spauldo

No, we wouldn't. Linux climbed its way up to overtake proprietary UNIX despite being less capable, which it very much was at the time.

Linux came around at the right time when the Internet was going public and regular people had access to hardware that could run a decent UNIX. People latched onto it because it was free and an interesting project. The free BSDs were just late enough to the party that they missed out on the momentum.

All the proprietary UNIX vendors (other than SCO) relied on expensive proprietary hardware sales. Intel ate their lunch while they were too busy stabbing each other in the back to notice. Linux killed SCO because SCO was, quite frankly, overpriced crap.

None of this had anything to do with the license, other that the fact you could use it for free. It was all about hardware availability, the rise of the Internet, the wave of new IT people who had experienced Linux at home, and the fact that Linux on Intel was good enough to replace those pricy proprietary machines.

Now, you wanna talk Apple, there's where your code "theft" kicks in. But that's a whole different thing.

I doubt NetBSD gets much use by "big corps." It's used by hobbyists, researchers, and universities.

NetBSD is the slim, small, traditional BSD that has an emphasis on clean code and portability. It's great for small jobs and it'll run on that old SPARC that's collecting dust in the closet. It's simpler than FreeBSD (the industrial strength BSD) and doesn't have the hyper focus on security that OpenBSD does.

You aren't going to see OpenBSD share a kernel with anyone - it's too different and makes trade-offs the others won't accept. And NetBSD doesn't need the heavyweight kernel FreeBSD uses.

From what I've seen, the BSD community swaps code around on a regular basis. But they pick and choose what code to use based on their own goals. It seems to work pretty well.

It's my nameserver/DHCP server. I used to have it set up as an iSCSI target for backups and as a boot server for my firewall, but I do something else these days.

My main reason for using NetBSD for this is to have easy access to the man pages. Like the other BSDs, the man pages are exceptionally well-written and are a tremendous resource for doing POSIX programming. Plus I find myself digging through the code when I'm interested in how something is implemented. Having a local repository of good C code with a liberal license is worth having the extra OS to manage.

Yeah I don't buy that argument either. The amount of e-waste being saved by NetBSD is so tiny as to be insignificant.

NetBSD is great for retrocomputing, since it's a modern OS that can run on very limited hardware. It's also a very nice traditional UNIX. It's well documented, has a nice codebase, and is a pleasure to use. But for saving e-waste, Linux has it beat.

Try going to west Oklahoma sometime. Not even the people who've never traveled think it's the most beautiful place on Earth.

Norse runes are just an alphabet. As long as your language uses the same set of sounds, you can write with them today.

People get confused about them because there's a tie-in with the old Germanic religions where they're used by the gods for divination, and the neopagans have adopted them for that purpose. But they're really just a set of alphabets optimized for carving into wood.

Terry Pratchett had some books kind of like this.

The Carpet People has characters that live in the fibers of a living room carpet and are subject to mysterious phenomena they don't understand (such as a vacuum cleaner).

The Bromeliad Trilogy is similar, although the characters are a few inches high and at least have a concept of full-sized humans. They have to move their tribe from a department store that's closing down to somewhere else, which means they have to learn about the outside world.

What an outrage! Everyone knows (but big pharma tries to hide it) that if a barrel of the vaccine rolls off a high roof and falls onto your head it'll kill you instantly!

The differences between the translations are generally very minor. There are very few places where there is any significant difference in meaning.

I suspect it depends on the industry and type of product.

In the PLC market, I've worked with Schneider-Electric, Wago, and Emerson support. All three were excellent. They're excellent because they know we're going to choose which vendor to use for our next project based on our experience with the current project.

For protocol bridges, I've dealt with Digi and Real Time Automation. Digi's support was halfhearted at best. RTA spent hours talking on the phone and even dug through a closet to find documentation for an ancient version of one of their products in order to help me figure out how to interface with it. Guess who we used for the next project?

Price is important but my time is expensive. Good support for a more expensive product wins over poor support for a cheap one.

But all this only works because of the nature of our industry. For consumer goods, good support will lose to price nearly every time.

Note I specifically said "is used to spread hate." There are a lot of people who use religion as a tool to push their agenda. That's especially true here in the US, where the evangelical churches are so prevalent.

It differs from church to church, of course, and it says nothing about any particular member of the congregation.

150 years ago, the buildings where I live were made of wood or sod and there were no cities. Fifty years before that, there were no buildings at all. The native people lived in tents, followed the buffalo herds, and the sky was their temple.

The churches that have been built since were built by denominations that place less value in visual and architectural art than, for example, the Catholic or Orthodox churches. The single Catholic church in my town does look nicer than the others, although the inside looks just as fake as everything built since the 1950s.

I have visited the church at Rota and the cathedral at Càdiz, and they are beautiful. We do not have churches like these where I live. But it wouldn't matter if we did. It is neither the blandness of my churches or the beauty of yours that cause me to dislike the church, but the way the church is used to spread hate for people who are different than them.

You must be in a very different part of the world than I am. One with grand cathedrals, perhaps. Where I'm from, a church is usually a big box with a brick facade, glass doors, paint over drywall interiors, and fake wood trim. Outside of the decorations, they're much like office buildings. They generally have a small steeple somewhere that holds no bell and only serves to identify the building as a church, because otherwise you wouldn't be able to tell.

There isn't anything to hate about the architecture that wouldn't also apply to most public buildings built in the last half century.

I don't believe that most people's dislike of churches stem from the architecture.

Yep, right there with you.

I envisioned one of those cartoon fight clouds with the occasional fist or foot sticking out of it on the deck of a ship.

The cloud being moving away from the "you must work to eat" economy and into the "you can work if you want nice stuff" economy. Getting there won't be fun but a lot of us would like that for our grandchildren.

Remember the "terrorist fist jab?"

He's a guy that knows a lot of math and how to turn that math into code. I don't know if he'd be able to come up with some brand new paradigm for AI but I'd want him on my team and I'd listen to what he has to say.

Mostly he seems to try to nail all the items on the "how to grow your YouTube channel" checklists. Clickbait sensationalist titles, exaggerated face on the thumbnail, etc. I have a rule that I don't click on any video where I can't tell the subject by the title, and that eliminated him from my watchlist a while ago.

I wish the guy luck on becoming a superstar influencer, since that seems to be his goal, but he can do it without my help.

Back when I wanted new packages, I ran Debian unstable.

Occasionally I'd find myself having to manually fix dependencies, but for the most part it worked great for me. I don't bother now, since it's rare that I want something newer than what backports can give me and I'm not adverse to compiling my own stuff if I need to.

I personally consider it invented. The universe is what it is. Math is a model we've collectively built that tries to work within the underlying rules of how logic works in the universe. Like all models, any disagreement with observation means our model is wrong.

But honestly, the whole question is akin to asking how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

On a separate subject, that site you linked does something strange with scrolling on Firefox mobile. Hey web devs - stop screwing around with things like scrolling! Browser devs implement scrolling in a consistent manner. You aren't making the user experience better with your silly JavaScript tricks!

It's probably different if you're at a company that actually does what they should and keeps up with all the service contracts and whatnot. I wouldn't know because I always end up at the other type of company.

But I will never buy a NAS or SAN from a company that uses custom firmware on drives. Some dipshit beancounter will come along, "save" some money by not renewing the service contract, and then I'm off hunting for replacement drives on eBay.

I totally agree. My work is a major part of my life. I do my job well and that's important to me.

But I don't care about any particular company. I'm just as happy automating refineries as I am factories or chemical plants. I just want to be a valuable member of a team that gets stuff done.

Not OP, but for me the biggest advantage of wired is that it's easier to find my mouse in my laptop bag or when my desk gets messy. I dunno how many times I've had to trace the wire to find my mouse buried in a stack of engineering drawings.

Reminds me of an old meme:

My wife asked me why I carry a pistol everywhere. I told her, "Decepticons!" I laughed, she laughed, the toaster laughed, I shot the toaster, it was a good time.

The lawyers don't even have to do anything. I avoid any code that's not MIT or equivalent for work-related things because I don't want to run the risk of polluting company code. The only exception is elisp, because that only runs in Emacs.

No, on the couple occasions it's happened I just told the boss immediately that I quit, I gathered up my stuff, and left. In both occasions it was witnessed by coworkers so they knew what happened.