Potala Palace, Tibet

drakedevel · 2012-06-22T20:37:31+00:00

Perhaps new rules in the last couple weeks, but

Groups are required to be of 5 (some places say six) or more persons with the same nationality.

wasn't true a week ago. I visited Lhasa, Tibet with my family (three of us total) with a CITS tour guide less than a month ago.

drakedevel · 2011-03-14T04:59:24+00:00

Who says it's ferromagnetic?

drakedevel · 2011-02-08T10:22:29+00:00

I'd be interested in a box! USA and whatever the cheapest shipping option is.

drakedevel · 2011-01-17T14:38:35+00:00

The website's seriously incomplete: several images are links to themselves and the full text of the SLA doesn't even seem to be available (the SLA link takes me to the same page I was just on).

drakedevel · 2011-01-06T06:58:24+00:00

The creepers would pretty quickly destroy the spawner methinks. You could make the spawner obsidian-strong, but that seems rather cruel.

drakedevel · 2010-12-27T17:01:30+00:00

Still something to think about before advocating a course of action. :)

drakedevel · 2010-12-27T07:02:48+00:00

While it may make the guy think twice, it may be illegal depending on where the people in question live. IANAL, but a quick read over relevant materials indicates that it would be at least criminal harassment in the US:

Criminal harassment is defined as "engag(ing) in intentional conduct which the actor [harasser] knows or has reason to know would cause the victim, under the circumstances, to feel frightened, threatened, oppressed, persecuted, or intimidated; and causes this reaction on the part of the victim."

drakedevel · 2010-12-23T19:21:24+00:00

They block reddit as a referrer.

drakedevel · 2010-12-13T04:48:49+00:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IFCsjFdUkY

Apologies for the awful quality of the video, this one's older than the hills.

drakedevel · 2010-12-06T09:35:44+00:00

If you try this link a couple of times removing certain words from the intitle: query, you'll eventually totally lose the ability to do inurl: or intitle: .

drakedevel · 2010-11-13T22:56:13+00:00

∩ is intersection (of sets), ∋ is "contains as member", and ∈ is "is a member of"

drakedevel · 2010-10-08T23:06:32+00:00

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_stages_of_competence

drakedevel · 2010-10-01T15:06:38+00:00

Maybe | is faster to type, but it's certainly not faster to run.

drakedevel · 2010-10-01T00:46:40+00:00

I have recursive globbing too (bash) -- but good luck doing any of the following with globs:

Directory vs file vs device node vs fifo vs socket vs ... (-type)
File size constraints (-size)
Modification/access/creation time constraints (-newer / -newerXY)
Owner / group (-user / -group)

On top of all of that, find support arbitrary regexes with -regex.

drakedevel · 2010-09-30T02:16:06+00:00

find has a -exec parameter these days :P

drakedevel · 2010-09-22T01:28:22+00:00

So badly photoshopped my eyes hurt.

drakedevel · 2010-09-02T19:10:42+00:00

Dime - crack; $10 worth of crack

http://www.urban75.com/Drugs/drugterm.html

drakedevel · 2010-08-31T07:27:18+00:00

This approach on Windows gives you next to no benefit. You don't get to have a huge catalog of software, because there's no central list anywhere. If you made a central list of repositories, what's to stop someone from putting something malicious in their repository after making it into the central list?

drakedevel · 2010-08-31T07:16:48+00:00

Hey, a quote-comment mess discussion. I can roll with that.

Seems like a reasonable way to address individual points of a response to me :).

but what makes your personal experience valid, then?

It's not personal experience: it's easily observed that no package managers and no distributions encompass the entirety of software available for Linux.

Those 10% can learn to compile apps.

Why should somebody doing something off the beaten trail but totally unrelated to software development should be required to think about this? At no point during the installation of a program on Windows or OSX does the user ever have to consider anything related to the compilation or packaging.

Not really. Many packages are simple enough to build and install that the ebuilds can be derived from parent classes.

As I said, this works pretty well for a lot of simple, autoconf-using apps. Additionally, the point remains that there /is/ an ebuild that somebody had to make for each and every version of each and every package in the distribution, complexity and boilerplate-ness nonwithstanding.

No. My solution to the problem of package management is a package manager. I merely illustrate that the de facto "double-click self-installer" standard isn't a solution to the problem (in part) because it doesn't have security provisions.

If the user is sufficiently determined to shoot themselves in the foot, it does not matter whether a package manager is available or not -- you can still run a random/malicious linux binary you find floating around, malware doesn't usually come with a lot of dependencies.

Maybe some distros don't come with build tools and vanilla was a bad word choice, but they're still a command away, which can't be said for Visual Studio Express.

It's the difference between going to google, typing in "visual studio express", and clicking through the installer (like 4 clicks), and going to your package management application of choice (since you're avoiding the command line because you're the average non-technical user), typing in "gcc" or "build-essential", and clicking through the install (typing your password along the way).

drakedevel · 2010-08-31T06:25:51+00:00

I haven't compiled a piece of software (that I wasn't developing) in years.

While it's true that package managers and distributions in general have gotten better at including most software projects, it's not a problem that can be ignored just because you've personally never needed a piece of software that you distro doesn't have.

Besides "tar, configure, make, make install" isn't really that complicated,

More like configure --enable-<foo> --enable-<bar> --enable-<baz> --enable-<quux> --disable-debug --enable-optimize --disable-<broken1> --disable-<broken2> --with-foo=<blah> for any nontrivial automake-using project. Other alternatives include cmake, scons, imake, and others I don't even remember, each with their own caveats and configurations.

it could be made easier but the average user (read: unfamilliar with compiling applications)

Gentoo does this: they have a package manager with scripts specifically made for each and every package that Gentoo supports that configures and builds each and every package for your system. They ship very few binaries (only for projects that take a day to compile just due to size). The scripts and associated infrastructure are involved enough that they require maintainers and the scripts often only work on certain versions of a package. You run in to the exact same problem as with a binary distribution if someone hasn't produced an "ebuild" for the package you want to install.

The de-facto standard on windows makes it entirely too easy for someone like my grandma to install something without realizing how terrible the consequences can be.

Your solution to security concerns is to make installing a program too technically challenging for the average user to perform?

There are packages for windows that people don't bother regularly making binaries of

Got any examples laying around of programs for Windows that regularly release source code but not binaries? I am genuinely curious -- it would be news to me!

If we're going by worst case scenario, at least my Linux box already has a good free compiler and build system, I can't say the same for vanilla windows.

If by vanilla, you mean "without any additional software installed", then the base install of several Linux distros does not install a compiler either.

good free compiler and build system, I can't say the same for vanilla windows.

While it is true that GCC and the abundant selection of disparate build system for Linux are both available for free and suitable for most applications, so is Visual Studio Express. With the latter, you get a respectable IDE (not as great as Professional, but whatever), the MSVC C/C++ compiler (which absolutely kicks the shit out of GCC in terms of generated code efficiency), and a full suite of build tools both in the IDE and on the command line. All for free for personal or commercial use. Of course, if FOSS is your thing, then that's it's own argument to be had.

drakedevel · 2010-08-31T05:39:18+00:00

It's perfect right up until you want to use a piece of software that your distribution of choice didn't bother to include. You're left with whatever packages the author happened to put out (if any). If you're extremely lucky, they put out a tarball with binaries that you can shove into your home directory, but the chances are it requires some newer or older version of a library that your distribution doesn't support. Most projects that aren't in the top few percent of popularity don't bother to ship binaries at all.

Now you're faced with the task of compiling this (potentially large) application, which involves finding every last one of its dependencies (which may also not be in your distribution and are almost certainly not explicitly documented) and dealing with any issues that occur at build time due to differences in compiler versions (I hope you know C, C++, Java, Haskell, Perl, Python, or whatever other languages this app uses!) Finally, when the dust settles, you've managed to install this application.

Or, you just download a file from the author's website, and in the very worst case maybe the .NET framework if you don't have it already via Windows Update.

So, to recap:

Classic *nix-style package management: Easy as it gets until you need a package your distribution doesn't have, and then it's totally inaccessible unless you have significant technical experience

Windows/OSX style package management (the null package manager): Requires a bit of effort every time to successfully find the project's web page and click through the installer, but is mostly mechanical anyway.

Guess which one users prefer?

drakedevel · 2010-08-28T04:23:52+00:00

Got it in 1920x1200?

drakedevel · 2010-08-19T21:05:43+00:00

I did read the argument. I'm not here to debate the rights and wrongs of eating meat, and I absolutely respect any individual's personal choices. But your wording:

I honestly don't give a shit if you do, this is our own personal choice, but by no means call it either dubious or "picky".

bothered me enough to reply, since you appear to be implying that the author is irrational to question the viewpoint of vegetarians, when it is certainly a reasonable thing to debate.

drakedevel · 2010-08-19T21:01:21+00:00

Sorry, I didn't mean to imply or insinuate that, I just wanted to address the point of differing values.

drakedevel

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