231–240 of 286 posts
One of the first multiuser systems I had access to, back in the 90's, was a VMS box. Many years later, I bought an Alpha off of ebay, and have a VMS box of my own! I rarely boot it up because it sounds like a jet engine. It's a whole different world.
https://blog.poggs.com/2020/04/21/openvms-on-a-raspberry-pi/
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Sigh. Why are there still lots, heaps, and tons of horrible, inhumane, broken legacy technology still around in active use? Because its users/proponents are "knowledgeable and motivated" enough to keep pushing through. Sort of a Stockholm syndrome of computing, really. My brain is really quite small compared to all the knowledge about computers that is out there. And my willpower too is very limited. So I would rathe…
>>"It is very easy to be blinded to the essential uselessness of them by the sense of achievement you get from getting them to work at all."
Vs obtuse half broken shit people created out of whole cloth and refuse to fix.
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I really, really hope that you're wrong. I optimistically hope a not-too-future (within 10y?) major version update of Windows is in reality a *nix distribution. As long as they can keep runtime compatibility with older versions of Windows software, I think it'd be a big win for Microsoft for various reasons. The only real challenge would be to get driver vendors in line.
Why would you want that? That is the last thing I want. It is like saying that in ten years we will only have Pepsi Cola. As the only soft drink. You can get Pepsi Cola Mint ,Pepsi Cola Cherry, Pepsi Cola regular etc. But no matter what it will always be Pepsi Cola. I want more, a lot more viable operating systems than we have ow. Now is a sad place to be. Linux was never created to be a modern operating system. Part…
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You know, it's funny, the topic in this article is the forced abandonment of VMS. Microsoft at one time had a video interview on their "Virtual Academy" with one of the PowerShell creators, and he talks about how they kept trying to create a "unixy" tool for managing Windows machines, and it never felt or worked right. So then they looked at VMS and realized it was the perfect inspiration. Most of what you love about…
Which also shouldn't be surprising given VMS also had a huge inspiration (and some key figures) on early NT Kernel development. In some ways modern Windows is "son of VMS".
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Thats nonsense really. What windows object model ??? Your 'simple' pipeline becomes hard core once you take into account all other things you require like grep, awk, sed, xargs, mount etc. Hack, even basic boolean stuff is from another dimension with executables like `[` or `true/false` (yeah, I know mostly builtin nowdays)
> your 'simple' pipeline becomes hard core once you take into account all other things you require like grep, awk, sed, xargs, mount etc. That's the whole point of unix. Non-integrated tools that talk to each other using plain text.
Just as you have to look at a text output of a unix command to figure out how to parse it and extract the subset of information you need from it, so do you have to look at the help metadata of a PS command to figure out how to extract the subset of information you need from its output.
The advantage of having objects instead of text is that if you thought you could parse the filename of grep matches by substring each line of `grep -H`'s output with `:`, you failed to account for filenames with colons. With PS's sls, its help metadata tells you it outputs `Microsoft.PowerShell.Commands.MatchInfo` objects, and the documentation for that type tells you it has a `Filename` property of type string.
One PS command is not "integrated" with another PS command; they're all integrated to .Net and a bunch of built-in PS types.
One of the first multiuser systems I had access to, back in the 90's, was a VMS box. Many years later, I bought an Alpha off of ebay, and have a VMS box of my own! I rarely boot it up because it sounds like a jet engine. It's a whole different world.
You can run it on a Raspberry Pi these days: https://blog.poggs.com/2020/04/21/openvms-on-a-raspberry-pi/
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> Have you ever tried to read git documentation? It is the most useless godawful piece of nonsense I ran "man git" for the first time ever. https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/git.1.html Heey, that's actually pretty good! I don't think it's "godawful". In the second sentence it recommends starting with gittutorial and giteveryday, for a "useful minimum set of commands". https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man7…
> I ran "man git" for the first time ever. > But the man pages are my first go-to It's not strictly a logical contradiction, but doesn't make much sense either.
For Git, I usually turn to online documentation (at https://git-scm.com/docs) or, more often than not, search for keywords and, yes, end up at StackOverflow.
That supports the root-parent comment's point, that there are "fundamental design issues of POSIX", if users new and experienced must resort to such channels. It also implies that "man" as the default documentation system is not sufficiently meeting our needs.
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I like the staging area, though–at any given time I always have code that I do not want to put in a commit object (perhaps I changed some build flags, or my IDE touched some files I don't care for, or…) However, I do agree 100% that all the terminology is pretty bad.
The sin of Git's staging area is that Git forces it into the default interaction path—requiring you to take it into consideration whether or not you're interested in only committing some of the changes. Git should default to including all changes, and iff you direct it to (i.e. by explicitly specifying `git add`) should you have to take into consideration the notion that some changes are staged and others aren't.
Pretty much each point raised in this post(?) are correct, current and relevant even 26 years later. POSIX is a monolith and really deserves to be improved. It's been around forever, yes. It will probably keep on being around forever, yes. Take the tar command (please!), which is already a nightmare where lower-case `a' means "check first" and upper-case `A' means "delete all my disk files without asking" (or somethi…
grep was standardized around 1990 by POSIX.2. In the last 25 years, I haven't had any problems with the POSIX compatible flags of grep, so maybe those points are not so relevant. Using grep for '$' without being aware that grep patterns are regular expressions ((g)lobal search for (re)gexp, and (p)rint), and redirecting the output to the printer without first seeing what it might be (e.g. with .. | head -50) is prett…
Global Regular Expression Parser
that seemed plausible enough I never questioned it.
"Anyway, have you ever tried to use man? It's fine as long as you know what you are looking for. How would you ever find out the name of command given just the function you wanted to execute? You can't. " One of my gripes with UNIX systems is how opaque they are