got me)
Me: *Calm* You're calling me a shitty developer? You're the person that doesn't understand a timer, I get that you're new to this world, but reading the wiki or even using the game's forums would've ripped this code to shreds and you to shreds. You're not even a developer, cause most of this is so disorganized it looks like you copy and pasted it. *Get's angered here and starts some light screaming* You're wasting CPU usage, the game can't use more than 1 physical core, and after a quick test, you're stupid 'amazing' module is using about 40% of the CPU. You need to fucking realize the 40ish average players, use less than this... THEY SHOULD BE MORE INTENSIVE THAN YOUR CODE, NOT THE OPPOSITE.
O: Hey don't be rude to Venom, he's an amazing coder. You're still new, you don't know as much as him. Ok, I'll pay you the money to get it recoded.
Me: Sounds good. *Angered tone* Also you developer boy, learn to listen to feedback and maybe learn to improve your shitty code. Cause you'll never go anywhere if you don't even understand who bad this garbage is, and that you can't even use the fucking wiki for this game. The only fucking way you're gonna improve is to use some of my suggestions.
D: *Leaves call without saying anything*

TL;DR: Shitty developer ran some shitty XP system code for a game nearly 4.8 million times an hour (average) or just above 7.6 million times an hour (if maxed), plus running MySQLite when it could've been done within about like 400 an hour at max. Tried calling me a shitty developer, and got sorta yelled at while I was trying to keep calm.

Still pissed he tried calling me a shitty developer...

Time to time I do some Hard- and Software repairs for neighbors and get some little money for it.

My neighbor let's call this one "Bob".

Bob has a new printer and a old one which is over 15 years old.

First: Holy shit 15 years old printer works still. WTF? Is this thing Hulk or what?

He ask me why he can't print a 128 site Doc with pictures in it from the old printer. It always stop at around 50 pages.

I tell him that it has only 32 MB Ram/Flash and can't print more. Before the Doc's were much smaller and could print that, but today you got files with more than 10 MB and on a printer it need's atleast 128 MB Ram to process and print it.

Guess what? One week later he asks me the same questions.

Why don't you print it on your new shiny expensive printer and why do you need still that OFFICE WAR VETERAN OF PRINTER to print it???

Seriously just use the new and better one!! Bob please give that old one a burial. He deservs it!

Got my tax return and am upgrading the ram in my PC from 8GB to 24GB. Can't wait to run even more tabs in Chrome!

I think I finally found a reason to have a phone with 8GB of RAM.
So that when TWRP craps out on data decryption and decides not even to ask for a password, at least I can push a whole fucking ROM into RAM to unfuck the phone. Because why not?! Why on Earth would software work properly when you can just throw more hardware at it?

Long live FBE, TWRP what craps out on it, and you remember those things.. SD cards for data storage? I could've used an unencrypted SD card so fucking badly right now, you know... Long live soldered in storage that's encrypted, "for security". Except for when the person who owns said data actually wants to use the bloody data.

FUCK!

A year ago I wrote a SDK on PS4 DevKit, and when I looked at the spec I was like "Wow 8GB RAM, that's a lot to play with".
But then the OS takes about 4GB, and we have some huge textures (0.5GB) , and pretty dense point clouds (some more RAM, ka-ching!), need to leave some memory for the application on top of the SDK...we ended up having about 0.5GB for ourselves.
I was really bummed out, and this feeling is pretty much identical to the one I have when I see my total income, and then what's actually left after taxes and all the other shit.

Nothing sucks more than running Android studio on a low configuration system (3GB RAM)!

Why is it that software has gotten so hardware heavy these days?

I get that some things require more ram, larger screen resolutions and games.

But even calculator apps are now in the hundreds of MB when the entire Microsoft office suite used to come on a couple of floppies.

Is it laziness and relying on ever higher level languages or is there some reason that stuff gets unnecessarily large now.

More than 3GB ram is useless on android phones. Change my mind.

I bought cheap lg g5. It has 4gb ram (my old phone had 1gb ram). I have opened chrome with 4 tabs, an AAA game, devRant, Instagram, a vpn app, android settings and I'm listening music. There is still free 1,2 gb ram. Also this is not my everyday usage. I use maximum 3 apps at same time.

I feel so empty.

I can't keep up with what is being teached to us in the mathematical courses. Everything else is fine. "Algorithm and data structures" aka Info A (Programming in C++) and "Computer engineering" aka Info C (details of how a CPU, RAM etc. works) is understandable, but when it comes to math I, completely, am lost.

2-4 hours drive to university and 2-4 hours drive back to my home each day. Two oral examinations each week in Info A and Info C. Three assignments in Info A, Info C and math.

I was so naive to believe that I would be more free and have more free time as a student haha.

Maybe I should switch to a university of applied sciences. The classical university is too theoretical for me, but in the same time I know that I can't keep up with the time when I have to build a circuit in the university of applied sciences.

I am able to design and build a circuit, but I am slow. Probably because I am checking many times if I did it properly before testing it.

To my fellow German devRanters who have studied or tried to study: You all just read my situation and my thoughts. Am I wrong about what I am thinking about a university of applied sciences? How are the mathematical courses there in terms of difficulty?

If mathematics is at the same difficulty, I will try to do something else that has nothing to do with college. It just won't get into my brain.

Here's an issue I've been having with my PC for the past year;

*gets blue screen of death* (every 5 mins)
*takes out my second pair of ram cards, blue screening stops*
*waits a day, puts cards back in, has no more problems for 1-2 weeks*
*gets more blue screens*
*repeats*
If I leave the cards out, the system NEVER has any issues.
But, I can't play games smoothly on 4gb of ram.
Also, I can't afford new cards.

A story about RAM and being... well... not so clever...

I've built a mid-range gaming PC for a friend, based on skylake, with 8GB DDR4 RAM. So I filled up only 2 slots to leave 2 more for upgrade. So he decided to do so.
Later he calls me and says "Hey, can you visit me? My PC won't boot".
So I came and he told me what happened: he found a random RAM stick and decited to put it in. He somehow(wait for it) managed to do it and PC refused to boot. He removed this stick, but PC won't boot anyway.
Soo, when I came, he showed me a stick he found: a random ddr2-533mhz 512 mb stick. Ofc, MB was shocked to see "grandfather" and refused to boot. I looked at the post code, which said ram error, cleared the cmos and it booted just fine.

Check compatability, young builders, and use Google if you're unsure :)

Despite common sense, I think technology is not making our lives easier. It's just build chaos on top of chaos.

Take server-side programming for instance.

First you have to find someone to host your thing, or a PaaS provider. Then you have to figure out how much RAM and storage you need, which OS you're going to use. And then there's Docker (which will run on top of a VM on AWS or GCP anyway, making even less sense). And then there's the server technology: nginx, Apache (and many many more; if, that is, you're using a server at all). And then there are firewalls, proxies, SSL. And then you go back to the start, because you have to check if your hosting provider will support the OS or Docker or your server. (I smell infinite recursion here.)

Each of these moving parts come with their own can of worms in terms of configuration and security. A whole bible to read if you want to have the slightest clue about what you're doing.

And then there's the programming language to use and its accompanying frameworks. Can they replace the server technology? Should you? Will they conflict with each other and open yet another backdoor into your system? Is it supported by your hosting provider? (Did I mention an infinite recursion somewhere?)

And then there's the database. Does it have a port to the language/framework of your choosing? Why does it expose an web interface? Is it supposed to replace your server? And why are its security features optional again? (Just so I have to test both the insecure and the secure environments?)

And you haven't written a single line of code yet, mind you.

I just tried Quantum and Chrome at my school libraries computer (4GB RAM).
Seriously?
Both times I tried opening my website (only one tab) and besides Quantum not even showing my website but a white loading circle... Here are both RAM usages..

Fucking nice, my damn PC has problems handling RAM and can't stay more than 1 minute in any OS without crashing. Windows bluescreens with MEMORY_MANAGEMENT or other bullshit. Nice fucking situation. It's either my CPU's IMC or all of the four RAM sticks. Long tests say it's not my board. Either way, I'm fucked because I haven't got any money to replace my PC yet.

What a coincidence, I got similar parts to someone on Google+ who lives near me and has this exact problem EXCEPT HE CAN REPLACE HIS PC SOON AND I CAN'T. GREAT.

Add more RAM. Computer won't turn on, reseting CMOS from motherboard jumper, everything works fine.
Feelings satisfied and everyone is in shock from the "jumper" method.

I fucking hate Electron, what ever happened to developing software natively? It's not like you have to stick to dot Net and C# or whatever, there's literally Lazarus or Delphi, which, at least Lazarus, not only is open source but also supports all major platforms.

Even Python has GTK, Qt and Pywin32 or whatever its called. While not exactly cross platform, it's still not eating up 1GB of RAM when you launch it.

I don't care if Bob from across the street uses it because he's too lazy to learn anything new, but when huge companies like fucking Discord (valued at 10B dollars) use it, it's insane.
More than once has Discord had a memory leak and was reaching upwards of 6.5GB of RAM usage.

Whats the most popular code editor? VSCode, Electron.
Chat client? Discord, Electron.
Wanna use something other than Discord? Maybe Matrix? Well guess what, while they do have multiple clients, the most developed and usable one is Element, yeah, Electron.
Slack? Electron
My crypto wallet? Exodus, Electron.

I genuinely don't think 16GB of RAM is enough nowadays. Thankfully I'm running a very minimal install of Arch Linux and do most of my work in a KVM, but it still hurts my brain.

By the way things are looking nowadays, We'll be using Javascript for Kernels soon.
Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk.

Also apparently the filter on this site sees ". net" as an url.

Now chrome uses 10% more RAM !
Whaattt the fuck ?

funny coincidence happened at work the other day.
One dev ask to get more ram for his pc so we sent him a link to download more ram... after all the laughs we actually gave hom more ram.
The next day, we had performance issue on our dev servers, and after checking the VM's where missing 4gb of ram each from the original setup... so i poke my dev and say see now we know where the downloaded ram came from XD. man those small things really make my day

Do you know that KDE is more lighter than MATE? In the screenshot the RAM usage you can see is from a live. The same test on the same PC with MATE take 900 MB and with GNOME 1,5 GB. Test made with the latest LTS of Ubuntu.

A customer brought in an older, beat-up machine and told us it wasn't booting. We noticed that his power supply was damaged, but checked it in for other diagnostics.

I found out he had a corrupted operating system, but with everything else on the computer, I didn't recommend fixing the computer.

Now, for reference, this is a Windows 7 computer with 10GB of RAM. But it also has a bent side-panel, the front-panel is hanging on by a thread, and it would also need the new power supply -- all of which would be over $200 USD.

When I finally relayed this info to him over the phone, we started talking about the system.

Him: So what do you think?

Me: I mean, this computer has some good specs, but with the damage, I wouldn't recommend repairing the computer. Now, this is your computer and you are more than welcome to tell me to shove it, but I'd recommend replacing it. We're at the breaking point of doing whatever you want to do, and it's your money that you're spending, but in my professional opinion, I don't think it's worth saving.

Him: Well, okay. I'll come in later and see what options I have

I've been away from devRant (and other social media) for a few days because I thought i needed to concentrate on a project that I'm currently working on.

I just realized that I need this, I really need to rant! There is just too much to rant about. Like how fuckin annoying tomcat is, (don't ask me, someone is paying for me to use it), or how eclipse is happily hugging over 1gb of my ram, ( again don't ask), meanwhile vscode is doing just the same thing (debugging a tomcat server) with less than 300mb! There's so much to be annoyed about that I truly don't know how I was getting along before devRant.

Can someone help me understand?

I subscribed to a nifty IT-releated magazine, and on its back, there's an ad for "Dedicated root server hosting", nothing unusual at a first glance, but after I read the issue, I decided to humor them and see what it is that they offered, and... It just... Doesn't make sense to me!

An ad for "Dedicated Root Server" - What is a dedicated root server first of all? Root servers of any infrastructure sound pretty important.

But, the ad also boasts "High speed performance with the new Intel Core i9-9900K octa-core processor", that's the first weird thing.

Why would anyone responsible enough want to put an i9 into a highly-reliable root server, when the thing doesn't even support ECC? Also, come on, octa-core isn't much, I deal with servers that have anywhere between 2 and 24 cores. 8 isn't exactly a win, even if it has a higher per-core clock.

Oh, also, further down the ad has a list of, seeming, advantages/specs of the servers, they proclaim that the CPU "incl. Hyper-Threading-Technology"... Isn't that... Standard when it comes to servers? I have never seen a server without hyperthreading so far at my job.

"64 GBs of DDR4 RAM" - Fair enough, 64 gigs is a good amount, but... Again, its not ECC, something I would never put into a server.

"2 x 8 TB SATA Enterprise Hard Drive 7200 rpm" - Heh, "enterprise hard drive", another cheap marketing word, would impress me more if they mentioned an actual brand/model, but I'll bite, and say that at least the 7200 rpm is better than I expected.

"100 GBs of Backup Space" - That's... Really, really little. I've dealt with clients who's single database backup is larger than that. Especially with 2x8 TB HDD (Even accounting for software raids on top)

This one cracks me up - "Traffic unlimited"
Whaaaat?! You are not gonna give me a limit to the total transferred traffic to the internet for my server in your data center? Oh, how generous of you, only, the other case would make the server just an expensive paperweight! I thought this ad was for semi-professionals at least, so why mention traffic, and not bandwidth, the thing that matters much more when it comes to servers? How big of a bandwidth do I get? Don't tell me you use dialup for your "Dedicated Root Server"s!

"Location Germany or Finland" - Fair enough, geolocation can matter when it comes to latency.

"No minimum contract" - Oooh, how kiiiind of you, again, you are not gonna charge me extra for using the server only as long as I pay? How nice!

"Setup Fee £60" - I guess, fair enough, the server is not gonna set itself up, only...

The whole ad is for "monthly from £55.50", that's quite the large fee for setup.

Oh, and a cherry on top, the tiny print on the bottom mentions: "All prices exclude VAT and are a subject to..." blah blah blah.
Really? I thought that this sort of almost customer deceipt is present only in the common people's sphere!

I must say, there's being unimpressed, and then... There's this. Why, just... Why? Anyone understands this? Because I don't...

Ah, developers, the unsung heroes of caffeine-fueled coding marathons and keyboard clacking symphonies! These mystical beings have a way of turning coffee and pizza into lines of code that somehow make the world go 'round.

Have you ever seen a developer in their natural habitat? They huddle in dimly lit rooms, surrounded by monitors glowing like magic crystals. Their battle cries of "It works on my machine!" echo through the corridors, as they summon the mighty powers of Stack Overflow and Google to conquer bugs and errors.

And let's talk about the coffee addiction – it's like they believe caffeine is the elixir of code immortality. The way they guard their mugs, you'd think it's the Holy Grail. In fact, a developer without coffee is like a computer without RAM – it just doesn't function properly.

But don't let their nerdy exteriors fool you. Deep down, they're dreamers. They dream of a world where every line of code is bug-free and every user is happy. A world where the boss understands what "just one more line of code" really means.

Speaking of bosses, developers have a unique ability to turn simple requests into complex projects. "Can you make a small tweak?" the boss asks innocently. And the developer replies, "Sure, it's just a minor change," while mentally calculating the time it'll take and the potential for scope creep.

Let's not forget their passion for acronyms. TLA (Three-Letter Acronym) is their second language. API, CSS, HTML, PHP, SQL... it's like they're playing a never-ending game of Scrabble with abbreviations.

And documentation? Well, that's their arch-nemesis. It's as if writing clear instructions is harder than debugging quantum mechanics. "The code is self-explanatory," they claim, leaving everyone else scratching their heads.

In the end, developers are a quirky bunch, but we love them for it. Their quirks and peculiarities are what make them the creative, brilliant minds that power our digital world. So here's to developers, the masters of logic and the wizards of the virtual realm!

Smartphone manufacturers these days, imagine how meetings to come up with ideas for new products go about.

Product manager :ok people,what can we do to make our next smartphone 'different'.

Employee 1: let's add more cameras
Employee 2:Let's kill the notch
Employee 3:Let's include the buzzword AI in all of our marketing
Employee 4:Let's put 8Gb of Ram in our phone
Employee 5:Let's just do all of those things and also give it a screen with a ridiculous aspect ratio and unnecessarily high resolution.

I have been keeping this inside for long time and I need to rant it somewhere and hear your opinion.

So I'm working as a Team Lead Developer at a small company remotely based in Netherlands, I've been working there for about 8 years now and I am the only developer left, so the company basically consists of me and the owner of the company which is also the project manager.

As my role title says I am responsible for many things, I maintain multiple environments:
- Maintain Web Version of the App
- Maintain A Cordova app for Android, iOS and Windows
- Working with pure JavaScript (ES5..) and CSS
- Development and maintenance of Cordova Plugins for the project in Java/Swift
- Trying to keep things stable while trying very hard to transit ancient code to new standards
- Testing, Testing, Testing
- Keeping App Stable without a single Testing Unit (sadly yes..)
- Just pure JavaScript no framework apart from JQuery and Bootstrap for which I strongly insist to be removed and its being slowly done.

On the backend side I maintain:
- A Symfony project
- MySQL
- RabbitMQ
- AWS
- FCM
- Stripe/In-App Purchases
- Other things I can't disclose

I can't disclose the nature of the app but the app is quite rich in features and complex its limited to certain regions only but so far we have around 100K monthly users on all platforms, it involves too much work especially because I am the only developer there so when I am implementing some feature on one side I also have to think about the other side so I need to constantly switch between different languages and environments when working, not to mention I have to maintain a very old code and the Project Owner doesn't want to transit to some more modern technologies as that would be expensive.

The last raise I had was 3 years ago, and so far he hasn't invested in anything to improve my development process, as an example we have an iOS version of the app in Cordova which of course involves building , testing, working on both frontend and native side and etc., and I am working in a somewhat slow virtual machine of Monterey with just 16 GB of RAM which consumed days of my free time just to get it working and when I'm running it I need to close other apps, keep in mind I am working there for about 8 years.

The last time I needed to reconfigure my work computer and setup the virtual machine it costed me 4 days of small unpaid holiday I had taken for Christmas, just because he doesn't have the enough money to provide me with a decent MacBook laptop. I do get that its not a large company, but still I am the only developer there its not like he needs to keep paying 10 Developers.

Also:
- I don't get paid vacation
- I don't have paid holiday
- I don't have paid sick days
- My Monthly salary is 2000 euro GROSS (before taxes) which hourly translates to 12 Euro per hour
- I have to pay taxes by myself
- Working remotely has its own expenses: food, heating, electricity, internet and etc.
- There are few other technical stuff I am responsible of which I can't disclose in this post.

I don't know if I'm overacting and asking a lot, but summarizing everything the only expense he has regarding me is the 2000 euro he sends me on which of course he doesn't need to pay taxes as I'm doing that in my country.

Apart from that just in case I spend my free time in keeping myself updated with other tech which I would say I fairly experienced with like: Flutter/Dart, ES6, NodeJS, Express, GraphQL, MongoDB, WebSockets, ReactJS, React Native just to name few, some I know better than the other and still I feel like I don't get what I deserve.

What do you think, do I ask a lot or should I start searching for other job?

!Rant

The Eve V is a Community Developed Windows Tablet which will be released in Ocotober this year.

The best specs you can get is i7 6th Gen, 16 GB Ram and 500 GB SSD for around 1400$.

He wants 32 GB RAM in such a slim and small Tablet. Also wants a 7th Gen Intel CPU and 1 TB SSD in it. He's ready to pay 1000 $ more for his special edition.

The Eve V is already finished with tooling and they are wating for the screens to arrive. They already have all the other parts.

Dude you're crazy and that specs just for VM's? What are you running? 10x WinShitBox?

He's insulting everyone on the forum with a different opinion and says, retooling will be such easy.

That guy is a real douchebag and doesn't know shit. If you would build in different parts like this, you would need to remodel the whole tablet. You can stick your 1000$ in your ass, retooling would cost more than 10'000$

If it's so easy you shithead, then do it yourself and dont say it's possible and say to other people they should do! 😂😂

How the fuck can Slack use more than 2GB of RAM running inside of the fucking browser? wow

I really really really need more RAM. 16GB is far from enough. Had to witness the kernel kill all of my Chrome extensions and most of my tabs and an IDE and still it wasn't able to run that container in the 8G RAM it just freed up...

I remember the days when 8G RAM was an overkill.

The times have changed. Now I'm looking into getting a Linux lappy w/ 96GB and still worried whether it'll suffice my needs....

This is a guide for technology noobies who wants to buy a laptop but have no idea what the SPECS are meaning.

1. Brand
If you like Apple, and love their !sleek design, go to the nearest Apple store and tell them "I want to buy one. Recommendations?"
If you don't like Apple, well, buy anything that fits you. Read more below.

2. Size
There are 11~15 inches, weight is 850g ~ 2+kg. Very many options. Buy whatever you like.

//Fun part coming

3. CPU
This is the power of the brain.
For example,
Pentium is Elementary Schoolers
i3 is Middle Schoolers
i5 is High Schoolers
i7 is University People

Dual-core is 2 people
Quad-core is 4 people

Quiz! What is i5 Dual-core?
A) 2 High Schoolers.

Easy peasy, right?

Now if you have a smartphone and ONLY use Messaging, Phone, and Whatsapp (lol), you can buy Pentium laptops.
If not, I recommend at least i3

Also, there are numbers behind those CPU, like i3-6100
6 means 6th generaton.
If the numbers are bigger, it is the most recent generation.

Think of 6xxx as Stone age people
7xxx as Bronze age people
8xxx as Iron age people
and so one.

4. RAM
This is the size of the desk.
There are 4GB, 8GB, 16GB, 32GB, and so one.
Think of 4GB as small desk to only put one book on it.
8GB as a desk to put a laptop with a keyboard and a mouse.
16GB as a normal sized desk to put some books, laptop, and food.
32GB as a boss sized desk.
And so one.

When you do multitasking, and the desk is too small...
You don't feel comfortable right?
It is good when there are spacious space.
Same with RAM.

But when the desk becomes larger, it gets expensive, so buy the one with the affordable price.

If you watch some YouTube videos in Chrome and do some document words with Office, buy at least 8GB. 16GB is recommended.

5. HDD/SSD
You take out the stuffs such as books and laptop from the basket (HDD/SSD), and put in your desk (RAM).

There are two kinds of baskets.
The super big ones, but because it is so big, it is bulky and hard to get stuffs out of the basket. But it is cheap. (HDD)
There are a bit smaller ones but expensive compared to the HDD, it is called SSD. This basket is right next to you, and it is super easy to get stuffs out of this basket. The opening time is faster as well.

SSDs were expensive, but as times go, it gets bigger as well, and cheaper. So most laptops are SSD these days.
There are 128GB, 256GB, 512GB, and 1024GB(=1TB), and so one. You can buy what you want. Recommend 256GB for normal use.
Game guy? At least 512GB.

6. Graphics
It is the eyesight.
Most computers doesn't have dedicated graphics card, it comes with the CPU. Intel CPUs has CPU + graphics, but the graphics powered by Intel isn't that good.
But NVIDIA graphics cards are great. Recommended for gamers. But it is a bit more expensive.

So TL;DR

Buying a laptop is
- Pick the person and the person's clothes (brand and design)
- Pick the space for the person to stay (RAM, SSD/HDD)
- Pick how smart they are (CPU)
- Pick how many (Core)
- Pick the generation (6xxx, 7xxx ....)
- Pick their eyesight (graphics)

And that's pretty much it.
Super easy to buy a laptop right?

If you have suggestions or questions, make sure to leave a comment, upvote this rant, and share to your friends!

Every time I think I've seen the worst there's someone to prove me wrong...

GRANT ALL ON ALL TABLES/SEQUENCES
To web user on production

if (x == 1) y = 1;
else y = x;

loop through a collection and get 'few' relations using ORM - 1000s of queries and not a single join - but don't worry, "The ITs will just add more RAM and some CPU cores to the server"

4th day off and I already miss this

No wonder why Google Chrome takes up alot of RAM when running, I've just seen chromiums dev requirements:

System requirements

- A 64-bit Intel machine with at least 8GB of RAM. More than 16GB is highly recommended.

- At least 100GB of free disk space on an NTFS-formatted hard drive. FAT32 will not work, as some of the Git packfiles are larger than 4GB.

- An appropriate version of Visual Studio, as described below.
Windows 7 or newer.

So true ...

"Many developers on a schedule aren't making efforts to write clean and efficient code, relying on idiot-proof languages (and consequently more RAM and faster processors) to make up for their malaise."

I wish laptops were more easily modifiable. Ram upgrade? Gpu upgrade? 10-GBit ethernet? Maybe I should just buy a desktop...

Working with acutal BigData. Will be ''promoted'' to a new team where I will work on a system wrote in php+mysql with literal millions of requests and database rows. We are currently seeing server crashes around once a week on peak usage. Stack is a vps 64gb ram server + i dont know how many cpu/ cores. Apache, php, mysql.Best ways to optimise and adapt in this case? Kafka? Rabbitmq?ngnix? More hardware?

So it's 2018 and i am wondering is there a:

Laptop with at least 16go of ram that can last AT LEAST 24 hours ?

Tasks involved:
Running vms
Ide
Browser

Work related stuff

No Apple products please

Thanks!

Ps: i already got a couple of laptops so i am not in a hurry i am more looking for something that i can carry around while traveling in a lightweight manner

Man, running a Minecraft server with 5 players on a VPS with 1 vCore and 1GB of ram is *really* pushing this thing to its limits!
Thank goodness Ubuntu Server doesn't need much ram to run, because Minecraft is a real resource hog.
I hope Hetzner approves my account on monday, so we can move to a 2 core VPS with 4GB of ram!

!rant

I started learning to use Hadoop recently, and am running a VM with all I need installed on it (the HDF Sandbox to be exact). The VM wants 8GB to run and my laptop only has just that, except it also needs to run Windows at the same time...

At first I thought I was screwed, that I'd need a more capable computer to learn. I gave it a shot anyway, and told VirtualBox to give the VM 4GB, hoping the VM itself would use RAM swap to function. And it did!

What I didn't expect was Windows not slowing down even a bit. Turns out Windows can triple the computer's RAM with virtual memory that it keeps on disk.

So the bottom line is: my VM is using 4GB as if it was 8GB, and at the moment my Windows is using 8GB as if they were 14GB. All of this without breaking a sweat. The more you know!

They did it. They really did it.

Oh my... I can't believe it.

I suggested app admins find a way to enable keep-alive in the app. And they installed it.

I mean it. KeepAlive_setup_v1.4.msi is what I found on the desktop.

Next, I feel like suggesting to download more RAM... After this stunt, I wouldn't even be surprised.....

I gonna puke if I see more whining on android studio from a guy having 8GB of ram and running IDE emulator and a browser. To remind everyone, decent android phones have 4GB of ram or more. They have memory cards with io speeds comparable to SSD. They have 10 core CPUs. And still, people want to develop on potatoes.

I started out on a Sinclair ZX 80. It has just 512 bytes of ram and you had to use a function button together with a key for each command since it did not have enough memory to keep the source in memory ;)

I attended few basic courses and then went on to hold them.

After a year there was suggestions of starting pascal courses so during the summer I read up in turbo pascal 5.5 but since the summer home did not have electricity I had to do it all theoretically for the first month before getting to try it out.

I got to try visual basic when doing school practice with Microsoft but the name was not set by then as it was a few months before the release.

Thats also where the more professional programming got going even though I did one pascal program that was used professionally before that.

My mac was saturating full 4Gb with only a few terminals and a text editor. I upgraded to 16 gigs and now it consumes 5Gb with 0 apps open.

It's like a evil plot to torture me. You got more RAM, I got more hungry.

> Develop puppet deployment module for hip new mail server
> set vm so taht it simulates cheap ass requirements of 1 core, 1 gig ram
> finally get to the webserver part, need to generate own dhparam.pem

Meanwhile my beard is becoming more and more grey

Respect to the devs of this app, noticed a changelog entry "Improved memory usage".
More devs should take ram consumption into account!

Discord...

Okay, I have a lot to rant about discord, but today, exceptionally, to the point.

I have my dedicated server. It has uptime last 3 years better than 99,99% (was down 15ish minutes for maintainance and RAM upgrade and like 10 minutes down becouse hoster's generators failed to trigger when there was outage)

This year it was up 24/7/365.

Why am I saying it?
Well, my TS3 server is up 100% of time this year. Yet still everyone moves to discord and suffers brutal audio quality and audio lags, and outages like right now. Its not first time this year and recently discord was acting up before. Today they scored bigger downtime than my dedi server (thats not redundant, not distributed nor any fancy "uptime helpers") last 3 years.

Why the fuck people prefer discord to ts3 other that it allows to upload images more conviniently? Okay, it looks nicer, and is like 10 times heavier on machine, but other than that? Its beyond me.

E: fix typo
E2: fix typo

Why is netbeans, or Java in general, so fucking bad at handling memory ? I mean, I'm literally doing nothing on my code and I see my IDE consuming more and more RAM, to some point it goes over 1GB so I have to close then reopen it to "flush" the memory taken...
It's 2017, how the fuck can't we still manage to actually use a correct amount of RAM when I open a barely 10MB project ??

And it applies to everything related to Java. Like Android, Minecraft and other Java based softwares...

It's 2022 and Firefox still doesn't allow deactivating video caching to disk.

When playing videos from some sites like the Internet Archive, it writes several hundreds of megabytes to the disk, which causes wear on flash storage in the long term. This is the same reason cited for the use of jsonlz4 instead of plain JSON. The caching of videos to disk even happens when deactivating the normal browsing cache (about:config property "browser.cache.disk.enable").

I get the benefit of media caching, but I'd prefer Firefox not to write gigabytes to my SSD each time I watch a somewhat long video. There is actually the about:config property "browser.privatebrowsing.forceMediaMemoryCache", but as the name implies, it is only for private browsing. The RAM is much more suitable for this purpose, and modern computers have, unlike computers from a decade ago, RAM in abundance, which is intended precisely for such a purpose.

The caching of video (and audio) to disk is completely unnecessary as of 2022. It was useful over a decade ago, back when an average computer had 4 GB of RAM and a spinning hard disk (HDD). Now, computers commonly have 16 GB RAM and a solid-state drive (SSD), which makes media caching on disk obsolete, and even detrimental due to weardown. HDDs do not wear down much from writing, since it just alters magnetic fields. HDDs just wear down from the spinning and random access, whereas SSDs do wear down from writing. Since media caching mostly invovles sequential access, HDDs don't mind being used for that. But it is detrimental to the life span of flash memory, and especially hurts live USB drives (USB drives with an operating system) due to their smaller size.

If I watch a one-hour HD video, I do not wish 5 GB to be written to my SSD for nothing. The nonstandard LZ4 format "mozLZ4" for storing sessions was also introduced with the argument of reducing disk writes to flash memory, but video caching causes multiple times as much writing as that.

The property "media.cache_size" in about:config does not help much. Setting it to zero or a low value causes stuttering playback. Setting it to any higher value does not reduce writes to disk, since it apparently just rotates caching within that space, and a lower value means that it just rotates writing more often in a smaller space. Setting a lower value should not cause more wear due to wear levelling, but also does not reduce wear compared to a higher value, since still roughly the same amount of data is written to disk.

Media caching also applies to audio, but that is far less in size than video. Still, deactivating it without having to use private browsing should not be denied to the user.

The fact that this can not be deactivated is a shame for Firefox.

After struggling all morning with my laptop, I finally accepted the fact that my 1TB hard drive died. Now I'm on a dilemma: Should I replace the drive and upgrade the RAM, or should I buy a new laptop altogether?

Current laptop is Lenovo G50-45, with AMD APU, 6GB (4+2 on graphics) and said 1TB drive.
Before this misfortune befell me, I was planning to upgrade the RAM to 8+2.
Now I'm at a loss, but my folks are willing to help.
Should I buy a new drive and RAM or should I start looking a new more dev oriented laptop? If the latter, any recommendations?

!rant

just a poll i'm looking for from all the linux based dev's

What distro would you recommend for a front end dev? Tried ubuntu but the wifi driver wasnt supported I guess in my dev machine. Currently looking at Elementary OS, but still undecided. I would primarily like it to be Debian based or something close as I'm very familiar with apt-get debain based stuff, and dont really feel like learning an entirely new distro at them moment.

Thanks all :D

PS. I have a Lenovo Ideapad 110
Specs include quad-core AMD A-8, 8gb ram, 1TB HDD, can give more if necessary

When older family members have entire notebooks dedicated to logging obscure, easily-hackable passwords, but then download any app in the world that promises to "make your phone run like new!" (by using 30MB more RAM on God-knows how much malware)
We aren't doing a good job of educating people if anyone we know can fall victim to those kinds of hackneyed procedures and snake-oil apps. It's almost painful to watch, and have to be the bad guy by telling someone dear to me they've been making things worse for themselves because of a seemingly harmless app that they were almost proud of.

I will soon move to Belgium for a few months due to my wife's job and I will go back to Germany once in a while for a few weeks. Of course I'll need a computer and I can't take my tower back and forth all the time, thus I'll need something more mobile. Since most notebooks <1000€ are shit and I'll also need at least two external monitors, I went for a small (USFF) PC instead; for about 350€ I got a HP ProDesk 400 G5 with a i5-9500T, 8 GB RAM (to be upgraded), 256 GB NVME (also to be upgraded), B360 chipset. I would have liked a Ryzen, but then I could only get the predecessor with a 2400GE...

Hopefully Linux (Qubes OS in particular) will work fine.

Finally, I got my laptop back after 4 gruelling days of separation with a new disc and more RAM!!!
I can't wait to finish up installing all the programmes I need to start writing code!!!

Oh fucking hardware virtualization.
how many times have I failed at setting sth up googled it and just read "check your BIOS ... and enable..."
Well I would IF I FUCKING COULD. THERE AIN'T NOTHING TO ENABLE ON THIS CHEAP CPU.

I know. I know. Should just get a newer setup, this lappy ain't that powerful anyways - but still - it's frustrating to get excited, start sth and than hit that dead end realizing they presupposed sth I don't have.

dude 1: Why is the sql sentence so slow? How can I improve it?
dude 2: buy more ram memory to database server

I really love my mother but.

A couple of weeks ago she asked me for advice regarding a laptop. She wanted something cheap for office and stuff.
Since I know her I exactly knows she needs extreme fast boot and responsiveness. She'll go all hulk rage if the laptop doesn't boot in less than 30 seconds.

Told her to get something with ssd since storage is no issue and 4gb ram with an decent older I5. Took a whole day going through stores in my area and online to find good deals. Send her everything I found. Really good laptop for under 500€ I would've killed for.

Fast forward. She bought some 300€ shit laptop because it had 1tb memory. She didn't ask for advice just bought the cheapest that would read decently description wise.

Now she is raging all day and bitching about it being so slow and I should fix it for her since I'm an it guy etc.

Looking at the specs I nearly started to vomit. She seriously bought a laptop worse than she already had. Old i3 2gb ram 5200rpm HDD.

I told her she should return it because it is shit. But no. She insists that since it's newer it is better and I am only a lazy fuck who doesn't want to be bothered to do her a favor.

Offered the best thing I could think of. Told her I'd install Linux on it for her and teach her how to use it.
Explained it would run more smoothly since she refused to take that shit laptop back. But no. Of course she insists on using windows 10....

FUUUUUUUCK. I love my mother but seriously I'm about to explode.

People keep asking me the reason why I am still using my 9 years old laptop which has Pentium b940 and 4 GB of ram. I should say Its enough for me!
All hard work is on the server side. I just need an SSH client, VS Code, Chromium, and Spotify, all running on a light weight Ubuntu. why should I buy one of those brand new laptops which has lights more than a UFO.

I’m so frustrated and I don’t know whether to blame my 2015 Mac, Audacity, both, or my present inability to be able to afford a new Mac because EVERYTHING/EVERYONE IN MY HOUSE IS BREAKING, NEEDS THERAPY OR BRACES, AND LIFE IS NOTHING BUT EXPENSES!

I had just finished tediously transferring, restoring, and trying to export tracks from some old cassette I had of a jazz concert I played in years ago. Audacity froze because my Mac is now apparently underpowered at 8GB of RAM. But Audacity autosaves and on restart usually can restore you back to where you left off. So I tried to force quit it.

I couldn’t even force quit the stupid app and had to totally restart. I think that ruined whatever autosave I had because it could only restore half of the work I’d done. Another freeze finished off the Audacity project, making it TOTALLY BLANK AND WORTHLESS. I just deleted the whole damned thing and will have to start over. I WAS MINUTES AWAY FROM BEING DONE AFTER HOURS OF WORK!!!!!

Now the Mac wants to update to a supplemental release. With each release this expensive boat anchor gets slower and slower.

I just wanna throw all tech out the window. Every damned thing is planned obsolescence in 2 years and made in China anymore and I HATE giving that totalitarian regime any more of my money. Apple is complicit. ALL computer companies are. They could just bring the jobs back here and walk the walk, but they’re all talk.

TL;DR: TIL for heavy queries use PDO and not some frameworks DB class

ffs I was trying to save 300k+ lines at once with Laravel for weeks. Mind you from a text file. 1gb ram on the vps so while trying to prepare the text to save: Fatal Error: Allowed Memory Size of bla bla Bytes Exhausted

ok so lets put it in a loop: Fatal error: Maximum execution time of 30 seconds exceeded (set_time_limit(0); lol)

optimising, varying the code got me into a situation when the content got saved in the BD but inconsistent (duplicates) and the table had often more than 1,5M rows. That was what told me its not a performance issue, my code is the issue. (dah)

I was starting to think it would be easier to export a prepared query to a sql file and load the file into the db as thats the fastest possible option...I even started to think about switching to python, then it hit me, Laravel has a shitload of routes to the DB so I switched to PDO

benchmark on 1vCPU, 1GB RAM VPS with SSD
379k lines with 11 columns in less than 10 sec with a loop of saving every ~6000 rows (if i tried choking it to save the whole thing at once it went up to 16-17sec)

If you look at the "lightweight business laptops" or business netbooks section of the market you'll notice almost all of them seem to have 4gb

Bitch, thats barely enough to run windows 10.

Looks like a market opening. If I were still doing upgrades and repairs I'd blame everything on low memory (well, a lot of slowness can loosely be attributed to lack of memory) and upsell new machines with more and better ram. Target 6gb, which is cheaper than 8 and offers a minor but noticeable boost, just enough to passably justify the increased cost to whoever is responsible for authorizing the upgrade.

I don't understand whats so hard to grasp about this. It's like companies trip over dollars to pick up dimes.

I wrote a parody of Sound of Silence based on the struggles of cleaning up people's shit in the shop

============

Hello problems, my old friends
I've come to talk with you again
Because a driver softly creeping
Left its seeds while RAM was leaking
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sound of crashing

In restless dreams I walked alone
Narrow bands of networking
'Neath the halo of a burned-out fan
I turned my collar to the hot and spinning
When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of an LED light
That split the night
And touched the sound of crashing

And in the naked light I saw
Ten thousand tasks, maybe more
Programs malloc with no swap
Programs writing with no space
Programs writing bits that voices never play
And no one dared
Disturb the sound of crashing

"Fools, " said I, "You do not know
Malware, like a plague, it grows
Hear my words that I might teach you
Take my tools that I might help you"
But my words, like silent raindrops fell
And echoed in the wells, of crashing

And the programs bowed and prayed
To the malware god they made
And Windows flashed out its warning
In the words that it was forming
And Windows said, "The words of the prophets are written in the event log
And dumped over COM"
And whispered in the sounds of crashing