Yeah, that was weird. In some bullet point the author is missing the times when Linux was "hard" to install and in another he is missing tools like linuxconf. No UNIX admin needs configuration tools to do his/her job. All you need is vi.
Well, vi and good documentation. I.e. Debian.
Like others here, I remember linuxconf just as a sign that it was time to ditch RedHat.
I think I used it *once* in the late 1990s, and it was obviously a disaster.
Around that time, RedHat also stopped providing documentation for their config files.
It wasn't just RedHat though -- around that time Sun had a GUI user administration tool
which would rm -rf/ in some circumstances.
But if you know what the problem is... and you have an image of the server in a working state, or a documented procedure on how to set up the server in it’s intended configuration then why would anyone waste time trying to repair it.
If you know what the problem is, you can generally fix it quickly, without downtime. On Unix, at least.
Of course, then you get to the standard C++ library and have to explain why the language standard itself violates this very principle. (If you think otherwise, explain how bitshifting a file handle should cause output?)
Since the language standard itself encourages users to ignore any sane rules for proper operator overloading, it should hardly be surprising that this "programmer problem" is widespread.
First explain how C can define "x is less than is less than 2" to mean "multiply x by four".
No really, your argument is silly, and I'm happy I've never been one of your students.
The left bitshift in C++ today has two different meanings: bitshift and stream output (or perhaps more generally "serialize these various things into the container" -- I wouldn't have a problem with code which overloaded it in such a way).
This is a problem for approximately noone.
C++ Templates will turn the most pious programmer into a curse-slinging, chain-smoking alcoholic.
Only those who don't understand them.
Learn a functional programming language, and you'll understand much more about C++ template programming.
For normal everyday use of templates, you don't even need that.
And in contrast, what makes *me* curse and drink is what people use in C, in the absence of templates:
What's this? Oh, yet another buggy linked list implementation. And this? An oddly mutated implementation of a balanced search tree. And this? The same tree, but for some other datatype. This void pointer? Aaargh...
Actually, the earth will simply get too hot to support life in about another 40 million years.... In fact, the Sun will make life nearly unbearable in as few as 5 million years.
Says who?
40 million years is a very short period in the history of life, not to mention 5 million years.
Popular science should be full of this stuff if it was an accepted fact, or even just a theory.
Or are you saying there there is a Big Conspiracy to hide the Truth from the people?
I happen to know that the TR system is.NET/C++, so their problems might be related to known issues of TCP/IP message passing from Unix/BSD stack to a Win stack. Let's just say you can get the most mysterious error messages in.NET. Of this, I have first hand experience in my own projects.
I really doubt the Linux IP stack (which isn't BSD-based) has problems talking to the Windows one. And even if it did, it couldn't have nothing to do with.NET (unless.NET comes with its own IP implementation).
What's so wrong about making an exception in this case?
Idealistic human rights aside, if a small group is being grotesquely obnoxious to everyone else (to the point of making the grieving so sick that they barf between wails and tears) - and *everybody* else hates them and what they do - it would not be unreasonable for the vast civilized population to shut them up.
And call yourself the "Voice of Free Speech" while you're doing it? Give me a break.
I always considered myself a hacker in its original sense. Someone who modded an existing piece of hardware or software to suit their needs, or to work around an existing issue. My latest and most simplest "hack" is getting Froyo on my phone, since my carrier wouldn't send the update. Where am I on the list? Certainly not Hackivist. I guess I am now a "modder" or "homebrewer". I am afraid that the previous terms will be added to the hacker list, with the word criminal added in front.
You're a hacker in my book.
Those others are not.
And I'm surprised that Slashdot has started using the word *exclusively* to mean criminals.
Slackware, Gentoo, Debian, etc - are especially great if you're a young geek who has plenty of time to enjoy debugging and playing with everything to get the simplest functionality out of your system (like sound or the right resolution to display properly on your screen).
I installed Squeeze a few weeks back, and I didn't have to touch a thing to get sound and graphics to work properly. Same with Lenny before that, actually.
Use a patched version of John Bradley's 'xv' image viewer to
manipulate the photos.
Run a pretty trivial perl script which renames the images
yyyy-mm-dd_nnnn.jpg, and also updates a text file with two
lines per image: file name and date-and-time.
Fill in the descriptions in the text file.
Keep the text file in version control using CVS
Rotate the 'portrait' images using a script based on jpegtran(1).
If the image sucks, keep it but run it through a script which
scales it to 800x600 and decreases JPEG quality.
chmod go-r sensitive photos.
Move the images to ~/photos/2011Q1/ (four directories per year is manageable with the tools I use and my rate).
Regularly backup ~/photos to various places using a script
based on rsync --link-dest.
Rsync the photos out to my web server.
Run a home-made Python script ("allergy") to create a static
gallery from the photos and the text file.
The obvious omission is gamma correction and color correction. I'd want to do that somehow, without losing JPEG quality.
I don't want to crop.
My photos are a megabyte each on average. If you got gigabytes back from Mexico I guess you use RAW. I'd probably convert most of those to JPEG (but be careful to keep EXIF data).
I've just assumed that IPv6 is somebody else's issue to deal with. In theory my OS (XP) supports it but that's all I know. Is there a way of pointing my browser somewhere to find out if everything 'at my end' and my ISP connection is fully functional?
I suppose if your computer doesn't have a global IPv6 address, applications will do the right thing and not ask for IPv6 addresses, or ask for them but not use them, or try to use them but fail and fallback to IPv4 a millisecond later.
There are URLs which tell you if you access them over IPv6 or IPv4, but I forget them.
One simple test is:
tuva:~> ping6 -c1 ipv6.google.com
PING ipv6.google.com(2a00:1450:8003::68) 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 2a00:1450:8003::68: icmp_seq=1 ttl=56 time=66.7 ms
Replace ping6 with whatever IPv6 ping utility comes with Windows.
That's not what TFA is about though: here it's obvious that you're only asking for IPv6, and don't expect fallback to IPv4.
I have said this before and I still believe the best course of action is to simply scrap IPV6 and take IPV4 and simply change the segment size from BYTES to WORDS. Right now we have 254 Class A networks and just going from BYTES to WORDS will give us 65535 CLASS A Networks and that gives us 65281 class A networks to hand out with each one having 281,474,976,710,655 (FFFF.FFFF.FFFF ) unique addresses, except we do it wisely this time instead of doing things like giving a single university and entire class A.
Yeah. All we have to do is keep the Internet down for a year while everyone renumbers everything.
Let's take 2013. That way if the universe ends in December 2012, we don't have to do anything.
Have them set up a basic LAMP server. That's how I learned Linux. Or for something somewhat more practical for them, how about a seedbox or a mythtv-box. Frankly, the best way to learn linux is to just get your hands dirty.
That's probably *not* in scope.
These guys are Unix end users; someone is doing the administration for them, and they don't get root access.
When I was a CS student, we had a lab full of SunOS machines, and we got a few photocopied papers describing how to use the shell, the basics of vi and Emacs, password safety, how to work the printers and so on.
That was more or less enough.
Sadly, designers do not have much interest in 'fixing' things when they can design new stuff AND increase the number of places their design can be used. That is the problem with C++... the people steering it want a language to solve all problems, and increasingly it becomes worse at solving any,.. or at minimal the increasing number of solutions to any given problem embedded in C++ makes understanding it more and more difficult.
You make it sound as if they are pushing out troublesome new vanity features in C++ weekly, making the language worse and worse. Examples, please?
In *my* world, the current standard is 13 years old, and the only important thing that has happened since then is that gcc and VC++ have stopped sucking.
"The C++ Programming language" mentions it twice, and says it's a C thing which you should avoid -- just use 0. Which is what I do.
And then you have to do all sorts of workarounds for it when you have overloaded functions where it thinks you are passing it to the one that takes an integer instead of the one assuming a pointer.
In ten years of C++ use I never ended up in that situation -- it's probably very rare to overload on integer types and raw pointers which may be null. But I suppose that's one reason they added nullptr.
It's a long time before anyone starts to use nullptr. NULL is still shorter to type and too entrenched in the documentation.
In which documentation? "The C++ Programming language" mentions it twice, and says it's a C thing which you should avoid -- just use 0.
Which is what I do.
Of course you can still *call* it "the NULL pointer" when you talk about it.
Porting a C++ program from x86 to ARM doesn't require any programming at all - you just select a different target and recompile. Perfect CPU port every time.
Not true. Memory alignment requirements, endianness, primitive sizes (eg 32bit vs 64bit pointers), inline assembly etc almost always come into play with non-trivial applications.
Some subcultures already know to stay away from the worst non-portable constructs. I bet free software for Unix systems is unlikely to have these problems even if the original author used Sparc (or x86, or whatever) exclusively. Google "vaxocentricity".
Note that I said the *worst* non-portable constructs. Personally I assume an int is at least 32 bits -- OK in most cases, because I don't target 8- or 16-bit systems.
PDF is in essence a PostScript-document (with restrictions of the use of external fonts and in a compressed form).
PostScript is a complete programming-language which implies that one could write PostScript that would react to the environment in which it runs.
A real programming language cannot "react to the environment" unless it has the needed I/O facilities. It seems to me that PostScript (as implemented by ghostscript) has been locked down more and more in this area.
PDF in Adobe's hands on the other hand has acquired more and more dynamic features *not* found in Postscript.
Well, the finding is by the Royal Botanic Gardens in London, and other reputable sources. And it seems plausible; before DNA sequencing and the Internet, it would be incredibly hard to prove nobody else had named the species previously.
Yes. If the "news" was really that a list of plant names will mostly be synonyms, it was already a well-known fact.
Both because of the reasons you cite, and because reclassification creates synonyms. Say you have 100 species of Cereus, and you claim they are really two different genera: ten Cereus and 90 Foocereus. You publish your results. You just created 90 synonyms. Repeat this over the centuries, starting with Linnaeus in the 1700s...
I can see no rational reason for TFA calling this a "surprising lack of diversity".
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, that was weird. In some bullet point the author is missing the times when Linux was "hard" to install and in another he is missing tools like linuxconf. No UNIX admin needs configuration tools to do his/her job. All you need is vi.
Well, vi and good documentation. I.e. Debian.
Like others here, I remember linuxconf just as a sign that it was time to ditch RedHat. I think I used it *once* in the late 1990s, and it was obviously a disaster. Around that time, RedHat also stopped providing documentation for their config files.
It wasn't just RedHat though -- around that time Sun had a GUI user administration tool which would rm -rf / in some circumstances.
But if you know what the problem is... and you have an image of the server in a working state, or a documented procedure on how to set up the server in it’s intended configuration then why would anyone waste time trying to repair it.
If you know what the problem is, you can generally fix it quickly, without downtime. On Unix, at least.
Gee, thanks a lot. You might as well have posted an ASCII goatse. Now we're all scarred for life too.
Only those unfortunate enough to understand Visual Basic (or whatever Access VBA is).
Of course, then you get to the standard C++ library and have to explain why the language standard itself violates this very principle. (If you think otherwise, explain how bitshifting a file handle should cause output?)
Since the language standard itself encourages users to ignore any sane rules for proper operator overloading, it should hardly be surprising that this "programmer problem" is widespread.
First explain how C can define "x is less than is less than 2" to mean "multiply x by four".
No really, your argument is silly, and I'm happy I've never been one of your students. The left bitshift in C++ today has two different meanings: bitshift and stream output (or perhaps more generally "serialize these various things into the container" -- I wouldn't have a problem with code which overloaded it in such a way). This is a problem for approximately noone.
C++ Templates will turn the most pious programmer into a curse-slinging, chain-smoking alcoholic.
Only those who don't understand them. Learn a functional programming language, and you'll understand much more about C++ template programming.
For normal everyday use of templates, you don't even need that.
And in contrast, what makes *me* curse and drink is what people use in C, in the absence of templates: What's this? Oh, yet another buggy linked list implementation. And this? An oddly mutated implementation of a balanced search tree. And this? The same tree, but for some other datatype. This void pointer? Aaargh ...
Actually, the earth will simply get too hot to support life in about another 40 million years. ... In fact, the Sun will make life nearly unbearable in as few as 5 million years.
Says who?
40 million years is a very short period in the history of life, not to mention 5 million years. Popular science should be full of this stuff if it was an accepted fact, or even just a theory. Or are you saying there there is a Big Conspiracy to hide the Truth from the people?
I happen to know that the TR system is .NET/C++, so their problems might be related to known issues of TCP/IP message passing from Unix/BSD stack to a Win stack. Let's just say you can get the most mysterious error messages in .NET. Of this, I have first hand experience in my own projects.
I really doubt the Linux IP stack (which isn't BSD-based) has problems talking to the Windows one. And even if it did, it couldn't have nothing to do with .NET (unless .NET comes with its own IP implementation).
What *are* these known issues, according to you?
What's so wrong about making an exception in this case?
Idealistic human rights aside, if a small group is being grotesquely obnoxious to everyone else (to the point of making the grieving so sick that they barf between wails and tears) - and *everybody* else hates them and what they do - it would not be unreasonable for the vast civilized population to shut them up.
And call yourself the "Voice of Free Speech" while you're doing it? Give me a break.
I always considered myself a hacker in its original sense. Someone who modded an existing piece of hardware or software to suit their needs, or to work around an existing issue. My latest and most simplest "hack" is getting Froyo on my phone, since my carrier wouldn't send the update. Where am I on the list? Certainly not Hackivist. I guess I am now a "modder" or "homebrewer". I am afraid that the previous terms will be added to the hacker list, with the word criminal added in front.
You're a hacker in my book. Those others are not. And I'm surprised that Slashdot has started using the word *exclusively* to mean criminals.
In other words (from personal experience):
Slackware, Gentoo, Debian, etc - are especially great if you're a young geek who has plenty of time to enjoy debugging and playing with everything to get the simplest functionality out of your system (like sound or the right resolution to display properly on your screen).
I installed Squeeze a few weeks back, and I didn't have to touch a thing to get sound and graphics to work properly. Same with Lenny before that, actually.
The obvious omission is gamma correction and color correction. I'd want to do that somehow, without losing JPEG quality. I don't want to crop.
My photos are a megabyte each on average. If you got gigabytes back from Mexico I guess you use RAW. I'd probably convert most of those to JPEG (but be careful to keep EXIF data).
I've just assumed that IPv6 is somebody else's issue to deal with. In theory my OS (XP) supports it but that's all I know. Is there a way of pointing my browser somewhere to find out if everything 'at my end' and my ISP connection is fully functional?
I suppose if your computer doesn't have a global IPv6 address, applications will do the right thing and not ask for IPv6 addresses, or ask for them but not use them, or try to use them but fail and fallback to IPv4 a millisecond later.
There are URLs which tell you if you access them over IPv6 or IPv4, but I forget them. One simple test is:
tuva:~> ping6 -c1 ipv6.google.com
PING ipv6.google.com(2a00:1450:8003::68) 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 2a00:1450:8003::68: icmp_seq=1 ttl=56 time=66.7 ms
Replace ping6 with whatever IPv6 ping utility comes with Windows.
That's not what TFA is about though: here it's obvious that you're only asking for IPv6, and don't expect fallback to IPv4.
I have said this before and I still believe the best course of action is to simply scrap IPV6 and take IPV4 and simply change the segment size from BYTES to WORDS. Right now we have 254 Class A networks and just going from BYTES to WORDS will give us 65535 CLASS A Networks and that gives us 65281 class A networks to hand out with each one having 281,474,976,710,655 (FFFF.FFFF.FFFF ) unique addresses, except we do it wisely this time instead of doing things like giving a single university and entire class A.
Yeah. All we have to do is keep the Internet down for a year while everyone renumbers everything. Let's take 2013. That way if the universe ends in December 2012, we don't have to do anything.
It'll always be Scorched Earth to me. Kids these days though, they'll probably just remember worms or [...]
I must be really old; I thought you meant /usr/games/worms.
I liked Scorched_Tanks for the Amiga
though.
Have them set up a basic LAMP server. That's how I learned Linux. Or for something somewhat more practical for them, how about a seedbox or a mythtv-box. Frankly, the best way to learn linux is to just get your hands dirty.
That's probably *not* in scope. These guys are Unix end users; someone is doing the administration for them, and they don't get root access.
When I was a CS student, we had a lab full of SunOS machines, and we got a few photocopied papers describing how to use the shell, the basics of vi and Emacs, password safety, how to work the printers and so on. That was more or less enough.
Sadly, designers do not have much interest in 'fixing' things when they can design new stuff AND increase the number of places their design can be used. That is the problem with C++... the people steering it want a language to solve all problems, and increasingly it becomes worse at solving any,.. or at minimal the increasing number of solutions to any given problem embedded in C++ makes understanding it more and more difficult.
You make it sound as if they are pushing out troublesome new vanity features in C++ weekly, making the language worse and worse. Examples, please?
In *my* world, the current standard is 13 years old, and the only important thing that has happened since then is that gcc and VC++ have stopped sucking.
"The C++ Programming language" mentions it twice, and says it's a C thing which you should avoid -- just use 0. Which is what I do.
And then you have to do all sorts of workarounds for it when you have overloaded functions where it thinks you are passing it to the one that takes an integer instead of the one assuming a pointer.
In ten years of C++ use I never ended up in that situation -- it's probably very rare to overload on integer types and raw pointers which may be null. But I suppose that's one reason they added nullptr.
It's a long time before anyone starts to use nullptr. NULL is still shorter to type and too entrenched in the documentation.
In which documentation? "The C++ Programming language" mentions it twice, and says it's a C thing which you should avoid -- just use 0. Which is what I do.
Of course you can still *call* it "the NULL pointer" when you talk about it.
But if the train is only serving Lutefisk http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lutefisk , I'll pass.
It wouldn't be. Too many Swedes dislike it. Why, I don't know. With potatoes, the right sauce and green peas it's delicious.
Now if I could only remember the name of the fish that they put into the cans, where the fermentation turns the cans into a hand grenade form . . .
You're thinking of Surströmming. I'd link to Wikipedia but ./ did not like the umlaut o in the URL.
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Surstr%C3%B6mming
"What about the huge catalogue of win32 applications?"
They'll probably create an x86-to-ARM JIT-compiler.
Or they'll not do it, and build a walled garden platform with an AppStore etc. Closed systems are popular again these days ...
Porting a C++ program from x86 to ARM doesn't require any programming at all - you just select a different target and recompile. Perfect CPU port every time.
Not true. Memory alignment requirements, endianness, primitive sizes (eg 32bit vs 64bit pointers), inline assembly etc almost always come into play with non-trivial applications.
Some subcultures already know to stay away from the worst non-portable constructs. I bet free software for Unix systems is unlikely to have these problems even if the original author used Sparc (or x86, or whatever) exclusively. Google "vaxocentricity".
Note that I said the *worst* non-portable constructs. Personally I assume an int is at least 32 bits -- OK in most cases, because I don't target 8- or 16-bit systems.
PDF is in essence a PostScript-document (with restrictions of the use of external fonts and in a compressed form).
PostScript is a complete programming-language which implies that one could write PostScript that would react to the environment in which it runs.
A real programming language cannot "react to the environment" unless it has the needed I/O facilities. It seems to me that PostScript (as implemented by ghostscript) has been locked down more and more in this area.
PDF in Adobe's hands on the other hand has acquired more and more dynamic features *not* found in Postscript.
Well, the finding is by the Royal Botanic Gardens in London, and other reputable sources. And it seems plausible; before DNA sequencing and the Internet, it would be incredibly hard to prove nobody else had named the species previously.
Yes. If the "news" was really that a list of plant names will mostly be synonyms, it was already a well-known fact. Both because of the reasons you cite, and because reclassification creates synonyms. Say you have 100 species of Cereus, and you claim they are really two different genera: ten Cereus and 90 Foocereus. You publish your results. You just created 90 synonyms. Repeat this over the centuries, starting with Linnaeus in the 1700s ...
I can see no rational reason for TFA calling this a "surprising lack of diversity".
Which contains stories of rape and incest.
And rape and mutilation. A graphics novel version of The Book of Judges (by Neil Gaiman and others) went to trial in .se in 1990:
http://seriewikin.serieframjandet.se/index.php?title=Pox-r%C3%A4tteg%C3%A5ngen&oldid=140123 .
The publisher won, but was boycotted and had to (more or less) close down.