301–310 of 818 posts
USB. It's hard to imagine, but we used to have a thing called SCSI (pronounced "scuzzy", and that's how it felt) which allowed you to connect to exactly one serial device. The plug was huge. And cables cost $50. Mice used an entirely separate interface that was different on Macs and PCs, and since Apple was dying at the time, it was a struggle to get Mac mice for a reasonable price. With USB, you could suddenly attac…
No, SCSI was worse than that... you had 5 or so different types, about 5 different connectors, and you had to terminate things, set the dip-switches just right, have the right Adaptec card, with the right drivers, and if you didn't look at things too hard... you might be able to take a $5 CD blank and get a good burn on it... otherwise you had a $5 coaster.
I hate SCSI because I always had the SCSI Blues.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Was Gmail really 10x better than Hotmail?
> Was Gmail really 10x better than Hotmail? No. Gmail did not suck badly enough to be merely 10× better than Hotmail. Gmail was lightyears beyond other early free webmail services.
SSDs. Virtualization. Git. I've used CVS and SourceSafe before. LVM. The old MBR way of partitioning is just awful. systemd and journald, just to be a bit controversial. I really don't miss my days of screwing around with init scripts, or having to parse logs by hand. Arduino. It makes lots of cool stuff very accessible. sshfs, it's amazingly convenient. pulseaudio. Sound on Linux finally works. I spent an unbelievab…
I absolutely love systemd and journald. The fact that you can do most things declaratively and have a common interface for logs, it's just beautiful. I can do things like "show me the logs for this service for the last 5 mins". I still don't fully understand why people prefer bash scripts. But then again, I have never once needed to edit those bash scripts since I usually don't stray too much from defaults.
Admin-wise it's nice not to ever have to look at a 3-way merge of stuff in /etc/init.d if somebody touched anything, and then the system was upgraded.
But besides that there's lots of cool benefits. Like not needing to deal with PID files, the fact that you always know what a random process belongs to, and that if you want to stop something, nothing will be left behind. Plus all the nice resource limits, auto-restart and other useful parameters that can be applied to anything.
A happy user. It helps you connect data from multiple places and write to a single source. Anyone know a smiliar open source project like that?
Firebug. Every developer from around 2006-2008 knows what I'm talking about. Debugging JS in IE6 was like trying to build a house blindfolded with both arms tied behind your back. Firebug is when JS went from just a web augmentation toy that could silently fail and your web page would still mostly function to becoming a critical function for a web page (many will see this as all a big mistake).
I used to love Firebug, but couldn't help but notice it getting more and more sluggish over the years, with no apparent cause for it. Does anyone know what happened?
So many good comments for me its a lot of what others said + - Python as the default for scripting/automation: instead of using bash/batch/autohotkey/ if you need to use some popular API it saved you time with it's huge number of packages. so many good built ins. it's dynamic enough to be comfortable but not insane like JS. So good.
I agree with this but Python is far more dynamic than JS.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Debugging JS in IE6 Visual Studio (even back when it was called Visual Interdev) supported first-class script debugging with Internet Explorer going as far back as Internet Explorer 4. Ditto cscript/wscript. It just wasn't popular (and few people knew about it) because most people doing front-end web-work _back then_ weren't using Visual Studio, and in general most people weren't doing back-end web-work in Visual S…
This didn't really help with the DOM or CSS, though. The developer toolbar that worked with IE6 was sorely lacking.
Support for CSS "debugging" was completely absent, yes.
Not sure if mathematics counts as software: Geometric / Clifford Algebra. It makes just about every aspect of handling geometry in computer graphics and robotics so much easier. It comes with a ton of upsides and only two downsides: You probably were not taught it yet (so you have to learn it) and if you do, others will have trouble following you unless they learn it too. I somehow feel like coming from a tribe where…
Do you think it is all of GA that helps, or really just the concept of bivectors / multivectors? (I have a lot of skepticism about the geometric product as a useful object, but I think that multivectors are clearly fantastically useful everywhere. My exposure is mostly in physics where multivectors are basically necessary to make any sense of a bunch of concepts. But I don't work in robotics/graphics so maybe don't k…
Yes, definitely all of it. Especially in physics, where every well known equation comes with its own, not so well known algebra. There are dozens (maybe even hundreds?) of them, all with their own notations and shenanigans. The thing is, all of them can be covered by GA. And you only need three instances of GA to cover everything [0]: Classical mechanics, quantum mechanics and relativistic mechanics / space time.
>> I have a lot of skepticism about the geometric product as a useful object
The geometric product is kind of like: "Here is everything you could possibly want to do, all at once!". We usually pick out specific parts of it (called grade projections) to operate on sub-algebras matching the specific problem domain at hand. Yet, all of them are still connected in one über-algebra so to speak. So, we don't need to switch notations.
>> bivectors / multivectors
Multivectors, the vectors of GA, are like "normal" vectors, from linear algebra, just tuples. There is nothing special about them. The genius lies in the idea that unlike "normal" vector algebra, where you have one element in your tuple for every dimension, you also have elements for every combination of dimensions in a multivector. The multivector is usually sorted by the grade (number of dimensions an element combines). That way a multivector has a 0D scalar, 1D vectors, 2D bivectors, 3D trivectors, etc.
[0]: https://www.scirp.org/journal/PaperInformation.aspx?PaperID=...