AT&T doesn't own any of the land that the poles are on. These local governments should threaten to use imminent domain to reclaim the poles and then lease them back to AT&T and anyone else who wants to use them. Basically, force AT&T to play nice or make them pay for the privilege of their monopoly.
A similar situation is playing out in the very sparsely populated area where I live: Centurylink has decided that it's not profitable to service my area so, they refuse to do any new DSL installations. Large expensive homes are built only to find that, at best, they are stuck on satellite internet and, at worst, will have no internet connection at all (cell phones don't work here so, that's not an option). Homes that Centurylink has previously serviced are being sold to new owners only to find out that Centurylink won't *re-install* an internet connection for the new owners. Since Centurylink owns all the poles and refuses to service the area anymore, the situation will never improve unless the local government intervenes.
The problem is that the local governments are either clueless or corrupt (frequently both I would imagine). My neighbor is literally the state senator for my area and when I've brought up the issue with him (in person), he considers it to be so low priority that he gives me some meaningless platitude and changes the subject. I don't think he's necessarily in the pocket of Centurylink, I think he just doesn't understand/believe what I'm telling him. He's from the "business can do no wrong" generation so, some nerd half his age must be either over reacting or just plain wrong.
It's amazing to see our infrastructure stagnate and crumble because the previous generation has sold us out to the highest bidder and doesn't see anything wrong with that.
The thing that I find so baffling is that the UK will almost certainly negotiate treaties with the EU similar to what Switzerland has. Those treaties will obligate the UK to adopt almost all the EU rules that they were trying to escape by voting to leave. So, effectively, nothing will change except that the UK will no longer have representation in the EU and will instead by forced to adopt EU policy via treaties.
It's still a lot less convenient than torrents. With a torrent, I download it once and have a "video player neutral" file that will remain on my disks for as long as I'm willing to maintain those bits. I own those bits. And I paid a VPN for that privilege and not Netflix.
Netflix also still offers DVD/Bluray service and, for low bandwidth customers (so, most of the geographic United States), this is a much less frustrating way to use Netflix. You can pay for a multi-disc plan and rip hundreds/thousands of movies and, again, you have them for however long you are willing to maintain the bits.
So, no, it's not "not a bad compromise". It's the kind of compromise a company makes when it's getting fucked in every orifice by the movie industry, the TV industry, the ISP industry, the mobile industry, etc. All of those industries want to see Netflix die a horrible death. This is a tiny concession that Netflix has granted users at the cost of, I would imagine, extremely painful negotiations with the industries that are trying to kill them.
This isn't an awesome new feature. It's a feature that took someone a day to write, another person a year to negotiate, and all Netflix customers paying $X more per month.
If the cost of the robot is cheaper than the cost of a cleaning lady over the warranty period of the robot, why wouldn't you buy it? If a $5000 cleaning robot was introduced with a 5 year warranty, you'd be crazy not to buy it. That's way cheaper than a cleaning lady and it's something that a middle class person could probably afford and justify. If useful robots genuinely become available to the middle class, it's going to be a huge win for society.
The lawsuit is an interesting example of the differences between the Middle East and the West. In the Middle East, when innocent people are killed en masse, terrorists are born. In the West, when innocent people are killed en masse, frivolous platitudes and lawsuits are born. I don't know how you defeat an enemy that grows after every attack you make on them. But, looking at the direction our society is going, it's pretty obvious that people have figured out how to defeat us. Just instill enough fear that we voluntarily devolve our society.
Blaming a small handful of online (and rich) entities for any kind of terror attack is absurd. In general, no single company facilitates a terrorist attack. As far as I'm aware, no one sued Boeing for 9/11. As far as I'm aware, no one has sued Toyota for the rise of ISIS. Taking it a step further, no one has sued clothing manufacturers for allowing terrorists to blend in with the rest of society. No one has sued the doctors that might have treated terrorists. No one has sued local construction companies for building the roads/subways that the terrorists have used. And on and on and on.
I think it's deplorable that people are trying to make a quick buck in the courts on the backs of innocent victims.
I imagine that the decline in market share for Firefox has absolutely nothing to do with "the developers being unable to resist destroying it". Sure, on slashdot you'll hear people endlessly bitch and moan about Firefox (and frequently for good reason) but the average user probably doesn't give a shit about that stuff. The market share decline in Firefox is almost certainly due to one single reason: People opting into the ecosystem that their phone uses. What is killing Firefox is not having a dominate mobile platform to entice people to use Firefox everywhere.
I imagine it's also a response to the Steamlink. I don't know how popular they are yet but, they are excellent devices. They work well enough that I just racked my gaming machine and put a Steamlink in my living room and another one on a desk with a monitor/keyboard/mouse.
Who wants a console when you can just tuck a beefy gaming machine in an out of the way spot and buy some cheap Steamlinks to play your games in the most appropriate spot.
It's actually a lot worse than you suspect. Research it a bit and you'll understand the underlying motivation. Basically, these morons have decided to break the traditional process hierarchy model and are spawning user processes "out of band". So, they don't have a reliable way to make those processes shutdown. This insane hack is their solution to fixing the problem that they created. You can't rely on screen working correctly anymore because sometimes the PulseAudio daemon doesn't correctly shut down. Not even fucking joking.
I think it's both. It's systemd for deciding that this is a sane default behavior and the debian guys for not having the balls to stand up to this bullshit. If you read the bug report linked in the summary, you'll see someone with an @debian.org address say what effectively amounts to, "This seems like a good idea for my laptop and, I can't imagine we have many users that are different from my laptop". Not even fucking kidding: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bi.... So, yes, debian is at fault for not having the fortitude to put this garbage in the bin. But, the filth didn't originate from debian.
No, my primary machine has no traces of systemd or PulseAudio or any other ultra-invasive piece of software. And it's the most stable, reliable machine I've ever used. By a huge margin. Inviting these ill-advised RedHat technologies onto your machine is just asking for trouble. They are *not* needed in a workstation or server environment. I honestly have no idea why a distro like debian would adopt them. They genuinely detract from the traditional stability of something like debian. I find it absolutely shocking to see systemd as a default in debian. And, if you are a debian user, it's non-trivial to exorcise systemd.
That's my take on it as well. Basically, poorly written stuff like PulseAudio doesn't properly shut down when you log off. The solution, obviously, is to break the normal behavior of Linux so that some moronic sound daemon properly shuts down when you log out. It's like watching a train wreck in slow motion.
Changes like this make me wonder if the systemd developers even use Linux beyond their local development workstations. This isn't just an inconvenient change, it breaks the expected and decades old behavior of how Unix machines work. This breaks ^Z/bg/disown, it breaks screen, it breaks nohup, etc. Yes, these things can be made to work still but, why do I need to jump through hoops to re-gain the functionality I've relied on for decades? If I'm not aware of this change, how would I even figure out why all my screen sessions died when I logged out? What benefits am I gaining by having this be the default behavior?
If you want to live downtown Ft. Collins, then sure, the housing prices are crazy. If you're willing to live in Wellington or take a longer commute and live up in Livermore or Red Feather Lakes then the housing prices are hilariously low. The house that I own in Livermore would be a multi-million dollar "ranch" in most parts of the country. But, it was probably cheaper than your average downtown shitbox condo in the majority of US cities.
This is a hilarious comment. I've lived in a number of big cities (New York, London, Buenos Aires, etc) and Denver strikes me as being remarkably safe for a city of its size. Sure, in Colorado a lot of people smoke marijuana but, I don't see how that's even vaguely an issue. I'm a business owner and I'd hire a heavy marijuana user without hesitation but I'd gladly show an alcoholic the door. I've never seen a marijuana smoker show up to work still stoned or hungover. I've never seen a marijuana smoker get into fights or otherwise behave in an anti-social manner. Marijuana smokers live perfectly normal, very laid back lives. If anything, the legalization of marijuana in Colorado has reduced crime and helped bolster our schools via the insane influx of tax money.
Our experiment has succeeded. Take your outdated way of thinking and fuck off.
The K&R book is definitely a classic. There was a time when it was on every developers bookshelf. If you want to go back that far, one of the most amusing programming books I've ever seen is A Fortran Coloring Book. I think you can still find copies of it and I don't think it's possible to read it without laughing.
Elementary schools shouldn't have an agenda. Software is so pervasive in our society that people who want to write software will gravitate towards it. I remember my teacher getting irritated with me when I realized that I could make the Logo turtle do really arbitrary shit. No one taught me how to do that, I just intuitively understood it.
We don't need more programmers, we need more natural born programmers. People that see the logic in programming as an art medium. People that derive genuine satisfaction from doing very interesting but very simple things with software.
The vast majority of humans I've met can not and will not ever be good at writing software. Introducing children to writing software is fine. I was introduced to music at that age and I know I could never be a good musician. I don't regret those music classes but, holy shit am I glad that they weren't vital to my progression through school. Making programming mandatory, or giving it such a high pedestal that people think they *need* to program is insanely harmful to our society. Write music, fiddle with cars, do what makes you happy. If you enjoy writing software then you should do that. You'll know if you enjoy it way before some unqualified teacher forces you to do it.
Absolutely. I completely understand their motivations. I've re-invented wheels many times but, I tend to do it at home as a hobby. That's the appropriate venue for re-inventing wheels because nothing is at stake if/when you fail. In a business environment, you need a genuine business case for re-writing a piece of working software. "It's in COBOL" is not a valid reason to re-write it.
Re-implementing an API and wholesale lifting a GPL software package are not even vaguely related. And, the end part of her quote, where she proclaims doom and gloom if we don't all move to the cloud, is ponderous hyperbole. The is just scare tactic garbage from an attorney who wants to bait the waters before she takes on the appeal and charges Oracle millions of dollars for the privilege.
Agreed. Unix Power Tools teaches the craftsman what his tools are capable of doing. When I was learning Unix many years ago, I integrated the book into my daily routine. I'd just open it up to a random page and read a couple articles each morning. Every day I knew something that I didn't know the day before with 10 minutes of effort. I think my love of Unix stems from Unix Power Tools.
Unix Power Tools is from O'Reilly but, it's not really a traditional book. It's more like 1000 pages of super useful Unix anecdotes. When I've worked at companies that had interns, I've always bought a copy for them and dropped it on their desk. I would consider it required reading for anyone working on Unix/Linux machines.
The real issue is that younger engineers think that all software needs to be new, shiny and preferably, in their pet language.
I once worked in a shop where a group of very young engineers spent several years trying to re-write an old and fairly complex build system that was written in perl. They weren't re-writing it because it was slow or buggy or anything like that. They were re-writing it because they didn't like perl. And their reason for not liking perl was that it wasn't spelled "ruby". Years of work by several engineers to replace the perl program and they never got it to the state where it was as fast and reliable as the perl. Eventually the project was cancelled and they just found someone who knew perl and he adds a new feature every once in a while.
I've also seen scientific shops decide that they need to replace all their fortran code with python for vacuous reasons like "modernization". This is frequently paid for by our tax money and, after years of development, if the python even becomes robust enough to deploy, they are shocked to find that the new code runs an order of magnitude slower than the old code and sometimes gives incorrect answers.
This is the nature of the modern software industry. If something is written in COBOL/Fortran/perl, it needs to be re-written in python or ruby or whatever the pet language of the week is. Not because the old stuff doesn't work, because the old stuff is old. Younger engineers love to re-invent the wheel as long as they can use their pet language.
Code is a byproduct of ideas. The actual act of writing the code is the least difficult and least time consuming part of creating software. I can't even remember the last time I sat down to write code and didn't already have all the code in my head. Once the problem is solved in your head, it's just pushing buttons in an editor to bring it to fruition.
I think that's part of the problem with the software industry. People think they need to show up to work and bang out code all day. That's basically the recipe to writing buggy code. Let the code brew in your head for a while and then sit down one day and bang it out and you'll probably find that it's super solid, very coherent code.
If you are writing code and can't see the next 100 lines of code you're about to write, you're doing it wrong.
Whatever kernel version ends up being in 16.10 will be available for older Ubuntu versions in the backports repo. For 16.04 the meta-package will probably be called something like linux-generic-lts-yakkety.
Slashdot Mirror
AT&T doesn't own any of the land that the poles are on. These local governments should threaten to use imminent domain to reclaim the poles and then lease them back to AT&T and anyone else who wants to use them. Basically, force AT&T to play nice or make them pay for the privilege of their monopoly.
A similar situation is playing out in the very sparsely populated area where I live: Centurylink has decided that it's not profitable to service my area so, they refuse to do any new DSL installations. Large expensive homes are built only to find that, at best, they are stuck on satellite internet and, at worst, will have no internet connection at all (cell phones don't work here so, that's not an option). Homes that Centurylink has previously serviced are being sold to new owners only to find out that Centurylink won't *re-install* an internet connection for the new owners. Since Centurylink owns all the poles and refuses to service the area anymore, the situation will never improve unless the local government intervenes.
The problem is that the local governments are either clueless or corrupt (frequently both I would imagine). My neighbor is literally the state senator for my area and when I've brought up the issue with him (in person), he considers it to be so low priority that he gives me some meaningless platitude and changes the subject. I don't think he's necessarily in the pocket of Centurylink, I think he just doesn't understand/believe what I'm telling him. He's from the "business can do no wrong" generation so, some nerd half his age must be either over reacting or just plain wrong.
It's amazing to see our infrastructure stagnate and crumble because the previous generation has sold us out to the highest bidder and doesn't see anything wrong with that.
The thing that I find so baffling is that the UK will almost certainly negotiate treaties with the EU similar to what Switzerland has. Those treaties will obligate the UK to adopt almost all the EU rules that they were trying to escape by voting to leave. So, effectively, nothing will change except that the UK will no longer have representation in the EU and will instead by forced to adopt EU policy via treaties.
It's still a lot less convenient than torrents. With a torrent, I download it once and have a "video player neutral" file that will remain on my disks for as long as I'm willing to maintain those bits. I own those bits. And I paid a VPN for that privilege and not Netflix.
Netflix also still offers DVD/Bluray service and, for low bandwidth customers (so, most of the geographic United States), this is a much less frustrating way to use Netflix. You can pay for a multi-disc plan and rip hundreds/thousands of movies and, again, you have them for however long you are willing to maintain the bits.
So, no, it's not "not a bad compromise". It's the kind of compromise a company makes when it's getting fucked in every orifice by the movie industry, the TV industry, the ISP industry, the mobile industry, etc. All of those industries want to see Netflix die a horrible death. This is a tiny concession that Netflix has granted users at the cost of, I would imagine, extremely painful negotiations with the industries that are trying to kill them.
This isn't an awesome new feature. It's a feature that took someone a day to write, another person a year to negotiate, and all Netflix customers paying $X more per month.
That probably explains why so many people rely on Facebook for news: Cat videos are approximately as useful as most "news". And, they have cats...
If the cost of the robot is cheaper than the cost of a cleaning lady over the warranty period of the robot, why wouldn't you buy it? If a $5000 cleaning robot was introduced with a 5 year warranty, you'd be crazy not to buy it. That's way cheaper than a cleaning lady and it's something that a middle class person could probably afford and justify. If useful robots genuinely become available to the middle class, it's going to be a huge win for society.
The lawsuit is an interesting example of the differences between the Middle East and the West. In the Middle East, when innocent people are killed en masse, terrorists are born. In the West, when innocent people are killed en masse, frivolous platitudes and lawsuits are born. I don't know how you defeat an enemy that grows after every attack you make on them. But, looking at the direction our society is going, it's pretty obvious that people have figured out how to defeat us. Just instill enough fear that we voluntarily devolve our society.
Blaming a small handful of online (and rich) entities for any kind of terror attack is absurd. In general, no single company facilitates a terrorist attack. As far as I'm aware, no one sued Boeing for 9/11. As far as I'm aware, no one has sued Toyota for the rise of ISIS. Taking it a step further, no one has sued clothing manufacturers for allowing terrorists to blend in with the rest of society. No one has sued the doctors that might have treated terrorists. No one has sued local construction companies for building the roads/subways that the terrorists have used. And on and on and on.
I think it's deplorable that people are trying to make a quick buck in the courts on the backs of innocent victims.
I imagine that the decline in market share for Firefox has absolutely nothing to do with "the developers being unable to resist destroying it". Sure, on slashdot you'll hear people endlessly bitch and moan about Firefox (and frequently for good reason) but the average user probably doesn't give a shit about that stuff. The market share decline in Firefox is almost certainly due to one single reason: People opting into the ecosystem that their phone uses. What is killing Firefox is not having a dominate mobile platform to entice people to use Firefox everywhere.
I imagine it's also a response to the Steamlink. I don't know how popular they are yet but, they are excellent devices. They work well enough that I just racked my gaming machine and put a Steamlink in my living room and another one on a desk with a monitor/keyboard/mouse.
Who wants a console when you can just tuck a beefy gaming machine in an out of the way spot and buy some cheap Steamlinks to play your games in the most appropriate spot.
It's actually a lot worse than you suspect. Research it a bit and you'll understand the underlying motivation. Basically, these morons have decided to break the traditional process hierarchy model and are spawning user processes "out of band". So, they don't have a reliable way to make those processes shutdown. This insane hack is their solution to fixing the problem that they created. You can't rely on screen working correctly anymore because sometimes the PulseAudio daemon doesn't correctly shut down. Not even fucking joking.
I think it's both. It's systemd for deciding that this is a sane default behavior and the debian guys for not having the balls to stand up to this bullshit. If you read the bug report linked in the summary, you'll see someone with an @debian.org address say what effectively amounts to, "This seems like a good idea for my laptop and, I can't imagine we have many users that are different from my laptop". Not even fucking kidding: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bi.... So, yes, debian is at fault for not having the fortitude to put this garbage in the bin. But, the filth didn't originate from debian.
No, my primary machine has no traces of systemd or PulseAudio or any other ultra-invasive piece of software. And it's the most stable, reliable machine I've ever used. By a huge margin. Inviting these ill-advised RedHat technologies onto your machine is just asking for trouble. They are *not* needed in a workstation or server environment. I honestly have no idea why a distro like debian would adopt them. They genuinely detract from the traditional stability of something like debian. I find it absolutely shocking to see systemd as a default in debian. And, if you are a debian user, it's non-trivial to exorcise systemd.
That's my take on it as well. Basically, poorly written stuff like PulseAudio doesn't properly shut down when you log off. The solution, obviously, is to break the normal behavior of Linux so that some moronic sound daemon properly shuts down when you log out. It's like watching a train wreck in slow motion.
Changes like this make me wonder if the systemd developers even use Linux beyond their local development workstations. This isn't just an inconvenient change, it breaks the expected and decades old behavior of how Unix machines work. This breaks ^Z/bg/disown, it breaks screen, it breaks nohup, etc. Yes, these things can be made to work still but, why do I need to jump through hoops to re-gain the functionality I've relied on for decades? If I'm not aware of this change, how would I even figure out why all my screen sessions died when I logged out? What benefits am I gaining by having this be the default behavior?
If you want to live downtown Ft. Collins, then sure, the housing prices are crazy. If you're willing to live in Wellington or take a longer commute and live up in Livermore or Red Feather Lakes then the housing prices are hilariously low. The house that I own in Livermore would be a multi-million dollar "ranch" in most parts of the country. But, it was probably cheaper than your average downtown shitbox condo in the majority of US cities.
This is a hilarious comment. I've lived in a number of big cities (New York, London, Buenos Aires, etc) and Denver strikes me as being remarkably safe for a city of its size. Sure, in Colorado a lot of people smoke marijuana but, I don't see how that's even vaguely an issue. I'm a business owner and I'd hire a heavy marijuana user without hesitation but I'd gladly show an alcoholic the door. I've never seen a marijuana smoker show up to work still stoned or hungover. I've never seen a marijuana smoker get into fights or otherwise behave in an anti-social manner. Marijuana smokers live perfectly normal, very laid back lives. If anything, the legalization of marijuana in Colorado has reduced crime and helped bolster our schools via the insane influx of tax money.
Our experiment has succeeded. Take your outdated way of thinking and fuck off.
The K&R book is definitely a classic. There was a time when it was on every developers bookshelf. If you want to go back that far, one of the most amusing programming books I've ever seen is A Fortran Coloring Book. I think you can still find copies of it and I don't think it's possible to read it without laughing.
Elementary schools shouldn't have an agenda. Software is so pervasive in our society that people who want to write software will gravitate towards it. I remember my teacher getting irritated with me when I realized that I could make the Logo turtle do really arbitrary shit. No one taught me how to do that, I just intuitively understood it.
We don't need more programmers, we need more natural born programmers. People that see the logic in programming as an art medium. People that derive genuine satisfaction from doing very interesting but very simple things with software.
The vast majority of humans I've met can not and will not ever be good at writing software. Introducing children to writing software is fine. I was introduced to music at that age and I know I could never be a good musician. I don't regret those music classes but, holy shit am I glad that they weren't vital to my progression through school. Making programming mandatory, or giving it such a high pedestal that people think they *need* to program is insanely harmful to our society. Write music, fiddle with cars, do what makes you happy. If you enjoy writing software then you should do that. You'll know if you enjoy it way before some unqualified teacher forces you to do it.
Absolutely. I completely understand their motivations. I've re-invented wheels many times but, I tend to do it at home as a hobby. That's the appropriate venue for re-inventing wheels because nothing is at stake if/when you fail. In a business environment, you need a genuine business case for re-writing a piece of working software. "It's in COBOL" is not a valid reason to re-write it.
Re-implementing an API and wholesale lifting a GPL software package are not even vaguely related. And, the end part of her quote, where she proclaims doom and gloom if we don't all move to the cloud, is ponderous hyperbole. The is just scare tactic garbage from an attorney who wants to bait the waters before she takes on the appeal and charges Oracle millions of dollars for the privilege.
Agreed. Unix Power Tools teaches the craftsman what his tools are capable of doing. When I was learning Unix many years ago, I integrated the book into my daily routine. I'd just open it up to a random page and read a couple articles each morning. Every day I knew something that I didn't know the day before with 10 minutes of effort. I think my love of Unix stems from Unix Power Tools.
Unix Power Tools is from O'Reilly but, it's not really a traditional book. It's more like 1000 pages of super useful Unix anecdotes. When I've worked at companies that had interns, I've always bought a copy for them and dropped it on their desk. I would consider it required reading for anyone working on Unix/Linux machines.
The real issue is that younger engineers think that all software needs to be new, shiny and preferably, in their pet language.
I once worked in a shop where a group of very young engineers spent several years trying to re-write an old and fairly complex build system that was written in perl. They weren't re-writing it because it was slow or buggy or anything like that. They were re-writing it because they didn't like perl. And their reason for not liking perl was that it wasn't spelled "ruby". Years of work by several engineers to replace the perl program and they never got it to the state where it was as fast and reliable as the perl. Eventually the project was cancelled and they just found someone who knew perl and he adds a new feature every once in a while.
I've also seen scientific shops decide that they need to replace all their fortran code with python for vacuous reasons like "modernization". This is frequently paid for by our tax money and, after years of development, if the python even becomes robust enough to deploy, they are shocked to find that the new code runs an order of magnitude slower than the old code and sometimes gives incorrect answers.
This is the nature of the modern software industry. If something is written in COBOL/Fortran/perl, it needs to be re-written in python or ruby or whatever the pet language of the week is. Not because the old stuff doesn't work, because the old stuff is old. Younger engineers love to re-invent the wheel as long as they can use their pet language.
Code is a byproduct of ideas. The actual act of writing the code is the least difficult and least time consuming part of creating software. I can't even remember the last time I sat down to write code and didn't already have all the code in my head. Once the problem is solved in your head, it's just pushing buttons in an editor to bring it to fruition.
I think that's part of the problem with the software industry. People think they need to show up to work and bang out code all day. That's basically the recipe to writing buggy code. Let the code brew in your head for a while and then sit down one day and bang it out and you'll probably find that it's super solid, very coherent code.
If you are writing code and can't see the next 100 lines of code you're about to write, you're doing it wrong.
Whatever kernel version ends up being in 16.10 will be available for older Ubuntu versions in the backports repo. For 16.04 the meta-package will probably be called something like linux-generic-lts-yakkety.