Slashdot Mirror
Torvalds' Secret Sauce For Linux: Willing To Be Wrong (ieee.org)
An anonymous reader writes: Linux turns 25 this year(!!). To mark the event, IEEE Spectrum has a piece on the history of Linux and why it succeeded where others failed. In an accompanying question and answer with Linus Torvalds, Torvalds explains the combination of youthful chutzpah, openness to other's ideas, and a willingness to unwind technical decisions that he thinks were critical to the OS's development: "I credit the fact that I didn't know what the hell I was setting myself up for for a lot of the success of Linux. [...] The thing about bad technical decisions is that you can always undo them. [...] I'd rather make a decision that turns out to be wrong later than waffle about possible alternatives for too long."
I just turned 26, I wish I was as successful as Linux...
I'd rather make a decision that turns out to be wrong later than waffle about possible alternatives for too long
Linux was successful because most of his decisions turned out to be right. The guy is a genius.
If you believe this to be the case, how do you account for the relative success of Linux vs. BSD?
Microsoft, who thinks very clearly and thoroughly over their decisions regarding Windows.
At this very moment, my dad's computer is attempting to download Windows 10 in the background, automatically without asking permission.
He has Dialup internet.
Let that sink in.
Clear and through decisions my ass.
Linux kernel development needs people who are capable, period.
And you seem to forget who Linus is married to.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Let's talk about kernels.
The number of Linux kernel currently running on mobile dwarfs XNU. Windows 7 dominates Desktop. Apple does better on Desktop than Linux, but this is becoming less relevant.
Linux also dominates the cloud.
And tomorrow, I have to format and re-install Win 7 on a customer's computer because reverting to Win 7 from Win 10 (which he didn't consent to) left it unusable. 4 hours of "startup repair", BCDEDIT, etc, etc and it still won't boot.
I will not recommend Win 10 to anyone under any circumstances. MS has really dropped the ball this time.
I can't really recommend Mint, either. Debian + {Windows look-alike shell} seems to be pretty stable so far.
They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
systemd is a distro decision, not a kernel decision.
I'll admit he is showing signs of developing alzheimer's, (No matter how much I explain, he still thinks "Foxfire" is his operating system) but windows update automatically downloading windows 10 in the background has been repeatedly posted on / and seems to be a pretty common issue:
http://www.cio.com/article/304...
http://winsupersite.com/window...
http://www.howtogeek.com/22855...
http://www.theguardian.com/tec...
It's so damned hard to tell these days--especially with Americans, who seem increasingly prone to take any criticism of their work as a personal attack.
(I'm originally from America, so yes, I'm allowed to say that.)
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Nothing is more despicable than people who attempt to shoehorn less qualified people in. If someone, let it be a minority or whatever, then let them succeed on merit alone, not this crap you're peddling about how STEM needs more women. It doesn't, by the way.
So please take your atrocious and neo-fascist bullshit back to whatever SJW pit it came from, where feelings are more important than anything else. And nothing is quite so insulting to women as your bullshit that the only way they're going to do well in STEM is if we give them golden tickets. They can do it on their own, through their own merit.
Linus was incredibly lucky to be in the right place at the right time. GNU was almost finished except for a kernel, and Linus wrote a kernel.
That's all folks.
You have no clue what you are talking about. Linux is the kernel. Systemd works outside the kernel. Linus has control of one thing only. I'll let you decide which that is.
This time? Man the ball is on the ground most of the time at Microsoft
He's managed lead one of the most elaborate software development projects ever undertaken for fifteen years, taking it from a tinker-toy up to one of the most successful of all operating systems. That's pretty impressive. Managers may not produce anything directly of value themselves, but that doesn't mean they are not important for the success of a project.
It is what leading people and/or companies is all about. Make fast decisions, then if wrong fix the consequences and learn from your errors. That is the learn from your errors that most entrepreneurs do not get.
And there should be another mandatory one for all these inflated ego types: most good decisions are not about being smart but being fast and lucky. I guess that Linus was at the right place at the right time too, that he is not a GNU or BSD zealot probably helped a lot too.
Stupidity is the root of all evil.
Is that you again, Kay?
They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
Not you again, Kay?
I guess the kernel shouldn't concern itself with user-land, but (not being a programmer), tell me, what will happen if a "don't-talk-to-systemd" routine is added to the kernel?
They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
I think Lennart P. would be utterly delighted with that and would get RedHat to put a fork of linux that he can claim as his own under his control. See PulseAudio and NetworkManager back when Lennart was running them before he started systemd for an example of how messed up that would be.
BSD has a mindset of "let's design it" instead of "grow it". So probably that kind of overthinking isn't working out so well for them.
It was a success because people far more talented than he was were willing to support an idea
How he earned this support? By luck?
a fucking tool for acting like a CEO
What the... with this statement. This man may (of course) not invent everything, he is of course not the most talented, but he definitely know stuffs he put in the kernel, and know how to do this very good (many of Slashdot users seem to agree that such "ruthless" Linus to be, is the reason why Linux is successful). If he such a tool, unlike a company, some other "more talented" people just fork the kernel and many other talents will follow the new ones.
and attempting to take all the credit for the millions of man-hours of work donated by other people.
You could track who has contributed to Linux kernel. How Linus "attempts to take all credits".
Unlike CEOs, who "invented" X, "designed" Y, and no one knows who the fuck actually done for them.
How many people were involved in the development of the first Linux kernel?
Of that person, how many are still actively developing it?
I see what you did there, timothy. I bet you don't.
At the bottom of the
So politics and Hollywood do not exist?
No, they're all SJWs, including Trump.
PS: SJW means "anyone I don't like and for the record, I'm also a fuckwit"
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Nope. He has successfully *developed* a massive project, and done so in a shoestring budget. And has done so *because* he has no clueless managers around trying to impress the Big Boss. Certainly, managers not only rarely produce anything of value, they often are a neat deterrent for projects.
The reason for the relative manager abundance is that The Man prefers to listen to nice people making promises, rather to listening to engineers explaining why their pet idea is stupid and doomed.
Licencing. The GPL made Linux an attractive platform, especially for people working on the critically important GNU software it needed to be useful. It also set the tone for distros like Debian to emerge, and for commercial outfits like Redhat and Canonical to operate in a way that kept the open source community happy and cooperative.
A lot of Linux is written by people being paid to write it. If the licence had been BSD then much of that code might never have seen the light of day, only ever being shipped as proprietary binaries. Linux development would be much further behind without the GPL.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
NetworkMangler is his too? That completely changes my opinion of him. I used to think he was a hack-and-hope chancer who chucks things over the wall when they're barely half finished.
Now I know it for sure.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Did you know Ada ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
One has to differentiate between opinions and facts.
Having two contradicting opinions does not neccesary mean one is right and the other is wrong.
Despite the hurt feelings that may occur sometimes, I think it is a good thing that Torvalds has the final say on such decisions.
This guarantees a somewhat homogenous design philosophy for the kernel.
"we are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further."
At the time of Linux's gestation, BSD was under a legal cloud because of licensing issues with AT&T - a nice quote from Linus is "If 386BSD had been available when I started on Linux, Linux would probably never had happened", and 386BSD was only not available because of the ongoing legal cases.
Capable != willing to put up with bad attitudes and being shouted at.
Indeed. This is why Sarah Sharp and Matthew Garrett left: unwillingness to put up with bullshit. Both contributed a whole bunch of really good stuff to the kernel and are thankfully still gainfully employed in the greater Linux community, just not with the kernel itself.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
>NetworkMangler is his too?
No it isn't and never was. Yeah, just keep on believing every lie ever told about systemd and Lennart Poettering. The attack attack against Linux software like systemd is manufactured controversy by a small group of BSD's dressed up like concerned Linux users. They are not afraid of spreading misinformation since they know how gullible people are and that people never check "facts". A simple google search would have showed you that the OP lied. Please don't ponder whether you bought into other lies and misinformation about systemd and other GPL Linux projects under attack. You might hurt your brain.
Lovely... That's how we get major changes of things like the audio subsystem; default schedulers that (suck, and) keep changing and getting more tweaks; spinning through one just-slightly-better file system after another; breaking binary compatibility over and over again; constant incompatible changes to better suit some random person's idea of what minor feature is worth completely upending decades of good design, legacy and stability (eg: KMS, Wayland, etc.); contortions and change after change to its design to suit the design constraints of the latest mainframe IBM is developing; etc. And dare I mention the nightmare of dealing with an initrd, which is more of a side-effect of some of the above?
Not that other systems have done perfectly well without going through all these continual changes and contortions.
"You cannot have improvement without change, but you sure as heck can have change without improvement!" https://slashdot.org/comments....
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
There are also some other factors at play like: GPL vs BSD license, managed by nerdz like us vs some ivory tower in Berkeley, charisma of the leader, etc.
Except you'd have a reasonable chance of figuring out why.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
You're correct, Linus does not maintain packages outside the kernel. That being said, he wields incredible influence, more than any one person, over the rest of the Linux community (GNU/Linux or whatever you want to refer to the whole community at large) and if he determines that something must be eliminated for the good of Linux in general, he would use that influence to see that the software would be a pariah and eventual bit death. The thing is that he must see something as a great threat to stick his neck out for it and last I saw him comment on systemd (several months ago), he saw it as flawed but, worthwhile if improved. So, like most things, he left it to the community at large to decide its fate and they have overwhelmingly decided to adopt it, flawed or not. Except for a handful of foaming at the mouth system admins, the vast majority of the community have replied with a resounding "meh." With the majority of the community ambivalent, the majority of package maintainers have chosen to adopt it, for better or worse. Either get over it and learn to use it, develop and better alternative or move to a distro that doesn't use it. Either way, quit trolling boards about systemd. You lost, move on.
"Be particularly skeptical when presented with evidence confirming what you already believe." -
Woo! Quarter-century of the Linux Desktop!!!
Did I get that right?
Willing To Be Wrong
It goes without saying, but it's ok to be willing to be wrong provided you have some skills and a clue of the issues you need to deal with. Otherwise, you are just a morbidly fat walrus flapping on dry land.
The Linux kernel is absolutely useless with out the rest of the GNU software in the distribution. Torvalds is not in charge of everything.
"I don't actually have any particularly strong opinions on systemd itself. I've had issues with some of the core developers that I think are much too cavalier about bugs and compatibility, and I think some of the design details are insane (I dislike the binary logs, for example), but those are details, not big issues." - Linus Torvald.
At this very moment, my dad's computer is attempting to download Windows 10 in the background, automatically without asking permission.
He has Dialup internet.
Let that sink in.
Nope... It does not sink in. Dialup internet went extinct long before Windows 10 was even conceived.
Lemon curry???
What's your alternative to NetworkManager? Manually configure every WiFi connection?
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
Licencing.
I agree that Linux' success is mostly about licensing, and I think the GPL did play a positive role, but I don't think it's as big as you say. At the time when Linux emerged and started building up steam, BSD existed but wasn't a viable alternative because it wasn't clear who owned it or how it could be legally used. Linux had an overwhelming advantage because its licensing situation was clear.
BSD was eventually freed by the courts in 1994, but by then Linux had already grown an ecosystem of distributions, with lots of great new ideas about how to package, deliver and support software. Some of those ideas were a direct outgrowth of the GPL philosophy, and the GPL on the kernel and the GNU tools helped to set the expectation that virtually everything should be open, so I don't want to understate the GPL's contribution, but I think that BSD could have been in roughly the place that Linux is, if it had actually been available for use and distribution three years earlier. I think we're better off with Linux and the GPL than we would have been with BSD and its license, but BSD could have worked almost as well.
At this very moment, my dad's computer is attempting to download Windows 10 in the background, automatically without asking permission.
He has Dialup internet.
Let that sink in.
Nope... It does not sink in. Dialup internet went extinct long before Windows 10 was even conceived.
You are quite wrong.
http://time.com/3856066/aol-ve...
2.1 million people in America using dialup as of last May.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Microsoft, who thinks very clearly and thoroughly over their decisions regarding Windows.
At this very moment, my dad's computer is attempting to download Windows 10 in the background, automatically without asking permission.
He has Dialup internet.
Let that sink in.
Clear and through decisions my ass.
Heh. OTOH, my father in law used a Debian box for years (I set it up for him, after maintaining Windows for him proved to be a Sisyphean task), and I had a similar nightmare trying to keep it updated. I wrote a script that dialed in every night at 1 AM and downloaded for six hours, then disconnected. That clearly didn't work because every now and then a package update came down that was bigger than what could be downloaded in six hours, and completely choked the process. So then I set up a complicated system that got a list of packages needed from the box at his house, sent it to a server I had, which downloaded the packages there, then his box rsynced them. That worked better because if a download didn't complete one night, rsync would resume it the next. That system worked for a while, though the box might go for a few weeks downloading before it had a complete set of updates and could apply them. But eventually the volume of updates grew to the point that it basically never caught up. So, every now and then I downloaded the outstanding packages to a USB stick and took them up to his house.
When I got tired of that, I convinced my wife and her siblings that we should all go in together and buy him a year of broadband (a 5mbit WiMax service). Predictably, when the pre-paid year was up he happily took over paying for the broadband service himself. It cost 3X as much as his dialup had, but was dramatically more useful.
There's a fundamental problem here, and it's not the decision by Windows 10 to download updates automatically. The problem is that modern systems are too big to keep patched over dialup, and, frankly, the Internet is no longer very useful over dialup. Now, I'd hope that Windows 10 offers you an alternative way to deliver updates to it, but the real solution is to get something better than dialup. To be clear, not updating is *not* a viable alternative.
Far from it. By far the most widespread usage of Linux is found in cellphones and embedded applications - none of which care about an init subsystem.
Systemd is a program. It's the first program the kernel calls after it's done it's work. There are several programs available that do the work of systemd. How could Linus (a single Sr developer on a world wide project) enforce anyone's choice of program through the kernel? Sheer will?
Virtually all distribution maintainers, from institutional to consumer grade, have moved their supported init system to systemd. There's nothing stopping you from using initd or upstart if that's your preference, but you'd better get used to writing startup scripts.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
I've noticed the bounce too. Sitting at -1 for both posts now, but in a while meta-moderation will probably push at least one back up to +2 or +3. Kinda screws with the debate though, since 80% of the comments are in the first hour or two.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
The attack attack against Linux software like systemd is manufactured controversy by a small group of BSD's dressed up like concerned Linux users.
That's patently false.
I have been using Linux since the earliest versions, and have only ever casually installed *BSD just to see what was there, and I absolutely loathe systemd. All of the distros and distro-forks that have appeared at without-systemd are maintained and used by ... wait for it ... Linux developers and Linux users. Not a single one is likely to be the primary OS of a *BSD user or developer, and it is unlikely any have been developed by a *BSD user or developer.
Trying to turn this into a BSD vs Linux thing is just pathetic.
You *are* aware that these things could be done before NM with other tools although not very pretty ones, right? All you have to do is google for them.
Considering he's never been wiling to admit when he's wrong.
I only have a small house so one WiFi hotspot is enough.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
My response was in regard to the post I was responding to. He was not talking about cell phones.
aaawwww poor you... my opensuse system with systemd boots fully every time.
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
15 years? More like 25.
Then you're an idiot.
Your logic is broken. All release BSD code is released. Any code that is not released is not BSD code, so no worries. BSD license only says that free code remains free.
The Victor Hugo quote about nothing being more powerful than an idea whose time has come is, to me, the story of Linux.
In the '90s we had the beginnings of the internet, so people could collaborate in ways they had never done before. We had commodity PC hardware that could do interesting OS things. More.
My first Linux system was a 486/66 with Slackware 96 back in 1997. It worked fine. I use Slackware to this day on my own computers. The standard at work is CentOS. So be it.
...laura
For simple wifi stuff, wicd is a nice lightweight solution.
The most ironic part of the whole thing is that the problems described here as justification for systemd's awful interface naming are all things that should be taken care of by a higher level tool such as network-manager.
I think the point being made here is that no separation is made between the kernel and Linux as a complete operating system. The kernel plays a role in the success of Linux, but it's not the sole reason for it's success. It's all the tools and software that make up the operating system which made it successful. Without those it would just be a car engine with no car built around it to make it useful.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
Not a single [operating system listed at without-systemd] is likely to be the primary OS of a *BSD user or developer, and it is unlikely any have been developed by a *BSD user or developer.
Perhaps you had to leave before reading far enough, but the UNIX-like and derivatives section lists plenty of *BSD variants as well as the Solaris-derived OpenIndiana OS. The "Debian GNU/kFreeBSD" and "ubuntuBSD" entries, which combine GNU with the kernel from FreeBSD, look interesting.
For wireless connections, Network Manager seems to work fairly well.
But in my experience, it's nothing but trouble for wired connections. Why is that?
I have no idea. But I have discovered that if I want my workstations to reliably connect to the wired network, I have to rip out all vestiges of NM and configure the "old fashioned" config files. Before I started doing that I could count on at least one computer in a lab refusing to connect to the network until it was rebooted. Maybe several times. And it was non-deterministic -- it wasn't the same computer every time.
Sure, it works most of the time. But that 3 or 4 percent chance that it would give up was enough to give me fits.
Ignorance killed the cat. Curiosity was framed.
Since the kernel is open source, the distros - and anyone else who wants to - will remove it from their copy, so... nothing.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
That's what I do. It's dead simple, and why would I want to connect to a WiFi AP without understanding it first? That only makes sense if you're a student with a laptop, or something like that. I'm a computer professional; wireless connections are not difficult magic for me, and I'm expected to maintain data security.
But now that Red Hat apparently wants to install Network Manager on hypervisors and servers, I don't even
<SERVER CONNECTION LOST>
If he did something like that, he'd probably cause a serious fork in the kernel. You can be an asshole about things, but if you start making project decisions that have nothing to do with your kernel function only because you don't like a particular application that uses it, and that application is supported by many mainline distros who provide paid kernel contributors, you're going to fuck your project.
Now if systemd caused bad behavior in the kernel, or took advantage of a feature in the kernel that he hated and wanted to get rid of, I could see him accepting a patch that would trash systemd without a second thought. But then it could be easily argued that this is well within his prerogative. He wouldn't be required to maintain bad kernel just to satisfy some shitty app developer. But just calling out one app because you don't like it is activist bullshit that would make people question his stewardship of the project.
I know he has strong opinions, but I don't this he's arbitrary.
So far. The systemd devs have been trying to get their hooks into the kernel in various ways. The latest was kdbus. Linus has managed to keep their horrible code out of the kernel thus far, but it'll be interesting to see how long he can hold out.
No. The GPL is more free, because Free software is really about the software's freedom.
When you get Free code, you have the Four Freedoms - to use, study, modify, and redistribute. If you modify that code, make an improved program, and let someone else use it, the next person must also have the Four Freedoms. And they only get that if they have access to the code. When you don't release the code, the next person does not get the Four Freedoms.
Circumcision is child abuse.
In any event, the original premise is that if BSD had been used, the code contributions could have been locked up in proprietary bundles, thus making sure that the advancements in BSD that were made by those companies are never contributed back to the project unless they wanted to. And they usually don't want to.
In Linux, if you make code changes to the kernel, they get released with source if you try and provide a solution that uses a modified Linux kernel.
Yes, BSD is free, and it will remain free. But only the BSD that is created by the BSD project team for BSD or voluntary contributions back. They're not forcing Apple, for instance, to release their alterations to BSD (if any) as free source code.
This is not to say BSD is bad, only that Linux under the GPL has a gimmick that forces more of the work done with it to end up as open source code contributions which can be more readily made use of by the general development world. This would tend to make it more popular among developers, and more developers means more potential for advancement on a project.
To be fair, Microsoft's decisions are not always about the viability or capabilities of their actual software. They're mostly thinking on how to make a product that gets them a wedge into a market. For that, the software only has to be sufficient, not necessarily ground breaking. The lack of software capability is made up for by clever deals and marketing.
Of course, sometimes they miss the target of "sufficient" and the product fails. Other times, this works well for them.
And for a mediocre product, Microsoft's decisions have maintained Windows' dominance of the desktop market better than you might otherwise expect, and even given them a niche in the server market, where they are much more clearly outclassed by UNIX-likes.
Perhaps Linus is willing to be wrong, but he's unwilling to admit when he's wrong.
Sometimes people focus on Linus' insults, but lost in all that is how often he insults himself. Even in the article, he mentions times when he was wrong.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Without those it would just be a car engine with no car built around it to make it useful.
A car engine is far more useful than a car, and designing a building block which underpins not only desktop operating systems, but servers, 80% of the world's smartphones, and embedded devices a plenty is a far greater achievement for what Torvald's is being poo-pooed for.
Thought I'd log in for a change to post this instead of just being yet another AC complaining about the direction mainstream distros have seem to taken.
I did Google to try to confirm whether or not Poettering had anything to do with NetworkManager. I didn't find anything to back up that assertion.
I have been a Linux user in one capacity or another for almost 20 years now; it's certainly been my kernel of choice for everything but video games for a little over 10 years. Whether or not Poettering has anything to do with NetworkManager or not doesn't change the fact that it's shit. PulseAudio is also shit. I have no idea whether SystemD is shit or not. I've never used it, and my distro of choice (Gentoo) uses OpenRC by default.
I've used most every major distro at one point or another from Slackware to Ubuntu. I've even gone through Linux from Scratch a couple times. I recommend everybody who wants to "learn computers" do a Linux from Scratch just for the educational experience. I've dabbled a bit with the BSDs but never really used them.
NetworkManager: as others have posted, it's just flat out unreliable. I used BodhiLinux on a laptop for a few years before the laptop died. It seemed to work well enough with wired and the home wifi, but it wouldn't connect at all, no matter what I tried, the last time I stayed in a hotel. It took me about an hour to figure out upstart and how to tear NetworkManager out (not nearly as familiar with Ubuntu as Gentoo and no Google to turn to without internet). After editing wpa_supplicant.conf, the thing connected just fine.
Maybe NetworkManager has its place, but it's not difficult for me to do iwlist wlan0 scanning and just edit a damned config file. That's just my desktop/laptop needs. I also have a IPv6 router/IPv4 NAT/wireless access point running Gentoo. I'm not sure I could imagine any kind of consumer oriented technology that would give an easy GUI to bridge the wireless nic with the wired lan, dhcp the wan side up, and also manage a 6RD tunnel. (Not to mention hostapd, dnsmasq, and radvd.) Well, I should say I can imagine it, but I would never spend time developing such a thing unless I were getting paid.
PulseAudio: while network transparency is neat and all, I never could figure out how to remove about 1 whole second of delay. I used ESD until ALSA became the audio stack of choice. I have no idea what PulseAudio provides above and beyond ALSA's built-in dmix. I'm also using the swmixer module since my headset is just way too damned loud by default for whatever reason.
SystemD: I still don't understand what I would gain by switching to systemd. Then again, I don't even use XDM or an XDM alternative. I understand how my system works inside and out right now. If I switched to systemd, same as with upstart, I would have to relearn all of that. If I ever get a job as a Linux admin, I'll worry about learning systemd then.
Honestly, I don't care what Debian and Fedora (and the derivative distros) do. When I was younger and had more free time, I didn't mind trying new things even if they were slightly broken. Hell, up until about 6 or 7 years or so ago, there was always something that was slightly wonky when it came to Linux on the desktop. The system I have now is solid as a rock and just works. I really don't give a crap if what I have set up would work well for a mobile device or whether a layperson can use it or not, because my computer isn't a mobile device, and I'm not a layperson.
I wrote dhcpcd-gtk and dhcpcd-qt to handle things like picking a SSID, entering a passphrase and basic IP config. Works well, works on BSD and Linux.
Correct. I went to all the trouble of looking up the year linux began and subtracting, and then typoed a digit.
Nope. If you have "recommended updates" it will automatically try to download in the background and then prompt for install.
So you're taking a stand on less than 1% of the population? If dialup isn't strictly extinct, it's an extremely endangered species.
Supporting dialup users simply isn't a major concern for a lot of companies anymore.
With about half of dialup users being poor (unable to afford broadband) or outright luddites (unwilling to change for any reason) according to that report, I can't really blame tech companies for ignoring them.
---
According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
apparently they were just trolls who were trolling Linus by withdrawing their free labour or something.
Not wanting to be sworn at and belittled makes one an SJW. We know SJWs are bad because and useless they represent everything evil in all its forms. Therefore not wanting to be sworn at makes them evil and useless. Since they're useless there's no point having them on the kernel team.
Moderation on Slashdot is broken.
Anything counter to running round like a headless chicken squawking "SJW SJW SJW" all over the place seems to get modbombed down pretty fast. You're back to +3 now though, so sanity is starting to prevail again. The modbombing crowd are pretty quick off the mark too, so posts tend to spike low before getting modded back up.
The two of you should get a room, because, really.... publicly ego-massaging and congratulating each other that you both think the "correct" thoughts? You both just responded to a post that was bombed down to -1 in no time, and try to say that *that* post is representative of slashdot?
BTW: Sanity *is* starting to prevail, which is why the ideological nonsense from both sides almost always goes down and stays down - right now AmiMoJo's comment is still modded down, not at +3. On the rare occasion either of you post something egalitarian, your post goes up and stays up. Hard as it may be for you to believe, to the middle majority of the bell curve, both sides look the same, whether the issue is Trump/Guns/Politics/Religion.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
At the time of Linux's gestation, BSD was under a legal cloud because of licensing issues with AT&T - a nice quote from Linus is "If 386BSD had been available when I started on Linux, Linux would probably never had happened", and 386BSD was only not available because of the ongoing legal cases.
Which is why when the various *BSD started they were absolutely anal about documenting every commit. The (e.g.) FreeBSD SVN (formerly CVS) code repository goes back over two decades years to the 4.4BSD Lite tapes:
* https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/COPYRIGHT?view=log
Something that it took Linux over a decade to learn--and which caused the SCO-IBM lawsuits: no one could really traces all the code to the source. One of Linux developers (Linus?) once famously remarked that he "didn't believe in source control management".
So you're taking a stand on less than 1% of the population? If dialup isn't strictly extinct, it's an extremely endangered species.
I'm taking a stand on nothing. I was replying to a poster that said it was extinct. It's not. I pointed that out.
Supporting dialup users simply isn't a major concern for a lot of companies anymore.
Certainly not Windows 10 - where it is going to down;had and install updates no matter what you are on.
Most Linux distros as well - a good internet connection is a huge advantage during the install.
With about half of dialup users being poor (unable to afford broadband) or outright luddites (unwilling to change for any reason) according to that report, I can't really blame tech companies for ignoring them.
Frankly, I don't care a whole lot about dialup users anyhow. I was just pointing out an inaccuracy. It isn't extinct.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
LOL most of those don't even have the GNU tools ;)
Queue the "but they compiled it with gcc and everybody knows the compiler name is included in the name of the every product."
Wow! That's very interesting.
I'm at a Fedora keyboard, and it boots every time too!
systemd seems to be launching the SysV init scripts I wrote at the right times, too.
#livinginfear
"Horrible code"? Care to elaborate?
Yes.
Oggly-boogley! Ugga ugga ugga ugga PEJORATIVE ugga wugga wugga.
PulseAudio!
GOTO 10
Computer won't work
So, exactly the same as if systemd is allowed to fuck things up?
You can test this for yourself, just install a distro like Fedora that uses systemd and see if the computer still works. ;)
Well, if you were to switch to a distro that uses it, you'd only find one major difference:
Your command that runs the init.d script for you would output a line telling you what other command it was running instead.
Of course, if you're not using that and you're running the init.d script directly, then you wouldn't notice any difference.
You can always still also install the SysV init.d scripts, when you run them directly the init system isn't even involved, so there is no harm in having both ways of doing a thing installed; the ones run by the init system aren't even seen by the user other than through a log, after all.
Yeah see PulseAudio... and find out if it is being use successfully by most distros, and if the early bugs have been worked out, or not.
Or did they all switch to something else because it is "messed up?"
For wireless connections, Network Manager seems to work fairly well.
But in my experience, it's nothing but trouble for wired connections.
Same. I run it on systems that use client wifi, but I disable it everywhere else, such as servers... including servers that are also wifi hotspots! :)
When a server has a networking problem, I just want to get in and fix it. Having the interface bouncing on me while I try to fix it is not helpful. But if the laptop needs to bounce the wifi somewhere, just go ahead and try it. It might actually help in that situation. But if it is a dedicated workstation on ethernet, no, don't touch that interface.
It is really simple to uninstall. Fedora server installs have had it for a long, long time. Generally it is just: remove package, write the old-style scripts with the correct names, done.
The reason I run it on a laptop is that I don't want to spend 10 minutes writing (or an hour searching for and evaluating options) a tray app to quickly bounce the connection. If I was only ever connecting to APs that are running on real servers, I wouldn't need that. But the consumer APs that are installed in most locations often get laggy after too many people connect more recently than you.
BSD strives to exist, not to be popular. It also actively restricts participation, even to the point of refusing patches and re-implementing the same idea in a similar way. This reduces distractions, and helps maintain a static culture.
Linux has wide open participation, and prefers to accept existing (potentially imperfect) patches rather than re-invent a wheel. The culture is fairly open, and evolves over time.
They both have equal success, if you measure each based on achieving their own goals.
"Foxfire"
Try this: "It's called Firefox, like the Clint Eastwood movie."
Baby steps.
Willing to be wrong, after yelling at, screaming at, swearing at opposition until all but the most thick-skinned and persistent get the message through.
Yes, but I wrote "back when Lennart was running them" for a good reason. PulseAudio is still very annoying at times but earlier it was incredibly buggy yet considered fit for release due to office politics at RedHat. I actually managed to solve a problem with a machine having poor network performance by doing nothing other than blocking the port PulseAudio was using - it went far beyond sound not working.
you are talking out of your backdoor
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
what are you on about? i've never posted anything about bitcoin.
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
its far too flexible if its doing that.... :o)
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Wicd is a piece of shit too. There's a checkbox for "never connect to this AP" that seems (if it does anything) to make it prefer the one in question.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
"Foxfire", like the Angelina Jolie movie.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
You should read the book "Outliers" by Gladwell. In it he examines why Gates, Jobs, etc became so successful. Was it because they were smarter than the rest? No, it is all about timing. In a short window, the computer industry was shaping and if you had the right knowledge you could create a company that became a leader. He dissects several successful business men and shows that it is all about timing. The IT giants (Jobs, Gates, etc) all were born roughly in the same year. If you were born outside that window, chances are much much smaller that you succeed in creating a giant IT company. For instance, he talks about hockey players. All elite hockey players, are born in january, february or march. If you are born in january, instead of december, you had almost a year more of physical development. Which translates into you being drafted into hockey schools instead of the december boy. And your hockey teacher focuses more on january boy (because he is better) and gives him more training. So he is selected to play more matches, instead of sitting on the bench. Over the years, this accumulates and adds up. So after 10 years, he is maybe twice as good as the december boy. So ALL elite players are born in jan/feb/mar. If you are born in december, you are NEVER going to make it to the top as a hockey player. There is NO elite hockey player that are born in december. But he also talks about... basketball(?) players that gets drafted in june. And guess what, all the elite NHL players are born in... June, July or August. If you are born in May you are never going to make it to the top as a basket player. Just drop it and change career plans. The book is _extremely_ interesting and again and again he explains that timing is everything. There is a short window where you can succeed. If not, it will be much much more difficult. FreeBSD was sued in court so nobody would touch FreeBSD. So Linus T had a window of opportunity. If FreeBSD were not sued in court, it would surely has won because FreeBSD was technically superior than a Linux kernel made by a teenager who just learned to program. The code was _bad_. That is why Linus unwinds code in Linux, because he did not know the best way to do stuff. So he experimented and tried this and that. He had to learn the hard way what works or not. That is also why Linux has no stable kernel ABI, so it is a moving target which creates lot of threads on "I upgraded Linux and now my sound card / printer / etc does not work". All OSes except Linux, has stable kernel ABIs. If Linux device driver model was superior, all OSes would change their driver model.