dunno how it is in the UK but here in AU, the main reason why there's a shortage of plumbers (and electricians and other tradespeople) is the privatisation of public utilities in the 80s and 90s, including Gas, Water, Electricity and Telephone services. Public Transport like trains and trams, too.
(I suspect it's similar in the UK because we copied your thatcherite privatisation policies - along with the ideology that it's wrong for government to in any way compete with the private sector, and that any public service that could make money *must* to be sold off cheap to the private sector so that they can make money out of it, with profit going to private pockets rather than for ongoing service provision)
These were huge government organisations that used to train almost all of the relevant trades apprentices, and then employ them for several years afterwards.
With privatisation and the introduction of the profit motive and the cost-cutting that goes along with it, they don't train the apprentices any more and they don't employ anywhere near as many tradies either (and many are employed as disposable contractors through outsourcing).
so, far fewer apprentices are being trained, and far fewer experienced employees are available to train them.
also, preventative maintainence has been replaced with emergency repairs......repairs are unavoidable when something breaks, but you can put off maintainence for years until something finally breaks and needs repair (cutting service to thousands while repair is in progress isn't important - they're paying anyway)
yeah, and i play pool much better after a beer or two than I do completely sober. a *little* alcohol to relax helps me to play better.
I wouldn't want to drive at that level, though. My reaction times will be slowed and I'll not notice things that I should (like traffic conditions, traffic signs, pedestrian crossings, kids chasing balls etc), and the roads are full of crazy bad drivers that require me to be performing at my best.
Controlling a cue and hitting a ball into a pocket across a few feet of felt-covered table is a very different thing to controlling a vehicle moving at 60-100 Kph.
at those speeds, the same relaxed confidence that helps me play pool better makes me a much worse, much more dangerous driver.
Leave it at 0.08 but triple or at least double the penalties, and things will change a lot more than that extra.03 would.
No, it wouldn't.
People generally over-estimate their own abilities, and drunk-drivers typically think they're the Bruce Willis of drunk driving...he can get up and run across broken glass, kill terrorists and blow up buildings even after being beaten up and shot, and they can drive a car perfectly even while they're shit-faced drunk.
Nothing will convince them otherwise, so even if they were able to rationally assess the penalties and risks while they're drunk, they're just not going to think it applies to them because "I'm a drinking hero, I'm not drunk, I can drive".
0.08 is seriously fucking impaired. Anyone who thinks they're capable of driving safely with a BAC of 0.08 is deluded. 0.05 is the point at which alcohol-caused impairment starts going from being mild and not statistically significant in contributing to accidents, to serious impairment with a statistically very significant contribution to causing accidents.
This is a *fact*, backed up by numerous studies, and anecdotal accounts of "I can hold my liquor" are deluded fantasy bullshit.
I have no idea what T-mobile charges, I'm not in the US.
from what I've read, US mobile plans and contract terms suck even worse than ours - with far greater concentration of market-share and far less competition. this is largely because your culture believes the corporate lie that regulation is evil....but the truth is that even a mostly-toothless competition regulator like our ACCC is better than nothing.
I know that in Australia, I can buy a Nexus 4 for anywhere from around $320 AUD to $400. I can use it with any pre-paid offering or on post-paid plans starting from $10/month (without contract).
I'm currently using my old HTC Desire HD (which i've had for almost 4 years and expect will last me another year or two before i need to replace it) on a $20/month plan that includes $450 of calls & SMS to anywhere, another $1000 worth of calls to other customers of the same provider, and 1.5GB of 3G data per month. i can cancel or change plans or switch to another provider any time without penalty (no contract).
I don't make anywhere near that number of calls, but the 1.5GB data is nice...I'd be on the $10/month plan if it included more than 200MB data, which isn't quite enough. I'm tempted to switch down to the $10 plan anyway and just make do with the data quota.
if i do decide to buy a nexus 4 or some other phone i can just take the SIM out of the old phone and put it in the new and start using it without any hassle (unless the new phone only takes micro-sim cards, then i have to call my provider and ask them to send me a micro-sim...IIRC that would cost $25).
AFAICT none of the telcos here are offering Nexus 4 phones with plans, but phones from LG and Samsung and Apple with similar specs come "free" with a minimum $60/month plan on a 2-year contract. the contract would give me about the same amount of calls and data.
I could buy the same phones outright for $600-$800 unlocked and use them on the same $10 or $20 plan. so, the phone on contract is an extra $40 or $50/month - over 24 months that costs $960 or $1200, both significantly more than buying the phone for outright. and, worse, i pay large penalties (the remainder of the contract plus another $60-$100 "admin fee" is typical) if i want to break the contract or switch provider for a better deal elsewhere.
the allegedly-"free" phone is a ripoff.
BTW, the Nexus 4 phone is a bit of a game-changer at ~$400 rather than the $600-$1000 of other phones....same as the Nexus 7 tablet was at around $250, rivalling other tablets with similar specs for $500+. Just the fact that they exist and are available as an alternative is acting to push down the prices of other phones and tablets.
The Nexus 7 is a very nice tablet - my third tablet (and fifth ebook reader) but it's the first one I've bought that really was worth the money. I wouldn't mind an Asus Transformer but not at almost three times the price, even with a 10" screen and a keyboard.
telcos and their allegedly-"subsidised" phones are the reason why phones are still so ridiculously expensive. they remove the normal effects of competition in the tech market-place, so we're still paying $600-$1000 for a current gen phone just as we were 10 or 15 years ago.
every other tech device - including extremely similar devices, tablets - have come down in price at least four-fold if not ten-fold over the same time period.
phones remain expensive to buy outright because the customers that the phone manufacturers are targetting are their largest customers, the telcos. if new phones were cheap to buy outright, people would be far less inclined to sign up for abusive two year contracts to get a hire-purchase phone (not "free" and not "subsidised" - the price is embedded in your contract)
that a bunch of people who spend a lot of time whinging about taxes and telling each other stories about being tax protestors and evading or even avoiding tax, may actually be good targets for tax audits.
i.e. if you're doing your job of loooking for people avoiding tax, then starting with people who are ideologically inclined to avoid tax would be sensible and, likely, productive.
the linux (and unix) attitude is that depending on undocumented behaviour is brain-damaged. if you do it and it bites you on the arse sometime in the future, then you've learnt a valuable lesson on why you shouldn't do that. fix it, recompile, and don't do it again.
this can cause a small amount of short-term pain (not as much as a windows user might expect because very few linux/unix developers don't understand this lesson) but it results in better quality software and less legacy bugs being kept alive for a decade or more.
Well the idea is that if you need to deploy the same package on a bunch of different computers, you grab that one install package, and then run it anywhere, and it will apply a consistent set of installs/updates.
that's easily done with a configuration file that lists the "packages" to install. Copy the main Ninite app and the config file to all machines.
to me, this is the natural and obvious way of doing it. i've been doing it this way for years - e.g. get dpkg to give me a list of installed packages on one machine, copy the list to another machine and import it.
and, being a simple text file, the list is easily generated and/or modified with standard text-processing tools like a text editor, or sed or
this is, IMO, the biggest blindness of Windows users and devs - they don't see data as something malleable and re-usable. The windows model is based around particular apps that "own" data. the *nix model is around data that can be manipulated by multiple apps or tools. The former works well for vendors, who want lock-in. The latter works better for users, who need to own their own data.
This is why Windows software vendors like Adobe are moving towards software rental, rather than software purchase. Once you have significant amounts of data locked into their proprietary software, you have no choice but to keep on paying your rent/subscription-fee if you want to keep accessing your data. It's why MS changes their data formats with every new release - to break compatibility with alternative software (forcing upgrades is only a secondary benefit), and it's why Microsoft has done everything they can to sabotage open formats like ODF with pseudo-open formats like OOXML & DOCX
Second, you can hold onto that installer and re-run it at any time, and it should update all of your existing installs
again, config file.
I guess I underestimated the effect of the windows mindset - i should have mentioned it explicitly. I didn't because i assumed it was obvious that an installer app should keep a record of what programs (and versions) are installed.
when you run it again, you have the option of just updating what's already installed, or you can examine and change the list of software-to-be-installed.
using this software, I can set up my own BitPonzi<tm> money scheme.
i'll make squillions, sell it all to buy gold, and then go retire in some libertarian utopia like Somalia, where wealth rules and i can even own other people if i want without evil socialist rules against perfectly legitimate sales contracts.
Why is it SO hard for people who use linux to understand that there are multiple runtime libraries because [...]
it's not that we don't understand how and why windows DLLs are fucked up, it's just that since we're used to a versioned shared library system that actually works, we see the windows DLL mess as being fundamentally broken.
you don't even seem to understand what's being discussed here - after the second sentence, you digress into an irrelevant rant about kernel versions.
and, BTW, since linux can run even ancient a.out format binaries from the 1990s on modern kernels, the problem you are describing is actually a problem of shoddy practices by proprietary software companies.
actually, it's something that Windows gets dead-wrong, because executable installer apps (setup.exe and the like) are just plain fucking stupid.
they're an unfortunate necessity because windows doesn't have, and never has had a decent package management system. and is unlikely to ever get one because the windows software market is primarily commercial and proprietary.
when you have 10 (or 100 or 500) packages to upgrade on a single system (and then multiply that by 100 or 1000 systems), executing hundreds of installer packages one after another is the worst possible way to do it.
i've never understood why Windows (or Apple) users tolerate that shit. it's a tedious chore that's ripe for automation - exactly the kind of thing that computers are good at doing and users are bad at doing (due to boredom, fatigue, loss of attention, ignorance, or stupidity)
which is precisely why linux distros (and other *nixes) don't do it that way. they have packaging systems because systems are consistent, predictable, and easily automated.
windows users and windows developers often have just the wrong way of looking at things, the wrong mental model of how things work and how they should work.
I ran across a program for Windows recently called Ninite. It's a multi-app installer and updater. it sounds like a good idea and is. it's a big improvement over the usual click-and-execute for each individual program.
except the way it works is weird and clumsy:
you go to their website and select which apps you want to install (from a bunch of internet-available apps, including free software and proprietary freeware like adobe flash), and then it builds you an installer app that you download and run, and it installs and/or upgrades the apps you selected off their website.
WTF?
nice starting idea, but the implementation is idiotic. Why not just have one Ninite app that fetches a list of available apps and installer URLs and whatever custom installer scripts ninite needs for them) and allow the user to select which apps whenever they run it?
i.e. instead of a moronic implementation, actually make a smart and useful implementation that copies good ideas from linux distro installers like apt-get and yum, and re-purposes them for the Windows environment.
(oh, and adobe are sending cease-and-desist letters and threatening to sue if the ninite developer doesn't remove the ability to install & update downloadable adobe products like flash, so his good ideas and good intentions are fucked by the corporate vermin mindset that dominates the windows software market)
another thing windows devs don't get is shared libraries (DLLs in windows terminology). Why does every single app have to install their own copy of the MS C++ libraries? or.net? or nvidia physx? and numerous other common library packages? these things are supposed to be shared resources provided and kept up-to-date by the operating system, not bundled with every app that uses them.
One of the most interesting talks at linux.conf.au this year was by Geoff Huston of APNIC (and with a long history of involvement in the internet in Australia), talking about IPv4 address exhaustion and IPv6 and Carrier Grade NAT (and why CGNAT sucks).
tl;d[wr] version: two of the main reasons why it sucks are a) it results in double-NAT when users have their own LANs and NAT devices behind a CGNAT connection and b) it's effectively a ways for a handful of major telcos around the world to gain control of the internet on their terms, just like in their Good Old Day (which is why they have little or no interest in IPv6).
CGNAT means getting the same kind of crappy barely-functional internet service on your landline (or wifi or satellite etc) broadband service as you get on a mobile phone.
every business and government department i've ever worked for over the last 30 years has had little or no problem with once-off capital expenditure (even if the "once-off" is actually once/year or similar in practice), but major problems authorising recurring expenditure.
in fact, many departmental budgets in both private sector and public sector organisations are written specifically to make incurring ongoing expenses difficult, if not impossible.
spend $250-500K or even millions once-off for new hardware or sofware? no problem.
spend $60-90K/year to hire a new programmer? impossible.
it's easier to get approval to pay a "once-off" fee of $200K to a consultancy to get a programmer for 12 months (and do it again next year, and the year after) than it is to hire one at $60K, because the books can be fiddled so that the consultancy fee is capex, but you can not do the same accountancy fiddle with an employee.
it's not about piracy, it's about extortion. it's about ending the old-fashioned notion of buying something, and replacing ownership with merely renting it.
you want to keep access to all your existing photoshop files? then keep paying the monthly subscription. as soon as you stop paying, you'll lose not only the software for new works but also the ability to open and use your old files.
and if adobe gets away with it, don't be too surprised if Nikon and other camera makers start doing the same thing with wifi-enabled, always-internet-connected cameras: you'll pay for the camera and you'll pay a monthly rental to keep on being able to use it, and (if they think they can get away with it), a small fee per photo taken.
i'd classify it as propaganda to get people to like the idea of a total surveillance police state because there's good-guy superheroes (including an ex-spook and a philanthropic billionaire. and don't forget the dog. doggies are nice and good guys are nice to dogs, it's the easiest way for you to know that they're good guys) protecting people who need protection from bad guys.
I stopped reading Phoronix because he never fucking links to external sites. Lots of links to other articles on phoronix but almost never a link to the original source of whatever he's crapping on about. it's just one big fucking circle-jerk.
also, the constant stream of pointless benchmarks and articles about i-am-so-great-because-i-guessed-about-steam-on-linux-first are just plain boring.
Unless you live in something called "reality," in which case we're looking at a case where the two are clearly in conflict: either accept DRM into an open spec, or accept the fact that closed plugins will continue to be a major part of the web ecosystem.
you have a great point there, it makes perfect sense and should be applied universally.
when ideals and principles conflict with 'reality', lets just ditch the principles. don't make any effort to make reality better, just drop your standards and lower your expectations.
for example, lets just accept the fact that the US illegally tortures people at Gunatanamo. the fact that they're doing it illegally is irrelevant, we should just accept 'reality' and let them legalise it.
and lets just accept the reality that sometimes people will murder other people - why bother insisting that it's wrong and should remain illegal if people are going to do it anyway? that's just reality. get over it.
Is slow and will always be slow while running from user land.
ZFS-on-Linux is not the userland FUSE version of ZFS. it's a kernel module port of ZFS and a portability layer ("spl" or solaris portability layer) by a team led by by Brian Behlendorf at LLNL (mostly because LLNL want to run Lustre on top of it).
and it's almost 10 years ahead of btrfs in terms of features, development time, and real-world testing and use in production servers.
ZFS's license is CDDL - free software but incompatible with the GPL. This means that distros can't distribute linux+zfs as a combined work (or should at least be very wary of doing so), but there's no legal problem at all with distributing the linux kernel and a separate zfs-dkms package or similar that automates the compilation and installion of ZFS on the end-user's own system.
installing it is slightly more hassle than using ext4 or xfs or btrfs or some other in-mainline-kernel FS, but not significantly more difficult. no harder than, say, installing the non-free nvidia or fglrx kernel modules on most distros.
Slashdot Mirror
RE: Plumbers
dunno how it is in the UK but here in AU, the main reason why there's a shortage of plumbers (and electricians and other tradespeople) is the privatisation of public utilities in the 80s and 90s, including Gas, Water, Electricity and Telephone services. Public Transport like trains and trams, too.
(I suspect it's similar in the UK because we copied your thatcherite privatisation policies - along with the ideology that it's wrong for government to in any way compete with the private sector, and that any public service that could make money *must* to be sold off cheap to the private sector so that they can make money out of it, with profit going to private pockets rather than for ongoing service provision)
These were huge government organisations that used to train almost all of the relevant trades apprentices, and then employ them for several years afterwards.
With privatisation and the introduction of the profit motive and the cost-cutting that goes along with it, they don't train the apprentices any more and they don't employ anywhere near as many tradies either (and many are employed as disposable contractors through outsourcing).
so, far fewer apprentices are being trained, and far fewer experienced employees are available to train them.
also, preventative maintainence has been replaced with emergency repairs......repairs are unavoidable when something breaks, but you can put off maintainence for years until something finally breaks and needs repair (cutting service to thousands while repair is in progress isn't important - they're paying anyway)
yeah, and i play pool much better after a beer or two than I do completely sober. a *little* alcohol to relax helps me to play better.
I wouldn't want to drive at that level, though. My reaction times will be slowed and I'll not notice things that I should (like traffic conditions, traffic signs, pedestrian crossings, kids chasing balls etc), and the roads are full of crazy bad drivers that require me to be performing at my best.
Controlling a cue and hitting a ball into a pocket across a few feet of felt-covered table is a very different thing to controlling a vehicle moving at 60-100 Kph.
at those speeds, the same relaxed confidence that helps me play pool better makes me a much worse, much more dangerous driver.
No, it wouldn't.
People generally over-estimate their own abilities, and drunk-drivers typically think they're the Bruce Willis of drunk driving...he can get up and run across broken glass, kill terrorists and blow up buildings even after being beaten up and shot, and they can drive a car perfectly even while they're shit-faced drunk.
Nothing will convince them otherwise, so even if they were able to rationally assess the penalties and risks while they're drunk, they're just not going to think it applies to them because "I'm a drinking hero, I'm not drunk, I can drive".
0.08 is seriously fucking impaired. Anyone who thinks they're capable of driving safely with a BAC of 0.08 is deluded. 0.05 is the point at which alcohol-caused impairment starts going from being mild and not statistically significant in contributing to accidents, to serious impairment with a statistically very significant contribution to causing accidents.
This is a *fact*, backed up by numerous studies, and anecdotal accounts of "I can hold my liquor" are deluded fantasy bullshit.
I have no idea what T-mobile charges, I'm not in the US.
from what I've read, US mobile plans and contract terms suck even worse than ours - with far greater concentration of market-share and far less competition. this is largely because your culture believes the corporate lie that regulation is evil....but the truth is that even a mostly-toothless competition regulator like our ACCC is better than nothing.
I know that in Australia, I can buy a Nexus 4 for anywhere from around $320 AUD to $400. I can use it with any pre-paid offering or on post-paid plans starting from $10/month (without contract).
I'm currently using my old HTC Desire HD (which i've had for almost 4 years and expect will last me another year or two before i need to replace it) on a $20/month plan that includes $450 of calls & SMS to anywhere, another $1000 worth of calls to other customers of the same provider, and 1.5GB of 3G data per month. i can cancel or change plans or switch to another provider any time without penalty (no contract).
I don't make anywhere near that number of calls, but the 1.5GB data is nice...I'd be on the $10/month plan if it included more than 200MB data, which isn't quite enough. I'm tempted to switch down to the $10 plan anyway and just make do with the data quota.
if i do decide to buy a nexus 4 or some other phone i can just take the SIM out of the old phone and put it in the new and start using it without any hassle (unless the new phone only takes micro-sim cards, then i have to call my provider and ask them to send me a micro-sim...IIRC that would cost $25).
AFAICT none of the telcos here are offering Nexus 4 phones with plans, but phones from LG and Samsung and Apple with similar specs come "free" with a minimum $60/month plan on a 2-year contract. the contract would give me about the same amount of calls and data.
I could buy the same phones outright for $600-$800 unlocked and use them on the same $10 or $20 plan. so, the phone on contract is an extra $40 or $50/month - over 24 months that costs $960 or $1200, both significantly more than buying the phone for outright. and, worse, i pay large penalties (the remainder of the contract plus another $60-$100 "admin fee" is typical) if i want to break the contract or switch provider for a better deal elsewhere.
the allegedly-"free" phone is a ripoff.
BTW, the Nexus 4 phone is a bit of a game-changer at ~$400 rather than the $600-$1000 of other phones....same as the Nexus 7 tablet was at around $250, rivalling other tablets with similar specs for $500+. Just the fact that they exist and are available as an alternative is acting to push down the prices of other phones and tablets.
The Nexus 7 is a very nice tablet - my third tablet (and fifth ebook reader) but it's the first one I've bought that really was worth the money. I wouldn't mind an Asus Transformer but not at almost three times the price, even with a 10" screen and a keyboard.
tablets have had similar or better performance improvements as well as huge price reductions.
(android tablets, anyway. ipads are still priced as luxury items because Apple customers are willing to pay that much)
...but bizarrely distorted from reality.
telcos and their allegedly-"subsidised" phones are the reason why phones are still so ridiculously expensive. they remove the normal effects of competition in the tech market-place, so we're still paying $600-$1000 for a current gen phone just as we were 10 or 15 years ago.
every other tech device - including extremely similar devices, tablets - have come down in price at least four-fold if not ten-fold over the same time period.
phones remain expensive to buy outright because the customers that the phone manufacturers are targetting are their largest customers, the telcos. if new phones were cheap to buy outright, people would be far less inclined to sign up for abusive two year contracts to get a hire-purchase phone (not "free" and not "subsidised" - the price is embedded in your contract)
please define 'google' and 'wikipedia'. and what's an 'internet'?
it's unfair and exclusionist of you to use such technobabble jargon without defining them.
also, i'm not clear on what 'straw' or 'man' are. you need to define them too. in grunts of one syllable or less.
that a bunch of people who spend a lot of time whinging about taxes and telling each other stories about being tax protestors and evading or even avoiding tax, may actually be good targets for tax audits.
i.e. if you're doing your job of loooking for people avoiding tax, then starting with people who are ideologically inclined to avoid tax would be sensible and, likely, productive.
the linux (and unix) attitude is that depending on undocumented behaviour is brain-damaged. if you do it and it bites you on the arse sometime in the future, then you've learnt a valuable lesson on why you shouldn't do that. fix it, recompile, and don't do it again.
this can cause a small amount of short-term pain (not as much as a windows user might expect because very few linux/unix developers don't understand this lesson) but it results in better quality software and less legacy bugs being kept alive for a decade or more.
that's easily done with a configuration file that lists the "packages" to install. Copy the main Ninite app and the config file to all machines.
to me, this is the natural and obvious way of doing it. i've been doing it this way for years - e.g. get dpkg to give me a list of installed packages on one machine, copy the list to another machine and import it.
and, being a simple text file, the list is easily generated and/or modified with standard text-processing tools like a text editor, or sed or
this is, IMO, the biggest blindness of Windows users and devs - they don't see data as something malleable and re-usable. The windows model is based around particular apps that "own" data. the *nix model is around data that can be manipulated by multiple apps or tools. The former works well for vendors, who want lock-in. The latter works better for users, who need to own their own data.
This is why Windows software vendors like Adobe are moving towards software rental, rather than software purchase. Once you have significant amounts of data locked into their proprietary software, you have no choice but to keep on paying your rent/subscription-fee if you want to keep accessing your data. It's why MS changes their data formats with every new release - to break compatibility with alternative software (forcing upgrades is only a secondary benefit), and it's why Microsoft has done everything they can to sabotage open formats like ODF with pseudo-open formats like OOXML & DOCX
again, config file.
I guess I underestimated the effect of the windows mindset - i should have mentioned it explicitly. I didn't because i assumed it was obvious that an installer app should keep a record of what programs (and versions) are installed.
when you run it again, you have the option of just updating what's already installed, or you can examine and change the list of software-to-be-installed.
using this software, I can set up my own BitPonzi<tm> money scheme.
i'll make squillions, sell it all to buy gold, and then go retire in some libertarian utopia like Somalia, where wealth rules and i can even own other people if i want without evil socialist rules against perfectly legitimate sales contracts.
it's not that we don't understand how and why windows DLLs are fucked up, it's just that since we're used to a versioned shared library system that actually works, we see the windows DLL mess as being fundamentally broken.
you don't even seem to understand what's being discussed here - after the second sentence, you digress into an irrelevant rant about kernel versions.
and, BTW, since linux can run even ancient a.out format binaries from the 1990s on modern kernels, the problem you are describing is actually a problem of shoddy practices by proprietary software companies.
only dirty stinking communists have five year plans.
the only thing that matters are the figures for the next quarter.
i can't see why i'd want to install an app by a developer who wasn't competent to do something that's actually quite easy.
the only purpose for this is to cater to ignorance and incompetence.
actually, it's something that Windows gets dead-wrong, because executable installer apps (setup.exe and the like) are just plain fucking stupid.
they're an unfortunate necessity because windows doesn't have, and never has had a decent package management system. and is unlikely to ever get one because the windows software market is primarily commercial and proprietary.
when you have 10 (or 100 or 500) packages to upgrade on a single system (and then multiply that by 100 or 1000 systems), executing hundreds of installer packages one after another is the worst possible way to do it.
i've never understood why Windows (or Apple) users tolerate that shit. it's a tedious chore that's ripe for automation - exactly the kind of thing that computers are good at doing and users are bad at doing (due to boredom, fatigue, loss of attention, ignorance, or stupidity)
which is precisely why linux distros (and other *nixes) don't do it that way. they have packaging systems because systems are consistent, predictable, and easily automated.
windows users and windows developers often have just the wrong way of looking at things, the wrong mental model of how things work and how they should work.
I ran across a program for Windows recently called Ninite. It's a multi-app installer and updater. it sounds like a good idea and is. it's a big improvement over the usual click-and-execute for each individual program.
except the way it works is weird and clumsy:
you go to their website and select which apps you want to install (from a bunch of internet-available apps, including free software and proprietary freeware like adobe flash), and then it builds you an installer app that you download and run, and it installs and/or upgrades the apps you selected off their website.
WTF?
nice starting idea, but the implementation is idiotic. Why not just have one Ninite app that fetches a list of available apps and installer URLs and whatever custom installer scripts ninite needs for them) and allow the user to select which apps whenever they run it?
i.e. instead of a moronic implementation, actually make a smart and useful implementation that copies good ideas from linux distro installers like apt-get and yum, and re-purposes them for the Windows environment.
(oh, and adobe are sending cease-and-desist letters and threatening to sue if the ninite developer doesn't remove the ability to install & update downloadable adobe products like flash, so his good ideas and good intentions are fucked by the corporate vermin mindset that dominates the windows software market)
another thing windows devs don't get is shared libraries (DLLs in windows terminology). Why does every single app have to install their own copy of the MS C++ libraries? or .net? or nvidia physx? and numerous other common library packages? these things are supposed to be shared resources provided and kept up-to-date by the operating system, not bundled with every app that uses them.
so the solution is for ISPs to offer IPv6 service PLUS a v4-to-v6 gateway or CGNAT for access to "legacy" IPv4 sites.
in a few years, the transition will be complete with little pain
One of the most interesting talks at linux.conf.au this year was by Geoff Huston of APNIC (and with a long history of involvement in the internet in Australia), talking about IPv4 address exhaustion and IPv6 and Carrier Grade NAT (and why CGNAT sucks).
tl;d[wr] version: two of the main reasons why it sucks are a) it results in double-NAT when users have their own LANs and NAT devices behind a CGNAT connection and b) it's effectively a ways for a handful of major telcos around the world to gain control of the internet on their terms, just like in their Good Old Day (which is why they have little or no interest in IPv6).
CGNAT means getting the same kind of crappy barely-functional internet service on your landline (or wifi or satellite etc) broadband service as you get on a mobile phone.
Video here:
http://mirror.linux.org.au/linux.conf.au/2013/ogv/The_IPocalypse_20_months_later.ogv
LWN article about Geoff's talk here:
http://lwn.net/Articles/424696/
three cheers for asset-stripping vulture capitalist scumbags.
they'll get richer gutting and eventually killing off BMC, but that's a small price to pay for the death of BMC Remedy.
every business and government department i've ever worked for over the last 30 years has had little or no problem with once-off capital expenditure (even if the "once-off" is actually once/year or similar in practice), but major problems authorising recurring expenditure.
in fact, many departmental budgets in both private sector and public sector organisations are written specifically to make incurring ongoing expenses difficult, if not impossible.
spend $250-500K or even millions once-off for new hardware or sofware? no problem.
spend $60-90K/year to hire a new programmer? impossible.
it's easier to get approval to pay a "once-off" fee of $200K to a consultancy to get a programmer for 12 months (and do it again next year, and the year after) than it is to hire one at $60K, because the books can be fiddled so that the consultancy fee is capex, but you can not do the same accountancy fiddle with an employee.
it's not about piracy, it's about extortion. it's about ending the old-fashioned notion of buying something, and replacing ownership with merely renting it.
you want to keep access to all your existing photoshop files? then keep paying the monthly subscription. as soon as you stop paying, you'll lose not only the software for new works but also the ability to open and use your old files.
and if adobe gets away with it, don't be too surprised if Nikon and other camera makers start doing the same thing with wifi-enabled, always-internet-connected cameras: you'll pay for the camera and you'll pay a monthly rental to keep on being able to use it, and (if they think they can get away with it), a small fee per photo taken.
i'd classify it as propaganda to get people to like the idea of a total surveillance police state because there's good-guy superheroes (including an ex-spook and a philanthropic billionaire. and don't forget the dog. doggies are nice and good guys are nice to dogs, it's the easiest way for you to know that they're good guys) protecting people who need protection from bad guys.
i'm not.
but in the not-too-distant future, there won't be any alternative.
motherboards that allow me to run whatever software I want just won't be available.
there'll still be neat educational and hobbyist toys like raspberry pi, but they're not a substitute for a desktop or server machine.
DRM is the thing that will enable the destruction of the market for open/unrestricted computers.
I stopped reading Phoronix because he never fucking links to external sites. Lots of links to other articles on phoronix but almost never a link to the original source of whatever he's crapping on about. it's just one big fucking circle-jerk.
also, the constant stream of pointless benchmarks and articles about i-am-so-great-because-i-guessed-about-steam-on-linux-first are just plain boring.
you have a great point there, it makes perfect sense and should be applied universally.
when ideals and principles conflict with 'reality', lets just ditch the principles. don't make any effort to make reality better, just drop your standards and lower your expectations.
for example, lets just accept the fact that the US illegally tortures people at Gunatanamo. the fact that they're doing it illegally is irrelevant, we should just accept 'reality' and let them legalise it.
and lets just accept the reality that sometimes people will murder other people - why bother insisting that it's wrong and should remain illegal if people are going to do it anyway? that's just reality. get over it.
ZFS-on-Linux is not the userland FUSE version of ZFS. it's a kernel module port of ZFS and a portability layer ("spl" or solaris portability layer) by a team led by by Brian Behlendorf at LLNL (mostly because LLNL want to run Lustre on top of it).
http://zfsonlinux.org/
It's not slow at all. It's fast.
and it's almost 10 years ahead of btrfs in terms of features, development time, and real-world testing and use in production servers.
ZFS's license is CDDL - free software but incompatible with the GPL. This means that distros can't distribute linux+zfs as a combined work (or should at least be very wary of doing so), but there's no legal problem at all with distributing the linux kernel and a separate zfs-dkms package or similar that automates the compilation and installion of ZFS on the end-user's own system.
installing it is slightly more hassle than using ext4 or xfs or btrfs or some other in-mainline-kernel FS, but not significantly more difficult. no harder than, say, installing the non-free nvidia or fglrx kernel modules on most distros.