It isn't so much that "old is bad" as that the new is more likely to have been designed with modern paradigms in mind. Despite your dismissal, parallelism in particular is important, especially as Linux has taken a role as the embedded OS of choice for smart devices and cheap laptops.
Linux was succeeding quite well in the non-RTOS embedded space and with cheap hardware long before systemd came around. And an embedded device (aka, an appliance) is precisely where you want the MOST deterministic functioning. You don't just randomly through a bunch of parallelized shit in there and hope systemd all figures it out for you.
The fact remains that the previous init harness was perfectly reasonable. People that needed service management, socket launching, and other functions had options in daemontools, inetd/xinetd, runit, and myriad other tools out there, while rc (on BSD) or the chkconfig-controlled symlinks in rc.d gave structured sanity to the set of deterministic instructions a machine needed at boot.
Systemd's writers forcefully shoved all that aside in favor of a one-size-fits-all strategy that people had to accept whether they liked it or not, and once it was in place, they did everything they could to burn the bridges back to other paradigms.
yay gentoo! Its very easy to avoid that systemd garbage. I'm not just bandwagoning here, I have to setup RHEL7 for a very large company because they wanted to stay with RedHat. It was hell on wheels. RHEL7.1 was a slight improvement but still not enough to ever consider it again.
I would kill for a systemd-free rebuild of RHEL, but it doesn't seem like there's enough of a push to be able to make it happen with some sort of plausible enterprise ability. It wouldn't be that hard -- basically take RHEL7 and stick RHEL6's initscripts and startup system onto it -- but it wouldn't be "EL7", which is important.
A systemd-free version of Fedora is tricker, if only because LP and friends have succeeded in burning as many bridges as possible within the base install away from any other init paradigm. Good job, guys. I hope you rot.
Same as if I started selling beer on a street corner and called it "beverage sharing", I cant use an app to get around the fact I'm operating an unlicensed bar.
Oh sorry, I ddin't know that only RedHat used systemd... They don't so the constant moaning about it is getting rather tiresome.
They aren't, but RH corporate inexplicably pushed it despite greybeards thinking moving wholesale to an unproven system with a leader with known issues was probably a bad idea.
Ironically, systemd solved problems that were mostly already-solved in RH-land, which is the big reason for the pushback ~2014 when it finally hit EL7 and enterprise admins had to actually care about it. (Boot speed? Please. Could have gotten a lot of that by mimicing Debian's use of DashAsBinSh. Virtually everything else other than cgroup management already had better discrete tools for management in the ecosystem.)
I tend to think systemd's adoption was just a classic case of organizational disaster, pushed by a FreeDesktop team with an agenda and myopia, and project managers with more faith in developers than the sysadmins who actually run the product. But "proprietary complexity on top of open source" is another explanation, given how simple-to-grok shell scripts were replaced with a technically-OSS 100K LoC mishmash of non-deterministic spaghetti.
Not when money is to be made, which is what wins in the end. My favorite fake news wave wasn't the election stuff, but the "plague' of "social justice warriors" "taking over the country." that made the internet so much over the pasty year or so. Never met any "SJWs" in real life, despite travelling around a lot, spending a lot of time in public places, and yes going to College Campuses. Mostly in California of all places, around San Francisco even! Surely the heartland of SJW scourge, even though it was almost non existent.
I find this, Anonymous Coward, extraordinarily difficult to believe. I'm still quite close to a number of people who are in college at universities here in San Diego, and it's clear from Facebook postings that there are many what can safely be described as "SJW"'s out there. Either you're intentionally avoiding them or we don't agree on what SJW refers to.
In fact, that advanced device in our pocket could greatly improve our privacy and security
How could it "greatly improve privacy and security" over, say, life in 1998? -- with the sole exception of a better voice call GSM/CDMA encryption algorithm.
People should assume that nothing is secure at this point. If you have an advanced device, someone will be able to spy on you.
Starting to wonder if the smartphone (advanced operating system, application ecosystem, sensors out the wazoo) are basically a net loss for society, even before you get to the actual cultural effects of mass, constant, information/internet use.
The VentureBeat article has been updated with a response from Microsoft:
"We believe in coordinated vulnerability disclosure, and today's disclosure by Google puts customers at potential risk," a Microsoft spokesperson told VentureBeat. "Windows is the only platform with a customer commitment to investigate reported security issues and proactively update impacted devices as soon as possible. We recommend customers use Windows 10 and the Microsoft Edge browser for the best protection."
What the hell are they smoking? Apple, the various Linux distributions, and the BSDs all are committed to "investigating reported security issues and proactively updating impacted devices as soon as possible." They all routinely release immediate updates for critical exploits. I think even Cisco's IOS has a better track record than Windows in time-to-fix for critical vulnerabilities.
I might be wrong, but it seems like that's a crack at the security issues within Google's Android ecosystem...
MS isn't the one that let it get to a point where a bazillion hacked devices without updates are in the field a mere year or two after hardware was released. XP had support for 10 years.
It's interesting to see the larger (old) AT&T successors competing back again...
New AT&T is, of course, former Baby Bell "Southwestern Bell", which bought the old AT&T, including the AT&T Long Lines department (and, of course, AT&T Long Distance, which is still a functioning corporate unit and is still "the old AT&T"). With CenturyLink, we'll now have two Baby Bells with significant fiber footprints. (As others have pointed out, AT&T / TW doesn't involve TWC/Comcast though.)
It's arguable whether the reconstitution of mega backbones was inevitable. Although divestiture helped competition (MCI, of course) and helped explosively develop the technical capacity needed for internet growth, economies of scale do come back into play. Especially when massive capital outlays come into play.
I used to not be too afraid of Google's technological dominance, but this is great evidence that Alphabet's well on it's way to becoming the full-on Umbrella Corp... They seem to only employee engineers and project leads who don't live in the real world, and lack a certain amount of common sense.
Laying cable is hard. And you can't just charge everyone marginal costs on physical operations.
Sometimes you can't software your way out of something.
No industry reach-out and responsible disclosure after the time needed for them to contemplate and execute a change across a 100K+-node base station network?
The current AT&T is not the original AT&T. It's the company that bought parts of AT&T and renamed itself AT&T. Also, Comcast and the original AT&T had already merged years ago...
If it was the original AT&T, their service would be more reliable and their network better engineered.
Seriously, Southwestern Bell sucked in all aspects of its service. When it bought PacBell customer service collapsed and general reliability problems started coming up out here in CA. I had the original AT&T Wireless mobile service here in San Diego and I seriously don't ever remember going under 3 bars anywhere, and this was over a decade ago. After SBC sucked up the old AT&T and took on its trade name, it didn't adopt old AT&T's engineering or reliability practices, or even AFAICT its work ethic....
I do sometimes wonder what it's like to work for AT&T Corporation now, which lives on as the long distance subsidiary...
Sure, but we're now replacing that with ecosystem lockin on the Linux side. Thanks, systemd.
Linux was a free-as-in-speech, *and* free-as-in-beer version of Unix... The Windows devs who've invaded seem to want to bring lockin back by standardizing the Vendor layer across their own userland middleware, and FreeDesktop locked we shall be.
... I would actually be expecting something pretty amazing right now.
The "Pro. Go. Whoa." tagline of the introduction of the original (Bondi Blue) iMac was something that was actually pretty astonishing and well worth the -- rather low-key, in retrospect -- hype going into it. The iMac itself was advertised displaying the infamous 1984 "hello" image on its front:
Since we don't have Jobs around any more, I'm not really sure what to expect. New form factors, perhaps, but it's weird to think of Apple caring much about its Mac line nowadays.
... it's an efficient server platform and offers a *nix environment with an easy-to-grok underpinning that a human can eventually understand, until systemd entendrils itself everywhere because non-determinism is cool now.
Ohhhh... You mean "Why do I use Linux on the Desktop?"
I don't. I use a Mac laptop and a Win10 PC desktop. I want to get work done and/or play games, not fiddle with crap.
Is the officer very well connected or does the Secret Service widely offer the service to scan gift cards?
I'm surprised the Secret Service just takes these requests as part of their duties..
Gift cards are a modern way to perform money laundering, which is part of the financial crimes that the Secret Service is in charge of when it's not protecting the President.
Old and Busted: Money Orders New Hotness: Applebee's Credits
why do cops have a Credit Card reader in their squad car? I'd heard stories of some cops taking payment for tickets when they pull you over and threatening jail time if you don't pay then and there...
It's not a credit card reader per se, just a magnetic stripe reader. The *vast* majority of magnetic cards of any type have their data encoded in one of only a few different ISO standard formats. Anything can read them, although they may or may not be able to make sense of the data encoded on them.
Obviously, it's not truly "unlimited" (hint: nothing is), but
Then maybe they should stop using that word in their advertisement of services. Most other industries get called out if they outright lie in advertisements. Pretty sure there are even laws about it. Why the special pass for carriers and ISPs?
A better word would be "un-metered". This is a time-definite plan, however, so it's not very relevant... Unlike with a physical 100Mbps port that one might purchase, here you're going to be getting LTE speeds and competing with however many other users are on your cell tower. So yes, feel free to download away for your half hour. They probably actually don't care too much.
... I think this is a pretty good idea. The use cases are exactly that -- you know you're about to do something bandwidth heavy for a (relatively) short period of time, and you want to signal to your upstream provider this fact so that you can negotiate an effective resource allocation.
This really isn't any different from going to a metered to a port-based uplink for a certain length of time. Obviously, it's not truly "unlimited" (hint: nothing is), but if it's not being held against you and the speed is sufficient for your purpose (eg, streaming videos, downloading a ton of apps, tethering to your computer as you're about to do an OS upgrade, etc.), this is a great option for a savvy user.
There are probably a fair number of users whose data usage is somewhat spiky -- low usage most of the time and then a day or two when they use 4GB livestreaming something. This'll be good for them.
Extensive first aid kit (at minimum, take a Red Cross first aid and CPR class)
... Also, take care of any medical and dental issues NOW. Doctors will be in high demand when TSHTF.
If you want something effective after TSHTF -- and also effective in virtually any other large scale disaster (the "earthquake or other emergency" of EBS fame) -- go beyond this and take a Wilderness First Responder class and get certified. If you have spare time and can find a convenient class, take an EMT class (~128 hours) and then take an EMT-to-Wilderness EMT upgrade instead.
Wilderness protocols go into effect when you're more than 2 hours away from "definitive care" -- that is, what most of the time think of as a local, functioning hospital in a city. Rather than just maintaining the stability of the patient for transport, in the wilderness/backcountry/whatever you have to worry about possible issues coming ahead (hypothermia, decompensated shock, etc.), and improvising equipment from whatever might happen to be around you. In short: it's about problem solving.
A problem solving medic who can improvise as needed in the field is a valuable asset to any group that needs to cope with unexpected events. They're not a doctor, or a combat surgeon, but you can bet they'll be wanted.
Slashdot Mirror
It isn't so much that "old is bad" as that the new is more likely to have been designed with modern paradigms in mind. Despite your dismissal, parallelism in particular is important, especially as Linux has taken a role as the embedded OS of choice for smart devices and cheap laptops.
Linux was succeeding quite well in the non-RTOS embedded space and with cheap hardware long before systemd came around. And an embedded device (aka, an appliance) is precisely where you want the MOST deterministic functioning. You don't just randomly through a bunch of parallelized shit in there and hope systemd all figures it out for you.
The fact remains that the previous init harness was perfectly reasonable. People that needed service management, socket launching, and other functions had options in daemontools, inetd/xinetd, runit, and myriad other tools out there, while rc (on BSD) or the chkconfig-controlled symlinks in rc.d gave structured sanity to the set of deterministic instructions a machine needed at boot.
Systemd's writers forcefully shoved all that aside in favor of a one-size-fits-all strategy that people had to accept whether they liked it or not, and once it was in place, they did everything they could to burn the bridges back to other paradigms.
yay gentoo! Its very easy to avoid that systemd garbage. I'm not just bandwagoning here, I have to setup RHEL7 for a very large company because they wanted to stay with RedHat. It was hell on wheels. RHEL7.1 was a slight improvement but still not enough to ever consider it again.
I would kill for a systemd-free rebuild of RHEL, but it doesn't seem like there's enough of a push to be able to make it happen with some sort of plausible enterprise ability. It wouldn't be that hard -- basically take RHEL7 and stick RHEL6's initscripts and startup system onto it -- but it wouldn't be "EL7", which is important.
A systemd-free version of Fedora is tricker, if only because LP and friends have succeeded in burning as many bridges as possible within the base install away from any other init paradigm. Good job, guys. I hope you rot.
Same as if I started selling beer on a street corner and called it "beverage sharing", I cant use an app to get around the fact I'm operating an unlicensed bar.
cf. Napster
Oh sorry, I ddin't know that only RedHat used systemd... They don't so the constant moaning about it is getting rather tiresome.
They aren't, but RH corporate inexplicably pushed it despite greybeards thinking moving wholesale to an unproven system with a leader with known issues was probably a bad idea.
Ironically, systemd solved problems that were mostly already-solved in RH-land, which is the big reason for the pushback ~2014 when it finally hit EL7 and enterprise admins had to actually care about it. (Boot speed? Please. Could have gotten a lot of that by mimicing Debian's use of DashAsBinSh. Virtually everything else other than cgroup management already had better discrete tools for management in the ecosystem.)
I tend to think systemd's adoption was just a classic case of organizational disaster, pushed by a FreeDesktop team with an agenda and myopia, and project managers with more faith in developers than the sysadmins who actually run the product. But "proprietary complexity on top of open source" is another explanation, given how simple-to-grok shell scripts were replaced with a technically-OSS 100K LoC mishmash of non-deterministic spaghetti.
Not when money is to be made, which is what wins in the end. My favorite fake news wave wasn't the election stuff, but the "plague' of "social justice warriors" "taking over the country." that made the internet so much over the pasty year or so. Never met any "SJWs" in real life, despite travelling around a lot, spending a lot of time in public places, and yes going to College Campuses. Mostly in California of all places, around San Francisco even! Surely the heartland of SJW scourge, even though it was almost non existent.
I find this, Anonymous Coward, extraordinarily difficult to believe. I'm still quite close to a number of people who are in college at universities here in San Diego, and it's clear from Facebook postings that there are many what can safely be described as "SJW"'s out there. Either you're intentionally avoiding them or we don't agree on what SJW refers to.
It's really just Mac OS 8.6 and some abstraction layers...
In fact, that advanced device in our pocket could greatly improve our privacy and security
How could it "greatly improve privacy and security" over, say, life in 1998? -- with the sole exception of a better voice call GSM/CDMA encryption algorithm.
People should assume that nothing is secure at this point. If you have an advanced device, someone will be able to spy on you.
Starting to wonder if the smartphone (advanced operating system, application ecosystem, sensors out the wazoo) are basically a net loss for society, even before you get to the actual cultural effects of mass, constant, information/internet use.
The VentureBeat article has been updated with a response from Microsoft:
"We believe in coordinated vulnerability disclosure, and today's disclosure by Google puts customers at potential risk," a Microsoft spokesperson told VentureBeat. "Windows is the only platform with a customer commitment to investigate reported security issues and proactively update impacted devices as soon as possible. We recommend customers use Windows 10 and the Microsoft Edge browser for the best protection."
What the hell are they smoking? Apple, the various Linux distributions, and the BSDs all are committed to "investigating reported security issues and proactively updating impacted devices as soon as possible." They all routinely release immediate updates for critical exploits. I think even Cisco's IOS has a better track record than Windows in time-to-fix for critical vulnerabilities.
I might be wrong, but it seems like that's a crack at the security issues within Google's Android ecosystem...
MS isn't the one that let it get to a point where a bazillion hacked devices without updates are in the field a mere year or two after hardware was released.
XP had support for 10 years.
Yeah, I have to agree with this. I had (old) AT&T Wireless and it was freaking awesome in San Diego.
If SBC had adopted old AT&T's engineering practices, maybe it wouldn't suck as much now.
It's interesting to see the larger (old) AT&T successors competing back again...
New AT&T is, of course, former Baby Bell "Southwestern Bell", which bought the old AT&T, including the AT&T Long Lines department (and, of course, AT&T Long Distance, which is still a functioning corporate unit and is still "the old AT&T"). With CenturyLink, we'll now have two Baby Bells with significant fiber footprints. (As others have pointed out, AT&T / TW doesn't involve TWC/Comcast though.)
It's arguable whether the reconstitution of mega backbones was inevitable. Although divestiture helped competition (MCI, of course) and helped explosively develop the technical capacity needed for internet growth, economies of scale do come back into play. Especially when massive capital outlays come into play.
A Netflix server is -- not -- missing its copy of Colossus: The Forbin Project
I continue to maintain that Solutionists, whether of the Millennial variety or not, have not read enough Dystopian '60s and '70s science fiction.
I used to not be too afraid of Google's technological dominance, but this is great evidence that Alphabet's well on it's way to becoming the full-on Umbrella Corp... They seem to only employee engineers and project leads who don't live in the real world, and lack a certain amount of common sense.
Laying cable is hard. And you can't just charge everyone marginal costs on physical operations.
Sometimes you can't software your way out of something.
No industry reach-out and responsible disclosure after the time needed for them to contemplate and execute a change across a 100K+-node base station network?
This is why we can't have nice things.
The current AT&T is not the original AT&T. It's the company that bought parts of AT&T and renamed itself AT&T. Also, Comcast and the original AT&T had already merged years ago...
If it was the original AT&T, their service would be more reliable and their network better engineered.
Seriously, Southwestern Bell sucked in all aspects of its service. When it bought PacBell customer service collapsed and general reliability problems started coming up out here in CA. I had the original AT&T Wireless mobile service here in San Diego and I seriously don't ever remember going under 3 bars anywhere, and this was over a decade ago. After SBC sucked up the old AT&T and took on its trade name, it didn't adopt old AT&T's engineering or reliability practices, or even AFAICT its work ethic....
I do sometimes wonder what it's like to work for AT&T Corporation now, which lives on as the long distance subsidiary...
I'm glad they pay you well, but we can and will hold them accountable for the rest of the company's existence.
In my official capacity as an ex- Sony employee and a 5-digit Slashdot UID holder: You're a f**king idiot.
Not really.
Security through obscurity is not security.
Nothing is security; security is a process that results from multiple aspects and layers of application.
Security through obscurity alone is not security. Obscurity, either in the hidden sense or in the rare sense, is one layer of security.
Sure, but we're now replacing that with ecosystem lockin on the Linux side. Thanks, systemd.
Linux was a free-as-in-speech, *and* free-as-in-beer version of Unix... The Windows devs who've invaded seem to want to bring lockin back by standardizing the Vendor layer across their own userland middleware, and FreeDesktop locked we shall be.
... I would actually be expecting something pretty amazing right now.
The "Pro. Go. Whoa." tagline of the introduction of the original (Bondi Blue) iMac was something that was actually pretty astonishing and well worth the -- rather low-key, in retrospect -- hype going into it. The iMac itself was advertised displaying the infamous 1984 "hello" image on its front:
http://lowendmac.com/wp-content/uploads/hello-again-imac.jpg via
http://lowendmac.com/1998/1998-good-bye-newton-hello-os-8-1-wallstreet-and-imac/
Since we don't have Jobs around any more, I'm not really sure what to expect. New form factors, perhaps, but it's weird to think of Apple caring much about its Mac line nowadays.
Whatever it is, it better be good.
... it's an efficient server platform and offers a *nix environment with an easy-to-grok underpinning that a human can eventually understand, until systemd entendrils itself everywhere because non-determinism is cool now.
Ohhhh... You mean "Why do I use Linux on the Desktop?"
I don't. I use a Mac laptop and a Win10 PC desktop. I want to get work done and/or play games, not fiddle with crap.
Is the officer very well connected or does the Secret Service widely offer the service to scan gift cards?
I'm surprised the Secret Service just takes these requests as part of their duties..
Gift cards are a modern way to perform money laundering, which is part of the financial crimes that the Secret Service is in charge of when it's not protecting the President.
Old and Busted: Money Orders
New Hotness: Applebee's Credits
why do cops have a Credit Card reader in their squad car? I'd heard stories of some cops taking payment for tickets when they pull you over and threatening jail time if you don't pay then and there...
It's not a credit card reader per se, just a magnetic stripe reader. The *vast* majority of magnetic cards of any type have their data encoded in one of only a few different ISO standard formats. Anything can read them, although they may or may not be able to make sense of the data encoded on them.
Obviously, it's not truly "unlimited" (hint: nothing is), but
Then maybe they should stop using that word in their advertisement of services. Most other industries get called out if they outright lie in advertisements. Pretty sure there are even laws about it. Why the special pass for carriers and ISPs?
A better word would be "un-metered". This is a time-definite plan, however, so it's not very relevant... Unlike with a physical 100Mbps port that one might purchase, here you're going to be getting LTE speeds and competing with however many other users are on your cell tower. So yes, feel free to download away for your half hour. They probably actually don't care too much.
... I think this is a pretty good idea. The use cases are exactly that -- you know you're about to do something bandwidth heavy for a (relatively) short period of time, and you want to signal to your upstream provider this fact so that you can negotiate an effective resource allocation.
This really isn't any different from going to a metered to a port-based uplink for a certain length of time. Obviously, it's not truly "unlimited" (hint: nothing is), but if it's not being held against you and the speed is sufficient for your purpose (eg, streaming videos, downloading a ton of apps, tethering to your computer as you're about to do an OS upgrade, etc.), this is a great option for a savvy user.
There are probably a fair number of users whose data usage is somewhat spiky -- low usage most of the time and then a day or two when they use 4GB livestreaming something. This'll be good for them.
Extensive first aid kit (at minimum, take a Red Cross first aid and CPR class)
... Also, take care of any medical and dental issues NOW. Doctors will be in high demand when TSHTF.
If you want something effective after TSHTF -- and also effective in virtually any other large scale disaster (the "earthquake or other emergency" of EBS fame) -- go beyond this and take a Wilderness First Responder class and get certified. If you have spare time and can find a convenient class, take an EMT class (~128 hours) and then take an EMT-to-Wilderness EMT upgrade instead.
Wilderness protocols go into effect when you're more than 2 hours away from "definitive care" -- that is, what most of the time think of as a local, functioning hospital in a city. Rather than just maintaining the stability of the patient for transport, in the wilderness/backcountry/whatever you have to worry about possible issues coming ahead (hypothermia, decompensated shock, etc.), and improvising equipment from whatever might happen to be around you. In short: it's about problem solving.
A problem solving medic who can improvise as needed in the field is a valuable asset to any group that needs to cope with unexpected events. They're not a doctor, or a combat surgeon, but you can bet they'll be wanted.