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rbanffy
194,611karma·63,760submissions·March 12, 2008
about
Seasoned software developer, proficient in Python, Java. Less proficient in Ruby and Lisp. A bit rusty in C and C++. Learning Erlang very slowly. Also a computer collector and restorer, lover of 8-bit computers, mainframes and interesting Unix workstations.
email: username at that google mail thing
http://about.me/rbanffy
https://linkedin.com/in/ricardobanffy
[ my public key: https://keybase.io/rbanffy; my proof: https://keybase.io/rbanffy/sigs/HtF1uAf_RNpwIkNP1-YGWP_-3doWV6S5Cc1KywXeLYo ]
recent activity (63,760 total)
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I regard string concatenation as very annoying in Java. Actually, just about anything is annoying in Java. I guess I have been spoiled by more modern languages like... Smalltalk/80 or Lisp'56.
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"it never takes long before I reach a point where I feel like I’m no longer programming in Ruby." This echoes perfectly my feelings about Rails. I have tried, several times, to do something with it, b…
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"and yet many people are unfamiliar with it." I think we could do an accurate emulator. If Jeff Raskin is not was^H^H^Hinvesting his time here, someone should invite him. Of course, that would require…
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PHP was a hack conceived long ago, in a time where there were no complex (as in "more than one page") web applications and little to no demand for them. It has the readability of Perl and the structur…
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Django is Rails, without the toxic company. That's why I am unsure about Zed Shaw at EuroDjangoCon. I love to have smart and capable people around, but Zed still has to prove he can play well with oth…
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Of course I could, but I don't have the time to put into this. And that would still do nothing to the fact that reading PDF files not formatted to the Kindle (such as magazines) is painful. A 12" 4xXG…
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What I want is an e-book reader that, when connected to the computer presents itself as both a printer and a disk drive. If I copy a .txt or PDF file over to the disk, it will be available when I unpl…
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Joel never could differentiate "free as in beer" from "free as in speech". He wants to get paid for using free (both as beer and speech) software but doesn't like paying for the books people wrote. He…
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Almost nothing I run is x86-only. There are official builds of Ubuntu for SPARC and PPC and, now, for ARM, that bring me a full rich desktop experience with just about any computer I can lay my hands …
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There are already instructions on how to install the official ARM build on machines like the Nokia N-800/810. http://www.internettablettalk.com/forums/showthread.php?t=25... …
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I am deeply disappointed with their selection criteria.
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Chernobyl was a criminally unsafe design coupled with a criminally unprepared crew in charge of the reactor. TMI was only an obsolete design (in use because it's hideously expensive to certify a new o…
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It's the One True Text Editor
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It's sluggish on Cygwin. I guess, though, it's not Emacs' fault.
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Emacs is an operating system where the default shell is a text editor.
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It seems there are a lot of Microsoft employees hanging around here. What's going on? Last time I saw, you were astroturfing on Digg...
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They need to use standards that are different and incompatible with whatever competitors use. If Microsoft went BSD with, say, Windows 9, it would be easy to port Unix stuff to Windows, which would be…
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"they can dump the old system entirely and move to something better" No... They will move to something newer. It's Microsoft we are talking about. There is great danger on not making APIs a moving tar…
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So, I assume your computer has a steering wheel, just like your fridge. Right?
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Since there was no way to get the computer (it's a netbook) with the specs I wanted without Windows, that's pretty much the only choice I had. And the Windows license proved handy on more than one occ…
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"I respect this guy's choices. Obviously he feels the need to vent, and that's what the internet is for." Not the internet as a whole, but that site of mine, certainly ;-)
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You summed it up pretty well, but I would put it slightly differently: there is a point where the characteristics of OSX are no longer an advantage, but a hindrance, the same way as the characteristic…
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If you cared enough to read the sentence a little bit further, you would realize that it's "mostly because they are incorrect". The other thing, that "Windows sucks, period"... Well... Millions of lem…
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I would advise them to go on sale at least a week ahead of WWDC. If they are too close and Apple launches an überphone, Apple would steal the attention Palm is aiming to get
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There are a lot of interesting tools that run as plug-ins within Excel. Of course, all functionality could be obtained with other tools, but that's not the point: they are not studying Windows - they …
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No it's not. My 13-yo son uses a Linux-based phone, my wife uses a Mac and my mother uses Ubuntu. It's fair to say neither of them uses the terminal for anything (wife did sudo shutdown her Macbook wh…
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There was no easy to use Unix in '96
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What if you need the upgraded functionality?
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If you spent too many years dicking around with Linux you have been doing it the wrong way.