Yahoo is/was famous (infamous?) for their email, portal, and search. They also have a few well known properties that aren't branded as Yahoo, such as Flickr. But all of these are Internet businesses. What, if anything, do they own that's not Internet? Isn't Yahoo minus Internet = -1?
I use Firefox despite critical components being designed and written by Brandon Eich, who's a contemptible homophobic jackass (and would have continued to use it even if he hadn't resigned.) I use OpenSSL despite the jackwagon who wrote it being some anti-GNU zealot. Those are two examples, and I'm sure I can find a thousand more utilities written by people I'd never go to a party with.
You're unwilling to work with systemd simply because you don't like the author, and are willing to throw the baby out with the bathwater because you are afraid to deal with your animosity against the author. OK, we get it.
But perhaps you need to reconsider your priorities if your approach to life is to decide what technologies to use on the basis of personality quibbles with people you'll never ever meet.
systemd's great. I can't comment on Poettering because, quite honestly, I've never really followed the guy. He could be as bad as Eric Raymond. He could be as nice as Bruce Perens. I'll bitch about him if I find out something that makes me think he's giving the F/OSS communit(ies) a bad name or is behaving in an exclusionary manner, but I'm not going to reject a long needed technological upgrade that's exactly what we need right now on that basis.
I wasn't referencing the Three Laws, I was referencing the current state of AI in self-driving car technology. It was a joke, but apparently it's flown over everyone's head, it's a shame Slashdot doesn't let you delete comments.
No batteries needed if it connects via the Lightning (or micro-USB for generic phones - let's be honest, if Apple goes there others will to) port. DAC and headphone amp will probably add about 25c to the cost of the device.
The only serious issue really is that nobody has these headphones. I don't mind us moving to digital audio transmission, but I'd like all the manufacturers to agree upon a common standard first. Apple unilaterally deciding to go Lightning is about the worst possible outcome.
Are they selling an object like a car or a service like access to a fairground?
Even ignoring quasi-legal arguments like software licensing, I'm inclined to feel this is an example of the latter.
This is not like selling costume packs for Skyrim, where both parties were involved in a transaction presented as a purchase of an object (again, legal arguments like licensing aside - user buys a box called "Skyrim", expects that to be the end of their relationship with Bethesda and Bethesda expected that to be the end of their relationship with the user, save for bug fixes and purchases of other products or services)
This is a straightforward "You pay us $X for access to our service.
And as such, just as paying money to access to a fairground doesn't mean you can reconfigure the rollercoaster, likewise you don't get to mod a multi-user game just because you paid money for access to it.
sysvinit is widely considered awful by most distro maintainers.
How do we know this? Well, because distro maintainers have been trying to get away from it for years. Even when everything was run from 'init' there have been multiple refactorings of/etc/*.d to try to produce a better start up environment.
At some point, some distributions, notably Ubuntu, switched to an initd replacement called Upstart. Because they were desperate to get away from sysvinit. ChromeOS, possibly the most widely used Desktop GNU/Linux distribution, was also an early adopter of Upstart. Again because it was considered better - more reliable, faster, etc - than horrible old init.
So why are they switching to systemd? Because systemd is considered better than Upstart (which in turn is considered better than sysvinit.) systemd has a better process model, and doesn't ignore required functionality (yes, the same program that configures devices at start up probably should configure USB devices that are plugged in dynamically, and the same processes that configure the network based upon what devices are plugged in at start up should probably configure the network based upon what devices become available later, etc. So yes, this supposed "monolithic" approach is basic common sense.)
Most of those complaining about systemd are actually fighting an argument they lost in 2006, when Upstart became part of Ubuntu 6.10. They've lost it not just in the GNU/Linux world, but also in, say, the Mac OS X world, where sysvinit was unceremoniously ejected back in 2005. Or the Solaris world. etc.
You know, I could understand this if we were actually losing anything by switching to systemd. The desire to remove X11 from *ix, for example, replacing it with a dumb graphics engine with a fraction of the functionality, I think is genuinely a tragedy. We'll lose much of what made *ix what it is if and when Wayland is adopted. But systemd doesn't remove anything. It's fast, efficient, and it fixes huge holes in GNU/Linux, problems we've been aware of since the mid-nineties but haven't had the spine to fix.
That's not really a low end desktop, not even today. Most desktops are still being sold with 4Gb of RAM, and when it comes to tablets, the situation is even worse.
My tests are on a Thinkpad X100e which originally came with Windows 7 and ran it fine, with 4Gb, and a HP Stream 8 which originally came with Windows 8.1. Both have, independently, had large numbers of BSoDs since the Fall Update. Responsiveness on both is pretty bad, though has improved with the FU, but still, more often than not, trying to bring up the Start menu takes more than 10 seconds (and sometimes more than a minute) on the X100e, and is a frequent occurrence on the tablet. The notifications bar usually takes so long to come up on both I usually give up on it.
(Want to see smooth and responsive? Try Windows 8.1 on a tablet. Made me never want to use an Android tablet again.)
For obvious reasons, I've not accepted by employer's offer to switch to Windows 10, nor have I upgraded my main PC. This is terrible. Yeah, I get people saying "Well, on my low end bargain basement $10,000 desktop, an 12GHz 16 core Intel i9 with 32Gb of RAM (I mean, who uses anything less these days, right?!" (I kid, but not by much...) "it works fine!" but when you have two devices in front of you that really suck thanks to the Windows 10 update, you tend to believe your own eyes.
Honestly, I still think Microsoft should have released Windows 8.11 (8.1 with a start menu) and then spent a year polishing Windows 10 until it was ready. It shows potential, but in its current form it's garbage.
This is another thing that's really pissing me off about Windows 10 - quite honestly, if it wasn't for the fact Windows 10 is slow and bug ridden (Fall update helped a little with the first, but made the latter much, much, worse), I'd have turned off updates completely by now. How does Microsoft expect us to trust them with automatic updates if they're not going to tell us what those updates are supposed to do?
You're looking at a Wikipedia page dated today. You need to look at the Wikipedia for two years from the release of Windows 10, in the hypothetical universe where he resigned;-) (In other words, you misread the GP!)
Now you won't even support some petty little dictators like Putin/Assad to defeat a religious movement that threatens the entire modern world?
It's a bunch of pathetic terrorists not a threat to the entire modern world. FFS people, stop crapping your pants every time some nut shoots or blows up something. When that happens, terrorists might not win anything, but we definitely lose.
Nobody religious extremist is going to kill you tomorrow. Go live your life. (But change your pants, please.)
Looking at context, I think literally was more appropriate than figuratively. "Figuratively" would have been wrong, he really wasn't able to do anything with his computer. "Literally" is OK but is completely unnecessary and, as a result, because it's generally only used in situations where there may be a doubt, is inappropriate. It's like saying "Look at this awesome phone I just bought and did not steal" unironically.
I suspect that's exactly the problem. I've been experiencing, on both my testbeds (a tablet and an old laptop) frequent BSoDs with the new version, and even the installation of the update had problems (on the tablet it would get stuck at 40%, which I found out afterwards was because I have an SD card installed. Yes, seriously.)
I'm still a little baffled they released Windows 10 at all. I'd have released Windows 8.11 (8.1 with a traditional start menu), which would have bought them time to polish 10, get the bugs out of it, and make it awesome (which it could be, the damned thing has potential) - but as it is, they've released something obviously Beta-quality as a production operating system, and I can't for the life of me understand why.
He's not complaining, he's observing and making decisions based upon those observations. All he's said above is that he observed he'd muck things up if he continued to try to be involved given he no longer has creative control, so he stepped back.
No, that's one not the alternative. Given the UI in Mozilla has always been separate from the rendering/JS engines, it would/should be trivially easy to update the non-UI part of Firefox from the UI, which would solve both problems, keeping security updates and standards compliance separate from usability.
That Mozilla doesn't separate this says much about why they update - it's never been about security.
1. The technology is mostly there but rarely all there. The US, for example, is rolling out PTC, which is 90% of the self-driving-train solution (though it's intended to be merely a safety upgrade), but PTC will not be universal. While Europe is way ahead of the Americas on this, largely because they're not stupid, boneheaded, and corrupt when it comes to transportation policy (and thus they take trains seriously rather than deliberately running them down, making them all but unobtainable, and then claiming nobody wants them when nobody rides once-a-day museum relics whose stations are 50 miles away from anywhere you want to go and whose speed rarely breaks 50mph) PTC is still not universal.
2. You do, still, need equivalents of the technologies going into, for example, Google's self driving car. Did a tree fall on the track? Has heat bent the rails out of shape? Is there an idiot driving parallel to the train who's likely to jump the tracks at the next crossing (well, in fairness, human engineers can't generally deal with that either, and usually have to suffer the trauma associated with slamming on the brakes, getting out, and finding bits of someone's head on the track.) What about a washout?
3. Yeah... unions. I hate blaming unions for anything, largely because 90% of the time when someone claims unions are the thing that killed a particular industry or stops needed reform from happening, they're making it up or at the very least massively exaggerating. In this case, however, the unions have this issue on their radar and have been fighting smaller crews, and expressed concerns that PTC = 1 engineer or eventually no engineers.
There are automated systems out there, but they generally run in completely enclosed subway tunnels and have a high degree of human monitoring. Until PTC can be augmented with techologies that can visually and non-visually verify the tracks ahead are safe, we can't really automate any major conventional intercity railways.
But I bet it wouldn't take a year for, say, a team made up of Google's self driving car engineers to create those technologies.
I think "Felony car accident" is a contradiction in terms. If it's an accident, it's highly improbable, probably impossible, to be accidental. Even manslaughter requires the killer did something willful that lead to the victim's death, even if death wasn't the intent.
Of course, mischievous designers could design a car so that it'll kill someone deliberately, but that's possible today too, so there's that.
Now, it is good news Volvo accepts liability, and I suspect all car manufacturers recognize that this is the only way it can work, but I suspect the consequences will be the death of car sales, and cars becoming rentable/leasable instead. No car company is going to be happy with being liable for the potentially deadly behavior of their vehicles when they can't control them, and they're even less likely to be happy about essentially writing a blank check for any accidents when a car leaves a car lot.
So more likely, you'll lease a vehicle. Leases will be short - perhaps even month to month. You'll need to return the car for servicing or risk losing it. If the manufacturer uncovers a problem that's expensive to fix and would need significant rises in lease payments to cover, you may find it unexpectedly withdrawn at the next renewal.
That sounds... unpopular? Leasing is common in the US, but it's not the majority, and it's usually sold as a way for someone on a medium income to get a better new car, which is a very specific market. I bet very few Slashdot readers would do that.
Cartoons aren't trying to look real. I think that's the problem, and the problem with "Aw, it's a movie, who cares?" attitudes from directors and SFX people is that it immediately pulls people out of the suspension of disbelief when in-your-face violations of reality occur in movies. You can get away with it in a cartoon because a cartoon is literally designed to look like nothing you've ever seen. If it starts looking real, it's a problem.
The concerns about breaking the suspension of disbelief happens at every level. It's why poorly written characters are also grating. Nobody speaks like that! And that person's obviously a fantasy! (etc)
But for some reason we care about it when it's a Manic Pixie Dream Girl and treat that as a legitimate criticism, but we don't - and get bashed as nerds - when it's a computer whose windows fly open and then closed when you insert a USB key and start mashing on a keyboard, or a silenced gun that whispers "hmmmph" rather makes a loud "PING" (which the shooter holds sideways with one hand...), or a bomb countdown timer which mysteriously remains turned on but not counting down any more after the hero snips the power to it, or a suspension bridge that lets small 10 yard sections fall without impacting the overall integrity of the structure.
All of those things, however, kill the suspension of disbelief for a significant segment of the audience. And it's all the more stupid because 90% of the time, the directory and SFX people have gone out their way to say "Wow, look at this, it's awesome, it's so real! Look at all the effort we made into ensuring the cars would look like they're falling through the hole in the bridge realistically!"
Slashdot Mirror
Yahoo is/was famous (infamous?) for their email, portal, and search. They also have a few well known properties that aren't branded as Yahoo, such as Flickr. But all of these are Internet businesses. What, if anything, do they own that's not Internet? Isn't Yahoo minus Internet = -1?
That's more or less what he just said, so I'm not sure how rewording it makes it "forgivable"...
I use Firefox despite critical components being designed and written by Brandon Eich, who's a contemptible homophobic jackass (and would have continued to use it even if he hadn't resigned.) I use OpenSSL despite the jackwagon who wrote it being some anti-GNU zealot. Those are two examples, and I'm sure I can find a thousand more utilities written by people I'd never go to a party with.
You're unwilling to work with systemd simply because you don't like the author, and are willing to throw the baby out with the bathwater because you are afraid to deal with your animosity against the author. OK, we get it.
But perhaps you need to reconsider your priorities if your approach to life is to decide what technologies to use on the basis of personality quibbles with people you'll never ever meet.
systemd's great. I can't comment on Poettering because, quite honestly, I've never really followed the guy. He could be as bad as Eric Raymond. He could be as nice as Bruce Perens. I'll bitch about him if I find out something that makes me think he's giving the F/OSS communit(ies) a bad name or is behaving in an exclusionary manner, but I'm not going to reject a long needed technological upgrade that's exactly what we need right now on that basis.
I wasn't referencing the Three Laws, I was referencing the current state of AI in self-driving car technology. It was a joke, but apparently it's flown over everyone's head, it's a shame Slashdot doesn't let you delete comments.
The winner will be the car with the most realistic image of a child about to run into the street painted on the back.
No batteries needed if it connects via the Lightning (or micro-USB for generic phones - let's be honest, if Apple goes there others will to) port. DAC and headphone amp will probably add about 25c to the cost of the device.
The only serious issue really is that nobody has these headphones. I don't mind us moving to digital audio transmission, but I'd like all the manufacturers to agree upon a common standard first. Apple unilaterally deciding to go Lightning is about the worst possible outcome.
Are they selling an object like a car or a service like access to a fairground?
Even ignoring quasi-legal arguments like software licensing, I'm inclined to feel this is an example of the latter.
This is not like selling costume packs for Skyrim, where both parties were involved in a transaction presented as a purchase of an object (again, legal arguments like licensing aside - user buys a box called "Skyrim", expects that to be the end of their relationship with Bethesda and Bethesda expected that to be the end of their relationship with the user, save for bug fixes and purchases of other products or services)
This is a straightforward "You pay us $X for access to our service.
And as such, just as paying money to access to a fairground doesn't mean you can reconfigure the rollercoaster, likewise you don't get to mod a multi-user game just because you paid money for access to it.
If only there were a Kickstarter to fund the creation of 3D printer blueprints to make those self-driving cars...
Better explanation:
sysvinit is widely considered awful by most distro maintainers.
How do we know this? Well, because distro maintainers have been trying to get away from it for years. Even when everything was run from 'init' there have been multiple refactorings of /etc/*.d to try to produce a better start up environment.
At some point, some distributions, notably Ubuntu, switched to an initd replacement called Upstart. Because they were desperate to get away from sysvinit. ChromeOS, possibly the most widely used Desktop GNU/Linux distribution, was also an early adopter of Upstart. Again because it was considered better - more reliable, faster, etc - than horrible old init.
So why are they switching to systemd? Because systemd is considered better than Upstart (which in turn is considered better than sysvinit.) systemd has a better process model, and doesn't ignore required functionality (yes, the same program that configures devices at start up probably should configure USB devices that are plugged in dynamically, and the same processes that configure the network based upon what devices are plugged in at start up should probably configure the network based upon what devices become available later, etc. So yes, this supposed "monolithic" approach is basic common sense.)
Most of those complaining about systemd are actually fighting an argument they lost in 2006, when Upstart became part of Ubuntu 6.10. They've lost it not just in the GNU/Linux world, but also in, say, the Mac OS X world, where sysvinit was unceremoniously ejected back in 2005. Or the Solaris world. etc.
You know, I could understand this if we were actually losing anything by switching to systemd. The desire to remove X11 from *ix, for example, replacing it with a dumb graphics engine with a fraction of the functionality, I think is genuinely a tragedy. We'll lose much of what made *ix what it is if and when Wayland is adopted. But systemd doesn't remove anything. It's fast, efficient, and it fixes huge holes in GNU/Linux, problems we've been aware of since the mid-nineties but haven't had the spine to fix.
It's something to be welcomed.
That's not really a low end desktop, not even today. Most desktops are still being sold with 4Gb of RAM, and when it comes to tablets, the situation is even worse.
My tests are on a Thinkpad X100e which originally came with Windows 7 and ran it fine, with 4Gb, and a HP Stream 8 which originally came with Windows 8.1. Both have, independently, had large numbers of BSoDs since the Fall Update. Responsiveness on both is pretty bad, though has improved with the FU, but still, more often than not, trying to bring up the Start menu takes more than 10 seconds (and sometimes more than a minute) on the X100e, and is a frequent occurrence on the tablet. The notifications bar usually takes so long to come up on both I usually give up on it.
(Want to see smooth and responsive? Try Windows 8.1 on a tablet. Made me never want to use an Android tablet again.)
For obvious reasons, I've not accepted by employer's offer to switch to Windows 10, nor have I upgraded my main PC. This is terrible. Yeah, I get people saying "Well, on my low end bargain basement $10,000 desktop, an 12GHz 16 core Intel i9 with 32Gb of RAM (I mean, who uses anything less these days, right?!" (I kid, but not by much...) "it works fine!" but when you have two devices in front of you that really suck thanks to the Windows 10 update, you tend to believe your own eyes.
Honestly, I still think Microsoft should have released Windows 8.11 (8.1 with a start menu) and then spent a year polishing Windows 10 until it was ready. It shows potential, but in its current form it's garbage.
This is another thing that's really pissing me off about Windows 10 - quite honestly, if it wasn't for the fact Windows 10 is slow and bug ridden (Fall update helped a little with the first, but made the latter much, much, worse), I'd have turned off updates completely by now. How does Microsoft expect us to trust them with automatic updates if they're not going to tell us what those updates are supposed to do?
You're looking at a Wikipedia page dated today. You need to look at the Wikipedia for two years from the release of Windows 10, in the hypothetical universe where he resigned ;-) (In other words, you misread the GP!)
Woohoo! Free gravel!
It's a bunch of pathetic terrorists not a threat to the entire modern world. FFS people, stop crapping your pants every time some nut shoots or blows up something. When that happens, terrorists might not win anything, but we definitely lose.
Nobody religious extremist is going to kill you tomorrow. Go live your life. (But change your pants, please.)
Yahoo Mail is one of their few products that large numbers of people still use. Remember, at one point it was the smart alternative to Hotmail.
Looking at context, I think literally was more appropriate than figuratively. "Figuratively" would have been wrong, he really wasn't able to do anything with his computer. "Literally" is OK but is completely unnecessary and, as a result, because it's generally only used in situations where there may be a doubt, is inappropriate. It's like saying "Look at this awesome phone I just bought and did not steal" unironically.
I suspect that's exactly the problem. I've been experiencing, on both my testbeds (a tablet and an old laptop) frequent BSoDs with the new version, and even the installation of the update had problems (on the tablet it would get stuck at 40%, which I found out afterwards was because I have an SD card installed. Yes, seriously.)
I'm still a little baffled they released Windows 10 at all. I'd have released Windows 8.11 (8.1 with a traditional start menu), which would have bought them time to polish 10, get the bugs out of it, and make it awesome (which it could be, the damned thing has potential) - but as it is, they've released something obviously Beta-quality as a production operating system, and I can't for the life of me understand why.
He's not complaining, he's observing and making decisions based upon those observations. All he's said above is that he observed he'd muck things up if he continued to try to be involved given he no longer has creative control, so he stepped back.
Which is entirely reasonable.
No, that's one not the alternative. Given the UI in Mozilla has always been separate from the rendering/JS engines, it would/should be trivially easy to update the non-UI part of Firefox from the UI, which would solve both problems, keeping security updates and standards compliance separate from usability.
That Mozilla doesn't separate this says much about why they update - it's never been about security.
man pages don't, but man does. man -k list should tell you which command you need to list files, for example.
We're very close to that. Problems are:
1. The technology is mostly there but rarely all there. The US, for example, is rolling out PTC, which is 90% of the self-driving-train solution (though it's intended to be merely a safety upgrade), but PTC will not be universal. While Europe is way ahead of the Americas on this, largely because they're not stupid, boneheaded, and corrupt when it comes to transportation policy (and thus they take trains seriously rather than deliberately running them down, making them all but unobtainable, and then claiming nobody wants them when nobody rides once-a-day museum relics whose stations are 50 miles away from anywhere you want to go and whose speed rarely breaks 50mph) PTC is still not universal.
2. You do, still, need equivalents of the technologies going into, for example, Google's self driving car. Did a tree fall on the track? Has heat bent the rails out of shape? Is there an idiot driving parallel to the train who's likely to jump the tracks at the next crossing (well, in fairness, human engineers can't generally deal with that either, and usually have to suffer the trauma associated with slamming on the brakes, getting out, and finding bits of someone's head on the track.) What about a washout?
3. Yeah... unions. I hate blaming unions for anything, largely because 90% of the time when someone claims unions are the thing that killed a particular industry or stops needed reform from happening, they're making it up or at the very least massively exaggerating. In this case, however, the unions have this issue on their radar and have been fighting smaller crews, and expressed concerns that PTC = 1 engineer or eventually no engineers.
There are automated systems out there, but they generally run in completely enclosed subway tunnels and have a high degree of human monitoring. Until PTC can be augmented with techologies that can visually and non-visually verify the tracks ahead are safe, we can't really automate any major conventional intercity railways.
But I bet it wouldn't take a year for, say, a team made up of Google's self driving car engineers to create those technologies.
I think "Felony car accident" is a contradiction in terms. If it's an accident, it's highly improbable, probably impossible, to be accidental. Even manslaughter requires the killer did something willful that lead to the victim's death, even if death wasn't the intent.
Of course, mischievous designers could design a car so that it'll kill someone deliberately, but that's possible today too, so there's that.
Now, it is good news Volvo accepts liability, and I suspect all car manufacturers recognize that this is the only way it can work, but I suspect the consequences will be the death of car sales, and cars becoming rentable/leasable instead. No car company is going to be happy with being liable for the potentially deadly behavior of their vehicles when they can't control them, and they're even less likely to be happy about essentially writing a blank check for any accidents when a car leaves a car lot.
So more likely, you'll lease a vehicle. Leases will be short - perhaps even month to month. You'll need to return the car for servicing or risk losing it. If the manufacturer uncovers a problem that's expensive to fix and would need significant rises in lease payments to cover, you may find it unexpectedly withdrawn at the next renewal.
That sounds... unpopular? Leasing is common in the US, but it's not the majority, and it's usually sold as a way for someone on a medium income to get a better new car, which is a very specific market. I bet very few Slashdot readers would do that.
Cartoons aren't trying to look real. I think that's the problem, and the problem with "Aw, it's a movie, who cares?" attitudes from directors and SFX people is that it immediately pulls people out of the suspension of disbelief when in-your-face violations of reality occur in movies. You can get away with it in a cartoon because a cartoon is literally designed to look like nothing you've ever seen. If it starts looking real, it's a problem.
The concerns about breaking the suspension of disbelief happens at every level. It's why poorly written characters are also grating. Nobody speaks like that! And that person's obviously a fantasy! (etc)
But for some reason we care about it when it's a Manic Pixie Dream Girl and treat that as a legitimate criticism, but we don't - and get bashed as nerds - when it's a computer whose windows fly open and then closed when you insert a USB key and start mashing on a keyboard, or a silenced gun that whispers "hmmmph" rather makes a loud "PING" (which the shooter holds sideways with one hand...), or a bomb countdown timer which mysteriously remains turned on but not counting down any more after the hero snips the power to it, or a suspension bridge that lets small 10 yard sections fall without impacting the overall integrity of the structure.
All of those things, however, kill the suspension of disbelief for a significant segment of the audience. And it's all the more stupid because 90% of the time, the directory and SFX people have gone out their way to say "Wow, look at this, it's awesome, it's so real! Look at all the effort we made into ensuring the cars would look like they're falling through the hole in the bridge realistically!"
Why did they bother?
Did you see how badly designed and made cars were in the 1970s? ;-)