Emacs by default has menus and point-and-click functionality. A lot of users turn all that off. Of course, that's not saying that Emacs is easy, even with all that turned on, but what does market share mean to an open source project, anyway? As long as enough people use it to maintain the community, the project continues.
I don't disable the menus because they're useful for rarely-used functions. I spend most of my time in org-mode or one of the programming modes, but every now and again I run something off-the-wall and the menu comes in handy. And hey, what's the point of having large monitors if I can't give up a few pixels for a menu?
Emacs doesn't do things like, for instance, edit movies or do Disney-style animation.
The interesting thing about Emacs is that the above two limitations are not because Emacs can't do those things, but because no one was written the code to do them yet.
That process didn't start with GNOME 3. GNOME 2 is a result of the exact same thing. And I'll enthusiastically disagree with your assessment that it was the "best desktop environment of its day." Maybe it was great if you were coming from Windows, but coming from earlier versions of GNOME or from other UNIX DEs, it was lackluster at best.
Sun provided UX people for GNOME because it wanted to ditch CDE (ironically, right after it had switched to it from OpenLook). The Sun people came in and said, "fuck the power users, let's make things easy!" Options were considered confusing and omitted. The traditional UNIX workflow was replaced with a very Windows-like workflow. This lives on today in MATE - if you compare the standard Windows workflow with MATE, it's basically the same.
Metacity is the perfect example here. It's the most brain-dead, unconfigurable window manager ever. It's less configurable than TWM. Thanks, GNOME, no, I don't want to be productive, what a silly idea! The first official WM for GNOME was Enlightenment, which was all kinds of configurable, and then Saw[mill|fish] (which I've been told was very configurable, although I didn't know LISP at the time so I never found out for myself). Going to Metacity was pretty much par for the course and indicative of their "options are evil" mentality.
Those of us who started using GNOME back in the 0.x days watched our beloved features go away. Some adapted. Some, like me, ditched GNOME as a DE and ran a mixture of various software, including GNOME and KDE apps, and put up with the times when stuff just didn't work right. I eventually switched to KDE, since KDM can do most of what I wanted FVWM for and supports something closer to the traditional UNIX desktop workflow, but I can see where the UX people have been "innovating" there too.
I'll admit that I don't hang out on the OpenBSD mailing lists, but I'm surprised to hear the LibreSSL team doesn't get much support. Theo himself was working on it, at least in the early days, and I had the impression the other devs on the project were pretty high profile. If they're not being funded out of OpenBSD's development fund or equivalent (again, I'm speaking out of ignorance about how the OpenBSD organization works), I'd be very surprised.
Things have shifted quite a bit - it works more or less a drop-in replacement for OpenSSL on OpenBSD now, so current efforts are aimed more at ports and the new API - but I imagine it's still pretty important to the OpenBSD project.
The FSM has changed focus. It was once just an argument against religious interference in schools. Now it's something like those people who claim their religion as "Jedi."
People are having fun with the concept. Let them have it. If people actually want to get married in front of a real god, they'll do so. If you don't want people making fun of your religion, quit using laws to shove it down our throats.
I was just considering intelligence, not necessarily space-faring. Honestly, we're barely a space-faring race ourselves.
Either way, we're working on way too little data at this point to do more than guess. We know a bit more about other planetary systems than we used to, but we're still largely ignorant. We've got statistics we can work with, but the variables we're feeding into it are flimsy at best. My reasoning for thinking we're not the first intelligent species is the number of stars in the galaxy - there's a whole whopping shitload of them. When we compare that to the tiny amount of time an intelligent species has been on this planet vs. the time between when planets first formed in the galaxy to now, however, we're certainly the newbies.
It's all a moot point unless we figure out a way to go out and look, though. Maybe one day we, or something we become later, will be able to do that.
I've heard that theory before, and I doubt its accuracy.
Life like ours, out on the surface, would have difficulty living without the magnetic field, but we evolved on this planet. Life that evolves in an ocean doesn't have to worry about radiation. Look at Europa, for instance - we think it's possible for life to evolve there, and it's in a much harsher environment than the Earth would be even without a magnetic field.
If life evolved in an ocean on a planet with a dead core, and eventually left the ocean to colonize land, it would evolve the capability of dealing with the environment. Perhaps it would have extra redundancy in its DNA analog, or maybe it would not even use a cell-based system like we do. Who knows?
That said, while life might be more common than you think, you might be right about intelligence - at least at our moment in time. I would be very surprised, however, if we were the first intelligent life in this galaxy.
I never used Logo, because none of the schools I attended in the 80s taught programming until high school, and by that age BASIC and Pascal were the languages of choice.
That said, I first learned BASIC by drawing things on an Atari 800. It was just PLOT and DRAWTO statements, so to do anything interesting you had to use loops and conditionals. It was a blast.
I can see where Logo would have been popular in the places it was taught.
I thought of that (although I was thinking HBO's True Blood), but Spike isn't a pay channel. Then again, Spike isn't a major broadcast network, either.
Maybe I'm showing my age.
(off topic: according to the Wikipedia page List of entertainment affected by the September 11 attacks, the WTC appears in scenes where an angel shows how the world would be if Kernit the Frog had never been born. So apparently, the truthers are wrong: Kermit caused 9/11!)
The Reds were a terrorist group in the books, but weren't exactly the bad guys. I wonder how the show's writers and executives are going to portray that in today's environment.
Come to think of it, most of the characters in the book were "terrorists," at least from the point of view of the UN organization that governed the project. It has massive infrastructure destruction (don't want to spoil it), guerilla warfare, cultural sectarianism, etc.
I doubt the network execs are going to allow that on the TV show without some major editing.
ABIs change much more rapidly than APIs, and there are so many platforms to choose from. If the project isn't actively maintained, source code distribution is the only way that makes sense.
Three year old.deb or.rpm files can be a pain to deal with, and it only gets worse over time. Often, they're linked to library versions that are outdated and clash with the system libraries. Yes, there's ways to solve those problems - both from the packager's point of view and the user's point of view - but why bother when you can just distribute the source code and leave it to the user to compile? If it's important enough, a distribution maintainer will pick it up and make binary packages available.
Getting reluctant code to compile on your system used to be a required skill for UNIX sysadmins. In my opinion, it still should be. The problems we had in 1994 haven't changed, and in some ways, i.e. Linux's horrible backwards compatibility compared to, say, Solaris - they have gotten worse.
I knew a couple X2s when I was in - both promoted to the point where they hadn't done any actual code in years - and they gave me a positive impression of Ada, but I've never used it myself.
Yeah, I saw that. It's definitely a step in the right direction.
Javascript is schizophrenic to the extreme. It's always struck me as a poorly implemented LISP that was pounded into something that looked like C. It's not so horrible once you get to know it, but learning it was a major pain in the ass.
My university is considering making it the first language they teach. I suggested to the instructor that it was probably not a good idea.
I wasn't doing your exercise, I was just doing an implementation of the PHP code (the earlier one without the htmlspecialchars() call) for shits and giggles.
If you're doing text manipulation, Perl's probably the way to go. The base language is set up well for it, and CPAN is full of text manipulation libraries.
I'd never suggest Perl as a first language, but it sounds like you've got other languages under your belt already.
I'd hate to use it outside of UNIX, though. Perl's very UNIXy. But I came to it as a sysadmin, not as a programmer, and I use it as a glue language more than anything else, so maybe that's just me.
Perl 5 has objects, BTW. The syntax is just weird for them. It's no worse (and probably better) than Javascript's funny OO system.
It's been a while since I was in the Air Force, and I was a 3C0X1, not an X2, so I wasn't a programmer myself. That said, I can give a pretty good guess.
The military had a push for "COTS" (commercial, off-the-shelf) systems back in the late '90s. That meant buying software rather than building it yourself. It was a lot cheaper that way. The internet had become a big thing, and desktops were all over the place. Outsourcing and contracting increased dramatically.
Ada doesn't make sense in that environment. Sure, if you're building a closed, mission-critical system where lives hang in the balance, then a language like Ada is probably your best bet. For most tasks, it doesn't.
Besides, Ada never saw much use outside the government. That meant your only source for Ada programmers was ex-government or -military people. With the big push toward outsourcing, I imagine Ada programmers were hard to find. Government contractors would fight the Ada requirement tooth and nail - and many of those have congresscritters in their pockets.
If anyone knows better, let me know. I'm curious too.
I wish people would remember in the voting booth that the government power to do this kind of crap comes from taxes.
Except it doesn't, not really.
It comes because the people consent to the government having power, for various reasons. It may be because people recognize the need for an organizing force to maintain public infrastructure and essential services (the justice system being one of those), because of societal pressure to follow the status quo, or because the government has enforcers that quell any serious threat to their power.
Taxes are a by-product of government power, not the source of it. Yes, the government needs money to operate, but if everyone stopped paying taxes, the government wouldn't just close their doors and go home. You'd wake up with the army on your lawn.
CSS had nothing to do with IE's adoption. Users didn't (and still don't) know what CSS was. That's like saying Windows XP was adopted by home users because of NTFS.
Hardly anyone was using CSS back then, anyway. I was experimenting with it with NS4 and IE, and while it was nice, it wasn't mature enough to rely on - in either browser.
Besides, IE's CSS implementation was incorrect, and remained that way for ages. I don't know about Edge, but given Microsoft's track record, I'm not holding my breath.
What's your hard on for IE, anyway? Did a Netscape employee run over your dog or something?
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Emacs by default has menus and point-and-click functionality. A lot of users turn all that off. Of course, that's not saying that Emacs is easy, even with all that turned on, but what does market share mean to an open source project, anyway? As long as enough people use it to maintain the community, the project continues.
I don't disable the menus because they're useful for rarely-used functions. I spend most of my time in org-mode or one of the programming modes, but every now and again I run something off-the-wall and the menu comes in handy. And hey, what's the point of having large monitors if I can't give up a few pixels for a menu?
Emacs doesn't do things like, for instance, edit movies or do Disney-style animation.
The interesting thing about Emacs is that the above two limitations are not because Emacs can't do those things, but because no one was written the code to do them yet.
Art mode's about due for an upgrade, anyway.
That process didn't start with GNOME 3. GNOME 2 is a result of the exact same thing. And I'll enthusiastically disagree with your assessment that it was the "best desktop environment of its day." Maybe it was great if you were coming from Windows, but coming from earlier versions of GNOME or from other UNIX DEs, it was lackluster at best.
Sun provided UX people for GNOME because it wanted to ditch CDE (ironically, right after it had switched to it from OpenLook). The Sun people came in and said, "fuck the power users, let's make things easy!" Options were considered confusing and omitted. The traditional UNIX workflow was replaced with a very Windows-like workflow. This lives on today in MATE - if you compare the standard Windows workflow with MATE, it's basically the same.
Metacity is the perfect example here. It's the most brain-dead, unconfigurable window manager ever. It's less configurable than TWM. Thanks, GNOME, no, I don't want to be productive, what a silly idea! The first official WM for GNOME was Enlightenment, which was all kinds of configurable, and then Saw[mill|fish] (which I've been told was very configurable, although I didn't know LISP at the time so I never found out for myself). Going to Metacity was pretty much par for the course and indicative of their "options are evil" mentality.
Those of us who started using GNOME back in the 0.x days watched our beloved features go away. Some adapted. Some, like me, ditched GNOME as a DE and ran a mixture of various software, including GNOME and KDE apps, and put up with the times when stuff just didn't work right. I eventually switched to KDE, since KDM can do most of what I wanted FVWM for and supports something closer to the traditional UNIX desktop workflow, but I can see where the UX people have been "innovating" there too.
I'll admit that I don't hang out on the OpenBSD mailing lists, but I'm surprised to hear the LibreSSL team doesn't get much support. Theo himself was working on it, at least in the early days, and I had the impression the other devs on the project were pretty high profile. If they're not being funded out of OpenBSD's development fund or equivalent (again, I'm speaking out of ignorance about how the OpenBSD organization works), I'd be very surprised.
Things have shifted quite a bit - it works more or less a drop-in replacement for OpenSSL on OpenBSD now, so current efforts are aimed more at ports and the new API - but I imagine it's still pretty important to the OpenBSD project.
Dunno if 2015 is a good year for the OpenSSL project.
LibreSSL is being ported to other operating systems, and they're working on a new API that is supposedly much easier to work with than OpenSSL's.
We'll see how it goes adoption wise, but I would not be surprised if 2015 is the beginning of the end for OpenSSL.
Apparently, you talk to one of their official representatives and set up an appointment.
I went through the process once. I was assured that the god in question was there. I couldn't quite make him out in the audience, though.
The FSM has changed focus. It was once just an argument against religious interference in schools. Now it's something like those people who claim their religion as "Jedi."
People are having fun with the concept. Let them have it. If people actually want to get married in front of a real god, they'll do so. If you don't want people making fun of your religion, quit using laws to shove it down our throats.
I was just considering intelligence, not necessarily space-faring. Honestly, we're barely a space-faring race ourselves.
Either way, we're working on way too little data at this point to do more than guess. We know a bit more about other planetary systems than we used to, but we're still largely ignorant. We've got statistics we can work with, but the variables we're feeding into it are flimsy at best. My reasoning for thinking we're not the first intelligent species is the number of stars in the galaxy - there's a whole whopping shitload of them. When we compare that to the tiny amount of time an intelligent species has been on this planet vs. the time between when planets first formed in the galaxy to now, however, we're certainly the newbies.
It's all a moot point unless we figure out a way to go out and look, though. Maybe one day we, or something we become later, will be able to do that.
I've heard that theory before, and I doubt its accuracy.
Life like ours, out on the surface, would have difficulty living without the magnetic field, but we evolved on this planet. Life that evolves in an ocean doesn't have to worry about radiation. Look at Europa, for instance - we think it's possible for life to evolve there, and it's in a much harsher environment than the Earth would be even without a magnetic field.
If life evolved in an ocean on a planet with a dead core, and eventually left the ocean to colonize land, it would evolve the capability of dealing with the environment. Perhaps it would have extra redundancy in its DNA analog, or maybe it would not even use a cell-based system like we do. Who knows?
That said, while life might be more common than you think, you might be right about intelligence - at least at our moment in time. I would be very surprised, however, if we were the first intelligent life in this galaxy.
I never used Logo, because none of the schools I attended in the 80s taught programming until high school, and by that age BASIC and Pascal were the languages of choice.
That said, I first learned BASIC by drawing things on an Atari 800. It was just PLOT and DRAWTO statements, so to do anything interesting you had to use loops and conditionals. It was a blast.
I can see where Logo would have been popular in the places it was taught.
Most of 'em.
See CLEP.
It's a good way to lighten your coarse load. It's not horribly unusual for people to use CLEP to graduate a semester or two early.
I thought of that (although I was thinking HBO's True Blood), but Spike isn't a pay channel. Then again, Spike isn't a major broadcast network, either.
Maybe I'm showing my age.
(off topic: according to the Wikipedia page List of entertainment affected by the September 11 attacks, the WTC appears in scenes where an angel shows how the world would be if Kernit the Frog had never been born. So apparently, the truthers are wrong: Kermit caused 9/11!)
That's a good point. They could frame it as a movement gone out of control, and villanize the extremists.
That would probably play well to the execs.
The Reds were a terrorist group in the books, but weren't exactly the bad guys. I wonder how the show's writers and executives are going to portray that in today's environment.
Come to think of it, most of the characters in the book were "terrorists," at least from the point of view of the UN organization that governed the project. It has massive infrastructure destruction (don't want to spoil it), guerilla warfare, cultural sectarianism, etc.
I doubt the network execs are going to allow that on the TV show without some major editing.
ABIs change much more rapidly than APIs, and there are so many platforms to choose from. If the project isn't actively maintained, source code distribution is the only way that makes sense.
Three year old .deb or .rpm files can be a pain to deal with, and it only gets worse over time. Often, they're linked to library versions that are outdated and clash with the system libraries. Yes, there's ways to solve those problems - both from the packager's point of view and the user's point of view - but why bother when you can just distribute the source code and leave it to the user to compile? If it's important enough, a distribution maintainer will pick it up and make binary packages available.
Getting reluctant code to compile on your system used to be a required skill for UNIX sysadmins. In my opinion, it still should be. The problems we had in 1994 haven't changed, and in some ways, i.e. Linux's horrible backwards compatibility compared to, say, Solaris - they have gotten worse.
Thanks for the insight. I was curious.
I knew a couple X2s when I was in - both promoted to the point where they hadn't done any actual code in years - and they gave me a positive impression of Ada, but I've never used it myself.
Maybe I'll give it a shot one of these days.
Yeah, I saw that. It's definitely a step in the right direction.
Javascript is schizophrenic to the extreme. It's always struck me as a poorly implemented LISP that was pounded into something that looked like C. It's not so horrible once you get to know it, but learning it was a major pain in the ass.
My university is considering making it the first language they teach. I suggested to the instructor that it was probably not a good idea.
Did you not see the point of the exercise?
I wasn't doing your exercise, I was just doing an implementation of the PHP code (the earlier one without the htmlspecialchars() call) for shits and giggles.
If you're doing text manipulation, Perl's probably the way to go. The base language is set up well for it, and CPAN is full of text manipulation libraries.
I'd never suggest Perl as a first language, but it sounds like you've got other languages under your belt already.
I'd hate to use it outside of UNIX, though. Perl's very UNIXy. But I came to it as a sysadmin, not as a programmer, and I use it as a glue language more than anything else, so maybe that's just me.
Perl 5 has objects, BTW. The syntax is just weird for them. It's no worse (and probably better) than Javascript's funny OO system.
page after page kept paging in the dos window before I three fingered the pc and rebooted
Wait...
Do you mean you were actually using Perl in DOS, or that you actually rebooted a Windows machine rather than just close the command window?
Care to rephrase? Because honestly, no one has had to do either in over a decade.
It's been a while since I was in the Air Force, and I was a 3C0X1, not an X2, so I wasn't a programmer myself. That said, I can give a pretty good guess.
The military had a push for "COTS" (commercial, off-the-shelf) systems back in the late '90s. That meant buying software rather than building it yourself. It was a lot cheaper that way. The internet had become a big thing, and desktops were all over the place. Outsourcing and contracting increased dramatically.
Ada doesn't make sense in that environment. Sure, if you're building a closed, mission-critical system where lives hang in the balance, then a language like Ada is probably your best bet. For most tasks, it doesn't.
Besides, Ada never saw much use outside the government. That meant your only source for Ada programmers was ex-government or -military people. With the big push toward outsourcing, I imagine Ada programmers were hard to find. Government contractors would fight the Ada requirement tooth and nail - and many of those have congresscritters in their pockets.
If anyone knows better, let me know. I'm curious too.
Oh, I forgot to mention that's the "unsafe" version without htmlspecialchars().
If you want that as well, you'd have to filter the string. Exercise for the reader?
I don't program much in C, and felt like doing something different, so I gave it a shot. Here's some quick code.
Constructive comments will be considered. Otherwise, include your own version or I'll just view you as a troll.
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <err.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#include <string.h>
struct NV_List {
char *name;
char *value;
struct NV_List *next;
};
char *get_value(char *name, struct NV_List *pairs);
void free_NV_List(struct NV_List *list);
int
main(int argv, char *argc[])
{
static char *buf = NULL;
char *postdata;
char *name = NULL;
char *value = NULL;
int nr;
size_t offset = sizeof(char);
size_t bufsize = 128 * sizeof(char);
struct NV_List *postvars = NULL;
struct NV_List **nextpair;
postdata = strdup("");
if ((buf = malloc(bufsize)) == NULL) {
err(-1, "malloc");
}
while ((nr = read(STDIN_FILENO, buf, bufsize)) != -1 && nr != 0) {
offset += nr * sizeof(char);
if ((postdata = realloc(postdata, offset)) == NULL) {
err(-1, "realloc");
}
strncat(postdata, buf, nr);
}
free(buf);
nextpair = &postvars;
name = strtok(postdata, "=");
while (name != NULL) {
*nextpair = malloc(sizeof(struct NV_List));
(*nextpair)->name = strdup(name);
(*nextpair)->value = strdup(strtok(NULL, "&"));
nextpair = &((*nextpair)->next);
name = strtok(NULL, "=");
}
nextpair = NULL;
printf("Content-type: text/plain\r\n\r\n");
printf("Hi ");
if ((value = get_value("name", postvars))!= NULL) {
printf("%s", value);
}
printf(".");
free(postdata);
free_NV_List(postvars);
}
char *
get_value(char *name, struct NV_List *pairs)
{
while(pairs != NULL) {
if (! strcmp(pairs->name, name)) {
return pairs->value;
}
pairs = pairs->next;
}
I wish people would remember in the voting booth that the government power to do this kind of crap comes from taxes.
Except it doesn't, not really.
It comes because the people consent to the government having power, for various reasons. It may be because people recognize the need for an organizing force to maintain public infrastructure and essential services (the justice system being one of those), because of societal pressure to follow the status quo, or because the government has enforcers that quell any serious threat to their power.
Taxes are a by-product of government power, not the source of it. Yes, the government needs money to operate, but if everyone stopped paying taxes, the government wouldn't just close their doors and go home. You'd wake up with the army on your lawn.
CSS had nothing to do with IE's adoption. Users didn't (and still don't) know what CSS was. That's like saying Windows XP was adopted by home users because of NTFS.
Hardly anyone was using CSS back then, anyway. I was experimenting with it with NS4 and IE, and while it was nice, it wasn't mature enough to rely on - in either browser.
Besides, IE's CSS implementation was incorrect, and remained that way for ages. I don't know about Edge, but given Microsoft's track record, I'm not holding my breath.
What's your hard on for IE, anyway? Did a Netscape employee run over your dog or something?