First off it's not a DE it's a WM. A Window Manager, not some Detestedesktop Environment.
And while it's not my WM of choice, there is a lot to be said for a WM rather than a DE. It has a lot lower requirements in terms of memory or storage or dependencies, and it also has a lot less junk to get in the way of its core functionality. And since the codebase is smaller it's much less difficult to audit as well.
There are several great old WMs out there that are mature, feature-complete, and nearly bug-free at this point. Companies arent interested (companies make profits selling latest and greatest and herding customers on the upgrade treadmill) and unfortunately in many cases neither are coders (maintaining a project that releases two updates to stomp minor bugs over 3 years does sound slightly boring, and isnt likely to help much in a job interview either I guess.
A lot of people will roll their eyes and talk about how this would supposedly weigh the system down. But it would not have to do so at all. Gnu systems can do this, if you care to set up all the requisite emulators/not-emulators, and dont mind some lack of polish. A modern PC can run all this old software in an emulator without bloating the (by todays standards, extremely modest) requirements of the old software by enough to really notice in most cases. You know why they dont do it?
Because they make money from selling new software. And for decades now they have driven demand for new software by deliberately breaking old software. Just like everyone else in the industry.
And in this case the appropriate response would have been to offer him immunity from prosecution to back and testify at the trial for all the other criminals whose actions he exposed. We do that routinely in cases with real bad guys who have no extenuating circumstances or qualities other than their testimony. In Snowdens case, his lawbreaking appears to have been motivated by the highest and most admirable of motivations - a will to obey the oath he took to the Constitution.
Of course the fact is the last thing the powers that be want is to prosecute the other criminals he exposed, which is why they dont want him to come back and will do all they can do discourage rather than encourage his return.
"I was consistently talking about the developers perspective, not the user! "
OK.
"If you think editing configure.ac and Makefile.am files is easy to learn, I bow to your brilliance, but myself and many others don't share this experience."
I dont think it's any harder than lots of other things that developers have to do routinely. Certainly in my experience it is much easier than trying to grapple with e.g. RPM packaging.
"Binary tarballs, as you say, are limited/useless"
I didnt say that at all. They are great! But not all distros are compatible. And it's not the developers job to fix the broken distribution.
" (dependency hell, different architectures)"
Different architectures require recompilation, obviously. Make is the best tool for that. Dependency hell? If I understand you correctly that is a package manager problem. It used to drive me nuts years ago trying to get RedHat to work, but I have used Slackware for decades without seeing anything like it.
"Sorry, but it *is* difficult to get from a compilable program to a distributable program that Linux users can try out easily."
A bare assertion with no logic or evidence behind it that directly contradicts experience.
"You suggest tarballs, meaning configure && make && make install. That means you need to deal with automake and friends which are insanely obscure and hard to learn."
What 'deal with?' What on earth do you mean. You type a command and press enter, a command simple enough you embedded it in your first sentence. If that is 'difficult' for you to 'deal with' I suggest you try something a little simpler than a general purpose computer.
And anyway I said only tarballs I didnt say anything about source tarballs. Binary tarballs are another very easy way to install a program, even easier than source tarballs, although compatibility may be more limited.
"The alternative is to make packages and get them into the offical repos. You have to do that for a couple of distributions, and probably test the installation on them as well. That is a large effort for a developer."
No, as a developer, you should not be making packages (except possibly for the distro you personally use.) Many distributions these days are crufty with proprietary junk and keeping up with all the little peculiarities of each distribution IS actually a lot more effort than typing 'make'. That job is best left in the hands of people who are intimately familiar with their distribution and have the motivation to tolerate its insanities.
That's bad advice. Publish a proper tarball and let Debian customise it for Debian, Ubuntu for Ubuntu, etc. Do one job well, dont try to do everything.
Even though I dont agree with you I will commend you for focusing on the key issue instead of chasing down side-alleys. But in fact your analysis, while commonly held, is fundamentally incorrect. These are not biological divisions but simple *statistical differences* - and much, much smaller than the differences between individuals of the same 'race.' You can redraw your *race* lines in a hundred different pseudo-random ways and get several hundred different groups that will all be somewhat mushily distinguishable on the basis of tiny statistical differences but that doesnt mean there is any real biological division there. The difference between two individuals is typically orders of magnitude larger than the differences between these supposed races.
Which indicates clearly they dont really exist. They are socially constructed categories given added and undeserved credibility by the assumption that they reflect a biological reality to which, in fact, they bear little to no resemblance.
Syria has chemical weapons, and has declined to sign the chemical weapons treaty, so they have every right to keep them. What they have denied (quite credibly) is having *used* them.
You are simply wrong. In common usage, race comes out nearly the same as ethnicity, but it is not an exact synonym. The distinction is that race carries with it the notion of biological division, which ethnicity does not imply. And it is precisely that element of biological division which does not, in fact, exist among humans today.
In fact we dont know what RdRand does. It is completely un-auditable. THAT is why it should never, ever, be used as a sole source of entropy for any operation.
Yes, Matt did the right thing there and Linus' responses on the RdRand issue have seemed entirely out of character for him. So out of character I am sure I am not the only one wondering if he is being blackmailed somehow.
"It's all the same."
No, actually, it's not all the same. Racism is unique in that it is prejudice based entirely on delusion. Men and women really are different on a biological level - I am not saying that excuses sexism, but sex itself is not something we just invented and assign arbitrarily, it's a real biological distinction. Race is not.
"Are you really going to ignore my point because of semantics?"
I am really going to point out when the point you thought you were making is inaccessible or unclear at best, because of your lack of semantic hygiene. You bet.
Semantic hygiene is extremely important if you wish to be able to think clearly and communicate clearly. If you think that semantics is somehow trivial or unimportant? You need to rethink that and find your error.
Unfortunately you may have to improve your semantic hygiene before you will be able to think clearly enough to realise how important it is. Kind of a chicken and egg problem there I guess.
No, actually, 'race' is a flat out delusion. It is distinct from ethnicity and implies a biological connection (between members of a purported race) as well as biological separation (between the purported races) neither of which actually exists.
It's not impossible to have multiple human races on the planet - it's happened before and it might well happen again. But the last human race besides our own, the Neanderthals, have been extinct for quite some time now, and all living humans are clearly of the same race.
"Let's face reality here - so long as there are obviously different races, there will be racism; it's an inevitability."
Let's face reality here - all humans are clearly members of one race. Racism is the *delusion* to the contrary. Apparently it is a delusion you have yet to free yourself from.
You need to set your own mind free before you can help others with their own.
The e-cig just has a battery and an 'atomizer' which is really nothing but a heating element and a liquid reservoir. The juice should contain nothing but PG, VG, water, flavor, and nicotine.
Nothing is "completely safe" but this is about as close as you can get. One thing to remember is that taste varies greatly, and nothing you will get out of a vaporiser is going to truly taste like burning vegetable matter. So it can take some sampling to find a flavor that you actually like.
It is a sad and shameful fact of American society that we have become more, not less, tribal since the Constitution was written, and a large number of us today do not seem to understand that other people have rights to.
In practice, written Chinese still reflects Mandarin - the phonology isnt encoded, but the grammar and syntax are. Word choice is affected as well - some words have direct equivalents often cognates with the same meaning but others do not.
In practice literary Chinese encodes Mandarin and some familiarity with Mandarin is needed for speakers of other Chinese 'dialects' to become fluent with it. In practice it is not felt to be a complete method for encoding non-Mandarin speech either. Although it's very convenient for the central authorities to believe otherwise.
It's also a market where the customer almost never understands what they are buying. The salescritters certainly never understand what they are selling. Just witness all the babble about 'speed' when they arent talking about speed at all, but throughput. (If you have difficulty understanding the difference, consider a Ferrari vs a Road Train. Which one is faster? According to the marketing materials from every ISP I have ever seen, the tractor-trailer is 'faster' which is obviously utter nonsense.)
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First off it's not a DE it's a WM. A Window Manager, not some Detestedesktop Environment.
And while it's not my WM of choice, there is a lot to be said for a WM rather than a DE. It has a lot lower requirements in terms of memory or storage or dependencies, and it also has a lot less junk to get in the way of its core functionality. And since the codebase is smaller it's much less difficult to audit as well.
There are several great old WMs out there that are mature, feature-complete, and nearly bug-free at this point. Companies arent interested (companies make profits selling latest and greatest and herding customers on the upgrade treadmill) and unfortunately in many cases neither are coders (maintaining a project that releases two updates to stomp minor bugs over 3 years does sound slightly boring, and isnt likely to help much in a job interview either I guess.
A lot of people will roll their eyes and talk about how this would supposedly weigh the system down. But it would not have to do so at all. Gnu systems can do this, if you care to set up all the requisite emulators/not-emulators, and dont mind some lack of polish. A modern PC can run all this old software in an emulator without bloating the (by todays standards, extremely modest) requirements of the old software by enough to really notice in most cases. You know why they dont do it?
Because they make money from selling new software. And for decades now they have driven demand for new software by deliberately breaking old software. Just like everyone else in the industry.
"Facebook got rid of something that took away their control over how the users interacted with FB's pages."
The web was specifically designed to prevent that from happening.
And then intentionally gimped to allow it.
Turn off javascript and take back the web.
And in this case the appropriate response would have been to offer him immunity from prosecution to back and testify at the trial for all the other criminals whose actions he exposed. We do that routinely in cases with real bad guys who have no extenuating circumstances or qualities other than their testimony. In Snowdens case, his lawbreaking appears to have been motivated by the highest and most admirable of motivations - a will to obey the oath he took to the Constitution.
Of course the fact is the last thing the powers that be want is to prosecute the other criminals he exposed, which is why they dont want him to come back and will do all they can do discourage rather than encourage his return.
"I was consistently talking about the developers perspective, not the user! "
OK.
"If you think editing configure.ac and Makefile.am files is easy to learn, I bow to your brilliance, but myself and many others don't share this experience."
I dont think it's any harder than lots of other things that developers have to do routinely. Certainly in my experience it is much easier than trying to grapple with e.g. RPM packaging.
"Binary tarballs, as you say, are limited/useless"
I didnt say that at all. They are great! But not all distros are compatible. And it's not the developers job to fix the broken distribution.
" (dependency hell, different architectures)"
Different architectures require recompilation, obviously. Make is the best tool for that. Dependency hell? If I understand you correctly that is a package manager problem. It used to drive me nuts years ago trying to get RedHat to work, but I have used Slackware for decades without seeing anything like it.
"Sorry, but it *is* difficult to get from a compilable program to a distributable program that Linux users can try out easily."
A bare assertion with no logic or evidence behind it that directly contradicts experience.
"You suggest tarballs, meaning configure && make && make install. That means you need to deal with automake and friends which are insanely obscure and hard to learn."
What 'deal with?' What on earth do you mean. You type a command and press enter, a command simple enough you embedded it in your first sentence. If that is 'difficult' for you to 'deal with' I suggest you try something a little simpler than a general purpose computer.
And anyway I said only tarballs I didnt say anything about source tarballs. Binary tarballs are another very easy way to install a program, even easier than source tarballs, although compatibility may be more limited.
"The alternative is to make packages and get them into the offical repos. You have to do that for a couple of distributions, and probably test the installation on them as well. That is a large effort for a developer."
No, as a developer, you should not be making packages (except possibly for the distro you personally use.) Many distributions these days are crufty with proprietary junk and keeping up with all the little peculiarities of each distribution IS actually a lot more effort than typing 'make'. That job is best left in the hands of people who are intimately familiar with their distribution and have the motivation to tolerate its insanities.
That's bad advice. Publish a proper tarball and let Debian customise it for Debian, Ubuntu for Ubuntu, etc. Do one job well, dont try to do everything.
If it's in any way difficult for you to install from a proper tarball then there is something wrong. Perhaps you should try a sane distribution?
Even though I dont agree with you I will commend you for focusing on the key issue instead of chasing down side-alleys. But in fact your analysis, while commonly held, is fundamentally incorrect. These are not biological divisions but simple *statistical differences* - and much, much smaller than the differences between individuals of the same 'race.' You can redraw your *race* lines in a hundred different pseudo-random ways and get several hundred different groups that will all be somewhat mushily distinguishable on the basis of tiny statistical differences but that doesnt mean there is any real biological division there. The difference between two individuals is typically orders of magnitude larger than the differences between these supposed races.
Which indicates clearly they dont really exist. They are socially constructed categories given added and undeserved credibility by the assumption that they reflect a biological reality to which, in fact, they bear little to no resemblance.
You thought wrong.
Syria has chemical weapons, and has declined to sign the chemical weapons treaty, so they have every right to keep them. What they have denied (quite credibly) is having *used* them.
You are simply wrong. In common usage, race comes out nearly the same as ethnicity, but it is not an exact synonym. The distinction is that race carries with it the notion of biological division, which ethnicity does not imply. And it is precisely that element of biological division which does not, in fact, exist among humans today.
" (And indeed, the trick of adding a spurious "h" on the beginning of "aitch".)"
So you are saying the 'h' 'haitch' is silent? ;)
In fact we dont know what RdRand does. It is completely un-auditable. THAT is why it should never, ever, be used as a sole source of entropy for any operation.
Yes, Matt did the right thing there and Linus' responses on the RdRand issue have seemed entirely out of character for him. So out of character I am sure I am not the only one wondering if he is being blackmailed somehow.
It's a helicopter if the writer pronounces the haitch. If he says 'an 'elicopter, mate' then he wrote it correctly.
"It's all the same." No, actually, it's not all the same. Racism is unique in that it is prejudice based entirely on delusion. Men and women really are different on a biological level - I am not saying that excuses sexism, but sex itself is not something we just invented and assign arbitrarily, it's a real biological distinction. Race is not.
"Are you really going to ignore my point because of semantics?"
I am really going to point out when the point you thought you were making is inaccessible or unclear at best, because of your lack of semantic hygiene. You bet.
Semantic hygiene is extremely important if you wish to be able to think clearly and communicate clearly. If you think that semantics is somehow trivial or unimportant? You need to rethink that and find your error.
Unfortunately you may have to improve your semantic hygiene before you will be able to think clearly enough to realise how important it is. Kind of a chicken and egg problem there I guess.
No, actually, 'race' is a flat out delusion. It is distinct from ethnicity and implies a biological connection (between members of a purported race) as well as biological separation (between the purported races) neither of which actually exists.
It's not impossible to have multiple human races on the planet - it's happened before and it might well happen again. But the last human race besides our own, the Neanderthals, have been extinct for quite some time now, and all living humans are clearly of the same race.
"Let's face reality here - so long as there are obviously different races, there will be racism; it's an inevitability."
Let's face reality here - all humans are clearly members of one race. Racism is the *delusion* to the contrary. Apparently it is a delusion you have yet to free yourself from.
You need to set your own mind free before you can help others with their own.
The e-cig just has a battery and an 'atomizer' which is really nothing but a heating element and a liquid reservoir. The juice should contain nothing but PG, VG, water, flavor, and nicotine.
Nothing is "completely safe" but this is about as close as you can get. One thing to remember is that taste varies greatly, and nothing you will get out of a vaporiser is going to truly taste like burning vegetable matter. So it can take some sampling to find a flavor that you actually like.
It is a sad and shameful fact of American society that we have become more, not less, tribal since the Constitution was written, and a large number of us today do not seem to understand that other people have rights to.
Apparently your English is not as good as you think it is.
Many, many Americans speak only Spanish. The vast majority of them live Central or South America, of course.
Iiiiiiiin theory.
In practice, written Chinese still reflects Mandarin - the phonology isnt encoded, but the grammar and syntax are. Word choice is affected as well - some words have direct equivalents often cognates with the same meaning but others do not.
In practice literary Chinese encodes Mandarin and some familiarity with Mandarin is needed for speakers of other Chinese 'dialects' to become fluent with it. In practice it is not felt to be a complete method for encoding non-Mandarin speech either. Although it's very convenient for the central authorities to believe otherwise.
It's also a market where the customer almost never understands what they are buying. The salescritters certainly never understand what they are selling. Just witness all the babble about 'speed' when they arent talking about speed at all, but throughput. (If you have difficulty understanding the difference, consider a Ferrari vs a Road Train. Which one is faster? According to the marketing materials from every ISP I have ever seen, the tractor-trailer is 'faster' which is obviously utter nonsense.)