The two sides are talking past each other. The "ooh shiny" crowd sees compatibility as an albatross and can't fathom why anyone would consider incompatibility as anything other than a cost of doing business on the path along forward progress. The other side can't fathom how anyone who's worked in software or engineering can be so cavalier about sacrificing compatibility for what may well be a passing fad.
Here's a hint: there's a right answer, and the reason one side doesn't see it is because they don't seem to share the experience and the background in engineering real solutions to real products that motivates one strongly to not want to do the same job twice when it's been done right once, at no small cost in sweat and tears.
I don't think there's a way to bridge that divide other than with time. Kids around my age and down, having grown up with participation trophies, tend to be hostile to learning from the mistakes of their predecessors, and haven't quite gotten to the phase of their careers when they can make and learn from their own mistakes just yet. I'm just getting there, but I work with hardware which is much less forgiving and makes you learn quicker. Pure software types in the "ooh shiny" crowd may not all be at the age yet where they've had their trial by fire and enough pushback from reality to temper their enthusiasm with an appreciation of the facts on the ground in regard to compatibility loss. Hence bullshit like systemd, binary format log files, and an "optional" attitude to POSIX.
People keep talking about "the year of the Linux Desktop". Guess what, Leonart is the only fucking person who is actually working on getting us there.
Screw your Linux on the Desktop. I use Linux for mission-critical compute nodes, process control systems, and engineers' and developers' workstations (ie serious work). I'm pissed already that the Ooh Shiny crowd has torn up my desktop environment (ie doesn't mess up all your mission-critical status displays at at an accidental mouse jerk), but I sure as hell will not abide the same crowd introducing bloatware into the boot system and making noise about breaking POSIX compatibilty at some point down the line. My workplace actually buys from RedHat, and
1. I will not recommend that we use RHEL 7 for anything and 2. If LP does get some non POSIX stuff into anything, I will recommend to my boss's boss that we draft a letter to RedHat demanding continued support for a POSIX compliant OS capable of network transparency on every graphical application we run on it. And maybe to fire LP for being a raging idiot.
Don't waste time on simple invective. Vote with your feet, and if you happen to do business with RedHat, vote with your dollars.
Microsoft's OS division must really have it in for those bastards at Microsoft's OS division. I don't think any serious software company out there competes with itself as badly as microsoft does.
I do. And I tried quite a few of them before reaching the conclusion that I'd have to either change code or lower expectations on all my deployed systems that use D6.
Re:Useless Elements and Padding.
on
GNOME 3.14 Released
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· Score: 3, Insightful
How about the status bar in nautilus replaced by a popover text bar like in Firefox that makes it impossible to read both the name and modification time of the bottom-most file in list view by default? Whole thing must have been designed by blind monkeys.
Mod parent up further. I didn't realize how badly the GNOME team screwed the pooch until I tried running Deb 7 and Deb 8 testing to get a new laptop to work.
I am at a complete loss as to why I should have to use a click-and-drag "swipe" gesture to unlock the screen on my workstation in the default configuration of GNOME 3 that comes with Jessie. I'm also not too fond of the default on for all the smart--phone centric gestures that mess up all of my window positioning if I accidentally mouse to the corner of the screen.
I use Debian 6 for an operator console for a piece of heavy moving machinery, and I will not upgrade to Deb 7 or 8 for as long as I can because my whole workflow is based on the quaintly named "classic desktop model" where screens and windows don't magically resize and change position if I sneeze. I am truing to put off as long as I can the task of having to figure out all of these "features" in GNOME 3 or KDE how to disable them so that I can use it for my operator console without fear of an accidental version of the killer poke. I'd switch to LXDE or XFCE, but they're a little too light-weight for my taste, and I don't want to switch to MATE because all the executables have been renamed and I'd lose compatibility with my legacy systems that run GNOME 2. Geez.
Again, baloney. The US constitution explicitly enumerates your right to *peaceably* advocate for the overthrown of the US government. The background check forms ask about *violent* overthrow. I hope for your sake you understand the difference and aren't so blinkered by your conspiracy theories to discount the former.
Baloney. As someone who deals with the military industrial complex on a daily basis, I know for a fact that the forms you submit to the OPM ask you in plain English "have you ever belonged to an organization dedicated to the violent overthrow of the US government" and these forms are retained by the OPM for something like 7 or 10 years, after which you are required to resubmit them. If she said "no" to the question in question, but knew that her acquaintances went to jail, something objectively doesn't add up. The best possible excuse is that she's just pathologically oblivious, not that the OPM has trumped up charges out of nowhere.
A good programmer would know to return an unsigned long long int (not an unsigned long int, because that's only 32 bits on 32 bit unix), and use one internally.
Exactly. Java programs aren't multiplatform. They're single platform: the JDK/JVM that you compiled with/for. If you're done everything on Sun Java 1.5, and suddenly Oracle changes it to "Oracle Java" 1.6, you're SOL.
Java is the new COBOL as far as I'm concerned. I work in a large research lab that got bitten by the java bug in the early-mid 2000s. And now we have a large codebase that's locked in to a particular vendor, that only works with other java code, and a whole bunch of "programmers" whose only skill is java. Which means if we need something in C or C++ for low-level hardware interfacing or for running faster than dead slow, we need to reimplement it from scratch, except we need to hire programmers to do it if it's big because all of our "programmers" only know java, except we can't hire anyone new, because we've already got all these "programmers" on staff.
For $10, you can pick up a very very basic refractor with a flimsy tripod mount at any CVS. This will let you look at the Moon, Jupiter, and Saturn, which are the most interesting things to look at without going up several orders of magnitude in price. It's dead simple to set up and focus, and the challenge of wrestling it into position so you can see the planets, and see them move away as the Earth rotates, will give you the chance to teach reasonably mature kids about basic astronomy and to gauge their interest without spending a lot of money. If you live in particularly dark country, you can just barely begin to see things like the Orion Nebula with this kind of scope (though it looks like a smudge--we've all been spoiled by nice pictures from 2m+ telescopes mated to CCD cameras).
And if you're doing any unit conversions in realtime software, you're the retard. You can have the fundamental unit of distance be the meter, the foot, the nautical mile, the astronomical unit, or the earth radius, but why would you ever need to do unit conversions in the code? It's just as easy to fuck up a decimal point in metric as it is to mix up a mile and a nautical mile.
That's only for stuff that goes up into the heavily populated geostationary belt. GPS orbits are about half-way down and much more sparse, so there's no need to have a graveyard orbit the way there is in GEO. Besides, a higher orbit analogous to the geostationary graveyard is still a usable orbit for GPS, so there's nothing to be gained by moving there at the end of life, and the orbits are too high for re-entry burns to be practical the way they are for certain LEO orbits.
* they did pretty much all of the things you would like to see (such as reversing the direction and making sure the thrust reverses).
* they seem to have done a thoughtful and careful job, including testing in vacuum.
So, I still think they are likely wrong, but this ups the ante. In my opinion, you can't just say "this is obviously wrong."
Sure I can. Was the apparatus temperature controlled during the vacuum test? Was it tested in all orientations (not just backwards) to remove any gyroscopic weirdness from the rotation of the earth (think Michelson-Morley experiment). Was there EM coupling between the cavity, the torsion balance, and the chamber that could manifest as an anomalous torque, not thrust (that is, did they just make a big brushless motor)? Does the instrument register a thrust when the cavity is radiating but is bolted to the chamber floor and not the balance? Is there no thrust when it's oriented orthogonally? Does it still work if the power supply is electrically isolated from the vacuum chamber without a common return (ie did they build an electron gun)?
Because being twenty trillion+ in the hole because you spent too much on welfare and robots deployed to other planets is better than being twenty trillion+ in the hole because you pissed it all away on welfare and don't even have any robots to show for it.
I remember a study making the news in the 90's comparing men and women's brain activity while doing tasks that require 3d reasoning. It was kind of a similar result: men and women would score about the same on the task, but the women's brains lit up like a Christmas tree while the men's brains had fairly localized activity.
It's a two cultures problem in IT. The vast majority of Microsoft's, or Apples, or Oracles, or whoever's customers use their OS on laptops, workstations, or servers, where the consequences of bugs are fairly well approximated by "nuisance". The other culture of computer software customers are folks who use computers handle large amounts of money and control moving machinery (power plants, drones, etc), where the consequences of bugs and unintended features start at "oh shit, we've lost millions of dollars" to "oh shit, the crane dropped its load 200ft" up through "oh God, the power plant has exploded!" People in the second camp have a healthy suspicion of getting the latest and greatest upgrade from companies run by and for people in the first camp. And that dichotomy is why most embedded OS's come with source code that you get to debug yourself if it doesn't quite work for your application (VxWorks, QNX, Windows Embedded, RTLinux, etc).
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The two sides are talking past each other. The "ooh shiny" crowd sees compatibility as an albatross and can't fathom why anyone would consider incompatibility as anything other than a cost of doing business on the path along forward progress. The other side can't fathom how anyone who's worked in software or engineering can be so cavalier about sacrificing compatibility for what may well be a passing fad.
Here's a hint: there's a right answer, and the reason one side doesn't see it is because they don't seem to share the experience and the background in engineering real solutions to real products that motivates one strongly to not want to do the same job twice when it's been done right once, at no small cost in sweat and tears.
I don't think there's a way to bridge that divide other than with time. Kids around my age and down, having grown up with participation trophies, tend to be hostile to learning from the mistakes of their predecessors, and haven't quite gotten to the phase of their careers when they can make and learn from their own mistakes just yet. I'm just getting there, but I work with hardware which is much less forgiving and makes you learn quicker. Pure software types in the "ooh shiny" crowd may not all be at the age yet where they've had their trial by fire and enough pushback from reality to temper their enthusiasm with an appreciation of the facts on the ground in regard to compatibility loss. Hence bullshit like systemd, binary format log files, and an "optional" attitude to POSIX.
I don't know. Hu?
You wanna go rewrite all my legacy code for me that I got working with Linux? Go right ahead. If you fuck it up, you owe me money for time lost.
Debian 6. Before all the shiny shit infected Deb 7.
People keep talking about "the year of the Linux Desktop". Guess what, Leonart is the only fucking person who is actually working on getting us there.
Screw your Linux on the Desktop. I use Linux for mission-critical compute nodes, process control systems, and engineers' and developers' workstations (ie serious work). I'm pissed already that the Ooh Shiny crowd has torn up my desktop environment (ie doesn't mess up all your mission-critical status displays at at an accidental mouse jerk), but I sure as hell will not abide the same crowd introducing bloatware into the boot system and making noise about breaking POSIX compatibilty at some point down the line. My workplace actually buys from RedHat, and
1. I will not recommend that we use RHEL 7 for anything and
2. If LP does get some non POSIX stuff into anything, I will recommend to my boss's boss that we draft a letter to RedHat demanding continued support for a POSIX compliant OS capable of network transparency on every graphical application we run on it. And maybe to fire LP for being a raging idiot.
Don't waste time on simple invective. Vote with your feet, and if you happen to do business with RedHat, vote with your dollars.
Microsoft's OS division must really have it in for those bastards at Microsoft's OS division. I don't think any serious software company out there competes with itself as badly as microsoft does.
And don't forget X11. Wayland-tards' complaints bitching and moaning notwithstanding.
I do. And I tried quite a few of them before reaching the conclusion that I'd have to either change code or lower expectations on all my deployed systems that use D6.
How about the status bar in nautilus replaced by a popover text bar like in Firefox that makes it impossible to read both the name and modification time of the bottom-most file in list view by default? Whole thing must have been designed by blind monkeys.
Mod parent up further. I didn't realize how badly the GNOME team screwed the pooch until I tried running Deb 7 and Deb 8 testing to get a new laptop to work.
I am at a complete loss as to why I should have to use a click-and-drag "swipe" gesture to unlock the screen on my workstation in the default configuration of GNOME 3 that comes with Jessie. I'm also not too fond of the default on for all the smart--phone centric gestures that mess up all of my window positioning if I accidentally mouse to the corner of the screen.
I use Debian 6 for an operator console for a piece of heavy moving machinery, and I will not upgrade to Deb 7 or 8 for as long as I can because my whole workflow is based on the quaintly named "classic desktop model" where screens and windows don't magically resize and change position if I sneeze. I am truing to put off as long as I can the task of having to figure out all of these "features" in GNOME 3 or KDE how to disable them so that I can use it for my operator console without fear of an accidental version of the killer poke. I'd switch to LXDE or XFCE, but they're a little too light-weight for my taste, and I don't want to switch to MATE because all the executables have been renamed and I'd lose compatibility with my legacy systems that run GNOME 2. Geez.
Somehow I doubt even Putin's craziest body double thinks his nukes let him invade the US.
Again, baloney. The US constitution explicitly enumerates your right to *peaceably* advocate for the overthrown of the US government. The background check forms ask about *violent* overthrow. I hope for your sake you understand the difference and aren't so blinkered by your conspiracy theories to discount the former.
Knew her acquaintance through the group went to jail. Didn't connect it. Like I said, the best excuse is obliviousness.
Baloney. As someone who deals with the military industrial complex on a daily basis, I know for a fact that the forms you submit to the OPM ask you in plain English "have you ever belonged to an organization dedicated to the violent overthrow of the US government" and these forms are retained by the OPM for something like 7 or 10 years, after which you are required to resubmit them. If she said "no" to the question in question, but knew that her acquaintances went to jail, something objectively doesn't add up. The best possible excuse is that she's just pathologically oblivious, not that the OPM has trumped up charges out of nowhere.
A good programmer would know to return an unsigned long long int (not an unsigned long int, because that's only 32 bits on 32 bit unix), and use one internally.
Exactly. Java programs aren't multiplatform. They're single platform: the JDK/JVM that you compiled with/for. If you're done everything on Sun Java 1.5, and suddenly Oracle changes it to "Oracle Java" 1.6, you're SOL.
Java is the new COBOL as far as I'm concerned. I work in a large research lab that got bitten by the java bug in the early-mid 2000s. And now we have a large codebase that's locked in to a particular vendor, that only works with other java code, and a whole bunch of "programmers" whose only skill is java. Which means if we need something in C or C++ for low-level hardware interfacing or for running faster than dead slow, we need to reimplement it from scratch, except we need to hire programmers to do it if it's big because all of our "programmers" only know java, except we can't hire anyone new, because we've already got all these "programmers" on staff.
For $10, you can pick up a very very basic refractor with a flimsy tripod mount at any CVS. This will let you look at the Moon, Jupiter, and Saturn, which are the most interesting things to look at without going up several orders of magnitude in price. It's dead simple to set up and focus, and the challenge of wrestling it into position so you can see the planets, and see them move away as the Earth rotates, will give you the chance to teach reasonably mature kids about basic astronomy and to gauge their interest without spending a lot of money. If you live in particularly dark country, you can just barely begin to see things like the Orion Nebula with this kind of scope (though it looks like a smudge--we've all been spoiled by nice pictures from 2m+ telescopes mated to CCD cameras).
And if you're doing any unit conversions in realtime software, you're the retard. You can have the fundamental unit of distance be the meter, the foot, the nautical mile, the astronomical unit, or the earth radius, but why would you ever need to do unit conversions in the code? It's just as easy to fuck up a decimal point in metric as it is to mix up a mile and a nautical mile.
That's only for stuff that goes up into the heavily populated geostationary belt. GPS orbits are about half-way down and much more sparse, so there's no need to have a graveyard orbit the way there is in GEO. Besides, a higher orbit analogous to the geostationary graveyard is still a usable orbit for GPS, so there's nothing to be gained by moving there at the end of life, and the orbits are too high for re-entry burns to be practical the way they are for certain LEO orbits.
* they did pretty much all of the things you would like to see (such as reversing the direction and making sure the thrust reverses).
* they seem to have done a thoughtful and careful job, including testing in vacuum.
So, I still think they are likely wrong, but this ups the ante. In my opinion, you can't just say "this is obviously wrong."
Sure I can. Was the apparatus temperature controlled during the vacuum test? Was it tested in all orientations (not just backwards) to remove any gyroscopic weirdness from the rotation of the earth (think Michelson-Morley experiment). Was there EM coupling between the cavity, the torsion balance, and the chamber that could manifest as an anomalous torque, not thrust (that is, did they just make a big brushless motor)? Does the instrument register a thrust when the cavity is radiating but is bolted to the chamber floor and not the balance? Is there no thrust when it's oriented orthogonally? Does it still work if the power supply is electrically isolated from the vacuum chamber without a common return (ie did they build an electron gun)?
Because being twenty trillion+ in the hole because you spent too much on welfare and robots deployed to other planets is better than being twenty trillion+ in the hole because you pissed it all away on welfare and don't even have any robots to show for it.
I remember a study making the news in the 90's comparing men and women's brain activity while doing tasks that require 3d reasoning. It was kind of a similar result: men and women would score about the same on the task, but the women's brains lit up like a Christmas tree while the men's brains had fairly localized activity.
In 1990 yes. In 2003...it's complicated.
It's a two cultures problem in IT. The vast majority of Microsoft's, or Apples, or Oracles, or whoever's customers use their OS on laptops, workstations, or servers, where the consequences of bugs are fairly well approximated by "nuisance". The other culture of computer software customers are folks who use computers handle large amounts of money and control moving machinery (power plants, drones, etc), where the consequences of bugs and unintended features start at "oh shit, we've lost millions of dollars" to "oh shit, the crane dropped its load 200ft" up through "oh God, the power plant has exploded!" People in the second camp have a healthy suspicion of getting the latest and greatest upgrade from companies run by and for people in the first camp. And that dichotomy is why most embedded OS's come with source code that you get to debug yourself if it doesn't quite work for your application (VxWorks, QNX, Windows Embedded, RTLinux, etc).