Sponge creates steam using ambient sunlight - <AUTHOR> http://news.mit.edu/2016/sponge-creates-steam-using-ambient-sunlight-0822 <comment><USER2> > A solution to this problem came from an unlikely source: Chen's 16-year-old > daughter, who at the time was working on a science fair project in which she > constructed a makeshift greenhouse from simple materials, including bubble > wrap. "She was able to heat it to 160 degrees Fahrenheit, in winter!" Chen > says. "It was very effective."

Love it when discoveries are made by accident.

<comment><USER3> That doesn't sound like an accident: it sounds like she considered the problem, and thought of a solution, on purpose.

<comment> semi-extrinsic I hate to be the negative guy, but isn't this the obvious, standard, well known way of building a greenhouse? You want to prevent hot air from escaping, you put up something that contains the air. An actual greenhouse doesn't really rely on "the greenhouse effect" of allowing visual light to pass but being opaque to infrared. It's all about preventing hot air from rising. This can be easily seen in polyethylene windowed greenhouses, which get just as hot as glass greenhouses, even though polyethylene is just as transparent to IR as to visible light.

That part of the piece seemed like something the MIT press office coaxed out of them to get a human interest angle TBH.

Really, most of their improvement over the 2014 version seems to come from the spectrally-selective absorber coating, which is a lot more expensive than bubble wrap. So they say this solution might be ~10x cheaper than existing solar destilling plants, but they also say it will need replacement ~10x as often. So depending on exactly how the numbers work out, this might mean slightly cheaper, more labor-intensive desalinisation plants, but we're not covering any deserts just yet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> _The sponge also converted 20 percent of the incoming sunlight to steam. ... The researchers' current design builds on a solar-absorbing structure they developed in 2014 ... that was able to boil water to 100 C and convert 85 percent of the incoming sunlight to steam._

Even if they're a little confused about turning energy into matter, it does make me wonder if it's possible to manufacture something cheap, flexible, and durable enough that you could carry a "solar still" blanket for survival purposes. Just unroll it over some moist sand or vegetation, and it would distill and collect water that you could then drink out of a little tube.

<comment><USER5> > _It seems MIT buried the lead. They 've found a way to convert sunlight to > steam. Should come in very handy in space._

Space has the opposite problem: Remember that vacuum is a perfect insulator. The problem is usually about being able to dump excess heat.

<comment><USER6> Radiative cooling. Vacuum flasks wouldn't work nearly as well as they do if the internal walls weren't reflective.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Can covering coastal waters with these sheets create artificial/on-demand clouds ? That would be awesome for drought prone areas!

</comment><comment><USER8> The paper is available on researchgate: [https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Hadi_Ghasemi10/publicat...](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Hadi_Ghasemi10/publication/264091569_Solar_steam_generation_by_heat_localization/links/53e0e5240cf24f90ff60c047.pdf)

Original link: www.nature.com/articles/ncomms5449

</comment><comment><USER9> So, what will this breakthrough mean for desalination efforts?

<comment><USER10> I assume the idea would be to condense the steam as distilled water, and feed the brine back into the brackish water source. Probably the engineering challenges would be getting the salt water into the evaporator, collecting and condensing the vapor, and removing the "used" brine from the evaporator, and making these components operate continuously.

From the article it sounded like this was an idea that was being considered.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> _the researchers found the structure heated water to its boiling temperature of 100 degrees Celsius, even on relatively cool, overcast days._

It's not surprising that one could get such a result from solar thermal. Heat pipe based solar collectors have been doing this in cloudy English environs for many years. The really impressive part of this solution is its potential extremely low cost.

</comment><comment><USER12> any instructions how to replicate?

</comment><comment><USER13> This really is vapor ware!

<comment><USER14> Please make sure all comments contribute to the article.

Humor is okay, but should at most be supplementing a more thoughtful comment, and not be the primary contribution of a comment.

<comment><USER15> Is that in the guidelines?

<comment><USER16> That's sort of an informal rule-of-thumb a lot follow. Amusingly, the guidelines do specifically say "Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site."

Really, the simplest thing to do is make sure you contribute to discussion in some small way, and then put a rider on for the less contributive aspects you want to voice. That's what the above is really espousing, and while it's not a rule, it does seem to make the discussion flow smoother (and prevents people from jumping in about how you aren't contributing...)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Building a New GitLab Docs Site with Nanoc, GitLab CI, and GitLab Pages - <AUTHOR> https://about.gitlab.com/2016/12/07/building-a-new-gitlab-docs-site-with-nanoc-gitlab-ci-and-gitlab-pages/ <comment><AUTHOR> I'd be happy to answer any questions anyone has (about the post or anything else) :)

<comment><USER2> When I clicked the CE button and entered a search term in the search bar at the top of the result page, I got results from the EE and Omnibus sections.

I did not expect that. I was hoping I would be able to search just within the applicable section.

I think it would be worthwhile to consider separating gitlab.com into its own section, distinct from the EE area. A lot of the content in the EE section doesn't apply to .com users, and the tone might need to change when the reader is just a user of your site rather than someone managing the EE situation. Maybe you alrleady have a different help area just for the .com that I don't see linked.

I like how you're building the site using GitLab Pages and all your other tools! Nice.

Turns out this is actually a GitLab Pages workflow tutorial in disguise. Thanks for sharing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, we're working on improving the search by moving to Algolia for it[1], the current system doesn't work as well as we'd like.

The point was at least partially to share a workflow I hadn't been able to find any other blog posts for, where the docs are hosted in each product's respective repository and needs to be pulled into the docs site before deployment. It's conveniently also a tutorial for our tools, but that isn't the only goal :)

[1]: [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/gitlab- docs/issues/21](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/gitlab-docs/issues/21)</comment></comment></comment>


Rationality and Intelligence: A Brief Update [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~russell/papers/ptai13-intelligence.pdf

<comment><USER2> NB: This PDF seems to be consistently missing the letter 'f'.

xpdf and evince under Debian.</comment>


Ask HN: Why some Ask HN posts does not show comments count - <AUTHOR>

Why does some HN posts does not show the comments count, even though there are lot of comments inside <comment><USER2> I'm guessing:

To reduce the memory use, the old threads have only a flag to signal if they have comments or not. The comments are not loaded and the system doesn't know the comment count.

For the recent threads and when someone open an old thread, the comments are loaded and now the system can display the comments count.</comment>


Dutch minister of health makes a GitHub commit - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/minvws/nl-covid19-notification-app-website/commit/ce16c03b221c1ba1f18035f3a11907039c663871 <comment><USER2> Relevant context for this commit:

• This minister has been criticized during the corona crisis for promoting privacy-violating technology without knowing what he was talking about.

• He just won the party candidate election for his political party.

• Dutch general election is coming up in March 2020.

</comment><comment><USER3> No he didn't.

<comment><USER4> He didn't? The commit message is awkward enough that I can believe it is a first time commit.

<comment><USER5> Few clicks of the pencil tool and yeah, not sure what's unbelievable here</comment></comment></comment>


Flowplayer 5.0.0 - <AUTHOR> http://flowplayer.org/ <comment><USER2> Well, that was fast. However, I don't think deleting the pause button is a good idea, yeah: you can click in the screen, but some people might not realize that.

<comment><USER3> I think people will figure it out. But it would be interesting to do some usability tests on this.

<comment><USER4> Well the pause button has been around since tape players and VCRs, I think it's a pretty well established control that people will look for. Why should clicking the video do anything?

<comment><USER5> This has been a big debate at Flowplayer before the release. At the end of the day it was clear to us. Play/pause button must go. Majority of users find it obvious that pausing happens by clicking on the video. This happens on both YouTube and Vimeo which makes it mainstream.

And when it's possible to remove an UI element we'll certainly do it. We want to make the player as minimal as possible and make the video star of the show. Now more than ever.

<comment><USER6> Speaking of controls, a request:

I want to be able to repeatedly replay selected moments in videos.

So, I hover my mouse pointer over the seek slider at a certain point in the video so that I can repeatedly click that point to repeatedly replay that particular moment.

But most video players (including Flowplayer) cause the controls to disappear after a few seconds, even if I just barely clicked.

This forces me to wiggle the mouse to wake up the controls right when I _don't_ want to move my mouse because it's remembering a position in the video for me.

I would welcome any solution to this problem. A keyboard solution might work well. Youtube has keyboard shortcuts '1', '2', '3', for jumping to 10%, 20%, 30% into the video. I wish you could hit '.' or something to jump to the last position I set by clicking my mouse on the seek slider.

Also, I wish the controls did not fade away when I am hovering over them, using them.

By the way, Flowplayer seems to have a bug: if I attempt to hover over a point in the seek slider and repeatedly seek to that point, after the first click or two, it begins ignoring my seek request.

<comment><USER5> This is a good one. So good that it's part of the next version. Here is a demo:

<http://flowplayer.github.com/demo/seek/>

<comment><USER6> Hey, sweet! Thanks.

A couple issues:

1) The number keys don't work when in full screen mode.

2) Also the keys don't work at all if the mouse pointer is outside the video rectangle. (Is that a limitation of the web browser interface?)

It'd be great to have a few more keyboard shortcuts too. Left/right arrow keys to skip backward/forward 10 seconds? Keys for double speed, half speed, and frame-by-frame playback mode? Hit '?' to see a list of keyboard shortcuts?

<comment><USER5> Initial version of slow motion and fast forward are now there. Use ALT + left/right arrow keys.

<comment><USER5> I can make it configurable for site owners and users but I'd rather find good keys that doesn't need to be changed. +/- are quite good .. maybe shift + arrow keys?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Really sleek, very nice minimal UI. More "fast and fluid" than Windows 8!

Love it, certainly going to use it when I need a video player. It even has full screen!

Edit: Even better, it's responsive to browser width changes!

<comment><USER7> To make a <video> responsive, you only have to set its width to 100%... not a big deal.

But yeah, I love flowplayer, it has a nice js API. Too bad it's not IE6 compatible.

<comment><USER8> Why on earth do you need IE6 support?

IE6 is not even in the top 12 browsers according to StatCounter.

<comment><USER7> Globaly, yes. But if you want, per example, to target China, IE6 is mandatory. <http://www.ie6countdown.com/>

(and even Japan is at 4.7% according to this site. 4.7% is significant enough.)

<comment><USER6> Mandatory? For everybody?

There's a cost to supporting IE6, and a cost to not supporting it. Depending on what you're doing, it might make much better sense to do something like:

<http://code.google.com/p/ie6-upgrade-warning/>

IE6 usage is falling fast, even in China.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> How does this stack up to <http://videojs.com>?

<comment> johnx123-up What about <http://mediaelementjs.com/> ?

<comment><USER5> Same as with videojs, you should compare at what Flowplayer can actually do: <http://flowplayer.org/demos/> . There is a difference.

<comment><USER10> What about vast in both html5 and flash?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> You guys finally came out with a release that rivals JWplayer. Congrats! I switched from flowplayer to jwplayer when it started to get bloated/buggy in v3. Looks like I might come back for 5 :)

<comment><USER5> Welcome on board!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I tried to play the demo videos on my Samsung Galaxy S II (Android 2.3.5), both with Dolphin Browser v8.8.2 and the stock web browser, but it doesn't seem to work in either of them.

<comment><USER13> Same here. It does not work in the stock Android browser or in Chorme, but it plays in Opera Mobile. It seems like a very basic oversight. I suspect this is the reason YouTube is so dominant: It works reliably everywhere.

<comment><USER5> But not on iPads or environments where Flash is not supported. They have certainly improved here but definitely not reliable everywhere.

And obviously Android we'll make Flowplayer work on stock Android browser. That's a oversight from our part on the initial release.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It forks flawlessly on iPad too, using the same controls as in desktop browsers.

</comment><comment><USER15> Looks nice but I was really hoping for <track> support - based on some recent testing, it appears that currently only mediaelement.js supports both the Flash fallback and support for subtitles / captions.

<comment><USER5> Track element is coming. We thought it was not a blocker for a first release.

Note: I'm one of the developers of Flowplayer.

<comment><USER16> Some US states require that you caption your streamed content to comply with the American with Disabilities Act.

[http://articles.boston.com/2012-06-22/business/32352980_1_di...](http://articles.boston.com/2012-06-22/business/32352980_1_disability- rights-education-disabilities-act-netflix)

I'd honestly say it should have been a blocker but at the least it should be high priority for next release.

<comment><USER5> This is important.

However, most web videos _today_ are not associated with captions and made us ignore this from the initial release.

<comment><USER16> I'm not sure I understand, why is that important? The way I read it is that whether or not they're associated with captions they still require subtitles if the company is registered in the "wrong" (I'd argue right) state and the the video contain speech.

<comment><USER5> Flowplayer Ltd is located in Finland but this does not matter here. What matters here is the feature set and how each feature is prioritized.

For the first release we picked the ones we thought were absolutely necessary to make a great product. For the next one we fill in the gaps. For some people captions are _highly_ critical and we cannot please them with Flowplayer 5. For them we recommend our flash offering

<http://flash.flowplayer.org>

until captions are implemented to the HTML5 version.

<comment><USER14> mfjordvald is saying that the company serving the video can be in one of these "wrong" US states where captions are required. Does not really matter where Flowplayer Ltd is located.

<comment><USER5> As I said it doesn't matter and we think this is an important feature.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Congrats Tero and Anssi, this is such an awesome update! Being on the FP journey over the years has been great, and V5 proves that journey is still very relevant and very exciting!

Going to have a play with it this week for sure.

</comment><comment><USER18> Does GPL 3 mean that I cannot use it for in my commercial projects?

<comment><USER5> No restrictions. You can use it commercially.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> safari 6.0.1 on mountain lion: <http://cl.ly/image/0d0V1B1C3V28>

<comment><USER20> Seems to work just fine for me with Safari 6.0.1 on Mountain Lion. [https://www.evernote.com/shard/s186/sh/2b0936f2-0581-4b57-96...](https://www.evernote.com/shard/s186/sh/2b0936f2-0581-4b57-968e-00b70e03d9c7/4725e32bff38c2d840e9f5c651faee63)

<comment><USER19> fiddlesticks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I like the clean design but for some reason by browser hangs up while scrolling through your site.

Safari 5.1.7 on Snow Leopard

<comment><USER5> We currently have an Amazon micro instance! We have static pages served with nginx. Thanks, we're studying these occasional 503 issues.

<comment><USER21> Uh ... well it is not a 503 issue but looks more a HTML5 issue to me. My browser works absolutely fine when your website is not in one of my tabs.

<comment><USER5> Sorry. Misunderstood your issue. Need to check this out with Safari 5.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


APIs are reshaping business: concrete ROI case studies - <AUTHOR> http://fr.slideshare.net/faberNovel/6-reasons-why-apis-are-reshaping-your-business#btnNext

<comment><USER2> API is not a feature, it's a blood and air of the business. Why it's even considered situation when a large public business doesn't provide some API? Imagine a presentation that explains: breathing is extremly important for living, everyone who's not breath are dead now! And those who breathes are very alive! Bs.

<comment><AUTHOR> What you are talking is a part of the Steve Klabnik presentation yesterday at APIdays event "Why Open?" in Paris.

He talked about exactly what you're saying, look a this photo of its slide about "organisation of organs" with APIs [http://twitter.com/Anton_in/status/275614644557717504/photo/...](http://twitter.com/Anton_in/status/275614644557717504/photo/1)

We will release soon his slides...

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I know this isn't reddit and I don't mean to be childish, but in case the creator of that slideshow will see this thread: slide 4 looks like somebody thinking about APIs while giving another person fellatio. You may want to rethink that slide.

</comment><comment><USER4> To a certain extent, isn't SOA trying to be a more business savy model of enterprise APIs?

</comment><comment><USER5> Business Development is API driven now. The Virality is created and Included in the product/platform and use it to distribute across the web.

<comment><USER6> Yep yep yep. I must remember when I see the 1 millionth domain name suggestion website to plug our api:

[https://www.mashape.com/nametoolkit/name-toolkit#Get- domain-...](https://www.mashape.com/nametoolkit/name-toolkit#Get-domain- suggestions)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Having somewhat biological background, I've wondered if it is about bees. The page and slide title are correct though (APIs).

</comment><comment><USER8> great slideshare! A lot of interesting and informative numbers -- really reminds you of the continous intertwining between business and technology

</comment><comment><USER9> This is clearly a good prez to look at. Wo do you think is adressing these points in the space? Apigee? Webshell?

<comment><AUTHOR> We made it for helping people in big organizations and in startups to better understand ROI of APIficiation of a business. New distribution models, scalability and architecture, open innovation

The "building bricks company" or the "API driven company"

My IT infrastructure is Amazon

My CRM is Salesforce

My Storage is Box.net etc...

Lots of players in API economy

You have API managements solution : Layer7, SOAsoftware, APIgee, Mashery, 3scale and plenty of new ones.

Then you have API distribution channels with market place and automation platforms : Mashape, Zapier, Apiary Temboo, elastic, IFTTT, Webshell

To my mind, this is all API economy which is addressing this point.</comment></comment>


Show HN: BriefInventory – the simplest way to keep a track of your assets - <AUTHOR> https://briefinventory.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hey, BriefInventory is something I developed for myself to allow me manage the few assets I have (store documents or define reminders). It worked well for me so I thought it may be useful for others so here it is available to everyone. Feel free to ask questions or suggest feedback :) Thanks.</comment>


Using strace to figure out how Git push over SSH works - <AUTHOR> http://kamalmarhubi.com/blog/2015/11/21/using-strace-to-figure-out-how-git-push-over-ssh-works/ <comment><USER2> While strace is awesome in general, git has some very useful debug environment variables: GIT_TRACE, GIT_TRACE_PACKET, GIT_CURL_VERBOSE and a few more[1].

Try:

        GIT_TRACE_PACKET=1 GIT_TRACE=1 git push

[1] [https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Internals-Environment- Var...](https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Internals-Environment-Variables)</comment>


Ask HN: I sumbitted a blog post, but it wasn't publicly visible. Why? - <AUTHOR> Hi, I just did my first submission and was disappointed that it was not publicly visible.<p>When are submissions visible and when not? It seems that I was the only one who saw the submission, because there were no following visits to the website. <comment><USER2> I don't see it neither. Try submitting it again.

If that fails, send an email to the mods email@example.com , they usually answer very fast.

<comment><AUTHOR> They answered, that it got hit by the spam filter, but don't want to take action, because the submission wasn't intellectual enough :D

Nice feedback for my first post.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> What's the link to the HN submission (I don't see the post in your submissions)?</comment>


Show HN: The lengths I will go to in order to find a technical co-founder - <AUTHOR>

My day job is managing a UX team at Intuit's global division. But I've had an idea bouncing around my head for the past few months that won't go away -- a B2B Web application that will dramatically improve the quality of life for anyone has to regularly attend meetings as part of their job. Everyone talks about hating meetings (especially people who work in companies with more than 500 employees), but meetings can be productive and even enjoyable, if the person who sets it up actually knows what they're doing. This idea of mine will quickly help companies uncover its employees' bad meeting habits -- isolating the individuals and functional teams who need coaching on how to set up effective meetings.
I work remotely from my home office in Victoria, British Columbia, and I am finding it impossible to find anyone in my immediate circle who would be suitable as a technical co-founder for this B2B project. So I decided to take a different approach than just 'asking around'.
As a person with a vision for what will hopefully become a very large business, it's frustrating not being able to build it yourself. And with each passing day I grow more and more impatient to get something into the hands of potential customers.
I know my strengths (designing user-friendly Web sites and applications, analytics, A/B testing, user research) and I also know my gaps/weaknesses (data modeling, coding, performance tuning... and all the things that go into taking something from an idea on paper to usable pixels on a screen).
So in an effort to demonstrate my passion for this idea and passion for finding someone with the skills to help me build out a vision, I set out to build something on a much, much smaller scale... with the help of my 11-year-old and 8-year-old sons.
I already had a good understanding of HTML and CSS, but I had to seriously brush up on syntax and proper formatting. The last time I wrote anything resembling code was in 2000, when I learned PHP to build a stock tip Web site (remember when everyone you knew was buying technology stocks?). Together, my sons and I learned how to design a data model, set up a cron job, incorporate open source code into our project and make it work, use the Facebook Open Graph protocol, and bring everything together into what we're hoping is a fun and useful way to look at your life.
Over the past 4 weeks, I have visited many of your Web sites, reading how to build an application quickly... as a minimum viable product. I've read your recent blog posts and posts going back many years. It has all helped immensely, including your tips on handling steep learning curves and overcoming coding roadblocks (of which there were many!!).
The result of our efforts is called Moodalytics (http://www.moodalytics.com), which is a Facebook application (well, in so far as you need to sign-in using Facebook credentials) that lets you create a 140-character daily journal entry and associate an emoticon with your mood -- and share it out (your emoticon; not your comments) with others in your social network. It's a visual record of your mood... designed for people who want to look back and see the interesting patterns that emerge. We expect that it will be more popular with teens and women (i.e., people who are more prone to writing down their feelings).
Once we have enough users, we can do some cool things like graph the daily mood of thousands of people... or just those people in certain countries or regions.
I'll continue to help my sons add new features to Moodalytics, but I am definitely no hacker -- and now I need to turn my attention to finding someone with outstanding application design and coding skills to build out a real business, likely with the addition of outside funding.
MY ASK: I want a technical co-founder for my B2B idea, called Meetalytics... someone who is looking for an opportunity to use their ideas, skills, and passion to change how people experience meetings at work!
I sincerely hope someone from this community -- who is as passionate about building things that companies will pay for as I am -- will emerge and we can begin a cool journey together.
Thanks, Lance <comment><USER3> Even if you ultimately manage to find a tech cofounder, it may take you months, and a couple of failed attempts before the relationship starts working. Plenty of tech people will approach you and say "it's doable", but then run out of motivation, etc.

Also - keep in mind that a cofounder is, well.. a cofounder! It's not a "de facto employee, who you pay with shares instead of cash". He will want to influence the overall project direction, and he will want to change all the things you planned so far into the product. I've met plenty of business people who told me that they were looking for a tech cofounder, but in reality didn't want to hear my design suggestions.

The tech-business partnerships work well, but only in some cases. It's usually two people who knew each other, who developed the idea together, and who were in a similar situation. Otherwise you're up for a tough start, because you will feel a lot of pressure to work (it's your idea, you spent a lot of time planning it), but your newly found partner will not. Even worse - if the partnership fails, it will not be easy to fire him.

There are plenty of routes that may be a better fit for you. You could do a proof of concept by yourself, sell it to a corporation and use the money from the sale to hire a tech guy. You could hire a student to do the first version, you could get some angel money and start a team... Really - <USER2> looking for a tech cofounder is not always the best option.

</comment><comment><USER4> Hey Lance, It took me awhile to find my CTO. Here are my recommendations: 1) Outsource: <http://www.sourcebits.com/> 2) Keep doing it yourself: <http://viniciusvacanti.com/>

I am currently in College and think I have a scalable idea. Kept searching in till someone believed me. However, even since I found my CTO, I'm teaching myself how to code to just build a basic crude prototype with no hard coding or algorithms.

Most VCs I've talked to are just looking for something tangible. If you can just build a crude protoytpe and pitch it then you're solid. Also, you might want to look into mobile apps.

-CC

</comment><comment><USER5> Clickable: <http://www.moodalytics.com>

OK - my $0.02 ...

What are the implications? If I login with Facebook, will you spam my friends? What will you do with my data? Is there more than there appears?

I'd like to know more.

Also, look at the icons, I really don't know which of those best fits, partly because I'm kinda just neutral, and partly because I don't know what most of them mean.

But looks reasonably slick. If I were a web coder with time I'd certainly be in touch. But I'm not. And I don't.

Good luck!

<comment><USER6> >look at the icons, .....I don't know what most of them mean

Same here too.

I guess showing a tooltip on each icon (e.g. happy, sad, surprised etc.) should fix this in short order.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The great thing about web 2.0 is that it doesnt cost that much to get something up and running. You can get ruby devs for 70-90/hour. They wont necessarily create the app that can scale, but scaling is a feature for later. My first iteration cost about 8K and the total is right around 20K to get to a pretty stable alpha. I have lots of horror stories about contract developers, but they are mostly about how the devs are working on too many projects at once so mine didnt get worked on at all. This didnt cost me money, just time.

</comment><comment><USER8> You have a serious skillset, why don't you use it to find a hacker to work with you?

You can build some serious prototype of your idea using a site prototyping tool like axure. test it with users and refine. it's not exactly a minimum viable product , but it's close.

Also do market research , and some general business plan.

It would be a lot easier to convince a hacker(or maybe even an angel) to work with you on your project after you finish those two things. And those 2 artifacts would take your project a step further.

</comment><comment><USER9> Goodluck with your ventures Lance!!

I've read your recent blog posts and posts going back many years. It has all helped immensely, including your tips on handling steep learning curves and overcoming coding roadblocks (of which there were many!!).

Would you mind putting up links for some articles that helped you in handling steep learning curves and overcoming coding roadblocks?

Thanks..

<comment><USER10> Feels a little bit spammy because of sentences like that one you reposted from the original submission:

" _I've read your recent blog posts and posts going back many years. It has all helped immensely, including your tips on handling steep learning curves and overcoming coding roadblocks (of which there were many!!)._ "

Regarding the project: I don't think it will be profitable and it will probably need some hard pivoting to get into B2B. I recommend: just take it as what it is -- a fun learning project for your and your family! I can guarantee you that doing this together is a great experience for your children.

Have fun!

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, RofG. In the Facebook permissions, we do not request access to your friends -- so only the actual user can share out their mood. I like your suggestion of labeling the emoticons!

<comment><USER5> Thanks.

Just a tip: If you replied to my comment instead of to the submission, then I'd see your reply when I look at my submission status via my profile page.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> If you had funds to pay developers, would you still need a technical co- founder? Could you use a tool like Axure to build a prototype and pitch it to investors?

</comment><comment><USER12> Possible flaw with the idea: the people that need it most won't want to adopt it, and forcing adoption from above is problematic. Thoughts?</comment>


GNU Emacs Reference mugs now available - <AUTHOR> http://www.fsf.org/blogs/gnu-press/gnu-emacs-reference-mugs-now-available <comment><USER2> German bookstore Lehmanns, known for academic books, is selling Vi, Emacs, Linux, BSD and Latex reference mugs. They even got one with the number Pi and e on it.

For example, the Vi mug: [http://www.lehmanns.de/shop/mathematik- informatik/5635112-97...](http://www.lehmanns.de/shop/mathematik- informatik/5635112-9783865410474-vi-referenz-tasse)

Latex: [http://www.lehmanns.de/shop/mathematik- informatik/7361330-97...](http://www.lehmanns.de/shop/mathematik- informatik/7361330-9783865410528-latex-referenz-tasse)

<comment> muuh-gnu My fave have always been the GNU mugs:

[http://www.linux-fan- shop.de/images/product_images/popup_ima...](http://www.linux-fan- shop.de/images/product_images/popup_images/15_0.jpg)

Another giant mug catalog is

[http://ixsoft.de/cgi- bin/web_store.cgi?cart_id=1177611_4791&...](http://ixsoft.de/cgi- bin/web_store.cgi?cart_id=1177611_4791&page=Catalogs/de/cups-catalog.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Should go nicely with the Emacs kitchen sink.

<comment><USER4> I was thinking more the junk drawer (you know, that one drawer that winds up as the catch all storage location).

As much as I hate that drawer in my house, I really do like Emacs. Outside of my operating system, it is the piece of software I've spent the most time in front of, and that adds up to a not insignificant percentage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is there one for Org-Mode? I will buy it.

</comment><comment><USER6> This reminded me to order a vi mug (<http://nostarch.com/mug.htm>)

</comment><comment><USER7> I ordered an emacs reference mug from cafepress.com a couple months ago. I'm fairly certain they would still have them.

</comment><comment><USER8> Where's the vim equivalent?

<comment><USER9> (Just in case you're not trolling)

You can get a vim mug from thinkgeek <http://www.thinkgeek.com/homeoffice/mugs/7bbe/>

Personally, I prefer the viemu cheat sheet [http://www.viemu.com/a_vi_vim_graphical_cheat_sheet_tutorial...](http://www.viemu.com/a_vi_vim_graphical_cheat_sheet_tutorial.html) (and viemu is well worth your time if you like vi and want to use it in MS software, imho)

<comment><USER8> No, I was legitimately curious. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> sold out already.

<comment><USER11> Frustrating. I was about to order two. Leave it to the FSF to underestimate demand.

<comment><USER12> Yup, was going to order one as well. What I wanted was one GNU Emacs one for the office, and one GNU Screen one for working from home!</comment></comment></comment>


Archive of old military maps published - <AUTHOR> https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/blog/2020/01/29/huge-archive-of-old-military-maps-published/ <comment><USER2> Centuries ago you could get executed for possessing the wrong map. Maps were considered military intelligence assets, a threat to national security in the wrong hands.

Kipling's novel _Kim_ is based on the true history of how the British incrementally mapped the territory of India and neighboring regions.

<comment><USER3> > Maps were considered military intelligence assets, a threat to national > security in the wrong hands.

Do you think that's not the case today?!

<comment><USER4> Well ones that just contain basic elevations, etc are all very available to the public now so that's no longer the case. It's true that placing critical resource locations on the map makes that the case, but that's not what OP is referring to.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is a fantastic resource, thank you. I really enjoy these old hand-drawn maps. I've collected a few myself, including a German map of the north coast of BC, Alaska and eastern Russia, including Kamchatka, unfortunately undated but I believe it's pre-sale of Alaska to the US. It's primarily an ethnographic map made for the "Zeitschrift fur Ethnologie", or Journal of Ethnology, which I guess was a German anthropological journal. The various Inuit groups are represented in different colours.

Another nice one is labeled "Polar Regions of British Nth America" and is principally of Canada. It dates from 1839 and shows Devon Island connected to Greenland, amongst other inaccuracies. It's beautifully drawn and quite small, perhaps 20 cm a side.

<comment><USER6> " _It 's primarily an ethnographic map made for the "Zeitschrift fur Ethnologie", or Journal of Ethnology, which I guess was a German anthropological journal._"

Still is, I think.

[https://www.dgska.de/zeitschrift-fuer- ethnologie/](https://www.dgska.de/zeitschrift-fuer-ethnologie/)

<comment><USER7> Still is. [http://www.reimer-mann- verlag.de/controller.php?cmd=detail&t...](http://www.reimer-mann- verlag.de/controller.php?cmd=detail&titelnummer=661441&verlag=4)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If such maps or the aesthetics of copper engravings interest you, I strongly suggest to have a look at Matthaeus Merian's "Topographia Germaniae" [0].

Some highlights:

Prague ([https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b6/Pr...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b6/Prag_im_Prospect_%28Merian%29.jpg/1920px- Prag_im_Prospect_%28Merian%29.jpg))

Vienna ([https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/df/Statt_Wi...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/df/Statt_Wien_%28Merian%29.jpg))

Strasbourg ([https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/eb/To...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/eb/Topographia_Alsatiae_%28Merian%29_p_023.JPG/1280px- Topographia_Alsatiae_%28Merian%29_p_023.JPG))

Nuremberg (Map: [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/15/De_Meria...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/15/De_Merian_Frankoniae_090.jpg), View: [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ae/De_Meria...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ae/De_Merian_Frankoniae_092.jpg))

Lübeck ([https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c7/Lv...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c7/Lvbecca_%28Merian%29.jpg/1920px- Lvbecca_%28Merian%29.jpg))

Frankfurt (Map: [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8e/De_Meria...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8e/De_Merian_Hassiae_075.jpg), View: [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/fa/De...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/fa/De_Merian_Hassiae_081.jpg/1920px- De_Merian_Hassiae_081.jpg))

[0] [https://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Topographia_Germaniae](https://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Topographia_Germaniae)

</comment><comment><USER9> The site: [https://militarymaps.rct.uk/](https://militarymaps.rct.uk/)

</comment><comment><USER10> I know we are not supposed to discuss dead comments, but Gusen is some kind of odd propaganda bot, right? Those comments are bonkers.

</comment><comment><USER11> There are some great maps[1] of the 1684 Siege of Vienna which IMHO is the most undertold story in European history.

The desperate plight of Vienna, with only 15,000 troops defending against the 150,000 strong Ottoman army. The creation of a relief coalition in only 6 days.

The arrival of the 70,000 strong Polish and allies army under Sobieski and their decision to attack immediately at daylight the next day. The attack of the Ottomans on the walls of Vienna in an attempt to breach it before they were attacked.

The day long battle, with Sobieski holding back his famed cavalry. And then, at 6:00pm the biggest cavalry charge in history - 18,000 horses led by the 3000 of the heavy Winged Hussars which had spent the past 70 developing their reputation as the best heavy cavalry in Europe.

AFIAK there isn't even a decent novelisation of this story, which I find astonishing.

[1] [https://militarymaps.rct.uk/ottoman-habsburg- wars-1521-1791/...](https://militarymaps.rct.uk/ottoman-habsburg- wars-1521-1791/great-turkish-war-1683-99)

<comment><USER12> For those that prefer their stories in a Swedish power metal music video format: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cuJk6MDUZFM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cuJk6MDUZFM)

<comment><USER13> That music video got its visuals from the movie The Day of the Siege.

[https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1899285/](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1899285/)

Which, based on nl's description of the events, I think I need to watch.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Some fascinating maps on there - e.g. this one of the 1746 Battle of Culloden, the last pitched battle on Britain:

[https://militarymaps.rct.uk/other-18th-19th-century- conflict...](https://militarymaps.rct.uk/other-18th-19th-century- conflicts/battle-of-culloden-1746-plan-of-the-battle-of-3)

<comment><USER15> For anyone else unfamiliar with the term: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitched_battle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitched_battle)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Do they have an API or does someone have an archive with all the pictures?

One of the other frontpage things pointed at this: [https://robottini.altervista.org/cartesio-low-cost- cartesian...](https://robottini.altervista.org/cartesio-low-cost-cartesian- plotter-robot)

and now I want to build it and find some nice maps to have it draw and then see if I can build boardgames on them!

</comment><comment><USER17> IANAL but the prominent

       (c) The Royal Collection Trust

overlaid on each map caught my attention.

Shouldn't these very old maps be in the public domain?

<comment><USER18> It'll be the digital (and any physical) reproductions that will be subject to copyright, not the maps themselves.

<comment><USER19> No. At least in the US, an exact replication of a public domain work is also public domain. They may be claiming public domain, but it wouldn't hold up in a US court of law (no idea about elsewhere).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_Inc.,_v._R...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_Inc.,_v._Rural_Telephone_Service_Co).

Now, if someone makes a database of digitized old books in some particular category, whose compilation required creativity and originality, that work might fall under copyright. But just a digitized book? No.

<comment><USER20> Another wrinkle is that the copyright clock traditionally starts at the time a work is published. So, unpublished manuscripts are not necessarily in the public domain, even if they were written 100s of years ago. If these were the King's personal maps, and just now published, they might still be under copyright.

<comment><USER19> > So, unpublished manuscripts are not necessarily in the public domain, even > if they were written 100s of years ago.

This may well be the case in the UK, but this assertion would likely not apply in the US, for multiple reasons. For one thing, manuscripts that have been displayed in a museum would be counted as published. Also, in the US copyright expires 120 years following creation, at the very latest.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Has anyone had success making prints of maps from image files? Some of these would look great hung up on a wall.

<comment><USER8> Yes. 5 years ago, I printed the Turgot map of Paris roughly 1.5 meters wide from this file:

[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b9/Turgot_m...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b9/Turgot_map_of_Paris_- _Norman_B._Leventhal_Map_Center.jpg)

It is hanging in my living room and look great.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Interesting that this "map" of the Royal Navy in 1804 looks so much like the infographics that are popular today.

[https://militarymaps.rct.uk/napoleonic-wars-1803-15/royal- na...](https://militarymaps.rct.uk/napoleonic-wars-1803-15/royal- navy-1804-a-view-of-the-royal-navy-of-great-britain)</comment>


Red Hat Expecting X.org to "Go into Hard Maintenance Mode Fairly Quickly" - <AUTHOR> https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=X.Org-Maintenance-Mode-Quickly <comment><USER2> What irritates me with regard to Wayland is the assumption that all rendering is local. The great thing about X was on a _LAN_ you could bang up an ssh session somewhere, carry across your $DISPLAY and have the exact same application running somewhere else but rendered to your screen. It doesn't sound like much but there were times when it was incredibly useful.

Thin terminals brought this to the logical conclusion of not needing a desktop at all, but unfortunately X's protocol is too chatty and sensitive to latency to really shine across a WAN. These days you can work around all of that by opening a session via Guacamole or the like but that's still one tab in a browser per graphical session. There's no just using SSH in a for loop and opening up a raft of xterms to a bunch of machines in Wayland, AFAIK.

From the Wayland FAQ

 _Is Wayland network transparent / does it support remote rendering?_

 _No, that is outside the scope of Wayland. To support remote rendering you need to define a rendering API, which is something I 've been very careful to avoid doing. The reason Wayland is so simple and feasible at all is that I'm sidestepping this big task and pushing it to the clients. It's an interesting challenge, a very big task and it's hard to get right, but essentially orthogonal to what Wayland tries to achieve._

<comment><USER3> To be honest, I think remote rendering is unnecessary and is mismatched for actualy application workloads. The amount of data and IO needed by the renderer in many applications outstrips that needed to send the rendered result to a display. I.e. the textures, models, or font curves loaded into GPU-local RAM and then resampled or reinterpreted to draw frames. This stuff is the heart of a graphical application, and doesn't really make sense to split across a network.

When the application host is really resource-starved and does not need to supply much content to a renderer, we are better off using more abstract network interfaces. On one hand, HTML+CSS+js are the remote rendering protocol to the browser which becomes the remote renderer. On the other hand, sensor/data interfaces become the remote data source for a GUI application that can be hosted somewhere more appropriate than on the resource-starved embedded device.

What I will miss from SSH X-forwarding is not remote rendering. It is per- window remote display. I would be perfectly happy with remote applications doing their rendering within their own host, and just sending their window contents to my display server, where my local compositor puts the window content onto my screen. Protocols more like VNC or RDP could be used for each of these windows, adaptively switching between damage-based blitting, lossless and lossy image codecs, or even streaming video codecs. What is needed is the remote window-manager and display protocol to securely negotiate and multiplex multiple windows opening and closing rather than one whole desktop.

What I won't miss from SSH X-forwarding is window and application lifecycle tied to the network connection. Let me disconnect and reconnect to my remote application and its windows. Let me share such a connection to have the same windows displayed on my desktop and my laptop, or to window-share with a coworker down the hall...

<comment><USER4> That's pretty typical. "I don't need it, so therefore nobody should need it, so therefore I will remove it".

Unix is different things to different people and to remove the network capability from X is a step back, not a step forward. There are a whole pile of neat things that you can do with networked graphics, so much, in fact that Plan 9, in many ways a successor of Unix used that theme as the core of many of the system services. All of them work locally as well as remote.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, I sure liked being able to run RPi apps rendered on my laptop with X.

Per a discussion the other day, my RPis are in a drawer. Have we swapped out screwdrivers for RPis in the modern junk drawer?

<comment><USER6> > Have we swapped out screwdrivers for RPis ...

No, they've been added to the screwdrivers. I've found it challenging to use RPi to drive screws.

<comment><USER7> Surely they can at least manage a flathead.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Uggh. RedHat has a long history now of replacing working stuff with half baked, regressed-by-design replacements.

I'd really like to have a working Unix environment, and Linux stopped being that for me years ago.

More conservative alternative distros keep bit rotting due to upstream (usually RedHat induced) breakage. (SystemD, Wayland, DBUS, PulseAudio, Gnome 3, kernel API brain damage, etc)

Does anyone know of any alternatives? Is there a distro/foundation that will actually support open source Unix moving forward (BSD, maybe?)

<comment> ainar-g I've been experimenting with OpenBSD, and it's been pretty nice. The code is beautiful, and a lot of stuff just works. Not sure how it will behave on a laptop though.

<comment><USER9> I bought a ThinkPad specifically to install OpenBSD. It's a great combination. I find OpenBSD much more straight forward and coherent than Linux. There are some bells and whistles that I wish it had, but in terms of the foundation it is wonderful.

<comment><USER10> How is the graphics support in OpenBSD for the ThinkPad, and which model?

I've found the recent P and X models underwhelming as far as hardware goes, and support in Linux hasn't been great in my experience. While I'd like to give BSD a try, I fear I'll have to deal with even more driver issues.

For example, all video out ports on my X1 Extreme are wired to the dedicated NVIDIA card, which forces me to either use Nouveau which causes kernel panics, or use huge binary blobs from NVIDIA, which I'm reluctant to do for several reasons, one of which is breaking my initramfs image and making the system unbootable.

I'm quite tired of the amount of these types of issues in the Linux ecosystem, so I'm very interested in trying something simpler and better thought out, as long as the hardware support is decent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's about time. A 10+ year transition from X.org to Wayland is long enough.

X.org is open source, it is does not belong to Red Hat. It's a truly desirable technology, anyone else is welcome to contribute to the maintenance of it or fork it.

When no one else wants to maintain it favor of newer technologies, that's a good sign it's ready for retirement.

<comment><USER12> In those ten years, clusters in remote datacenters went mainstream, but Wayland has never delivered network transparency except by embedding X. Where are these users who are still running everything on one computer under their desk?

<comment><USER13> I think the demand for remote GUI apps went down, for several reasons:

\- Web apps got better and more common

\- Windows (and MS SQL Server etc), which are some of the big OS-level reason for using remote GUI management tools, has improved its command-line management story and added UI-less server editions

\- Network improvements (more bandwidth, more clouds and POPs) made existing 'remote desktop' protocols more tolerable on the Internet, all the way back to the venerable VNC and RDP

What kind of remote UI app/workload do you see as common today?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Sad. It's probably unpopular but wayland is not ready yet IMHO and lacking on a conceptual level. Yet another few years/months until most bugs are fixed and more broken functionality...

<comment><USER15> Maintenance mode != dead [1]

This just means that development of _new_ features and research should take place on Wayland where it belongs. From what I've read X has been a long evolution into a hodepodge of historical but effectively dead interfaces with newer ones crammed along side... it doesn't make sense to continue the tradition of cramming more features into X, but that doesn't stop people developing new things on top of it while Wayland matures.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maintenance_mode](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maintenance_mode)

<comment><USER16> You mean _parity_ features? SSHing into a server and launching a small GUI tool is still dead. It was killed by Wayland intentionally and willfully as a fundamental design idea. In fact, the feature of doing that is considered "not part of wayland" by Wayland designers.

The root problem is that wayland replaced half of x.org and left the rest for someone else to figure out.

<comment><USER17> > SSHing into a server and launching a small GUI tool is still dead.

They are working on native support for that via PipeWire. For the time being you can still do that with Xwayland.

<comment><USER12> PipeWire is video streaming, not remote rendering. They're assuming a rack of GPUs in the datacenter and a virtual circuit dedicated to me, but in reality I have a congested link and one GPU attached to my display.

<comment><USER18> The question is, which is more data. Rendered result or the data to do the rendering.

If the rendered result is lighter, then a video stream makes perfect sense.

If sending the data over to render is lighter, there's still one more issue: that GPUs are still not interchangeable, and the server hosting the application needs to have the necessary information about all the possible GPUs, their quirks and limitations. And you might still get inconsistent results at various clients.

My personal guess is that the data to render is a lot more than data the required to do video streaming. So much depends on doing CPU rendering directly to textures. Although more and more is moving to GPU, so...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm wondering if all the resources that went to Wayland for the past TEN years were directed to slowly evolve X11 to the same direction we would be in a worse or better situation. It seems to me very similar to the Python2/Python3 debacle.

What pisses me off more than anything else is having to replace a lot of tools there are working perfectly with xorg but are not compatible with wayland.

A few example

* Window manager (of course)

* taking screenshots

* setting desktop background

* Intercepting multimedia key (e.g. volume handling)

* using redshift to set the screen temperature

* ...

Yes, I know that I'm using an unconventional setup, but the freedom to do that was one of the reasons that attracted me to a unix environment. Redhat is working very hard to change all of that for a "year of the linux Desktop" that (in my opinion) will never come.

<comment><USER20> Might be time for me to stop using XMonad, unfortunately.

Pretty annoying IMO. XMonad works exactly how I want it to.

<comment><USER21> [https://github.com/waymonad/waymonad](https://github.com/waymonad/waymonad)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> With the coming IBM transition, I'm expecting Red Hat itself to go into "Hard Maintenance Mode" fairly quickly. Another comment here estimates 10 years of RH support, but I'm confident that X.org will outlast RH.

<comment><USER23> And Wayland might get completely abandoned in the process.

<comment><USER24> If wayland gets abandoned it will have to be re-invented. It solves real problems with X11. That doesn't mean Wayland itself doesn't have problems though. Over time they will get solved. If people or companies need them to get solved sooner I m sure Wayland devs will welcome any contributions.

<comment><USER25> It's not implausible, there's ready Arcan

[https://arcan-fe.com/](https://arcan-fe.com/)

<comment><USER26> > At every step of the way, the underlying development emphasises security, > performance and debugability guided by a principle of least surprise in > terms of API design.

I'm very happy they started that list with security, which links to a nice security overview:

[https://github.com/letoram/arcan/wiki/Engine- Security](https://github.com/letoram/arcan/wiki/Engine-Security)

One of the things no one mentions is how awful security is on X.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> The Wayland developers have a security model [-1] that is hostile to "power- users" (those who like to use the Unix (or other OS) programming environment to its full potential) and the visually impaired (eg., blind). See [0] [1] [2] to see what features I am talking about.

It is possible to implement some of those features on a per-compositor basis, but the result of that will be graphical API fragmentation, as programs that interact with GUIs will need to have separate code for each compositor. And the work is not done even for Gnome (more precisely Gnome's Wayland compositor and the Gnome applications that use it) yet.

On the other hand one could say, eg. "Why not make a compositor accessibility protocol on top of Wayland?". End result of that, it is easy to guess, would be something worse than X Windows (because of even more layers of abstraction, and possibly even more incompatible standards/APIs/protocols), which the Wayland people were supposedly trying to escape from.

Edit: Another thing that makes Wayland (at least without an extension ...) unsuitable to replace X Windows is forced compositing. This means unavoidable double buffering and thus worse video performance (especially noticeable for interactive stuff like video games).

[-1] I prefer calling it security theater, because it does not bring any real security improvement in practice.

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20308011](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20308011)

[1] [https://wiki.gnome.org/Accessibility/Wayland](https://wiki.gnome.org/Accessibility/Wayland)

[2] [https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Accessibility/Wayland/](https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Accessibility/Wayland/)

</comment><comment><USER28> The X Window System has had a great run; a whole generation. And it's still going, even if it's trailing edge tech now. Thanks Bob Scheifler, Jim Gettys, and the whole crew.

</comment><comment><USER29> Fedora 31 is looking to be the most advanced OS yet. If you haven't tried it yet..I strongly recommend trying it out (for those who don't know, Linux can be tried out using a usb drive without affecting your hard disk called "liveboot").

Fedora is a much more polished experience than Ubuntu and other than the lack of Sketch and Photoshop, I daresay at par with OSX.

<comment><USER30> From a normal users perspective it didn't seem any more advanced than Ubuntu. Exactly the same but installing software on the command line takes 2 minutes longer.

<comment><USER29> that's incorrect. the dependency resolver in dnf is far faster and accurate than ubuntu.

Its pretty good computer science reading as well - [https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Formal_methods_tool_suite#Boo...](https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Formal_methods_tool_suite#Boolean_Satisfiability_.28SAT.29_Solvers)

[https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2016/08/30/why-red- hats-n...](https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2016/08/30/why-red-hats-new-dnf- package-manager-is-not-just-another-yum-2/)

I have done system upgrades since fedora 22 to fedora 30 without breakage. I have never had that happen with Ubuntu.

In general, Wayland/Systemd/Xorg etc are maintained by Fedora . If you look at the blog post - [https://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2019/06/24/on-the-road-to- fed...](https://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2019/06/24/on-the-road-to-fedora- workstation-31/)

>> _he reality is that X.org is basically maintained by us and thus once we stop paying attention to it there is unlikely to be any major new releases coming out and there might even be some bitrot setting in over time. We will keep an eye on it as we will want to ensure X.org stays supportable until the end of the RHEL8 lifecycle at a minimum, but let this be a friendly notice for everyone who rely the work we do maintaining the Linux graphics stack, get onto Wayland, that is where the future is._

<comment><USER31> >the dependency resolver in dnf is far faster and accurate than ubuntu

As a Fedora user, that's probably true, but that doesn't make DNF itself faster. Actually installing and removing packages tends to be fairly slow.

But, it's much better than legacy yum.

<comment><USER32> Yes, the constant refreshing of metadata is very annoying. You can disable it for searches, though. Gnome software sometimes becomes very unresponsive because of this (and because of flatpaks silently downloading a >1GB runtime). Probably a reason while it gets so much FUD.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I wish I could move to Wayland, but I make heavy use of X-only automation tools ( [https://github.com/autokey/autokey](https://github.com/autokey/autokey) for keyword expansion and cross-app macros, and wmctrl/xdotool for window switching using [https://github.com/ronjouch/marathon](https://github.com/ronjouch/marathon) ) and nothing similar exists under Wayland.

So far, it doesn't look like similar tools are planned, and neither GNOME nor Sway offer these features I'm looking for :-/ .

<comment><USER34> Oh, I was going to mention Sway too, since of all the compositors I've seen it is the only one that seems to care about replicating such functionality. Is it really still that lacking on the automation front?

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Everybody's blaming Red Hat. Why should they maintain something they're no longer using? If a credible new maintainer would step up, I'm sure Red Hat would be happy to hand over the reigns.

<comment> rvp-x They shouldn't call it maintenance mode just because they stopped using it. There's a lot of non-Red Hat contributors to X.org.

<comment><USER31> >There's a lot of non-Red Hat contributors to X.org.

There's maybe 5 people that really "know" Xorg top to bottom and none of them want to work on it any more. The ones that were working on it anyway were being paid to do so and many of them are also working on Wayland on the side.

A lot of people have made small contributions, but that's not the same thing as being able to design and develop large new changes. The people with the knowledge to do that, don't have the will to do so any longer.

<comment> rvp-x You should try living less in a bubble.

<comment><USER36> Please don't do personal attacks on HN.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Nvidia's lack of support for Wayland really hurts linux desktop adoption.

It's especially bad new if there's no more x.org support

<comment><USER38> Linux on the desktop would be a reality already if Linux had a stable driver API.

<comment><USER24> Not really. It is well known across the industry how you can get drivers in linux now. There many players, big (Dell, Lenovo) and small (system76, Entroware, etc) that sell linux supported devices.

Here's a great write up on the technical merits of linux's approach to drivers [https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/process/stable-api- no...](https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/process/stable-api- nonsense.html)

<comment><USER39> I think OP was thinking about commercial players who do not like to upstream their driver code. This might be for copyright/GPL reasons, or for trade- secret / code obscurity reasons. This is impossible with linux drivers. To quote from your link:

So, if you have a Linux kernel driver that is not in the main kernel tree, what are you, a developer, supposed to do? Releasing a binary driver for every different kernel version for every distribution is a nightmare, and trying to keep up with an ever changing kernel interface is also a rough job.

Simple, get your kernel driver into the main kernel tree (remember we are talking about drivers released under a GPL-compatible license here, if your code doesn't fall under this category, good luck, you are on your own here, -snip-).

Thing is, this excludes quite a lot of drivers from getting into the kernel. And that kind of sucks.

<comment><USER40> I'm noob what regards kernel specifics, so probably a stupid question: so basically if you want kernel to support all possible hardware in the world, you would need to add those drivers to main kernel ? seems like a bad idea because the kernel's source code would not fit into terabyte size disk..

<comment><USER39> If you want your driver to run _in kernel space_ you need that code to be in the main kernel. Anything that runs in user-space can be kept outside of the main kernel repo.

There is a bad middle version where you put some interface exposed to user- space into the mainline kernel and then dump in binary-blobs to interface with this. The bad part is doing this if you will be the only user of that interface, and if you do it to intentionally keep your driver out of the kernel. I believe there was/is an attempt by nvidea to essentially get a shim for their windows drivers into the kernel.

The good version of this is where the userspace interface evolves naturally, and in cooperation between multiple consumers. Or at least a case where in the end there are multiple consumers of the interface in the end.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> The biggest thing preventing me from using Wayland right now is that XWayland applications don't scale correctly on high DPI screens.

I don't even own any screens that _aren 't_ high DPI at this point.

<comment><USER42> This is especially bad with anything based on Chromium/Electron and fractional scaling at the moment. The Ozone/Wayland back end is still a way off it seems.

<comment><USER32> Why do you believe that? Apparently it's possible to build a somewhat functional version from their git branch. Anyway, chromium is just the first step. Then electron has to work with the wayland version of chromium.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I want to switch to wayland, but it's impossible until Nvidia get their shit together on linux. I hear AMD has awesome open source drivers now, time to give them a shot!

<comment><USER44> I read that OpenCL has some compatibility issues with various libraries still, or else it would be an easier choice

<comment><USER45> Not only that, OpenCL is a lower-level alternative to CUDA, somewhat comparable to Vulkan/OpenGL relationship. Trying to actually write something useful with OpenCL is... rough.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Have been using Sway on Wayland since 1.0 came out six months or so ago and the only awkward part has been HiDPI (I have an Intel card so not effected by the nVidia support). Otherwise good riddance to X, honestly. It felt old 10 years ago! Here's hoping the major desktops etc can finally sort out the remaining instability/rough edges over the next year or two.

<comment><USER47> > HiDPI

Hasn't HiDPI support been one of the main drivers of the renewed interest in Wayland the last few years?

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Here's hoping that the wlroots protocols become more widespread so that one can actually make cross-DE tools like taskbars. I'm using tint2 on Xorg at the moment and there just isn't any alternative on wayland - you have to use what your DE gives you or suck it.

That means a plethora of taskbar extensions on GNOME, all of which suck (poor multi monitor support, poor workspace support). Having to have a separate software project for each DE is the way to get bit rotting projects nobody cares about.

</comment><comment><USER49> * Nvidia drivers suck on Wayland

* KDE and most non-gnome based DEs don't work with Wayland

Wayland is not ready for mass usage

<comment><USER50> huh? KDE Plasma 5 works well, GNOME and KDE are considering/merging nvidia proprietary support (fuck nvidia, btw)

<comment><USER51> >KDE Plasma 5 works well

I use Plasma, and test the Wayland compositor every couple of months. Last time I checked, many features were still missing, performance was bad, and I still got crashes occasionally. If it's really gotten into a usable state since then, that's great.

<comment><USER52> Resume from sleep causes a black screen. Crashes do happen occassionally, where the plasma desktop will die and restart itself... this happens _more_ frequently with the latest releases. In recent releases, with multiple panels, sometimes the kicker menu doesn't open on one of them. On multi-monitor setups, it doesn't remember the monitor positions after reboot.

On the plus side, I think the copy-paste situation with XWayland is finally improved.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> I really hope they consider that Linux' graphic stack isn't an end in itself, but a driver for running the relative wealth of graphic apps (GIMP, Inkscape, Krita, Blender, Firefox, and more) many people spent the last 30 years or so developing. Those aren't going to be rewritten from scratch into Electron- based apps or whatever, and loosing them, as well as BSD and Mac OS compat, is no option IMHO.

<comment><USER54> Why do you think those apps would need to be rewritten and what has electron to do with that? Most of these apps already run natively on top of Wayland, as they are written using a toolkit like GTK or QT and those toolkits support Wayland.

Also, there is XWayland, which implements the X protocol on top of Wayland, so any X application should continue to run. The only thing they talked about stopping development on is the standalone X server X.org.

I have been using Wayland on my desktop for a while and am quite happy about it.

<comment><USER55> Electron needs to be pushed down the stack to the bare metal, to become the window system itself. Then there will only be one instance of it running, that every other application can share, and the window manager and user interface and networking can all use standard web technologies, that everything else uses.

<comment><USER55> If you disagree, then tell me what X-Windows or Wayland can do that a modern web browser with bare metal drivers couldn't do much better?

You've got JavaScript and WebAssembly for programming, WebGL and <canvas> and <video> and DHTML and CSS for drawing (including low latency rendering with desynchronized canvases), JSON and XML and ArrayBuffer for data representation, HTTP and WebSockets and WebRTC for networking. What is it missing?

[https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2019/05/desynchron...](https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2019/05/desynchronized)

There's really no need for X-Windows or Wayland any more.

<comment><USER56> You're catching downvotes (have some goddamned respect people) but I'm facing this choice right now.

I have a project that involves a compiler written in Prolog targeting Prof. Wirth's RISC chip (for Project Oberon[1]), and I want to make it easily accessible.

I can use e.g. TCL/Tk/Tkinter/Python+SWI-Prolog, and make a native app that the user has to install... or...

There is a Prolog in JS[2], and an emulator for the chip in JS[3], and rich widget frameworks (I like Knockout[4], but there are literally dozens in JS), so it's pretty easy to make a SPA that shows off the code (literate programming style) along with live compilation and emulation, and you can even let users save their work[5]. "Installation" is just visiting the page.

I keep trying to come up with reasons NOT to go that route (out of some perhaps-misplaced JS prejudice) and I can't.

> There's really no need for X-Windows or Wayland any more.

Indeed!

[1] [http://www.projectoberon.com/](http://www.projectoberon.com/)

[2] Tau Prolog [http://tau-prolog.org/](http://tau-prolog.org/)

[3] [http://schierlm.github.io/OberonEmulator/](http://schierlm.github.io/OberonEmulator/) [https://github.com/schierlm/OberonEmulator](https://github.com/schierlm/OberonEmulator)

[4] [https://knockoutjs.com/](https://knockoutjs.com/)

[5] [https://calroc.github.io/HulloWurld/Hullo.html](https://calroc.github.io/HulloWurld/Hullo.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> iso-8859-1 Interestingly, the old maintainer (Keith Packard) has a fairly recent (2018) list of improvement ideas for Xorg: [https://keithp.com/x-ideas/](https://keithp.com/x-ideas/)

</comment><comment><USER57> Let's hope it doesn't go into maintenance mode before this feature is released: [https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GLXVND-O...](https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GLXVND- Offload-Improve-1.21)

Not sure if I understand correctly, but the absence of this is what has prevented Nvidia's proprietary drivers from supporting GPU switching without having to restart the X server session.

</comment><comment><USER58> This is big news, no?

<comment><USER59> It's more an admission of the current state of things. Adam Jackson, the previous release manager, stepped down, decided to switch gears to doing other graphics-related stuff, and nobody has volunteered to make a new X server release.

xorg-devel has always been a relatively slow mailing list, and very little new R&D has been done on the X server for the past 5 years or so. Latest I can think of is the DRM lease work, which is still ongoing.

<comment><USER60> x.org has always been that way. Slow, hard to get started developing, and not really "sexy". it is critical infrastructure, but nobody wants to maintain it.

Wayland was at least started by people frustrated with the real problems in X. (unlike most other replace X projects I've seen over the last 20 years where were someone who had no idea what is really wrong proposing a solution that didn't solve the real problems.

<comment><USER31> >Wayland was at least started by people frustrated with the real problems in X

Many of whom, it's worth pointing out, are themselves the core Xorg developers who don't want to be stuck maintaining Xorg forever.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> RIP, X11. You had the correct architecture. I still believe that the goals of Wayland would have been better achieved as a collection of X extensions than as an entirely new system that's lost many of the capabilities of X, including network transparency, input configuration, and window manager decoupling. Wayland is great if you want to build a Windows clone that works exactly the way Red Hat wants it to work --- but it represents a decline from the Unix ideal of configurability, experimentation, and simplicity.

<comment><USER62> Ken Thompson himself is on record bashing X Windows, so that's a strike against its ideal Unix status

<comment><USER27> Everybody who knows it hates X Windows, but that does not mean Wayland is better, or even that it is a possible replacement for X Windows.

<comment><USER34> The sad reality is that as bad as X is, Wayland is too much of a half-baked replacement to say that it is definitely better. Case in point: it's about 10 years old now and people still say it isn't ready yet!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> One thing I'm reminded of is the huge role of Red Hat in maintaining loads of open-source software. They get to choose what direction "linux" is taking by simply having paid developers put in a lot of time writing and maintaining software that everyone then adopts. So Wayland will get adopted by most distributions, just like SystemD because Red Hat will invest in it.

</comment><comment><USER64> Still waiting for KWin to become functional on Wayland. Some serious bugs prevent it. And where is RedHat rushing exactly? Something like adaptive sync doesn't even work with Wayland compositors yet. So good luck using your fancy adaptive sync high refresh monitor with games in Wayland session.

</comment><comment><USER65> I currently use x11vnc to use a third monitor (via raspberry pi connected to a monitor). Is something like this possible with Wayland?

<comment><USER66> Nope. It is impossible by design. They believes not allowing it would bring a better security. Huh.

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> So Raspbian will be the only viable option on the new Raspberry Pi 4 due to the lack of Wayland for the VideoCore 6?

<comment><USER50> > lack of Wayland for the VideoCore 6

What?

Even VideoCore 4 with the Mesa vc4 driver supports Wayland — since it's Mesa, of course it implements GBM and whatnot. I've used Weston on an RPi3 with Arch Linux ARM.

For VideoCore 5/6, IIUC the __only __driver is Mesa v3d, even better situation, of course everything should work, and it will always work since no proprietary crap driver would ever get into people 's hands.

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> Is there an NX type solution for Wayland?

<comment><USER8> If there is something like NX, it was added as an afterthought (last time a Remote Desktop protocol for wayland came up, it was explicitly outside the scope of what wayland was designed to support).

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> The Unix philosophy has been abandoned at this point. What advantages have we really gained from it? More gaping security flaws? Unnecessary centralization is pushing the old Unix admins who laid the groundwork for Linuxs success into BSDs and other alternatives, and the Linux kernel will likely rot as a result. Could we consider this moment the peak of Linux development?

<comment><USER55> And for good reason! It's about time, too. The "Unix Philosophy" is intellectually bankrupt. You shouldn't have to fork a process from the shell to multiply two floating point numbers (especially when the CPU can do that in one instruction), or do simple string manipulation. That's ridiculous.

<comment><USER70> > The "Unix Philosophy" is intellectually bankrupt.

The rest of your post appears to be about shell (presumably Bourne) script, leaving this claim unsupported. "UNIX philosophy" != "writing shell scripts".

> You shouldn't have to fork a process from the shell to multiply two floating > point numbers

I can't remember a single time in the >25 years I've been writing Bourne shell (or bash) scripts where I've wanted to "multiply two floating point numbers". I've sent large lists of floating point numbers to various programs for processing, but other languages are far more appropriate for problems that requires any amount of actual calculation (especially floating point calculations). If I did need to multiply two floats for some reason, it would be such a rare event that the few hundred milliseconds "wasted" in spawning bc is utterly irrelevant.

You seem to be complaining about shell by selecting a feature that is not actually needed in common use. What, specifically, were you doing that you needed fast floating point match but needed to use Bourne shell instead of C/Python/whatever?

> fork a process ... do simple string manipulation.

For many types of string manipulation, you don't. Manipulating strings (command lines) is what the shell was designed to do! Sometimes sed/awk/etc is useful for _complex_ tasks, but the shell's variable expansion and other builtins are generally enough for most _simple_ needs.

And if your needs actually are complex, the cost to start another process (which is probably much smaller than you think) is insignificant.

<comment><USER55> You're blinded by the limitations of your tools. Of course you wouldn't do something that's impossible with the shell, because you know it's impossible, and would switch to another language if you needed to do that. That doesn't mean that you never need to use floating point numbers. It just means you need to switch languages when you need to use them. Which is my point.

And no, the kind of stuff you need to fork sed or awk to do is not "complex". It's simple. It only seems complex because you're writing a shell script, and the backflips you have to do to escape the parameters and fork the processes to do that simple string manipulation is complex, not the string manipulation itself.

<comment><USER71> I look forward to using your enhanced tools, once they're ubiquitious and fully-featured.

More seriously I can't imagine what "points" you're trying to score. Yes the shell is good at launching external processes, and yes the built-in facilities for other things are lacking in some ways. On the whole people work around them by using perl, python, and other tools.

It might be, as you say, that people resort to using such external scripts/languages because their shells suck. But I have to ask: So what? They get the job done. A "super-shell" doesn't need to be present, even if people do things the "hard-way".

<comment><USER55> When did I every say or imply that I was writing my own shell? There are already ample real programming languages to use that can fork off and manage sub-processes just fine, thank you, instead of writing ridiculously inefficient complex hard to maintain un-modular shell scripts.

Why would I waste my time trying to fix something that's fundamentally flawed, and that nobody would use because it wasn't "standard"?

We already have Python, JavaScript, Perl, etc. Even PHP is overwhelmingly better and more modular than bash! Why try to put lipstick on a pig like bash?

My point (which I already stated) is that the "Unix Philosophy" in intellectually bankrupt, not that the shell should be extended with string manipulation and floating point to make it unnecessary to fork "sed", "awk" and "bc".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Can you even disable desktop composition in Wayland? One of the reasons I hate Windows is that I'm forced to use composition, which provides nothing to me.

<comment><USER50> If visual perfection is nothing to you, if you love screen tearing, slow window redraw when moving, Windows 95-esque window trails, etc. — keep using Xorg.

Wayland is a protocol fully designed around composition. Clients have their own buffers, the server composites them. There is no way to draw directly to the screen, because we're not in the 90s with 640K of RAM and there's no reason whatsoever to implement the crappy way of rendering windows.

<comment><USER72> Forced composition and vsync is a mistake for gaming.

The added output latency is unacceptable, especially for first-person shooters. A little tearing is nothing compared to the vsync lag.

If Wayland wants to replace X.org, then it should support also this use case. But full composition being mandatory isn't very encouraging in regard to this.

<comment><USER73> Untrue in my experience.

Games still can render more FPS than mandated by vsync.

I tried playing sauerbraten (with SDL2) on sway other day, it was butter smooth (no tearing) with vsync off in game, and I felt no input lag unlike when I switch vsync flag on in game which limits FPS.

It probably does triple buffering, but somehow on sway it worked better than triple buffering of intel's xorg driver back when I tried that.

<comment><USER74> VSync fundamentally introduces a frame+ of delay by design, it does not matter what your FPS is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Wayland doesn't work with Nvidia (and no improvements in last 3 years). Nvidia is the most popular GPU option out there. The end.

</comment><comment><USER61> Meanwhile, Windows has become an acceptable Unix. (I'm not trolling.) I don't want to admit this, but I've been wondering whether, over the long term, FOSS stuff really can't match the quality of a sustained commercial endeavor.

<comment><USER75> You may be right (about Windows) but I am not going to pay $100 (for a new Windows license) or so to find out.

edit for clarity

<comment><USER76> You can buy online-only keys for about 10€ on amazon. They work well, although they are not transferrable to a new pc.

<comment><USER77> Those cheap Amazon keys are still not legal, so you might as well pirate Windows

<comment><USER78> Thank you! I hate people on Reddit who advocate for those cheap keys. If you don't follow the license you are pirating it. Simple as that. Now whether or not piracy is okay is a whole different issue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER79> After 18 years struggling with the Linux desktop, I switched to Windows for my GUI needs. Everything just works, if somewhat slowly. My "working environment" is a Linux VM. If I need to run a graphical app from the VM, there are plenty of rootless X servers for Windows, plus Windows 10 has workspaces.

I get the best of both worlds: real vendor support for hardware, and the best software for getting work done (windows business software, Linux coding software). Honestly, this feels like the future to me, and I hope M$ is working towards this being a normalized hybrid platform.

<comment><USER80> The new Windows Subsystem for Linux looks legit. Is that what you're using, or are you spinning up your own VM?

<comment><USER79> Some things don't work well with WSL right now ( _stares at Docker intensely_ ) so it's a Vagrant VM w/Ubuntu.

<comment><USER81> Doesn't Docker use WSL2 now officially?

<comment><USER82> I tried it on the weekend, and it indeed work...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Wayland is broken by design (or, as another commenter says, "lacking on a conceptual level") and NOT A REPLACEMENT for X Windows.

Wayland has a bonkers security (theatre) model based around protecting from untrusted processes (graphical applications) connected to the compositor. (If you must give untrusted code a process on your machine, the correct solution is to give it its own Unix user and run an X Windows server owned by the same user.)

One consequence is that screenshots/screencasts do not exist on Wayland, applications can only see their own windows. Also, quoting Red Hat: "Furthermore, there isn't a standard API for getting screen shots from Wayland. It's dependent on what compositor (window manager/shell) the user is running, and if they implemented a proprietary API to do so."

EDIT: Other stuff that you can not do with Wayland and is justified by their "security" model is injection of input events and reading other applications input (think xdotool, autohotkey; this is great when you want more control of your graphical user interface system).

<comment><USER83> What you describe as broken by design in terms of security is in fact its primary advantage from my perspective:

With the security nightmare that is modern web browsers I do not want any of them which runs on my machine to be able to access a single bit of more data than which is necessary.

Firejail helps a lot for this purpose, but fixing the browser to not be able to spy on other X applications requires sticking them into a Xpra sandbox, which greatly intereferes with performance and is a hell of an ugly hack (it's like running a local VNC server and connecting locally to it).

Putting software into different user accounts isn't a solution either because the usability of that is well, unusable.

<comment><USER27> Use different users and/or virtual machines if you want security.

BTW, Firejail is also shit, it had some stupid design decisions and security bugs. And it basically relies on Userspace namespaces which are or were an experimental/unsecure feature in Linux.

Wayland's security model is bonkers because the attack surface it implies is just too great.

BTW, Is useradd not usable for you?

<comment><USER83> > Use different users and/or virtual machines if you want security.

The Internet is so important that for daily computer usage I, and probably everyone else, have a browser open at basically any point in time.

So do you want me to switch users between the $browser_user and $main_user every 5 minutes I need to do something outside of the browser?

<comment><USER27> I just run chromium as my main user (but usually with a temporary scripted --user-data-dir and HOME environment variable), because it is relatively secure.

And switching Linux consoles/X servers is just two key presses anyway.

<comment><USER27> Correction: usually it is three key presses: Control, Alt, F3; for example.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


[e-book] React.js by example - <AUTHOR> http://reactkungfu.com/react-by-example/

<comment><USER2> The language is a bit rough, but I'm curious to see where things go.</comment>


Eve: The most thrilling boring game in the universe - <AUTHOR> http://www.polygon.com/features/2014/2/24/5419788/eve-online-thrilling-boring

<comment><USER2> I got bored just reading the article (made it about halfway through). The game obviously holds someone's interest, but "spreadsheets in space" probably isn't for me.</comment>


SSDs and distributed data systems - <AUTHOR> http://blog.empathybox.com/post/24415262152/ssds-and-distributed-data-systems <comment><USER2> I'll add a few things (I've done a lot of SSD testing lately) as SSD performance is highly dependent on factors that don't influence hard disks:

0) Sequential performance is easy. If that's what you want, SSDs work pretty well and you can skip this post. The below points are for random IO.

1) Almost all SSDs are significantly slower at mixed read/write workloads (as a database would do) that either just reads or just writes. Sometimes as much as 1/4 the speed!

2) Random I/O throughput, especially for writes, is highly dependent on how full the disk is (assuming TRIM). For example, a 50% full is usually pretty fast, an 80% full disk is getting slower, and a 95% full disk is dog slow.

3) I have seen SSD controller and firmware version drastically impact performance. A recent firmware "upgrade" halved IOps on 100 of our SSDs (glad we tested that one...)

4) Time dependence! Many of my heavy I/O tests took 8+ hours to stabilize (often with very odd transition modes in between). Don't run a 30 second test and assume that's how fast the disk will stay.

5) Lastly, have many outstanding IOs in the queue if you want good IOps throughput. Think 32+.

My recommendation overall: Test your actual application workload for 24 hours. Use a Vertex 4 with firmware 1.4 less than 75% full for your mixed read/write workload needs!

</comment><comment><USER3> I'd really like to see x86_64 servers that use direct memory-mapped IO to the SSD. Some add-in PCI cards already do (can't find the link right now). It would really take Intel jumping on board for it to become the standard though.

More particularly, right now, assuming the app wants something from memory- mapped file, the process is:

      1. app attempts to read some bytes
      2. CPU page fault triggers a read by the kernel to get them from disk
      3. kernel block layer locates bytes on disk
      4. block read request submitted to storage subsystem
      5. read request (probably merged with others, e.g. readahead) submitted to SATA controller
      6. ATA command decoded by SSD
      7. bytes sent back up the chain
      (skipping the return trip up the chain for brevity)

Some PCI SSDs already make it possible for the kind of improvement that looks like this:

      1. app opens a file
         blocks mapped into app address space as read-only

<comment><USER4> _I'd really like to see x86_64 servers that use direct memory-mapped IO to the SSD._

It's not clear whether this is as good an idea as people think. Flash is fast, but the difference between ~20 us and ~50 ns is still huge. You could end up wasting a lot of cycles while the processor is stalled. Also, there's no way for memory to report errors short of a machine check that (if you're lucky) kills the process.

Fusion io is working on an intermediate approach that bypasses the OS but doesn't try to treat flash as memory.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I find myself in disagreement with the idea that read/write cycles for (rotating) hard disks are unlimited. While it may be much higher, and a 'per block' characterization is largely improper -- the thing that fails is not the block itself but the moving parts -- when I worked in a job where we had tons of cheap consumer-grade hard disks, they did seem to fail after a few hundred complete passes over the disk.

<comment><USER6> Pretty sure google published a paper on disk failures that can begin to refute that assumption: <http://research.google.com/archive/disk_failures.pdf>

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I remember RethinkDB was tackling this... if I recall correctly, they had been developing a new MySQL engine specifically designed for SSD's, but looking at their site now it seems they gave that up and changed it to a memcache protocol to focus on NoSQL?

Has anybody ever used it, or know of other companies working on similar ideas?

<comment><USER8> Tokutek uses Fractal Trees which have several SSD-friendly properties: <http://www.tokutek.com/>. Unfortunately, I don't have any first hand experience with it.

If you want an interesting challenge, you could also try implementing a MySQL storage engine using LevelDB. Obviously basic implementation shouldn't be too difficult, but getting good performance and reliability would require some effort.</comment></comment>


Dumping core - <AUTHOR> http://adamrosenfield.com/blog/2010/04/23/dumping-core/

<comment><USER2> There's also a really cool library if you need a core dump, but don't want to actually stop the application: <http://code.google.com/p/google-coredumper/> \- it needs one line only:

WriteCoreDump('filename');</comment>