Such an organism may evolve slowly, but since there is no such thing as perfect data copy, (Even in computers-- which is why RAM has such things as ECC, and uncorrectable errors) the organism would still evolve.
Even if we go full on SciFi Robot Apocholypse here, we have the potential for manufacturing defects in the replication process prohibiting perfect program upload, and other forms of imperfect data transfer/replication, which will have cumulative effect given sufficient time.
Evolution is the phenomenon that occurs as a result of living organisms responding to changing stimuli in their environment, coupled with the need to consume energy to procreate and survive.
If the phenomenon consumes energy, reproduces, and responds to stimuli, it will experience evolution.
This is for "Life" in the generalized sense, fully abstracted away from any specific mechanisms by which those processes may be achieved. It is perfectly sensible for an artificial lifeform to be constructed, as long as it is able to fully carry out those processes. It needn't have any organic components whatsoever.
Nowhere in the historical definition of "life" used by life science is there a requirement for specific mechanisms-- just processes.
Dont asks silly questions that you dont really want to know the answer to-- That's been one of the major reasons why HR drones have been looking up facebook accounts for many years now-- To see if you are naughty or nice.
So, YES. Big data knows that.
Big data knows who you voted for. Big data knows what kind of hamburger you get from McDonalds. Big data knows what fragrance your girlfriend/wife wears.
THAT IS THE POINT OF BIG DATA.
Big data takes shit loads of seemingly unrelated bits of information that people foolishly air in public, cross-references it, then uses it to make correlation based predictions.
Personally, I am opposed to the very idea behind big data. (Then again, I harbor these "quaint" notions that things need to be allowed to be kept private.)
I believe the previous poster was referring to such lovely things as the employment of "The pear of anguish" for people "convicted" of "the heinous, unnatural" act of sodomy.
Due to religious influence, the practice of "Sodomy" (a wide umbrella for multitudinous sexual acts considered 'sinful') was considered a capital offence in more countries in europe than not. (And those that didnt have it as a capital offence, had torture as one of the major punishments, such as the afore mentioned pear of anguish.)
"Christians" generally DID do those things (Beheading people and the like) for a very long time. The major reason we don't now, came from 3 things, one of which is vitally important for the others to have as much influence as they did.
Firstly, THERE MUST BE A NON-AMBIGUOUS MESSAGE OF FORGIVENESS AND ACCEPTANCE in their religious text.
Secondly, Literacy and availability of that religious text must be high.
Thirdly, some political figure must shatter the religious oligarchy, and make free-practice of religion safe.
The middle east has a very "medieval" worldview. The difference between modern christianity (with emphasis on catholicism and the vatican) and current islam (in the middle east), is that modern christianity is radically more "Enlightened"--- That's just on the secular front.
This happened because 1) The actual text of the new testament is one of forgiveness, (practically unending levels of forgiveness), 2) The Rennaisance enabled the common public to have access to the bible, so that they could read it for themselves, and 3) The great schism of the roman catholic church, pushed into prominence by the king of england instituting the church of england, and protecting "Heretical protestants" enabled people who free-practiced to do so without fear of political prosecution.
On the religious front, the actual tenets of the bible's new testament strongly advocate forgiveness of sin, not punishment. The entire new testament is basically devoted to this ideal. There is no such parallel in islam. The qur'an is very much like christianity's levitical law; it advocates extreme punishments for infactions of the religious code of conduct. The prescribed punishment for homosexuality in the levitical law is stoning. (same with adultery, beastiality, etc.)
That does not say that people who self-identify as musslim strictly adhere to the written text of the qur'an however. This is every bit like there are many many people who self-identify as christian, who do not strictly adhere to the biblical text. (For good and for ill.)
The major difference, is that in the middle east, there is no secular protection for people who self-practice islam, (and don't bow to a religious leader/clerical hierarchy), and literacy is poor-- coupled with no strong underlying message telling the religiously faithful that they should not be extremists.
The basic thing I am reading here are arguments that are not very logical.
One side says "Islam is a backward religion that advocates brutalism, and is in no fashion a religion of peace."
Another side says "There are more moderate Muslims than there are extremist ones, so islam is clearly not the problem."
Both are wrong, but for different reasons.
Judaism was every bit as cruel and medieval as strict Islam is now before the appearance of Jesus of Nazareth. (Religiosity of this figure witheld; the individual existed, but any divine status is not substantiated.) Islam has a similarly prophesied figure, called the Mahdi, (or the hidden imam, and several other descriptors.) This figure has not yet come for Islam.
The appearance of Jesus of Nazareth, and the message he brought, changed Judaism permanently. Christianity came into existence because of it, and the message of forgiveness (even if subverted by power trippers in the medieval period for pu
I think in fact it would be disingenuous to those *without* a degree to underestimate their own ambitions that way!
It often isn't that these people choose not to get a degree, it is that they are (either for time or money) incapable of getting the degree.
There are 3 trends working to cause this:
1) Cost of tuition continues to climb. 2) Median base pay remains the same 3) Work/Life balance of employees continues to tip toward work.
This means that adults paying for college (either their own, or their children's) are running into hard limits. There are only 24 hours in a day, and with wages remaining relatively static, despite people working more hours, coupled with rising tuition costs, the eventuality is that the middle class will no longer be able to afford higher education, even with debt up to their eyeballs.
Sooner or later, as a hiring manager, YOU WILL have to drop the degree requirement.
From my perspective, the issue is that HR departments view "Has degree" as a marker for "Can read, Can write, and can finish what they start." In reality, they are becoming more and more "You need to be this wealthy to work here."
I understand that they (HR) have legal obstacles that prevent them using actual skills based assessments for literacy and basic math, as part of the equal opportunity law, which is what kicked the whole "Use 'has degree' as a proxy measure" thing in the first place. "College degree" is the new "Highschool diploma". The problem is that unlike highschool, college is not subsidized by taxes, and thus not free to the public good.
The student debt issue is very much an important factor. If you don't contemplate it, you are not properly measuring the reality that your employees face. When you leave the gate with 20k to 30k in non-dischargable debts, you NEED to make above median salary to pay just the interest rates. (Unless daddy and mommy are really wealthy, and paid FOR you that is.) Nobody wants to hire a fresh college grad for above median pay, because "has degree" is the new "highschool diploma". You need that degree, plus several years experience. The problem is that people with an iron ball of debt on their leg at the start are unable to survive without going deeper into debts of other kinds while they build that experience to get the better pay. [most of their income goes to paying minimum payments on their debts.]
Right now the situation is just 'barely' tenable, but cost of tuition shows no signs of leveling off or of going down. This means that in the next decade or so, the cost of higher learning will outstrip the middle class's ability to pay.
At that time, the only people who will be able to get degrees of any kind will be people who are from rich families.
If you don't factor student debt into your hiring policy now, YOU WILL in another 10 years.
You will have to. OR-- you can be deluded, and hire 100% H1Bs.
The OP stated that he was looking for talent at a median wage; Not high, not low.
This means that he needs to target his employment search criteria for those individuals who have good talent, and are not:
1) Overqualified (Expectations from working in the industry for long periods of time is that pay will go UP over time, not stay static.) 2) Burdened with oppressive student debt (which will require above median pay to be a viable career choice for such individuals.)
Demanding a degree, while insisting upon median pay, excludes the vast majority of the talent pool.
The majority of viable talent that can work for median pay will be those that either have no student debts (already a poor prospect), or those without a degree.
So, again-- by the numbers, the people he is looking for are not in the demographic he is insisting upon. More available A+ talent will fall into the "no degree" category than will fall into "Has a degree" category.
What I said was not wrong, but I agree, was not very clear.
So, let me make sure I understand this perfectly, and without error:
You wouldn't hire me, because I am not writing in the way you have come to expect to be written to, (Please, do enlighten me with a stellar example of such communication, so that I might emulate it for you. I don't want you to starve to death standing at an all you can eat buffet, because the food there does not "meet your standards".)
Here, let me be blunt with you.
You are hiring for a position where you want a technical problem to be solved with a robust and fully logical solution. That's what good programmers provide. Yet, you have now redefined the role to be the logical union of ((Good analytical skill) + (Creativity in problem resolution) + (Competency implementing the solution as real computer code)) with ((Writes like an English Lit major when communicating with peers) + (Keeps trying even though logically there is no viable solution.))
Just so you know, those two compound sets do not overlap.;) "Keeps trying when there is no logical solution" (and provably so) is mutually exclusive to "Good analytical skill".
But again, rather than accept this with aplomb, and reconsider your position if even for a moment-- you have instead resorted to an ad-hominem attack at worst, and a non-sequitor at best.
Remember, I don't even want the job you are offering. I have moved to a completely different career path, far removed from IT. I have no interest in the positions you are offering. My only interest is to see you stop acting illogically, as it will make the hiring experience better for you and for your applicants. That's all.
Your response was to say that you would rather take people that are not capable of understanding large and complex problems, because they don't complain.
(And you wonder why your programmers are sub-par, and cant understand basic concepts in logic?)
[This is a joke answer, to a joke post. The only whooshing sound I hear, is the sound of this joke reply going over your head.]
Greetings Mr Stoll,
I would like to apply for position #2, GLASSBLOWER.
I would like to point out however, that they oxy-hydrogen torch you specified may not be the appropriate tool for working with borosilicate glass, as it may not be able to achieve good melt or annealing temperatures with that formulation. A properly fitted acetylene torch with a hot-head and forced air would typically achieve greater temperatures, and is the more common-place appliance for use with this medium. Under very specific conditions I suppose an oxy-hydrogen torch may be suitable and even desirable, where an oxidizing flame would be appropriate, however the lower flame temperature, and invisible nature of the flame would make its use a difficult prospect. (Not to mention, lampwork tends to be small, ornate handwork details-- such as worked glass sculpture or beads-- not blown glass vessels. Those are typically done with a pot furnace and a glory hole.) I would also like to point out that any real shape can be defined as a manifold, which was one of the major points of the poincare conjecture, which was recently proven by a Russian mathematician who famously rejected the Fields Medal for his accomplishment, and told the press to stop calling him when they interrupted his mushroom hunting. I presume your company focuses mainly on non-orientable surfaces, such as klein bottles, (as per your name), moebius loops, and similar topologies-- however, this then makes your insistence upon knowing the difference between "inside and outside" a tricky matter-- the defining characteristic of an unorientable manifold is that there IS NO DIFFERENCE between the inside and the outside. To fill a klein bottle, one needs to submerge the vessel, then turn it end over end several times in the presence of a gravity well. After that, its unique shape will allow either gravity to retain the liquid, or atmospheric pressure will prevent the liquid from escaping through the narrow "neck". Again, there is no true inside nor true outside to this object, as per its geometrical definition. Any retention of liquid is merely an interesting and novel artifact of the interplay between the manifold, fluid viscosity and meniscus formation, and atmospheric pressure. (It is important to point out that superfluids such a s liquid helium will not be constrained by the a-fore mentioned technique.) I am familiar with this particular manifold, and could produce vessels of this configuration, should I be required to do so.
I am reasonably well versed in minor burn care, having had to treat several such injuries over the years. Depending on the severity of the burn, topical application of a cool compress can be an effective remedy, followed by a topical ointment (Such as bacitrin or neosporin) and a bandage to discourage infection and topical agitation. For more severe burns, a more specialized ointment and more intensive care is required-- such as the use of something like silver sulfadiazine cream. This is applied topically to the burned area several times daily with the frequent changing of sterile gauze bandages, as this ointment can cause the burn to produce a clear liquid exudation during treatment. As far as I know, that specific preparation requires a prescription when intended for human use however. I do not advocate the use of veterinary grade pharmaceuticals in humans, no matter how fiscally attractive the option seems, and irrespective of the availability of such veterinary preparations.
Typically, however, one should be wearing proper personal protective equipment, such as gloves, eyewear, and a fire resistant shop apron, which should minimize the risks of this happening. Appropriate foot protection is also a must; Full toe shoes, preferably with steel toe. I have appropriate foot and eye wear, but will need to obtain a suitable apron, and a sheer pair of aramid fiber gloves. I presume your company can either prov
The problem is that outside silly valley-- Say, in flyoverland USA, the cost of relocation is not trivial.
Your typical house in silly valley costs more than 10 years salary elsewhere. There is not enough equity in the house they currently own to be able to afford the move.
Sweeten the deal with guaranteed housing, and travel expenses. You will get MANY more people willing to relocate.
OR-- allow telecommuting from another state as an option.
And, of course, you fail to comprehend why this is the case.
The reality is that the people you really want probably dont have a degree. They probably dont have the exact skillset you want, but can easily attain it, given half the chance.
You create an iron-curtain that is rigorously enforced by a computer to pre-screen your applicants, "Because there are so many out there!", which REAL computer experts and programmers understand perfectly well, and KNOW that they will be systemically excluded before they can even talk to you-- the actual person at the other end of that dark tunnel-- Leaving only the people that outright lie, cheat, and plagiarize other people's work that make it through your filter.
Rather than realize that your filter is an effective tool at concentrating charlatans and liars, and not an effective tool at concentrating actual talent-- then making the appropriate action, you instead conclude that there are too many charlatans and liars!
It boggles the mind!
"But they have these really attractive resumes and degrees!"
If that's that case, then I must be a fantastic programmer, and not even realize it.
I know how to write software, but am not driven to delve into it. I dont find it all that pleasurable, but do find it a valuable skill to have when I need to make something that does $FOO, when I need it to. My solutions may not be the most efficient, or the most pretty, but they do $FOO, and I am the only person that needs to worry about the ugly code. I can recognize ugly code when I see it, (as I make plenty of it, and know it to be ugly.)
I am honest about that. I do not consider myself a good programmer at all. There are many people out there that make much better code than me, and do so with greater speed, alacrity, and skill.
I keep hearing horror stories about people who can't pass a fizz-buzz test, or who can't make a good function that can withstand having strange edge cases thrown at it. I can do that, but again-- I dont even really consider myself a programmer. I did a little bit of VBA backend wallpaper-paste type crap for one of my recent jobs to fill niche needs for my company because nobody else in my department knew how to use VBA, but any really competent programmer would have run circles around me.
The major problem I see here, is that if I said this at a job interview, the hiring manager would laugh nervously, thank me for coming, then promptly shred my file.
Could I learn to be a good programmer? Sure. All the programming skill I picked up is entirely self-taught, because I wanted to learn how to do it, because it is one of those essential skills of this century. I really do think that it will be as "expected" as being able to use a word processor or a spreadsheet program. Given the right motivation, I could become very good at it. I just dont find it pleasurable to do.
That's the real heart of the issue.
Hiring managers dont look for people that can be molded to fit a position in the company.
Hiring managers want the candidate that "Is a perfect fit"-- which really means "Is just like that other guy we had, but who isn't that other guy."
This is analogous to a starving man looking for "Just the perfect morsel of food", standing at an all you can eat buffet, looking at food with minor blemishes on it.
"Oh, that apple has a spot on it." he says. "I can't eat that apple-- but, oh, i'm so hungry!"
After looking at every single morsel of food on the table, he makes the bold assertion that he just cant find anything to eat there.
"There's a terrible food shortage!" he screams, holding his stomach, as it rumbles angrily-- Surrounded by a mountain of perfectly edible food. It just isn't absolutely perfect, and he wont dare lower his standards on what he considers to be perfect.
So, he goes crying to the government. "I'm starving!" he screams, amid a giant buffet of food. "I need food or I will die!"
The government says "Ok, We will import food for you, since there does not seem to be enough. India has food they can provide, we'll ask them to send some."
"YAY!" says the hiring manager.
What does india do? They say "The man's expectations are unrealistic, which is why he wont eat the food that surrounds him. He does not realize that the food he has is better than what we have to offer, so we will just peel or cook the food first, to hide the blemishes. He wont know the difference."
So they do that.
The man sees the cooked food-- which has been peeled, boiled, fried, and otherwise rendered so that the blemishes are no longer visible-- even though the ingredients were far from the model of perfection he held in his mind. But it looks appealing, and it isn't obviously bearing any defects, so he digs in. "MM! This is good shit!" he says. "Gimme more!"
That's what I really see as what's going on here. Am I a perfect programmer? No. Do hiring managers demand perfect programmers? yes. Is there a shortage of perfect programmers? Probably-- NOBODY is perfect, especially when the definition of "Perfect" is very m
For democracy to work, the public at large must be well educated, so that they can make sound, well informed votes in the governance process.
By making a public statement of this nature, the rep from NZ has basically stated, (implicitly), that his citizenry is not educated enough to participate in a democratic government. He is basically saying that education in NZ is a failure, and that the citizenry cant be trusted to make sound judgments.
If that same explanation is then carried by other political figures in other countries, it means the reps from those other countries have the same exact problems.
Rather than reform education to actually fix the problem, they instead have elected to usurp government, and destroy the foundational core of the democratic process itself.
Educating the public so that they can make sound and valid judgments and criticisms takes too long and is too hard for these supposedly skilled and benevolent representatives to ensure, apparently.
Everything about this statement indicates that the rep in question has no business in office, as he is not representing his citizenry, (brazenly so in fact), and is NOT acting in their best interests, by working behind their backs in secret, instead of improving conditions and overall base education to a level where they can then participate publicly.
For the people of NZ, your representative basically just said you are too fucking stupid to be trusted with governing yourselves. He has insulted you to your faces. Do something about him.
in quickbasic (and msbasic before that), you use the built-in graphics routines GET, and PUT, and make use of a graphics mode. GET and PUT use a user-defined variable to store graphics data, and require at least 1 set of screen coordinates. (GET requires 2 sets-- the top left, and the bottom right corners of the area to GET-- Put only requires 1 set of coordinates; the top left position of the data to be PUT on the screen.) The usual choice for easy graphics routines is mode 13, however, if you first do a poke, you can get into the infamous "Mode X" instead, if you have a VGA card. Ideally, and to avoid flicker, you want a graphics mode with 2 display "pages"-- (actually, 2 display buffers), You perform the PUT command on the INACTIVE page, then switch the page with a PUT command to the VGA controller. This way the human does not see the page being drawn on. You can use this to do simply iterative composting of images to get new ones, etc. (EG, writing several characters on top of each other to get custom shapes quickly, etc.) Once you have written data to the page and then switched the active/inactive pages, you need to re-draw the new inactive page each time if you are doing animation. Getting data written to the inactive page quickly is a significant hurdle with QBASIC, as the builtin functions are painfully slow.
With visual basic, you need to create a new form object, define its size, add an image object to the form, load data into the image object, then activate the form. This will display a window with a picture in it. You can move the picture around inside the form by modifying the properties of the image object, one of which is the position property. You can also move the form's window position around this way as well.
(If you wrapped a few win32api COM libraries with local subs and structures, you can directly call the win32api to produce an opengl window, and draw all over that with opengl calls... but that isn't pure VB)
with javascript and a browser's javascript interpreter, you simply define an image element, populate it with image data of some sort, then define the absolute position of the image (and its z-level) using variables controlled by the vbscript.
It isn't that nobody "teaches graphics"-- it's that graphics suffers from the "Yet ANOTHER Library!" problem. Do you want to draw using directx? OpenGL? Vesa? SDL, nCurses, etc.
Graphics are not a fixed, easily agreed upon set of things that a computer should do-- like say, arithmetic or logic is. As such, it does not get an obviously "best practice" implementation that can be taught. Doing graphics is not something that an instructor can tell a student how to do, and have it "Stick" everywhere, like a FOR-NEXT loop, an IF-THEN-ELSE logic block, a CASE statement, or a basic raw datatype (String, Integer, Float, etc) that is basically the same no matter where you go in programming. (An unsigned short integer is an unsigned short integer everywhere you go.) How you scribble graphics onto the screen simply lacks the same riggor; The ways OpenGL, DirectX, and raw frame buffer manipulation with ASM work to get data onto the screen that is fully artistic in nature cannot be effectively taught one, and implemented the same way everywhere else.
If you want to learn graphics, you are going to have to trust to help you lean an master that part .
That's because government likes power, and money is basically instant power.
The problem, is that government types are often so blinded by things like this, that they fail to comprehend how that money works in the market-- they aren't economists, they are inept managers looking to bolster personal powers.
This happens in every government, of every kind.
Hungary sees the internet, (Fuck, EVERY country sees the internet this way!) and sees a system saturated in untapped "Taxation potential". They don't realize that one of the big reasons WHY the internet is a powerhouse of economic activity, is BECAUSE it is not regulated by local and foreign tax control.
Then you also have the "We can tax it, therefor we can regulate and control its use" power trippers. "I can control what people see, do, watch, and hear on the internet!" gives such people a very big boner indeed. Nothing says "I can shape your network use!" like a great big service fee, and nothing says "You will poison the well with my special sauce brand of misinformation when I tell you to!" like "Incentive tax breaks."
A free, open, untaxed, unregulated internet is the antithesis of these people's desires. that's why they refuse to be sensible about this, and are FOCUSED on getting that control.
There's also the possibility of dense star formation, or other sources of intense radiation with nearby rouge planets.
A dense stellar nursery will have lots of interstellar dust, (and a shitload of local radiation), and will also have a good chance of producing such rouge planets, because of the presence of the large interstellar cloud, and the perturbations caused by the protostars.
It takes time for these dense star forming regions to push each other apart from radiative pressures, and without a local star to push away strong ionizing radiation (Dont underestimate the effects that a star's magnetosphere has!), it isn't inconceivable to imagine that there would be rouge objects within these nurseries that get enough total radiation from such diffuse sources, coupled with a very thick atmosphere that could provide effective rad shielding, that they could support life. They just wouldnt have a day/night cycle, nor any seasons.
Basically, the planet is inside a big dust/gas cloud, has a very thick atmosphere, and has permanent auroras 24/7 from the strong radiation hitting its upper atmosphere from all the nearby protostars.
It would of course, die and become a frozen iceball as the nursery gets pushed apart, but that would take many billions of years.
The packages it installs are just the core debian console-only base system. Nothing super fancy. It can consume upwards of 300mb of disk however-- but when you absolutely NEED to get $FOO running, because busybox does not have it compiled in, or you need some special service to start, the repository access is very handy.
Again, because it installs into a user-specified directory, it is a ready made chroot ready to be jumped into. I have a debian chroot on my consumer grade wifi router, which I use for all kinds of fun things. It sits alongside openwrt without issue, and keeps the flash clean from extraneous stuff. It sits on the small USB stick I have stuck in it.
The real point I was making though, was that debian was a REFERENCE DISTRO.
It does NOT fall into the "Desktop" or "Server" category. It is "Reference". Debian is neither a really good desktop (older, more mature packages, which means spottier driver support), nor a really good server. What it is, is a good reference platform from which to BUILD a specialized distro.
Many systems are based on debian. Decisions which impact debian will impact those other downstream distros. Not all of which will be too pleased with including systemd.
Debian has its niche. Much like the argument about vi and emacs, the init vs systemd argument will not go away. That's why reference distros like debian should support both without favoritism. Any downstream distros that use them as the reference can pick as their userbase deems appropriate.
The "Remove the fragmentation!" rally cry fails to capture that "homogeneity is not always good" and is in fact, the antithesis of "choice."
That is precisely why a chroot on external memory can be useful in certain circumstances (You mean that particular FS utility wasn't compiled into the busybox binary in your current system image? Well, better get creative then!), and also why something that is easy to deploy, like a debootstrap'ed minimalist core deploy, in a chroot can be handy for specialist daemons that demand real versions of tools and libraries. The core kernel lives in the tiny image that boots in the embedded system, which does all of the core init gruntwork.
A chroot is also easy to completely purge when done with it as well. A chroot can run off a network share, or any other mounted location in the filesystem.
The special daemon runs in the chroot, which is fired off as if it were a normal daemon using a simple shell script. This keeps the core image clean, and gives a sandbox in which to run something that is more demanding. Again, that other "something" does not need a full init-- the system is already up and running. A simple init script that starts things and monitors to keep them running is a perfect fit, and consumes very little extra memory or processor resources.
'systemd' needs to stay optional, and I mean that explicitly. optional. Not "default", and not "optional, in the sense that you then have to do the maintainer's job for them because they are too lazy to consider people not using systemd, because systemd is the default, and the maintainer does not want to consider the people that dont want systemd, regardless of the reasons or circumstances." kind of way.
Systemd is potentially useful for only a subset of the linux ecosystem, and forcing this kind of change is a bad thing.
Please allow me to explain why:
Systemd seeks to be a "Be all, end all solution to system initialization", which ultimately means that it will itself try to cover every possible thing that its maintainers believe needs to or should happen during system init. That in and of itself means that it will be large and cumbersome; exactly the things that embedded linux should avoid, where ultra-minimalism is king. (We are talking systems that have just a few dozen megabytes of memory, and just a few hundred megahertz of processor power at the most. Having all that gobbled up by the init system as soon as power is applied is not going to win you any trophies, and boldly asserting that embedded devices need to obey a desktop paradigm is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.)
This is especially true with "reference distributions", like debian. Debian "console only" deployments with tools like debootstrap are reasonably common with embedded devices, as are deployments that make use of chroots for specific sandboxed services. A chroot does not need a full blown init like systemd. It is best served with a simple init script. Building a distro with the intention of killing simple init, and replacing it with a monolithic solution like systemd will make service daemons much more difficult to control in this way, and will actually rob core functionality away from the distro that goes that route--- exclusively in favor of desktop flavored deployments.
Linux is more than desktops.
Linux is routers. Linux is home automation systems. Linux is servers performing specialized functions. Linux is so much more.
Please be more considerate about trying to force systemd into debian. Optional is OK. Optional like "gnome vs kde vs xfce vs $ManagerHere". Not "optional" like "unity on ubuntu". Debian is a reference distro, upon which many other distros are based. It has already found its niche in the linux ecosystem. Please dont try to reinvent it.
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There is no such thing as perfect replication.
Such an organism may evolve slowly, but since there is no such thing as perfect data copy, (Even in computers-- which is why RAM has such things as ECC, and uncorrectable errors) the organism would still evolve.
Even if we go full on SciFi Robot Apocholypse here, we have the potential for manufacturing defects in the replication process prohibiting perfect program upload, and other forms of imperfect data transfer/replication, which will have cumulative effect given sufficient time.
That would be "Sensitivity"/Responds to stimulus.
Evolution is the phenomenon that occurs as a result of living organisms responding to changing stimuli in their environment, coupled with the need to consume energy to procreate and survive.
If the phenomenon consumes energy, reproduces, and responds to stimuli, it will experience evolution.
Historically, "Life" has been defined as being any phenomenon that possesses all 5 life processes:
#1 Food intake/ nutrition
#2 Respiration
#3 Excretion
#4 Growth & Repair
#5 Reproduction
However, this seems to have been expanded to 7:
#1 Movement
#2 Respiration
#3 Sensitivity
#4 Growth
#5 Excretion
#6 Reproduction
#7 Nutrition
This is for "Life" in the generalized sense, fully abstracted away from any specific mechanisms by which those processes may be achieved. It is perfectly sensible for an artificial lifeform to be constructed, as long as it is able to fully carry out those processes. It needn't have any organic components whatsoever.
Nowhere in the historical definition of "life" used by life science is there a requirement for specific mechanisms-- just processes.
Dont asks silly questions that you dont really want to know the answer to-- That's been one of the major reasons why HR drones have been looking up facebook accounts for many years now-- To see if you are naughty or nice.
So, YES. Big data knows that.
Big data knows who you voted for.
Big data knows what kind of hamburger you get from McDonalds.
Big data knows what fragrance your girlfriend/wife wears.
THAT IS THE POINT OF BIG DATA.
Big data takes shit loads of seemingly unrelated bits of information that people foolishly air in public, cross-references it, then uses it to make correlation based predictions.
Personally, I am opposed to the very idea behind big data.
(Then again, I harbor these "quaint" notions that things need to be allowed to be kept private.)
I believe the previous poster was referring to such lovely things as the employment of "The pear of anguish" for people "convicted" of "the heinous, unnatural" act of sodomy.
Due to religious influence, the practice of "Sodomy" (a wide umbrella for multitudinous sexual acts considered 'sinful') was considered a capital offence in more countries in europe than not. (And those that didnt have it as a capital offence, had torture as one of the major punishments, such as the afore mentioned pear of anguish.)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/ptop/...
"Christians" generally DID do those things (Beheading people and the like) for a very long time. The major reason we don't now, came from 3 things, one of which is vitally important for the others to have as much influence as they did.
Firstly, THERE MUST BE A NON-AMBIGUOUS MESSAGE OF FORGIVENESS AND ACCEPTANCE in their religious text.
Secondly, Literacy and availability of that religious text must be high.
Thirdly, some political figure must shatter the religious oligarchy, and make free-practice of religion safe.
The middle east has a very "medieval" worldview. The difference between modern christianity (with emphasis on catholicism and the vatican) and current islam (in the middle east), is that modern christianity is radically more "Enlightened"--- That's just on the secular front.
This happened because 1) The actual text of the new testament is one of forgiveness, (practically unending levels of forgiveness), 2) The Rennaisance enabled the common public to have access to the bible, so that they could read it for themselves, and 3) The great schism of the roman catholic church, pushed into prominence by the king of england instituting the church of england, and protecting "Heretical protestants" enabled people who free-practiced to do so without fear of political prosecution.
On the religious front, the actual tenets of the bible's new testament strongly advocate forgiveness of sin, not punishment. The entire new testament is basically devoted to this ideal. There is no such parallel in islam. The qur'an is very much like christianity's levitical law; it advocates extreme punishments for infactions of the religious code of conduct. The prescribed punishment for homosexuality in the levitical law is stoning. (same with adultery, beastiality, etc.)
That does not say that people who self-identify as musslim strictly adhere to the written text of the qur'an however. This is every bit like there are many many people who self-identify as christian, who do not strictly adhere to the biblical text. (For good and for ill.)
The major difference, is that in the middle east, there is no secular protection for people who self-practice islam, (and don't bow to a religious leader/clerical hierarchy), and literacy is poor-- coupled with no strong underlying message telling the religiously faithful that they should not be extremists.
The basic thing I am reading here are arguments that are not very logical.
One side says "Islam is a backward religion that advocates brutalism, and is in no fashion a religion of peace."
Another side says "There are more moderate Muslims than there are extremist ones, so islam is clearly not the problem."
Both are wrong, but for different reasons.
Judaism was every bit as cruel and medieval as strict Islam is now before the appearance of Jesus of Nazareth. (Religiosity of this figure witheld; the individual existed, but any divine status is not substantiated.) Islam has a similarly prophesied figure, called the Mahdi, (or the hidden imam, and several other descriptors.) This figure has not yet come for Islam.
The appearance of Jesus of Nazareth, and the message he brought, changed Judaism permanently. Christianity came into existence because of it, and the message of forgiveness (even if subverted by power trippers in the medieval period for pu
There is a problem with this statement:
I think in fact it would be disingenuous to those *without* a degree to underestimate their own ambitions that way!
It often isn't that these people choose not to get a degree, it is that they are (either for time or money) incapable of getting the degree.
There are 3 trends working to cause this:
1) Cost of tuition continues to climb.
2) Median base pay remains the same
3) Work/Life balance of employees continues to tip toward work.
This means that adults paying for college (either their own, or their children's) are running into hard limits. There are only 24 hours in a day, and with wages remaining relatively static, despite people working more hours, coupled with rising tuition costs, the eventuality is that the middle class will no longer be able to afford higher education, even with debt up to their eyeballs.
Sooner or later, as a hiring manager, YOU WILL have to drop the degree requirement.
From my perspective, the issue is that HR departments view "Has degree" as a marker for "Can read, Can write, and can finish what they start." In reality, they are becoming more and more "You need to be this wealthy to work here."
I understand that they (HR) have legal obstacles that prevent them using actual skills based assessments for literacy and basic math, as part of the equal opportunity law, which is what kicked the whole "Use 'has degree' as a proxy measure" thing in the first place. "College degree" is the new "Highschool diploma". The problem is that unlike highschool, college is not subsidized by taxes, and thus not free to the public good.
The student debt issue is very much an important factor. If you don't contemplate it, you are not properly measuring the reality that your employees face. When you leave the gate with 20k to 30k in non-dischargable debts, you NEED to make above median salary to pay just the interest rates. (Unless daddy and mommy are really wealthy, and paid FOR you that is.) Nobody wants to hire a fresh college grad for above median pay, because "has degree" is the new "highschool diploma". You need that degree, plus several years experience. The problem is that people with an iron ball of debt on their leg at the start are unable to survive without going deeper into debts of other kinds while they build that experience to get the better pay. [most of their income goes to paying minimum payments on their debts.]
Right now the situation is just 'barely' tenable, but cost of tuition shows no signs of leveling off or of going down. This means that in the next decade or so, the cost of higher learning will outstrip the middle class's ability to pay.
At that time, the only people who will be able to get degrees of any kind will be people who are from rich families.
If you don't factor student debt into your hiring policy now, YOU WILL in another 10 years.
You will have to. OR-- you can be deluded, and hire 100% H1Bs.
I suppose I should have been more clear.
The OP stated that he was looking for talent at a median wage; Not high, not low.
This means that he needs to target his employment search criteria for those individuals who have good talent, and are not:
1) Overqualified (Expectations from working in the industry for long periods of time is that pay will go UP over time, not stay static.)
2) Burdened with oppressive student debt (which will require above median pay to be a viable career choice for such individuals.)
Demanding a degree, while insisting upon median pay, excludes the vast majority of the talent pool.
The majority of viable talent that can work for median pay will be those that either have no student debts (already a poor prospect), or those without a degree.
So, again-- by the numbers, the people he is looking for are not in the demographic he is insisting upon. More available A+ talent will fall into the "no degree" category than will fall into "Has a degree" category.
What I said was not wrong, but I agree, was not very clear.
LOLOL--
No, spelling 'weird' is not a problem. The problem is that 'weird' is not my internet alias. :D
I don't suppose that "Misspelling on purpose" ever entered into your cogitative process, but that's OK-- it's a common misconception about my alias.
This little rhyme may help:
" 'I' before 'E', when you are talking about ME."
" 'E' before 'I', when describing the guy."
It was a piece of meta-humor: A weird way to spell "weird."
It's a spot I wear on purpose, to filter out people with unreasonable preconceptions.
In other words, I am an apple, that has a spot on it.
Thank you for proving my point.
So, let me make sure I understand this perfectly, and without error:
You wouldn't hire me, because I am not writing in the way you have come to expect to be written to, (Please, do enlighten me with a stellar example of such communication, so that I might emulate it for you. I don't want you to starve to death standing at an all you can eat buffet, because the food there does not "meet your standards".)
Here, let me be blunt with you.
You are hiring for a position where you want a technical problem to be solved with a robust and fully logical solution. That's what good programmers provide. Yet, you have now redefined the role to be the logical union of ((Good analytical skill) + (Creativity in problem resolution) + (Competency implementing the solution as real computer code)) with ((Writes like an English Lit major when communicating with peers) + (Keeps trying even though logically there is no viable solution.))
Just so you know, those two compound sets do not overlap. ;) "Keeps trying when there is no logical solution" (and provably so) is mutually exclusive to "Good analytical skill".
But again, rather than accept this with aplomb, and reconsider your position if even for a moment-- you have instead resorted to an ad-hominem attack at worst, and a non-sequitor at best.
Remember, I don't even want the job you are offering. I have moved to a completely different career path, far removed from IT. I have no interest in the positions you are offering. My only interest is to see you stop acting illogically, as it will make the hiring experience better for you and for your applicants. That's all.
Your response was to say that you would rather take people that are not capable of understanding large and complex problems, because they don't complain.
(And you wonder why your programmers are sub-par, and cant understand basic concepts in logic?)
And THAT, is your problem.
Never mind that by the numbers, the actual top A+ talent does not fall into the "Has prestigious 4 year degree!" demographic.
(And that those who DO go the 4 year degree route, often have oppressive student debts, and cannot accept low-ball salaries.)
There isn't a shortage of talented prospects.
There's a shortage of invisible pink unicorns.
That's why you get such a large number of frauds-- You only accept applicants that claim to be both invisible, AND pink, AND are unicorns.
[This is a joke answer, to a joke post. The only whooshing sound I hear, is the sound of this joke reply going over your head.]
Greetings Mr Stoll,
I would like to apply for position #2, GLASSBLOWER.
I would like to point out however, that they oxy-hydrogen torch you specified may not be the appropriate tool for working with borosilicate glass, as it may not be able to achieve good melt or annealing temperatures with that formulation. A properly fitted acetylene torch with a hot-head and forced air would typically achieve greater temperatures, and is the more common-place appliance for use with this medium. Under very specific conditions I suppose an oxy-hydrogen torch may be suitable and even desirable, where an oxidizing flame would be appropriate, however the lower flame temperature, and invisible nature of the flame would make its use a difficult prospect. (Not to mention, lampwork tends to be small, ornate handwork details-- such as worked glass sculpture or beads-- not blown glass vessels. Those are typically done with a pot furnace and a glory hole.) I would also like to point out that any real shape can be defined as a manifold, which was one of the major points of the poincare conjecture, which was recently proven by a Russian mathematician who famously rejected the Fields Medal for his accomplishment, and told the press to stop calling him when they interrupted his mushroom hunting. I presume your company focuses mainly on non-orientable surfaces, such as klein bottles, (as per your name), moebius loops, and similar topologies-- however, this then makes your insistence upon knowing the difference between "inside and outside" a tricky matter-- the defining characteristic of an unorientable manifold is that there IS NO DIFFERENCE between the inside and the outside. To fill a klein bottle, one needs to submerge the vessel, then turn it end over end several times in the presence of a gravity well. After that, its unique shape will allow either gravity to retain the liquid, or atmospheric pressure will prevent the liquid from escaping through the narrow "neck". Again, there is no true inside nor true outside to this object, as per its geometrical definition. Any retention of liquid is merely an interesting and novel artifact of the interplay between the manifold, fluid viscosity and meniscus formation, and atmospheric pressure. (It is important to point out that superfluids such a s liquid helium will not be constrained by the a-fore mentioned technique.) I am familiar with this particular manifold, and could produce vessels of this configuration, should I be required to do so.
I am reasonably well versed in minor burn care, having had to treat several such injuries over the years. Depending on the severity of the burn, topical application of a cool compress can be an effective remedy, followed by a topical ointment (Such as bacitrin or neosporin) and a bandage to discourage infection and topical agitation. For more severe burns, a more specialized ointment and more intensive care is required-- such as the use of something like silver sulfadiazine cream. This is applied topically to the burned area several times daily with the frequent changing of sterile gauze bandages, as this ointment can cause the burn to produce a clear liquid exudation during treatment. As far as I know, that specific preparation requires a prescription when intended for human use however. I do not advocate the use of veterinary grade pharmaceuticals in humans, no matter how fiscally attractive the option seems, and irrespective of the availability of such veterinary preparations.
Typically, however, one should be wearing proper personal protective equipment, such as gloves, eyewear, and a fire resistant shop apron, which should minimize the risks of this happening. Appropriate foot protection is also a must; Full toe shoes, preferably with steel toe. I have appropriate foot and eye wear, but will need to obtain a suitable apron, and a sheer pair of aramid fiber gloves. I presume your company can either prov
The problem is that outside silly valley-- Say, in flyoverland USA, the cost of relocation is not trivial.
Your typical house in silly valley costs more than 10 years salary elsewhere. There is not enough equity in the house they currently own to be able to afford the move.
Sweeten the deal with guaranteed housing, and travel expenses. You will get MANY more people willing to relocate.
OR-- allow telecommuting from another state as an option.
And, of course, you fail to comprehend why this is the case.
The reality is that the people you really want probably dont have a degree. They probably dont have the exact skillset you want, but can easily attain it, given half the chance.
You create an iron-curtain that is rigorously enforced by a computer to pre-screen your applicants, "Because there are so many out there!", which REAL computer experts and programmers understand perfectly well, and KNOW that they will be systemically excluded before they can even talk to you-- the actual person at the other end of that dark tunnel-- Leaving only the people that outright lie, cheat, and plagiarize other people's work that make it through your filter.
Rather than realize that your filter is an effective tool at concentrating charlatans and liars, and not an effective tool at concentrating actual talent-- then making the appropriate action, you instead conclude that there are too many charlatans and liars!
It boggles the mind!
"But they have these really attractive resumes and degrees!"
Seriously.
If that's that case, then I must be a fantastic programmer, and not even realize it.
I know how to write software, but am not driven to delve into it. I dont find it all that pleasurable, but do find it a valuable skill to have when I need to make something that does $FOO, when I need it to. My solutions may not be the most efficient, or the most pretty, but they do $FOO, and I am the only person that needs to worry about the ugly code. I can recognize ugly code when I see it, (as I make plenty of it, and know it to be ugly.)
I am honest about that. I do not consider myself a good programmer at all. There are many people out there that make much better code than me, and do so with greater speed, alacrity, and skill.
I keep hearing horror stories about people who can't pass a fizz-buzz test, or who can't make a good function that can withstand having strange edge cases thrown at it. I can do that, but again-- I dont even really consider myself a programmer. I did a little bit of VBA backend wallpaper-paste type crap for one of my recent jobs to fill niche needs for my company because nobody else in my department knew how to use VBA, but any really competent programmer would have run circles around me.
The major problem I see here, is that if I said this at a job interview, the hiring manager would laugh nervously, thank me for coming, then promptly shred my file.
Could I learn to be a good programmer? Sure. All the programming skill I picked up is entirely self-taught, because I wanted to learn how to do it, because it is one of those essential skills of this century. I really do think that it will be as "expected" as being able to use a word processor or a spreadsheet program. Given the right motivation, I could become very good at it. I just dont find it pleasurable to do.
That's the real heart of the issue.
Hiring managers dont look for people that can be molded to fit a position in the company.
Hiring managers want the candidate that "Is a perfect fit"-- which really means "Is just like that other guy we had, but who isn't that other guy."
This is analogous to a starving man looking for "Just the perfect morsel of food", standing at an all you can eat buffet, looking at food with minor blemishes on it.
"Oh, that apple has a spot on it." he says. "I can't eat that apple-- but, oh, i'm so hungry!"
After looking at every single morsel of food on the table, he makes the bold assertion that he just cant find anything to eat there.
"There's a terrible food shortage!" he screams, holding his stomach, as it rumbles angrily-- Surrounded by a mountain of perfectly edible food. It just isn't absolutely perfect, and he wont dare lower his standards on what he considers to be perfect.
So, he goes crying to the government. "I'm starving!" he screams, amid a giant buffet of food. "I need food or I will die!"
The government says "Ok, We will import food for you, since there does not seem to be enough. India has food they can provide, we'll ask them to send some."
"YAY!" says the hiring manager.
What does india do? They say "The man's expectations are unrealistic, which is why he wont eat the food that surrounds him. He does not realize that the food he has is better than what we have to offer, so we will just peel or cook the food first, to hide the blemishes. He wont know the difference."
So they do that.
The man sees the cooked food-- which has been peeled, boiled, fried, and otherwise rendered so that the blemishes are no longer visible-- even though the ingredients were far from the model of perfection he held in his mind. But it looks appealing, and it isn't obviously bearing any defects, so he digs in. "MM! This is good shit!" he says. "Gimme more!"
That's what I really see as what's going on here.
Am I a perfect programmer? No. Do hiring managers demand perfect programmers? yes. Is there a shortage of perfect programmers? Probably-- NOBODY is perfect, especially when the definition of "Perfect" is very m
More than that-- if you read between the lines:
For democracy to work, the public at large must be well educated, so that they can make sound, well informed votes in the governance process.
By making a public statement of this nature, the rep from NZ has basically stated, (implicitly), that his citizenry is not educated enough to participate in a democratic government. He is basically saying that education in NZ is a failure, and that the citizenry cant be trusted to make sound judgments.
If that same explanation is then carried by other political figures in other countries, it means the reps from those other countries have the same exact problems.
Rather than reform education to actually fix the problem, they instead have elected to usurp government, and destroy the foundational core of the democratic process itself.
Educating the public so that they can make sound and valid judgments and criticisms takes too long and is too hard for these supposedly skilled and benevolent representatives to ensure, apparently.
Everything about this statement indicates that the rep in question has no business in office, as he is not representing his citizenry, (brazenly so in fact), and is NOT acting in their best interests, by working behind their backs in secret, instead of improving conditions and overall base education to a level where they can then participate publicly.
For the people of NZ, your representative basically just said you are too fucking stupid to be trusted with governing yourselves. He has insulted you to your faces. Do something about him.
in quickbasic (and msbasic before that), you use the built-in graphics routines GET, and PUT, and make use of a graphics mode. GET and PUT use a user-defined variable to store graphics data, and require at least 1 set of screen coordinates. (GET requires 2 sets-- the top left, and the bottom right corners of the area to GET-- Put only requires 1 set of coordinates; the top left position of the data to be PUT on the screen.) The usual choice for easy graphics routines is mode 13, however, if you first do a poke, you can get into the infamous "Mode X" instead, if you have a VGA card. Ideally, and to avoid flicker, you want a graphics mode with 2 display "pages"-- (actually, 2 display buffers), You perform the PUT command on the INACTIVE page, then switch the page with a PUT command to the VGA controller. This way the human does not see the page being drawn on. You can use this to do simply iterative composting of images to get new ones, etc. (EG, writing several characters on top of each other to get custom shapes quickly, etc.) Once you have written data to the page and then switched the active/inactive pages, you need to re-draw the new inactive page each time if you are doing animation. Getting data written to the inactive page quickly is a significant hurdle with QBASIC, as the builtin functions are painfully slow.
With visual basic, you need to create a new form object, define its size, add an image object to the form, load data into the image object, then activate the form. This will display a window with a picture in it. You can move the picture around inside the form by modifying the properties of the image object, one of which is the position property. You can also move the form's window position around this way as well.
(If you wrapped a few win32api COM libraries with local subs and structures, you can directly call the win32api to produce an opengl window, and draw all over that with opengl calls... but that isn't pure VB)
with javascript and a browser's javascript interpreter, you simply define an image element, populate it with image data of some sort, then define the absolute position of the image (and its z-level) using variables controlled by the vbscript.
It isn't that nobody "teaches graphics"-- it's that graphics suffers from the "Yet ANOTHER Library!" problem. Do you want to draw using directx? OpenGL? Vesa? SDL, nCurses, etc.
Graphics are not a fixed, easily agreed upon set of things that a computer should do-- like say, arithmetic or logic is. As such, it does not get an obviously "best practice" implementation that can be taught. Doing graphics is not something that an instructor can tell a student how to do, and have it "Stick" everywhere, like a FOR-NEXT loop, an IF-THEN-ELSE logic block, a CASE statement, or a basic raw datatype (String, Integer, Float, etc) that is basically the same no matter where you go in programming. (An unsigned short integer is an unsigned short integer everywhere you go.) How you scribble graphics onto the screen simply lacks the same riggor; The ways OpenGL, DirectX, and raw frame buffer manipulation with ASM work to get data onto the screen that is fully artistic in nature cannot be effectively taught one, and implemented the same way everywhere else.
If you want to learn graphics, you are going to have to trust to help you lean an master that part .
That's because government likes power, and money is basically instant power.
The problem, is that government types are often so blinded by things like this, that they fail to comprehend how that money works in the market-- they aren't economists, they are inept managers looking to bolster personal powers.
This happens in every government, of every kind.
Hungary sees the internet, (Fuck, EVERY country sees the internet this way!) and sees a system saturated in untapped "Taxation potential". They don't realize that one of the big reasons WHY the internet is a powerhouse of economic activity, is BECAUSE it is not regulated by local and foreign tax control.
Then you also have the "We can tax it, therefor we can regulate and control its use" power trippers. "I can control what people see, do, watch, and hear on the internet!" gives such people a very big boner indeed. Nothing says "I can shape your network use!" like a great big service fee, and nothing says "You will poison the well with my special sauce brand of misinformation when I tell you to!" like "Incentive tax breaks."
A free, open, untaxed, unregulated internet is the antithesis of these people's desires. that's why they refuse to be sensible about this, and are FOCUSED on getting that control.
There's also the possibility of dense star formation, or other sources of intense radiation with nearby rouge planets.
A dense stellar nursery will have lots of interstellar dust, (and a shitload of local radiation), and will also have a good chance of producing such rouge planets, because of the presence of the large interstellar cloud, and the perturbations caused by the protostars.
It takes time for these dense star forming regions to push each other apart from radiative pressures, and without a local star to push away strong ionizing radiation (Dont underestimate the effects that a star's magnetosphere has!), it isn't inconceivable to imagine that there would be rouge objects within these nurseries that get enough total radiation from such diffuse sources, coupled with a very thick atmosphere that could provide effective rad shielding, that they could support life. They just wouldnt have a day/night cycle, nor any seasons.
Basically, the planet is inside a big dust/gas cloud, has a very thick atmosphere, and has permanent auroras 24/7 from the strong radiation hitting its upper atmosphere from all the nearby protostars.
It would of course, die and become a frozen iceball as the nursery gets pushed apart, but that would take many billions of years.
Or, you could just mount /var with ramfs, and still not batter the flash, and not use systemd at all.
(and if you do it that way, to get the ram back, just prune the log files.)
debootstrap. All you need is a disk that is mounted, and access to a repository.
https://wiki.debian.org/Deboot...
The packages it installs are just the core debian console-only base system. Nothing super fancy. It can consume upwards of 300mb of disk however-- but when you absolutely NEED to get $FOO running, because busybox does not have it compiled in, or you need some special service to start, the repository access is very handy.
Again, because it installs into a user-specified directory, it is a ready made chroot ready to be jumped into. I have a debian chroot on my consumer grade wifi router, which I use for all kinds of fun things. It sits alongside openwrt without issue, and keeps the flash clean from extraneous stuff. It sits on the small USB stick I have stuck in it.
The real point I was making though, was that debian was a REFERENCE DISTRO.
It does NOT fall into the "Desktop" or "Server" category. It is "Reference". Debian is neither a really good desktop (older, more mature packages, which means spottier driver support), nor a really good server. What it is, is a good reference platform from which to BUILD a specialized distro.
Many systems are based on debian. Decisions which impact debian will impact those other downstream distros. Not all of which will be too pleased with including systemd.
Debian has its niche. Much like the argument about vi and emacs, the init vs systemd argument will not go away. That's why reference distros like debian should support both without favoritism. Any downstream distros that use them as the reference can pick as their userbase deems appropriate.
The "Remove the fragmentation!" rally cry fails to capture that "homogeneity is not always good" and is in fact, the antithesis of "choice."
Oh, I know this.
That is precisely why a chroot on external memory can be useful in certain circumstances (You mean that particular FS utility wasn't compiled into the busybox binary in your current system image? Well, better get creative then!), and also why something that is easy to deploy, like a debootstrap'ed minimalist core deploy, in a chroot can be handy for specialist daemons that demand real versions of tools and libraries. The core kernel lives in the tiny image that boots in the embedded system, which does all of the core init gruntwork.
A chroot is also easy to completely purge when done with it as well. A chroot can run off a network share, or any other mounted location in the filesystem.
The special daemon runs in the chroot, which is fired off as if it were a normal daemon using a simple shell script. This keeps the core image clean, and gives a sandbox in which to run something that is more demanding. Again, that other "something" does not need a full init-- the system is already up and running. A simple init script that starts things and monitors to keep them running is a perfect fit, and consumes very little extra memory or processor resources.
'systemd' needs to stay optional, and I mean that explicitly. optional. Not "default", and not "optional, in the sense that you then have to do the maintainer's job for them because they are too lazy to consider people not using systemd, because systemd is the default, and the maintainer does not want to consider the people that dont want systemd, regardless of the reasons or circumstances." kind of way.
Systemd is potentially useful for only a subset of the linux ecosystem, and forcing this kind of change is a bad thing.
Please allow me to explain why:
Systemd seeks to be a "Be all, end all solution to system initialization", which ultimately means that it will itself try to cover every possible thing that its maintainers believe needs to or should happen during system init. That in and of itself means that it will be large and cumbersome; exactly the things that embedded linux should avoid, where ultra-minimalism is king. (We are talking systems that have just a few dozen megabytes of memory, and just a few hundred megahertz of processor power at the most. Having all that gobbled up by the init system as soon as power is applied is not going to win you any trophies, and boldly asserting that embedded devices need to obey a desktop paradigm is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.)
This is especially true with "reference distributions", like debian. Debian "console only" deployments with tools like debootstrap are reasonably common with embedded devices, as are deployments that make use of chroots for specific sandboxed services. A chroot does not need a full blown init like systemd. It is best served with a simple init script. Building a distro with the intention of killing simple init, and replacing it with a monolithic solution like systemd will make service daemons much more difficult to control in this way, and will actually rob core functionality away from the distro that goes that route--- exclusively in favor of desktop flavored deployments.
Linux is more than desktops.
Linux is routers.
Linux is home automation systems.
Linux is servers performing specialized functions.
Linux is so much more.
Please be more considerate about trying to force systemd into debian. Optional is OK. Optional like "gnome vs kde vs xfce vs $ManagerHere". Not "optional" like "unity on ubuntu". Debian is a reference distro, upon which many other distros are based. It has already found its niche in the linux ecosystem. Please dont try to reinvent it.
Drink AstroCorp Stellar Mineral Water! It's literally not of this earth, and may be older than the stars!
Indeed.
This is about Tim Cook's new "iGay", which he claims to be very proud of.