If so, wouldn't it be nicer if they could change to something better?
Depends what you mean by "better" - for many situations where FAT is used, you don;t *want* stuff like journalling because you're dealing with very low power embedded systems.
my motto is "if AOL or Yahoo filters mail based on XYZ policy, I will too".
AOL and Yahoo are some of the worst for filtering on crazy criteria. They are also *very* bad at responding to mail server operators who want to discuss what they can do to get off their block lists...
If I could find an open source software package capable of doing what I require, I would have gone that way a long time ago. As it stands, I have to use a proprietary software package that does not allow me to weight the incoming emails based of *any* RBL's. I can only refuse the connection based on the RBL's
I'm curious what you are doing that can't be done with one of the Free MTAs...?
there are many who now think any email they don't like or want is spam.
I'm afraid I've pretty much lost track of which of the following categories email I don't like falls into:
* Totally unsolicited untargeted mail
* Totally unsolicited targeted mail
* Marketing junk from a company who legitimately has my email address but was explicitly asked not to send me marketing junk by ticking a "don't send me junk" box.
* Marketing junk from a company who legitimately has my email address but was implicitly asked not to send me marketing junk by not ticking a "send me junk" box.
* Other random junk that someone I have done business with feels would be in my interest to read but really isn't.
* Stuff I actually signed up for once upon a time.
And rarely do the unsubscribe links actually work on the last 4 types of junk too, so even if things once were legitimate or honest mistakes, they end up no better than the true spam.
They didn't just unsubscribe, they went the extra steps to report our email as spam, which it isn't because they opted-in.
See above - most of the time the unsubscribe links just plain don't work on the legitimate stuff, you definitely don't want to click an unsubscribe link on non-legit stuff and I get so much crap in my inbox I honestly can't remember whether I voluntarily signed up for it 5 years ago anyway.
The funny thing is that these are probably the same poeple who then complain about personal privacy and pubic safety cameras watching them.
I agree with everything you said up until this point - I think you have completely missed the point here.
Giving a running commentary on your life, using credit cards, store loyalty cards, filling in questionnaires etc. (all of which can be used to gather data about you) are personal decisions. The governments legislating the requirement to track everyone is very different as you do not have a choice - if the government suddenly turned evil (lets say they do something completely unheard of and unlikely to ever happen*, such as rounding up and gassing all the jews for example), you can stop (micro)blogging, pay for everything in cash, etc., but you can't stop the government exercising the powers that they have already legislated for (such as CCTV cameras, warrantless phone-taps, the requirement for ISPs to log all your email activities for the security services, the ability to detain anyone without charge, warrantless stop-and-search powers, etc.).
(* for the Americans amongst you, this is sarcasm)
1. My research computer cluster at work twitters to tell me simulations are done.
Seems that something like XMPP, SIP/SIMPLE, or maybe even email, might be a better and more standard solution. Your mileage may vary though.
2. The journal of the American Chemical Society twitters updates on interesting papers and news
Wouldn't a professional organisation be better off running their own server providing this sort of update by a standard protocol (RSS, ATOM, etc.) be more sensible than relying on a third party service of which they have no control (especially one run by an organisation that doesn't really seem to have a viable business plan)? I know this isn't your decision, it's the Americal Chemical Society's decision, but it seems a bit crazy to me.
Although many of these things could be done with RSS and e-mail, it's just nice to have everything in one spot and quickly digestible. Hopefully this should clear any confusion for the "get off my lawn" slashdot.
I'll agree that having everything in one place is important (this is one of my primary problems with web fora - no I don't want to have to poll 15 different websites several times a day with my web browser, I'm far happier with mailing lists where it all lands in a mail client of by choice). This is one of the reasons why I read RSS feeds using rss2email - my online communications tend to be in 2 places - email for non-instantaneous stuff, XMPP for instantaneous communications (actually, also SIP for phone calls). It just seems to me that there are (and have been for years) technologies that offer pretty much the same functionality as Twitter with less limitations, so I'm not sure why anyone would choose to use Twitter instead - the only thing Twitter seems to have going for it is an awful lot of undue media hype.
Seriously: you value your RSS news feeds - but can't understand the value of updates from people that you actually know?
Oddly enough, I have personal conversations (in real life, or online) with my friends rather than just reading "status updates" broadcast as summaries to the masses. Generally I couldn't care less about the status of people who aren't my friends, let alone people I don't even know (there seems to be a trend for people to follow celebrities on twitter that I just don't get...).
unless you have some need they serve that's worth hooking into the abusive relationship they insist on with their customers, it's best to go with something else.
The kicker here is that the "something else" is basically Linux, BSD, etc. - Apple seem to be more abusive to their customers than MS these days.
Does Microsoft realizes that nobody in their right mind is going to immediately switch to Win7 (if at all?)
What are you basing that off of? I've heard nothing but good things about Win7 (except in Linux circles, and even there I've seen positive reviews) and I haven't heard anyone say that they're going to skip it.
Microsoft is suffering from the fact that for most people, XP is "good enough" (incidentally, this is probably one of the factors stopping many people from considering a switch to Linux too). I'm sure that MS will sell Windows 7 to OEMs to be shipped on new PCs - there probably won't be as much resistance as Vista saw, but unlike many of the previous Windows releases, most XP users generally seem to be pretty happy with the status quo to I'm not really expecting to see huge numbers of people flock to the shops to buy upgrades for their existing systems.
Most people I've read have said the opposite, that they're skipping Vista in favor of waiting for Windows 7.
That's not really that surprising - if you're one of the people who is going to upgrade, it would seem silly to buy an upgrade that is about to be superseded, bad press or not.
That's for sure. I use those "ancient" jacks to access high-speed internet. Although not having telephone jacks would not stop me from buying a house, it would drop my offer a few thousand dollars since I have to deal with the hassle of re-installing the lines.
What the hell? I installed cat 6 structured cabling throughout my house when I moved in - it really wasn't that hard. Certainly didn't take a few grand's worth of my time.
...but nothing today comes even close to the reliability of carving information into stone if you want to store it for 1 billion years. And its easily accessible/readable to anyone or I guess maybe at this point in time, anything alive and aware of it.
Wake me up when you figure out how to store video on a stone tablet and have it easily accessible to anyone...
I realize we, as in all space agencies, use helium or something else to keep these instruments cold, but why can't we use the coldness of space to do the same thing?
Space isn't really "cold", or rather, the terms "cold" and "hot" lose much of their meaning when you're talking about incredibly low densities like you have in space.
If you have an atmosphere then you transfer heat by radiation and conduction. You can cool your instruments by putting them in the shade (so they don't get the radiated energy from the sun) and ensuring the atmosphere is cool so that it will conduct the heat away. The atmosphere on Earth is actually not a great conductor, but because it is a fluid you can keep the air moving so that as soon as some of the heat has been conducted to the surrounding air you move that (warmer) aid out of the way and replace it with cool air - this can be done naturally by convection or by forcing the air to move with a fan.
In space you have practically no atmosphere, so the heat transfer is almost entirely by radiation - your instruments are essentially in a giant vacuum flask. Your satellite needs to reflect away the energy radiated by the sun, and the cosmic microwave background radiation, etc. and also radiate away its own heat (remember, these satellites contain lots of electronics and like all electronics they will generate heat). This is a pretty tall order - surfaces that radiate well are also really good at absorbing energy. - I imagine it's much cheaper and lighter to send up a load of liquid helium and dissipate the heat by letting it boil away.
When buying my new laptop (~1 month ago), one of the things I wanted was bluetooth. It turns out that most people didn't use the bluetooth in their laptops, so manufacturers started pulling it from just about every model you can find. Going to the local shops, only about 10% of the laptops had it. For god's sake, there were almost as many with blueray drives as bluetooth!
My laptop is bluetoothless because Acer would only include bluetooth if I bought the extra high capacity (read: extra heavy) battery with the laptop. It isn't as if the normal battery was too underpowered to drive a poxy little bluetooth radio or anything (although it is now because after a little over a year the battery was as good as useless and Acer don't seem to give a crap. I know that batteries are consumables, but I don't expect to have to replace it on a yearly basis).
The bit of my post that said "when you already know what architecture the binaries will be running on when you build them". Clearly if you didn't know the architecture ahead of time then my post isn't relevant to you, which is why I put a qualifier in it.
And on my system? I have a PC Card slot. And a bluetooth radio. Why should the servers be turned off by default?
Why is it so damned difficult to start them if the hardware is present instead of running them all the time even when they are of no use? Do you expect your computer to also have all the software which is required for every other piece of hardware in existence to be running all the time, just in case you happened to have that piece of hardware?
Really, you're just bitching because you have an ancient machine.
My machine is about 8 years old - yeah, I guess that makes it "ancient". However, what I use it for hasn't changed - there is no reason why you should need to upgrade a computer every few years to do *exactly the same stuff as you already do* - the requirement to keep upgrading perfectly good hardware is, to a large extent, motivated by lazy developers and inappropriate use of technologies.
I didn't realize that he was saying only Ubuntu users get tired arms, and that only screens connected to an Ubuntu PC get smudged. Thanks for clearing that up!
Given that the thread is about Ubuntu's touch screen support and my post that he was replying to was specifically talking about desktop machines, I guess you can figure out the relevance of your post.
Compile-time typechecking is overrated. Duck typing and unit tests are much better.
Compile time typechecking catches a *lot* of stupid mistakes really quickly - if I make a typo in a variable name, my software just plain won't compile - it doesn't get all the way to unit testing (which you need to ensure definately covers all the execution paths) before I discover a silly typo, and the compiler also tells me exactly which line the typo happened on, which wouldn't necessarily be the case during unit testing.
In any case, how much software *really* gets decent (or any) unit tests? I'd wager a good proportion of the software on practically any desktop computer had a testing strategy of "ship it to the user, see if they complain about stuff breaking". Making it so the stuff that can be trivially tested *has* to pass the tests before the software will work at all is a Good Thing.
Once you find your program is using too much RAM, that's when to start thinking about this.
That's exactly the wrong attitude to take - what is "too much RAM"? If you'd written the software properly in the first place, it would probably be using far less RAM even though you didn't consider it to be using "too much" anyway.
I think that's a much better use of your time than developing a habit of running free() as much as possible, especially when that may actually be slower.
If you have finished with some memory and you're never going to use it again, freeing it is not going to make your application slower. If you don't believe that its a good idea to get rid of as many memory leaks as possible then I sincerely hope I never use any of your software. As a professional software developer, *all* my code gets tested through a memory checker as much as possible (I tend to use Valgrind) and any leaks which show up get fixed unless they are caused deep within a third party library.
You can write downright ugly code in any language. On the other hand, I've seen some downright elegant C code
That is true. However, at a certain point it is "fast enough". A command that runs in 10 milliseconds isn't that much better of a user experience than one that runs in 100 milliseconds.
That rather depends on how frequently the command is run. If you need to run it 10 times or so then your 100 millisecond command starts to become a noticeable delay in the system.
If that 10-millisecond command segfaults ever, it loses.
You seem to be under the misapprehension that a segfault is the only failure mode and that avoiding C magically makes your software completely reliable. Over the years I'm sure I've seen more interpreted programs bomb out spectacularly than compiled programs, so anecdotally I'm afraid I think you're dead wrong.
I suppose that's what you meant by "prototyping".
Partly, yes. I frequently code stuff up in Python to see how well it'll work, even to the point of giving it to a customer, but I'm under no illusions about the robustness and efficiency of Python code - if robustness or efficiency are important then I code C. An unstable, poorly developed product may get to the market place faster, but that's not what my customers want - giving them bad software is just going to get me a bad reputation.
Because I'm too lazy to fuck with the piece of shit trackpad that most laptops come with? Because sometimes the mouse refuses to work properly, or maybe the keyboard got something spilled on it and I'm out of warranty? How about for those of us with arthritis and bursitis, which can make clicking a button a massive pain where one could just touch the screen and be on their way?
Maybe you should go back and read the thread before replying. The post I was replying to was saying that there was no on-screen keyboard - the only one of your examples which is going to want an on-screen keyboard is the one where you were dumb enough to spill coke on your keyboard.
Seriously - innovate or die off and make room for someone that can.
I prefer to innovate in ways that are actually useful to a significant number of people...
I might as well throw my 2 cents in here too. In Gnome, by default, Nautilus doesn't just display your files, it also paints the picture on your desktop and gives your desktop its right click menu. So, if you use either of those things, you are using Nautilus.
Yep, which frankly is bloody stupid - why do I want to have the bloat of a file manager I never use permanently in memory just to display the desktop background? (This question is coming from someone who has been using X since the days when you used xsetroot to set a backdrop on the root window, and there was no need for any extra software to stay resident).
No sane reason to use Java? I completely agree! I mean, why would you want to ship one build that runs on Windows, OSX AND Linux? That's just crazy talk!</sarcasm>
Did you actually bother to read my post, or did you stop before you got to the bit that said "when you already know what architecture the binaries will be running on when you build them."?
So, are we going to complain about having to go out to RAM and using a lot of it (which is nano-/microseconds away), or are we going to complain about going out to disk/the internet and using very little RAM and taking (milli)seconds?
Your argument only makes sense if the system automatically scales this caching to available resources - the Linux pagecache does this, but most userland processes won't. If I start firefox up on a machine that has 64MB of RAM, it will use exactly the same amount of memory, even though that means it'll be thrashing swap. Also, it's worth pointing out that much of firefox's memory usage is for caching the _rendered_ page - i.e. you can reduce the memory usage by throwing away the rendered page without becoming I/O bound (it just takes more CPU time since you have to parse and rerender the cached HTML and images).
So yes, using memory that would otherwise be empty is good, it makes stuff faster. But using that memory even when it isn't available is really bad because it causes a *massive* performance hit and essentially forces people to upgrade their hardware.
Slashdot Mirror
The poster to whom I originally replied mentioned cross-OS compatibility. I think the scope was pretty clear at that point.
UDF is pretty well supported isn't it?
If so, wouldn't it be nicer if they could change to something better?
Depends what you mean by "better" - for many situations where FAT is used, you don;t *want* stuff like journalling because you're dealing with very low power embedded systems.
Either you are ignorant (thus it wouldn't do me any good anyway)
How are the ignorant supposed to learn (and thus become non-ignorant) if no one tells them when they got something wrong?
or have them change their password every week.
That would also demonstrate a lack of clue - forced regular password changes harm security and piss people off.
my motto is "if AOL or Yahoo filters mail based on XYZ policy, I will too".
AOL and Yahoo are some of the worst for filtering on crazy criteria. They are also *very* bad at responding to mail server operators who want to discuss what they can do to get off their block lists...
If I could find an open source software package capable of doing what I require, I would have gone that way a long time ago. As it stands, I have to use a proprietary software package that does not allow me to weight the incoming emails based of *any* RBL's. I can only refuse the connection based on the RBL's
I'm curious what you are doing that can't be done with one of the Free MTAs...?
there are many who now think any email they don't like or want is spam.
I'm afraid I've pretty much lost track of which of the following categories email I don't like falls into:
* Totally unsolicited untargeted mail
* Totally unsolicited targeted mail
* Marketing junk from a company who legitimately has my email address but was explicitly asked not to send me marketing junk by ticking a "don't send me junk" box.
* Marketing junk from a company who legitimately has my email address but was implicitly asked not to send me marketing junk by not ticking a "send me junk" box.
* Other random junk that someone I have done business with feels would be in my interest to read but really isn't.
* Stuff I actually signed up for once upon a time.
And rarely do the unsubscribe links actually work on the last 4 types of junk too, so even if things once were legitimate or honest mistakes, they end up no better than the true spam.
They didn't just unsubscribe, they went the extra steps to report our email as spam, which it isn't because they opted-in.
See above - most of the time the unsubscribe links just plain don't work on the legitimate stuff, you definitely don't want to click an unsubscribe link on non-legit stuff and I get so much crap in my inbox I honestly can't remember whether I voluntarily signed up for it 5 years ago anyway.
triangulate
GPS uses trilateration, not triangulation.
The funny thing is that these are probably the same poeple who then complain about personal privacy and pubic safety cameras watching them.
I agree with everything you said up until this point - I think you have completely missed the point here.
Giving a running commentary on your life, using credit cards, store loyalty cards, filling in questionnaires etc. (all of which can be used to gather data about you) are personal decisions. The governments legislating the requirement to track everyone is very different as you do not have a choice - if the government suddenly turned evil (lets say they do something completely unheard of and unlikely to ever happen*, such as rounding up and gassing all the jews for example), you can stop (micro)blogging, pay for everything in cash, etc., but you can't stop the government exercising the powers that they have already legislated for (such as CCTV cameras, warrantless phone-taps, the requirement for ISPs to log all your email activities for the security services, the ability to detain anyone without charge, warrantless stop-and-search powers, etc.).
(* for the Americans amongst you, this is sarcasm)
1. My research computer cluster at work twitters to tell me simulations are done.
Seems that something like XMPP, SIP/SIMPLE, or maybe even email, might be a better and more standard solution. Your mileage may vary though.
2. The journal of the American Chemical Society twitters updates on interesting papers and news
Wouldn't a professional organisation be better off running their own server providing this sort of update by a standard protocol (RSS, ATOM, etc.) be more sensible than relying on a third party service of which they have no control (especially one run by an organisation that doesn't really seem to have a viable business plan)? I know this isn't your decision, it's the Americal Chemical Society's decision, but it seems a bit crazy to me.
Although many of these things could be done with RSS and e-mail, it's just nice to have everything in one spot and quickly digestible. Hopefully this should clear any confusion for the "get off my lawn" slashdot.
I'll agree that having everything in one place is important (this is one of my primary problems with web fora - no I don't want to have to poll 15 different websites several times a day with my web browser, I'm far happier with mailing lists where it all lands in a mail client of by choice). This is one of the reasons why I read RSS feeds using rss2email - my online communications tend to be in 2 places - email for non-instantaneous stuff, XMPP for instantaneous communications (actually, also SIP for phone calls). It just seems to me that there are (and have been for years) technologies that offer pretty much the same functionality as Twitter with less limitations, so I'm not sure why anyone would choose to use Twitter instead - the only thing Twitter seems to have going for it is an awful lot of undue media hype.
Seriously: you value your RSS news feeds - but can't understand the value of updates from people that you actually know?
Oddly enough, I have personal conversations (in real life, or online) with my friends rather than just reading "status updates" broadcast as summaries to the masses. Generally I couldn't care less about the status of people who aren't my friends, let alone people I don't even know (there seems to be a trend for people to follow celebrities on twitter that I just don't get...).
unless you have some need they serve that's worth hooking into the abusive relationship they insist on with their customers, it's best to go with something else.
The kicker here is that the "something else" is basically Linux, BSD, etc. - Apple seem to be more abusive to their customers than MS these days.
What are you basing that off of? I've heard nothing but good things about Win7 (except in Linux circles, and even there I've seen positive reviews) and I haven't heard anyone say that they're going to skip it.
Microsoft is suffering from the fact that for most people, XP is "good enough" (incidentally, this is probably one of the factors stopping many people from considering a switch to Linux too). I'm sure that MS will sell Windows 7 to OEMs to be shipped on new PCs - there probably won't be as much resistance as Vista saw, but unlike many of the previous Windows releases, most XP users generally seem to be pretty happy with the status quo to I'm not really expecting to see huge numbers of people flock to the shops to buy upgrades for their existing systems.
Most people I've read have said the opposite, that they're skipping Vista in favor of waiting for Windows 7.
That's not really that surprising - if you're one of the people who is going to upgrade, it would seem silly to buy an upgrade that is about to be superseded, bad press or not.
That's for sure. I use those "ancient" jacks to access high-speed internet. Although not having telephone jacks would not stop me from buying a house, it would drop my offer a few thousand dollars since I have to deal with the hassle of re-installing the lines.
What the hell? I installed cat 6 structured cabling throughout my house when I moved in - it really wasn't that hard. Certainly didn't take a few grand's worth of my time.
...but nothing today comes even close to the reliability of carving information into stone if you want to store it for 1 billion years. And its easily accessible/readable to anyone or I guess maybe at this point in time, anything alive and aware of it.
Wake me up when you figure out how to store video on a stone tablet and have it easily accessible to anyone...
I realize we, as in all space agencies, use helium or something else to keep these instruments cold, but why can't we use the coldness of space to do the same thing?
Space isn't really "cold", or rather, the terms "cold" and "hot" lose much of their meaning when you're talking about incredibly low densities like you have in space.
If you have an atmosphere then you transfer heat by radiation and conduction. You can cool your instruments by putting them in the shade (so they don't get the radiated energy from the sun) and ensuring the atmosphere is cool so that it will conduct the heat away. The atmosphere on Earth is actually not a great conductor, but because it is a fluid you can keep the air moving so that as soon as some of the heat has been conducted to the surrounding air you move that (warmer) aid out of the way and replace it with cool air - this can be done naturally by convection or by forcing the air to move with a fan.
In space you have practically no atmosphere, so the heat transfer is almost entirely by radiation - your instruments are essentially in a giant vacuum flask. Your satellite needs to reflect away the energy radiated by the sun, and the cosmic microwave background radiation, etc. and also radiate away its own heat (remember, these satellites contain lots of electronics and like all electronics they will generate heat). This is a pretty tall order - surfaces that radiate well are also really good at absorbing energy. - I imagine it's much cheaper and lighter to send up a load of liquid helium and dissipate the heat by letting it boil away.
When buying my new laptop (~1 month ago), one of the things I wanted was bluetooth. It turns out that most people didn't use the bluetooth in their laptops, so manufacturers started pulling it from just about every model you can find. Going to the local shops, only about 10% of the laptops had it. For god's sake, there were almost as many with blueray drives as bluetooth!
My laptop is bluetoothless because Acer would only include bluetooth if I bought the extra high capacity (read: extra heavy) battery with the laptop. It isn't as if the normal battery was too underpowered to drive a poxy little bluetooth radio or anything (although it is now because after a little over a year the battery was as good as useless and Acer don't seem to give a crap. I know that batteries are consumables, but I don't expect to have to replace it on a yearly basis).
And how much of that is just caching that will be free'd instantly when it is needed by another app?
None of it. The kernel has no way to reclaim this memory if another application needs it.
So basically you've focussed on a technicality and completely ignored the point of my post - great job.
Who says the architecture is known ahead of time?
The bit of my post that said "when you already know what architecture the binaries will be running on when you build them". Clearly if you didn't know the architecture ahead of time then my post isn't relevant to you, which is why I put a qualifier in it.
And on my system? I have a PC Card slot. And a bluetooth radio. Why should the servers be turned off by default?
Why is it so damned difficult to start them if the hardware is present instead of running them all the time even when they are of no use? Do you expect your computer to also have all the software which is required for every other piece of hardware in existence to be running all the time, just in case you happened to have that piece of hardware?
Really, you're just bitching because you have an ancient machine.
My machine is about 8 years old - yeah, I guess that makes it "ancient". However, what I use it for hasn't changed - there is no reason why you should need to upgrade a computer every few years to do *exactly the same stuff as you already do* - the requirement to keep upgrading perfectly good hardware is, to a large extent, motivated by lazy developers and inappropriate use of technologies.
I didn't realize that he was saying only Ubuntu users get tired arms, and that only screens connected to an Ubuntu PC get smudged. Thanks for clearing that up!
Given that the thread is about Ubuntu's touch screen support and my post that he was replying to was specifically talking about desktop machines, I guess you can figure out the relevance of your post.
Compile-time typechecking is overrated. Duck typing and unit tests are much better.
Compile time typechecking catches a *lot* of stupid mistakes really quickly - if I make a typo in a variable name, my software just plain won't compile - it doesn't get all the way to unit testing (which you need to ensure definately covers all the execution paths) before I discover a silly typo, and the compiler also tells me exactly which line the typo happened on, which wouldn't necessarily be the case during unit testing.
In any case, how much software *really* gets decent (or any) unit tests? I'd wager a good proportion of the software on practically any desktop computer had a testing strategy of "ship it to the user, see if they complain about stuff breaking". Making it so the stuff that can be trivially tested *has* to pass the tests before the software will work at all is a Good Thing.
Once you find your program is using too much RAM, that's when to start thinking about this.
That's exactly the wrong attitude to take - what is "too much RAM"? If you'd written the software properly in the first place, it would probably be using far less RAM even though you didn't consider it to be using "too much" anyway.
I think that's a much better use of your time than developing a habit of running free() as much as possible, especially when that may actually be slower.
If you have finished with some memory and you're never going to use it again, freeing it is not going to make your application slower. If you don't believe that its a good idea to get rid of as many memory leaks as possible then I sincerely hope I never use any of your software. As a professional software developer, *all* my code gets tested through a memory checker as much as possible (I tend to use Valgrind) and any leaks which show up get fixed unless they are caused deep within a third party library.
You can write downright ugly code in any language. On the other hand, I've seen some downright elegant C code
That is true. However, at a certain point it is "fast enough". A command that runs in 10 milliseconds isn't that much better of a user experience than one that runs in 100 milliseconds.
That rather depends on how frequently the command is run. If you need to run it 10 times or so then your 100 millisecond command starts to become a noticeable delay in the system.
If that 10-millisecond command segfaults ever, it loses.
You seem to be under the misapprehension that a segfault is the only failure mode and that avoiding C magically makes your software completely reliable. Over the years I'm sure I've seen more interpreted programs bomb out spectacularly than compiled programs, so anecdotally I'm afraid I think you're dead wrong.
I suppose that's what you meant by "prototyping".
Partly, yes. I frequently code stuff up in Python to see how well it'll work, even to the point of giving it to a customer, but I'm under no illusions about the robustness and efficiency of Python code - if robustness or efficiency are important then I code C. An unstable, poorly developed product may get to the market place faster, but that's not what my customers want - giving them bad software is just going to get me a bad reputation.
Because I'm too lazy to fuck with the piece of shit trackpad that most laptops come with? Because sometimes the mouse refuses to work properly, or maybe the keyboard got something spilled on it and I'm out of warranty? How about for those of us with arthritis and bursitis, which can make clicking a button a massive pain where one could just touch the screen and be on their way?
Maybe you should go back and read the thread before replying. The post I was replying to was saying that there was no on-screen keyboard - the only one of your examples which is going to want an on-screen keyboard is the one where you were dumb enough to spill coke on your keyboard.
Seriously - innovate or die off and make room for someone that can.
I prefer to innovate in ways that are actually useful to a significant number of people...
I might as well throw my 2 cents in here too. In Gnome, by default, Nautilus doesn't just display your files, it also paints the picture on your desktop and gives your desktop its right click menu. So, if you use either of those things, you are using Nautilus.
Yep, which frankly is bloody stupid - why do I want to have the bloat of a file manager I never use permanently in memory just to display the desktop background? (This question is coming from someone who has been using X since the days when you used xsetroot to set a backdrop on the root window, and there was no need for any extra software to stay resident).
No sane reason to use Java? I completely agree! I mean, why would you want to ship one build that runs on Windows, OSX AND Linux? That's just crazy talk!</sarcasm>
Did you actually bother to read my post, or did you stop before you got to the bit that said "when you already know what architecture the binaries will be running on when you build them."?
So, are we going to complain about having to go out to RAM and using a lot of it (which is nano-/microseconds away), or are we going to complain about going out to disk/the internet and using very little RAM and taking (milli)seconds?
Your argument only makes sense if the system automatically scales this caching to available resources - the Linux pagecache does this, but most userland processes won't. If I start firefox up on a machine that has 64MB of RAM, it will use exactly the same amount of memory, even though that means it'll be thrashing swap. Also, it's worth pointing out that much of firefox's memory usage is for caching the _rendered_ page - i.e. you can reduce the memory usage by throwing away the rendered page without becoming I/O bound (it just takes more CPU time since you have to parse and rerender the cached HTML and images).
So yes, using memory that would otherwise be empty is good, it makes stuff faster. But using that memory even when it isn't available is really bad because it causes a *massive* performance hit and essentially forces people to upgrade their hardware.