On Sunday, 2 September 2018 at 21:07:20 UTC, Nick Sabalausky (Abscissa) wrote:
> B. Physical interface:
> ----------------------
>
> By this I mean both actual input devices (keyboards, controllers, pointing devices) and also the mappings from their affordances (ie, what you can do with them: push button x, tilt stick's axis Y, point, move, rotate...) to specific actions taken on the visual representation (navigate, modify, etc.)

Also guess why Linux has problems with hardware support even though they have all programmers they need who can write pretty much anything.

On Tuesday, 4 September 2018 at 11:21:24 UTC, Kagamin wrote:
> On Sunday, 2 September 2018 at 21:07:20 UTC, Nick Sabalausky (Abscissa) wrote:
>> B. Physical interface:
>> ----------------------
>>
>> By this I mean both actual input devices (keyboards, controllers, pointing devices) and also the mappings from their affordances (ie, what you can do with them: push button x, tilt stick's axis Y, point, move, rotate...) to specific actions taken on the visual representation (navigate, modify, etc.)
>
> Also guess why Linux has problems with hardware support even though they have all programmers they need who can write pretty much anything.

Because hardware costs money, reverse engineering hardware is a specialized discipline, reverse engineering the drivers means you need twice as many people and a more rigorous process for license reasons, and getting drivers wrong could brick the device, requiring you to order another copy?

Because Linux *doesn't* have all that many programmers compared to the driver writers for literally every device in existence?

On Monday, 3 September 2018 at 02:58:01 UTC, Nick Sabalausky (Abscissa) wrote:
> In the 50's/60's in particular, I imagine a much larger percentage of programmers probably had either some formal engineering background or something equally strong.

I guess some had, but my impression it that it was a rather mixed group (probably quite a few from physics since they got to use computers for calculations).

I have heard that some hired people with a music background as musicians understood the basic algorithmic ideas of instructions and loops. I.e. how to read and write instructions to be followed (sheet-music).

Programming by punching in numbers was pretty tedious too... so you would want someone veeeery patient.

Another example I read on HackerNews today:

"I recall that during their most recent s3 outage Amazon's status page was green across the board, because somehow all the assets that were supposed to be displayed when things went wrong were themselves hosted on the thing that was down."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17913302

This is just so basic, folks.

On 09/04/2018 06:35 PM, Walter Bright wrote:
> Another example I read on HackerNews today:
> 
> "I recall that during their most recent s3 outage Amazon's status page was green across the board, because somehow all the assets that were supposed to be displayed when things went wrong were themselves hosted on the thing that was down."
> 
> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17913302
> 
> This is just so basic, folks.

I absolutely hate webmail (and not being able to spin up arbitrary amounts of specific-purpose email addresses). So years ago, I added a mailserver of my own to my webserver.

I made absolutely certain to use a *gmail* account (much as I hate gmail) and not one of my own self-hosted accounts, as my technical contact for all my server-related services. It's saved my ass many times.