This article from 2013 might give an indication on why some people choose FOSS even when they can afford the non-FOSS solutions:
The licensing. My God, the licensing. It's not so much the money, as the infernal, mind-bending tax code level complexity involved in making sure all your software is properly licensed: determining what 'level' and 'edition' you are licensed at, who is licensed to use what, which servers are licensed... wait, what? Sorry, I passed out there for a minute when I was attacked by rabid licensing weasels.
I'm not inclined to make grand pronouncements about the future of software, but if anything kills off commercial software, let me tell you, it won't be open source software. They needn't bother. Commercial software will gleefully strangle itself to death on its own licensing terms.
Agreed. This effects everyone, event At a simple user level. We have access to Adobe Creative Cloud at uni. Every time I walk into a new classroom, I need to go through the creative cloud academicc licence dance. Sign in, sign out, sign in again, Singh out again la la la.
Note that the Cloud resolves licensing in that you can’t consume resources you’re not licensed for (although “uncapped cloud” lets you consume resources that you don’t know are paying for).
It's worth mentioning that the initial version of this didn't use WebAssembly. Bellard literally implemented i386/PC emulation in pure JavaScript (ES5) back in 2011.
It did require W3C Typed Arrays to perform decently, but I remember with polyfills it even ran in the contemporary version of Internet Explorer (9 if memory serves correctly?)
A lot of research into the genetic history of the Indian subcontinent seems to be from the late 90s and early 2000s.
Is there a reason it has stopped? We have gotten a lot better at genetic anthropology since then but for some reason there is very little new research on the genetic history of the Indian subcontinent.
I assume people are not in a hurry to get themselves canceled. I’d imagine genetic researchers are particularly sensitive to potential misuse of their research.
Maybe it's time for the rest of the world to do sustainable rare earth metal mining or end up being more geopolitically subjugated by China and Russia.
What exactly does "sustainable rare earth metal mining" mean and look like? Are there any actual examples of it?
Also not all minerals are so evenly spread. For example, it's estimated that half of all cobalt reserves is in little old Democratic Republic of the Congo
Companies that repeatedly fail to detect and solve this type of problem using automated testing and QA are exactly the companies that lack the sophistication to do distributed microservice architecture.
Learn to do proper CI/CD, end-to-end testing, and logging/metrics on your monolith before you decide to transition to microservices.
Disagree. At well-run companies with highly available services that you have certainly heard of I have routinely discovered microservice backends that are just crashing all over the place with no consequences to the user whatsoever. You can never say that about crashy monoliths.
In the coming years we will probably see a lot of complicated microservice architectures be replaced by well-designed and optimized Rust (and modern C++) monoliths that use simple replication to scale horizontally.
Replication and simple never belong in the same sentence. DNS which is one of the simplest replication systems I know of has its own complex failure modes.
CockroachDB is nice to use but every database has complexity you have to deal with.
Here's one I ran into recently: if a range has only 1 of 3 replicas online then it will stop accepting traffic for that range until it has 3 replicas again.
(for the folks at home, "range" is a technical term for 512 bit slice of the data - CRDB replicates at the range level)
So, in some code I wrote, I had account for not only 1) the whole DB being unavailable but also 2) just one replica being unavailable (they're different failure modes that say different things about the health of the system).
It's a good behavior! Good for durability. But I had to do some work to deal with it, spend an hour coming up with a solution, etc. There are databases that work at Twitter scale but no there are no silver bullets among those that do. You need full time engineers to manage the complexity and keep it online, or else it could cost the company shitloads of money - I've seen websites of similar scale where a two-hour outage cost them $20 million.
You're right, no progress has ever been made in software, no new ideas are better than any old ideas, and it's fads all the way down. The only difference between software today and software in 1980 is that today's software is hip and software from 1980 is square.
I understand the frustration with flavor of the week "best practices" and the constant churn of frameworks and ideas, but software engineering as a practice IS moving forward. The difficulty is separating the good ideas (CI/CD, for example) from the trends (TDD all the things all the time) ahead of time.
You don't even need Rust or highly optimised code. Just moving the existing code from "vCPUs" and networked storage to real CPUs with direct-attach NVME storage will be enough for most purposes. (btw you can do that now, just get yourself a beefy server at OVH/Hetzner and play around with it)
As long as I have been browsing the English-language Internet the overall mood among Americans has been that the S&P500 and US dollar hegemony will collapse in a month.
Why is that? I'm European but the US doesn't seem too different from most of Europe in terms of stability and the risk of unrest.
On the internet, you never know who are those "Americans". Keywords such as "US dollar hegemony", "petrodollars" and "Yellowstone volcano explosion" are strong indicators of a certain country's troll operation.
