Remember, Ruby is at the forefront of the agile development community. Many developments in unit testing, for instance, directly involve Ruby.
I call BS. Do you have any evidence whatsoever for that claim, or did it just sound good? And "I use Ruby, and the people around me are all into agile!" doesn't count for our purposes.
Ruby developers are often the most experienced at effectively employing such development techniques.
Oh, please. OK, you like Ruby. We get that. But there is nothing - nothing - about it that magically makes its programmers smarter and cooler than everyone else.
I guarantee that there's a Lisp programmer or a hundred somewhere snickering at every "my language does $foo better 'cuz we invented it" statement floating around here. Yours falls into that category.
He's made plenty of direct statements over the years. Given the context of these particular statements, why do you think that they're ironic or rhetorical?
That's the crux of the discussion: you think he's trying to make a point, and I think he meant what he said. A literal interpretation would support my position. I don't see any evidence to support yours, but I'm willing to consider your reasoning if you'd detail it.
Linus doesn't give a fsck if other users use KDE or Gnome.
Then why did he say:
I personally just encourage people to switch to KDE.
Really, why is it impossible to take him at face value? The man said that he doesn't like Gnome, he lists his reasons for not liking it, and says that he encourages people not to use it. Is it really necessary to second-guess him and interpret the possible meanings of every single word?
Linus is not a Zen koan (to the best of my knowledge). In fact, his reputation is of speaking his mind and not mincing words.
No, he did not want to switch users to KDE. His sentence was solely of rhetoric nature, to show Gnome developers how useless Gnome got during the last releases.
Thus spake Linus:
The current example of "intentionally not listed in the printing dialog, the usability team of GNOME was against listing these options." is clearly not the exception, but the rule.
Jeff, if the explanation had been "exposing PPD features is too hard, we need developer manpower", I'd have understood. THAT is what open source projects tend to say. Not "powerful interfaces might confuse users and not look nice".
If this was a one-off, I'd buy it. But I've heard it too damn many times. And only ever from Gnome.
The reason I don't use Gnome: every single other window manager I know of is very powerfully extensible, where you can switch actions to different mouse buttons. Guess which one is not, because it might confuse the poor users? Here's a hint: it's not the small and fast one.
To my untrained ears, that sounds an awful lot like he's saying that Gnome is broken, particularly when he says that he uses something else for these reasons. Those aren't the words of someone who sounds like they're interested in fixing the situation, but rather like they've rejected the idea altogether and moved on to greener pastures.
There is a small section in our brain that lets us understand mirrors. That is, we can look in a mirror and know that we're looking at a representation of ourselves, and use that reflection for things like grooming, self-examination, and so on. IIRC, there are three other primates that have this capability (gorillas, bonobos, and orangutans (or was that chimpanzees?)), but that's it - no other animal has this capacity. For various reasons, some scientists also believe this directly correlates with self-awareness.
Since mice don't have it, this hypothesis would mean that they are not thinking, conscious beings. Graft it into them, and they would be.
IANA neuro researcher, but that's my understanding of the situation.
I'm quick sick of all these GPL-fanatical twits going on about how evil Tenable is for doing what any reasonable person would have done. It's a wonder that Tenable put up with all the other companies selling their work for as long as they did.
Yep. I mean, NetBSD closed the source after OpenBSD rebranded their hard work and started selling CDs. Star dropped the Open Source version of StarOffice because of the relative lack of external development. Remember when Linus started selling "ClosedLinux++" after people started thinking of Linux and RedHat as the same thing?
Oh, wait. None of that happened. It seems like Nessus really is breaking new ground after all.
Re:Yeah, but there's also...
on
Nessus 3.0 Released
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Not everyone will avoid anything that isn't free/libre, especially if the quality is good.
You're probably right. Only the terminally paranoid will refuse to run a closed source vulnerability finder on their network.
Then again, the terminally paranoid are pretty much the only audience for this software. People with trusting natures don't tend to become security auditors in the first place, and even if they do, they don't tend to make a career out of it (mainly because they lack the mindset to be truly great at it).
They demand that their property is protected by law, but when that same law is used to provide food and shelter to other human beings - indeed, as soon as they are not the ones getting the benefits - these people start to loudly complain about "nanny state", "communism" or other similar things.
I agree with much of what you say, but I think that you chose a bad example above. In the first case, those people are happy that the government is "allowing" them to use their property as they see fit. In the second case, they're angry that the government is taking their property (in the form of taxes) and not allowing them to use it at their will. Even if you disagree with their opinion, those seem to be consistent positions.
TCO is a valid concern for appliances (and that's really all that a home theater is)
Oh, I understand that point, and it's legitimate. But if you're looking at $1,500 stereos, then TCO probably isn't high on your priority list, especially when the difference probably amount to a few cents per month.
Put another way, I would be completely unsurprised to find that they'd ranked a Kia coupe over a BMW sedan because it got 30MPG instead of the Beemer's 28. People in the market for the latter have no interest in the former, and vice versa.
The reviews I read really did place that much emphasis on what I considered trivial details, and once I noticed it, I couldn't not see it - the darn little fnords were everywhere.
Then there is the small matter of actual professional benchmarks, like SPEC, which are all in C.
Yes, but that doesn't really relate to the issue. SPEC is a relative measurement; if it where written in Visual Basic, then MachineA[SPEC-VB]:MachineB[SPEC-VB] would probably be similar to MachineA[SPEC-C]:MachineB[SPEC-C].
Is there a language that can do better than C in a wide series of situations ?
Yes: Fortran. No, I'm not going to advocate it for general programming use (although it can and has been used as a general purpose language). However, it wins hugely over C because its data structures lend themselves to easy parallelization, instead of requiring a huge amount of guesswork and pray-this-works.
If you can formally prove that "A" and "B" do not depend on each other as per the language definition, then you can schedule the two to run inside different processes without fear of unforeseen side effects. On single-CPU systems, that's not much of a big deal. On huge NUMA machines, that's critically important. Ever notice that pretty much all HPC programs are written in Fortran variants? That's why.
The mail client, Gnus, is far and away the best mail and news reader I've ever used on any platform. I've migrated to KMail over the last couple of years, but only because it was so integrated with the rest of the KDE desktop, and not because it was particularly better than Gnus in any real way.
No reason not to have some sort of configuration options to handle the (actually quite minor) differences between them.
On the other hand, as easy as it would be to make a package to address those changes, no one has bothered to do so. Translation: there seems to be very little interest in coercing Emacs to meet someone else's guidelines.
Launching vim takes 4888KB of resident memory (per "top") on my system. Emacs (in console mode) takes 9700KB. Although it's nearly twice as big, it amounts to an extra 1/218th of the 1024MB of memory in my desktop.
There are no references to "the N word" in the first page of Google results for "nigar" (but there is a sometimes photogenic Pakistani actress). I'm sick of PC radicals who leap at the chance to point out fictional offenses. Is "jewelry" verboten? What about "dike"? Spic And Span?
It must be miserable living in a world where every thought and deed has a covert double-meaning. Why do you want to live there?
7. "Order confirmation doesn't constitute a final offer or contract. All orders are subject to management review and approval and if found to be invalid due to any reason, are subject to cancellation by management." -- Royal Camera website (similar on some others)
I remember when it was fairly common for online stores to trust the clients. They'd send you an order form showing "item X" for "price Y", and when you submitted it, it'd take the price from the value in the web form. A lot of people would edit the HTML to reflect "price Z", and get a $500.00 product for $0.75.
At least one court ruled that this was legal. In effect, the client was making an offer to buy item X for price Z, and the vendor's automated purchasing system was accepting their offer. It wasn't the client's fault that the purchasing system was phenomenally naive and would accept any offer thrown at it.
So, that clause may well have been in self-defense. Their intent might be along the lines of "we have the right to manually confirm that your order is for the amount that we legitimately offered it for". I might be completely off-base, but that seems fairly likely.
You're thinking of "right" as in "correct". Instead, think of "rite" as in "ritual ceremony", as in the formal act of contacting your Attorney General and humbly filing a Writ Of Smiting. It makes a lot more sense that way.
The problem with Consumer reports is that the reports and reviews are not written by experts.
The other problem is their bizarre scoring criteria. Let's face it: their evaluations tend to have a left-of-center leaning. Now, that's not necessarily a bad thing when they're advocating mandatory safety requirements for cars, or lobbying for more consumer-friendly laws. However, it is a bad thing when they score down an otherwise ideal home theater because it draws more power at low volume than another, or when they rank one coffee over another because they disapprove of the way our government treats the farmers in the country of origin.
Sure, I just invented those examples. However, if you've closely read their reviews for a long time, you'll start noticing a lot of similar subjective grading. I want a magazine that's like Consumer Reports, but which leaves political and economic concerns (beyond the price of the product) out of the equation.
The real question is why you'd use slow language like C for kernel development in the first place.
C programmers (as opposed to programmers who happen to write C) seem to be under the strange and baseless impression that it's the fastest language out there, and thus the only option for low-level programming. In reality, several languages are faster in many key respects, and many are vastly safer. Given two languages of roughly equal running speeds, I'll take the one that makes my code less susceptible to stupid bugs any time.
I've used GNU Emacs for several years, and I don't remember why I chose it over XEmacs anymore. Could someone familiar with both compare/contrast them? I know that the canonical answer is "try both and see which you like", but the differences between the two aren't terribly obvious and I haven't stumbled across major schisms on my own.
In particular:
Does one have a killer feature that the other hasn't added yet?
Are XEmacs's packages really that nice?
Do most popular Emacs programs run unchanged on both?
How (un-)evenly is development split between the two?
In summary, is there significant likelihood of one of them becoming an evolutionary dead end, or at least a still backwater?
I know that seems to be begging for flames, but it's really not. I'm honestly curious whether I'm better off where I am, if it'd be worthwhile to switch, or if it even matters at all. Yes, I know there are webpages that discuss this, but that's not nearly as interesting as talking about it with other users.
That doesn't mean they're anything other than completely worthless.
Here, here. Like my first advisor, who after hearing me talk about how much I loved math and science, told me I'd be a perfect fit for the Computer Information Systems major (in the business school). I changed majors after the first day of the semester, when I discovered that the class syllabus peaked at learning how to do column operations in Excel. Side note: the CompSci department head was pretty surprised to get a student wanting to transfer from CIS to CSC. He said most students were going the other direction.
Fortunately, I was already taking the same first-year calc class as the CompSci majors, and the rest of my schedule was general ed stuff. I was one of the lucky ones. I learned early into my school career to only take advice from teachers and staff that I personally knew and trusted; I can't even remember who my official counselor was supposed to be.
Slashdot Mirror
The downside is that you'll have be more creative when making the blood sacrifice required to get the thing to work.
The upside is that fan blade cuts heal much more quickly than the flesh rips you get from stamped metal cutouts.
I call BS. Do you have any evidence whatsoever for that claim, or did it just sound good? And "I use Ruby, and the people around me are all into agile!" doesn't count for our purposes.
Ruby developers are often the most experienced at effectively employing such development techniques.
Oh, please. OK, you like Ruby. We get that. But there is nothing - nothing - about it that magically makes its programmers smarter and cooler than everyone else.
I guarantee that there's a Lisp programmer or a hundred somewhere snickering at every "my language does $foo better 'cuz we invented it" statement floating around here. Yours falls into that category.
And you know this because...?
He's made plenty of direct statements over the years. Given the context of these particular statements, why do you think that they're ironic or rhetorical?
That's the crux of the discussion: you think he's trying to make a point, and I think he meant what he said. A literal interpretation would support my position. I don't see any evidence to support yours, but I'm willing to consider your reasoning if you'd detail it.
Then why did he say:
Really, why is it impossible to take him at face value? The man said that he doesn't like Gnome, he lists his reasons for not liking it, and says that he encourages people not to use it. Is it really necessary to second-guess him and interpret the possible meanings of every single word?
Linus is not a Zen koan (to the best of my knowledge). In fact, his reputation is of speaking his mind and not mincing words.
Thus spake Linus:
To my untrained ears, that sounds an awful lot like he's saying that Gnome is broken, particularly when he says that he uses something else for these reasons. Those aren't the words of someone who sounds like they're interested in fixing the situation, but rather like they've rejected the idea altogether and moved on to greener pastures.
Since mice don't have it, this hypothesis would mean that they are not thinking, conscious beings. Graft it into them, and they would be.
IANA neuro researcher, but that's my understanding of the situation.
Yep. I mean, NetBSD closed the source after OpenBSD rebranded their hard work and started selling CDs. Star dropped the Open Source version of StarOffice because of the relative lack of external development. Remember when Linus started selling "ClosedLinux++" after people started thinking of Linux and RedHat as the same thing?
Oh, wait. None of that happened. It seems like Nessus really is breaking new ground after all.
You're probably right. Only the terminally paranoid will refuse to run a closed source vulnerability finder on their network.
Then again, the terminally paranoid are pretty much the only audience for this software. People with trusting natures don't tend to become security auditors in the first place, and even if they do, they don't tend to make a career out of it (mainly because they lack the mindset to be truly great at it).
So, um, which was the right answer?
I suspect your interviewees learned a fair amount about you in the process.
Left = Consumer.
That is correct - from the perspective of the left. In the point of view of the right:
Left = Big Government
Right = Individual
So, from a conservative viewpoint, Consumer Reports takes the side of Big Government instead of individuals.
Which way you see it, then, largely depends on your political position. It's definitely not universally agreed.
I agree with much of what you say, but I think that you chose a bad example above. In the first case, those people are happy that the government is "allowing" them to use their property as they see fit. In the second case, they're angry that the government is taking their property (in the form of taxes) and not allowing them to use it at their will. Even if you disagree with their opinion, those seem to be consistent positions.
Oh, I understand that point, and it's legitimate. But if you're looking at $1,500 stereos, then TCO probably isn't high on your priority list, especially when the difference probably amount to a few cents per month.
Put another way, I would be completely unsurprised to find that they'd ranked a Kia coupe over a BMW sedan because it got 30MPG instead of the Beemer's 28. People in the market for the latter have no interest in the former, and vice versa.
The reviews I read really did place that much emphasis on what I considered trivial details, and once I noticed it, I couldn't not see it - the darn little fnords were everywhere.
Yes, but that doesn't really relate to the issue. SPEC is a relative measurement; if it where written in Visual Basic, then MachineA[SPEC-VB]:MachineB[SPEC-VB] would probably be similar to MachineA[SPEC-C]:MachineB[SPEC-C].
Is there a language that can do better than C in a wide series of situations ?
Yes: Fortran. No, I'm not going to advocate it for general programming use (although it can and has been used as a general purpose language). However, it wins hugely over C because its data structures lend themselves to easy parallelization, instead of requiring a huge amount of guesswork and pray-this-works.
If you can formally prove that "A" and "B" do not depend on each other as per the language definition, then you can schedule the two to run inside different processes without fear of unforeseen side effects. On single-CPU systems, that's not much of a big deal. On huge NUMA machines, that's critically important. Ever notice that pretty much all HPC programs are written in Fortran variants? That's why.
The mail client, Gnus, is far and away the best mail and news reader I've ever used on any platform. I've migrated to KMail over the last couple of years, but only because it was so integrated with the rest of the KDE desktop, and not because it was particularly better than Gnus in any real way.
On the other hand, as easy as it would be to make a package to address those changes, no one has bothered to do so. Translation: there seems to be very little interest in coercing Emacs to meet someone else's guidelines.
That's OK. It's mutual.
If I wanted a bloated editor I'd be using Microsoft Word to edit my text files.
As I write this, Emacs is occupying 1.17% of my available memory. I've only got 30 files open at this instant, so that may be artificially low.
When I want to edit a text file vi is infinitely easier [for me],
I fixed that for you.
virtually universal on UNIX platforms,
Likewise Emacs.
and has a tiny memory footprint.
Launching vim takes 4888KB of resident memory (per "top") on my system. Emacs (in console mode) takes 9700KB. Although it's nearly twice as big, it amounts to an extra 1/218th of the 1024MB of memory in my desktop.
Happy to clear up your misperceptions!
It must be miserable living in a world where every thought and deed has a covert double-meaning. Why do you want to live there?
I remember when it was fairly common for online stores to trust the clients. They'd send you an order form showing "item X" for "price Y", and when you submitted it, it'd take the price from the value in the web form. A lot of people would edit the HTML to reflect "price Z", and get a $500.00 product for $0.75.
At least one court ruled that this was legal. In effect, the client was making an offer to buy item X for price Z, and the vendor's automated purchasing system was accepting their offer. It wasn't the client's fault that the purchasing system was phenomenally naive and would accept any offer thrown at it.
So, that clause may well have been in self-defense. Their intent might be along the lines of "we have the right to manually confirm that your order is for the amount that we legitimately offered it for". I might be completely off-base, but that seems fairly likely.
You're thinking of "right" as in "correct". Instead, think of "rite" as in "ritual ceremony", as in the formal act of contacting your Attorney General and humbly filing a Writ Of Smiting. It makes a lot more sense that way.
The other problem is their bizarre scoring criteria. Let's face it: their evaluations tend to have a left-of-center leaning. Now, that's not necessarily a bad thing when they're advocating mandatory safety requirements for cars, or lobbying for more consumer-friendly laws. However, it is a bad thing when they score down an otherwise ideal home theater because it draws more power at low volume than another, or when they rank one coffee over another because they disapprove of the way our government treats the farmers in the country of origin.
Sure, I just invented those examples. However, if you've closely read their reviews for a long time, you'll start noticing a lot of similar subjective grading. I want a magazine that's like Consumer Reports, but which leaves political and economic concerns (beyond the price of the product) out of the equation.
C programmers (as opposed to programmers who happen to write C) seem to be under the strange and baseless impression that it's the fastest language out there, and thus the only option for low-level programming. In reality, several languages are faster in many key respects, and many are vastly safer. Given two languages of roughly equal running speeds, I'll take the one that makes my code less susceptible to stupid bugs any time.
In particular:
I know that seems to be begging for flames, but it's really not. I'm honestly curious whether I'm better off where I am, if it'd be worthwhile to switch, or if it even matters at all. Yes, I know there are webpages that discuss this, but that's not nearly as interesting as talking about it with other users.
A Clockwork Orange was originally rated "X" in the USA.
Do you, umm, have a link to it?
Here, here. Like my first advisor, who after hearing me talk about how much I loved math and science, told me I'd be a perfect fit for the Computer Information Systems major (in the business school). I changed majors after the first day of the semester, when I discovered that the class syllabus peaked at learning how to do column operations in Excel. Side note: the CompSci department head was pretty surprised to get a student wanting to transfer from CIS to CSC. He said most students were going the other direction.
Fortunately, I was already taking the same first-year calc class as the CompSci majors, and the rest of my schedule was general ed stuff. I was one of the lucky ones. I learned early into my school career to only take advice from teachers and staff that I personally knew and trusted; I can't even remember who my official counselor was supposed to be.