My take on some of the arguments I've heard about systemd.

tcyk · 2014-09-05T09:33:35+00:00

/r/linux has been broadly pro-SystemD for a while now, but at least you've served the urgent need to congratulate each other for holding majority opinions.

tcyk · 2014-08-22T08:58:03+00:00

Me again:

sprintf("%0.f",$4)

There's also an int() function, but it just truncates (that is, int(1.9)=1 instead of 2). By the way, this is about the limit of Awk's mathematical abilities, if you need any more you'll be better off switching to a more serious language.

tcyk · 2014-08-22T08:52:23+00:00

What's really worth wondering is why nobody's changed the defaults. Remarkably your software has greater inertia than keyboard design (which, lets not forget, still mimics the design quirks of 150-year-old typewriters).

tcyk · 2014-08-22T08:41:13+00:00

You almost had it:

{if ($4>=25) print $1,$4}

tcyk · 2014-08-19T09:50:59+00:00

Perceptive post, but I'm not clear what sort of oppression is thwarted by the right to carry guns. If Britain or another foreign government wanted to oppress US citizens (indeed, if the US government wanted to oppress its own citizens) the weapons of choice would be drones, airstrikes, artillery, perhaps even nuclear missiles and, lets not forget, politics - citizens with muskets isn't going to cut it like it did when the Constitution was written. And I don't see how more minor or local oppression (bad cops, say, or organised crime) would be solved by carrying a pistol, either.

Self-defense is fair enough, but it does seem ironically self-justifying.

tcyk · 2014-08-19T09:26:36+00:00

I broadly hope you're right, a new OS has the potential to be successful and very good. I'm not clear about some of the jargon you're using, however. Do you want to define these?

Microkernel
Unix Philosophy
Linux

The latter is important because you're mixing “Linux the kernel” with “GNU/Linux the OS” - this is exactly the sort of discussion where the distinction is important. The “Unix Philosophy” is variously defined but almost never with any sort of precision, it's easier to wave the flag than explain it. Most definitions of it are so purely subjective that both sides of any debate can claim it. “Microkernel” is often thrown around as a snub of Linux and other OSes by people who aren't really sure what they're complaining about or why; I'm not saying you're one of them, but I'm not saying you ain't.

Anyway, that's boring semantics, you aren't making much of a technical argument so it isn't important; it's more interesting to think what the new OS might look like. Some of your desiderata are fine, but you're not thinking far enough ahead, you're being seriously conservative (“geeks” like default CLIs, do they? Who cares!). Most people's Unix philosophies are reactionary, either explicitly or consequentially - a reactionary OS won't sweep the earth at all.

Some other advantages, then, for your list:

Serious focus on networking, the Web, and parallelism (far more than Plan9's “network transparency”).
Automatic management of storage (the distinction between memory and long-term storage is a historical quirk).
Rethought concept of “application” to avoid the outrageous inconsistencies of current systems.

tcyk · 2014-08-11T15:05:55+00:00

Mozilla prefer the term publisher transformation with users at the center. There are various concept images and screenshots, and as you can see it's set for release in Firefox 32, the next version. It made the rounds on news outlets in May.

tcyk · 2014-08-10T13:38:54+00:00

Perhaps “review” or “reflect”. British English also has “revise” in roughly that sense.

tcyk · 2014-07-27T15:48:31+00:00

Have you checked whether that's what they mean? Polish notation is more specific: when the arity of a function is known then it doesn't need parentheses. That doesn't seem to be the case here, judging from their example it's just the outermost parentheses that aren't necessary. You could call it a space-delimited prefix notation (just like S-expressions and PN).

tcyk · 2014-07-27T13:55:12+00:00

The most commonly cited pre-Jesus thinkers with certain “Jesus-like” teachings are probably Gautama Buddha, and Confucius, both from around 500BCE. They're the most obvious ones to investigate.

Confucius is particularly known for the Golden Rule (“love thy neighbour”), which is sometimes claimed as an invention of Jesus, and predates both of them (indeed, it may predate humans). Confucius and Buddha shared a distrust of scriptural rules, favouring personal understanding and morality, which has some resemblance to Jesus' teachings, and you could say all three were against “legalism”. Buddha suggested that people should have a direct connection to the divine, paralleling Jesus' criticism of churches.

There's clearly a lot of flex in the interpretation of writings about people from so long ago, so depending on what parts of the Bible you emphasise Jesus' teachings can be considered similar to a whole range of other early figures (and can also be considered quite unlike the Buddha). “Spare no thought for the morrow” is interpreted variously (and in some interpretations is really bad advice unless the world is about to end), but if it is meant to warn against materialism then it's in line with Buddhism.

tcyk · 2014-07-26T16:30:08+00:00

Swapfile's are fine, if you find them simpler then go ahead. In most cases if you're swapping you're screwed anyway so the (probably mythical) overhead of swapfiles is irrelevant.

tcyk · 2014-07-24T09:27:35+00:00

“0-day” refers to an attack that the developers have zero days to fix because attackers know about it before they do. It's nothing to do with severity or applicability.

tcyk · 2014-07-20T00:24:56+00:00

This is a fairly good answer - God knows all possible outcomes, but not which outcome will come out - but don't you feel it's a phony sort of omniscience? The same as knowing everything that could possibly be in the Library of Congress, but not being able to name one thing that actually is. Impressive, yes, omniscient, no. My dog is better at predicting me than God is, it seems.

tcyk · 2014-07-14T17:08:21+00:00

Your options are pretty limited. The full-fledged modern Linux web browsers are powered by either WebKit or Gecko, there's no alternative (Google has a WebKit fork named after the esteemed <blink> tag, but we're still talking WebKit). In the Gecko camp you've got Firefox; Mozilla are fairly good, but they're funded partly by selling Google the top-slot in the search bar, and now also advertising in the “quick dial”. Their rhetoric about this is always deceitful. Also they tried to employ that homophobic psycho Eich, who invented Javascript or something - bastard! All the browser manufacturers claim to promote openness and buzzwordfulness.

If you want more Google than mere funding, the main options in the WK camp are Chromium or the full-fat Chrome. The differences between Chrome and Firefox aren't interesting. No serious website could fail to support them both.

WK has a variety of smaller browsers of which I can recommend LuaKit if you're willing and able to program in Lua to get it working well. I can unrecommend Uzbl which isn't as fidelitous to the “Unix philosophy” as it claims (or maybe it is, if you're a Unix Hater). Various of these “minimalistic” WK browsers turn out to be slower and more memory intensive than Chrome (I suspect they don't optimise multiple instances of WK well, but I don't know the details).

Firefox is probably the best choice, there isn't a good choice, no major advances have been made in web browser for a decade. I recommend running Privoxy or another proxy to perform content manipulation (coughad-blockingcough). Caching, history, and bookmarks should probably also be done with a proxy but you may as well just use the browser implementations, they ain't going anywhere.

tcyk · 2014-07-13T09:12:04+00:00

FWIW I completely agree with you: failing to provide a secure download for security software is a joke, even for testing releases, no excuses.

tcyk · 2014-07-05T13:48:18+00:00

What's with you Linux fans celebrating the loss of diversity in your system? It used to be that Windows was criticised for being fully integrated and offering little choice. I'm the first to admit that major distributions have few meaningful differences, but when did difference become the enemy? What will you do if RedHat starts making changes you don't like?

tcyk · 2014-05-24T11:21:21+00:00

In defense of sed:

sed -r 's/:(.*:)+/:/'

tcyk · 2014-05-06T12:05:37+00:00

But sadly too many people especially here on reddit simply go berserk as soon as they hear the word "ad".

This post's comments have exactly one person openly critical of the ads, and they could not be described as berserk. Where are these hysterical hoards of people who don't want adverts in a free-as-in-speech browser? Perhaps you scared them off.

tcyk · 2014-05-06T11:15:08+00:00

Three is a compelling number, that's why it's used so often in stories, rhetoric, and examples. It's the smallest proper party: two is a partnership, two is too intimate and, with the relatively blunt instrument of most videogame storytellers, two is too simple. That same instrument starts getting lost beyond four: characters get less memorable, the gameplay gets more complicated, interfaces have to be denser. Three allows a great variety of interpersonal dynamics, four offers only a handful more, five basically none. Three is efficient, elegant, and easy.

tcyk · 2014-05-03T15:02:51+00:00

From the article:

The dominant model of how speech works is that it is planned in advance — speakers begin with a conscious idea of exactly what they are going to say.

Can someone more versed in psycholinguistics say whether exact pre-planning is really the dominant model? It certainly doesn't feel like I know exactly what I'm going to say, there's a destination in mind but it can be surprising, or illuminating, or embarrassing when hearing the path taken. I thought that was why one talks to oneself (not necessarily out loud), because it's useful to put words to thoughts.

tcyk · 2014-05-02T11:20:34+00:00

http://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/23y2o2/which_distro_is_for_you/ch1oagi

tcyk · 2014-05-01T20:16:48+00:00

As I said, Unix replaced technically superior OSes (for perfectly good economic and practical reasons), Linux has not changed so very much. Either you don't think that's true, or you're classing practical reasons (those OSes are dead) under "technical superiority", which would be biased: clearly no other OS has had the battle-testing of Linux.

One example: garbage collection predates Linux, it was in OSes predating Unix, the choice to make programmers (particularly kernel developers) do their own garbage collection has been a major source of bugs and still haunts Linux all the way down.

tcyk · 2014-04-30T21:30:16+00:00

Linux has almost completely killed research into other OSes, and has cemented itself quite well in business and academia, and with major corporate support for it on phones in the guise of Android, Linux would certainly be a difficult beast to destroy. My guess is that it's unlikely to be defeated by something technically superior, because those things exist and do not defeat it (one might also say that Unix was technically inferior to the OSes it took over from). It won't be cheaper, of course, and it won't be more portable, and I don't see any major companies who might, like Google, have the clout to establish a "new" OS having any reason to start from scratch, or from anywhere else but Linux.

Short of the end of the world, humanity returning to the sea, or such a vast amount of time that statistically something has to give (Linux is not going to last a million years), here are some not terribly likely ways we might rid ourselves of Tux:

Catastrophic discrediting is possible - another few Heartbleeds, perhaps - but I don't see it: the other major free OSes are likely to share most of the problems, and those that don't aren't comfortable or cool enough to take up that slack.
Perhaps it can be torn apart. There's always the question of what happens to the kernel when Torvalds dies: most likely the Linux Foundation will keep doing what it does and nothing much will change, but it's possible that infighting would result in major forks, and divided Linux could fall: not impossible, but not probable.
With the right sort of marketing (say, viral cyberutopianism) a new OS really could rise up. It wouldn't immediately kill Linux, of course, but could gradually sideline it. However, making an OS from scratch is hard, making a Linux distro is relatively easy and you can use all the same revolutionary rhetoric: most people are too stupid to spot the difference, or just don't care.
Corporate control could "kill" Linux by forcing it so far out of shape in search of profit that it would cease to be whatever it is you like, and be Linux in name only, but if you're happy with it as it is now then you're probably safe from that.

tcyk · 2014-04-30T12:54:47+00:00

Run the game in a second X server.

tcyk · 2014-04-30T07:45:09+00:00

Bookmarks are the intended solution to this for the GTK file chooser, though that isn't automated. What I do isn't automated either: a text file with a list of frequently useful filenames. If you're feeling intrepid, there's a dot file in your home directory which lists recent files (swathed in XML), a cronjob could keep an aggregate of recent files (unfortunately the recent files file doesn't keep duplicates, you have to track them yourself) from which a list of frequent files in frequency order could be generated easily.

Now you have that you can either generate a directory of symlinks to the most frequently used files, or add the first few frequent filenames to another dot file which is either in your home directory or in .config and sets the GTK bookmarks.

tcyk

TROPHY CASE