Exactly, *everyone* being able to code flies in the face of pretty much every other industry.
Decades ago, everyone knew how to work on cars. In part because cars were more straightforward, but *mostly* because cars were so unreliable, you pretty much had to know how to work on it to be able to own one without going nuts. Nowadays a typical car maintenance schedule has a a recommended oil change every 8,000 miles or so and otherwise very little maintenance that hits a *typical* car. Tires and brakes wear out over a long period of time, but generally there's plenty of warning. A car suddenly not starting or general misbehavior is no longer that commonplace, so most people just leave it to a mechanic. Even things as dead simple as changing oil or even the air filter is perceived as a black art by most folks.
Same for computing. If you had a system in the 70s or 80s, you essentially had to know how to program to be productive. As the software ecosystem has matured with canned applications targeting the use case of more and more and more usual situations, people just don't need to know that stuff anymore. As a portion of the computing population, programmers are less represented now than they were in the past. To imagine a reversal of that trend is silly.
Some view programming as a sort of 'literacy', but that's more of the misnomer of programming as 'languages'. It's really not a form of literacy at all.
Note that one of two things happen: 1) You are paying someone else the expense of caring about that stuff (on top of their margin) or 2) They are not caring about many of those things, and you may not have to care as much either.
Note that a *lot* of #2 is happening is these providers. They are doing things that a business wouldn't dare do to themselves (sometimes for not particularly good reasons). A lot of the savings for these customers is getting to close their eyes and not see the stuff they wouldn't do to themselves that turns out to work just fine for the most part. When it does go awry, there are big news stories about an outage that affects a bunch of people, and that does happen to the 'best' of them.
There are really two things at play, economies of scale (if you need very small utilization of equipment) and moving capex to opex. If you have large scale, then it really is mostly a financial debate about whether you get out better with overall more money, but in opex, or save some money, but it's capex. There is some fierce debate about which way is better.
It could be construed in a negative light. For example the 'warning' that MS does when you use edge to search for firefox/chrome where it says MS really recommends Edge rather than what they are trying to do. That's unambiguously *not* doing it for the sake of the user, but for the sake of the vendor interest.
There are legitimate risks with sideloading, but a cynical argument could be made that Google isn't too torn up about making sideload extra scary sounding and the Play Store a nice safe, and coincidentally profitable for Google place to get applications. So it's an area where there is a legitimate reason, but an ulterior motive may factor in. An alternative approach to make sideloading safer could be a distributed scheme for signed applications, but without the revenue attach of play store, but Google doesn't bother with such a scheme. Note this discrete signing sort of architecture is done for Linux packages and Windows executables, for example, with extensible trust schemes to allow third parties be trusted rather than requiring the original vendor to vouch for everything.
The answer has been the phone subsidies in the US, giving the carriers a powerful marketing point ("look at these deep discounts"). With those going away, I'd expect the market pricing in general to correct in the near to medium term future.
I had this exact same argument many times that a tablet and phone are very similar and there's no good justification for the price difference
I'd complain about both Amazon and Apple. Google fares better for allowing sideloading, though it says all sorts of aggressively scary things about it (which to be fair may be a good warning to provide for the common user).
The courts haven't ruled on it, but I'm guessing...
Probably should just stop after 'haven't ruled on it'. The thing is that it is without precedent. They bust a bootlegger of DVDs, they don't go after the individuals who may have bought from that bootlegger (whether in good faith or not). If someone was selling through brick and mortar and got busted, the copies in the store may demand immediate removal, but I don't think that retailer is going to be required to aid in identifying any prior purchaser of the content.
I can't think of a case where copyright has been used to take back a work from a purchaser who acted in good faith, even if their copy was illegitimate through no fault of their own. Amazon acted overly eagerly in proactively erasing the content from devices that had downloaded it. Their obligation should be to discontinue repeat access, not extending to proactively destroying predownloaded copies. This seems to be where they (and the rest of the industry, I know first hand an application I downloaded was taken down from google play in a dispute with a company, but my copy is intact) have landed. However it is worth being aware that from a technical perspective, they have retained the capability of doing this as far as I know.
Well, there's the interesting part. Most of the console releases come to PC too nowadays. If I buy a PS4 game, in 10 years I might not be able to play it easily. On PC, I almost certainly will be able to if I want.
But next time they'll double down on always-on and no media, which were two huge parts of the bad press of Xbone.
Though for all that public bitching about that, and the fact that PS4 is faster, the key factor was probably pricing, with all the controversy not even visible to the person looking at the two boxes on a retailer shelf or on amazon web pages and just seeing the price tags.
Sure, there will be some of those folks.Overwhelmingly people just take defaults even when it doesn't take much effort to change, unless the default is very clearly perceived as horrible.
It's close to 100% fatal once symptoms present (and are further successfully diagnosed as n. fowleri). There are confirmed instances of signs that some of the population has unknowingly gotten into their systems, so it may be significantly less than 100% fatal even when infected.
So the number to eye is about 3.5 deaths per year. So it's either the case that exposure is actually very low or else that most that get infected never even know. Pneumonia on the other hand has a much higher death count.
So basically, if you start showing the signs, you are probably gone. However, IIRC, they found a fairly large portion of the population actually has antibodies for N. fowleri, indicating that getting infected may not be that uncommon, just that most infected are asymptomatic (or maybe mistook it for some more trivial ailment).
It would be interesting to also know the percentage of exposed who do not experience brain swelling...
The problem for RH becomes that on top of being wildly successful in the free market, Canonical also promises 24x7 commercial support. People can bitch and moan about their opinion of the quality of that support, but RH simply cannot pretend that they are the only ones that check off that marketing bullet point.
This further reinforces my opinion that RH has pretty much nothing to lose by making RH 'free' and charging for support, rather than this 'sort of not quite' in between state that they are in now by pretending CentOS and RH are different and never should the two mix...
RH also has a pretty heavy dose of 'not invented here' for an 'open source' sort of company. It's cool that they fund so much open source effort mind you, but they are actually a pretty difficult company to collaborate with, even if you are willing to be totally open source.
This is a huge part of RH's problem IMO, that they go to great pains to distance functionally identical things. For Ubuntu, the free and supported client base aren't so visibly separate, so it's hard to get a read on how many folks actually pay for it. So stories like this happen, where the gap between RHEL and Ubuntu is presented as hopelessly wide when reality is that they are surprisingly close...
It's when paid businesses go to Ubuntu they have to worry, but the requirements of the customers willing to pay out big money for licenses and support are vastly different than those of desktop users
And here's the rub, they made the desktop platform pretty bleeding edge (major kernel changes are inflicted in routine updates, breaking things like nvidia driver if you choose to use it, not merely being mostly unhelpful about closed source realities but actively making it more painful). Even if drivers didn't break, updates can change things dramatically at a whim, and there's no blessed 'long term' servicing branch that so nearly matches their 6 month cycle releases like Ubuntu does. RedHat is making the free situation needlessly complicated and risky to push people to RHEL, but instead are giving ubuntu the free market. Like you say, the free market by itself is no huge threat, but it influences the commercial market in the long term.
You could also say RedHat has very little to lose by having something more like Ubuntu in lifecycle out there for free. Those folks won't pay for anything, but their mindshare is valuable among the audience that will pay.
i love how people use things like this to reject copyright laws all together. NO ONE is bashing in your front door and tazing you because you made a copy of a DVD you purchased.
I did not reject copyright laws altogether. I complained that something that should be legal is not. The argument that no one is *bothering* to prosecute is not a defense of a law existing that could be used to prosecute. If there is a situation that should be legal, the law should be changed to allow that. That doesn't mean 'no copyright', it means that DMCA should be repealed (the things enabled by the DMCA were *already* illegal, DMCA just tries to get ahead of things to prevent even attempting, which interferes with fair use). This isn't a theoretical thing, getting software that decrypts DVD/BluRay is tricky precisely because that software is *actively* pursued.
slow compared to other modern examples, but the researchers say their formal verification can also work with faster designs
If we can accept 'slow', it's not that difficult to build an always consistent filesystem. While they can formally verify a faster design should one exist, there remains the question of whether it's possible to be formally proven to be resilient to data loss while taking some of the utterly required performance shortcuts for acceptable performance. I suspect the answer is that some essential performance 'shortcuts' will fail that verification.
I agree. There are outlandish things that are forbidden. For example, the DMCA means my ripping of my own personal DVD and Blu Ray discs to HDD is not lawful, which is absurd. Sure string me up for sharing the result of that effort or selling the original while keeping my copy, but that transfer from media to disk itself should absolutely be legal.
However in the case of popcorn time, I don't really see the violation being some silly thing (though claims of how much 'harm' is done in judicial terms can be absurd, jailtime and/or unrealisticly high amounts of damage).
I can also go on an offtopic rant about how the copyright holders are unwilling to provide me a quality experience. I just want to buy a DRM-free mkv or mp4 of their media with high quality and then use some very good software to curate the content (like Emby for example). Popcorn time I've never used, but the principle of the thing doesn't appeal either, I want to actually have my library at hand at any given time.
If anything it is more important in a 'digital era'. The whole point of copyright is to try to protect intellectual 'property' because it's been relatively more trivial to replicate the essence of your work compared to real physical goods. In the 'digital era', the contributing factors to wanting copyright are even stronger as it becomes even more trivial.
Arguments can be made about how you get people to produce this content in an ideal versus a real world, or how long copyright should ask to balance rewarding new creations versus being able to use those works in new and exciting ways. However the realities that have thus far driven the existence of copyright are unchanged.
I would suggest that the areas where it is the most cost effective solution to the problem at hand (or believed to be the most cost effective) have low overlap with linux applications. A z without z/OS is a rather silly overprised, under-capability system.
I don't know about system z, but in some designs there are even redundant midplanes/backplanes, such that you could service them independently.
Yes 'bunch of wires' (traces) can have problems. A metal can corrode, a connector can deform. It's one reason that if you have a fully redundant system and expecting 100% uptime, sometimes a midplane is a worse decision than discretely cabled components. However with redundant and indpendently serviceable mid/backplanes, that no longer becomes a risk.
Your accountant would know if it were really running on a mainframe. Your users and developers wouldn't notice any benefit, but your accountant can painfully feel the weight of the mainframe.
This is IBM grasping at relevance of their mainframe platform to a wider audience. The problem is that it's not an appealing architecture for those workloads. If anything this may be making some hardcore mainframe shops wonder more strongly if they should be moving off, since even IBM seems to be legitimizing the 'not-mainframe' way of doing it for mainframe users. Along the lines of how OS/2's windows compatibility made it so that workloads shouldn't bother targeting OS/2 since IBM would support it via windows compatibility. IBM hoped windows compatibility would make users prefer OS/2 so they could run both, but it backfired on the developer end.
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Exactly, *everyone* being able to code flies in the face of pretty much every other industry.
Decades ago, everyone knew how to work on cars. In part because cars were more straightforward, but *mostly* because cars were so unreliable, you pretty much had to know how to work on it to be able to own one without going nuts. Nowadays a typical car maintenance schedule has a a recommended oil change every 8,000 miles or so and otherwise very little maintenance that hits a *typical* car. Tires and brakes wear out over a long period of time, but generally there's plenty of warning. A car suddenly not starting or general misbehavior is no longer that commonplace, so most people just leave it to a mechanic. Even things as dead simple as changing oil or even the air filter is perceived as a black art by most folks.
Same for computing. If you had a system in the 70s or 80s, you essentially had to know how to program to be productive. As the software ecosystem has matured with canned applications targeting the use case of more and more and more usual situations, people just don't need to know that stuff anymore. As a portion of the computing population, programmers are less represented now than they were in the past. To imagine a reversal of that trend is silly.
Some view programming as a sort of 'literacy', but that's more of the misnomer of programming as 'languages'. It's really not a form of literacy at all.
Note that one of two things happen:
1) You are paying someone else the expense of caring about that stuff (on top of their margin)
or
2) They are not caring about many of those things, and you may not have to care as much either.
Note that a *lot* of #2 is happening is these providers. They are doing things that a business wouldn't dare do to themselves (sometimes for not particularly good reasons). A lot of the savings for these customers is getting to close their eyes and not see the stuff they wouldn't do to themselves that turns out to work just fine for the most part. When it does go awry, there are big news stories about an outage that affects a bunch of people, and that does happen to the 'best' of them.
There are really two things at play, economies of scale (if you need very small utilization of equipment) and moving capex to opex. If you have large scale, then it really is mostly a financial debate about whether you get out better with overall more money, but in opex, or save some money, but it's capex. There is some fierce debate about which way is better.
It could be construed in a negative light. For example the 'warning' that MS does when you use edge to search for firefox/chrome where it says MS really recommends Edge rather than what they are trying to do. That's unambiguously *not* doing it for the sake of the user, but for the sake of the vendor interest.
There are legitimate risks with sideloading, but a cynical argument could be made that Google isn't too torn up about making sideload extra scary sounding and the Play Store a nice safe, and coincidentally profitable for Google place to get applications. So it's an area where there is a legitimate reason, but an ulterior motive may factor in. An alternative approach to make sideloading safer could be a distributed scheme for signed applications, but without the revenue attach of play store, but Google doesn't bother with such a scheme. Note this discrete signing sort of architecture is done for Linux packages and Windows executables, for example, with extensible trust schemes to allow third parties be trusted rather than requiring the original vendor to vouch for everything.
The answer has been the phone subsidies in the US, giving the carriers a powerful marketing point ("look at these deep discounts"). With those going away, I'd expect the market pricing in general to correct in the near to medium term future.
I had this exact same argument many times that a tablet and phone are very similar and there's no good justification for the price difference
I'd complain about both Amazon and Apple. Google fares better for allowing sideloading, though it says all sorts of aggressively scary things about it (which to be fair may be a good warning to provide for the common user).
The courts haven't ruled on it, but I'm guessing...
Probably should just stop after 'haven't ruled on it'. The thing is that it is without precedent. They bust a bootlegger of DVDs, they don't go after the individuals who may have bought from that bootlegger (whether in good faith or not). If someone was selling through brick and mortar and got busted, the copies in the store may demand immediate removal, but I don't think that retailer is going to be required to aid in identifying any prior purchaser of the content.
I can't think of a case where copyright has been used to take back a work from a purchaser who acted in good faith, even if their copy was illegitimate through no fault of their own. Amazon acted overly eagerly in proactively erasing the content from devices that had downloaded it. Their obligation should be to discontinue repeat access, not extending to proactively destroying predownloaded copies. This seems to be where they (and the rest of the industry, I know first hand an application I downloaded was taken down from google play in a dispute with a company, but my copy is intact) have landed. However it is worth being aware that from a technical perspective, they have retained the capability of doing this as far as I know.
Well, there's the interesting part. Most of the console releases come to PC too nowadays. If I buy a PS4 game, in 10 years I might not be able to play it easily. On PC, I almost certainly will be able to if I want.
But next time they'll double down on always-on and no media, which were two huge parts of the bad press of Xbone.
Though for all that public bitching about that, and the fact that PS4 is faster, the key factor was probably pricing, with all the controversy not even visible to the person looking at the two boxes on a retailer shelf or on amazon web pages and just seeing the price tags.
Sure, there will be some of those folks.Overwhelmingly people just take defaults even when it doesn't take much effort to change, unless the default is very clearly perceived as horrible.
Naegleria fowleri is close to 100% fatal,
It's close to 100% fatal once symptoms present (and are further successfully diagnosed as n. fowleri). There are confirmed instances of signs that some of the population has unknowingly gotten into their systems, so it may be significantly less than 100% fatal even when infected.
So the number to eye is about 3.5 deaths per year. So it's either the case that exposure is actually very low or else that most that get infected never even know. Pneumonia on the other hand has a much higher death count.
" 97% of people whose brains start swelling"
So basically, if you start showing the signs, you are probably gone. However, IIRC, they found a fairly large portion of the population actually has antibodies for N. fowleri, indicating that getting infected may not be that uncommon, just that most infected are asymptomatic (or maybe mistook it for some more trivial ailment).
It would be interesting to also know the percentage of exposed who do not experience brain swelling...
The problem for RH becomes that on top of being wildly successful in the free market, Canonical also promises 24x7 commercial support. People can bitch and moan about their opinion of the quality of that support, but RH simply cannot pretend that they are the only ones that check off that marketing bullet point.
This further reinforces my opinion that RH has pretty much nothing to lose by making RH 'free' and charging for support, rather than this 'sort of not quite' in between state that they are in now by pretending CentOS and RH are different and never should the two mix...
WBEM is a monstrosity. That's chasing the tail of Windows WMI from over a decade ago. WBEM is a horrible horrible road to go down.
RH also has a pretty heavy dose of 'not invented here' for an 'open source' sort of company. It's cool that they fund so much open source effort mind you, but they are actually a pretty difficult company to collaborate with, even if you are willing to be totally open source.
This is a huge part of RH's problem IMO, that they go to great pains to distance functionally identical things. For Ubuntu, the free and supported client base aren't so visibly separate, so it's hard to get a read on how many folks actually pay for it. So stories like this happen, where the gap between RHEL and Ubuntu is presented as hopelessly wide when reality is that they are surprisingly close...
It's when paid businesses go to Ubuntu they have to worry, but the requirements of the customers willing to pay out big money for licenses and support are vastly different than those of desktop users
And here's the rub, they made the desktop platform pretty bleeding edge (major kernel changes are inflicted in routine updates, breaking things like nvidia driver if you choose to use it, not merely being mostly unhelpful about closed source realities but actively making it more painful). Even if drivers didn't break, updates can change things dramatically at a whim, and there's no blessed 'long term' servicing branch that so nearly matches their 6 month cycle releases like Ubuntu does. RedHat is making the free situation needlessly complicated and risky to push people to RHEL, but instead are giving ubuntu the free market. Like you say, the free market by itself is no huge threat, but it influences the commercial market in the long term.
You could also say RedHat has very little to lose by having something more like Ubuntu in lifecycle out there for free. Those folks won't pay for anything, but their mindshare is valuable among the audience that will pay.
i love how people use things like this to reject copyright laws all together. NO ONE is bashing in your front door and tazing you because you made a copy of a DVD you purchased.
I did not reject copyright laws altogether. I complained that something that should be legal is not. The argument that no one is *bothering* to prosecute is not a defense of a law existing that could be used to prosecute. If there is a situation that should be legal, the law should be changed to allow that. That doesn't mean 'no copyright', it means that DMCA should be repealed (the things enabled by the DMCA were *already* illegal, DMCA just tries to get ahead of things to prevent even attempting, which interferes with fair use). This isn't a theoretical thing, getting software that decrypts DVD/BluRay is tricky precisely because that software is *actively* pursued.
slow compared to other modern examples, but the researchers say their formal verification can also work with faster designs
If we can accept 'slow', it's not that difficult to build an always consistent filesystem. While they can formally verify a faster design should one exist, there remains the question of whether it's possible to be formally proven to be resilient to data loss while taking some of the utterly required performance shortcuts for acceptable performance. I suspect the answer is that some essential performance 'shortcuts' will fail that verification.
I agree. There are outlandish things that are forbidden. For example, the DMCA means my ripping of my own personal DVD and Blu Ray discs to HDD is not lawful, which is absurd. Sure string me up for sharing the result of that effort or selling the original while keeping my copy, but that transfer from media to disk itself should absolutely be legal.
However in the case of popcorn time, I don't really see the violation being some silly thing (though claims of how much 'harm' is done in judicial terms can be absurd, jailtime and/or unrealisticly high amounts of damage).
I can also go on an offtopic rant about how the copyright holders are unwilling to provide me a quality experience. I just want to buy a DRM-free mkv or mp4 of their media with high quality and then use some very good software to curate the content (like Emby for example). Popcorn time I've never used, but the principle of the thing doesn't appeal either, I want to actually have my library at hand at any given time.
copyright is for a non-digital era.
If anything it is more important in a 'digital era'. The whole point of copyright is to try to protect intellectual 'property' because it's been relatively more trivial to replicate the essence of your work compared to real physical goods. In the 'digital era', the contributing factors to wanting copyright are even stronger as it becomes even more trivial.
Arguments can be made about how you get people to produce this content in an ideal versus a real world, or how long copyright should ask to balance rewarding new creations versus being able to use those works in new and exciting ways. However the realities that have thus far driven the existence of copyright are unchanged.
I would suggest that the areas where it is the most cost effective solution to the problem at hand (or believed to be the most cost effective) have low overlap with linux applications. A z without z/OS is a rather silly overprised, under-capability system.
I don't know about system z, but in some designs there are even redundant midplanes/backplanes, such that you could service them independently.
Yes 'bunch of wires' (traces) can have problems. A metal can corrode, a connector can deform. It's one reason that if you have a fully redundant system and expecting 100% uptime, sometimes a midplane is a worse decision than discretely cabled components. However with redundant and indpendently serviceable mid/backplanes, that no longer becomes a risk.
you wouldn't know you're running on a "mainframe"
Your accountant would know if it were really running on a mainframe. Your users and developers wouldn't notice any benefit, but your accountant can painfully feel the weight of the mainframe.
This is IBM grasping at relevance of their mainframe platform to a wider audience. The problem is that it's not an appealing architecture for those workloads. If anything this may be making some hardcore mainframe shops wonder more strongly if they should be moving off, since even IBM seems to be legitimizing the 'not-mainframe' way of doing it for mainframe users. Along the lines of how OS/2's windows compatibility made it so that workloads shouldn't bother targeting OS/2 since IBM would support it via windows compatibility. IBM hoped windows compatibility would make users prefer OS/2 so they could run both, but it backfired on the developer end.
Actually, Windows isn't perfect either. My home desktop will hang on attempts to suspend, shutdown, or reboot. No idea why.
My other windows systems are fine, and all my linux systems also suspend/resume without issue.
So anecdotes can be found everywhere. It has more to do with the firmware/hardware than anything else.
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