caspper69

Google records include every place you've ever been (if you use an Android device), every wifi hotspot you've ever connected to, every website visited, every app executed, every message (text or email) you've sent. It's like having a voice recorder permanently on your shoulder and then having to turn that over to law enforcement.

It's very bad. Text and email should be private, unless it is in the context of the action being pursued. This is just too much data to just turn over willy nilly. Very slippery slope.

There's so much more to the IBM/Microsoft OS/2 story than the quote you posted. In fact, there have been books written about it. I'm not sure your quote accurately captures what actually happened over those 5 or so years.

Ok man, now that's just over the top.

/s

> To be excessively pedantic

This is the best, most delicious, type of pedantry friend!

I would hazard a guess that the last POSIX/SuS VAX/VMS were coded against still specified a 32-bit time_t, which would have likely polluted their proprietary userspace. The OpenVMS guys were shooting for compatibility, so it stuck. Legacy is a PITA.

Only for a semi-certain range of values of t, as far as I can tell. /s

> Interesting that they did 100% incoming part inspection on their ICs going into the arcade machines. I’m not sure if ICs were less reliable then, or they just built a higher quality product.

If memory serves, it was a little of column A, and a little of column B.

Yeah, lol. It's called adult thinking. And it happens once you actually become one. One that is responsible for others, not just yourself and your whims. "Adulting" for an hour a week to pay your bills doesn't count.

This is just not true man. I want it to be true. It looks good on paper. But let me tell you... People will waste their lives on drugs, alcohol, sex and all number of vices whether there's a good job available or not. Happily. And they'll spit in your face, lie, cheat & steal all while telling you everything you want to hear. Some people just suck, and there will always be this group of people, opportunity & prosperity be damned.

Ada would do better if they adopted a cleaner and more c-like syntax. It's just ugly, and people don't want to write it. But it is awesome!

Habits that could shave 4/5ths off of our existing software stack if you ask me.

This is the same way that PHP works if you don't use the fast CGI modules. The webserver runs the php executable just as apache would've run perl in the gp's example.

The short answer, they are not;

The long(er) answer? Mathematics are more limited, and thus, at least on the surface, provide a more rigid model.

Plus, we have about 4500 years worth of equations that we know to be accurate; not so true for C or any other programming language. Plus, we can model all the way down in mathematics, as it is more abstract in nature.

The long(est) answer? It's turtles all the way down.

You are correct; you can learn what these things "are," but without at least some of the mathematics, it's going to be tough to fully grasp.

And yes, mathematics is a language; it is the language for modelling the phenomena we experience in the world, including the non-physical (contracts, data / counting, etc.).

I so, so, so wish that people were taught that mathematics is a language of relationships rather than one of rote numerical calculation. I think more people would stick with it. It's a shame, because the doors it opens are huge.

I'm not going to carry on with you in two forks when you ignore what I said in the other.

Well, your reading comprehension is what impresses me the least. You presumably read all of my comments and still typed that. I'm not sure how, because it is a direct contradiction to what I said.

It's a bit challenging to have a discussion with someone who responds to what he thinks you said, rather than what you did say.

> It was actually a question regarding the need to tell tales about 'crusty basement-dwelling kids now in their 50s'. What was the point of that other than to make yourself feel better?

I told the story. And it is a relevant one. There is an element in the community, not as pervasive as it once was, but it is not insignificant, that is and behaves exactly as I set forth. And I know it to be true, just as you do, and every other person here on HN knows it to be true. I lived through it.

That "attitude" is one of the major things holding back Linux on the desktop. Sad, but true. And it doesn't have anything to do with my technical prowess (or that of any HN reader for that matter). It's for Joe down the street. Jen who can barely turn a computer on, etc.

> Is this basement-dweller fantasy something you have personal experience with or is it just a story you like to tell to make yourself feel better about your own technical ignorance and laziness?

As an embedded developer with over 20 years in industry and nearly that many with GNU/Linux (and a whole host of other UNIX systems), I say piss off with that. Who exactly do you think you are that you can be so incredibly presumptuous?

> Personally I don't think it can be fixed not because the software is beyond saving, but the community surrounding it doesn't actually want it to be an experience for regular non-technical people. Try going to a mailing list and suggesting that editing text files in /etc isn't a practical end-user experience and see what response you get.

Thank you. This is the truth, and your attitude on the issue will tell you which dog you have in the fight;

The non-technical among us, the 80-90% if you will, are not going to use a desktop Linux distribution the way they are currently setup. A home user is not going to use Google to fix a problem. They're not going to call their technically-inclined family member. They're not going to edit text files nor understand the minutiae of their hardware (and it WILL happen, eventually, 100% guaranteed). They are either going to throw "that piece of shit away" or they're going to call their buddy Steve who can put Windows on it.

Unfortunately, the community is still "the community," and much like those kids who wouldn't get out of their parents' basements, they're now in their 50s, crusty and pedantic as hell, sitting in their own ivory tower, incidentally not much different than the one they rebelled against in the 90s. Anyway... blah, blah, blah.

I don't disagree with your statement at all.

But I do disagree with the statement I was replying to.

No, it's not.

You do not need to learn how to analyze algorithmic complexity from a theoretical point of view, which would be very math-heavy.

But a college/university-level mathematics / comp-sci course in algorithms & data structures, usually only a 3 credit, 200-level course, isn't really asking too much.

Then you'd know why your O(n^2) algorithm sucks on any dataset larger than a toy without having to be scolded.

There's 10,000 shades of gray between not knowing shit other than sort() and having a PhD. Use some common sense.

Many of these industrial systems are built from reusable components. In my experience at a Tier 1 OEM for the US domestic auto market, a line could be torn down and re-purposed to another line by adding or removing physical components, modifying the physical layout where appropriate, and then adjusting the PLC programming.

An assembly line isn't really a "product," per se. It's more of amalgamation of several products and technologies, many legacy, that forms a cohesive but loosely-coupled whole. You may have several vendors' products / systems in a line. So what you end up with are ongoing contracts that provide for installation, programming, troubleshooting, maintenance, etc.

There's actually a whole specialized industry that does nothing but design assembly lines. It's pretty neat.

No, it is that spacetime itself is expanding. Nothing with mass accelerated to an impossible speed.

Because user code and kernel code are not the same, and printf is part of the standard c library, which is a userland application library.

Everything goes around in circles because we hit walls and obstacles, work around them and move on. Then at a later date, when we hit new walls and obstacles, we re-visit old areas, many times to find that they are no longer problems (faster hardware, more network capacity, algorithmic breakthroughs), and so the industry half-pivots in a new direction.

Everything old is new again. Wash, rinse, repeat.

I have actually been running the Edge beta for about a month. It's pretty good. I've noticed that since I no longer use Chrome, a lot of the ad-tracking related items have gotten much more generic over time (such as the news articles on my phone on the chrome homepage).

I at least I feel like I'm being tracked a little less by a single entity.

Better than the Fall 2015 6.046J where the TA admits he's never implemented the tree algorithm he's teaching in code. At MIT. As a graduate student.

Let that sink in.

Actually Dominos stock has outperformed Apple over the last 20 years. It's a remarkable story. Nothing at all like Uber and WeWork.

Well, that's not at all a fair comparison. Who knows what that one core is doing? Not all algorithms are parallelizable, in fact most aren't. So doing standard, everyday things in code might still max out a core.

Didn't glibc use setjmp()/longjmp() for task switching eons ago (maybe even pre-Linux)?