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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • I don’t have experience with Twitter or Mastodon but it reminds me of time when I quit drinking.

    When I quit drinking and tried to stay around people I used to drink with, I realized really fast how pointless this “engagement” (really just two people speaking past each other, and feeling like they have deep conversation) is. It’s almost insulting what a waste of effort such an “engagement” can be.



  • Why? Why ask for this from the creator?

    If someone can create new software and offer it for free, they should not also be expected to also create a comprehensive analysis of what other people did and list of differences.

    Just take it or leave it, it’s that simple. No need to act as if you’re trying to waste some door-to-door salesman’s time.

    Edit: I expected some downvotes but not that many.

    To my defense, the question in this thread is “you could elaborate what exactly you did different than all the others”. Look, I’m not a native English speaker either but I feel we could agree that is still pretty far away from simply being curious about design choices or “what led you to create this” sort of exploratory question.

    I might have overreacted, though, so sorry for that.



  • When it comes to identifying the server, hostname the first thing that counts. lemmy.world or mastodon.social or google.com are three different hostnames. At this point you can basically treat the period as no special character, it’s just part of the funny world. This basically answers your question: those are two different domains, ie. for all purposes, different instances.

    However, your computer does not really connect to hostname but to IP address, so the next important thing is to translate the hostname to an IP address.

    Aside: a valid hostname does not even have to have period in it. For example, localhost is a valid hostname! But generally hostnames without periods don’t get translated to any useful IP addresses. localhost is probably the only one widely used hostname but your OS will translate it to a special IP address which marks your own device.)

    So to translate the hostname to IP address is done using so-called DNS. So before you can connect, your computer already knows an IP address of a DNS server, and asks it to translate the hostname to IP address. Technically, this is still not where the period is strictly important.

    Where the period does start to be meaningful is when you think about: so we have billions of IP addresses, billions of hostnames, how do we organize it all? Who is going to maintain the huge massive list?

    So it works like this: There are dozens of organizations, each of which is assigned one or more “top level domains” (TLD). Then they are responsible for maintaining lists of all hostnames ending with those domains. Many of these organizations are local to certain states. For example, in Czech Republic, where I live, we have organization called CZ.NIC which maintains all domains ending with .cz. So it’s up to CZ.NIC how it manages permissions and gives out the domains. In this case, basically anyone can register any free domain ending with .cz, and what this registration means is that now they can get a server with an IP address, run whatever they want and have the registered domain name point to that IP address.

    Note that other organizations may decide to add additional rules. For example .uk domains are managed with extra rules, where non-government (commercial) entities are normally allowed to register only .co.uk and other .uk names are not handed out easily. I don’t actually know the details about .uk but my point is that if you are going to think about a hostname and how to begin to understand who owns it, first thing that matters is the TLD, and from that point the rules might be slightly different. To be fair, I haven’t seen much variance between this; almost all public TLD’s I’ve seen were either “simple”, meaning myname.tld or this thing that UK does (also New Zealand, from the top of my head).

    One almost universal rule is, though, that if I, say, register seznam.cz with CZ.NIC, then I automatically get not only seznam.cz but also any address I can possibly come up which ends with .seznam.cz. foo.seznam.cz, bar.seznam.cz, www.seznam.cz, I can now start organizing my servers using this whole infinite space, with any number of extra periods. I could totally start a business and start promoting my server foo.bar.baz.whatever.cz on billboards, as long as CZ.NIC grants me whatever.cz.

    So back to your question: mastodon.social and piefed.social are two completely different domains. All we know that they have in common is that whoever registered them, had to deal with the same organization; that is whoever maintains .social.

    So TL;DR: there’s really nothing that suggests that they would be the same instance.





  • netvor@lemmy.worldtoLinux@lemmy.ml33 years ago...
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    2 months ago

    Well, I was thinking of a quote that was much more similar to what I wrote (and it’s not in the video you linked).

    I had such a trouble finding it that I’m starting to feel like it might be one of those “quotes” where the credited author never really said that, but I haven’t completely given up :D

    Here’s one closer to what I paraphrased (but not quite it)–quoting an article from cio.com

    While Linux pretty much dominates almost every walk of our lives, even on the consumer devices like smartphones and smart TVs, it has not had the same success on the desktop. What does Torvalds think about it? Is Linux a failure on the desktop? Not really. “The desktop hasn’t really taken over the world like Linux has in many other areas, but just looking at my own use, my desktop looks so much better than I ever could have imagined. Despite the fact that I’m known for sometimes not being very polite to some of the desktop UI people, because I want to get my work done. Pretty is not my primary thing. I actually am very happy with the Linux desktop, and I started the project for my own needs, and my needs are very much fulfilled. That’s why, to me, it’s not a failure. I would obviously love for Linux to take over that world too, but it turns out it’s a really hard area to enter. I’m still working on it. It’s been 25 years. I can do this for another 25. I’ll wear them down.”



  • netvor@lemmy.worldtoLinux@lemmy.ml33 years ago...
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    2 months ago

    Funny how he made it basically for his desktop computer.

    33 years later, and Linux is dominating in every part of the OS world except … the desktop.

    (I’m paraphrasing his quote – he said something like this years ago, can’t find it, though.)

    (Edit: to be more fair with quotes, it might be the case that I “hallucinated” the quote. he might not have said that, or he might have just said part of it and other part would be someone else’s comment. This cio.com article is probably a better source on his position )


  • netvor@lemmy.worldtoLinux@lemmy.ml33 years ago...
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    2 months ago

    Yeah. And I like how even from the message it shows that it’s been already well recognized by then.

    If I recall correctly from some RMS’ talks I’ve seen many years ago, they’ve been working on it for years before, it’s just the kernel that was missing. As I see it, GNU and Linux was the breakthrough for FLOSS, since at that time you would still have to use a proprietary kernel. (Well, there’s GNU Hurd, but I’m not sure if it existed at that time, and even if it did, it was not ready.)


  • That’s a noble goal but does adding more people help the (long-term only, please) effectiveness? At what point does it start hindering it?

    I would assume that someone like a pharmacist has to be focused all the time, stakes is high…

    Do we have precise data about how physiological state of a pharmacist is changing through the shift? Do we know whether or not the pauses between people – which we might or might not have considered a wasted time – are actually essential for their ability to stay focused and reliable? (Is the answer the same for all of them?) Or maybe they could actually still use part of that time in a productive way, right? Also, why is there lack of people in the first place?

    Focusing solely on adding more people to the equation seems to neglect factors like this. This tells me that whoever this factoid is trying to impress is not someone who I would want to trust with managing a pharmacy (or anything except maybe some production line) in the first place.