Posts by Rob Gr

I admire Bill Gates more, who put hard cash and thought towards realisable goals.

Re: Let's Hope...

and worse, I can finally understand the lyrics "wooaaah your sex is on fire".

Re: ksh or nothing, thank heavens for cygwin

I must admire the originality of your wit. Micro-Shaft, .Not, and Power-hell.

"WHY, Microsoft?"

Because it is part of the Unicode character set perchance?

To be fair, COBOL is probably the most successful language ever, if your criteria is long-term support.

Re: So what you're saying is...

"...that Facebook should go out of their way to hire more non-white people, in other words: hire more people based entirely on the colour of their skin?"

The issue is that they already are - just it is easier to get a job with them if your skin is white.

I refer you to an excellent post on this issue by Aral Balkan: https://ar.al/notes/on-false-dichotomies-and-diversity/

"It gives me a glimpse into the presumably popular entertainments of the young."

No it doesn't. I can guarantee that youngsters spend more time watching YouTube than MTV, by far.

TV is pretty dull to that generation.

Absolutely, because Function and End Function is so much of an improvement

Re: "It's written in slow-ass Python"

"I think that was exactly the point, I don't believe Gentoo install is renowned for it's speed. It might be very clever, but it isn't fast. It builds everything from source, slowly."

In that case, the reason for its speed is nothing to do with Python, it is the strategy of building from source.

Re: A: he is not a real musician

"Or did I miss something relevant here?"

It also re-encodes it to Apple format, rendering it unusable in any other software.

Embrace, extend, assimilate into the ecosystem.

Re: What chance ordinary users to stay safe?

The only way I can see the situation really improving is if a clean slate O/S was available that verified (properly) all code before it is executed. That means different, safe, languages as well as vast changes in the O/S architecture.

Sadly, most of the world seems to think the state of the art is a command-line based O/S developed in the 1970's (or clones thereof).

MS, to their credit, did some good research projects in this area: Singularity (http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/singularity/) and Midori (http://joeduffyblog.com/2015/11/03/blogging-about-midori/). Sadly, they don't seem to have been taken further.

"I guess if you aren't the kind of musician that can make money by performing then yes."

Some forms of music lend themselves well to live performance, others not so much. Massive Attack, for example, were absolutely dire live, but their studio albums works of genius.

"Unwanted advances" is sexual harassment?

In a working environment, yes it is. Especially if the one making the unwanted advances is in a position of authority.

Re: tin foil hat time?

I get the impression he may be a LotR obsessive.

Seems he prefers working for the Land where the Shadows Lie.

Re: Job's the marconi of his day!!

"No need to be a Stallman and crap on everyone you disagree with. Both have their place."

Personally, I think the writers of software should be free to use whatever software they choose to build their products (as long as they recursively abide by the licenses thereof), and be free to release their software under whatever license they choose (subject to the restrictions of products they use).

That's real freedom.

Naturally, I have my own preferences (MIT/BSD), but those are just my preferencs. YMMV.

Re: Done before, failed before

But it generally involved programming in HyperScript to do anything useful.

Re: Display

That's not hard at all, Broadcom published the works in February as a "birthday present"...

https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/a-birthday-present-from-broadcom/

Re: One less ...

I'm afraid your wrong, I'll cite the Oxford English Dictionary to back up my claim. Will that suffice?

http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/less

Re: how many of the MEPs were from the UK

Couldn't be bothered to follow the link and read the list of signatories then?

(In case you still can't, I'll save you the bother, none).

Re: The Ministry of Silly Languages

I'm working on a precursor to this; to be titled "Ying Tong Iddle I Po."

To be fair, judging by Jet Brains responses it looks like they are now considering this.

Wow, I hadn't come across that case.

The mind boggles. Interesting is that the patent was rejected for 12 years, but after perseverance they eventually got to waste their money.

and how exactly was that Microsoft's fault?

Re: Not "reaching out" again...

Actually its in quite common usage, and has been for years, its even mentioned in the OED.

Re: The Emperor Occasionally Wears Pants

That is just total bolox.

Yes, "ls" is an alias for the get-childitem command, not an imitation of the UX command.

In fact, given a current "folder" of, for example, a WMI object, get-childitem works to enumerate children, just as with enumerating subfiles/folders.

Further, instead of every command converting the output to text and the next command parsing the input as text, each command passes fully blown objects to the next command.

Saying that Powershell is an imitation of the UX command shell just shows your ignorance.

Re: Clean slate

Its actually being based on asm.js, not javascript. This an entirely different beast.

Re: So funny

"yes windows come from that fruit company.. developed to solve the problem of small screens of the day"

Er.. no they don't. Windows come from Xerox Parc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_graphical_user_interface