81–90 of 479 posts
The cost of a new fullly-spec'd workstation + high performance laptop is tiny compared to the salary of good software developers. Managements have a warped sense of how to save money and as a result grossly hurt morale and productivity where it matters the most.
It is good that these "water is wet" statements get written down so we can point humidity-skeptical people to them from time to time. The deeper problem is the sad state of affairs of distributed computing for the end user : * Application instances expect to be the only ones modifying the files that underlie the document being edited. Most of them simply bail out when the files get modified by another application. *…
That's absolutely spot on. The problem is: who is going to pay for it?
No vendor will do this because it would break lock-in, and building something like this and making it polished enough for widespread adoption is far beyond what pure volunteer open source can reasonably accomplish.
The problem is economic, not technical. There is no business model for user-empowering software anymore.
Software is extremely costly to produce but we pretend it's free and won't pay for it directly, so instead the industry has deeply wrapped itself around business models in which we are the product or that use lock-in to force payment eventually.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For the life of me I don’t understand why folks default to laptops for development. Yes portability is great, but most of us park our behinds at the same desk everyday. If I’m going to be out of the office (away from home) I take a laptop and remote into the desktop! Even M1 macs (I have one and love it), while powerful, just can’t hold a candle to a workstation class machine.
What development are you doing where there's a notable difference between an M1 Mac and a "workstation class machine?" Is it just running a bunch of VMs? I don't doubt the tasks exist but it's got to be a list that's been dwindling for the last few years.
Building Firefox on a macbook air or pro M1: half an hour. Fastest M1 max is around 15 minutes.
Building Firefox on my Threadripper workstation: 5 minutes.
Different workloads require different tools. I work with Rust and TypeScript projects - MBP M1 Pro 32Gb RAM is 110% enough.
I've had this in the last few jobs. One reason for it is that to move desks in NYC requires a union employee to move the computer which ends up costing a few thousand dollars. With terminals and a cloud PC you avoid this.
Try working in banking for 20 years, stuck behind at least 1 layer of citrix living in citrix inception. Latency for every keystroke, your brain starts to add latency to latency that is not there to compensate for a life lived wearing citrix latency goggles.
I'd walk into customer sites for the first time, meet people, and within minutes they would start ranting about how bad Citrix is.
I suspect only dentists get this kind of feedback from customers before a procedure.
Having said that, 99% of the time the problem boils down to this:
The guy (and it is a guy) signing the cheques either doesn't use Citrix OR uses it from the head office with the 10 Gbps link.
The poor schmuck in the backwater rural branch office on a 512 Kbps link shared by two dozen staff gets no say in anything, especially not the WAN link capacity.
I've seen large distributed orgs that were 100% Citrix "ugprade" from 2 Mbps WAN links to 4 Mbps to "alleviate network congestion" in an era where 100 Mbps fibre-to-the-home is standard. With 2 Mbps you can watch PDF documents slooooowly draw across the screen, top-to-bottom, line by line. Reminds me of the 2400 baud days in the early 90s downloading the first digital porn, eagerly watching the pixels filling the screen.
Don't blame Citrix. Blame the bastard in the head office that doesn't give a f%@$ about anyone not him.
It was just too hard.
I never got to the stage they hint at, if a tiny amount of things won't work, does it means the whole idea fails?
If you only have Word/Excel/internet etc in one lab inevitably someone will ask for X,Y,Z. Is the money saved on computer and maintenance and benefits of instant installs/upgrades worth more or less than the property & teacher/student time costs of that lab running at 90% useability.
But licensing stopped the experiment.
It is good that these "water is wet" statements get written down so we can point humidity-skeptical people to them from time to time. The deeper problem is the sad state of affairs of distributed computing for the end user : * Application instances expect to be the only ones modifying the files that underlie the document being edited. Most of them simply bail out when the files get modified by another application. *…
>What we need is not [...] cloud storage. We need [...] a decent distributed filesystem, Distributed files to where exactly? You need to be more concrete about the remote location of non-local data that normal people can use. Ok, so you want "distributed filesystem" to not mean "cloud storage" ... So is it p2p? Something else? In other words, we want Windows, macOS, Linux, iPhone, Android, etc operating systems... to…
So the topology is a mesh network of my devices, and perhaps optionally a few defined remote endpoints that the opaque blob storage service provides me, and that I enter as part of the config of my filesystem.