darkpuma

> I think 25% of our Dell motherboards broke in the spring of 2006 because of a batch of bad capacitors

The capacitor plague. Pretty much everybody in the industry was hit by that to at least some extent:

> "Major vendors of motherboards such as Abit,[9] IBM,[1] Dell,[10] Apple, HP, and Intel[11] were affected by capacitors with faulty electrolytes. In 2005, Dell spent some US$420 million replacing motherboards outright and on the logistics of determining whether a system was in need of replacement.[12][13] Many other equipment manufacturers unknowingly assembled and sold boards with faulty capacitors, and as a result the effect of the capacitor plague could be seen in all kinds of devices worldwide. "

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague#Prevalence

Why should it be a common practice for individual developers when it's completely unnecessary with the right (cheap!) support contract? What you're suggesting seems insane to me, like setting money on fire to stay warm instead of simply buying firewood. Is it about 'flexing on plebs' or something? Eating cake when you're out of bread?

But let's pretend good support contracts don't exist because if it's not Apple it must not be real... If I'm going to pay the full price for duplicate hardware, I may as well wait until the day it breaks then walk into an Apple store and buy whatever they have in stock at the moment. I'll be walking down to the Apple store to get the broken one fixed anyway, won't I? And on the off chance that the computer never breaks I've just saved myself $2k that I can use to buy a bunch of cocaine and throw a party to celebrate reliable consumer hardware. That sounds like a lot more fun than owning twinned computers, no? You're invited.

By making computers more reliable, a company like Dell could dramatically reduce the amount of computers that require on-site servicing in the first place. For instance, what percentage of Dell XPS's have their keyboards fail within a year? What percentage of MBPs do?

Right now a base warranty for an XPS includes on site repair during business hours after a remote diagnosis for one year. Getting three years of that is $160. One year of the more advanced "ProSupport" is $50 more than the base price, and three years of that is $280 more. The non-linearity between those two figures is perhaps indicative of the failure rates Dell is expecting.

I couldn't say if Dell is losing their ass with these service contracts or not, but from what I've seen it works pretty well for the consumers.

Edit: And beyond baseline reliability, the particular design of a computer can determine whether a particular failure is cheap or expensive to fix. If the Foo widget requires replacing the Bar board, that's going to be a more expensive design to fix than a computer in which the Foo widget and the Bar board aren't soldered together. This matter crops up in things like "flexgate" for Apple, where faulty cables necessitate replacing the entire screen. What could have been a very cheap repair suddenly becomes a very expensive repair. I can't claim to be familiar with the insides of a modern XPS, but I wager they tend to be cheaper to repair than modern MBPs.

> it's part of the cost of doing business.

I think the point you're missing is that it needn't be a requirement of doing business, unless you insist on using Apple products. And, even if I have a full closet of old computers (I do) that doesn't mean I find it enjoyable to switch back to old hardware for a week or more, when the alternative is somebody coming to me within a day to fix it on site. If I enjoyed using that old hardware, I probably wouldn't have the new hardware would I? Surely any typical Apple user prefers using their brand new $2000 computer over their old computer that would struggle to get a tenth of that on ebay.

> for certain operators

AFAIK it works for any operator that takes two operands (or more, but it makes less sense to be using it with three or more operands.)

e.g:

    > '(arg0 . operator . arg1 arg2)
    '(operator arg0 arg1 arg2)

From a practical standpoint, basing everything off balanced parens (or square brackets, that makes no difference to me) makes the language much easier to write in. Being able to jump to the matching paren makes it trivial to copy/paste blocks of code, delete code, replace code, etc. It's so much easier than with things like Python. For instance, from the first line of a block of racket, copying that block in vim (not an editor known for being well suited for lisp) is as simple as %y. How do you do that in Python? If you know you're after 5 lines you could do 5Y, but that requires you to count how many lines you're after. You could use visual selection mode with V and then highlight the relevant lines, but that is more keystrokes than %y. You can get extensions for vim that create concise movements for dealing with indented blocks of python code, but with lisp no such extension is necessary. Even in vi-compat mode or things like Busybox's vi implementation that has no extension support, % works.

What's it like for C? A little bit better than python, but worse than lisp. Consider this block of code:

    if (foo) {
    ...
    }

How can I yank that entire thing, if my cursor is on the first character of the first line? The obvious answer to me is v$%y, which is pretty convenient, it doesn't require counting, but it's also fragile. What if that opening squiggly brace was on a new line? Then I'd have to do something like vj%y

As far as I'm concerned, despite vim being considered a second rate editor at best for lisp, lisp is arguably still the language vim is best suited for, and that's entirely a consequence of the fundamental usefulness of s-expressions.

M8 the "dude dell" phase ended back in 2003; there will soon be people working in this industry that were born after it ended. That is a long time ago. Since that time, Dell has been taken private, then public again. That advertising campaign ended years before the powerbook and ibook were discontinued, before the macbook brand was created, and before Apple switched architectures to intel x86 processors.

That some technically proficient people will find ways around it is beyond doubt, however it may prove to be an effective system for information control despite that, if the common user finds it difficult to circumvent.

I'm not sure, but that's how I've been using it. For me it replaced python for fun and casual programming.

Are you suggesting that house cat claws are vestigial? That simply isn't the case. Their claws improve their hunting success rate dramatically since they use them to snare their prey. A declawed cat may still have some success in hunting, but will be far less effective. In fact is one of the arguments I've often heard offered up by advocates of declawing bans (to reiterate, I also support declawing bans but I believe that particular argument against it is misguided.)

I guess you disapprove? I don't take it personally, but neither do I understand your characterization. Wouldn't the stereotypical American position on this matter be one of hyper-individualism and prioritizing your property (your pet cat's desire to kill native birds) before the wellbeing of the environment? Those are stereotypes of course, but stereotypes seem to have informed your remark.

They should have banned outdoor cats at the same time. Cats shouldn't be declawed and neither should they be outside, but if they're going to be outside it is better for the native wildlife if they have been declawed (making them ineffective hunters.)

I'm not angry yet, I'm just concerned. If it actually happens, then I'll be angry.

> "From a community perspective, the rub is that the "many people" for Racket syntax is a barrier are mostly people outside the community. It's fair to ask who would benefit. It's difficult to ask a community to tackle a problem whose solution targets a different community."

Yeah no shit, alienating the 1% of the general population who uses your tool to appease to the 99% who don't currently use it might work sometimes, but you could just as easily lose that 1% and pick up jack shit, because the grassroots advocates for your language just evaporated. Dropping s-expressions from the primary lang would likely prove to be the kick in the ass I need to switch to CL.

(Other proposals listed sound a lot better. This syntax matter is my one serious grievance here.)

Edit:

> "From what I've seen there is no advantage that editors can give you with parens, that they can't do better without parens, given that you've written loads of tests and done the grunt work to make that happen."

This seems like one of those cases where lack of editor diversity among a lisp community once again threatens to cause trouble for anybody who doesn't use emacs (see also: terrible default REPL experiences because the devs all use racket-mode or geiser-mode.) What am I meant to replace the % command with when using vim or evil-mode? I don't want to do "loads of gruntwork", nor do I wish to rely on editor extensions for a matter that should be so straight forward. I want to press % and jump to the matching paren.

The RX 590 should be good to go with the kernel driver since last December: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=RX-590-L...

What that practically means is that any linux distro with a kernel at least that new should support your card without needing to download anything from AMD's website. (Generally speaking, downloading drivers from the manufacturer's website is a windows-ism. There are some exceptions, like Nvidia, but a machine well configured for linux use should aim to use hardware supported by FOSS drivers (such as your AMD card.))

In the case of Fry's, you have evidence that they've received a counterfeit product from a single supplier. It may be rampant, or it may not be. With that single datapoint, it's hard to say.

In the case of Amazon, we know them to have a long and extensive history of selling a wide variety of counterfeit products. There is not nearly as much ambiguity to the situation. Elsewhere in this discussion the comparison to a flee market has been made, and I think that describes it well.

You don't need write access to a remote for that remote to be useful. Two or more people can collaborate using public repos that others may fetch from but not push to. Then, in lieu of github PRs, you request other people pull from you with email or however you like.

If you need access control without VPNs or whatnot (or if you simply want something closer to the github workflow), there are other services similar to github that can almost certainly provide what you need, such as gitlab.

> "Also, the additional effort to manage multiple remotes is entirely nontrivial."

With practice, I'd say it asymptotically approaches trivial.

Are you sure that you bought a modern system? ATI hasn't existed since 2006 and I believe AMD stopped using the brand name almost a decade ago; it's all AMD now. Also AMD GPUs have had really good FOSS support in the mainline kernel since the late 00's. Unless you were trying to get fglrx to work, in which case that was a huge mistake.

Do you need it to be a commercial service? I just use nfs over wireguard, hosted at home on some old hardware I already had. Total cost: $0 Setup took no more than a few minutes.

Obviously that's not suitable for everybody for a number of reasons, but for me it's totally erased the appeal dropbox or anything like it.

A single repo can have many remotes. Adding additional remotes does not prevent you from also using old remotes, nor do you ever have to remove a remote that you intend on using again in the future.

Obviously it's a moot point for you now, but getting comfortable with how git remotes works is something that could pay dividends for you in the future.

In America, nothing is more sacred than cash.

That's not something you decide once at the beginning and get stuck with it. You can reevaluate that decision at any point and easily add more remotes to a git repo on the fly.

20 years ago, software that included advertisements was called adware, and it was widely considered to be a form of malware. And software that sent out telemetry without the informed opt-in consent of the user was considered spyware, another form of malware.

Windows 10 is doing both of these today, but mainstream expectations for how software should behave have severely degraded. I fear the situation will not improve unless the public can be 're-educated', but a company with the brand recognition and legacy of Microsoft participating in these practices goes a long way towards further normalizing it.

Au contraire, it exists despite your refusal to see it.

> "this guy works in Douran (شرکت دوران) company, proudly stated in his page (Which screams amateur and narcissist)"

You really decimate your credibility when you say absurd things like this. If you're willing to misconstrue something as simple as stating your employer on the internet as such a serious character flaw, how can we trust the rest of your judgement to be reasonable?

> "US promotes values I am interested in,"

What, like overthrowing democratically elected governments, as they did in Iran? I really hope neoconservativism dies with the boomers, but I fear you're young.

Why, so the CIA can ruin it again for them?

The solution to that is to build it bigger with a wider footprint. Obviously this is an expensive way to build, but if you engineer it right (and throw enough concrete at it) you can create structures with nearly arbitrary shake resistance.

(Think of how hard you'd have to shake the Great Pyramid of Giza to make it collapse. That's not concrete obviously, but it too is under compression almost entirely, except for the corbel and lintel ceilings. The proper arches used in Roman concrete construction show that with the right engineering you can push unreinforced concrete pretty damn far. The Pantheon is probably the most impressive example of it. Compare how well it's withstood earthquakes with the Colosseum.)

The result is genuinely hilarious. I'm sure I wouldn't have enjoyed a faithful translation nearly as much.

> "Well, in a populist culture without an aesthetic hierarchy"

Closing your eyes doesn't make things disappear. Otherwise, I'd be a wizard.