Apparently this is history week for Lazy Reading.
- You know what I like about older retail games? Not the playing, but the paraphernalia that came with it – maps, histories, stories on printed paper. This Empire for Apple ][ description even has pictures of a hand-drawn timeline.
- Remember when Enlightenment was considered too graphically intensive to run easily? Now E17 is in alpha! (via multiple places including here.)
- The regular expression that’s the equivalent of a shrug and a handwave.
- “Why BSD is better than Linux” (2002). It’s an old PDF presentation, but a good history overview. I got a kick out of slide 40.
- Rob Pike on why object-oriented programming isn’t always awesome. Slightly related: I wish Google+ pages had RSS feeds. (via)
- The GPL is usually described as a defense for users against companies. What if it’s being used as a bludgeon by one company against another?
- Remember in last week’s Lazy Reading, I pointed at complaints about Linuxisms; changes that assumed Linux was the only Unixlike system. The problem continues even within distributions. There’s a common thread of the people involved.
- When In Git, different animated gifs set to different git habits and events. This is the next stage after rage comics.
Your unrelated link of the week: The Useless Web. Random single-purpose sites, and oddly compelling. (via)
An interesting if a bit maddening read:
https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/524606/611b3cb2f33e32ae/
Bleh. The BSDs are hurting enough with actually needed things like KMS/GEM/TTM etc. and drivers in general. Thankfully there is ongoing progress being made to resolve this particular problem.
The most infuriating Linuxisms for me are the push by third party software people like Gnome who are quickly moving to make hard _requirements_ on really Linux only things like systemd (which isn’t without its share of detractors in Linux-land) instead of leaving such things as optional dependancies providing better integration with systems that supply said dependancies.
Although I’m not one of them, a lot of BSD users want Gnome, and other software that is primarily built for Linux. I’ve read quite a lot on how difficult it would be to port systemd to BSD, but those people who mention that fact don’t seem to understand that the BSD people in general don’t _want_ systemd. We want working third party software, and porting it is being made needlessly difficult by simple short-sightedness.
Well, that and the virulent flavour of insanity which first took root in that Poettering fellow.