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"How to read the fucking manual"
"How to ask a question"
and "how to spot bullshit"

Surely you jest! The pinnacle state for any software package is having an email client functionality.

You would probably find that you are unhappy with his review of systemd.

In fact, since systemd has turned into a kind of tribal warfare, where facts don't matter and sides are the only thing, someone who comes with a fact-based argument would likely be rejected by both sides.

If you think you can write a better systemd, then do it. Frankly, it's not that hard, the main thing people want is an easy way to write init scripts. You don't need to include a time-server. The difficulty is gettiing the UI correct (that is, making it easy for system builders to write init scripts).

Follow the Unix philosophy and it has a good chance of being accepted by the larger community.

Or they could open a bank with their money and loan it out at fantastical-yet-perfectly-legel cash-to-debit ratios that make modern banks possible.

At some point all successful programs grow until they read mail.

At some point all successful for-profit-only companies grown until they become banks.

Again where did your $100M estimate come from?

An educated guess. Point remains, there is a gaping omission in TFA... So gaping, so obviously contrary to the journalistic rules and traditions, that it can only be deliberate. A lie by omission.

By your logic when reporting on the Holocaust, journalism must present the Nazis in a favorable light.

You didn't finish reading the page I linked to... But you did trip over Godwin's Law.

Remember to logout.

What competent programmer converts the abstraction of code to ENGLISH to grok it?

Programmers for the Pick operating system, which used a query language called ENGLISH.

Or people trying to debug something over Skype screen sharing, with voice and screencast one way and voice the other way. (This has happened a couple times for me.)

Do you even know what FUD means? It means Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt.

This is one of those things that mean nothing if you simply expand the acronym and look up each word in the dictionary. To make sense of the thing, you need the actual definition:

FUD:: /fuhd/, n.
Defined by Gene Amdahl after he left IBM to found his own company: “FUD is the fear, uncertainty, and doubt that IBM sales people instill in the minds of potential customers who might be considering [Amdahl] products.” The idea, of course, was to persuade them to go with safe IBM gear rather than with competitors' equipment. This implicit coercion was traditionally accomplished by promising that Good Things would happen to people who stuck with IBM, but Dark Shadows loomed over the future of competitors' equipment or software. See IBM. After 1990 the term FUD was associated increasingly frequently with Microsoft, and has become generalized to refer to any kind of disinformation used as a competitive weapon.

(emphasis added)

Now, let's look at what you call 'no FUD':

'need someones permission...redmond' FEAR! Be very afraid!!!

Redmond holds the keys needed to sign competitor's bootloaders lest this gums up the works for offering easy installation to "average users". Redmond has a long track record of uncompetetive practices and a conviction of same to boot.

Note that neither is this disinformation nor am I a competitor, seeing as I offer nothing in that space. So I'm not IBM trying to keep you off of Amdahl products, nor any analogue you might try to concoct instead.

It still stands that putting redmond in such a position of power over competitors is a clear risk, one that you have no excuse for not having seen it coming. Known and convicted violent perp with a gun type risk. It's about as clearly cut-and-dried anticompetetive-in-a-can as you can imagine, short of caught-red-handed proof they're abusing that power, too.

'maybe be MAFIAA' UNCERTAINTY! They could be watching!!!

We know they are. They and their members are the market for a cottage industry of commercial spy-on-consumers companies, for one. No uncertainty there.

'MAYBE is your work really hard...' DOUBT! You'll never be able to run anything bu Windows!!!

So show us how setting up secure boot for yourself is really really easy to do, about as easy as popping some data carrier into the machine and starting an installation of a non-redmond OS.

Put a nice little tutorial video on your anti-FUD-channel on some video sharing site or other while at it, why don't you. Oh right, that's actual work, and you don't do that.

Your entire post is nothing but FUD.

BZZT, thanks for playing. Also for showing that as flimsy as it is, that's really your only argument.

Or a schrödingbug that they triggered but didn't fix.

A design or implementation bug in a program that doesn't manifest until someone reading source or using the program in an unusual way notices that it never should have worked, at which point the program promptly stops working for everybody until fixed.

"Many eyes makes bugs shallow" is a lie.

It never was meant to state that just because everyone can access the source everyone will and magically all bugs get spotted and solved. The "many eyes" are people actively involved in developing and testing. It was meant to characterize Linus' approach to organizing the Linux kernel development: get many people involved, resulting in an increased probability that someone is around who understands a problem and knows how it can be solved.

You can find the original text here.

there were no people of average intelligence allowed anywhere near a computer originally.

Why do you even think that? Do you have some kind of research to demonstrate it? We're talking about the late 50s and 60s btw, not when the only computers in existence were at the Institute for Advanced Study or something. Despite what you may believe, not everyone in those days was like Mel.

Seriously, look at this code and tell me that it was good. I've seen ugly Javascript but never that bad.

We used to do that ON PURPOSE. It's wasn't mechanical failure, it was an undocumented feature. http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargo...

Either you accept that you don't know what you are doing and educate yourself, or you keep claiming you do know what you are doing and blaming git for your ignorance. I don't really care which one you choose. Also, you need to read this. Off you go now.

http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/s...

"We've found by experience that people who are careless and sloppy writers are usually also careless and sloppy at thinking and coding (often enough to bet on, anyway). Answering questions for careless and sloppy thinkers is not rewarding; we'd rather spend our time elsewhere."

"We've found by experience that people who are careless and sloppy writers are usually also careless and sloppy at thinking and coding (often enough to bet on, anyway). "

http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/s...

He does indeed regard himself as a hacker. And, RobotRunAmok, before you say he believes "hacker" means simply "programmer", I suggest you consult his own writing on the subject: Start with How To Become a Hacker, especially the Section "What Is a Hacker?".

He definitely does not believe information wants to be free. That's a Stallmanism.

And, as it happens, he does recognize Hendrix as groundbreaking, but does not agree with the common assessment that he's the greatest guitarist ever. He's more likely to argue that Joe Satrianni qualifies. ("But don't let [Satrianni] sing!")

And, as it happens, he does recognize Hendrix as groundbreaking, but does not agree with the common assessment that he's the greatest guitarist ever. He's more likely to argue that Joe Satrianni qualifies. ("But don't let [Satrianni] sing!")

And he's wrong. Hendrix made real music, had real talent. Satriani plays mindless wank. Being technically proficient at your instrument doesn't mean you're actually talented. Satriani is undeniably very technically gifted but, unfortunately, has no fucking clue about music.At all.

And the greatest guitarist of all time, anyway, is Rory Gallagher.

He does indeed regard himself as a hacker. And, RobotRunAmok, before you say he believes "hacker" means simply "programmer", I suggest you consult his own writing on the subject: Start with How To Become a Hacker, especially the Section "What Is a Hacker?".

He definitely does not believe information wants to be free. That's a Stallmanism.

And, as it happens, he does recognize Hendrix as groundbreaking, but does not agree with the common assessment that he's the greatest guitarist ever. He's more likely to argue that Joe Satrianni qualifies. ("But don't let [Satrianni] sing!")

Then I am in good company, for I too am an asshole. Just not a "special kind of asshole".

Normally, I cite ESR, not RMS at the start of a project--this is a pretty effective way to demonstrate to the rest of the team the particular sort of asshole they're going to be dealing with.

When people are forced to put their desires in text form, they will subconsciously organize it coherently and completely before sending it off to you.

Some will. Most won't.

If they did, ESR wouldn't have had to write this: http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/s...

Unexpected encounters with dirty code will make it very difficult to make a sane prediction.

Dirty code is defined as ' overly complex or highly coupled.' As a programer you are expected to deliver X number of features by Y date. Unless one of those features is 'simple and loosely coupled code' what does that have to do with predicting anything? For performance you don't predict. Experiments are the only thing you have that work: test and change and re-test and un-change and re-test, endlessly. Anything else is voodoo programming, not to insult the pracitioners of Santaria, Vodou or Hoodoo.

How about predicting the schedule? I recall that Steve McConnell once joked that to get better at estimating we need to get better at estimating. (This may have been someone else.) Greg Wilson showed we can do this in programming, and Computer Science in general. We only have to do scientific experimentation with various methods. We throw away what doesn't work (instead of writing pulpy business books to bilk people out of money.) But you'll still have to run a lot of tests to do that, too.

It is not uncommon to see "quick" refactorings eventually taking several months to complete. In these instances, the damage to the credibility and political capital of the responsible team will range from severe to terminal. If only we had a tool to help us identify and measure this risk.

It is my opinion that any refactoring that cannot be done by an automatic program isn't refactoring. The original definition of refactoring is just 'factoring' or re-organizing the code. It is not a re-writing as in an 'several months' effort.

Misuse of a sexy, trendy name from the 90s does not change this. All re-writing suffers the risk of second-system syndrome and not in the throw-one-away sense of prototyping. Do you have a button to press in your IDE to make the change? Do you have in mind a short sed statement, simple awk program, EMACS macros or a on-hand shell scriptlet to do the transformation? If not then you cannot get away from re-thinking the problem. This will require re-design of the solution and re-implementation of the feature. Each of these carries time risk at least as high as the original work.

What if the problem is overly complex or highly coupled? The code may merely be an expression of this. In this case only a paradigm or perspective change by the customer, developer or user can untangle the problem. The computer cannot help you do anything but automate making a mess if the problem is a mess. Changing perspective is often an unbound-in-time problem for human beings. Good luck with estimating completion dates for that.

In fact, we have many ways of measuring and controlling the degree and depth of coupling and complexity of our code. Software metrics can be used to count the occurrences of specific features in our code. The values of these counts do correlate with code quality.

In fact, Greg Wilson showed in his presentation that almost every metric on the market when analyzed showed no better and usually equal predictive power as simple counts of Lines of Code.

The situation in programming is almost as if more code equals more bugs while less code equals less bugs.

This seems obvious and

Anyone else thought about The Jargon File?
It is not that at all.

Nowadays, some people install up to seven instant messengers to be able to keep up with various circles of people. How do you see this situation being resolved?

I see them dropping some of those circles of people or more likely those people will over time converge to towards one platform. Also remember Zawinski's Law.

And yet, here you are, kid, responding to an idiotic AC post. As we used to say back in my day: YHBT. YHL. HAND.

Nope. Kluge is the right spelling, and the right pronunciation. The Jaron File speaks thusly:

Physician, heal thyself.

Is that a new word or are we re-spelling the long-established word "kludge"?

Nope. Kluge is the right spelling, and the right pronunciation. The Jaron File speaks thusly:

Nowadays this term is often encountered in the variant spelling 'kludge'. Reports from old farts are consistent that 'kluge' was the original spelling, reported around computers as far back as the mid-1950s and, at that time, used exclusively of hardware kluges. In 1947, the New York Folklore Quarterly reported a classic shaggy-dog story 'Murgatroyd the Kluge Maker' then current in the Armed Forces, in which a 'kluge' was a complex and puzzling artifact with a trivial function. Other sources report that 'kluge' was common Navy slang in the WWII era for any piece of electronics that worked well on shore but consistently failed at sea.
. . .
TMRC and the MIT hacker culture of the early '60s seems to have developed in a milieu that remembered and still used some WWII military slang (see also foobar). It seems likely that 'kluge' came to MIT via alumni of the many military electronics projects that had been located in Cambridge (many in MIT's venerable Building 20, in which TMRC is also located) during the war.

The variant 'kludge' was apparently popularized by the Datamation article mentioned under kludge; it was titled How to Design a Kludge (February 1962, pp. 30, 31). This spelling was probably imported from Great Britain, where kludge has an independent history (though this fact was largely unknown to hackers on either side of the Atlantic before a mid-1993 debate in the Usenet group alt.folklore.computers over the First and Second Edition versions of this entry; everybody used to think kludge was just a mutation of kluge). It now appears that the British, having forgotten the etymology of their own 'kludge' when 'kluge' crossed the Atlantic, repaid the U.S. by lobbing the 'kludge' orthography in the other direction and confusing their American cousins' spelling!

Or, as some people spell the word, a kludge.

Also known as literate people.

So, some random site decided to grab the URL of "oxford dictionaries", I assume to mislead people into thinking that this is the Oxford English Dictionary

Don't slashdotters know about the Jargon File anymore? (here or here or here.) It's sad how classic hacker history is so quickly forgotten.

http://www.catb.org/jargon/htm... : kludge

  1. /kluhj/ n. Incorrect (though regrettably common) spelling of kluge (US). These two words have been confused in American usage since the early 1960s, and widely confounded in Great Britain since the end of World War II.

In English, the soft "g" is pronounced as if it has a "d" in front of it. Kluge rhymes with huge. Kludge, on the other hand, would rhyme with sludge or judge.

Or, as some people spell the word, a kludge.

Also known as literate people.

So, some random site decided to grab the URL of "oxford dictionaries", I assume to mislead people into thinking that this is the Oxford English Dictionary

Don't slashdotters know about the Jargon File anymore? (here or here or here.) It's sad how classic hacker history is so quickly forgotten.

http://www.catb.org/jargon/htm... : kludge

  1. /kluhj/ n. Incorrect (though regrettably common) spelling of kluge (US). These two words have been confused in American usage since the early 1960s, and widely confounded in Great Britain since the end of World War II.

In English, the soft "g" is pronounced as if it has a "d" in front of it. Kluge rhymes with huge. Kludge, on the other hand, would rhyme with sludge or judge.

Or, as some people spell the word, a kludge.

Also known as literate people.

So, some random site decided to grab the URL of "oxford dictionaries", I assume to mislead people into thinking that this is the Oxford English Dictionary

Don't slashdotters know about the Jargon File anymore? (here or here or here.) It's sad how classic hacker history is so quickly forgotten.

http://www.catb.org/jargon/htm... : kludge

  1. /kluhj/ n. Incorrect (though regrettably common) spelling of kluge (US). These two words have been confused in American usage since the early 1960s, and widely confounded in Great Britain since the end of World War II.

In English, the soft "g" is pronounced as if it has a "d" in front of it. Kluge rhymes with huge. Kludge, on the other hand, would rhyme with sludge or judge.

People who do not ask correctly can be pointed to here http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/...
Often it is that they have no idea WHAT to ask. That can be solved by the above. It will show people who are willing to answer that the person asking has put some time and effort into it. Even saying "I looked for 'ABC + DEF' and found nothing" will show that it is not just somebody that is just somebody who wants the easy way out.

On part of the people who reply, I believe it is due to a lack of people who are active on forums. It is the same small group who replies and they will have seen all the standard questions 50 times at least and are tired of it.
Also what happens with me is that if I get an answer, I have no incentive to return to the forum, so I don't. That means that I won't give any answers, even if I would have them.

With Usenet I would have subscribed to the Newsgroup and I would have to unsubscribe from the group. Most likely I will stay subscribed for at least a day and read a bit. I might also read other things that come in. And perhaps I will then contribute to the general knowledge.
Not so with forums that I need to open and then try to follow what went on. I have tried, but it is just too messy to try to follow websites when comparing to Usenet.

And concerning the 'works for me' crowd. It becomes even harder when you have three parties involved. I had an issue with displaying Windowmaker correctly with the NVidea drover and running X. Each of them said it was not them and to ask the next guy.

Similar frustrations happened when I did bug reporting. Either no follow up or "It works here, please give more details." When you gave details, the answer was "It works here, try the latest version" Next a silence and "Please try the newest version, but install 25GB of extra software that will break your machine. And if you don't want to, there clearly is unwillingness on your side." So, yeah, I am not doing that anymore.

I'm struggling a bit with the comment that "1GB is in fact completely unacceptable."

At the risk of i) showing my age and/or ii) getting laughed off the page... I started my career in technology being paid to write software for the 1980s era BBC Micro, a computer that shipped with 32Kb of RAM, of which only 27Kb was usable in the best possible scenarios, and which disappeared rapidly if you wanted anything as high-spec as a graphical display mode...

But behind the ridicule I expect the above comment to attract, I think there lies an important point. Most of us today experience an entire technology stack that has been developed in accordance with some of the rules personified by Eric Raymond in The Art of Unix Programming, specifically things like, "Rule of Economy: Programmer time is expensive; conserve it in preference to machine time". Or "Rule of Generation: Avoid hand-hacking; write programs to write programs when you can"

As a result of this, the technology we use gradually loses sight of the purpose for which it was created. I use a word processor because it is a quick and simple way to allow me to edit a document, layering my thoughts, editing content until I am happy with it, without having to re-type it from scratch each time I want to make a change. There is/was an extremely capable word processing application called Wordwise [which shipped on a ROM chip] for the BBC Microcomputer and which took no RAM [because its code executed in ROM] and which allowed me to edit and maintain documents. Sure, Wordwise doesn't have the features of Microsoft's Word 2016, or LibreOffice Writer 5.0.3.2 [both of which I use], but it gave me word processing with a fraction of the resources demanded today.

I think that we sometimes lose sight of the absolutely insane improvements in system performance over the last 20-30 years - and the complete lack of progress that we see at the human interface. My suspicion - going back to the works of Eric Raymond - are that our developers are writing code that is increasingly inefficient, that the environments that run that code are increasingly wasted [do I really need an animated "ribbon" in my Word Processor - i.e. something that actually slows the software down? No.].

Today we find ourselves arguing that a computer with more than thirty-two thousand times the capacity offered by that fully-functional 1980s BBC micro is "completely unacceptable."

Let's just pause for a moment and consider whether today's 1Gb system is north of 30,000 times faster, better, or cheaper than that 1980s system. Today's machine will surely have many improvements over such early-era systems, but will still fall far short of the orders-of-magnitude improvements that simplistic comparative analysis would suggest. Why is that? Because we have become lazy and inefficient, and so has our technology.

In other words, "If you can't do it in 1Gb of RAM, you are doing it wrong."

Just avoid the python groups, and you'll avoid the spots where most of these sorts of people hang out.

In a more serious vein, I haven't seen this happening excessively. I've spent a good deal of time on a large number of forums and irc channels, and by and large, this doesn't seem to be happening frequently in the way you describe. I'm not saying that you haven't experienced this, it's just that in the last 20 years, there haven't been a lot of know-nothing folks just spamming "you suck noob" to any given question.

I can guess why; in any technical discussion it quickly becomes apparent who does and does not know what they're talking about. In fact, many quickly devolve into a special-case-knowledge comparison contest. The unhelpful person is ignored or derided by the masses as a whole. They quickly leave. That's why they're just not around.

That being said, what I have seen is people asking other people to do their work for them, including but not limited to: easily googleable questions, questions specified explicitly by documentation, questions that require more information to answer than is given, questions that could easily be answered by trying it out in a test, and so on. 95% of the time, these folks are inexperienced in technical forums as a whole, and don't understand that they're being lazy and trying to shift work they could easily do onto others because of it.

This is irritating, especially in channels of 300+ people with new folks jumping in and asking a single question and popping out, never to contribute, once every 2-3 minutes. Especially when many of them appear to be homework.

The best option for these folks is to ask them to read http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/... , especially the whole of http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/... , before asking another question.

Just avoid the python groups, and you'll avoid the spots where most of these sorts of people hang out.

In a more serious vein, I haven't seen this happening excessively. I've spent a good deal of time on a large number of forums and irc channels, and by and large, this doesn't seem to be happening frequently in the way you describe. I'm not saying that you haven't experienced this, it's just that in the last 20 years, there haven't been a lot of know-nothing folks just spamming "you suck noob" to any given question.

I can guess why; in any technical discussion it quickly becomes apparent who does and does not know what they're talking about. In fact, many quickly devolve into a special-case-knowledge comparison contest. The unhelpful person is ignored or derided by the masses as a whole. They quickly leave. That's why they're just not around.

That being said, what I have seen is people asking other people to do their work for them, including but not limited to: easily googleable questions, questions specified explicitly by documentation, questions that require more information to answer than is given, questions that could easily be answered by trying it out in a test, and so on. 95% of the time, these folks are inexperienced in technical forums as a whole, and don't understand that they're being lazy and trying to shift work they could easily do onto others because of it.

This is irritating, especially in channels of 300+ people with new folks jumping in and asking a single question and popping out, never to contribute, once every 2-3 minutes. Especially when many of them appear to be homework.

The best option for these folks is to ask them to read http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/... , especially the whole of http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/... , before asking another question.

Eric Raymond did a pretty good essay about this at http://www.catb.org/~esr/writi..., back in 2003. It was about the "CUPS" printing software management interface.

Too much of the focus on many interfaces are on what the developer wishes people would use it for, rather than what they actually need to do. I hold up the AWS console of today as an example of *just* that sort of stupidity.

BUT WHAT ABOUT SOLARIS

It was dead the moment Oracle ate Sun -- it wasn't even their primary target, merely collateral damage in their plan to kill MySQL.

Unrelated: you really should check your keyboard, either your Caps Lock or Shift is stuck. If you can't fix that immediately, try stty iuclc although this helps on terminals only (although elinks is an option). If you did that intentionally, please at least use small caps: apt install tran; echo "But what about Solaris?"|tran smallcaps; that's way less rude. As the Great Runes are dead in England since 11th century, last computer terminals since late 1970s, there's no reason to use them.

complete operating systems from multiple vendors such as HPUX, Solaris, IRIX, etc

Using HPUX and IRIX as an example of the unix way only shows you don't understand what the unix way is. Suggested reading here.
Hint: it's significantly more sophisticated than "each tool does one small thing." For people who think that's the Unix way, they need to read the afore linked to page.

It's the perfect time to re-visit the Halloween Documents from the late 1990s and early 2000s. Yes, much has changed.

Eric Raymond's archive: http://catb.org/esr/halloween/
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents

The Halloween Documents provide an inside look at the internal dialogues within a large company confronted by change. Terms in broad general use today, such as FUD and "embrace, extend, extinguish" , originated here. The Halloween Documents are important historically, but are also well-worth another look today.

It never meant that many eyes make bugs easy to find, it means that having more people involved increases the likelyhood that one of them understands the problem and knows how to fix it. It makes solving bugs easier, not necessarily finding them. From the source:

My original formulation was that every problem ``will be transparent to somebody''. Linus demurred that the person who understands and fixes the problem is not necessarily or even usually the person who first characterizes it. ``Somebody finds the problem,'' he says, ``and somebody else understands it. And I'll go on record as saying that finding it is the bigger challenge.''

Voter ID is one of those common sense things

The great thing about calling something "common sense" is that it can be applied to absolutely anything. It doesn't have to correct, it just has to be a common belief and be able to survive a very shallow logical analysis. And, actually, it doesn't even have to all that common... you can also use it to describe something you'd like to portray as a common belief in the hope that it will become one.

Common sense is neither common, nor sense. We should ignore it and instead focus on reasoned sense, based on solid data. And from that perspective there is absolutely zero evidence that voter ID is necessary... or even useful.

if you're incapable of obtaining identification which most people have (state ID, drivers license, etc.)

Mu.

No one is saying people are incapable of obtaining identification, but there is a large minority of people who don't need identification in their daily lives, and therefore don't have it. Requiring them to obtain it solely for the purpose of voting places a large obstacle in front of them... especially if the government also "consolidates" DMV offices, closing the ones within easy reach of the people who don't have identification, which was also done in NC. Even without that step, it's a great way to discourage people from voting, to add one more (rather large) obstacle. How many people who have ID don't vote because they're too busy to make it to the polling place? Now tell them they have to first spend half of a day sitting in a DMV office several weeks beforehand. Oh, and that's half a day during working hours; so they have to take time off -- and the class in question does not get paid time off, so it's also expensive.

The effect is not only predictable, it's measurable, and has been measured. There are many studies, actually, that article discusses only one of them.

then perhaps you shouldn't be entrusted with a vote.

You should be ashamed of yourself for even thinking that, much less saying it. If you're going to do that, why not limit the vote to male landowners, or have income level requirements, or IQ tests?

The government should represent all of the people it governs, not just the ones you think are "worthy". I'll grant that there are other big problems with our achievement of that ideal, but that's no reason to add more.

> that do one thing and do it well (aka unix).

http://catb.org/esr/writings/u...

Also it's not like it's one blob (like eg. ... you know ... the actual fucking kernel)

That "Halt and catch fire" is only an expression, and not supposed to mean that the phone should literally explode and burn.

The expression has an origin story with a kernel of truth.

Seriously?

"Embrace, extend, extinguish" isn't something that the Linux crowd just made up to slander Gates and Co. It's Microsoft's own internal policy, made public when documents were released during their trial and conviction. They are on record as considering open source to be equivalent to a cancer to be eradicated. They were found to be funneling money into SCO during their attack against Linux and IBM. And let's not forget the halloween documents. None of this is made-up conspiracy theorist nonsense on the part of the OSS community. It's part of the public record which anyone can reach in five minutes of googling:

https://www.justice.gov/sites/...
http://techrights.org/2009/06/...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...
http://archive.is/201207112333...
http://www.catb.org/esr/hallow...

Microsoft is not a good-faith actor, and never has been. I see no reason to trust them, no matter their Github numbers.

Yup. Utter bullshit.

I have an XP machine with 2Gb RAM which is used mainly to run Logic Audio 5.5.1. I did a track last week that had 18 audio files and 12 VSTs. It ran perfectly.

Truth is modern operating systems are bloated pieces of shit with innumerable unwanted, unnecessary services and other crapola that think they can run all the time stealing CPU cycles performing pointless shit that I do not want.

Similarly I also did a great little song using my old Atari ST1040FM. 1Mb of RAM but using CLAB Creator it's rock solid and just works. Saved the finished MIDI data to a 720Kb floppy disk to boot.

Modern technology has become bloated crap. Hipster cretins writing crap using Gbs of shitty "frameworks" which need 4Gb of RAM just to draw a capital letter "A" on the screen (with fancy shading, etc. etc.)

The story of Mel seems more pertinent every day !

Turn in your nerd card. Classic SF Reference. . Or consult the Jargon File

Seriously, if you don't understand something, look it up. . .

Samsung, you are doing it wrong.

Remember, Halt Catch Fire may be single instruction but its actions are supposed to be carried out in the order listed.

But given this is Slashdot..
http://www.catb.org/jargon/htm...

1. n. Originally, a quick job that produces what is needed, but not well.
2. n. An incredibly good, and perhaps very time-consuming, piece of work that produces exactly what is needed.
3. vt. To bear emotionally or physically. âoeI can't hack this heat!â
4. vt. To work on something (typically a program). In an immediate sense: âoeWhat are you doing?â âoeI'm hacking TECO.â In a general (time-extended) sense: âoeWhat do you do around here?â âoeI hack TECO.â More generally, âoeI hack fooâ is roughly equivalent to âoefoo is my major interest (or project)â. âoeI hack solid-state physics.â See Hacking X for Y.
5. vt. To pull a prank on. See sense 2 and hacker (sense 5).
6. vi. To interact with a computer in a playful and exploratory rather than goal-directed way. âoeWhatcha up to?â âoeOh, just hacking.â

Notice there's nothing about legality or authorization. That was all added afterwards by authority figures who didn't like people poking their noses into things they weren't "supposed to be" messing with.

In the olden days of /., 'hack' would have been more about technical skill and an inquisitive attitude, rather than legality or authorization. Even with the later, incorrect usage of hacking to mean cracking, I wouldn't say that "doing stuff without a permission" is synonymous with "hacking".

Since the beginning of the public Internet on Usenet and now following on comment boards worldwide, live the trolls, the online creatures dedicated to stirring up trouble with their versions of online flaming, fact-twisting, and overall being a menace to online society

What rubbish. Here, let us consult the book of knowledge:

Oh holy fucking shit! I tried to paste the first paragraph from The Hacker Dictionary on Trolling. and the dumbfucks running this site have it tripping the lameness filter!

Let me just get around the filter with some 13375p34k.

troll
        1. v.,n. [From the Usenet group alt.folklore.urban] To utter a posting on Usenet designed to attract predictable responses or flames; or, the post itself. This Derives from the phrase “tro11ing for n3wbies” which in 7urn c0m3s from lamestream “tro11ing”, a s7y13 0f f1sh1ng in which one trails bait through a likely spot hoping for a bite. Th3 well-c0n5truc73d tr011 is a p0st that induces lots of n3wb13s and fl4m3rs to m4ke themselves look even more clueless than they already do, while subtly conveying to the more savvy and experienced that it is in fact a deliberate tro11. If you don't fall for the joke, you get to be in on it.

Bunch of stupid net noobs now think a "troll" is an under the bridge dweller, but "trolling" is when you set bait lines for the new fishies to bite on, for the amusement of all. Esp. the noob who learns not to be a lamer and how to avoid getting baited, then later re-reads the hilarious thread.

Trolling is an art form. The Orwellian media is doing now to Tr011s what they did to Hacker. The authoritarian controlled media wants to conflate as much tech culture with criminal behavior as they can. Make no mistake about it, this is a propaganda attack. This is why Zoe Quinn, who was a self admitted helldump addict ( a somethingaweful forum dedicated to doxing and harassing people) is now getting government funds for her Online Harassment Prevention group Crash Override. Labeling more and more people as "criminal harassers" is what TFA is meant to get you to do.

Don't confuse networking with what makes UNIX useful. See http://www.catb.org/esr/writin...

Sending passwords in the clear wasn't unique to UNIX, so it's a bit disingenuous to assert that.

Users doing things in insecure ways is a hallmark of Linux because users/developers started treating the system as a single-user box with annoying legacy multi-user cruft getting in the way.

Systemd is a natural result of treating the UNIX philosophy as a design flaw.

So in summary, Facebook is going to become biased in order to prevent being labeled as biased.

In the days when Sussman was a novice, Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-6.

        "What are you doing?", asked Minsky.
        "I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-tac-toe", Sussman replied.
        "Why is the net wired randomly?", asked Minsky.
        "I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play", Sussman said.

        Minsky then shut his eyes.
        "Why do you close your eyes?" Sussman asked his teacher.
        "So that the room will be empty."
        At that moment, Sussman was enlightened.

Some AI Koans - Hacker Folklore

Software isn't Harry Potter magic spells

Careful. Doth Wizards not wriggle fingers to produce software from thin air? Indeed, this is marked as true even the ancient scrolls of Hackerdom.