Posts by tsprad

NetBSD 10 proves old tech can still kick apps and take names three decades later

Re: Variety Versus Fragmentation

This relates to something I noticed during the "Unix Wars" thirty years ago: there seemed to be a lot of effort devoted to compatibility for programmers but a lot of differentiation in the system administration tools. This surprised me because I thought that the system administrators would have more influence on purchasing decisions than programmers.

I still see the same thing today among Linux distros and BSD variants: the core application software is all very similar, compatible, portable, but configuration and system management are all very different.

Software innovation just isn't what it used to be, and Moxie Marlinspike blames Agile

Who could downvote Donald Knuth?

Kids these days! Furrfu.

Your first sentence nailed it. When I first heard of the metric "lines of code per day" (in 1975) I was flabbergasted and appalled, and the numbers being used in those days were around 10 to 100. I think it was Dennis Ritchie who remarked that one of his most productive days was when he deleted about a thousand lines of code.

No mere mortal will ever be able to comprehend millions of lines of code.

MDM vendor Mobile Guardian attacked, leading to remote wiping of 13,000 devices

Wiped Chromebooks?

I thought that Chromebooks stored everything "in the clouds". Nothing really lost then, right? Shouldn't take but a moment to reinstall ChromeOS. Wasn't that the promise?

WordStar 7, the last ever DOS version, is re-released for free

Re: First used in on CP/M

"focused on content rather than form"

I've always thought of those as two very different tasks, but then I've never done much "word processing". I was a manufacturing engineer for the very first Word Processor, the Xerox 810 that coined the term. The daisy wheel printer made the prettiest print I've seen to this day. The only other one I actually used was Ventura Publisher. I wrote the text using vi and then fed plain ASCII into it to make it pretty.

A much more convenient layout. Some people still swap them in their X keymap, but I was always afraid to do that for fear I'd do something disastrous using someone else's keyboard.

Drowning in code: The ever-growing problem of ever-growing codebases

Re: A Few Ironies

"send or receive papers that were prepared using "standard" tools "

"e-mail it as an ASCII text"

ASCII and email are indeed important, standard tools. I don't recall ever having trouble reading ASCII text, but Firefox has rendered PDF completely unreadable for me just yesterday.

I've been reading ASCII text since bits were forged from rings of iron and bytes were hand sewn like baseballs by women in Puerto Rico.

How to make today's top-end AI chatbots rebel against their creators and plot our doom

Re: I continue to say

How well is that working on the mosquitoes?

Study shock! AI hinders productivity and makes working worse

Re: I think AI is overhyped

Yeah, customers just LOVE those IVR phone trees. And hold music. /s

How tech went from free love to pay-per-day

Re: Speaking the copium

>> FOSS software in some markets - office productivity, DevOvs, specialized scientific supplications - has been good enough for more than a while now. But that is because the FOSS developers in those markets needed the solutions for themselves and worked hard in creating functioning solutions.

>> On the other hand, mostly in the creative markets, FOSS software has historically lagged WAY, WAY behind their commercial counterparts.

It seems to me pretty obvious that the people using that software can't (or won't, or don't) write the code they need for themselves, so they have to pay someone else to write the code.

I'd like to kick M$ of my home network, but my wife depends on Quickbooks for her business, and neither of us has enough ambition or talent to try to replicate that in open source. If you're not in a position to write the code yourself then you have pay someone else to do it, or find someone else who has already done it and given it away for free.

Re: The gigantic statistical text-prediction models

I remember the hype about "expert systems" in the early 1990s. I remember trying to make any sense of Marvin Minsky before that.

Re: The gigantic statistical text-prediction models

When I first heard of the "AI" research at MIT in the late 1960s it struck me as using a silk purse to emulate a sow's ear. I still don't understand the motivation for using something as simple, straightforward, and reliable as digital logic to emulate something as confused and unreliable as human "intelligence".

I guess I'm just a hopeless geek.