For my money, JavaScript is a nice, simple little language with first-class functions that manages to fake 90% of what I want out of object orientation with simplistic hashes and first class functions. Which is awesome.
Yes, JavaScript (And its equivalent sister language, ActionScript) are sweet little languages with a surprisingly lispy feel. Too bad they're embedded in two of the most frustrating environments known to man (Flash and browsers).
I know studies have found the four day workweek to produce better productivity than the five day, and likewise for a six hour day. Humans are just not made for 8-hour sustained focus.
As for Iain Banks, sure, but outside of science fiction, we're not liable to see that soon. And I question whether it would be a good idea: after all, spending all of your time on hobbies seems like it would be destructive to your sense of meaning/value, a little. But it connects to what I was saying; namely that unemploying people isn't ever the goal: it's shifting things so that people can work a reasonable work-week, have enough to live, and so that as many people can be working interesting/quality jobs as possible, preferably that have some potential lasting result value. Less burger-flippers, more science. Or, even, less burger-flippers, more chefs.
I suppose... the guy who's least likely to continue breaking the law and pushing us into dangerous economic and military conflicts?
Speaking as a former republican (although always a social liberal), I really wish there was a reasonable, either one is ok, let's all be reasonable people sort of choice presented us. But what we have is Obama, who is not ideal, and McCain, who is a continuation of the evil vampires from space that currently run the republican party. So by all means, don't vote Obama if your conscience won't let you. But don't vote for McCain, because you will be demonstrably hurting your country. And I'm not sure four more years of Bushite mismanagement can be sustained.
In actuality, it's more "Drive the working (in desirable, productive jobs) to burnout, while the non-high-end-employable) strive to support themselves, while competing for undesirable work which pays under a living wage, often at multiple places for unsustainable hours.
The welfare queen never fucking existed. Welfare doesn't pay enough to support a single person, and adding family makes it worse. Jobs are harder to find, and those that exist primarily pay under what is required to sustain life at a reasonable standard of living. If you look at inflation-adjusted salaries, we're working more hours and making less (on average), while basic necessities like food and rent are proportionately more expensive. And, there are models in the past for what we're currently suffering from: it's the fucking Gilded Age. We've reversed all of the economic reforms that came out of the great depression, and we're set up for another event like it.
Also, less jobs and more people isn't a good goal. More people working at important/satisfying work is. Less jobs and more people is the setting of Brave New World.
Although I find that a little reductionist, there. I mean, aren't they also vastly different fantasy environments (One light fantasy, one Burroughs-style), different age-ranges (I remember Conan launching AO or M, I could be wrong), and different levels of pre-launch hype/support?
As well as World of Warcraft being the established high-water mark of the genre, and Conan being a rough upstart?
I'm not saying that the technical issue isn't a limiter... I'm just saying that there may be other factors here.
That's true... At the very least, any guaranteed page break should render anything before it kerning-irrelevant. I'm not sure the dynamic recompilation AND redisplay required for WYSIWIG is fast enough, especially on the word-by-word level.
The other problem with WYSIWYG is the inherent difference between view-on-screen and view-on-paper... which is the problem TeX is actually designed for. Example: Word document versus the printed output.
What I would LOVE is a simplified interface for creating (La)TeX styles: I do agree that creating a more than basic one is courting madness, currently.
Hmmm... Not a bad idea, overall, although it seems to me that some specific kerning/layout issues don't resolve well on a character by character level. I mean, isn't that why typesetting programs generally use some sort of compilation stage?
If someone were to do a total rethink/rewrite, and if said person were a genius on the level with Knuth, then by making use of what we know today a new and better typesetting system could probably be created. Getting everyone to agree on anything else would be the biggest problem.
* Emphasis mine.
One of the biggest problems here is that, for such a system to exist, it would have to be created by a hypergenius. A hypergenius that could not only exceed Knuth (Knuth, for Bob's sake!), but do it without resting on the established highest technology in the field (i.e. TeX and packages built around it). Now, there's certainly room for more friendly programs built around this incredibly solid core, but I think a full ditch-and-rewrite is pretty much off the books.
I think the idea is that it would strip all the indentation along with the comments, and then apply rigorous auto-indent (or, possible, indents stored with the sets of comments) of the nature you want.
Either way, I think any advantages of this idea are canceled out by the fact that A)No one would use it, since it complicates producing source code by several factors if you want to make it useful, and B)It complicates the process of getting the functional source + comments mix to start working. I do see how being able to support multilanguage comments would be nice, though. The problem is, they're such ephemeral objects (non-programmatic sense) that the effort of constantly re-translating them when they change would be pretty constant and pointless-feeling.
Except that he didn't say "You don't optimize for situations that take small amounts of time." He said "You don't optimise for incredibly rare situations."
This is more like, for instance, lowering the top of a convertible: It's done, but it's such a small part of operating the car that it doesn't matter that it's slow. Except since this is a rather low-importance (In terms of the program's purpose: to the programmer with the bank account, of course it matters a great deal) operation that will occur only rarely, it doesn't matter as much as, say, atomic commits, which is directly tied to the core function of the software, and potentially affects every single commit.
To speak directly to your analogy, although I only drive my car in reverse 5% of the time (Arbitrary small number), I use reverse drive every time I exit a parking lot, or twice per drive. If reverse drive didn't work, my car would not be functionally parkable except in the rare case where I could drive through in forward. In your additional examples: Yes, you have fog lights, a spare tire, a jack. And these are indeed important. But does changing a tire need to be as easy as reversing a car? No. It just needs to be possible, which it is in both CVS and SVN (Reference comments above for proof).
Linux: Select packet in packet manager, OR get a.deb or.rpm file, then install. If the packet is in the repository, Linux scores some bonus points for convenience but that's all.
I consider the.deb or.rpm file the equivalent of the setup.exe BTW.
What, other than convenience, are we talking about here? Just having the searchable collection of programs is a pretty big step forward, IMHO. It reduces the "Find a program to do this thing" process to one step in a large number of cases, where Windows (Or even OSX) always requires "Find a program externally. Download the program. Install the program." as separate steps.
Also, as a side note, I think having a dedicated package format has advantages over having an install file that's just a specially named (OR NOT, as the case may easily be: Convention isn't always honored) executable file.
You are utterly right that the ease of use we're seeing today is leaps and bounds ahead of where we were just 10 years ago. As recently as 7, I found myself unable to get a printer to function without some serious fiddling. And let's not talk about X11 and the brittleness of its configuration file, shall we not?
In other words, all I'm saying is that it's causing a lot of controversy -- a fact that anyone who knows how to open a search engine can easily verify.
Sorry to be a little pedantic, but a better phrase for that would perhaps be "KDE 4.0 is a very controversial release." From reading the article (and this post), I believe you mean it as you state here. But "Everyone agrees now that KDE 4.0 was a mistake" has a very clearly defined meaning in English, and that meaning is worlds harsher than the intent behind it in this case.
It is possible (Though non-trivial) to parse out from the surrounding context that you are speaking of the release in more general terms than the actual software released (The reference to distributers/users allows this), but even if someone hasn't failed to pick up on this, it's still an accusation of mismanagement, rather than controversy.
Except that there's consistent support from the hosts on one side of the debate, thus making it invariably two on one.
And that's ignoring that their NEWS shows also show rampant bias, poor to nonexistant fact-checking, and deliberate propaganda reporting, as well as just plain dirty tricks (Such as their constant "Obama/Osama" name slip-ups. I'm not saying that they can't have pundits, I'm saying that their regular newscasters, who are positioned as NEWSCASTERS, are engaging in propaganda and punditry while claiming to be delivering factual and unbiased coverage.
As for Keith Olberman... even while delivering an opinion column, the man has an infinitely better record on vetting his sources and producing factual, correct news than Fox News ever has. That's a bad sign, that is.
Given the choice of reading material you put up, I'm assuming this is not the case, but on the internetwebitrons, "rabid anti-zionist" links in to a particular brand of conspiracy-whackjobbed anti-semitism. I think you're identifying with non-support of Israeli policy coupled with non-belief in "the Holy land belongs to Jews on religious grounds," as opposed to "Ah'm a skinhead but don' lahk to let on, then the gummint will take mah kids and guns away."
Assuming you're not looking to identify with that definition, explicit definition of what you mean by anti-zionist might avoid some grief based on the median (perhaps also mode) anti-zionist.
Or, conversely, someone leaves in a Time Machine for 10 years in the future. Until they arrive, it's just a missing persons case, which hardly hits the front page. Of course, it's news when they get there, unless time machines are common/all media have been destroyed by the nuclear holocaust.
Perhaps it's more accurate to say that any hack involving a time machine is newsworthy at some time, presuming news exists at the time that it's worthy of it.
Seriously, the plugin system works so freaking badly. I have had MULTIPLE 3-5 hour install nightmares based around the CDT and the various PHP plugins from a stock Eclipse download.
Not to mention the problems you run into when you have multiple JREs in Linux.
Back in the old days, I used Eclipse because Sun's offering ground my computer to a halt. But today, Eclipse does that, and is impossible to manage plugins-wise.
What I'd really like to see is a no-frills, T9 enabled SSH for non-smart phones. That should be well within their processing capability, and would make the lives of the poorer class of sysadmins much better. Mine included;-)
Re: The simulator, I bow to your superior experience. I was going off of googled information.
I guess I'm just saying that, regardless of how many there are when the app store opens, it is reasonable and valid to point out that, right now, there's not really a workable solution in place. I think an accurate statement right now would be that the iPhone has the capability to host a first class SSH client, but currently doesn't have one.
Right now there is no limit to the number of people that can develop apps, as a terminal could easily be developed on the simulator. When the SDK comes out of Beta there will also be no limit to the number of people that can deploy apps on phones using the SDK.
The simulator is not quite the same thing as the actual iPhone in terms of development. It replicates the iPhone browser environment, which is a subtly different proposition. And while yes, web-based SSH terminals can run in the iPhone browser, that's substantially different than having a genuine native SSH client. For one thing, it requires server-side installation that someone may not have the authority or desire to do.
As for the "When the SDK comes out of beta," well, again we hit a fairly nebulous future target date.
As for the "ONE MINUTE" thing, seriously, stop being a jackass. No amount of ridicule is going to equal out to the actual point brought up, which is that right now, I could buy a Nokia e70 and have SSH natively right now, whereas if I walked into a store and bought an iPhone, I would have to configure my server with webshell or similar to have the same functionality.
I'm not hating on the iPhone, but I am hating on a mentality that interprets valid problems and potential issues as "haterism."
Well, actually... If he were, say, going on vacation tomorrow, and needed to have the phone before he left, then he wouldn't have the option of waiting a month.
And that assumes that the limited pool of vendors who can officially work on the iPhone produce an SSH tool, or that he's willing to crack the iPhone for homebrew software which you would again have to assume was there, in a month. Maybe one of these is true, but neither of these assumptions is anywhere near certain. You also assume that whichever of these comes to fruition will incorporate a specific technology (The custom keyboard layout) which is just one possibility out of many.
Really, since his question is "What smartphone is best for system administration over SSH," not "Which smartphone has the capability to host the best version of SSH in the near future," you're basically side-stepping his actual question and the very real points brought up against the iPhone.
The custom-keyboard for SSH is a pretty clever idea, though, and seems like it would produce a pretty good SSH interface.
Slashdot Mirror
Bravo!
For my money, JavaScript is a nice, simple little language with first-class functions that manages to fake 90% of what I want out of object orientation with simplistic hashes and first class functions. Which is awesome.
Yes, JavaScript (And its equivalent sister language, ActionScript) are sweet little languages with a surprisingly lispy feel. Too bad they're embedded in two of the most frustrating environments known to man (Flash and browsers).
I know studies have found the four day workweek to produce better productivity than the five day, and likewise for a six hour day. Humans are just not made for 8-hour sustained focus.
As for Iain Banks, sure, but outside of science fiction, we're not liable to see that soon. And I question whether it would be a good idea: after all, spending all of your time on hobbies seems like it would be destructive to your sense of meaning/value, a little. But it connects to what I was saying; namely that unemploying people isn't ever the goal: it's shifting things so that people can work a reasonable work-week, have enough to live, and so that as many people can be working interesting/quality jobs as possible, preferably that have some potential lasting result value. Less burger-flippers, more science. Or, even, less burger-flippers, more chefs.
I suppose... the guy who's least likely to continue breaking the law and pushing us into dangerous economic and military conflicts?
Speaking as a former republican (although always a social liberal), I really wish there was a reasonable, either one is ok, let's all be reasonable people sort of choice presented us. But what we have is Obama, who is not ideal, and McCain, who is a continuation of the evil vampires from space that currently run the republican party. So by all means, don't vote Obama if your conscience won't let you. But don't vote for McCain, because you will be demonstrably hurting your country. And I'm not sure four more years of Bushite mismanagement can be sustained.
In actuality, it's more "Drive the working (in desirable, productive jobs) to burnout, while the non-high-end-employable) strive to support themselves, while competing for undesirable work which pays under a living wage, often at multiple places for unsustainable hours.
The welfare queen never fucking existed. Welfare doesn't pay enough to support a single person, and adding family makes it worse. Jobs are harder to find, and those that exist primarily pay under what is required to sustain life at a reasonable standard of living. If you look at inflation-adjusted salaries, we're working more hours and making less (on average), while basic necessities like food and rent are proportionately more expensive. And, there are models in the past for what we're currently suffering from: it's the fucking Gilded Age. We've reversed all of the economic reforms that came out of the great depression, and we're set up for another event like it.
Also, less jobs and more people isn't a good goal. More people working at important/satisfying work is. Less jobs and more people is the setting of Brave New World.
Although I find that a little reductionist, there. I mean, aren't they also vastly different fantasy environments (One light fantasy, one Burroughs-style), different age-ranges (I remember Conan launching AO or M, I could be wrong), and different levels of pre-launch hype/support?
As well as World of Warcraft being the established high-water mark of the genre, and Conan being a rough upstart?
I'm not saying that the technical issue isn't a limiter... I'm just saying that there may be other factors here.
That's true... At the very least, any guaranteed page break should render anything before it kerning-irrelevant. I'm not sure the dynamic recompilation AND redisplay required for WYSIWIG is fast enough, especially on the word-by-word level.
The other problem with WYSIWYG is the inherent difference between view-on-screen and view-on-paper... which is the problem TeX is actually designed for. Example: Word document versus the printed output.
What I would LOVE is a simplified interface for creating (La)TeX styles: I do agree that creating a more than basic one is courting madness, currently.
Hmmm... Not a bad idea, overall, although it seems to me that some specific kerning/layout issues don't resolve well on a character by character level. I mean, isn't that why typesetting programs generally use some sort of compilation stage?
* Emphasis mine.
One of the biggest problems here is that, for such a system to exist, it would have to be created by a hypergenius. A hypergenius that could not only exceed Knuth (Knuth, for Bob's sake!), but do it without resting on the established highest technology in the field (i.e. TeX and packages built around it). Now, there's certainly room for more friendly programs built around this incredibly solid core, but I think a full ditch-and-rewrite is pretty much off the books.
I think the idea is that it would strip all the indentation along with the comments, and then apply rigorous auto-indent (or, possible, indents stored with the sets of comments) of the nature you want. Either way, I think any advantages of this idea are canceled out by the fact that A)No one would use it, since it complicates producing source code by several factors if you want to make it useful, and B)It complicates the process of getting the functional source + comments mix to start working. I do see how being able to support multilanguage comments would be nice, though. The problem is, they're such ephemeral objects (non-programmatic sense) that the effort of constantly re-translating them when they change would be pretty constant and pointless-feeling.
Mod parent up.
You sir or madam, are an absolute gem.
Except that he didn't say "You don't optimize for situations that take small amounts of time." He said "You don't optimise for incredibly rare situations."
This is more like, for instance, lowering the top of a convertible: It's done, but it's such a small part of operating the car that it doesn't matter that it's slow. Except since this is a rather low-importance (In terms of the program's purpose: to the programmer with the bank account, of course it matters a great deal) operation that will occur only rarely, it doesn't matter as much as, say, atomic commits, which is directly tied to the core function of the software, and potentially affects every single commit.
To speak directly to your analogy, although I only drive my car in reverse 5% of the time (Arbitrary small number), I use reverse drive every time I exit a parking lot, or twice per drive. If reverse drive didn't work, my car would not be functionally parkable except in the rare case where I could drive through in forward. In your additional examples: Yes, you have fog lights, a spare tire, a jack. And these are indeed important. But does changing a tire need to be as easy as reversing a car? No. It just needs to be possible, which it is in both CVS and SVN (Reference comments above for proof).
What, other than convenience, are we talking about here? Just having the searchable collection of programs is a pretty big step forward, IMHO. It reduces the "Find a program to do this thing" process to one step in a large number of cases, where Windows (Or even OSX) always requires "Find a program externally. Download the program. Install the program." as separate steps.
Also, as a side note, I think having a dedicated package format has advantages over having an install file that's just a specially named (OR NOT, as the case may easily be: Convention isn't always honored) executable file.
You are utterly right that the ease of use we're seeing today is leaps and bounds ahead of where we were just 10 years ago. As recently as 7, I found myself unable to get a printer to function without some serious fiddling. And let's not talk about X11 and the brittleness of its configuration file, shall we not?
Sorry to be a little pedantic, but a better phrase for that would perhaps be "KDE 4.0 is a very controversial release." From reading the article (and this post), I believe you mean it as you state here. But "Everyone agrees now that KDE 4.0 was a mistake" has a very clearly defined meaning in English, and that meaning is worlds harsher than the intent behind it in this case.
It is possible (Though non-trivial) to parse out from the surrounding context that you are speaking of the release in more general terms than the actual software released (The reference to distributers/users allows this), but even if someone hasn't failed to pick up on this, it's still an accusation of mismanagement, rather than controversy.
Otherwise a very informative article.
Except that there's consistent support from the hosts on one side of the debate, thus making it invariably two on one.
And that's ignoring that their NEWS shows also show rampant bias, poor to nonexistant fact-checking, and deliberate propaganda reporting, as well as just plain dirty tricks (Such as their constant "Obama/Osama" name slip-ups. I'm not saying that they can't have pundits, I'm saying that their regular newscasters, who are positioned as NEWSCASTERS, are engaging in propaganda and punditry while claiming to be delivering factual and unbiased coverage.
As for Keith Olberman... even while delivering an opinion column, the man has an infinitely better record on vetting his sources and producing factual, correct news than Fox News ever has. That's a bad sign, that is.
Is... is that Klingon?
Experience beeJ! (Spelling may not be accurate, source is the Star Trek Interactive VCR Board Game.
Given the choice of reading material you put up, I'm assuming this is not the case, but on the internetwebitrons, "rabid anti-zionist" links in to a particular brand of conspiracy-whackjobbed anti-semitism. I think you're identifying with non-support of Israeli policy coupled with non-belief in "the Holy land belongs to Jews on religious grounds," as opposed to "Ah'm a skinhead but don' lahk to let on, then the gummint will take mah kids and guns away."
Assuming you're not looking to identify with that definition, explicit definition of what you mean by anti-zionist might avoid some grief based on the median (perhaps also mode) anti-zionist.
Or, conversely, someone leaves in a Time Machine for 10 years in the future. Until they arrive, it's just a missing persons case, which hardly hits the front page. Of course, it's news when they get there, unless time machines are common/all media have been destroyed by the nuclear holocaust.
Perhaps it's more accurate to say that any hack involving a time machine is newsworthy at some time, presuming news exists at the time that it's worthy of it.
Maybe it's just me, but I've had trouble getting it to stay configured with one JRE without using command-line options.
I think we can all agree that any hack involving a time machine is newsworthy.
Seriously, the plugin system works so freaking badly. I have had MULTIPLE 3-5 hour install nightmares based around the CDT and the various PHP plugins from a stock Eclipse download.
Not to mention the problems you run into when you have multiple JREs in Linux.
Back in the old days, I used Eclipse because Sun's offering ground my computer to a halt. But today, Eclipse does that, and is impossible to manage plugins-wise.
That's certainly fair.
What I'd really like to see is a no-frills, T9 enabled SSH for non-smart phones. That should be well within their processing capability, and would make the lives of the poorer class of sysadmins much better. Mine included ;-)
Re: The simulator, I bow to your superior experience. I was going off of googled information.
I guess I'm just saying that, regardless of how many there are when the app store opens, it is reasonable and valid to point out that, right now, there's not really a workable solution in place. I think an accurate statement right now would be that the iPhone has the capability to host a first class SSH client, but currently doesn't have one.
The simulator is not quite the same thing as the actual iPhone in terms of development. It replicates the iPhone browser environment, which is a subtly different proposition. And while yes, web-based SSH terminals can run in the iPhone browser, that's substantially different than having a genuine native SSH client. For one thing, it requires server-side installation that someone may not have the authority or desire to do.
As for the "When the SDK comes out of beta," well, again we hit a fairly nebulous future target date.
As for the "ONE MINUTE" thing, seriously, stop being a jackass. No amount of ridicule is going to equal out to the actual point brought up, which is that right now, I could buy a Nokia e70 and have SSH natively right now, whereas if I walked into a store and bought an iPhone, I would have to configure my server with webshell or similar to have the same functionality.
I'm not hating on the iPhone, but I am hating on a mentality that interprets valid problems and potential issues as "haterism."
Slight correction: There is currently a jailbreak method to enable SSH for iPhone. Nothing official, though.
Well, actually... If he were, say, going on vacation tomorrow, and needed to have the phone before he left, then he wouldn't have the option of waiting a month.
And that assumes that the limited pool of vendors who can officially work on the iPhone produce an SSH tool, or that he's willing to crack the iPhone for homebrew software which you would again have to assume was there, in a month. Maybe one of these is true, but neither of these assumptions is anywhere near certain. You also assume that whichever of these comes to fruition will incorporate a specific technology (The custom keyboard layout) which is just one possibility out of many.
Really, since his question is "What smartphone is best for system administration over SSH," not "Which smartphone has the capability to host the best version of SSH in the near future," you're basically side-stepping his actual question and the very real points brought up against the iPhone.
The custom-keyboard for SSH is a pretty clever idea, though, and seems like it would produce a pretty good SSH interface.