Which also meant you had to code to the lowest possible denominator.

Solaris has a kick-ass new feature in it's shell? Too bad; can't touch it. IRIX has a neat library to do something? Too bad, can't touch it. You can code to C-89, maybe POSIX, and that's that.

Both approaches have advantages and disadvantages.

The other day, I booted up a new-in-the-box Acer laptop (or Asus, maybe) and was pleasantly surprised that it was already set to boot to desktop.

There's a fuckton of good stuff under the hood of Win8; the start menu just went fullscreen.

So, basically you're saying that you Love the Power Glove?

It's so bad.

There is an unspoken assumption by "sensitive" people that they deserve your time, or that their ideas need to be heard irrespective of merit.

Disagreeing with them, correcting them, or challenging them is _offensive_ to them.

Your first response doesn't convey the additional problem the way the 2nd one does

What additional problem?

"Hi, I am the busiest man in the free software world, and you just consumed my valuable time with amateur level mistakes. We have a FAQ about this, which you either didn't read or didn't understand, and as a result, my productivity has suffered. Please re-read the contribution FAQ. If you are still confused, send a message to LKML, not to me"

"I've cc'd this response to LMKL so that others don't repeat your mistakes, and so that everyone else is expecting your follow up questions and amended patch"

It's not "abusive" to point out that when people don't do their due diligence, everyone else suffers. Set an expectation of excellence, and expect people to follow it.

Results first. Feelings later.

Do you have any evidence of this? At all?

Because here's what I see:

Linux has remade the software world in its own image. I'd hardly call that "failing". Real actual super computer companies (e.g. Silicon Graphics) stopped developing their own OS and started shipping Linux.

Microsoft, the arch nemesis of Linux and Open Source, is shipping kernel patches and releasing code under open source licenses.

What does "success" look like to you?

And lest you say "that's just a singular case", we can look at Theo and OpenBSD. OpenBSD has been wildly successful, both as a BSD fork, but also in its broader mission to cultivate a software culture of excellence and correctness, with results that speak for themselves.

Linux and OpenBSD are two of the oldest open source projects around, with two pretty intense personalities at the helm.

I see no evidence to support your claim whatsoever.

There's this idea in the US that you are never allowed to hurt anyone's feelings.

The problem with that is that people are irrational, oversensitive, and cannot control themselves. Interacting with such fragile daisies is like tiptoeing through a minefield.

It is not, to me, a foregone conclusion that assertive people should tolerate having to deal with sensitive people. That is the prevailing dogma in US business, but it's not clear why that should be the case.

The meta response to this entire conversation space should be "stop bothering me with your bullshit and submit some fucking code"

For many years, I ran an alix2d3 box with OpenBSD installed on it as my edge device. Excellent hardware, excellent OS.

pf.conf is simple for a basic configuration.

If you want to run off of a read-only flash file system, or have a router-style config experience, there are adaptations for that purpose also. But just plain old boring openBSD is a great place to start.

My favorite thing about openBSD is how lightweight the install is. There is very little garbage you'll want to shut off or remove.

For the canonical SOHO edge device, choose any x86 hardware you have, put 2 network interfaces on it, and you're done.

A basic pf.conf that gives you NAT and blocks everything evil from the outside is only a few lines, and well documented on the interwebs.

Put your samba server somewhere else.

Oddly enough, I finally retired my openbsd device and got a few Ubiquity EdgeRouters. My home network situation changed and I wanted a smallish device with POE support, but still wanted a real OS on it..

if you understand scalar assembly, understanding the basic "how" of vector/SIMD programming is conceptually similar

Actually, if you think back to pre-32bit x86 assembler, where the X registers (AX, BX) were actually addressable as half-registers (AH and AL were the high and low sections of AX), you already understand, to some extent, SIMD

SIMD just generalizes the idea that a register is very big (e.g. 512 bits), and the same operation is done in parallel to subregions of the register.

So, for instance, if you have a 512 bit vector register and you want to treat it like 64 separate 8 bit values, you could write code like follows:

C = A + B

If C, A, and B are all 512 bit registers, partitioned into 64 8 bit values, logically, the above vector/SIMD code does the below scalar code:

for (i == 1..64) {
    c[i] = a[i] + b[i]
}

If the particular processor you are executing on has 64 parallel 8-bit adders, then the vector code

C = A + B

Can run as one internal operation, utilizing all 64 adder units in parallel.

That's much better than the scalar version above - a loop that executes 64 passes..

A vector machine could actually be implemented with only 32 adders, and could take 2 internal ops to implement a 64 element vector add... that's still a 32x speedup compared to the scalar, looping version.

The Cray 1 was an amazing machine. It ran at 80mhz in 1976

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

According to WP, the only patent on the Cray 1 was for its cooling system...

Actually, I'm going to disagree here.

I spent the last 10 years working on the unglamorous parts of the MS stack that deal with writing business software. I worked on ERP systems (big stuff, big money) and small stuff (VS Lightswitch).

It turns out that there are zillions of little apps that make businesses run. Some of them are no more robust than an excel workbook on a well known file share. Some are Access applications. Lots of VB6 apps are still keeping businesses running.

Integrating with existing systems is notoriously hard. The larger a system is, the more likely you are to need a VAR/integrator for an industry specific vertical to build customizations for you.

There is absolutely a need for tooling to build business critical apps - forms over data, basic workflow, reliable data storage, etc.

It is possible to roll-your-own on each of these pieces, but it turns out that tailoring any of them for business app usage, much less stitching them all together into some sort of recipe or middleware... is hard.

However, the smaller the problem domain is, the larger the advantage in NOT trying to integrate or use off-the-shelf software.

With LightSwitch, you can write a 1-5 form productivity app in a few minutes that will let a small team of people do data entry, with basic validation and reliable storage underneath. This makes it great for volunteer organizations and other low time / low budget endeavours...

I'm very interested to see if other people have had positive experiences apart from Lightswitch... our customers tell us its the only tool quite like it... unless you go back to PowerBuilder or something along those lines...

This should be standard for quite a few things. Call it the 'eat your own dogfood' provision.

Easier to just slap on term limits, though. Members of Congress (or Parliament or any other elected representative) are supposed to be representatives, not an aristocratic subclass.

The problem is that the WebView is one of the remaining pieces that was still tied directly to the OS in those earlier versions, so it can't be updated directly

Wait. It sounds likes you're saying that on older versions of Android, the Browser Rendering Engine is part of the OS?

This sounds familiar. I think a very large software company has made a claim like this before... it was somewhere around 15 to 20 years ago...

I consider then harmful.
I suspect Emoji are like those smileys with mustaches, beer steins, and birthday cakes that show up in skype chat. I hate that garbage. Many a time, I write a sentence that contains a parenhtesis, using grammar correctly, and then my message comes across as some random retarded shit sprinkled with smileys. I have a hard enough time avoiding typos, I don't really need the client mucking it up even worse.

That's not the fault of Emoji, that is the fault of the client replacing things like ":)" and ";P" with pictures in order to simulate Emjoi.

As bizarre as it sounds, you actually want to be embracing the support of Emoji! This is because all the searching and replacing logic (which, as you rightly pointed out, tends to make unwanted changes to your text) is now redundant and can be removed by the developers.

The net result is that people can still insert smileys with moustaches, beer steins, and birthday cakes and you can still type grammatically correct messages (or code) without fear of them being replaced with pictures. A win for everyone.

The sound the ZX Spectrum played when loading your game.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbumzCdw4Ts