6 ms·
Not a very appealing setup, period.
by kprobst 15y ago
Not a very appealing setup, period.
- Argorak 15y agoPractically? No. From the ultra-geek perspective? Yes.
- lysol 15y agoThe real geeks I know what to get work done, not send email all day.
- Argorak 15y agoThe real geeks I know would at least dream of building a computer of which they control all pieces of software. Maybe for the achievement only, but they at least dream of it. I am pretty sure that RMS gets his work done as well, whatever that work is. I wouldn't suspect him to be _lazy_.
- ufo 15y agoYou do realise that a big part of RMS's job is sending email, right?
- jamespo 15y agoHow do their achievements stack up against RMS?
- Avshalom 15y agoPeople were getting work done back when RMS's computer would have been cutting edge.
- asto 15y agoWhat sort of ultra-geek uses that sort of setup? The current generation of that notebook has a processor that runs at less than 1GHz! The only reason he gets away with it is that he mostly does mail on emacs from console. It's too minimalist for any present day software development work
- _delirium 15y agoI know a reasonable number of present-day developers who use a setup not much more complex than that: emacs or vim in a console. Not very practical for webdev, but you can do scientific-computing or embedded dev that way. For scientific computing you'd probably want a beefier CPU to run tests, but those are often run remotely on a computing cluster anyway.
- AlexandrB 15y agoYup. For embedded dev I use Vim in a console. It's convenient to have a big screen so I can have multiple terminals and reference materials open at the same time, but using a tiny computer like that is not out of the realm of possibility.
- threedaymonk 15y ago> Not very practical for webdev On the contrary! I spend most of my working day using vim in a terminal (with tmux) to do web development. It's just text generation, after all. I'd go so far as to say that if you're doing test-driven web development, it should be possible to build a system entirely within a terminal, and that's what I aspire to. It's only the front-end styling (CSS etc.) that actually needs anything more than a terminal. And yes, I find this efficient: far more efficient than hacking and pressing F5. I think there are other benefits to this way of working: it tends to make progressive enhancement and accessibility the path of least resistance.
- bri3d 15y agoIf by "any present day work" you mean "web development," then maybe I buy your point. I know plenty of climate science and financial programmers who spend 100% of their development time SSHed somewhere else, or who write reporting code using a minimal test case set of data that runs in 1s on their (slow, old) machine. For these people a slow, old machine is often totally acceptable - it doesn't take much horsepower to SSH (or even to run emacs and perl locally).
- nknight 15y agoI could do 99% of my job effectively on a ~200MHz Pentium with maybe 64MB of RAM. About the only thing that would really bite me is the occasional need to help the client team, which often means booting Windows in a VM and replicating their comparatively bloated development environment.
- maxer 15y agoderek sivers almost has a comparable setup on the software end http://derek.sivers.usesthis.com/ http://derek.sivers.usesthis.com/
- kprobst 15y agoOh, I'm sorry. I thought I was on HN but it seems I wondered into Reddit or Slashdot. Let me amend my point of view: "I loooove Richard Stallman and I totally dig his choice of computing platform. I would never dare to say otherwise"