Comment Incredible horrifying bloat (Score 4, Insightful) 503
tomboy package "Description: desktop note taking program using Wiki style links"
"..except for the 50 MByte size of the Tomboy package..."
What's wrong with this picture?
tomboy package "Description: desktop note taking program using Wiki style links"
"..except for the 50 MByte size of the Tomboy package..."
What's wrong with this picture?
... because "pornography featuring violence, bestiality, and incest" is very illegal, right?
ISPs that don't do the mandatory spying on citizens, storing of logs, keeping tabs on the copyright-protection evading, crippleware-breaking terrorists, they have to be eliminated! For the sake of our civilization and of our children.
The TFA is a worthless troll, even more so than usual in these "Linux is not ready for the desktop" Slashdot articles.
It has the usual list of ignorant complaints (oh no, there is a choice of distributions, boo hoo! oh no, there is a choice of GUI toolkits, boo hoo!), but some points stand out in their sheer stupidity.
"Bad security model: there's zero protection against keyboard keyloggers and against running malicious software (Linux is viruses free only due to its extremely low popularity). sudo is very easy to circumvent (social engineering). sudo still requires CLI (see clause 4.)"
Really?
Who admits these articles to the front page anyway?
So as expected, there is a veritable army of people demanding the old behavior restored; also, most probably a lot of them will "downgrade" or stay with using EXT3.
Of course, the things at fault are really the buggy applications. But even deeper than that, the *paradigm* of having a lot of generated files (that store important user data) that are rewritten unconditionally at each program startup is wrong. What the hell is up with that?
Can't they come up with a method where you rewrite a file only when absolutely necessary? Why must all icon locations, thumbnails and other such GUI desktop bullshit be written and rewritten zillions of times?
Not to mention that EXT3 is just one file system out of many, and arguably not even a very good one. It's rather weird that it was chosen as a default option for so many "popular" distributions (maybe out of some misguided desire to be backwards compatible?). If your application (or again, *paradigm*) works well on only one file system, then it's most probably not the file system's fault.
From a more technological point of view there is also a fundamental difference between the philosophies of the two languages.
Perl subscribes to "there is more than one way to do it"; Python is all about "there should be only one way". The latter is what made Java such an insipid and annoying language to develop in. Python is probably saved from this only by its much better standard library and generally smaller verbosity.
Personally, if I had to choose from the two, I would still choose Python because of the gentler learning curve, and because I hate forced indentation/whitespace slightly less than Perl's type sigils.
But if you can choose any language, try one of those newly popular "modern" languages - finally get down on your ass and learn Haskell (as I should), or Kaya, or LISP (which, as one of the oldest still in use today, is more "modern" than almost anything that has seen light ever since), or Ocaml, or even F# or something. (Any one of these can also show you that OO is not the only way of abstraction, or the best way, or, god help me, even a particularly good way.)
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