111–120 of 478 posts
(No credit of course, and the marketing copy around it made it sound like it was all their own code. Welcome to open source I guess!)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't understand what bsdiff does, or is. I am a software developer and I frankly have no clue what I would ever use bsdiff for! I've read what it does (libraries for building and applying patches to binary files) and still don't really have a sense for what the purpose of this tool is. What are some real life use cases for it? When does a developer need such a tool?
Implementing software updates where you don't want to ship entire binaries again (and only the diff) would be one. In some video games the assets are also packed into massive binaries, so you don't want to ship gigabytes of data because you replaced one icon. Sadly many games do this anyway nowadays.
Also, as a dev, you have no idea what version your users are updating _from_. You either need to generate some number of patches for every version you could be updating from, and figure out if you should just download the whole thing again in any of those cases anyway.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the GPL and FSF etc lost momentum with their GPLv3 push. I know that was the case for me. I really liked GPL (v2). Then GPLv3 came out and I was like huh? After that I became much more open to the lighter versions of things MIT / BSD. GPLv3 is not really workable in terms of preserving developer freedom to do what they want with code (as long as they share their code back). Obviously the powers that be disagr…
You can still use gplv2 if you like. The auto-update clause is optional afaik, and lots of projects are gpl2-only. I suppose you're right though in as much as it splits mindshare.
The sample license header here [1] says:
> This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
That is only a suggested header.
From Linux kernel here [2], you can see:
> under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2 only
[1] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.en.html
> a heavy American accent Any non-Americans want to chime in on what is a heavy American accent? I’m imagining heavy southern accent, but maybe this is something that can only be heard by non-Americans?
I'd say most people hear divergence from their local accent, and consider theirs to be (at least subconsciously) a normal accent. This results in English people hearing my accent as a bit Irish, and Irish people hearing the English parts. Neither acknowledge fully the shared parts. In truth, I am a bit of both. So I'd say a strong American accent to an Australian is the most divergent one, not one that somebody in US…
Great article. Gives me flashbacks to the time someone sent me a link to a newly-released version of Minecraft, and it turned out to be using my own voxel engine. :D (No credit of course, and the marketing copy around it made it sound like it was all their own code. Welcome to open source I guess!)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Implementing software updates where you don't want to ship entire binaries again (and only the diff) would be one. In some video games the assets are also packed into massive binaries, so you don't want to ship gigabytes of data because you replaced one icon. Sadly many games do this anyway nowadays.
One of the reasons games do this is the data is compressed, so a "patch" might be indistinguishable from a real update. Also, as a dev, you have no idea what version your users are updating _from_. You either need to generate some number of patches for every version you could be updating from, and figure out if you should just download the whole thing again in any of those cases anyway.
Does this happen with more advanced compression algorithms? I've rsynced zip files of different versions of internal software and the diff was always much, much smaller than the entire package.
Great article. Gives me flashbacks to the time someone sent me a link to a newly-released version of Minecraft, and it turned out to be using my own voxel engine. :D (No credit of course, and the marketing copy around it made it sound like it was all their own code. Welcome to open source I guess!)
Could you please link the voxel engine? Which version of Minecraft was this?
Great article. Gives me flashbacks to the time someone sent me a link to a newly-released version of Minecraft, and it turned out to be using my own voxel engine. :D (No credit of course, and the marketing copy around it made it sound like it was all their own code. Welcome to open source I guess!)
I would love more details! Could you please link the voxel engine? Which version of Minecraft was this?
The game is still live though: https://classic.minecraft.net - Originally it supported multiplayer, but that stopped working the day after the game launched.
The voxel engine is here: https://github.com/andyhall/noa/tree/develop
> a heavy American accent Any non-Americans want to chime in on what is a heavy American accent? I’m imagining heavy southern accent, but maybe this is something that can only be heard by non-Americans?
Speak through your nose and and lean heavily on the R sound wherever you find it. Peter Sellers called Americans "The Herns" [1]: > Various American characters with the surname Hern or Hearn, often used for narration, outrageous announcements or parody sales pitches. The Goons referred to Americans as "herns", possibly because saying "hern hern hern...." sounded American to them, possibly because Sellers once said th…
Personally I'd rather have Americans "lean heavily on the R" than act like the letter doesn't exist (rhotic vs non-rhotic). I think it's another factor why American English is more popular than British English (besides the huge economic factor, the US economy being 5x the UK one), since their pronunciation is clearer and more explicit.