What really surprises me is that in my office, most people have a docked laptop with an external monitor, and don't choose to run both displays as a dual monitor setup. It's like a free dual monitor setup for them, and they ignore it and stick to a single monitor!
That's me. The laptop is in an awkward place, my desk is small, and I want plenty of room for the keyboard and for sketching on paper.
Besides, I already flip between virtual desktops in two levels (four in Windows, and four in the VNC session which occupies one of the Windows ones.)
Soooo you spend years not using some very good software because it's proprietary and might force you, at some point in the future, to not use it? Sounds like cutting your nose off to spite your face. What if they don't stop supporting the linux client? Then you've permanently removed yourself from being able to use Skype, and forced yourself to use some half-baked not-as-good alternative. Genius.
That is exactly what I do.
I believe in open standards enough to invest time and effort into them.
If others hadn't done that before us, we wouldn't have an Internet to discuss this over...
and Skype wouldn't be worth $8e9.
Just as a reality check, here's a single command line that:
- gets the Windows security Event Log
- filters for failed logon events (4648)
- extracts some fields from the events, in some cases these are exposed as simple properties of the streaming objects, in one other it's using RexEx, with a named capturing group, to find the user name in the message
- inserts the data in a SQL RDBMS
I'm no genius either, have no MCSE, been into Xenix last century, but oddly enough I ended up with a completely different opinion of the people in Redmond.
Are you joking? Based on your description, that multi-line gibberish above seems to be equivalent to grep -w Failed/var/log/auth.log.
Seriously, it might be because we have decent media coverage of these things.
This is just one in a series of daft technological decisions coming from the EU, and journalists in.se
are used to covering them. (And Slashdot readers in.se are used to submitting the results here.)
What?.se coverage of EU matters is horrendous. Sure, once the laws decided there start showing up in country, coverage may start happening, but covering the EU parliament and the doings of the commission? Perish the though!
If you say so -- I can't pretend that I'm following it closely.
Although my argument still holds if coverage is even worse in other countries.
This is of coursed based on an EU directive. Not sure why Sweden was singled out.
Because we plan to kidnap Julian Assange and lose him on a small island in the Baltic sea where the only female inhabitants
are sheep?
Seriously, it might be because we have decent media coverage of these things.
This is just one in a series of daft technological decisions coming from the EU, and journalists in.se
are used to covering them. (And Slashdot readers in.se are used to submitting the results here.)
"the application essentially has to reinvent the window manager for those internal windows."
No they are not. Any modern OS has implementations of windows-inside-of-windows.
I have yet to see the program which embeds a copy of my window manager (ctwm) inside its own big window,
with my own customizations, keyboard shortcuts etc.
(Or are you saying Windows whatever-the-latest-release-is is the only modern OS?)
Why does anyone still use shell scripts anymore?
Every major(and most minor) distro ships with python, ruby, and perl either built in or a trivial statement away.
These languages give you access to basic OS functions and much more sane syntaxes. Shell scripting is something I haven't felt the need to do in 5 years.
Then your tasks are different from mine.
There are things that can be done much better in a shell script than in Perl or Python.
Anything that executes a lot of other programs for example. Anything that pipes them together.
I use Perl and/or Python a lot for many things, but shell scripts still have their place.
(And if you choose to use bash rather than/bin/sh the language isn't *that* primitive.)
Back in the days of the Commodore 64 virus were practically non existent, and they were made only to show off how 133t the coders were.
I didn't own a C64, but a few years later on the Amiga viruses were plentiful and widespread. The users were the same, and the virus programmers... I bet most people had an infected floppy or two. But yes, they spread more slowly with no internet connection, and there were no online personalities or credit card numbers to steal.
Brilliant! I assume they've got rid of those things called header files by now.
And before anyone moans that "header files provides a good overview of a project", well, it should be up to the IDE to display information (much better presented) about a project and its classes and members.
I prefer header files to having to learn some IDE.
Even Bjarne Stroustrup said that header files were a kludge,
Sure, they *are* a kludge (along with the rest of the preprocessor).
Break backwards compatibility a little bit and you can do so much stuff better. Otherwise you ultimately have a dying language.
Remove header files, and all existing C++ code would immediately stop working.
All interoperability with C libraries would also stop working.
So yes, it's a horrible language. But yes, I'm on a team writing an OpenGL based game engine, and we're using C++, because it's the only reasonable choice. We need exact control over bitfield layouts, we need inline assembly, we need good GL bindings, and so on.
Too bad that C++ has none of those things. You're programming in Visual C++ X.Y for x86, or something.
(For bitfields, I bet you can replace those with a class containing an uint32_t or whatever, and a set of inlined functions.
Unless that inline assembly forces you to disable the optimizer...)
Here we are talking about wasting one more machine word per list for performance reasons, in a structure that wastes two machine words per list element for performance reasons.
No, we're talking about ditching a O(1) splice() -- one of the defining properties of a linked list! See smellotron's posting elsewhere in the thread.
size() should not be a member of std::list at all if the O(n) crowd is to be listened to, for its inclusion is then only a trap to be fallen into.
Now *that* is something I can agree with. But it's 15 years too late for that.
C++ isn't Python: once mistakes have been standardized we have to live with them.
There are many places where anything other than C++ simply doesn't make sense.
Example Please.
Large, long-lived applications which need to work properly and need to be maintainable, and have
programmers come and go over time.
You need (IMO) static typing for this, which disqualifies most popular languages.
You also need a well-known language, and you probably don't want to rely on Microsoft or Oracle
not screwing you over.
That leaves C and C++.
The entire Linux kernel is written in pure C.
I attribute that to some weird mental block shared by Linus and many other Unix hackers.
Which industry is that? Around me it's 95% C, or else buy into the.NET or Java franchises.
I'm being told C++ is gaining ground in embedded systems, but I've not seen any proof of it yet.
people who want to use a different language, even when they can list every good reason for making that decision, often find that the pressure to stick with C++ is too much to overcome. A lot of people simply refuse to hear the arguments about better languages for a particular project, or are afraid of being unable to find programmers who know something that is not C++ (or similar enough, like Java)
Ugh. Java is nothing like C++, except they both use a C-like syntax.
But you're right in at least one sense: some tasks are much better suited for languages like shell script or Python.
So glad to hear that some people actually know about D! D is great....
D does a marvelous job fixing the syntax and the shortcomings of C++. Also, there's NO PREPROCESSOR! (Before you jump on this, there is nothing you can't do in D that you could do with a C preprocessor)
Ah, so it has all the problems caused by the preprocessor, except it doesn't call it a preprocessor?
I outright laugh at people in an Interview when they ask me if I'll write OO code.
I bet you have to go to a lot of interviews, then.
OO code is worse than 10,000 jmp, or goto's.
Code written in an OO "framework" produces an excessive of files, classes, and thousands upon thousands of useless objects that are not even necessary for the task at hand, almost as bad as XML, but worse. You end up with bloated apps, that cannot be read or understood by anyone quickly. Let alone have any of the code be re-usable anywhere else.
You're now arguing about various frameworks which suck. You're probably right,
but you haven't provided any arguments against OO.
Here's how I think of it: objects it's about creating abstract data types that fit your problem, rather than solving your problems with a combination of raw char, int, and *.
Most people seem to agree that OO also implies using inheritance and run-time polymorphism when there's a need for it. I don't know -- I very rarely see a need for that.
Incidentally, Standard ML (the language of choice in TFA) supports abstract data types,
so probably the parts of OO which the CMU guys hate are the parts I don't use a lot,
not the parts I find essential.
I love the vernacular "switch". It's a telco switch. Not to be confused with the more nerdy (and hopefully slashdot-friendly) network switch. As in Layer 2 of the OSI model. Because the $50 gigabit switch sitting on my desk can handle "tens of thousands of gigabytes of data a day" as well.
Maybe I'm just not impressed with telco stuff, being a network nerd and overall "virtual protocol" kinda guy. Just wanted to point out if you're thinking network switch like I was, you won't be comparing apples to apples.
The article mentioned LTE, which implies mobile broadband.
That's not too far away from normal IP networking.
I'm a developer and I'm selling programs for Mac OS, but as long as Apple decides which app to include in the app store and which not I won't buy or use an iPhone and won't develop for iOS. It's as simple as that.
Yeah.
We got the right to develop and install software on our computers when the home computers came in the 1970s.
We must not trade that freedom for convenience. Companies like Apple would fuck us over like IBM used to do in the mainframe era.
You don't have to be Richard Stallman to see that.
I _massively_ use destructors for doing more than freeing memory [...]
AOL.
In addition to that, if you're using destructors to free memory, you may be doing something wrong.
If the class members are all real objects (including standard containers or various smart pointers)
all that is taken care of already.
Buddy you're just showing your own ignorance there. The limit for SMS is 160 characters, no matter the provider.
There's something called "concatenated messages" -- like IP fragmentation, but for SMS. I thought everyone supported that by now -- I did the system testing of one implementation 8 years ago.
Guess I'm lucky to use IceWM which still works the way it worked ten years ago - and I find that a good thing.
I use ctwm. It works the way it worked almost 20 years ago. If I need a "maximize" button, I configure it to have one.
(I had to do that at work. At home I just have "maximize height" which I find more useful.)
This is the way to go, it is what I use when I want to send encrypted email. There are some big problems with PGP/GPG where government could help, these are:
not enough people use it. A government push would speed adoption, if government departments use it then others will follow -- that is probably all that they need to do.
helping with key management and verification. I would be happy to pay a small charge (say £10 one off) to have my key verified against passport,...
Once they have done that then the normal commercial forces would kick in: some people would pay for s/ware that works, others would use FLOSS; it doesn't really matter -- it is the standard that is important.
Right on. All I'd have to do is to trust the German key (they could publish the fingerprint in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung or something) and
I could communicate with anyone in.de.
And that is why I resent the "OMG I would never trust a system where the government is involved!" comments here.
Handing out public identities for people is precisely what governments *are for*.
Without the government, we are clearly stuck where we are today: with unsigned and unencrypted mail.
Isn't 'Number of descendent distributions' a crappy metric for 'Importance'? Wouldn't something like 'Installed base' be humongously better?
Yes. But TFA started out by saying 3/4 of the most downloaded distros were Debian-based.
The "number of descendent distributions" was just something that looked nifty and quotable.
The killer features of Debian though are that it's driven by *people*, not shareholder profits,
and that these guys work in the Unix tradition. Kind of like a *BSD, I imagine.
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What really surprises me is that in my office, most people have a docked laptop with an external monitor, and don't choose to run both displays as a dual monitor setup. It's like a free dual monitor setup for them, and they ignore it and stick to a single monitor!
That's me. The laptop is in an awkward place, my desk is small, and I want plenty of room for the keyboard and for sketching on paper. Besides, I already flip between virtual desktops in two levels (four in Windows, and four in the VNC session which occupies one of the Windows ones.)
Soooo you spend years not using some very good software because it's proprietary and might force you, at some point in the future, to not use it? Sounds like cutting your nose off to spite your face. What if they don't stop supporting the linux client? Then you've permanently removed yourself from being able to use Skype, and forced yourself to use some half-baked not-as-good alternative. Genius.
That is exactly what I do. I believe in open standards enough to invest time and effort into them. If others hadn't done that before us, we wouldn't have an Internet to discuss this over ...
and Skype wouldn't be worth $8e9.
Firstly, why is this a nightmare? Who wants extra competition?
Because if there *is* work that needs to be done, you now have to
Just speculating, of course.
Just as a reality check, here's a single command line that: - gets the Windows security Event Log - filters for failed logon events (4648) - extracts some fields from the events, in some cases these are exposed as simple properties of the streaming objects, in one other it's using RexEx, with a named capturing group, to find the user name in the message - inserts the data in a SQL RDBMS
Get-EventLog -LogName "Security" | ? { $_.InstanceID -eq 4648 } | Select Index, TimeGenerated, MachineName, @{Name="AccountName"; Expression={(([regex]"Account Name:\s*(?.*)\x0d\x0a").Match($_.Message) | ? {$_.Success}).Groups['AccountName'].Value}} | % { Invoke-Sqlcmd -Query "INSERT INTO tempdb.dbo.FailedLogons VALUES ($($_.Index), '$($_.TimeGenerated)', '$($_.MachineName)', '$($_.AccountName)');" }
I'm no genius either, have no MCSE, been into Xenix last century, but oddly enough I ended up with a completely different opinion of the people in Redmond.
Are you joking? Based on your description, that multi-line gibberish above seems to be equivalent to /var/log/auth.log.
grep -w Failed
Seriously, it might be because we have decent media coverage of these things. This is just one in a series of daft technological decisions coming from the EU, and journalists in .se
are used to covering them. (And Slashdot readers in .se are used to submitting the results here.)
What? .se coverage of EU matters is horrendous. Sure, once the laws decided there start showing up in country, coverage may start happening, but covering the EU parliament and the doings of the commission? Perish the though!
If you say so -- I can't pretend that I'm following it closely. Although my argument still holds if coverage is even worse in other countries.
This is of coursed based on an EU directive. Not sure why Sweden was singled out.
Because we plan to kidnap Julian Assange and lose him on a small island in the Baltic sea where the only female inhabitants are sheep?
Seriously, it might be because we have decent media coverage of these things. This is just one in a series of daft technological decisions coming from the EU, and journalists in .se
are used to covering them. (And Slashdot readers in .se are used to submitting the results here.)
"the application essentially has to reinvent the window manager for those internal windows."
No they are not. Any modern OS has implementations of windows-inside-of-windows.
I have yet to see the program which embeds a copy of my window manager (ctwm) inside its own big window, with my own customizations, keyboard shortcuts etc. (Or are you saying Windows whatever-the-latest-release-is is the only modern OS?)
Why does anyone still use shell scripts anymore? Every major(and most minor) distro ships with python, ruby, and perl either built in or a trivial statement away. These languages give you access to basic OS functions and much more sane syntaxes. Shell scripting is something I haven't felt the need to do in 5 years.
Then your tasks are different from mine. There are things that can be done much better in a shell script than in Perl or Python. Anything that executes a lot of other programs for example. Anything that pipes them together. I use Perl and/or Python a lot for many things, but shell scripts still have their place. (And if you choose to use bash rather than /bin/sh the language isn't *that* primitive.)
Back in the days of the Commodore 64 virus were practically non existent, and they were made only to show off how 133t the coders were.
I didn't own a C64, but a few years later on the Amiga viruses were plentiful and widespread. The users were the same, and the virus programmers ... I bet most people had an infected floppy or two. But yes, they spread more slowly with no internet connection, and there were no online personalities or credit card numbers to steal.
Brilliant! I assume they've got rid of those things called header files by now.
And before anyone moans that "header files provides a good overview of a project", well, it should be up to the IDE to display information (much better presented) about a project and its classes and members.
I prefer header files to having to learn some IDE.
Even Bjarne Stroustrup said that header files were a kludge,
Sure, they *are* a kludge (along with the rest of the preprocessor).
Break backwards compatibility a little bit and you can do so much stuff better. Otherwise you ultimately have a dying language.
Remove header files, and all existing C++ code would immediately stop working. All interoperability with C libraries would also stop working.
So yes, it's a horrible language. But yes, I'm on a team writing an OpenGL based game engine, and we're using C++, because it's the only reasonable choice. We need exact control over bitfield layouts, we need inline assembly, we need good GL bindings, and so on.
Too bad that C++ has none of those things. You're programming in Visual C++ X.Y for x86, or something. (For bitfields, I bet you can replace those with a class containing an uint32_t or whatever, and a set of inlined functions. Unless that inline assembly forces you to disable the optimizer ...)
Here we are talking about wasting one more machine word per list for performance reasons, in a structure that wastes two machine words per list element for performance reasons.
No, we're talking about ditching a O(1) splice() -- one of the defining properties of a linked list! See smellotron's posting elsewhere in the thread.
size() should not be a member of std::list at all if the O(n) crowd is to be listened to, for its inclusion is then only a trap to be fallen into.
Now *that* is something I can agree with. But it's 15 years too late for that. C++ isn't Python: once mistakes have been standardized we have to live with them.
There are many places where anything other than C++ simply doesn't make sense.
Example Please.
Large, long-lived applications which need to work properly and need to be maintainable, and have programmers come and go over time.
You need (IMO) static typing for this, which disqualifies most popular languages. You also need a well-known language, and you probably don't want to rely on Microsoft or Oracle not screwing you over. That leaves C and C++.
The entire Linux kernel is written in pure C.
I attribute that to some weird mental block shared by Linus and many other Unix hackers.
The problem is that C++ dominates the industry;
Which industry is that? Around me it's 95% C, or else buy into the .NET or Java franchises.
I'm being told C++ is gaining ground in embedded systems, but I've not seen any proof of it yet.
people who want to use a different language, even when they can list every good reason for making that decision, often find that the pressure to stick with C++ is too much to overcome. A lot of people simply refuse to hear the arguments about better languages for a particular project, or are afraid of being unable to find programmers who know something that is not C++ (or similar enough, like Java)
Ugh. Java is nothing like C++, except they both use a C-like syntax.
But you're right in at least one sense: some tasks are much better suited for languages like shell script or Python.
So glad to hear that some people actually know about D! D is great. ...
D does a marvelous job fixing the syntax and the shortcomings of C++. Also, there's NO PREPROCESSOR! (Before you jump on this, there is nothing you can't do in D that you could do with a C preprocessor)
Ah, so it has all the problems caused by the preprocessor, except it doesn't call it a preprocessor?
I outright laugh at people in an Interview when they ask me if I'll write OO code.
I bet you have to go to a lot of interviews, then.
OO code is worse than 10,000 jmp, or goto's. Code written in an OO "framework" produces an excessive of files, classes, and thousands upon thousands of useless objects that are not even necessary for the task at hand, almost as bad as XML, but worse. You end up with bloated apps, that cannot be read or understood by anyone quickly. Let alone have any of the code be re-usable anywhere else.
You're now arguing about various frameworks which suck. You're probably right, but you haven't provided any arguments against OO.
Here's how I think of it: objects it's about creating abstract data types that fit your problem, rather than solving your problems with a combination of raw char, int, and *. Most people seem to agree that OO also implies using inheritance and run-time polymorphism when there's a need for it. I don't know -- I very rarely see a need for that.
Incidentally, Standard ML (the language of choice in TFA) supports abstract data types, so probably the parts of OO which the CMU guys hate are the parts I don't use a lot, not the parts I find essential.
I love the vernacular "switch". It's a telco switch. Not to be confused with the more nerdy (and hopefully slashdot-friendly) network switch. As in Layer 2 of the OSI model. Because the $50 gigabit switch sitting on my desk can handle "tens of thousands of gigabytes of data a day" as well. Maybe I'm just not impressed with telco stuff, being a network nerd and overall "virtual protocol" kinda guy. Just wanted to point out if you're thinking network switch like I was, you won't be comparing apples to apples.
The article mentioned LTE, which implies mobile broadband. That's not too far away from normal IP networking.
I'm a developer and I'm selling programs for Mac OS, but as long as Apple decides which app to include in the app store and which not I won't buy or use an iPhone and won't develop for iOS. It's as simple as that.
Yeah. We got the right to develop and install software on our computers when the home computers came in the 1970s. We must not trade that freedom for convenience. Companies like Apple would fuck us over like IBM used to do in the mainframe era. You don't have to be Richard Stallman to see that.
I _massively_ use destructors for doing more than freeing memory [...]
AOL. In addition to that, if you're using destructors to free memory, you may be doing something wrong. If the class members are all real objects (including standard containers or various smart pointers) all that is taken care of already.
Buddy you're just showing your own ignorance there. The limit for SMS is 160 characters, no matter the provider.
There's something called "concatenated messages" -- like IP fragmentation, but for SMS. I thought everyone supported that by now -- I did the system testing of one implementation 8 years ago.
So does this make *nix the jews?
No, the atheists.
also (unfortunately) Celine Dion and Justin Bieber.
Skinny Puppy neutralizes Celine Dion pretty well.
Guess I'm lucky to use IceWM which still works the way it worked ten years ago - and I find that a good thing.
I use ctwm. It works the way it worked almost 20 years ago. If I need a "maximize" button, I configure it to have one. (I had to do that at work. At home I just have "maximize height" which I find more useful.)
This is the way to go, it is what I use when I want to send encrypted email. There are some big problems with PGP/GPG where government could help, these are:
Once they have done that then the normal commercial forces would kick in: some people would pay for s/ware that works, others would use FLOSS; it doesn't really matter -- it is the standard that is important.
Right on. All I'd have to do is to trust the German key (they could publish the fingerprint in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung or something) and I could communicate with anyone in .de.
And that is why I resent the "OMG I would never trust a system where the government is involved!" comments here. Handing out public identities for people is precisely what governments *are for*. Without the government, we are clearly stuck where we are today: with unsigned and unencrypted mail.
Isn't 'Number of descendent distributions' a crappy metric for 'Importance'? Wouldn't something like 'Installed base' be humongously better?
Yes. But TFA started out by saying 3/4 of the most downloaded distros were Debian-based. The "number of descendent distributions" was just something that looked nifty and quotable.
The killer features of Debian though are that it's driven by *people*, not shareholder profits, and that these guys work in the Unix tradition. Kind of like a *BSD, I imagine.