Everybody in this industry copies ideas from everybody else, we already know this and it has been the case for forever. Apple is not some great inventor of ideas to be called out when they have the audacity to implement a concept that somebody else already implemented. Their original idea of what multitasking should be like was rubbish, so they copied the way that Windows Phone did it and that's a good thing. The control center was a copy of what Android was doing and that's a good thing otherwise you end up with shitty implementations purely as a result of NIH syndrome. Likewise these products copied concepts that Apple came up with.
Are people really surprised to find out that many of the features being introduced in this industry have been done before? Yes webOS was a decent operating system (and so was Maemo and Meego and Windows Phone and FirefoxOS, etc) but it wasn't successful because the things that made them good weren't disruptive and compelling enough to make people abandon their existing platform. "Oooh you close an app by swiping up on its 'card' instead of pressing the little 'x' on its app icon"...it's nice to have but it isn't going to convince people to switch.
So, if I'm in an auto accident, or I trip and fall face-first into the sidewalk, or if I'm assaulted and have a broken nose, a black eye and blood on my face, will the "facial recognition" still unlock my phone and let me call the cops?
Facial recognition for anything really urgent sounds like a REALLY bad idea.
Yes and people invented such scenarios to decry the use of fingerprint scanners to unlock your device. The idiots of the world still seem oblivious to the reality that if you can't use the fingerprint scanner for whatever reason then you type in your passcode instead, likewise if you can't use the facial recognition or don't want to use it then you type in your passcode instead.
The are already open source projects doing this, in fact they are even linked in the summary. VoxForge already exists so instead of yet another NIH syndrome project why not work together to improve VoxForge?
Carl Richell, CEO, System76 explains, "While our operating system and computers are great for any user, the ideas and features we develop for Pop!_OS will be squarely focused on the professionals and makers that use their computers to create."
^^ In that case invest in building applications for those users, they couldn't give 2 craps about the OS, they'd run BeOS if it ran the applications they use to do their work. As far as most of them are concerned the OS is just the bit that launches the programs they actually spend their time using. There's got to be over 100 Linux-based operating systems by now, we don't need any more because nobody cares about that. To increase the popularity of Linux and have it benefit from economies of scale what is needed is innovative programs that users want/need that work better on Linux than anything else.
Do they really have to follow the crap things that we get phone manufacturers doing with Android? Adding their own "style" to it?! As for drivers, contribute those to Ubuntu so that everybody benefits from that work rather than just those using a downstream fork.
Ultimately this is just going to be "whatever RedHat decides" + "whatever Ubuntu decides" + "yet another not invented here syndrome UI styling" anyway.
And Pop!_OS? Really? I never thought I'd see the day that Microsoft's branding style would be a better option than anything, I think I would actually prefer System76 Operating System for System76 Systems 2017.
Well I always see the sort of thing that you wrote, that it's all Lennart's fault, not RedHat. Regardless it means the desktop Linux community is controlled by corporations like RedHat because, as you say, the distros do not have the resources to actually maintain themselves without RedHat.
This really does seem like a fundamental problem with the community or development methodology. If one person can completely upend the system to the point where it requires a team of developers to make something like logging work again that is a very bad thing. I hate to think about the myriad of other things that would end up in the "too hard" basket if somebody or some corporation decided to go in a different direction.
So assuming you can't just convert them (systemd doesn't include such a tool to read/convert log files?) could you not just augment systemd to output the same data to a text file as it encodes in the binary file? It's all open source.
Why the hate on systemd? I LOVE having binary logs I can't easily parse!
Can't you just convert them to text files then? I'm not familiar with systemd but I would be surprised if you couldn't convert binary log files into plain text log files.
Windows Phone wasn't really a "shit product", in fact none of the real competitors to the smartphone market were. They were just late entrants to an established market that offered no compelling feature/innovation.
Like you say, Apple upended the Blackberry/Windows Mobile duopoly with compelling innovation, Android then made that new paradigm accessible to everybody. The same is true of the desktop, Linux on the desktop is by no means a "shit product" but its usage share is low because it doesn't have that one thing that users say "yes, I will abandon my current computer and learn a new way of doing things because this feature makes my desktop computing so much better", that is what happened with cell phones when iOS/Android were introduced.
The Ubuntu phone failed because it's a fucking stupid idea. People want smartphones with a large base of popular apps.
The other way to succeed is to have some really killer feature, something that is hugely innovative and disruptive. Many users can do what they need with a few basic applications and a web browser so if some competitor came along with a feature that was really compelling to people then they may have a chance. Ubuntu Phone (and Windows Phone, webOS, Maemo, Meego, etc) didn't offer that, they weren't necessarily bad operating systems, they were just more of the same.
So the made up, convoluted mobile platform that doesn't actually exist is less efficient than the desktop paradigm...wow, what a revelation. Let's just invent things to complain about!
The assumption that "everyone knows Windows" is laughable.
He didn't mean literally 'everyone', but the vast majority, i.e. >90% of computer users. Even most of us who use macOS or Linux primarily still know Windows.
Is there even a good suite of FOSS products that does that? I mean LibreOffice is in most cases an adequate replacement for MS Office but what about integrating it with and email and calendar (meeting/booking/etc) with push notifications solution?
My guess is there are a few bureaucrats who can't understand how to use open office or think it's "too difficult" to send/receive attachments. Thus Linux is "no good" and Windows is a "necessity."
Even then they could switch to Linux as their OS and use Office365 if the office suite is the problem.
I would have thought this lesson has been learned enough times for people to not make that mistake anymore but increasing raw computational throughput does not necessarily increase performance (see single vs multicore CPUs for an example) but in the graphics world because we know how many compute units we have and we know how powerful each one is we can optimize our data structure layout for that and optimize for cache coherency. If what you do is then bump the clockspeeds then you just get more performance without affecting the optimization, if you start adding more cores you break the optimizations of the data structure layout and end up with stacks of cache misses which kills performance.
Well no, this is the difference between developing for the console vs developing for the PC. Sure you can code purely to the DirectX abstraction and not care about the underlying architecture but the advantage of developing for a console is that you know what the underlying architecture is and can optimize for it.
Those days are long gone. They are just little computers now and that's how software is developed for them.
But it just isn't and I'm not sure why you think it is. There is a vast difference between developing for a platform with millions of different possible configurations vs a platform that has 1 or 2 different configurations. Even if they are ultimately x86 processors and DirectX/OpenGL-compatible GPUs, you really think every opportunity for targeted optimization thanks to a concrete target is just ignored or abstracted away? If so then you could not be more wrong.
you don't really think developers just use DirectX and don't care about leveraging the advantage of unified memory over separate memory groups connected by a system bus do you?
You don't really think Microsoft forgot about that when they implemented the software their graphics subsystem do you?
No, I know they didn't forget about that because you can query that and then optimize your software accordingly but it most certainly does not abstract that away from you no matter how much you might imagine that it does.
Well that really depends on what you want. If you want an OS/device that you can hack on and do whatever you want with where you would otherwise be limited by a closed ecosystem, then yes I would say it likely is. Personally I prefer to mess around with my PC or raspberry PI and leave my smartphone to just be good at being a smartphone so I use an iPhone.
There is theoretical advantage in having hackers get in and play with the internals to do innovative things, the theory being that open collaboration would produce innovation but thus far there hasn't really been anything compelling that really gives Android an advantage, like no really awesome "must have", disruptive feature born from open collaboration.
It could be a completely alien architecture and you would be unlikely to notice.
Well no, this is the difference between developing for the console vs developing for the PC. Sure you can code purely to the DirectX abstraction and not care about the underlying architecture but the advantage of developing for a console is that you know what the underlying architecture is and can optimize for it.
Consider say the unified memory architecture that the APUs in the latest consoles provide, you don't really think developers just use DirectX and don't care about leveraging the advantage of unified memory over separate memory groups connected by a system bus do you? They could do that and on the PC it's generally cost effective to do so given the variety of systems you target and just address that inefficiency with "get a better/more CPU, GPU, memory, etc" because PCs have the flexibility to offer that option. But on consoles you make the most of what you have and leverage the fact that it is a known quantity.
Slashdot Mirror
Why do you say that?
Everybody in this industry copies ideas from everybody else, we already know this and it has been the case for forever. Apple is not some great inventor of ideas to be called out when they have the audacity to implement a concept that somebody else already implemented. Their original idea of what multitasking should be like was rubbish, so they copied the way that Windows Phone did it and that's a good thing. The control center was a copy of what Android was doing and that's a good thing otherwise you end up with shitty implementations purely as a result of NIH syndrome. Likewise these products copied concepts that Apple came up with.
Are people really surprised to find out that many of the features being introduced in this industry have been done before? Yes webOS was a decent operating system (and so was Maemo and Meego and Windows Phone and FirefoxOS, etc) but it wasn't successful because the things that made them good weren't disruptive and compelling enough to make people abandon their existing platform. "Oooh you close an app by swiping up on its 'card' instead of pressing the little 'x' on its app icon"...it's nice to have but it isn't going to convince people to switch.
How do you manage the driver kernel compatibility?
Some of us would rather not remove our motorcycle helmets every time we want to check our phones.
So why couldn't you just use the fingerprint scanner? Or the passcode mechanism? Or disable the passcode completely?
So, if I'm in an auto accident, or I trip and fall face-first into the sidewalk, or if I'm assaulted and have a broken nose, a black eye and blood on my face, will the "facial recognition" still unlock my phone and let me call the cops?
Facial recognition for anything really urgent sounds like a REALLY bad idea.
Yes and people invented such scenarios to decry the use of fingerprint scanners to unlock your device. The idiots of the world still seem oblivious to the reality that if you can't use the fingerprint scanner for whatever reason then you type in your passcode instead, likewise if you can't use the facial recognition or don't want to use it then you type in your passcode instead.
"Veritaseum has confirmed today that a hacker stole $8.4 million"
TFA: Hacker Steals $8.4 Million Worth of Ethereum
Ethereum are not USD.
No but they have a value in USD.
They "stole" some bits arranged in a fashion that some people assign a value to.
And you can "steal" some atoms arranged in a fashion that some people assign a value to.
Try to convert those bits to USD, and watch the exchange price plummet.
Even if that were the case, who says you have to do it all in one go?
The are already open source projects doing this, in fact they are even linked in the summary. VoxForge already exists so instead of yet another NIH syndrome project why not work together to improve VoxForge?
It is wasted effort!
Carl Richell, CEO, System76 explains, "While our operating system and computers are great for any user, the ideas and features we develop for Pop!_OS will be squarely focused on the professionals and makers that use their computers to create."
^^ In that case invest in building applications for those users, they couldn't give 2 craps about the OS, they'd run BeOS if it ran the applications they use to do their work. As far as most of them are concerned the OS is just the bit that launches the programs they actually spend their time using. There's got to be over 100 Linux-based operating systems by now, we don't need any more because nobody cares about that. To increase the popularity of Linux and have it benefit from economies of scale what is needed is innovative programs that users want/need that work better on Linux than anything else.
Do they really have to follow the crap things that we get phone manufacturers doing with Android? Adding their own "style" to it?! As for drivers, contribute those to Ubuntu so that everybody benefits from that work rather than just those using a downstream fork.
Ultimately this is just going to be "whatever RedHat decides" + "whatever Ubuntu decides" + "yet another not invented here syndrome UI styling" anyway.
And Pop!_OS? Really? I never thought I'd see the day that Microsoft's branding style would be a better option than anything, I think I would actually prefer System76 Operating System for System76 Systems 2017.
Well I always see the sort of thing that you wrote, that it's all Lennart's fault, not RedHat. Regardless it means the desktop Linux community is controlled by corporations like RedHat because, as you say, the distros do not have the resources to actually maintain themselves without RedHat.
This really does seem like a fundamental problem with the community or development methodology. If one person can completely upend the system to the point where it requires a team of developers to make something like logging work again that is a very bad thing. I hate to think about the myriad of other things that would end up in the "too hard" basket if somebody or some corporation decided to go in a different direction.
Im not suggesting a fork, just a patch of a couple of lines that you could apply to redirect logging to a text file. You dont need a team for that.
So assuming you can't just convert them (systemd doesn't include such a tool to read/convert log files?) could you not just augment systemd to output the same data to a text file as it encodes in the binary file? It's all open source.
Why the hate on systemd? I LOVE having binary logs I can't easily parse!
Can't you just convert them to text files then? I'm not familiar with systemd but I would be surprised if you couldn't convert binary log files into plain text log files.
Windows Phone wasn't really a "shit product", in fact none of the real competitors to the smartphone market were. They were just late entrants to an established market that offered no compelling feature/innovation.
Like you say, Apple upended the Blackberry/Windows Mobile duopoly with compelling innovation, Android then made that new paradigm accessible to everybody. The same is true of the desktop, Linux on the desktop is by no means a "shit product" but its usage share is low because it doesn't have that one thing that users say "yes, I will abandon my current computer and learn a new way of doing things because this feature makes my desktop computing so much better", that is what happened with cell phones when iOS/Android were introduced.
The Ubuntu phone failed because it's a fucking stupid idea. People want smartphones with a large base of popular apps.
The other way to succeed is to have some really killer feature, something that is hugely innovative and disruptive. Many users can do what they need with a few basic applications and a web browser so if some competitor came along with a feature that was really compelling to people then they may have a chance. Ubuntu Phone (and Windows Phone, webOS, Maemo, Meego, etc) didn't offer that, they weren't necessarily bad operating systems, they were just more of the same.
So the made up, convoluted mobile platform that doesn't actually exist is less efficient than the desktop paradigm...wow, what a revelation. Let's just invent things to complain about!
How am I supposed to know that a menu needs to be swiped, then double pressed then held.
What menu operates like that?
Like VS, hate VS; be a MS fan boy or a MS hatter, but please VS is not a lightweight editor as the blurb says.
Are you talking about Visual Studio or Visual Studio Code? They are two different things and this article is about the latter.
The assumption that "everyone knows Windows" is laughable.
He didn't mean literally 'everyone', but the vast majority, i.e. >90% of computer users. Even most of us who use macOS or Linux primarily still know Windows.
Is there even a good suite of FOSS products that does that? I mean LibreOffice is in most cases an adequate replacement for MS Office but what about integrating it with and email and calendar (meeting/booking/etc) with push notifications solution?
My guess is there are a few bureaucrats who can't understand how to use open office or think it's "too difficult" to send/receive attachments. Thus Linux is "no good" and Windows is a "necessity."
Even then they could switch to Linux as their OS and use Office365 if the office suite is the problem.
Total computational throughput.
I would have thought this lesson has been learned enough times for people to not make that mistake anymore but increasing raw computational throughput does not necessarily increase performance (see single vs multicore CPUs for an example) but in the graphics world because we know how many compute units we have and we know how powerful each one is we can optimize our data structure layout for that and optimize for cache coherency. If what you do is then bump the clockspeeds then you just get more performance without affecting the optimization, if you start adding more cores you break the optimizations of the data structure layout and end up with stacks of cache misses which kills performance.
Well no, this is the difference between developing for the console vs developing for the PC. Sure you can code purely to the DirectX abstraction and not care about the underlying architecture but the advantage of developing for a console is that you know what the underlying architecture is and can optimize for it.
Those days are long gone. They are just little computers now and that's how software is developed for them.
But it just isn't and I'm not sure why you think it is. There is a vast difference between developing for a platform with millions of different possible configurations vs a platform that has 1 or 2 different configurations. Even if they are ultimately x86 processors and DirectX/OpenGL-compatible GPUs, you really think every opportunity for targeted optimization thanks to a concrete target is just ignored or abstracted away? If so then you could not be more wrong.
you don't really think developers just use DirectX and don't care about leveraging the advantage of unified memory over separate memory groups connected by a system bus do you?
You don't really think Microsoft forgot about that when they implemented the software their graphics subsystem do you?
No, I know they didn't forget about that because you can query that and then optimize your software accordingly but it most certainly does not abstract that away from you no matter how much you might imagine that it does.
Well that really depends on what you want. If you want an OS/device that you can hack on and do whatever you want with where you would otherwise be limited by a closed ecosystem, then yes I would say it likely is. Personally I prefer to mess around with my PC or raspberry PI and leave my smartphone to just be good at being a smartphone so I use an iPhone.
There is theoretical advantage in having hackers get in and play with the internals to do innovative things, the theory being that open collaboration would produce innovation but thus far there hasn't really been anything compelling that really gives Android an advantage, like no really awesome "must have", disruptive feature born from open collaboration.
If it's faster overall, it wouldn't be a problem.
By "faster" what is your measurement?
It could be a completely alien architecture and you would be unlikely to notice.
Well no, this is the difference between developing for the console vs developing for the PC. Sure you can code purely to the DirectX abstraction and not care about the underlying architecture but the advantage of developing for a console is that you know what the underlying architecture is and can optimize for it.
Consider say the unified memory architecture that the APUs in the latest consoles provide, you don't really think developers just use DirectX and don't care about leveraging the advantage of unified memory over separate memory groups connected by a system bus do you? They could do that and on the PC it's generally cost effective to do so given the variety of systems you target and just address that inefficiency with "get a better/more CPU, GPU, memory, etc" because PCs have the flexibility to offer that option. But on consoles you make the most of what you have and leverage the fact that it is a known quantity.