Slashdot Mirror

jargon file

Please read what Raymond actually wrote in The Cathedral and the Bazaar. My criticism applies equally to his more formal definition of Linus's Law, and to his extended argument as a whole.

No-one (sensible) claims that any code review process will find absolutely all bugs. But Raymond's article seems to be arguing that having enough developers and testers on a project will inevitably get you very close.

And yet, we are talking about this in a discussion about a severe bug in one of the most widely used OSS projects on the planet that went undiscovered (or at least unreported and unfixed) for years.

The great thing about MongoDB is you can install two or three servers in different datacenters, and have redundancy out of the box. It's really simple. And you can scale horizontally if you need to without any downtime.

I've never had to use 3rd party solutions to implement horizontal scaling, replication, pooling, clustering, etc. with Postgresql. I have often had to demand changes of 3rd party vendor-lockin-ware, or add a kludge myself to fit a business's needs. RTFM application used to be far more common, but seems to have fallen out of fashion of late as more programmers and DBAs are increasingly discovered not to be hackers. Did you know Postgresql supports NoSQL features via HStore and JSON?

Much experience has shown that it's better to look well before leaping rather than hop on the buzz-wagon then try adding wings on the fly. The problem with one-size-fits-all methodology is that when one designs a system with everyone in mind, one has actually designed it for no one at all. What happens when that "simple" redundancy solution meets a more complex problem space is that you're left with folks who didn't understand the issue in the first place trying to fix the problems they've caused.

It's boring to those that see it but don't understand it.

Negative. It is boring to hackers since we're likely to think a sport is something you do, not something you watch.

How did pop-culture steal my identity?

Many people have bought into the cultural comodificiation of "nerd culture" or "geek culture" -- Which is a largely fabricated phenomena constructed by corporations to sell you a product, just like "hipster culture", "hippie culture", "thug culture", "punk culture", "rave culture", etc, have been appropriated reshaped normailzed and sold to the ignorant masses at a mall near you.

"Geek" and "nerd" wasn't initially desirable, much as "thug" wasn't a prestigious label for minority inner city youths, but it is arguably now desirable to be called "nigga", "thug", "geek" or "nerd" by peers. The rise of "geek" or "nerd" or "thug" or "punk" culture did not happen over night nor without the help of commercial interests. Contrast this with the similarities among hackers which emerged without the media's attention (whereafter their image was wrongly portrayed in the media). The thug, hippie, punk and other counter cultures began organically as well before they were appropriated and perverted by the corporate interests.

Pay attention to the media's portrayals of sympathetic "nerds" and "geeks". Do you remember Urkel? Screech? Revenge of the Nerds? Weird Science? During much of the 80's and 90's the token 'nerd' sidekick and his persecution in media created an artificial Poindexter to be the target of shame, exploited for laughs, and sympathy. This construction of the Poindexter identity and subsequent transformation into cool-ness as a "child geniuses" to sell parents on "intelligence boosting" toys and videos is responsible for what you now call "nerd" or "geek" culture: Doogie Howser MD, Dexter's Lab, Jimmy Neutron, etc. The construction of "nerd/geek culture" is primarily artificial. Now it's "cool" to be a "nerd" or "geek", but those terms are as meaningless now as the term "nigga".

Meanwhile, in reality, much as similarities among hackers appeared organically, commonalities among avid gamers and other passionate introverted hobbyists. Most of these similarities appeared without mimicry, and cross culturally esp. in the case of hackers, thus are not socially constructed by nature. I have a hard time reconciling the identity of "nerd" and "geek" culture as sold in media as representative of the hobbyist subcultures given that the "nerd" and "geek" identities do not match the prevalent traits of the subcultures they are attributed to:

Very few hackers actually fit the National Lampoon Nerd stereotype, though it lingers on at MIT and may have been more common before 1975. At least since the late Seventies backpacks have been more common than briefcases, and the hacker ‘look’ has been more whole-earth than whole-polyester.

The actual introverted hobbyist subcultures that are branded "nerd" or "geek" have nothing to do with the actual "nerd" or "geek" identity. Hackers had more in common with the hippie subculture than "nerd" or "geek". Gamers had more in common with the skater subculture. Science fiction and comic book fans have more in common with the otaku (anime enthusiast) subculture. But comparatively the subcultures are as different from each other as "jocks" are from "kickers", or "preps" are from "goths". Yes, even these once organic identities have been appropriated reshaped and sold. There is a country-western song, "I'm sexier on the Internet"... See? Normalized and easier to digest.

Congratulations. You are not a geek or nerd. Nigger, Nerd, and Geek are derogatory terms, which now have non-deragatory uses thanks to the commodification of culture. Though some are celebrating the mainstream interest and "coming out" of the enthusiast closet, I'd never call myself a "nerd" or "geek" except i

How did pop-culture steal my identity?

Many people have bought into the cultural comodificiation of "nerd culture" or "geek culture" -- Which is a largely fabricated phenomena constructed by corporations to sell you a product, just like "hipster culture", "hippie culture", "thug culture", "punk culture", "rave culture", etc, have been appropriated reshaped normailzed and sold to the ignorant masses at a mall near you.

"Geek" and "nerd" wasn't initially desirable, much as "thug" wasn't a prestigious label for minority inner city youths, but it is arguably now desirable to be called "nigga", "thug", "geek" or "nerd" by peers. The rise of "geek" or "nerd" or "thug" or "punk" culture did not happen over night nor without the help of commercial interests. Contrast this with the similarities among hackers which emerged without the media's attention (whereafter their image was wrongly portrayed in the media). The thug, hippie, punk and other counter cultures began organically as well before they were appropriated and perverted by the corporate interests.

Pay attention to the media's portrayals of sympathetic "nerds" and "geeks". Do you remember Urkel? Screech? Revenge of the Nerds? Weird Science? During much of the 80's and 90's the token 'nerd' sidekick and his persecution in media created an artificial Poindexter to be the target of shame, exploited for laughs, and sympathy. This construction of the Poindexter identity and subsequent transformation into cool-ness as a "child geniuses" to sell parents on "intelligence boosting" toys and videos is responsible for what you now call "nerd" or "geek" culture: Doogie Howser MD, Dexter's Lab, Jimmy Neutron, etc. The construction of "nerd/geek culture" is primarily artificial. Now it's "cool" to be a "nerd" or "geek", but those terms are as meaningless now as the term "nigga".

Meanwhile, in reality, much as similarities among hackers appeared organically, commonalities among avid gamers and other passionate introverted hobbyists. Most of these similarities appeared without mimicry, and cross culturally esp. in the case of hackers, thus are not socially constructed by nature. I have a hard time reconciling the identity of "nerd" and "geek" culture as sold in media as representative of the hobbyist subcultures given that the "nerd" and "geek" identities do not match the prevalent traits of the subcultures they are attributed to:

Very few hackers actually fit the National Lampoon Nerd stereotype, though it lingers on at MIT and may have been more common before 1975. At least since the late Seventies backpacks have been more common than briefcases, and the hacker ‘look’ has been more whole-earth than whole-polyester.

The actual introverted hobbyist subcultures that are branded "nerd" or "geek" have nothing to do with the actual "nerd" or "geek" identity. Hackers had more in common with the hippie subculture than "nerd" or "geek". Gamers had more in common with the skater subculture. Science fiction and comic book fans have more in common with the otaku (anime enthusiast) subculture. But comparatively the subcultures are as different from each other as "jocks" are from "kickers", or "preps" are from "goths". Yes, even these once organic identities have been appropriated reshaped and sold. There is a country-western song, "I'm sexier on the Internet"... See? Normalized and easier to digest.

Congratulations. You are not a geek or nerd. Nigger, Nerd, and Geek are derogatory terms, which now have non-deragatory uses thanks to the commodification of culture. Though some are celebrating the mainstream interest and "coming out" of the enthusiast closet, I'd never call myself a "nerd" or "geek" except i

and let them know that this is a bit of a black eye against Linux.

Or, you could recognize TFA as the hit-piece it is: Points to the Bug, knows what a bug tracker is, doesn't use the bug tracker to fix the issue: Open a new duplicate bug to get it re-triaged and noticed by more than just the bug assignee. Escalate the issue to other devs. It's not like the devs are saying: NO WE DO NOT GIVE A FLYING FUCK ABOUT DISABLED PEOPLE GO USE MICROSOFT OR APPLE, ANYTHING BUT A FREE AND OPEN SOURCE OPERATING SYSTEM.

This is a tempest in a teapot with sizable negative PR spin. I do not negotiate with terrorists. I do not speak for everyone, but to the users who jump to shaming tactics instead of resolution options: Fuck you, I don't give a flying fuck about your persecution complex. I would rather not deal with such disgusting shit-stirrers.

For future reference, Submitter, if you're reading this: How to ask a question the smart way. -- Everything here also pertains to bugs or questions like "Why isn't this fixed yet?". The answer? You reap what you sew.

Welcome to Slashdot. You'll be needing a copy of our language reference.

...this line:

"This is not a joke, it's true!"

...in the OP makes my bogometer go to eleven.

Email is just the same as FB, without inviting FB to be the middle-man

And that's the problem. Internet mail became less useful to people when spammers learned how to defeat Bayesian filters. Facebook has the resources to filter spam centrally and apply an effective death penalty to repeat offenders because making and verifying a new Facebook account means getting a new cell phone number.

Noooooo, that would give a completely different meaning to http://www.catb.org/jargon/htm..., poor ESR would have to rewrite the jargon file!

Seriously, why do OSs have to grow enough to nix the advances in hardware, both in size and speed?

Gates' Law

It permeates everything you write: the moral assuredness that You Are Right. I'm all in favor of positing that a position someone takes is the right one -- that's human nature. But your whole "I speak for the hackers" tone, wherein you seem to feel the need to put your views forward as representing others', puzzles me. I give, as a case-in-point, your "Sex Tips for Geeks" as exhibit A, but, really, most any of your writings -- most definitely including your handling of The Jargon File, as well as your stance on homosexuality -- qualify. Care to comment?

It permeates everything you write: the moral assuredness that You Are Right. I'm all in favor of positing that a position someone takes is the right one -- that's human nature. But your whole "I speak for the hackers" tone, wherein you seem to feel the need to put your views forward as representing others', puzzles me. I give, as a case-in-point, your "Sex Tips for Geeks" as exhibit A, but, really, most any of your writings -- most definitely including your handling of The Jargon File, as well as your stance on homosexuality -- qualify. Care to comment?

We can go on like this for days, by the way.

• Do you still think anyone who opposed the Second Iraq War is an "Idiotarian"?
• Do you still think the scientific consensus on global climate change is a conspiracy?
• Are you still a scientific racist/"race realist"?
• Do you still believe that the 2010 Haitian Earthquake was caused by a Voodoo curse?

In all seriousness, why is this guy still a thing in the Open Source movement? He wrote a few books in the 90s, very good ones, but he's been irrelevant for years and he's a nut. He has nothing to offer.

My post has a typo. That should be http://www.catb.org/jargon/

Catb is Eric S. Raymond's page. If you're not familiar with ESR yet, he's pretty awesome. I highly recommend two of his essays, "How to Ask Questions the Smart Way" and "the Cathedral and the Bazaar".

Thanks for the sharing the link, will have a good read :)

My post has a typo. That should be http://www.catb.org/jargon/

Catb is Eric S. Raymond's page. If you're not familiar with ESR yet, he's pretty awesome. I highly recommend two of his essays, "How to Ask Questions the Smart Way" and "the Cathedral and the Bazaar".

That's “non-open open source”, with two opens.

In other words, it's the Cathedral model.

The link is to Eric Raymond's "The Luxury of Ignorance: A CUPS Horror Story". It's just what I I point people to when they deal with Windows 8, the new Ubuntu interface, Gnome 3, and the new Fedora installer. Its follow up article, "The Luxury of Ignorance: Part Deux" is at:

          http://www.catb.org/esr/writin...

The followup shows that the authors of CUPS, much like Mark Shuttleworth in his first responses to the nearly universal dislike for the new Ubuntu interface, showed the same response as CUPS authors made to Eric's complaints. I'm also afraid that the built-in CUPS configuration tool as not improved in any appreciable way since Eric's original essay. Fortunately, many OS developers have written their own and far superior wrappers for configuring CUPS. But such technically sophisticated but incomplete and ignorant of basic workflow tools still abound. Cleaning up after the chaos they leave when they overwrite hand-edited system configurations and disable critical features actually pays a considerable amount of my wages.

http://www.catb.org/~esr/writi...

Assembly language was originally considered automatic programming.

I can't believe you made this point without linking to the legendary story of Mel. Here is a story where simply getting the punchline requires an order of magnitude more understanding than the poster manifests. Tell me how to use an integer overflow to bound a loop in LabView, and I'll believe that graphical programming is the wave of the future.

Thanks for the reasonable response.

Some functionality hasn't made it to the beta yet, yes. That's a totally valid objection, and we're working to make it feature complete. My personal preference is to never lose functionality -- but at the same time, I'm well aware of the development conventions that say at some point, you need to ship. It's really tough deciding which features don't make the initial launch.

something functionally identical to USENET/NNTP except architected with anti-spam provisions and the fact that if a site gets known for uncontrolled spamming, other sites just won't forward that site's stuff.

So... USENET/NNTP? It could do that stuff: the failure wasn't technical, it was the human element. Admins tended to be notably reluctant to employ the UDP, for some reason

Xerox Star with an icon for floppy disk.

Then one day a programmer notices the dependence on the uninitialized value, which would clearly produce a severe failure if fed the correct inputs, and he thinks "surely this hasn't been running for thirty years deployed on hundreds of thousands of nodes, and never triggered a fatal anomaly" and yet there it is.

And then it breaks simultaneously in the whole world.

"Simply folks who REALIZE they lend a helping hand when they send you a friendly "RTFM" or multiple links instead of simply helping out even is they could help out and solve the problem in a few sentences. "

FTFY. As an added bonus in this post I am going to help you in a way that nobody has (apparently) ever helped you before. I mean this with 100% sincerity. Before you ever stop to think if you might be more qualified than those of us with more than 30 years experience, Read This.

If you can show me a case where the aforelinked content was clearly understood, and the advice followed, where the person didn't provide the kind of help you want then we can talk. Right now, I guarantee you are grousing about them, when it is you that is woefully in err, and you and your "brethren" still just don't get it..

IMHO, a computer primarily designed for gaming is a console.

So is a Wintendo a "console". Another definition of a "console" is a computer whose case and UI are designed for use with a TV as its display.

Though you might want to draw a line so that it's a console when the manufacturer spends extra effort to limit its computational abilities in order to make it cheaper. Which, IMHO, does not compute.

To me, a "personal computer" is a piece of computing hardware where the person who owns it controls what computing it performs. For example, a device running SteamOS (or other X11/Linux distributions), Windows, OS X, or Android is a personal computer. A device running operating system whose publisher has veto power over apps, such as Windows RT, Windows Phone, Apple iOS, Nintendo iOS (Wii, Wii U), Sony GameOS (PS3), Sony Orbis OS (PS4), is an "appliance".

I believe this is for the Visual Basic 6 or less, not for "Visual Fred" which has the same name but mostly unrelated syntax and semantics. See: http://catb.org/jargon/html/V/Visual-Fred.html I think you have to take those measures with large grains of salt, but it's certainly true that languages affect productivity.

Graphics libraries and their APIs are Here Today, Gone Tomorrow. The hot thing today will most likely be superseded and irrelevant in 10-15 years time.

Glass-TTY interfaces, like the implementations of stdin and stdout in C++ compilers targeting PCs when not redirected to a file or pipe, have for the most part been superseded by GUIs. At least Cairo would provide a starting point toward a bare-minimum image manipulation and GUI component that a C++ program can expect, much as Tkinter does for Python.

Who asks?

http://catb.org/~esr/writings/unix-koans/

I happen to have mod points today, and so could engage in a losing "Insightful/Funny" vs "Troll/Offtopic" mod war, but instead I'll comment that the people knee-jerk modding this down are *entirely* missing the point. Granted, "gelfing"'s 4-digit UID lends context that normally isn't available, but it's blazingly clear that "Nigger Hitler Fuck" is a bit of performance art which is both spot-on-topic and PERFECTLY cromulent to the discussion at hand.

I'm reminded of Tom Duff's quote about Duff's Device as regards the fall-through behavior of case statements in C: "This code forms some sort of argument in that debate, but I'm not sure whether it's for or against."

One of ESR's Unix koans makes the point wonderfully, I think.

From the jargon file:

killer app

The application that actually makes a sustaining market for a promising but under-utilized technology. First used in the mid-1980s to describe Lotus 1-2-3 once it became evident that demand for that product had been the major driver of the early business market for IBM PCs. The term was then retrospectively applied to VisiCalc, which had played a similar role in the success of the Apple II. After 1994 it became commonplace to describe the World Wide Web as the Internet's killer app. One of the standard questions asked about each new personal-computer technology as it emerges has become âoewhat's the killer app?â

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/K/killer-app.html

Show me REAL operating system!

See here.

According to the Jargon File, IBM tested lead as a method for shielding chips from cosmic rays, and found it to be ineffective.

I find it interesting that IBM's result conflicts with this DoE conclusion; however, I think it's consistent with lead being a . Of course, you said:

Does it work? Who cares. If people will pay £150 for a wooden volume knob on their audio system, someone is going to pay whatever you ask for a lump-o-lead that may or may not improve the reliability of equipment below.

so I guess, in the spirit of P.T. Barnum, carry on.

According to the Jargon File, IBM tested lead as a method for shielding chips from cosmic rays, and found it to be ineffective.

I find it interesting that IBM's result conflicts with this DoE conclusion; however, I think it's consistent with lead being a . Of course, you said:

Does it work? Who cares. If people will pay £150 for a wooden volume knob on their audio system, someone is going to pay whatever you ask for a lump-o-lead that may or may not improve the reliability of equipment below.

so I guess, in the spirit of P.T. Barnum, carry on.

..and there turned out be lots of communists and communist sympathizers in that group. See: http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/sf-history.html "Not until the late 1970s did any the participants admit that many of the key Futurians had histories as ideological Communists or fellow travellers, and that fact remained relatively unknown in the field well into the 1990s. As with later revolts against the Campbellian tradition, part of the motivation was a desire to escape the "conservative" politics that went with that tradition. While the Futurians' work was well understood at the time to be a poke at the consumer capitalism and smugness of the postwar years, only in retrospect is it clear how much they owed to the Frankfurt school of Marxist critical theory."

No, it says "More Magic".

Would you like citations? Be careful what you wish for, because you just might get it. How about no browser acceleration for Linux (but yes to Windows) because X is too fucking buggy? Not good enough? How about the head of OSNews having Ubuntu shit itself because..gasp..he tried to do TWO things at once! Still not famous enough? How about one of the fathers of the FOSS movement having to spend hours on what takes seconds in Windows?

At the end of the day if EVERY SINGLE RETAILER ON THE PLANET avoids your product like an STD even though it would allegedly save them piles of money? Then the problem isn't a conspiracy, its the simple fact that YOUR PRODUCT SUCKS. Want more links? How about over 200 current show stopping bugs with all major hardware from realtek to Nvidia? And I've found the "much vaunted" hardware "support" ends up being a bunch of bullshit and half baked crap so yet again point for Windows.

At the end of the day there is a REALLY easy way to prove this one way or the other, put your money where your mouth is and take the Hairyfeet challenge and post the video of you taking the challenge to YouTube. But of course you won't because you'd find out the truth, that even with only having HALF the Windows support cycle Linux FAILS. Linux...good for servers and embedded, deep fried ass on the desktop.

Yup.

It's the wheel of reincarnation:

...a well-known effect whereby function in a computing system family is migrated out to special-purpose peripheral hardware for speed, then the peripheral evolves toward more computing power as it does its job, then somebody notices that it is inefficient to support two asymmetrical processors in the architecture and folds the function back into the main CPU, at which point the cycle begins again.

Anyone who's worked for a company that uses the Mongolian Hoarde technique of software development can tell you that "not enough Indians" (literally) isn't the problem.

Reinventing the wheel is how you put your collective mark on things. Programmers like writing things, and there is a natural desire to write rather then use, and a warm fuzzy feeling when other people use what you have written.

The whole unix way is to reuse, http://catb.org/esr/writings/unix-koans/ten-thousand.html comes to mind.

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/H/ha-ha-only-serious.html

Extensions, corrupt profile, or buggy google labs addins?

How dare you suggest that a user rushed to claim a bug instead of reducing the environment to the minimal configuration needed to cause the bug (and thereby probably solve the problem themselves)!!

For the most part, Xubuntu is Ubuntu with xubuntu-desktop preinstalled instead of ubuntu-desktop. I tell people I run Xubuntu 12.04 LTS on my laptop, even though what I actually installed was the Ubuntu 9.10 CD with a sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop a month after release of 11.10. But the packages that are running are closest to what one gets from a Xubuntu image, and if I had to reinstall, it would be from a Xubuntu image. Sometimes I have to come up with fresh ways to say "If you want Xubuntu, you know where to find it", sacrificing a small amount of rigor for rhetoric.

I want Empire!
Actually, what I really want is built in support for file version numbers (á la VMS presumably). Is that too much to ask?

I don't want to have to run some experimental file system that hasn't got support in the kernel. I want to run something mainstream, supported, and useful. But with versioning. Maybe EXT5 (if brfs doesn't do it) could have it...

VLC is a fantastic free program, but the attitude some/one of their devs have towards it's users is disheartening for the project as a whole.

A friend recorded a video with her phone, and held it so the video was taken in "portrait mode" vs. "landscape mode". On a PC I was surprised when VLC was unable to correctly orient itself as I was use to my Mac's native application always orienting properly.

I spent the time looking for solutions on their forum and the devs responses is nothing short of arrogant:

Dude, whoever was insistent to reopened an Invalid bug, used an attached word document as their only source for reopening it. I don't know what's in it, nor do I care to. If it was one of those screenshot embeds, a png would have been sufficent, and if their was documentation in could have been in the bug report itself. Doing that on more conservative project would get you ignored or rediculed, since it's a basic courtesy. That dev at least acknowledged that you could submit a fix if you believed it to be that important, instead of tossing your attachment and email to /dev/null.

Nothing personal, but please, read this before submitting another bug.

That's a shame. I don't even do any OS development, but I really like the UNIX way of doing things. Sounds like more developers need to read this

This is what "gives". At least it gives you an idea how to ask a question so that we might possibly be able to answer it. Your question, as written, is a useless waste of everyone's time.

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/C/cow-orker.html

I guess don't click if you really don't want to know.