concrete-faucet

If RMS thinks that dumb jokes in documentation are worth having, I say we wholeheartedly embrace it. For example:

* GNU/Hurd - almost as traumatic as childbirth.

or

* childbirth - if it takes as long as it takes to write GNU/Hurd, may God have mercy on your soul.

or

* RMS - I know how to program computers (maybe), so obviously I am an expert on female reproductive issues.

Only building what is needed is only part of avoiding writing code. I'd say that during the first half of my career, I was completely ignorant of just how powerful shell scripting was for increasing productivity and reducing the amount of code that I would need to write and then later have to maintain.

One of the best pieces of advice you can give to a young developer is to learn about the tools already available on the operating system and how to build solutions by composing them via scripts.

It was really only after being a few years into a job where the primary development environment was OpenVMS with a crusty old manager that knew DCL inside and out that I fully understood - and boy oh boy did people think I was some sort of freak 10x developer when in fact I was just writing a few hundred lines of C to fill in the gaps between what I could get for free.

I really hate developing on Windows, but PowerShell is an amazing tool (I saw an interview with the creator who said that he started trying to do a UNIX-like shell but gave up when he realized that it just doesn't fit in the Windows paradigm. So he modeled it off of VMS. If you want PowerShell to act like bash, you're doing it wrong). The pipeline is passing around full .Net objects and the feature set is amazing. If you program Windows for a living and don't learn PowerShell, you're missing out on a lot of free productivity.

Lately, I've been using Linux more and am all in on shell scripting. I am following some advice I got to explore man pages more frequently and it is paying off. I even found an old System V printed manual and sometimes flip through it, finding random commands that I had no idea existed and thinking about how I could use them.

The last time I used Pine was in the early 2000s. I had gone on vacation and during that time some computer virus caused mass emails over the course of a few days (can't remember any more detail than that). I returned to work with many tens of thousands of unread emails in my inbox. Outlook crashed upon opening because it couldn't handle it. After a few minutes of trying Outlook over and over again, I remember that I can check my mail through Pine on the UNIX servers. Log in, open Pine, delete mass emails, Outlook is ok again. It's a quality program.

The thing that gets me most of all with the SBCs is that I need to go out and buy another power supply. I know - they aren't really that expensive, but I just don't want to do it. I already have so many 5V USB power supplies that I don't even know what to do with them all. I doubt I am the only one.

I like that the Pi Zero seems to be perfectly stable with any old phone charger I've used, and they seem to range from 800mA to 1mA. I have a couple iPad chargers that go up to 2.1A, so I'd be really happy if I could find a multicore SBC that was good to go with one of those.

Where I live, there are gifted schools for kids that speak Polish, Spanish and Russian. Their only goal for English is to make sure the child is proficient by the 6th grade.

The kids section at the local library branch (there is one in every neighborhood) will have half the books in English and the rest in whatever languages are common in that neighborhood.

Language barriers are only a problem if your local city makes them one.

My son is in 3rd grade and his NWEA MAP reading score put him at the 11/12 grade level, so he got put into an advanced reader class. In the fall, they read books about history, wrote about and discussed them in class. This spring, the teach chose a young adult novel that I guess is entirely appropriate from a reading-level point of view. But some of the subject matter goes way over the heads of the kids and other stuff in the book is disturbing to them. Our son simply refused to finish reading the book. The teacher wasn't going to switch books because a couple kids didn't like it, and the class depended on discussing what they read... What can you do but stop reading and/or drop out of the class?

Serious trouble like jail, hundreds of thousands in fines against you personally, being labeled a rogue employee and treated as the whipping boy, paying for your own defense out of your own pocket?

Yes, it might be a bit serious. When the first lawsuit was filed, a lot of stuff went under legal hold. Ask the legal department if it is ok to delete. If they say yes, it's their neck on the line, not yours. CYA CYA CYA.

Well, what about adding a new signal (SIGXMEM) with a default action of ignore? If the system is running low on memory it can send this to some or all processes and wait for a little bit to see if things get better.

This is how iOS has handled things since version 2.0: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uiapplicatio... > It is strongly recommended that you implement this method. If your app does not release enough memory during low-memory conditions, the system may terminate it outright.

What does State Farm have to do with Chicago? The HQ is 150 miles away. And how does an insurance company lose money absent a massive act of God? By being bad at math, that's how. Why is that the fault of government?

> Eventually somethings gotta give and I am assuming it will be much higher state and property taxes

Well since y'all refuse to consolidate governmental units, it will be higher property taxes. A typical suburb with 50,000 people has its own police department, its own fire department, its own library system, its own parks department, road department, etc. Two school systems (K-8 and high school), each with a full administration! Drive your car, cross an intersection, and now you are in some other identical suburb of 50,000 people with all those same governmental units.

I know you want your community to feel like a little village, and your community is better than the one next door, so you'll never vote to combine into one. This is how much it costs.

Someone pays $15000 per year tax on a $280000 house. I pay $9000 per year on a $650000 condo. I share the cost of a police chief with 2.7 million people and you share it with 50,000.

Oak Park is very urban and not at all a typical suburb, though the property taxes are astronomical! You already know that though...

I stay in Chicago because I have a very high quality of life here. Higher than I could get in many other places.

Every single person that I work with that complains about taxes and money lives in the suburbs. It's no wonder, of course. Property taxes in many Chicago suburbs are double or even triple than those inside the actual city of Chicago. Many of these people once lived in Chicago, but had kids and then left for a house with a yard in some suburb with good schools and high taxes. "It's cheaper than private school" is how they justify it. They buy a second car and drive it to the train station, paying a monthly parking fee in addition to their monthly train ticket.

I ride a bicycle to and from work, except when it is too wet or slippery to be safe. I take the bus when that happens. I get home from work and am spending time with my family before the commuter train leaves the station with my suburban colleagues on board. Within a 20 minute walk, we have 5 different parks to choose from. We have some of the best museums and cultural attractions in the world available to us. These places offer free workshops and learning events for children and are required by law to offer a minimum number of days per year of free admission for local residents.

I live in a high-rise building filled with a wide variety of people of all different skin tones. Immigrants from Europe, Asia, Latin America and even Africa. Same sex couples. Interracial couples. Muslims, Catholics and Evangelicals. This has been what my children know as normal and have for their entire lives.

Perhaps you may want to consider that leaving a place like Chicago is the ethically questionable decision, especially if you are concerned about the thought processes, viewpoints, and experiences that are required to make neocolonialism and war seem like good ideas.

> The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

This really isn't as crazy as it may sound. When my spouse was working in BigLaw, we rarely paid anything for weekends out. A typical case was a "charity gala" at a downtown hotel. A law firm partners would buy the tickets for an entire table but would inevitably be working and couldn't go. Even if he could, he still needed 6 or 8 other people so his table didn't have empty seats, which would be very embarrassing. So the call would go around - who has time to attend a free party? Me, that's who. The bar would be stocked with top-shelf liquor only, food was provided and excellent. The catch? You have to know people to get invited. And you have to be able to show up in a perfectly-fitting tuxedo with only a few hours notice. So you buy one, and it needs to be pretty good because you're going to wear it 20-30 times a year. Amortized out, an Armani costs a fraction of a rental.

> Does anyone know why they don't do this? Or know of examples where they do do this?

Just about any capital-intensive industry cooperates. Your computer is made by any one of a few dozen companies; open it up and you'll see a bunch of parts made by suppliers. Open up a computer made by a competitor and you will see that most of the parts come from the very same suppliers.

The auto industry is both the same and different. I worked for an automotive electronics company in college. We'd get a binder full of specification in Japanese or German or French, translate it to English, and run the validation on the same part that went into a Ford or GM car, but with a few changes to the firmware to satisfy the differences in specifications. Most of the time, these things went out the door with no labels so the companies could put on their own.

Then there is collaboration between the automakers themselves. The new 10-speed transmission in Ford and GM trucks is a joint venture between the two. For decades, all automatic transmissions in BMWs came directly from GM. The new Mercedes Benz pickup truck is based on a Nissan. The upcoming Toyota Supra was joint developed with BMW. The new Diesel engines in Fords are co-developed with PSA. It goes on and on...