Slashdot Mirror

I don't think that there's any evidence that the linux swapfile performs better - and in any case why would it being unfragmented be an advantage? Memory access is random, and so swapfile access is random, and so why does having it non-contiguous cause an issue? Added to which, SSDs are becoming much more widespread, meaning the fragmentation issue vanishes.

In any case, can you make Linux use a swapfile permanently? One system I look after needs more swap, and I really don't want to repartition the entire drive just to increase the available virtual memory.

dphys-swapfile is available on all distributions that I know of.

Still, swapping from a partition will be faster than swapping from a file. There are simply less layers to traverse, but whether it's a perceptible difference, I just don't know as I've not measured it.

But you're right, SSDs are obviating the need for a contiguous swap file/partition. Swapping is inherently random in nature, which translates to random IO on contiguous or non-contiguous swap.

I have wondered what sort of difference log structured swapping would have? Swapping out would reduce to a contiguous operation as you'd be writing to the end of the log, and swapping in is effectively random IO anyway, so would not be impacted by the fragmentation introduced by the log structured writing. Again, not that much of an issue with SSD, but with HDD, it might be a measurable benefit when trying to free memory.

.net is inferior to javascript

In what way?

One advantage of the .NET Framework is static typing. In a fully dynamic language such as PHP, Python, or JavaScript, you need to put unit tests into your program to make sure the correct types are getting passed in and out of functions. A language with static typing, such as C#, already ensures type safety. So it's like the compiler writes a lot of your unit tests for you.

The .NET Framework used to have the disadvantage of being a non-free platform, which put .NET programs in what FSF calls a "Java trap". But nowadays, a lot of the interesting parts of the .NET Framework are released under a free software license.

Once you get over the syntax, C++ metaprogramming is just like functional programming.

No, the syntax is the entire thing wrong with C++ metaprogramming. It clearly wasn't designed for things like this. To clear up any doubt about the syntax, check out this file. In addition the inscrutable error messages (although those have improved over the past decade). If anyone likes template metaprogramming, I suggest they just use LISP.

That said, this project is really cool. Nice hack mattbierner.

Then I started learning 3d modelling and I build a framework around python and OpenSCAD to aid in the design of pinball playfields: https://github.com/felipesanch... Using that I prepared CAD files for the PARTYLand playfield (the one I actually built was originally manually drilled): https://github.com/felipesanch... One Pinball Fantasies enthusiast in Sweden found my CAd files and actually started building his own playfield replica in Sweden! And he used a CNC milling machine, so his replica is much better than mine (Great Work!): http://cyb.se/pinball-fantasie... I'm astonished, since the game was originally developed in Sweden, then I came up with this project here in Brazil and later it naturally got back to Sweden in the hands of this guy! Happy Hacking, Felipe "Juca" Sanches

Then I started learning 3d modelling and I build a framework around python and OpenSCAD to aid in the design of pinball playfields: https://github.com/felipesanch... Using that I prepared CAD files for the PARTYLand playfield (the one I actually built was originally manually drilled): https://github.com/felipesanch... One Pinball Fantasies enthusiast in Sweden found my CAd files and actually started building his own playfield replica in Sweden! And he used a CNC milling machine, so his replica is much better than mine (Great Work!): http://cyb.se/pinball-fantasie... I'm astonished, since the game was originally developed in Sweden, then I came up with this project here in Brazil and later it naturally got back to Sweden in the hands of this guy! Happy Hacking, Felipe "Juca" Sanches

There seems to be a few other contributors along the way.

https://github.com/MoonchildPr...

wolfbeast (Moonchild) makes up the majority though.

Well there is this:

Detekt - https://resistsurveillance.org...

Scroll to the bottom and you'll see:

"Detekt is released in partnership with Amnesty International"

So maybe, just maybe, this tool could have something to do with it.. I mean, if you really read about it's goals. What a shame it's been neglected since version 1.9.

"Detekt is a free tool that scans your Windows computer for traces of FinFisher and Hacking Team RCS, commercial surveillance spyware that has been identified to be also used to target and monitor human rights defenders and journalists around the world. Read more about our Intentions & Methods[1]."

[1] https://resistsurveillance.org...

"In recent years we have witnessed a huge growth in the adoption and trade in communication surveillance technologies. Such spyware provides the ability to read personal emails, listen-in skype conversations or even remotely turn on a computers camera and microphone without its owner knowing about it.

Some of this software is widely available on the Internet, while some more sophisticated alternatives are made and sold by private companies based in industrialized countries to state law enforcement and intelligence agencies in countries across the world.

There is little to no regulation currently in place to safeguard against these technologies being sold or used by repressive governments or others who are likely to use them for serious human rights violations and abuses.

You can find many reports on the use of spyware against civil society here. You can learn more about the trade in unlawful surveillance equipment by visiting the Coalition Against Unlawful Surveillance Exports website.[2]"

[2] http://www.globalcause.net/

"It has been well documented that governments are using surveillance technology to target human rights defenders, journalists, NGOs, political opponents, religious or ethnic minorities and to conduct countrywide surveillance.

If you suspect you are at risk of surveillance, learn how to use Detekt here[3].

If you are technical, learn more about how Detekt works and how to contribute here[4]."

[3] https://resistsurveillance.org...
[4] https://github.com/botherder/d...

"Please beware that Detekt is a best effort tool. While it may have been effective in previous investigations, it does not provide a conclusive guarantee that your computer is not compromised by the spyware it aims to detect. The tool is provided as is, without warranties or guarantees of any kind."

"IS DETEKT FOR ME?

If you suspect that your work or activities put you at risk of targeted surveillance you may wish to use Detekt to scan your computer for traces of known spyware."

"It is important to underline that if Detekt does not find trace of spyware on a computer, it does not necessarily mean that none is present. Some spyware will likely be updated in response to the release of Detekt in order to avoid detection. In addition, there may be existing versions of spyware, from these or other providers, which are not detected by this tool.

To learn more we recommend you visit EFF's Surveillance Self-Defense[5]."

[5] https://ssd.eff.org/en/module/...

"If you suspect you are at risk of targeted surveillance you should always seek and follow security advice to ensure you protect yourself and others in your digital communications."

"About the organizations behind Detekt

Detekt is released in partnership with Amnesty International, Digitale Gesellschaft, Electronic Frontier Foundation and Privacy International.

This tool has been released publicly in order to provide researchers, human righ

Agreed. Not using an open source license, cause I don't know enough about all the different licenses (yet). But, here is the source for the server side. Doesn't prove all my claims, but does show no ip logging and no PII on the server. I'll have to put the app up too, to prove I'm doing end to end encryption between devices. This is the code I'm running in prod now (minus a couple of server specific redactions). It's quite simple, I think. https://github.com/jgriffith32...

its not much of anything:
https://github.com/awslabs/s2n...
contains #include <openssl/...>

Same here, but in some weird way the '.so' file is there and a header file which has a 'duplicate function' in it named 's2n_shutdown', maybe they wanted to make sure it shuts down.
btw I'm making a .net wrapper at https://github.com/Behrooz-Amo...
only a few hours spent figuring this thing out/coding, any help is appreciated people.

At least if something goes wrong with the stew you know where to look for the problem.

Really?

The last update to jQuery was to fix "a timing bug in iOS8 that causes mobile Safari to incorrectly report a 'length' on objects that don't have one."

Ref: https://github.com/jquery/jque...

You'd have known 'where to look' for that and been able to fix it, right?

Helping developers answer this question is the primary goal of https://choosealicense.com/ which itself is Open Source under the MIT license: https://github.com/github/choo...

I'm not sure if Force Touch enough to convince an Android user like myself to switch, but there are definitely some interesting possibilities for app developers.

Why would it make you want to switch? Android apps have been doing it since at least 2011. Android's touch API communicates sufficient information to implement this if you wish.

But this being Apple, they will give it a fancy name, everyone will think they invented it, and they will pretend like they invented it. Just like Siri, which came out after I'd been doing searches, sending texts, and starting apps by voice on Android for at least a year.

To throw another one out there - lower bitrate, different approach, much cheaper (especially if built yourself - designs are completely open): https://github.com/waywardgeek...

I was surprised to find this show up on the Slashdot front page, and then realized that since the last time we had a Bennett post, I had switched computers, and so my user script to block them was no longer installed. Since I'd already seen it, though, I figured I'd post a link to the script again: https://gist.github.com/anonymous/3235db049b18699c082b#file-gistfile1-txt.

This article isn't as stupid as Bennett's normal tripe; at least he seems to have identified a real issue here, although Slashdot is still allowing him to use their website as his personal blog. One amusing thing, though: he's complaining that United isn't responding to his emails about the hole. I've asked Slashdot repeatedly (through both e-mail and comment threads) to make it possible for us to block Bennett posts, or at least to comment on why they won't. The Slashdot staff have, so far, completely ignored me. They have apparently been too busy adding "share to TwitBook" buttons to the stories.

A container is what used to be called a virtual machine running a single application which is fucking amazing, like a standardized cargo container on a boat from Hanoi to Wyoming.

TFTFY

Mount the drive-storage solution 'normally', and use it as a local git repository.
If you use something like https://github.com/shadowhand/... you can encrypt all files that you store in git, hence on the cloud. There are likely similar solutions for svn, and cross platform solutions.

Their mobile client is open source: https://github.com/SpiderOak/S...

The desktop client is mostly unobfuscated Python bytecode and easily inspected, docstrings, symbol names and all, with a bytecode decompiler. Not good enough, but at least a bit more transparent than most.

https://pcloud.com/ - they have end-user encryption, currently in the desktop versions, working on getting it in the web and mobile versions. The encryption sources are open and available at their github account ( https://github.com/pcloudcom ), and they recently got an audit of the whole software and encryption schema.

(disclaimer - i worked there and helped design it)

Try the open source equivalent of BTSync, Syncthing
https://syncthing.net/
https://github.com/syncthing/s...

https://github.com/coursera-dl...

Its a lot easier when you have whole course material on the hdd and play video clips in mplayer window.

Following the crapware/adware SF bundled with these mirror projects, the adblocker uBlock Origin decided to completely block access to all of sourceforge.net

Here is the commit.

I can still click on "allow once" and "always allow" (or whatever the name of these two button were). Not sure I want to though.

If by bytecode you mean 8-bit instructions for a stack machine, such as Python and the JVM use, then WebAssembly is NOT NOT NOT a bytecode. In fact, it is a concise binary encoding of a program in AST form. The team are working on a polyfill for existing browsers which will translate the AST into Javascript for execution. Future browsers will be able to JIT-compile the WebAssembly in much the same way as they JIT-compile asm.js or its equivalent.

Basically, WebAssembly is a distributed compiler infrastructure for the web, where browsers get to see a pre-parsed top-down view of a program instead of the bottom-up view that the JVM gives. Low-end devices will be able to quickly translate the AST into something that runs relatively slowly; browsers etc on high-end devices will be able to do lots of optimization.

Further reading:
  * https://brendaneich.com/2015/0...
  * https://github.com/WebAssembly...

BTW, the really scarey thing to be learned here is near the top of that FAQ: "pthreads ... are coming to asm.js". Yep. Asm.js will support pthreads. And people will write code that uses pthreads. In your browser.

I still love languages like Scala and Python and I still want Linux for most of my web servers, but the gaps are closing and the game is getting really interesting. If you are ignoring Microsoft, you may get caught by surprise.

The funny part is, MS is no longer trying to pretend that the world ends at its bubble - .NET is nice, but not all people like it, and it's not perfect for everything; and that's okay. So, for example, you can do Python using Microsoft tools and on Microsoft platforms (and yes, it is all open source under sane licenses like AL 2.0). At the same time, a Microsoft employee is one of the core CPython maintainers, and is basically responsible for the official Win32 releases. Expect more of that kind of thing in the future.

(full disclosure: I am a developer on the PTVS team)

I still love languages like Scala and Python and I still want Linux for most of my web servers, but the gaps are closing and the game is getting really interesting. If you are ignoring Microsoft, you may get caught by surprise.

The funny part is, MS is no longer trying to pretend that the world ends at its bubble - .NET is nice, but not all people like it, and it's not perfect for everything; and that's okay. So, for example, you can do Python using Microsoft tools and on Microsoft platforms (and yes, it is all open source under sane licenses like AL 2.0). At the same time, a Microsoft employee is one of the core CPython maintainers, and is basically responsible for the official Win32 releases. Expect more of that kind of thing in the future.

(full disclosure: I am a developer on the PTVS team)

Various ES6 to ES5 transpilers already have existed for quite a long time.

https://babeljs.io/
https://github.com/termi/es6-t...
https://github.com/google/trac...
https://esnext.github.io/es6-m...
https://github.com/matthewp/es...

Various ES6 to ES5 transpilers already have existed for quite a long time.

https://babeljs.io/
https://github.com/termi/es6-t...
https://github.com/google/trac...
https://esnext.github.io/es6-m...
https://github.com/matthewp/es...

Various ES6 to ES5 transpilers already have existed for quite a long time.

https://babeljs.io/
https://github.com/termi/es6-t...
https://github.com/google/trac...
https://esnext.github.io/es6-m...
https://github.com/matthewp/es...

I like many other people are forced to work in JavaScript. It's not too bad a language if you are careful but it would be nice to have some choose when working with webpages.While at first it will be all JS they plan to expand WebAssembly to other languages which could be compiled to the bytecode. Hurrah!

Hey guess what - you're in luck!

If they abandon .NET, you can fork it and maintain it yourself.

They cannot retroactively rescind licensing on something they've already released - they can ONLY close-source "future development."

I can't wait for this!

revamped syntax featuring classes

So they just gave up on the whole prototype system and duct taped class-based OO on top of it? That's actually kind of sad -- It was a special aspect of Javascript that set it apart from other languages, and homogenization is boring. I guess maybe today's "Javascript developers" just couldn't wrap their heads around it.

Here's a rundown of the new features if anyone else hasn't been following ES6 and is curious. A few of note are

scoped and const declaration via let and const,
lazy iterators and generators,
format/heredoc strings,
and varargs ala Lua.

Overall this looks like a good step in bringing Javascript closer to being on par with more modern languages.

More than that. They've rewritten the VB.NET compiler in VB.NET (although some of the core parts of Roslyn used by both the C# and VB.NET compilers are written in C#), open-sourced them and have opened the design and development process to the public.

https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn/

Surespot is most likely toast now. I see two possible attacks from someone who controls the servers:

• Send fake pubkeys (standard MitM attack, really)
• Crack the crypto directly. Surespot uses the secp521r1 Elliptic Curve, which was created by NSA and published by NIST, and may be backdoored.

They do: https://jobs.github.com/

One thing that he was absolutely wrong about: his insistence that commit messages be wrapped to 72 characters. The summary is that he railed against the idea that display tools (like HTML) should automatically wrap text because humans know better how to wrap text.

Why the 72 character limit? So it appropriately works on 1960's display technology.

Oh, and the hilarious thing about this is that he word wrapped his own HTML text in the very Gtihub post, making it display wrong in the web browser, while everyone else's text looks correct at the right width as prescribed by the page's CSS rules.

https://github.com/torvalds/li...

It takes a couple of links and searching through source code to get there. So here's the list of problematic drives, better formatted but still in regular expression format:

/* devices that don't properly handle queued TRIM commands */
Micron_M500*
Crucial_CT*M500*
Micron_M5[15]0*
Crucial_CT*M550*
Crucial_CT*MX100*
Samsung SSD 8*

So, basically, all the ones I thought were the best. The list of whitelisted drives after it only includes those brands, Intel, and ST-something. So other brand may be unknowns.

see ata_blacklist_entry

(reformatted to get past Slashdot's 'junk' filter)

static const struct ata_blacklist_entry ata_device_blacklist [] = {
see ata_blacklist_entry

static const struct ata_blacklist_entry ata_device_blacklist [] = /* Devices with DMA related problems under Linux */
WDC AC11000H, NULL, ATA_HORKAGE_NODMA ,
WDC AC22100H, NULL, ATA_HORKAGE_NODMA ,
WDC AC32500H, NULL, ATA_HORKAGE_NODMA ,
WDC AC33100H, NULL, ATA_HORKAGE_NODMA ,
WDC AC31600H, NULL, ATA_HORKAGE_NODMA ,
WDC AC32100H, 24.09P07, ATA_HORKAGE_NODMA ,
WDC AC23200L, 21.10N21, ATA_HORKAGE_NODMA ,
Compaq CRD-8241B, NULL, ATA_HORKAGE_NODMA ,
CRD-8400B, NULL, ATA_HORKAGE_NODMA ,
CRD-848[02]B, NULL, ATA_HORKAGE_NODMA ,
CRD-84, NULL, ATA_HORKAGE_NODMA ,
SanDisk SDP3B, NULL, ATA_HORKAGE_NODMA ,
SanDisk SDP3B-64, NULL, ATA_HORKAGE_NODMA ,
SANYO CD-ROM CRD, NULL, ATA_HORKAGE_NODMA ,
HITACHI CDR-8, NULL, ATA_HORKAGE_NODMA ,
HITACHI CDR-8[34]35,NULL, ATA_HORKAGE_NODMA ,
Toshiba CD-ROM XM-6202B, NULL, ATA_HORKAGE_NODMA ,
TOSHIBA CD-ROM XM-1702BC, NULL, ATA_HORKAGE_NODMA ,
CD-532E-A, NULL, ATA_HORKAGE_NODMA ,
E-IDE CD-ROM CR-840,NULL, ATA_HORKAGE_NODMA ,
CD-ROM Drive/F5A, NULL, ATA_HORKAGE_NODMA ,
WPI CDD-820, NULL, ATA_HORKAGE_NODMA ,
SAMSUNG CD-ROM SC-148C, NULL, ATA_HORKAGE_NODMA ,
SAMSUNG CD-ROM SC, NULL, ATA_HORKAGE_NODMA ,
ATAPI CD-ROM DRIVE 40X MAXIMUM,NULL,ATA_HORKAGE_NODMA ,
_NEC DV5800A, NULL, ATA_HORKAGE_NODMA ,
SAMSUNG CD-ROM SN-124, N001, ATA_HORKAGE_NODMA ,
Seagate STT20000A, NULL, ATA_HORKAGE_NODMA ,
2GB ATA Flash Disk, ADMA428M, ATA_HORKAGE_NODMA , /* Odd clown on sil3726/4726 PMPs */
Config Disk, NULL, ATA_HORKAGE_DISABLE , /* Weird ATAPI devices */
TORiSAN DVD-ROM DRD-N216, NULL, ATA_HORKAGE_MAX_SEC_128 ,
QUANTUM DAT DAT72-000, NULL, ATA_HORKAGE_ATAPI_MOD16_DMA ,
Slimtype DVD A DS8A8SH, NULL, ATA_HORKAGE_MAX_SEC_LBA48 ,
Slimtype DVD A DS8A9SH, NULL, ATA_HORKAGE_MAX_SEC_LBA48 , /* Devices we expect to fail diagnostics */ /* Devices where NCQ should be avoided */ /* NCQ is slow */
WDC WD740ADFD-00, NULL, ATA_HORKAGE_NONCQ ,
WDC WD740ADFD-00NLR1, NULL, ATA_HORKAGE_NONCQ, , /* http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.ide/14907 */
FUJITSU MHT2060BH, NULL, ATA_HORKAGE_NONCQ , /* NCQ is broken */
Maxtor *, BANC*, ATA_HORKAGE_NONCQ ,
Maxtor 7V300F0, VA111630, ATA_HORKAGE_NONCQ ,
ST380817AS, 3.42, ATA_HORKAGE_NONCQ ,
ST3160023AS, 3.42, ATA_HORKAGE_NONCQ ,
OCZ CORE_SSD, 02.10104, ATA_HORKAGE_NONCQ , /* Seagate NCQ + FLUSH CACHE firmware bug */
ST31500341AS, SD1[5-9], ATA_HORKAGE_NONCQ |
ATA_HORKAGE_FIRMWARE_WARN ,
ST31000333AS, SD1[5-9], ATA_HORKAGE_NONCQ |
ATA_HORKAGE_FIRMWARE_WARN ,
ST3640[36]23AS, SD1[5-9], ATA_HORKAGE_NONCQ |
ATA_HORKAGE_FIRMWARE_WARN ,
ST3320[68]13AS, SD1[5-9], ATA_HORKAGE_NONCQ |
ATA_HORKAGE_FIRMWARE_WARN , /* Seagate Momentus SpinPoint M8 seem to have FPMDA_AA issues */
ST1000LM024 HN-M101MBB, 2AR10001, ATA_HORKAGE_BROKEN_FPDMA_AA ,
ST1000LM024 HN-M101MBB, 2BA30001, ATA_HORKAGE_BROKEN_FPDMA_AA , /* Blacklist entries taken from Silicon Image 3124/3132
Windows driver .inf file - also several Linux problem reports */
HTS541060G9SA00, MB3OC60D, ATA_HORKAGE_NONCQ, ,
HTS541080G9SA00, MB4OC60D, ATA_HORKAGE_NONCQ, ,

There's FiredTV launcher, an alternative home/launcher for the FireTV line that shows sideloaded apps.

For quite some time, Eionrob has written a Skype plugin for purple (thus works in pidgin, adium, etc.)

Currently 2 versions available:

One requires the skype client running and uses the official Skype API to use it.
It still requires Skype, but at least it's being now routed to a half-decent client.
Voice calls work by opening a window from the original skype client.

The other version uses "Skype for Web".
It works thus 100% natively on any installation, without needing the original client.
Voice calls currently not implemented (because actually voice calls in "Skype for Web" aren't done with official web technologies, but using a proprietary binary plugin. But microsoft has mentioned considering upgrading that to WebRTC and such standards at some point of time in the future, so there's still hope)

Not perfect yet, buton the right track.

As probably many others, I've been looking into this exact problem for a while, comparing a lot of available options. Ultimately, I want something to run on Android, iOS, Windows (+ Phone), Linux, and OS X. The very complex core logic should be a write-once affair, while not having a single shared UI is not such a major issue, nor is writing some platform-specific utility classes. I have also come to the conclusion that C++11 for that core is the most viable option.

Some interesting tidbits not mentioned in the summary is that they used DropBox's djinni to generate C++, ObjC and Java bindings; and they used the Flux unidirectional data flow architecture. Both of these things are worth reading about, more so than any thing that is actually mentioned in the summary.

Duck typing is not implicit type conversion - it's structural typing. And there are statically typed languages which use structural typing, even though they're rare. The canonical example is OCaml, which uses structural typing for its object system. For example, suppose you define a function like this:

let foo x = x#y

The # syntax is the same as dot-notation in Simula family, basically. Note that there are no type annotations anywhere. However, this is strongly typed as follows:

val foo : <x : 'a -> 'b; .. > -> 'b

What this says is that we've got a function that takes an object that has a method named "x" that takes a single parameter of unspecified type 'a, and returns a value of some other unspecified type 'b (maybe the same, maybe not). That function then also returns a value of that same type 'b.

You can, in fact, call this function with an object of any class that has a method that is matching these constraints, and 'a and 'b will be appropriately inferred. But in all those cases, all the types will be checked at compile time - because the type is actually there, it can be checked against at every call site. And the <...> notation can be used explicitly to describe object types anywhere, so you don't really have to rely on type inference here (though as I understand, the main reason why they went for structural typing is because it plays well with type inference).

Another example, which is a bit less clear-cut is TypeScript. It's less clear-cut because typing there is optional and opt-in, but if you do fully opt-in, it's static and strong - but still structural.

So basically duck typing is yet another axis that can be used to describe a type system: structural vs nominal - and is orthogonal to the static/dynamic and weak/strong axes.

I agree that the weak/strong is one of the least well defined axes, though. But given the existence of the other two, I don't see how it can be anything other than how types of values (as opposed to types of bound identifiers) are treated. And that's basically whether values are typed at all (to remind, there are languages that only have a single type that's interpreted depending on the context - e.g. Rexx or Tcl), and if they are, then how often that type is actually taken into account rather than being implicitly overriden by the context, as in PHP's arithmetic addition and string concat operators, or C's array decay.

I assume this is the same project. Written in Python, MIT licence, FWTW

https://github.com/OpenBazaar/...

First you have to find them. Fortunately there is software for that: on a rooted Android, use https://github.com/SecUpwN/And... and https://opensource.srlabs.de/p...

While Go and Swift are interesting incremental improvements, they are not taking into account what we learned about programming languages. In many ways, these two languages seem firmly stuck in the 1980s. For example, Go has no generics, and as far as I can tell, Swift still does not have the kind of true generic types I introduced in XL in 2000, i.e. the possibility to call "ordered" all types that have a less than, and then define functions with "ordered" instead of having to use <T> all over the place just like in C++ (and please, could we stop using angle brackets?)

More generally, there was a lot to be learned from more dynamic languages deriving from Lisp. Being able to treat code as data (homoiconicity) completely changes things. It means your language can be extended in itself, just like Lisp integrated object-oriented capabilities effortlessly. It means you can do metaprogramming, introspection, reflection, dynamic code generation, in a natural way rather than with specialised ad-hoc features. All things that Go or Swift spectacularly fail to do.

A real language redesign does not bring you incremental benefits, it should bring orders of magnitude on many tasks. I speak from experience. In XL, I can do complex arithmetic in 11 lines of code. What about Swift or Go? Ask yourself why Go can't offer complex arithmetic as a library package? Similarly, in Tao3D, I can do things HTML5 just can't, in a much less verbose, much higher-level language, and simple animations take 30 times less code than in JavaScript. The 30x factor tells me that I invented something new. Many others can demonstrate similar innovation.

I fail to see benefits of a similar order of magnitude with Swift or Go, and it annoys me. Companies like Apple and Google have the means, if only the financial ones, to make bigger things happen, in particular when smaller teams like ours already did a lot of investigative work.

1. There is a custom debugger for go: https://github.com/derekparker.... Also worrying this much about debuggers is kind of sad, what will happen when you literally can't use one or it doesn't help? Oh you have never done embedded or distributed work I see.

2. Nope (also [citation needed]). The go compiler is fast because it doesn't use modules/header files. See the C++ working group on the subject to understand why it is so slow: http://llvm.org/devmtg/2012-11...

3. "Built in functions". The built in "generics" are not functions, they are data types. And no you probably don't need them.

4. I'm sorry you don't catch your exceptions. Your coworkers are too.

5. A definition of systems that tons of people use.

6. Godeps. Or like 30 other ones. Java and C++ don't come with a version system either, but you probably assumed Maven was part of the core. 7. Guys CPU profiling for a server side language doesn't work on OSX (except it does).

8. Go doesn't have a virtual (byte code interpreted) runtime, so its nothing like the JVM. And yes every language has a runtime. I mean literally what?

9. Nothing of value here folks.

10. Or here.

There are things wrong with Go, but none of these are them. In fact this post shows such a stunning lack of understanding about programming languages it worries me.

The list I use is the result of merging three separate adserver blacklists about a decade ago. It honestly doesn't require all that much maintenance... if I see an ad, I find the hostname it came from and add it to the hosts file. I think I've made 3 such edits in the past year or so.

I highly recommend using RT for tickets, and installing a plugin called Asset Tracker. You can have multiple types of assets with different fields for each asset, link assets in tickets, use REST or their command line tool for automated queries/updates, and much more. It is all open source, modular, and very easy to modify.

"One fringe benefit for Google and Apple is that making your own programming language makes recruitment easier — for instance, since it builds a lot of its own server applications in Go, Google is more likely to hire a developer who's already proficient in the language since she would need less training."

This is a real headscratcher. When was the last time you used someone's company-specific language to solve your problems? Anybody remember that flop of a Facebook open-source "launch" last year?

I've been using http://snipeitapp.com/ Pretty easy to set up on a box in digital ocean, very low maintenance after I got it all set up and working, and if you'd rather not host it yourself you can pay them to do it. Has QR code/label printing capabilities, user management, less-detailed accessory tracking for keyboards and mice (i.e. there's like 20 keyboards over in accounting, and I have 5 available, but i know who has the other 12, and that 3 are broken). Can create reports of how much stuff costed, upload receipts to each asset, when warranty expires, all kinds of stuff. My only bitch about this was how you have to fill out the model before creating an asset under that model, which meant a lot of tedious tabbing back and forth while setting it up. Now that I have all the standard models of phones, laptops, and other hardware that we buy filled it, adding a new asset and assigning it to someone takes like a minute. The developer is super responsive to bugs and questions on her github page: http://github.com/snipe/snipe-...