Ed Davies @edavies@octodon.social

@cynicalsecurity What I saw (from my little software corner, but my projects did mean I talked quite a bit with people in other divisions) was a shift away from a focus on engineering to a “managerial” style where people were supposed to be “professional” and detached from the products they were working on. The result was managers jockeying for position amongst themselves rather than concentrating on making good things.

@cynicalsecurity OTOH, HP was on the way down well before then. Morale amongst engineers dropped significantly in the time I was there, from 1981 to 1989.

@kensanata @tomasino Yes, opening pages in Liferea is very clumsy - part of why I'd prefer it not to try to be a browser as well so a single click can open where I want it open. Once I've got a few items open in Firefox tabs, though, reading through them is very quick; it's just a one-stroke mouse gesture to close each when done with it.

@tomasino @kensanata We clearly have different mental models of what RSS and Atom are for. I think of it as just a way of finding out about new content on sites I'm interested in. What are your views?

@tomasino @kensanata Sometimes I don't see any justification for JavaScript, full stop. But whether or not it is justifiable is orthogonal to the question of whether you got to a bit of web content by browsing or by being notified of an update via a feed.

@kensanata @tomasino Seems to me that multiple “versions” which are actually completely disjoint languages is a bit unnecessary in something so simple.

I simply don't see the point of reading web content at the command line. I often want to view images, search on content, follow links, bookmark and so on, all of which are best done in a browser.

@kensanata @tomasino I just use Liferea to scan the feeds and flag up new things to read, then read them with Firefox. Is it that weird to read web content with a web browser?

But, I'd prefer that Liferea presented a slightly smaller attack surface given that it doesn't seem to have the same level of resources applied to its security as the major browsers.

I've considered doing my own feed scanner but given the abominable mess RSS is I've never got round to it.

@kensanata @tomasino I use Liferea but have no idea what HTML rendering engine it uses and whether it's up to date on my system so avoid opening anything in it as far as possible. Much rather read stuff in a version of Firefox which is as up to date as Ubuntu keeps it.

@tomasino @kensanata I feel that RSS readers that do anything more than tell me the author, date and title of the post to read are a nuisance and a security risk. I'd much rather read posts in a proper up-to-date browser where I can follow links, bookmark and so on as normal.

Sarking: https://edavies.me.uk/2018/01/sarking/

@nolan @technomancy @kensanata Irritatingly, his feed (http://idlewords.com/index.xml) doesn't include posts more recent than his Antarctic trip.

(Yeah, I realise twitrss.me isn't about this. Just moaning about the general neglect of feeds (RSS or Atom) in the world.)

@cynicalsecurity @thamesynne Right, but my recollection/understanding was that it tended to split execution up much more granularly than the Unix/Windows process model making hardware exploitation of locality easier.

@cynicalsecurity @thamesynne Indeed. But maybe something of the sort would make better use of the transistors on a modern chip: lots of simpler cores with a bit of local memory.

@cynicalsecurity @thamesynne Maybe. I was thinking more of the Transputer and (I'm very vague about the details) Multics.

@thamesynne @cynicalsecurity But 64K is probably pretty much what any typical bit of code needs. Your average OO method needs its own local variables, the object's attributes, bits of the caller's stack and not a lot else. The problem is that 1 μs later the same processor will be running another method of a different object losing the benefits of that locality.

@kat It's a bit difficult to see the point of using it, then.

@kat

$ wget -S http://qttr.at/21d1
--2018-01-05 16:57:24-- http://qttr.at/21d1
Resolving qttr.at (qttr.at)... 193.180.164.102
Connecting to qttr.at (qttr.at)|193.180.164.102|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... Read error (Connection reset by peer) in headers.
Retrying.

Seen this before on these short URLs.

@HerraBRE £86.40/year (inc VAT) for a dedicated Pi3. 1TB/month. IPv6 only, though. But much faster networking, I imagine.

https://www.mythic-beasts.com/order/rpi

Maybe it's time to re-examine whether Multics was really “too complicated”.

Only ever read a book about it and that was decades ago but my recollection is that it split code up much more than the Unix/Windows process model reducing the pressure towards a small number of cores and super-scalar processing.

@deshipu @ekaitz_zarraga Yes. Also a vicious cycle of operating systems optimised for large monolithic application programs (yes, including games) and hardware optimised to run them. E.g,, push from 32 to 64 bit when practically no code actually needs access to anything like 4G of data. So radically different architectures (which, e.g, ARM isn't) don't get a look in. RIP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transputer , for example.