telent

Compare http://catb.org/jargon/html/U/UTSL.html

George Bernard Shaw, iirc

On the general question: there is an obvious distinction to be made between someone asking you for advice on what they plan to spend the next three years doing, and what they're hacking together on a single pizza-fueled weekend. The latter is a learning experience and even without your advice they'll fail fast if they fail, so don't sweat it.

> My point is that Openness advocates seem to place Google on a pedestal

That may be your perception, but I don't think it's universally true. Ask anyone who's tried to build a project on AOSP ...

> there's no semantic distinction between code and data

I struggle to understand how this can be true, and I say that as a Lisper (spiritually if not currently), because 'this data does something meaningful when interpreted by a computer' is exactly a semantic distinction from 'this other data doesn't'

As stories go, this one would be a lot better if it actually linked to some technical information about the bug. Does anyone have a reference for what the samsung_laptop driver's doing that is so bad? The kernel bugzilla link (#47121) that someone has speculated is related is a boot panic, not a complete bricking, so while it _may_ be the same thing ...

https://bugzilla.kernel.org/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=samsung-... # but nothing else in there looks to be any closer either

The article is from May 2012, perhaps the thread title could be updated to say so?

Indeed, the value of threading on usenet was that it provided data for the user-agent to decide in what order to present unread posts to the user - if the original topic A had drifted to subjects B C and D which were being discussed in parallel, when reading it three hours later I would get all the posts about B before the posts about C and then the posts about D. And if I grew tired of B I could hit 'k' and move immediately onto C. As long as I wanted to carry on reading, though, all I needed to do was hit SPACE (or in today's language, scroll down)

This is all a completely separate issue from the one of whether replies should be indented under their parent. For my money, this only makes sense if the reply is approximately as long as 'ME TOO!!!11!!!1!' and in the more interesting case that the reply is actually a reply and not just a comment, indenting is the wrong decision. But there is no need to conflate the two: ordering and indenting are independent decisions

Er, this is email we're talking about here, not http

So why is an article about the Metropolitan Police forensic lab in south London (UK) illustrated with a stock photo of what appears to be a US power socket? (It might be a Euro socket, but it's certainly not a UK one.) Do they not have electricity sockets anywhere at the BBC that they could have taken a picture of?

The continual references to how much easier it was "ten years ago" makes me wonder if the author was actually in the industry ten years ago, or is merely using it as a shorthand for "grandpa's stories of how it was in his day"

I'm pretty sure I could have written the same thing in 2002 except that the list of technologies would have looked different.

> The Linux kernel itself is a remarkably stable system as far as ABI/API is concerned

If we're talking about userland applications, the Linux kernel A[BP]Is have IME historically been more stable than the Glibc interfaces (which are supposedly the "supported" interfaces) layered atop them.

In-kernel interfaces for binary-only modules are a different kettle of fish altogether.

Their (Smile) online banking is "not bad for a financial institution", and if that sounds like damning with faint praise ...

Particular nits are: - pressing the browser 'back' button triggers an immediate logout - they don't use email for anything except to tell you they've sent you a "secure message" that you have to log in and read - no data export (though there are greasemonkey scripts)

Their customer service I've found to be fine unless you want anything usual, complicated, or to be done in a timely fashion. Much like any large company, really

Does anyone know of "friend discovery" services using OStatus? Most proprietary social networks have that "let me riffle through your addressbook" thing, which I imagine the privacy-conscious would eschew (I certainly do), but e.g. my Twitter "following" list is publically available, so it shouldn't be hard to go through that and find people I'm following who are also on an ostatus-compatible service somewhere

I'd question the assumption that ftp was ever the old ftp, if by "ftp" we mean "deployment channel to production services". As soon as your web site is complicated enough to need a database, you have database migrations or their moral equivalent to worry about as part of the upgrade process, an simply dumping files in a directory somewhere doesn't cut it

> strip the input of all apostrophes or double quotes.

This approach will be a hard sell for Father O'Reilly and Dwight David "Ike" Eisenhower

tl;dr Eric explains reasonably well why he thinks RMS is a fanatic, but fails utterly to explain why his opinion (on that or any other subject) matters.

I'm a cyclist but I've never worked as one

Building bridges may not be the best analogy. What if everyone started learning to dance the macarena instead?

Seriously, cooking as an analogy highlights a difference between private recreational practice and public for-pay professional practice. Building bridges, unless you live in a place where everyone has a backyard with a river in it, not so much.

> there are still plenty of cases -- students going to exams, book that depend on exact layout, etc -- where ebooks are no substitute.

Quite. Does anyone yet make an ereader that can safely and sanely be used in the bath?

Which is exactly why I'd rather use a library that doesn't make the choice of Rails and ActiveRecord for me.

The lack of a timestap datatype is a problem, but the lack of a 'link' datatype is imo a greater one, now that people are doing supposedly-RESTful APIs with JSON payload. Which is not to say that you can't layer that type info on top of JSON (see e.g. HAL) but you do need both ends to agree that that's what you're doing otherwise it kind of treads on the "no out-of-band info" property

In a place and time where the motor lobby had not been so successful, the law would probably recognize this reality by imposing strict limitations on the use of machinery which, as you describe it, is so intrinsically dangerous. Locomotive Acts, for example

> in my mind it is the opposite, the biggest, heaviest vehicles should have ROW especially at this point in history when the average driver is distracted by so many things in his vehicle. Response times are going to be suboptimal

This sounds to me like you're saying that the law should reward people for wielding more power (bigger heavier vehicles) less responsibly (driving distracted). A prudent pedestrian will and should be mindful of where he's going and I don't think anyone with an instinct to self-preservation would say otherwise, but shouldn't the law serve the interests of the vulnerable where they conflict with the powerful?

I think I agree with the general tone of the article, but his ordering is upside down: "data" is bad, but "data2" is worse, not better.

> not particularly professional…

I am reminded of http://philip.greenspun.com/ancient-history/professionalism-...

> the focus is on the object rather than the process

From a business apps point of view, this is exactly it. You might find that methods are subordinate to objects, but in the business domain itself, the objects themselves are manipulated by processes. It's a whole other layer above the OO layer, and failure to realise this means you either end up with lots of FooManager classes, or you push overarching responsiblities back down into low-level objects that don't really want them, and find you have too much coupling and not enough Demeter

(Of course, you might be writing FooManager classes with this upper layer explicitly in mind - in which case fair enough and you'll probably like DCI. But I think there's still a lot of mileage in plain ordinary functions that don't have to belong to anything)

For exactly that reason it's a really good example of the point I was making: what you really need to know is whether a given product is strategic to its supplier. "Am I paying for it?" is one indicator that it may be, but it's not conclusive

> If all your algorithms are as trivial as calculating a weighted modulo 11 checksum, then the sort of case I'm thinking of doesn't apply.

My estimate is that 98% of all programming everywhere is as algorithmically trivial as calculating a weighted modulo 11 checksum - probably more so - and it acquires its bugginess from accidental complexity due to poor factoring, and from conflicts at interfaces. Test-driven development is pretty good, in my experience, at helping ameliorate both these problems.

Of course, that doesn't mean I actually do it 100% or even 80% of the time. I'm happy to agree that it's no panacea: testing threads and UIs are particular pain points for me, and usually I substitute with either Thinking Really Hard or just Not Changing Stuff As Much

Formal proof for me is stuff I learnt at college, forgot subsequently, and keep meaning to reread up on. Thank you for prompting it back up my TODO list

(with-devils-advocacy A Real Programming Language is one that can be used (and has been used) to implement its own compiler or interpreter ) That said, by this definition Python qualifies.

If I have a function/module/method buried deeply inside my system such that testing it requires either ten lines of setup code or backdoors ("special cases and privilege escalation tricks") in the deployed code, that might say something interesting about my architecture in either case. Is the code really only ever going to be called from that one place and in that one way, and if so, exactly how valuable is it? Sure, it might be that the only place I currently want to call (say) a weighted modulo 11 checksum is in credit card validation and the context there is I have a third-party payment gateway and a valid order object and all that stuff, but I would still be looking at surfacing the actual calculation in a library module somewhere that I can test it without doing all this setup. I grant you that architecture is only ever easy in retrospect - that's why we refactor - but I don't think that represents an architectural compromise.