(no subject)

[sigmaleph]

as an aside re: previous post: I always feel uncomfortable talking out loud about accomplishments doing things with computers.

because, while I am in fact better with computers than the average person, even the average person who grew up with internet access, I am also substantially worse at them than a good chunk of the people reading my posts. Saying I accomplished something is almost bragging, y'know, and I know there's a good chance that everything I did there was a better way to do and obviously I am inviting social retribution by claiming to be good at a thing I'm not, in fact, good at.

This is a bad instinct but I still have it and I have to fight past it.

Comments

[contrarianarchon]

Hey, I'm doing a degree in compsci (and another in electrical engineering) and I still haven't gotten around to sitting down and learning how to use non-windows OSs. It's very silly of me, to be honest, but I only ever have one computer so learning to muck around with it on a low level seems needlessly high-risk.

[brin_bellway]

>>but I only ever have one computer so learning to muck around with it on a low level seems needlessly high-risk.<<

You can muck around with simulated computers! I'm running my test of a new web scraper inside a virtual machine, after becoming Concerned by the amount of shit-I-didn't-really-understand I was doing to my host system in an effort to get it working there. So instead I split off a fork of my WordPress server (since I already had it lying around), where if anything gets seriously fucked up I can just erase the whole machine and start again with a fresh copy.

Linux makes for nice VMs because they don't give a shit about operating-system piracy, so you can run as many copies of it as you have the hardware to support, for as long as you want, and the software will not object. Windows didn't used to support you running disposable VMs at all: these days you can get official Windows VMs for free, but they're designed to deliberately [become prone to crashing] after three real-time months: *Microsoft* wants to be the one that decides when to dispose of the machine, not you.

As a general rule the VM will have to be significantly lower-spec than your actual hardware, in order to leave some for the host system, but for many things that's fine. The one I'm running right now has 1 GB RAM, 25 GB HDD, and I think 1 CPU thread (for comparison, host: 8 GB RAM, 400 - 500 GB HDD depending on how you count†, 8 CPU threads), and this is causing no problems for either the guest or the host. (Also, you can edit the hardware specs *after* creating the machine, so you can do things like "my host is lagging too much, I need to reduce the guest's RAM" without starting over completely.)

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†I have a dual-boot system, and 100 GB of my hard drive belongs to my Windows installation.