Weirdly, I think it all got me my first job. I interviewed at a graphics card manufacturer and the interviewer placed one of their cards on the table and said “tell me what’s on that card”.

I picked it up and pointed out all the components because I knew them all by their part numbers that were written on them. I hadn’t seen them before, but I knew they were options in XFree86. Then add in that the regular array of chips was likely VRAM and the chips with the same logo on them as was above the door where the companies own video processors.

I didn’t know how any of it worked, but he didn’t know that. All he saw was a fresh graduate that just effortlessly identified some quite esoteric components of a design he’d personally made.

The thing that sticks with me is video card support. Back then (before Nvidia, 3dfx, etc) you had VGA cards that had one of a number of chipsets on, but it would be paired with a video timing chip and a RAMDAC. Buying a card required knowing which combination of parts it used and which combinations had support in XFree86. Then writing the configuration required knowing the video timings supported by your monitor. Not just frequencies, but blanking periods and such like.

EDID solved that last problem.

…and punctuation.

Veggie is a lot easier than vegan. Ghee is used a lot in Indian cooking.

Everybody did. Now we have everything.

Things get less well connected in the more eastern nations, especially heading down to Greece.

Disagree. Central Paris is something special. Like any European capital there’s tons of stuff to see and do.

It falls off off a cliff once you’ve done the centre though.

…but it all goes wrong again at the south coast. Even the locals leave for the summer.

Since Apple’s keynote this week.

You are, if you’re calling for Apple like features.

You might argue that “private cloud” is privacy preserving, but you can only implement that with the cash of Apple. I would also argue that anything leaving my machine, to a bunch of servers I don’t control, without my knowledge is NOT preserving my privacy.

I don’t understand the people who say they’d be bored if they didn’t work.

I think it’s that they would miss the sense of achievement that comes from a group collaboration on a shared goal. Doesn’t mean it needs to be what they do today, but I suspect you’d find these people in community projects if you didn’t have to earn.

Yes and no.

You have to eat less than you consume, and going to the gym doesn’t “burn calories” in a significant enough amount to make a difference. So there you’re right.

However, the biggest factor in your consumption rate is how much muscle you have. You can be laying in bed, but your muscles still need feeding. You just don’t keep muscles very long laying in bed all the time.

So, does the gym help weight loss? No, not directly, but increasing your muscle mass can.

While I was vacating my colleagues…

I’m reminded of a scene from The Wire:

https://youtu.be/h5d82ndui_s

(I know. I removed a comma from the quote, but that’s how I read it)

It does matter in distributed application on LANs. The thin client model is still in operation at a lot of HPC and similar environments. Laptops and Desktops just display what is being done elsewhere.

Remote X11 is a better user experience in that environment than anything else I’ve tried. It feels like the application is local even if it’s not.

Still worth trying.

The word “support” is used in a very corporate way in the ROCm docs. They mean in terms of support contracts, sending engineers out to customer sites, having people dedicated to specific customers.

The code works on more devices than they list, but they won’t enter into a support contract with anyone using anything but their latest and greatest.

“set the magic environment variable because the tool chain will mis-detect the architecture of your unsupported card”

I don’t think it’s misdetecting it. Rather it detects it correctly, tries to use specific support for that device, but then finds that the support was switched off at compile time. The environment variable forces it to pretend to be a different (very similar) device.

Clunky, yes.

Sounds like you already worked it out.

One of which is that Stephen Hawking threw a lousy party.

This thinking just leads to science being turned into a religion. Knowledge being passed down from blessed people who perform obscure practises, and the masses being expected to accept it without question. Science should be open and understood by all. Then it has the weight it deserves and then you can have proper public discourse about issues.

A young earth creationist’s hypothesis does not agree with existing evidence and so your example does not refute my argument.