I accepted that the Amiga platform died in the mid 90's and moved onto Window and from there to OS X.
The Amiga platform was amazing for its time but we are now in the 2010's. Nobody except crazy nut jobs want to use 20 year old technology.
Right -- we Unix users prefer 40 year old technology.
Re:Alternatives to Ubuntu
on
Ubuntu Turns 7
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· Score: 1
I tried Debian, but video drivers are a mess, and the sudoers is just a neeedless PITA on a single-user use of a Linux.
I run Debian, and I've never heard about "the sudoers" before.
Are you speaking of ways to become root? I need that once per month or so, and I just su.
Also I make sure to have graphics hardware supported by free software, so I have no video driver problems either.
When you create something, normally, you fill a niche. Dennis Ritchie did something useful and did it well, but if his stuff took off, that's because there was a need for it in some way. If he didn't exist, then somebody else would have filled that need a short while later, with something that might have been better or worse, there is no way to tell. Without Ritchie you would have no UNIX, but then somebody else would have made something similar.
I'm not sure about that.
People kept inventing really sucky OSes like MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 for decades after Unix was created,
and people who used them thought they were the best.
Computing isn't the kind of place where everything quickly converges towards the best possible solution.
Also consider that there were few places like Bell Labs.
It isn't what you have, it's what you don't have--resistance.
Perhaps the recovered virus DNA researchers are looking at is similar to the modern Yersinia pestis because it is the same critter--just somewhat removed in ancestry. It doesn't take many changes in our own biological functions to acquire a resistance to Yersinia pestis. That alone can explain the difference in symptoms between the Black Plague victims and victims of the virus today.
ISTR a TV documentary where they showed that each plague outbreak (and there have been many, in Europe too)
had less and less casualties, probably due to resistance.
From the beginning, the half-smirking explicit intent of the majority of the alt.* hierarchy was "megabytes of copyright violations."
This is not at all true. Ignorant people shouldn't make up shit.
I can confirm that. In the 1991--1995 timeframe (which isn't at all early in Usenet's history), alt.* was like any other hierarchy, plus some really alternative groups like
alt.suicide.holiday, alt.drugs.*, alt.fan.* and so on. There might have been some stuff in alt.binaries.* but back then it made more sense to bury the stuff in some obscure corner of your Uni FTP server.
It wasn't until many years later I learned that some people saw Usenet as a big warez server.
That still pisses me off -- it's destructive, like fishing with dynamite.
User reviews are useless at places like Amazon. Amazon wants you to buy things, so they have a vested interest in putting high-ranked reviews up front.
Citation needed.
I figure they know they'd make more money by directing you away from the crap
so you buy things you like and come back for more.
(Not that I think reviews from anonymous users are a great source of knowledge in general.)
Named after "greenwashing," the act of selling something as eco-friendly when it actually isn't, openwashing is the act of selling something as open when it actually isn't.
To be fair, "open" WRT software once meant it had published APIs and that you were free to write programs which worked with it. The Unix lifestyle versus consultants from IBM. But that was in the 1980s.
Yeah, I know! It's like how I saw this old newspaper a while back that called the Italians "fascists". What's up with that? It's like people and groups can change over time or something. Weird, you know?
And Italians still exist. ATI disappeared five years ago.
I need to feed my family. I write code for a living. How do I get paid for doing this in a world where all software is free?
You don't, but that world does not exist and never will.
All the software I *directly* use in my daily life is already free; all the software I produce as a hobby is free.
Yet I have no trouble finding things to do at work.
Of all of those listed, I own 3: Kraftwerk's Computer World, Queen's greatest hits, and Blondie's greatest hits.
I own three:
The Teardrop Explodes' Wilder;
The Church's Of Skins and Heart;
Matt Johnson's Burning Blue Soul.
All excellent works.
I wish I had the Tom Verlaine and the Foetus albums too, but much of the rest seems to have sucked.
That's why I can't take the Agile Manifesto seriously. Any group that thinks a semantical term used and misued by many a fanatical political grouping (see where I'm going here) as a substitue for reasoned and nuanced thinking (there is no silver bullet) deserves serious scorn and derision.
A "manifesto" is when a number of people think alike, condense their thinking into a short text
and publish it hoping to swing even more people. What's wrong with that, exactly:
thinking alike, writing it down, or telling people about it?
Mine too. I've spent many man-months cleaning up after people who read it.
In one instance, after someone who's credited in the bloody book itself!
Ok, maybe design patterns are a good thing in some places.
But they also inspired a yet another generation of masturbators to
hide their single-purpose code in a sticky mess or generality.
My vote goes to Brooks.
Seriously, there's a bad trend among some "modern" languages of piling up constructs without regards for efficiency, simplicity or sanity. For example, you can write a non-optimized compiler for languages I'd call sane in a week while for some a team in five years can't be expected to fully implement the standard. There is not a single compliant compiler of C++ [...]
That argument worked in 1999, but not today. Both GCC and Microsoft have had reliable, compliant C++ compilers for many years now.
And frankly I don't care if it takes *twenty* years to write a new C++ compiler, when gcc exists, is free, and is the first piece of software ported to any new CPU architecture.
No, something with an IDL compiler that generates a typelibrary, proxy & stub code and some kind of lookup service / transport running over something such as D-Bus. This sort of thing has been done lots of times before.
That's also the only thing I would hate *more* than Lisp or Tcl as an extension language...
Any high school student who uses these words in a piece of schoolwork is either committed a mistake--a mistake that could potentially cost them a job if their adult life--or they're engaged in a breaching experiment. Either way, it is perfectly appropriate for the school to take some kind of action.
How about letting a teacher take that action, after he or she has read it? Teachers still read what the students write, right?
...Come on, give me a good military flightsim like F19 that will run on my netbook, I know you can do it!
F19 Stealth Fighter?
It was a good game, but not so good as a flight simulator. Ugly, and with not very realistic physics.
And at the time, bombing Libya seemed unlikely and cruel. Sigh.
Because it would be a major inconvenience for the majority of people which only benefitted a tiny minority.
I interact a lot with people over time zones, but it's either like Slashdot or mail (I post now, you reply later)
or I need to know if you're at work, not what your wall clock says. So I still need to know what timezone you're in.
The first situation doesn't need to be solved; the second one cannot be solved until you force half the planet to
work night shifts.
Python is a nice language, but I'm not sure how it scales to tens of millions of lines of code? Java with its mature tools scales really well. It's not hard to maintain and add new features.
This would make more sense if you could mention some features of Java, pertaining to large codebases, that Python doesn't have.
He did, in the part you didn't quote: static typing.
I really like the way Python handles this for small programs, but for anything a bit larger I really want a compiler, not myself, to do the static checking.
Likewise, GC has been a favorite subject of C++. Should we have GC in the core of C++ or not? There is always a third party library that can add GC to your C++ project. Does using that library make you a bad coder?
Yes, if you use it for things where C++ has better mechanisms, i.e. most of the cases.
... As a rough example: I open a file in Java or C++, I still have to think about how that file will be used and when I need to close it (no other option in C++) or just let it close by itself (an option in Java but not usually the best one.)
Have you ever done any C++ programming? Does RAII ring a bell? A file gets closed when its object goes out of scope.
(Of course no matter what the language, if you've written to the file it's usually prudent to check it for I/O errors at closing time.)
If you have a giant build, your design is not modular enough. Above some size, it's time to go to multiple intercommunicating programs.
I bet most giant builds aren't giant because there's actually so much building work that needs to be done;
they're giant because the build system is *broken*.
Can't do a proper incremental build, can't be parallelized, and so on.
I once reduced a 15--20 minute build time to 0--15 seconds by fixing up the Makefile to do the right thing.
I recently upgraded from the older interface to the old (with a big empty window with a smirking coyote
when I'm not editing an image), and I don't like it at all.
I suppose I will dislike the new one even more, when it hits my Linux installation in a few years.
Do you have a solution for MITM attacks? No? Well then.
Chances are you've visited the site before. If an ssh key changes, I get a stern warning when I ssh in.
I sometimes think the problem with crypto is the ultra-paranoid people who want all or nothing.
This is a good example:
unless you somehow verify the ssh host key the first time you interact with a host, you don't
*really* know that the NSA isn't listening in or modifying what you see...
but on the other hand it's completely trouble-free, decentralized and easy to understand!
I've tried to use OpenPGP for mail, but the problem is noone is interested in implementing just *decent*
security; it's full paranoid mode and usability suffers. (And of course at the same time it's as vulnerable
to a local root kit as anything else.)
Slashdot Mirror
I was an Amiga user from 1989-95.
1990--1996 in my case.
I accepted that the Amiga platform died in the mid 90's and moved onto Window and from there to OS X.
The Amiga platform was amazing for its time but we are now in the 2010's. Nobody except crazy nut jobs want to use 20 year old technology.
Right -- we Unix users prefer 40 year old technology.
I tried Debian, but video drivers are a mess, and the sudoers is just a neeedless PITA on a single-user use of a Linux.
I run Debian, and I've never heard about "the sudoers" before. Are you speaking of ways to become root? I need that once per month or so, and I just su.
Also I make sure to have graphics hardware supported by free software, so I have no video driver problems either.
When you create something, normally, you fill a niche. Dennis Ritchie did something useful and did it well, but if his stuff took off, that's because there was a need for it in some way. If he didn't exist, then somebody else would have filled that need a short while later, with something that might have been better or worse, there is no way to tell. Without Ritchie you would have no UNIX, but then somebody else would have made something similar.
I'm not sure about that. People kept inventing really sucky OSes like MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 for decades after Unix was created, and people who used them thought they were the best. Computing isn't the kind of place where everything quickly converges towards the best possible solution.
Also consider that there were few places like Bell Labs.
It isn't what you have, it's what you don't have--resistance.
Perhaps the recovered virus DNA researchers are looking at is similar to the modern Yersinia pestis because it is the same critter--just somewhat removed in ancestry. It doesn't take many changes in our own biological functions to acquire a resistance to Yersinia pestis. That alone can explain the difference in symptoms between the Black Plague victims and victims of the virus today.
ISTR a TV documentary where they showed that each plague outbreak (and there have been many, in Europe too) had less and less casualties, probably due to resistance.
From the beginning, the half-smirking explicit intent of the majority of the alt.* hierarchy was "megabytes of copyright violations." This is not at all true. Ignorant people shouldn't make up shit.
I can confirm that. In the 1991--1995 timeframe (which isn't at all early in Usenet's history), alt.* was like any other hierarchy, plus some really alternative groups like alt.suicide.holiday, alt.drugs.*, alt.fan.* and so on. There might have been some stuff in alt.binaries.* but back then it made more sense to bury the stuff in some obscure corner of your Uni FTP server.
It wasn't until many years later I learned that some people saw Usenet as a big warez server. That still pisses me off -- it's destructive, like fishing with dynamite.
User reviews are useless at places like Amazon. Amazon wants you to buy things, so they have a vested interest in putting high-ranked reviews up front.
Citation needed. I figure they know they'd make more money by directing you away from the crap so you buy things you like and come back for more. (Not that I think reviews from anonymous users are a great source of knowledge in general.)
More specifically, I call it "openwashing."
Named after "greenwashing," the act of selling something as eco-friendly when it actually isn't, openwashing is the act of selling something as open when it actually isn't.
To be fair, "open" WRT software once meant it had published APIs and that you were free to write programs which worked with it. The Unix lifestyle versus consultants from IBM. But that was in the 1980s.
Yeah, I know! It's like how I saw this old newspaper a while back that called the Italians "fascists". What's up with that? It's like people and groups can change over time or something. Weird, you know?
And Italians still exist. ATI disappeared five years ago.
I need to feed my family. I write code for a living. How do I get paid for doing this in a world where all software is free?
You don't, but that world does not exist and never will. All the software I *directly* use in my daily life is already free; all the software I produce as a hobby is free. Yet I have no trouble finding things to do at work.
Any one else getting sick of all these "reboots" ? Reboot this, Reboot that, etc. Enough with the freaking reboots already.
Meanwhile, Nethack has an excellent uptime ...
Of all of those listed, I own 3: Kraftwerk's Computer World, Queen's greatest hits, and Blondie's greatest hits.
I own three: The Teardrop Explodes' Wilder; The Church's Of Skins and Heart; Matt Johnson's Burning Blue Soul. All excellent works. I wish I had the Tom Verlaine and the Foetus albums too, but much of the rest seems to have sucked.
That's why I can't take the Agile Manifesto seriously. Any group that thinks a semantical term used and misued by many a fanatical political grouping (see where I'm going here) as a substitue for reasoned and nuanced thinking (there is no silver bullet) deserves serious scorn and derision.
A "manifesto" is when a number of people think alike, condense their thinking into a short text and publish it hoping to swing even more people. What's wrong with that, exactly: thinking alike, writing it down, or telling people about it?
Yeah, this book changed my career.
Mine too. I've spent many man-months cleaning up after people who read it. In one instance, after someone who's credited in the bloody book itself!
Ok, maybe design patterns are a good thing in some places. But they also inspired a yet another generation of masturbators to hide their single-purpose code in a sticky mess or generality. My vote goes to Brooks.
I use M-x hippie-expand. Bind it to M-/:
Why not use M-x dabbrev-expand, which is already bound to M-/ ?
Seriously, there's a bad trend among some "modern" languages of piling up constructs without regards for efficiency, simplicity or sanity. For example, you can write a non-optimized compiler for languages I'd call sane in a week while for some a team in five years can't be expected to fully implement the standard. There is not a single compliant compiler of C++ [...]
That argument worked in 1999, but not today. Both GCC and Microsoft have had reliable, compliant C++ compilers for many years now. And frankly I don't care if it takes *twenty* years to write a new C++ compiler, when gcc exists, is free, and is the first piece of software ported to any new CPU architecture.
No, something with an IDL compiler that generates a typelibrary, proxy & stub code and some kind of lookup service / transport running over something such as D-Bus. This sort of thing has been done lots of times before.
That's also the only thing I would hate *more* than Lisp or Tcl as an extension language ...
Any high school student who uses these words in a piece of schoolwork is either committed a mistake--a mistake that could potentially cost them a job if their adult life--or they're engaged in a breaching experiment. Either way, it is perfectly appropriate for the school to take some kind of action.
How about letting a teacher take that action, after he or she has read it? Teachers still read what the students write, right?
...Come on, give me a good military flightsim like F19 that will run on my netbook, I know you can do it!
F19 Stealth Fighter? It was a good game, but not so good as a flight simulator. Ugly, and with not very realistic physics. And at the time, bombing Libya seemed unlikely and cruel. Sigh.
So why aren't we doing it?
Because it would be a major inconvenience for the majority of people which only benefitted a tiny minority.
I interact a lot with people over time zones, but it's either like Slashdot or mail (I post now, you reply later) or I need to know if you're at work, not what your wall clock says. So I still need to know what timezone you're in.
The first situation doesn't need to be solved; the second one cannot be solved until you force half the planet to work night shifts.
Python is a nice language, but I'm not sure how it scales to tens of millions of lines of code? Java with its mature tools scales really well. It's not hard to maintain and add new features.
This would make more sense if you could mention some features of Java, pertaining to large codebases, that Python doesn't have.
He did, in the part you didn't quote: static typing. I really like the way Python handles this for small programs, but for anything a bit larger I really want a compiler, not myself, to do the static checking.
Likewise, GC has been a favorite subject of C++. Should we have GC in the core of C++ or not? There is always a third party library that can add GC to your C++ project. Does using that library make you a bad coder?
Yes, if you use it for things where C++ has better mechanisms, i.e. most of the cases.
... As a rough example: I open a file in Java or C++, I still have to think about how that file will be used and when I need to close it (no other option in C++) or just let it close by itself (an option in Java but not usually the best one.)
Have you ever done any C++ programming? Does RAII ring a bell? A file gets closed when its object goes out of scope. (Of course no matter what the language, if you've written to the file it's usually prudent to check it for I/O errors at closing time.)
If you have a giant build, your design is not modular enough. Above some size, it's time to go to multiple intercommunicating programs.
I bet most giant builds aren't giant because there's actually so much building work that needs to be done; they're giant because the build system is *broken*. Can't do a proper incremental build, can't be parallelized, and so on. I once reduced a 15--20 minute build time to 0--15 seconds by fixing up the Makefile to do the right thing.
I just learned the old interface! :)
I recently upgraded from the older interface to the old (with a big empty window with a smirking coyote when I'm not editing an image), and I don't like it at all. I suppose I will dislike the new one even more, when it hits my Linux installation in a few years.
Named after Hugo Gernsback, the founder of Amazing Stories magazine
Am I the only illiterate who thought, for a second, that the Hugo awards was actually named after Victor?
In this context, Hugo Gernsback beats Victor Hugo and yes, you were.
Do you have a solution for MITM attacks? No? Well then.
Chances are you've visited the site before. If an ssh key changes, I get a stern warning when I ssh in.
I sometimes think the problem with crypto is the ultra-paranoid people who want all or nothing. This is a good example: unless you somehow verify the ssh host key the first time you interact with a host, you don't *really* know that the NSA isn't listening in or modifying what you see ...
but on the other hand it's completely trouble-free, decentralized and easy to understand!
I've tried to use OpenPGP for mail, but the problem is noone is interested in implementing just *decent* security; it's full paranoid mode and usability suffers. (And of course at the same time it's as vulnerable to a local root kit as anything else.)