Comments by "Lawrence D’Oliveiro" (@lawrencedoliveiro9104) on "Brodie Robertson" channel.

  1. Groklaw did reveal their true pro-IBM colours later, in the TurboHercules case.
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  2. Before X, there was W (which ran on the V OS). Then X was created as its successor, and went through all these major version bumps until it got to 11. So then the major version stopped, but we kept seeing revisions--X11R2 etc, up until X11R7. And then the major R number stopped incrementing too, and now we have decimal points, up to X11R7.7.
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  3. “Pro bono” (“for the good”) immediately raises the question “cui bono?” (“whose good?”). The full phrase is supposed to be “pro bono publico” (“for the good of the public”).
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  4.  @SkyFly19853  In case you didn’t realize, they are slowing development of on-prem Windows Server to concentrate more on the cloud version. Basically, they are conceding the on-prem market to Linux. Trouble is, the cloud is already dominated by Linux--and that is also true of Microsoft’s cloud. So all in all, the future of Windows Server does not look bright.
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  5.  @SkyFly19853  That’s for Bing search. Which is just reinforcing the trend away from Windows itself.
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  6. 2:35 I would argue that network transparency is better handled through mechanisms like VNC. Consider that X11’s idea of “network transparency” means that, if the network connection goes down, all your GUI apps get errors trying to communicate with the display server and die. Whereas with VNC, you can disconnect from a running GUI session and reconnect, and everything is still there, and didn’t even notice you were gone. That, in my view, is the proper meaning of “transparency”.
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  7. Windows is an absolute mess. This is why you need special tools to migrate app installations from one system to another. On Linux, you don’t.
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  8. I think also Apple will stick with ARM a while longer, if only because of the sunk-cost fallacy.
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  9. Remember that macOS is a “Unix” system primarily in legal, not technical terms. They have licensed the “Unix” trademark, but that doesn’t mean that they work quite the way that people expect of a traditional “Unix” system. If you want that, you go to Linux or the BSDs.
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  10.  @BrodieRobertson  Yes, there is some aspect of technical terms, yes. But it doesn’t really cover all the things that are traditionally thought of as “Unix”.
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  11. I wonder how long before WSL 2 becomes a mandatory part of a Windows install. Then, to cut ongoing development costs, Microsoft starts relying more and more on the Linux kernel for hardware drivers. Then the Windows kernel eventually withers away, leaving just an API layer on top of Linux ... think of it as WINE with Microsoft branding.
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  12. I found an online example where someone needed to run a single-line shell command at boot time to enable a particular battery-saving mode in the kernel. The systemd unit file was just 12 lines, including options for controlling when the command should be executed. Someone else tried to do a sysvinit version, but that was 17 nonblank lines, nearly all of which was the same old boilerplate you see in every sysvinit script.
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  13. Blender is still a smaller download than any proprietary CG app, or any proprietary video editor, or any proprietary compositor for that matter.
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  14. If you want the ultimate in “stable”, how about Horsedung Linux! (“Stable” ... geddit?)
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  15.    I have started writing man pages for some of my programs, directly in troff.
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  16. Fun fact: if you create a ~/.xsessionrc file, this completely overrides any choice of desktop environment you may try to make in a display manager login. And if you further make that ~/.xsessionrc file, and the home directory it’s in, non-writeable and non-owned by the user, then that provides a simple mechanism for creating a captive GUI account.
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  17. FreeBSD are adopting the Linux Netlink API, though (RFC 3549).
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  18. 1:16 You could have scrolled that screen down just a bit, to give more content and less ambush ad.
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  19. I remember coming across a site which tried to give you access to a certain number of free articles per month. Of course they kept track of whether they’d seen you before by setting cookies on your browser. Which you could defeat by using private-browsing mode. Which they then tried to detect by noticing that things like the JavaScript local-storage API didn’t quite work the same in private-browsing mode. But, coincidentally (or not), there happens to be a Firefox addon that fakes out the local-storage API, to make it appear to be working as though in non-private-browsing mode.
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  20.  @MegaLokopo  You were the one who brought it up. In any case, Windows 10 IoT Edition is irrelevant to the issue of a replaceable GUI layer.
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  21.  @steven631764  What’s happening is Windows is bringing in less and less revenue, while the cost of maintaining its increasingly complex and buggy code keeps going up and up.
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  22.  @MegaLokopo  I made a relevant comparison. You didn’t like that? Maybe you have some personal stake in Windows IoT, and it made you feel embarrassed? You know what you can do.
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  23. For program-specific definitions, put them in a wrapper script.
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  24.  @generallyunimportant  I made it with uuidgen(1).
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  25. BeOS ties the GUI into the OS kernel, which is not something you expect in a modern platform.
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  26. “We” presumably meaning TempleOS users ... all two of them?
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  27. Microsoft Office macros are a well-known security risk. Nobody should be blindly accepting them from unknown sources.
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  28. Been using it for years.
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  29. Also, we normally pronounce SCO as though it were a word: “sco”.
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  30. True network transparency means you can addi it on as a separate layer or take it off, and none of the existing apps will even notice.
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  31. Where I come from, “Vim” is a brand of abrasive household cleaner.
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  32.  @dand337  Is there an example of theming done right?
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  33. What is really pointless is having these “.” and “..” entries in every directory. The kernel has to have special handling for these anyway, so why bother cluttering up every directory with them, and have the kernel interpret their meaning directly?
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  34. Windows has a monolithic GUI tied into its OS kernel. So, no chance.
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  35. It is possible because those man pages are part of common packages available across just about all distros. Only man pages for distro-specific commands need to be distro-specific. For example, the man pages for bash, iproute2, coreutils, util-linux etc will be the same across all distros. As for apache, the apachectl command is the same across all distros, and it has a man page.
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  36. So you are a bit of an ... em-bezel-ler?
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  37. Hate the Government, not the people.
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  38. He did so well with Windows Phone, Windows RT and the Kin, didn’t he.
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  39.  @BrodieRobertson  So what did he win?
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  40.  @BrodieRobertson  Did he introduce that?
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  41.  @theParticleGod  There are no “embedded codes” in Word or any other current WYSIWYG word processor.
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  42. Containers really only work well on Linux.
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  43. Maybe wait until he piques your interest instead ...
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  44.  @marloelefant7500  How many network shares does desktop Windows allow? Last I checked, it was 4 for the regular version, or 10 if you paid extra for Windows Pro. Samba is a standard package on most Linux distros, fully compatible with Windows SMB file service. That has no inbuilt limit on how many shares clients can mount: the only limit is what your hardware can stand. It can even act as a domain controller, if you want.
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  45.  @marloelefant7500  Linux/BSD/Unix systems could run Samba, which is a full-featured SMB-compatible server with no restrictions. Where was there the equivalent of Samba for Windows?
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  46.  @marloelefant7500  It doesn’t exist because it can’t. Samba came into existence because there was an incentive to bypass Microsoft’s revenue model; it was implemented for *nix systems because they can handle it. Another workstation feature Windows doesn’t support is multiuser remote shell access.
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  47. People complaining about Free Software projects somehow “forcing” them into certain things is just hilarious. Sad, but hilarious.
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  48.  @shaunpatrick8345  What “monolithic Linux installation” is this? I thought SLS disappeared back in the 1990s.
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  49. If your business is crucially dependent on obsolete, unsupported software, then it is just one crash away from bankruptcy.
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  50. New distros get created for many reasons. Consider how Raspbian came about: when the first model of Raspberry π came out, it could run regular Debian, but was a bit of an odd fish because while it had hardware floating point, the core ARM instruction set was an older version, and there was no Debian build optimized for this combination--the one for the older ARM instruction set made no use of hardware floating point. So a couple of guys took it upon themselves to rebuild the whole of Debian just for the π. It had to be done on the π itself, and the bulk of it was done in six weeks.
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