One of the big turning points for Facebook for them to increase the difficulty of switching was cutting off RSS as a way to syndicate content into Facebook. After that, content had to be manually created in Facebook, instead of automatically imported from a third party source based on standard protocols. This forced people away from their chosen content authoring system into Facebook’s opinionated, inflexible, ad infested walled garden.

But here’s the thing: all those other platforms, the ones where I unwisely allowed myself to get locked in, where today I find myself trapped by the professional, personal and political costs of leaving them, they were all started by people who swore they’d never sell out. I know those people, the old blogger mafia who started the CMSes, social media services, and publishing platforms where I find myself trapped. I considered them friends (I still consider most of them friends), and I knew them well enough to believe that they really cared about their users.

They did care about their users. They just cared about other stuff, too, and, when push came to shove, they chose the worsening of their services as the lesser of two evils.

Neal Stephenson has entered the chat.

Moving towards the equator made me hate winter a lot less. Having more consistent daylight throughout the year made a big difference for me.

Weird. I updated it with the dir the letters are in.

As funny as this is, it’s worth mentioning that it seems like Hans Reiser has really come around to understanding the crime he committed and is genuinely making an effort to turn himself around.

https://ftp.mfek.org/Reiser/Letters/ Number 2 … / reiser_response.html

I was asked by a kind Fredrick Brennan for my comments that I might offer on the discussion of removing ReiserFS V3 from the kernel. I don’t post directly because I am in prison for killing my wife Nina in 2006.

I am very sorry for my crime–a proper apology would be off topic for this forum, but available to any who ask.

There’s too much to quote here, and it’s too spread out, but I think that while we make dark humor jokes (and I am certainly not saying dark humor is inherently bad) we should also appreciate the progress he has made.

“Dear god, are you sure?”

Sure, but there’s no verification when calling a cab so you can use an alias if you want.

How did Mr. Bungle think he could pull it off without messing it up?

Let me guess. You bought those at Borders? The one next to Starbucks and Chipotle? That was a great bookstore.

Funny you say that. I did tech support when XP first came out, and I quit my job and switched to Linux.

XP SP2 was actually pretty good though.

Most useful? Without a doubt, my laptop. The amount of things that can be done with a modern computer is pretty stunning, and a portable one is arguably more useful.

Other than that, maybe my car keys because the amount of things you can do with a car is stunning, but you need the keys to start it, and the car isn’t in this room.

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If I understand the problem correctly it has a pretty simple solution that I have done before. Make a new partition on the destination and dd if=/dev/diskAsB of=/dev/diskXsY where A is the source disk and B is the source partition and X is the destination disk and Y is the destination partition. You may have to run fsck on the destination afterwards and maybe a gpt repair tool.

Honestly though, since it’s an ext filesystem, if it were me I’d just mount the source and dest and rsync.

While I don’t disagree with you, I think it’s a bit funny that you’re bringing up hardships using apt to update software in Debian when the biggest complaint about Ubuntu is having to use snap instead of apt.

Ubuntu is not terrible and if it works for you then fine. I would be surprised if Debian or Mint didn’t also work for you just as well though.

I had the same experience on my one gui Ubuntu machine. I also have several headless machines, and due to some shared libraries I always ended up with snapd installed even though none of the packages I was running were installed through snap. I always found it through the mount point pollution that snapd does.

BSD is a solid second choice in my experience. For a while I was considering using it as my primary platform, but in the last 10 years all i’ve done at work is linux, so that tipped me into linux. I haven’t used BSD in a long time though, so my answers about what BSD has that linux does not have are outdated, as most of the things I loved on BSD are now found in some form on linux. Though I do love some of the CLI tools like diskutil. In general though, I’ve always found the GNU core utils and the tooling in linux that follows the same patterns to be really user friendly. It also drives me crazy that common tools like awk, sed, date, etc. are inconsistent between BSD and GNU, and I prefer the GNU syntaxes. (Yes, you can install GNU core utils on BSD and other platforms, but that’s nonstandard, and why would I do that for daily driving when I can choose a platform that uses the GNU toolchain as the standard?)

Like @[email protected] said, BSD brought a lot to the table in the last 20 years, zfs being a big one. FreeBSD 8 and 9 were the last BSDs I ran, and zfs was a big part of that. Once we got zfs on linux, I went back to full linux. dtrace was also a huge one, and giving that up was hard, but now linux has strace.

I’m just so over AIX, HPUX, and Solaris. I’m glad I got experience with them and less so a few others like irix and sys-v. Working with Sun hardware was particularly eye opening, like being able to hot swap processors and memory, things I had never imagined. But since about 2012 I have deliberately steered my career away from all unixes except linux, and waaaaaay away from anything windows related, going so far as to take everything windows related off my resumé.

Definitely me, despite of and because I have used so many other unixes.

It’s not a typo. The first section of the regex is a matching section, where a dot means “match any character”, and an escaped dot is a literal dot character. The second section is the replacement section, and you don’t have to escape the dot there because that section isn’t matching anything. You can escape it though if it makes the code easier to read.

rename is written in Perl so all Perl regular expression syntaxes are valid.

However, your comment did make me realize that I hadn’t escaped a dot in the third example! So I fixed that.