Posts by captain veg 782 posts • joined 12 Jun 2009
VS Code seems to be establishing itself as the go to IDE for web development on Linux, for better or worse. You can't escape them*: the company is a major contributor to Linux itself!
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*Well, not unless you're in to compiling kernels yourself from source.
Firefox did sterling work, but Opera was what did it for me (up to version 12). Not only the fastest and most standards compliant, but also the one which did what I wanted it to do, not (necessarily) what the web site owner wanted. First to block unsolicited popups, for example.
Definite honourable mention to Konqueror, without which we wouldn't have Safari. Without which we wouldn't have Chrome. Without which Edge would still be trying to hide its Trident heritage.
It's a real shame that Opera and Microsoft gave up on their own rendering engines, though, in favour of just repackaging Chrome/Blink. Competition is good. Edge notwithstanding.
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This is indeed the point. I feel no need whatsoever to be able to prove who I am. I already know very well who I am, and it's me that defines it, not government.
If there is any practical application of this kind of technology (which I doubt) then it should address a different question, viz am I authorised/qualified/entitled to (do) the thing at hand. This depends in no way at all on my identity.
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> The complexity is such that it is impractical to build a new browser engine from scratch - Microsoft of all people tried and gave up.
Ahem. Microsoft has never built a browser from scratch. The first version of Internet Explorer was simply Spyglass Mosaic with a different badge.
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> one core of a 2nd generation Pentium.
Pentium II only had one core. Mind you, that was also true of the Pentium IV that I first ran VirtualBox on, and that went tolerably well despite the lack of any kind of hardware virtualisation support. I also remember running Windows XP inside a VirtualBox VM on an XP host, which had done that Microsoft thing of slowing to an inexplicable crawl due to nothing more than the passage of time. The virtualised instance ran just fine, much better than the copy running on bare hardware. Pentium M, that one.
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You can see the curvature of the earth while standing on it.
Loads of rockets are fired into the sky every 5th November. None make it to space.
Die very quickly when outside, also known as drowning, possible at zero altitude.
Weightlessness is easy. Just put a big aeroplane into freefall.
I can see the blackness of space every night, weather permitting.
Now, if it had gone into *orbit*, that would have been a different matter.
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You seem to have missed the point that this is red tape which had already been comprehensively slashed, ground up and the resulting dust jumped up and down upon thanks to membership of the EEA by virtue of the EU. Its resurrection was wholly and exclusively the consequence of Brexit. And now a tiny little bit of it has been peeled back again and this is presented as some kind of win for Global Britain instead of what it really is, the trifling mitigation of a huge loss.
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Of course it is indeed just perception. I'm talking about a time before the RHEL/Fedora split (and CentOS), and certainly to my perception it seemed like "Linux" and Red Hat were pretty much synonymous. As it happens, the first distribution I ever tried was Slackware. Gnome notwithstanding, Red Hat felt like less hassle.
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My first Linux dabblings involved Red Hat when that was the default choice not just on servers, and there was no separate version for curious desktop users who didn't want to pay for commercial server support.
It was OK but I hated Gnome, which looked like it had been crayoned by small children. So I tried SuSE, which also at that time had no separate versions for desktop enthusiasts and support-contract server users. It used KDE, which was *much* better. And YaST, which was great. I soon tired of the RPM package system, however, which all too often required you to resolve version conflicts on your own and *never* managed a version upgrade without, at least, killing X.
Ubuntu, then. Debian's package management just works, mostly. In place upgrades, ditto. UI not to my liking.
So now I'm on Mint. And it's OK. The default UI is a bit grey, but I can live with that. Still prefer, KDE, though. Tried TrueOS, with KDE, which was fine until it came time for a version upgrade. Same with Neon. Kubuntu? Yes, probably.
I get that software sometimes has to be patched. I would really, really like it to be totally unobtrusive. Please?
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I just don't get why people import third party libraries to do trivial stuff like string manipulation. A relational database, sure. Some kind of cool UI widget, maybe. But at the very least you should ask yourself "could I write that?".
If the answer is no then maybe you should find another career.
If the answer is "of course, but I don't have time" then the supplementary questions are (a) how long will it take to learn and master the library, (b) have you got time to read and validate the library's source code, and (c) how much additional effort will it take to get that third party thing to do exactly what I need it to do rather than what the author presumed I would need.
The "it's been tested lots and ought to work perfectly" proposition is attractive, but flies contrary to experience.
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Maybe peak Microsoft, but secure it wasn't. At the time a 56K modem was the best internet connection most people could hope for, and at that speed downloading the critical security patches post-installation took longer than the average time to being pwned while connected to the net.
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... That Windows 8, at least in its .1 incarnation, is still in support (of a kind), and so a viable alternative to the to-be-avoided-at-all-costs Windows 10 abomination. For a short while, at least.
Put Classic Shell on it, and don't move your mouse too near the right edge of your (primary?) monitor, and it's almost usable.
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Learned Pascal and C at (what is now a) uni, but first job was in Pick shop, so back to BASIC. I tried to make my code as Pascal-like as I could, which bemused my colleagues.
The PC revolution happened and I got a gig writing DOS programs. In C, natch, with some assembler. And then Windows took off. Like everyone else I acquired a copy of Charles Petzold's "Programming Windows" and was horrified to learn that simply putting the words "Hello, world" on the screen required 80 lines of code. That's why VB took off. Not because of BASIC, but the Visual part. You could put the words "Hello, world" on screen without writing a single line of code. The language itself was slow and pretty clunky, but you could still write the serious stuff in C and compile to a DLL and call that.
The BASIC part got better over time, swallowing a lot of Pascal along the way and a little bit of Java. By the end, you hardly ever needed to code anything in C unless you were doing *very* low level stuff. All it really lacked was proper inheritance, strongly typed generics and the option to base collections at index zero instead of one. But instead they gave us the almost completely incompatible VB.NOT, so we switched to C# and, later, JavaScript.
I've still got quite a lot of old code to maintain. Firing up the IDE is certainly a trip down memory lane, but it takes hardly any time to get back into the swing of it. There's precious little code-completion, and I miss the ability to just magic up an object without having to add a tedious boilerplate class definition -- in its very own source file -- but it's still perfectly usable. Even under Wine on Linux.
Being able to target 64-bit platforms would be nice, but for new projects, no, I don't thinks so. When VB was king there was nothing like it for quickly knocking up a GUI. Now there's plenty of choice, and you don't have to fight the limitations of BASIC. Had something like this been around in 2002 it might have been a different matter. Right now, I don't see much point.
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I don't like even my car cancelling the indicators for me. Automatic handbrake? How will I do handbrake turns? Automatic headlight dipping? Oddly enough, everyone else shows their appreciation my furiously flashing theirs.
Who actually wants self-driving cars?
I get that there is a different culture in the US, but in Europe we even prefer to change gears manually.
Ask yourself this: if you were in danger of missing a plane (or train, or whatever), would you (a) press on, turning up the spatial awareness so that you can stretch the rules a little bit on speed limits, or (b) accept that the computer won't go any faster no matter what.
If (b), which is a perfectly valid choice, why have a private car at all?
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My driving instructor told me, after testing me on emergency stops by saying STOP, that in the actual exam the tester won't actually say STOP... at which moment I hit the brakes and he mashed his forehead on the windscreen. I guess my young reactions were better than his. In retrospect, not sure why he wasn't wearing a seatbelt.
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Way back when, Microsoft released version 3.11 of Windows, also known as Windows for Warehouses because it brought no new features for anyone not connected to a networks, which was most people at the time. There was much merriment that the Windows Calculator app asserted that 3.11 - 3.1 = 0. This wasn't fixed, IIRC, until Windows 98.
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