Yes, sometimes decentralized, small encapsulated components are a win, but sometimes monolithic designs where the pieces can talk to each other easily are a win
I actually do see what you're saying, here. In The Art of UNIX Programming, Eric Raymond mentions that occasionally there are tasks where it simply isn't possible to make them small.
I don't have a problem with systemd being monolithic, as much as with the parts of said monolith being so tightly welded together. The other problem is lack of transparency and discoverability. Systemd is hard to understand, and for a big, monolithic project, transparency becomes more important, not less.
Lennart Poettering is an arrogant bully, with a proven track record of writing bad software and attempting to shove it down everyone else's throats. Systemd isn't his first nightmare; some of us remember PulseAudio as well. If you don't believe me about his software being excessively complex, go and look at Pulse's configuration files, and see if you can understand them.
http://without-systemd.org/ [without-systemd.org] Take a stand against systemd!
I can hardly begin to describe, the extent to which this warms my heart, or the sense of hope it gives me. I had feared that Linux's users as a whole had simply rolled over and accepted Lennart's crap. This is a revolution that needs to continue.
I always had a strange, nagging gut feeling about GitHub. The sort of feeling Han Solo was talking about, right before the debri field of the planet Alderan came into view, during the first Star Wars film. So I never started using it. I got an account very early, before I fully realised what I was looking at; but once said realisation set in, said account was never used.
I think it's because I remembered what had happened to the Great Library of Alexandria; and as a result, I really didn't think that building an online software equivalent of that was a good idea. Some of you probably understand why in engineering terms, a single point of failure is not considered desirable.
Now, the proverbial Great Library is going to be in the hands of the Linux operating system's oldest and most tenacious opponent; a corporation with a consistently depraved and parasitic modus operandi.
I used to get really angry about things like this. I've seen one initiative after another after another, to get transparent, open, non-corporate software and standards obsoleted, and replaced with incomprehensible corporate crap, which ultimately has no other purpose or effect, than to eliminate the ability of the end user to either understand or control, the hardware or software they use.
I am becoming resigned to it, however; because I've realised that the relentlessly tenacious, compulsive stupidity and amorality of the Millennials can not be defeated. They rammed systemd through, and everyone just rolled over and capitulated, and anyone who didn't was just called a troll until they shut up.
So go ahead. Destroy everything in the name of corporate profit and looking superficially cool. In the end, you'll only harm yourselves.
Am I the only one noticing that every post attached to this article, which is either critical of systemd, or points out that Linux is controlled by Red Hat, has been moderated Redundant?
Note to systemd advocates:- If you want us to believe you that systemd is [b][i]not[/i][/b] insidious, then having shills attempt to crush literally any dissenting opinion about it, is unlikely to produce the outcome you're looking for.
The single biggest mistake that systemd's advocates made, was the degree to which they tried to censor any criticism of it whatsoever. Doing that is not going to shut people up; and it is also not going to convince those of us already hostile to it, that it is in any way beneficial to us. It actually just makes you (and systemd itself) look downright evil.
Now please, go ahead and mod this post Redundant as well, just to reassure me that systemd is in fact both harmless and truly wonderful, and I'm just being a paranoid schizophrenic.
Sounds to me like you're just too complacent to adapt to change.
While I know you think it does, advocating change purely for its' own sake, without thinking about whether or not such change is actually beneficial, does not make you look intelligent.
There are a lot of people who dislike systemd, and they have valid reasons for that, which have nothing to do with them being technophobic.
I know I will get hate for this, but I stopped using Linux when systemd was forcibly and mysteriously rammed down almost everyone's throat. I've always known that systemd is to Linux what UEFI is to the PC itself; an abstraction layer allowing control for the intelligence community.
Call me a troll, scream at me as much as you like; but if as a Linux user, you support systemd, you are a traitor. It is extremely simple.
Unfortunately though, many do not. Said propaganda has been working too well; and the other problem is that most people do not have the psychological strength to avoid caving into it, even if they can see that it is factually false.
And they are massively negative and destructive for Linux and its community if not repelled decisively.
Sadly, they are not going to be repelled. Reddit's main Linux sub is almost completely supportive of systemd. Say anything against it whatsoever, and you will be trolled and downvoted into oblivion.
On the other hand, I don't completely agree with you at this point, about systemd being entirely devoid of technical merit, or at least not in the minds of some. While I don't like the idea of it myself, I've encountered several people who've looked at it and think that many of its' features are worth keeping, but that the overall design is bad and needs to be re-worked.
In other words, it's given us some good features, but they will probably need to be re-incorporated into another project, with a better overall design.
I suspect that the law actually has more to do with the incredibly vindictive, recent initiative to completely outlaw homelessness within American cities. This is another means of criminalising dumpster diving.
I can't remember the last time I did a Linux distro install, where I did not use the minimal net install image, when one was available. I always expect any distro's large default install to be full of superfluous crap; so I do not necessary resent Debian because theirs also is.
My philosophy is that there is a direct relationship between the quality of anything I receive, and the amount of work I put into it myself. So if I get something where all of the usual decisions have been made for me, then I consider it only natural that it will be horrible.
While bash is by far my favourite UNIX shell, I've seen various bits of evidence that have indicated a need for major refactoring, for quite a while now. I would look into it myself, but there is always the risk that whatever changes I proposed would be rejected. Perhaps I should think about creating a fork, although that would be a lot of work.
This is one of those guys who jumped on the "I want to be a web designer" bandwagon many years ago when the field was hot and it was easy to churn out crap and make money at it. He learned (by cargo cult copypasta and/or Whatever for Dummies books?) to get by in PHP and Javascript over the years. But he never really understood what he was doing.
So...
An Anonymous Coward responds to the OP article with an extended string of smug, elitist ad hominem, uses this to construct a strawman argument, and gets modded +5, Insightful.
I have overwhelmingly observed that the majority of computer users, do not want a truly free, democratic, autonomous, or self-empowering scenario, where their use of a computer is concerned.
With computer use, we now essentially have two groups of people. A minority of specialised, elitist programmers who write software for an almost completely unskilled, disinterested, and technophobic majority; and said technophobic majority themselves.
It seems that the proverbial "owner driver," of computers (a group among whom I gladly self-identify) are becoming a dying breed. I sat up all night last night, until 7 am this morning, compiling and re-compiling sources for my new NetBSD/amd64 vm. I have found use of that system tricky; and the current install is my third attempt. It is uneven in some areas, and there are many jagged edges. Nevertheless, I am determined, and while it has been somewhat frustrating, I have enjoyed the process; to the point where I have since only had six hours' sleep, in part due to my level of enthusiasm to get back into it.
People need to understand that maintaining their freedom requires vigilance, personal initiative and responsibility, and active defense. The psychopaths are tireless in their attempts to take it away from us; and more, to convince us that we should actually want them to take it away.
Learn to program yourself; but when I say this, I do not merely mean the new languages that are popular, which will win you approval from a manager. I mean the old languages, like C, FORTH, Tcl/Tk, shell, awk, m4, and LaTeX. Learn simple HTML, and use RMS' own web site as a code example if you do not know how. Java might bring you money, but in my observation at least, it will not bring you joy.
Use the BSDs. Get comfortable with compiling something from source code. A lot of applications are designed much more smoothly than they used to be, so this is nowhere near as difficult as it once was. Get VMware Player, and install an Open or NetBSD guest. Use it to teach yourself the command line and shell scripting, and then realise that there is no reason for you to pay hundreds of dollars to Microsoft for Windows if you don't want to. You can buy a perfectly good computer from here, which has completely Free Software compatible hardware, and then run one of the BSDs natively, and dual boot it with Windows if you want. I don't hate Microsoft at all; I just think people should have that choice.
In addition to your use of Twitter, consider downloading XChat 2 and discovering Internet Relay Chat. Many open source software projects have IRC channels, so if you do start using *BSD, that will also be a good way of getting help if you need it.
In addition to your use of Reddit, get Forte Agent and find out if your service provider maintains a Usenet server. If they don't, Forte sells Usenet access at $3/month for 20GB.
I know many of you want the new, shiny thing; but voluntary simplicity is becoming a major movement in other areas of life as well, and truthfully I really think it's time we brought it to computer use as well. I am certified as a Permaculture designer, and I truthfully view use of the BSDs as being as close as I can get to using a computer in a Permacultural manner. The word Permaculture is short for "permanent culture," and UNIX is timeless.
I salute the German government in adopting this measure, quite seriously. I am migrating to virtualised NetBSD/amd64 myself, and aside from using pkgsrc in order to install Xorg, am probably going to rely on manual installation of packages in named directories in either/usr/local or/opt.
I fully believe that maximising simplicity, to the point of adopting seemingly primitive solutions, is the most effective means of maintaining reliability and security. There truly is no school like the old school. Others can call me a Luddite if they wish, but that is a title that I will wear with pride.
Better that, than what the likes of Verizon want. While they are not always, in this particular debate, the Randian demographic are my enemies. This is one case where the corporations have to be stopped, and I am entirely willing to see government or any other available means employed in order to do so.
After all, everyone knows that drones are intended exclusively for performing targetted assassinations, not potentially beneficial, civilian applications like advertising.
What on Earth were those real estate people thinking?
The haters and trolls notwithstanding, Minix was a worthy accomplishment; and may yet prove more important in the future than first thought, given Red Hat's ongoing destruction of Linux.
Professor Tanenbaum is a great man; and truthfully, I have always wished that Linus Torvalds had been kinder to him. Not all of us are necessarily meant to stand fully in the spotlight, and although perhaps both history and the debates proved Linus right, it would not have cost anything to allow the Professor to keep his dignity.
May he have as much time with his grandchildren as he wishes; and when the time comes, an easy and joyous passing.
Because the only people who claim that have "harming the US" as a goal.
I don't think anyone should have harming the American people, as a goal, at all. The complete abolition of the American government, on the other hand, is a goal which I think is overwhelmingly in the interests of humanity as an entire species, and in seeking such, the American people themselves should be leading the charge.
> I think this entire discussion suffers from survivor bias: those who advocate strongly for Fortran have not given serious consideration to anything else.
I've just honestly never heard of OO being used anywhere, where it wasn't a crutch for bad programmers; with again, the appeal to modernity fallacy being used to justify it.
I consider computer programming in its' current form, to very largely be a field in serious decline, and ruled by baseless hubris, to be honest. That is also the reason why I'm so wary of the appeal to modernity. Most of the time in my observation, newer methods are actually markedly inferior to older ones, rather than an improvement.
I think a big part of the reason for this, is because the emphasis is constantly on reducing programmer effort. What nobody seems to remember, however, is that needing to apply effort, is how you become good at something.
So we now have spoon-fed, degenerate Millenials, awash in cheap CPU cycles and coding in C++. They don't need to learn efficiency; they don't need to learn how to do things truly well. The complexity of the software they write, also perpetuates their delusions that they are skilled at what they do; when the truth is the exact opposite.
And that was a shame, because many new generations of scientific programmers did not get exposed to new languages with new expressive power (such as OO) that could solve new problems.
I've only ever seen two groups of people, who advocated OO as some sort of inherent virtue in itself.
a} Psychopathic, buzzword-obsessed, clueless IT managers.
b} Elitist, equally clueless programmers, who mainly advocate OO and related languages, (such as C++) because they enjoy ego tripping about the fact that they can write code that nobody else is able to read, rather than actually getting real work done.
The main argument that both groups use to advocate OO, is the appeal to modernity fallacy. I.e., the idea that "modernity," is an inherent virtue, purely for its' own sake.
While a lot of numerical specialists who aren't computer scientists still code in FORTRAN (or MATLAB or Python with NumPy), most cutting-edge research for large scale parallelism, heterogeneous computing and high performance computing is done in C or C++.
You have just confirmed something, which I have suspected for a while. Namely, that C++ is the programming language of choice for psychopaths; and given that IT managers are also usually psychopaths, that explains why so many programmers are forced to use it.
Whether you love, hate, or are ambivalent about >systemd, I think you have to accept it at this point.
There's something called individuality. Some of us have it. If you don't, then that's a shame; but that is not going to prevent us from retaining ours.
We are under no obligation to simply shut up and accept systemd whatsoever. We can go to FreeBSD. We can go to Minix. We have any number of possible alternatives.
Slashdot Mirror
I actually do see what you're saying, here. In The Art of UNIX Programming, Eric Raymond mentions that occasionally there are tasks where it simply isn't possible to make them small.
I don't have a problem with systemd being monolithic, as much as with the parts of said monolith being so tightly welded together. The other problem is lack of transparency and discoverability. Systemd is hard to understand, and for a big, monolithic project, transparency becomes more important, not less.
Lennart Poettering is an arrogant bully, with a proven track record of writing bad software and attempting to shove it down everyone else's throats. Systemd isn't his first nightmare; some of us remember PulseAudio as well. If you don't believe me about his software being excessively complex, go and look at Pulse's configuration files, and see if you can understand them.
I can hardly begin to describe, the extent to which this warms my heart, or the sense of hope it gives me. I had feared that Linux's users as a whole had simply rolled over and accepted Lennart's crap. This is a revolution that needs to continue.
I always had a strange, nagging gut feeling about GitHub. The sort of feeling Han Solo was talking about, right before the debri field of the planet Alderan came into view, during the first Star Wars film. So I never started using it. I got an account very early, before I fully realised what I was looking at; but once said realisation set in, said account was never used.
I think it's because I remembered what had happened to the Great Library of Alexandria; and as a result, I really didn't think that building an online software equivalent of that was a good idea. Some of you probably understand why in engineering terms, a single point of failure is not considered desirable.
Now, the proverbial Great Library is going to be in the hands of the Linux operating system's oldest and most tenacious opponent; a corporation with a consistently depraved and parasitic modus operandi.
What could possibly go wrong?
I used to get really angry about things like this. I've seen one initiative after another after another, to get transparent, open, non-corporate software and standards obsoleted, and replaced with incomprehensible corporate crap, which ultimately has no other purpose or effect, than to eliminate the ability of the end user to either understand or control, the hardware or software they use.
I am becoming resigned to it, however; because I've realised that the relentlessly tenacious, compulsive stupidity and amorality of the Millennials can not be defeated. They rammed systemd through, and everyone just rolled over and capitulated, and anyone who didn't was just called a troll until they shut up.
So go ahead. Destroy everything in the name of corporate profit and looking superficially cool. In the end, you'll only harm yourselves.
Am I the only one noticing that every post attached to this article, which is either critical of systemd, or points out that Linux is controlled by Red Hat, has been moderated Redundant?
Note to systemd advocates:- If you want us to believe you that systemd is [b][i]not[/i][/b] insidious, then having shills attempt to crush literally any dissenting opinion about it, is unlikely to produce the outcome you're looking for.
The single biggest mistake that systemd's advocates made, was the degree to which they tried to censor any criticism of it whatsoever. Doing that is not going to shut people up; and it is also not going to convince those of us already hostile to it, that it is in any way beneficial to us. It actually just makes you (and systemd itself) look downright evil.
Now please, go ahead and mod this post Redundant as well, just to reassure me that systemd is in fact both harmless and truly wonderful, and I'm just being a paranoid schizophrenic.
Sounds to me like you're just too complacent to adapt to change.
While I know you think it does, advocating change purely for its' own sake, without thinking about whether or not such change is actually beneficial, does not make you look intelligent.
There are a lot of people who dislike systemd, and they have valid reasons for that, which have nothing to do with them being technophobic.
I know I will get hate for this, but I stopped using Linux when systemd was forcibly and mysteriously rammed down almost everyone's throat. I've always known that systemd is to Linux what UEFI is to the PC itself; an abstraction layer allowing control for the intelligence community.
Call me a troll, scream at me as much as you like; but if as a Linux user, you support systemd, you are a traitor. It is extremely simple.
Unfortunately though, many do not. Said propaganda has been working too well; and the other problem is that most people do not have the psychological strength to avoid caving into it, even if they can see that it is factually false.
Sadly, they are not going to be repelled. Reddit's main Linux sub is almost completely supportive of systemd. Say anything against it whatsoever, and you will be trolled and downvoted into oblivion.
On the other hand, I don't completely agree with you at this point, about systemd being entirely devoid of technical merit, or at least not in the minds of some. While I don't like the idea of it myself, I've encountered several people who've looked at it and think that many of its' features are worth keeping, but that the overall design is bad and needs to be re-worked.
In other words, it's given us some good features, but they will probably need to be re-incorporated into another project, with a better overall design.
I suspect that the law actually has more to do with the incredibly vindictive, recent initiative to completely outlaw homelessness within American cities. This is another means of criminalising dumpster diving.
I can't remember the last time I did a Linux distro install, where I did not use the minimal net install image, when one was available. I always expect any distro's large default install to be full of superfluous crap; so I do not necessary resent Debian because theirs also is.
My philosophy is that there is a direct relationship between the quality of anything I receive, and the amount of work I put into it myself. So if I get something where all of the usual decisions have been made for me, then I consider it only natural that it will be horrible.
While bash is by far my favourite UNIX shell, I've seen various bits of evidence that have indicated a need for major refactoring, for quite a while now. I would look into it myself, but there is always the risk that whatever changes I proposed would be rejected. Perhaps I should think about creating a fork, although that would be a lot of work.
Again, more elitism that is being modded +5, Insightful. Your bias is showing, Slashdot.
So...
An Anonymous Coward responds to the OP article with an extended string of smug, elitist ad hominem, uses this to construct a strawman argument, and gets modded +5, Insightful.
What are we to make of this, fellow Slashdotters?
The Aesir already have women among them. What about Freya, or the Valkyries? Marvel don't need to do this.
I'd actually be interested to know the opinions of any genuine Asatruar who read these comics, about this development. Do you consider it sacrilege?
I have overwhelmingly observed that the majority of computer users, do not want a truly free, democratic, autonomous, or self-empowering scenario, where their use of a computer is concerned.
With computer use, we now essentially have two groups of people. A minority of specialised, elitist programmers who write software for an almost completely unskilled, disinterested, and technophobic majority; and said technophobic majority themselves.
It seems that the proverbial "owner driver," of computers (a group among whom I gladly self-identify) are becoming a dying breed. I sat up all night last night, until 7 am this morning, compiling and re-compiling sources for my new NetBSD/amd64 vm. I have found use of that system tricky; and the current install is my third attempt. It is uneven in some areas, and there are many jagged edges. Nevertheless, I am determined, and while it has been somewhat frustrating, I have enjoyed the process; to the point where I have since only had six hours' sleep, in part due to my level of enthusiasm to get back into it.
People need to understand that maintaining their freedom requires vigilance, personal initiative and responsibility, and active defense. The psychopaths are tireless in their attempts to take it away from us; and more, to convince us that we should actually want them to take it away.
Learn to program yourself; but when I say this, I do not merely mean the new languages that are popular, which will win you approval from a manager. I mean the old languages, like C, FORTH, Tcl/Tk, shell, awk, m4, and LaTeX. Learn simple HTML, and use RMS' own web site as a code example if you do not know how. Java might bring you money, but in my observation at least, it will not bring you joy.
Use the BSDs. Get comfortable with compiling something from source code. A lot of applications are designed much more smoothly than they used to be, so this is nowhere near as difficult as it once was. Get VMware Player, and install an Open or NetBSD guest. Use it to teach yourself the command line and shell scripting, and then realise that there is no reason for you to pay hundreds of dollars to Microsoft for Windows if you don't want to. You can buy a perfectly good computer from here, which has completely Free Software compatible hardware, and then run one of the BSDs natively, and dual boot it with Windows if you want. I don't hate Microsoft at all; I just think people should have that choice.
In addition to your use of Twitter, consider downloading XChat 2 and discovering Internet Relay Chat. Many open source software projects have IRC channels, so if you do start using *BSD, that will also be a good way of getting help if you need it.
In addition to your use of Reddit, get Forte Agent and find out if your service provider maintains a Usenet server. If they don't, Forte sells Usenet access at $3/month for 20GB.
I know many of you want the new, shiny thing; but voluntary simplicity is becoming a major movement in other areas of life as well, and truthfully I really think it's time we brought it to computer use as well. I am certified as a Permaculture designer, and I truthfully view use of the BSDs as being as close as I can get to using a computer in a Permacultural manner. The word Permaculture is short for "permanent culture," and UNIX is timeless.
I salute the German government in adopting this measure, quite seriously. I am migrating to virtualised NetBSD/amd64 myself, and aside from using pkgsrc in order to install Xorg, am probably going to rely on manual installation of packages in named directories in either /usr/local or /opt.
I fully believe that maximising simplicity, to the point of adopting seemingly primitive solutions, is the most effective means of maintaining reliability and security. There truly is no school like the old school. Others can call me a Luddite if they wish, but that is a title that I will wear with pride.
Better that, than what the likes of Verizon want. While they are not always, in this particular debate, the Randian demographic are my enemies. This is one case where the corporations have to be stopped, and I am entirely willing to see government or any other available means employed in order to do so.
After all, everyone knows that drones are intended exclusively for performing targetted assassinations, not potentially beneficial, civilian applications like advertising.
What on Earth were those real estate people thinking?
The haters and trolls notwithstanding, Minix was a worthy accomplishment; and may yet prove more important in the future than first thought, given Red Hat's ongoing destruction of Linux.
Professor Tanenbaum is a great man; and truthfully, I have always wished that Linus Torvalds had been kinder to him. Not all of us are necessarily meant to stand fully in the spotlight, and although perhaps both history and the debates proved Linus right, it would not have cost anything to allow the Professor to keep his dignity.
May he have as much time with his grandchildren as he wishes; and when the time comes, an easy and joyous passing.
I don't think anyone should have harming the American people , as a goal, at all. The complete abolition of the American government , on the other hand, is a goal which I think is overwhelmingly in the interests of humanity as an entire species, and in seeking such, the American people themselves should be leading the charge.
> I think this entire discussion suffers from survivor bias: those who advocate strongly for Fortran have not given serious consideration to anything else.
I've just honestly never heard of OO being used anywhere, where it wasn't a crutch for bad programmers; with again, the appeal to modernity fallacy being used to justify it.
I consider computer programming in its' current form, to very largely be a field in serious decline, and ruled by baseless hubris, to be honest. That is also the reason why I'm so wary of the appeal to modernity. Most of the time in my observation, newer methods are actually markedly inferior to older ones, rather than an improvement.
I think a big part of the reason for this, is because the emphasis is constantly on reducing programmer effort. What nobody seems to remember, however, is that needing to apply effort, is how you become good at something.
So we now have spoon-fed, degenerate Millenials, awash in cheap CPU cycles and coding in C++. They don't need to learn efficiency; they don't need to learn how to do things truly well. The complexity of the software they write, also perpetuates their delusions that they are skilled at what they do; when the truth is the exact opposite.
I've only ever seen two groups of people, who advocated OO as some sort of inherent virtue in itself.
a} Psychopathic, buzzword-obsessed, clueless IT managers.
b} Elitist, equally clueless programmers, who mainly advocate OO and related languages, (such as C++) because they enjoy ego tripping about the fact that they can write code that nobody else is able to read, rather than actually getting real work done.
The main argument that both groups use to advocate OO, is the appeal to modernity fallacy. I.e., the idea that "modernity," is an inherent virtue, purely for its' own sake.
You have just confirmed something, which I have suspected for a while. Namely, that C++ is the programming language of choice for psychopaths; and given that IT managers are also usually psychopaths, that explains why so many programmers are forced to use it.
There's something called individuality. Some of us have it. If you don't, then that's a shame; but that is not going to prevent us from retaining ours.
We are under no obligation to simply shut up and accept systemd whatsoever. We can go to FreeBSD. We can go to Minix. We have any number of possible alternatives.