Barrier has been abandoned quite awhile ago. Its successor is supposed to be InputLeap, and although their GitHub repo is very active, they have yet to make a release.

I didn’t even know that Synergy provided a “community” version of their app until very recently. I’ve paid for a license many years ago, so I’ve been using their 1.1x versions, which for better or worse, are still maintained along with the 3.x branch (which I’ve tried using but could never make it work, which is for the best because the fact they pivoted their UI to electron-based also left a bad taste in my mouth).

Edit: also, if I understand correctly, Synergy’s latest versions on the 1.x branch borrows a lot from InputLeap.

Not a variant. Read their README. It IS Synergy, they’re renaming the open-source / community version to that, while Synergy will remain the commercial product built out of that.

I’m very torn on disco. Season 2 is probably the best (due in no small part that it sets up SNW), but the rest are a chore to watch. Most of them have some neat ideas, but they’re badly executed more often than not. They also were too heavy handed with each season arcs serialization, most episodes don’t stand on their own, and the writing and consistency is just bad. I just finished the final season, and I’m glad they’re done with it so they can put more money on good Trek like SNW - hopefully they don’t screw it up eventually.

Here. Tl;dr: He took it private for reasons, should bring it back in a “build it yourself” form later.

France has a big, big problem with overemphasizing individual politicians over policies.

I think that’s a “humans” problem, really, specially in the last few decades.

Apparently it’s not that the software is broken, it’s that the software being installed breaks Windows Update. There are reports from people that uninstalling StartAllBack, updating the OS, then reinstalling it back (renaming the install executable first) works fine.

As much as being affected by this is frustrating to me (though this is all happening still on the dev channel, so for me it’ll be a problem for the future), I understand Microsoft’s rationale here. They can’t be expected to support every third-party tool that can break the OS, and it’s known that both ExplorerPatcher and StartAllBack relies on many hacks using undocumented APIs to work.

In the last few decades that I’ve been using Windows, I never felt compelled to use shell replacements or customizations - the default experience always worked fine for me with a few tweaks. So, if anything I’m more frustrated at Microsoft that I’m forced to use StartAllBack, because MS went and removed options from the shell that existed forever and always took for granted, and then some.

Thank you for digging this out. Turns out it’s even worse than what I gleaned from my surface-level take.

This sounds like dev sour grapes but what the company was asking them to do seems better from the customer pov and for cyber security I’m general.

As a developer myself (though not on the level of these guys): sorry, but just, no.

The key point is this:

[…] we did not issue CVEs for experimental features and instead would patch the relevant code and release it as part of a standard release.

Emphasis mine. In software, features marked as “experimental” usually are not meant to be used in a production environment, and if they are, it’s in a “do it at your own risk” understanding. Software features in an experimental state are expected to be less tested and have bugs - it’s essentially a “beta” feature. It has a security bug? Though - you weren’t supposed to be using it in a security-sensitive environment in the first place, it sounds perfectly reasonable to me that it should be addressed in a normal release as opposed to an out-of-band one.

We can argue if forking the project is or isn’t extreme, but the devs absolutely have good reason to be pissed. This is typical management making decisions without understanding technical nuances and - from what is being told by the devs - not talking it through before doing it.

Doesn’t PS2 use a PowerPC architecture?

No, it uses a custom architecture around a custom CPU, the “Emotion Engine”, a MIPS-based CPU. You must be thinking of the Wii or XBox360 that came after it.

You have plenty of time to fall madly in love, get married, fall madly out of love, get divorced, and repeat.

As a 43yo, fuck did that hit hard. Well, except for the “repeat” part. I have a lot of issues to work through before I get to that, if ever.

there’s almost nobody with 3 legs

Hol up there, tell me about those people with 3 legs!

Yes, and you have to remember that the situation there is so volatile due to the factors involved.

Just FYI, Barrier has been abandoned / unsupported for awhile. Although the last release mostly works, don’t expect future support.

Its successor is https://github.com/input-leap/input-leap, and although there have been some coy maintainance on it, they have yet to provide an installable release, due to “reasons”.

I use Synergy myself, which is the ancestor of both of the above. Although it started as open source, it has been turned into a commercial product a long time ago, which is why I’m not providing the link here. It’s still maintained, for better or for worse, but in the latest release-to-be they revamped the UI and for some reason I couldn’t get it to work at all on my setup - it seems to rely on some auto configuration / autodetection gimmickry which simply is not working here. To make matters worse, the new UI is essentially an electron app, which means it has become a lot more bloated. And then there’s also the telemetry thing. I’ve been using the old 1.1 legacy version, holding out hope that input-leap eventually lifts off.

Be sure to hear the 2000’s re-record. It’s one of those rare cases where the re-record blows the original (IMHO, at least)

As I grow old and struggle with the break up of a marriage of ~19 years: Both Sides Now, from Joni Mitchell

It’s a bit long to paste here, so just Google it if you care.

~19 years of marriage ended late last year due to mental health issues + NPD. I’m still trying to get over it, but it’s tough; she just won’t leave me alone.

Yeah, but then we’re not talking about social media anymore, but brand and company names in general.

When you want a brand name to be part of people’s everyday vocabulary, as is the case with social media, it needs to be succint and easily referred to. Hell, sometimes people even turn those names into verbs (tweeeting, facebooking, etc.), how do you do that with Mastodon without compounding the problem? (E: I know about “toots”, but now that’s coming up with unintuitive jargon for the platform - which is fine, but shouldn’t have been necessary in the first place if more thought had been put into the brand)

My point was more about pronunciation, not necessarily a hard count of syllables (which would be just an easier guideline). Your example and “Amazon” are kinda the exceptions that proves the rule. 🙂

Marketing-wise, I believe it’s very hard to make a name for a product/service/platform/app/whatever that has (or sounds like having) more than 2 syllables catch on. I mean, mas-to-don doesn’t quite roll off your tongue like face-book, twit-ter, you-tube, lem-my, etc.

In that sense, I agree with the OP in that “Mastodon” was a poor name choice (and as opposed to him, even if there is an explanation for it), and may well contribute to hurt its adoption by the general public. It’s the kind of name you sometimes see FOSS enthusiasts come up who can write great software but has poor knowledge (or downright disdain) in marketing, product management, and other business aspects.

Chromium-based browsers still trounces Firefox on the Jetstream benchmark. I mean, I realize the Speedometer benchmark is supposed to test real-world scenarios, while Jetstream is more synthetic, but whatever work mozilla did to improve performance I’d expect to scale in other benchmarks too, so I’d expect Firefox to at least be bit closer to Chromium, even if losing a little.