John Gilmore of the EFF said, "The Archive is helping people to understand that BitTorrent isn't just for ephemeral or dodgy items that disappear from view in a short time. BitTorrent is a great way to get and share large files that are permanently available from libraries like the Internet Archive."
In other words, the EFF is working towards legitimizing BitTorrent so that illegal uses can continue unabated.
Huh? How did you pull that message out of the statement you just quoted?
How do you get to the "newbie software selection dialog"?
That's probably tasksel.
It pops up at some point during an "expert" install. Probably
it's there in the normal install too; haven't tried that because the "expert" one is so straightforward.
I always tell tasksel to do nothing, and instead pull in the stuff I need later, using aptitude.
Here's the weird stuff: You already mentioned tabs. The stock answer is "use an editor designed for Python." Erm, what? Why should I have to use an editor specifically for one language? For any other language, I can use any editor or none (count gedit as none).
Not easily. Writing decent code in any language gets a lot harder if you don't have help with indentation. You'll make mistakes and your coworkers will waste time reindenting it.
And when you decide to play with Python in a serious way, you now get to go editor-hunting, downloading, installing and trying them out, figuring out their idiosyncrasies.
That's when it pays off to already have invested in an editor which is everywhere and supports everything, like Emacs or Vim.
I wouldn't say that. It *does* have that traditional Microsoft "catastrophically bad and yet my boss bought it" feel. Their OS and even things like Exchange kind of work nowadays.
English is also the language in which most of the computer-related neologisms originated. Leaving the terms in English makes them unambiguous whereas translating them has constantly been shown to do nothing but confuse people.
Yeah.
I always argued that we in the rest of the world got the better bargain.
The English had to dilute their language by giving new, high-visibility meanings to everything from Apache to zip.
The RaspberryPi actually seems to max at about 2MB/s per my tests at a 1500MTU, and over 4.4MB/s at 1492MTU.
Sounds as if something is broken in your setup. The only reason for that huge difference is something which introduces IP fragmentation for pretty much every datagram.
Many protocols such as SSH have high overhead, but a low-overhead protocol can expect these numbers.
"Overhead" is maybe not the best term here. Compression and ciphering (i.e. CPU usage) easily becomes the bottleneck
in bulk data transfer over ssh, but those are some of the features which make ssh attractive!
Git is not designed to handle big binary data. Since Git is creating SHA hashs for each file, with a file 500MB and more it will take more time, also it will use up all the RAM to calculate the hash.
Git uses way too much RAM for some reason, but this is not it.
Correctly done, it only takes kilobytes to calculate any hash, regardless of the size of the hashed data.
[...]
Git is good for text documents and source code. But since even the Odt documents are binary blobs (the xml data is compressed with zip), you can't use git efficient with open document text files or other documents like Excel, Spreadsheets, etc.
My solution to that is to avoid file formats and tools which are hostile to version control.
We knew decades ago that MS Office was a mistake; why repeat it?
I'm typing this on a 10 year old Dell XP machine that has served me nicely. I replaced a video card in 2006 and my monitor died during a move. (I actually think the pins just got bent and one broke, but I had a spare to replace it with so haven't bothered investigating). At some point I would like to replace XP with a linux distro, but I haven't been able to find one that will live boot. Any suggestions for a distro that will run on 10 yr old hardware that was fairly high end at it's time would be greatly appreciated!!
Don't know about the "live" part (aren't there hundreds of live CDs?), but don't let anyone convince you you need a special Linux distro targeted for old/small/otherwise challenged systems.
Any Linux will work, if you can tell it not to use Gnome, KDE or whatever the heavy desktop environments are called.
Debian, for example.
The browser is then the main problem. Both Firefox and Opera are rather too resource-hungry these days.
This will probably show on a 2002 high-end PC.
Depending on which IDE you're using, you may already have that functionality. Netbeans, for example, has a "Tasks" tab which will show you all your commented notes that start with "TODO:" or "FIXME:" within your code.
This Unix user would like to point out that so does grep(1)...
You should always strive for 100% test coverage and zero trivial bugs when releasing.
I (and many others) disagree.
It's normally not worth the effort. Like with anything else you do, you have to prioritize --
spend your energy where it's best needed.
There are no bugs in personal software projects. If something doesn't work, it gets fixed. you don't need anything to remind you that something you want to work doesn't. It's only the other people who try to use my software that find bugs, if you are making software for other people, it isn't really a personal project anymore, it's a product.
You have a valid point, but it's not always quite that clear.
I sometimes forget and rediscover (the hard way) bugs/limitations in my own software.
Especially if I use it infrequently.
Of course, a list of bugs wouldn't help much in that scenario. Maybe under BUGS in the man page, but not in some
bug tracker somewhere.
Oh wait, were they talking about those gigantic slow clunky things that include a kitchen sink and everything? Yeah, those can just go away... please.
AOL.
I just use the ctwm window manager. Have been doing that for 20 years, if you count plain old twm on SunOS.
I honestly don't see the business case for these so-called desktop environments... they seem to just
cause conflicts, incompatibilities, bloat and interdependencies. I don't see what people *use* them for.
Sure, people need a window manager; a way to set their preferences; a way to launch applications; a file manager; a way to lock/reboot/shut off the computer.
That doesn't imply they need Gnome or KDE, or whatever they're called.
That line isn't going to get any less false the more you C++ zealots keep repeating it. If you have a modern C application that can compile as C++ with a few extra casts here and there, then you're really missing out on lots of useful new syntax and semantics in C, both standard and extended.
Maybe so (especially since I don't know C extensions) but you're missing out on *more* useful C++ features.
I know it may surprise you C++ guys, but full-time C programmers don't secretly wish they were using C++. It's been right in front of us the whole time, and frankly we thought the whole thing would blow over until Google started mass producing legions of C++ zombies who are intent on porting every open source application to C++.
Never heard of that before. I use C++ because it's a good C-like language for plain old Unix programming,
with a good, free compiler and access to all C libraries.
I don't think I've ever met a Google-generated C++ zombie.
Now its starting to get personal, because it's really hard to use C++ libraries in C, Perl, Python, Lua or basically anything other than C++, notwithstanding the mountains of wrappers, compiler options, and linker flags that allow access to a few useless entry points.
Agree. Libraries should primarily have a C interface. I can wrap them myself in C++ if I want, and probably do a better
job (from my project's point of view) than some library author.
Friend of a guy who worked in intelligence here, all your encryption is worthless, they will just park outside your lawn and point a device towards your keyboard. The electrical charge generated by each key can somehow be translated into clear text.
Not everyone who wants my data has a black van full of electronics, readily available for dispatching, in my area.
I tried to read it, but couldn't get past the first 100 pages. It was trying soooooo hard to be cool & edgy it turned me off.
Never thought about it before, but now that you mention it I think it's a bit tounge-in-cheek. Works out well with that in mind. Although I never cared much for Gibson...
In talks with Hungarian friends, some of which still live there, they seem keenly aware of the poor image their country has in the eyes of the rest of the world. It's a country best known for giving the origins to history's most prolific serial killer...
Perhaps your friends need a reality check?
Bathory was 16th century. Since then, the rest of us fucked over Africa, the Americas and most of Asia.
There's Napoleon, Stalin and Hitler, king Leopold and many others.
Hell, even.se spent half a century raping, killing and looting in central Europe, until we ran out of farm boys.
The jewish community has maintained geneology records to an unrivaled level of detail ever since;
Ever since *when*? Also, citation needed. Wikipedia says Confucius' family tree is the oldest, and I don't think he
was Jewish. I know there are traditions, e.g. Leonard Cohen's folks were said to be descendants of David, but I
seriously doubt this is based on records. For David, we don't even know if he existed!
it's at the very heart of their religion. The scientific test is completely superfluous to them; they know who they are because they've maintained records since before we knew what DNA was.
Hell, I do that myself. DNA was discovered in the 1950s or something.
The microwave example is not that good, either. Many modern microwaves have an insanely complicated user interface, and I wouldn't mind replacing it with a more intuitive one. Not to mention what silly things you could do with a microwave if you could network it.
Because if there's one thing people think of when it comes to FOSS software, it's well designed, intuitive interfaces.
Well, yes actually. Although that probably has more to do with the Unix tradition.
This is another example of ESR ignoring the dangers of closed-source software in his devotion to "pragmatism."
Well, at least this: I didn't understand why he would dedicate the article to RMS-bashing.
That was really the core of it, and it looks silly and secterian.
I hope he does *other* pieces on OSS which don't focus on that.
But think about the people who spend hours and hours coding. How do they afford coffee to stay up writing software so open-source freeloaders can consume whatever they feel like?
(a) I don't know how it happens, but they do. There are more than 25,000 packages in Debian.
(b) "open-source freeloaders" is an oxymoron. You can't give things away for free (which is what you're getting at) and then when someone accepts it, accuse him of being a parasite.
Having XFCE and ubuntu earlier today granted me with some artifacts tween the gimp and firefox which built up until the screen was complete garbage, and its been a number of years, possibally since windows 98 days since I have seen that on the MS side
Windows may suck for a long list of reasons, but for some odd reason, will millions of brilliant nerds working for a goal, more shit gets screwed up on OSS systems, more frequently.
N=1. If we push that to N=2:
I've seen free software suck as badly as proprietary. And people at work have major problems with Windows (Vista and 7), up to and including daily BSODs.
There can be a significant divide, though, between "someone who knows how to run a Linux server" and "someone who is qualified to be a Linux sysadmin."
s/can be/is/.
I've run my own Linux boxes since 1998 and can occasionally give the real sysadmins at work some tips,
but I wouldn't dream of claiming I could do their job.
Slashdot Mirror
John Gilmore of the EFF said, "The Archive is helping people to understand that BitTorrent isn't just for ephemeral or dodgy items that disappear from view in a short time. BitTorrent is a great way to get and share large files that are permanently available from libraries like the Internet Archive."
In other words, the EFF is working towards legitimizing BitTorrent so that illegal uses can continue unabated.
Huh? How did you pull that message out of the statement you just quoted?
How do you get to the "newbie software selection dialog"?
That's probably tasksel. It pops up at some point during an "expert" install. Probably it's there in the normal install too; haven't tried that because the "expert" one is so straightforward.
I always tell tasksel to do nothing, and instead pull in the stuff I need later, using aptitude.
Here's the weird stuff: You already mentioned tabs. The stock answer is "use an editor designed for Python." Erm, what? Why should I have to use an editor specifically for one language? For any other language, I can use any editor or none (count gedit as none).
Not easily. Writing decent code in any language gets a lot harder if you don't have help with indentation. You'll make mistakes and your coworkers will waste time reindenting it.
And when you decide to play with Python in a serious way, you now get to go editor-hunting, downloading, installing and trying them out, figuring out their idiosyncrasies.
That's when it pays off to already have invested in an editor which is everywhere and supports everything, like Emacs or Vim.
Sharepoint? Not much to write home about.
I wouldn't say that. It *does* have that traditional Microsoft "catastrophically bad and yet my boss bought it" feel. Their OS and even things like Exchange kind of work nowadays.
English is also the language in which most of the computer-related neologisms originated. Leaving the terms in English makes them unambiguous whereas translating them has constantly been shown to do nothing but confuse people.
Yeah. I always argued that we in the rest of the world got the better bargain. The English had to dilute their language by giving new, high-visibility meanings to everything from Apache to zip.
The RaspberryPi actually seems to max at about 2MB/s per my tests at a 1500MTU, and over 4.4MB/s at 1492MTU.
Sounds as if something is broken in your setup. The only reason for that huge difference is something which introduces IP fragmentation for pretty much every datagram.
Many protocols such as SSH have high overhead, but a low-overhead protocol can expect these numbers.
"Overhead" is maybe not the best term here. Compression and ciphering (i.e. CPU usage) easily becomes the bottleneck in bulk data transfer over ssh, but those are some of the features which make ssh attractive!
Are we talking about source code size, or the actual binary footprint on any individual supported system?
Neither. He's talking about the size of the diff from the previous release candidate (although it's impossible to tell from TFA).
Git is not designed to handle big binary data. Since Git is creating SHA hashs for each file, with a file 500MB and more it will take more time, also it will use up all the RAM to calculate the hash.
Git uses way too much RAM for some reason, but this is not it. Correctly done, it only takes kilobytes to calculate any hash, regardless of the size of the hashed data.
[...] Git is good for text documents and source code. But since even the Odt documents are binary blobs (the xml data is compressed with zip), you can't use git efficient with open document text files or other documents like Excel, Spreadsheets, etc.
My solution to that is to avoid file formats and tools which are hostile to version control. We knew decades ago that MS Office was a mistake; why repeat it?
I'm typing this on a 10 year old Dell XP machine that has served me nicely. I replaced a video card in 2006 and my monitor died during a move. (I actually think the pins just got bent and one broke, but I had a spare to replace it with so haven't bothered investigating). At some point I would like to replace XP with a linux distro, but I haven't been able to find one that will live boot. Any suggestions for a distro that will run on 10 yr old hardware that was fairly high end at it's time would be greatly appreciated!!
Don't know about the "live" part (aren't there hundreds of live CDs?), but don't let anyone convince you you need a special Linux distro targeted for old/small/otherwise challenged systems. Any Linux will work, if you can tell it not to use Gnome, KDE or whatever the heavy desktop environments are called. Debian, for example.
The browser is then the main problem. Both Firefox and Opera are rather too resource-hungry these days. This will probably show on a 2002 high-end PC.
Depending on which IDE you're using, you may already have that functionality. Netbeans, for example, has a "Tasks" tab which will show you all your commented notes that start with "TODO:" or "FIXME:" within your code.
This Unix user would like to point out that so does grep(1) ...
You should always strive for 100% test coverage and zero trivial bugs when releasing.
I (and many others) disagree. It's normally not worth the effort. Like with anything else you do, you have to prioritize -- spend your energy where it's best needed.
There are no bugs in personal software projects. If something doesn't work, it gets fixed. you don't need anything to remind you that something you want to work doesn't. It's only the other people who try to use my software that find bugs, if you are making software for other people, it isn't really a personal project anymore, it's a product.
You have a valid point, but it's not always quite that clear. I sometimes forget and rediscover (the hard way) bugs/limitations in my own software. Especially if I use it infrequently.
Of course, a list of bugs wouldn't help much in that scenario. Maybe under BUGS in the man page, but not in some bug tracker somewhere.
And so in 2012 began another chain of "you use x? I only need y!" discussion that [---]
Well, I am honestly trying to understand what's the use case for desktop environments. Should I interpret your posting as "I don't know, either"?
Oh wait, were they talking about those gigantic slow clunky things that include a kitchen sink and everything? Yeah, those can just go away... please.
AOL. I just use the ctwm window manager. Have been doing that for 20 years, if you count plain old twm on SunOS. I honestly don't see the business case for these so-called desktop environments ... they seem to just
cause conflicts, incompatibilities, bloat and interdependencies. I don't see what people *use* them for.
Sure, people need a window manager; a way to set their preferences; a way to launch applications; a file manager; a way to lock/reboot/shut off the computer. That doesn't imply they need Gnome or KDE, or whatever they're called.
What features do you want?
Automatic memory management? Isn't this what makes C++ so fucking insanely complex?
No. Have you ever used C++?
That line isn't going to get any less false the more you C++ zealots keep repeating it. If you have a modern C application that can compile as C++ with a few extra casts here and there, then you're really missing out on lots of useful new syntax and semantics in C, both standard and extended.
Maybe so (especially since I don't know C extensions) but you're missing out on *more* useful C++ features.
I know it may surprise you C++ guys, but full-time C programmers don't secretly wish they were using C++. It's been right in front of us the whole time, and frankly we thought the whole thing would blow over until Google started mass producing legions of C++ zombies who are intent on porting every open source application to C++.
Never heard of that before. I use C++ because it's a good C-like language for plain old Unix programming, with a good, free compiler and access to all C libraries. I don't think I've ever met a Google-generated C++ zombie.
Now its starting to get personal, because it's really hard to use C++ libraries in C, Perl, Python, Lua or basically anything other than C++, notwithstanding the mountains of wrappers, compiler options, and linker flags that allow access to a few useless entry points.
Agree. Libraries should primarily have a C interface. I can wrap them myself in C++ if I want, and probably do a better job (from my project's point of view) than some library author.
Friend of a guy who worked in intelligence here, all your encryption is worthless, they will just park outside your lawn and point a device towards your keyboard. The electrical charge generated by each key can somehow be translated into clear text.
Not everyone who wants my data has a black van full of electronics, readily available for dispatching, in my area.
I tried to read it, but couldn't get past the first 100 pages. It was trying soooooo hard to be cool & edgy it turned me off.
Never thought about it before, but now that you mention it I think it's a bit tounge-in-cheek. Works out well with that in mind. Although I never cared much for Gibson ...
In talks with Hungarian friends, some of which still live there, they seem keenly aware of the poor image their country has in the eyes of the rest of the world. It's a country best known for giving the origins to history's most prolific serial killer ...
Perhaps your friends need a reality check? Bathory was 16th century. Since then, the rest of us fucked over Africa, the Americas and most of Asia. There's Napoleon, Stalin and Hitler, king Leopold and many others. Hell, even .se spent half a century raping, killing and looting in central Europe, until we ran out of farm boys.
The jewish community has maintained geneology records to an unrivaled level of detail ever since;
Ever since *when*? Also, citation needed. Wikipedia says Confucius' family tree is the oldest, and I don't think he was Jewish. I know there are traditions, e.g. Leonard Cohen's folks were said to be descendants of David, but I seriously doubt this is based on records. For David, we don't even know if he existed!
it's at the very heart of their religion. The scientific test is completely superfluous to them; they know who they are because they've maintained records since before we knew what DNA was.
Hell, I do that myself. DNA was discovered in the 1950s or something.
The microwave example is not that good, either. Many modern microwaves have an insanely complicated user interface, and I wouldn't mind replacing it with a more intuitive one. Not to mention what silly things you could do with a microwave if you could network it.
Because if there's one thing people think of when it comes to FOSS software, it's well designed, intuitive interfaces.
Well, yes actually. Although that probably has more to do with the Unix tradition.
This is another example of ESR ignoring the dangers of closed-source software in his devotion to "pragmatism."
Well, at least this: I didn't understand why he would dedicate the article to RMS-bashing. That was really the core of it, and it looks silly and secterian. I hope he does *other* pieces on OSS which don't focus on that.
But think about the people who spend hours and hours coding. How do they afford coffee to stay up writing software so open-source freeloaders can consume whatever they feel like?
(a) I don't know how it happens, but they do. There are more than 25,000 packages in Debian.
(b) "open-source freeloaders" is an oxymoron. You can't give things away for free (which is what you're getting at) and then when someone accepts it, accuse him of being a parasite.
Having XFCE and ubuntu earlier today granted me with some artifacts tween the gimp and firefox which built up until the screen was complete garbage, and its been a number of years, possibally since windows 98 days since I have seen that on the MS side
Windows may suck for a long list of reasons, but for some odd reason, will millions of brilliant nerds working for a goal, more shit gets screwed up on OSS systems, more frequently.
N=1. If we push that to N=2: I've seen free software suck as badly as proprietary. And people at work have major problems with Windows (Vista and 7), up to and including daily BSODs.
There can be a significant divide, though, between "someone who knows how to run a Linux server" and "someone who is qualified to be a Linux sysadmin."
s/can be/is/. I've run my own Linux boxes since 1998 and can occasionally give the real sysadmins at work some tips, but I wouldn't dream of claiming I could do their job.