Now, that's an impressive build-time.

[elfs]

The keyboard is tolerable, although it looks like it might be two weeks before I can buy a replacement. I called around to all the used places in Seattle and nobody had one. I checked Ebay and bought one for $39 from a reseller; here's hoping it's what I want. Unfortunately, the purchase has dropped my PayPal account below six bucks. Ah, well.

I continue to be impressed with some parts of Microsoft. The MS Shell looks to be a kick-ass application. Although Raymond's cadre will pooh-pooh the use of non-ASCII streams through the pipelines I think it's one hell of a good idea, and not one that could be too difficult to port to Unix. The only headache here is that it does require a consistent object model-- not something you're likely to see coming out of the Gnome project anytime soon. I also like C#; the "get" and "set" attribute handlers absolutely rock and ensure contract consistency within a given object and between objects. It's incredibly easy to write object relationships and application databases where the object's persistent representation is in a at-least-2nd-normal-formed database somewhere. C# and Ruby seem to be heading into the common space of modern languages, making some strong assumptions about how much horsepower and memory you've got and doing the correct thing with respect to the programmer. And the C# compiler for Linux works really well.

Now if only Microsoft didn't act like it had to rule the world, and if only it's C and C++ divisions actually learned how to do proper product development and not this cowboy crap they've been doing for the past fifteen years.

Hard as it is for me to believe, my laptop is still running an install I started 15 hours ago. It's not stuck, and I can see it performing useful work. Apparently it really takes over 16 hours for Gentoo to install OpenOffice on my little machine. Poor little workstation. Right now it's building the help files.

Comments

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

This is why I continue to insist on binary packages and haven't drunk the Gentoo kool-ade. I, too, use old-skool hardware, and I'm not patient enough to let them take that long to install stuff. At that rate it would take a couple of *days* to install the whole enchilada... and here I started an Ubuntu install at around 11, finished the main part of the install at 11:56, and will have all of KDE downloaded (that's the slow part) in another... hour? or less...

If you've got really weird hardware, you're uberconcerned with security, or you really want to get your head around how stuff works, I can see it. For me, I remain unconvinced.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

I don't have really weird hardware, but I do have a tiny little machine and every erg of performance I can wring out of the system by choosing my compiler optimizations is worth the effort. Besides, I'm patient. I don't need the office suite right now. I also like the fact that every component has run its own configure and I know that it's built to the specifications of the libraries I have on board. Generic builds are just that, generic, without significant optimizations or compensation for libraries you don't have, or advantanges for optional toolkits that you do.

That said, of course, it's now 20 hours and still building. It's actually been a pretty good little build; no one compile has been so extreme that other applications have suffered for it. I wouldn't try watching a movie right now, but other than that, I seem to be having no problem.

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

Well, if it runs OK in the background and doesn't get in the way, then I suppose by judicious planning you could get away with such an animal...

Me, I'm not nearly so patient... I used to dread kernel upgrades on dialup simply because of the 40mb download... :)