VPS providers usually have reasonable reasons to customize the distros they run somewhat to fit within the framework they're using to virtualize each server - which are vary rarely simple "VMWare on a Xeon" type environments due to cost/scalability issues.
My guess is that certain providers are crappier than others.
Nokia had a range of operating systems that were, in every sense, fully functional computer operating systems, but were far more efficient. I'm not sure the choice between No Linux and Linux is what you claim.
At this point the market has decided everyone wants devices that, if you're lucky, might be able to last a day and a half on a single battery life (and that require battery technologies that have proven to be somewhat unstable to provide that amount of life.) So I'm not sure how much the "efficient operating system" thing counts right now, but I wish it did.
At 4.37 it'll report that 4.38 molests goats. 4.38 will retaliate by claiming 4.37 killed a man and lied about it. 4.39 will accuse 4.38 of secretly having two wives who know nothing about one another. 4.40 will claim 4.38 and 4.37 are having a secret affair and are making up allegations about one another to hide the fact. 4.41 will claim 4.40 is a multiple felon. 4.42 will accuse 4.41 of cheating on his taxes...
Reddit has one of the most open membership processes there is, with no email address or similar required. Throwaway accounts are extremely common. The posting history of an account doesn't reflect the visibility of its comments - while there's "karma", it doesn't work the same way as with Slashdot where postings from high karma users are given more visibility.
So banning users, however toxic, is going to be relatively pointless. At best, it means someone can't prove they're the same person as, say, the originator of a thread. But in all reality, if all you're known for is shitposting, will anyone want to?
Make it politically possible for others to resist.
Make it politically impossible for him to win again.
You know, Republicans managed to completely neuter the relatively harmless Obama within two years of his election, simply by putting up every roadblock they could. I think blocking the political agenda of someone running as a Fascist is considerably more worthy.
It might actually help in the long run. I mean, if he spends all his time sending stupid attacks on Brazillian supermodels at 3am using the National Emergency Alert System, rather than, say, playing with the Nuclear football, or dreaming up ways to deport suspected sympathizers of flag burners, we might be a little safer.
Come to think of it, all those rumors about Twitter banning him? Maybe, for the safety of our nation, we need to let him continue with the distraction.
He started his campaign by demonizing and scapegoating immigrants. He continued by demonizing members of a minority religion and proposed policies actively harmful to them. He actively encouraged, promising to pay the legal fees for, supporters to attack protestors, who were at the time standing silently holding banners criticizing Trump's previous comments. He has continued along these lines, and before the election itself even started making threats to prosecute his political opponent over charges long since investigated and dismissed by not only law enforcement, but by hostile congressional committees. He even - for reasons that remain peculiar - managed to insert barely concealed anti-Semitic language in his last round of election ads.
What about him makes you say he's the "closest thing to a moderate"? Because I'm not seeing it. He's the closest thing to Mussolini we've seen win the Presidency (or even get close to winning the Presidency.) Is he as bad as Mussolini? Mussolini started in a country that had descended into lawless anarchy, and could get away with a lot more than Trump can. So it's hard to really make a direct comparison, but we know what drives both.
I appreciate many don't like Clinton. I don't either. Depending on how many conspiracy theories you believe about her, she's either an honest, female, version of Richard Nixon, or, well, just as bad as Richard Nixon. But even Nixon vs Mussolini is no contest.
What's frightening is that while all of this was acknowledged before the election, now he's one many seem to feel the need to fall in line and pretend it's not happening. Oh no, it must instead be the media's fault, the "lying press"... now where have I heard that phrase before?
I'm going to try the OP's tactic in other contexts: "You got cancer, get over it", "Your baby died, get over it", "You got hit by a car and you're bleeding to death in the middle of the street in agonizing pain, get over it".
Let's see if it's seen as appropriate in the same way as "A Fascist just won the election and is about to be the President of your country, get over it" is.
Yeah, I don't get it, was Osama Bin Laden involved in some giant event that had world wide ramifications in 2001 or something? And yeah, I totally agree Bush should have gotten it, with his completely unprovoked, out of the blue, totally unrelated to anything Osama Bin Laden did, toppling of the Taliban...
I have to admit to being somewhat concerned about this. For an advertising company to refuse to place its ads on a website infamous for fascist propaganda may seem welcome to many, but those who welcome it are ignoring something very fundamental about free speech, the web, and the power of advertising: namely, wouldn't it be more effective to flood Brietbart with hundreds of autoplaying audio-enabled videos instead?
The GPL doesn't force anyone to do jack shit. If you don't want to release source code, either use non-GPL code as a base, or don't release anything. You're never forced to use GPL'd code as a base in the first place, how can it possibly be forcing you to do anything?
The "You didn't understand rural America" meme is getting tiresome. It's not as if 2008 or 2012 was followed by calls for conservatives to understand urban America.
This country is a melting pot of many different groups, and demanding that any one group - already a group with outsized representation in government - be treated with more reverence than all the others is exactly the kind of identity politics that those who whine about rural people not being listened to complain about.
Nor does it really help understanding why a crazy thin-skinned posterchild for the ultra rich who spouts fascist rhetoric, and who on the face of it, whether you're liberal or conservative, appears to be an existential threat to America, got elected.
"Oh no, someone called me a racist, well I'm going to vote for a racist fascist who'll destroy America and everything it stands for, that'll show them!" said nobody ever.
We called Trump supporters racist, sexist, fascists because Trump is a racist, sexist, fascist, and because anyone supporting him by definition supports racism, sexism, and fascism. We didn't randomly insult people and they switched their votes to Trump, the people we described were already voting for Trump.
I'm not disagreeing with you, I was looking at the likelihood of this campaign succeeding. I'd be in favor of an automatic audit at every election, if only on a sample of votes at each precinct.
She really is that unpopular. Look, even if you presume the popular vote is the right tracker of popularity (hard, because people decide their votes based upon the EC system), she's only 2% more "liked" (or 2% less disliked) than a crazy narcissistic posterchild for the 0.1% who keeps spouting fascist rhetoric.
Trump's negative campaign against her is merely a few years old. Clinton's opponents have been running a smear campaign against her for 25 years, and after a while, some of the mud sticks, no matter how unfair. Also she's a neo-conservative who pals around with Henry Kissenger, and is associated with international trade treaties widely - if unfairly - associated with the decline of US industry*. Her husband, who she's assumed to be close to, spent a significant amount of time reinventing the Democratic Party to be less concerned with social justice, neutering welfare, and introducing draconian "law and order" laws that devastated communities.
So, she's not popular with the left, and according to the right she's a murdering real estate fraudster who runs secret email servers so she can hide her secret ISIS plot to kill Heroic American Gamers in Benghazi.
Why would you think she's popular?
* Footnote: that decline actually dates back to Reagan, but people always think the bad stuff happened in the short term - witness the amnesia about how high gas prices were during Bush's eight years, for example. The novelization of Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign, Primary Colors, actually has him winning over his future campaign manager when he makes a speech to some out of work factory workers, telling them he can't bring back those jobs, that they're pretty much permanently moved overseas at this point, but that he'll fight every day to create new jobs for them.
To bring this closer to home as we're all nerds here, Commodore, which went bankrupt in the early nineties, was widely criticized for its policy of domestic computer manufacturing, virtually everyone else was hiring companies in the far east to manufacture their computers for them, with only superficial assembly in the US, if any.
That's how I voted too. The thing that counts against the idea that the machine might have switched any of your choices is that it can easily be audited - the ballots themselves are available to match against the count on the machine.
It would, I'd have thought, be a good idea for an independent organization to be allowed to audit random machines after an election as a matter of course, to reduce the likelihood of machines being tampered with.
I agree, and I suspect it would be both a waste of time and money, and counter productive, for Clinton to challenge the results because of that. From Clinton's point of view, there's no upside: the likely result of a challenge is that the results will stay the same, resulting in her being portrayed as a "sore loser" (see Al Gore, who had far more legitimate reasons to demand recounts in Florida, but was demonized for it), and Trump's legitimacy being entrenched in the public mind.
The only person whose interests would be served by an audit would be Trump. I just don't see it as likely he'll ask for one.
I think this is a dead end, much as I'd like to see Trump's inauguration cancelled.
Because you're simplifying a legal distinction. Telecommunications doesn't simply divide into "common carriers" and "non common carriers" with one getting certain rights and restrictions, and the other getting a complementary set of rights and restrictions. The rights and restrictions granted are entirely what Congress decides, and it can, and has, used more categories than the ludicrous binary simplification half of Slashdot thinks exists.
Yes, Common Carriers have certain rights and restrictions. But other categories of telecommunications service provider also have an overlapping set of rights and restrictions. If I use Google Sites to host child porn, Google doesn't get prosecuted for it unless they fail to take action when they discover the child porn is there, for example. Additionally, common carriers have also always had the right to prioritize and manage traffic based upon their technical needs - they can't do it on the basis of the message being sent, but they certainly can limit it based upon technical characteristics of the type of message being sent - so services like Binge On, for example, would be fine.
So, no, it doesn't hinge on whether ISPs are Common Carriers.
It's not the OS, it's the cloud layer. Android divorced of the cloud layer already exists and Google maintains it (AOSP), but the cloud services Google offers are what the user was trying to access.
A better "fix" would be to create an alternative to the cloud services layer - a different way to obtain, store, and update apps, a different way to back up photos, etc.
Many, many things simply can't be done through the GUI anymore, in fact that are quite a few that can't be done with any combination of batch, gpo, and GUI, you MUST use Powershell to do them as the management interface layers aren't exposed any other way
OK, but if you're not a Windows programmer, how many of those things are things you actually have to do?
I've been using GNOME in one form or another (sometimes GNOME-derived UIs like Unity) for the best part of 10 years. All this time I've been aware of gconf, and on one or two occasions I dove into it to try to fix a problem or two. But despite the fact it's where you have to go to change much of how GNOME works, I barely know it, and I find it almost impossible to get around it.
In the end I just want to get my work done, so I live with the slightly shitty UI (or use bash) rather than spend time learning how to customize it.
That's not to suggest the situation might not change, but literally nothing has come up that's ever required I learn Powershell - or if it has, I wouldn't have known it was Powershell I needed to look at in the first place.
In my experience, most of us learn huge amounts of stuff relevant to our little silo, but only have passing knowledge of advanced features of stuff outside of that silo.
Whenever the subject of Java comes up, for example, most of the responses about how well it works assume that Java is used to build desktop applications, and applets that run within web browsers. Java is almost never used in either platform, it's primarily used either on servers (at all levels, from data management to web services), or on Android phones (in its Android version.) [In my experience, it seems to be stagnant, perhaps even dying, on the former, but if you're looking for a Java job, most of the time you'll be offered work maintaining or extending backend software infrastructure.]
Powershell suffers from being an enhanced shell on an operating system whose native command line is so crude and ugly, the rest of the system has been built to work without it. So even programmers who primarily use Windows (albeit don't develop for Windows) don't spend much time even investigating stuff like Powershell, as they've already gotten used to using the point and click shell instead.
It's understandable. If it's a choice between learning how to use an advanced command line on an operating system designed not to use one, or a new Python programming framework, which do you think most readers here would spend their time on?
Slashdot Mirror
VPS providers usually have reasonable reasons to customize the distros they run somewhat to fit within the framework they're using to virtualize each server - which are vary rarely simple "VMWare on a Xeon" type environments due to cost/scalability issues.
My guess is that certain providers are crappier than others.
Hmm, possibly the Mediterranean, though the English Channel and North Sea can also be sources of clouds in Europe.
Nokia had a range of operating systems that were, in every sense, fully functional computer operating systems, but were far more efficient. I'm not sure the choice between No Linux and Linux is what you claim.
At this point the market has decided everyone wants devices that, if you're lucky, might be able to last a day and a half on a single battery life (and that require battery technologies that have proven to be somewhat unstable to provide that amount of life.) So I'm not sure how much the "efficient operating system" thing counts right now, but I wish it did.
At 4.37 it'll report that 4.38 molests goats. 4.38 will retaliate by claiming 4.37 killed a man and lied about it. 4.39 will accuse 4.38 of secretly having two wives who know nothing about one another. 4.40 will claim 4.38 and 4.37 are having a secret affair and are making up allegations about one another to hide the fact. 4.41 will claim 4.40 is a multiple felon. 4.42 will accuse 4.41 of cheating on his taxes...
Reddit has one of the most open membership processes there is, with no email address or similar required. Throwaway accounts are extremely common. The posting history of an account doesn't reflect the visibility of its comments - while there's "karma", it doesn't work the same way as with Slashdot where postings from high karma users are given more visibility.
So banning users, however toxic, is going to be relatively pointless. At best, it means someone can't prove they're the same person as, say, the originator of a thread. But in all reality, if all you're known for is shitposting, will anyone want to?
Resist.
Make it politically possible for others to resist.
Make it politically impossible for him to win again.
You know, Republicans managed to completely neuter the relatively harmless Obama within two years of his election, simply by putting up every roadblock they could. I think blocking the political agenda of someone running as a Fascist is considerably more worthy.
It might actually help in the long run. I mean, if he spends all his time sending stupid attacks on Brazillian supermodels at 3am using the National Emergency Alert System, rather than, say, playing with the Nuclear football, or dreaming up ways to deport suspected sympathizers of flag burners, we might be a little safer.
Come to think of it, all those rumors about Twitter banning him? Maybe, for the safety of our nation, we need to let him continue with the distraction.
You can defend them, you just can't pretend they didn't do what they told you they did.
He started his campaign by demonizing and scapegoating immigrants. He continued by demonizing members of a minority religion and proposed policies actively harmful to them. He actively encouraged, promising to pay the legal fees for, supporters to attack protestors, who were at the time standing silently holding banners criticizing Trump's previous comments. He has continued along these lines, and before the election itself even started making threats to prosecute his political opponent over charges long since investigated and dismissed by not only law enforcement, but by hostile congressional committees. He even - for reasons that remain peculiar - managed to insert barely concealed anti-Semitic language in his last round of election ads.
What about him makes you say he's the "closest thing to a moderate"? Because I'm not seeing it. He's the closest thing to Mussolini we've seen win the Presidency (or even get close to winning the Presidency.) Is he as bad as Mussolini? Mussolini started in a country that had descended into lawless anarchy, and could get away with a lot more than Trump can. So it's hard to really make a direct comparison, but we know what drives both.
I appreciate many don't like Clinton. I don't either. Depending on how many conspiracy theories you believe about her, she's either an honest, female, version of Richard Nixon, or, well, just as bad as Richard Nixon. But even Nixon vs Mussolini is no contest.
What's frightening is that while all of this was acknowledged before the election, now he's one many seem to feel the need to fall in line and pretend it's not happening. Oh no, it must instead be the media's fault, the "lying press"... now where have I heard that phrase before?
I'm going to try the OP's tactic in other contexts: "You got cancer, get over it", "Your baby died, get over it", "You got hit by a car and you're bleeding to death in the middle of the street in agonizing pain, get over it".
Let's see if it's seen as appropriate in the same way as "A Fascist just won the election and is about to be the President of your country, get over it" is.
Yeah, I don't get it, was Osama Bin Laden involved in some giant event that had world wide ramifications in 2001 or something? And yeah, I totally agree Bush should have gotten it, with his completely unprovoked, out of the blue, totally unrelated to anything Osama Bin Laden did, toppling of the Taliban...
I have to admit to being somewhat concerned about this. For an advertising company to refuse to place its ads on a website infamous for fascist propaganda may seem welcome to many, but those who welcome it are ignoring something very fundamental about free speech, the web, and the power of advertising: namely, wouldn't it be more effective to flood Brietbart with hundreds of autoplaying audio-enabled videos instead?
GNUStep has been working on FOSS clones of a lot of NextStep derived technologies. They're not all the way there yet, but it's worth checking out.
The GPL doesn't force anyone to do jack shit. If you don't want to release source code, either use non-GPL code as a base, or don't release anything. You're never forced to use GPL'd code as a base in the first place, how can it possibly be forcing you to do anything?
The "You didn't understand rural America" meme is getting tiresome. It's not as if 2008 or 2012 was followed by calls for conservatives to understand urban America.
This country is a melting pot of many different groups, and demanding that any one group - already a group with outsized representation in government - be treated with more reverence than all the others is exactly the kind of identity politics that those who whine about rural people not being listened to complain about.
Nor does it really help understanding why a crazy thin-skinned posterchild for the ultra rich who spouts fascist rhetoric, and who on the face of it, whether you're liberal or conservative, appears to be an existential threat to America, got elected.
"Oh no, someone called me a racist, well I'm going to vote for a racist fascist who'll destroy America and everything it stands for, that'll show them!" said nobody ever.
We called Trump supporters racist, sexist, fascists because Trump is a racist, sexist, fascist, and because anyone supporting him by definition supports racism, sexism, and fascism. We didn't randomly insult people and they switched their votes to Trump, the people we described were already voting for Trump.
I'm not disagreeing with you, I was looking at the likelihood of this campaign succeeding. I'd be in favor of an automatic audit at every election, if only on a sample of votes at each precinct.
She really is that unpopular. Look, even if you presume the popular vote is the right tracker of popularity (hard, because people decide their votes based upon the EC system), she's only 2% more "liked" (or 2% less disliked) than a crazy narcissistic posterchild for the 0.1% who keeps spouting fascist rhetoric.
Trump's negative campaign against her is merely a few years old. Clinton's opponents have been running a smear campaign against her for 25 years, and after a while, some of the mud sticks, no matter how unfair. Also she's a neo-conservative who pals around with Henry Kissenger, and is associated with international trade treaties widely - if unfairly - associated with the decline of US industry*. Her husband, who she's assumed to be close to, spent a significant amount of time reinventing the Democratic Party to be less concerned with social justice, neutering welfare, and introducing draconian "law and order" laws that devastated communities.
So, she's not popular with the left, and according to the right she's a murdering real estate fraudster who runs secret email servers so she can hide her secret ISIS plot to kill Heroic American Gamers in Benghazi.
Why would you think she's popular?
* Footnote: that decline actually dates back to Reagan, but people always think the bad stuff happened in the short term - witness the amnesia about how high gas prices were during Bush's eight years, for example. The novelization of Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign, Primary Colors, actually has him winning over his future campaign manager when he makes a speech to some out of work factory workers, telling them he can't bring back those jobs, that they're pretty much permanently moved overseas at this point, but that he'll fight every day to create new jobs for them.To bring this closer to home as we're all nerds here, Commodore, which went bankrupt in the early nineties, was widely criticized for its policy of domestic computer manufacturing, virtually everyone else was hiring companies in the far east to manufacture their computers for them, with only superficial assembly in the US, if any.
That's how I voted too. The thing that counts against the idea that the machine might have switched any of your choices is that it can easily be audited - the ballots themselves are available to match against the count on the machine.
It would, I'd have thought, be a good idea for an independent organization to be allowed to audit random machines after an election as a matter of course, to reduce the likelihood of machines being tampered with.
I agree, and I suspect it would be both a waste of time and money, and counter productive, for Clinton to challenge the results because of that. From Clinton's point of view, there's no upside: the likely result of a challenge is that the results will stay the same, resulting in her being portrayed as a "sore loser" (see Al Gore, who had far more legitimate reasons to demand recounts in Florida, but was demonized for it), and Trump's legitimacy being entrenched in the public mind.
The only person whose interests would be served by an audit would be Trump. I just don't see it as likely he'll ask for one.
I think this is a dead end, much as I'd like to see Trump's inauguration cancelled.
I have some terrible hardware that runs Windows with numerous problems too. It's not a GNU/Linux issue.
Because you're simplifying a legal distinction. Telecommunications doesn't simply divide into "common carriers" and "non common carriers" with one getting certain rights and restrictions, and the other getting a complementary set of rights and restrictions. The rights and restrictions granted are entirely what Congress decides, and it can, and has, used more categories than the ludicrous binary simplification half of Slashdot thinks exists.
Yes, Common Carriers have certain rights and restrictions. But other categories of telecommunications service provider also have an overlapping set of rights and restrictions. If I use Google Sites to host child porn, Google doesn't get prosecuted for it unless they fail to take action when they discover the child porn is there, for example. Additionally, common carriers have also always had the right to prioritize and manage traffic based upon their technical needs - they can't do it on the basis of the message being sent, but they certainly can limit it based upon technical characteristics of the type of message being sent - so services like Binge On, for example, would be fine.
So, no, it doesn't hinge on whether ISPs are Common Carriers.
It's not the OS, it's the cloud layer. Android divorced of the cloud layer already exists and Google maintains it (AOSP), but the cloud services Google offers are what the user was trying to access.
A better "fix" would be to create an alternative to the cloud services layer - a different way to obtain, store, and update apps, a different way to back up photos, etc.
OK, but if you're not a Windows programmer, how many of those things are things you actually have to do?
I've been using GNOME in one form or another (sometimes GNOME-derived UIs like Unity) for the best part of 10 years. All this time I've been aware of gconf, and on one or two occasions I dove into it to try to fix a problem or two. But despite the fact it's where you have to go to change much of how GNOME works, I barely know it, and I find it almost impossible to get around it.
In the end I just want to get my work done, so I live with the slightly shitty UI (or use bash) rather than spend time learning how to customize it.
That's not to suggest the situation might not change, but literally nothing has come up that's ever required I learn Powershell - or if it has, I wouldn't have known it was Powershell I needed to look at in the first place.
In my experience, most of us learn huge amounts of stuff relevant to our little silo, but only have passing knowledge of advanced features of stuff outside of that silo.
Whenever the subject of Java comes up, for example, most of the responses about how well it works assume that Java is used to build desktop applications, and applets that run within web browsers. Java is almost never used in either platform, it's primarily used either on servers (at all levels, from data management to web services), or on Android phones (in its Android version.) [In my experience, it seems to be stagnant, perhaps even dying, on the former, but if you're looking for a Java job, most of the time you'll be offered work maintaining or extending backend software infrastructure.]
Powershell suffers from being an enhanced shell on an operating system whose native command line is so crude and ugly, the rest of the system has been built to work without it. So even programmers who primarily use Windows (albeit don't develop for Windows) don't spend much time even investigating stuff like Powershell, as they've already gotten used to using the point and click shell instead.
It's understandable. If it's a choice between learning how to use an advanced command line on an operating system designed not to use one, or a new Python programming framework, which do you think most readers here would spend their time on?