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big respect to this guy and he seems to make awesome software. But using a 5 year old netbook with very low resolution and 2gigs of ram, no external Screen and

by kayoone 14y ago

big respect to this guy and he seems to make awesome software. But using a 5 year old netbook with very low resolution and 2gigs of ram, no external Screen and dialup modems for internet doesnt seem like a very productive working enviroment...but if it works for him, why not, but this is clearly is too minimal for my taste ;)

hippich 14y ago
It is just random thoughts, but may be this very limited setup helps to think through software he develop more which probably results in better software overall.
- antidoh 14y ago
  I probably enjoy using whatever he writes, because it doesn't assume the latest hot.
mercurial 14y ago
Probably makes it less tempting to procrastinate on Hacker News. Upgrading Debian Unstable must be fun though. Ugh.
- hollerith 14y ago
  Actually, it wasn't so bad in 2006 when I was running Debian. I ran apt-get update && apt-get upgrade at 3 am via cron.
  - mercurial 14y ago
    Yeah, the trick must be to run it regularly. Skip the upgrade and you're in for 900MB of upgrades (though deb-delta can help a lot).
    - hollerith 14y ago
      Actually, I was subscribed to the security repository, meaning I only got security updates, and over the year and a half I did this, there were probably no more than 10 megs of updates total IIRC. You're probably (and the OP, Joey Hess is definitely) talking about Debian unstable, though, which does not have a security repo. (I was on testing IIRC.) It was not hard to upgrade to a new version of Debian, either, because the tool I was using to download the necessary files, apt-get, would reliably restart the download where it left off, so I downloaded the files over about 7 consecutive nights. It was pretty sweet, actually. In contrast, I wouldn't have a clue how to keep OS X updated with security patches using a dial-up connection.
      - chrisbolt 14y ago
        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Software_Update#Command_line http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Software_Update#Command_l...
        hollerith 14y ago
        Apple's update flow is huge, averaging over a gig a month it seems to me. Probably impractical to download it all over dial-up even if you run the updater every night. But let me ask why you jumped into this conversation: do you or someone you know of have experience keeping OS X patched over a dial-up connection? Do you have reasons to believe it is possible?

by kayoone 14y ago

hippich 14y ago

It is just random thoughts, but may be this very limited setup helps to think through software he develop more which probably results in better software overall.

antidoh 14y ago
I probably enjoy using whatever he writes, because it doesn't assume the latest hot.

mercurial 14y ago

Probably makes it less tempting to procrastinate on Hacker News. Upgrading Debian Unstable must be fun though. Ugh.

hollerith 14y ago
Actually, it wasn't so bad in 2006 when I was running Debian. I ran apt-get update && apt-get upgrade at 3 am via cron.
- mercurial 14y ago
  Yeah, the trick must be to run it regularly. Skip the upgrade and you're in for 900MB of upgrades (though deb-delta can help a lot).
  - hollerith 14y ago
    Actually, I was subscribed to the security repository, meaning I only got security updates, and over the year and a half I did this, there were probably no more than 10 megs of updates total IIRC. You're probably (and the OP, Joey Hess is definitely) talking about Debian unstable, though, which does not have a security repo. (I was on testing IIRC.) It was not hard to upgrade to a new version of Debian, either, because the tool I was using to download the necessary files, apt-get, would reliably restart the download where it left off, so I downloaded the files over about 7 consecutive nights. It was pretty sweet, actually. In contrast, I wouldn't have a clue how to keep OS X updated with security patches using a dial-up connection.
    - chrisbolt 14y ago
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Software_Update#Command_line http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Software_Update#Command_l...
      - hollerith 14y ago
        Apple's update flow is huge, averaging over a gig a month it seems to me. Probably impractical to download it all over dial-up even if you run the updater every night. But let me ask why you jumped into this conversation: do you or someone you know of have experience keeping OS X patched over a dial-up connection? Do you have reasons to believe it is possible?