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dusty_dex wrote: You only have to count the number of Linux distros in existence. Almost a thousand last time I checked.
Hardly a ringing endorsement by OSS-types for accepting what's already available.
I was just talking about this with my brother last night. Most linux distro's are so similar, if you've used a couple of them you can make your way around any of them. They all deal with the standard file system, and you can put your shell of choice on top of them (though the most common is bash). You also install the same desktop environments (gnome, kde, xfce, etc) which make them even more similar.
The main difference is the package manager and the tools you choose to install.
If it moves, compile it
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Even the package managers are shared across a bunch of distros. Usually the biggest difference will be what packages they choose to bundle and some of their default settings. The big problem is that they're just different enough where it's hard to get software working consistently across all platforms (specially GUI based applications, which is I guess where the reliance on the terminal comes from) 
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yeah, I considered GUI based appliations to be like some IDE's, a web browser, stuff like that. Anything I really want to work I learn how to do in the terminal
If it moves, compile it
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No, reliance on the terminal comes from having a really powerful terminal that allows you to easily do things that will probably never be possible in a GUI.
Back when I was using Linux a lot, I generally avoided GUI admin tools because I generally found them harder to use than the terminal. They all seem to suffer from the poor organization and incomplete feature set that the Windows admin GUIs suffer from. Of course, Linux also inherited a culture that encouraged app developers to use sensibly formatted plain text config files, which left experienced users with little motivation to spend effort improving the GUI tools, creating a nice little feedback loop.
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I knew these two guys working for a local charity that was funded by the EU, *allegedly* to support local regeneration.
They were supposed to deliver a working web site and provide technical support etc, for the walk-in customers. One of the guys just kept out of sight, re-configuring servers and moaning about connection speeds and asking for better equipment. The phone exchange was on the other side of a fence next door. The other was a linux hacker, armed with Gentoo which requires recompiling source code (that's the package management in Gentoo) - he frittered away the hours doing nothing much in particular. Usual response, "oh just waiting for a compile to finish." (just like the guy in Jurassic Park) This guy liked pies too.
Horror of horrors! they lost their funding after 2 years. Go figure.
Q. Hey man! have you sorted out the finite soup machine?
A. Why yes, it's celery or tomato.
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sounds like a programmer problem, not a gentoo problem.
If it moves, compile it
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I think that is part of the issue, but not most.
Most linux users expect choices. Ubuntu doesn't allow you, at least in any reasonable way, to decide which of the implementations you want to use. It's fine to make unity and mir the defaults in your package, but I should be able to make a decision if I want to. The way they are doing it forces us as users to do what they think is correct regardless.
If it moves, compile it
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loctrice wrote: Most linux users expect choices. Ubuntu doesn't allow you, at least in any reasonable way
I don't find that to be true... for example, I hate Unity, but it's really simple to go back to the Gnome shell, takes all of three minutes. Download the gnome-shell and run the installation, log off and log back on and you're done.
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Fair enough. I stopped paying attention after they took the option of "classic" gnome out of the installer. As soon as unity came out, I went to gentoo.
If it moves, compile it
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Yeah, it's still easy to do but it's not part of the installation process any more.
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loctrice wrote: Most linux users expect choices. Ubuntu doesn't allow you.. to decide which of the implementations you want to use
Sure it does, you can install Ubuntu, or you can install another distro, you have that choice.
The part that appears to be sticking in OSS advocate's craws, is that they can see into the future far enough to realize that if Ubuntu is successful, a developer ecosystem will grow up around it that will create sofware that doesn't run on just any distribution of Linux. Well, duh. If you want a large base of users and a developer ecosystem to grow, you have to give them stability, which means stepping off the Linux distro jogging machine. By limiting your choices about the OS as a user, they hope to give you more choices about what applications you can use in the future.
If you don't like it, use the choice they've given you, vote with your feet and switch to another distro. If they're wrong, they;ll fall by the wayside, just like a bunch of other distros over the years.
We can program with only 1's, but if all you've got are zeros, you've got nothing.
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That's exactly what I did. I switched to another distro ASAP.
If it moves, compile it
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Better it's better than X.Org or Wayland, they're walking too close to the edge... 
In any case, you can take the less evil side of the story, they're competing against Wayland, and competition (and more than that the right to choose) is always good.
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RafagaX wrote: they're competing against Wayland, and competition (and more than that the right to choose) is always good.
True... competition is always good.
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It's been quite awhile since I debugged a computer program. Too long. Although I miss coding, the thing I miss more is the process of finding and fixing bugs in the code. Especially the really hard-to-track-down bugs that have you tearing your hair out - convinced your code cannot possibly be wrong - that something else must be the problem. But then when you track down that impossible bug, it becomes so obvious. I wanted to write here about the most fun I've ever had debugging code. And also the most bizarre, since fixing the bugs required the use of an oven. Yes, an oven. It turned out the bugs were temperature dependent.
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The freemium or free to play (F2P) business model is still new and in an immature state. There are some early adopters that have used exploits or tricks to squeeze money from their players, while others created what we call a “pay-to-win” experience where you’re almost guaranteed to win if you pay money. While these tactics may have generated a lot of revenue for these developers, as the market, business model and player expectations mature, these tactics will become less and less accepted by players. They probably won’t go away all together, but it’s better to get ahead of the curve and start designing and executing smarter games today. Here are examples of 5 of these tactics... This article does not contain any paragraphs that must be unlocked through in-app purchase.
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I am not a computer scientist. Or to be accurate, I am a computer scientist by adoption. I adopted the discipline, having as a background systems engineering, and the discipline adopted me. Of course, the result is that shamefully, I miss large parts of the proper formation of a computer scientist and have had to acquire the requisite knowledge, at least sufficient to 'pass' as a computer scientist, subsequently. Perhaps however, this has given me a more sensitive appreciation of the elegance of computer science and of its 'ninja arts'. Here are my selected five, which exemplify the intellectual and technical tools that computer scientists are able to bring to bear on complex problems. Sorry, there's nothing in this article about nunchucks and throwing stars.
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Hopefully just a brief post in response to one I consider to be spectacularly wrong.... The author of the above-linked post knows a hell of a lot about TDD and the various disciplines that go along with it, and I’ve generally got a lot of respect for him and his work, but when you’re wrong, you’re wrong, and when you’re an authority figure and you’re wrong it needs to be pointed out in case you make a lot of other people wrong too. OMG, someone is wrong on the internet... about TESTING!
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I didn't get my hands on VisiCalc until 1981. The first thing any Apple ][ VisiCalc user had to know was that the '/' (forward-slash) key brings up the menu on the top row of the screen. You used the left and right arrow keys to pick a top-level command, and hit RETURN. At least some of the commands then had a sub-menu which would appear on the second row, and then you'd hit RETURN again to execute the command. It was a really elegant system for using just four keys to represent a command hierarchy on two lines of all upper-case text, just 40 characters long. That was about 8% of the total available screen real estate, which was otherwise occupied by some status readouts - location, cell contents, formula, etc. To this very day in Office 2010 on Windows the '/' key puts focus on the "Ribbon".
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Netflix just used the quiet Friday afternoon to announce that it is effectively ending its public developer program. Netflix will stop issuing API keys immediately and will not accept new API affiliates. The company will no longer offer a test environment for developer and its developer portal is already set to be read-only. Netflix’s OData catalog, which was never updated all that regularly in the first place, will be retired a month from now on April 8. If you're using that database as an example, time to update your articles.
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Universities are not offering the IT programming skills that firms need, according to global research. Skills in programming languages like Cobol, CICS and JCL are essential to support business-critical IT systems that underpin many organisations today, but the majority of IT courses don't support them.... Respondents were also asked how they thought their IT course students felt about learning Cobol skills, and 39 percent said their students viewed Cobol as "un-cool and outdated", with 15 percent saying they wouldn’t know what Cobol was. There's also worryingly low enrollment in Conversational Latin.
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Learning Latin would be more interesting. 
Q. Hey man! have you sorted out the finite soup machine?
A. Why yes, it's celery or tomato.
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dusty_dex wrote: Learning Latin would be more interesting.
sure - and if you can get a job and pay your bills by learning that knowledge, why not ?
as for COBOL, there's still a fair bit of work out there in it, so, so much for it being 'uncool'
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Well that's the upside.
If I could do what Richard Pryor's character did in Superman III and siphon off the fractions of $0.01c at a financial institute, and get away with it. I'd be very interested in that job. 
Q. Hey man! have you sorted out the finite soup machine?
A. Why yes, it's celery or tomato.
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