As I understand it, AIX is still being sold by IBM. IBM also takes backwards compatibility very seriously. So buying a modern AIX workstation would not be that much different from buying an older AIX workstation from IBM.
All of this is 100% true. I started in the mid-90s on an RS6000 and decades later find I'm back working with AIX. Hell, IBMi (the rebranding of AS/400) is also still alive and kicking. So yes, "very seriously."
I will add that people being stuck behind screens for most of the day already reduces opportunities for socialization and human contact. The least we can do is give people more free time OUTSIDE OF WORK, so they can go to a bar, a social event, or join a club without the pressure of hustle culture nagging them to work-work-work, rush-rush-rush.
You've spouted a lot of opinions in this thread that I -- and others -- heartily disagree with but here you're on to something. The problem remains that you're seemingly convinced that office work is the only way to accomplish this goal and it clearly isn't. I, for one, can't reconcile schlepping into an office with having more time "OUTSIDE OF WORK." Lunch and after work drinks with co-workers does not meet that definition, that's still work. Playing pool in the break room with co-workers is work (I remember the dot com boom). The commute is work.
The other assumption that I think you've made is that WFHers are somehow suburban hermits. I'm sure that describes some people and I'm sure some who fit that description are happy and some are unhappy. It does not describe all of us though. It's possible to WFH, live in a city, ride trains regularly, and have a bountiful social life; I've done all this for years. I can only speak for myself but I go to lunch a few times a week with actual friends, have impromptu drinks with WFHers from other companies where we gossip about our workplaces, put in a set amount of weekly hours, produce significant contributions at my job, unplug when I'm not on the clock, take lengthy non-working vacations, and have reclaimed all the time lost to non-work-but-still-work BS.
If that doesn't all work for you, by all means commute to an office and engage with your co-workers. Don't go thinking that you've somehow figured out the one true key to happiness (or best work practices, or maximum productivity, or plan for bringing society together, or cure for loneliness, or
Might be geeky, but it's cute!
Agreed! It's a pretty good excuse to spend a few weeks gaining some familiarity with a new language. Low stakes, three weeks of mild pressure to keep going, and immediate feedback. There's a lot to like.
As I moved up the ranks and started hanging out with wealthier and wealthier people I quickly discovered what's described here is how many wealthy people behave. I would end up at cocktail parties and when you walked in it was there's weed in the garage, beer in the back, wine on the table, the ladies at the counter have pills, Rob has coke. People would disappear all the time then pop up a half hour later, obviously redressed. Am I saying this is all wealthy people, hell no, but there's a decent size chunk that just like to party.
The same sentiment is also true of the so-called working class. (Though here in New Orleans it's socially acceptable to be buzzed, high, tripping, rolling, dripping, or even occasionally sober. Maybe this less true elsewhere.) In my experience it's the middle management class who don't share their party favors or hide them behind a prescription.
If I'm recalling correctly, TeX produces
(MacOS as of Monterey (12.5) still includes pstopdf. One hopes that remains in Ventura although Ghostscript is readily installed with the brew package manager.)
I'm not sure how we got from drawing what seem like professional boundaries at work to this no man is an island talk. Many of us -- including those in TFA -- are happily engaged with our chosen communities and opt not to socialize with co-workers. Yes, loneliness is a problem with some of my co-workers; feigning friendship with them isn't going to solve that issue and I'm not a therapist.
On the other hand, the *consequences* of my co-workers' life choices often are my problems. And I, like most, am more than happy to cover for a colleague whose kid's been up all night sick/got lucky at the bar/spent the day in court. I don't need details. (One of the great benefits of Slack is that even the least self aware stop before describing their kid's/conquest's/lawyer's effluvia in writing.)
This is especially true of workers pushing 50 or 60 because they don't have the breath and depths of hobbies that young folks do...
#notAllGenXers
I don't necessarily disagree with you but people's social lives -- or lack thereof -- should not be a sufficient reason to mandate schlepping into an office. Likewise escaping children and spouses. My co-workers' questionable life choices are not my problem.
Huh. Some of us actually have these folks we call "friends" with whom we chat and grumble. I can't speak for you but I'd rather choose the people I spend my social energy on (and very few co-workers over 30 years fall into that category). From where I sit, it's folks like you attempting to force people into the office to listen to your inane stories (well, maybe yours aren't inane but that'd be an outlier) who have the social inability to meet new people.
My experience (coincidentally at the Lakeside Apple Store) matches yours. The folks there have fixed small, long out of warranty stuff for me (e.g., a broken laptop keycap; dust under an iMac screen) free of charge on a few occasions. Delighting the customer (and trust me, a functional S key was delightful that day) has paid off long term for Apple as I rarely consider switching to other hardware.
Usually I’d fully agree with your cynicism. Here though, the truth is that NYT XWords are getting more and more feature laden (overlays, graphics, double sized boxes, &c) that other vendors can’t manage. Not only that but some of the 3rd party software doesn’t handle rebuses correctly: check out Thursday Wordplay blog comments, it’s a big deal.
Note, I just remembered I left out a critical step which is methylation of the RNA
You sound a lot like my boss.
I don't follow the goings on with other editors; the most correct statement I could make is "this is true in this case, perhaps it is generally true." I didn't want to tout a feature as being exceptional but did want to call out that functions I wrote three decades ago still evaluate without requiring modifications. I hope users of other editors are as fortunate.
But yes, I think programmers routinely use tools they can't rely on (in a backward compatible way). Witness Python. Emacs could have had a flag day like Python's any number of times (and for good reasons) but the ethos is strongly against it.
Having little experience with other editors (save vim -- it's everywhere and it's useful), I couldn't say (nor am I trying to change anyone's mind). It's non-trivial to use productively and in my opinion takes a good month to get to know. There's a reason user friendliness has been a hot topic of late.
With that out of the way, I think there are some damn nice features. Tramp allows for remote work over more or less seamlessly over ssh (among other methods[1]). Magit is a git front-end that works well, including over tramp. VTerm has largely replaced tmux in my workflow. Although I'm not a heavy user, org-mode has exploded, even among non-developer types. (A lot of EmacsConf 2020 discussed various org-mode use cases.) Add to that unlimited customizability, keyboard macros, and extensibility (in emacs-lisp, which is either a pro or con, depending on how you feel about programming in a lisp dialect).
In truth, even though I'm fairly conversant with hacking out functions in elisp, there's less and less need to do that as time goes on. With a package manager and ~5000 available packages, lots of work has already been done. I see that as a positive.
Important to note is that although development continues apace, there have been few breaking changes. Once you get used to it, you can pretty much rely on it. Perhaps all of this is true of other editors as well; I'd hope so.
Again, I'm not trying to proselytize. It's been a boon to my productivity for decades and I've never regretted the time spent learning and customizing it. YMMV.
I realize this is a naive question to a potentially hostile audience but I'm really curious: once virtualization on the M1 is in place (which doesn't seem like "if" so much as "when") and Docker is again functional (ditto), what's the point of running Linux on the bare metal? I can think of some abstract reasons (dislike of the MacOS UI, adherence to FSF principles, familiarity) and those are valid enough for sure, but are there functional issues that folks are encountering?
For background, I'm an old (primarily) Erlang developer and do 90% of my work in Emacs & Docker and really haven't run into any issues on MacOS. Admittedly there'll be additional scrutiny deploying code developed on ARM to Intel but it's not something that'll keep me up at night (and would be true even with Linux on ARM).
To reiterate: I'm genuinely curious and not trying to start some sort of holy war here.
Obviously I can't speak for local as it applies to you but here in New Orleans one of the indy theaters is set to expand to a second nine screen location in early November[1] and another has opened up a socially distant 100 seat outside venue[2]. New Orleans is weird though: it's like us to prioritize movie theaters over basic infrastructure.
[1] https://www.nola.com/entertain...
[2] https://www.nola.com/gambit/fi...
And it should be the law: If you use the word `paradigm' without knowing what the dictionary says it means, you go to jail. No exceptions. -- David Jones
