But email was better suited to the way we used to use the Internet--logging off and on, checking our messages in bursts. Now, we are always connected, whether we are sitting at a desk or on a mobile phone. The always-on connection, in turn, has created a host of new ways to communicate that are much faster than email, and more fun.
Why wait for a response to an email when you get a quicker answer over instant messaging?
I can't see where you got that quote from, since it's not in the summary or any other message I can see. But in any case, it's totally wrong. When the term "Internet" was first officially defined, around 1980 or so, and on its predecessor the ARPAnet, there was no logging on/of for the Internet. Since the mid-1970s at least, it has always-on, and email has always been instantaneous from a human viewpoint.
Agreed. The IM craze (and here I'm partly just summarizing your lengthy rant)
seems driven by:
mail on POP3 servers, which you aren't allowed to poll too often
People don't know how to quote properly, so mail conversations quickly become unreadable.
HTML mail, top-posting and so on.
AFAICT, IM clients can't quote either, but at least they force a "you said"/"I said" kind of conversation list.
The psychological urge to respond immediately when you know the other part
is sitting there just *waiting* (everybody knows the I is for "instant").
I used IBM SameTime for a while, but had to turn it off. Too often I got interrupted in my work by someone
writing "Hello", and then I had to sit and wait while he slowly formulated his question.
And whatever I wrote as reply, I knew I couldn't reuse it the *next* time someone asked something,
of refer to it myself... so I never felt motivated to give complete answers.
It's part of that retro-is-new thing, all the kids are doing it, it's alltuhh-9ytujhff all the rage
Actually, there's been a vinyl revival for at least five years now.
Walk into a indie music store, and you'll find the latest major releases as vinyl LPs on the counter.
Classic albums (in the sense Love's Forever Changes, not Beethoven) get re-released in the same way.
So Apple's overloading of the term "LP" isn't an ironic wink to music history --
it shows that they are out of touch.
You say you're "emulating embedded hardware on Windows".
What will you use the platform independence for?
If you don't need it right now but "maybe in the future", I suggest skipping it.
Write for Windows, but make sure ask the compiler to accept ISO C++ only, and don't
sprinkle Windows-specific crud (UWORD, __declspec and whatever they are called)
in the parts of the code which *are* platform-independent.
An unused portability layer only weakens your code.
Personally, I couldn't care less for Windows, so I develop under Linux and target
Unix in general (not actively, but I expect it to be easy to port to some other
decent Unix if I have reason to in the future).
It's great -- I can use select(2), fork(2) and treat file descriptors and sockets
alike. And I can learn from good books (e.g. Stevens) and discuss it with
people who have been using those interfaces since, well, forever.
No portability layers have that much support.
By the way, I don't see why you need a bloody *database* (even a nice one
like BerkleyDB) to emulate flash memory. Can't you just mmap() a file?
For buggy applications. Applications that break the multi-user contract pop-up UAC prompts often, yes, but those applications were already broken-- Vista is just exposing their brokenness. (And, UAC enables them to run *at all* automatically, without you having to use "Run As... Admin" like you would on XP and Windows 2000. In Windows XP, a broken app like that would just fail with a vague error message.)
If that's true, Windows 2000 and XP exposed the brokenness of those applications too, didn't they?
Not that I care sontongly... we were "upgraded" to Vista at work, and after ~1 day of chaos
(not Vista's fault, as far as I can tell) it started working. Then I went through
the preferences and disabled anything Vista, and my computer now behaves exactly as when
it ran Windows 2000.
I see a contribution from a "Terry", I have no idea if that is a male or female, and really why would I care? Either the code is god, o rit isn't. Why would sex ever have any bearing at all?
Frankly I really don't even get how a claim of sexism could exist in the FOSS world. It just doesn't translate from meat-space, because frankly, more often than not you have no idea the sex of the person in the first place. And really, that is how it should be.
A lot of people don't want to hide, a lot of others don't like dealing with pseudonyms,
and most people aren't called Terry.
If there is a problem, going anonymous isn't a general-purpose answer.
What I *don't* see is why anyone should be surprised, or what the "FOSS" "community" is
supposed to do about it. Or what kind of people Byfield met who think there is 30--45%
women in free software.
I suppose no-one would want to work on making a completely open (source, design) and free (charge and speech) electronic voting system either - I mean, it's not like you can show up at a voting booth with your own computer and use that instead of the already provided option.
Why not?
It seems it's unfashionable these days to standardize on file formats
and protocols, and let different implementations coexist...
to open up for clients written to different peoples' tastes and usage patterns.
In the voting case, I should be able to hand over an USB stick with
an OpenPGP-signed text file on it, the text file being formatted to be
a valid vote. They'd check the signature, check against my ID card, syntax-check
the text, and feed it into the database.
-- If that design has flaws, keep in mind that I'm not an expert in any of those
fields, and only thought about it for a minute.
This was in the UK and I no longer work in the NHS. But in Primary Care (i.e. your local doctor's, not a hospital), there are a handful of providers of medical systems with a couple of really big ones [---] quite frankly, it's a mess. I think it got a little better, but in the modern age we could do so very much better.
At least once, seeing my dentist or her nurse battling those forms,
I have apologized for being a programmer...
Would everyone who actually manages to run their servers with only "-stable" please raise their hands? One, two... no wait, that person is scratching their head.
*Raises hand*.
There's nothing I need on my home server that hasn't existed and been stable for a decade or so.
Much of the time it runs Debian 'oldstable' because even though an upgrade would be cool, there is no actual need.
At work, we recently got rid of Redhat 8, which is from 2002 or something.
No new features we wanted; it simply didn't run on new hardware.
So what is this bleeding edge stuff everyone needs, according to you?
Maybe you are a niche user. Or maybe I am.
This is C++-only, right? Cuz I develop.NET code all day in VS2005, and it works very happily on all sorts of messed up machine configurations.
Surely it applies to C as well, or don't Microsoft-people use that language?
By the way, neither.NET or VS2005 is the name of a programming language, as far as I can tell.
In my very humble opinion, tools such as Emacs and vi are precursors to larger development environments, such as Eclipse or Delphi. In your case, and assuming my argument is true, we would all be going back to flipping switches and pressing buttons, since that's the only true way of understanding the code.
If you don't accept my argument, then why are syntax highlighting,:make macros and identifier matching part of every vi install nowadays? And don't even get me started about emacs, which design purposes was to help programmers write better code. So, if you don't accept my premise, where do you draw the line?
I draw the line when the editor/IDE forces your coworkers to use the same IDE.
Vi/Emacs users can work on the same code without problems, but once IDE-specific build systems,
"project files" and whatnot start replacing the Makefiles, you're screwed.
Yes, the unmanaged unchecked software world on Windows has lead to an era free from viruses, worms, trojan attacks and pop-up windows. Thank goodness anyone can install anything they want on their computing devices with such ease.
What would you rather like: spend your life in a prison, or risk getting run over by cars?
(Keep in mind that people will smuggle cars into prison, too.)
I'm all for the least formal processes consistent with the production of reasonable quality software shipping on schedule using the resources you have available. But anyone who has had to maintain the code written by cowboys (which is what DTP's are) knows how much damage their unbridled attitude can do to a company.
Hey, Spolsky just used "duct tape programmer" as a catch-phrase in some blog post, people are already capitalizing and TLAing it...
I want to mention here that it's an unfortunate overloading of a term. I've always associated duct-taping to glue,
as in building programs quickly by combining other programs, with pipelines, shell scripts, and Perl.
Or maybe that's just me?
Spolsky is also a bit vague with the definition.
Are these duct tape programmers people who:
(a) whip together unmaintainable crap just to get something onto the market,
or
(b) refuse to accept overengineering, defined as work which is not needed,
solving problems which do not need solving, and releasing unmaintainable crap 6 months too late?
His "messy go-cart" is (a), but then he's talking about refusing to use CORBA, which is clearly -- to him and to me --
in the (b) category.
I laughed out loud when I read this. I write in C++. It's my favorite language.
Mine too, but I identify with Spolsky's duct tape programmers (not the term, but the idea).
But I can't stand these Duct Tape Programmers who are the ones casting to void * because they can't be bothered with templates.
We all set the limit somewhere... Spolsky, JWZ, ESR and a whole lot of slashdotters think C++ is on the wrong
side of that limit. I like to think they're basing that on old information, from the hype days in the 1990s
when everyone had to pretend that they were developing abstract general reusable libraries
rather than Getting Work Done. I think that sick attitude is mostly gone from C++ today
(although some (not all) Boost libraries give me nasty flashbacks...)
Now I know nothing of COM or CORBA
That is something to be grateful for,
but multithreading is generally not something you have a choice about. Avoid it if you can, think very carefully about when you need to use it because of the application requirements.
Sure you have a choice. You can pick a task which has no need whatsoever for multithreading,
and add threads. Lots of people do this, when a sane select() loop would have been enough.
I have to disagree with you about templates. In C++, IIRC, templates bring with them limitations and restrictions that can really cause problems down the line.
Such as...?
Worse, their memory footprint is an abomination. You can generally assume that for each different template type you pass to a template class, you've duplicated a significant portion (and possibly all) of the executable code for that class.
Yeah, that's probably going to take up a few kilobytes of your gigabyte of RAM.
Seriously, I believe this is very, very rarely a problem. I'm more concerned about
the bloat effect of inlining (which has little to do with templates).
They also clutter up the syntax every time you declare the class, though one might reasonably argue that void casting does the same for every use, so that's not a very strong argument.
You mean the < and > are clutter, or what other information in e.g. map<string, int> do you feel
is clutter and not vital parts of the type name?
Or are you talking about the definition of the template? I'm not sure I understand.
If you really don't like casts, add extra wrapper methods for each type, thus confining the void casting to a limited number of places in the class itself without causing a significant amount of code bloat. Or use macros to do the casting for you and remove all the code bloat.
*Boggle* Do people still *do* things like that?
I somehow get the feeling that you see templates as just a way to define the C++ standard containers:
list, map, vector and so on, and that you dislike them so you define your own lists, maps and vectors
using void pointers and casts.
That is not at all how I use templates (someone has already written, tested and documented those containers for me).
Mine tend to be tiny utilities, like accumulator (some integer type which starts out at 0 and can only
be incremented) or small function templates which do stuff to similar but unrelated types.
I use them mostly to make my code simpler and easier to use, by removing tedious duplication.
I agree with you about multithreading, though. One should not eschew it because it is hard. Bolting it on when you realize you're only taking advantage of 12.5% of that eight core CPU is much harder than designing your app right to begin with.
And yet again, the argument for multithreading boils down to
"I must max out my CPU resources using no more than a single process"!
The situation you describe is bad only if
(a) more performance from the program would be nice,
(b) a multiple-process design isn't easier and safer,
(c) you can handle the extra development cost for a multithreaded design (as you said, it's hard),
and
(d) you have no other use for the other seven CPUs.
That situation can happen, but it's rare.
Most threading is due to stupidity, not a real need.
But when its open source, it's easier to think that maybe I cant be bothered to look at this now, someone else can do it. When its proprietary software and you get the assignment to look at it, you pretty much have to do it.
Have you ever worked with commercial software?
The programmers typically want to clean up, but aren't allowed to.
The bosses see the prospect of $$$ going into work which cannot be sold, when they
could spend the same $$$ to create new features which can be sold, features
which may be needed to sell the product at all.
And they tie it to the PDF file format *why* exactly?
PGP/OpenPGP/GnuPG have supported signing *any* kind of file since... well, forever.
But I suppose it could have been worse -- they could have spent a few years to design
a standard for signing Commodore 64 binaries or something.
Maybe the big thing is really how they plan trust to work -- the article doesn't
say and I'm too lazy to check.
Okay so when I first saw the title, I read it as "Surprise! Discovery In Earth's Upper Atmosphere" and thought the landing a couple of days ago was a hoax or something.
That's not so bad.
When *I* saw the title I had a flashback to Heinlein's short story "Goldfish Bowl".
This is why I stopped using Linux on my laptop. I couldn't get the darn thing to connect to Netscape ISP, and after frakking with it for several hours, I finally gave up and reinstalled Windows XP.
So when you said you "stopped using Linux" you really meant "stopped using Linux after 2--3 hours"?
I had it connected in just 5 minutes. There are advantages to proprietary software that "just works".
Sorry to hear that (both about the pain and that you gave up), but your experience is not the norm.
Not today, unless you have unsupported hardware.
Besides is Linus really "free"? My time has value too (about $50/hour) and the hours I spent trying to connect to my ISP could have been spent earning overtime at work, buying Windoze for ~$120, and still having some cash leftover in my pocket. Sometimes it's worth handing-over the credit card to get plug-and-play software, rather than put-up with free software's constant need to "configure" everything.
There is no such constant need, in my experience.
Hell, my basic config files have moved with me all the way from university, where I stole them
off their Sun environment back in 1993 or so. Sure I tweak things once in a while,
but not because the *software* needs it. It's because *I* want it.
I'm a new Qt user, but MOC doesn't bother me at all. It's less invasive than "MFC Class Wizard"
Google "damning with faint praise"...:-)
I don't do GUI programming... and I'm not likely to start if it means wizards,
new preprocessors, new build systems, new casts, new bloody string classes...
I don't see why *this* particular problem has to be so complex.
Ospreys are deeply beautiful birds of prey and watching them is magic, but I've never seen an osprey take anything but fish.
Yeah, they are very specialized on fish.
I suppose it could eat a pigeon if it was sitting beside it, but catching
it in the air -- that's not going to happen.
Also, the summary says "hawks and ospreys", but TFA said
"There are hawks, ospreys in this canyon... they do get them... what are you going to do?" she said.. Reminds me of attitude to raptors you find among very old people, where all of them get classified as "hawks" and blamed for the disappearance of any tame, eatable or pleasant bird, from chickens to Robins.
And by the way, this is of course the traditional use of homing pigeons.
Interesting, but not because of a humorous RFC.
I'd point out the successful projects on my CV, and then point out that they were all accomplished using common sense - not some bullshit laden methodology of the week.
My "methodogy" if you can call it that? KISS.
Scrum isn't all that bullshit-laden. I haven't used it, but during a presentation
I was at, I remember going "oh, this makes sense" or "this is already what I'm trying to do".
And I'm not exactly known for loving new methodologies and buzzwords...
Of course, people will still fuck it up --
some by being overly cynical, others by trying to bend it so that
their role is whatever it always was, customers who really still want the
same detailed pseudo-control that they always used to have...
In other news, whenever you format an ext3 partition, remember that 5% is set aside for root use. For a 917GiB partition, that's almost 5GiB. Do yourself a favor and reduce it to 1% with tune2fs.
The annoying part is that you cannot specify 0.1% or 0.01% --
if you cannot safely say 0% (because the partition in question *does* need that
safety margin) your next step is 1%, which is almost certainly overkill for a big disk.
They haven't banned the word bank. They've merely asked the registrar to highlight requests containing the word "bank" so that they can be checked for adherence to an existing law regarding portraying a company as a banking institution if it is not.
Confirmed, in the original, untranslated PDF.
They even point out (like a score of/.ers did) that the word "bank" has several meanings.
BTW, it's already fairly difficult to obtain a.se domain. Generally, they won't let anyone have one who doesn't have a Personnummer (personal number, Swedish equivalent to US SSN) or who can't prove they have a business or other legitimate concern in Sweden.
Makes sense. Since I'm in.se, it's easy for me, and I wouldn't assume I could just go out and buy a.no,.uk, or.us domain -- that's what org/com are for.
I thought tiny islands in the Pacific with funny names were the only ones which worked differently,
and only because they needed the money.
Another reason most open-source projects get no press is that they are very poorly communicated in every way. An example is LaTeX. It requires two paragraphs in the Wikipedia article to explain just the name.
It's a word-play on TeX, on which it is based, and it also inherits its purposely silly pronounciation and typography.
Surely, that's all that needs to be said?
I don't mind that the Wikipedia article provides more background, though.
[...]
The open source experience is often "It's free, but you must spend a very frustrating week learning how to use it." Those who write for publication don't have a week to understand a project, and they don't want to write about something that would frustrate their readers
Isn't that the case for every piece of software except maybe Microsoft Word?
And should people stop working on advanced software so that the people who read the glossies don't
have to be frustrated by articles which don't get written anyway, because the frustrated journalists don't have a week to spare to understand it?
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed. The IM craze (and here I'm partly just summarizing your lengthy rant) seems driven by:
I used IBM SameTime for a while, but had to turn it off. Too often I got interrupted in my work by someone writing "Hello", and then I had to sit and wait while he slowly formulated his question. And whatever I wrote as reply, I knew I couldn't reuse it the *next* time someone asked something, of refer to it myself ... so I never felt motivated to give complete answers.
Actually, there's been a vinyl revival for at least five years now. Walk into a indie music store, and you'll find the latest major releases as vinyl LPs on the counter. Classic albums (in the sense Love's Forever Changes, not Beethoven) get re-released in the same way.
So Apple's overloading of the term "LP" isn't an ironic wink to music history -- it shows that they are out of touch.
You say you're "emulating embedded hardware on Windows". What will you use the platform independence for? If you don't need it right now but "maybe in the future", I suggest skipping it. Write for Windows, but make sure ask the compiler to accept ISO C++ only, and don't sprinkle Windows-specific crud (UWORD, __declspec and whatever they are called) in the parts of the code which *are* platform-independent.
An unused portability layer only weakens your code.
Personally, I couldn't care less for Windows, so I develop under Linux and target Unix in general (not actively, but I expect it to be easy to port to some other decent Unix if I have reason to in the future). It's great -- I can use select(2), fork(2) and treat file descriptors and sockets alike. And I can learn from good books (e.g. Stevens) and discuss it with people who have been using those interfaces since, well, forever. No portability layers have that much support.
By the way, I don't see why you need a bloody *database* (even a nice one like BerkleyDB) to emulate flash memory. Can't you just mmap() a file?
If that's true, Windows 2000 and XP exposed the brokenness of those applications too, didn't they?
Not that I care sontongly ... we were "upgraded" to Vista at work, and after ~1 day of chaos
(not Vista's fault, as far as I can tell) it started working. Then I went through
the preferences and disabled anything Vista, and my computer now behaves exactly as when
it ran Windows 2000.
A lot of people don't want to hide, a lot of others don't like dealing with pseudonyms, and most people aren't called Terry. If there is a problem, going anonymous isn't a general-purpose answer.
What I *don't* see is why anyone should be surprised, or what the "FOSS" "community" is supposed to do about it. Or what kind of people Byfield met who think there is 30--45% women in free software.
Why not?
It seems it's unfashionable these days to standardize on file formats and protocols, and let different implementations coexist ...
to open up for clients written to different peoples' tastes and usage patterns.
In the voting case, I should be able to hand over an USB stick with an OpenPGP-signed text file on it, the text file being formatted to be a valid vote. They'd check the signature, check against my ID card, syntax-check the text, and feed it into the database. -- If that design has flaws, keep in mind that I'm not an expert in any of those fields, and only thought about it for a minute.
At least once, seeing my dentist or her nurse battling those forms, I have apologized for being a programmer ...
*Raises hand*. There's nothing I need on my home server that hasn't existed and been stable for a decade or so. Much of the time it runs Debian 'oldstable' because even though an upgrade would be cool, there is no actual need. At work, we recently got rid of Redhat 8, which is from 2002 or something. No new features we wanted; it simply didn't run on new hardware.
So what is this bleeding edge stuff everyone needs, according to you? Maybe you are a niche user. Or maybe I am.
Surely it applies to C as well, or don't Microsoft-people use that language? By the way, neither .NET or VS2005 is the name of a programming language, as far as I can tell.
I draw the line when the editor/IDE forces your coworkers to use the same IDE. Vi/Emacs users can work on the same code without problems, but once IDE-specific build systems, "project files" and whatnot start replacing the Makefiles, you're screwed.
What would you rather like: spend your life in a prison, or risk getting run over by cars? (Keep in mind that people will smuggle cars into prison, too.)
Hey, Spolsky just used "duct tape programmer" as a catch-phrase in some blog post, people are already capitalizing and TLAing it ...
I want to mention here that it's an unfortunate overloading of a term. I've always associated duct-taping to glue,
as in building programs quickly by combining other programs, with pipelines, shell scripts, and Perl.
Or maybe that's just me?
Spolsky is also a bit vague with the definition. Are these duct tape programmers people who: (a) whip together unmaintainable crap just to get something onto the market, or (b) refuse to accept overengineering, defined as work which is not needed, solving problems which do not need solving, and releasing unmaintainable crap 6 months too late? His "messy go-cart" is (a), but then he's talking about refusing to use CORBA, which is clearly -- to him and to me -- in the (b) category.
Mine too, but I identify with Spolsky's duct tape programmers (not the term, but the idea).
We all set the limit somewhere ... Spolsky, JWZ, ESR and a whole lot of slashdotters think C++ is on the wrong
side of that limit. I like to think they're basing that on old information, from the hype days in the 1990s
when everyone had to pretend that they were developing abstract general reusable libraries
rather than Getting Work Done. I think that sick attitude is mostly gone from C++ today
(although some (not all) Boost libraries give me nasty flashbacks ...)
That is something to be grateful for,
Sure you have a choice. You can pick a task which has no need whatsoever for multithreading, and add threads. Lots of people do this, when a sane select() loop would have been enough.
Such as ...?
Yeah, that's probably going to take up a few kilobytes of your gigabyte of RAM. Seriously, I believe this is very, very rarely a problem. I'm more concerned about the bloat effect of inlining (which has little to do with templates).
You mean the < and > are clutter, or what other information in e.g. map<string, int> do you feel is clutter and not vital parts of the type name? Or are you talking about the definition of the template? I'm not sure I understand.
*Boggle* Do people still *do* things like that?
I somehow get the feeling that you see templates as just a way to define the C++ standard containers: list, map, vector and so on, and that you dislike them so you define your own lists, maps and vectors using void pointers and casts. That is not at all how I use templates (someone has already written, tested and documented those containers for me). Mine tend to be tiny utilities, like accumulator (some integer type which starts out at 0 and can only be incremented) or small function templates which do stuff to similar but unrelated types. I use them mostly to make my code simpler and easier to use, by removing tedious duplication.
And yet again, the argument for multithreading boils down to "I must max out my CPU resources using no more than a single process"! The situation you describe is bad only if (a) more performance from the program would be nice, (b) a multiple-process design isn't easier and safer, (c) you can handle the extra development cost for a multithreaded design (as you said, it's hard), and (d) you have no other use for the other seven CPUs. That situation can happen, but it's rare. Most threading is due to stupidity, not a real need.
Have you ever worked with commercial software? The programmers typically want to clean up, but aren't allowed to. The bosses see the prospect of $$$ going into work which cannot be sold, when they could spend the same $$$ to create new features which can be sold, features which may be needed to sell the product at all.
And they tie it to the PDF file format *why* exactly? PGP/OpenPGP/GnuPG have supported signing *any* kind of file since ... well, forever.
But I suppose it could have been worse -- they could have spent a few years to design
a standard for signing Commodore 64 binaries or something.
Maybe the big thing is really how they plan trust to work -- the article doesn't say and I'm too lazy to check.
That's not so bad. When *I* saw the title I had a flashback to Heinlein's short story "Goldfish Bowl".
So when you said you "stopped using Linux" you really meant "stopped using Linux after 2--3 hours"?
Sorry to hear that (both about the pain and that you gave up), but your experience is not the norm. Not today, unless you have unsupported hardware.
There is no such constant need, in my experience. Hell, my basic config files have moved with me all the way from university, where I stole them off their Sun environment back in 1993 or so. Sure I tweak things once in a while, but not because the *software* needs it. It's because *I* want it.
Google "damning with faint praise" ... :-)
I don't do GUI programming ... and I'm not likely to start if it means wizards,
new preprocessors, new build systems, new casts, new bloody string classes ...
I don't see why *this* particular problem has to be so complex.
Yeah, they are very specialized on fish. I suppose it could eat a pigeon if it was sitting beside it, but catching it in the air -- that's not going to happen. Also, the summary says "hawks and ospreys", but TFA said "There are hawks, ospreys in this canyon ... they do get them ... what are you going to do?" she said.. Reminds me of attitude to raptors you find among very old people, where all of them get classified as "hawks" and blamed for the disappearance of any tame, eatable or pleasant bird, from chickens to Robins.
And by the way, this is of course the traditional use of homing pigeons. Interesting, but not because of a humorous RFC.
Scrum isn't all that bullshit-laden. I haven't used it, but during a presentation I was at, I remember going "oh, this makes sense" or "this is already what I'm trying to do". And I'm not exactly known for loving new methodologies and buzzwords ...
Of course, people will still fuck it up -- some by being overly cynical, others by trying to bend it so that their role is whatever it always was, customers who really still want the same detailed pseudo-control that they always used to have ...
The annoying part is that you cannot specify 0.1% or 0.01% -- if you cannot safely say 0% (because the partition in question *does* need that safety margin) your next step is 1%, which is almost certainly overkill for a big disk.
Confirmed, in the original, untranslated PDF. They even point out (like a score of /.ers did) that the word "bank" has several meanings.
Makes sense. Since I'm in .se, it's easy for me, and I wouldn't assume I could just go out and buy a .no, .uk, or .us domain -- that's what org/com are for.
I thought tiny islands in the Pacific with funny names were the only ones which worked differently,
and only because they needed the money.
It's a word-play on TeX, on which it is based, and it also inherits its purposely silly pronounciation and typography. Surely, that's all that needs to be said? I don't mind that the Wikipedia article provides more background, though.
Isn't that the case for every piece of software except maybe Microsoft Word? And should people stop working on advanced software so that the people who read the glossies don't have to be frustrated by articles which don't get written anyway, because the frustrated journalists don't have a week to spare to understand it?