Praise shoddy design and white-heat-inspiration hacking as "visionary" and "wave of the future"! Imply that any project concerned about quality over features is "slowing down" and losing its developer base!
Find wildly biased opinion pages and report them as if they were news! Abuse your position as editor to add snide immature comments as part of the story!
Report them again a few hours later!
Isolate the only actual humor in the polls section!
but rather they are short and easy to type over and over. That was the primary criterion at the time of their creation.
Remember: no shell aliases. No command or file completion. No command history of any kind (neither arrow key or !n or ^P or anything). Work under those conditions and you'll be very happy for two-letter commands.
Occasionally, depending on the terminal, no backspace. The longer the command is, the greater the chance that you'll make a typo and have to start all over.
There are very good reasons why it's spelled "ls" instead of "list" or "show me all my files". It's not lack of design, or a deliberate wish to beat the new user upside the head.
...is that apropos (man -k) just grep's the SYNOPSIS line that's at the top of the man page. So if the man page is poorly written, the tools can't help you.
Better implementations of man allow the user to restrict the -k searching to certain section numbers, just like normal man usage.
You are asking for programmable completion, which zsh and ksh have had for years, and bash just added a couple of point revisions ago. Look for the "bash completion" project at freshmeat to get a large library of hooks. Some distros already distribute the library, you just to turn it on (e.g., for Debian, uncomment some stuff in/etc/bash.something).
For ls, I type "ls --q<tab><tab>" and get a list of options beginning with q. For make, I type "make cl<tab>" and it completes the target name to "clean". And so forth.
I contributed one that does option completion for gcc, then somebody rewrote it.:-)
They have man pages for everything, and they are well-written. With examples. With cross-references. No "go see the Info page" or "for documentation that doesn't suck goat balls, go to http://[some immature linux-only project].sourceforge.net/docs".
My dream OS is GNU/Solaris. The GNU userspace tools and the Solaris kernel. And maybe their man pages, too.
The kind of person who stands out and doesn't fit in will not suddenly become a social creature because he is on a team. What, you think teammates don't give each other immense amounts of shit?
But the sport idea is very good. It doesn't have to be team-based in order to be social. The sports where the person is competing against himself (new high score, faster time, farther distance, etc) fit very well with the mentality. It will hold his interest, put him amongst others who are interested in the same sport but not competing against him for position/whatever, and improve his health to boot.
Martial arts is good. The added self-discipline is a big boost. I recommend fencing myself, but TKD or karate would work just as well. Distance hiking, indoor/outdoor rock climbing, etc, are good. You only need to be 14 to get a sailplane pilot's license in many states, and -- trust me -- that's a serious conversational icebreaker. ("It's a two-seater airplane, but longer, and the wings are thinner and longer, and the whole thing's narrower, and very responsive." [Listener's eyes start to glaze over.] "Oh, and also, there's no engine.")
Once a week, a snapshot release is made. That means a tag is added. This operation takes, on average, 40 minutes, because the GCC source tree is large.
Every time someome makes a branch, they create a tag just before branching (for use later on, with diffs and merging). 40 minutes to tag, another 40 minutes to branch.
All because these are, stupidly, O(n) operations instead of O(1). We'd like to move to Subversion, but can't, until they get annotate ('svn blame') fully working, because GCC developers spend a lot of time doing "revision-control archaeology".
Just out of curiosity, how long did it take to research your comment?:)
Heh, this will be disturbing: it's from memory.:-) S. happens to be one of my favorite books, because the style requires so much imagination to visualize it mentally, instead of just reading a straight description with nothing left to the imagination. I've always enjoyed that, even though it's extra work. The immense scope of the action is just freaking astounding.
Besides, "go hence unto a swift and bitter death" is just a memorable line in general. If I ever leave a job I don't like, maybe I'll use it during the exit interview.:-)
(The secret to getting through the dry style: read it aloud. It's meant to be told, not read, like a bard reciting in the firelight at the front of a king's hall. The very very early forms of the S. stories actually have a bard telling all of this stuff to a traveller, with occasional comments and questions from the listeners; in the published form, that "wrapper" layer is gone, but the style didn't change.)
Um. You really need to read the Silmarillion. The early Elves had already fought two bloody battles of a civil war before the race of Men even awakened, all because of the Vow of Feanor, to "persue with hatred" anyone who kept a Silmaril from its rightful owners.
When an Elf tells a Man, "go hence unto a swift and bitter death," before shooting at his girlfriend with a poisoned arrow, I'd say they understood hatred just fine.:-)
There are a couple occurrances of love, but he didn't write them in any of the Elvish tongues. The Elves certainly understood the concept, but not everything Tolkien wrote had to first be in Quenya or Sindarin before getting translated to English. Some of it was just, ya know, written in English.
...is exactly that: Perl supports ten ways of doing X, so you're free to choose #3 for your code.
And your coworker is free to choose way #7, and the sourceforge project whose code you're extending chose way #2, and they're all incomoatible.
So even though you're free to choose which way you want to do something, you still have to learn and understand all ten ways if you plan on completing the project and getting paid. And then maintaining it.
Yeah, you could pick one way and enforce it with corporate coding standards (and hope you pick the right one), but then there goes the advantage of ten different ways. Or the sourceforge project could document the choice in its HACKING.README file, but then the coders who only know six of the ten ways are locked out.
All the coders I know at big companies tell me that this is exactly why Perl is banned -- at each of those companies -- for official work. There's too much variance between each way of doing X for large scripts to remain maintainable across multiple serial coders.
(I suspect most of the people who are going to post followups flaming me have only ever had to maintain their own Perl scripts, without ever inheriting a pile of mission-critical scripts from somebody whose choices were all different from yours, and who's not available for questioning.)
...I am terrified of people in business suits wearing bright blue gloves.
On the up side, I know now how to say "Fuck everyone in the universe to death!", "Shut up," and my favorite, "Holy mother of God and all her wacky nephews!" in Mandarin Chinese.
IIUC, there's more "stuff" on the heads side of a coin. (The head is a large surface, the tails usually have more of the coin "removed" so to speak.) So if you were to draw a line down the middle, the heads side would have more material, and is thus heavier, ending face down slightly more often.
Getting {people, equipment, etc} into space becomes a lot easier when you only have to lift them partway. Then they get thrown the rest of the way, really, really fast, with no work on your part. By controlling when you start the ride, you determine when you get flung off the end, and thus where you're going to be at the end of the arc.
by James Gleick, described here. A most excellent book. It has a chapter or two on this exact phenomenon, and some interesting facts about elevator design and placement in various kinds of office buildings and skyscrapers.
Also a chapter on the NTP network and the master clocks at the US Naval Observatory.
...those of us with a very early Slackware box (which came with sendmail but no sendmail docs) didn't know that there was such a thing as the M4 files. We had some helpful comments in the.cf file for what the lines did, but that was it.
When we did find docs, it was just for the.cf file, not the installation-and-regeneration docs. (Which didn't really exist then.)
I became very good at editing sendmail.cf, and then came the day, years later, when I had to do it from absolute scratch, and downloaded the full tarball for the first time, and discovered the installation docs, which pointed me to the M4 files. Then I gave up in disgust and found qmail.
Having done my own rewriting rulesets, I became acutely aware of what's involved in processing an email. The knowledge gained helped me figure out qmail, in spite of its craptacular documentation.
Slashdot Mirror
Sim Slashdot!
Maintain a minimum population of trolls!
Never ever lern 2 spel!
Praise shoddy design and white-heat-inspiration hacking as "visionary" and "wave of the future"! Imply that any project concerned about quality over features is "slowing down" and losing its developer base!
Find wildly biased opinion pages and report them as if they were news! Abuse your position as editor to add snide immature comments as part of the story!
Report them again a few hours later!
Isolate the only actual humor in the polls section!
but rather they are short and easy to type over and over. That was the primary criterion at the time of their creation.
Remember: no shell aliases. No command or file completion. No command history of any kind (neither arrow key or !n or ^P or anything). Work under those conditions and you'll be very happy for two-letter commands.
Occasionally, depending on the terminal, no backspace. The longer the command is, the greater the chance that you'll make a typo and have to start all over.
There are very good reasons why it's spelled "ls" instead of "list" or "show me all my files". It's not lack of design, or a deliberate wish to beat the new user upside the head.
...is that apropos (man -k) just grep's the SYNOPSIS line that's at the top of the man page. So if the man page is poorly written, the tools can't help you.
Better implementations of man allow the user to restrict the -k searching to certain section numbers, just like normal man usage.
You are asking for programmable completion, which zsh and ksh have had for years, and bash just added a couple of point revisions ago. Look for the "bash completion" project at freshmeat to get a large library of hooks. Some distros already distribute the library, you just to turn it on (e.g., for Debian, uncomment some stuff in
For ls, I type "ls --q<tab><tab>" and get a list of options beginning with q. For make, I type "make cl<tab>" and it completes the target name to "clean". And so forth.
I contributed one that does option completion for gcc, then somebody rewrote it. :-)
...the help system offered by...
...wait for it...
...VMS.
You type "help [command]" and you entered an interactive mini-CLI environment. The help screens were nested, so your help sessions might look like
The help interpreter was "fuzzy", so you could just type part of a command, or even just a topic, and be presented with a list.
They have man pages for everything, and they are well-written. With examples. With cross-references. No "go see the Info page" or "for documentation that doesn't suck goat balls, go to http://[some immature linux-only project].sourceforge.net/docs".
My dream OS is GNU/Solaris. The GNU userspace tools and the Solaris kernel. And maybe their man pages, too.
The kind of person who stands out and doesn't fit in will not suddenly become a social creature because he is on a team. What, you think teammates don't give each other immense amounts of shit?
But the sport idea is very good. It doesn't have to be team-based in order to be social. The sports where the person is competing against himself (new high score, faster time, farther distance, etc) fit very well with the mentality. It will hold his interest, put him amongst others who are interested in the same sport but not competing against him for position/whatever, and improve his health to boot.
Martial arts is good. The added self-discipline is a big boost. I recommend fencing myself, but TKD or karate would work just as well. Distance hiking, indoor/outdoor rock climbing, etc, are good. You only need to be 14 to get a sailplane pilot's license in many states, and -- trust me -- that's a serious conversational icebreaker. ("It's a two-seater airplane, but longer, and the wings are thinner and longer, and the whole thing's narrower, and very responsive." [Listener's eyes start to glaze over.] "Oh, and also, there's no engine.")
The person who tried it reported it wasn't working for certain branches off the main trunk. *shrug* Haven't tried it personally since the 1.0 release.
Once a week, a snapshot release is made. That means a tag is added. This operation takes, on average, 40 minutes, because the GCC source tree is large.
Every time someome makes a branch, they create a tag just before branching (for use later on, with diffs and merging). 40 minutes to tag, another 40 minutes to branch.
All because these are, stupidly, O(n) operations instead of O(1). We'd like to move to Subversion, but can't, until they get annotate ('svn blame') fully working, because GCC developers spend a lot of time doing "revision-control archaeology".
Heh, this will be disturbing: it's from memory. :-) S. happens to be one of my favorite books, because the style requires so much imagination to visualize it mentally, instead of just reading a straight description with nothing left to the imagination. I've always enjoyed that, even though it's extra work. The immense scope of the action is just freaking astounding.
Besides, "go hence unto a swift and bitter death" is just a memorable line in general. If I ever leave a job I don't like, maybe I'll use it during the exit interview. :-)
(The secret to getting through the dry style: read it aloud. It's meant to be told, not read, like a bard reciting in the firelight at the front of a king's hall. The very very early forms of the S. stories actually have a bard telling all of this stuff to a traveller, with occasional comments and questions from the listeners; in the published form, that "wrapper" layer is gone, but the style didn't change.)
was hearing quotes directly from the book... and watching some truly mangled translations appear in the subtitles.
Um. You really need to read the Silmarillion. The early Elves had already fought two bloody battles of a civil war before the race of Men even awakened, all because of the Vow of Feanor, to "persue with hatred" anyone who kept a Silmaril from its rightful owners.
When an Elf tells a Man, "go hence unto a swift and bitter death," before shooting at his girlfriend with a poisoned arrow, I'd say they understood hatred just fine. :-)
There are a couple occurrances of love, but he didn't write them in any of the Elvish tongues. The Elves certainly understood the concept, but not everything Tolkien wrote had to first be in Quenya or Sindarin before getting translated to English. Some of it was just, ya know, written in English.
The proposal is here, on the ISO site. Why yes, I did have this bookmarked, why d'ya ask?
We can only hope.
My argument is that Perl is too sloppy for anything other than small, one-shot, on the fly jobs.
I don't think Java and corporate standards are the way to go either.
...is exactly that: Perl supports ten ways of doing X, so you're free to choose #3 for your code.
And your coworker is free to choose way #7, and the sourceforge project whose code you're extending chose way #2, and they're all incomoatible.
So even though you're free to choose which way you want to do something, you still have to learn and understand all ten ways if you plan on completing the project and getting paid. And then maintaining it.
Yeah, you could pick one way and enforce it with corporate coding standards (and hope you pick the right one), but then there goes the advantage of ten different ways. Or the sourceforge project could document the choice in its HACKING.README file, but then the coders who only know six of the ten ways are locked out.
All the coders I know at big companies tell me that this is exactly why Perl is banned -- at each of those companies -- for official work. There's too much variance between each way of doing X for large scripts to remain maintainable across multiple serial coders.
(I suspect most of the people who are going to post followups flaming me have only ever had to maintain their own Perl scripts, without ever inheriting a pile of mission-critical scripts from somebody whose choices were all different from yours, and who's not available for questioning.)
...I am terrified of people in business suits wearing bright blue gloves.
On the up side, I know now how to say "Fuck everyone in the universe to death!", "Shut up," and my favorite, "Holy mother of God and all her wacky nephews!" in Mandarin Chinese.
IIUC, there's more "stuff" on the heads side of a coin. (The head is a large surface, the tails usually have more of the coin "removed" so to speak.) So if you were to draw a line down the middle, the heads side would have more material, and is thus heavier, ending face down slightly more often.
was the bit where he talks about movie tickets only costing eight bucks. Ah, those were the days.
...has a cameo in ROTK. I think he's a foot soldier of Gondor, marching off to the Morannon.
It was seven bigatures.
Seeing the quarter-sized one, with Peter squeezing through the front gates and stomping down the ramp like his own future King Kong, was hilarious.
Getting {people, equipment, etc} into space becomes a lot easier when you only have to lift them partway. Then they get thrown the rest of the way, really, really fast, with no work on your part. By controlling when you start the ride, you determine when you get flung off the end, and thus where you're going to be at the end of the arc.
by James Gleick, described here. A most excellent book. It has a chapter or two on this exact phenomenon, and some interesting facts about elevator design and placement in various kinds of office buildings and skyscrapers.
Also a chapter on the NTP network and the master clocks at the US Naval Observatory.
...those of us with a very early Slackware box (which came with sendmail but no sendmail docs) didn't know that there was such a thing as the M4 files. We had some helpful comments in the
When we did find docs, it was just for the .cf file, not the installation-and-regeneration docs. (Which didn't really exist then.)
I became very good at editing sendmail.cf, and then came the day, years later, when I had to do it from absolute scratch, and downloaded the full tarball for the first time, and discovered the installation docs, which pointed me to the M4 files. Then I gave up in disgust and found qmail.
Having done my own rewriting rulesets, I became acutely aware of what's involved in processing an email. The knowledge gained helped me figure out qmail, in spite of its craptacular documentation.