It's not just bad language. I have on occasion commented ugly hacks as "being forced upon me by Mr. X who should know better but apparantly left his brain in the car this morning" or something similar. The reason was quite simple: this was my code, with my name attached to it, but I did in no way want to be viewed as the idiot who wrote that specific part of the file.
I wouldn't call that bad language, but it would still have to be taken out before making this code public. Of course, were the latter to happen, I'd give the code a rewrite and fix it properly, as Mr X. no longer has a say in what I do.
And a further question: Do Linux geeks really pull in that much more money salary-wise than Windows geeks!? find this claim hard to swallow, especially in today's economy. I call BS. Show some proof.
I don't have proof, but I do have a company using both Windows and UNIX/Linux to look at. The conclusion here is simple: on average, they do. The reasons also are simple:
Remote administration. Windows requires more support people because they spend more time walking around for fixing silly little issues. Silly little issues are preferably fixed by less-qualified and cheaper personel. Especially as they spend much of their time walking around.
Dump users. Windows has many more and much more dumb users (at least as far as computers are concerned). Thus, it again requires more support people because they spend more time walking around for sorting out silly little user problems. Silly little problems are preferably fixed by less-qualified and cheaper personel. Especially as they spend much of their time walking around and dealing with dumb users that don't have a clue what they're doing.
A twin engine aircraft is SAFER than a single engine aircraft in terms of engine loss because, while the aircraft is more likely to lose an engine, it can still fly on one engine. Whereas my single engine aircraft will be making an emergency landing in a nearby field if the engine quits.
Note that this analogy does not extend to the use of multiple OS-es within one company. While a Windows-only shop is more likely to go down completely if (for instance) a virus hits than one that uses both Windows and Mac (or Linux, or...), it does not make economical sense to constantly duplicate all your company databases and/or development tools om multiple platforms just because of this probability. Hence, if your Windows or UNIX-based database server goes down, so does the database, no matter how many of its clients are using the other operating system.
In an twin-engine aircraft both engines are identical and, while they both need to be maintained, their maintenance requires less resources than if they would be different. This also holds for computers/OSes (also consider license fees for application products etc.), but for computers the redundancy does not provide an equally large degree of protection. I've never seen a virus transfer from one aircraft engine to another...
Yep, I'm Belgian too. I also hate the idea of the thing. Before we know it, they will be pushing (and later: forcing) us to do all sorts of stuff online. That alone is enough for me to hate it. But with some bad luck, of which there is plenty around, they'll also buy into some M$ technology that not only forces us to fill out taxforms online, but also to use Windows while we're doing it. Bad, bad, bad.
But then again, I'm active in micro-electronics research (i.e. I'm one of the people who help make this possible) and yet I refuse to even buy a cell phone. So maybe it's just me being weird...
I disagree wholehartedly. I HATE it when some ramdom or accidental change that I make to my setup for some specific once-in-a-month (or even lifetime!) reason gets saved "behind my back" and applied to any future session. I want a clean session to be just that: clean and starting in a known state that I have spent years to develop such that it optimally fits my usage preferencess and optimises my productivity. In short, I hate session management with a burning passion.
Our company site (we're into microelectronics research and as such biased towards more technically minded visitors) was recently subject of a (admittedly lower volume)/. article, so I can give you some data. For what it's worth, that is.
The normal distribution of visiting browsers at our site on a daily basis is 85 to 90 perscent IE and 8 to 12 percent Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox combined.IE has been in decline for several months now, it used to reach 95% a year or so ago.
On the day we hit/. (we weren't/.-ed, so one can't say that they hit us:-) we saw about 75% IE and about 20% Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox. (I had the exact data sitting in my inbox till yesterday evening, but this morning I threw them away since I thought I'd never have an opportunity to use them anyway. Damn!)
My first personal Y2K problem also hit on Dec 31 1998 or Jan 1 1999 (don't remember exactly which one of those it was). I had come to the office during the holidays so as to get some real coding work done that I never found the time for on normal company time. As it turned out, the HP-UX version of SCCS that we were still using back then had a Y2K problem that hit me in the face a full year in advance.
Until that incident happened, our IT support gang was not really worried about Y2K yet, but this very early helpdesk call was one of the things that made them realise that they needed to study the entire issue way before Jan 1 2000.
I can remember most of them. My memory still is functioning 20/20, thank you...:-)
I'll admit that that's partly because I reuse a some paswords if the site in question isn't that important to me (anything possibly involving money is important!), but I do use a subtantial set of paswords overall. Even if you get to know one of these reused paswords, it will only give you access to at most 3 sites, as oposed to all of them as would be the case with MS passport.
And yes, some of these paswords are even to be found on a piece of paper. Trouble for an identity thief is, however, that in order to get this piece of paper he or she first needs to break into my appartment, then find the paper (it's not to be found in any obvious place), then know how to decode the strings on it (yep, they're encrypted, even if with an easy algorithm since I need to be able to apply it in my head), and then find out which of these belongs to what account (because that info is not written down).
Before you make statements about how things are installed on UNIX, you should understand that what you seem to know is a personal Linux box on which you can do everything you please and of which you don't understand the package management. It is not the UNIX way.
In the true UNIX world, application software has always been such that it can be installed stand alone underneath ONE directory, quite simply because in the true UNIX world not every (other) user has root powers and the people who do have them understand that they don't want to mix shared application files with local OS files the way toy OS-es such as Windows and (sadly) some Linux distros do.
Where I work, we install evereything in networked directories called/our-company-name/software/package-name/version. Then we wrap everything in shell scripts that automatically select the correct platform (HP-UX, Solaris, Linux) on the fly and that automatically set every single environment variable the softare needs. Then we add links to make a specific package version current and publish the key binaries of packages that many people use through 1 common bin directory. Not a single file needs to be stored and/or managed locally (crucial, considering the amount of machines involved).
And now comes the best part: I (yes, I developed the setup and do most of the maintainance) do not even need root powers for anything.
You misunderstand. It's not because we are not the (main) cause (well, I think we are, but anyway) that we cannot do something about it. And that is meant not only in terms of adapting, but also in terms of trying to prevent - or at least limit - the damage.
Look, I for one am convinced that we humans are causing a (large) part of this. But whether or not we do should not even matter!
It is an undeniable fact, backed by a large volume of evidence, that the climate is changing worldwide. Whether or not we humans co-caused this, we will have to live with the consequences! And if we're sufficiently open minded about what is going on we may be able to mitigate some of the bad effects, or at least slow down these unwanted changes by pro-actively looking for "solutions".
I simply fail to understand how scientifically educated people can be so stubbornly blind to this simply because "they don't like the consequences"!
O2 also is essential for life. But if you raise the O2 concentration too much, life as we know it becomes impossible. I don't remember the treshold from where onwards O2 in teh earthls atmosphere would become a life threathener, but I do remember that it's not a lot about the current value. In practice, we're not at all in danger of this happening, but it does show that your point is irrelevant.
The fact that apps don't know about workspaces and windowmanagers does *not* mean that the bevaiour wanted by your parent post would not be possible. I have been using this exact same thing for many many years with a by now prehistoric window manager. I can make nearly all apps go to the workpsace I want them to be in, even if that workspace is not active. With one very annoying exception (well, there will be more of them, but this one is the one I run into on a daily basis): Mozilla. No matter what I tell it where it should place it's windows, it plainly refuses to listen and overrides my directives. It selfishly insists on considering itself so important that anything other than my current workspace is deemed unacceptable.
One of my grandfathers had a habbit of working a LOT (no coding back then, obviously: he was a musician) sleeping 5 to 6 hours max until way into his seventies 7 days a week. He died a few days before his ninetieth birthday and would have lived longer had he not smoked like a chimney.
I'm nowhere near my seventies yet, but the big 40 is getting very close. So far I've been able to do something similar to what my grandfather has done, so it seems to run in the family. Back in my twenties, skipping an entire night was not an exception at all. Nowadays it is an exception, but last week I once more worked for a 41 hour period with only 3 short breaks for eating. I have to admit that my coding time is rather limited nowadays, though. Most of my time now goes into management stuff that requires less focussed attention to the very last detail, or for which I at least have more freedom to plan things such that I can do the mentally more demanding stuff during "normal" hours and the non-critical boring bullshit when I'm starting to get tired. And the coding that I still do is (to a large extent, at least) not for release, but for automating parts of my other tasks.
Another well known example of someone who needs (or at least once needed) only a limited amount of sleep is Margaret Thatcher. She could do with only 4 hours of sleep per night for a very long time, including her entire period as Prime Minister.
My policy is to buy a top-of-the-line box (well, within some reasonable bounds, at least, but I'm not afraid of putting some Euros on the table to get performance and quality that's near the top of what the market has to offer) and to then stick with that until it becomes unbearably slow for my typical use (and then some more until some external factor forces me to upgrade).
My first computer does not count, as back then it was not me who was paying it. It lasted only about 3 years. But my second one lasted for 6 years (and after 6 more years is still being used by my father). My third one lasted for 7 years (and is still being used by me as a backup and experimental box). My fourth one is only about 6 months old at the moment, but I fully intend it to last till +- 2009 at least.
In terms of GHz performance guesstimate factors: nos. 1 and 2 were a factor 4 to 8 apart (depending on whether one counts the turbo switch on no. 1); nos. 2 and 3 were a factor 5 to 10 apart (depending on how one counts the fact that no. 3 was/is an SMP one); no's 3 and 4 are a factor 13 to 26 apart (again depending on how one counts the fact that no. 3 was/is an SMP one). That last factor could have been even bigger, but as I had reasons to coose a portable this time, I had to compromise a little bit. But I did go for a "portable for power users".
Actually, I still have the punchcards for all the stuff (crap, actually, but...) that I wrote during my first university year. I was lucky enough to start my studies during the last year that the punchcards were still being used for student exercises and had quite some fun with them. The machines were not being maintained/repaired anymore, since everybody already knew that it was the
last year, which resulted in even more fun. Some had specific keys that wouldn't work, some had a DUP key that would do anything but DUPping the card...
I also have stacks of floppies that are about 3 years younger than those happy card memories but several of which are not readable anymore.
Of course he may be one of the exceptions. All I wanted to say is that I've seen from personal experience that experienced coders can do things so horrible that one wouldn't believe them possible. This guy did spend all those years coding, by the way.
Sadly, the "experience yields more readable" code idea is not generally true.
The most experienced (in terms of years of experience: more than 20 to be precise) (ex-)coder on my current project prefers an absolutely horrible coding style if you let him do as he pleases. Utterly unreadable for anyone but him (endless lines that wrap on even the widest of screens; NO blank lines; the weirdest indentation convention I ever saw; countless "this was/is experimental or old code" sections that have been commented out without any documentation of why they are commented out nor of why they are not simply deleted; debugging code that can only be enabled by uncommenting it line by line and recompiling the lot instead of using the "setenv"-based debugging mechanism that we provided him with to switch on/off debugging code at run time;...).
I tend to find sites that interest me but that I have no time to read at that specific moment (yes, I'm abnormal: an IT geek with non-IT interests that are not subject to the fallout of Moore's law). So I bookmark them in a special "to be processed" category. As I'm chronically overworked, on the average I add more pages to this list than I actually check out to classify elsewhere or remove. But I surely do every so often spend an evening researching some specific topic purely out of interest and diving into this "to be processed" list. When that happens, I select the links that are related to the topic at hand, no matter how long they have been in the list.
So a delay of year or more is not unusual for me. In fact, the oldest item my current list that I have explicitly not yet removed for being no longer relevant anyway has been on there for about three years now. Someday I will look at it (if the page still exists, at least (it does now, I just checked)).
A long time ago, borwsers like Mosaic had a nifty feature that allowed you tcheck your entire list of bookmarks for validity with only a single mouseclick. I really wish Mozilla would support this.
One could think of a strong magnetic field to do the attaction part. But then there's the even more challenging issue of shooting the ball away in a random direction after it has been attracted into the well
The thing I'd like to see would be a physical incarnation of the SpaceCadet pinball game that MS distributes with Windows. Not that it's such a fantastic game (it isn't), but because it features some errm... interesting challenges from a physics point of view...
It's not confusing at all, provided you start from the correct point of view.:-)
Seriously: a server is an entity that offers a service, a client is an entity that requests to use the service. This actually is the only definition that logically holds up in all possible application areas of the client/server concept.
Whether or not the user directly deals with something is irrelevant. Besides: when I'm typing into an xterm, am I dealing with the xterm client, or with the X server program? Honestly, as a user, I don't care for one second about the answer to that question, but if I really want/have to answer it, I'd actually rather think of it as dealing with the xterm client, not with the X server.
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I wouldn't call that bad language, but it would still have to be taken out before making this code public. Of course, were the latter to happen, I'd give the code a rewrite and fix it properly, as Mr X. no longer has a say in what I do.
I don't have proof, but I do have a company using both Windows and UNIX/Linux to look at. The conclusion here is simple: on average, they do. The reasons also are simple:
Remote administration. Windows requires more support people because they spend more time walking around for fixing silly little issues. Silly little issues are preferably fixed by less-qualified and cheaper personel. Especially as they spend much of their time walking around.
Dump users. Windows has many more and much more dumb users (at least as far as computers are concerned). Thus, it again requires more support people because they spend more time walking around for sorting out silly little user problems. Silly little problems are preferably fixed by less-qualified and cheaper personel. Especially as they spend much of their time walking around and dealing with dumb users that don't have a clue what they're doing.
Note that this analogy does not extend to the use of multiple OS-es within one company. While a Windows-only shop is more likely to go down completely if (for instance) a virus hits than one that uses both Windows and Mac (or Linux, or...), it does not make economical sense to constantly duplicate all your company databases and/or development tools om multiple platforms just because of this probability. Hence, if your Windows or UNIX-based database server goes down, so does the database, no matter how many of its clients are using the other operating system.
In an twin-engine aircraft both engines are identical and, while they both need to be maintained, their maintenance requires less resources than if they would be different. This also holds for computers/OSes (also consider license fees for application products etc.), but for computers the redundancy does not provide an equally large degree of protection. I've never seen a virus transfer from one aircraft engine to another...
Yep, I'm Belgian too. I also hate the idea of the thing. Before we know it, they will be pushing (and later: forcing) us to do all sorts of stuff online. That alone is enough for me to hate it. But with some bad luck, of which there is plenty around, they'll also buy into some M$ technology that not only forces us to fill out taxforms online, but also to use Windows while we're doing it. Bad, bad, bad.
But then again, I'm active in micro-electronics research (i.e. I'm one of the people who help make this possible) and yet I refuse to even buy a cell phone. So maybe it's just me being weird...
Then stop posting to /. and go do something useful with your life... :-)
I disagree wholehartedly. I HATE it when some ramdom or accidental change that I make to my setup for some specific once-in-a-month (or even lifetime!) reason gets saved "behind my back" and applied to any future session. I want a clean session to be just that: clean and starting in a known state that I have spent years to develop such that it optimally fits my usage preferencess and optimises my productivity. In short, I hate session management with a burning passion.
The normal distribution of visiting browsers at our site on a daily basis is 85 to 90 perscent IE and 8 to 12 percent Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox combined.IE has been in decline for several months now, it used to reach 95% a year or so ago.
On the day we hit /. (we weren't /.-ed, so one can't say that they hit us :-) we saw about 75% IE and about 20% Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox. (I had the exact data sitting in my inbox till yesterday evening, but this morning I threw them away since I thought I'd never have an opportunity to use them anyway. Damn!)
Until that incident happened, our IT support gang was not really worried about Y2K yet, but this very early helpdesk call was one of the things that made them realise that they needed to study the entire issue way before Jan 1 2000.
But please not as "informative" (someone just did! :-)
Sometimes I really wonder what mental world /. readers live in...
I'll admit that that's partly because I reuse a some paswords if the site in question isn't that important to me (anything possibly involving money is important!), but I do use a subtantial set of paswords overall. Even if you get to know one of these reused paswords, it will only give you access to at most 3 sites, as oposed to all of them as would be the case with MS passport.
And yes, some of these paswords are even to be found on a piece of paper. Trouble for an identity thief is, however, that in order to get this piece of paper he or she first needs to break into my appartment, then find the paper (it's not to be found in any obvious place), then know how to decode the strings on it (yep, they're encrypted, even if with an easy algorithm since I need to be able to apply it in my head), and then find out which of these belongs to what account (because that info is not written down).
In the true UNIX world, application software has always been such that it can be installed stand alone underneath ONE directory, quite simply because in the true UNIX world not every (other) user has root powers and the people who do have them understand that they don't want to mix shared application files with local OS files the way toy OS-es such as Windows and (sadly) some Linux distros do.
Where I work, we install evereything in networked directories called /our-company-name/software/package-name/version. Then we wrap everything in shell scripts that automatically select the correct platform (HP-UX, Solaris, Linux) on the fly and that automatically set every single environment variable the softare needs. Then we add links to make a specific package version current and publish the key binaries of packages that many people use through 1 common bin directory. Not a single file needs to be stored and/or managed locally (crucial, considering the amount of machines involved).
And now comes the best part: I (yes, I developed the setup and do most of the maintainance) do not even need root powers for anything.
You misunderstand. It's not because we are not the (main) cause (well, I think we are, but anyway) that we cannot do something about it. And that is meant not only in terms of adapting, but also in terms of trying to prevent - or at least limit - the damage.
It is an undeniable fact, backed by a large volume of evidence, that the climate is changing worldwide. Whether or not we humans co-caused this, we will have to live with the consequences! And if we're sufficiently open minded about what is going on we may be able to mitigate some of the bad effects, or at least slow down these unwanted changes by pro-actively looking for "solutions".
I simply fail to understand how scientifically educated people can be so stubbornly blind to this simply because "they don't like the consequences"!
O2 also is essential for life. But if you raise the O2 concentration too much, life as we know it becomes impossible. I don't remember the treshold from where onwards O2 in teh earthls atmosphere would become a life threathener, but I do remember that it's not a lot about the current value. In practice, we're not at all in danger of this happening, but it does show that your point is irrelevant.
The fact that apps don't know about workspaces and windowmanagers does *not* mean that the bevaiour wanted by your parent post would not be possible. I have been using this exact same thing for many many years with a by now prehistoric window manager. I can make nearly all apps go to the workpsace I want them to be in, even if that workspace is not active. With one very annoying exception (well, there will be more of them, but this one is the one I run into on a daily basis): Mozilla. No matter what I tell it where it should place it's windows, it plainly refuses to listen and overrides my directives. It selfishly insists on considering itself so important that anything other than my current workspace is deemed unacceptable.
One of my grandfathers had a habbit of working a LOT (no coding back then, obviously: he was a musician) sleeping 5 to 6 hours max until way into his seventies 7 days a week. He died a few days before his ninetieth birthday and would have lived longer had he not smoked like a chimney.
I'm nowhere near my seventies yet, but the big 40 is getting very close. So far I've been able to do something similar to what my grandfather has done, so it seems to run in the family. Back in my twenties, skipping an entire night was not an exception at all. Nowadays it is an exception, but last week I once more worked for a 41 hour period with only 3 short breaks for eating. I have to admit that my coding time is rather limited nowadays, though. Most of my time now goes into management stuff that requires less focussed attention to the very last detail, or for which I at least have more freedom to plan things such that I can do the mentally more demanding stuff during "normal" hours and the non-critical boring bullshit when I'm starting to get tired. And the coding that I still do is (to a large extent, at least) not for release, but for automating parts of my other tasks.
Another well known example of someone who needs (or at least once needed) only a limited amount of sleep is Margaret Thatcher. She could do with only 4 hours of sleep per night for a very long time, including her entire period as Prime Minister.
All they need is the data. They're perfectly capable of producing their ofn presentation and all that.
My first computer does not count, as back then it was not me who was paying it. It lasted only about 3 years. But my second one lasted for 6 years (and after 6 more years is still being used by my father). My third one lasted for 7 years (and is still being used by me as a backup and experimental box). My fourth one is only about 6 months old at the moment, but I fully intend it to last till +- 2009 at least.
In terms of GHz performance guesstimate factors: nos. 1 and 2 were a factor 4 to 8 apart (depending on whether one counts the turbo switch on no. 1); nos. 2 and 3 were a factor 5 to 10 apart (depending on how one counts the fact that no. 3 was/is an SMP one); no's 3 and 4 are a factor 13 to 26 apart (again depending on how one counts the fact that no. 3 was/is an SMP one). That last factor could have been even bigger, but as I had reasons to coose a portable this time, I had to compromise a little bit. But I did go for a "portable for power users".
I also have stacks of floppies that are about 3 years younger than those happy card memories but several of which are not readable anymore.
Of course he may be one of the exceptions. All I wanted to say is that I've seen from personal experience that experienced coders can do things so horrible that one wouldn't believe them possible. This guy did spend all those years coding, by the way.
The most experienced (in terms of years of experience: more than 20 to be precise) (ex-)coder on my current project prefers an absolutely horrible coding style if you let him do as he pleases. Utterly unreadable for anyone but him (endless lines that wrap on even the widest of screens; NO blank lines; the weirdest indentation convention I ever saw; countless "this was/is experimental or old code" sections that have been commented out without any documentation of why they are commented out nor of why they are not simply deleted; debugging code that can only be enabled by uncommenting it line by line and recompiling the lot instead of using the "setenv"-based debugging mechanism that we provided him with to switch on/off debugging code at run time; ...).
So a delay of year or more is not unusual for me. In fact, the oldest item my current list that I have explicitly not yet removed for being no longer relevant anyway has been on there for about three years now. Someday I will look at it (if the page still exists, at least (it does now, I just checked)).
A long time ago, borwsers like Mosaic had a nifty feature that allowed you tcheck your entire list of bookmarks for validity with only a single mouseclick. I really wish Mozilla would support this.
One could think of a strong magnetic field to do the attaction part. But then there's the even more challenging issue of shooting the ball away in a random direction after it has been attracted into the well
The thing I'd like to see would be a physical incarnation of the SpaceCadet pinball game that MS distributes with Windows. Not that it's such a fantastic game (it isn't), but because it features some errm... interesting challenges from a physics point of view...
It's not confusing at all, provided you start from the correct point of view. :-)
Seriously: a server is an entity that offers a service, a client is an entity that requests to use the service. This actually is the only definition that logically holds up in all possible application areas of the client/server concept.
Whether or not the user directly deals with something is irrelevant. Besides: when I'm typing into an xterm, am I dealing with the xterm client, or with the X server program? Honestly, as a user, I don't care for one second about the answer to that question, but if I really want/have to answer it, I'd actually rather think of it as dealing with the xterm client, not with the X server.