I feel old, guys. I feel like the old man sysadmin with the Unix Beard and suspenders (which I continually think of as a halloween costume, less and less ironically). My coworkers are all... what would have been slashdotters had they not found digg or reddit, or whatever it was.

These are "kids" who grew up with linux. (They're all 30.) But they don't have the base knowledge that I expect them to have. They only know bash. They mostly know Ubuntu and Red Hat, although the one 'sysadmin' type dude knows virtual machines with Xen, and seems to know what he's doing most of the time.

I figured I'd pick up python, because I ordered a raspberry pi, and it seems that's what all the cool kids are doing. (I get along fine with shell and perl for most of whatever it is I do around here.) The advice I got from one of my coworkers was that I should "uninstall the IDE." IDE? For python? Seriously? It's interpreted, you use a goddamned text editor. Apparently that's one of the 'tips' from "Learning Python the Hard Way." (I'm reading Programming Python on my nook, FWIW. And I'm already yelling at it, as the examples are how to create a database from your filesystem with pickle, because seriously, if you're managing peoples' salaries, you don't want your data in flat files, or necessarily in a readable format to your other employees. But that's my cross to bear.)

When I got home, I started ranting about that to the Benny. Frothing at the mouth kind of ranting like I used to be able to do. Who uses a goddamned IDE for an interpreted language!? There's no "I" for your "DE". When you're writing C, in a complex environment, sure. When you're writing Obj-C for your iPhone app of the year, fine. You have libraries, you have interdependencies, you have reasons to have a debugger and a compiler. Python is interpreted. There's no need for these things.

Goddamned kids these days. In my day, we had emacs and vi, and flamewars about both. There was no IDE for writing shell scripts. There was no IDE for perl. There wasn't even really decent tab completion! We used 'more' instead of 'less'. We knew how to pipe things to awk and grep. We used which instead of locate. And we liked it, damnit!

I'm running OpenNMS on Ubuntu at work, using vi (technically vim) to edit all the xml files and java.properties style files. I don't run KDE, Gnome, or any other desktop on the damned thing. It's a server, for pete's sake. Not that it's lacking RAM or CPU for me to run that, but because I'm old, and old-school. Some of my coworkers (and I use that word loosely, as I'm a department of one) run linux on the desktop ... not because all the tools are there and work, necessarily, but because our IT group doesn't know how to deal with linux, and they can get away with it.

More or less every day I visit the Raspberry Pi home page to see if there is any new information on when the allegedly-mostly-working Android 4 will be released, and every day there isn't. As far as I know, Broadcom is the holdup. This does not give me confidence in Broadcom...

Is there indeed anything we can do about the new cadre of Microsoft astroturfers with modpoints? Is it just time to finally give up. I can't imagine that they haven't actually paid their way in.

I am looking for a large-format inkjet with continuous inking that is suitable for printing poster prints and the like. Ideally it would have both Linux and Windows support, preferably through a standard protocol, but this is not an absolute necessity. What IS a necessity is the ability to install a continuous inking system for making these large prints, and being able to change inks. I am biased towards Epson or Canon but I want good advice, not just biased.

Most people have read "1066 and all that: a memorable history of England, comprising all the parts you can remember, including 103 good things, 5 bad kings and 2 genuine dates" (one of the longest book titles I have ever encountered) and some may have encountered "The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody", but these are the exceptions and not the rule. What interesting - but accurateish - takes on history have other Slashdotters encountered?

Copyright is not a natural right, and if it had been instituted in its current form (denial of copying, as opposed to forced copying) two thousand years earlier we'd probably be at least a thousand years behind where we are now.

So on the main page, there was a story about cognitive decline starting as early as 45. As a 44-year-old, I can testify personally that it starts much sooner than that, though it's in baby steps.

There's nothing I can't do now that I couldn't do when I was 20, but it's somehow different. Learning new things requires a little more effort on my part, and it takes a little more time. Nothing too onerous, but it's certainly a change. I'm still a sponge for new knowledge and skills, but where I used to be a dry sponge, I'm a fairly damp sponge.

What about you?

ps - It took me 10 minutes to find how to write in my journal. Is that due to cognitive decline, or the stupid interface that puts the "Write in Journal" only at the bottom of my list of journals, completely breaking the temporal organization of the page? Presumably, any journal I wish to write now will be more recent than any journals I've already posted, at least until I perfect that time-traveling web browser I've been working on (homepage set to powerball.com, natch).

OK, I know AI is hard (no pun intended) but are there any strategy games out there that don't cheat on any but the lowest levels? Haven't tried Civ V yet, but IV is just another case of easy easy easy IMPOSSIBLE to me... I just can't muster the interest to outsmart a computer program written to cheat against me.

I want some continuous servos. Should I buy or hack? What's good to buy if I just want to do that? Double-BB and metal gear would both be nice.

I would like them to be informed that they are douchewaffles. Even the whole sign-in/password recovery system feels like something running on a 3270.

The trial is two days, so I didn't want to start it, and now I've removed it for disk space, and probably won't bother to reinstall. Let this be a lesson to you, limited-time trials are for fucking idiots.

From Dioxin-contaminated Agent Orange to corn even rats can't eat, Monsanto wants you dead.

Fantastic.

Let me count the ways... I just want to uninstall a game, I don't want to update Steam. I need that disk space back now, not tomorrow.

They solicited me several times to go to expensive dinners I can't afford, and now they want me to buy "which mitt" mugs. Is it a plot to attempt to drive me to the republican party? It's not going to work, I'll vote third party this time no matter what.