...lately as a sole developer, I never saw any significant difference between CVS and Subversion despite how lauded Subversion was.
Oh man... to each his own.:-)
My own experience is that I learned version control with Subversion, and after I was somewhat familiar and mostly happy with it, had to work on a couple projects for some time that was using CVS.
And man... dealing with CVS was almost universally about as much fun as pounding nails into my eyes. Or so I suspect, I haven't actually tried it. To try to quantify it less facetiously, I would honestly pay $100 for some sort of "you will never have to use CVS again" insurance.
Git has submodules, which is at least conceptually like svn:external. I haven't used either very much (though I've used both a tiny bit) to compare or contrast in any useful way.
I'm also not so familiar with webdav.
So SVN is not that bad.
No, it's not that bad; I used it for quite some time and was pretty happy with it. (I did at one point work on a wrapper script which was going to add some features, e.g. making it's handling of svn:ignore not be retarded -- have they added recursive ignores yet?)
But since giving Git a try... there's just no going back for me. A few years ago the research group I'm in was still using CVS(now that is that bad) and there was some discussion about whether we'd switch to SVN or to Git. I had been using Git for only a little bit at that point, and I didn't have a big opinion at the time. As far as I was concerned, a CVS to Subversion switch got 95% of the benefit of a CVS to Git switch. If my present-day self was around then, I would have pushed rather harder for Git... I'd now put that at 60-70%.
I'm not saying that Git is right for everyone, but I do think that it's the right choice of the two almost all the time.
That is really incredibly useful to know. Thanks, and I'll be using that for the group projects that are on SVN.
I'll admit that I haven't kept up with Subversion for a while, because I switched to Git for my personal projects not too long after SVN 1.5 was released, but I hadn't stumbled across that one. It looks like ^ was added in 1.6, which I do have available.
Re:because the others still suck
on
The Rise of Git
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· Score: 1
On top of that, it's extremely annoying to have file duplicates in your directory. I hate searching SVN folders and importing SVN projects into Eclipse (I know, I know, you can fix the duplicate file problem, but it's still annoying).
The flip side of that problem is that a subdirectory of a Subversion working copy is itself a Subversion working copy.
I actually use that a surprising amount when working with Subversion, and occasionally miss it in Git. E.g. if I want two revisions of just a portion of a repository around for a bit, I'll just copy that subdirectory. Concrete recent use case: I copied just the 'docs' directory so I could get an old version and run latexdiff.
It's not a huge win... but IMO it's not a particularly large cost to have the.svn directories sitting around, either, at least for my workflows.
I used to think that Git wasn't much better than SVN outside of distributed environments, but I've since changed my mind.
For instance, suppose I have local changes to my Subversion working copy, and I 'svn up', and there are some gnarly conflicts. How do you go back to the state you were in before that 'svn up'? As far as I know, you can't; you're just screwed. With git, it's easy.
Or branches. I think Subversion gets a bad rap for branching/merging difficulties, especially since 1.5, but to me the pure syntactic overhead of dealing with full repo URLs makes it a much bigger pain than it should be.
And of course you can't work on a SVN project on a plane or somewhere you don't have a network connection. (Not without Svk or git-svn.)
Or take your objection:
For instance, if you want to check in a group of specific files and not every change you've made.. PITA
I really don't know what you're talking about. At worst it's an extra command: instead of 'svn commit foo bar baz' you run 'git add foo bar baz' then 'git commit'.
At best, it's much easier, because you don't have to figure out every file you want to commit and list them all in the same command, like you do in SVN. You can change to one directory, do a 'git diff' of a file, and 'git add' it if you want the changes, then go to another directory and repeat.
And really, it's even much better than that: every tried git add --interactive? That thing is amazing. I'd pay $25 to someone if they added that feature to Subversion. (I'm a grad student and poor, or it'd be more.) That even solves the "I want to commit only some of the changes in this file" problem that I have in the past solved in Subversion by getting an 'svn diff', reverting, editing the patch file to split it up, then applying each part individually.
I really have only four complaints about git right now. (1) As stupid as it sounds, I don't like any of the workflows for setting up an initial repository. One of these days I'm going to wrap that up in a shell script so I don't have to deal with it. (2) You can't check out just a subtree of a Git repository. This actually has cost me quite a lot of time when I had to take a repository that I later figure out was too big and split it up. (3) I will occasionally get the repository into a configuration where I don't really understand how to get it back to something I know. Usually playing with it for a bit will fix it. (4) It's easy to forget to push.
Personally I'd say it was at least a couple years between the iMac and thumb drives. I was in high school when they started putting in iMacs, and I was trucking files back and forth on floppies for a couple years. You had to make sure to get one of the couple Macs with external floppies if you did that (or use one of their Dells). And while my family wasn't on the bleeding bleeding edge, we were definitely towards it. We had Excite@Home cable for at least a year before they imploded, and I still remember using a 2x, parallel-port CD burner.
But if you stop counting Pluto as a planet, and then you discover another Kuiper Belt object that's not only bigger than Eris but as big or bigger than Mercury, do you make it a planet, or do you take Mercury off the list?
"It depends". I tend to feel like Pluto's size is almost the least compelling reason to not classify it as a planet. Other properties, like the fact that it's orbit and Neptune's cross, it's orbit is out of the orbital plane of the other eight, it hasn't even close to cleared its orbit, etc. are way more compelling (and interesting!). I would say evaluate your Planet X on those merits rather than size or mass.
I'm not sure that the IAU's current definition is great (you mention the "clears its orbit" criteria for a young solar system, but I'm not even sure that it's all that great for our own. If we have to re-evaluate our definition every decades or two for a while, I'm fine with that. But I do still think that what we've got now is better than what we had before. At the very least, it keeps people's terminology (largely) consistent.
My own feeling as a non-astronomer but who has done a small amount of reading on the Pluto classification is that it is very difficult to come up with a definition of "planet" that does all of the following: 1. Includes Pluto 2. Excludes enough stuff to start giving our system well over a dozen planets 3. Doesn't include some arbitrary measurement that is pretty much specifically designed to do #1 and #2. (What I mean by "arbitrary" is something like "is at least 2000km in radius where if I say "why did you pick 2000?" you don't have an answer other than "well, it was a nice round number". Something like "has enough mass to become a near-sphere" has a physical meaning, and I'm okay with.)
Pluto has enough really weird characteristics (as compared to the other 8, or even as compared to Eris) that it seems to me that a separate category is pretty well-merited.
MS has visual feedback disabled on their virtual keyboards
Just for clarification, I meant to say "on password screens". It's off for the login screen and I think anything else the app reports is a password box.
And by contrast, MS has visual feedback disabled on their virtual keyboards on the tablet editions of Windows. (Primarily for convertible tablets... remember those?)
Kinda depends on which PC manufacturers. Really, there are two diametrically opposed problems being solved: either you're going for the silent, no-moving-parts, low-cost, low-maintenance approach (commodity PCs, home-entertainment appliances, etc.)... or you're going for the balls-to-the-walls, maximum FPS, humongo display resolution enthusiast machines.
I definitely wouldn't group that first category all together. Silent/no-moving-parts really shouldn't be together with low-cost, and I'm not sure where low-maintenance should be.
I would make three categories: low-cost (commodity PCs and cheap home-entertainment appliances), silent (custom PCs and more expensive home-entertainment), and powerful.
That said, my categorization doesn't really change your overall point I think. This tech is almost certainly not appropriate for low-cost. I only took a brief glance at the PDF and the article didn't really say, but how appropriate it is for the silent group depends on its noise level compared to fans.
Well, they also knew at may have been aimed at Iran.
But still, they didn't know how precisely targeted the worm was at that point, and they certainly didn't know it was aimed at the centrifuges at that point.
If you had RTFA (or perhaps with a more critical eye) you'd know that they had no clue about that at that time. When they first went public with it, all they knew was that it was a quite sophisticated attack that went after Step7 controllers. And given that, I definitely agree with them that it was in everyone's best interest to release that information.
more like if you don't know your way well enough.... it only comes down to your skill and patience.
Well sure. My point is that it's possible for someone who is pretty well-acquainted with Linux (I consider myself to have been in that category even then) to arrive at a situation where less patience seems to be required in order to do a full reinstall than to make your current system work. This is especially true as a reinstallation actually can be a fair bit less work on Linux because of some *nix culture like isolated config files (instead of registry droppings).
I haven't used Linux on my home machine much at all for a couple years, but when I used it more I used Gentoo. A bit less than 5 years ago I managed to mess up Portage enough that I couldn't get Emerge to do anything (except complain a lot), so I gave up and reinstalled. It can definitely happen, even if you know your way around pretty well.
GP was wrong BTW. It didn't work that way on XP either, not in 2001 and not in 2011. Before XP SP2 people were actually requesting Autorun functionality, to the extent that 3rd-party programs were made to automatically invoke autorun.inf on removable drives.
It's trivial to work around in XP though if you have control of the hardware (cf. U3 flash drives) by making your flash drive present itself as a USB CD drive which, oh look, has a disc in it.
The change in Vista was to disable autorun for any drives, including CDs, making the autorun program basically just another option in the autoplay dialog. Personally, I am a huge fan of this compromise.
So, it's entirely possible to set up a situation where keyboards and mice work just fine and people can charge their phones and mp3 players without a security risk.
"Without" is a strong statement. "With a significantly lower" is closer, though even that isn't really true with the default disabling of autorun in the last couple versions of Windows.
They may teach it, but the church as an institution sure doesn't practice it very well, or they wouldn't move around accused priests, fight tooth-and-nail for their priests to not be subjected to criminal court proceedings, etc.
I've always hated the fact that Microsoft (in their on-going attempt to pander to drooling idiots) has set it up by default so that it will pretty much run anything that comes near it, without asking the user or any level of assumption that this could be a bad idea.
You mean "had". It hasn't been the case that you'd autorun stuff from something you plug in under a default configuration for years; MS changed the settings with the release of Vista.
Now, you could still make a USB stick that fakes a mouse/keyboard and probably selects the right thing from the autoplay dialog (huge different from autorun btw) that pops up, but I don't think I know of an OS that won't just work if you plug in a keyboard or mouse. You could just as easily make a USB stick that opens up a terminal and runs 'rm -rf ~'; that really is a case where the wide deployment of Windows means that a uniform attack vector is much much eaiser. But as for the fundamental problem, there's... not really much of anything you can do there.
As someone who lives at a crappy place in terms of daylight, I have a better idea: make DST year-round. Gets rid of the clock change while still having the benefits (not getting dark at 4:30pm for as much of the year) of DST.
Say what? Not that I entirely don't believe you, but I don't think I've really heard any noise out of MS on that matter. I put the blame on PC manufacturers who don't want to pay for physical discs.
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...lately as a sole developer, I never saw any significant difference between CVS and Subversion despite how lauded Subversion was.
Oh man... to each his own. :-)
My own experience is that I learned version control with Subversion, and after I was somewhat familiar and mostly happy with it, had to work on a couple projects for some time that was using CVS.
And man... dealing with CVS was almost universally about as much fun as pounding nails into my eyes. Or so I suspect, I haven't actually tried it. To try to quantify it less facetiously, I would honestly pay $100 for some sort of "you will never have to use CVS again" insurance.
Git has submodules, which is at least conceptually like svn:external. I haven't used either very much (though I've used both a tiny bit) to compare or contrast in any useful way.
I'm also not so familiar with webdav.
So SVN is not that bad.
No, it's not that bad; I used it for quite some time and was pretty happy with it. (I did at one point work on a wrapper script which was going to add some features, e.g. making it's handling of svn:ignore not be retarded -- have they added recursive ignores yet?)
But since giving Git a try... there's just no going back for me. A few years ago the research group I'm in was still using CVS(now that is that bad) and there was some discussion about whether we'd switch to SVN or to Git. I had been using Git for only a little bit at that point, and I didn't have a big opinion at the time. As far as I was concerned, a CVS to Subversion switch got 95% of the benefit of a CVS to Git switch. If my present-day self was around then, I would have pushed rather harder for Git... I'd now put that at 60-70%.
I'm not saying that Git is right for everyone, but I do think that it's the right choice of the two almost all the time.
That is really incredibly useful to know. Thanks, and I'll be using that for the group projects that are on SVN.
I'll admit that I haven't kept up with Subversion for a while, because I switched to Git for my personal projects not too long after SVN 1.5 was released, but I hadn't stumbled across that one. It looks like ^ was added in 1.6, which I do have available.
On top of that, it's extremely annoying to have file duplicates in your directory. I hate searching SVN folders and importing SVN projects into Eclipse (I know, I know, you can fix the duplicate file problem, but it's still annoying).
The flip side of that problem is that a subdirectory of a Subversion working copy is itself a Subversion working copy.
I actually use that a surprising amount when working with Subversion, and occasionally miss it in Git. E.g. if I want two revisions of just a portion of a repository around for a bit, I'll just copy that subdirectory. Concrete recent use case: I copied just the 'docs' directory so I could get an old version and run latexdiff.
It's not a huge win... but IMO it's not a particularly large cost to have the .svn directories sitting around, either, at least for my workflows.
I used to think that Git wasn't much better than SVN outside of distributed environments, but I've since changed my mind.
For instance, suppose I have local changes to my Subversion working copy, and I 'svn up', and there are some gnarly conflicts. How do you go back to the state you were in before that 'svn up'? As far as I know, you can't; you're just screwed. With git, it's easy.
Or branches. I think Subversion gets a bad rap for branching/merging difficulties, especially since 1.5, but to me the pure syntactic overhead of dealing with full repo URLs makes it a much bigger pain than it should be.
And of course you can't work on a SVN project on a plane or somewhere you don't have a network connection. (Not without Svk or git-svn.)
Or take your objection:
I really don't know what you're talking about. At worst it's an extra command: instead of 'svn commit foo bar baz' you run 'git add foo bar baz' then 'git commit'.
At best, it's much easier, because you don't have to figure out every file you want to commit and list them all in the same command, like you do in SVN. You can change to one directory, do a 'git diff' of a file, and 'git add' it if you want the changes, then go to another directory and repeat.
And really, it's even much better than that: every tried git add --interactive? That thing is amazing. I'd pay $25 to someone if they added that feature to Subversion. (I'm a grad student and poor, or it'd be more.) That even solves the "I want to commit only some of the changes in this file" problem that I have in the past solved in Subversion by getting an 'svn diff', reverting, editing the patch file to split it up, then applying each part individually.
I really have only four complaints about git right now. (1) As stupid as it sounds, I don't like any of the workflows for setting up an initial repository. One of these days I'm going to wrap that up in a shell script so I don't have to deal with it. (2) You can't check out just a subtree of a Git repository. This actually has cost me quite a lot of time when I had to take a repository that I later figure out was too big and split it up. (3) I will occasionally get the repository into a configuration where I don't really understand how to get it back to something I know. Usually playing with it for a bit will fix it. (4) It's easy to forget to push.
Personally I'd say it was at least a couple years between the iMac and thumb drives. I was in high school when they started putting in iMacs, and I was trucking files back and forth on floppies for a couple years. You had to make sure to get one of the couple Macs with external floppies if you did that (or use one of their Dells). And while my family wasn't on the bleeding bleeding edge, we were definitely towards it. We had Excite@Home cable for at least a year before they imploded, and I still remember using a 2x, parallel-port CD burner.
But if you stop counting Pluto as a planet, and then you discover another Kuiper Belt object that's not only bigger than Eris but as big or bigger than Mercury, do you make it a planet, or do you take Mercury off the list?
"It depends". I tend to feel like Pluto's size is almost the least compelling reason to not classify it as a planet. Other properties, like the fact that it's orbit and Neptune's cross, it's orbit is out of the orbital plane of the other eight, it hasn't even close to cleared its orbit, etc. are way more compelling (and interesting!). I would say evaluate your Planet X on those merits rather than size or mass.
I'm not sure that the IAU's current definition is great (you mention the "clears its orbit" criteria for a young solar system, but I'm not even sure that it's all that great for our own. If we have to re-evaluate our definition every decades or two for a while, I'm fine with that. But I do still think that what we've got now is better than what we had before. At the very least, it keeps people's terminology (largely) consistent.
My own feeling as a non-astronomer but who has done a small amount of reading on the Pluto classification is that it is very difficult to come up with a definition of "planet" that does all of the following:
1. Includes Pluto
2. Excludes enough stuff to start giving our system well over a dozen planets
3. Doesn't include some arbitrary measurement that is pretty much specifically designed to do #1 and #2. (What I mean by "arbitrary" is something like "is at least 2000km in radius where if I say "why did you pick 2000?" you don't have an answer other than "well, it was a nice round number". Something like "has enough mass to become a near-sphere" has a physical meaning, and I'm okay with.)
Pluto has enough really weird characteristics (as compared to the other 8, or even as compared to Eris) that it seems to me that a separate category is pretty well-merited.
Interesting, I didn't know that.
(That being said, I'm not convinced that mass isn't what should be used for the "bigger/smaller" measure in the first place.)
Depending on how you count, it may be more accurate to say "rocky ice". By volume, Pluto has more ice than rock. (By mass, it is indeed an icy rock.)
If you count Pluto as a planet, do you count Eris as a planet? (It's bigger than Pluto.) What about Sedna? (Smaller, but not by a whole lot.)
Wikipedia says Nix and Hydra were discovered in 2005 (also by the Hubble team, apparently) and named in 2006.
MS has visual feedback disabled on their virtual keyboards
Just for clarification, I meant to say "on password screens". It's off for the login screen and I think anything else the app reports is a password box.
And by contrast, MS has visual feedback disabled on their virtual keyboards on the tablet editions of Windows. (Primarily for convertible tablets... remember those?)
Bizarro world, huh?
Kinda depends on which PC manufacturers. Really, there are two diametrically opposed problems being solved: either you're going for the silent, no-moving-parts, low-cost, low-maintenance approach (commodity PCs, home-entertainment appliances, etc.)... or you're going for the balls-to-the-walls, maximum FPS, humongo display resolution enthusiast machines.
I definitely wouldn't group that first category all together. Silent/no-moving-parts really shouldn't be together with low-cost, and I'm not sure where low-maintenance should be.
I would make three categories: low-cost (commodity PCs and cheap home-entertainment appliances), silent (custom PCs and more expensive home-entertainment), and powerful.
That said, my categorization doesn't really change your overall point I think. This tech is almost certainly not appropriate for low-cost. I only took a brief glance at the PDF and the article didn't really say, but how appropriate it is for the silent group depends on its noise level compared to fans.
Well, they also knew at may have been aimed at Iran.
But still, they didn't know how precisely targeted the worm was at that point, and they certainly didn't know it was aimed at the centrifuges at that point.
If you had RTFA (or perhaps with a more critical eye) you'd know that they had no clue about that at that time. When they first went public with it, all they knew was that it was a quite sophisticated attack that went after Step7 controllers. And given that, I definitely agree with them that it was in everyone's best interest to release that information.
more like if you don't know your way well enough. ... it only comes down to your skill and patience.
Well sure. My point is that it's possible for someone who is pretty well-acquainted with Linux (I consider myself to have been in that category even then) to arrive at a situation where less patience seems to be required in order to do a full reinstall than to make your current system work. This is especially true as a reinstallation actually can be a fair bit less work on Linux because of some *nix culture like isolated config files (instead of registry droppings).
I haven't used Linux on my home machine much at all for a couple years, but when I used it more I used Gentoo. A bit less than 5 years ago I managed to mess up Portage enough that I couldn't get Emerge to do anything (except complain a lot), so I gave up and reinstalled. It can definitely happen, even if you know your way around pretty well.
GP was wrong BTW. It didn't work that way on XP either, not in 2001 and not in 2011. Before XP SP2 people were actually requesting Autorun functionality, to the extent that 3rd-party programs were made to automatically invoke autorun.inf on removable drives.
It's trivial to work around in XP though if you have control of the hardware (cf. U3 flash drives) by making your flash drive present itself as a USB CD drive which, oh look, has a disc in it.
The change in Vista was to disable autorun for any drives, including CDs, making the autorun program basically just another option in the autoplay dialog. Personally, I am a huge fan of this compromise.
So, it's entirely possible to set up a situation where keyboards and mice work just fine and people can charge their phones and mp3 players without a security risk.
"Without" is a strong statement. "With a significantly lower" is closer, though even that isn't really true with the default disabling of autorun in the last couple versions of Windows.
They may teach it, but the church as an institution sure doesn't practice it very well, or they wouldn't move around accused priests, fight tooth-and-nail for their priests to not be subjected to criminal court proceedings, etc.
I've always hated the fact that Microsoft (in their on-going attempt to pander to drooling idiots) has set it up by default so that it will pretty much run anything that comes near it, without asking the user or any level of assumption that this could be a bad idea.
You mean "had". It hasn't been the case that you'd autorun stuff from something you plug in under a default configuration for years; MS changed the settings with the release of Vista.
Now, you could still make a USB stick that fakes a mouse/keyboard and probably selects the right thing from the autoplay dialog (huge different from autorun btw) that pops up, but I don't think I know of an OS that won't just work if you plug in a keyboard or mouse. You could just as easily make a USB stick that opens up a terminal and runs 'rm -rf ~'; that really is a case where the wide deployment of Windows means that a uniform attack vector is much much eaiser. But as for the fundamental problem, there's... not really much of anything you can do there.
As someone who lives at a crappy place in terms of daylight, I have a better idea: make DST year-round. Gets rid of the clock change while still having the benefits (not getting dark at 4:30pm for as much of the year) of DST.
What do you expect MS to do about it? Pay out of their pockets (not to mention the whole "taking your word for it" thing) to get you a recovery CD?
Say what? Not that I entirely don't believe you, but I don't think I've really heard any noise out of MS on that matter. I put the blame on PC manufacturers who don't want to pay for physical discs.