>Known physics like relativity gets completely ignored
That one wasn't entirely true. Roddenberry at the very least seriously considered the FTL problem and came up with a novel solution, the warp drive. And now phycisists actually think it could be done (whether this will realize I have no idea - but it's still in the realm of plausible right now). Interestingly Alcubierre, the scientist who proved it's theoretically possible (with our currently known physics), is on record as saying that Star Trek inspired him to do the research in the first place (in an e-mail to William Shatner).
The point isn't really whether Alcubierre drives are possible (and can actually be built with human technology and all practical difficulties overcome), it's simply that not only did Roddenberry consider relativity (at least to a degree) but that his solution was sufficiently plausible for real scientists to investigate and affirm.
This is quite an achievement in science fiction, it's not a very common occurrence but it does happen sometimes though it seems SF inspires engineers far more frequently than scientists - which is why Clarke's geostationary satelites are a thing now. It could be that engineering is just a little easier, and so good SF writers get good engineering ideas more often ?
> What drives people to do things? Actually he does answer that- repeatedly. Self-improvement. Bettering ourselves, the opportunity to learn new things and push the frontiers of human knowledge.
Gene's vision is of a society without the mundane, so that everybody can spend time in these pursuits - which in our society is largely the preserve of a fairly small subset of academia and science. But the fundamental drive to DO those things, that's pretty universal - indeed that drive is practically the definition of humanity, it's literally the difference between inventing or not inventing the wheel.
Another premise of Star Trek is a post-religion highly sexually liberated society. In that society, hookers haven't got much of a market because getting laid has become ridiculously easy. Basically - picking somebody up consists "Horny?" and "Yeah/Nay"
>For as long as communities have existed, there has been evidence of bartering Do you always make unsubstantiated claims which are outright false or only on Mondays ?
When communities first form, they generally just share everything equally - including the work to acquire resources. There are still communities like that living in the world today - all hunter gatherer communities are like that. Later, as the community grows, it's needs grows and specialization becomes valuable. Still bartering and trade does not develop. All that happens is that teams start to split labour according to abilities, specialist teams all producing surpluses which are shared with all the other teams in return for access to their surpluses. There are still communities like that in the world today - and I would argue that the internal division of labor in modern corporations are the same pattern. My team does not pay the operations team to maintain the servers for us, nor do they pay my devops team to develop automation software for them. They get access to our production, and we to theirs - and that's the relationship between all the teams internal to the company. If the population grows however, it eventually reaches a point where the organisational overhead of this system starts to exceed the production. Often you need specialist management teams just to manage distribution between teams (this is often a role taken on by priest-hoods, in the modern corporation - managers fill this role). But eventually there is a point where the scalability of the system is exceeded, and only then is bartering or trade invented. Many communities never reach this point. At this point, money is still not invented, and it's invention is by no means guaranteed. Bartering works very well, it solves the efficiency problem of share-everything by distributing the management of distribution across the entire community with each individual only managing the part to and from themselves. But it does have it's own efficiency issues which come to play only if the community gets much, much larger. Then much like the share-everything system, the organisational overhead starts to get too big and something new is needed to organise distribution. In the middle-east - that something was money, which was inherited by the cultures directly descdended from there - European and Asian.
But it was not the only solution, any kind of value-proxy will do and value-proxies do not need to be tangible. The Incas for example found a very different solution - their currency was labor. Specifically if I wanted to buy say a pumpkin from you - then I would have to promise to do a favor for you to pay for it. Favors were traded to buy goods, and could be retraded (so you may want to buy some potatoes from Jack now, you go to him and tell him that I owe you a favor for a pumpkin so if he gives you the potatoes you'll have me do an equivalent favor for him instead). That favor could be helping to plow his potato field for the next crop for example.
Things get very bizarre when two societies that have very different solutions at this point meet (we don't know what the next point, if any, will look like since no society has gotten there yet). This happened when the Spanish invaded the Americas. The Spanish worked Incan slaves literally to death in the silvermines, and the more they mined- the worse they became, the harsher the conditions, the greater the demands. The Incans could never understand why the Spanish were apparently impossible to satisfy. That's because the Spanish had a money-society, and silver was a currency. The trouble is that the massive inequality between the conquistadors (with their large ships full of silver) and the rest of Spain caused hyperinflation (yes you can get inflation, even hyper-inflation in metal based currencies - history is filled with examples and severe inequality is a massive inflation driver as shops seek to capitalize on the vast money supplies of the rich and thus price goods out of the reach of the poor). The more
And the core point of Star Trek is to ask what happens when the supply of everything you could demand is infinite ? Strictly speaking the price of anything with infinite supply is always zero. In fact, it doesn't even have to be infinite - it just has to APPEAR infinite. Nobody can survive without oxygen for more than a few minutes, it's the ultimate requirement. The highest demand any product can ever have... yet none of us pay for it. The SCUBA and Space Travel industries are the sole places where anybody makes a profit out of selling air to breath. Everywhere else it's available for free -because the supply is close enough to infinite that we don't need to charge for it (of course, assuming regulations are kept intact and this remains true...)
This is actually of great interest right now as we have other products which exist right now which we can produce at post-scarcity levels but not INVENT that way. Raising the interesting question of how to reward inventors appropriately when that dichotomy exists ? Intellectual products are foremost on this list. Right now the favored approach is to try and *create* scarcity where it doesn't exist, in order ot allow a market with a price to exist. This artificial scarcity is created by government intervention (in the form of laws like copyright) - and the more easy technology has made the replication, the more draconian the artificial scarcity laws have had to get. The current path leads to dictatorship (and if you compare copy laws in the west today to what they were like under ACTUAL dictators - we've long surpassed them - the motivation for the laws is very different - but the practical implementation is not).
So what other paths are there ? If everything is post scarcity, perhaps that solves the problem because you don't NEED to pay the authors, after all - they can get everything they need for free. But when only some products are post-scarcity, that creates a conflict between "produces a post-scarcity product" and "needs to eat".
Frankly we haven't got a good answer to how to deal with this yet, only a very BAD answer which politicians are unwilling to question.
I've worked as a unix sysadmin in a shop where that meant having copies of every commercial and free unix. Hell I had two actual DEC Alphas running ! I had every version of Solaris from 8 onwards, every version of HPUX ever released and numerous linux systems there.
I'll know from bitter experience which things which unixes did best or worst. Linux had the best package managers by far for example, and HPUX probably the worst one you could ever have the misfortune of having to work with. And as for init systems - there was nothing, absolutely nothing, that was more sheer hell to administer than SMF. SMF was a truly horrendous and unmanageable piece of crapware. Building a system similar to it is an act of sheer, calculated sadism.
Ive spent the majority of my career building distributions. Trust me as a distro developer of some distinction (linux.com once said that I did for slackware what Ubuntu did for debian, my distro at its height ran 95% of all computers in an entire country) when i tell you i know the decision making process and the motivation for adopting systemd has absolutely nothing to do with technical superiority.
But its worthless debating you. I showed you a legitimate case for not ever integrating core utilities. You responded with work arounds. I told you work arounds are not good enough. You pretend I changed topics ! Then you give examples of binary formats nobody minds... all of them databases, the very thing I said in five posts earlier was the only case in all software where binary formats for textual data had a legitimate case. Logs dont have the needs of databases or the constraints. Databases are an edge case. You dont apply edge case reasoning to core technology. Its bad engineering.
And here is the real issue. In the past I could swap out any utility on my box for any other utility that was compatible. This allowedfor experimentation. For competition and evolution. I could replace sysv in any distro with upstart or openrc. Nothing else would be affected. Nothing would break. Now if I try replace the init system it breaks the message bus and that breaks the desktop.
>Oh dear. Unix turned into a religion. I guess we're going to disagree here because I'm not religious and don't care about staying true to the doctrine. Ah the classic "call it a religion" and you can dismiss it argument. There's just one problem - this is the exactly OPPOSITE of a religion: because it's based on solid evidence. 40 years of hard experience and engineering principles that have seen the single greatest success in the entire history of software and produced the most flexible, powerful and reliable operating system that has ever existed. You can't dismiss that as blind faith. The Unix philosophy is more like a software-world application of the scientific method than it is like religion. If anything - everything that goes against it tends to be religious - and based on programmers casting themselves as priests who know better than users what users will need to do.
>That's actually entirely intentional. journald contains a way to sign log files in such a way that it would make tampering detectable. If I making log files untamperable is my particular use-case, I will be happy to get a third-party tool to do that for me. Taking it away is a terrible thing to do, the developers are assuming that the use-cases THEY can think of are all the use-cases that can legitimately exist. In the entire history of software that assumption has never once been true of any program. It is literally mathematically impossible for it NOT to be a false assumption. It's arrogance, plain and simple.
>First it wouldn't be as quick to access, second it would take a lot more space. An 87 byte log line (in the format normally seen in/var/log) turns into 1085 bytes of JSON. There's quite a lot of data stored in there. So maybe, indexing is not as useful as you initially thought ? There are plenty of other formatted text outputs without the overhead of JSON though - the colon-seperation format of the passwd file for example. We've solved these problems very well, repeatedly, for 40 years without ever having to abandon clear-text for a core utility, the argument to go against that now - when computers are faster and more powerful than ever before in those 40 years, would have to be incredibly strong indeed, and nothing presented so far has come anywhere close. You're tearing the wings of the plane, which could be a great innovation - but you'll need to PROVE that your wingless plane can fly better. So far, the project has failed to even prove it can still fly.
>But I guess if you want that anyway you could try submitting a patch. It's an open source project after all. Or I can do what I did do - change distros to one that doesn't use systemd. But since Linux is now the unix of enterprise, and the distros that are being used professionally have all found the dependency hell created by systemd overwhelming and given up on offering alternatives - the problem isn't solved by that, it solves it for me at home, but it leaves me dealing with it when I get to the office in the morning.
Software development is an engineering discipline and there has, in it's history, never once been a more successful set of design principles than the unix philosophy. They have stayed - not out of blind faith - but as a consequence of their incredible and utterly unmatched success. There is a reason why Unix systems have come to dominate the OS space throughout the entire breadth of devices we've invented: it's the only design that is flexible and scalable enough to do ANY job you could possibly want. Every other design ends up in the same trap: easy things are easy, hard things are impossible. Unix alone found a way to make easy things easy, hard things possible (and not very hard). SystemD is a perfect example of the kind of changes that win a battle and lose the war.
None of those are good enough reasons to violate a fundamental unix design principle thats been in place since Thompson's earliest experiments. I cant edit the log with vi ? Then you broke unix. Its not unix anymore. Cant imagine why anybody would possibly want to edit a log by hand ? Neither can I but thats the point: fundamental to the unix philosophy. We never ever try to imagine what a user may need to do or why. We do not do that. We let them do whatever they want exactly by not trying to imagine what that will be: because that way the system is never limited to what we can imagine.
There is nothing you cited worth losing that for. And formatted text is fine. Why not store it in json then ? You could get all those features without losing text as a format.
I should not need a specific tool to get the text. You should never ever have data that cannot be accessed by every tool you have. No work arounds required.
Right... because the only alternative to systemd is SysV - actually I am in favor of parallel init and helped Richard Gooch worked on his back in circa 2000.
The fact is though - none of those ended up replacing half the damn base system with other components. Every other init replacement was an init replacement. The end. Upstart was very nice, hell even slackware's RC based one was quite nice and lacked most of the issues you raise (though it didn't support paralel bootups out of the box I added support for those to OpenLab back in 2005 with trivial effort).
That's just it though - if any component didn't do EXACTLY what I want, I want to be able to swap THAT component out with anything else I choose, or write, and the init system has no business telling me what that should be.
The pipeline concept fundamentally depends on not violating one of the principle unix philosophy rules which systemd does not honour: everything should always be clear-text. Never store data in a binary format. It is NEVER a good idea. The sole justifiable exception to that rule is relational databases and I'm not even sure it was a good idea to make that exception. Everything should always be editable with standard tools. And nothing, should EVER be strongly coupled, weak coupling only.
Let me give you an example of why systemd is really a problem. A few years ago I worked for a company that build an application which, among other things, needed to know about ip-phone registrations on the network from CISCO hardware. As it happens the CISCO hardware does not expose this information in any sane way - but it DOES log it via syslog and can send those via the syslog protocol to another system. There's just one problem - when a site comes online, it is incredibly common to have tens of thousands of phones registering in a matter of seconds. No syslog system out there could (at the time anyway) handle 40-thousand messages arriving in 5 seconds, and reliably log them all.
And we had to process these, and could not afford to lose a single one. So we wrote our own syslog daemon, that was backed by a powerful queueing system which could get the whole bunch and queue them up so the application could process them and add the phones to the database. An incredibly niche requirement, absolutely, but being able to meet that niche by simply writing our own replacement for a core OS utility which met our unique needs - that's WHY Unix runs the internet, and systemd harms that. No harm, no matter how minor, can be tolerated of that - because if we lose that, we will lose everything.
We are not trying to compete with MacOSX. Nobody sane runs servers on MacOSX. The desktop is important, but we cannot and shouldn't try to get it by becoming what the desktop OS's are, if we can't offer what's unique and powerful about our system there - then what's the point of being there at all ?
The ability to use a DIFFERENT logger is not a bug, in fact that feature is the reason Unix has survived for 40 years - because no matter how technology changed, no matter what hardware changes we saw, no matter what new demands were placed on it, you can meet them by swapping out just one or two simple components.
It is possible - only when every component is independent and simple, so you CAN swap out components individually and everything else still just works.
>Thanks, but I'm not religious. I prefer things that are convenient to those that are ideologically pure.
That's all well and good but when that "ideology" is the result of 40 years of practical experience by a culture that has produced the engine that drives the entire 21st century (yes, that engine is Unix, because it drives the internet), which has allowed that system to survive thousands of incredible changes to technology virtually unchanged - because no matter how the world changed, it was still working, still useful, still more powerful than the alternatives and changing it to make use of the latest and greatest available technology was always ridiculously easy, when it produced the only operating system that runs on everything from the tiniest embedded systems to the largest supercomputers - then rejecting it requires a strong, rational argument - and even the best such arguments are likely to hold only in very rare niche cases.
And the problem with systemd is it violates virtually every one of the principles of that philosophy and offers NO rational reason for ANY of the violations - and it isn't doing so in a niche where perhaps some of those principles are genuinely not applicable, it's doing it to the heart of the system. These changes are the ONLY reason Linux exists - because they are the reason Unix didn't die in 1969 when it was invented, or in the 1970s when mainframes met microprocessors, or in the 1980s when PCs were invented... they are what allowed unix to adapt and scale to the fast changing world of technology at the front of the curve at all times, exactly because they made changing it always easier than building something new.
It violates the rule of separating mechanism from policy. It now enforces policy on what ought to be a pure mechanism - and there is a very solid and rational reason for that rule: policy changes often but mechanism tends to be long-lived. Failing to separate them means tying the policy to the lifespan of the mechanism and when new technology requires new policies you get incredible hardship. Virtually every major problem windows ever had sprung from it's marriage of mechanism with policy. Why do you think it took them 20 years to implement the bare beginnings of proper multi-user support ? Because the policy of single user was tied fundamentally into the mechanisms of the system 20 years earlier. And what does systemd offer as a rational reason for violating this ? Nothing.
It violates the rule that applications should always expect simple clear text as input, and produce simple clear text as output. That rule is so fundamental to the flexibility and power of unix that to break it at the init level is to completely destroy that power. If systemd becomes universal, linux will lose all the marketshare it gain in every market, and lose it to unix systems that kept the rule - because the next breakthrough in technology will require adaptations - which systemd will have made incredibly hard. More-over, it weakens what you can do with the system - the ability to string commands together in utterly arbitrary ways via pipelines have allowed a relatively small set of primitive applications to serve literally ever conceivable user need, exactly by NOT trying to conceive of every possible user need - but providing the means to construct whatever solution you could possibly want on the fly. And what rational reason does systemd offer for this ? Nothing.
And those are just two out of a very long list. The argument that the unix was is "too complex" is not new, people have been making that argument for the entire 36 years since Unix was first invented, they have always been proven wrong -because even if it's true, the reality is that the trade-off is worth it, because it creates a system where anything and everything is possible - including the one thing no other system has EVER managed: to survive fashions.
There are many variations on capitalism. What Americans call libertarianism however is only compatible with Austrian school. Welfare states are also capitalist (no they have less than nothing to do with socialism and there is literally nothing whatsoever about socialism that requires or even involves the state. Anarcho-socialist philosophies are perfectly logical to people who know what the word means)
All your other claims are blatantly false and ignorant however. For a start libertarianism is almost 500 years old and no such thing as capitalist libertarianism has existed for more than 40 of those. In the world outside America its coupled with socialism. Indeed the only libertarian society that has ever actually existed was a socialist one. Read up on Andalusia.
You think the political philosophy of libertarianism does not favour a particular economic model and vice versa ? Then you are flagrantly ignorant of it. So ignorant in fact that I would be most surprized if you did not consider yourself to be a libertarian. Much like religion libertarianism tends to be cured by an indepth study of its precepts.
Hell not only do they lack evidence they even use their own custom definition of inflation as "increased money supply". The proper definition is "decreased buying power". Those things do not always correlate. A lot of inflation happens in static currencies as well for example. By their definition it is true that austerity prevents inflation but also utterly meaningless since thats just what they defined the word to mean. However they want you to assume the connotations of the proper definition still apply (it does not). Increased money supply does not have to equal decreased buying power. Especially if it is offset by taxes (which they ignore). So the claim is nothing but a ruse intended to drive a political ideology. It has absolutely no bearing on useful economic analysis.
As an aside ignoring taxes is stupid because austerity reduces tax revenue and provably it always does so by several orders of magnitude more than it saves in expenses. Austerity can, as baseline mathematics, never ever achieve anythiny except to make the deficit much larger much faster.
Hell there are still entire fields of economics including the Austrian model (which libertarianism is based on) that utterly rejects empiricism. They refuse to accept any contrary data as disproving a theory as a result.
Well here is mine. I invented the installable live CD. I did it first. Damn near every distro in the world uses that idea today, but I was the one who invented it. Thats just item one on a very long list. I am probably the most accomplished free software contributor on my entire continent.
And I am proud to be a feminist because its a natural and utterly inevitable logical outcome of applying a shred of rational thought to human society and the realities of power dynamics. Go ahead and mod ne down. Call me an SJW. Claim that being a fucking asshole is somehow a critical requirement to being productive (its actually the exact opposite: a major detriment). You won't hurt my feelings because "hurt feelings" is a strawman that literally never has anything to do with anything we SJWs talk about. Silencing and oppression and stereotyping does and those are far more harmful than mere hurt feelings: they are how you destroy equal opportunity de facto when it's been gained de jure. But I am a white male and secure enough in my accomplishments that acknowledging the huge role privilege played in them doesn't scare me. It doesn't make new feel guilty or oppressed. It's just simple reality. The only feeling I get from it is an urgent to share as much of that privileges with others as I can so we don't lose talented people because the opportunity to develop their talents was brutally denied them. Go ahead take your best advice hominem shot. Watch me not flinch.
The whole anti-PC culture has gotten completely out of control. Everyone is so eager to see who they can offend and whose lived experience they can utterly invalidate on no grounds whatsoever. Everybody is so keen to silence any voices that challenges their established worldview and so defensive of their status that when sombody talks of eradicating fruit juice you can't be sure if he is a diabetic or a homophobic antisemite.
Back in the late 1980s i tried to control my scalectric cars by hooking the controller cables up to the pc speaker. The idea was that by writing code to play sound at different volumes I could control the voltage to the tracks, thus car speed, and write a program to drive perfect laps. Totally failed to consider the power differentials or the RF noise from the brushes (hey I was 10 years old). Fried the entire computer, even the old seral mouse (my first ever) was toast.
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But the core of the Star Trek idea is to base everything on renewable resources. Which is at least technologically plausible.
While I was quite happy with upstart.
>Known physics like relativity gets completely ignored
That one wasn't entirely true. Roddenberry at the very least seriously considered the FTL problem and came up with a novel solution, the warp drive. And now phycisists actually think it could be done (whether this will realize I have no idea - but it's still in the realm of plausible right now).
Interestingly Alcubierre, the scientist who proved it's theoretically possible (with our currently known physics), is on record as saying that Star Trek inspired him to do the research in the first place (in an e-mail to William Shatner).
The point isn't really whether Alcubierre drives are possible (and can actually be built with human technology and all practical difficulties overcome), it's simply that not only did Roddenberry consider relativity (at least to a degree) but that his solution was sufficiently plausible for real scientists to investigate and affirm.
This is quite an achievement in science fiction, it's not a very common occurrence but it does happen sometimes though it seems SF inspires engineers far more frequently than scientists - which is why Clarke's geostationary satelites are a thing now. It could be that engineering is just a little easier, and so good SF writers get good engineering ideas more often ?
> What drives people to do things?
Actually he does answer that- repeatedly.
Self-improvement. Bettering ourselves, the opportunity to learn new things and push the frontiers of human knowledge.
Gene's vision is of a society without the mundane, so that everybody can spend time in these pursuits - which in our society is largely the preserve of a fairly small subset of academia and science. But the fundamental drive to DO those things, that's pretty universal - indeed that drive is practically the definition of humanity, it's literally the difference between inventing or not inventing the wheel.
Another premise of Star Trek is a post-religion highly sexually liberated society. In that society, hookers haven't got much of a market because getting laid has become ridiculously easy.
Basically - picking somebody up consists "Horny?" and "Yeah/Nay"
Nope, that episode seems to have slipped my mind...
Wait, do you mean the one where Picard took a dump on the holodeck ? I believe it was called "The Captain's Log" ?
>For as long as communities have existed, there has been evidence of bartering
Do you always make unsubstantiated claims which are outright false or only on Mondays ?
When communities first form, they generally just share everything equally - including the work to acquire resources. There are still communities like that living in the world today - all hunter gatherer communities are like that.
Later, as the community grows, it's needs grows and specialization becomes valuable. Still bartering and trade does not develop. All that happens is that teams start to split labour according to abilities, specialist teams all producing surpluses which are shared with all the other teams in return for access to their surpluses. There are still communities like that in the world today - and I would argue that the internal division of labor in modern corporations are the same pattern. My team does not pay the operations team to maintain the servers for us, nor do they pay my devops team to develop automation software for them. They get access to our production, and we to theirs - and that's the relationship between all the teams internal to the company.
If the population grows however, it eventually reaches a point where the organisational overhead of this system starts to exceed the production. Often you need specialist management teams just to manage distribution between teams (this is often a role taken on by priest-hoods, in the modern corporation - managers fill this role). But eventually there is a point where the scalability of the system is exceeded, and only then is bartering or trade invented. Many communities never reach this point.
At this point, money is still not invented, and it's invention is by no means guaranteed. Bartering works very well, it solves the efficiency problem of share-everything by distributing the management of distribution across the entire community with each individual only managing the part to and from themselves. But it does have it's own efficiency issues which come to play only if the community gets much, much larger. Then much like the share-everything system, the organisational overhead starts to get too big and something new is needed to organise distribution. In the middle-east - that something was money, which was inherited by the cultures directly descdended from there - European and Asian.
But it was not the only solution, any kind of value-proxy will do and value-proxies do not need to be tangible. The Incas for example found a very different solution - their currency was labor. Specifically if I wanted to buy say a pumpkin from you - then I would have to promise to do a favor for you to pay for it. Favors were traded to buy goods, and could be retraded (so you may want to buy some potatoes from Jack now, you go to him and tell him that I owe you a favor for a pumpkin so if he gives you the potatoes you'll have me do an equivalent favor for him instead).
That favor could be helping to plow his potato field for the next crop for example.
Things get very bizarre when two societies that have very different solutions at this point meet (we don't know what the next point, if any, will look like since no society has gotten there yet). This happened when the Spanish invaded the Americas. The Spanish worked Incan slaves literally to death in the silvermines, and the more they mined- the worse they became, the harsher the conditions, the greater the demands. The Incans could never understand why the Spanish were apparently impossible to satisfy.
That's because the Spanish had a money-society, and silver was a currency. The trouble is that the massive inequality between the conquistadors (with their large ships full of silver) and the rest of Spain caused hyperinflation (yes you can get inflation, even hyper-inflation in metal based currencies - history is filled with examples and severe inequality is a massive inflation driver as shops seek to capitalize on the vast money supplies of the rich and thus price goods out of the reach of the poor). The more
And the core point of Star Trek is to ask what happens when the supply of everything you could demand is infinite ?
Strictly speaking the price of anything with infinite supply is always zero. In fact, it doesn't even have to be infinite - it just has to APPEAR infinite. Nobody can survive without oxygen for more than a few minutes, it's the ultimate requirement. The highest demand any product can ever have... yet none of us pay for it. The SCUBA and Space Travel industries are the sole places where anybody makes a profit out of selling air to breath. Everywhere else it's available for free -because the supply is close enough to infinite that we don't need to charge for it (of course, assuming regulations are kept intact and this remains true...)
This is actually of great interest right now as we have other products which exist right now which we can produce at post-scarcity levels but not INVENT that way. Raising the interesting question of how to reward inventors appropriately when that dichotomy exists ? Intellectual products are foremost on this list. Right now the favored approach is to try and *create* scarcity where it doesn't exist, in order ot allow a market with a price to exist. This artificial scarcity is created by government intervention (in the form of laws like copyright) - and the more easy technology has made the replication, the more draconian the artificial scarcity laws have had to get.
The current path leads to dictatorship (and if you compare copy laws in the west today to what they were like under ACTUAL dictators - we've long surpassed them - the motivation for the laws is very different - but the practical implementation is not).
So what other paths are there ? If everything is post scarcity, perhaps that solves the problem because you don't NEED to pay the authors, after all - they can get everything they need for free. But when only some products are post-scarcity, that creates a conflict between "produces a post-scarcity product" and "needs to eat".
Frankly we haven't got a good answer to how to deal with this yet, only a very BAD answer which politicians are unwilling to question.
I've worked as a unix sysadmin in a shop where that meant having copies of every commercial and free unix. Hell I had two actual DEC Alphas running ! I had every version of Solaris from 8 onwards, every version of HPUX ever released and numerous linux systems there.
I'll know from bitter experience which things which unixes did best or worst. Linux had the best package managers by far for example, and HPUX probably the worst one you could ever have the misfortune of having to work with.
And as for init systems - there was nothing, absolutely nothing, that was more sheer hell to administer than SMF. SMF was a truly horrendous and unmanageable piece of crapware. Building a system similar to it is an act of sheer, calculated sadism.
Ive spent the majority of my career building distributions. Trust me as a distro developer of some distinction (linux.com once said that I did for slackware what Ubuntu did for debian, my distro at its height ran 95% of all computers in an entire country) when i tell you i know the decision making process and the motivation for adopting systemd has absolutely nothing to do with technical superiority.
But its worthless debating you. I showed you a legitimate case for not ever integrating core utilities. You responded with work arounds. I told you work arounds are not good enough. You pretend I changed topics !
Then you give examples of binary formats nobody minds... all of them databases, the very thing I said in five posts earlier was the only case in all software where binary formats for textual data had a legitimate case.
Logs dont have the needs of databases or the constraints. Databases are an edge case. You dont apply edge case reasoning to core technology. Its bad engineering.
And here is the real issue. In the past I could swap out any utility on my box for any other utility that was compatible. This allowedfor experimentation. For competition and evolution. I could replace sysv in any distro with upstart or openrc. Nothing else would be affected. Nothing would break. Now if I try replace the init system it breaks the message bus and that breaks the desktop.
That. Is. Insane.
>Oh dear. Unix turned into a religion. I guess we're going to disagree here because I'm not religious and don't care about staying true to the doctrine.
Ah the classic "call it a religion" and you can dismiss it argument. There's just one problem - this is the exactly OPPOSITE of a religion: because it's based on solid evidence. 40 years of hard experience and engineering principles that have seen the single greatest success in the entire history of software and produced the most flexible, powerful and reliable operating system that has ever existed. You can't dismiss that as blind faith. The Unix philosophy is more like a software-world application of the scientific method than it is like religion.
If anything - everything that goes against it tends to be religious - and based on programmers casting themselves as priests who know better than users what users will need to do.
>That's actually entirely intentional. journald contains a way to sign log files in such a way that it would make tampering detectable.
If I making log files untamperable is my particular use-case, I will be happy to get a third-party tool to do that for me. Taking it away is a terrible thing to do, the developers are assuming that the use-cases THEY can think of are all the use-cases that can legitimately exist. In the entire history of software that assumption has never once been true of any program. It is literally mathematically impossible for it NOT to be a false assumption. It's arrogance, plain and simple.
>First it wouldn't be as quick to access, second it would take a lot more space. An 87 byte log line (in the format normally seen in /var/log) turns into 1085 bytes of JSON. There's quite a lot of data stored in there.
So maybe, indexing is not as useful as you initially thought ? There are plenty of other formatted text outputs without the overhead of JSON though - the colon-seperation format of the passwd file for example. We've solved these problems very well, repeatedly, for 40 years without ever having to abandon clear-text for a core utility, the argument to go against that now - when computers are faster and more powerful than ever before in those 40 years, would have to be incredibly strong indeed, and nothing presented so far has come anywhere close.
You're tearing the wings of the plane, which could be a great innovation - but you'll need to PROVE that your wingless plane can fly better. So far, the project has failed to even prove it can still fly.
>But I guess if you want that anyway you could try submitting a patch. It's an open source project after all.
Or I can do what I did do - change distros to one that doesn't use systemd. But since Linux is now the unix of enterprise, and the distros that are being used professionally have all found the dependency hell created by systemd overwhelming and given up on offering alternatives - the problem isn't solved by that, it solves it for me at home, but it leaves me dealing with it when I get to the office in the morning.
Software development is an engineering discipline and there has, in it's history, never once been a more successful set of design principles than the unix philosophy. They have stayed - not out of blind faith - but as a consequence of their incredible and utterly unmatched success. There is a reason why Unix systems have come to dominate the OS space throughout the entire breadth of devices we've invented: it's the only design that is flexible and scalable enough to do ANY job you could possibly want. Every other design ends up in the same trap: easy things are easy, hard things are impossible. Unix alone found a way to make easy things easy, hard things possible (and not very hard).
SystemD is a perfect example of the kind of changes that win a battle and lose the war.
None of those are good enough reasons to violate a fundamental unix design principle thats been in place since Thompson's earliest experiments.
I cant edit the log with vi ? Then you broke unix. Its not unix anymore.
Cant imagine why anybody would possibly want to edit a log by hand ? Neither can I but thats the point: fundamental to the unix philosophy. We never ever try to imagine what a user may need to do or why. We do not do that. We let them do whatever they want exactly by not trying to imagine what that will be: because that way the system is never limited to what we can imagine.
There is nothing you cited worth losing that for. And formatted text is fine. Why not store it in json then ? You could get all those features without losing text as a format.
I should not need a specific tool to get the text. You should never ever have data that cannot be accessed by every tool you have. No work arounds required.
Right... because the only alternative to systemd is SysV - actually I am in favor of parallel init and helped Richard Gooch worked on his back in circa 2000.
The fact is though - none of those ended up replacing half the damn base system with other components. Every other init replacement was an init replacement. The end.
Upstart was very nice, hell even slackware's RC based one was quite nice and lacked most of the issues you raise (though it didn't support paralel bootups out of the box I added support for those to OpenLab back in 2005 with trivial effort).
That's just it though - if any component didn't do EXACTLY what I want, I want to be able to swap THAT component out with anything else I choose, or write, and the init system has no business telling me what that should be.
The pipeline concept fundamentally depends on not violating one of the principle unix philosophy rules which systemd does not honour: everything should always be clear-text. Never store data in a binary format. It is NEVER a good idea. The sole justifiable exception to that rule is relational databases and I'm not even sure it was a good idea to make that exception. Everything should always be editable with standard tools. And nothing, should EVER be strongly coupled, weak coupling only.
Let me give you an example of why systemd is really a problem. A few years ago I worked for a company that build an application which, among other things, needed to know about ip-phone registrations on the network from CISCO hardware. As it happens the CISCO hardware does not expose this information in any sane way - but it DOES log it via syslog and can send those via the syslog protocol to another system.
There's just one problem - when a site comes online, it is incredibly common to have tens of thousands of phones registering in a matter of seconds. No syslog system out there could (at the time anyway) handle 40-thousand messages arriving in 5 seconds, and reliably log them all.
And we had to process these, and could not afford to lose a single one. So we wrote our own syslog daemon, that was backed by a powerful queueing system which could get the whole bunch and queue them up so the application could process them and add the phones to the database.
An incredibly niche requirement, absolutely, but being able to meet that niche by simply writing our own replacement for a core OS utility which met our unique needs - that's WHY Unix runs the internet, and systemd harms that. No harm, no matter how minor, can be tolerated of that - because if we lose that, we will lose everything.
We are not trying to compete with MacOSX. Nobody sane runs servers on MacOSX. The desktop is important, but we cannot and shouldn't try to get it by becoming what the desktop OS's are, if we can't offer what's unique and powerful about our system there - then what's the point of being there at all ?
No, I don't like that it requires replacement with "something compatible" - ANYTHING that can accept a message should be compatible.
The ability to use a DIFFERENT logger is not a bug, in fact that feature is the reason Unix has survived for 40 years - because no matter how technology changed, no matter what hardware changes we saw, no matter what new demands were placed on it, you can meet them by swapping out just one or two simple components.
It is possible - only when every component is independent and simple, so you CAN swap out components individually and everything else still just works.
>Thanks, but I'm not religious. I prefer things that are convenient to those that are ideologically pure.
That's all well and good but when that "ideology" is the result of 40 years of practical experience by a culture that has produced the engine that drives the entire 21st century (yes, that engine is Unix, because it drives the internet), which has allowed that system to survive thousands of incredible changes to technology virtually unchanged - because no matter how the world changed, it was still working, still useful, still more powerful than the alternatives and changing it to make use of the latest and greatest available technology was always ridiculously easy, when it produced the only operating system that runs on everything from the tiniest embedded systems to the largest supercomputers - then rejecting it requires a strong, rational argument - and even the best such arguments are likely to hold only in very rare niche cases.
And the problem with systemd is it violates virtually every one of the principles of that philosophy and offers NO rational reason for ANY of the violations - and it isn't doing so in a niche where perhaps some of those principles are genuinely not applicable, it's doing it to the heart of the system.
These changes are the ONLY reason Linux exists - because they are the reason Unix didn't die in 1969 when it was invented, or in the 1970s when mainframes met microprocessors, or in the 1980s when PCs were invented... they are what allowed unix to adapt and scale to the fast changing world of technology at the front of the curve at all times, exactly because they made changing it always easier than building something new.
It violates the rule of separating mechanism from policy. It now enforces policy on what ought to be a pure mechanism - and there is a very solid and rational reason for that rule: policy changes often but mechanism tends to be long-lived. Failing to separate them means tying the policy to the lifespan of the mechanism and when new technology requires new policies you get incredible hardship. Virtually every major problem windows ever had sprung from it's marriage of mechanism with policy. Why do you think it took them 20 years to implement the bare beginnings of proper multi-user support ? Because the policy of single user was tied fundamentally into the mechanisms of the system 20 years earlier.
And what does systemd offer as a rational reason for violating this ? Nothing.
It violates the rule that applications should always expect simple clear text as input, and produce simple clear text as output. That rule is so fundamental to the flexibility and power of unix that to break it at the init level is to completely destroy that power. If systemd becomes universal, linux will lose all the marketshare it gain in every market, and lose it to unix systems that kept the rule - because the next breakthrough in technology will require adaptations - which systemd will have made incredibly hard.
More-over, it weakens what you can do with the system - the ability to string commands together in utterly arbitrary ways via pipelines have allowed a relatively small set of primitive applications to serve literally ever conceivable user need, exactly by NOT trying to conceive of every possible user need - but providing the means to construct whatever solution you could possibly want on the fly.
And what rational reason does systemd offer for this ? Nothing.
And those are just two out of a very long list.
The argument that the unix was is "too complex" is not new, people have been making that argument for the entire 36 years since Unix was first invented, they have always been proven wrong -because even if it's true, the reality is that the trade-off is worth it, because it creates a system where anything and everything is possible - including the one thing no other system has EVER managed: to survive fashions.
There are many variations on capitalism. What Americans call libertarianism however is only compatible with Austrian school. Welfare states are also capitalist (no they have less than nothing to do with socialism and there is literally nothing whatsoever about socialism that requires or even involves the state. Anarcho-socialist philosophies are perfectly logical to people who know what the word means)
All your other claims are blatantly false and ignorant however. For a start libertarianism is almost 500 years old and no such thing as capitalist libertarianism has existed for more than 40 of those. In the world outside America its coupled with socialism. Indeed the only libertarian society that has ever actually existed was a socialist one. Read up on Andalusia.
You think the political philosophy of libertarianism does not favour a particular economic model and vice versa ? Then you are flagrantly ignorant of it. So ignorant in fact that I would be most surprized if you did not consider yourself to be a libertarian. Much like religion libertarianism tends to be cured by an indepth study of its precepts.
Breathing is carbon neutral. Your joke would have been funny if you stopped one line earlier and didn't go full retard.
Hell not only do they lack evidence they even use their own custom definition of inflation as "increased money supply". The proper definition is "decreased buying power". Those things do not always correlate. A lot of inflation happens in static currencies as well for example. By their definition it is true that austerity prevents inflation but also utterly meaningless since thats just what they defined the word to mean. However they want you to assume the connotations of the proper definition still apply (it does not). Increased money supply does not have to equal decreased buying power. Especially if it is offset by taxes (which they ignore).
So the claim is nothing but a ruse intended to drive a political ideology. It has absolutely no bearing on useful economic analysis.
As an aside ignoring taxes is stupid because austerity reduces tax revenue and provably it always does so by several orders of magnitude more than it saves in expenses. Austerity can, as baseline mathematics, never ever achieve anythiny except to make the deficit much larger much faster.
Hell there are still entire fields of economics including the Austrian model (which libertarianism is based on) that utterly rejects empiricism. They refuse to accept any contrary data as disproving a theory as a result.
Well here is mine. I invented the installable live CD. I did it first. Damn near every distro in the world uses that idea today, but I was the one who invented it. Thats just item one on a very long list. I am probably the most accomplished free software contributor on my entire continent.
And I am proud to be a feminist because its a natural and utterly inevitable logical outcome of applying a shred of rational thought to human society and the realities of power dynamics. Go ahead and mod ne down. Call me an SJW. Claim that being a fucking asshole is somehow a critical requirement to being productive (its actually the exact opposite: a major detriment). You won't hurt my feelings because "hurt feelings" is a strawman that literally never has anything to do with anything we SJWs talk about. Silencing and oppression and stereotyping does and those are far more harmful than mere hurt feelings: they are how you destroy equal opportunity de facto when it's been gained de jure.
But I am a white male and secure enough in my accomplishments that acknowledging the huge role privilege played in them doesn't scare me. It doesn't make new feel guilty or oppressed. It's just simple reality. The only feeling I get from it is an urgent to share as much of that privileges with others as I can so we don't lose talented people because the opportunity to develop their talents was brutally denied them.
Go ahead take your best advice hominem shot. Watch me not flinch.
The whole anti-PC culture has gotten completely out of control. Everyone is so eager to see who they can offend and whose lived experience they can utterly invalidate on no grounds whatsoever. Everybody is so keen to silence any voices that challenges their established worldview and so defensive of their status that when sombody talks of eradicating fruit juice you can't be sure if he is a diabetic or a homophobic antisemite.
Back in the late 1980s i tried to control my scalectric cars by hooking the controller cables up to the pc speaker. The idea was that by writing code to play sound at different volumes I could control the voltage to the tracks, thus car speed, and write a program to drive perfect laps. Totally failed to consider the power differentials or the RF noise from the brushes (hey I was 10 years old).
Fried the entire computer, even the old seral mouse (my first ever) was toast.
Chemically speaking electronics are mostly rocks. Silicone and copper are both rocks.