However, the thing that makes it a dealbreaker for me is that it reduces the granularity and flexibility of the system. It absorbs far too many system services. If it were just an init manager, I'd have no real qualms with it. That it goes way beyond that, and important applications are beginning to require it, means that it signifies a huge shift away from the sort of system architecture that is the very reason I'm using GNU/Linux systems to begin with.
Since it's removing a real advantage of GNU/Linux systems without giving me any benefits that matter to me, its presence is an overall degradation of the OS.
If Debian had done the right thing and preserved user choice by creating a distro that realistically allows you to avoid using systemd, none of this would be a problem. That's why the failure of this GR is such a disaster: it's Debian voting against user choice.
With the failure of this GR, it is clear that I can not trust Debian to ensure that systemd remains optional. As such, I cannot trust Debian to remain a distro that meets my needs. It's all well and good that the dependency will remain avoidable in Jessie -- that gives me enough time to enact my escape plan to BSD with minimal disruption.
I am so saddened by this whole thing. I am even more saddened that a wonderful distro that has served me very well has stopped doing so. But, I suppose, times change.
The problem with the statement is that it doesn't really address my major privacy concerns at all. Even if they adhered to it 100%, there are enough exceptions that I don't care. It doesn't reassure me. My car simply should not be phoning home, period. It gives me zero benefit, and exposes me to risk.
i'm more worried about google knowing everything about me... or facebook.
Well then, you're in luck. You can avoid being spied on by the likes of Google and Facebook. You have no such choice about being spied on by the government.
To what standard do you hold the US government as opposed to other governments? You can be damn sure that every other intelligence agency is doing exactly the same thing... but you're criticizing NSA why exactly?
For two reasons: The NSA is part of my own government, and the other governments aren't, and the US government is in a position to cause me a lot more harm than other governments are. That other nations may be doing the same thing is irrelevant to the issue at hand. We cannot set our standards of freedom and liberty based on the global lowest common denominator.
A lady at work the other day didn't seem to know that one could still receive over-the-air broadcasts for television. I wonder how many people don't realize this and are paying for TV that they don't want or need.
Since the digital switchover, there are a lot of people who can no longer receive OTA broadcasts at all, even in urban areas. The coverage of the digital broadcasts is very, very spotty.
Funny thing is we would have gladly removed all tv services but they would have charged more for the service going Internet only.
This is the only reason I have cable TV service, too -- I haven't even hooked up the cable to my TV. I think that's why they do this -- it helps them artificially boost the subscriber numbers.
Nobody said the new next was not going to be a shitty place.
True, but could it be any shittier than the sentence "SugarString publishes thoughtful tech-focused stories that track humanity's climb towards the new next."?
Speak for yourself. The merchants I buy from only know that some anonymous person bought a specific group of items at one time. They have no way of tying it to me, personally, nor do they have any way of tracking what I've purchased over time. The miracle method I use to ensure this is to pay cash.
If you want to take advantage of the retail's card or membership discounts, you will have to use CurrentC or the membership card (which will inturn use it).
No problem, then. I don't even trust retailers enough to use those cards in the first place. Further, I generally avoid shopping at stores that have such cards, since they typically jack the prices up and the card's "discount" just brings them back in line with what you would pay if you were at a reasonable store. So in the end, there's no little to no savings to be had by using the cards.
I think you'll find that even for regular discounts, there are a LOT of people who will simply not be willing to give up their bank account and SSN details to retailers
I'm one of these people too. I simply cannot imagine a discount steep enough to convince me to not only share my banking details with a consortium of retailers, but to do so in exchange for a payment system that is less convenient than cash. Not to mention the increased amount of spying this lets those retailers engage in.
I don't trust Apple or Google enough to use their NFC payment systems. On the other hand, I trust a private consortium of retailers a whole lot less. So far as I'm concerned, there's still no viable NFC system on the horizon.
Download the process monitor from the SysInternals suite and take a look at the frequency of registry queries. Reading and particularly modifying text files at that rate would be a significant burden on the system.
Since the registry was introduced, both windows and applications access the registry as if it were a no-cost operation (in other words, far more often than is actually necessary or advisable.) Even so, the vast majority of those accesses are for the same small set of data. Things like file associations, etc. There would be no significant performance penalty if text files were used, as that data would be cached anyway (just like it is with the registry).
The registry also enables concurrent access and permissions control.
The registry is used for these things, yes, but there's literally nothing that makes it hard or impossible to do the same thing with text files, so that's not really an advantage of using the registry.
In my view, the registry is one of the top 10 worst things about Windows.
If you set up Word the way you like on one machine the settings should go with you if you log in at a different office on a different PC.
Windows can do this? I change machines managed by AD all the time, but have never seen this happen. Nonetheless, it's not necessary to use a mechanism like the registry to accomplish this, so this functionality doesn't explain it.
When using an application data folder, you have the choice of using Local, LocalLow, or Roaming. No one in the world understands the difference between these folders or why some programs use one over another (or use multiple!).
Yeah, this is another pet peeve of mine. When I have to look in an application data folder, I have to find the right one through trial and error, because the folder that's used is apparently chosen at random. And don't get me started on the horrorshow that is the Users folder.
Those of you know more than me can maybe advise: why the hell does this thing even exist? Why not stick with ordinary text files containing things like
Because Microsoft doesn't like users and developers. That's the only reason I could find. When they introduced the registry in the first place, the primary advantage they talked about was the elimination of the onerous 64k restriction on.ini files (completely ignoring the fact that they could have just allowed.ini files to be arbitrarily large). Other advantages involved performance and being able to have all that stuff in a single place. Performance was never a big enough issue to be worth sacrificing the benefits of the.ini files, though, and the problem of having them scattered willy-nilly throughout the filesystem could have easily been addressed without eliminating them.
... and no, searching for everything is NOT a solution....
This may be a stupid question, but why not?
For a handful of reasons, but topping the list is discoverability. Searching for everything involves knowing what everything is called or consulting a manual. If you want to do something that you rarely do, this is a big problem. Personally, I absolutely loathe this trend of using searching as the main way to launch applications. It's intrusive and inconvenient, and makes the OS more difficult to use. It's basically removing the advantages of a GUI while keeping the disadvantages, and introducing the disadvantages of the command line without introducing the advantages. It's just suck all around.
They're going to replace the control panel with a Metro app? Damn it. I was hoping that I could just avoid all Metro apps completely. That's really irritating.
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It is more opaque and nonstandard.
However, the thing that makes it a dealbreaker for me is that it reduces the granularity and flexibility of the system. It absorbs far too many system services. If it were just an init manager, I'd have no real qualms with it. That it goes way beyond that, and important applications are beginning to require it, means that it signifies a huge shift away from the sort of system architecture that is the very reason I'm using GNU/Linux systems to begin with.
Since it's removing a real advantage of GNU/Linux systems without giving me any benefits that matter to me, its presence is an overall degradation of the OS.
If Debian had done the right thing and preserved user choice by creating a distro that realistically allows you to avoid using systemd, none of this would be a problem. That's why the failure of this GR is such a disaster: it's Debian voting against user choice.
Good enough for me.
With the failure of this GR, it is clear that I can not trust Debian to ensure that systemd remains optional. As such, I cannot trust Debian to remain a distro that meets my needs. It's all well and good that the dependency will remain avoidable in Jessie -- that gives me enough time to enact my escape plan to BSD with minimal disruption.
I am so saddened by this whole thing. I am even more saddened that a wonderful distro that has served me very well has stopped doing so. But, I suppose, times change.
The problem with the statement is that it doesn't really address my major privacy concerns at all. Even if they adhered to it 100%, there are enough exceptions that I don't care. It doesn't reassure me. My car simply should not be phoning home, period. It gives me zero benefit, and exposes me to risk.
For my part, I'll just continue to disable the car's ability to communicate.
i'm more worried about google knowing everything about me... or facebook.
Well then, you're in luck. You can avoid being spied on by the likes of Google and Facebook. You have no such choice about being spied on by the government.
To what standard do you hold the US government as opposed to other governments? You can be damn sure that every other intelligence agency is doing exactly the same thing... but you're criticizing NSA why exactly?
For two reasons: The NSA is part of my own government, and the other governments aren't, and the US government is in a position to cause me a lot more harm than other governments are. That other nations may be doing the same thing is irrelevant to the issue at hand. We cannot set our standards of freedom and liberty based on the global lowest common denominator.
You made the claim. You back it up. That's how basic logic works.
Logic that the NSA director apparently feels doesn't apply to him.
And why should we believe what Rogers says?
It's awfully hard to be sympathetic to companies that engage in or support fracking.
They probably have no choice. In the area I live in (large metropolitan), my available broadband choices consist of Comcast, Comcast, or Comcast.
A lady at work the other day didn't seem to know that one could still receive over-the-air broadcasts for television. I wonder how many people don't realize this and are paying for TV that they don't want or need.
Since the digital switchover, there are a lot of people who can no longer receive OTA broadcasts at all, even in urban areas. The coverage of the digital broadcasts is very, very spotty.
Funny thing is we would have gladly removed all tv services but they would have charged more for the service going Internet only.
This is the only reason I have cable TV service, too -- I haven't even hooked up the cable to my TV. I think that's why they do this -- it helps them artificially boost the subscriber numbers.
Nobody said the new next was not going to be a shitty place.
True, but could it be any shittier than the sentence "SugarString publishes thoughtful tech-focused stories that track humanity's climb towards the new next."?
The merchants already know what you're buying.
Speak for yourself. The merchants I buy from only know that some anonymous person bought a specific group of items at one time. They have no way of tying it to me, personally, nor do they have any way of tracking what I've purchased over time. The miracle method I use to ensure this is to pay cash.
If you want to take advantage of the retail's card or membership discounts, you will have to use CurrentC or the membership card (which will inturn use it).
No problem, then. I don't even trust retailers enough to use those cards in the first place. Further, I generally avoid shopping at stores that have such cards, since they typically jack the prices up and the card's "discount" just brings them back in line with what you would pay if you were at a reasonable store. So in the end, there's no little to no savings to be had by using the cards.
I think you'll find that even for regular discounts, there are a LOT of people who will simply not be willing to give up their bank account and SSN details to retailers
I'm one of these people too. I simply cannot imagine a discount steep enough to convince me to not only share my banking details with a consortium of retailers, but to do so in exchange for a payment system that is less convenient than cash. Not to mention the increased amount of spying this lets those retailers engage in.
I don't trust Apple or Google enough to use their NFC payment systems. On the other hand, I trust a private consortium of retailers a whole lot less. So far as I'm concerned, there's still no viable NFC system on the horizon.
Download the process monitor from the SysInternals suite and take a look at the frequency of registry queries. Reading and particularly modifying text files at that rate would be a significant burden on the system.
Since the registry was introduced, both windows and applications access the registry as if it were a no-cost operation (in other words, far more often than is actually necessary or advisable.) Even so, the vast majority of those accesses are for the same small set of data. Things like file associations, etc. There would be no significant performance penalty if text files were used, as that data would be cached anyway (just like it is with the registry).
The registry also enables concurrent access and permissions control.
The registry is used for these things, yes, but there's literally nothing that makes it hard or impossible to do the same thing with text files, so that's not really an advantage of using the registry.
In my view, the registry is one of the top 10 worst things about Windows.
If you set up Word the way you like on one machine the settings should go with you if you log in at a different office on a different PC.
Windows can do this? I change machines managed by AD all the time, but have never seen this happen. Nonetheless, it's not necessary to use a mechanism like the registry to accomplish this, so this functionality doesn't explain it.
When using an application data folder, you have the choice of using Local, LocalLow, or Roaming. No one in the world understands the difference between these folders or why some programs use one over another (or use multiple!).
Yeah, this is another pet peeve of mine. When I have to look in an application data folder, I have to find the right one through trial and error, because the folder that's used is apparently chosen at random. And don't get me started on the horrorshow that is the Users folder.
Those of you know more than me can maybe advise: why the hell does this thing even exist? Why not stick with ordinary text files containing things like
Because Microsoft doesn't like users and developers. That's the only reason I could find. When they introduced the registry in the first place, the primary advantage they talked about was the elimination of the onerous 64k restriction on .ini files (completely ignoring the fact that they could have just allowed .ini files to be arbitrarily large). Other advantages involved performance and being able to have all that stuff in a single place. Performance was never a big enough issue to be worth sacrificing the benefits of the .ini files, though, and the problem of having them scattered willy-nilly throughout the filesystem could have easily been addressed without eliminating them.
The only thing left that makes sense is spite.
... and no, searching for everything is NOT a solution. ...
This may be a stupid question, but why not?
For a handful of reasons, but topping the list is discoverability. Searching for everything involves knowing what everything is called or consulting a manual. If you want to do something that you rarely do, this is a big problem. Personally, I absolutely loathe this trend of using searching as the main way to launch applications. It's intrusive and inconvenient, and makes the OS more difficult to use. It's basically removing the advantages of a GUI while keeping the disadvantages, and introducing the disadvantages of the command line without introducing the advantages. It's just suck all around.
They're going to replace the control panel with a Metro app? Damn it. I was hoping that I could just avoid all Metro apps completely. That's really irritating.
As a user, I hate hate hate "release early, release often." It's a major pain in the ass.