spauldo

Tornado: return to the barn when you receive emergency weather alerts. Not much different than people.

The resources system was really cool though. It gave you a unified configuration system and allowed deep levels of themeability. I remember you could assign a pixmap to every element of Netscape 3's interface, for instance.

Motif wasn't considered ugly at the time (at least by most people). If you ran Netscape on your SGI, you know what Motif looks like.

Motif did have a reputation for being a total drag to develop with, though. It's based on Xt. So is Athena, so if you've ever written an Xaw app it's pretty similar.

It's the platform that's proprietary.

Sun used a lot of open parts, but they had absolute control over the platform. Everything in your solution came from Sun or a Sun partner. Fujitsu doing weird stuff with Japanese mainframes was an interesting fact but irrelevant to 99% of Sun's user base.

Intel/AMD combined with EFI or IBM-compatible BIOS? You can get that from anybody. An HP server is basically interchangeable with a Dell.

Sun was proprietary in the same way Apple is.

In my case, it's literally free money. I travel a lot for work. I pay for everything with my card, and I'm reimbursed by the company. I rack up points, and whenever I travel for pleasure or as an independent contractor, hotels are free. I'd get free airfare like my coworkers do if I didn't avoid flying and drive everywhere.

The system is broken. No one with the power to fix it has any incentive to do so. Might as well get what you can.

DMV is a state level agency and varies a lot depending on where you are. It's partially privatized here in Oklahoma and mostly painless (you only need the actual DMV for driver's tests, CDL background checks, etc.) but when I lived on the Illinois side of St. Louis I routinely heard of people spending hours in line.

Normally I'm not a huge fan of privatization but the way it's done here works great. The fees are set by the state and the agency gets a percentage, so if an area is underserved someone just opens another one.

FreeBSD does, but I haven't tried it. It has its own chapter in the handbook. No idea about the others. I rarely need to run Windows binaries so I'm not the best person to ask.

Depends on what you need. Software compatibility is mostly good, as long as it doesn't have a dependency on systemd or some other Linux-specific feature. Driver support varies, but FreeBSD in particular is pretty decent there.

FreeBSD has a Linux compatibility feature that lets you run native Linux binaries. I've never used it so I can't say how good it is, though - all the stuff I use runs fine natively.

The major BSDs have decent package management and sizeable repositories, with the option to build software (and customize compile-time options) using the ports or pkgsrc systems. You can also rebuild and customize the kernel and base system (aka "make world") but that's strictly optional these days.

I seem to remember there was some GNOME stuff that had a hard systemd dependency and wouldn't run on the BSDs. That was a while back though and I don't run GNOME so I don't know whatever happened there or what the status is.

If a nation state actor is out to get you, then your cybersecurity is meaningless anyway.

The term "PLC" is a lot more specific than "computer with some GPIO ports." No one that works with PLCs would consider a Raspberry Pi to be one.

These things are walled gardens. You never see the operating system. You can only change their behavior using the vendor's software. They generally run a single program (that you write using the vendor's software) on a fixed scan cycle. They read the inputs, run your program, write the outputs, then repeat.

While you're giving up the nearly infinite possibilities that an SBC gives you, the benefits more than make up for the lack of flexibility. They run (and have parts and support available) for decades. Modules are easy to diagnose and replace. An electrician who isn't a programmer can follow ladder logic and troubleshoot problems. Integrators can quickly come up to speed and understand your code.

There's a reason companies will pay tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars for these things.

A microcontroller based solution is rarely a good replacement for a PLC. You can find integrators willing to come out and troubleshoot your device in the field a lot more easily than embedded progammers and vendor support is usually excellent. When your plant is down, that sort of thing matters. PLCs handle harsh environments for decades, whereas with a microcontroller all the thermal issues and power conditioning are all on you. When something fails, it's usually just a matter of pulling a spare module off the shelf and plugging it in.

If that's an old GE 90-30 (a common FANUC system), it's time to replace it. You're currently in that period when the CPU has reached end of life but the modules are still supported and the vendor has an easy upgrade path. Emerson owns the brand now, and can sell you a new unit that'll run your old program with minimal changes. You can call them and get a list of integrators in your area. It'll be pricey, but you won't need to do it again for another quarter century.

The first line of text on their homepage?

But I don't see anything wrong with OpenBSD saying they focus on security when it's well documented that they do, in fact, focus heavily on security.

I ran it diskless for years with read-only NFS mounts. Set up syslog and a pflog daemon to send logs elsewhere, and you don't need write access most of the time.

I'll add another recommendation for Scheme. The concepts in SICP map very well into Scheme, whereas I can only imagine them being awkward and non-idiomatic in JS. There's lots of passing around first class functions and use of recursion.

One of the two professors (Dr. Sussman) that give the lectures in this series is a co-creator of Scheme.

Because a lot of people aren't libertarians?

I agree that the characterization was uncalled for in the post you replied to. But I don't agree with your statement that most people who generally oppose regulation have good reasons for doing so. Conservative media outlets have pushed that stance for decades now and it gets regurgitated all the time. Ask most of them what specific regulations they want to see gone and you'll get a blank stare.

I swear if Sun Microsystems was still around, their machines would still ship with 8-bit pseudocolor and you'd have to pay an extra $3k for 24-bit.

Yep. I can do basic plumbing, but I haven't touched it since I started making enough money to pay a plumber to do it for me. Plumbers are worth every dollar they charge if it means I don't have to spend two hours under a sink cursing at rusty bolts.

It's really no different than every other BSD utility (and SysV utility, if you're running one of those) being different than the GNU ones. We've coped with it for fifty years at this point.

I don't have much to disagree with there, only that any survey answer is the difference between complex things is going to be simplified. I'm thumb typing here and no one's paying me to write a book.

I will defend my "heaviness" argument, though. Sure, you can run OpenBSD on large hardware, but it's not going to be able to take advantage of it like FreeBSD can. Which makes sense if you think about it - FreeBSD optimizes for heavy workloads. Conversely, if you set up minimal installs, OpenBSD will be smaller. Again, that makes sense, since OpenBSD focuses on security over features (plus the only truly secure code is the code that doesn't exist). There's a lot of overlap in the middle, of course.

I wouldn't use OpenBSD for a NAS, and I wouldn't use FreeBSD for a diskless firewall. Not because they can't do those things - they just each have their strengths and weaknesses.

Well it 40 below and I don't give a...

FreeBSD is a heavier, more capable system, suitable for large servers. It's got its own virtualization platform (bhyve), an LXC-ish container system (jails), native ZFS, dtrace, Linux emulation, and a bunch more. It makes for a decent workstation and has pretty decent hardware support.

NetBSD is small and simple. It's a lot like an old-school UNIX. It makes a decent platform for small services. I run bind and dhcpd on a NetBSD machine. The source code is very pleasant to read. It uses the pkgsrc software repository. It's my preferred platform for writing POSIX code.

OpenBSD still carries much of the general feel of NetBSD and can fill a similar niche on a network, but the security focus stands out in their documentation, subprojects (OpenSSH, LibreSSL, OpenNTPD, etc.), APIs (see pledge(8)), and policies. It makes for a great firewall. I'd say it also requires the most know-how.

All of them have excellent documentation (especially compared to Linux distros) and the base system is developed alongside the kernel, giving you a very consistent experience compared to Linux distros where everything is developed in isolation. If you write C, it's worth keeping a BSD system around just for the manpages and to make sure you're not letting Linuxisms creep into your codebase.

I had the opposite food experience in the EU, but I'll admit my experience is mostly Spain.

In the US there's usually a good variety of food from all different cultures available. When I spent two months in Spain, I got really, really tired of the same three seasonings the Spanish put on everything. I craved Mexican food like crazy the whole time.

Spanish food is great, don't get me wrong - I wish we had it here in the sticks where I live - but I'm used to a bit more variety.

I seem to remember Iceland was looking hard into hydrogen for their fishing fleets. They have to import Diesel fuel but they've got geothermal running out of their ears.

I haven't checked to see how that went, but it sounded like the perfect test case for hydrogen's viability.

I pay DigitalOcean $6/mo for a VM that started out as just that - a bare repo and ssh. If it was available at the time, I'd probably have paid $10 for the same if I didn't have to set up and administer the thing. I lost interest in administrating web servers in the early Apache 2.0 days so a private "mini-githib" would be tempting.

(I use that VM as my primary public nameserver now and I don't really need a web front end for git so I'll be keeping my current setup. But if it had been available back then, I'd probably have gone for it.)

Only certain types of contractors, and likely only in the short term.

Military contractors do well when the military has widespread support from the voters. Congresscritters will happily approve tax dollars going to the military industrial complex when their constituents view the US as the global protector of democracy. Wars like this one that aren't popular and make us look like thugs open the floor up to anti-military candidates. So yeah, the companies building missiles do well while the war is on, but the people like me who automate military fuel farms see budget cuts and projects cancelled.

The carriage return and linefeed combo are the commands to move to the next line of a teletype. Other commands might (in theory) be used for this purpose on other devices. These are implementation details.

Text inside a computer doesn't need any of that just to signal a newline. UNIX chose to use a single line feed character as a line separator because there was no good reason to use two. MacOS chose a single carriage return for similar reasons. Anything going out to a printer or teletype would run through a device driver that would turn the newline character into whatever the device expects.

Windows copied DOS which copied CP/M which was a very basic program loader for 8-bit machines and didn't really have "drivers" like we think of them today. I'm guessing here, but I imagine they chose the teletype combo because that's what most serial printers understood and printing was a major use case for those machines. That was probably the right choice for CP/M, but I can't imagine Microsoft would choose it if they were developing Windows from scratch today.

The American suburbs are full of houses with attached garages, so I'm hardly alone in this.

He's got that Venezuelan woman's Nobel too, doesn't he?

Unless you travel a lot and live in hotels for months at a time, like I do. Granted, that's not horribly common but there are still legitimate reasons to want an ICE.