The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built
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@topspin And when you come up with a new development that's qualitatively different rather than simply quantitatively different maybe people will listen.
Apple did that 35 years ago, rendering the command line UI obsolete by producing a fully-featured personal computer that did not have one and never needed it, and it launched the modern age of computing. A very useful principle has emerged since then that the *nix community has simply failed to grasp ever since: if your users need to know that a command line exists in order to use your software, your software sucks. (Note: what I just said means exactly what it says, and not anything that it does not actually say. Please word any criticisms accordingly to avoid common pitfalls leading directly to humiliation.)
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@mott555 said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
And I'd bet that 99.9999% of the websites you visit are hosted on Linux boxes.
Why? IIS has been quite popular for a long time now.
For that matter, literally 100% of smartphones are Linux/UNIX based.
Sure, but try opening a terminal on them! Try accessing the C compiler, or
grep, or basically any of the distinctly "unix-y" things that everybody hates.They may be built atop a *nix core (because free stuff!), but they're definitely not from the Unix world; they're from the modern world through and through. Heck, one of the most popular brands is *literally built by Apple! Smartphones show what it takes to actually get Unix technology to gain mainstream acceptance: a total, thorough, systematic rejection of the Unix philosophy.
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@Mason_Wheeler said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
if your users need to know that a command line exists in order to use your software, your software sucks.
You know what sucks? When I have to RDP into multiple Windows servers to use the GUI and click through 15 half-baked Control Panels to find what I'm looking for. On the Linux servers, I just SSH into the CLI and either run a script or paste some text in and I can do the same thing on all of them in a fraction of the time it takes on Windows. And I say this as someone who generally prefers Windows.
I really get the impression that you're not an IT worker, you're just a tech consumer with a very limited understanding of the broader picture.
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@Mason_Wheeler said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
Why? IIS has been quite popular for a long time now.
IIIS costs quite a bit to license. Linux/Apache/Nginx costs nothing (unless you have silly IT policies requiring you to use RHEL instead of CentOS because reasons, like my company
). That makes a huge difference when you're operating gigantic clusters of web servers.@Mason_Wheeler said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
Sure, but try opening a terminal on them! Try accessing the C compiler, or grep, or basically any of the distinctly "unix-y" things that everybody hates.
That stuff appears to exist on my smartphone.
@Mason_Wheeler said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
They may be built atop a *nix core (because free stuff!), but they're definitely not from the Unix world; they're from the modern world through and through. Heck, one of the most popular brands is *literally built by Apple! Smartphones show what it takes to actually get Unix technology to gain mainstream acceptance: a total, thorough, systematic rejection of the Unix philosophy.
I spent a fair amount of time developing with Apple toolchains at a previous job. Apple's products are literally just early-90's UNIX/NextStep with shiny effects on them.
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@mott555 said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
@Mason_Wheeler said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
if your users need to know that a command line exists in order to use your software, your software sucks.
You know what sucks? When I have to RDP into multiple Windows servers to use the GUI and click through 15 half-baked Control Panels to find what I'm looking for. On the Linux servers, I just SSH into the CLI and either run a script or paste some text in and I can do the same thing on all of them in a fraction of the time it takes on Windows.
All that means is that you're in a highly specialized bubble and you happen to have memorized the way to do things on one highly specialized system but are unfamiliar with the equivalent techniques on the much more popular system.It's quite possible to run command-line scripts on Windows. The capability is there, but the user doesn't need to know it exists in order to do anything. (Also, once you start using a command-line as an automated script execution platform, it's not a user interface anymore, and we're in an area where it's actually a good fit for the job. This is not in any way what I was talking about.)
I really get the impression that you're not an IT worker, you're just a tech consumer with a very limited understanding of the broader picture.
I've always said, "I want software that doesn't suck because I'm a computer user first and a programmer second." If you don't have that perspective, it really limits your effectiveness as an IT worker, because you get stuck in a highly specialized bubble and produce software that ordinary people can't understand.
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@mott555 said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
@Mason_Wheeler said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
Why? IIS has been quite popular for a long time now.
IIIS costs quite a bit to license.
Also, Kestrel (the .NET Core successor to IIS) can be found for free on GitHub.
That stuff appears to exist on my smartphone.
What phone are you using
@Mason_Wheeler said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
They may be built atop a *nix core (because free stuff!), but they're definitely not from the Unix world; they're from the modern world through and through. Heck, one of the most popular brands is *literally built by Apple! Smartphones show what it takes to actually get Unix technology to gain mainstream acceptance: a total, thorough, systematic rejection of the Unix philosophy.
I spent a fair amount of time developing with Apple toolchains at a previous job. Apple's products are literally just early-90's UNIX/NextStep with shiny effects on them.
...and everyone hates their toolchains. Heck, even the rest of Apple couldn't stand some of the crap Steve Jobs forced down everyone's throat! Objective-C was so abysmal that they literally didn't even wait for him to finish dying before starting to work on Swift to replace it!
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@Mason_Wheeler said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
All that means is that you're in a highly specialized bubble and you happen to have memorized the way to do things on one highly specialized system but are unfamiliar with the equivalent techniques on the much more popular system.
I have very little memorized. My biggest frustrations with Linux are I have to dig through mailing lists archived from 1999 to find instructions on how to do something. But once I figure it out, I can just dump it into a script, toss it in my shared folder, and it's there for the next time. Windows shuffles things around between various Control Panels about every other update, constantly breaks the location of things that you might be used to in CMD.exe, and PowerShell is a joke due to security policies and the massive ball of WTF that .NET is turning into.
@Mason_Wheeler said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
I've always said, "I want software that doesn't suck because I'm a computer user first and a programmer second." If you don't have that perspective, it really limits your effectiveness as an IT worker, because you get stuck in a highly specialized bubble and produce software that ordinary people can't understand.
I hate computers. I actively try to avoid technology anymore, so my IT bubble is 90% of my tech life. And producing software that ordinary people can't understand is literally my job, because I work in aviation. If we treated aviation systems like standard consumer equipment, we'd have planes falling from the sky every fourteen seconds. (This is why car companies and especially Tesla have so many problems with technology--aviation figured it all out decades ago, but the car guys don't listen to us and refuse to learn from history.)
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@Mason_Wheeler said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
...and everyone hates their toolchains. Heck, even the rest of Apple couldn't stand some of the crap Steve Jobs forced down everyone's throat! Objective-C was so abysmal that they literally didn't even wait for him to finish dying before starting to work on Swift to replace it!
I agree 100%, but this is completely irrelevant to the fact that 100% of smartphones run Linux/UNIX.
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@Mason_Wheeler said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
Til 35-year-old, well-tested, mature technology is "shiny new stuff" to the
crowd...What'cha gonna do? Ignorant people gonna ig.
So you're saying that your original comment made no sense? I can accept that correction.
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@Mason_Wheeler said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
The capability is there, but the user doesn't need to know it exists in order to do anything.
if your assertion is that in order to do anything in a *nix box requires the use of the command line then you are MASSIVELY out of date with current desktop Linux. Every major distribution now supports the GUI to the point that the command line is not required for normal usage.
yes servers still need the command line, and there are some things that you might prefer to do with the command line, but it's totally possible to be a non geek user of a *nix machine and not need to open the shiny black box with green text of power.
Look at any Cellphone, Smart TV, Macintosh, or any Linux distribution with a desktop version. do you need a terminal to use any of them? nope! you can do damn near anything without it. Do they all run *nix? YOU BET YOUR ASS THEY DO!
If you're going to hate on Linux, that's fine, but at least be accurate in your reasons for the hate. Hating just on preconceived reasons and prejudices and fear of the other does not strengthen your case, in fact it weakens it.
so, go grab a VM. install Ubuntu, play around with it. try all these things that you say are impossible to do without the command line. Google how to do them, see the stack overflows and other documentation that shows you how to do them. And be enlightened.
or come back to us with a whole new set of reasons to hate it, that's fine too because at least then you'll be hating it for reasons that are actually accurate to the current state of the product.
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@Mason_Wheeler said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
Apple did that 35 years ago, rendering the command line UI obsolete by producing a fully-featured personal computer that did not have one and never needed it, and it launched the modern age of computing.
Uh...no. We get that you hate it, but honestly, that's just another thing in its favor as being a valuable tool.
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@mott555 said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
I work in aviation. If we treated aviation systems like standard consumer equipment, we'd have planes falling from the sky every fourteen seconds. (This is why car companies and especially Tesla have so many problems with technology--aviation figured it all out decades ago, but the car guys don't listen to us and refuse to learn from history.)
Because aviation software has such an amazing track record lately!
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@Mason_Wheeler said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
@mott555 said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
I work in aviation. If we treated aviation systems like standard consumer equipment, we'd have planes falling from the sky every fourteen seconds. (This is why car companies and especially Tesla have so many problems with technology--aviation figured it all out decades ago, but the car guys don't listen to us and refuse to learn from history.)
Because aviation software has such an amazing track record lately!
737 MAX wasn't a software failure. It was a hardware failure (specifically angle-of-attack sensors) coupled with the pants-on-head-retarded decision to have no backup sensors or manual overrides for MCAS, which really means it was a personnel/management failure because everyone except whoever signed off on that implementation of MCAS knows how to prevent this kind of thing.
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@Vixen said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
if your assertion is that in order to do anything in a *nix box requires the use of the command line then you are MASSIVELY out of date with current desktop Linux.
How "MASSIVE" is 2 years? Because that's the last time I was working at a place where desktop Linux was a part of the job. I found that Ubuntu's UI worked pretty well... right up until it didn't. For example, trying to install new software packages apt works from the UI... with about 50% reliability. The other half of the time, you'd get incomprehensible and/or terse-to-the-point-of-useless error messages, and have to drop into the command line to resolve things through
apt-get.Has that changed at any point in the last 2 years?
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@masterX244179 said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
@PleegWat That character probably was intended for data streams like from teletypes/serial transmissions and only got repurposed there
Back in DOS days I would use it to make files using
copy con
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@Mason_Wheeler Judging all Linuxes by Ubuntu is like judging all hamburgers by McDonald's. Ubuntu is the worst of the worst.
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@Mason_Wheeler said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
Has that changed at any point in the last 2 years?
No. But at least it doesn't install updates while you're shooting aliens.
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@Mason_Wheeler said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
with about 50% reliability.
I call bullshit on this one, the only time i've had a problem installing packages through the UI was when I had some incompatible package installed and apt failed resolving packages because of the incompatibility. This was a problem that dropping to the command line and using apt-get wouldn't have fixed as I had to remove the offending incompatible package. which I could and did do through the UI.
@Mason_Wheeler said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
Has that changed at any point in the last 2 years?
But also yes. things have improved dramatically in the last two years. Particularly when you look at the product without deciding before you open your eyes that you are going to hate it.
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@Mason_Wheeler said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
@mott555 Google "linux market share" sometime. Depending on which source you come up with, you'll get figures anywhere between about 0.75% and 2.5%. This seems like an example of selection bias on your end; if you're a person where
Probably 90 - 95% of the machines I use are Linux. In fact, I only have two Windows machines I regularly use. The rest are some version of Linux or another.
then you're the one in a very weird bubble.
In the 25 years since its inception, linux has become dominant in every OS market imaginable.
Except the one it was initially intended for.
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@dkf I love making custom controls. Real custom controls, too, not jamming regular controls into a UserControl panel. It should set me apart at interview time but they usually just think I'm a witch or something if I mention it.
Anyway...most absurd thing I've ever coded...
The department had bought (code and all) a desktop application for managing corporate/charitable registrations. It was written in VB5 or VB6. Of course, none of the H1Bs that you pick up in the 7-11 parking lot these days can do classic VB, so it had to go. They built a new application, wrongly, on top of MS CRM, against the explicit advice of Microsoft themselves because they knew better (LOL). It constantly returned wrong information, because nothing was ever tested, so the users didn't trust it. When the executives found out they were using both systems in parallel, they had the bright idea to make the legacy database read only, so users continued to use it to verify existing data. Until, randomly, installations of this old application would just stop working and nobody could (or would) figure out why (because effort).
So, the CIO at the time, who was exasperated with both bureau management and their pet H1Bs, wanted me to write a verification application...in SSRS. Yes, SSRS. Because something something dark side.
So there's an IIS instance out there, running two search pages written in JavaScript, that link to two SSRS report "screens," with several embedded SSRS reports posing as containers/controls, that all call down to a dozen or so T-SQL procedures (plus supporting functions and views), written to replicate the logic of a 20 year old VB application, and it actually does the lookups faster than the "state of the art" CRM solution.
There are so many
s here, I don't know which is 
.Is it bringing in a 3rd potentially unstable system to verify/correct the results of a 2nd definitely unstable system?
Is it kludging together TSQL and SSRS to replicate a VB5 desktop application?
Is it that I didn't quit immediately after being asked to bring such a monster into the world?
Is it management acting like I don't know anything about development despite this miracle that I've performed in plain view?
Is it continuing to assign no-bid blank-check contracts to the H1Bs despite a track record of projects that never end because they never work right?
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@Vixen said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
@Mason_Wheeler said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
with about 50% reliability.
I call bullshit on this one, the only time i've had a problem installing packages through the UI was when I had some incompatible package installed and apt failed resolving packages because of the incompatibility. This was a problem that dropping to the command line and using apt-get wouldn't have fixed as I had to remove the offending incompatible package. which I could and did do through the UI.
Believe what you want. This was a regular occurrence at that job. Not daily, but certainly something we'd run into at least once every week or two!@Mason_Wheeler said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
Has that changed at any point in the last 2 years?
But also yes. things have improved dramatically in the last two years. Particularly when you look at the product without deciding before you open your eyes that you are going to hate it.
Funny how quick some people are to look at judgments based on experience and proclaim them to be based on prejudice simply because they're uncomfortable with the conclusions.
I've been learning my way around multiple different command lines for 30 years now. That's how I know they suck as a UI: because I know them quite intimately.
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@mott555 said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
If we treated aviation systems like standard consumer equipment, we'd have planes falling from the sky every fourteen seconds.
I'm impressed they'd get up there in the first place.
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@Vixen said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
so, go grab a VM. install Ubuntu, play around with it.
I mean, that is a good way to get someone to really appreciate Windows
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@Zenith said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
Is it bringing in a 3rd potentially unstable system to verify/correct the results of a 2nd definitely unstable system?
Something something man with two clocks...
Is it kludging together TSQL and SSRS to replicate a VB5 desktop application?
Meh. Around here that's just an average-grade
.Is it that I didn't quit immediately after being asked to bring such a monster into the world?
Probably this. Change your organization or change your organization.
Is it acting like I don't know anything about development despite this miracle that I've performed in plain view?
Amusing Larry Wall quotes notwithstanding, software development remains one of the few places where humility is still widely considered a genuine virtue.
Is it continuing to to assign no-bid blank-check contracts to the H1Bs despite a track record of projects that never end because they never work right?
DING DING DING! I think we've found
of all s! What do you think, Mr. Einstein?
Well folks, there you have it!
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@Mason_Wheeler said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
@mott555 Google "linux market share" sometime. Depending on which source you come up with, you'll get figures anywhere between about 0.75% and 2.5%. This seems like an example of selection bias on your end; if you're a person where
Probably 90 - 95% of the machines I use are Linux. In fact, I only have two Windows machines I regularly use. The rest are some version of Linux or another.
then you're the one in a very weird bubble.
Linux has maybe 1% of users if you count the whole population. I'd guess that on these forums, it's more like 50%. And that's because about half of programmers and sysadmins are Linux users. As a thought experiment, do 2 things:
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Make all of the code written for Unix/Linux in the world disappear; restore, then
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Make 1/99 of the code written for Windows in the world disappear.
I think you'd find that the first action would bring the world to a screeching halt, as in Dark Angel. The second would have a great effect, but not as serious.
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@mott555 said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
management failure
The core problem with the 737 MAX was the commercial decision to produce a plane with hugely different flight characteristics to an existing plane, yet to sell it as having the same flight characteristics as that plane (which required a complex hardware/software solution to implement, which was in turn bodged because having sufficient competent engineers on staff is actually expensive) in order to encourage buyers to think they could use it without further pilot training (a vast commercial benefit had it been true). This was compounded by the lack of a good enough testing regime (probably due to regulatory capture, as encouraged by various parties over a long time) but I absolutely put blame primarily on management as they were among the ones who were lobbying most strongly for “light touch regulation”.
One of the consequences of this is that it is going to be more expensive for future US planes to be brought to the global market; the co-acceptance of FAA certification by other aircraft safety regulators is basically gone, and likely to be so for a long time. That means that getting permission for a new US-originated plane to fly outside US airspace is going to be a matter of satisfying an entirely different regulator as well…
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@PleegWat said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
In the 25 years since its inception, linux has become dominant in every OS market imaginable.
Except the one it was initially intended for.More or less. Torvalds invented Linux because he wanted an open replacement for Unix. I'm not sure he really had the general consumer PC desktop market in mind at the beginning.
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@jinpa said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
Torvalds invented Linux because he wanted an open replacement for Unix.
Partially, and partially because he wanted to experiment with making a Unix kernel that really used the hardware features of the 80386 at a time when other codebases were very slow to move on that.
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@dkf said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
The core problem with the 737 MAX was the commercial decision to produce a plane with hugely different flight characteristics to an existing plane, yet to sell it as having the same flight characteristics as that plane
I'm not going to disagree with this, but it really seems to me that they'd have gotten away with it and it would have been a complete non-issue had they done MCAS right. Modern military fighters (even those designed by Boeing) have extremely unstable aerodynamic profiles with complex hardware/software solutions to make their flight characteristics manageable. What they attempted to do with 737 MAX looks to be an order of magnitude simpler than what they've already successfully achieved on the F-18.
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The most absurd thing I've ever written was an IDE for a custom bytecode system that I wrote for driving robot control boards (that I was experimenting with at the time) attached to a BBC microcomputer. The maximum absurdity of it all was that, because of the display mode I was using, I had very little space left in RAM for program; I had to figure out a mechanism for paging things in from disk. The only disk I had at the time was a 5½" floppy drive that used a filesystem that made supremely awful use of the space on the medium, and restricted the number of files per disk to just 31. (There were 32 directory entries available — no nesting! — and one was used for metadata about the disk directory itself. Of course.) I ran out of space very thoroughly, and had to extend the mechanism to support swapping of multiple disks.
All of which was while I was still at school, and was coded in a mix of BBC BASIC and 6502 assembler. I later on figured out how to connect the robot boards to my PC XT clone at home; that was a much better platform for what I was trying to do due to being a much larger computer, but GW-BASIC was a miserable and slow programming language by comparison with BBC BASIC.
I also won't do hand-made PCBs again ever. Especially not bilayer ones; those require proper tooling to make if you don't want to go completely mad. So perhaps those bilayer boards were the real most absurd things I ever made…
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@Mason_Wheeler said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
That's not just "a bit more annoying to write in the first place"; that means that addition of a new file becomes an O(N) operation! For a large archive, that can mean an unacceptable performance degradation.
Depends on your intended use case. If you're distributing assets or other large data, the archive is going to be largely static. Changing the archive can be slow and rewriting the whole archive is ok, because it happens so infrequently. Reading/loading data from the archive is what you want to optimize for.
The index at the end allows you to add new files, but if you want to change any of the existing files or remove one, you're pretty much facing the same problem again.
Can you think of any way around this problem?
You could go for the middle ground with split indices (possibly linked together, so you know where to find them). It's messy, but doable. A bit of an overhead to random-access because you need to first go and collect all the different parts of the index.
Alternatively, keep the index in a separate file/stream and let the file system deal with shuffling around data. (If you know you're only ever going to be on a NTFS filesystem or similar, you could stuff the index into an ADS even.)
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@Mason_Wheeler said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
I've been learning my way around multiple different command lines for 30 years now. That's how I know they suck as a UI: because I know them quite intimately.
Funny how quick some people are to look at judgments based on experience and proclaim them to be based on prejudice simply because they're uncomfortable with the conclusions.
No, but seriously, I love the power of the command line in a proper console, and none of your affinity for mousing around will change that.
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@PleegWat said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
@dkf multi-part archives are part of the base spec
Base spec, yes. Unfortunately, not in the format itself. Pretty much you can split anywhere that isn't a structure (so in the middle of compressed/encrypted data). There's no segment indicator in Zip segments like RAR has. Makes it annoying to identify Zip segments among random files.
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@hungrier said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
@Vixen said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
so, go grab a VM. install Ubuntu, play around with it.
I mean, that is a good way to get someone to really appreciate Windows
Yeah, because I definitely need something to get into the corporate VPN, and they only alternatively allow Macs (after fighting through a big appeals process and then having some fragile MAC address whitelisting that apparently breaks every few weeks). But fortunately I can still use Kubuntu in a VM so I can still get work done.
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@dkf said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
The core problem with the 737 MAX was the commercial decision to produce a plane with hugely different flight characteristics to an existing plane, yet to sell it as having the same flight characteristics as that plane (which required a complex hardware/software solution to implement, which was in turn bodged because having sufficient competent engineers on staff is actually expensive) in order to encourage buyers to think they could use it without further pilot training (a vast commercial benefit had it been true).
I read something recently that pointed out that most US airline pilots are retired military pilots and so have a ton of training and experience with weird situations in the cockpit. But that's not true in places like Ethiopia. And IIRC, it also talked about how some US pilots actually encountered those situations, but the pilots were capable enough to detect it and do the right thing and so no one got hurt.
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@Mason_Wheeler said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
Google "linux market share" sometime.
Okay,
https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/linux-market-share/Looks like the server side is dominated by linux and the consumer side is dominated by windows. Surprising nobody here, except possibly you.
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@Mason_Wheeler said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
I've been learning my way around multiple different command lines for 30 years now. That's how I know they suck as a UI: because I know them quite intimately.
No, what you know is that the command line is less useful for your use cases than a GUI. You have made no quantitative analysis of all use cases and compared the two, so you can not make the statement that the command line sucks as a UI and have it taken with any validity.
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@boomzilla said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
We get that you hate it
With his deep-seated hatred of CLI, is @Mason_Wheeler a @blakeyrat alt, or just channeling his spirit?
@boomzilla said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
that's just another thing in its favor
Mason hates it; it must be good.
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@mott555 said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
For that matter, literally 100% of smartphones are Linux/UNIX based.
Not quite true yet; about 3 months too early.
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@TwelveBaud said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
@mott555 said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
For that matter, literally 100% of smartphones are Linux/UNIX based.
Not quite true yet; about 3 months too early.
You must be the last guy with a Windows Phone then. I thought I was the last one, and I got rid of mine three years ago.
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@mott555 said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
it really seems to me that they'd have gotten away with it ... had they done MCAS right
But they didn't, and they didn't, and a bunch of people are dead.
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@Dragoon said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
You have made no quantitative analysis
I don't need to; Apple already did it. As Bruce Tognazzini famously reported,
We’ve done a cool $50 million of R & D on the Apple Human Interface. We discovered, among other things, two pertinent facts:
- Test subjects consistently report that keyboarding is faster than mousing.
- The stopwatch consistently proves mousing is faster than keyboarding.
This contradiction between user-experience and reality apparently forms the basis for many user/developers’ belief that the keyboard is faster.
People new to the mouse find the process of acquiring it every time they want to do anything other than type to be incredibly time-wasting. And therein lies the very advantage of the mouse: it is boring to find it because the two-second search does not require high-level cognitive engagement.
It takes two seconds to decide upon which special-function key to press. Deciding among abstract symbols is a high-level cognitive function. Not only is this decision not boring, the user actually experiences amnesia! Real amnesia! The time-slice spent making the decision simply ceases to exist.
While the keyboard users in this case feels as though they have gained two seconds over the mouse users, the opposite is really the case. Because while the keyboard users have been engaged in a process so fascinating that they have experienced amnesia, the mouse users have been so disengaged that they have been able to continue thinking about the task they are trying to accomplish. They have not had to set their task aside to think about or remember abstract symbols.
Hence, users achieve a significant productivity increase with the mouse in spite of their subjective experience.
Not that any of the above True Facts will stop the religious wars.
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@PleegWat said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
@dkf said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
EOF character
Why was that even a thing. Did early file systems not support byte-level granularity on file sizes?
According to Wikipedia, it’s so that the end of an input stream can be signalled by a terminal driver in Unix, to prevent programs endlessly reading from a terminal when they should get on with doing their thing on the input.
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@Vixen said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
the Unix and Linux folks support Zip files as an act of compassion for those poor lost souls that will never, nay can never know the beauty and purity that is the TAR format.
The (probably vast) majority of Unix systems in use today use zip as their default compressed archive format, in this manner:
https://icdn9.digitaltrends.com/image/digitaltrends/how-to-create-zip-file-step-4-1200x799.jpg
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That applies to a CLI vs. GUI how?
But as a counter anyway:
https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Hidden-Costs-of-Graphical-User-Interfaces%3A-Failure-Lane-Napier/e0f2731275341810adac620533ff527600d777c1In reality, if your hands are already on the keyboard and you are doing a 1 or 2-key shortcut (and in some cases even 3 keys) it is faster than moving your hand to the mouse.
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@Gurth So, how did your GOT theories turn out?
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@mott555 said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
Modern military fighters (even those designed by Boeing) have extremely unstable aerodynamic profiles with complex hardware/software solutions to make their flight characteristics manageable.
Yeah. But flying a military fighter is a high-risk job anyways, and they don't carry hundred of passengers.
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@Mason_Wheeler lol triggered
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@mott555 said in The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built:
You must be the last guy with a Windows Phone then. I thought I was the last one, and I got rid of mine three years ago.
I don’t own a smartphone, but this kind of makes me want to own a Windows one …
Categorization costs for hierarchical keyboard commands | Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
