It wasn't that bad until @JeffSchaller and @Kusalananda became mods, I rarely used to see it over like 25-30 items but now it seems to be 100+ every day
Yeah, I'm not saying they are slacking now. I think it was even mentioned that the mods should spend less time on the close vote queue as the system was setup in a manner that users are supposed to be the ones that process it in a democratic way...or some other words that describe that better than I can
And we've also encouraged flagging bad quality questions, if I don't mis-remember, or at least rude comments. I agree that the close-queue is too long.
And yes, mods should leave the review queues for the users more often than when they were not mods, or at least not go stomping on every Q/A that we see in there (because we might be wrong, and users often think they are being oppressed if they get their answer or question deleted by a mod).
We, unfortunately sometimes, have golden hammers in every topic.
But we, and especially @JeffSchaller I believe, do look at it.
@Kusalananda I keep an eye on things, but I do tend to avoid the close-queue because of the hammer. I tend to VTC egregious stuff from the main page(s)
solidly in the top spot at unix.stackexchange.com/tags/apt/topusers -- it's funny about #2 & #3 having only 2 & 3 answers, respectively, in that tag -- just massively up-voted A's
I find it weird how one can end up with skewed badges with a few answers with massive scores — for example, I’m 39 answers away from shell-script, so I could just go and write 39 random answers and get the gold badge...
I just received a spam message which said in part:
> A ComputerVaultComputerVault performs like a local PC in both the LAN and WAN at less than 1/5th the cost of Azure. ComputerVault is an on-premises solution while Azure is a public cloud Desktop-as-a-Service.
I demo'd a few solutions at two different companies I worked for and both costed way more than buying actual desktops, still required you to buy actual desktops, and did not perform nearly as well as actual desktops
> In 2004 nobody could use Linux except programmers— you struggled to run office suites on Linux
Have things really changed much since 2004? I remember 2004. It wasn't that different from today. MS Office still doesn't run on free platforms. Nor does most of the other crappy proprietary software that people use.
@StephenKitt We had those Sun Ray thin clients at uni just before I left.
It was nice to be able to work at a desk, then just pull your card out and stick it into another terminal somewhere else and have your desktop appear as you left it.
@Wildcard that's duplicate albums, this was duplicate (and not fully sorted) people. Though with the other issues... I didn't bother trying to troubleshoot.
@StephenKitt It was good for development and writing documents and everything that we did at the department. For running stuff "for reals" we had "the super computer", a DEC Alpha machine in four cabinets running DEC OSF/1 AXP (Tru64), 1 Gb RAM in each cabinet.
What's wrong with my cronjob? aaa > results.csv && diff -U 0 results.csv.old || true && cp results.csv results.csv.old it seems the copy happens even if aaa fails
@ColonelPanic Also, if you're running this from cron, you may want to redirect the diff into some file unless you want the diff mailed to you by the cron daemon.
@ColonelPanic yours doesn't work because you have a && b || c && d, which first evaluates a, if it fails skips b. Then it runs c (because || could still be true if c works); and c is true), so it runs d
I agree if-then-else is much clearer and obviously works.
@StephenKitt I trust you'll use it responsibly -- remember to change the oil every 5,000 miles, take it for walks once a day, and to oil the hinges. Thanks!
@JeffSchaller Ok, I personally have something like that... I have a script that logs in to a remote server over ssh and essentially does apt-get upgrade with some checking around it
So worse it has to survive the extra quoting for ssh
I eventually gave up maintaining that thing by hand, and wrapped it in a perl script, which turns a reasonably-written multi-line shell script into a monstrosity to pass to ssh :-)
I gave up when I added a host which needs me to wrap the mess with sudo.
@FaheemMitha in 2004, Ubuntu was vastly simpler to install than pretty much any other distro (Mandrake had a nice installer too), and gave users a default setup which “just worked”, with a fair amount of polish so that users could spend their time using their computers rather than fiddling with them.
@FaheemMitha that was in 2005, and it’s still not particularly user-friendly
By user-friendly I mean an installer where you have one or two screens of questions, and then it goes and does its thing, reboots and you have a working system.
@StephenKitt It's not bad. Could be better, of course. Still doesn't take much to confuse it, last I checked. But I haven't done a new installation in a while.
It's best to hide curly quotes in code sections where monospaced fonts that don't show them as curly (or make ' curly) can drive someone to madness trying to figure out why a clearly-correct copy & pasted command does not work.
Well, when you get a new machine, you have to. Or when you repurpose an old one its often easier to just blow it away and start from scratch.
Though installs I do here aren't the same as running them elsewhere, since I have preseeding set up here. But that's mostly to preseed the correct mirror, http cache, network setup.
Possibly when I switched from i386 to amd64. Around 2013, maybe.
Possibly later. I forget.
Once I used to do installs quite regularly.
> This package is a travesty.
I was a bit shocked when I was told that CTAN basically takes anything. I was under the delusion it was quite selective. They do require the package to build/compile, though.
@derobert can't fault you for that. :) I'm hoping it will work out nicely for me. I want to gradually migrate to open source, cross-platform software as a prelude to eventually switching to Linux for my primary laptop.
@FaheemMitha yep. And a couple others, like when I leave my account logged in for a while, then certain applications don't open, including Terminal, until I log out and back in.
@Wildcard Try using other distributions. Also, desktop hardware is usually less fussy. And cheaper than laptops.
Also, check hardware for Linux compatibility before buying it. It's not so much an issue these days, but still worth checking.
Actually, the Linux kernel had relatively reasonable support for hardware even back in the early days. At least for basic things like motherboards and processors.
Laptops are just generally trickier, because of all the custom hardware. Some might even be proprietary.