@alhelal Are you running a 64bit system or a 32bit one? You are almost certainly running 64, but you can check by looking at the output of uname -m: if it is something like x86_64, you're on a 64 bit system.
The 64-bit version is typically called 'amd64' because AMD developed the 64-bit instruction extensions. (AMD extended the x86 architecture to 64 bits while Intel was working on Itanium, but Intel later adopted those same instructions.)
The 32-bit version is called i386, because Intel originated ...
So, Linux Journal is History. I remember reading it in UNC's Brauer (Math & Science) Library, a long time ago. UNC had a print subscription. Back in the days when Linux seems glamorous and exciting. We thought we were going to change the world.
@FaheemMitha funny that — while it’s true that most of their content (by quantity) is news aggregation, their value (IMO) is in the in-depth articles they publish, particularly the kernel articles
@StephenKitt There is value in news aggregation too. And I agree some of their content is good. But some of it isn't. Their kernel articles are unusually detailed. I suppose because the editor is himself a kernel developer.
But I suppose they would not mean much to those outside the kernel development community.
I think it's difficult to run a technical publication long term without some kind of subsidy. Cf. academic journals.
There are lots of interesting articles one could write in the free software space, but many of them would mean little to those outside the specific community, as, indeed, is the case with the kernel articles.
@FaheemMitha in many cases yes; there is the occasional article which ends up being canonical (e.g. the “How programs get run” articles I refer to in several of my answers here)
@StephenKitt I specifically had in mind version control. Lots of interesting quasi-CS problems/issues there, but how many people would actually care? Definitely a niche area.
(Maybe I should remove the "quasi" prefix, but I know little about what CS people consider CS.)
@FaheemMitha a niche area with widespread applications — it helps an awful lot with git for example if you’re familiar with the kind of graph reasoning it uses
and version dependencies etc. are SAT problems, so knowledge in that area is also useful (but more for developers of package management tools, and people trying to figure out really complex upgrade scenarios)
there’s a huge disconnect between our ability to make software usable and non-dangerous and resistant to mis-behaviour, and the knowledge needed to understand things
we make computers too hard to use
@FaheemMitha not really in the package management case, no
As opposed to doing semi-random things to get something to work, and then doing other increasingly random and desperate things when the first things don't pay off.
for example, if you lock a Linux system down, you can tell users “do what you want, you can’t break the system”, which is very liberating for users (I’ve seen this in practice)
add a continuous backup system and you can tell users “you can’t lose data either” which is even better
Like using TeX. You can use it to some extent. But at some point you have to have some idea what you are doing. Well, either that, or go running to the experts for a recipe or a fix.
@StephenKitt If your users are doing easy and simple things, sure.
@FaheemMitha But that's the whole point. You're not writing "text", but TeX or LaTeX. Your "This is my sentence" is not TeX, the \section{foo} is TeX and the contents of the section are irrelevant.
TeX is quite similar to HTML, really. It's a language that defines how various elements are to be arranged, laid out on a page. That those elements are often text is irrelevant.
@FaheemMitha I think every program I have ever written produced text as output. Nevertheless, the language I wrote the program in was a programming language, no matter what its output is.
@FaheemMitha Not at all. That's the thing. To a human, an image of text could be interpreted as text, yes. To a computer they are two completely separate things.
@terdon Of course. But it's a computer thing that produces stuff of interest to humans.
Anyway, all thing is a tangent to what Stephen was earlier talking about. Which is that computers can be easy to use "properly". I don't think they can.
I think complicated things are complicated.
The essay "In the Beginning Was the Command Line" expresses that quite well. Part of what it talks about are the issues of hiding complexity. Non-human complexity.
That said, I think computers do an incredible job of making something complicated simple. The whole point of UIs is to handle the complexity so the user doesn't have to.
@FaheemMitha Gnome devs have this thing about removing choices and making everything "simple". Which leads to the sort of useless user interface with no text and just obscure buttons (one button, actually, and everything under that) that we see these days.
> (You wouldn't happen to be the author of "Snow Crash" and "The Diamond Age", would you? If so, I love your work. If not, well, never mind.)
Much of Debian's earlier bug archive is lost. But I think Joey Hess put this one back online after reading "In the Beginning...". It's discussed somewhere.
That's about when I purchased my first as well. I still have bits of it next to me right now (I think the case, the floppy(!) and the sound card are all from the original build).
@FaheemMitha Kinda. I get a kick out of the fact that it's still around. I might be taking it with me to the UK when I move there next month. But I'll probably just take its guts and buy a new case there (I use it as a NAS)
@FaheemMitha Same job, but my girlfriend has started a 3-year postgraduate arts course at the Royal Academy so we're moving to London. Happily, my boss was amenable to my working from home and for a higher salary!
@FaheemMitha And yeah, I know. That's one of the things we have in common. I console myself by repeating the mantra London is not England, London is not England over and over again.
Oh stephen since youre here actually, i have a question, neurodebian still has no package for netselect provided for Ubuntu 17.10, what would i need to build it from source?
@FaheemMitha Well, depends on how you define country, but yeah. They have their own "currency", their own government, soccer team, and a passport that says "Scottish" (I think).
Scotland (; Scots: [ˈskɔt.lənd]; Scottish Gaelic: Alba [ˈal̪ˠapə] ( listen)) is a country that is part of the United Kingdom and covers the northern third of the island of Great Britain. It shares a border with England to the south, and is otherwise surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean, with the North Sea to the east and the North Channel and Irish Sea to the south-west. In addition to the mainland, the country is made up of more than 790 islands, including the Northern Isles and the Hebrides.
The Kingdom of Scotland emerged as an independent sovereign state in the Early Middle Ages and continued to...
@StephenKitt OK. I thought I remember a Scottish friend claiming that the passports were slightly different. Something like the bank notes: a British passport but one that set the nationality as Scottish or some such.
@StephenKitt OK, thanks.
@FaheemMitha Oh man. I should make that into a t-shirt :)
Expressions:
-.- - sarcastic, can mean fail, you don't say... or any derivations of not sure if / can not believe in this
o/, \o - Waving either hello or goodbye
\o/ - excitement, exclaiming "yay!"
/me - it's like "insert my name here"
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ - Shrug, I don't know
;P - Almost anyth...
well however the debian package is not split like the one for ubuntu zesty was with having 3 other dependencies, so i just installed the deb package for Debian9 stretch and it works for what i mostly use it