didgetmaster

The EXIF data says that the picture was taken with the flash off!

How did they get the Earth to light up when it is obviously dark outside? Is this fake?

Our UI guy (a good friend of mine from college) did a really good job of making our DOS app look like a windows app.

The first version of our disk imaging product (Drive Image) was not so polished because I was the only one working on both the engine code and the UI layer. Once that started selling we'll, they assigned someone to help me with later versions.

Since we had to shift (i.e. copy) blocks of data around in order to dynamically resize partitions that were formatted with FAT, NTFS, or HPFS file systems; we had to know the internal structures of each of them.

It's been a long time, but I seem to remember that there were a few areas that were not documented well by Microsoft and we had to guess what certain fields meant.

Because we often had to move file contents around, some files became more fragmented while others became less fragmented since we tried to be smart about where we moved file blocks.

My biggest takeaway was understanding file system architecture. For some features, I was impressed by what their architects designed. For others, I wondered why on Earth they did it 'that way'. I started keeping a list of things I wanted to be different and eventually incorporated many of them in my new object store design.

http://www.didgets.com

Merci

I joined the startup making PartitionMagic after I saw a prototype. I had just wasted another half day repartitioning my 80MB hard drive so I could dual boot OS/2 while working at Novell.

This problem has been around for decades. An application installer doesn't just copy some files to a few directories. It may put them in hundreds of different places. In addition, it adds entries to the registry or other system files. Even the best uninstallers or cleaners miss something when deleting the app.

This is one of the many issues my side project is designed to address. Imagine if installing every application meant just dropping it on the computer. The software 'package' was just a list of data objects the comprised all the files, config settings, etc. Needed to run the app. All these objects would be copied to the storage drive(s).

Imagine further, that the operating system did not have a central registry. Instead, all configuration was managed via a set of configuration objects, spread all over (preferably in the app folders). The configuration manager was just a program that could find every configuration object and make them appear to the user (and the OS) like they were in a unified file.

If a configuration object was copied anywhere in the system, it looked like its contents were just appended to the configuration store. If you deleted an object, all its settings just disappeared.

Uninstalling an application would mean just deleting all the objects in its package. The files would be gone and any configuration settings with them.

This is just one of the features my 'file system replacement' project is designed to handle.

Thank you and to all the others who remember and liked PartitonMagic. It makes an old programmer feel good to know that something he worked on 30 years ago made a difference.

BTW: I am currently working on a hobby project called Didgets. It is an object store that does a lot of cool file system stuff and relational table manipulation and analysis. It is available for free download at http://www.didgets.com

The install process is to unzip the downloaded file to a directory. The uninstall process is to delete that directory.

I mainly mentioned it that way because once the company (PowerQuest) was bought out by Symantec, the product was mostly abandoned. Unlike Google, most programmers younger than 30 have never heard of it.

I also headed up a disk imaging product for the same company called Drive Image. It wasn't quite as popular, but it was fun to develop as well.

Glad you liked it. I still have fond memories of working on it.

I worked on a disk utility in the 90s called PartitionMagic that was one of the first ones to let you dynamically resize disk partitions.

Maybe Samsung used that when naming their product.

I am old, but I miss the days when the install process was copy . to /<appFolder> and the uninstall process was delete /<appFolder>

This is what scares me the most about AI. You have a handful of really big companies trying to outdo each other as they race to implement it and deploy it as quickly as possible.

To try and justify their outrageous capital spending on data centers; they are incentivised to exaggerate its current capabilities and also what it will be capable of 'soon'.

There is no time to evaluate each step to make sure it is accurate and going in the right direction, before setting it loose on the public.

I have heard that you can speed up your favorite compression algorithm by 1000x, if you are not so concerned about what happens when you try to decompress it.

>At the global level, 2025 also saw a sharp rebound in non-renewable additions, which nearly doubled compared to 2024," IRENA noted. China led that drive, with 100 GW of non-renewable capacity added last year, most of which was coal.

Why is China adding so many new generation plants powered by coal? On this and other forums, I see claims all the time that solar is cheaper than coal. As the world's leading producer of solar panels, you would think that they would utilize it even more if those claims are true.

Is it just the need for power when the sun is not shining? Or is it something else?

How spoiled we have become...

I remember my company buying RAM expansion boards for our PCs back in 1989 so we could run OS/2. The 4MB boards (MB! Not GB.) cost around $2000 at the time.

Like everyone, I love getting tons of RAM or SSD storage on the cheap; but we have a ways to go before we reach the 'unaffordable' level.

I once read about a gas station that rigged their pumps. They discovered that the 'gas police' who came and measured gas to make sure pumps were properly working; always pumped a multiple of 10 gallons to measure.

They rigged the pumps to rack up more charges for the first 5 gallons, and then slow the charges for the next 5 gallons. That way it always read 10 gallons at those intervals, but overcharged you if you got less. Someone pumping 4 gallons (or 14) was charged as if they had pumped 6 (or 16).

They got caught when someone noticed that the gauge ran faster, then slower as you filled up.

In my opinion a 'civil servant' sees their job as serving the American people to the best of their ability even if they don't agree with the outcomes of the latest election.

A member of the 'deep state'; however, is ideologically driven. If their favorite party is in power, they use their job to push their ideology to its limits. If the opposition party won the election; then they view their role as a means to 'resist', 'thwart', or otherwise delay any policies the elected officials try to implement.

Their general view is that their own opinions are superior to those of voters.

I am confused. The article claims that solar is the best, cheapest source of power. It also claims that the Trump administration is undermining it in the US by cutting federal subsidies.

If solar truly is the cheapest, why does it need any help from any government? It would seem to me that it should flourish in any capitalist society where money naturally flows towards the cheapest solution that actually works.

Do people who prompt an LLM for personal advice about relationships or other social interactions; take the advice seriously?

If I were to do that (I don't), I would treat it about as seriously as asking a magic 8 ball.

That is why we have slow, bloated software. The companies that create the software do not have to pay any of the operational costs to run it.

If you have to buy extra RAM or pay unnecessary electrical or cooling expenses because the code is bad; it's not their problem. There is no software equivalent to MPG measurements for cars where efficient engine designs are rewarded at the time of purchase.

I upgraded my desktop last year (motherboard, cpu, RAM) and I felt like I wanted 64GB of DDR5 but figured I might need 128GB in a year or so. Normally, I would have bought the 64GB and waited to get the extra RAM later. Price usually dropped over time.

Boy, am I glad I decided to get the whole 128GB before RAM prices spiked!

I see the next really big task for software as the ability to separate the signal from the noise. Sifting the wheat from the chaff has gone from a 'nice to have' to 'rescue my sanity'.

Maybe agents and AI in general will help with that. Maybe it will just make the problem worse.

This is just one of the many risks you take when your app or service is dependent on some other third party service. Even if it is run by 'the big boys' (in this case Apple), your success is dependent on their good graces.

They can kick you out and make your software the equivalent of bricked hardware; without any means to appeal their decisions.

The article suggests that the event occurred in a different galaxy, but does not indicate which one, or how far away it is from us. Anyone know?

Everyone who thinks that some kind of subscription service will replace ads, needs to take a look at history. Cable TV, satellite TV, etc., might have started ad free, but they soon adopted ads. So you ended up paying for a subscription in addition to high numbers of ads.

I agree. Faster hardware or horizontal scaling on distributed cloud environments can mask the problem; but it certainly doesn't solve the problem of bloated, inefficient software.

While it might not be necessary to spend hours fine-tuning every function; code optimization should be the mindset of every programmer no matter what they are coding.

How many fewer data centers would we need if all that software running in them was more efficient?

https://didgets.substack.com/p/finding-and-fixing-a-billion-...

No guidelines. No privacy statement. No promise to not spam you. No examples until after you give them your personal information.

Pass!

If you are trying to bootstrap your startup, then one of your biggest challenges is trying to find co-founders who can/will put as much skin in the game as you do. Everyone wants you to take all the risks while sharing all the rewards.

Unlike OP, I don't think forks are great. Far too many forks happen when they shouldn't. In this case, it feels like the original project was hijacked just because it lacked a feature this person wanted.

Many forks can confuse the market and fracture adoption. A dozen different projects, each with slightly different features, is harmful in my opinion. A fork should be done as a last resort. With AI, it may become just another knee jerk reaction.

Also, how would they really know if a species is endangered? With millions of species that haven't even been identified, how would they know how common any of them are?

There are thousands of different species of many branches of the taxonomy tree (insects, molds, bacteria, etc.) and like fungi, each have tons of species not even identified.

Scientists estimate that something like 99% of species that ever existed, are extinct. I understand why people get upset when something like elephants hit the endangered list, but should we really care if some obscure species of dung beetle is endangered?