🐘 So, PHP is skipping a version...

Onyx

Hey, I loved ME. Taught me loads. I mean, I had to learn how to reinstall it, given that I had to do that like every two weeks...

loopback0

@RaceProUK said:

There's a damn good reason why, from XP on, Windows has been built on the NT kernel instead of the 9x kernel ;)

The 9x kernel wasn't terrible when Windows 98 (SE) was current. Windows ME was a special kind of fucking terrible.

RaceProUK

@loopback0 said:

The 9x kernel wasn't terrible when Windows 98 (SE) was current. Windows ME was a special kind of fucking terrible.

98SE was alright, IIRC; the issue with ME was MS shoehorned bits and pieces of the NT kernel into it.

loopback0

@RaceProUK said:

the issue with ME was MS shoehorned bits and pieces of the NT kernel into it.

Also it was fucking terrible.

Captain

Right now, I've got Ubuntu 14.04 dual-booting with Windows 7 on the laptop, and Ubuntu 14.04 on a desktop. I mostly don't boot into Windows -- I pretty much only do it for games, and deleted Roller Coaster Tycoon 3 to find disk space.

Windows 7 is good, for sure. But it's really only as impressive as OS X 10.3 or so. That is, it does what it's supposed to, reasonably quickly, without constantly crashing. And it looks fairly pretty. Neat, but not mindblowing.

blakeyrat

@tar said:

But maybe @Captain only has Linux hardware?

I should charge royalties for that joke.

Yamikuronue

I got through ME by switching to 2000. I got through Vista by moving to Kubuntu. I got through 8 by sticking with 7.

RaceProUK

@Yamikuronue said:

I got through 8 by sticking with 7

I got used to 8 quite quickly; the 8.1 upgrade helped a lot. 7 still has the edge though in overall usability.

loopback0

@Yamikuronue said:

I got through ME by switching to 2000

I did this too.

loopback0

@RaceProUK said:

7 still has the edge though in overall usability.

Replace the Start Screen with the Start Menu and they're effectively the same.

tar

@loopback0 said:

Replace the Start Screen with the Start Menu and they're effectively the same.

Which is Windows 8's key weakness...

RaceProUK

@tar said:

Which is Windows 8's key weakness...

That and the fact that ~~Metro~~Modern UI apps don't integrate at all with the desktop; that's meant to be changing in 10 though.

loopback0

Easily solved by avoiding Metro/Modern/whatever apps.

tar

Oh, I don't use any of those newfangled Modern apps. Also I've trained myself to never hit the  key on its own, and to use +Q if I want to open an app....

hungrier

But you can get Classic Shell or something similar and not have to worry about it.

tar

Yeah, I CBA. I don't particularly miss the Start Menu. I heard a rumour that in Win10, the Start Page is being scaled down to roughly the size of a menu anyway...

RaceProUK

Correct ;)

tar

I know :P

FrostCat

@Jaloopa said:

What would make sense is for them to skip the Galaxy Note 4

You mean Note 5, because the 4's already out.

FrostCat

@Onyx said:

Well I'm advocating PHP becoming good as well. I know, I know, fat fucking chance, but I can dream, can't I?

Sure, but why not advocate people migrate to something that's already good?

FrostCat

@RaceProUK said:

that's meant to be changing in 10 though.

It is. "Windows apps" run in a window now.

asdf

@Yamikuronue said:

I got through Vista

I still don't get why people hated Windows Vista.

@Yamikuronue said:

by moving to Kubuntu.

Holy crap. I remember how buggy and unusable Kubuntu was back then. Are you really trying to tell me that Kubuntu was better than Vista at the time?

RaceProUK

@asdf said:

I still don't get why people hated Windows Vista

At launch, it was a disaster, mostly because of the new graphics drivers required; most of them were rushed out, buggy, unstable pieces of total crap. Once they were sorted out though, and SP1 landed, Vista was OK.

FrostCat

@asdf said:

I still don't get why people hated Windows Vista.

Because it's different from the previous version, the same reason they hated 95, XP, and 8.

FrostCat

You're making an argument that the real problem was the graphics card maker's fault.

Watson

What version is TeX at now? 3.1415926?

tar

@Watson said:

What version is TeX at now? 3.1415926?

Every new version adds another digit of π, although I think at this point Knuth has said that even the bugs are canonical behaviour, and it is, in effect "perfect", so another version of T_EX seems unlikely...

Oh I see, you can tell it went into read-only mode because the page jumped down by the height of the banner. Nice.

RaceProUK

There is an element of truth to that assertion :P

Onyx

@FrostCat said:

Sure, but why not advocate people migrate to something that's already good?

Because I think that effectively killing of a language with a large userbase and millions of applications running in it (and yes, I am counting on most of the bigger and better ones upgrading) just because the creators are a bunch of stubborn bastards is a shame.

Also because competition is good. From all I read this whole ordeal with PHP 7 and it's focus on performance is due to HHVM was kicking it's ass on that front. Also, Hack has this:

Type Annotations allow for PHP code to be explicitly typed on parameters, class member variables and return values:

Looks familiar? Yeah, Hack forced PHP to make at least some steps in the right direction. I'd like PHP doing the same for other languages. Because I want more good languages, damn it! And more competition helps with that.

tar

@RaceProUK said:

There is an element of truth to that assertion :P

That MS didn't wait for the graphics card manufacturers to get their driver shit together before lurching forward with a whole new version of Windows nobody was ready for?



tar

@Onyx said:

Because I want more good languages, damn it!

Well, 2 out of 3 is alright...

Onyx

Do I have to go all pendant here and point out I was talking about web oriented languages?

tar

I suppose it's a PHP thread, so the context was implicit. My inner language nerd doesn't care for such trifles.

Web languages. Hmmm... That narrows the field somewhat... I heard ES6 is nice?

Onyx

@tar said:

I heard ES6 is nice?

First of all, that's clientside (no, I'm not recognizing node.js as a proper replacement for PHP/ASP.NET, get off my lawn). Troll noticed though.

Second of all, the damned thing has many of the same problems PHP does, and then some.

tar

@Onyx said:

no, I'm not recognizing node.js as a proper replacement for PHP/ASP.NET, get off my lawn

Can I interest you in a nice second-hand io.js instead then? Lovely model this, one careful owner, just had its oil changed only a couple of thousand miles on the clock...

OR, shifting gears a little, why not treat _asm.JS as your target platform, and then you can use Emscripten and write all you client side code in C++?!?! I know, , right?! :D

(Did we just lose the server for about 10 minutes there?)

Eldelshell

@Onyx said:

no, I'm not recognizing node.js as a proper replacement for PHP

If you're going to develop in a crappy language/platform, at least do it only on one. That's my biggest selling point for NodeJS.

PJH

@Watson said:

What version is TeX at now? 3.14159265?

According to pikiweedia anyway.

ftp://ftp.cs.stanford.edu/pub/tex/ -> tex14.tar.gz 2378 KB 01/12/2014 12:00:00 AM

would seem to support it

[pjh@thinkpad tex]$ grep "Version 3\." ./tex/tex.web
% Version 3.0 fixed unusual displays; was more \output robust (March 1990).
% Version 3.1 fixed nullfont, disabled \write{\the\prevgraf} (September 1990).
% Version 3.14 fixed unprintable font names and corrected typos (March 1991).
% Version 3.141 more of same; reconstituted ligatures better (March 1992).
% Version 3.1415 preserved nonexplicit kerns, tidied up (February 1993).
% Version 3.14159 allowed fontmemsize to change; bulletproofing (March 1995).
% Version 3.141592 fixed \xleaders, glueset, weird alignments (December 2002).
% Version 3.1415926 was a general cleanup with minor fixes (February 2008).
% Version 3.14159265 was similar (January 2014).
@d banner=='This is TeX, Version 3.14159265' {printed when \TeX\ starts}
[pjh@thinkpad tex]$

FrostCat

@tar said:

graphics card manufacturers to get their driver shit together

Available evidence suggests they STILL haven't done that.

Onyx

@FrostCat said:

Available evidence suggests they STILL haven't done that.

You have not experienced pain until you tried getting an ATI/AMD card to work properly on Linux.

Heavens help you if it's a muxless setup as well.

tarunik

@Onyx said:

You have not experienced pain until you tried getting an ATI/AMD card to work properly on Linux.

Dunno -- mine seems to be pretty well behaved under Debian testing, but then again, I'm using stock radeon -- no sense mucking around with that fglrx abomination if I don't have to ;)

Onyx

It's a desktop PC isn't it? How's the power management, if you even took a look at it. I'm also going to assume you don't use "switchable graphics" or whatever they are calling it this week.

TwelveBaud

@RaceProUK said:

Once they were sorted out though, and SP1 landed, Vista was OK.

I'll just get out my Launch Party t-shirts and sharpies....

Steve_The_Cynic

@Bort said:

4.0 - Windows 95

It's more complicated than that.

Win95 reported two different version numbers, depending on who called it.

Win16 code marked in the NE header as linked for some version before 4.0 got told that the version was 3.95.

Win32 code of any sort and Win16 code marked as linked for 4.0 got told that the version was 4.0.

WTF is up with that?

First part: The Win16 GetVersion() call would return the major version in the LSByte and the minor version in the MSByte of a 16-bit value. Yes, that is definitely a WTF.

Second part: According to the book where I read this, some (unnamed) "commercially important" Win16-for-3.X applications detected that they were running on at least 3.1(0) and not on 3.0 by comparing the returned value with 0x0a03, and aborting if it was lower, so ~~for~~ because of them, Win95 returned 0x5F03 ("3.95") which is greater than 0x0A03 rather than 0x0004 ("4.0") which is not.

tarunik

@Onyx said:

It's a desktop PC isn't it? How's the power management, if you even took a look at it. I'm also going to assume you don't use "switchable graphics" or whatever they are calling it this week.

Desktop, yes -- it just stays on all the time. And no, I don't use switchable graphics -- I suspect my hardware doesn't support it to begin with ;)

FrostCat

@Onyx said:

You have not experienced pain until you tried getting an ATI/AMD card to work properly on Linux.

I actually did that late last year, on Mint. The biggest problem I had was figuring out how to get the driver and how to install it. It worked fine once I got that part resolved.

Onyx

Ok, next time I'll specify the exact card and setup that's near-impossible to get working... Actually, I think I already did, asking for help. What little responses I got were pretty much "no fucking clue".

So yeah. I have good luck with buying hardware it seems. (This time I couldn't even choose, if I could I'd get NVidia)

darkmatter

i used to use active desktop to load the company's single-sign-on application list so I wouldn't have to fire up my browser to do it.

i am that lazy. problem was, the desktop would die anytime explorer crashed, which was too often. so it became more of a hassle than it was helpful.

darkmatter

@loopback0 said:

Windows ME was a special kind of fucking terrible.

Very much so. They shoehorned the parts of the NT kernel that were NOT the useful parts. What it really needed was the ability to separate processes that allows you to kill an app/explorer without taking down the whole computer - the best feature started by win2k.