WTF is this modded troll? Fsck you and your "liberal media" and "slashdot has a liberal bias". Right here plain as day, someone being modded down for telling the truth; if that's not conservative bias, I don't know what is. Reality does have a well-known liberal bias.
I use rsync for this. It can use SSH as the transport, so it should be as secure as SSH. Why would someone need to involve a third party for such a simple feature?
Because they are lazy, ignorant, or just too distracted by teh shiny. A friend of mine (a Mac user) tried to convince me to use dropbox, and was flabbergasted when I told him I already synced my personal files on my phone (N900), laptop (Debian) and web/email server (Debian again) via git. Personally, I use git for the same thing you use rsync for; gives me versioning and pretty damn good merging; uses ssh by default.
Then I don't get your point. It seemed you were saying that C is useless for writing an OS, but apparently you mean it isn't good for making a better OS? I really don't know; I don't believe you made yourself clear.
That's a bad habit of mine (not making myself clear); you can blame it on having my head in code all day;)
The point I was attempting to make is that C has some quality that endears it to people, or at least makes it ideal for implementing operating systems. Many still prefer it over higher level languages for even application level programming. Multics was supposed to be "the last OS"; I hypothesized that perhaps it wasn't because it was written in PL/1, and when PL/1 went out of fashion, so did Multics. This is perhaps overbroad and I wasn't even alive at the time PL/1 and Multics were around. But I have a feeling that Linux and C succeed where other languages and OSes fail because of a critical factor: the developers are the users of Linux and C. From what I've heard, PL/1 and Multics were more like Windows and C#: designed by corporate overloads, implemented by wage slaves. Not something thought about after working hours, or even looked forward to working with the next day.
Haven't we been reading the articles about how malware has been ramping up on mobiles? Isn't it obvious that one of the quickest and easiest ways to limit a program's access is to jail it or otherwise virtualize it? And just because *your* smartphone won't let you multitask doesn't mean that mine won't. Having multiple cores (that can be turned off to save power when not needed) would be very handy, thank you very much.
Before the flaming commences, I'd like to defend myself by saying that I promote GNU software in the workplace and support their hard work.
You sir, are one of my heroes. I'm sorry I was so harsh to you earlier over the stable abi stuff. But I still stand by my opinion that standard kernel abis are neither necessary nor good.
The Last OS? Isn't that what they said about Multics?
Unfortunately, that was before my time. I have heard of Multics though; I think I may still have a scan of my first vi reference card that had MULTICS(or was that ULTRIX?) printed on it. But wasn't Multics written in PL/1? Perhaps that was the cause of it's downfall, whereas I don't see C going anywhere (especially for OS implementation) anytime soon.
The key to Linux survivability, I think is that lots of people are working on it and using it; in other words, invested. To see the number of changes and technologies that have been integrated into Linux over the years is truly astounding; to imagine something that could replace it (something that would have all the benefits of Linux, and either improve upon its failings, or add something Linux could not), is not something easy to imagine.
Calm down. I'm joking. It has gotten better. Just the occasional, changing of the name of constants.
Oh good. Well, you could just always go the route of getting your driver into the mainline kernel. Or hell, if that's too much trouble, ask them to write it for you. What's that you say? You want a binary interface so you can write closed source drivers? Well in that case, fuck off. It's called "open source" for a reason.
Fsck, here we go again. Let's just stop this before it even gets started. The difference between science and faith is that science works, whether you believe in it or not and whether you understand it or not.
No one talks about the data stealing on iPhones. Is that because we know they are not doing it on iPhone, or because the iPhone doesn't warn the user that the app is stealing their data.
No, it's because anyone with half a clue already knows that iPhones don't belong to the people carting them around, they belong to Apple; therefore, any info put on an iPhone automatically belongs to Apple. Probably Apple doesn't do much of anything with this info, that's not really a part of their business plan (yet), and Apple is such a control freak it probably won't let anyone else touch the data. But just wait until iPhone market share starts to seriously decline, then you will see Apple start making deals with "research firms" to "enhance the end user experience." Heck, they've already allowed devs to allow ads on their apps if they so choose.
Seriously, friend. Can you tell me what a "pam stack" is? I'm having trouble understanding the google results. I'm half a moron, so if you could be gentle, I'd appreciate it.
PAM = Pluggable Authentication Modules; stack = like a LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP) stack, ie, software that works together. I'm no PAM expert, but from packages I've seen, I would guess that the PAM stack is pretty pluggable and can do authentication via everything from smartcards to windows domain controllers.
Once permitted in, most commercial applications barge into your PC, rewrite whatever files they please, alter configuration settings, gobble up memory, install themselves as startup applications and often install an entire suite of unwanted applications and advertisements you didn't even ask for. Then they plonk themselves down in your living room, feet on the sofa, and begin to shout at you, along with all the dozens of other loudmouth applications you've invited in.
Two things:
This is *precisely* why open source is needed, and yes, you can make money selling open source software. Then if your customers decide they don't like the way your app works, they can cut out the shit part and fork it. Just more motivation not to do any of the above.
People might question the wisdom of ubiquitous VMs (say, even on smartphones), but even just chrooting or jailing apps could help curtail some of these problems. I was incredulous when I saw an article about VMs on smartphones, but it makes sense in this context.
Of course, the real question is, why trust an entity (the people making the software) who obviously wants to do you harm? Stop using software and products designed to work against your own best interests!
I'm sorry, but I like Linux and hate Microsoft, yet I still can't stomach this marketing'esque spew of BS. If Microsoft said the reverse of this this topic would hit 500+ comments.
Comments: 500. And yet people still talk of slashdot groupthink.
You voted those idiots into office in part because they made promises they cannot keep.
I have NEVER voted for anyone who made it into office. I keep voting third (fourth, fifth, etc) party based on the candidates past actions, but yeah, I'm pretty sure they would have been corrupted by the corpratist system within a couple of months. This country is f*cked seven ways to Sunday. That being said, I'm not counting on ever getting any money back from social security. As long as it goes to keeping grandma off the street, that's okay by me.
Most I hear from academics is that they got annoyed with Wikipedia once somebody removes their well explained text, around a subject they know a lot about, once too often.
This. I'm no researcher or academic, but I can't see putting the effort it takes to create a well researched, well written article about something I am an expert in, only to have some know-nothing come along and delete it for "not being notable", or worse, altering it so it doesn't conflict with their political views. For instance, if you were Richard Dawkins and you posted an article to wikipedia, only to have some creationist (aka, intelligent design proponent), piss all over it, what would you do?
If they had spent just 50 euro more per phone for a nice solid case and a thin form factor, I would have spent 100 euro more and been happily running UQM or Firefox on my phone.
Making it thinner probably would have involved removing the keyboard, and you can't use Emacs with an onscreen keyboard (at least not that I've seen).
Quite frankly, I don't see what the big deal about the thickness of the N900 is; it's not any thicker than my Treo 650, and it's not like it's thicker for no good reason (see keyboard comment above). Heck, to me, the thickness is good; makes it easier to grab. I've tried holding some of the iPhones pre v4, and they felt very dainty and hard to hold.
First, I love how everyone here is bashing him as a troll, calling him a non-developer, etc, etc. Yet anytime we get some glowing salespiece in favor of Apple, the fanboys start crawling out of the woodwork and modding down anyone who calls them on their BS.
Aw, does it hurt to have your favorite little toy's failings pointed out?
Looking at the tone of the piece, I'm pretty sure it's not a troll and it's not a marketing hit piece, and in case you were too lazy to click the link above, he *is* a professional developer. I think it's straight from the heart, and it hit so many chords with me, I couldn't help but wipe a tear from my eye. And I don't even do web development.
Second, I love how everyone is ignoring the points he backed up well. Any takers for the packaging mess in OSX that resembles Windows more and more? How 'bout that price tag? Sure, keep telling yourself you're paying for higher quality or "design".
As for some of the attacked points:
Emacs: until you've written code with it - and I mean plenty of code - you just won't understand. Can anyone even name an editor/IDE besides vi where you don't have to remove your hands from home row all day? I've tried other IDE's (mainly Eclipse-based) that people have recommended. It always pains me how clumsy, slow, and resource intensive they are. Why should I have to break my flow to move my hand to the mouse to do something? Or even off of home row? Also, It is well-regarded advice that your editor should be configurable, extensible and programmable. Emacs and vi are the only two editors I've ever used that meet this criteria.
His website design: don't know about you, but lack of Flash and JavaScript, as well as an elegant, readable layout are signs of a mature web dev, one who has gotten over the point-and-click to create a website phase.
Quite frankly, I'm glad to see this kind of article get posted. We have far too many Apple and MS fanboys here; slashdot was created by Linux users for Linux users, and this kind of from the heart, in the trenches opinion piece is much more worthy than some marketing piece about the latest shiny piece of crap to come out of Steve Jobs' ass.
Such a technology as this is really an abandonment of rationalism -- we concede we can't use empirical arguments and evidence about saving and retirement to convince people to save, so now we'll just scare them.
Unfortunately, we do not live among Vulcans. People have feelings, and sometimes the best way to motivate someone is by manipulating those feelings. Sure, I'm an idealist in the sense that I think it would be ideal if people used their brains and saved more money. But I'm also a pragmatist, and my experience tells me that in 30 years when I retire because I've been saving, *someone* is going to have to pay for those that didn't save. No, letting them starve is not an option, at least not in a civilized country, especially one that you want to keep that way (starving people generally have nothing left to lose . . . ). Tax the rich? Yeah, good fucking luck with that. No, I'm afraid that if we have to manipulate people into saving, then that's what we should do. If nothing else, maybe it will keep the retards from spending money on awful pop cultural shit, and we might see a return to art in our society.
So OO Programming because it's unsuitable for a modern CS curriculum. I guess we should go back to just assembly language so we can make sure we never go down this road of false progress again.
No, trust me, they probably already have some other higher level paradigm lined up, perhaps functional. While I may disagree with OO being anti-parallel (have they never heard of thread classes?) and anti-modular (WTF? what are classes if not modules?), I can see how they might want to start students out on something simpler or more straightforward. For a little better understanding into this mindset, see Object Oriented Programming is Inherently Harmful.
I think the real problem is that people mostly can't afford to live close to where they work.
There's also the ugly fact that most employers discourage telecommuting (say, from home; zero mileage tax!), right up until they outsource your job to somewhere without labor laws.
If employers had to count commute time as part of the working day and compensate employees for fuel and maintenance, or have to pay employees enough to live closer to where they work, you would see a "free market" solution to this problem real fast. Plus, it would probably have the added benefit of forcing companies to upgrade Internet infrastructure.
Slashdot Mirror
WTF is this modded troll? Fsck you and your "liberal media" and "slashdot has a liberal bias". Right here plain as day, someone being modded down for telling the truth; if that's not conservative bias, I don't know what is. Reality does have a well-known liberal bias.
Because they are lazy, ignorant, or just too distracted by teh shiny. A friend of mine (a Mac user) tried to convince me to use dropbox, and was flabbergasted when I told him I already synced my personal files on my phone (N900), laptop (Debian) and web/email server (Debian again) via git. Personally, I use git for the same thing you use rsync for; gives me versioning and pretty damn good merging; uses ssh by default.
That's a bad habit of mine (not making myself clear); you can blame it on having my head in code all day ;)
The point I was attempting to make is that C has some quality that endears it to people, or at least makes it ideal for implementing operating systems. Many still prefer it over higher level languages for even application level programming. Multics was supposed to be "the last OS"; I hypothesized that perhaps it wasn't because it was written in PL/1, and when PL/1 went out of fashion, so did Multics. This is perhaps overbroad and I wasn't even alive at the time PL/1 and Multics were around. But I have a feeling that Linux and C succeed where other languages and OSes fail because of a critical factor: the developers are the users of Linux and C. From what I've heard, PL/1 and Multics were more like Windows and C#: designed by corporate overloads, implemented by wage slaves. Not something thought about after working hours, or even looked forward to working with the next day.
This is of course, all opinion.
Especially when you can use a bluetooth keyboard and mouse with it.
Haven't we been reading the articles about how malware has been ramping up on mobiles? Isn't it obvious that one of the quickest and easiest ways to limit a program's access is to jail it or otherwise virtualize it? And just because *your* smartphone won't let you multitask doesn't mean that mine won't. Having multiple cores (that can be turned off to save power when not needed) would be very handy, thank you very much.
And I can list a dozen or more OSes written in C, despite the various attempts over the years to write a "better" OS in a "better" language. And that's just open source OSes.
There's a quote that talks about most successful programming languages having been created by the authors for their own use, whereas most programming language failures were created for others to use. C was created by its authors for their own use.
You sir, are one of my heroes. I'm sorry I was so harsh to you earlier over the stable abi stuff. But I still stand by my opinion that standard kernel abis are neither necessary nor good.
Sigh . . .
I figured I would post the relevant part of the linked document, since you obviously didn't read it.
Unfortunately, that was before my time. I have heard of Multics though; I think I may still have a scan of my first vi reference card that had MULTICS(or was that ULTRIX?) printed on it. But wasn't Multics written in PL/1? Perhaps that was the cause of it's downfall, whereas I don't see C going anywhere (especially for OS implementation) anytime soon.
The key to Linux survivability, I think is that lots of people are working on it and using it; in other words, invested. To see the number of changes and technologies that have been integrated into Linux over the years is truly astounding; to imagine something that could replace it (something that would have all the benefits of Linux, and either improve upon its failings, or add something Linux could not), is not something easy to imagine.
Oh please don't tell me you're another one of those going on about stable kernel API nonsense.
Oh good. Well, you could just always go the route of getting your driver into the mainline kernel. Or hell, if that's too much trouble, ask them to write it for you. What's that you say? You want a binary interface so you can write closed source drivers? Well in that case, fuck off. It's called "open source" for a reason.
You joke, but I was just looking at a comparison of open source OSes, and Linux really DOES seem to have everything. I keep getting reminded of The "Last" OS comment. Truly insightful.
Fsck, here we go again. Let's just stop this before it even gets started. The difference between science and faith is that science works, whether you believe in it or not and whether you understand it or not.
No, it's because anyone with half a clue already knows that iPhones don't belong to the people carting them around, they belong to Apple; therefore, any info put on an iPhone automatically belongs to Apple. Probably Apple doesn't do much of anything with this info, that's not really a part of their business plan (yet), and Apple is such a control freak it probably won't let anyone else touch the data. But just wait until iPhone market share starts to seriously decline, then you will see Apple start making deals with "research firms" to "enhance the end user experience." Heck, they've already allowed devs to allow ads on their apps if they so choose.
PAM = Pluggable Authentication Modules; stack = like a LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP) stack, ie, software that works together. I'm no PAM expert, but from packages I've seen, I would guess that the PAM stack is pretty pluggable and can do authentication via everything from smartcards to windows domain controllers.
Two things:
Of course, the real question is, why trust an entity (the people making the software) who obviously wants to do you harm? Stop using software and products designed to work against your own best interests!
Comments: 500. And yet people still talk of slashdot groupthink.
I have NEVER voted for anyone who made it into office. I keep voting third (fourth, fifth, etc) party based on the candidates past actions, but yeah, I'm pretty sure they would have been corrupted by the corpratist system within a couple of months. This country is f*cked seven ways to Sunday. That being said, I'm not counting on ever getting any money back from social security. As long as it goes to keeping grandma off the street, that's okay by me.
This. I'm no researcher or academic, but I can't see putting the effort it takes to create a well researched, well written article about something I am an expert in, only to have some know-nothing come along and delete it for "not being notable", or worse, altering it so it doesn't conflict with their political views. For instance, if you were Richard Dawkins and you posted an article to wikipedia, only to have some creationist (aka, intelligent design proponent), piss all over it, what would you do?
As Bakunin said in "God and the State", rejecting all authority is foolish. Egalitarianism has its place, but applying it everywhere is madness.
Making it thinner probably would have involved removing the keyboard, and you can't use Emacs with an onscreen keyboard (at least not that I've seen).
Quite frankly, I don't see what the big deal about the thickness of the N900 is; it's not any thicker than my Treo 650, and it's not like it's thicker for no good reason (see keyboard comment above). Heck, to me, the thickness is good; makes it easier to grab. I've tried holding some of the iPhones pre v4, and they felt very dainty and hard to hold.
First, I love how everyone here is bashing him as a troll, calling him a non-developer, etc, etc. Yet anytime we get some glowing salespiece in favor of Apple, the fanboys start crawling out of the woodwork and modding down anyone who calls them on their BS.
Aw, does it hurt to have your favorite little toy's failings pointed out?
Looking at the tone of the piece, I'm pretty sure it's not a troll and it's not a marketing hit piece, and in case you were too lazy to click the link above, he *is* a professional developer. I think it's straight from the heart, and it hit so many chords with me, I couldn't help but wipe a tear from my eye. And I don't even do web development.
Second, I love how everyone is ignoring the points he backed up well. Any takers for the packaging mess in OSX that resembles Windows more and more? How 'bout that price tag? Sure, keep telling yourself you're paying for higher quality or "design".
As for some of the attacked points:
Quite frankly, I'm glad to see this kind of article get posted. We have far too many Apple and MS fanboys here; slashdot was created by Linux users for Linux users, and this kind of from the heart, in the trenches opinion piece is much more worthy than some marketing piece about the latest shiny piece of crap to come out of Steve Jobs' ass.
Considering his website doesn't require Flash or JavaScript, I'd say he's already two steps ahead of all the other web developers out there.
Ted Dziuba's vitae
Oh, look at that, I just tore your argument to shreds. Pity
Unfortunately, we do not live among Vulcans. People have feelings, and sometimes the best way to motivate someone is by manipulating those feelings. Sure, I'm an idealist in the sense that I think it would be ideal if people used their brains and saved more money. But I'm also a pragmatist, and my experience tells me that in 30 years when I retire because I've been saving, *someone* is going to have to pay for those that didn't save. No, letting them starve is not an option, at least not in a civilized country, especially one that you want to keep that way (starving people generally have nothing left to lose . . . ). Tax the rich? Yeah, good fucking luck with that. No, I'm afraid that if we have to manipulate people into saving, then that's what we should do. If nothing else, maybe it will keep the retards from spending money on awful pop cultural shit, and we might see a return to art in our society.
No, trust me, they probably already have some other higher level paradigm lined up, perhaps functional. While I may disagree with OO being anti-parallel (have they never heard of thread classes?) and anti-modular (WTF? what are classes if not modules?), I can see how they might want to start students out on something simpler or more straightforward. For a little better understanding into this mindset, see Object Oriented Programming is Inherently Harmful.
There's also the ugly fact that most employers discourage telecommuting (say, from home; zero mileage tax!), right up until they outsource your job to somewhere without labor laws.
If employers had to count commute time as part of the working day and compensate employees for fuel and maintenance, or have to pay employees enough to live closer to where they work, you would see a "free market" solution to this problem real fast. Plus, it would probably have the added benefit of forcing companies to upgrade Internet infrastructure.