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Member since:2005-07-06
Well I'd disagree to a certain extent. UNIX is pretty conservative about these things. That's why it's still fundementally the same OS it was 35 years ago.
As the author of the original article points out, when globbing was implemented as part of the shell it was a good idea. These days, perhaps it isn't. Maybe things could be made more flexible if globing wasn't built into the shell.
As it happens, this is one of those things that just can't change. It's baked right into the design. Not performing globing before passing the arguments to the executable would break pretty much everything; applications would need to be re-written to perform the globing themselves and expand the raw shell arguments, and that clearly isn't going to happen.
What's been really amazing is that a simple reply to make the simple point that perhaps a design decision made over 30 years may not be the best design today has erupted into a long thread about the merits of globing, something that I happen to care very little about in the grand scheme of UNIX design. Even if I don't think it's much of a problem, it's amazing to see that many people arn't even willing to consider the possibility that it could be done better today.
Member since:2005-11-14
As the author of the original article points out, when globbing was implemented as part of the shell it was a good idea. These days, perhaps it isn't. Maybe things could be made more flexible if globing wasn't built into the shell
So the article is based on shaky grounds ? The author based all this rant on supposition ? Well, it reads like a troll.
As it happens, this is one of those things that just can't change. It's baked right into the design. Not performing globing before passing the arguments to the executable would break pretty much everything
Did you hear about quotes ? There's no need to remove the globing from the shell, there are already mechanisms preventing the shell from parsing the arguments
And it doesn't break anything if you quote the arguments. So I still fail to see where the problem could be in the design.
What's been really amazing is that a simple reply to make the simple point that perhaps a design decision made over 30 years may not be the best design today
Everybody can say "perhaps sth is not the best". It stays an empty discussion until you bring something to support your claim.
Even if I don't think it's much of a problem, it's amazing to see that many people arn't even willing to consider the possibility that it could be done better today
And I find amazing that some people, out of boredom, make some troll based on empty discussions, searching for problems where there are none.
That's not how you do things better. You have to find issues first, then try to solve them, proposing sth.
As with using the shell for all these years, I still fail to see any issues with its design : I don't even master it yet, and can do very powerful things already (things like some used on production servers). Companies invent big GUI programs to do a little of what the shell can do in one line.
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Official Apple statement on PRISM and privacy: "Regardless of the circumstances, our Legal team conducts an evaluation of each request and, only if appropriate, we retrieve and deliver the narrowest possible set of information to the authorities. In fact, from time to time when we see inconsistencies or inaccuracies in a request, we will refuse to fulfill it." This is basically Apple re-publishing their earlier statement in a more official manner. You either believe it, or you don't.
The open source Contiki operating system and its commercial Thingsquare distribution are making strides towards the connected home. According to a Computerworld article, a new LED light bulb manufacturer is putting small computers into their light bulbs. Each computer runs the Contiki OS, which gives each bulb an IP address and allows them to be controlled with a smartphone application. To connect the bulbs to the application, the bulbs use both Wi-Fi and the much lower power IEEE 802.15.4 mesh technology.
"Google asked the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court on Tuesday to ease long-standing gag orders over data requests it makes, arguing that the company has a constitutional right to speak about information it's forced to give the government. The legal filing, which cites the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech, is the latest move by the California-based tech giant to protect its reputation in the aftermath of news reports about sweeping National Security Agency surveillance of Internet traffic." Draining the ditch after the cow has drowned in it."I can't find one person who has been using the Nexus 7 for an extended period of time, and hasn't seen a massive downgrade in performance. Just what kind of downgrade are we talking here? I cannot pick up my Nexus 7 without experiencing problems like a lag of ten seconds, or more, just to rotate the display; touches refusing to acknowledged; stuttering notification panel actions; and unresponsive apps." Fully and utterly agreed. My Nexus 7 was blazing-fast and awesome for a few months, and at some point, it just started sucking. Just like that. I've tried loads of ROMs, and nothing helps.A new release of the hobby operating system MenuetOS! The release notes are a bit non-descript, but you'll have to take what you can get: "updates and improvements (picview, httpc, ehci, ...)"."The Internet is one of the most transformative technologies of our lifetimes. But for 2 out of every 3 people on earth, a fast, affordable Internet connection is still out of reach. And this is far from being a solved problem. There are many terrestrial challenges to Internet connectivity - jungles, archipelagos, mountains. There are also major cost challenges. Right now, for example, in most of the countries in the southern hemisphere, the cost of an Internet connection is more than a month's income. Solving these problems isn't simply a question of time: it requires looking at the problem of access from new angles. So today we're unveiling our latest moonshot from Google[x]: balloon-powered Internet access." Insane."MineAssemble is a tiny bootable Minecraft clone written partly in x86 assembly. I made it first and foremost because a university assignment required me to implement a game in assembly for a computer systems course. Because I had never implemented anything more complex than a 'Hello World' bootloader before, I decided I wanted to learn about writing my own kernel code at the same time. Note that the goal of this project was not to write highly efficient hand-optimized assembly code, but rather to have fun and write code that balances readability and speed. This is primarily accomplished by proper commenting and consistent code structuring." Just cool.
Member since:
2005-12-21
It's not so much that it's "the way it has always been" as it is that there is a good reason for things to be the way they are, and if you don't fully understand how file globing works and why it is the way it is, then you may think that something is wrong with it.
If something was wrong with the way it works and if some other way had clear advantages it would have been fixed a long time ago, the Unix world is not that conservative.