So uncomfortably true!

I recall spending a (large) number of weeks struggling through Elementary Stochastic Calculus, which had an incredibly misleading sticker on the cover proclaiming:-

“This book is suitable for the reader without a deep mathematical background.”

This. Exactly the same response where I worked.

I’m not sure how much money they’ll actually get from this.

The (50,000 employee) company I worked for had very slow IT processes at the time, but when the licensing changed they treated it like a critical security vulnerability because of the amount of money involved: they very quickly migrated their software packages to include non-Oracle OpenJDK builds & rolled out an update to uninstall Oracle java from all PCs. And all server owners were given a deadline to migrate or start paying recovery costs.

I imagined it’d be smaller organisations which would’ve sat on this issue.

Or, from the 99PI podcast a month ago…

https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/towers-of-silence/

Linux font rendering is generally very good now, so I think they’ve gotten past that. Apart from a System76 desktop, which was terrible, I haven’t hated the rendering for many years. It’s just that Microsoft’s font rendering (maximizing clarity at the expense of destroying the font metrics) is exactly what I want to look at all day if I’m staring at code. When I look at screenshots of vscode on Linux and Mac the code looks beautiful, because the font renderer hasn’t beaten the characters with a big stick to make them fit the pixel grid, but when I switch back to windows after using Linux/Mac then it feels like someone fixed the focus and de-blurred everything.

And now that I can have as many Linux installs as I like running concurrently via WSL2, I get to use Linux all day without losing the stuff I like about Windows.

I don’t play games, but I do plenty of dev work including a lot in Visual Studio & SSMS. I always have a few Linux boxes running & try every few months to live on Linux rather than Windows.

Visual Studio can be swapped out for Rider. Rider is quite different feeling than VS, but I guess a lot of devs use another Jetbrains IDE of some kind, in which case it’s a fairly easy switch.

SQL Server runs happily on Linux. But SSMS is harder for me to do without. I have Aqua Data Studio & Jetbrains DataGrip, but they don’t feel as seamless as SSMS.

In the end though, it’s hard to beat Windows + WSL2 now that Windows VSCode & Jetbrains IDEs seamlessly connect to Linux projects. And if you enable nested virtualization and MAC address spoofing then Hyper-V can run anything WSL can’t.

Usually I end up moving back to Windows because of font rendering. I far prefer Windows cleartype font rendering on 2160p desktop screens. One day Linux fractional scaling will be perfected or 200+dpi desktop screens will become affordable. Then I might stay on Linux.

Totally OK way of doing it. You basically manually implemented the protocol APIPA uses to allocate 169.254 addresses.

In addition to the excellent https://sci-hub.se suggestion…

I can find the paper for free 90% of the time by googling the authors and visiting their personal page on their university’s website.

I occasionally have to download and run old versions in a VM to build poorly supported software.

E.g. step 1 of the build instructions here…

Install the following packages in an ubuntu - 14.04.6 LTS machine