Agreed 100%. Ron and his fellow volunteers have worked on this for several years, not only transcribing the Apollo Command Module and Lunar Module flight software from paper listings, but also writing the toolchains and simulators with which to build and run it. And not only for Apollo, but also for the Saturn IB and V rockets, the Gemini spacecraft, and probably other things I haven't found yet. There are lucid explanations of everything, and original project documentation as well. The site is a treasure trove of information for anyone interested in the software aspect of these great historical space missions. http://www.ibiblio.org/apollo/...
The new Slashdot design is based on Windows 8. That fact alone, even aside from the numerous usability issues, indicates that the new owners have no fucking idea in the world what they've acquired.
Slashdot is a technology site, a geek site, an open source site, a programming site, an Internet / Web advocacy site. But more than that, it is a Linux community site. It lives and dies by its community. That community, by and large, is made up of passionate Linux advocates who can be whipped into a frenzy at the mention of Microsoft, who think Bill Gates is the Great Satan, who sincerely believe in free and open source software, and who implement that passion in their lives, hobbies, and jobs. Sure, not everyone here fits the mold. But that's the core of the community.
As one single data point, I work on simulators in the aerospace segment. We develop and integrate specialized, whole-system, software-only simulators, supporting software development when the hardware has limited availability or hasn't been built yet. Our user community is not large, but includes key technical people at well known organizations. Like others we interface with, our work has gone from Windows and Linux in the beginning, to mostly Linux, plus Windows if we have to. That's how we like it. Linux works for us - it's developer friendly, it's rock solid, it's quite deployable, and it lets us do what we need to do. And a bunch of us come to Slashdot to catch the news on Linux and other geek-worthy subjects, and discuss it with others.
And now the owners, having acquired this rather unique and valuable site, want to make it into Windows fucking 8 - the friendly, cuddly, but unusable Fisher-Price operating system that represents everything we despise? The mind reels. You might as well just make it a SEO parking page for Microsoft.
Seriously, DICE, do not do this thing. I know you don't care about the history, community, or shared values of this site, but this move will destroy them, and take the site with it. It will become a ghost town, abandoned by its residents, only visited by tourists and people that got lost on their way somewhere else.
I used to be a huge Subversion cheerleader, but switched to Git everything I could some time ago. Our work repo is Subversion, but using Git day-to-day is well worth the hassle of converting files in and out of another tool to do so.
I was actually considering going back to Subversion full time at work a couple weeks ago, but merging a long-running development branch to trunk was enough to kill that idea. Subversion's merge pretty much shit itself at the get-go. The CM lead insisted on saving the development history on the branch - not worth the effort, but his call. I managed to save history for pre-existing files that were modified. After wasting hours of my (and Google's) time and trying everything short of standing on my head, I finally brute-forced the added and deleted files so I could move on with my life. Lesson learned but day wasted.
Merge is fundamental, and it's completely solid on Git. I'll let someone else sort out whether it works now in Subversion.
It should come as absolutely no surprise to anyone that the same CEO that canned the Sun-Times photo staff did the same thing at Newsday in 2008. See for instance, Vincent Laforet's blog on the layoffs. But these aren't isolated instances.
The new millenium has not been kind to newspapers. Certainly the newspapers are under great pressure from blogs, social media, and other Internet sources. There may also be an element of union busting in these actions. But from what I've seen over the years, there is a much larger element of simple greed following the familiar script of buy out the companies, dump half the staff, make the survivors do the jobs of the laid off as well as their own, count the dough. The continued existence of quality newspaper journalism in this country is quite remarkable considering the owners' continued efforts to get rid of the people who produce it.
Can we get along without traditional newspapers? Absolutely. Are we still losing something of tremendous value? Without a doubt. Will blogs pick up the slack? I hope so, but I just don't see it. There are a lot of truly great blogs out there. I follow a number of them. But to think they will make up for the depth and breadth of professional journalism that's disappearing before our eyes is naively optimistic.
From the linked Reuters article: > The database is a joint project of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which provided most of the > funding, the Carnegie Corporation of New York and school officials from several states. Amplify > Education, a division of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, built the infrastructure over the past 18 > months. When it was ready, the Gates Foundation turned the database over to a newly created > nonprofit, inBloom Inc, which will run it.
I thought the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation was trying to *help* children, not *sell* them.
Kind of late, but... Agree totally. I meant that Google's move, not MegaUpload, was evil. Although after spending time with the new image search, it seems more douchey (not showing the source page) than evil (which would be pretending that there was no source page). The UI makes it plain that the image is coming from somewhere else and gives you the option to see the page or go directly to the image, so while I'm not thrilled, I'll stand down from my earlier comment.
It would be more responsible to give users a choice on the matter. Especially for those using Macs for work, teleworking, etc where not running Java may not be an option. Fine, disable it by default to be safe, but give an option to re-enable it besides Googling for random XProtect plist hacks.
Perl5 OO is not so much "bolted on" as "Nonexistent"--instead it has a mechanism for designing your own OO system, which is great except that most people just want to get things done and don't care about being an architect at that level.
+1 for that. Plan 9's code, written in C, has a clean, minimalist aesthetic throughout that makes it dead easy to navigate, skim, or analyze in depth. Files, lines, and functions all tend to be short. Code within functions is often times linear with simple conditionals or loops; there's still complex logic to be found, but far less than other software; more than 4 levels of indentation is uncommon. Even the makefiles are simple and clean.
File, type, and function names are usually short and unambiguous. Variable names average 1-2 letters: r for Request, f for File, to and from for strings. Comments are used sparingly; when present, they give you the salient facts without unnecessary detail. They, too, are mostly short, but longer where more explanation is called for.
With all this brevity, you might expect the code would be cryptic or cramped, but it is extremely easy to follow, with a very "clean" and "natural" feel - easy on the eyes, with plenty of space. You can dive in at any random point and easily understand what is going on and why.
One may, of course, argue that the limited number of hardware platforms supported (half a dozen or so?) and operating systems (one) freed the authors from a huge amount of complexity and allowed them to keep their code simple. Could be. gcc's headers make my eyes bleed, but between POSIX and portability to every hardware and OS known to humanity, it's hard to fault them for it.
Overall, Plan 9's code is the cleanest, the easiest to understand, and possibly the most "beautiful" that I've seen.
Accidentally dropped the date from the article snippet, but it was this June - 6 months ago. In only 6 months Google stopped being alarmed at government censorship requests, and started preemptively applying their own.
Google reports 'alarming' rise in government censorship requests
By John D. Sutter, CNN
(CNN) -- Western governments, including the United States, appear to be stepping up efforts to censor Internet search results and YouTube videos, according to a "transparency report" released by Google.
"It's alarming not only because free expression is at risk, but because some of these requests come from countries you might not suspect -- Western democracies not typically associated with censorship," Dorothy Chou, a senior policy analyst at Google, wrote in a blog post on Sunday night. http://www.cnn.com/2012/06/18/tech/web/google-transparency-report/index.html
I'm sorry, did you just say the police got involved because you had to deposit a measly couple thou in cash?? That one thing pretty much negates any other advantage the Swedish system may have. No offense, but that's just insane.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed 100%. Ron and his fellow volunteers have worked on this for several years, not only transcribing the Apollo Command Module and Lunar Module flight software from paper listings, but also writing the toolchains and simulators with which to build and run it. And not only for Apollo, but also for the Saturn IB and V rockets, the Gemini spacecraft, and probably other things I haven't found yet. There are lucid explanations of everything, and original project documentation as well. The site is a treasure trove of information for anyone interested in the software aspect of these great historical space missions.
http://www.ibiblio.org/apollo/...
Volvo plans to sell businesses the right to open your trunk.
Ok, shouldn't admit it, but I literally laughed out loud on that one.
The new Slashdot design is based on Windows 8. That fact alone, even aside from the numerous usability issues, indicates that the new owners have no fucking idea in the world what they've acquired.
Slashdot is a technology site, a geek site, an open source site, a programming site, an Internet / Web advocacy site. But more than that, it is a Linux community site. It lives and dies by its community. That community, by and large, is made up of passionate Linux advocates who can be whipped into a frenzy at the mention of Microsoft, who think Bill Gates is the Great Satan, who sincerely believe in free and open source software, and who implement that passion in their lives, hobbies, and jobs. Sure, not everyone here fits the mold. But that's the core of the community.
As one single data point, I work on simulators in the aerospace segment. We develop and integrate specialized, whole-system, software-only simulators, supporting software development when the hardware has limited availability or hasn't been built yet. Our user community is not large, but includes key technical people at well known organizations. Like others we interface with, our work has gone from Windows and Linux in the beginning, to mostly Linux, plus Windows if we have to. That's how we like it. Linux works for us - it's developer friendly, it's rock solid, it's quite deployable, and it lets us do what we need to do. And a bunch of us come to Slashdot to catch the news on Linux and other geek-worthy subjects, and discuss it with others.
And now the owners, having acquired this rather unique and valuable site, want to make it into Windows fucking 8 - the friendly, cuddly, but unusable Fisher-Price operating system that represents everything we despise? The mind reels. You might as well just make it a SEO parking page for Microsoft.
Seriously, DICE, do not do this thing. I know you don't care about the history, community, or shared values of this site, but this move will destroy them, and take the site with it. It will become a ghost town, abandoned by its residents, only visited by tourists and people that got lost on their way somewhere else.
Does anyone one else get the sickening irony of one of the great pro-Linux Web sites changing their layout to look like Windows 8?
I used to be a huge Subversion cheerleader, but switched to Git everything I could some time ago. Our work repo is Subversion, but using Git day-to-day is well worth the hassle of converting files in and out of another tool to do so.
I was actually considering going back to Subversion full time at work a couple weeks ago, but merging a long-running development branch to trunk was enough to kill that idea. Subversion's merge pretty much shit itself at the get-go. The CM lead insisted on saving the development history on the branch - not worth the effort, but his call. I managed to save history for pre-existing files that were modified. After wasting hours of my (and Google's) time and trying everything short of standing on my head, I finally brute-forced the added and deleted files so I could move on with my life. Lesson learned but day wasted.
Merge is fundamental, and it's completely solid on Git. I'll let someone else sort out whether it works now in Subversion.
It should come as absolutely no surprise to anyone that the same CEO that canned the Sun-Times photo staff did the same thing at Newsday in 2008. See for instance, Vincent Laforet's blog on the layoffs. But these aren't isolated instances.
The new millenium has not been kind to newspapers. Certainly the newspapers are under great pressure from blogs, social media, and other Internet sources. There may also be an element of union busting in these actions. But from what I've seen over the years, there is a much larger element of simple greed following the familiar script of buy out the companies, dump half the staff, make the survivors do the jobs of the laid off as well as their own, count the dough. The continued existence of quality newspaper journalism in this country is quite remarkable considering the owners' continued efforts to get rid of the people who produce it.
Can we get along without traditional newspapers? Absolutely. Are we still losing something of tremendous value? Without a doubt. Will blogs pick up the slack? I hope so, but I just don't see it. There are a lot of truly great blogs out there. I follow a number of them. But to think they will make up for the depth and breadth of professional journalism that's disappearing before our eyes is naively optimistic.
I prefer the metric assload, because it's a bit bigger than a "regular" assload.
You mean, if Open Source isn't magic, it's bullshit? Way to straw man.
Almost - you forgot fat people.
From the linked Reuters article:
> The database is a joint project of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which provided most of the
> funding, the Carnegie Corporation of New York and school officials from several states. Amplify
> Education, a division of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, built the infrastructure over the past 18
> months. When it was ready, the Gates Foundation turned the database over to a newly created
> nonprofit, inBloom Inc, which will run it.
I thought the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation was trying to *help* children, not *sell* them.
+1 Internets for you, sir.
Hear, hear. Good old CALL -151. Once in a great while I still fire up AppleWin and bask in its Garden of Eden-like 24x40 ALL UPPER CASE wondrousness.
Kind of late, but... Agree totally. I meant that Google's move, not MegaUpload, was evil. Although after spending time with the new image search, it seems more douchey (not showing the source page) than evil (which would be pretending that there was no source page). The UI makes it plain that the image is coming from somewhere else and gives you the option to see the page or go directly to the image, so while I'm not thrilled, I'll stand down from my earlier comment.
It's obvious, right?
Google just turned every other web site on the planet into MegaUpload. Sort of. "Don't, be evil" indeed.
It would be more responsible to give users a choice on the matter. Especially for those using Macs for work, teleworking, etc where not running Java may not be an option. Fine, disable it by default to be safe, but give an option to re-enable it besides Googling for random XProtect plist hacks.
Perl5 OO is not so much "bolted on" as "Nonexistent"--instead it has a mechanism for designing your own OO system, which is great except that most people just want to get things done and don't care about being an architect at that level.
Yeah. Just like C++.
+1 for that. Plan 9's code, written in C, has a clean, minimalist aesthetic throughout that makes it dead easy to navigate, skim, or analyze in depth. Files, lines, and functions all tend to be short. Code within functions is often times linear with simple conditionals or loops; there's still complex logic to be found, but far less than other software; more than 4 levels of indentation is uncommon. Even the makefiles are simple and clean.
File, type, and function names are usually short and unambiguous. Variable names average 1-2 letters: r for Request, f for File, to and from for strings. Comments are used sparingly; when present, they give you the salient facts without unnecessary detail. They, too, are mostly short, but longer where more explanation is called for.
With all this brevity, you might expect the code would be cryptic or cramped, but it is extremely easy to follow, with a very "clean" and "natural" feel - easy on the eyes, with plenty of space. You can dive in at any random point and easily understand what is going on and why.
One may, of course, argue that the limited number of hardware platforms supported (half a dozen or so?) and operating systems (one) freed the authors from a huge amount of complexity and allowed them to keep their code simple. Could be. gcc's headers make my eyes bleed, but between POSIX and portability to every hardware and OS known to humanity, it's hard to fault them for it.
Overall, Plan 9's code is the cleanest, the easiest to understand, and possibly the most "beautiful" that I've seen.
+1 to you guys for picking a great project name :-)
Accidentally dropped the date from the article snippet, but it was this June - 6 months ago. In only 6 months Google stopped being alarmed at government censorship requests, and started preemptively applying their own.
Also forgot to say Fuck you, Google!
By John D. Sutter, CNN
(CNN) -- Western governments, including the United States, appear to be stepping up efforts to censor Internet search results and YouTube videos, according to a "transparency report" released by Google.
"It's alarming not only because free expression is at risk, but because some of these requests come from countries you might not suspect -- Western democracies not typically associated with censorship," Dorothy Chou, a senior policy analyst at Google, wrote in a blog post on Sunday night.
http://www.cnn.com/2012/06/18/tech/web/google-transparency-report/index.html
I'm frothing-at-the-mouth mad about this latest Google bullshit, but the result page from that query, with the new censorship, is just hilarious.
Screw 'em. I've already switched to the MATE desktop. Its developers actually want to listen to users.
I'm sorry, did you just say the police got involved because you had to deposit a measly couple thou in cash?? That one thing pretty much negates any other advantage the Swedish system may have. No offense, but that's just insane.