Experts have to get made somehow. It's not as if Linux is a frozen target where you can count on being "productive and community standard-compliant without any effective lag time" without going back to the docs sometimes.
A great example in my opinion: Red Hat RHEL7 introduced systemd. A lot changed versus RHEL6. RHEL6 "experts" turned into clumsy RHEL7 "80%-ers". We figured it out.
Not to even mention that SuSE, RHEL, and Ubuntu are about as similar as "Linux" and FreeBSD, if you are worried about the finer points of best practice. We figure it out.
Absolutely. It happens. But to harken back to the original post, there are definite advantages to "technology with X experts available in the market" than "technology with Y experts available in the market". Where X > Y.
And those advantages don't disappear even if Y is easy to learn.
On that basic point, I agree -- although there are advantages to swimming upstream sometimes. Otherwise, given the landscape of 10-15 years ago, we'd be having this discussion about Windows servers instead of Linux!
Besides, probably the best way to find out if it's a "big deal" is to ask your sysadmins. Or, generally, the people who are going to be stuck running it.
Granted on the upstream point! Especially with how quick transformative technology goes through its various phases, it may be essential (/Strangelove emphasis) to make the harder choice now so that you're not behind your competitors in the near future.
Excluding filenames containing newlines, I wonder how many weird corner cases this would reveal:
ls | tr '\n' '\0' | xargs -0 rm
I've been annoyed by ls and xargs not playing together here and there, but the above only just occurred to me. Not sure if it's a good idea yet or not!
I teach a college UNIX systems programming class. This semester I decided to switch to GitHub, and so far, I can't believe I didn't do it earlier.
I like to write code in class, and it's great to be able to push every couple of minutes so students can follow along on their laptops if they want. Of course that's more about git itself, but the GitHub interface is good and I think that it lowers the frictional cost for both me and the students, so everybody gets a little more done.
I used it to teach my class as well. But I have to be honest, it wasn't obvious at first how to use it - especially how would I manage the course website there (which needed to accommodate different semesters). Eventually, I figured out that I don't really need an HTML website, but using Markdown files would get the job done (and would be better, as it makes it easy for students to commit PR with corrections and suggestions to the course website and material). I really love our setup now, but it took some figuring out the best way to do it. BTW, if anyone is interested here the course website (just as our example):
I am definitely feeling that: I've already had to do some reorganizing as I discover that some of my initial decisions weren't perfect, as to organizing the class repo.
By the way, your article has encouraged me to get the students using issues for eg. homework questions they'd normally email, thanks for that.
Sure. Basically, we go through the first half or so of Stevens' Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment fairly sequentially. My first take was to group the example code by topic, but I've realized that it might make more sense to group it by book chapter. So that's my current reorganization plan. The thought is, with lots of topics, it will help orient people better if they have an explicit cue for what chapter to review if they are confused.
That's pretty specific to the more or less sequential approach with the book, though. It's a good book, so it can support that kind of thing.
I think it will also help with presenting the supplemental material that is linked with each chapter/section. Again, that might be specific since in the Stevens book, there is always a manpage or Single UNIX Specification reference to give for almost any section.
Yes, you're probably right. I didn't want it to include any HTML (to make it easy for anyone to contribute to course website), but perhaps there is a way to use a simple Markdown for GitHub pages.
Well, I use Octopress (similar to this) for my own blog. But, for the course, where I wanted all the students and other staff members to be involved, I wanted something much more simple. More specifically - nothing that would require building. Perhaps that could be just me and my preference.
This might be a good solution if people want something a bit more fancy as a course website. Thanks for sharing.
I have actually used daytime for a "real" use: as a quick and dirty way of eliminating the possibility of guest clock drift when running benchmark scripts inside of emulated guests with unreliable timekeeping. Obviously a bad idea for benchmarks measured on the order of seconds, but probably fine for benchmarks running for hours. ntpdate -q would probably work just as well though.
Only on topic regarding interesting 1970s OS design, but does anybody have a reference with a similar level of technical detail to this one, but for the ICL (now Fujitsu) VME operating system?
The book "Inside the AS/400" has some really cool exposition on the unique aspects of the AS/400. If I remember right, the disks and memory are in a single address space, and of course, there is a relational database built in to the operating system.
I have seen the binary translation in action: it was required when POWER6 machines came out. On a POWER5 machine, I remember it taking around 20 minutes for an application that was around 20 MB zipped, but for software licensing reasons not all of the server models exposed the full performance of the processor, so that might not be representative. And at any rate, like the OP said, it's a one time thing, and then the translated version is kept.
In the last several months, I listened to the Hardcore History podcast about World War I. I am still struggling with the same question as the article poses, but applied to war instead of disease. I want to believe that it's respectful to try to understand these experiences on their own terms, maybe especially because of how horrible they were. But at other times I remember that I can walk away whenever I want, and so I can never understand, and if I enjoy the podcast (for example), is that exploitative?
I think it is important not to forget these people, but aside from that, no answer here.
"Microsoft Edge is also 64-bit, not just by default, but at all times when running on a 64-bit processor."
After 32-bit Windows Server went away as of 2008 R2, I didn't expect MS to keep shipping 32-bit client for this long. Anybody have a convincing argument as to why? 16-bit legacy apps in large businesses?
Obviously it's not free to do this, especially since they'll be producing every patch for two PC platforms for probably another decade.
Drivers would be the only justification. If they really cared about 16-bit apps they would have supported them on 64-bit Windows: it's only real mode and virtual 8086 mode that are hard to support on a 64-bit OS; 64-bit compatibility mode can handle 16-bit protected mode software just as easily as 32-bit software. Additionally, virtualization works fine for application-level code, but not drivers.
