Technology Commentary

Posted on Friday 7 Jul 2023. 1,242 words, 5 links. By Matt Webb.

Programming book reviews, programming tutorials,programming news, C#, Ruby, Python,C, C++, PHP, Visual Basic, Computer book reviews, computer history, programming history, joomla, theory, spreadsheets and more.

Until the announcement that CentOS Linux 8 would be EOL at the end of 2021, CentOS users enjoyed a relatively drama-free period of stability that might suggest RHEL has always had a viable, dependa…

After Saturday’s post I wanted to take a step back and talk about some history that many have either forgotten or weren’t familiar with in the first place. Some may remember it quite well, bu…

It’s been an exciting week for people who care about Linux distributions, FOSS licensing, FOSS distribution, FOSS business models, and the future of open source in general. Red Hat’s an…

The advantages of WebAssembly, with its tight security model, very fast boot-up time, scalability at the edge, much smaller footprints, and portability across environments will really drive a shift away from container-based runtimes for things Kubernetes and edge workloads by 2030. There’s a ton of energy around making...

Developments in AI, Security, Quantum Computing, and More

Services like ChatGPT may be the future, but they also bring risks.

The LXD container-management system is no longer a part of the linuxcontainers.org project: Canonical, the creator and main contributor of the LXD project has decided that after over 8 years as part of the Linux Containers community, the project would now be better served directly under Canonical’s own set of projects. While the team behind Linux Containers regrets that decision and will be missing LXD as one of its projects, it does respect Canonical’s decision and is now in the process of moving the project over.

The majority of the IT industry operates with low quality development and survives. However there are companies where quality is not an option.

A few days ago I came across a blog post, by Valentina Cupać, titled “Are bugs and slow delivery ok?”. The title itself was enough to irritate me. What do you mean? That’s been an…

Did the “creative class” learn anything from buying into a product that was obviously destined to flop?

The streaming service provider made waves when its engineers reported they had refactored their QoS monitor for a monolithic architecture. Microservices experts evaluating the details discovered they actually did just the opposite.

The Intel i960 was a remarkable 32-bit processor of the 1990s with a confusing set of versions. Although it is now mostly forgotten (outs...

Watching the old web die a painful death as something new is being born from the ashes.

Since Elon Musk bought Twitter, people have been making a lot of comparisons between internet institutions – particularly various social media things – and premodern political forms and figures.

When social media was taking shape fifteen-odd years ago, the concept of “context collapse” helped frame and explain the phenomenon. Young scholars like Danah Boyd and Michael Wesch, bu…

Technical deep-dive on why you shouldn't have SVGs in your JS bundle and better techniques for JSX usage.

More than 140 brands are advertising on low-quality content farm sites—and the problem is growing fast.

Reviews based purely on the feel of the knob

I can’t believe I never blogged about KnobFeel during its lifespan (the site hasn’t been updated in a long time) but the archives are a delight: reviews, replete with videos, of the kno…

There’s a high-end grocer in a very expensive neighborhood of New York–and they focus all of their energy on Italian food. Everything is imported, and they spend a lot of time and money…

Over the years I've accumulated a bunch of digital assets, and while most of those are things that I can keep using (effectively) forever, some of them keep costing me money whether I'm using them or not. A big category for me (and maybe you if you're anything like me)

Photo by Taylor Vick on Unsplash There must be something to this whole notion that “time flies!” I distinctly remember writing a short essay about the incredible adaptability of the Ether…

Even though our computers are now better than 15 years ago, they still malfunction 11%–20% of the time, a new study from the University of Copenhagen and Roskilde University concludes. The researchers behind the study therefore find that there are major gains to be achieved for society by rethinking the systems and involving users more in their development.