my whole workflow is based on the quaintly named "classic desktop model" where screens and windows don't magically resize and change position (...) I'd switch to LXDE or XFCE, but they're a little too light-weight for my taste
What does "a little too light-weight" mean? Something like JWM or icewm?**
LXDE has a useful set of features and it won't waste your time with unwanted "special effects". If you really are frustrated by the barkers at the KDE-Gnome-Mate-Cinnamon desktop carnival, I suggest that you try Debian LXDE or even Lubuntu.
The configurable simplicity of LXDE is the main reason to use it. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_X_window_managers)
One of the main reasons why the Debian folks switched from Gnome to XFCE was that they couldn't fit Gnome on a CD anymore. The fact that the market is abandoning optical disks in favour of USB/SDHC booting doesn't mean that I want KDE/Gnome bloat.
**Disclaimer: I use icewm on my Raspberry Pi(s). The icewm DE light, simple, and easy to understand. Oh yeah, and the R.Pi won't run much else very well anyway. (o;
"Due to being in a relationship with a comics geek"
This must mean that you are a girl who enjoys basement lodging. Therefore, your post is false and was either submitted by a program that won the Turing Test or by a CIA operative.
It's 2014 and Slashdot is full of Golden-Age Comics.
I use Seamonkey with Adblock Plus and No Script. I also block all third party cookies. I'm also considering adding Ghostery to the mix. This takes care of most of the trackers, cookies, ads, etc.
Not Ghostery -- it has a dubious mission and works by parsing lists that are growing longer by the week. Try the Request Policy extension for Firefox. Request Policy is simpler. It blocks off-site requests and shows you a list of what each site is requesting. You'll learn just how much tracking is happening and you may begin to avoid sites that you used to trust.
The latest Firefox has a "click to play" feature. Type "about:config" and search for "click_".
I have not used Linux on a desktop in years, and I am yet to touch Windows 8, so I can't comment there.
I prefer Linux on my desktop in every way. Just don't buy Nvidia and Broadcom hardware. Linux provides the tools that show exactly what your computer is doing. Debian 7 is excellent.
Windows 8, like ChromeOS, ties your computer to an e-mail account. Stay away.
We're in the golden age for software development. I prefer an "open" solution like the Beagleboard but I received an R.Pi v2 for free and have made it part of my low-power dev environment. I'll describe this environment for the amusement of ye 'dotters.
I installed a $10 hardware clock in the R.Pi and I power the it with a spare power cord from an Amazon Kindle.
I run Raspbian (Debian) with Icewm DE. I use the R.Pi for coding (Java, C++, Perl, Go) and I push Mercurial updates to a code repo on a Sheevaplug running Debian Wheezy. The Sheevaplug's power supply had failed (typical problem, melted capacitors) but I wired the mainboard to an AC adaptor from a USB hub.
I've overclocked the R.Pi to 900MHz. This isn't enough CPU to browse the Internet directly from the R.Pi with Iceweasel/Firefox, but Midori and NetSurf work well enough. On a Pogoplug V2 (running Debian, you see the pattern here), I have lighttpd and a Perl program that fetches and summarises RSS feeds for me. I can view the RSS summary from the R.Pi using NetSurf or Midori. (Dillo doesn't do tables well.)
When I need to do Web research that requires Flash or special plug-ins, I use rdesktop to connect to a VM instance of Firefox (M-Windows XP or Debian) installed on an AMD box running VMware ESXi server. ESXi server is free.
I have all this running with an APC battery back-up. The APC unit can run for some time with only the ARM kit to power. I have another APC UPS feeding my modem, router, and assorted switches.
It's a versatile dev environment and it didn't cost much. None of it would be possible without Linux. I'll say it again: this is a golden age for software developers.
I once had a job in the EduBubble where I had to learn SAS. It's a language could only survive in the EduBubble, which is at least 15 years behind in technology and 25 years behind in thinking.
If R isn't a well designed language, at least it is free, open source, and capable.
For the sake of order on this sadly degenerating News for Nerds site, please add your post to this parent if the essence of your "thinking" is one of the following:
= LibreOffice is not MS Office, therefore it's crap. = LibreOffice uses Java, which everyone know is not as fast and portable as.NET. = LibreOffice lacks MS Office proprietary features and misfeatures, therefore it disappoints me terribly. = LibreOffice doesn't read or write the constantly mutating, rubbish file formats of MS Office the way only MS Office can. = LibreOffice isn't backed by a large corporation that Only Wants The Best For Me. = LibreOffice is bloated, and I insist on the lean responsiveness and stability of MS Office! = LibreOffice doesn't have ribbons to help me not find features that I used to use.
How you resolve your cognitive dissonance is your personal matter. You abandon intellectual integrity and the practice of science when you talk rubbish.
Citizen: Help! Randian Nutbag! My house is on fire!
RN: Contemptible Weakling, if you were strong, I would help you. Or perhaps I would murder you and take everything that makes you strong. That certainly would be an option for a Heroic Spirit. But you are weak and destined for failure.
Citizen: My family is in the house! Oh, save them!
RN: Pusillanimous Conformist Vermin, you have bred hapless, dependent whelps as pathetic as yourself. You are weak and destined for failure. I am indifferent to your suffering. { begins to fly away }
Citizen: W-wh-where are you going?
RN: To collect my welfare cheque. I am *not* indifferent to my own suffering.
And I expect that a highly numerate society would understand the probabilities well enough not to wage open war against a numerically superior adversary.
There are many forces apart from incompetence acting upon any non-trivial software project. There are compromises to be made, and risks to be evaluated.
In short, there are factors that have nothing to do with the code that affect the quality of code.
The larger the organisation, the greater the tendency towards failure to understand, failure to communicate, and failure to complete. It isn't simply a question of architects, coders, testers, and documenters doing their very best.
There are some coding projects that are as essential as housing, in the sense that defects might cause death. But the majority of coding done in the world is slapped together and discarded within a five-year cycle.
What the heck, if it's for revenue recognition, release the prototype and hire e-workers to post favourable comments on some Web sites!
... except that it's not, despite several similar obituaries having been published.
With all due respect to "language companies" and all the script kiddies coming out of universities today, C and Perl are the stable tools. They will remain important for any work requiring stability.
Most "alternative" languages mentioned in this discussion have broken backwards compatibility at least once, have serious performance and other internal problems, and don't come close to the practical effectiveness of C and Perl.
Perl 6 is a new language. I have played with it and I think it is evolving with the right principles.
The next big challenge to serious programmers is concurrency. Functional programming is the only solution, but let's acknowledge that functional programming is nowhere near becoming the norm. It's very difficult to master, especially for OOP-damaged, pattern-deranged programmers and their IDEs of Desperation.
Having said all this, I'll add that tools will change. Fads come and go, but the tools that do the real work in the most efficient way are always at the top of a smart coder's tool box. Including a Fad Detector.
The US market for guns is more than 300 million people. Gun ownership in Canada and the UK, to cite figures from nations that have gun-control laws, is at about 30%. Gun ownership in the US is at about 80%.
So, the probability of a gun in the US being in the hands of a crazy person is very high.
The probability of a gun in the US being in the hands of a person who will *go crazy* at some point is also high.
The guns won't go away -- there are too many of them now, and a profitable, constitutionally protected gun business with a huge market will do whatever it must to keep producing and selling.
The only practical options for gun ownership are
constraints on types of weapons and quantity of ammunition for citizens, and annual psychological testing of gun owners.
Other famous Microsoft Moments In Time (MMITs) that were not Actual Problems:
= 8.3 filenames = Microsoft Bob = Windows XP security = Microsoft Windows Vista, *.* = Microsoft advertisement in which Seinfeld asks Bill Gates to "adjust his shorts" = Microsoft Zune, whether brown or not = Chief Executive Orificer, Squirts Ballmer, *.* = Microsoft advertisement for the Surface tablet in which ungraceful, robotic people coordinate senseless movements that no one would ever do in reality... if anyone bought a Surface tablet in reality
Slashdot Mirror
Do you know your device?
Do not let anything connect to the Internet if you don't know why it should.
And I say this as a Christian rather than the typical rabid atheist Slashdot poster
I don't have rabies, you insensitive clod!
my whole workflow is based on the quaintly named "classic desktop model" where screens and windows don't magically resize and change position (...) I'd switch to LXDE or XFCE, but they're a little too light-weight for my taste
What does "a little too light-weight" mean? Something like JWM or icewm?**
LXDE has a useful set of features and it won't waste your time with unwanted "special effects". If you really are frustrated by the barkers at the KDE-Gnome-Mate-Cinnamon desktop carnival, I suggest that you try Debian LXDE or even Lubuntu.
The configurable simplicity of LXDE is the main reason to use it. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_X_window_managers)
One of the main reasons why the Debian folks switched from Gnome to XFCE was that they couldn't fit Gnome on a CD anymore. The fact that the market is abandoning optical disks in favour of USB/SDHC booting doesn't mean that I want KDE/Gnome bloat.
**Disclaimer: I use icewm on my Raspberry Pi(s). The icewm DE light, simple, and easy to understand. Oh yeah, and the R.Pi won't run much else very well anyway. (o;
"Due to being in a relationship with a comics geek"
This must mean that you are a girl who enjoys basement lodging. Therefore, your post is false and was either submitted by a program that won the Turing Test or by a CIA operative.
It's 2014 and Slashdot is full of Golden-Age Comics.
For music that I want to hear in its entirety, I use cdrdao to rip an entire audio disc to a single file. I use mplayer to play the file.
Here's the howto:
https://forums.freebsd.org/vie...
mplayer is available for Windows too.
I use Seamonkey with Adblock Plus and No Script. I also block all third party cookies. I'm also considering adding Ghostery to the mix. This takes care of most of the trackers, cookies, ads, etc.
Not Ghostery -- it has a dubious mission and works by parsing lists that are growing longer by the week. Try the Request Policy extension for Firefox. Request Policy is simpler. It blocks off-site requests and shows you a list of what each site is requesting. You'll learn just how much tracking is happening and you may begin to avoid sites that you used to trust.
The latest Firefox has a "click to play" feature. Type "about:config" and search for "click_".
I have not used Linux on a desktop in years, and I am yet to touch Windows 8, so I can't comment there.
I prefer Linux on my desktop in every way. Just don't buy Nvidia and Broadcom hardware. Linux provides the tools that show exactly what your computer is doing. Debian 7 is excellent.
Windows 8, like ChromeOS, ties your computer to an e-mail account. Stay away.
We're in the golden age for software development. I prefer an "open" solution like the Beagleboard but I received an R.Pi v2 for free and have made it part of my low-power dev environment. I'll describe this environment for the amusement of ye 'dotters.
I installed a $10 hardware clock in the R.Pi and I power the it with a spare power cord from an Amazon Kindle.
I run Raspbian (Debian) with Icewm DE. I use the R.Pi for coding (Java, C++, Perl, Go) and I push Mercurial updates to a code repo on a Sheevaplug running Debian Wheezy. The Sheevaplug's power supply had failed (typical problem, melted capacitors) but I wired the mainboard to an AC adaptor from a USB hub.
I've overclocked the R.Pi to 900MHz. This isn't enough CPU to browse the Internet directly from the R.Pi with Iceweasel/Firefox, but Midori and NetSurf work well enough. On a Pogoplug V2 (running Debian, you see the pattern here), I have lighttpd and a Perl program that fetches and summarises RSS feeds for me. I can view the RSS summary from the R.Pi using NetSurf or Midori. (Dillo doesn't do tables well.)
When I need to do Web research that requires Flash or special plug-ins, I use rdesktop to connect to a VM instance of Firefox (M-Windows XP or Debian) installed on an AMD box running VMware ESXi server. ESXi server is free.
I have all this running with an APC battery back-up. The APC unit can run for some time with only the ARM kit to power. I have another APC UPS feeding my modem, router, and assorted switches.
It's a versatile dev environment and it didn't cost much. None of it would be possible without Linux. I'll say it again: this is a golden age for software developers.
a senseless waist of human life
Kardashian is working on this too?
A factoid is not a fact.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factoid
The only "factoid of interest" is that Slashdot may have editors.
I once had a job in the EduBubble where I had to learn SAS. It's a language could only survive in the EduBubble, which is at least 15 years behind in technology and 25 years behind in thinking.
If R isn't a well designed language, at least it is free, open source, and capable.
If this is true, then it proves once again these truisms of a military-based capitalist economy:
= Politicians serve their economic masters.
= When the rich declare war, poor kids are sent to die.
= The betrayal of the credulous happens every day.
Welcome to the oligarchy folks, it's all down from here.
In other breaking news, the Egyptian foreign minister just announced the completion of the Great Pyramid of Giza.
Great, now I will know what the function with the following comment does:
"Gott vergib mir, das ist eine schreckliche Hack!"
For the sake of order on this sadly degenerating News for Nerds site, please add your post to this parent if the essence of your "thinking" is one of the following:
= LibreOffice is not MS Office, therefore it's crap. .NET.
= LibreOffice uses Java, which everyone know is not as fast and portable as
= LibreOffice lacks MS Office proprietary features and misfeatures, therefore it disappoints me terribly.
= LibreOffice doesn't read or write the constantly mutating, rubbish file formats of MS Office the way only MS Office can.
= LibreOffice isn't backed by a large corporation that Only Wants The Best For Me.
= LibreOffice is bloated, and I insist on the lean responsiveness and stability of MS Office!
= LibreOffice doesn't have ribbons to help me not find features that I used to use.
How you resolve your cognitive dissonance is your personal matter. You abandon intellectual integrity and the practice of science when you talk rubbish.
Citizen: Help! Randian Nutbag! My house is on fire!
RN: Contemptible Weakling, if you were strong, I would help you. Or perhaps I would murder you and take everything that makes you strong. That certainly would be an option for a Heroic Spirit. But you are weak and destined for failure.
Citizen: My family is in the house! Oh, save them!
RN: Pusillanimous Conformist Vermin, you have bred hapless, dependent whelps as pathetic as yourself. You are weak and destined for failure. I am indifferent to your suffering. { begins to fly away }
Citizen: W-wh-where are you going?
RN: To collect my welfare cheque. I am *not* indifferent to my own suffering.
> I'm no economist, but
That's ok, they don't know what they're talking about either.
And I expect that a highly numerate society would understand the probabilities well enough not to wage open war against a numerically superior adversary.
Hence the "global economy" that we have today.
There are many forces apart from incompetence acting upon any non-trivial software project. There are compromises to be made, and risks to be evaluated.
In short, there are factors that have nothing to do with the code that affect the quality of code.
The larger the organisation, the greater the tendency towards failure to understand, failure to communicate, and failure to complete. It isn't simply a question of architects, coders, testers, and documenters doing their very best.
There are some coding projects that are as essential as housing, in the sense that defects might cause death. But the majority of coding done in the world is slapped together and discarded within a five-year cycle.
What the heck, if it's for revenue recognition, release the prototype and hire e-workers to post favourable comments on some Web sites!
To paraphrase the Shat, "Bad code... survives."
... except that it's not, despite several similar obituaries having been published.
With all due respect to "language companies" and all the script kiddies coming out of universities today, C and Perl are the stable tools. They will remain important for any work requiring stability.
Most "alternative" languages mentioned in this discussion have broken backwards compatibility at least once, have serious performance and other internal problems, and don't come close to the practical effectiveness of C and Perl.
Perl 6 is a new language. I have played with it and I think it is evolving with the right principles.
The next big challenge to serious programmers is concurrency. Functional programming is the only solution, but let's acknowledge that functional programming is nowhere near becoming the norm. It's very difficult to master, especially for OOP-damaged, pattern-deranged programmers and their IDEs of Desperation.
Having said all this, I'll add that tools will change. Fads come and go, but the tools that do the real work in the most efficient way are always at the top of a smart coder's tool box. Including a Fad Detector.
> We have a messed up society.
What the US has is a constitutionally protected gun business.
There are more than 20 US manufacturers of guns. This business is worth about $30 billion a year (
http://www.csmonitor.com/Business/2013/0103/A-look-at-America-s-gun-industry).
The US market for guns is more than 300 million people. Gun ownership in Canada and the UK, to cite figures from nations that have gun-control laws, is at about 30%. Gun ownership in the US is at about 80%.
So, the probability of a gun in the US being in the hands of a crazy person is very high.
The probability of a gun in the US being in the hands of a person who will *go crazy* at some point is also high.
The guns won't go away -- there are too many of them now, and a profitable, constitutionally protected gun business with a huge market will do whatever it must to keep producing and selling.
The only practical options for gun ownership are
constraints on types of weapons and quantity of ammunition for citizens, and
annual psychological testing of gun owners.
In short, political suicide.
> I can't help but to see bitter jealousy
You probably mean "envy".
And if so, you'll need to explain how you think RMS demonstrates envy of the late Thermonuclear Patent Litigator.
"Steve Jobs is praised for the elegant styling of the jails he designed"
Well said, RMS.
Other famous Microsoft Moments In Time (MMITs) that were not Actual Problems:
= 8.3 filenames
= Microsoft Bob
= Windows XP security
= Microsoft Windows Vista, *.*
= Microsoft advertisement in which Seinfeld asks Bill Gates to "adjust his shorts"
= Microsoft Zune, whether brown or not
= Chief Executive Orificer, Squirts Ballmer, *.*
= Microsoft advertisement for the Surface tablet in which ungraceful, robotic people coordinate senseless movements that no one would ever do in reality... if anyone bought a Surface tablet in reality
Demon-Haunted World - Sagan
Portable Atheist - Hitchens
Unpopular Essays - Russell
Once a mind has escaped ignorance, there are plenty of laughs to be had at the expense of tribalism and tradition. There's your whimsy, too. (o;