It used to be that 640K oughta be enough for anyone.

The Linux software you can get as a regular user from your typical Linux distributions is absolutely not any more secure on average than your typical Windows software.

I say this as someone who writes application programs on both systems.

I think it’s really debatable whether the Linux kernel is really any more secure than the Windows NT kernel. Linux advocates have pushed the “many eyes, shallow bugs” line for a long time, but high profile lapses seem to really have put the lie to that.

If wasn’t full garbage collection in the spec. It was some infrastructure support in the spec that would make it easier to write garbage collectors in C++.

That’s what I’ve got (on Gentoo).

There’s also D. You could just upgrade to D.

When Fortran was created, each line was a separate punched card. The syntax made sense for that medium.

C was setup from the start for use on teletypes with fancy line editors like ed.

I think my mother played that star trek game on a time shared minicomputer.

Let us all remember that, at least back when it started, the establishment alternative to systemd was a product named after its original operating system, System V UNIX, which is a direct descendent of the original UNIX from AT&T. This sysvinit software used complicated shell scripts to manage daemons. Contrary to some opinions, these shell scripts were not “just working”; they were in fact a constant and major maintenance burden for Linux distributions. When I started on Linux at least, Debian had a suspiciously large fraction of bugs on init script breakages.

All this is to say that the new system, systemd, doesn’t have to be anywhere near perfect to be worth replacing sysvinit.

People argue that systemd is rejecting the “UNIX philosophy” of small tools that do one thing well. I argue that this UNIX philosophy is not some kind of universal good with no tradeoffs. It’s an engineering rule of thumb. There are always tradeoffs.

People argue that systemd is too much like Windows NT. I argue that Windows NT has at least a few good ideas in it. And if one of those ideas solves a problem that Linux has, Linux should use that idea.

Pay no attention to gconf, dconf, GSettings, or whatever else there is.

Or Fortran variables that collide with Fortran built-in functions.

Keep in mind that array subscript and function call are both () in Fortran.

And you can write more than six characters, but only the first six are recognized. So APFLWSAC and APFLWSAF are really the same variable.

And without namespaces, company policy reserves the first two characters for module prefix and Hungarian notation.

Some of those dialog boxes have not changed a bit since Windows 3.0.

Hint: if the non-free firmware is necessary to make most systems work, Debian is not actually all that close to being completely free.

It’s not git that’s complicated. The work is complicated. git is just one of the tools that programmers use to manage the complexity.

I also think that some people get too hung up on having a “clean” history, and trying to “fix” the history after it has already occurred. I usually have enough problems to worry about in the present, without also trying to worry about the past.

Yeah, I think that guy only got a superficial understanding of what Uncle Bob was saying.

My policy as a tech lead is this: In an ideal world, you don’t need the comment because the names and the flow are good. But when you do need the comments, you usually really need those comments. Anything that’s surprising, unusual, or possibly difficult to understand gets comments. Because sometimes the world is not ideal, and we don’t have the time or energy to fully express our ideas clearly in code.

My policy on SCM logs is that they should be geared more towards why this commit is going in, not what is being done. And what other tickets, stories, bugs it relates to.

The bit about the small forge forging a forge is skewering the Gentoo concept of toolchain bootstrapping.

Problem: how can you claim to have compiled the entire system on your own local machine if you need a compiler to compile a compiler? Where do you get that compiler from?

Solution: Use an external compiler to compile a compiler. Then use that compiler that you just compiled to compile itself again. Then use that second compiler to recompile the rest of the system.

I think the real time requirement can be relaxed for self contained experiment packages. And given that the shuttle ran a healthy number of student experiments, it’s pretty likely that X system has appeared.

I believe crew laptops for email and stuff are also running non real-time systems.

Was that one of the ones from the Megan era?

For me it was 2003. Debian Woody. On an EasyBytes CDROM. That I paid 5 dollars for. Replaced Windows 98. The boost to the usability of that computer was insane.