/tech/ - Technology★

What does "harmful software" mean in this case?

>>841950

(((Bloat)))

>>841947 (OP)

stop having harmful mental illnesses

>>841956

/thread

Stop telling me what to do!

MY COMPUTER, MY CHOICE

>encouraging the use of cuck licenses and cuck licensed software

no wonder he killed himself

>>842014

>Believing the kikery that comes out of a kike's mouth

C'mon lad

I still use Emacs to work, mostly because TRAMP and SQL mode helps a lot.

Simplicity, not only in technology, but in life itself is a worth goal.

Now, my doubt about OP's picture is how a file system hierarchy can be an alternative to SQL? You mean directories as tables and file as columns? Sure that can work, but the management would be hard when shared.

Also, I looked through cat-v, but they don't mention it too much. What's the opinion about Lisp, Scheme to be precise, it's my favorite language and I'm doing some small stuff with Chicken Scheme lately.

>>842058

> What's the opinion about Lisp, Scheme to be precise.

You know I always thought it was weird that they didn't talk about scheme it being very (((bloat))) free but I think they generally fall in line behind rob pike. I know he's mentioned it before, I can't find it now though.

>harmful: YAML

<less harmful: JSON

...

well you're not wrong.

>harmful: PCRE

you can take my zero-width negative lookbehinds from my cold dead hands

>harmful: pthreads

not inherently.

>harmful: GNU screen

nah m8

<Less harmful: Tk

you fucking wot

>harmful: Vim, Emacs, nano

eat shit.

nano is also shit, but not harmful.

Acme and Sam are a meme. ed is famously a meme.

>Harmful: Latin-1

<less harmful: UTF-8

you'll justify this with Chinese text, but you only actually use Unicode for the fucking emojis and cute symbols

>Harmful: SQL databases

sqlite would like to have a 'word' with you outside. Don't plan on coming back in with all your teeth.

>Harmful: subversion

how old is this image?

>Harmful: ALSA

HOW OLD IS THIS IMAGE?

>>842061

Good points anon. Tk is awesome though.

>The move to FLTK from GTK+ also removed many of the project's dependencies and reduced Dillo's memory footprint by 50%.

I'd like UTF-8 but with a charset of only the necessities, that'd be nice.

>>841947 (OP)

Uriel considered himself harmful.

>>842061

>you'll justify this with Chinese text, but you only actually use Unicode for the fucking emojis and cute symbols

Nah. These people were UTF-8 fanboys before emoji were even a thing. It's an invention from the Bell Labs-sphere.

They don't use any emoji or cute symbols. They have a different brand of autism.

>>842069

Unicode is still harmful. The proper solution is either

1) going back to ASCII, then using HTML for fancy characters, foreign letters are not plain text just like colored ones aren't

or

2) remove RTL and everything except BMP from unicode (Arabic is saved as LTR and the text editor gets to handle conversion), then use UTF-16 like it was originally designed

or

3) fuck the japs and arabs, fit everything else (latin+cyrillic+european) into 8 bits

or

4) Big5, the white man's encoding (but with cyrillic and euro in SBCS, moving punctuation out to DBCS)

I've considered issue this a lot, because Unicode and the disgusting communists behind it makes me feel physically ill. I would rank them in order as 4>2>3>1.

Attention-Hungry Games 21 nominations has started:

>>>/sudo/64490

What's wrong with SVN?

>>842084

Way to restrict the flow of information. If there was ever a way to implement Newspeak, these ways are the way to do it.

>>842084

Unicode is not harmful.

People implementing optional symbols you don't like != Harmful software or standard

>>841947 (OP)

half the stuff there is just as shit

>>842061

>sqlite would like to have a 'word' with you outside.

>making memory leak on purpose for performance reasons is not considered harmful

This guy.

>>842148

sounds like FUD and not understanding APIs

>>842168

Internal implementation, not API.

This is all Unix-centric, so it's kinda lame from the start. Not even a mention of Forth. Nothing about TempleOS/HolyC, or whatever it was called, Sparrow OS or something.

Just give me a Commodore 64 fam, or at least a CP/M box.

>>842148

>>842168

>>842180

My bad I was mistaken. I don't know why I had in mind liblzma from XZ Utils, which leak on purpose for performance reasons. *pls no bully*

>>842084

>Big5

Well said, Aryan

t. Chinese

>>842184

You can still run CP/M-86 on modern PC hardware.

>ed

Opinions discarded. Nobody who recommends ed as a text editor can be taken seriously.

>>842722

For a limited time, until Intel gets rid of BIOS entirely. They already said it's going to happen soon. Then you won't be able to run DOS natively either.

>>842745

The BIOS would not be a problem. You could get around it with a bootloader that maps a BIOS into RAM. The real problem is Intel's plans to get rid of protected mode and other legacy x86 features.

If he was such a græt philosopher shouldn't he have explained why such and such is harmful instead of screeching "I don't like this! REEEEEEE!!!"? What charachterizes a descent philospher is not being right but helping you think. Uriel just shouted HARMFUL at everything that didn't follow the suckless philosophy, it should exactly be considered a guide to choosing and developing software.

tl;dr: Advocating software minimalism is good, but good arguments should be made instead of insults and quote mining.

(Merry Christmas Eve to everyone and have a non-botnet new year!)

>>842808

<it should exactly

Meant:

<it shouldn't exactly

>>842808

He did, though. You're looking at the deliberately memey inflammatory tabular version. http://harmful.cat-v.org has more if you click through.

I still don't agree with him.

>>842808

>charachterizes

I'm not a native English speaker either, but man could you at least look up words you're not sure how to spell.

>>841947 (OP)

>EPUB => DjVu

two totally different beasts.

>>842826

>Note: At the moment a detailed rationale is not provided for most of this, so figuring out why some things are considered more or less harmful than others is left as an exercise for the reader. Here is a hint: complexity is the bane of all software, simplicity is the most important quality.

He wants software that requires super experts to use them. I personally believe that the computer exists to serve the user and not the other way around.

>>842902

>He wants software that requires super experts to use them.

The exact opposite was the case. He wanted software that humans could understand fully. The more complexity you add to single parts, the more difficult it becomes to understand the whole system. He wanted to be in full control of his computer and not leave most of it to experts who each only understand a single part of it.

All software is harmful, all hardware is harmful as well, there is no escape

>>842857

You ended a question with a period. To make that sentence grammatically correct, you'd have to remove the period & add a question mark or change it to "But man you could at least look up words you're not sure how to spell.".

Do you guys think Uriel would have liked Rust?

>>842908

>He wanted to be in full control of his computer

This is what I mean by a super expert. To have this level of control inherently means you want to know every part of the system. I believe that users should achieve their computing outcomes without the need to become such a super expert.

>>842953

I have no idea how Uriel thought about it, but I think people who lack the ability to control their computer should not be in control of a networked general purpose computer. In the same way that we do not give cars or firearms or heavy equipment to retards. Let them have purpose built appliances that require no maintenance. And let us have sane and simple systems to do our work, and build their toys, and keep the world from falling apart.

If I was stuck using C, Go, awk, and rc, I would kill myself too.

>>842948

No. Great Rust is always worse code than good C (presuming the C is well-written, obviously).

>>843091

Posted from iPhone X.

>>842084

>4) Big5, the white man's encoding

You DO know Big5 is the worst encoding scheme ever invented, written by a bunch of DOS faggots, don't you? Due to some really brain-dead design decisions, Big5 has quite a few characters starting with the same code as special ASCII symbols used on Unix-like systems, such as "\" in escape sequences, "|" in shell pipes, and "%" in printf(), and it was a complete nightmare for Unix (a.k.a, real) webservers.

Even the outdated Shift-JIS is better. Ken Thompson designed UTF-8 to solve this exact problem.

>disgusting communists behind it

False. The communists are behind GB2312, it didn't even include the character of their prime minister back in the 90s, and these cucks still refused to adopt proper UTF-8 as standard, even what they are doing now is to port more and more symbols from Unicode to this stupid encoding scheme instead, because they think UTF-8 is a foreign conspiracy to take over the control of the Chinese writing system. The latest GB18030 contains almost the entire Unified-Han CJK characters, copied and pasted from UTF-8.

>>842116

>Unicode is not harmful.

This. Through all these history of insanity…

chicks, japs, and kimchi all made their epoch attempts, more than one time (more than 1 shitty encoding scheme for each of them), and their clever tricks all broke loose, just to say, today most Asians still believed the currency symbol, ¥, is separator of file path on Windows and the escape character for C programmers, for stupid reasons similar to Big5’s design, in comparison even the Euro-symbol issue becomes just a slight annoyance.

TL;DR, in the end, UTF-8 is the only standard encoding with the least number of problems to deal with (besides RTL and compound characters, which are not needed for most use cases.) if you want your program to work for every languages/symbols on proper systems. The point is you DON'T have to test them or even know them, if the program is in correct UTF-8, but chicks or japs complaint, it's now their problem.

"on proper systems", means it's not BOM, not UTF-16 or other counterfeits, like the so-called fake "utf8" encoding in MySQL that fooled so many web developers 'til today.

>>842061

>you'll justify this with Chinese text, but you only actually use Unicode for the fucking emojis and cute symbols

The shiity emoji comes only as a by-product because of this easy of supporting more symbols enabled by UTF-8.

In addition, if you explicitly don't want to make your program to work for all types of symbols (even if you don't have it test and implement it in a UTF-8 manner), perfectly fine, you are still free to use the plain-old ASCII (which is still a valid subset of UTF-8 ), or for your master race, you can use Latin-1 (aka ISO/IEC 8859-1), I think it's still a useful non-Unicode encoding.

>>841950

>What does "harmful software" mean in this case?

Basically they are Unix Puritans who think HTTP/1.0, POSIX multi-lingual support, or even the early 4.2BSD ("cat -v"), is a divert from the True Unix Path. They are The Philosophers (TM), and they do make plenty of insightful comments about the history and current state of Unix, modern programs and software throughout cat-v.org, and surprisingly, some of them are correct. Such as bloat issue in general, programs that scream and die when they run out of memory regardless of the scenario, or the recommendation of UTF-8 or tmux (I don't mind returning to GNU/Screen if the development can be active again).

Good place to find obscure and good lightweight solutions, and to listen about the complaints of software development by these minimalists. But overall don't take them too seriously.

>>842960

You have that world today! Plan 9 OS was made for people exactly like you! The rest of us have software that works without being experts. That's why I use Gnome.

>>843348

Due to some really brain-dead design decisions, Unix has quite a few """special""" characters, such as "\" in escape sequences, "|" in shell pipes, "%" in printf(), "/" in paths, and "\0" as a string terminator.

>The communists are behind GB2312, it didn't even include the character of their prime minister back in the 90s, and these cucks still refused to adopt proper UTF-8 as standard, even what they are doing now is to port more and more symbols from Unicode to this stupid encoding scheme instead, because they think UTF-8 is a foreign conspiracy to take over the control of the Chinese writing system. The latest GB18030 contains almost the entire Unified-Han CJK characters, copied and pasted from UTF-8.

The problem is with Unicode itself, not how the bits are converted into bytes. "Bit twiddling" encodings like UTF-8 don't fix it. It doesn't matter if it's UTF-128 or UTF-36.

>>843135

Bullshit. Sage negated.

>>842948

rustc includes the whole stdlib in the binary of a basic hello world program by default, so, no, Uriel would have probably considered Rust harmful.

>>843493

It is, though.

He is not always consistent as I show with examples from his site. On his page "Words Can be Harmful"[1] he writes:

<While freedom of expression should always be sacrosanct, it is important to recognize some words are harmful.

<But the reason words can be harmful is not their meaning, but their lack of meaning. Words are a communication tool, a symbolic system to represent complex ideas in a concise and clear way, words that for whatever reason do not have a minimally clear and well defined meaning become harmful as everyone (the speaker and the listener or anyone else for that matter) can attach whatever semantics they find convenient at any given time.

<Often even the same individual can attach clearly inconsistent and contradictory meanings to the same word!

<The reason this words should be avoided is not because their meaning could be dangerous, but because for all practical purposes they have become devoid of any real meaning and undermine the use of language to aid communication, debate and thought.

<Here are some examples of harmful words that are worse than useless:

<*Capitalism

<*Communism

<*Fair

<*Natural

<*Microkernel

<*Object-Oriented

<*Socialism

<*Regulation

<*Speculation

That there are confusing words is a sentiment that many people, including Richard Stallman[2] has expressed, but in another page "The Swedish dream"[3] he uses the word socialism quite liberally:

<Sweden is probably (together with Japan) the most undemocratic developed country in the world. For all practical purposes Sweden has been a single party system for the last 60 years, the single party system is so strong, that the few very short times other parties have been in power their policies even more socialist and it never was long before the real Socialists were back in power.

<Cronyism and corruption are rampant, except that they have become so institutionalized that they are accepted as normal.

<In the Socialist government power has passed from generation to generation, they are so imbredded that the Prime Minister was married with the CEO of the national liquor monopoly (which is one of the biggest, if not the biggest, company in the country and which provides huge amounts of income to the government).

<Politicians abused the rent control system so they can pay almost nothing for huge apartments in the center of town while everyone else has to pay exorbitant prices for a pathetic sociality flat so far from everything that it takes you two hours to get to work.

<There are less than five construction companies that control all the housing in the whole country thanks to exclusive contracts from the government.

<The list goes on and on, Sweden [Swedish perhaps?] society is a lie, don’t believe it.

As pointed out he also doesn't think you should use the term Object-Oriented but he is fine with using it in his page "Object Oriented Programming is Inherently Harmful"[4].

First he condemns the use of words without precise meaning, perhaps longing for the long dead philosophy of Ideal Language Philosophy, but then he uses the term socialism, a very contested word with many different interpretations without even giving it his own definition, when social democracy would have been a more precise word and less emotion stirring.

His apparent inconsistencies ask for much sympathy. Too much in my book.

tl;dr: You can't use these words, but I can.

[1]: http://harmful.cat-v.org/words/

[2]: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html

[3]: http://harmful.cat-v.org/society/sweden

[4]: http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/OO_programming/

>>841947 (OP)

>XML -> plain (UTF-8) text

But XML is plaintext.

>>843616

Just simply saying that these words are harmful doesn't achieve anything. It'd be better if he just said "Be careful when somebody says these words and be consistent when you use them. Always define them before using them." Using the shortcut "harmful" is just as ambigous. "Bloated", " unsafe", "not needed", " overly complex", "badly-designed", etc. He is a hypocrite with some legitimate concerns.

>>842116

O(n) indexing is. Unicode contains harmful symbols. It also supports degenerate RTL and zero-width characters.

>>843348

Big5 is a fantastic concept. Either single-width (ASCII) or double-width (foreign). Always O(1) indexing. The only issue is the structure. SBCS should have cyrillic latin and numbers, and punctuation in DBCS. But that's a minor problem. It still fares better than UTF16 for dumb monospace rendering.

Big5's wide characters have the high bit set, not sure what you're on about.

Shift-JIS is bad, doesn't have high bits for all in DBCS and yen symbol issue was a giant mistake.

>>843819

>O(n) indexing is.

Then use an encoding with O(1) indexing.

>>841956

Never, normalfag.

>>842084

Agree. Unicode is cancer.

U R I E L W A S R I G H T

R

I

E

L

W

A

S

R

I

G

H

T

>>841956

Mental illness breaks me free from normie faggotry you fucking nigger.

>>849776

Why do we need anything other than ASCII? The internet was an oppurtunity to unify language and we fucked it up.

>>849782

Chinks and their fucktarded writing system. basically.

>>849783

Chinese is literally the most retarded writing system in current use. Literally fucking HIEROGLYPHS.

Suckless > cat-v

These memers did some good software, at least. Ranting without doing anything won't give you any credibility.

>>849790

>Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den

>In a stone den was a poet called Shi Shi, who was a lion addict, and had resolved to eat ten lions. He often went to the market to look for lions. At ten o’clock, ten lions had just arrived at the market. At that time, Shi had just arrived at the market. He saw those ten lions, and using his trusty arrows, caused the ten lions to die. He brought the corpses of the ten lions to the stone den. The stone den was damp. He asked his servants to wipe it. After the stone den was wiped, he tried to eat those ten lions. When he ate, he realized that these ten lions were in fact ten stone lion corpses. Try to explain this matter.

>>849792

>>849790

It's really hard to tell if this is a failure of the writing system or the speaking system. It's such a horrific clusterfuck of the basic concepts of language itself: the communication of ideas from one person to another.

>>849790

If chinese is the future i'm gonna kill myself right now.

>>849782

You are arguing for Newspeak. Please don't do this.

>>849805

I'm arguing against having 2 trillion different fucking characters because chinks can't learn english. Having just ASCII would prevent all the emoji cancer too.

>>849807

You're lying my friend.

>>849809

How am i lying?

>>849811

Even if you are not lying, you are too stupid to use clear and precise language or you're intentionally being unclear. This means you are good level troll without even trying. Bravo my friend 8/10 you've got me good.

who's trolling whom in this thread?

>>849815

yes

>>849815

whom's trolling who*

>>849791

I think suckless.org runs on software cat-v wrote.

>>849849

stop using laptops, notebooks, smartphones and everything else that isn't a powerful PC that weighs at least 10kg.

>muh portable

what are you homeless?

>>850197

In that case, dvtm is better.

http://www.brain-dump.org/projects/dvtm/

Also web browser like Lynx shouldn't do networking itself, but instead use curl or wget, and only render the page and handle user input.

>>850284

>wget

What the fuck? Do you even know what wget is? Do a line count of its man page. Read through its capabilities. Realize that it understands HTML.

Why would you want lynx to delegate webpage fetching to another web browser?

>>850361

Well that's news to me. How exactly does wget render webpage on screen and manage user input? As far as I can tell, all it does is transfer data.

Now you're right that it's kind of bloated, and personally I'd go with OpenBSD's ftp client instead, but those (wget, curl) were just examples everyone is familiar with.

>>850391

I guess calling it a web browser is exaggerating, but it can parse the data it retrieves and fetch additional files based on it, or rewrite it to make URLs point to local files, for example. It does a lot more than just transfer data.

It's not just kind of bloated, it shits all over the Unix philosophy (which is the way I like it). The kind of purism that says a web browser shouldn't fetch its own data doesn't belong near wget.

>>849774

>"Mental illness breaks me free from normie faggotry you fucking nigger."

And gets you straight into low functioning autism faggotry, nigger.

>>850503

I only have autism cause my parents wanted autismbux you niggerfaggot.

>>842058

>how a file system hierarchy can be an alternative to SQL?

Perhaps it's a reference to the use of BLOBs to store files in SQL RDBMS, when convention holds that's what filesystems were made for, and the proper way is to store a pointer to the file.

I'm not sure how this compares in reality. I suspect that under the hood, the RDBMS is actually doing the file & pointer thing anyway.

>>850393

>It's not just kind of bloated, it shits all over the Unix philosophy (which is the way I like it). The kind of purism that says a web browser shouldn't fetch its own data doesn't belong near wget.

Wget2 is in line with the unix philosophy. It splits out libwget, so in theory someone could build a web browser using its http functions.

UNIX is the most harmful thing ever to happen to computers.

   I don't know if Minow is committing the hagiolatry one
associates with the typical weenix unie, but I really feel
that any further mention of the reputed tear-inspiring
beauty, simplicity, symmetry, economy, etc of "V7" (or
whatever) Unix should be cause for immediate and permanent
expulsion from present company.

   I've seen quite a number of allusions to some downward
fall of unix even in this forum.  Let's get this straight
once an for all: Unix was flawed from conception.  Its
entire New-Jerseyist philosophy is flawed.  In fact, its
entire "philosophy" is a Source of Evil in the Modern World.

   THERE WAS AND IS NO FALLING-OFF FROM A WORLD OF
UNDIVIDED LIGHT.  THERE WAS NO GREAT PURE, PRIMORDIAL,
PRELAPSARIAN UNIX.  The Unix you see, with which you
struggle, which you curse, is not a diseased and reduced
remnant, but is itself the agent of disease and reduction.

   How can one lose sight of that? 

>>854354

That's not an argument.

>>854358

..then we have this winner, because I'm sick and tired of
reading the same damned man page eight times in a row every
time I have to do the same operation (and, of course,
because the _obvious_ command to do this doesn't work in
some lurid way that I recall being discussed here
recently)...

   # Yecch on CP for the fact that I can't use it to copy
   # things!  First arg is fromdir, second arg is todir.
   # You must specify both pretty carefully, especially the
   # todir, since we cd to the fromdir before expanding the
   # todir.  Leaves you in the todir.  Expect to see
   # "tar: Warning: The 'p' option will only restore the
   #       modes of files you own"
   # emitted as a "harmless" diagnostic at the very start.
   alias copy_tree 'cd \!:1; tar cf - . | (cd \!:2; tar xvpf -); cd \!:2'

Of course, most of the entries in my .aliases file are there
to modify the syntax of commands so I can remember how to
use them (or to insulate myself from the common screwups I'd
otherwise make), since there's no such thing as interactive
prompting, noise words, argument checking, or any of those
other wimp things that mere lispheads like myself have been
taking for granted since...  oh, when did Twenex first
become popular?  Before most of the current crop of weenix
unies were born, you say?

Who knows?  Maybe there's some tricky way to do what I want
in all the above mess, and I'm sure that asking the local
Twinkie & Jolt addicts would probably get me some plausible
answer.  Or maybe I could spend another five hours or so
poking & prodding at things, staring it these tremendously
useful error messages that the various shells emit.  Of
course, I could always read the twenty-five THOUSAND words
of nonetheless peculiarly useless description that make up
the man pages for sh, csh, and tcsh, in the vain hopes of
finding something usable in the zillions of ridiculous
little special-case rules about how each little piece of a
command line gets teased apart, in what order, with what
special-case syntax for each part, with the exceptions
listed in the most obscure and offhanded way possible, far
from the actual point at which they'd be useful...  (All the
while, of course, beating myself on the head with a mace,
screaming, "It's _not_ a waste of my time to spend hours
learning this stuff!  _Really_ I'll use this arcane
knowledge again in some _other_ little shell tool.  Who
_cares_ if it took me ten hours to do a task that it would
have taken me about five minutes to write in Lisp?") 

http://wiki.c2.com/?WhatIsNotInPlanNine

cp -r
    Recursive copy isn't built into the cp command in PlanNine. Imagine how many separate Unix commands have the TreeWalking built into them... RefactorMercilessly. Instead, this shell script, dircp refactors that functionality for the cp command into two invocations of tar: 

        #!/bin/rc
        switch ($#*) {
        case 2 @{ cd $1 && tar c . } | @{ cd $2 && tar x }
        case * echo usage:  dircp from to >[1=2]
        }

>>841947 (OP)

>go can replace c++

kys google shill

>>854354

> UNIX is the most harmful thing ever to happen to computers.

No that would be Intel architecture, GUIs, and inviting all the plebs in with MS Windows and iphones.

>>854378

>No that would be Intel architecture

Pretty much this.

WE NEED RISC-V FUCKING NOW

>>854430

Uriel considered himself harmful.

>>854431

>RISC-V

   Look, those guys at berkeley decided to optimise their
chip for C and Unix programs.  It says so right in their
paper.  They looked at how C programs tended to behave, and
(later) how Unix behaved, and made a chip that worked that
way.  So what if it's hard to make downward lexical funargs
when you have register windows?  It's a special-purpose
chip, remember?

   Only then companies like Sun push their snazzy RISC
machines.  To make their machines more attractive they
proudly point out "and of course it uses the great
general-purpose RISC.  Why it's so general purpose that it
runs Unix and C just great!"

   This, I suppose, is a variation on the usual "the way
it's done in unix is by definition the general case"
disease. 

>>854450

what is this autism?

>>854464

pajeet nigs discovered this >>854554 book and are using it for propaganda purposes

>>842061

>HOW OLD IS THIS IMAGE?

When did Uriel die anyways? 2013 or something. His ghost has been haunting message boards since then.

You guys joke but deep inside you know it's all true, you know that all software is harmful and you know that life itself is harmful too.

>>854577

His soul has transcended the flesh. Physical existence is harmful.

>>854563

>UNIX wuz white and sheeit, unlike EVERYONE who did every other operating system who wuz really black and pajeet and sheeit

>>854641

If you use Plan 9, you think everything sucks. You would think "How can death be any worse?" AT&T must have been funding how to put depression and suffering on a CD and they came up with Plan 9.

>>850200

>stop using laptops, notebooks, smartphones and everything else that isn't a powerful PC that weighs at least 10kg.

You got it.

>>841950

It's all relative. That meme list that gets posted constantly should be taken with a grain of salt, instead of a definitive, static, final solution. You can actually do things to make software simpler and better without jumping to the extreme and unpractical. But then again, you have to use actual applied intelligence, and not just forsake your task of thinking critically to any ideology. It's actually hard work and that's why people don't even try and just spread stupid memes and then attack those same strawmen. Terry Davis explained it pretty clearly in one of his video: any idiot can make it more complicated, but it takes a super-genius to make it simpler. That's because the intelligent guy can actually distinguish between what's needed and what's not, and he does the hard work of separating the seeds from the chaff, which requires a different approach in many cases.

>>854745

The super-genius figures out a way that does all the work of the existing software in a simpler way. It's more general and encompasses the existing software. It does not take away what the user can already do. That's another reason why I hate UNIX/suckless. UNIX infected the rest of the world with the philosophy that we can't or shouldn't solve problems (which were usually already solved by real operating systems in the 60s and 70s). Suckless preaches that inferior software (worse) is better.

These people are seemingly -incapable- of even believing
that not only is better possible, but that better could have
once existed in the world before driven out by worse.  Well,
perhaps they acknowledge that there might be room for some
incidental clean-ups, but nothing that the boys at Bell Labs
or Sun aren't about to deal with using C++ or Plan-9, or,
alternately, that the sacred Founding Fathers hadn't
expressed more perfectly in the original V7 writ (if only we
paid more heed to the true, original strains of the unix
creed!) 

File locking?  Not seeing output files in "ordinary"
directory listings until their output is finalized?  Version
numbers?  Common sense in coding?  Gee, these concepts are
only 30 years old (some are older).  Any one of the above
would have prevented this problem.  It's a real pity that
UNIX still hasn't managed to grasp these concepts.

(I know that the deficiencies of UNIX aren't your folks'
problem per se.  You've got to deal with what the iron
vendor dishes out, as do we all.  I just figured that, as a
member of the Learning and Common Sense group, it sure
doesn't bode very well that our computational environment
show no evidence of either.) 

      Raise your hand if you remember when file systems
      had version numbers.

  Don't.  The paranoiac weenies in charge of Unix
  proselytizing will shoot you dead.  They don't like
  people who know the truth.

Heck, I remember when the filesystem was mapped into the
address space!  I even re<BANG!> 

Good thing you didn't CC this apologistic aside to
Unix-Haters, else we would have had to chastise you...  (And
please pardon me for CCing this reply to Unix-Haters -- it
inspired a flame.)

Of -course- mail to Unix-Haters fails to blame any
particular responsible individual.  -Every- little bug or
problem is actually the responsibility of some individual,
if you could only figure out who.  The problem is that
dealing with Unix seems like a grand game of finger pointing
and pass-the-buck (without Harry Truman).  Is the real
problem that the programmer didn't check the array bounds?
Or is it ultimately the fault of the designers of C for
designing a language in which programmers must error check
array indices manually?

Eventually, you stop caring about the details that would let
you sort out who was responsible.  Recently I was unable to
use FTP on a PC to send a file to my directory on a Unix
machine because on the Unix box I use the `bash' shell.
Heaven help me, I even understand why this restriction
plugged yet another security hole in Unix, and I was able to
remove the restriction as soon as I understood what was
happening, but after enough absurdities like that, your
average user has no energy left to assign blame.  What do
all these bad experiences have in common?  Unix!  Thus, Unix
is the problem.

Hell, Unix even -encourages- this phenomenon.  Contrast what
happens on ITS or a Lisp Machine or Multics when a program
error happens, with what happens on Unix.  On ITS, Lisp
Machines or Multics your program suspends and you are given
the opportunity to debug the problem and perhaps fix it and
proceed.  You are given the chance to assign some blame.  On
Unix -- *blam* -- core dumped.  -Maybe- you can debug it,
but you certainly can't proceed, so why bother?  Ignore that
(huge) core dump file and move on to your next task.

Note that users -like- this behavior.  No kidding.  Ask half
the graduate students at MIT these days -- they -hate- the
Lisp Machine debugger.  All those blasted -choices-.  All
those explainations and questions.  They don't want to know
who to blame -- all they want to know is that it what they
were doing didn't work so they can try something else.

So if I want to -think- about who to blame for my problems,
I'll go use a Lisp Machine (or an ITS or a Multics).  But
these days I use Unix, where I don't have to think. 

>>854464

Ancient butt-hurt whining about the m68k from Lisp grognards. The funny thing about the Unix Hater's Handbook is that most of the gripes don't even fucking apply to Linux and the BSDs anymore.

I'm all for simplicity in software. Simpler software has less bugs, it's easier to understand and we should avoid as much as possible to pile up features on top a working software that could be implemented as a independent unit.

The term "simplicity", though, is relative. Simple in relation to what. The editor vi is simpler than Eclipse and ed is simpler than vi. But in using ed it's easy to get lost in any text file with more than ~50 lines, easy to make mistakes (and the undo only lasts for one command) and takes a lot of time to do basic editing. ed is not truly recommended, but it was a great editor back in the time when Unix had a limit of 20 file descriptors opened at the same time [1].

In short, there's a need to strike a balance between simplicity and features and that's when inter process communication comes at hand. If it's efficient and easy to connect programs, you can focus on writing small ones that do one thing, you chain them together. This is often associated with the Unix way, but I say it's more common sense. If you write Lisp, specially Scheme, you start off writing small functions and build up large and useful structures, the input is transformed like in a factory line that can take many routes.

I think the problem we face today is the lack of standard way of making process work together. Plan 9 solved this with 9p, the file system itself and namespaces. But it's a damn shame it was never adopted in mass.

[1]https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/BSDExtendedDevelopment

>>854787

How do you feel about GNU, the "not Unix" OS? I can tell you for a fact that the GNU team are not concerned about minimalism and are more interested in features i.e. bloat in the eyes of Suckless.

>>854787

It must feel great to be a UNIX-hating contrarian, but consider this: if all those other operating systems were so great and sophisticated, why are they dead and almost no one even remembers their names anymore?

>>854831

They were proprietary OS that also commanded a high price to license. Microsoft got its marketshare by undercutting the price of the OS of old.

>>854834

And? UNIX was proprietary too. The source license (primary distribution channel in 70s) was around $10k which was pretty expensive. Pricing was never a clear advantage of UNIX.

Unless you're comparing it with IBM mainframes, but that doesn't make sense because that's an entirely different class of computer systems.

>>854842

In the case of Unix, GNU and the BSD systems supported the Unix platform of OSs. This is why the idea of Unix continues on long after the rise of Microsoft and their tactics to dominate people into Windows.

>>854828

Everything that makes UNIX suck is still there in GNU. I don't want a better awk, I want no awk because awk is a waste of space. I think ls and a lot of other commands suck, but they can't fix them. The linker sucks. They don't want to replace them with something that works better, they just want to add more options. Some of that is necessary because the UNIX tools don't work right, but if there wasn't the UNIX compatibility, they could make much simpler programs that work better. Everyone has a right to complain about it being bloated, and I also think that without the UNIX foundation, they wouldn't need a lot of these workarounds like D-Bus and Systemd. UNIX compatibility is preventing the OS from being good.

>>854831

>It must feel great to be a UNIX-hating contrarian, but consider this

Hating UNIX is not contrarian, it's the right thing to do, and it feels great to do the right thing.

>why are they dead

The hardware is no longer made. Adding POSIX ruined a lot of better operating systems.

>almost no one even remembers their names anymore?

People who care about the facts remember their names.

[code]What I find disgusting about UNIX is that it has *never*
grown any operating system extensions of its own, all the
creative work is derived from VMS, Multics and the
operating systems it killed. 

Yesterday Rob Pike from Bell Labs gave a talk on the latest
and greatest successor to unix, called Plan 9.  Basically he
described ITS's mechanism for using file channels to control
resources as if it were the greatest new idea since the
wheel.

There may have been more; I took off after he credited Unix
with the invention of the hierarchial file system! 

   Actually, the GNU project has much higher coding
   standards than the UNIX kernel.  For example: no fixed
   constants.  Everything must dynamically expand.

   UNIX is terrible.  GNU is trying to make a UNIX that
   isn't terrible, just bad.

Not a good excuse.  Shite painted pink is just pink shite.
Why didn't FSF try to invent a free operating system that
was good?  Answer: their political agenda is 10^6 times more
important to them than good engineering. 

This has indeed puzzled me about FSF.  Here is an
organization with incredibly lofty (IMHO misguided, but
lofty) political ideals, and apparently no technological or
engineering ideals whatsoever.

It's as if there were a shite cartel charging high prices for
shite, and a counter-culture grassroots movement agitating
that shite should be free.

For those who want shite, I guess it matters. 

>>854870

Paste the source of these quotes. I would like to read more about the ITS one.

>>842745

BIOS is the most fundamental software interface of the PC platform. Complete removal of BIOS is the end of the PC. End of story. Period.

MBR disks won't function. BIOS-reliant software like bootloaders (IO.SYS, NTLDR, LILO, GRUB, SYSLINUX) and everything that relies on them in turn (all variants of DOS, Windows9x, and NT-based systems older than Vista, as well as all kinds of bootable system tools such as those featured on the Ultimate Boot CD etc.) will become entirely disfunctional. The original developers won't give a damn and won't write UEFI replacements, and neither will soyboy javascript artisans.

>>842014

>implying he actually killed himself

c'mon anon, for all we know it could have been a very complex ruse from (((them)))

>>842061

>GCC

>not harmful alternative not being Clang

obviously this list its a joke

>>855658

https://gopherproxy.meulie.net/sdf.org/0/users/kickmule/unix/unix_haters_ml_2.txt

>>854870

Can you stop spamming this shit in every thread, or get a tripcode so I can filter you? If ITS is so fucking great, we have emulators up to PDP-11 now, go fucking use it. Write an implementation of a LISP machine for an FPGA and use that as your daily fucking driver (try and see how "simple" the mess becomes, asshole). Just stop spamming your shitty unix-haters post in every thread, because nothing good has ever come of LISP and nobody except you fucking cares.

>>863618

>Write an implementation of a LISP machine

GNU Emacs?

>>863621

I really hope you're not the guy I'm responding to

>>863623

I'm not.

>>863612

~>> cat /usr/src/gnu/README
$OpenBSD: README,v 1.2 2016/09/03 22:32:04 benno Exp $

This directory contains software that is Gigantic and Nasty but
Unavoidable.
...
~>> ls /usr/src/gnu/
...
llvm
...

Clang is the same gigantic tumor of C++ cancer as gcc. The version of gcc that doesn't require c++ to compile is actually much less shit then clang.

This thread, Cat-v, and Plan 9 have opened my eyes. It feels like I'm a kid again, there's a whole world to explore. Jesus christ, what have I been doing with my life for the past fifty years?

>>841947 (OP)

How can you call C++ and Java, and then recommend C? This is a troll attempt.

>>863880

There's a camp of people who use Clang for much the same reason that people use GNU stuffs: "muh principles". It's honestly confusing, open source--at least compared to the free software camp. At least I know where the free software camp is coming from. When people say "libre", they have the four freedoms in mind, right? So you would infer that everyone who totes copycenter appreciates freedom zero but just not the other parts of the four freedoms that define strong copyleft. But it's not.

There's a party of people like OpenBSD who are denizens of "open source" who genuinely do think like that, who think Stallman is a slimeball hypocrite for the other freedoms he appends onto freedom zero and that their interpretation is simply better, more ethical; e.g. "Copyleft uses the same tools and imposes the same restrictions as copyright, and although we ourselves don't care for proprietary software, we have to stick to Our Principles".

And then there's the suckless/cat-v people, who are in part reactionaries that see Stallman as an authority figure (due to GNU/Linux's dominating the market), someone whom they can project they can project their unresolved daddy issues onto. And then there's the side that's not even interested in the ethical issue but just technical ones; e.g. "Fuck GNU bloat".

And there's no distinction between the two. There's no real category that separates the two, so when you think of open source, you might think of someone like Bryan "I worked at Microsoft once" Lunduke who doesn't want to acknowledge the ethical issues for fear of being ostracized (which he will be), but gets angry at the (unproven) fact that a Linux Foundation talking head uses MacOS (probably because of practical issues). And then you also get Randall Schwartz who says, "Yay open source" but then shamelessly states that he "only uses BSD" like MacOS (which any idiot knows is even less BSD than even most East Coast Unices) and would rather use proprietary software than use the GPL Virus.

>>864011

The copycenter people believe that people ought to be allowed to fork free software into proprietary software. They call this capability as a form of freedom. The copyleft people believe people shouldn't be allowed to fork people into proprietary software. They believe that the restriction of forbidding the fork into proprietary software preserves the users' freedom.

I personally believe in copyleft. I don't think permissive free software is inherently wrong but I wouldn't invest my time into developing these projects. The reason is that I don't want to support the capability to fork free software into proprietary software.

>>864019

BSD / public domain = cucked developers

GPL / proprietary = cucked users

>>864011

I actually forgot about the license nonsense when I made that post, I guess I assumed that since the topic was suckless/cat-v that licensing was not a priority.

>And then there's the side that's not even interested in the ethical issue but just technical ones; e.g. "Fuck GNU bloat".

Speaking of which I just tried tcc[1], and its actually pretty great. If it supported PIE and SSP I might have been tempted to use it as a system compiler. I will however use it to for testing programs because it is so fast.

[1] https://bellard.org/tcc/

>>864022

Thats honestly how I see that whole argument. It boils down to cucks calling each other cucks.

>>864023

>Thats honestly how I see that whole argument. It boils down to cucks calling each other cucks.

In one case the users are cucks in the other the developers are cucks.

>>864022

How are users cucked by GPL? It is more that corporations that want to fuck over users that are cucked by GPL licence.

>>864027

>users aren't cucked

>corporations are cucked

>literally the exact same license

hmm really makes you think

>>864030

Sorry please explain because I may be retarded.

My reasoning: corporation wants to enforce users pay money by hiding source code from them, so a permissive licence allows them to close the source and users are fucked because they have to eat whatever shit that corporations puts out (ads, tracking etc). If it is GPL the source must remain open so users win in the end because they can still after modify that code.

>>864034

User cant do what they want with GPL code.

>>864027

If I modify a GPL program and then give a copy to a friend I now have to distribute it to everyone

>>864036

Obviously they can't close the source code, because it would infringe on other's freedoms. Seems fair to me.

>>864023

We're all cucks in a sense. I got cucked by nature when I was born into this life I didn't choose. I was cucked by my dog when I caught him fucking my girlfriend. Life is one big cuckfest. The question becomes: who is getting cucked by whom?

>>864037

No you don't, you're not obliged to do anything for anyone you're not distributng software to under the GPL.

However, your friend is able to distribute your modfied version if he so desires.

>>864040

Source code is a symptom of free software, not freedom in itself. This site that you're downloading and executing on your computer is open source; that doesn't mean you necessarily have the right to modify and redistribute it--although in this case you do have that right. But that's certainly not the precedent.

>>864042

I will give him a copy of the source but he has to sign a contract saying he want distribute it.

>>864044

*wont

>>864044

That would be violating the terms of the GPL.

>>864040

>Doing something with code on my own computer infringes on the rights of others

>>864046

Which part of the GPL would that violate?

>>864047

I don't understand your logic. When you redistribute the code then it starts to impact others. Nobody cares if you chance the GPL code locally and don't share it.

>>864049

>chance

change

>>864049

The only "impact" on others is that they asked my webserver for a download of the proprietary code I so graciously provided for their web browser.

Can the cuck(license) posters please leave this thread. How many threads have you fuckers killed in the last week? It is contributing zero to this board.

>>864053

>communist cuck

>>864052

>webserver

This is a service. You just getting data and displaying locally, the code runs on another computer. Running code locally is different story.

>>864053

To cuck or not to cuck--that is the question.

>>864054

I wasn't talking about either license you fucking autist.

You two retards have killed a number of semi-decent threads lately and need to go and stay go.

>>864053

You're right, I am sorry. But the threads on this board die at ~30 posts anyway. Too much noise in general.

>>864048

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html

Sections 4 through 6.

>>864060

Be the change that you want to happen; just ignore them. Geez.

>>864057

If I host a proprietary program on my webserver and a user decides to download it and run it on their computer I am not infringing on any of their rights.

>>864062

Intellectual property is a spook I am going to ignore the license on your GPL just like I ignore copyright on movies.

>>864068

That's fine, but it'd be hard to run a business that way.

>>864069

Not when you accept monero / zcash

>>864069

Here the fascist shows himself using the states militarized police to enforce his intellectual property

>>864034

>it's not a restriction because I agree with it

lol

>>864073

On the contrary, a committed Libertarian would argue that the state has no purpose except to enforce property rights.

>>864073

No, I'm not saying that I'd abuse the draconian American IP laws for violating my hypothetical proprietary license, I'm saying that I would be the one being fucked in the ass were I to violate said laws. If not by the copyright owners themselves, then by patent trolls and the like. Either way, it's still the truth, isn't it? American IP laws are enforced internationally, and we've seen how sovereign citizens who haven't ever done business in the US have been attacked and arrested by the FBI with the same kind of prejudice reserved for terrorists.

>>864077

Property is exchangeable. If I give you a car its yours now. Intellectual "property" only exists as a license. If I did not sign a contract to use a piece of software I am not beholden to the license. Modern IP laws apply to everyone even those that did not accept the contract. No information is property.

>>864078

GPL software is based on American intellectual property laws.

>>864080

It's also made to combat the abuses said laws in terms that are legally enforceable.

>>864082

I cant support licensing based on draconian IP laws that got Kim Dot com fucked.

>>864079

Funnily enough you'll find many sympathisers in the FSF, including RMS himself. However, the fact of the matter is that these laws do exist, unethical as they are. Copyleft is a way of subverting copyright law using copyright law.

>>864085

There is no subversion going on. You are mandating restrictions on what a user can do with sequences of bits at the threat of the American police forces gun point.

>>864084

Yeah, yeah, I know that good ol' Uncle Kimmy is basically Lex Luthor, but it's a good example of why the debate over piracy isn't a Capitalist/Communist thing. It's more like a Material/Digital commodity issue, and the former is terrified of the latter. At the very worst, Dotcom is an anarchocommunist and an easy target.

>>864088

What's your alternative? You've seen what happens when you release code into public domain.

>>864088

When software distributors distribute proprietary software, they are also mandating restrictions on what their recipients can do with a sequence of bits at the thread of the Amercian polices force's gun point. The difference with the GPL is that the users' essential freedom is enforced with all the users of the software.

>>864093

haha you already got to the freedom is slavery argument.

Such a classic thread.

>>864093

>>864091

>>864095

>>864089

Proprietary software using the legal system is just as evil as the GPL using it. All software software should be delivered with extreme layers of DRM not legal demands.

>>864095

It's your fault for clinging to that naive, shortsighted, anarchist definition of freedom and then playing abusing semantics.

>>864100

Really you cant be trusted to have freedom so how about you just like me run your life. You will be more free that way.

>>864095

Some degree of slavery in service of a higher freedom. Being able to do absolutely anything one wants without restriction leads only to destruction of both the individual and his society.

>>864102

You are free to do whatever you want with your own property. You are not allowed to do anything to others property.

>>864103

There is a major problem with proprietary software in that the users are not allowed to control the software. When users choose to enter that situation, that's their own problem but the software distributors should never call that freedom.

>>864101

And now you're resorting to strawmans when you know fully well that's not my point.

>>864108

The users have full power to redistribute and modify the binary of proprietary software that exists outside of intellectual property laws.

>>864103

And so to the extent that software is property one should be able to do whatever one desires with it, which must include modification and distribution.

>>864110

Its the point you are avoiding that is implicit in it

>>864114

The hard drive is property the bits are not. You can distribute and modify the binary I give you.

>>864116

I am going to include a shit ton of DRM in the binary though

>>864115

Okay. You're absolutely right. Now what? Does this revelation change American IP laws? Are they no longer enforced? What should I do as a programmer if I want to share my work and neither want to oppress people by imposing restrictions but don't want a patent troll to lock me out of my own project and sue me for distributing my own software?

>>864126

You patent the algorithm then release the code as public domain

>>864116

That's an absurd reductionist argument. People don't interact with data as etchings on a platter, rather as distinct files within a computer system.

I might as well say that there is no such thing as property in the physical world because on some level everything is just an arrangement of atomic particles, or that murder is entirely imaginary because a singlular human being cannot exist by a simmilar argument.

>>864128

And when Google simply patents that same code in every other country making it impossible to commercialize?

>>864129

Those atoms cannot be duplicated. Information can be copied. If I look at your atoms across the street that form a car, and I build a car with my own atoms, its not theft. Not the same as me stealing your car.

>>864132

Giving away something for free does not save you from a patent violation. No license will save you if you are violating someone else s patent.

>>864132

It is not possible to claim something that was put in the public domain. It is possible a derivative work could be patented though.

>>864134

Good advice. I'll combat the oppressive, draconian patent laws by relying on the authority of oppressive, draconian patent laws.

>>864139

Na the advice is patent it then release it as public domain. Only thing you are doing there is noting with that draconian law that X code is exempt. No one will have any of their freedom restricted for anything they do with the code.

>>864141

Good job. Now you understand the point of the GPL.

>>864155

No the point of the GPL is to restrict the freedom of people who have a copy of GPL code.

>>864113

Just because they have that capability to operate outside the boundary of law doesn't change the fact that they still don't have freedom. This is not how a free user lives in freedom.

>>841947 (OP)

Read Plan 9's man pages before calling anything else harmful.

>>864221

No. I want a to abolish the evil of "intellectual" property. DRM > law.

>>842826

If his dead, who's updating his blog? Or did he kill himself very recently?

>>864345

Cron job

>>864011

>Lunduke

He always seemed like a mega ass faggot. Like the beliefs he has are not his own.

>>864011

>at the (unproven) fact

Yea the photos are totally not good proof

>>864676

u wot m8

>>864676

BSD developers are cucks, BSD users are not.

GPL users are cucks, GPL developers are not

>>864712

> BSD developers are cucks

yes

> BSD users are not

depends if the software in question was made proprietary since the BSD license, being cucked, allows this.

> GPL users are cucks

So all Linux users are cucked, mm no.

> GPL developers are not

yes

>>864740

>So all Linux users are cucked, mm no.

GPL restricts the users freedom

>was made proprietary since

If its proprietary its not BSD

>yes

Still more cucked than proprietary developers though

>>841954

bloat is a meme, nobody gives a flying fuck about an extra 20mb of storage space used

>>864750

No not at all.

>>864751

>using GPL software that cucks you

>harmful things considered harmful

Oh whew, what a surprise

>>864751

That's like saying "nobody gives a fuck about a few closets of useless junk in the house". Some don't give a fuck, some are ocd about it and won't sleep well util they got rid of it or cleaned it out in whatever way they deem appropriate.

>>864810

If anyone cared about bloat they would not be posting on 8chan a shitty html site

>>841947 (OP)

>software being harmful

Unless you're a wimpy boipussy to be anal-retentive about small forgotten issues. I bet these fags like COBOL or some shit but still use botnet outside like a voting machine or let themselves get recorded by having conversation with other people carrying updated botnet machine.

I'd be caring more about the OBVIOUS software backdoors and hardware the fact that your VGA cable leaks data for the *???* to snoop on your screen remotely and again intercept all of your keyboard strokes because the ferrite beads weren't put at the final end of your monitor cable and weren't shielded enough (this also includes your external drives) and your keyboard doesn't contain any ferrite bead at all WHILE your whole meme computer system or laptop assuming it is post 2013 doesn't have a ferrite bead over the DC and it fucking broadcasts all your shit for at least 10 spy agencies.