But then you discover that 50% of browsers don't accept it as SSL.
It's no longer "fit for purpose". If you have a single brain cell, and read a wiki page about your local consumer law, you will get a refund or a better certificate.
If, however, you live only by the vague wording of the contract, ignore all consumer and contract law, and because it's a large company you are terrified they might wriggle out of it, you might not.
You can, and will, argue that an IP is not fit for purpose if it's blocked for spam email - the only cause of that is the ISP not managing the IP properly. No different to a credit card that nobody will take anywhere because fraud on it is so high and shops won't risk taking it - it's up to them to stop the fraud.
They are not holding up their end of the contract - the paper contract is only 1% of what they have to do. They have to also provide services fit for purpose. If you have a business that needs to reliably send email, this service is NOT fit for purpose. They are failing to manage their own network and thus impacting on you because they are doing it so poorly that third parties don't want to deal with you PURELY because of that reputation.
Which is why, in any ISP of any significant size, arguing here will get you moved to another IP range in a second. I know. I've done it.
Or you could practice "I'm not a lawyer and that looks scary" and pay them another year's money for doing bugger-all.
Say you hired an e-marketing firm to send out email on your behalf. And they come back and say they couldn't send any emails because their server was blocked (e.g. by their supplier ComCast) but here's our bill anyway. Do you still think you have zero recourse there?
Your contract is worthless in the face of consumer law and a legal interpretation of "reasonable". It's unreasonable to expect your business customers to not be able to send email to three of the largest email outfits on the planet, just because you can't be bothered to throw spammers off your network.
Their IP is their management problem. If they were on a spam blocklist, you'd expect to move to another.
You tell them if you can't send mail from your business account, it's pointless having it.
Then you terminate the contract because it's now useless and the conditions you can use it under have changed - you can NO LONGER SEND EMAIL.
Then it's in their court. They can either fix it, or let you out of the contract. If they do neither, you terminate the contract and let them chase you.
I've found that what matters most about a job is who I work under. I can't properly work under idiots. The person above me - getting on with them, not having to put on a front with them, having them understand or have done my job themselves - is the most important aspect of my selecting a job. And, sorry, but I select jobs as much as they choose whether they want me.
If you want me to work for you, you have to have done - or could do in a pinch - my job. It's a simple rule.
My favourite time was working under a boss who was technically literate if not complete expert (but good enough to spot the difference between technical mumbo-jumbo and actual technical solutions) who answered to only one person - who was also technically literate if not expert. Between the two of them, they rebuilt an entire school network after a disappointing experience with some contracted-out IT. They were literally there pushing the Windows CD's into the servers and bringing up the AD themselves from scratch.
Though their effort was far from perfect, it did the job, and THEY UNDERSTOOD that it was only ever a stopgap. And, in fact, hired me to clean it up. That was brilliant. I was there for several years. When the boss's boss left to retire (and his retirement gift was a Mini-ITX PC loaded up with DosBOX and Linux and his favourite games!), my boss still kept the place good to work for.
After a while, he was forcibly removed from his job (he nearly had a heart attack from work stress, and quit to work elsewhere encouraging me to follow suit) because his boss did not appreciate or understand what he did for a living. From that point on, I was managed by someone with no clue about what I did for a living. I delivered all the promises I'd made, and got the hell out of there.
I took a six-month hiatus of taking only temporary work for places I liked (including taking a "demotion" and working for someone who was in the same job role as I was previously - it was fabulous, I think we both loved it, we're still friends on Facebook etc.) because I was promised a job.
My boss had spoken to his friend, who worked in the same position at a place nearer to my home, to contact me after they got into IT trouble. I was available but it wasn't the "right time" for the other place (they needed to get rid of someone first!), yet I was hired on the basis of starting the next April. Promises were delivered upon, and I was more than happy to hold out for the right job rather than be dumped into a job under someone who doesn't understand what I do for a living.
My new boss knows what I do for a living, understands it, works with it, can't be duped by my waffling, and knows what's reasonable and what's not. In a pinch, he could do my job. The new job is great. His own boss may not know much about IT, but it doesn't matter - his boss could do his job in a pinch. It works. It makes for a perfect work environment.
I still talk to my old boss regularly. I still keep in contact with the temporary boss I had in between. And my new boss and I have a laugh almost every day. Everyone else? Pah. Who cares?
Work for someone who could do your job. Maybe not forever. Maybe to the same depth of skill. But understands what you do because they've been there or know enough.
If you're worried about encryption, a protocol designed to be able to strip the encryption at any stage and pass it on to other servers, servers which may be out of your control, is not really encryption at all.
Email just isn't designed to do what you might want. Email encryption is either that of the message (which requires all recipients to have keys you can use and knowledge to use them) or merely securing transit to your first-hop email server. If anyone thinks that email you can read in your client without decrypting it is in any way secure, they have zero understanding of the system (which is the most dangerous security flaw you can have).
The problem is, as always, that we're forcing old protocols to do things they were never designed to, and relying on the goodwill of other people to follow our rules. Even if we published a policy "refuse any email server without STARTTLS en-route", it's easily ignored or bypassed in the case of a single malicious operator in the path of the message.
The solution is really for all domains to publish a public key via DNS, for the client or first-hop server to encrypt the message to the recipient's domain with their domain key, then it DOES NOT MATTER who you hand it off to. The data is encrypted so it cannot be revealed except to the proper desired recipient.
All we have is transit security to the first hop. We would still need that (otherwise I could easily still get an email server that sniff my credentials and uses them to spam people) but it's not the same as message encryption - not by a long shot.
Transit security to the first hop, so your login is protected, so you can authenticate that it's YOUR email server, etc. Then send an encrypted message. Then it doesn't matter what your email server chooses to do with it - either the desired recipient receives an email only they can open, or they receive nothing at all.
The problem is, email DOES NOT DO THIS. And backward compatibility with plain-text email means we can't do this without breaking half-the-world. The time will come, like SSH over telnet, or SFTP over FTP, when we decide that we do need to do this. But it's not happened yet.
Sadly, when it does happen, it makes mass-spam-filtering much more difficult, vastly increases load on mail-servers and still doesn't stop spam.
Gnome is a generic word, so we'll just lose all trademark ability.
Just being in "computer-related" trademarks isn't broad enough to cover everything from POS down to specific desktop environments. If they used "For GNOME" or based it on GNOME or were creating a desktop environment called Gnome, then yes, possibly.
But really, this is nothing more than Apple Computers vs Apple Records.
Tell me, what OS do those things run on? And what parts of that OS aren't an application framework (e.g. Dalvik) but actual hardware drivers? So the graphics cards for those devices would need a driver for what OS?
So all of the work Valve are doing will be wasted - except on ChromeOS and Android who can benefit from all their work?
Desktops may be "dead" - but it's more likely their use has shifted so that device and UI are different but the OS is still the same.
What's a disc? Haven't installed a game from disc in nearly ten years.
I'm not in front of a PC I can load Steam up on at the moment (work), but:
Flash-conversions? Few. Indie-games? Lots. And Lots. And Lots. Hell, the indie bundles are basically all-Linux nowdays. Generic engines? Lots.
Just off the top of my head based on games I've actually played and which Google suggests were released in the last two years? Defense Grid 2. Space Hulk. Cities in Motion 2. Sanctum 2.
XCOM: Enemy Unknown just misses on the dates, but there's DLC that is newer. As does CS:GO but that's Valve so you probably class it as cheating.
I don't think that's bad just from memory. The fact is that if you want AAA titles on there, Valve are doing exactly what's necessary - pick the low-hanging fruit and the stuff they can easily get the source to / put pressure on the developers, tune the systems for those titles and then work from the bottom up to capture the bigger studios. To dismiss that because CoD 2014 doesn't support it is to be ignorant of not only gaming as a genre (and not your "gamer" clique) but of simple business and politics. Shall we do it by a different metric? How about games ranked by hours played, and their Linux support? Bang, you've just sucked in some of the most populous and active gaming communities in the world in one fell swoop. It's easy to cheat at statistics.
However, just your attitude is telling. Because something comes from an engine never was cause to dismiss it. In fact there was a time (and still is) where publishers advertise that an engine was used - it suggest they aren't reinventing the wheel but instead extending an existing, proven engine.
Flash based conversions - fair enough if that's not your game, but there are plenty of good indie games out there that might look like that but aren't. If you don't class them as games, that's your lookout.
But, "almost all" of those Linux games are not Flash conversions. Maybe generic engines feature highly but I don't see how that's a problem. Gosh, someone based their game on a cross-platform engine, how dumb of them! In fact, if you wanted to argue, technically more of my games are Mac compatible at the moment. I don't even own a Mac, however, and the cost of one is prohibitive.
And, sorry, but personally I haven't bought a game in the first year of release since I was stung a long time ago. This has since saved me from atrocities like Aliens:CM, Duke Nukem Forever, and saved me god-knows-how-much money.
There's "gamers" and "people who play games". The latter is actually MORE profitable for many companies. Sorry, but your gaming industry is full of grannies playing PvZ and spending more than you are. You might be buying graphics cards and top-end machines, but they are pumping cash into F2P games and to get their next farm.
Both of you meet your chaperone, Valve, who are actually doing something to solve the problem of nobody bothering to port to Linux because "there are no other games on it", and thus nobody bothering to optimise for games "because nobody is porting to Linux".
More has happened in Linux gaming in the last couple of years thanks, almost exclusively, to the push from Valve than has happened in all the years before.
Something like a third of my 800-game Steam library runs on Linux now. That's bloody amazing. And they are all double-click-and-it-just-runs from the Steam client.
Those publishers too lazy to do this - are you telling me that they don't spot bugs in nVidia drivers and report them on Windows? Are you saying they don't spend a lot of their time working around bugs in drivers? Because for damn sure I've seen a lot of big releases have to patch like mad on day one when they hit all the ATI and nVidia and Intel bugs, and get bad performance reviews on certain chipsets etc.
Valve are DOING SOMETHING ABOUT IT. Whatever you perceive the current state to be, that's something to be applauded. And, to my eye, they've done a damn good job and not once have bitched about Linux beyond "look at this odd performance bug we found where a manufacturer never bothered to turn the optimisation on for Linux machines".
Because a vacuum is "nothing". But there's energy and waves passing through it all the time.
To get "nothing", you have to remove the dimensions entirely so there's "nothing" to oscillate in at all.
In that case, what happens if a set of dimensions that we *can't* perceive as they aren't part of our reality exist out there? Is that "nothing"?
To us, "nothing" means nothing material or energy-based within the 3 dimensions we know and our time. That's quite a big nothing.
But outside of that, things still exist and we hypothesise that they might create universes like ours elsewhere. Hence it's not "nothing" at all. If fact, there might be billions of universes and a universe factory that pervades them all.
But, like a small child covering their eyes so you can't find them, just because we can't see them doesn't mean they don't exist.
If dark matter existed in normal form, the gravity associated with it would be vastly distorting the universe as we know it.
Pretty much, we know that dark matter can't be normal - as you would consider it - matter. All other theories as to what it might be are just as unproven and have just as many holes.
For a long time, I've been hoping for an OS where, by default, the apps cannot access anything outside of their private areas.
It's possible with chroots and cgroups and other facilities but it's always a mess of third-party after-thoughts.
There's no reason I should have to give my satnav app full read-write permission to the entire SD card just so it can save my favourite places to permanent storage. It shouldn't even be able to know where it's saving them, that's for me to choose.
As such, these are all moves towards a safer, more secure environment. The problem, as always, is what happens in the meantime for the transition or if we mess up and stop apps doing what they need to do. No photo app needs read-write access to the entire SD card, nor can it cope with just read-write access to a private app area. It needs to share the files it writes with the user. Isn't this precisely what the amalgamation of several folders into, say, "Pictures" or "Music" is on several OS? All the app needs to do is say "this is a pictures folder that the user might want to use". And when uninstalled, it stays around because it's still one of the many listed pictures folders for that user.
Gone are the days of full-write-to-everything access. We don't need it. It's not necessary. But we do need the facilities to ensure apps can do what they need to do. This very much pushes into the filesystem-as-a-database idea that we've been wanting for decades. There's nothing stopping an app opening up a separate table for its photos and having the database just join the rows from several tables when the user wants to look at all their photos. And that does not require giving the app access to every table and row in the entire database.
All this tells me is that there's so little difference as it not to be a major factor in your choice of language. As such, other more practical considerations (such as hiring programmers, project time, and even speed of the final code) should take far more precedence than the triviality of what language you happen to use.
As with all things "programming language" - apply them to real language. I'm certain that in some languages, it's easier to mis-speak at a critical moment, or to say the wrong thing, or be misconstrued. I'm also certain that some languages are more prevalent, easier to learn, clearer in their intent and grammar, etc.
But it doesn't mean at any point that you should change what you're doing to the language of the moment, nor that you should choose what language to do a project in taking any notice of the structure or grammar of the language over who you have who can speak it and how well everyone can be understood if they speak it together.
Also, there are languages and dialects that make specific tasks easier (for instance, IT has a language all of it's own, talking about SCSI, buses, cloud, etc.). If everyone is able to "speak the lingo", then that's a good choice, but it's not the be-all and end-all of a good project.
As such, all the programming language discussion is really like saying "We should all speak and write only in Chinese, because the Chinese for death and dearth sound more different and we won't get confused". Don't. Program in the language that you're comfortable with, that the people you hire can read and write fluently, and that is most common and available.
Personally, that's always been C / C99 for me. So I always find it hard to justify the use of other languages except when there's a functional difference that gives a distinct advantage (e.g. a scripting language for scripting, or string-handling in Perl, etc.)
TL;DR version: Who cares what language? Stop arguing about it and start coding.
The problem is really the boundary of the culture. It's got very little to do with the externalities as much as natural human grouping and cliques.
I work in schools. In my most recent workplaces, I feel incredibly out of place. The reason being that they have been private schools.
I was educated in a state school, in a very working-class area. I have a "common" accent. I drop my H's and sound very working-class. Even some of the maintenance guys are former "boys" of the school and correct my English. They mean no harm, it's just the way they were brought up and there's a friendliness there anyway. We get on very well.
As such, there's a divide, however. You can spot other "working-class" people in the school. They become your friends more easily, you have more in common, you have a common "enemy" in your "you'll never guess what happened today" chats, even.
But you can feel it. The divide is there. It's definitely present. And the same is in all schools anyway (I guarantee you that teaching staff do not mingle with "admin" or "facilities" staff naturally - you can see the divide in office, staffrooms, social events, etc.).
And, yes, I have been mistaken for everything from a parent to a cleaner to an outside engineer. It happens, purely because of people's assumptions and the mental categorisations they make. And it happens with both children and adults. The polite ones, you might not notice because, well, they're just polite to everyone anyway. That's an issue of basic manners, not to talk down to someone that you might perceive as "lower" than yourself. It's really a function of such manners - it doesn't matter who you are if you're not accepting of others and try to find commonalities.
And there is no workplace where there's not a divide - none that I've ever seen anyway. The tech guys go over there, the admin people sit over there, the management huddle together and then force themselves to "do the rounds" to the other cliques but never linger, etc. It's how people work. It's a human trait. We do it for good reason - to surround ourselves with people we feel comfortable with, can talk to, can sympathise with, can help out. I can't help out the headmaster of a private boarding school socially - we're in different worlds. So long as we're both accepting, we get on fine, however. I'm never going to come to a wine-tasting, and he's never going to come dig through the dusty network cabinets and hold cables for me. But it doesn't mean that we ignore each other, or talk down to each other, or wouldn't hold the door or give the other a hand with something heavy.
I absolutely do not condone racism or any other discrimination in any way. I could never do so in my workplace and I constantly feel that my generation are stupid if they continue the mistakes of the previous generations.
But there will always be groups, cliques and social circles. It's human - and animal - nature. When I go to a social event, unless there are other IT guys there, it's the maintenance guys that I end up leaning towards. They talk on the same level as myself, have the same expectations, have similar experiences and histories, and I identify more with them.
As such, when someone without those properties is trying to ingratiate themselves into my social circle, it's more difficult for them.to do so, no matter how welcoming we are. It's literally time for them to smile awkwardly and pretend they sympathise or know what we're talking about (especially in IT!).
Nobody asking those people to change. Nobody should make me change to make them more comfortable. We should be accepting of others but also understand that, you know, sometimes the guy in the same department doesn't want to go for a drink with the rest of you after work. It's not offensive, he just doesn't fit in, or want to fit in, or has his own plans etc.
The problem only comes when people FORCE acceptance. Then you end up with a secret social group that excludes others anyway, and a faux fron
I can't come up with good reasons for remote control of a house. I struggle to explain why I need a remote control for my car (To unlock doors? What's my VERY NEXT step? To approach the door and physically open it!). I can't even begin to fathom why I need some complex RF control to do that, that's open to scanning and replay attacks, when I can quite happily just put the key in the lock. Hell, my previous car had infrared door locking... worked just the same but from a slightly reduced distance (and no doubt is just as easy to attack, and just as easy secure properly if someone bothered to try).
I always think of the scene in The Big Bang Theory where someone from China is operating their lights. That's about all you can do with it.
I'm sure there are use cases. I'm sure there's a guy who religiously programs his lights and heating on the way home from work and sees a benefit to him. But, to me, a timer is much more reliable and works just the same. If I'm getting home at midnight for some reason, chances are my house is warm enough anyway - certainly warmer than the outside, and warm enough to go to bed and go to sleep. And if I want to change that, it could start to heat up before I've even took my coat off if I touch the heating controls as the first thing I do when I get in.
In my country, the energy suppliers are trying to sell you smart meters on the basis you could use smart control as well and turn your heating up before you get home. I absolutely can't fathom the link there at all. But because it's my ENERGY company trying to promote that, I can only assume they are in compliance with their shareholders wishes, which just makes me think that they know it will mean more energy used overall (because I'll turn the heating on on a whim and cost more energy than if I'd just left it alone).
When I don't want something to happen, I don't want to be overridden... ever.
When I do want something to happen, I want it to happen, no matter what.
The problem I see with smart homes, and automation in general, is that we're considered too stupid to have control of such a complex system, so we don't get it.
With control can come reliability. If I can control what stays up and what doesn't in a power cut, that's useful to me. If the lights stay on but the heating goes off, that's useless if I'm in the middle of winter.
Control can be opposed to security, if the system design is that awful. Most smart home gadgets I see rely on some remote control or RF control and that's just asking for trouble. Authenticate me, then give me control.
And you can't have evolving security without software upgrades unless you literally air-gap everything.
However, I agree with the sentiment of your last paragraphs. Controlling some LED light is the domain of a GBP10 kit from Amazon. GBP20 if you want wifi. Tying the home into the Internet for things like smartphone control brings enormous security and reliability problems (my friend has a NEST fire alarm... it has to talk home to Google).
But the real "smart" functionality either comes from contorl of things I'd rather have control of (temperatures, timings, etc.) or something that we just don't see - automation of manual tasks.
Automating the lights to come on is a parlour trick that anyone with a GBP20 gadget could do from the other side of the world. Automating the dishwasher to load and wash the dishes itself is something you could put into every home, smart or not. Just have a "dirty plate" box and let it work out how to get them into the washer and wash them and check whether they are clean yet.
We're decades, if not centuries, from that level of automation being mainstream.
And an almost certain charge of contempt of court and destruction of evidence.
The law is worded the way it is so that you can't be held liable for a password that you set ten years ago, or something you were told briefly and don't stand a chance of remembering now. Just because the court KNOWS you know, it doesn't mean they can punish you if you can't remember it.
It's not there to provide innocent defence when you are trying to hide information, but that's an unfortunate side effect.
However, as you've said, if there's any way on earth they can prove or trick you into demonstrating that you're knowingly destroying evidence, you'll go down for much longer than whatever the evidence was for. If you've genuinely forgotten which finger deletes the data and which doesn't, and you state that, they can't force you to tell them which it is.
But if you're stupid enough to hide actual evidence and then deliberately destroy it, the consequences will be much worse for you if you're found out. Don't co-operate. Warn them that it might delete the data. But to not mention the possibility and then deliberately delete it? You're going to end up in jail.
Those facilities are not given by systemd. They are given by cgroups and other security features. Systemd just has a way for you to specify them for services, it's not doing all of the heavy lifting.
Similarly, imagine that config file, interpreted by SysVInit scripts, and applied the same. Would that be better or worse than systemd?
And, to be honest, in terms of the userbase, that's quite a niche preference. I can count on my fingers the number of times that I've personally had to lock down a service to the bare essentials. That's what package managers and SELinux policies are for.
Again, it's a lovely feature. But does that justify ripping out the init code from the entire distro for? And could it be done any other way (I'm guessing yes).
Correct me if I'm wrong but the cgroups features that allow this, without rewriting services, have nothing to do with systemd at all.
This is exactly my point. It's a fancy logging feature. We have fancy logging systems. But, no, apparently we HAVE to use systemd to get this completely unrelated "feature".
I wouldn't use it often enough to justify the development time. But even I can run the above through my head and come up with a way to do it using the existing systems.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay.
You buy an SSL certificate.
But then you discover that 50% of browsers don't accept it as SSL.
It's no longer "fit for purpose". If you have a single brain cell, and read a wiki page about your local consumer law, you will get a refund or a better certificate.
If, however, you live only by the vague wording of the contract, ignore all consumer and contract law, and because it's a large company you are terrified they might wriggle out of it, you might not.
You can, and will, argue that an IP is not fit for purpose if it's blocked for spam email - the only cause of that is the ISP not managing the IP properly. No different to a credit card that nobody will take anywhere because fraud on it is so high and shops won't risk taking it - it's up to them to stop the fraud.
They are not holding up their end of the contract - the paper contract is only 1% of what they have to do. They have to also provide services fit for purpose. If you have a business that needs to reliably send email, this service is NOT fit for purpose. They are failing to manage their own network and thus impacting on you because they are doing it so poorly that third parties don't want to deal with you PURELY because of that reputation.
Which is why, in any ISP of any significant size, arguing here will get you moved to another IP range in a second. I know. I've done it.
Or you could practice "I'm not a lawyer and that looks scary" and pay them another year's money for doing bugger-all.
Say you hired an e-marketing firm to send out email on your behalf. And they come back and say they couldn't send any emails because their server was blocked (e.g. by their supplier ComCast) but here's our bill anyway. Do you still think you have zero recourse there?
Your contract is worthless in the face of consumer law and a legal interpretation of "reasonable". It's unreasonable to expect your business customers to not be able to send email to three of the largest email outfits on the planet, just because you can't be bothered to throw spammers off your network.
Their IP is their management problem. If they were on a spam blocklist, you'd expect to move to another.
You tell them if you can't send mail from your business account, it's pointless having it.
Then you terminate the contract because it's now useless and the conditions you can use it under have changed - you can NO LONGER SEND EMAIL.
Then it's in their court. They can either fix it, or let you out of the contract. If they do neither, you terminate the contract and let them chase you.
Apart from the obviously correct outcome;
I've found that what matters most about a job is who I work under. I can't properly work under idiots. The person above me - getting on with them, not having to put on a front with them, having them understand or have done my job themselves - is the most important aspect of my selecting a job. And, sorry, but I select jobs as much as they choose whether they want me.
If you want me to work for you, you have to have done - or could do in a pinch - my job. It's a simple rule.
My favourite time was working under a boss who was technically literate if not complete expert (but good enough to spot the difference between technical mumbo-jumbo and actual technical solutions) who answered to only one person - who was also technically literate if not expert. Between the two of them, they rebuilt an entire school network after a disappointing experience with some contracted-out IT. They were literally there pushing the Windows CD's into the servers and bringing up the AD themselves from scratch.
Though their effort was far from perfect, it did the job, and THEY UNDERSTOOD that it was only ever a stopgap. And, in fact, hired me to clean it up. That was brilliant. I was there for several years. When the boss's boss left to retire (and his retirement gift was a Mini-ITX PC loaded up with DosBOX and Linux and his favourite games!), my boss still kept the place good to work for.
After a while, he was forcibly removed from his job (he nearly had a heart attack from work stress, and quit to work elsewhere encouraging me to follow suit) because his boss did not appreciate or understand what he did for a living. From that point on, I was managed by someone with no clue about what I did for a living. I delivered all the promises I'd made, and got the hell out of there.
I took a six-month hiatus of taking only temporary work for places I liked (including taking a "demotion" and working for someone who was in the same job role as I was previously - it was fabulous, I think we both loved it, we're still friends on Facebook etc.) because I was promised a job.
My boss had spoken to his friend, who worked in the same position at a place nearer to my home, to contact me after they got into IT trouble. I was available but it wasn't the "right time" for the other place (they needed to get rid of someone first!), yet I was hired on the basis of starting the next April. Promises were delivered upon, and I was more than happy to hold out for the right job rather than be dumped into a job under someone who doesn't understand what I do for a living.
My new boss knows what I do for a living, understands it, works with it, can't be duped by my waffling, and knows what's reasonable and what's not. In a pinch, he could do my job. The new job is great. His own boss may not know much about IT, but it doesn't matter - his boss could do his job in a pinch. It works. It makes for a perfect work environment.
I still talk to my old boss regularly. I still keep in contact with the temporary boss I had in between. And my new boss and I have a laugh almost every day. Everyone else? Pah. Who cares?
Work for someone who could do your job. Maybe not forever. Maybe to the same depth of skill. But understands what you do because they've been there or know enough.
So that's one, then, from several replies. And pretty much the only project suggested.
Not a great endorsement.
Next question: Could someone have written Docker in other languages just as easily?
Can anyone name a large (non-Google) project written in Go?
If you're worried about encryption, a protocol designed to be able to strip the encryption at any stage and pass it on to other servers, servers which may be out of your control, is not really encryption at all.
Email just isn't designed to do what you might want. Email encryption is either that of the message (which requires all recipients to have keys you can use and knowledge to use them) or merely securing transit to your first-hop email server. If anyone thinks that email you can read in your client without decrypting it is in any way secure, they have zero understanding of the system (which is the most dangerous security flaw you can have).
The problem is, as always, that we're forcing old protocols to do things they were never designed to, and relying on the goodwill of other people to follow our rules. Even if we published a policy "refuse any email server without STARTTLS en-route", it's easily ignored or bypassed in the case of a single malicious operator in the path of the message.
The solution is really for all domains to publish a public key via DNS, for the client or first-hop server to encrypt the message to the recipient's domain with their domain key, then it DOES NOT MATTER who you hand it off to. The data is encrypted so it cannot be revealed except to the proper desired recipient.
All we have is transit security to the first hop. We would still need that (otherwise I could easily still get an email server that sniff my credentials and uses them to spam people) but it's not the same as message encryption - not by a long shot.
Transit security to the first hop, so your login is protected, so you can authenticate that it's YOUR email server, etc. Then send an encrypted message. Then it doesn't matter what your email server chooses to do with it - either the desired recipient receives an email only they can open, or they receive nothing at all.
The problem is, email DOES NOT DO THIS. And backward compatibility with plain-text email means we can't do this without breaking half-the-world. The time will come, like SSH over telnet, or SFTP over FTP, when we decide that we do need to do this. But it's not happened yet.
Sadly, when it does happen, it makes mass-spam-filtering much more difficult, vastly increases load on mail-servers and still doesn't stop spam.
On to a loser.
Gnome is a generic word, so we'll just lose all trademark ability.
Just being in "computer-related" trademarks isn't broad enough to cover everything from POS down to specific desktop environments. If they used "For GNOME" or based it on GNOME or were creating a desktop environment called Gnome, then yes, possibly.
But really, this is nothing more than Apple Computers vs Apple Records.
ChromeOS. And Android.
Tell me, what OS do those things run on? And what parts of that OS aren't an application framework (e.g. Dalvik) but actual hardware drivers? So the graphics cards for those devices would need a driver for what OS?
So all of the work Valve are doing will be wasted - except on ChromeOS and Android who can benefit from all their work?
Desktops may be "dead" - but it's more likely their use has shifted so that device and UI are different but the OS is still the same.
What's a disc? Haven't installed a game from disc in nearly ten years.
I'm not in front of a PC I can load Steam up on at the moment (work), but:
Flash-conversions? Few.
Indie-games? Lots. And Lots. And Lots. Hell, the indie bundles are basically all-Linux nowdays.
Generic engines? Lots.
Just off the top of my head based on games I've actually played and which Google suggests were released in the last two years? Defense Grid 2. Space Hulk. Cities in Motion 2. Sanctum 2.
XCOM: Enemy Unknown just misses on the dates, but there's DLC that is newer. As does CS:GO but that's Valve so you probably class it as cheating.
I don't think that's bad just from memory. The fact is that if you want AAA titles on there, Valve are doing exactly what's necessary - pick the low-hanging fruit and the stuff they can easily get the source to / put pressure on the developers, tune the systems for those titles and then work from the bottom up to capture the bigger studios. To dismiss that because CoD 2014 doesn't support it is to be ignorant of not only gaming as a genre (and not your "gamer" clique) but of simple business and politics. Shall we do it by a different metric? How about games ranked by hours played, and their Linux support? Bang, you've just sucked in some of the most populous and active gaming communities in the world in one fell swoop. It's easy to cheat at statistics.
However, just your attitude is telling. Because something comes from an engine never was cause to dismiss it. In fact there was a time (and still is) where publishers advertise that an engine was used - it suggest they aren't reinventing the wheel but instead extending an existing, proven engine.
Flash based conversions - fair enough if that's not your game, but there are plenty of good indie games out there that might look like that but aren't. If you don't class them as games, that's your lookout.
But, "almost all" of those Linux games are not Flash conversions. Maybe generic engines feature highly but I don't see how that's a problem. Gosh, someone based their game on a cross-platform engine, how dumb of them! In fact, if you wanted to argue, technically more of my games are Mac compatible at the moment. I don't even own a Mac, however, and the cost of one is prohibitive.
And, sorry, but personally I haven't bought a game in the first year of release since I was stung a long time ago. This has since saved me from atrocities like Aliens:CM, Duke Nukem Forever, and saved me god-knows-how-much money.
There's "gamers" and "people who play games". The latter is actually MORE profitable for many companies. Sorry, but your gaming industry is full of grannies playing PvZ and spending more than you are. You might be buying graphics cards and top-end machines, but they are pumping cash into F2P games and to get their next farm.
Chicken meet egg. Egg meet chicken.
Both of you meet your chaperone, Valve, who are actually doing something to solve the problem of nobody bothering to port to Linux because "there are no other games on it", and thus nobody bothering to optimise for games "because nobody is porting to Linux".
More has happened in Linux gaming in the last couple of years thanks, almost exclusively, to the push from Valve than has happened in all the years before.
Something like a third of my 800-game Steam library runs on Linux now. That's bloody amazing. And they are all double-click-and-it-just-runs from the Steam client.
Those publishers too lazy to do this - are you telling me that they don't spot bugs in nVidia drivers and report them on Windows? Are you saying they don't spend a lot of their time working around bugs in drivers? Because for damn sure I've seen a lot of big releases have to patch like mad on day one when they hit all the ATI and nVidia and Intel bugs, and get bad performance reviews on certain chipsets etc.
Valve are DOING SOMETHING ABOUT IT. Whatever you perceive the current state to be, that's something to be applauded. And, to my eye, they've done a damn good job and not once have bitched about Linux beyond "look at this odd performance bug we found where a manufacturer never bothered to turn the optimisation on for Linux machines".
Define "nothing". That's why you're confused.
Because a vacuum is "nothing". But there's energy and waves passing through it all the time.
To get "nothing", you have to remove the dimensions entirely so there's "nothing" to oscillate in at all.
In that case, what happens if a set of dimensions that we *can't* perceive as they aren't part of our reality exist out there? Is that "nothing"?
To us, "nothing" means nothing material or energy-based within the 3 dimensions we know and our time. That's quite a big nothing.
But outside of that, things still exist and we hypothesise that they might create universes like ours elsewhere. Hence it's not "nothing" at all. If fact, there might be billions of universes and a universe factory that pervades them all.
But, like a small child covering their eyes so you can't find them, just because we can't see them doesn't mean they don't exist.
I damn well hope so.
Otherwise a) it's not science, b) it makes for a very boring universe.
I think the requirement to have all your roommate's email addresses is the actual point of the website.
People can work out fair regimes. They can't spam their roommates easily enough, apparently.
That's not what dark matter is.
If dark matter existed in normal form, the gravity associated with it would be vastly distorting the universe as we know it.
Pretty much, we know that dark matter can't be normal - as you would consider it - matter. All other theories as to what it might be are just as unproven and have just as many holes.
Not really:
http://stackoverflow.com/quest...
This stinks of "bodge".
Off the top of my head?
Do you want to give app X permission to access all your photos?
Do you want to give app Y permission to access all your photos?
Problem solved.
For a long time, I've been hoping for an OS where, by default, the apps cannot access anything outside of their private areas.
It's possible with chroots and cgroups and other facilities but it's always a mess of third-party after-thoughts.
There's no reason I should have to give my satnav app full read-write permission to the entire SD card just so it can save my favourite places to permanent storage. It shouldn't even be able to know where it's saving them, that's for me to choose.
As such, these are all moves towards a safer, more secure environment. The problem, as always, is what happens in the meantime for the transition or if we mess up and stop apps doing what they need to do. No photo app needs read-write access to the entire SD card, nor can it cope with just read-write access to a private app area. It needs to share the files it writes with the user. Isn't this precisely what the amalgamation of several folders into, say, "Pictures" or "Music" is on several OS? All the app needs to do is say "this is a pictures folder that the user might want to use". And when uninstalled, it stays around because it's still one of the many listed pictures folders for that user.
Gone are the days of full-write-to-everything access. We don't need it. It's not necessary. But we do need the facilities to ensure apps can do what they need to do. This very much pushes into the filesystem-as-a-database idea that we've been wanting for decades. There's nothing stopping an app opening up a separate table for its photos and having the database just join the rows from several tables when the user wants to look at all their photos. And that does not require giving the app access to every table and row in the entire database.
You can code sloppily in any language.
All this tells me is that there's so little difference as it not to be a major factor in your choice of language. As such, other more practical considerations (such as hiring programmers, project time, and even speed of the final code) should take far more precedence than the triviality of what language you happen to use.
As with all things "programming language" - apply them to real language. I'm certain that in some languages, it's easier to mis-speak at a critical moment, or to say the wrong thing, or be misconstrued. I'm also certain that some languages are more prevalent, easier to learn, clearer in their intent and grammar, etc.
But it doesn't mean at any point that you should change what you're doing to the language of the moment, nor that you should choose what language to do a project in taking any notice of the structure or grammar of the language over who you have who can speak it and how well everyone can be understood if they speak it together.
Also, there are languages and dialects that make specific tasks easier (for instance, IT has a language all of it's own, talking about SCSI, buses, cloud, etc.). If everyone is able to "speak the lingo", then that's a good choice, but it's not the be-all and end-all of a good project.
As such, all the programming language discussion is really like saying "We should all speak and write only in Chinese, because the Chinese for death and dearth sound more different and we won't get confused". Don't. Program in the language that you're comfortable with, that the people you hire can read and write fluently, and that is most common and available.
Personally, that's always been C / C99 for me. So I always find it hard to justify the use of other languages except when there's a functional difference that gives a distinct advantage (e.g. a scripting language for scripting, or string-handling in Perl, etc.)
TL;DR version: Who cares what language? Stop arguing about it and start coding.
The problem is really the boundary of the culture. It's got very little to do with the externalities as much as natural human grouping and cliques.
I work in schools. In my most recent workplaces, I feel incredibly out of place. The reason being that they have been private schools.
I was educated in a state school, in a very working-class area. I have a "common" accent. I drop my H's and sound very working-class. Even some of the maintenance guys are former "boys" of the school and correct my English. They mean no harm, it's just the way they were brought up and there's a friendliness there anyway. We get on very well.
As such, there's a divide, however. You can spot other "working-class" people in the school. They become your friends more easily, you have more in common, you have a common "enemy" in your "you'll never guess what happened today" chats, even.
But you can feel it. The divide is there. It's definitely present. And the same is in all schools anyway (I guarantee you that teaching staff do not mingle with "admin" or "facilities" staff naturally - you can see the divide in office, staffrooms, social events, etc.).
And, yes, I have been mistaken for everything from a parent to a cleaner to an outside engineer. It happens, purely because of people's assumptions and the mental categorisations they make. And it happens with both children and adults. The polite ones, you might not notice because, well, they're just polite to everyone anyway. That's an issue of basic manners, not to talk down to someone that you might perceive as "lower" than yourself. It's really a function of such manners - it doesn't matter who you are if you're not accepting of others and try to find commonalities.
And there is no workplace where there's not a divide - none that I've ever seen anyway. The tech guys go over there, the admin people sit over there, the management huddle together and then force themselves to "do the rounds" to the other cliques but never linger, etc. It's how people work. It's a human trait. We do it for good reason - to surround ourselves with people we feel comfortable with, can talk to, can sympathise with, can help out. I can't help out the headmaster of a private boarding school socially - we're in different worlds. So long as we're both accepting, we get on fine, however. I'm never going to come to a wine-tasting, and he's never going to come dig through the dusty network cabinets and hold cables for me. But it doesn't mean that we ignore each other, or talk down to each other, or wouldn't hold the door or give the other a hand with something heavy.
I absolutely do not condone racism or any other discrimination in any way. I could never do so in my workplace and I constantly feel that my generation are stupid if they continue the mistakes of the previous generations.
But there will always be groups, cliques and social circles. It's human - and animal - nature. When I go to a social event, unless there are other IT guys there, it's the maintenance guys that I end up leaning towards. They talk on the same level as myself, have the same expectations, have similar experiences and histories, and I identify more with them.
As such, when someone without those properties is trying to ingratiate themselves into my social circle, it's more difficult for them.to do so, no matter how welcoming we are. It's literally time for them to smile awkwardly and pretend they sympathise or know what we're talking about (especially in IT!).
Nobody asking those people to change. Nobody should make me change to make them more comfortable. We should be accepting of others but also understand that, you know, sometimes the guy in the same department doesn't want to go for a drink with the rest of you after work. It's not offensive, he just doesn't fit in, or want to fit in, or has his own plans etc.
The problem only comes when people FORCE acceptance. Then you end up with a secret social group that excludes others anyway, and a faux fron
I can't come up with good reasons for remote control of a house. I struggle to explain why I need a remote control for my car (To unlock doors? What's my VERY NEXT step? To approach the door and physically open it!). I can't even begin to fathom why I need some complex RF control to do that, that's open to scanning and replay attacks, when I can quite happily just put the key in the lock. Hell, my previous car had infrared door locking... worked just the same but from a slightly reduced distance (and no doubt is just as easy to attack, and just as easy secure properly if someone bothered to try).
I always think of the scene in The Big Bang Theory where someone from China is operating their lights. That's about all you can do with it.
I'm sure there are use cases. I'm sure there's a guy who religiously programs his lights and heating on the way home from work and sees a benefit to him. But, to me, a timer is much more reliable and works just the same. If I'm getting home at midnight for some reason, chances are my house is warm enough anyway - certainly warmer than the outside, and warm enough to go to bed and go to sleep. And if I want to change that, it could start to heat up before I've even took my coat off if I touch the heating controls as the first thing I do when I get in.
In my country, the energy suppliers are trying to sell you smart meters on the basis you could use smart control as well and turn your heating up before you get home. I absolutely can't fathom the link there at all. But because it's my ENERGY company trying to promote that, I can only assume they are in compliance with their shareholders wishes, which just makes me think that they know it will mean more energy used overall (because I'll turn the heating on on a whim and cost more energy than if I'd just left it alone).
Bulbs are consumables.
And any automated system would have the same number of failures in that regard.
The SWITCH however, and the electrics behind it - no problem going 50 years without maintenance.
I've been in houses with 1920's wiring. With 1930's plug sockets. Nobody bothered to change it because it worked.
Personally, my first thought is "control".
When I don't want something to happen, I don't want to be overridden... ever.
When I do want something to happen, I want it to happen, no matter what.
The problem I see with smart homes, and automation in general, is that we're considered too stupid to have control of such a complex system, so we don't get it.
With control can come reliability. If I can control what stays up and what doesn't in a power cut, that's useful to me. If the lights stay on but the heating goes off, that's useless if I'm in the middle of winter.
Control can be opposed to security, if the system design is that awful. Most smart home gadgets I see rely on some remote control or RF control and that's just asking for trouble. Authenticate me, then give me control.
And you can't have evolving security without software upgrades unless you literally air-gap everything.
However, I agree with the sentiment of your last paragraphs. Controlling some LED light is the domain of a GBP10 kit from Amazon. GBP20 if you want wifi. Tying the home into the Internet for things like smartphone control brings enormous security and reliability problems (my friend has a NEST fire alarm... it has to talk home to Google).
But the real "smart" functionality either comes from contorl of things I'd rather have control of (temperatures, timings, etc.) or something that we just don't see - automation of manual tasks.
Automating the lights to come on is a parlour trick that anyone with a GBP20 gadget could do from the other side of the world. Automating the dishwasher to load and wash the dishes itself is something you could put into every home, smart or not. Just have a "dirty plate" box and let it work out how to get them into the washer and wash them and check whether they are clean yet.
We're decades, if not centuries, from that level of automation being mainstream.
And an almost certain charge of contempt of court and destruction of evidence.
The law is worded the way it is so that you can't be held liable for a password that you set ten years ago, or something you were told briefly and don't stand a chance of remembering now. Just because the court KNOWS you know, it doesn't mean they can punish you if you can't remember it.
It's not there to provide innocent defence when you are trying to hide information, but that's an unfortunate side effect.
However, as you've said, if there's any way on earth they can prove or trick you into demonstrating that you're knowingly destroying evidence, you'll go down for much longer than whatever the evidence was for. If you've genuinely forgotten which finger deletes the data and which doesn't, and you state that, they can't force you to tell them which it is.
But if you're stupid enough to hide actual evidence and then deliberately destroy it, the consequences will be much worse for you if you're found out. Don't co-operate. Warn them that it might delete the data. But to not mention the possibility and then deliberately delete it? You're going to end up in jail.
Those facilities are not given by systemd. They are given by cgroups and other security features. Systemd just has a way for you to specify them for services, it's not doing all of the heavy lifting.
Similarly, imagine that config file, interpreted by SysVInit scripts, and applied the same. Would that be better or worse than systemd?
And, to be honest, in terms of the userbase, that's quite a niche preference. I can count on my fingers the number of times that I've personally had to lock down a service to the bare essentials. That's what package managers and SELinux policies are for.
Again, it's a lovely feature. But does that justify ripping out the init code from the entire distro for? And could it be done any other way (I'm guessing yes).
Correct me if I'm wrong but the cgroups features that allow this, without rewriting services, have nothing to do with systemd at all.
This is exactly my point. It's a fancy logging feature. We have fancy logging systems. But, no, apparently we HAVE to use systemd to get this completely unrelated "feature".
I wouldn't use it often enough to justify the development time. But even I can run the above through my head and come up with a way to do it using the existing systems.