This is an interesting angle on recent events. However, that faith in "technology" brings with it its own problems, and is in absolutely no way separate from "human institutions". Computer code is not some sort of magic entity that lives apart from human institutions. It seems like a bit of a false dichotomy.
Also: "Well-tested code" seems to be a bit leading. Is this a hedge against when things fall apart ("Well, it wasn't well-tested!" )? Or just simple leading?
Clearly you have spent time thinking about systemd, and so some questions:
1) Any chance systemd will improve? I think about how gnome3 seems to be slowly gaining more acceptance, perhaps this will be similar?
2) One of the challenges, even for a general-purpose computer distro, is to run on a wide variety of hardware with different needs. Example: Portable computer needs to be able to sleep, use graphics switching (start quicker??) while on a server these might be less important. It seems that systemd is screwing up more on the server side, which is a bit surprising. Any ideas on why? Theoretically these systems would be admined by more seasoned humans, but they seem to be having the biggest issues.
Anyway, just some thoughts. In my personal experience running a single server running Debian Jesse all seems OK with systemd, but I am not doing anything too fancy there. I also run mint on some desktop systems, and systemd seems OK there too..
The optimist in me wants to think that in response to the last keylogger (in the audio driver) HP did an audit and found this other "oops" in the Synaptics driver. Actually, that would be good spin. Unfortunately, I think systematic incompetence is more likely. Wonder if other drivers have this "feature" enabled, perhaps on machines from other vendors...
Was going to post just that song title, glad to see you did an even better job already. Is Uber redeemable as a corporate entity? Seems like things are not changing much, new CEO or not- bad headlines weekly.
Perhaps its time for the corporate death penalty, disband this org.
This! If I had mod points, you'd get one. Thank you for pointing out that we should be using pdf readers for rendering pdfs, and that this does not need to be built into the browser. Every new feature added, especially to web browsers- which have become such complex pieces of software- needs to be carefully evaluated from a security and redundancy perspective.
I am as annoyed as anyone that none of these seem to interoperate. However, since AirDrop was introduced first (around 2011, it seems) and has the nice feature of using wifi mentioned above, wouldn't it make more sense for MS and Google to adopt that technology or something compatible? Licensing headaches aside, of course...
I dunno, seems like important core functionality. Lastpass is popular, and certainly "exciting" to many people. If Mozilla can pull something off that does not involve servers/machines I don't own and control but allows me to share passwords between machines- that would seem pretty news worthy.
Its been interesting to read that apparently some of the limits reddit instituted last time (amid much controversy and gnashing of teeth) were in reducing hate speech.
The take-home to me is that groups online should define and enforce their standards; doing so will determine what sort of people participate and whether the site is a "cess pool". Seems obvious now.
Thanks, that is helpful a helpful report. The numbers you cite appear to be nation-wide, though. For DC, the report you link seems to show a pretty low rate ("The largest differentials between 2009 and 2010 have been in Washington DC with a decline of 257%"), though it also notes that "DC’s transparency index is the worst in the nation so that locality’s low misconduct rate may be a result of under-reporting".
So, perhaps the rate of misbehavior by police was low already, and so with the cameras there was not much room for rates to drop further. Results = no measurable difference. Its an interesting idea, off to look at the paper and see if that holds. Anyone with knowledge of rates of police misconduct who can say if the rates in DC are particularly low?
I have to agree on the HW point, but I think it is too simple to say 'avoid crap'. The larger issue is that your experience will with distro X be *extremely* variable depending on hardware choices. Spending more can help- I will give you a concrete example, since you ask: I had an HP Elitebook 8440w that was the absolute best mobile Linux experience I have ever had. I noted battery life was a little poorer than on Win7, but it was close. Sadly, I followed up with a Zbook 15 and it was bad- poor wifi range, regressions (screen brightness problems) and much poorer battery life than on Windows (could not easily switch between nvidia and intel graphics). Neither of those were crap HW, but experience was highly variable.
Of course, this is a tiny dataset, and only a couple of experiences (if you want a few more views, and folks trying to deal with the issue, see here) A colleague just obtained an XPS13 'sputnik' edition (Ubuntu as installed by Dell) and has trouble with font scaling when he connects his external display. All small data points, but indicates to me that it might be relatively rare for someone to install a current distro on a notebook computer and have everything work flawlessly (even after significant hacking).
Ways forward? Dunno. Make sure we all check the Linux compatability database? I still think it Linux on mobile is very worth it due tot he spyware issues UnknownSolider mentioned above. While MacOS does not seem to have these problems to the same extent as MS Windows, I feel there won't be much movement due to the other tradeoffs.
A lot of what you write resonates with me. I'll add another variable that I don't see mentioned yet: Linux support of notebook computers. Its another layer of problems (power management, nvidia optimus, even wifi drivers) that really put me over the edge. Many of the 'client' machines out there in 2017 are laptops, and poor support on those makes things difficult beyond the "interoperability" issues.
Things are clearly constantly changing, including my own ability to keep up (generally decreasing over time). Makes it hard to get a handle on comparisons between MS Windows, Linux; but my view is that when I started using Linux in 2001 it was clearly superior to the Microsoft offering. By the time I moved off of Linux for as a primary client computing platform (2015) it was much less clear. Today, as I have dabbled around, the tables seem to have turned, at least on notebooks. I'd be interested to read what others think on this aspect.
Its easy to understand the anger and frustration this causes, especially when something works for some time and then ceases to function; we suspect for commercial reasons. But it may not be (just?) for commercial reasons.
Apple tightly regulates the market around their widgets- that has been the case for a very long time. They really want you to only use their HW and SW with their products, and would claim that this leads to a consistent and improved experience. There are examples where we can see negative effects of allowing any and all accessories to be produced cheaply- here is a recent one.
Neat way to put it, but I think there are strong limits to the sorts of historical parallels you are drawing here. Though it makes for a nice pattern, I don't have any reason to believe that MS, Apple and Google will all follow the trajectory of IBM.
This. I started reading around 2000-2001, remember that at that time could barely make sense of the headlines. Slashdot was important to me for introducing OSS, *nix and computer fundamentals that are now pillars of my professional life. I was pretty sure I'd be happy lurking forever, but when the current owners took over and seemed to really want to rebuild the glory that was the old slashdot, I ended up signing up for an account (2016- is that some sort of lurking record? I would guess not, the truly hardcore are still lurking!). Have enjoyed the site more since, wonder why I took so long! To those still in the shadows: come on in, folks, the water is fiiine!!
I agree with you, entirely. Too many tabs seems..unhygienic.
However, this discussion also suggests to me that it might be time to overhaul bookmark UIs in web browsers. There may be a way to make them more useful to users currently maintaining hundreds of tabs. A thought, anyway.
I ran a selection of those OSs, and have to say that the NT kernel flavors were also the ones more likely to approach 50d uptimes compared with the others.
You probably do more coding than I do; When I am at work I dock my notebook to a KVM, large monitor, etc and find that setup just fine for what I do, including some light development. I completely agree with your point on SW development on the small screen- I'd do that when docked.
"Redistributing wealth does fuck-all to solve AGW."
likely true in the narrow sense, but it could do something about mitigating the effects of AGW for a large portion of humanity. This may be what folks who combine these issues are thinking, anyway.
Having written that, I basically agree with you that roping the two together probably harms our ability to deal with AGW. It's an interesting point, and we should remain skeptical of this sort of "issue bundling". Come to think of it, issue bundling seems common in the West today (ex: anti-GMO+anti-vax, or birther+anti-ACA+911 conspirasist; you can probably think of others..); beyond being a bit lazy, bundling might be increasing polarization. Or is it a product of some other process driving polarization..?
You bring an interesting point to this discussion - thank you.
A priori, I agree with you that anthropogenic climate change (ACC, if I may) and global inequality don't necessarily need to go together. Worse, perhaps putting them together makes it harder for people to take necessary actions to avoid possible environmental calamity- it certainly seems to rub you the wrong way, and I don't think you are alone. However, once you add in that less wealthy parts of the world are going to suffer more under ACC, then it makes more sense to discuss climate impacts and human inequality together. This is a major point of the paper on which the article is based.
Slashdot Mirror
OP is about naturalized citizens, not non-citizens.
The government *may not* discriminate against any citizen (natural born or naturalized) wrt security clearance. See this for a ruling from 1988 reaffirming that a citizen is a citizen is a citizen. We even have a naturalized US citizen serving in the US senate.
As far as I know the only exception is the position of commander in chief.
This is an interesting angle on recent events. However, that faith in "technology" brings with it its own problems, and is in absolutely no way separate from "human institutions". Computer code is not some sort of magic entity that lives apart from human institutions. It seems like a bit of a false dichotomy.
Also: "Well-tested code" seems to be a bit leading. Is this a hedge against when things fall apart ("Well, it wasn't well-tested!" )? Or just simple leading?
Clearly you have spent time thinking about systemd, and so some questions:
1) Any chance systemd will improve? I think about how gnome3 seems to be slowly gaining more acceptance, perhaps this will be similar?
2) One of the challenges, even for a general-purpose computer distro, is to run on a wide variety of hardware with different needs. Example: Portable computer needs to be able to sleep, use graphics switching (start quicker??) while on a server these might be less important. It seems that systemd is screwing up more on the server side, which is a bit surprising. Any ideas on why? Theoretically these systems would be admined by more seasoned humans, but they seem to be having the biggest issues.
Anyway, just some thoughts. In my personal experience running a single server running Debian Jesse all seems OK with systemd, but I am not doing anything too fancy there. I also run mint on some desktop systems, and systemd seems OK there too..
The optimist in me wants to think that in response to the last keylogger (in the audio driver) HP did an audit and found this other "oops" in the Synaptics driver. Actually, that would be good spin. Unfortunately, I think systematic incompetence is more likely. Wonder if other drivers have this "feature" enabled, perhaps on machines from other vendors...
enough said.
Was going to post just that song title, glad to see you did an even better job already.
Is Uber redeemable as a corporate entity? Seems like things are not changing much, new CEO or not- bad headlines weekly.
Perhaps its time for the corporate death penalty, disband this org.
This! If I had mod points, you'd get one. Thank you for pointing out that we should be using pdf readers for rendering pdfs, and that this does not need to be built into the browser. Every new feature added, especially to web browsers- which have become such complex pieces of software- needs to be carefully evaluated from a security and redundancy perspective.
I'll add my vote for the unicomp. Probably not the best for everyone, especially since it weighs more than my laptop ;-)
I am as annoyed as anyone that none of these seem to interoperate. However, since AirDrop was introduced first (around 2011, it seems) and has the nice feature of using wifi mentioned above, wouldn't it make more sense for MS and Google to adopt that technology or something compatible?
Licensing headaches aside, of course...
amazing that it got a 6 out of 10 for "repairabilty". The trend seems to be with tech that the newer (thinner) models are less and less repairable.
I dunno, seems like important core functionality. Lastpass is popular, and certainly "exciting" to many people. If Mozilla can pull something off that does not involve servers/machines I don't own and control but allows me to share passwords between machines- that would seem pretty news worthy.
Its been interesting to read that apparently some of the limits reddit instituted last time (amid much controversy and gnashing of teeth) were in reducing hate speech.
The take-home to me is that groups online should define and enforce their standards; doing so will determine what sort of people participate and whether the site is a "cess pool". Seems obvious now.
Thanks, that is helpful a helpful report. The numbers you cite appear to be nation-wide, though. For DC, the report you link seems to show a pretty low rate ("The largest differentials between 2009 and 2010 have been in Washington DC with a decline of 257%"), though it also notes that "DC’s transparency index is the worst in the nation so that locality’s low misconduct rate may be a result of under-reporting".
So, perhaps hypothesis still holds.
So, perhaps the rate of misbehavior by police was low already, and so with the cameras there was not much room for rates to drop further. Results = no measurable difference. Its an interesting idea, off to look at the paper and see if that holds. Anyone with knowledge of rates of police misconduct who can say if the rates in DC are particularly low?
I have to agree on the HW point, but I think it is too simple to say 'avoid crap'. The larger issue is that your experience will with distro X be *extremely* variable depending on hardware choices. Spending more can help- I will give you a concrete example, since you ask: I had an HP Elitebook 8440w that was the absolute best mobile Linux experience I have ever had. I noted battery life was a little poorer than on Win7, but it was close. Sadly, I followed up with a Zbook 15 and it was bad- poor wifi range, regressions (screen brightness problems) and much poorer battery life than on Windows (could not easily switch between nvidia and intel graphics). Neither of those were crap HW, but experience was highly variable.
Of course, this is a tiny dataset, and only a couple of experiences (if you want a few more views, and folks trying to deal with the issue, see here) A colleague just obtained an XPS13 'sputnik' edition (Ubuntu as installed by Dell) and has trouble with font scaling when he connects his external display. All small data points, but indicates to me that it might be relatively rare for someone to install a current distro on a notebook computer and have everything work flawlessly (even after significant hacking).
Ways forward? Dunno. Make sure we all check the Linux compatability database? I still think it Linux on mobile is very worth it due tot he spyware issues UnknownSolider mentioned above. While MacOS does not seem to have these problems to the same extent as MS Windows, I feel there won't be much movement due to the other tradeoffs.
A lot of what you write resonates with me. I'll add another variable that I don't see mentioned yet: Linux support of notebook computers. Its another layer of problems (power management, nvidia optimus, even wifi drivers) that really put me over the edge. Many of the 'client' machines out there in 2017 are laptops, and poor support on those makes things difficult beyond the "interoperability" issues.
Things are clearly constantly changing, including my own ability to keep up (generally decreasing over time). Makes it hard to get a handle on comparisons between MS Windows, Linux; but my view is that when I started using Linux in 2001 it was clearly superior to the Microsoft offering. By the time I moved off of Linux for as a primary client computing platform (2015) it was much less clear. Today, as I have dabbled around, the tables seem to have turned, at least on notebooks. I'd be interested to read what others think on this aspect.
Its easy to understand the anger and frustration this causes, especially when something works for some time and then ceases to function; we suspect for commercial reasons. But it may not be (just?) for commercial reasons.
Apple tightly regulates the market around their widgets- that has been the case for a very long time. They really want you to only use their HW and SW with their products, and would claim that this leads to a consistent and improved experience. There are examples where we can see negative effects of allowing any and all accessories to be produced cheaply- here is a recent one.
It may not be so black and white.
Neat way to put it, but I think there are strong limits to the sorts of historical parallels you are drawing here. Though it makes for a nice pattern, I don't have any reason to believe that MS, Apple and Google will all follow the trajectory of IBM.
Good reminder indeed. Second reminder from this story: Don't be an unmitigated creep and cyber stalker. Jus sayin.
This. I started reading around 2000-2001, remember that at that time could barely make sense of the headlines. Slashdot was important to me for introducing OSS, *nix and computer fundamentals that are now pillars of my professional life. I was pretty sure I'd be happy lurking forever, but when the current owners took over and seemed to really want to rebuild the glory that was the old slashdot, I ended up signing up for an account (2016- is that some sort of lurking record? I would guess not, the truly hardcore are still lurking!). Have enjoyed the site more since, wonder why I took so long! To those still in the shadows: come on in, folks, the water is fiiine!!
I agree with you, entirely. Too many tabs seems..unhygienic.
However, this discussion also suggests to me that it might be time to overhaul bookmark UIs in web browsers. There may be a way to make them more useful to users currently maintaining hundreds of tabs. A thought, anyway.
I ran a selection of those OSs, and have to say that the NT kernel flavors were also the ones more likely to approach 50d uptimes compared with the others.
You probably do more coding than I do; When I am at work I dock my notebook to a KVM, large monitor, etc and find that setup just fine for what I do, including some light development. I completely agree with your point on SW development on the small screen- I'd do that when docked.
"Redistributing wealth does fuck-all to solve AGW."
likely true in the narrow sense, but it could do something about mitigating the effects of AGW for a large portion of humanity. This may be what folks who combine these issues are thinking, anyway.
Having written that, I basically agree with you that roping the two together probably harms our ability to deal with AGW. It's an interesting point, and we should remain skeptical of this sort of "issue bundling". Come to think of it, issue bundling seems common in the West today (ex: anti-GMO+anti-vax, or birther+anti-ACA+911 conspirasist; you can probably think of others..); beyond being a bit lazy, bundling might be increasing polarization. Or is it a product of some other process driving polarization..?
You bring an interesting point to this discussion - thank you.
A priori, I agree with you that anthropogenic climate change (ACC, if I may) and global inequality don't necessarily need to go together. Worse, perhaps putting them together makes it harder for people to take necessary actions to avoid possible environmental calamity- it certainly seems to rub you the wrong way, and I don't think you are alone. However, once you add in that less wealthy parts of the world are going to suffer more under ACC, then it makes more sense to discuss climate impacts and human inequality together. This is a major point of the paper on which the article is based.
Something to think about, anyway.