Back when I was in grade school and solar cells were made with selenium paste, your assertion was entirely correct. But nowadays you've got companies like AstroPower that make their cells from recycled materials, so their products represent a huge improvement.
Once you've run an Astropower panel for a couple of years you've more than paid for the total pollution cost of manufacture, and after 20 years (they last longer than that usually) you've made an enormous difference in the amount of pollution that was required to produce the energy you used during that time.
Apparently sticking anything in their flight path will do the job... I bet windmills are usually noisy enough to warn off more birds than buildings do, though.
When you smoke outside, you're so accustomed to the lack of an outdoor ashtray that you reflexively toss the butt on the ground. It's unfortunate.
No, it's exactly the kind of unthinking lameness the original poster was complaining about.
During the 20 years I smoked I never threw a butt on the ground. My friends that still smoke don't do it now. Just strip the biodegradable bits off and put the filter in your pocket until you find an appropriate receptacle.
And yes, I occasionally forgot and ran one through the laundry, at which point all my clothes smelled vaguely like an ashtray - but face it, if you smoke you smell like an ashtray to other people regardless. If it really bothers you, carry one of those small round sweet tins in your pants pocket and use it for a filter bin, I've seen people do that too and they easily hold a pack or three's worth of stripped filters.
Well, I kinda want both. I want to personally be able to say, given a file or a tree of files, what disk(s) and machine(s) that data is held on, so that I can move them if that drive starts to fail. I don't want to have to tell the app that just to use the data. I don't want the app to care if the data moves (especially if I had to move it because a drive is failing). I've had drive letters sneak into project files in IDEs under Windows. Moving a project from one computer to another, where the drive mappings are different, is an adventure. I want to avoid this.
Me too. Under VMS it's pretty easy, programmers use logical names instead of drive letters and those logical names can be reassigned as need be. They work like *nix aliases, but in VMS you make symbols that equate to verbs (like, cd=="SET DEFAULT") and names that equate to nouns (like, define App$dir ClusterNode2::UserDisk1:[rootdir.subdir.appdir]). The syntax is a bit clumsy (so's *nix, though - in the blue & white unix bible I think it says "set is a command that does too mnay things") but in practice it works pretty well, and VMS syntax is completely redefinable anyway. I think we can agree that the DOS method sucks for at least five or six reasons that have cropped up in this conversation!
One defines logicals at program or system startup time, and programs should be written to give useful messages if a name isn't present (typically something like "ERROR: User's mail directory MAIL$DIR is not defined.").
PS: VMS syntactica above are off the cuff, probably aren't precisely accurate.
Again, I see your point, but I think you're trying to state a general rule from specific cases. By choosing my own cases - for example, the static rocket motor testing app I mentioned, and some of the industrial automation projects I did for DuPont - I can compose the opposite rule.
We agree completely on the need for layered software, though. I don't want to rewrite the networking stack for every app, or the printer drivers either.
The difference in opinion is that you feel that devices, that is, storage locations, should be invisible to applications and managed only by the filesystem, and I want to specifically know exactly which physical hard drive contains which bytes at all times. I'd also like all media to be removable and hot-pluggable; one of my favorite tricks is to pull half of a mirror set (either a pair of synced disks or a 0+1 RAID array) and attempt a complex software upgrade, then if it doesn't work out I just power down and put the untouched disks in.
What benefits does one get from these shows besides a good excuse to travel and meet others in the industry?
LinuxWorld NYC is where I met Linus Torvalds, Alan Cox, Eric Raymond, Bruce Perens, Andrew Tridgell, and Rasmus Lehrdorf, among others. A couple of these guys I knew already over the Internet, but meeting them in person really made it easier to communicate with them over the 'net later on.
Unfortunately, because of the DMCA, you won't see Alan at any US convention. But he's really a nice guy, not as scary as you'd think from the "floating head of Alan Cox" picture.
Of course, meeting them in person also gives you a great chance to make a titanic fool of yourself.
We are not going to talk about my chat with Linus...
That substance, exuded by humans pressed together too tightly (as fruitcake in a juicer) that causes politeness to evaporate, intelligence to rot, and cars to get dented.
I see your point, but I'd argue that a well constructed program can be trivially reconfigured to be in a new location.
For example, I built Infozip's unzip facilities for unix on an HP-UX box yesterday, and I had to change one line in one file (the prefix setting in the makefile) to put it exactly where I wanted it. Took less than five minutes all told (with no prior knowledge of the software) so recompiling it for a new location would be extremely trivial.
I'm not saying that your statement Fundamentally programs should not care where their physical storage is, only where it is in the namespace. is incorrect, but I think it's more a matter of preference related to the type of programs you write. For a word processor, OK, I see you'd want hardware abstraction. For a program that exercises the hardware to the extremes of its physical limitations (for example, a program to test solid fuel rocket motors) you can't afford the overhead, it's too inefficient to have opaque software layers between you and the circuitry.
I'd like to be able to write any sort of program, so I prefer exposed structures and I'm willing to do the extra work if I'm going to write an end-user app. Which I almost never do, incidentally, I'm usually a plumber not a painter.
I don't understand your point. P'raps I'm as stupid as DOS is:P.
So tell me, when is the last time you have operated a VAX? I remember my last interaction with a VAX was the finance system in a Steel Mill, circa 1996.
I have a vax in my basement, but I haven't turned it on recently. It's a salvaged Alpha that I converted from Saint/OSF-1 to VMS (hobbyist edition, which is free for home use). But my VMS skillz are pretty rusty I think, I can't remember all the QIO parms anymore.
The last time I used a VMS system professionally was in the 90s (unless you count systems that I don't personally admin, in which case it was a week or so ago.)
I don't recall slashes of either variety in VMS file specifications.
Right, they aren't. The original poster pointed out that DOS uses backslashes for directory separation because they already used slashes for the switch initiator character. Like as in "dir/p c:\" for example (which can also be written "dir c:\/p" which is nice). DOS and CPM got the use of slashes for switches from the same place VAX/VMS DCL got it, that is the RSX family of PDP operating systems.
Since DOS already had used slashes for switches, and the command parse routine was not based on space characters like unix shells are (for example, in DOS you can do cd\ or cd.. which does not work in bash) they had to use a different slash when they implemented hierarchical file storage (aka directory structure). Kapiche?
As an old DEC hand you'll remember that VAX and PDP commands all used the tparse routine (which was available to user programs too) to parse command lines, and tparse allowed abbreviation and switch position independence while avoiding the more undesireable effects of shell pre-processing.
But the real advantage of the DEC systems was version numbering. Anyone who ever programmed for any length of time on a VMS system understands how inexpressibly primitive and lame filesystems without version numbers are.
I recall DEC claims at a DECUS symposium that VMS was the first OS to achieve POSIX compliance, which was quite a feat since it was so non-UNIXy to begin with.
Yup, I believe that claim is correct. People forget that VMS was much more advanced than unix (though linux is going to surpass it pretty soon) for native english speakers. Linus Torvalds hated it, and I suspect this is because at the time his english really sucked (no longer true).
You think you're tired of it, I worked at Thiokol right up until Challenger... so I get sent the stupid thing every month or so when some friend or relative stumbles across it on the net.
It's not really utter bullshit, though, it's just off in several places. Most significantly in the "roman war chariots" nonsense - the grooves were engineered into Roman roads to keep multi-ton oxcarts from brushing against buildings and each other, they weren't "worn" into them by any mythical chariots. The part about the size of the SRMs being restricted by the size of railroad tunnels is actually true.
I like device roots, personally - I don't like the way *nices obscure the hardware. But now that we've got cheap RAID it's a lot harder to argue in favor of knowing which disk pack you're using, so I see your point.
The slashes go "the wrong way" (hmm, any explicit biases there?) because the switch syntax was copied from CPM, the dominant microcomputer OS at the time. CPM in turn copied it from DEC's PDP operating systems (like RSX-11, TSX-11, RT-11, etc. etc. etc - the VAX/VMS system also inherited this syntax, incidentally, along with DCL (Digital Command Language) which is the direct descendant of CCL (Concise Command Language) and RSX Indirect).
A stupider paradigm is Unix's re-use of the directory separator as the name of the root directory; there are some efficiencies of notation and processing that this provides but it's really profoundly counter-intuitive. It's actually worse than the exposed numeric MFD of VMS (which is also stupid, but at least it forces one to understand the mechanics of the filesystem).
Read the article (I know, it will be hard to force yourself to do so if you are a slashdot regular:)) and then read this chapter from TAoUP.
I don't know if Spolsky didn't read this far, or if he's just a weak plagarist, or maybe this is the only part that made a big enough impression on him to merit rephrasing for his own column.
The only difference I see is POV, and substitute "mac" for "windows".
Don't DirectX games absolutely blow chunks when playing across untrusted networks? I mean, they always have in my experience, but that's limited to the Civilization series of strategy games.
Configuring a firewall to pass the ridiculous number of ports required is a pain in the ass (I actually wrote a script to do it because it's too tedious otherwise) and you still can't have multiple players inside and outside if you're NATted to a single outside address. Well, OK, you can sort of do it if you are willing to settle for huge performance hits and major lack of function.
I suspect directX has evolved into a scam to sell uPnP firewall technology, which is out of the question for anyone who actually needs a real firewall.
I'll agree that humans today are producing hundreds or thousands of times more greenhouse gases that they produced in the past.
Where I come from, we consider quantitative changes of "hundreds or thousands of times more" to be "vast".
Perhaps your perception of the problem is based on the result you desire - you don't want to give up polluting, so you have decided to listen to those who say the pollution isn't significant?
I personally am not convinced that humans can do anything that (in the long term) will significantly change how long it takes our species to become extinct. But I'm not going to use that as an excuse to behave foolishly, and that (to me) means I will do whatever I can to minimise pollution. Going back to basics again (and avoiding the sophistries of temperatures, carbon cycles, and republicrat politics) it doesn't make sense to shit where you eat, and it doesn't make sense to pump poisons into the air when alternatives are available. That's the bottom line, all this "global warming" fooferaw is just noise.
The term "Global warming" is a stalking horse that the pro-pollution crowd uses to manipulate the media, and thus public perception.
When I last heard the man who coined the term speak, about a decade ago, he bemoaned that he'd ever said it. He wishes he'd said "global climate destabilization" instead - but too late now, as witness this thread.
He says (roughly quoted from memory) "the issue is not temperature per se, it's the decreased albedo of the planet resultant from increased carbon in the atmosphere causing more energy to be absorbed by the planet and its atmosphere. This does not mean that your house gets warmer, it means that weather patterns (which are chaotic) become more energetic, and thus less predictable. Your house may in fact get dramatically colder, or a tornado may destroy it and make the point moot."
Instead of getting your knickers in a twist over mean ocean temperature rises, and what rivers are or are not freezing, look at the problem simply and rationally.
We, that is, human beings and the other denizens of this planet, evolved to survive in an ecosystem that cycled a certain amount of unbreathable crap through the atmosphere. That amount being variable within a certain range, not fixed.
We, that is, human beings and our industry, have vastly increased the amount of unbreathable crap being pumped into our air. (Of course, the Clean Air Act drastically altered this trend, and since these things take time we can theorise that the current stabilisation might have something to do with that. Or maybe not.)
So, we are shitting where we eat, to misuse a folksy metaphor - how can that possibly be a good idea?
People need to stop arguing about stupid pseudo-scientific buzzphrases, put down the olean chips, and try walking their lardy asses somewhere instead of driving. And buy electric lawnmowers, or better yet give up that whole 1950s yard ideal.
Sure, from a USER point of view.
on
On The Death Of Unix
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Use Unix. Use Linux. Then just try to tell the difference. I've been there; there's essentially no different from a user's point of view.
Admin HP-UX. Admin Linux. Admin OSX. I've been there, and the differences are profound.
Using your criteria, there is no difference between a bus, a train, or an airplane - as long as you keep your eyes tightly shut!
You and WireDog can choose to remain ignorant of the differences, but that won't make them go away...
Linux is to Unix as the child is to the father - superficially similar (two legs, one nose, etc.) but also very different, and hopefully better.
Holy crap, did all the South Americans die of ebola, so their lands had to be bulldozed into the sea?
Did we finally kick the other North Americans asses and forcibly integrate them into the US? Those damn canucks and beaners deserved it, I guess, but why wasn't I informed?
Oh, and I suppose the non-american state of Hawaii has been jettisoned as non-essential to the mainland's economy. What with the Bush economic miracle destroying the tourist trade I can understand that...
The idea was that people might benefit more from a little research and critical thought than by simply parroting a minister who was quite atypical in his views and actions.
So what?
So go read up on Niemoeller, Martin Luther, global anti-semitism in the 1930s, and the genesis of violent Zionism. You might learn something apropos to the current global political situation.
Slashdot Mirror
Back when I was in grade school and solar cells were made with selenium paste, your assertion was entirely correct. But nowadays you've got companies like AstroPower that make their cells from recycled materials, so their products represent a huge improvement.
Once you've run an Astropower panel for a couple of years you've more than paid for the total pollution cost of manufacture, and after 20 years (they last longer than that usually) you've made an enormous difference in the amount of pollution that was required to produce the energy you used during that time.
Apparently sticking anything in their flight path will do the job... I bet windmills are usually noisy enough to warn off more birds than buildings do, though.
I agree with you 100%, and hope everyone else does too!
I get nearly all my hardware from dumpsters and recycling bins, so the faster you upgrade the better my stuff is.
No, it's exactly the kind of unthinking lameness the original poster was complaining about.
During the 20 years I smoked I never threw a butt on the ground. My friends that still smoke don't do it now. Just strip the biodegradable bits off and put the filter in your pocket until you find an appropriate receptacle.
And yes, I occasionally forgot and ran one through the laundry, at which point all my clothes smelled vaguely like an ashtray - but face it, if you smoke you smell like an ashtray to other people regardless. If it really bothers you, carry one of those small round sweet tins in your pants pocket and use it for a filter bin, I've seen people do that too and they easily hold a pack or three's worth of stripped filters.
One defines logicals at program or system startup time, and programs should be written to give useful messages if a name isn't present (typically something like "ERROR: User's mail directory MAIL$DIR is not defined.").
PS: VMS syntactica above are off the cuff, probably aren't precisely accurate.
Again, I see your point, but I think you're trying to state a general rule from specific cases. By choosing my own cases - for example, the static rocket motor testing app I mentioned, and some of the industrial automation projects I did for DuPont - I can compose the opposite rule.
We agree completely on the need for layered software, though. I don't want to rewrite the networking stack for every app, or the printer drivers either.
The difference in opinion is that you feel that devices, that is, storage locations, should be invisible to applications and managed only by the filesystem, and I want to specifically know exactly which physical hard drive contains which bytes at all times. I'd also like all media to be removable and hot-pluggable; one of my favorite tricks is to pull half of a mirror set (either a pair of synced disks or a 0+1 RAID array) and attempt a complex software upgrade, then if it doesn't work out I just power down and put the untouched disks in.
Unfortunately, because of the DMCA, you won't see Alan at any US convention. But he's really a nice guy, not as scary as you'd think from the "floating head of Alan Cox" picture.
Of course, meeting them in person also gives you a great chance to make a titanic fool of yourself.
We are not going to talk about my chat with Linus...
That substance, exuded by humans pressed together too tightly (as fruitcake in a juicer) that causes politeness to evaporate, intelligence to rot, and cars to get dented.
See here for more information.
I see your point, but I'd argue that a well constructed program can be trivially reconfigured to be in a new location.
For example, I built Infozip's unzip facilities for unix on an HP-UX box yesterday, and I had to change one line in one file (the prefix setting in the makefile) to put it exactly where I wanted it. Took less than five minutes all told (with no prior knowledge of the software) so recompiling it for a new location would be extremely trivial.
I'm not saying that your statement Fundamentally programs should not care where their physical storage is, only where it is in the namespace. is incorrect, but I think it's more a matter of preference related to the type of programs you write. For a word processor, OK, I see you'd want hardware abstraction. For a program that exercises the hardware to the extremes of its physical limitations (for example, a program to test solid fuel rocket motors) you can't afford the overhead, it's too inefficient to have opaque software layers between you and the circuitry.
I'd like to be able to write any sort of program, so I prefer exposed structures and I'm willing to do the extra work if I'm going to write an end-user app. Which I almost never do, incidentally, I'm usually a plumber not a painter.
Calling something "wrong" because it is unusual is not something that appeals to me.
That being said, yeah, obviously standardization has its value, especially in an international arena.
You're making me feel very old, though, - URLs and C++ are pretty newfangled in my world.
I have a vax in my basement, but I haven't turned it on recently. It's a salvaged Alpha that I converted from Saint/OSF-1 to VMS (hobbyist edition, which is free for home use). But my VMS skillz are pretty rusty I think, I can't remember all the QIO parms anymore.
The last time I used a VMS system professionally was in the 90s (unless you count systems that I don't personally admin, in which case it was a week or so ago.)
Since DOS already had used slashes for switches, and the command parse routine was not based on space characters like unix shells are (for example, in DOS you can do cd\ or cd.. which does not work in bash) they had to use a different slash when they implemented hierarchical file storage (aka directory structure). Kapiche?
As an old DEC hand you'll remember that VAX and PDP commands all used the tparse routine (which was available to user programs too) to parse command lines, and tparse allowed abbreviation and switch position independence while avoiding the more undesireable effects of shell pre-processing.
But the real advantage of the DEC systems was version numbering. Anyone who ever programmed for any length of time on a VMS system understands how inexpressibly primitive and lame filesystems without version numbers are.
Yup, I believe that claim is correct. People forget that VMS was much more advanced than unix (though linux is going to surpass it pretty soon) for native english speakers. Linus Torvalds hated it, and I suspect this is because at the time his english really sucked (no longer true).
You think you're tired of it, I worked at Thiokol right up until Challenger... so I get sent the stupid thing every month or so when some friend or relative stumbles across it on the net.
It's not really utter bullshit, though, it's just off in several places. Most significantly in the "roman war chariots" nonsense - the grooves were engineered into Roman roads to keep multi-ton oxcarts from brushing against buildings and each other, they weren't "worn" into them by any mythical chariots. The part about the size of the SRMs being restricted by the size of railroad tunnels is actually true.
I like device roots, personally - I don't like the way *nices obscure the hardware. But now that we've got cheap RAID it's a lot harder to argue in favor of knowing which disk pack you're using, so I see your point.
Correct. It's stupid there too. And don't get me started about single-character device names...
The slashes go "the wrong way" (hmm, any explicit biases there?) because the switch syntax was copied from CPM, the dominant microcomputer OS at the time. CPM in turn copied it from DEC's PDP operating systems (like RSX-11, TSX-11, RT-11, etc. etc. etc - the VAX/VMS system also inherited this syntax, incidentally, along with DCL (Digital Command Language) which is the direct descendant of CCL (Concise Command Language) and RSX Indirect).
A stupider paradigm is Unix's re-use of the directory separator as the name of the root directory; there are some efficiencies of notation and processing that this provides but it's really profoundly counter-intuitive. It's actually worse than the exposed numeric MFD of VMS (which is also stupid, but at least it forces one to understand the mechanics of the filesystem).
Read the article (I know, it will be hard to force yourself to do so if you are a slashdot regular
I don't know if Spolsky didn't read this far, or if he's just a weak plagarist, or maybe this is the only part that made a big enough impression on him to merit rephrasing for his own column.
The only difference I see is POV, and substitute "mac" for "windows".
However, here in reality, whoever has the most money is most likely to win the court case. And lawyers write absolute trash all the time.
Our lawyer wrote a contract that stipulated we would deliver all data "instantaneously". And could not understand why that was a problem!
Don't DirectX games absolutely blow chunks when playing across untrusted networks? I mean, they always have in my experience, but that's limited to the Civilization series of strategy games.
Configuring a firewall to pass the ridiculous number of ports required is a pain in the ass (I actually wrote a script to do it because it's too tedious otherwise) and you still can't have multiple players inside and outside if you're NATted to a single outside address. Well, OK, you can sort of do it if you are willing to settle for huge performance hits and major lack of function.
I suspect directX has evolved into a scam to sell uPnP firewall technology, which is out of the question for anyone who actually needs a real firewall.
Perhaps your perception of the problem is based on the result you desire - you don't want to give up polluting, so you have decided to listen to those who say the pollution isn't significant?
I personally am not convinced that humans can do anything that (in the long term) will significantly change how long it takes our species to become extinct. But I'm not going to use that as an excuse to behave foolishly, and that (to me) means I will do whatever I can to minimise pollution. Going back to basics again (and avoiding the sophistries of temperatures, carbon cycles, and republicrat politics) it doesn't make sense to shit where you eat, and it doesn't make sense to pump poisons into the air when alternatives are available. That's the bottom line, all this "global warming" fooferaw is just noise.
OK, here's the basic rundown:
The term "Global warming" is a stalking horse that the pro-pollution crowd uses to manipulate the media, and thus public perception.
When I last heard the man who coined the term speak, about a decade ago, he bemoaned that he'd ever said it. He wishes he'd said "global climate destabilization" instead - but too late now, as witness this thread.
He says (roughly quoted from memory) "the issue is not temperature per se, it's the decreased albedo of the planet resultant from increased carbon in the atmosphere causing more energy to be absorbed by the planet and its atmosphere. This does not mean that your house gets warmer, it means that weather patterns (which are chaotic) become more energetic, and thus less predictable. Your house may in fact get dramatically colder, or a tornado may destroy it and make the point moot."
Instead of getting your knickers in a twist over mean ocean temperature rises, and what rivers are or are not freezing, look at the problem simply and rationally.
We, that is, human beings and the other denizens of this planet, evolved to survive in an ecosystem that cycled a certain amount of unbreathable crap through the atmosphere. That amount being variable within a certain range, not fixed.
We, that is, human beings and our industry, have vastly increased the amount of unbreathable crap being pumped into our air. (Of course, the Clean Air Act drastically altered this trend, and since these things take time we can theorise that the current stabilisation might have something to do with that. Or maybe not.)
So, we are shitting where we eat, to misuse a folksy metaphor - how can that possibly be a good idea?
People need to stop arguing about stupid pseudo-scientific buzzphrases, put down the olean chips, and try walking their lardy asses somewhere instead of driving. And buy electric lawnmowers, or better yet give up that whole 1950s yard ideal.
Using your criteria, there is no difference between a bus, a train, or an airplane - as long as you keep your eyes tightly shut!
You and WireDog can choose to remain ignorant of the differences, but that won't make them go away...
Linux is to Unix as the child is to the father - superficially similar (two legs, one nose, etc.) but also very different, and hopefully better.
Nan-in, a Japanese master during the Meiji era (1868-1912), received a university professor who came to inquire about Zen.
Nan-in served tea. He poured his visitor's cup full, and then kept on pouring.
The professor watched the overflow until he no longer could restrain himself. "It is overfull. No more will go in!"
"Like this cup," Nan-in said, "you are full of your own opinions and speculations. How can I show you Zen unless you first empty your cup?"
Holy crap, did all the South Americans die of ebola, so their lands had to be bulldozed into the sea?
Did we finally kick the other North Americans asses and forcibly integrate them into the US? Those damn canucks and beaners deserved it, I guess, but why wasn't I informed?
Oh, and I suppose the non-american state of Hawaii has been jettisoned as non-essential to the mainland's economy. What with the Bush economic miracle destroying the tourist trade I can understand that...
So go read up on Niemoeller, Martin Luther, global anti-semitism in the 1930s, and the genesis of violent Zionism. You might learn something apropos to the current global political situation.