elektronjunge

Development tools on linux continue to be great. A visual studio quality ide would be nice, but realistically I'd continue to use vim and the terminal.

What really irks me is the desktop environment situation. I haven't had a linux install in a couple of years and it seems that all of the desktops have gotten worse in the last few years. Unity continues to add on terrible features and follows the similar ui antipatterns and gnome 3 has. KDE4/5 are decent but very heavy. Xfce and lxde are great but you occasionally run into some weirdly missing features (no font manager -- why?) that make you pull in gnome/kde and question why you picked a lightweight desktop in the first place. I'm not sold on the tiling window managers, ya the tiling is nice, but they look terrible, require way too much config, and sometimes I just want to use the mouse damn it.

You may also be interested in this post[1] by nrc for a couple of strategies for implementing graphs. And this companion[2] by Niko Matsakis.

[1] https://github.com/nrc/r4cppp/blob/master/graphs/README.md [2] http://smallcultfollowing.com/babysteps/blog/2015/04/06/mode...

> wicked fast and devoid of bugs

Having ported a lot of old fortran to modern fortran and C I wish that were the case. More often than not, that's the assumption but its rarely true. There are some great lower level libraries like that *packs. But for the most part the performance and bug-freeness of these codes is more dogma than reality. For instance, in MCNP (a large monte-carlo neutronics package) a coworker of mine replaced the 70s era handrolled FFT function (which looked like someone was trying to write assembly in fortran) with a modern libary for 500%+ performance gain.

> Every human endeavour until incredibly recently in our timeline was a self-cost, whether it be in health, time or wealth. Only in the last blink of an eye have we expected a Govt or Govt funded entity to do it for us. And it's clear they can't.

Absolutely not. Governments have been funding innovation since the dawn of time, nearly every royal court hired scientists in some capacity. Many developments in navigation and transportation were funded by governments looking to improve their armies. Its not like a the average scientist could have afforded to make their own train engine, or a large sailing vessel to test their new technologies.

For what? Most of openmp is useful because you can slap a pre-processor directive on a for loop and make it parallel. Rust has the ability to provide ergonomic fork-join parallelism at the library level. Right now collections that can iterate provide a .iter() method that can provide an iterator. I see no reason that equivalent functionality couldn't be provided by something like a .par_iter() or similar.

At worst firefox will use some of the libraries that come out of servo. Firefox is supposed to use the url parser from servo by 2016.

> Seperate Select for files and Sockets on Windows..

And linux has the epoll/posix aio split for sockets and files.

> Go was attempting to use only very-well-understood ideas to make a very-well-understood, simple language.

Many of the ideas in go were not well understood and had only been demonstrated in research languages prior to go. Its concurrency model and associated primitives, and the automatic interface system were in roughly the same state then as Rust's new ideas are now.

That said the ideas in Rust were not as well understood 5 years ago and I doubt that the go creators could have incorporated them well at the time. It took Rust 5 years of experimentation to come to what it is now (and its still got a number of additions to go!).

And the /bin symlinking... systemd and GRUB legacy were bigger. But about annually there's something arch land that will break even the most minimal installations if you aren't careful.

This is correct. I haven't had flash on my computer for nearly a year and I've been able to watch hd youtube videos in firefox.

Its also ambiguous there are about 5 different, relatively popular "x64" architectures.

Its very heavy. I've been using airline for the last year or so. https://github.com/bling/vim-airline

In the windows 10 announcement they demoed a version of Office that supported the adaptive design. I don't know if they're dog fooding to get there though.

I have no idea what you are talking about. I opened a 26,000 line file (no I don't want to talk about it). In vim it opened instantly and my scrolling was only limited by my key repeat rate. The scrolling isn't as smooth looking because vim doesn't animate the scrolling between lines. Sublime took 2 seconds to open the same file, and scrolling was smooth.

Maybe you are using to many vim plugins? I'll admit vim plugins are a real problem, the gui rendering desperately needs to be moved to its own thread.

>While it's easy to say "it's more compelling to do stuff on a phone than it is to do it on a watch, so you'll naturally use the phone more", that rather makes me wonder why I would bother buying the watch, especially when you actually need the phone as well.

While this is true, no body is browsing the web or watching a video on their watch. People are doing quick checks of stocks, the weather, firing off a text message on their watches. The use cases overlap significantly but smart watches fill the niche of "I don't want to pull my phone out to check the time/if I have texts."

LLVM isn't a vm like the others, its a generic compiler backend. Languages with LLVM backing generally compile to native.

Correct and there are games that model that behavior, for instance iterated stag hunt[1]. This shows the benefits of cooperation for pack animals much more than the classic prisoner's dilemma. Of course you could construct a more detailed game that includes factors like defense and having a single leader that would be even closer to reality. The math behind game theory is right, its a question of whether we have chosen the right game to play.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stag_hunt

That's not a problem with game theory. That's a problem with using overly simplistic games. You can easily model all of those punishments with different payouts in a game. In fact, when I studied it in school most of the games we worked through included punishment mechanisms.

Doubtful. WPF isn't even the recommended GUI toolkit on windows anymore.

QE finished last October.

That story has never made any sense to me. The U.S. and Britain are far closer allies with a much longer history of extradition. If the U.S. wanted to extradite Assange they would have done it from Britain. Extraditing him to Sweden first only to later extradite him to the U.S. is non-sensical.

They're referring to writing your own allocator.

That's just a viewer. Getting documents to render and making a usable touch interface for editing documents are two very different things.

Hit Alt the numbers and letters are the shortcuts for moving around the ribbon. That's actually one of my favorite parts of the ribbon, you are able to see what the shortcuts are very easily. The alt trick works on just about anything in windows.

The new pkg tool in freebsd is pretty good and meshes nicely with the ports tree. The marginal improvements for 3rd-party built packages with apt aren't really worth getting rid of the rest of freebsd for. It also doesn't help OpenBSD, which really needs a new package manager.

I had a couple classes like that, usually it was more at the semester boundary. E.g. my intro to compilers classes involved writing a compiler for a c-subset. The advanced compilers class built on that compiler by adding optimizations and such. My intro to systems class had a project that was to write a shell. My operating systems class had a project to add job management and pipes to the shell from the systems class. I really liked those projects you felt like you had something pretty substantial when you were done.

You can actually implement IO using unsafePerformIO fairly easily. There's a little bit of compiler magic for speed, but its not strictly necessary.

That's a great solution if your not blind. Or navigating somewhere with poor sight lines like a parking garage.

You can use forward slashes in paths in cmd and powershell. But yes, I agree with your main point.

The article is actually incorrect about PF. FreeBSD forked OpenBSD's 4.5 version but has provided its own set of enhancements including SMP it has fallen behind in other respects. PF in OpenBSD has had some large architectural changes that break SMP and the biggest change (new syntax) wasn't deemed worthwhile to port back to the SMP version. The blog links to an email chain about it https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-pf/2014-July/007...