Well, if you take the first panel of that comic there are two possibilities, right? The first possibility is that one or more of the existing standards has a design adequate to address the technical problem it tries to solve, and the people in the panel should throw their weight behind one of those. In that case, creating a new standard is counter-productive. The second possibility is that all thirteen competing standards are inadequate and a new attempt is required. In that case, creating a new standard is the right thing to do.
I agree on your first point, and would add that if your application runs on the command line then you will increase your chance of popular use and recommendations by a factor of ten by giving useful error messages and ending with "for more information, run 'man foo'" so that a complete newbie gets help.
On your second point, I emphatically disagree. Read Poettering's blog, starting with "Rethinking Pid 1", then "Biggest Systemd Myths". The backlash against systemd is 90% people who don't even understand systemd and have been too lazy to RTFM and 10% people who understand the technical tradeoffs and think differently, all spurred on by Slashdot, Phoronix, and a dozen other sites making a mint off the advertising revenue from people visiting the flame war. And the documentation for systemd, both at the official website and from the man pages, is outstanding.
It's open source, though. So the information is available somewhere and it's never a violation of a EULA to make use of it.
I think the problem you hit is poor documentation - and that's almost always a major weakness of open source software that we the users need to work on.
I can - and do - make Linux dance to my tune and I've used it as my only desktop operating system at home for years. But yes, the learning curve was a pain in the neck. 90% of the time, everything installs and works perfectly. 7% of the time, you hit a problem that you can fix with a quick web search and twenty minutes of work. 3% of the time, you hit a headache that requires days of research and trying different things until you solve it or give up and try a different distribution or give up and go back to a proprietary operating system. I probably made a dozen switches to Linux that failed before they finished or only lasted a few months before I acquired enough skill to make the switch permanent.
About once every four or five hours of play, Minecraft crashes for my kids on my Linux machine. The display becomes completely unresponsive. So I have to switch to a virtual terminal or use a remote ssh (or better, mosh) connection into the machine, run "ps aux | grep -i minecraft" to find the processes related to minecraft, and "kill -9 PID" the processes for Minecraft. A full screen crash that hung the entire graphical interface has not happened to me on Windows more than a handful of times since Windows 98. I would never expect a casual user or even a moderately technical one that does not have a lot of Linux experience to be able to deal with this. I think I read somewhere that Wayland (the replacement for the X11 window system that underpins most graphical applications on Linux) has some fundamental design differences with X11 specifically so that a crash or hang of a full screen application can be detected and dealt with inside the graphical interface instead of requiring a switch to a terminal or remote shell.
All of these things can be improved and should be improved. I want to do my part, but work plus kids keep me too busy.
But to the article's original complaint, I think that sounds like the whining of someone who refuses to learn something new. For example, older/etc/fstab files listed disks and partitions like/dev/sda1 (first disk, first partition) and/dev/sdb2 (secon disk, second partition). The newer/etc/fstab files can support that format, but the preferred way to work is to use the UUID (universally unique identifier) of each disk partition. Yes, UUIDs make the file harder to read. Yes, UUIDs take a little more time to set up. But the advantage is that if you add a hard drive, solid state disk, etc... or remove one, it can change the order drives are enumerated to the operating system. If your/etc/fstab has the UUIDs of the partitions then that change is not a problem. If your/etc/fstab has/dev/sda1,/dev/sda2, etc... that change can break your boot process or at least mount some partitions in the wrong place. Likewise, the systemd "journalctl -r" is a new command to learn instead of "tail/var/log/messages". But the systemd journal uses digital hashes to make sure the system log has not been tampered with by a hacker./var/log/messages has no such security, so the old way is convenient but less safe. Some changes are stupid, and unnecessary. But some are necessary, and useful.
You're correct, of course. But such a tiny portion of the population understands all of this and applies it that it's almost totally useless. If ten thousand people in a city of a million - and that's probably being generous - don't use public email hosting and encrypt all of their internet traffic with a VPN or something similar as a matter of routine, the NSA can just keep tabs on those ten thousand.
What we need to do is build tools and services that make hosting your own information and encrypting all of your traffic a simple process for anyone. When all million inhabitants of the city are untraceable in the cloud unless their own machine is directly accessed, then we have protection from Big Brother. Until then, all we're doing is erecting a neon sign on our property "If you want to play 1984, raid here first!"
The problem is still the technology. No centralized information hosting company - not Google, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, or others - can solve this problem, because as you said a National Security Letter will compel them to provide the requested information or be shut down.
So the solution is decentralized replacements. Projects like Diaspora, pump.io, Friendica, and so forth move in the right direction but they still need hosting and the overwhelming majority of average citizens lack the expertise to manage them in a useful, secure way. So the next step is fully peer-to-peer software that runs on any iOS device, Android device, Windows, Mac, or Linux machine for messaging, financial transactions, photo and video sharing, and even search features in a distributed, decentralized, and all but prohibitively expensive to track way.
Good point. And this is especially important for the worst schools, in which the whole environment is so toxic to learning and to normal (define that as you wish) social interaction that the drawbacks outweigh the benefits.
Of course, as adults all but the best jobs will still have some garbage to go with the treasure. But it's nowhere near the lock-in as at school.
As opposed to what? Homeschooling all of those people would fix their behavior problems? Most likely, they brought some or even all of their behavior problems from home to school, and not vice versa.
I do not want to make a blanket assertion that any one path is the right choice. I have the same problem of limited viewpoint as everyone else. But I hypothesize that major and minor behavioral problems are commonplace all over the world, not easy to solve on a massive scale, and thus learning how to deal with them - even though the learning curve is painful to climb - is an essential skill.
I'm moderately bright, I'm not a genius. I have the sense that with proper instruction, I could have finished the academic aspects of my formal education by age 17 (instead of 24). But the things that slowed me down - sometimes working at a pace much lower than I could tolerate, sometimes wasting time because of pointless work, sometimes dealing with unpleasant people, sometimes struggling to prioritize tasks across different sets of responsibilities - were all essential life skills to acquire.
I never said it's the way things should be, or that we should contribute to the problem. But unless you're absurdly lucky, you will have to deal with at least some of those headaches at your work.
We have the tribes based on C# vs Java vs Python vs Perl vs Javascript. We have the pro-systemd and anti-systemd tribes. We have the Linux vs FreeBSD vs Mac vs Windows tribes. We still have to deal with cleaning up the technical mess when someone doesn't do their job or does it poorly. We still argue about decisions and job delegations. Dealing with real work includes things like filling in a time sheet (similar to the bullshit paperwork at school), meetings to plan stuff, code comments (whether you think they're necessary or valuable or not, they're extra work), etc... etc...
Our lives in the technology industry aren't quite like a prison scenario, but the analogues between corporate work-life in technology and corporate work-life in regular labor jobs are still present. We have it easier than most others, but the same situations occur.
Have you worked at a corporation? Except for the similarities in age, I'd say every single damn headache you encounter in elementary school, middle school, and high school except maybe having a colleague mess their pants will occur. Specifically:
1. Some people you work with are assholes.
2. Some people you work with will copy other people's work or otherwise take credit for it.
3. Some people you work with will only pretend to participate in group projects while reaping the benefits.
4. Some people you work with will be too busy talking and playing games to get anything done.
5. Some people you work with will have a poor grasp of hygiene, grooming, or both.
6. Some of your assigned tasks will be boring as hell and merely exist to fill some bureaucratic need for paperwork.
7. You will occasionally need to read, research, speak about, write about, or otherwise deal with topics that don't interest you.
8. There will be people you work with that you find attractive, and you'll have to interact with them in a courteous way and collaborate with them on work without acting inappropriately or being too nervous to proceed.
9. There will be micro-tribes and hierarchies. There's always micro-tribes and hierarchies, some are just more pleasant and well organized than others. There's the appropriate and brilliant quote, "People who say they don't play at politics just play at them poorly."
Even a dream job - and I consider software development pretty close to a dream job for me, I love my work - has all of those problems. I despised elementary school and middle school, had an okay time at high school, and loved college. But I'm grateful I went through schooling because of all of the aspects of day to day employment that it was [i]perfect[/i] preparation for.
The "I have nothing to hide" line frustrates me too.
The twitter-friendly response is, "Just because I have nothing to hide, it doesn't mean I'm happy with a webcam on my toilet."
The longer response is that the NSA is asking Google to record all of my searches, Comcast to record every website I visit at home, Verizon to record every place my cell phone goes and every cell phone call I make, and Voipo (my home phone service, similar to Vonage) to record the phone number on every home call I make. Even if I was comfortable with the government possessing that information without probable cause, it means a crooked law enforcement official, a disgruntled employee, or a criminal hacker can get a scary amount of private data about me from any one of those five sources and use it to stalk me or commit identity theft. If I am the only person with all of that data then the stalkers, the identity thieves, and the government have to hack my personal machines to get it.
PGP or GPG is not a full solution. It's currently difficult enough to setup and annoying enough to use that only a tiny portion of the population will ever bother. The NSA can't watch everyone. But as long as GPG is in use by less than 0.1% of the population and of course PGP doesn't obscure senders, recipients, or even message size (though you can pad message size if you choose), the NSA can watch people who use it.
Likewise Tor isn't a solution it's integral to the HTTP 3.0 protocol.
What I saw was a video that included footage taken from a helicopter. On the 1080p television, you could make out some of the detail on the cars. On the 4K, you could make out a lot more of the detail.
If that was the result of increased color space instead of 4K, then I'm sold on UHD for increased color space. Because no matter what the cause, the visual difference was noticeable and I could see details in one that were obscured in the other.
Elsewhere in the discussion, someone suggested that the retailer intentionally degraded the video quality on the 1080p television to promote the 4K television. In case you were going to mention that, I'll respond again - it seems unintuitive to push consumers away from your lower cost, much higher sales volume products just to get a much smaller number of higher margin sales. I can't rule it out, but it seems unlikely.
I think one legitimate objection to getting 4K is that a lot of 4K content isn't available yet.
I rip my DVDs so that I can skip the damn previews and warnings and just start the film when I want. (But if anybody cares, every single rip is for a DVD I purchased. Nothing is downloaded.) I want to do the same thing for my Blu Rays for the same reasons, but I haven't gotten around to figuring it out yet - a lot of websites mention the MakeMKV software, I'll try that.
The 1080p was much cheaper. So if the seller (in this case, Costco) intentionally degraded the visual quality of their cheaper product in favor of the more expensive one, then they would be willing to forego a higher volume sales of the more affordable 1080p HDTVs to get the profits on a smaller number of 4KTVs. That seems unlikely to me, though definitely possible.
Oh wow. Thanks. I hadn't been following the price of 4K televisions closely, I assumed it was still at least twice the cost of an equivalent size 1080p television.
Damn. We just got a second 37" HDTV in December for $245 (floor model). I thought that was a screaming deal, but $340 for 4K trumps it.
You can see a difference in a store very easily, even from more than ten feet away. So you will see a difference in your house, even with a relatively small television.
I don't plan to be an early adopter, but when a 4K 37" television is under $400 I will probably get one.
I disagree. I've watched a Blu Ray played on a 50" HDTV at 1920x1080 resolution, and next to it a 50" 4K (3880xwhatever) television was playing some UHD content. The difference in definition was very easy to see from even ten feet away.
Now, I'm perfectly happy to use $12 Blu Ray disks (6-12 months after a film comes to video) and a $300 37" HDTV for entertainment. 4K is gorgeous, but didn't buy an HDTV until my previous television was ten years old and I could get an HDTV for $300 or less. Once a 37" 4K TV costs $300, I'll upgrade.
That is the free market at work. What do you think happens when the libertarians get their way and the FCC, FDA, OSHA, and EPA get abolished? They stay gone forever and the market has perfect competition? Of course not. The richest incumbent companies buy some lawmakers again, and bring those agencies back with new names and even more rules favorable to the incumbent companies than we have today.
The only permanent solution to regulatory capture is the extinction of humanity. Otherwise, all we the voters and politicians can ever do is fight a holding action against it. Believing anything else is as much a libertarian fantasy as a worker's utopia is a communist fantasy.
Removing government interference isn't the fix. Fixing the regulations as best as we can, even knowing the solutions are still flawed, is the best option we have.
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Thanks for the correction. You're right, and I didn't allow for that possibility.
Well, if you take the first panel of that comic there are two possibilities, right? The first possibility is that one or more of the existing standards has a design adequate to address the technical problem it tries to solve, and the people in the panel should throw their weight behind one of those. In that case, creating a new standard is counter-productive. The second possibility is that all thirteen competing standards are inadequate and a new attempt is required. In that case, creating a new standard is the right thing to do.
I agree on your first point, and would add that if your application runs on the command line then you will increase your chance of popular use and recommendations by a factor of ten by giving useful error messages and ending with "for more information, run 'man foo'" so that a complete newbie gets help.
On your second point, I emphatically disagree. Read Poettering's blog, starting with "Rethinking Pid 1", then "Biggest Systemd Myths". The backlash against systemd is 90% people who don't even understand systemd and have been too lazy to RTFM and 10% people who understand the technical tradeoffs and think differently, all spurred on by Slashdot, Phoronix, and a dozen other sites making a mint off the advertising revenue from people visiting the flame war. And the documentation for systemd, both at the official website and from the man pages, is outstanding.
It's open source, though. So the information is available somewhere and it's never a violation of a EULA to make use of it.
I think the problem you hit is poor documentation - and that's almost always a major weakness of open source software that we the users need to work on.
I can - and do - make Linux dance to my tune and I've used it as my only desktop operating system at home for years. But yes, the learning curve was a pain in the neck. 90% of the time, everything installs and works perfectly. 7% of the time, you hit a problem that you can fix with a quick web search and twenty minutes of work. 3% of the time, you hit a headache that requires days of research and trying different things until you solve it or give up and try a different distribution or give up and go back to a proprietary operating system. I probably made a dozen switches to Linux that failed before they finished or only lasted a few months before I acquired enough skill to make the switch permanent.
/etc/fstab files listed disks and partitions like /dev/sda1 (first disk, first partition) and /dev/sdb2 (secon disk, second partition). The newer /etc/fstab files can support that format, but the preferred way to work is to use the UUID (universally unique identifier) of each disk partition. Yes, UUIDs make the file harder to read. Yes, UUIDs take a little more time to set up. But the advantage is that if you add a hard drive, solid state disk, etc... or remove one, it can change the order drives are enumerated to the operating system. If your /etc/fstab has the UUIDs of the partitions then that change is not a problem. If your /etc/fstab has /dev/sda1, /dev/sda2, etc... that change can break your boot process or at least mount some partitions in the wrong place. Likewise, the systemd "journalctl -r" is a new command to learn instead of "tail /var/log/messages". But the systemd journal uses digital hashes to make sure the system log has not been tampered with by a hacker. /var/log/messages has no such security, so the old way is convenient but less safe. Some changes are stupid, and unnecessary. But some are necessary, and useful.
About once every four or five hours of play, Minecraft crashes for my kids on my Linux machine. The display becomes completely unresponsive. So I have to switch to a virtual terminal or use a remote ssh (or better, mosh) connection into the machine, run "ps aux | grep -i minecraft" to find the processes related to minecraft, and "kill -9 PID" the processes for Minecraft. A full screen crash that hung the entire graphical interface has not happened to me on Windows more than a handful of times since Windows 98. I would never expect a casual user or even a moderately technical one that does not have a lot of Linux experience to be able to deal with this. I think I read somewhere that Wayland (the replacement for the X11 window system that underpins most graphical applications on Linux) has some fundamental design differences with X11 specifically so that a crash or hang of a full screen application can be detected and dealt with inside the graphical interface instead of requiring a switch to a terminal or remote shell.
All of these things can be improved and should be improved. I want to do my part, but work plus kids keep me too busy.
But to the article's original complaint, I think that sounds like the whining of someone who refuses to learn something new. For example, older
I know that post, but while I think he has a point, I also think it's too defeatist. If everyone took that attitude, nothing would ever get done.
You're correct, of course. But such a tiny portion of the population understands all of this and applies it that it's almost totally useless. If ten thousand people in a city of a million - and that's probably being generous - don't use public email hosting and encrypt all of their internet traffic with a VPN or something similar as a matter of routine, the NSA can just keep tabs on those ten thousand.
What we need to do is build tools and services that make hosting your own information and encrypting all of your traffic a simple process for anyone. When all million inhabitants of the city are untraceable in the cloud unless their own machine is directly accessed, then we have protection from Big Brother. Until then, all we're doing is erecting a neon sign on our property "If you want to play 1984, raid here first!"
The problem is still the technology. No centralized information hosting company - not Google, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, or others - can solve this problem, because as you said a National Security Letter will compel them to provide the requested information or be shut down.
So the solution is decentralized replacements. Projects like Diaspora, pump.io, Friendica, and so forth move in the right direction but they still need hosting and the overwhelming majority of average citizens lack the expertise to manage them in a useful, secure way. So the next step is fully peer-to-peer software that runs on any iOS device, Android device, Windows, Mac, or Linux machine for messaging, financial transactions, photo and video sharing, and even search features in a distributed, decentralized, and all but prohibitively expensive to track way.
We can build it, it will just take work.
Good point. And this is especially important for the worst schools, in which the whole environment is so toxic to learning and to normal (define that as you wish) social interaction that the drawbacks outweigh the benefits.
Of course, as adults all but the best jobs will still have some garbage to go with the treasure. But it's nowhere near the lock-in as at school.
As opposed to what? Homeschooling all of those people would fix their behavior problems? Most likely, they brought some or even all of their behavior problems from home to school, and not vice versa.
I do not want to make a blanket assertion that any one path is the right choice. I have the same problem of limited viewpoint as everyone else. But I hypothesize that major and minor behavioral problems are commonplace all over the world, not easy to solve on a massive scale, and thus learning how to deal with them - even though the learning curve is painful to climb - is an essential skill.
I'm moderately bright, I'm not a genius. I have the sense that with proper instruction, I could have finished the academic aspects of my formal education by age 17 (instead of 24). But the things that slowed me down - sometimes working at a pace much lower than I could tolerate, sometimes wasting time because of pointless work, sometimes dealing with unpleasant people, sometimes struggling to prioritize tasks across different sets of responsibilities - were all essential life skills to acquire.
I never said it's the way things should be, or that we should contribute to the problem. But unless you're absurdly lucky, you will have to deal with at least some of those headaches at your work.
I think tribal behavior is inherent to human beings. We can teach people to be aware of it, and to downplay it. But you'll never get rid of it.
We have the tribes based on C# vs Java vs Python vs Perl vs Javascript. We have the pro-systemd and anti-systemd tribes. We have the Linux vs FreeBSD vs Mac vs Windows tribes. We still have to deal with cleaning up the technical mess when someone doesn't do their job or does it poorly. We still argue about decisions and job delegations. Dealing with real work includes things like filling in a time sheet (similar to the bullshit paperwork at school), meetings to plan stuff, code comments (whether you think they're necessary or valuable or not, they're extra work), etc... etc...
Our lives in the technology industry aren't quite like a prison scenario, but the analogues between corporate work-life in technology and corporate work-life in regular labor jobs are still present. We have it easier than most others, but the same situations occur.
Have you worked at a corporation? Except for the similarities in age, I'd say every single damn headache you encounter in elementary school, middle school, and high school except maybe having a colleague mess their pants will occur. Specifically:
1. Some people you work with are assholes.
2. Some people you work with will copy other people's work or otherwise take credit for it.
3. Some people you work with will only pretend to participate in group projects while reaping the benefits.
4. Some people you work with will be too busy talking and playing games to get anything done.
5. Some people you work with will have a poor grasp of hygiene, grooming, or both.
6. Some of your assigned tasks will be boring as hell and merely exist to fill some bureaucratic need for paperwork.
7. You will occasionally need to read, research, speak about, write about, or otherwise deal with topics that don't interest you.
8. There will be people you work with that you find attractive, and you'll have to interact with them in a courteous way and collaborate with them on work without acting inappropriately or being too nervous to proceed.
9. There will be micro-tribes and hierarchies. There's always micro-tribes and hierarchies, some are just more pleasant and well organized than others. There's the appropriate and brilliant quote, "People who say they don't play at politics just play at them poorly."
Even a dream job - and I consider software development pretty close to a dream job for me, I love my work - has all of those problems. I despised elementary school and middle school, had an okay time at high school, and loved college. But I'm grateful I went through schooling because of all of the aspects of day to day employment that it was [i]perfect[/i] preparation for.
Thank you. I agree with you.
The "I have nothing to hide" line frustrates me too.
The twitter-friendly response is, "Just because I have nothing to hide, it doesn't mean I'm happy with a webcam on my toilet."
The longer response is that the NSA is asking Google to record all of my searches, Comcast to record every website I visit at home, Verizon to record every place my cell phone goes and every cell phone call I make, and Voipo (my home phone service, similar to Vonage) to record the phone number on every home call I make. Even if I was comfortable with the government possessing that information without probable cause, it means a crooked law enforcement official, a disgruntled employee, or a criminal hacker can get a scary amount of private data about me from any one of those five sources and use it to stalk me or commit identity theft. If I am the only person with all of that data then the stalkers, the identity thieves, and the government have to hack my personal machines to get it.
Dammit, I meant "Likewise Tor isn't a solution until it's integral to the HTTP 3.0 protocol."
PGP or GPG is not a full solution. It's currently difficult enough to setup and annoying enough to use that only a tiny portion of the population will ever bother. The NSA can't watch everyone. But as long as GPG is in use by less than 0.1% of the population and of course PGP doesn't obscure senders, recipients, or even message size (though you can pad message size if you choose), the NSA can watch people who use it.
Likewise Tor isn't a solution it's integral to the HTTP 3.0 protocol.
We need to create better tools.
What I saw was a video that included footage taken from a helicopter. On the 1080p television, you could make out some of the detail on the cars. On the 4K, you could make out a lot more of the detail.
If that was the result of increased color space instead of 4K, then I'm sold on UHD for increased color space. Because no matter what the cause, the visual difference was noticeable and I could see details in one that were obscured in the other.
Elsewhere in the discussion, someone suggested that the retailer intentionally degraded the video quality on the 1080p television to promote the 4K television. In case you were going to mention that, I'll respond again - it seems unintuitive to push consumers away from your lower cost, much higher sales volume products just to get a much smaller number of higher margin sales. I can't rule it out, but it seems unlikely.
I think one legitimate objection to getting 4K is that a lot of 4K content isn't available yet.
I rip my DVDs so that I can skip the damn previews and warnings and just start the film when I want. (But if anybody cares, every single rip is for a DVD I purchased. Nothing is downloaded.) I want to do the same thing for my Blu Rays for the same reasons, but I haven't gotten around to figuring it out yet - a lot of websites mention the MakeMKV software, I'll try that.
The 1080p was much cheaper. So if the seller (in this case, Costco) intentionally degraded the visual quality of their cheaper product in favor of the more expensive one, then they would be willing to forego a higher volume sales of the more affordable 1080p HDTVs to get the profits on a smaller number of 4KTVs. That seems unlikely to me, though definitely possible.
Oh wow. Thanks. I hadn't been following the price of 4K televisions closely, I assumed it was still at least twice the cost of an equivalent size 1080p television.
Damn. We just got a second 37" HDTV in December for $245 (floor model). I thought that was a screaming deal, but $340 for 4K trumps it.
You can see a difference in a store very easily, even from more than ten feet away. So you will see a difference in your house, even with a relatively small television.
I don't plan to be an early adopter, but when a 4K 37" television is under $400 I will probably get one.
I disagree. I've watched a Blu Ray played on a 50" HDTV at 1920x1080 resolution, and next to it a 50" 4K (3880xwhatever) television was playing some UHD content. The difference in definition was very easy to see from even ten feet away.
Now, I'm perfectly happy to use $12 Blu Ray disks (6-12 months after a film comes to video) and a $300 37" HDTV for entertainment. 4K is gorgeous, but didn't buy an HDTV until my previous television was ten years old and I could get an HDTV for $300 or less. Once a 37" 4K TV costs $300, I'll upgrade.
That is the free market at work. What do you think happens when the libertarians get their way and the FCC, FDA, OSHA, and EPA get abolished? They stay gone forever and the market has perfect competition? Of course not. The richest incumbent companies buy some lawmakers again, and bring those agencies back with new names and even more rules favorable to the incumbent companies than we have today.
The only permanent solution to regulatory capture is the extinction of humanity. Otherwise, all we the voters and politicians can ever do is fight a holding action against it. Believing anything else is as much a libertarian fantasy as a worker's utopia is a communist fantasy.
Removing government interference isn't the fix. Fixing the regulations as best as we can, even knowing the solutions are still flawed, is the best option we have.