That’s that speed the ports are capable of. 10/100/1000 megabits per second. Most things with an Ethernet port nowadays are 10/100/1000 capable, and 2.5Gb is becoming reasonably common.

Weirdly, Roku and other smart TVs are often only 100Mb capable since 4k streaming only requires about 60Mb and if you are squeezing pennies a 1Gb port is a bit more expensive.

10Gb is just starting to get available for high end consumer devices.

My router only has four downstream ports, and due to the layout of my house I only want to run one cable from the router to my home office anyway. If it had enough ports and the house was laid out differently I wouldn’t have bothered with the switch.

Unmanaged switches are usually quite a bit cheaper and just work. You plug everything in and that’s it. Managed switches need configuring and cost more. I paid $25 for my 8 port 10/100/1000 switch, while the managed version is about $120. With a managed switch you can do things like turn individual ports on and off, traffic limit and monitor per port, and other fancy networking things that I’ve never bothered with.

In my home state there is a very small town that supposedly was going to be the recipient of a large investment that sank on the Titanic. Or possibly it was just the investors? Either way, the town never got the investment and so remained a very small town. I imagine that there must be a number of such stories of what might have been if the Titanic had made it to dock. Do you know of any?

I daily drive Debian on a couple of thirteen year old laptops. This is exactly right and I’m damn happy about it.

I wired my house with cat6 when I moved in. The overall setup looks like 10G fiber to the house -> 2.5G capable router -> 2.5G capable NAS running *arr stack. Also off the router is a single cat6 run downstairs -> 8 port 1G unmanaged switch, which is connected to my desktop, work dock, parters dock, TV, and backhaul run to the back of house wifi extender. The desktop, both docks and wifi extender are 2.5G capable. The TV is 100M. This has been extremely reliable. I plan on upgrading the switch to a 10g capable one at some point, and then the router. Since the switch is unmanaged, is there a good way to know when it is the limiting factor and I should update it?

I think the first full terminal was the hard copy terminal for the Wirlwind 1 in 1956. So he missed it by two years. Fucking hell.

Middle-aged guy take: Computer voices should be medium pitched because we’ve lost too much of our high pitched hearing due to concerts and working in noisy environments.

Grumpy middle-aged guy take: Computers shouldn’t talk to me. If I want get information from one, I’ll use a terminal like Turing intended.

Shitty way to say it, but you’re right. I used to work on mobile industrial robots, the sorts of machines that deliver parts in factories, clean rooms, semiconductor fabs, etc. These are industrial machines and have about as much gender as an office printer. We sold them in countries all over the world. At some point we added an off the shelf text to speech library so that to robots could communicate with non-technical people and say things like, “Excuse me” or “I’m lost”. It supported a bunch of languages and could use a male or female voice.

People in different countries had shockingly strong opinions about what gender the voice should have. The US, Canada, France and UK customers wanted them to be female. Germany and the Spanish speaking countries wanted male. Korea and China wanted male IIRC, but Japan insisted on female.

I’m sure this says something about the culture in all of those places, but I have no idea what.

I feel this deep in my soul. My kids don’t have tablets or phones and are only allowed to watch things with us there that we approve of. And yet, somehow, my youngest wants to talk about fucking Mikey and JJ videos.

A decent number of modern TUIs do that, lazygit for example. I also find that tldr and navi do a great job of explaining those inscrutable options.

So true. I mostly live in the embedded world but have had to write GUIs from time to time, mostly to connect and send commands to some sort of embedded device.

I always start with a cli version for testing and then write the GUI. A quick wrapper around the comms library and I’m done.

But there are so many annoying fiddly little details in the GUI to deal with that it usually takes as long just to write the GUI as it does the entire rest of the code. Layout, menus, tooltips, icon choices, dealing with screen sizes, DPI, resizing windows, responsive data, etc.

Edit: A simple example that I’ve dealt with many times is reading and writing config data. For the CLI version it’s typically two commands:

‘tool read_cfg’ reads from the device and prints the config to stout

‘tool write_cfg’ reads a config from stdin and sends to the device.

Add a ‘-f’ option to use a file instead of stout for people that don’t remember how to use redirects. Add a couple of documentation sentences to the help command. If there are any issues, print them to stderr and bail. If the user wants to edit the config they can use whatever $EDITOR they prefer.

The same functionality in a GUI means that you have to first implement an editor for values. In my case that was generally a bunch of nested key/value pairs so I could probably find a widget that would work. And then understand how it handles being resized, gets styled, uses tooltips, etc. Of course there would need to be some code to get the data into and out of that widget which would probably need massaging. Then I need to let the user know if there are local edits. And then there is the fact that the data is now in three places, on a local disc, on the device, and in the editor and I need to communicate with the user that there is a difference between loading and saving from disc vs the device. Do I give a warning that loading from once place will overwrite anything they’ve changed in the editor? How do I make the four load/save buttons have obvious icons? And how to handle errors? An annoying pop up? Partially load the data? Something else? So many little things that have to be designed, implemented, and tested.

Oh I agree, I’m not saying that PDF is some sort of document format perfection. But it is a fully open one with a spec that fits in 250 pages, as opposed to docx’s 7500(!!) page spec with undocumented binary blobs mixed in.

I see you too are a person of culture.

Are fine, but not 100% compatible with all Office files and very heavyweight for viewing a document.

The problem is that Office file formats are an “open” standard but not a real open standard. PDF is.

Edit: Hell, not even all Office files are openable in all modern versions of Office. I have an Excel file I have to use once a quarter that will only open in locally installed versions of Office, not Office365. I keep a VM with Windows on it just for this one file.

What if I don’t want to spend several hundred dollars per year to use a proprietary program that doesn’t run on my computer just to look at some documents?

This is called Dutch Disease and most often happens with natural resources, but also with natural stupidity.

The state of office desks has been continuously getting worse my entire career.

The very first place I interviewed had small private offices with a door for everyone. They weren’t any bigger than a decent sized cubicle but were real separate rooms and most of them had exterior windows. I didn’t get that job though.

My first desk at my first engineering job was in a cubicle with real six foot tall walls, a window with a nice view, big L desk, shelves, filing cabinets, etc.

Then I got the same setup, but in a fabric cube. Honestly, not really a downgrade. I had that setup three times, and the only difference was how good the view was.

Then the same but no windows.

Then a smaller cube with a simple 6 foot desk and a single cabinet.

Then a line of 6 foot wide desks with privacy screens on three sides.

Then privacy screen on left and right only.

Then no screens.

Then four foot desks.

My current office is four foot desks that are hotdesked for most people. But we are also completely remote if you want, so I use my nice desk that I built at home 90% of the time.

I joined a Canada based company in the last year. Every time we chat abooot non-work stuff I find yet another reason to be envious of them.

I’ve been hearing that, but only from random comments here and there. Is there an authoritative article somewhere?

You mean meta-up, right?