If you made people legally liable for damages as a result of software bugs, no one would ever write software again. Bugs are inevitable, including security holes, and anyone writing code would go under in very short order.
By that logic, there should be no automobile, construction, or medical device industries.
Nothing is perfect and there's always something you can be held legally liable for. On the other hand, if you are making an honest effort and observe best practices, you can still produce something of sufficient quality that you can stand behind and still stay in business.
But that's not what users demand. They demand cheap products and expect them to fail. Because, in the end, they're getting what they pay for.
There's definitely time to purge your inputs. We're not talking about something that's going to take weeks here, or even days in most cases. We're talking about something that takes seconds or minutes.
That's because we don't really hire software "engineers". We hire "hackers" in the literal sense of the term - people who hack and slash with crude brute force to just "Git 'R Dun!" as fast and as cheap as we can. It's like furnishing a house and all your furniture was made by the side of the road by a guy with a chain saw. No sanding, no gloss, no detail work, no mortise-and-tenon or complex joinery, just 10-penny nails and lots of splinters.
Or maybe a better analogy is particle board. Stamp on a pretty faux-woodgrain facade and ship it. Just hope it doesn't get wet.
We don't value polished quality work. As long as it's pretty and it's cheap, that's "good enough".
Actually, I suppose that what really grates on me on the comments issue is that I was doing "literate programming" long before Knuth named it.
In other words, the comments go in first and they explain WHAT the code is going to do. Then I wrap code around them to do it.
Those are fundamental attributes of the function and while details change, this kind of comment doesn't go out of date nearly as fast as the "add 1 to X" type comments that say HOW the code does it. And the code is IMHO better quality because I have mapped the forest before I started laying in all the trees.
The how-to comments can end up being more trouble than they're worth, and on that, I'll agree that sometimes it's better to just skip them. The WTF am I doing? comments often mean I don't need many, if any how-to comments. And since my basic code design is based off them, I don't skip them.
The rules in question weren't things like architectural standards and other things that can hobble solution of a problem. Unless your idea of a "solution" is simply "Git 'R Dun!"
The rules that the article praised breaking were things like commenting your code (too much time and effort), defining data types (too much time and effort - let's see those pretty web page NOW!) and stuff like that.
Rules, in other words, that are generally violated - and freely violated at that - by people who hack out software with blunt instruments instead of "wasting" time on producing something that's reliable, secure, and easy/inexpensive to maintain and debug.
While we are generalising, we can also talk about how those 'experienced' always seem to know better and refuse to do what they are asked unless it's done their way.
Yes, younger people can have their issues, but then again, so do the older ones.
And if you mix the two, you can leverage the advantages of both and reduce the overall predominance of any one issue. But why do that when the only real goal is to hack out stuff fast and cheap?
There's another way of looking at it. They're doing you a favor by letting you know in advance that you wouldn't fit in there. Otherwise you could come in, work your tail off, show good results, and be laid off anyway 18 months down the road.
On the other hand, you'd have had a chance to pay your bills for 18 months in the mean time.
I enjoy a good paper copy of a piece of fiction or prose, but I will never buy another physical technical manual again. Trying to read one with the computer next to it is ridiculous. They can flop their huge selves over to the trash can as far as I'm concerned.
Funny, I'm the exact opposite.
Then again, the technical pubs I read are rarely optimal on a paperback-sized reader screen.
Worse, a lot of docs are web-based now and have really obnoxious borders and slide-outs that make them not only virtually impossible to read on a 7-inch tablet, but often cannot even be printed without contortions up to and including scraping and re-formatting. That's something that really bugs me, since a lot of projects I work on only need a chapter or so actually on hard copy for detailed dissection and annotation, and I really don't enjoy spending more time getting the hardcopy than I will spend reading it.
It's really not THAT hard to make a reader/printer-friendly document on the web if you pay more attention to intelligent CSS than to multi-media circuses.
The first Nook reversed this and had a tiny color screen at the bottom to go with the main e-ink reading surface. All your navigation used the color screen, it could show thumbnails of covers, etc.
They dropped it after one iteration though. I guess it wasn't very popular.
It's a pain to use. Because ONLY the small strip of color screen was touch-sensitive, the web browser was almost useless and selecting books to read from the e-ink listing meant scrolling a lot. And, of course, the power-saver always switched it off just before you needed it again, but that's hardly a nook thing.
Still, it was a pretty decent reader and it could easily play music while you read if you wanted it to.
Pablum would also be a step up. But never under-estimate the determination of people to make strange choices. After all, they'll pay a premium for coffee that comes out a cat's anus, so in addition to the pablum-eaters and "real food" eaters, we can expect there to be people willing to buy into real meat that doesn't resent it when you harvest it.
The problem is it will turn out to be bad for you. Factory produced problems.
Yes, but that's what most people are eating anyway. Factory-farmed meat stuffed full of noxious chemicals and raised under stressful conditions. After that, vats of chemicals could only be a step up.
If it's "healthy" it's not close enough to real meat.
I'd be interested in something if it's healthy for the pigs, cows, &Co., but if "healthy" non-meat meat is what you want, there are several products that have been out for years that are passable (but only passable) substitutes.
Who ever interacts with the init system on a desktop? It does not solve your sound or graphics problems or game and application compatibility, and it's arcane enough that you might as well uninstall a daemon instead of disabling it, on the once every two years occurrence you might need to do it.
Well, actually, it gets into fights with USB devices and network shares totally blocking booting where earlier releases would simply boot degraded.
Then I get into fights with it, because its version of "single-user" diagnose/repair mode isn't as straightforward as the old-time "runlevel 1" option. Not all of the system resources that runlevel 1 offered are up and available in systemd recovery.
Can they stop me from taking a picture of the picture with my smart phone and then transferring it back to my computer?
Well, Barnes and Noble can stop you from archiving a copy of a work whose cover page includes these words:
The author and publisher have provided this ebook to you without Digital Rights Management software (DRM) applid so that you can enjoy reading it on your personal devices. This e-book is for your personal use only. You may not print or post this e-book, or make this e-book publicly available in any way. You may not copy, reproduce or uplod this e-book, other than to read it on one of your personal devices.
Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on this copyright, please notify the published at...
I had to type this in manually from the eReader screen because the Nook software hides the document file. Boldface is the publisher's, not mine, and the URL was omitted because this is basically the same text that other publishers are using, with their own URLs substituted.
IANAL, but I'd say that by making the downloaded book inaccessible outside of the Nook software, which keeps its files in a location that cannot be read by other apps without hacking the system constitutes a form of DRM and therefore infringes on the author/publisher agreement.
There are actually 4 aspects to software design and implementation.
1. Scientific: The discovery, proof, and design of algorithms. An algorithm is a basic set of rules to accomplish a task, and although more than one algorithm might accomplish that task (for example, sorting), the algorithm considered as a "black box" is invariant as to functionality. This is true science, with a mathematical slant.
2. Engineering. The ability to locate appropriate algorithms for a given task from the "literature" (speaking abstractly, since traditional printed textbooks are only a small part of the resources most of us tap these days). And to determine which algorithms are optimal for the specific project at hand.
3. Creative. This is the part Management hates. Ideally, software could be constructed by employing automated processes. In reality, there's almost always a creative aspect, and creativity is something that, so far, requires human beings. You can give 2 people an algorithm and they can implement it in 2 entirely different ways. Some of which are easier to read/maintain than others. Some of which are more flexible. Highest marks (in my book) go to implementations that are compact, readable, efficient, reliable (including fail-soft) and adaptable. I can name some sterling examples of such code. Low marks (again, my book) go to crap that's poorly-documented, ill-organized, unreliable and inflexible. Experience has taught me that if code has one virtue, it often has more, and, alas, the same thing goes for faults.
4. Mechanical. Code grinding. No matter how artistic a software project may be, there's just a certain amount of underlying concrete and rebar that demands less in the way of creativity and more in the way of just plain uninspired grunt work. If you're going to employ monkeys on a project, this is the part - and the only part - where monkeys should be employed. Don't undervalue them, no amount of inspired mathematical architecture and engineering can survive a rotten foundation. Although if we have a fault in that area these days its that the wallpaper-and-panelling crowd is valued more than the flooring-and-wall-stud group.
Of course, getting a project implemented is only one phase, even though it's where the ball gets built and started rolling. Other aspects not covered here include the support and maintenance, and the requisite planning and budgeting to ensure that the project continues for as long as it's needed and doesn't get hammered when IE8 support is dropped by Microsoft or some similar internal or external upset to the scheme of things.
Mission creep. Your init system now has a logon shell, and handles DHCPD tasks. Why is init handling logons and dhcpds?
...Because it should. When the system's done initializing, I want a logon shell available. If something fails, I want a shell as a fallback. / As for DHCP, it's about time.
Once upon a time, if something failed, you booted in single-user mode. And you got a shell, not the "One True and Non-Replaceable Shell". Systemd takes away the flexibility to configure things optimally for your specific needs.
Binary log files (PUKE)
...which are really the first step towards a proper database holding log files, which I'd also love to see someday.
Fine. Although ELK seems to be the practical popular choice for that and it doesn't require total ownership of the kernel. If systemd offered plug-in loggers and one of them happened to be a binary log database, that would be OK. But systemd's designers apparently lack the skills to make a simple and flexible system.
Extremely poor documentation
Can't comment. I haven't had much to do with anything beyond the man pages.
Rushed to market with little objective testing
What, exactly, is "objective" testing for a completely different software architecture? The software managers I work with have been debating the essence of that question for the past few decades. That said, it's been out for five years. It is in active use, and working well enough for all normal purposes.
Well, in this case, it's that there was no "trial mode" for people to gradually evaluate, find bugs in, and accept/reject. Instead all of the sudden the familiar, functional (if imperfect) systems were all gone and systemd ruled everything. Since systemd isn't as flexible as what it replaced, you couldn't fall back to the old stuff in cases where it failed to satisfy or as an emergency solution.
Bugs pile up with no resolution in sight, they just keep going for another dameon.
...So it's like any other software project? New development is usually the priority once something works well enough. I'll also note that within the last month, 60 bug reports have been closed on systemd's github tracker, and only 44 opened. The oldest bug is from June.
OK. But the rate at which you "close bugs" is a meaningless metric. Were the bugs closed because repairs had been made or were they simply marked "WONTFIX"?
And then when you ask a fan of it why they like it, the response is "My system boots faster."
How about instead you tell me why systemd is so much better then everything we had before? And no cheating you dont reboot servers typically so boot time is meaningless.
No, you don't reboot servers, so your boot time is meaningless, but you have no justification to project that onto me. I actually work on a system with a requirement to cold-start the entire site in 15 minutes, from turning on the circuit breaker to being 100% ready for operation. My boot time is very meaningful.
If your system is so fragile that a single server being down is that critical, maybe you need to re-evaluate your architecture. For those of us to whom such things are essential, we have clusters, failovers, and other HA constructs so that the loss of a single machine doesn't hold the whole operation prisoner.
Yes, faster boot times are nice, but even at its worst, a Linux system boots significantly faster than Windows. You don't have the machine being thrashed by massive software updates and disk-burning virus checks on reboot. I like quick boots as well. But not enough to gain it at the expense of overall boot-time repair functions. And systemd is a royal bitch to run in its "repair mode".
Actually it is simple. 1. The majority of the tech press is in SF. The best product on the web or the app store does not always win. It is the one that people know about. You come up with a cool app in Twin Falls, ID and you will be hard pressed get any buzz.
So why do the developers need to be located in the same city as the PR department?
2. A lot of the venture capital people are in SF.
Ditto for the money people.
3. If your startup in SF goes belly up you can walk down the street and find a new job.
Or, I could got to an Internet site and see jobs all over the world.
4. SF, Seattle, and Austin are seen as being cool tech centers.
Frankly it is probably the reason that Slashdot never became huge like Engadget dispite the fact that at one time it was the tech site on web for techies.
I live and work in South Florida. The PC was created in Boca Raton Florida. We used to have a ton of tech companies in South Florida and we have an extremely diverse population but very little in the way of start ups. I think a large part is the lack of colleges with strong tech programs in South Florida. The schools with the best tech programs are FSU, UF, and UCF which are all located central and north Florida.
Since when are techies sociable?
Anyway, "real" tech exists more in S. Florida than N/Central. Only UCF has really tried to do a proper research park, and that's only about 2 decades old.
Florida is still loaded with tech companies like Harris, Raytheon, Boeing, Lockheed Martin and there is a lot of talent, cheap housing, good beaches, clean air, and sunshine but venture capital? Thriving start-up scene? Nope not at all.
Those companies are all doing military work. Most of the civilian space program work is not in Florida, and the whole military-industrial complex is alien to the "cool tech". Even when military tech is cool, they're not allowed to talk about it, share it, or show it off (except to congressthings, maybe).
Outside of military, the older tech enclaves are Jacksonville and Tampa Bay. For some reason, Miami seems to have mostly been happy with System 38's while the smaller cities were into the big mainframes. Now that mainframes are passé, Orlando has picked up on a little PC work, but the old-line computer users in Jacksonville are still trying to figure out who stole their punched cards.
Texas has less to offer than Florida, but it has a better tech reputation. Maybe it's because they know how to do something other than lure in tourists and use minimum-wage under-educated workers to do it.
Back around May, the Nook software shifted the (previously-visible) book files to a directory that could only be read by rooting the device.
Like virtually all B&N software updates, there was nothing said. Their idea of an update bulletin tends to be on the order of "some small changes were made to the Nook software".
changing from their "social encryption" to randomly generated keys, all for the specific purpose of making it impossible to keep an archive of your purchases, so that you have to rely on B&N to reload stuff if you replace a device (and you can only do so on their devices, or using their reader).
I didn't like that either. It's not like I'm cracking books and handing them out on the street corners, but if they ever do a "Borders" - go defunct (and it's a rough business) - and turn off their servers, a thousand dollars of "purchases" would evaporate overnight. Physically, the files would still exist, but practically, they'd be random bits at that point.
The other thing I don't like is that they keep "hiding" their downloaded books, so even with a key, you can only find them if you root the device.
Since no few of my purchases are from publishers like Baen and O'Reilly whose books carry an explicit notification that the book was to be sold without Digital Rights Management, and since in my view, making the book files physically inaccessible is itself a form of DRM, that implies that B&N, by doing so, is probably in violation of their licensing agreements with the publishers. B&N does not encrypt such books, but if you can't get at the files, they don't need to.
Slashdot Mirror
If you made people legally liable for damages as a result of software bugs, no one would ever write software again. Bugs are inevitable, including security holes, and anyone writing code would go under in very short order.
By that logic, there should be no automobile, construction, or medical device industries.
Nothing is perfect and there's always something you can be held legally liable for. On the other hand, if you are making an honest effort and observe best practices, you can still produce something of sufficient quality that you can stand behind and still stay in business.
But that's not what users demand. They demand cheap products and expect them to fail. Because, in the end, they're getting what they pay for.
There's definitely time to purge your inputs. We're not talking about something that's going to take weeks here, or even days in most cases. We're talking about something that takes seconds or minutes.
Yah. All You Have To Do Is...
Can you even name the number of libraries in use in an application like Chrome?
Can you even name the number of (different) components in use in the Empire State Building?
Quantity is no excuse.
That's because we don't really hire software "engineers". We hire "hackers" in the literal sense of the term - people who hack and slash with crude brute force to just "Git 'R Dun!" as fast and as cheap as we can. It's like furnishing a house and all your furniture was made by the side of the road by a guy with a chain saw. No sanding, no gloss, no detail work, no mortise-and-tenon or complex joinery, just 10-penny nails and lots of splinters.
Or maybe a better analogy is particle board. Stamp on a pretty faux-woodgrain facade and ship it. Just hope it doesn't get wet.
We don't value polished quality work. As long as it's pretty and it's cheap, that's "good enough".
Actually, I suppose that what really grates on me on the comments issue is that I was doing "literate programming" long before Knuth named it.
In other words, the comments go in first and they explain WHAT the code is going to do. Then I wrap code around them to do it.
Those are fundamental attributes of the function and while details change, this kind of comment doesn't go out of date nearly as fast as the "add 1 to X" type comments that say HOW the code does it. And the code is IMHO better quality because I have mapped the forest before I started laying in all the trees.
The how-to comments can end up being more trouble than they're worth, and on that, I'll agree that sometimes it's better to just skip them. The WTF am I doing? comments often mean I don't need many, if any how-to comments. And since my basic code design is based off them, I don't skip them.
Obviously you didn't RTFA.
The rules in question weren't things like architectural standards and other things that can hobble solution of a problem. Unless your idea of a "solution" is simply "Git 'R Dun!"
The rules that the article praised breaking were things like commenting your code (too much time and effort), defining data types (too much time and effort - let's see those pretty web page NOW!) and stuff like that.
Rules, in other words, that are generally violated - and freely violated at that - by people who hack out software with blunt instruments instead of "wasting" time on producing something that's reliable, secure, and easy/inexpensive to maintain and debug.
Get it right.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
A lot of contracts are "negotiable", as long as "negotiable" means that one party is stretched over a barrel with pants pulled down.
Now about your Windows License Contract...
Well, see, they had to bring in all those H1-B workers because they couldn't find qualified Americans!
Sorry. There's no "Irony" mod.
While we are generalising, we can also talk about how those 'experienced' always seem to know better and refuse to do what they are asked unless it's done their way.
Yes, younger people can have their issues, but then again, so do the older ones.
And if you mix the two, you can leverage the advantages of both and reduce the overall predominance of any one issue. But why do that when the only real goal is to hack out stuff fast and cheap?
There's another way of looking at it. They're doing you a favor by letting you know in advance that you wouldn't fit in there. Otherwise you could come in, work your tail off, show good results, and be laid off anyway 18 months down the road.
On the other hand, you'd have had a chance to pay your bills for 18 months in the mean time.
I enjoy a good paper copy of a piece of fiction or prose, but I will never buy another physical technical manual again. Trying to read one with the computer next to it is ridiculous. They can flop their huge selves over to the trash can as far as I'm concerned.
Funny, I'm the exact opposite.
Then again, the technical pubs I read are rarely optimal on a paperback-sized reader screen.
Worse, a lot of docs are web-based now and have really obnoxious borders and slide-outs that make them not only virtually impossible to read on a 7-inch tablet, but often cannot even be printed without contortions up to and including scraping and re-formatting. That's something that really bugs me, since a lot of projects I work on only need a chapter or so actually on hard copy for detailed dissection and annotation, and I really don't enjoy spending more time getting the hardcopy than I will spend reading it.
It's really not THAT hard to make a reader/printer-friendly document on the web if you pay more attention to intelligent CSS than to multi-media circuses.
The first Nook reversed this and had a tiny color screen at the bottom to go with the main e-ink reading surface. All your navigation used the color screen, it could show thumbnails of covers, etc.
They dropped it after one iteration though. I guess it wasn't very popular.
It's a pain to use. Because ONLY the small strip of color screen was touch-sensitive, the web browser was almost useless and selecting books to read from the e-ink listing meant scrolling a lot. And, of course, the power-saver always switched it off just before you needed it again, but that's hardly a nook thing.
Still, it was a pretty decent reader and it could easily play music while you read if you wanted it to.
Pablum would also be a step up. But never under-estimate the determination of people to make strange choices. After all, they'll pay a premium for coffee that comes out a cat's anus, so in addition to the pablum-eaters and "real food" eaters, we can expect there to be people willing to buy into real meat that doesn't resent it when you harvest it.
The problem is it will turn out to be bad for you. Factory produced problems.
Yes, but that's what most people are eating anyway. Factory-farmed meat stuffed full of noxious chemicals and raised under stressful conditions. After that, vats of chemicals could only be a step up.
If it's "healthy" it's not close enough to real meat.
I'd be interested in something if it's healthy for the pigs, cows, &Co., but if "healthy" non-meat meat is what you want, there are several products that have been out for years that are passable (but only passable) substitutes.
Who ever interacts with the init system on a desktop?
It does not solve your sound or graphics problems or game and application compatibility, and it's arcane enough that you might as well uninstall a daemon instead of disabling it, on the once every two years occurrence you might need to do it.
Well, actually, it gets into fights with USB devices and network shares totally blocking booting where earlier releases would simply boot degraded.
Then I get into fights with it, because its version of "single-user" diagnose/repair mode isn't as straightforward as the old-time "runlevel 1" option. Not all of the system resources that runlevel 1 offered are up and available in systemd recovery.
Can they stop me from taking a picture of the picture with my smart phone and then transferring it back to my computer?
Well, Barnes and Noble can stop you from archiving a copy of a work whose cover page includes these words:
I had to type this in manually from the eReader screen because the Nook software hides the document file. Boldface is the publisher's, not mine, and the URL was omitted because this is basically the same text that other publishers are using, with their own URLs substituted.
IANAL, but I'd say that by making the downloaded book inaccessible outside of the Nook software, which keeps its files in a location that cannot be read by other apps without hacking the system constitutes a form of DRM and therefore infringes on the author/publisher agreement.
There are actually 4 aspects to software design and implementation.
1. Scientific: The discovery, proof, and design of algorithms. An algorithm is a basic set of rules to accomplish a task, and although more than one algorithm might accomplish that task (for example, sorting), the algorithm considered as a "black box" is invariant as to functionality. This is true science, with a mathematical slant.
2. Engineering. The ability to locate appropriate algorithms for a given task from the "literature" (speaking abstractly, since traditional printed textbooks are only a small part of the resources most of us tap these days). And to determine which algorithms are optimal for the specific project at hand.
3. Creative. This is the part Management hates. Ideally, software could be constructed by employing automated processes. In reality, there's almost always a creative aspect, and creativity is something that, so far, requires human beings. You can give 2 people an algorithm and they can implement it in 2 entirely different ways. Some of which are easier to read/maintain than others. Some of which are more flexible. Highest marks (in my book) go to implementations that are compact, readable, efficient, reliable (including fail-soft) and adaptable. I can name some sterling examples of such code. Low marks (again, my book) go to crap that's poorly-documented, ill-organized, unreliable and inflexible. Experience has taught me that if code has one virtue, it often has more, and, alas, the same thing goes for faults.
4. Mechanical. Code grinding. No matter how artistic a software project may be, there's just a certain amount of underlying concrete and rebar that demands less in the way of creativity and more in the way of just plain uninspired grunt work. If you're going to employ monkeys on a project, this is the part - and the only part - where monkeys should be employed. Don't undervalue them, no amount of inspired mathematical architecture and engineering can survive a rotten foundation. Although if we have a fault in that area these days its that the wallpaper-and-panelling crowd is valued more than the flooring-and-wall-stud group.
Of course, getting a project implemented is only one phase, even though it's where the ball gets built and started rolling. Other aspects not covered here include the support and maintenance, and the requisite planning and budgeting to ensure that the project continues for as long as it's needed and doesn't get hammered when IE8 support is dropped by Microsoft or some similar internal or external upset to the scheme of things.
That's a good thing. We don't need more useless code monkeys who think making shiny webapps in CSS+JS+HTML is computer science.
Yes, but look at the want ads. What prospective employers want - nay, demand are code monkeys making shiny webapps in CSS+JS+HTML.
Oh, and BTW. DHCP is something that I DON'T always want on my network.
Mission creep. Your init system now has a logon shell, and handles DHCPD tasks. Why is init handling logons and dhcpds?
...Because it should. When the system's done initializing, I want a logon shell available. If something fails, I want a shell as a fallback. / As for DHCP, it's about time.
Once upon a time, if something failed, you booted in single-user mode. And you got a shell, not the "One True and Non-Replaceable Shell". Systemd takes away the flexibility to configure things optimally for your specific needs.
Binary log files (PUKE)
...which are really the first step towards a proper database holding log files, which I'd also love to see someday.
Fine. Although ELK seems to be the practical popular choice for that and it doesn't require total ownership of the kernel. If systemd offered plug-in loggers and one of them happened to be a binary log database, that would be OK. But systemd's designers apparently lack the skills to make a simple and flexible system.
Extremely poor documentation
Can't comment. I haven't had much to do with anything beyond the man pages.
Rushed to market with little objective testing
What, exactly, is "objective" testing for a completely different software architecture? The software managers I work with have been debating the essence of that question for the past few decades. That said, it's been out for five years. It is in active use, and working well enough for all normal purposes.
Well, in this case, it's that there was no "trial mode" for people to gradually evaluate, find bugs in, and accept/reject. Instead all of the sudden the familiar, functional (if imperfect) systems were all gone and systemd ruled everything. Since systemd isn't as flexible as what it replaced, you couldn't fall back to the old stuff in cases where it failed to satisfy or as an emergency solution.
Bugs pile up with no resolution in sight, they just keep going for another dameon.
...So it's like any other software project? New development is usually the priority once something works well enough. I'll also note that within the last month, 60 bug reports have been closed on systemd's github tracker, and only 44 opened. The oldest bug is from June.
OK. But the rate at which you "close bugs" is a meaningless metric. Were the bugs closed because repairs had been made or were they simply marked "WONTFIX"?
And then when you ask a fan of it why they like it, the response is "My system boots faster."
How about instead you tell me why systemd is so much better then everything we had before? And no cheating you dont reboot servers typically so boot time is meaningless.
No, you don't reboot servers, so your boot time is meaningless, but you have no justification to project that onto me. I actually work on a system with a requirement to cold-start the entire site in 15 minutes, from turning on the circuit breaker to being 100% ready for operation. My boot time is very meaningful.
If your system is so fragile that a single server being down is that critical, maybe you need to re-evaluate your architecture. For those of us to whom such things are essential, we have clusters, failovers, and other HA constructs so that the loss of a single machine doesn't hold the whole operation prisoner.
Yes, faster boot times are nice, but even at its worst, a Linux system boots significantly faster than Windows. You don't have the machine being thrashed by massive software updates and disk-burning virus checks on reboot. I like quick boots as well. But not enough to gain it at the expense of overall boot-time repair functions. And systemd is a royal bitch to run in its "repair mode".
Actually it is simple.
1. The majority of the tech press is in SF. The best product on the web or the app store does not always win. It is the one that people know about. You come up with a cool app in Twin Falls, ID and you will be hard pressed get any buzz.
So why do the developers need to be located in the same city as the PR department?
2. A lot of the venture capital people are in SF.
Ditto for the money people.
3. If your startup in SF goes belly up you can walk down the street and find a new job.
Or, I could got to an Internet site and see jobs all over the world.
4. SF, Seattle, and Austin are seen as being cool tech centers.
Frankly it is probably the reason that Slashdot never became huge like Engadget dispite the fact that at one time it was the tech site on web for techies.
I live and work in South Florida. The PC was created in Boca Raton Florida. We used to have a ton of tech companies in South Florida and we have an extremely diverse population but very little in the way of start ups. I think a large part is the lack of colleges with strong tech programs in South Florida. The schools with the best tech programs are FSU, UF, and UCF which are all located central and north Florida.
Since when are techies sociable?
Anyway, "real" tech exists more in S. Florida than N/Central. Only UCF has really tried to do a proper research park, and that's only about 2 decades old.
Florida is still loaded with tech companies like Harris, Raytheon, Boeing, Lockheed Martin and there is a lot of talent, cheap housing, good beaches, clean air, and sunshine but venture capital? Thriving start-up scene?
Nope not at all.
Those companies are all doing military work. Most of the civilian space program work is not in Florida, and the whole military-industrial complex is alien to the "cool tech". Even when military tech is cool, they're not allowed to talk about it, share it, or show it off (except to congressthings, maybe).
Outside of military, the older tech enclaves are Jacksonville and Tampa Bay. For some reason, Miami seems to have mostly been happy with System 38's while the smaller cities were into the big mainframes. Now that mainframes are passé, Orlando has picked up on a little PC work, but the old-line computer users in Jacksonville are still trying to figure out who stole their punched cards.
Texas has less to offer than Florida, but it has a better tech reputation. Maybe it's because they know how to do something other than lure in tourists and use minimum-wage under-educated workers to do it.
Back around May, the Nook software shifted the (previously-visible) book files to a directory that could only be read by rooting the device.
Like virtually all B&N software updates, there was nothing said. Their idea of an update bulletin tends to be on the order of "some small changes were made to the Nook software".
changing from their "social encryption" to randomly generated keys, all for the specific purpose of making it impossible to keep an archive of your purchases, so that you have to rely on B&N to reload stuff if you replace a device (and you can only do so on their devices, or using their reader).
I didn't like that either. It's not like I'm cracking books and handing them out on the street corners, but if they ever do a "Borders" - go defunct (and it's a rough business) - and turn off their servers, a thousand dollars of "purchases" would evaporate overnight. Physically, the files would still exist, but practically, they'd be random bits at that point.
The other thing I don't like is that they keep "hiding" their downloaded books, so even with a key, you can only find them if you root the device.
Since no few of my purchases are from publishers like Baen and O'Reilly whose books carry an explicit notification that the book was to be sold without Digital Rights Management, and since in my view, making the book files physically inaccessible is itself a form of DRM, that implies that B&N, by doing so, is probably in violation of their licensing agreements with the publishers. B&N does not encrypt such books, but if you can't get at the files, they don't need to.