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Comment Re:So...anyone want to suggest replacements? (Score 1) 167

Picassa was always a joke for anyone who took a lot of photos.

The thing I liked about Picasa was that it was über-fast when indexing and browsing your collection.

I tend to use darktable for all my photo management, but it's cumbersome if you just want to browse your collection. I'd love to know of any open-source equivalent that's as fast as Picasa ...

Comment Re:what? (Score 1) 288

This is where most open-source users whine and complain about features, design flaws, and bugs while devs and fanboys tell them "If you don't like it, fork it and do it YOUR way." as if that were a trivial thing just anyone can do in their spare time...

Sure, but at least with OSS you have the option to fork the project.

If that's not something you appreciate, why would you use OSS? It's not like anyone forced you to.

Comment Re:what? (Score 3, Insightful) 288

A true open source project is driven by the community, not by the maintainer alone

Wait, you just make up definitions on the fly, post as AC, and get modded up for it? A true open source project is a project whose code is freely available. That's all.

As for community contribution, firefox looks reasonably healthy to me: https://github.com/mozilla/kit...

Compare that to Pale Moon, which you praise: https://github.com/MoonchildPr... ...

Pale Moon has fewer contributors and a much higher volume of commits coming from a single dev. Not that this is bad -- they're both true open source projects, and different projects have different numbers of contributors.

Maybe instead of whinging, you could learn to code and contribute too?

Comment Re: Harsh crowd (Score 1) 187

As a statistician: someone not trained in statistics using statistical methods when they don't understand the concepts in that mathematically dense paper from 1963 is a dangerous thing. If you want me to be your statistics consultant, pay me my consulting rate. I don't generally costly for free, on the r-help mailing list or elsewhere.

If you don't understand that 1963 paper, you need a statistics consultant. Don't expect someone to do your statistical work for free.

I think you just beautifully proved the OP's point.

Comment Re:Future of R, now that programmers use it? (Score 1) 187

I actually program exclusively in R and fine it OK once you learn the quirks.

I dunno -- there's an awful lot that's cumbersome about R and constantly does my head in. My pet bugbears:

No native hash/dictionary construct (there is the third-party hash library, but that's not great for portability).
It's not possible to define functions at the end of your code, making code difficult to read (or requiring you to source a separate script that contains your functions, but again, portability suffers).
Variable scoping is ... odd (many people have written previously about R quirks in this regard)
R is so sloooowwwww ...

I still use R quite a bit and suffer through writing code for it because of the incredible power of the modules. But ... I kinda feel dirty every time :(

Comment Re:Telemetry (Score 1) 137

Note how nobody has said how.

Well, I imagine rm -rf libtelemetry.so would do the trick ... :)

Seriously, though, it's pretty clear that Clear Linux is designed for server deploys, in situations where I'd guess the telemetry service might catch issues in order to make an admin's task easier. It's touted by Intel as a feature of the distro, after all, so they obviously think some people will find it useful. They also note that the telemetry service is open source, so I imagine you could vet the code if really wanted to.

Would I want a telemetry service running on my linux box? Hell, no! But I'm also not the target market for this distro.

Comment Re:Oh the Irony..... (Score 1) 735

Additionally, randomly picking France or some other 'Western' country that is the size of Minnesota and has 1/8th the US population is simple cherry-picking. If you take all of Europe from Portugal to Moscow, which is far more equivalent to the size, population, and geographic disparities of the US, as well as income and education variations, the murder rates are far closer despite firearm ownership being so much less so as to be statistically none in comparison.

I'm not sure you want to be using Russia as your benchmark of a civilized society. If you look at homicide rates in the OECD you'll see that the USA has a homicide rate three times or more higher than almost everyone else.

Even if you believe this is solely a "people problem", do you not think there might be a danger in giving a naturally homicidal population free access to weapons that make homicide easy?

Comment Re:Looking forward to anything really great (Score 1) 279

It's wishful thinking, but I personally hope that in 10 years we're writing our "Hello World" with a stack that involves DNA and proteins, customized virii, phages and new-fangled bacteriocides. I'd love for clusters to be microscopic, not covering racks in a data center or virtualized/containerized. It's probably 20 years out not 10. but if I was fresh out of school I'd be hacking in Biotech, not just in tech.

If that's your dream, I hope you're OK with the incredibly low baud speed of DNA-based systems. We're talking ~1-5kb per minute (based on RNA polymerase speeds) and whilst you might possibly tweak that up an order of magnitude you're not going to get much more. Bring in complex structures like phages, and it'll slow to a crawl; and you've got the added issue that a phage can only carry ~40 kb of data.

Electrons are way, way faster.

Comment Re:Hopefully I'm done with Perl (Score 2) 131

It's remarkable that two languages which are fairly semantically similar (you can do most of the same things in about the same way) have such converse philosophies: Perl has "There's More Than One Way to Do It" and Python has "There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it."

Not that remarkable -- there's more than one way to think about code, after all :) I think most people will always fall into one camp or the other, and it's probably a good thing that the choice is available.

Comment Re:Calling out Perl detractors in a release? (Score 1) 131

I recently got hired (july) and found out I was to learn perl to maintain their current infrastructure.

I'm 25% done with rewriting the infrastructure - and should be free of perl and autoit by this time next year.

Hang on ... you were hired to maintain code in a language you didn't know, and have responded by -- instead of learning the language and maintaining a mature code base -- by rewriting everything? And you're doing it all in Windows ...

This all seems ... inefficient.

Comment Re:I've found the Perl 6 community to be dreadful. (Score 1) 131

I gave up on Perl around version 4 but still dabbled with it...and then version 5 came out, and my response was a resounding, "Hell no!"

I watched perl go from a very cool, somewhat terse language to a complete clusterfuck of unimaginable proportions. When carp started crashing in response to a bad bug I realized that perl was only going to cause me more heartaches, headaches, and wasted hours of trying to track the problem to the offending line.

I think you must have had a couple of unusually bad experiences very early on. Perl 5 is in my experience (and god knows how many lines of Perl code I've written by now) a very mature and stable language. I can't recall an experience in which an error wasn't simple and straightforward to debug thanks to a clear error message pointing me to the exact issue in the code.

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