Even apart from costs associated with proprietary software, the other reason to avoid vendor lock-in is to avoid self-propagating backdoors in the compiler. Ken Thompson described how to make such a backdoor with C in his 1983 "Reflections on Trusting Trust" speech. David A. Wheeler described "diverse double-compiling", a defense against compiler backdoors that relies on the existence of independent implementations of a language. Stable Rust doesn't have that because it's such a moving target, with widely used programs relying on language and library features less than half a year old.

See also "Reflections on Rusting Trust" by Manish Goregaokar

They knew this and decided to maintain Perl 5 alongside Raku (formerly known as Perl 6) for what is looking to be noticeably longer than the 11-year transition from Python 2 to Python 3.

For an important API, yeah, it is probably a good idea if that API is something that you're told you can rely on, but I don't think this is still the case with the Linux kernel, where rust is more of a playground.

Except there are real drivers being written in Rust. It's being done because it eliminates a class of memory bugs that were tricky and difficult in C, and when you're dealing with complex devices, likely an overhead you don't want to deal with (e.g., GPU drivers).

Sure, if you're a hard core kernel developer, then you probably know the intricacies of the memory management. But if you're a slightly weaker developer trying to get hardware to work, well, you probably want some help so you can work more on driver bits and less on memory management bits.

Asahi Linux, for example relies on Rust on Linux code that's not in mainline yet - they're something like 600 patches that they have but cannot submit because the base dependencies are not in.

The most prolific poster on my Mastodon feed is a retrocomputing enthusiast who uses a decades-old (pre-Intel) Macintosh PowerBook G4 as their daily driver.

There was a brief spot between IE and Chome where Firefox had the market, but Google put that damn button on their search page that took everyone to a Chrome download and "wow"d people with the URL bar search.

I personally love Firefox, and for any minor problem it might have, I think the ability to have a reliable ad blocker without much hassle is well worth it.

Sure, let's ignore all the times during that heyday where Mozilla decided to alienate Firefox users. Sure, maybe they had a good reason to break the UI multiple times going away from XUL - first they get a new UI and then you needed an extension to fix it. Then they break it again and obsolete all the extensions you used. Users gave up and switched because it was a support nightmare where one day you start up Firefox and nothing works the way it used to because the update rolled out. Like what I needed to do that day was fix Firefox again because half my favorite extensions no longer work, or exist.

Firefox was on top and Chrome was the newcomer. Chrome did a lot of things better, but Firefox was still the king until they alienated users with this stuff that caused people to give up and switch. I mean, if I'm going to be burned by Firefox who decided one day I was going to lose basically everything, then I might as well check out the competition.

And now Firefox is where it is because they've refused to do things that users want - instead forcing Pocket and adware down our throats in the shadiest way possible. Like, do we NEED reasons to not use Firefox?

Earlier the entire Japanese localization team decided to quit. And likely taking the whole Japanese userbase with it because of the culture and the nature of the insult. In an era where Firefox should be able to pick up users easily it's still doing its best to shed them.

Crying over lost users while declaring "It's Google's fault! Monopoly!" when much of the damage was self-inflicted is not how it works. It even came back to bite them when the lawsuit threatened to cut Google's funding of Firefox.

Time to admit the damage was done, and then go about trying to attract users back. Maybe bringing back what was lost - why is changing the look still something I need to edit config files for - something we gave up in the 80s? Lots of Firefox customization is locked away in config files when it was a simple extensions to alter them.

There's a reason the Thunderbird team broke off because they didn't want to deal with the baggage Mozilla was bringing.

GCC has tended to support more historic instruction sets than LLVM. If a device's instruction set is supported by GCC and not by LLVM, it can run programs written in C, C++, Fortran, and other languages supported by GCC. It can also run programs in an interpreted language whose interpreter is implemented in a language supported by GCC, such as Python and PHP last I checked. It cannot build programs written in languages supported only by LLVM and not by GCC, such as latest stable Rust. What keeps gccrs (the Rust front end of GCC) from entering production is that the Rust language is still a rapidly moving target, with popular programs routinely requiring features added to the language or the standard library less than six months ago.

The service worker API is explicitly designed to avoid downasaurs in "offline-first" use cases. It acts as a proxy to serve the shell document, style sheet, scripts, and stale data, even without an Internet connection. That's why I asked what obstacles there are other than a downasaur.

I have not presented my ideas to Grab because I am not a user of Grab. I would imagine that most readers of Slashdot are likewise not users of Grab.

The 45 minute builds back in the 1990s .....

Obviously someone never tried compiling the Linux kernel back then. An hour to build was considered fast. It also was a good stability test because questionable computers would almost always crash.

These days the Linux kernel takes 5 minutes tops.

Android is also a beast to build - back in the early days, half a day to build it was common. Even on a high end machine you did a clean build in around an hour and a half. If you got a super tricked out Threadripper PC with SSDs you got it down to around 45 minutes. 64 core builds at the time were impressive. Of course these days we have 128 core PCs, but even Android 14 doubled the build time over Android 13.

Windows reportedly took 8 hours to build in the NT days.

In a little over 20 years we went from build times on things like Linux, GCC, Glibc, and other big projects which took the better part of an hour to just a few minutes. Fast enough that OpenEmbedded Linux builds everything from source - you set up a project and build it and it compiles the cross-compilers, the host libraries, and build tools and then spits out an image you can use in about half an hour.

Of course, the real thing is likely more WFH stuff - because if you walked in the door to the office, you were on the clock. At home, I suppose you could go through all that, but most people I know just close their laptops which puts them to sleep, so they just need to log into the VPN the next day. Hell, I'm super lazy, I just lock the PC and leave it running. It's not like the few watts the laptop consumes is going to kill me - I'm saving tons on gas and other things not going to the office so leaving the laptop plugged in and on isn't going to hurt matters.

Yep. This is not explainable below "complete incompetence" and "extreme arrogance" and, quite important for Japan, "extreme rudeness".

And knowing the Japanese, this is basically the kiss of death to them using Firefox.

As if Mozilla really needed ANOTHER reason to see their marketshare go down even more.

It's like they're purposely tanking their numbers so they can blame "Google monopoly!" for their dwindling numbers, when in reality it's because they're pushing users to alternative browsers.

Pushing away the Japanese like this certainly isn't a good move. But watch as they blame Google for destroying Firefox instead of themselves for pushing users away from Firefox.

Do they really need to give people reasons to not use Firefox?

Call me old skool, but Legos were my favorite "toy" growing up and those sets were far more "generic". You build anything and everything, not just whatever a set was designed for... that kinda came later. Anyway, it is more fun and educational, using your imagination than it is just building a predetermined "model". I spent endless hours making stuff.

The problem was, selling bricks didn't make Lego much money. They fell on hard times because toys went electronic and the 90s were rough as everyone drifted towards computers.

They basically reinvented themselves - no kid is getting a $400 Lego set - but adults do. And adults love to collect. These sets basically brought Lego back. So while they're limited in a way, they also do sell, and licensed sets are one of their bigger revenue streams.

That said, they do make generic sets, and you can buy bulk lots, but they're more oriented towards kids who do take them apart and build more stuff with them. But they also realize there's a growing crowd of builders who want special pieces so you can order them by the brick, and a growing adult segment that wants to do a build with their kids, but have something on display.

The beauty of Lego is it can be all things. You can build this with your kid, you might then buy them a bunch of random sets for them to play with - they can choose to build the desired outcome, or who cares, open all the bags, and build whatever comes to mind. No one's touching my Enterprise, but if I give you a Mona Lisa set and you use it to make a spaceship, more power to you.

And yes, people do buy sets often to collect pieces - there are sites that value the sets on how much you get per dollar.

No one has any qualms if you choose to buy this set and build something else completely different. Or if you buy 10 of these sets to build your collection of pieces and have absolutely no intention on building a USS Millennium Falcon.

Nah, that's been the norm for the past 30 years.

Vibe Coding is the next Visual Basic. You know the tool that basically runs Fortune 50 or so companies because some middle manager saw a demo version, cooked something up with it, then it spread like wildfire. Eventually it started accruing features in an ad-hoc manner and is now this unworkable blob of an application that someone has to keep running on a mysterious Windows XP machine that no one dares touch. It started using the demo version, then someone's kid found a pirated version so you didn't have to take 3 million steps to install it every month. Eventually someone actually bought a legitimate version.

Attempts had been made to bring it to VB# but it's only been a buggy mess since, so no one's actually moved from VB6, but the timeline is "sometime" and everything has to be made both to the app everyone uses and the failed VB# version they can finally retire that Windows XP machine and move onto Windows Server 2008. Because as we all know, VB# is also end of life.

Oh sure, some new middle manager sees this and is currently vibe coding their way to a replacement for both the Windows XP and obsolete VB# version, but it only seems to work half the time, and features that worked yesterday mysteriously broke today, so those vital reports that barely worked on Windows XP, well, if it worked, it would be wrong, despite even the Windows 2008 version having that working for years.

People expect to be paid for commute time too, at least in the sense that they will want more money if the commute is longer. Work from home made just coming to the office at all something which people want more money for.

$6 billion could do a lot to end hunger in many parts of the world. Instead, Musk bought Twitter and turned it into a hellsite, and told people to have more kids.

I was expecting someone who has used the product to help others in this discussion understand why Grab probably chose and continues to choose to develop iOS apps instead of PWAs. The answers might have taken the form:

A. PWAs weren't capable enough 12 years ago for X, Y, and Z reasons, are now, and the engineering resources to port the native app to a web app would exceed the cost of acquiring and maintaining Macs capable of running the latest macOS
B. PWAs still aren't capable for X, Y, and Z reasons

People paying $2.99 for a flash game on their phone have finally figured out that you can play them for free on the interwebs. News at 11.