Comments:

1. JimM on February 16th, 2011 at 10:53:

   Hearing about decisions like this makes me think I should extend my 4-day stay here in .nl by a factor of years…

Comments:

1. Desiato on February 15th, 2011 at 17:48:

   I’m kinda curious which 2 you don’t identify with, but I’ll tell you which one made me stop reading the rest of the article: editor arguments are incredibly inane, and the only reason to claim that admins should use vi is to point to the fact that it is more widely available. Claiming that you shouldn’t use it because it’s “the Unix equivalent of Microsoft Word” is fucking retarded. What does he use on Windows, Notepad? Come on. *flush*

2. John Sinteur on February 15th, 2011 at 17:56:

   I use vi because it’s always available. Try using emacs in a box that’s stopped half-way through a reboot because of a file system inconsistency.

   Anyway, the two I missed. I avoid regular expressions like the plague. I fully agree with Jami Zawinski: Some people, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I’ll use regular expressions.” Now they have two problems.

   The second one is “We have more in common with medical examiners than doctors”. I won’t attempt to diagnose something to death. I use gut feeling (or, as some call it, experience) to guess how likely it is going to happen again, and I’m quick to decide that it’s going to take me too long to figure out for such a remote possibility of recurrence.

3. Desiato on February 15th, 2011 at 18:03:

   Agreed, that’s a valid reason for preferring vi. His justification made me twitch.

4. Jan Joris Vereijken on February 15th, 2011 at 22:49:

   8/9 (I use sudo. What’s wrong with sudo? I like sudo! OK, I admit, I work for a bank. We’re sudoish people.)

5. Jan-Mark on February 15th, 2011 at 23:56:

   I am not even an admin and I score 9/9. With some variations. I use ‘sudo bash’, I use emacs for regular editing but vi for quick an safe editing, though on a slow connection or heavily loaded machine I might use ed. The vi[m] versus emacs discussion is a non issue to me, they both have their place. Only once I found it amusing to ask a person which he preferred, but that person was RMS and it was in a car full of nerds. And I LOVE regular expressions, I use them even if I don’t need them like when writing a valentine poem. I guess if you score 9/9, you think you are bad, but I’ve seen bad, and let met tell you, you are not bad. Bad types ‘cat | cc; a.out’ on the command line to convert a color image to black and white. I bet you think this song is about you.

6. Roland Hesz on February 18th, 2011 at 23:55:

   I scored 6. And never been a Unix admin.

Comments:

1. Steffen on February 15th, 2011 at 13:11:

   Here is a response of an astronomy enthusiast (who maintains one of the best blogs about astronomy, in my humble opinion):

   http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/02/14/no-theres-no-proof-of-a-giant-planet-in-the-outer-solar-system/

Comments:

1. Desiato on February 15th, 2011 at 15:02:

   Or the right hand side could be a picture of a riot police guy unplugging the routers handling backbone traffic into the country…

2. John Sinteur on February 15th, 2011 at 18:00:

   How well did that work out in Egypt?

3. Desiato on February 15th, 2011 at 18:48:

   I didn’t follow Egypt closely, but my impression is that after the first few days, people didn’t need FB or Twitter to organize–there was a standard routine, and people showed up day after day.

   Whether or not it works at all depends strongly on the topology of the local networks and the amount of government control over the operators. That’s going to vary from country to country. I’d bet that a few governments and dictators are evaluating whether they have “enough” control over the local infrastructure.

   Seems like a good idea to develop a Twitter-like service that’s not tied to one set of central servers to which access can be shut down, but instead using a p2p serverless-torrent-like structure.

4. John Sinteur on February 15th, 2011 at 18:50:

   [Quote]:
   

   Google and Twitter went considerably further than merely expressing concern, jointly creating a tool to allow Egyptians to bypass the Internet closure and post messages to Twitter by making telephone calls.

   Google said the "Speak to Tweet" service, which turns voice messages into "tweets," was aimed at "helping people in Egypt stay connected at this very difficult time."

5. Rob on February 15th, 2011 at 21:35:

   Wish Google would make that service available to China.

6. Desiato on February 17th, 2011 at 9:43:

   Fyi relevant article:
   http://nyti.ms/hojSBe

Comments:

1. Desiato on February 15th, 2011 at 17:55:

   The top 5 largest blocks, accounting for 2.8 of the 3.7 trillion dollars, are increasing. Admittedly 3 of the 5 are “mandatory” spending, but still. Seems fundamentally broken, no?

2. John Sinteur on February 15th, 2011 at 17:59:

   In itself it’s not a problem if blocks grow. For example, if your population grows, you can expect to spend more on things that are in direct relation to population size – for example, printing driver licenses. In those cases, the speed of growth is more interesting. Are the costs growing faster than they should?

3. Desiato on February 15th, 2011 at 23:53:

   If you’re trying to reduce your deficit, and revenues aren’t expected to increase (see under lingering unemployment), it *is* a problem if 80% of your expenses are not only exempt from cuts but are in facy rising. Just think how hard it is to offset a small rise in the 80% with a cut in the remaining 20%.

4. John Sinteur on February 16th, 2011 at 6:41:

   You’re adding new parameters to your first statement: “revenues aren’t expected to increase”. You’re right the US is in trouble, of course.

5. Desiato on February 16th, 2011 at 8:16:

   You’re crediting me with adding parameters to reality. Thank you for the confidence in my abilities, I appreciate it. :-p :-p

   The background of the article is that Obama wants to take some initiative in narrowing the deficit. All the coverage discussed that angle, it seemed like an obvious part of the context.