Tom's Hardware of Finland

a nice thing is that Dell is still supporting my haswell venue 11 pro

and the firmware updates are totally Linux friendly as they can be installed from the UEFI

It’s all Intel ME fixes and boring spectre stuff but still

still by far the best non-Apple OEM

anyone who is using Xcode is using it because it’s necessary for whatever they’re making. you can’t make macOS or iOS apps without touching that toolchain, and if you work with that toolchain through the CLI instead of through the GUI, you’re going to encounter the same bugs in even less scrutable forms.

emacs and vim poked my aspergers in a not-fun, unproductive way. i used TextMate from like 2008-2011, then switched to Sublime Text from 2011-2017, then switched to VSCode. i experimented with atom and it’s a nice editor but its input lag bothered me. (check out the benchmarks online – it’s pretty bad, adding around 200ms last i checked.)

in terms of light(er)weight editors that aren’t emacs or vim, vscode is really the jam. sane defaults, extremely customizable, great plugin ecosystem, etc. i’m not a web guy so i’ll take busted’s word that sublime still rules at that.

1 Like

yeah atom can be extremely slow on some machines. and it’s sometimes it’s impossible to get the root of why.

the whole damn thing is basically just chrome, maybe that’s why.

I guess I should check out sublime text??

I mean a ton of apps these days are all electron based, it sucks that there isn’t yet a more native way of integrating “browser GUI framework” other than on mobile platforms because you can see why it’s appealing to people who are already doing all of their GUI logic in js/CSS, but if I look at tweeten, spotify, slack, signal, and mailspring that I’m also already running, atom is hardly unique, it’s just that a pure js GUI is a particularly bad choice for something that’s constantly evaluating and formatting text input

the sublime maintainer, bless them, doesn’t actually use any GUI middleware, they maintain a from-scratch cross-platform app singlehandedly

slack is particularly egregious, it’s like impossible for it to not use 2GB of swap after being open for an hour

1 Like

Right, I don’t have a problem with electron based apps and I plan on using it for some stuff in the future. It just isn’t a good fit for an extendable, graphics-rich code editor.

which puts it firmly into the top contender list for the “go and fxxx off” category for software, if you ask me. And i’ve used ffox + tabmix plus for years, with up to 70ish open tabs at once yet topping 1.2ish GB of ram at best.

tl;dr embedded programming would probably feel like torture-camp for its devs, huh.

I’m not a free memory diehard nor do I get upset about looking and seeing the swap being used in the first place as though it’s a non-renewable resource and I know it’ll gladly release the memory if it needs to but like … even within that, most Linux desktops’ swappiness isn’t well-tuned out of the box to apps that will gladly use as much memory as they can until they’re told to stop. but most of these concerns don’t really register unless you’re trying to apply low-level UX to Linux desktops, which no one is

2 Likes

granted, even in my phenom 965 quad i had more than enough RAM with 4GB…

However.
As a programmer myself, that figure is just unacceptable™ - or rather like, just feels unehtical to waste resources like that for no valid reason*.
I used the slack app a few times, and didn’t really notice since i tended to close it after checking a few channels, so it’s not like i was a victim of the OoM going berserk… but still… just… no.


*: of course, the devs - benefit of doubt! - must have a reason why they are using that kind of amount of memory. Again, i am a programmer and know how ugly and dreary it gets to valgrind a puny application to find out why it sloooooowly starts eating up byte after byte, until it starts to hog a few KB after a long weekend chomping away at it, so i want to be the last to go to war here - but, jesus christ and stallman, gigs?! May the OoM have mercy with our souls if that trend continues....

I think it just runs a fresh chromium electron instance per slack you’re connected to, and those will tend to get up to ~300M trivially with any electron app if you aren’t actively concerned about memory management, so if you’re in five different slacks (which the app is designed to let you do)…

2 Likes

http://images.uncyc.org/commons/thumb/3/3e/Segfault.jpg/450px-Segfault.jpg

awwww come ON, interwebs!

I know better, I know better, I know better…

So these are probably The Last Intel Macs, right? At least they updated the mini for the last time lol

I love the monkey paw wish corruption of the iPad getting USB-C but losing the headphone jack.

1 Like

It is extremely weird that Apple offers engraving on their stylus but not their watch.

hasn’t the Smartphone war instilled the only truth in you yet?

Next Revision, Mate™

why would you remove a headphone jack on an 10+ inch device

This means they definitely want to remove it on laptops too, right?

I hate to be “that guy” but removing analog audio ports is probably a good thing for signal fidelity given how most audio receivers work these days

except, I guess, for listening on actual headphones :expressionless:

I have a (decade out of date) impression that Apple actually had some of the better regular audio interfaces on their stuff. I think the 5th gen iPod is still valued for its DAC relative to cost?

If Apple sold tiny amps and DACs that’d be nice - it was the promise when lightning headphones came along but the market never happened.

that’s not the issue, it’s just that most receivers these days end up reconverting any analog signal to digital so they can DSP them up and then reconvert them back to analog for playback.

obv if you’re buying higher end audiophile stuff that’s not an issue but in that case you don’t want to be using your device’s DAC to began with

1 Like

Whether or not your device can do digital audio out seems independent of whether or not it can do analog audio out too?