There is a distinct sub-culture in the Unix-type operating universe made up of gnarly old geekbeards who were raised up in the green-screen command-prompt era. They think X Window is for amateurs and any executable over 100K is bloatware. These are the wizened gurus who can touch-type 100 words per minute, remember every option for [...]
One longstanding Unix tradition is best summed up thus: “Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together.” On a Linux machine, this philosophy is most clearly visible from the command line, where Unix hackers continue to provide simple, flexible tools that talk to one another and don’t have [...]
Before Vim 7.0 was released last May, I usually had six or seven xterms or Konsole windows open, each with a single Vim session in which I was editing a single file. This takes up a lot of screen space, and isn’t very efficient. With Vim 7.0, users now have the option of using tabs [...]
Novell on Monday reiterated support for unfettered Linux development — even as analysts hailed its controversial co-development pact with Microsoft, the freely distributed operating system’s archrival. The company trumpeted its role as a founding member of the Linux Foundation, a merger of the Open Source Development Labs and the Free Standards Group. The two [...]
Microsoft landed in the Wikipedia doghouse Tuesday after it offered to pay a blogger to change technical articles on the community-produced Web encyclopedia site. While Wikipedia is known as the encyclopedia that anyone can tweak, founder Jimmy Wales and his cadre of volunteer editors, writers and moderators have blocked public-relations firms, campaign workers and [...]
Microsoft has just released its ASP .NET AJAX 1.0, a free tool that lets developers create standards-compliant Web applications based on Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, or Ajax. The most ubiquitous Ajax-based applications, for example, are Google Maps and Gmail, which let users interact with them without requiring the full browser page to refresh while [...]
