"Skilled developer, designer and mentor with over 15 years of industry experience. Focus on high-quality reusable code, and designs that stand the test of time. Also an innovator and source of new ideas who can push them forward in a way that's greeted positively by the entire organization. A rare blend of good communication skills and technical excellence. "
Perhaps Obj-C has a few nice features but personally I don't see it. If they'd stuck to C or C++ like every other version of Unix then this would never have been an issue in the first place. Plus a lot more people would have been able to cross-code for OS/X without having to learn an obscure OO version of C which never caught on in the wider IT world and is still used on practically no other system.
Firefox crashes and locks up on me every single day. And lets not start on the issue of every browser instance hanging if one instance has DNS lookup issues.
I know scrub fires have always happened in California , but is this year particularly bad or is the media just focusing on it because it happens to be threatening LA suburbs for once instead of a few hick towns 50 miles from nowhere?
Sorry , thats not meant to be patronising , but thats the way I think the media see it usually (not me personally).
"saved except that the firefighters were focused on Canberra suburbs and towns like Tharwa"
I hate to break the news to you but I suspect that for 99.999% of the population saving their homes is a bit more important than saving a completely non-essential government funded facility. Thats not to say what happened to the scope wasn't sad , but the emergency guys got their priorities spot on.
Have they gone bust or did they go bust years ago and what was left of the company kept the name? Did a former CTO squirrel it away somewhere for a rainy day and $$$$ ?
"I think you can keep your lame patronizing to yourself kiddo, coz it just came around to take a bite right up your ass"
Funnily enough I don't own a donkey. Oh sorry , did you mean "arse"? Try learning to spell before composing your hopeless putdowns.
"As to more important things to do than spend the 5 minutes it takes to build an initrd in Slack (which is not necessary 95% of the time), I guess that reading explicit readmes and actually experiment with the stuff in order to provide knowledgeable advice is not one of them..."
So it only takes you 5 minutes to figure out what drivers are needed and what parameters they require? Well either you're a genius or a fucking liar. I know which one of those I'll believe...
Gimme the lame patronising a rest sonny. I used slackware right from the 1.1 kernels when you were probably still dribbling over your rusks and watching saturday morning cartoons up, right until the 2.4 series. I have a pretty damn good clue of how to build a kernel and glue together a system. Being able to do it isn't the issue - having more important things to do these days is.
Last time I looked at/proc/config.gz for a 2.6 kernel it had over 3000 options. I have better things to do with my life these days I'm afraid. 2.4 kernel building at home was just about do-able. 2.6 is best left to people who do it as a job.
PAM can be a PITA. One machine I used had its/var/log directory wiped. Because some file in there (I forget whichi - probably messages or syslog) was now missing PAM couldn't write to it and consequently failed every single login. A pretty moronic coding error IMO.
Agreed. I used to use slackware but the novelty of manually setting everything up wore off a while back. Plus theres so much more to set up in a modern distribution that you really don't want to have to worry about getting low level plumbing up and running - it should just work out of the box.
"To use a generic kernel you'll need to build an initrd to load your filesystem module and possibly your drive controller or other drivers needed at boot time"
Sorry guys , this is 2009. If the only options to get my devices running is some huge BLOB of a kernel or having to manually hack together an initrd I think I'll stick with other distributions. Installing a distribution is enough work as it is these days without having to worry about fundamentals such as getting the kernel to boot in the first place. This might have been fine in the days when all you wanted out of a setup was a working command prompt and maybe fvwm but these days its just too much work.
KDE 4.2 still isn't really ready for primetime rollout - you just need to fiddle with it too much to get some things to work and with slackware you'll be spending enough time fiddling with the core OS as it is. Why didn't patrick stick with 3.5 and leave 4.2 as an option?
If there are 100 stars and 1 of those stars has a planet spiralling into it then if you view all of those stars the probability of you finding that planet is 1. If you view 50 the probability is 0.5. You're confusing the probality of each type of event occuring with the probility of seeing a given type event from a whole collection of events.
"I take it you that you don't disagree that the following is an accurate depiction of Microsoft practices."
I do disagree. When I was at uni we had to use HP-UX. Perhaps HP should be charged with poisoning my education? As for the rest , name we one large IT company that doesn't do that. Why single out MS other than the fact that its successful?
"That would be speaking only for yourself and what OSS have you contributed to ?"
Well usually in english when you say "my" that generally refers to yourself. Perhaps English your 2nd language though so I'll let that pass.
As for the OSS I've written if I was to post my website Id' give my identity away so you'll have to make do without. Suffice to say I've written 4 apps (1 language, 3 games) which I've GPL'd.
There are 100 billion stars in our galaxy. If we look at enough of them then at some point by the laws of probability we're going to find a planet on its final death spiral into the star. I don't see what the issue is. Ok , if in 50 years time the planets orbit hasn't changed *then* we start to worry and revisit our theories.
... I'm frankly getting sick of the FSF. This latest stupid campaign reads like it was written by some petulant teenager without the first clue as to the realities of life and it tars the rest of us who support (and in my case actually write) OSS with the same idiotic uncompromising brush.
Message to Stallman - close source will be around after you've retired from your cosy ivory tower paid-by-the-taxpayer college job so get over it, learn to live with it and stop making other OSS advocates look and sound like immature fools.
"And your alternative is...? A specially built OS from Joe's basement?"
Yes. What OSes do you think run aircraft avionics, train safety control systems and so on? Fucking Windows with a VB app on top?? Get a bloody clue!
"Most of the medical systems I work with (where lives hang in the balance) are plain ol' WinXP"
That says a lot about the indifference and stupidity of most medical organisations that it does about the suitability of using a consumer OS in safety critical systems.
"The idea is to have something that people can maintain in the future."
Sorry - the idea is to provide the best value for money to customers. Charging more for something slower and less reliable that required them to upgrade their hardware while they were at it is not.
Slashdot Mirror
"Skilled developer, designer and mentor with over 15 years of industry experience. Focus on high-quality reusable code, and designs that stand the test of time. Also an innovator and source of new ideas who can push them forward in a way that's greeted positively by the entire organization. A rare blend of good communication skills and technical excellence. "
You forgot to add "modest" to that list.
Oh , wait...
Perhaps Obj-C has a few nice features but personally I don't see it. If they'd stuck to C or C++ like every other version of Unix then this would never have been an issue in the first place. Plus a lot more people would have been able to cross-code for OS/X without having to learn an obscure OO version of C which never caught on in the wider IT world and is still used on practically no other system.
No doubt they hope some pretty pictures will make the drooling fanbois forget about the endless bugs in 3.x.
Actually , probably not.
Firefox crashes and locks up on me every single day. And lets not start on the issue of every browser instance hanging if one instance has DNS lookup issues.
They only had floppy disk drives internally AFAIR.
I know scrub fires have always happened in California , but is this year particularly bad or is the media just focusing on it because it happens to be threatening LA suburbs for once instead of a few hick towns 50 miles from nowhere?
Sorry , thats not meant to be patronising , but thats the way I think the media see it usually (not me personally).
"saved except that the firefighters were focused on Canberra suburbs and towns like Tharwa"
I hate to break the news to you but I suspect that for 99.999% of the population saving their homes is a bit more important than saving a completely non-essential government funded facility. Thats not to say what happened to the scope wasn't sad , but the emergency guys got their priorities spot on.
Have they gone bust or did they go bust years ago and what was left of the company kept the name? Did a former CTO squirrel it away somewhere for a rainy day and $$$$ ?
"I started using Slackware back in '94"
And? I started at the same time.
"I think you can keep your lame patronizing to yourself kiddo, coz it just came around to take a bite right up your ass"
Funnily enough I don't own a donkey. Oh sorry , did you mean "arse"? Try learning to spell before composing your hopeless putdowns.
"As to more important things to do than spend the 5 minutes it takes to build an initrd in Slack (which is not necessary 95% of the time), I guess that reading explicit readmes and actually experiment with the stuff in order to provide knowledgeable advice is not one of them..."
So it only takes you 5 minutes to figure out what drivers are needed and what parameters they require? Well either you're a genius or a fucking liar. I know which one of those I'll believe...
Gimme the lame patronising a rest sonny. I used slackware right from the 1.1 kernels when you were probably still dribbling over your rusks and watching saturday morning cartoons up, right until the 2.4 series. I have a pretty damn good clue of how to build a kernel and glue together a system. Being able to do it isn't the issue - having more important things to do these days is.
Last time I looked at /proc/config.gz for a 2.6 kernel it had over 3000 options. I have better things to do with my life these days I'm afraid. 2.4 kernel building at home was just about do-able. 2.6 is best left to people who do it as a job.
PAM can be a PITA. One machine I used had its /var/log directory wiped. Because some file in there (I forget whichi - probably messages or syslog) was now missing PAM couldn't write to it and consequently failed every single login. A pretty moronic coding error IMO.
Agreed. I used to use slackware but the novelty of manually setting everything up wore off a while back. Plus theres so much more to set up in a modern distribution that you really don't want to have to worry about getting low level plumbing up and running - it should just work out of the box.
"To use a generic kernel you'll need to build an initrd to load your filesystem module and possibly your drive controller or other drivers needed at boot time"
Sorry guys , this is 2009. If the only options to get my devices running is some huge BLOB of a kernel or having to manually hack together an initrd I think I'll stick with other distributions. Installing a distribution is enough work as it is these days without having to worry about fundamentals such as getting the kernel to boot in the first place. This might have been fine in the days when all you wanted out of a setup was a working command prompt and maybe fvwm but these days its just too much work.
(And yes , I used to run slackware up to 11.0)
KDE 4.2 still isn't really ready for primetime rollout - you just need to fiddle with it too much to get some things to work and with slackware you'll be spending enough time fiddling with the core OS as it is. Why didn't patrick stick with 3.5 and leave 4.2 as an option?
... would be used if all computers were still that big!
If there are 100 stars and 1 of those stars has a planet spiralling into it then if you view all of those stars the probability of you finding that planet is 1. If you view 50 the probability is 0.5. You're confusing the probality of each type of event occuring with the probility of seeing a given type event from a whole collection of events.
"I take it you that you don't disagree that the following is an accurate depiction of Microsoft practices."
I do disagree. When I was at uni we had to use HP-UX. Perhaps HP should be charged with poisoning my education? As for the rest , name we one large IT company that doesn't do that. Why single out MS other than the fact that its successful?
"That would be speaking only for yourself and what OSS have you contributed to ?"
Well usually in english when you say "my" that generally refers to yourself. Perhaps English your 2nd language though so I'll let that pass.
As for the OSS I've written if I was to post my website Id' give my identity away so you'll have to make do without. Suffice to say I've written 4 apps (1 language, 3 games) which I've GPL'd.
There are 100 billion stars in our galaxy. If we look at enough of them then at some point by the laws of probability we're going to find a planet on its final death spiral into the star. I don't see what the issue is. Ok , if in 50 years time the planets orbit hasn't changed *then* we start to worry and revisit our theories.
Sorry , whats your point? You compiled it with gcc, of course it'll work. Try compiling it with Suns forte compiler for example and see what happens.
They probably wrote it using a combination of Emacs macros and LaTex.
... I'm frankly getting sick of the FSF. This latest stupid campaign reads like it was written by some petulant teenager without the first clue as to the realities of life and it tars the rest of us who support (and in my case actually write) OSS with the same idiotic uncompromising brush.
Message to Stallman - close source will be around after you've retired from your cosy ivory tower paid-by-the-taxpayer college job so get over it, learn to live with it and stop making other OSS advocates look and sound like immature fools.
"And your alternative is...? A specially built OS from Joe's basement?"
Yes. What OSes do you think run aircraft avionics, train safety control systems and so on? Fucking Windows with a VB app on top?? Get a bloody clue!
"Most of the medical systems I work with (where lives hang in the balance) are plain ol' WinXP"
That says a lot about the indifference and stupidity of most medical organisations that it does about the suitability of using a consumer OS in safety critical systems.
"Seems like a reasonable tradeof"
Yeah , whatever.
"The idea is to have something that people can maintain in the future."
Sorry - the idea is to provide the best value for money to customers. Charging more for something slower and less reliable that required them to upgrade their hardware while they were at it is not.