I meant "love or hate" based on more than just the name. Though I suppose hate based on the name alone could work in a few cases: D, P, R - effective search queries based on those names must be a royal pain to write.
Free-as-in-freedom is not the same as written-the-way-I-want. There is nothing stopping the open source community from making forks of existing projects or brand new projects to escape systemd.
The hatred in the free software world for Canonical is pretty understandable - Mark Shuttleworth and others have occasionally issued inflammatory or dishonest statements (for example, the false claims about design flaws in Wayland) or included adware in their software releases (the Amazon shopping lens).
The hatred for systemd baffles me - you're mad because volunteers are building something you don't want? Isn't that a ridiculous display of arrogance and entitlement? "This thing you're making and giving away has features I don't like, so you shouldn't create it!"
In all seriousness I wish the developers and supporters of Devuan, Gentoo (which can run with or without systemd), Void Linux, GuixSD, and the other systemd-free Linux distributions all the success in the world. But frankly I don't care enough to contribute. For the people that do care, if they put 1% of the energy that went into the flame wars into contributing, Devuan would have conquered the world by now.
Love or hate Go, Typescript, Dart, C#, F#, Swift, etc... on their own merits or flaws, not on whether or not their corporate creators are assholes (hint: yes). They're all open source.
Agreed. I have to assume the teasers are actually an attempt to attract venture capital investments.
The only way I can see this succeed is if it goes right after the NES Classic - a cheap device that emulates all of the old Atari classics. If they're trying to make a serious modern gaming console with a $150+ price, they have to make something to compete with the Nintendo and especially Sony and Microsoft consoles that most of their potential customers already own, and attract developers to make serious games for it. If they're trying to make a casual modern gaming console, their potential market is satisfied with the indie games on Steam and the mountain of games for iOS and Android.
You skipped an important aspect of the story: the people who would otherwise be at the vanguard, the Microsoft fanatics, aren't interested. They thought Microsoft was serious about Pocked PC 2000, then it was abandoned. Then Windows Mobile, and then it was dropped. Then Windows Phone 7 was important. Then it was dropped. Then Windows Phone 8...
It's poetic justice. The big reason Microsoft still dominates corporate desktop is legacy support. Companies are running Windows 95 and Windows NT applications they still need in dusty corners. That's why they bought XP, and Vista, and 7. But in Microsoft's quest to fight Blackberry and Palm and later the iPhone and Android, they kept introducing things and then dumping them. So legacy works against them.
Do you have metrics for the traffic? I have a hard time believing the volume of data they stored and served in 2007 was even 10% of what they have to handle today. And even though hardware has gotten cheaper over that time, scaling horizontally is not trivial.
So that justifies needing more than $5 million. It doesn't justify needing $90 million, or paying executives a six figure exit fee.
I wouldn't even mind that, to be honest. I have nothing against a movie studio that takes a familiar story or myth and then twists it to make a new story with a handful of elements the audience is expected to understand. Clash of the Titans, the recent Hercules with Dwayne Johnson, Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief, or kung-fu Sherlock Holmes (which took.. what, one or two references that Holmes knew Chinese boxing from the original Sherlock Holmes stories and made him into an action hero... and I loved it)
But nothing in this trailer looked interesting to me. It just appeared to be a generic fantasy action movie with totally uninteresting characters.
You're right, I overstated my case. But I really do have the sense that there are just flat out more big budget action movies and major films aimed at kids and young adults per year now than ten or twenty years ago. Maybe my perspective is skewed with age, maybe I'm just more aware of the barrage of options now than I was as a young adult.
You're overthinking this. The real reason I'm not watching Baywatch or Pirates of the Caribbean 5 is that I spent a lot of money to watch Guardians of the Galaxy 2 and I'm about to spend money to watch Wonder Woman this weekend and The Mummy next weekend.
If either of those films or even the King Arthur disaster had come out in January or February, the only popcorn junky cheesefest competition was XXX: The Return of Xander Cage. They would probably have done twice as well then versus what they'll get now. As it is, April to September is neck deep in silly adventure and action movies. I'm going to skip plenty of films I might otherwise watch just because I don't have the time and money to catch them all.
How many biology 101, history 101, or Mandarin 101 professors expect the students to enter the classroom with a decent background in the topic? "101" course levels imply introductory material. Until computer science classes are a standard, non-optional part of high school education in every school in the country, college CS101 students should be expected to know nothing about programming when they get to their first class.
I think Continuum will make sense for casual computer users within a few years - definitely within ten years. My teenage son has a $500 gaming PC, no smart phone is going to match it for performance. But my wife uses her phone and tablet for everything, her desktop is usually idle or off. The next time we buy a monitor for her, if getting one with mobile docking is cheap we'll do it.
And in fact, I think Continuum is exactly why Microsoft is desperate to get into mobile computing. They are going to lose hundreds of millions of non-power-users to Android and iOS in the next decade if they don't.
I think this is one of the things that's killing their adoption by the Microsoft fans. If they would just stick with one strategy and keep enhancing it, it would take even more money than they've already invested but they might make progress. But if they abandon Windows Phone 10 and users and app developers have to start again with Windows Mobile.next, their weak chances will become even weaker.
...I'm a free software nerd. So all this doesn't bother me. What bothers me is that proprietary firmware is making Android only marginally more free-as-in-freedom than iOS and Windows Phone.
How do you know what the standard case is? My oldest kid at eleven was writing better code than I could at 19. He had access to better teaching materials and an experienced mentor. If he ever takes CS101 at a college, he'll sleep through it. That doesn't mean he's got some special 'capability for insight'.
We take for granted all of the concepts you have to handle to be a developer. We do abstract visualization of algorithms - and not just the fancy O(n logn) stuff but even simple things like "open the file, read each line, extract the entries between the third and fourth commas, convert from string to integers, sum the values". We know syntax rules, and won't get tripped up by errors like "if (condition);" (the semi-colon means the if condition has no result). We understand concepts like explicit and implicit type conversions. We understand variable scoping. We understand passing by value and passing by reference. We understand compilers and interpreters. We understand static types and dynamic typing.
And none of those concepts are difficult. Really, they're not, as long as you learn them one at a time, in isolation. If you throw three or four at a novice at once, that person is going to choke even if their raw intelligence is really high. I had a tough time with the learning process and cheated to pass the first few classes. When I was in my 20s, my father tried to make a career switch into software development. His CS101 class had C++ with some libraries and web services. The old guy had a full scholarship to college the first time around and graduated with a degree in math, so he's not stupid. But the only people who passed that class were the ones that were experienced developers that just wanted to put a degree on their resume. Every true novice flunked.
You're weeding out the people whose secondary education program didn't have adequate computer science offerings. Even in 2017, that describes most secondary schools in the US.
Bullshit. This is not a tough field. When CS101 and CS102 classes are hard, all you're doing is weeding out the kids who didn't have any coding experience in high school.
My family didn't own a fucking computer before I got to college. I wanted to work in the industry, but I new nothing. I passed my first three classes by cheating. The kids that aced had taken programming classes in high school and owned computers since they were in elementary school. By junior year I was all caught up. I'm still working as a developer, almost twenty years later. Java, Python, Perl, Scala; git; Maven; Jenkins; shell, vim, sed, piping. And I would have never got here if they did a better job catching cheaters at school.
All you're doing is weeding out the people that didn't start young.
Yeah? Who uses the git tools with any piece of software other than git? Ever fire up "git cherry-pick" while working with Subversion? Ever use "git fetch" instead of rsync? Ever "git revert" your SQLite database? It's a monolithic tool with a bunch of executables - and that's fine.
And Vim with its plugin systems, buffers, diff tools, regular expressions, shell out and redirect, etc... etc... system is damned close to having feature parity with emacs. So it's still a monster tool instead of itty bitty 'ed' or 'nano'. But nobody is screaming that we should all be using 'ed'.
Are they holding the GNOME developers at gunpoint? Are they blackmailing them? No, they released a piece of software with features, and the GNOME developers adopted it. No force. And they haven't shut down Xfce, Blackbox, Ratpoison, IceWM, or the other desktops either.
git and emacs go against the "small sharp tools principle", and I don't see anybody yelling that we should be using RCS and ed.
More importantly, nobody is being forced. Every developer and contributor anywhere is completely free to make their own Linux distribution without systemd, or fork an existing one. You can't say, "The Fedora and Debian developers picked systemd, and I don't want it, so they're forcing me!!!!!" - you don't have the right to make other free software contributors use the specific tools you like. If the entire Debian team wants to rewrite their display environments to look like Pac-man, I don't have to like it but they still aren't forcing me to do anything.
And again, I think the failure cases are grossly over-reported. But even if it does happen, it's like anything else - someone will fix it. We don't insist on using kernel 2.26 because there were some regressions in the 3.x and 4.x series.
Seconded. I work for a relatively small company, we have maybe seventy or so virtual machines running CentOS 7.3. There haven't been any systemd-related problems.
I think the real problem is dishonest pricing. For Netflix, Amazon Prime video streaming, Hulu, Playstation Vue, Sling.tv, Youtube TV, etc... etc..., the advertised price is what you pay. And the pricing isn't necessarily cheap, either. I think Playstation Vue and Youtube TV and around $40/month.
I get brochures from Comcast, DirecTV, and Dish in the mail at least once a month each, and the prices in dazzling gold lettering have fuckall to do with the actual amount I would see on the bill. The fine print takes up most of the second page, and if you average out all of the added fees (not government taxes, but fees they just don't include in the advertised price) you're going to pay $30-$40 more than what's on front.
If they just advertised straight, I might even have stayed with their service. "$70 per month for the following 120 channels and DVR service the first year, $100 per month the second year. Plus extra fees listed below if you include any of the following channels: HBO, Cinemax, Starz, Epic." Instead unlike all of the streaming services it's "$25 per month for the first twelve months!" and then you have to spend ten minutes reading 7 point font text to figure out that between the subscriber fee, sports fee, connectivity fee, equipment fee, DVR service fee, and the $5 per month they charge customers that don't set up automatic debit for billing you're going to pay $70. It's like advertising a $6,000 new Honda Civic and then when the customer arrives mentioning that the engine costs extra.
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There is still choice. You can put FREEDOS on the computers. You can turn them into pieces of modern art. You can take them to the firing range.
You can't demand other people write the software you want.
I have systemd running on three machines at my house and fifty servers at work without problems.
I meant "love or hate" based on more than just the name. Though I suppose hate based on the name alone could work in a few cases: D, P, R - effective search queries based on those names must be a royal pain to write.
Free-as-in-freedom is not the same as written-the-way-I-want. There is nothing stopping the open source community from making forks of existing projects or brand new projects to escape systemd.
The hatred in the free software world for Canonical is pretty understandable - Mark Shuttleworth and others have occasionally issued inflammatory or dishonest statements (for example, the false claims about design flaws in Wayland) or included adware in their software releases (the Amazon shopping lens).
The hatred for systemd baffles me - you're mad because volunteers are building something you don't want? Isn't that a ridiculous display of arrogance and entitlement? "This thing you're making and giving away has features I don't like, so you shouldn't create it!"
In all seriousness I wish the developers and supporters of Devuan, Gentoo (which can run with or without systemd), Void Linux, GuixSD, and the other systemd-free Linux distributions all the success in the world. But frankly I don't care enough to contribute. For the people that do care, if they put 1% of the energy that went into the flame wars into contributing, Devuan would have conquered the world by now.
Love or hate Go, Typescript, Dart, C#, F#, Swift, etc... on their own merits or flaws, not on whether or not their corporate creators are assholes (hint: yes). They're all open source.
Is someone forcing you to use systemd? Is it part of your license agreement? A paid contract? A gun held to your head?
Free software is free-as-in-freedom. Runit, SysV init, Upstart, and GNU Shepherd all have their own virtues. Support one.
Agreed. I have to assume the teasers are actually an attempt to attract venture capital investments.
The only way I can see this succeed is if it goes right after the NES Classic - a cheap device that emulates all of the old Atari classics. If they're trying to make a serious modern gaming console with a $150+ price, they have to make something to compete with the Nintendo and especially Sony and Microsoft consoles that most of their potential customers already own, and attract developers to make serious games for it. If they're trying to make a casual modern gaming console, their potential market is satisfied with the indie games on Steam and the mountain of games for iOS and Android.
Good luck, Atari.
You skipped an important aspect of the story: the people who would otherwise be at the vanguard, the Microsoft fanatics, aren't interested. They thought Microsoft was serious about Pocked PC 2000, then it was abandoned. Then Windows Mobile, and then it was dropped. Then Windows Phone 7 was important. Then it was dropped. Then Windows Phone 8...
It's poetic justice. The big reason Microsoft still dominates corporate desktop is legacy support. Companies are running Windows 95 and Windows NT applications they still need in dusty corners. That's why they bought XP, and Vista, and 7. But in Microsoft's quest to fight Blackberry and Palm and later the iPhone and Android, they kept introducing things and then dumping them. So legacy works against them.
Do you have metrics for the traffic? I have a hard time believing the volume of data they stored and served in 2007 was even 10% of what they have to handle today. And even though hardware has gotten cheaper over that time, scaling horizontally is not trivial.
So that justifies needing more than $5 million. It doesn't justify needing $90 million, or paying executives a six figure exit fee.
I wouldn't even mind that, to be honest. I have nothing against a movie studio that takes a familiar story or myth and then twists it to make a new story with a handful of elements the audience is expected to understand. Clash of the Titans, the recent Hercules with Dwayne Johnson, Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief, or kung-fu Sherlock Holmes (which took.. what, one or two references that Holmes knew Chinese boxing from the original Sherlock Holmes stories and made him into an action hero... and I loved it)
But nothing in this trailer looked interesting to me. It just appeared to be a generic fantasy action movie with totally uninteresting characters.
Probably. But again, I don't mind catching the occasional Rotten Tomato. I still have fun.
I simply don't have the time or money to catch them all.
You're right, I overstated my case. But I really do have the sense that there are just flat out more big budget action movies and major films aimed at kids and young adults per year now than ten or twenty years ago. Maybe my perspective is skewed with age, maybe I'm just more aware of the barrage of options now than I was as a young adult.
You're overthinking this. The real reason I'm not watching Baywatch or Pirates of the Caribbean 5 is that I spent a lot of money to watch Guardians of the Galaxy 2 and I'm about to spend money to watch Wonder Woman this weekend and The Mummy next weekend.
If either of those films or even the King Arthur disaster had come out in January or February, the only popcorn junky cheesefest competition was XXX: The Return of Xander Cage. They would probably have done twice as well then versus what they'll get now. As it is, April to September is neck deep in silly adventure and action movies. I'm going to skip plenty of films I might otherwise watch just because I don't have the time and money to catch them all.
I don't even look at Rotten Tomatoes.
How many biology 101, history 101, or Mandarin 101 professors expect the students to enter the classroom with a decent background in the topic? "101" course levels imply introductory material. Until computer science classes are a standard, non-optional part of high school education in every school in the country, college CS101 students should be expected to know nothing about programming when they get to their first class.
I think Continuum will make sense for casual computer users within a few years - definitely within ten years. My teenage son has a $500 gaming PC, no smart phone is going to match it for performance. But my wife uses her phone and tablet for everything, her desktop is usually idle or off. The next time we buy a monitor for her, if getting one with mobile docking is cheap we'll do it.
And in fact, I think Continuum is exactly why Microsoft is desperate to get into mobile computing. They are going to lose hundreds of millions of non-power-users to Android and iOS in the next decade if they don't.
I think this is one of the things that's killing their adoption by the Microsoft fans. If they would just stick with one strategy and keep enhancing it, it would take even more money than they've already invested but they might make progress. But if they abandon Windows Phone 10 and users and app developers have to start again with Windows Mobile .next, their weak chances will become even weaker.
...I'm a free software nerd. So all this doesn't bother me. What bothers me is that proprietary firmware is making Android only marginally more free-as-in-freedom than iOS and Windows Phone.
How do you know what the standard case is? My oldest kid at eleven was writing better code than I could at 19. He had access to better teaching materials and an experienced mentor. If he ever takes CS101 at a college, he'll sleep through it. That doesn't mean he's got some special 'capability for insight'.
We take for granted all of the concepts you have to handle to be a developer. We do abstract visualization of algorithms - and not just the fancy O(n logn) stuff but even simple things like "open the file, read each line, extract the entries between the third and fourth commas, convert from string to integers, sum the values". We know syntax rules, and won't get tripped up by errors like "if (condition);" (the semi-colon means the if condition has no result). We understand concepts like explicit and implicit type conversions. We understand variable scoping. We understand passing by value and passing by reference. We understand compilers and interpreters. We understand static types and dynamic typing.
And none of those concepts are difficult. Really, they're not, as long as you learn them one at a time, in isolation. If you throw three or four at a novice at once, that person is going to choke even if their raw intelligence is really high. I had a tough time with the learning process and cheated to pass the first few classes. When I was in my 20s, my father tried to make a career switch into software development. His CS101 class had C++ with some libraries and web services. The old guy had a full scholarship to college the first time around and graduated with a degree in math, so he's not stupid. But the only people who passed that class were the ones that were experienced developers that just wanted to put a degree on their resume. Every true novice flunked.
You're weeding out the people whose secondary education program didn't have adequate computer science offerings. Even in 2017, that describes most secondary schools in the US.
Bullshit. This is not a tough field. When CS101 and CS102 classes are hard, all you're doing is weeding out the kids who didn't have any coding experience in high school.
My family didn't own a fucking computer before I got to college. I wanted to work in the industry, but I new nothing. I passed my first three classes by cheating. The kids that aced had taken programming classes in high school and owned computers since they were in elementary school. By junior year I was all caught up. I'm still working as a developer, almost twenty years later. Java, Python, Perl, Scala; git; Maven; Jenkins; shell, vim, sed, piping. And I would have never got here if they did a better job catching cheaters at school.
All you're doing is weeding out the people that didn't start young.
I was responding to Hognoxious' post, in which he or she (or it) wrote "and also people don't like being forced."
So you and I are saying the same thing - there's no force involved. Devuan's existence is proof there is no force involved.
Yeah? Who uses the git tools with any piece of software other than git? Ever fire up "git cherry-pick" while working with Subversion? Ever use "git fetch" instead of rsync? Ever "git revert" your SQLite database? It's a monolithic tool with a bunch of executables - and that's fine.
And Vim with its plugin systems, buffers, diff tools, regular expressions, shell out and redirect, etc... etc... system is damned close to having feature parity with emacs. So it's still a monster tool instead of itty bitty 'ed' or 'nano'. But nobody is screaming that we should all be using 'ed'.
Are they holding the GNOME developers at gunpoint? Are they blackmailing them? No, they released a piece of software with features, and the GNOME developers adopted it. No force. And they haven't shut down Xfce, Blackbox, Ratpoison, IceWM, or the other desktops either.
git and emacs go against the "small sharp tools principle", and I don't see anybody yelling that we should be using RCS and ed.
More importantly, nobody is being forced. Every developer and contributor anywhere is completely free to make their own Linux distribution without systemd, or fork an existing one. You can't say, "The Fedora and Debian developers picked systemd, and I don't want it, so they're forcing me!!!!!" - you don't have the right to make other free software contributors use the specific tools you like. If the entire Debian team wants to rewrite their display environments to look like Pac-man, I don't have to like it but they still aren't forcing me to do anything.
And again, I think the failure cases are grossly over-reported. But even if it does happen, it's like anything else - someone will fix it. We don't insist on using kernel 2.26 because there were some regressions in the 3.x and 4.x series.
Seconded. I work for a relatively small company, we have maybe seventy or so virtual machines running CentOS 7.3. There haven't been any systemd-related problems.
As an aside, some of the wireless carriers explicitly allow sharing phone plans across households.
I think the real problem is dishonest pricing. For Netflix, Amazon Prime video streaming, Hulu, Playstation Vue, Sling.tv, Youtube TV, etc... etc..., the advertised price is what you pay. And the pricing isn't necessarily cheap, either. I think Playstation Vue and Youtube TV and around $40/month.
I get brochures from Comcast, DirecTV, and Dish in the mail at least once a month each, and the prices in dazzling gold lettering have fuckall to do with the actual amount I would see on the bill. The fine print takes up most of the second page, and if you average out all of the added fees (not government taxes, but fees they just don't include in the advertised price) you're going to pay $30-$40 more than what's on front.
If they just advertised straight, I might even have stayed with their service. "$70 per month for the following 120 channels and DVR service the first year, $100 per month the second year. Plus extra fees listed below if you include any of the following channels: HBO, Cinemax, Starz, Epic." Instead unlike all of the streaming services it's "$25 per month for the first twelve months!" and then you have to spend ten minutes reading 7 point font text to figure out that between the subscriber fee, sports fee, connectivity fee, equipment fee, DVR service fee, and the $5 per month they charge customers that don't set up automatic debit for billing you're going to pay $70. It's like advertising a $6,000 new Honda Civic and then when the customer arrives mentioning that the engine costs extra.