What makes me sad is that someone spent a huge amount of time making something, working on something, supporting something. If you don't like that something, then use something else or write your own thing. I don't get how there is some responsibility of maintainers to turn a passion project into anything other than what they want?! Fork.
How was attending this University? I recently moved family abroad from USA. Hoping my daughter may have interest in attending here for computer science. I am just blown away by the cost of US Universities. Not sure what you get out of USA schools anymore compared to some European Universities?
Not the OP, but I studied at ETH Lausanne and visited at ETH Zurich, and it was my best academic memory, surpassing Paris, London or the other universities I attended.
So I recommend you a lot to try to get into this School, it's one of the best in the world, and the price of the education is a bargain compared to the comparable US universities.
In case someone gets confused searching for it, normally the federal politecnic university at Lausanne is called by its French name, EPFL.
ETH Zürich has better score in international ratings, but the EPFL doesn't lag behind much. It's a really top noch place to learn any technical career.
I enjoyed my time there a lot (did a BSc and MSc there) and can recommend it to anyone who's interested in the engineering and natural sciences. School doesn't cost much (I paid around 600CHF per semester), provides a great infrastructure (for one, I was already running simulations on a high-performance distributed-memory cluster during my third BSc semester), allows you to meet and work with a lot of great people, and you are also able to choose from a vast number of very interesting lectures thought by some great scientists (this gets unlocked during your MSc).
One of the "downsides" to ETH Zürich is that it's quite competetive right from the beginning: you have to pass the Basisprüfung after your first year to continue your studies there (8-9 exams during the month of August), which 40%-50% of the attending students will not pass (it's kind of a "filter-exam"); this is one of the differences compared to the popular US universities: everyone with a high school degree (Gymnasium here in Switzerland) is allowed to attend University here in Switzerland, i.e., we don't have interviews or entry exams for most of the BSc majors (medical school is an exception).
If you have questions, feel free to contact me (see my profile).
Yes. For PhD, it is paid very well. For MSc and BSc the cost is low. What ends up high are the living costs in Zurich. But given how much these costs have increased in the hot US cities, this may not be a problem.
This is one of those 90s inspired urban tales. Even a decade old CPU can rip through the entire registry without breaking a sweat.
And it is just a hierarchical database, nothing special about it. It shouldn't be very different than accessing files on the file system.
(there were some bugs at the past that caused Windows Explorer to slow down but those were fixed long ago and they were just bugs with a single application, not something inherently slow with the registry itself)
It's not the registry itself, it's using the word "registry" as a synecdoche for all the things that may be installed there. And hooked into Windows subsystems.
Speaking of Explorer, one of the classic ways to end up with a Windows system that's slow for no readily apparent reason is shell extensions. Either on the rightclick menu or in the thumbnail engine. At one point I had a folder I couldn't navigate to without getting an error popup that mentioned Nvidia in it - a chain of handlers had been installed such that JPEG decoding was delegated to the graphics card, so trying to create and cache the thumbnail of a corrupt file crashed in an unrelated-looking place.
Well yeah, but it isn't specific to registry or even to Windows, you could get that with pretty much any extensible system. In Window Maker, for example, you can set up the application menu to use a dynamically filled entry so i wrote a shell script that scan my Steam folder to fill the installed games. Any mistake there could have had a similar outcome (e.g. launching Steam every time i right clicked on the desktop or generating an endless .\.\.\.\.\.\.\. list from not skipping the . directory or whatever). KDE and GNOME have many extensions and people already complain about GNOME's performance when it comes to shell extensions.
It's not that the registry grows large. It's because it accumulates cruft. If your software relies on information in the registry to make decisions, it'll often make decisions based on outdated information a long uninstalled (or upgraded) program left there.
It's the wrong solution to an old problem: having your configuration in hundreds of .INI files was a problem because opening and reading files took a long time. Instead of solving the problem and making opening and reading hundreds of files fast (which would be awesome for a number of other uses of a computer) they created new file that every application would read and write to. It seemed like a great idea at the time.
Every problem has a solution that's simple, elegant, and wrong.
> It's not that the registry grows large. It's because it accumulates cruft.
This seems to be the correct answer, but not for the reason you think ("outdated information"). The registry is a highly indexed database, because it needs to be quick at answering if say a low-level kernel-level driver needs something in real time for an operation. Many of those indexes are variations on Most-Recently-Used (MRU) caches. The more applications that make random queries to the Registry, the more those MRU caches churn and the more likely the MRU caches are full of small, one-off application data versus important stuff that needs to be queried as quickly as possible. (Over time Windows has seemed to work to compensate by changing indexing strategies, but at a high level a lot of the slow down issues with registry still boil down to index problems.)
The Registry wasn't intended to be a general application configuration store, per the original registry usage guidelines. Certainly that ship sailed.
(Also, the key problem with INI files was not that opening/reading them took a long time, it was the same centralization problem: almost every Windows 3.x application stored their INI in C:\WINDOWS for a number of dumb reasons. When Windows 9x started enforcing basic directory ACLs and not every program under the sun could read/write to arbitrary files in C:\WINDOWS, people scurried for the Registry as that seemed the closest to what they were already doing, squirreling config data in C:\WINDOWS for dumb reasons. It took a while for developers to realize they should just put config files in whatever format they prefer in %LOCALAPPDATA% or such like and stop trying to centralize them.)
In the Windows 3.1 days I had some interesting problems when importing data into an MS Access databases that would contain reports for our senior execs to read while offline (the web was not a thing back then) and import throughput slowed down to a near-halt after 30 megs of data or so. Our solution was to do the import in chunks, and defragment the database between them.
> If your software relies on information in the registry to make decisions, it'll often make decisions based on outdated information a long uninstalled (or upgraded) program left there.
Why is your software looking at registry entries that it didn't create?
> Why is your software looking at registry entries that it didn't create?
I may want to know where Photoshop is installed to I can register a plugin. Or know about the printers installed. Or know more about the environment than the OS is willing to tell me. Or those may be entries that older versions of other applications of mine did create. Or Windows. Or older versions of Windows.
There are many reasons to look into registry entries that aren't the ones you wrote.
I agree with everything that you said, except the part about windows explorer slowdowns being fixed. I still find it to be an order of magnitude slower than Gnome's file manager for simple cases. I understand some of the reasons why this is, but its still pretty nasty.
I might have agreed with you up to ~2 months ago (my 2 Win7 installs had been running for 3-4 years each) until a real, normal, official Radeon graphics card update completely hosed the install. Unusable and unrecoverable from the save point thing, whatever it's called.
Sure, it happens rarely - but it really depends on your usage patterns. If you often have to try out software on a regular basis (I've always used Windows VMs for work stuff when I needed to evaluate things from $randomVendor) it might accelerate this. Or sometimes it's a piece of hardware. yes, some are 90s tales but to some degrees it has persisted.
It's a mish-mash. A bunch of VMs running on ProxMox, Wireguard is the link from the outside world, QNAP NAS for document storage and running SyncThing server for phone photos and videos backup, a couple of Windows VM's we RDP into for banking and centralised documents and spreadsheets. Also PiHole running on a VM so my 'roaming' browsing is nice and clean. Also, although off-topic-ish, ZoneMinder and LMS (lightweight music server - which the author linked to in comments a week ago or so: https://github.com/epoupon/lms) VMs accessible via the VPN.
Nothing particularly "integrated" like Sandstorm or NextCloud, but I haven't had the existential need for that level of accessibility.
The QNAP NAS (like Synology) has personal cloud apps, but I don't tend to like doing things the easy way. Going down that path also locks services into a particular hardware dependency. VMs are easily backed up and restorable to ProxMox running on new / different hardware if necessary.
1. Uploading my Signature in Preview and being able to sign and edit PDF documents on any of my Apple Devices.
2. Screen rendering quality, on Mac everything seems to be sharper and more crisp than Linux on the same device.
3. Keynote. I so want a cross-platform replacement that is nearly as good.
4. iMessage integration with phone. I can send sms/iMessages from my Mac.
But I am planning to switch anyways. As all these companies move to a "service model", I feel like I am only leasing my software, and tools that make the hardware work. Furthermore, it feels impossible to get under the hood anymore.
Would love any advice or recommendations for the above.
Those were about the only reason I could tolerate a standard Centos or RHEL desktop, but I'd heard the maintainer 'disappeared' and nobody has picked them back up.
Preview is amazing. I’ve never used another PDF reader that didn’t make me sad every time I had to use it. It’s nice to like PDFs. Signing and moving pages between or to new PDFs are my most-used features.
And it’s the best basic image viewer / light editor I’ve used.
Libreoffice draw is amazing at PDF documents as well. It's something that feels like it should be advertised more, though I can imagine why they don't.
Not OP but work @Helium. All the hardware designed will be open sourced. The end node devices can run on LoRa modules with custom (open source) firmware and secure crypto-processor (https://www.microchip.com/wwwproducts/en/ATECC608A).
