SystemD is a collection of small pieces of software. Together it makes a big system but you probably haven't paid any attention to it.
Not this argument again.
It doesn't matter how many pieces something is if the pieces are more or less inseparable. There's a reason all of those things are developed under the "systemd" banner. If you decide that you absolutely must have systemd without the crap you don't want, your only option is to configure and compile it yourself. If that's "modular" or "not monolithic", then I guess Windows is too.
If it were truly not monolithic, then I'd be able to install systemd's non-init stuff on a sysvinit system and vice-versa.
So you are saying that if it doesn't work as promised, it will suck and be broken. You just somehow know it will suck even though it's not done yet. Have you ever closed the lid on a laptop, then later opened it and found it displaying all your desktop windows and then going to the unlock screen? I hate that.... if this does work as promised, I want this.
Much, much easier solution to this problem:
1. You press suspend button
2. DE's hotkey handler catches this, tells screen locker to lock
3. Screen locker reports back that the screen is locked
4. DE then puts the computer to sleep.
Same strengths and weaknesses without ever going outside the DE except to tell the system to suspend.
That's really strange, I seem to recall Linux DEs having user switching features long before systemd. Inhibitor locks cause more problems than they solve (e.g. I press the suspend button, put laptop in bag, oops now it's overheating because it never actually finished going to sleep). For most of the other stuff there's no good reason for it to be monolithically lumped into one big piece of software.
The actual end-user benefits of systemd (like boot times) get completely overshadowed by their idiotic fixing of things that weren't broken to begin with. It's not like a modern DE is massively better than one 5 years ago, so stuff shouldn't be getting more complicated under the hood. Most of the stuff you listed already was implemented outside the init system, so if it's decided that those things are desired by multiple DEs, then they can simply be implemented in a generic version that still exists outside the init system.
But they weren't getting notices that people on the service were violating the law. They got notices saying that the *AAs believed that their customers were violating the law. There's no hard evidence that someone who the *AA sends a notice to is actually guilty of that charge unless they do a proper investigation.
Better question is why does a TV have anything more than basic firmware (or just an ASIC) to begin with. This "Smart TV" crap (which seems to be more and more TVs, it's harder to buy a "Dumb TV") would be much better suited for a cable box or other peripheral.
Think about how many businesses out there directly or indirectly are affected by the costs of transporting freight via trucks. If your business ships things to customers, you bear the cost of trucking. If your business receives supplies from vendors, you bear the cost. Reducing the cost of transportation benefits pretty much everyone to the point where I have no doubt that at least as many jobs would be created as lost. Reducing efficiency for the sake of jobs is really no different than the broken glass fallacy.
I'd argue that a fingerprint is better specifically for phones, but falls flat in most other applications. iPhones have a touchID chip paired to the CPU, so they're extremely difficult to crack even if you have physical access. A well-done fingerprint system like touchID is great for the security of a local device. But it doesn't work well for anything remote, since a fingerprint can't be hashed which has numerous implications. It also can't be used directly as an encryption key.
Also, it's one thing to peek at someone's 4-digit phone passcode over their shoulder. It's an entirely different thing to try to get someone's password which may be really long or have lots of symbols as they type it on a computer.
It was wrong to buy a CPU without looking at benchmarks first. AMD's IPC is far worse than Intel's, to the point where in many workloads, a 4-core Intel will beat an 8-core AMD even if they didn't have shared FPUs. Remember when AMD had better IPC, and would even rub it in peoples' faces by naming their CPUs after the equivalent Intel Mhz? Well, now it's the opposite.
Well, AMD CPUs are notorious for their lack of efficiency (and therefore heat output), so I'm not sure what AMD has to do with CPUs that "allow the device to be smaller, generate less heat, and run longer on a given mass of battery".
But even if a CPU has an integrated GPU, it's not part of any specific core. It's just off on its own. Not to mention, for the foreseeable future, high end desktop/server CPUs won't have integrated GPUs.
But that has a major weakness: someone could modify the computer to display the correct vote on the screen, print the correct vote for the human-readable part of the printout, but make the QR code correspond to the other candidate. The better way to do that would be to have it print a scantron-like form, so that the exact the machine-readable section is also human-readable.
Why should I care where the sun is, where the moon is, where the earth is, with respect to time?
Because the primary function of time since the dawn of civilization has been to allow human activity to synchronize with the position of the sun, from planting seasons to night watches.
If it's winter, I can start work at 9, I can start at 10, I can start an hour after sunrise.
If you never leave the server room, perhaps. Most human beings have lives that are affected by sunlight. At the very least commuting in light or dark matters. Construction, farming, and many other jobs are deeply affected by daylight conditions. And some of us actually just like to go and play in the big blue room while it's blue. (Try it sometime!)
Okay, so let's say time drifts 6 hours. What was 6 am now occurs at noon.
That just means that rather than working 900 to 1700, you now work 1500 to 2300. You'd still be working the same hours relative to the sun. The only difference is what direction the little hand on the clock points (if analog clocks even still exist at that point).
It's like they don't actually know the level of technology that most people know in a K-12 school. How do they plan to dump people straight into programming when most people's knowledge of the actual workings of a computer is nowhere near the point where they could program anything meaningful? You could probably ask the average person at a K-12 school a basic question like "What's a home directory?" and they wouldn't be able to answer it. I'm all for computer classes (my elementary school forced everyone to learn typing with a cloth over their hands so they couldn't hunt and peck) but suggesting that CS should be in K-12 schools is like saying that we should teach brain surgery in K-12 before we teach them what the different parts of a brain do.
Like I said on another post, the problem is that if an ISP wants to prioritize their own service over others, there's nothing stopping them from trivially modifying an existing protocol, calling it a new protocol, and prioritizing that over other protocols of the same nature.
The solution to bandwidth hogs like p2p is per-user bandwidth control. If user A is using tiny amounts of bandwidth but user B is using a ton, then you prioritize user A's packets. If someone wants to suck down tons of bandwidth, then the only packets they choke out are their own.
Okay, so if I run an ISP, and we offer our own video service, I'll just barely modify an existing protocol and use that for our video service. Then I'll prioritize it over all other video protocols.
But just taking IP without permission or compensation and hiding the act? No. There's a very good reason we provide the opportunity for improving one's economic standing via IP, one I have yet to hear a decent argument against as long as we are living in a more-or-less capitalist economic society. If we're to address the failures in the current legal system as it relates to IP, sneaking around and hiding what is being done about it seems to be to be entirely the wrong way to go about it.
Because for every single person or entity that chooses to not purchase rights to an IP (and simply forgoes the use of it rather than pirating it), there is a nonzero economic loss. For a product with zero marginal costs, if someone gets any value out of it, then there is economic gain from them having access to the IP.
Especially in international matters like this one, where someone in a dirt poor country probably won't be able to afford the relatively expensive IP from first world countries. If it comes down to "pay 6 months wage for this software suite" or "pirate it", you can guess which one it's going to be. And that's good, because while the act of paying for the software is zero-sum, the act of receiving a copy of the IP is strictly positive-sum. It's the economic version of perpetual motion.
Now, it is sort of modified tragedy of the commons, in that if everyone pirated, then some IP creators might not be able to survive. But in practice that doesn't happen, because as long as enough people buy a particular piece of IP to keep it afloat, then everyone benefits from it. As long as piracy is illegal enough and/or the IP industries churn out enough propaganda to make average Joes believe that it's wrong, then everything works out. There are very few IPs that actually get screwed with piracy, especially seeing as how the biggest pirates also tend to be the biggest purchasers. This is the important thing to remember when talking about piracy: different people/entities are going to have different propensities to pirate things, and that's exactly what keeps piracy from being a real problem.
Here's a quick example: let's say there was a magic piece of software that could make any business 50% more efficient overnight. Would you really say that any business should be denied use of that software?
But sometimes you get awful, poorly thought out "style" guides like PEP8 that in many situations result in less-readable code. Go try lining up colons in a dictionary definition for the purpose of readability and see how it likes it. So actual readability gets thrown out in favor of some feel-good style guide.
Because then you can supply your own router which can support whatever advanced functionality you need. If the modem forces you to use router mode, then you're either stuck with whatever features the modem-router supports, or you end up with a double NAT.
Seeing as how awful the security can be on these devices, do you really think there won't be exploits in their auto-patching? Just because Google/MS/Apple can do it right doesn't mean some bottom-of-the-barrel router manufacturer necessarily will.
But piracy rates are meaningless, because there's no way of knowing how many of those people would have actually bought the game had they not been able to pirate it. There's no difference to a studio's bottom line between someone who buys 5 games, and someone who buys 5 games and pirates 50 more. Or someone who buys 10 games after waiting for them to drop to half their original price. Or someone who buys 50 games when they're 90% off on steam.
I'd say the problem is circular: a lot of people don't want to pay the asking price for PC games because they're awful ports and also because the standard for PC games has generally always been higher in certain areas. Obviously people don't want to pay full price for a game that has no LAN support, has an interface clearly not designed for a kb/m, and crashes your video driver every 30 minutes.
My main gripes with things like this are:
1. Poor price/performance: I'm using a used atom board that I got for $65 with 4GB RAM included. It's hard to beat stuff like that in cost-efficiency.
2. Proprietary cases and accessories: For the love of god, just make your board compatible with mini-ITX mounting holes so I can throw it in a plain old PC case if need be.
3. Not enough support for niche accessories: can it fit a huge Compex wifi card? All that would require in most situations is having one of the mPCIe slots use a high-profile connector.
4. Debugging/recovery/etc: I hope one of those headers on the board is for a serial port or it's going to suffer the classic "bad network config locked me out, time to reset and start over" unless you're booting off of mSATA (more expensive) or USB (which is going to be sticking out of the device rather than internal).
I'll probably buy one anyway but I don't know if it would replace my main router.
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SystemD is a collection of small pieces of software. Together it makes a big system but you probably haven't paid any attention to it.
Not this argument again.
It doesn't matter how many pieces something is if the pieces are more or less inseparable. There's a reason all of those things are developed under the "systemd" banner. If you decide that you absolutely must have systemd without the crap you don't want, your only option is to configure and compile it yourself. If that's "modular" or "not monolithic", then I guess Windows is too.
If it were truly not monolithic, then I'd be able to install systemd's non-init stuff on a sysvinit system and vice-versa.
So you are saying that if it doesn't work as promised, it will suck and be broken. You just somehow know it will suck even though it's not done yet. Have you ever closed the lid on a laptop, then later opened it and found it displaying all your desktop windows and then going to the unlock screen? I hate that.... if this does work as promised, I want this.
Much, much easier solution to this problem:
1. You press suspend button
2. DE's hotkey handler catches this, tells screen locker to lock
3. Screen locker reports back that the screen is locked
4. DE then puts the computer to sleep.
Same strengths and weaknesses without ever going outside the DE except to tell the system to suspend.
.
That's really strange, I seem to recall Linux DEs having user switching features long before systemd. Inhibitor locks cause more problems than they solve (e.g. I press the suspend button, put laptop in bag, oops now it's overheating because it never actually finished going to sleep). For most of the other stuff there's no good reason for it to be monolithically lumped into one big piece of software.
The actual end-user benefits of systemd (like boot times) get completely overshadowed by their idiotic fixing of things that weren't broken to begin with. It's not like a modern DE is massively better than one 5 years ago, so stuff shouldn't be getting more complicated under the hood. Most of the stuff you listed already was implemented outside the init system, so if it's decided that those things are desired by multiple DEs, then they can simply be implemented in a generic version that still exists outside the init system.
But they weren't getting notices that people on the service were violating the law. They got notices saying that the *AAs believed that their customers were violating the law. There's no hard evidence that someone who the *AA sends a notice to is actually guilty of that charge unless they do a proper investigation.
Better question is why does a TV have anything more than basic firmware (or just an ASIC) to begin with. This "Smart TV" crap (which seems to be more and more TVs, it's harder to buy a "Dumb TV") would be much better suited for a cable box or other peripheral.
With some types of projects, it takes way too many resources to have a working prototype before getting funding.
But with this particular project, this isn't their first router anyway, so there's not much of a question of whether they'll deliver or not.
This is the entire problem. They eliminate the things that set their browser apart. If I wanted a Chrome-like browser, guess what: I'd use Chrome.
Well I don't think making the best Mac in the world is very hard for Apple, there isn't exactly a lot of competition there.
Think about how many businesses out there directly or indirectly are affected by the costs of transporting freight via trucks. If your business ships things to customers, you bear the cost of trucking. If your business receives supplies from vendors, you bear the cost. Reducing the cost of transportation benefits pretty much everyone to the point where I have no doubt that at least as many jobs would be created as lost. Reducing efficiency for the sake of jobs is really no different than the broken glass fallacy.
Well, yes, except for the part where the iPhone requires the passcode in addition to the fingerprint after a certain period of time.
I'd argue that a fingerprint is better specifically for phones, but falls flat in most other applications. iPhones have a touchID chip paired to the CPU, so they're extremely difficult to crack even if you have physical access. A well-done fingerprint system like touchID is great for the security of a local device. But it doesn't work well for anything remote, since a fingerprint can't be hashed which has numerous implications. It also can't be used directly as an encryption key.
Also, it's one thing to peek at someone's 4-digit phone passcode over their shoulder. It's an entirely different thing to try to get someone's password which may be really long or have lots of symbols as they type it on a computer.
Is it a good game? Sure, but people never seem to learn that you should always wait a few months for modders to fix any Fallout or TES game.
It was wrong to buy a CPU without looking at benchmarks first. AMD's IPC is far worse than Intel's, to the point where in many workloads, a 4-core Intel will beat an 8-core AMD even if they didn't have shared FPUs. Remember when AMD had better IPC, and would even rub it in peoples' faces by naming their CPUs after the equivalent Intel Mhz? Well, now it's the opposite.
Well, AMD CPUs are notorious for their lack of efficiency (and therefore heat output), so I'm not sure what AMD has to do with CPUs that "allow the device to be smaller, generate less heat, and run longer on a given mass of battery".
But even if a CPU has an integrated GPU, it's not part of any specific core. It's just off on its own. Not to mention, for the foreseeable future, high end desktop/server CPUs won't have integrated GPUs.
But that has a major weakness: someone could modify the computer to display the correct vote on the screen, print the correct vote for the human-readable part of the printout, but make the QR code correspond to the other candidate. The better way to do that would be to have it print a scantron-like form, so that the exact the machine-readable section is also human-readable.
Because the primary function of time since the dawn of civilization has been to allow human activity to synchronize with the position of the sun, from planting seasons to night watches.
If you never leave the server room, perhaps. Most human beings have lives that are affected by sunlight. At the very least commuting in light or dark matters. Construction, farming, and many other jobs are deeply affected by daylight conditions. And some of us actually just like to go and play in the big blue room while it's blue. (Try it sometime!)
Okay, so let's say time drifts 6 hours. What was 6 am now occurs at noon.
That just means that rather than working 900 to 1700, you now work 1500 to 2300. You'd still be working the same hours relative to the sun. The only difference is what direction the little hand on the clock points (if analog clocks even still exist at that point).
It's like they don't actually know the level of technology that most people know in a K-12 school. How do they plan to dump people straight into programming when most people's knowledge of the actual workings of a computer is nowhere near the point where they could program anything meaningful? You could probably ask the average person at a K-12 school a basic question like "What's a home directory?" and they wouldn't be able to answer it. I'm all for computer classes (my elementary school forced everyone to learn typing with a cloth over their hands so they couldn't hunt and peck) but suggesting that CS should be in K-12 schools is like saying that we should teach brain surgery in K-12 before we teach them what the different parts of a brain do.
Like I said on another post, the problem is that if an ISP wants to prioritize their own service over others, there's nothing stopping them from trivially modifying an existing protocol, calling it a new protocol, and prioritizing that over other protocols of the same nature.
The solution to bandwidth hogs like p2p is per-user bandwidth control. If user A is using tiny amounts of bandwidth but user B is using a ton, then you prioritize user A's packets. If someone wants to suck down tons of bandwidth, then the only packets they choke out are their own.
Okay, so if I run an ISP, and we offer our own video service, I'll just barely modify an existing protocol and use that for our video service. Then I'll prioritize it over all other video protocols.
See why that doesn't work?
But just taking IP without permission or compensation and hiding the act? No. There's a very good reason we provide the opportunity for improving one's economic standing via IP, one I have yet to hear a decent argument against as long as we are living in a more-or-less capitalist economic society. If we're to address the failures in the current legal system as it relates to IP, sneaking around and hiding what is being done about it seems to be to be entirely the wrong way to go about it.
Because for every single person or entity that chooses to not purchase rights to an IP (and simply forgoes the use of it rather than pirating it), there is a nonzero economic loss. For a product with zero marginal costs, if someone gets any value out of it, then there is economic gain from them having access to the IP.
Especially in international matters like this one, where someone in a dirt poor country probably won't be able to afford the relatively expensive IP from first world countries. If it comes down to "pay 6 months wage for this software suite" or "pirate it", you can guess which one it's going to be. And that's good, because while the act of paying for the software is zero-sum, the act of receiving a copy of the IP is strictly positive-sum. It's the economic version of perpetual motion.
Now, it is sort of modified tragedy of the commons, in that if everyone pirated, then some IP creators might not be able to survive. But in practice that doesn't happen, because as long as enough people buy a particular piece of IP to keep it afloat, then everyone benefits from it. As long as piracy is illegal enough and/or the IP industries churn out enough propaganda to make average Joes believe that it's wrong, then everything works out. There are very few IPs that actually get screwed with piracy, especially seeing as how the biggest pirates also tend to be the biggest purchasers. This is the important thing to remember when talking about piracy: different people/entities are going to have different propensities to pirate things, and that's exactly what keeps piracy from being a real problem.
Here's a quick example: let's say there was a magic piece of software that could make any business 50% more efficient overnight. Would you really say that any business should be denied use of that software?
But sometimes you get awful, poorly thought out "style" guides like PEP8 that in many situations result in less-readable code. Go try lining up colons in a dictionary definition for the purpose of readability and see how it likes it. So actual readability gets thrown out in favor of some feel-good style guide.
Because then you can supply your own router which can support whatever advanced functionality you need. If the modem forces you to use router mode, then you're either stuck with whatever features the modem-router supports, or you end up with a double NAT.
Seeing as how awful the security can be on these devices, do you really think there won't be exploits in their auto-patching? Just because Google/MS/Apple can do it right doesn't mean some bottom-of-the-barrel router manufacturer necessarily will.
But piracy rates are meaningless, because there's no way of knowing how many of those people would have actually bought the game had they not been able to pirate it. There's no difference to a studio's bottom line between someone who buys 5 games, and someone who buys 5 games and pirates 50 more. Or someone who buys 10 games after waiting for them to drop to half their original price. Or someone who buys 50 games when they're 90% off on steam.
I'd say the problem is circular: a lot of people don't want to pay the asking price for PC games because they're awful ports and also because the standard for PC games has generally always been higher in certain areas. Obviously people don't want to pay full price for a game that has no LAN support, has an interface clearly not designed for a kb/m, and crashes your video driver every 30 minutes.
My main gripes with things like this are:
1. Poor price/performance: I'm using a used atom board that I got for $65 with 4GB RAM included. It's hard to beat stuff like that in cost-efficiency.
2. Proprietary cases and accessories: For the love of god, just make your board compatible with mini-ITX mounting holes so I can throw it in a plain old PC case if need be.
3. Not enough support for niche accessories: can it fit a huge Compex wifi card? All that would require in most situations is having one of the mPCIe slots use a high-profile connector.
4. Debugging/recovery/etc: I hope one of those headers on the board is for a serial port or it's going to suffer the classic "bad network config locked me out, time to reset and start over" unless you're booting off of mSATA (more expensive) or USB (which is going to be sticking out of the device rather than internal).
I'll probably buy one anyway but I don't know if it would replace my main router.