Fedora has been using systemd for several releases now. You're using it, if you're using F16. The feature is for the conversion of service configuration scripts shipped with Fedora from SysV format to systemd-native format, not for actually changing the daemon.
FWIW - I just did a fresh install of F18 to LVM, then installed over the top of that, shrinking the LV that was mounted as / in the first install and creating a new LV within the same VG to be mounted as / in the new install. Worked fine. New install boots, the old LV still exists, can be mounted and contains the old install.
"I consider it basic software engineer to never count on a given feature that isn't done (to the point of having had at least some testing) to be available on release. You don't let your salespeople sell it. And you don't announce it. This is something I've always had a lot of respect for Google for. They rarely announce things until they're actually done. "
This is impossible if you are an open, public project. We can hardly work on a Fedora release with a new installer UI in secret. If we don't make some kind of effort to put out controlled messaging about the new installer UI, the result won't be that no-one knows about it until we're ready, the result will be that instead of controlled, accurate information being released, random, often inaccurate information will show up. Probably as a result of Phoronix taking public mailing list threads wildly out of context.
"Which are unique to Fedora that would compel one to chose it over one of the other distributions"
That's not really the point of Fedora features. Almost nothing is 'unique to Fedora' because that's not what we want with Fedora. We _want_ other distros to adopt the stuff that originates in Fedora and at RH.
"and I hope we are past the point of talking about installers"
Why would you hope that? The capabilities and interface of the installer are one of the major differentiators between distributions.
The major features that are affecting the F18 release schedule are the new installer UI and the new upgrade tool:
That was true in the past when the PSU wasn't a particularly valued component and the industry standard method of rating their power output was 'think of a number, any number. Now write that number on the side.'
It's *less* true these days if you're buying from one of the decent brands. The numbers they write on their spec sheets actually bear some kind of resemblance to reality, these days: you can actually accurately spec up your expected draw against the capabilities of a PSU and expect it to more or less work out. It's worth leaving a bit of safety room, but you don't really need 2X.
follow-up thought: as many slashdotters should probably recognize, Iain M. Banks' Culture verse is nothing but the endpoint of this process. The Culture is what you get when there is zero employment. Doesn't seem like a bad setup, all round.
Wasn't eroding employment supposed to be the *point* of technology? The biggest problem with this debate seems to be that everyone is assuming a lack of employment is a _bad_ thing.
If we can, at a relatively trivial cost, build machines to replace all menial drudgery, why is this a problem? Isn't it The Glorious Future?
We need to adjust our social, economic and political systems for the new reality, of course, but that's hardly impossible. It's not like we haven't changed them before. 150 years ago domestic service was one of the largest employment categories and only those who employed the domestics got the vote, after all. (Thinking of the U.K. here).
Hell, looked at from a certain perspective, we're already halfway *through* this change. 150 years ago a large majority of the population of any 'civilized' country had to work - whether actual paid employment, or some form of domestic labour - probably 72+ hours a week to give the country as a whole a standard of living quite a long way below what we enjoy today. I know there are still substantial numbers of people in some 'civilized' countries who have to work two jobs to keep the wolf from the door, but still, there's a hell of a lot more people who get by perfectly well on 40 hour working weeks and then don't have to hand wash their clothes or dishes when they get home.
Look at it that way and technology has _already_ reduced the amount of actual labour humans have to do by, say, 50%, and the world does not appear to have ended. What's terrible about getting rid of the other 50%?
"I wouldn't be suprised if it's just Bayes. The majority of messages with links leading to those registrars' domains were categorized by human readers as spam, so automated bayesian analysis picked it up."
Try reading the longer summary.
"It's conceivable that one or more of the domains might have gotten blacklisted as a result of Hotmail or Yahoo users clicking their "This is spam" button. However, Hotmail allows newsletter publishers to view data about what percent of their messages to Hotmail users are being flagged by users as "spam," and when I looked up the stats for our IP, they showed a "complaint rate" of less than 0.1% (usually the rest of people hitting 'Junk Mail' to unsubscribe from the list). Assuming that the complaint rates are similar for Yahoo Mail, it's unlikely that the domains got blacklisted as a result of user complaints, unless the blacklist trigger has a ridiculously low complaint threshold."
"A lot of tax avoidance strategies are based upon exploiting differences in tax codes in different countries, states and/or municipalities."
That's exactly what this story is about: the transfer of profits to no-tax or low-tax countries. According to its official accounts, Google makes about zero profit in the U.K. It officially makes a huge amount of money in Ireland, though, where its tax rate is - surprise! - rather low. All that money being 'made' in Ireland is being paid to Google by customers in the U.K., but let's not worry about such piffling details.
The tax issue here is very simple and nothing to do with loopholes in any single country's tax code, really - it's to do with the fact that international systems of tax and accounting are structured such that it's trivial for companies to report income pretty much wherever they want, regardless of where it occurred.
To pick up the very original OP's point: it's as if we were all allowed to buy a nameplate on a wall in the United Arab Emirates and then declare our income there instead of where we actually live, so we would pay 0% tax on it. Strange how individuals aren't allowed to do that.
Sigh. Again, people seem to be taking McAfee's description of Belize at face value.
Tip: don't. It's a former British colony with a by-and-large functional democracy and court system. And he _fricking well chose to live there_, to take advantage of its lax law enforcement regarding taxes and/or drugs. Seems a bit rich to start loudly protesting about said legal system once it stops serving your ends.
And the accepted way for people to be proven guilty is for them to be brought to trial. McAfee appears to believe not in 'innocent until proven guilty', as he's dead set against giving anyone a chance to prove him guilty in court. He appears to believe in 'innocent until caught'.
We *could* only give source to paid enterprise customers, if we chose, but we choose to host it for anyone to download. You can actually get RHEL binaries free too, you have to sign up for an 'evaluation' though. We only make official update binaries available to paid enterprise customers, via the RH update network.
"At the moment it looks like email client support is dead" - Evolution is still actively maintained, there are at least two full-time developers on it that I know of. That's why it has bugs, funnily enough - because it's still getting major updates...
Evo has been pretty heavily touched in the last few release cycles, though most of the changes are 'under the hood' and right now the UI is still rather like a copy of Outlook from a decade ago (which actually suits me fine, but might not be what most people want). But stuff like the calendar backends have had heavy work and the entire IMAP backend was written over the last few versions.
I've always liked Evo, though there certainly was a Thunderbird-trend for a while. I use it with a personal server on a local network, so I wonder if those who have more trouble with it are using remote servers.
The 3.5 builds were _very_ buggy, but most of the mess got shaken out for 3.6.0 and now 3.6.2 is pretty decent for me. It still has a weird bug where it seems to get very sluggish after it's been running for a while (not RAM exhaustion), but that doesn't appear to be happening to everyone, so probably wouldn't affect you.
It has Google calendar integration which works pretty well for me (this is one of the things that was affected by recent rewrites; for a few releases it wasn't working very well at all, but in 3.6 it seems pretty good). It does CalDAV at least in theory, though I haven't tried it out much myself. It has all the other features listed as 'desired'.
"The term "football" is in reference to playing the game "on foot" as opposed to mounted on a horse like polo. Many early versions of games called football in the middle ages involved practically no kicking of a ball at all. The direct precursors to Association Football, or Soccer, allowed one to not only touch the ball with your hands, but catch it, too (i.e. the fair catch, which still survives with Soccer's cousins Rugby and American Football)."
You can put it even more simply than that: the North American football codes derive directly from the sport of rugby football, as it is formally known. You know, the sport whose UK governing body is the Rugby Football Union.
The UK spawned two football codes, rugby football and association football. Through various quirks of fate, the rugby code was the one mostly adopted in North America, and it gradually mutated into the sport played today. (Various CFL teams still had 'rugby' in their formal club names well into the 20th century, FWIW). Simple enough.
I always like to point this out to smirking Brits who say football should be called 'handegg', and invite them to go down to their local rugby club and politely explain to the nice friendly boys there why their game should be called 'handegg'...
The other factor to consider is that the U.S. has very liberal healthcare regulations. To put it more colorfully: the U.S. is very tolerant of people offering medical treatments which have no proven use whatsoever. So long as they don't actively hurt anyone, and you jump through the appropriate legal loopholes, you'll do fine.
The publicly-funded systems in Canada won't pay for you to receive a treatment for your disease which has been shown by clinical studies to be completely ineffective in treating that disease. obviously. There wouldn't be any fricking point.
But say the disease you have is a terminal one, and you read on the internet that this treatment REALLY WORKED because some dude in Florida had it and he ran a marathon the next week! Can you go the the U.S. and waste a ton of your own money on that treatment? Why yes, you absolutely can. It will be a waste of your (extremely precious) time and money, but you absolutely can do it.
Quite a lot of medical tourism to the U.S. falls in precisely this category of quacks taking advantage of the desperate. That doesn't seem like something the U.S. should be *proud* of.
"Doesn't an elevator know approximately how many people there are in it based on the weight of the cart?"
Weight of human beings varies from about 5lbs right up to 800lbs, so, no. Even if you discount people unlikely to be old enough to be making their own floor decisions, a very thin/short person can easily weigh in well under 100lbs, or 1/8th of a Biggest Loser candidate...
You mean, 'on your Windows RT device'. Which, if you don't want to deal with the restrictions on, you don't buy. Just like if you don't want to deal with the restrictions on an iPad, you don't buy an iPad.
Slashdot Mirror
Fedora has been using systemd for several releases now. You're using it, if you're using F16. The feature is for the conversion of service configuration scripts shipped with Fedora from SysV format to systemd-native format, not for actually changing the daemon.
FWIW - I just did a fresh install of F18 to LVM, then installed over the top of that, shrinking the LV that was mounted as / in the first install and creating a new LV within the same VG to be mounted as / in the new install. Worked fine. New install boots, the old LV still exists, can be mounted and contains the old install.
"I consider it basic software engineer to never count on a given feature that isn't done (to the point of having had at least some testing) to be available on release. You don't let your salespeople sell it. And you don't announce it. This is something I've always had a lot of respect for Google for. They rarely announce things until they're actually done. "
This is impossible if you are an open, public project. We can hardly work on a Fedora release with a new installer UI in secret. If we don't make some kind of effort to put out controlled messaging about the new installer UI, the result won't be that no-one knows about it until we're ready, the result will be that instead of controlled, accurate information being released, random, often inaccurate information will show up. Probably as a result of Phoronix taking public mailing list threads wildly out of context.
"It is basically impossible to create a new LV or btrfs subvolume and install into it."
Um. No it isn't. Specific bug references, please?
sysv-to-systemd is not blocking release. If you want to know what's blocking release, what you want to look at is the Release Blockers:
http://qa.fedoraproject.org/blockerbugs/milestone/18/final/buglist
"Which are unique to Fedora that would compel one to chose it over one of the other distributions"
That's not really the point of Fedora features. Almost nothing is 'unique to Fedora' because that's not what we want with Fedora. We _want_ other distros to adopt the stuff that originates in Fedora and at RH.
"and I hope we are past the point of talking about installers"
Why would you hope that? The capabilities and interface of the installer are one of the major differentiators between distributions.
The major features that are affecting the F18 release schedule are the new installer UI and the new upgrade tool:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/NewInstallerUI
Features that are significant new code that's landing in Fedora probably before most other places:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/Virt_Guest_Suspend_Hibernate
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/SystemStorageManager
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/SecureBoot (Ubuntu 12.10 actually landed shim first, it was written by mjg59 as part of this Fedora feature and on RH time, though)
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/PackagePresets
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/RealHotspot
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/firewalld-default
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/DNF
there's probably others, I don't know a lot about some of the features at https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/18/FeatureList .
So now the slashvertisements have nothing to do with tech?
It's not like this is even news, I've heard of several small sake breweries in NA. There's at least one (I think two, now) here in Vancouver (BC).
"Cuban said, 'The current state of patents and patent litigation in this country is shameful," said Cuban"
I've invented a system for automatically removing double quotation attributions from news stories. Should I take out a patent, folks?
Headline should read "Researchers Develop Tool For Twitter Trolls To Improve Plausibility Of Their Tweets"
That was true in the past when the PSU wasn't a particularly valued component and the industry standard method of rating their power output was 'think of a number, any number. Now write that number on the side.'
It's *less* true these days if you're buying from one of the decent brands. The numbers they write on their spec sheets actually bear some kind of resemblance to reality, these days: you can actually accurately spec up your expected draw against the capabilities of a PSU and expect it to more or less work out. It's worth leaving a bit of safety room, but you don't really need 2X.
follow-up thought: as many slashdotters should probably recognize, Iain M. Banks' Culture verse is nothing but the endpoint of this process. The Culture is what you get when there is zero employment. Doesn't seem like a bad setup, all round.
Wasn't eroding employment supposed to be the *point* of technology? The biggest problem with this debate seems to be that everyone is assuming a lack of employment is a _bad_ thing.
If we can, at a relatively trivial cost, build machines to replace all menial drudgery, why is this a problem? Isn't it The Glorious Future?
We need to adjust our social, economic and political systems for the new reality, of course, but that's hardly impossible. It's not like we haven't changed them before. 150 years ago domestic service was one of the largest employment categories and only those who employed the domestics got the vote, after all. (Thinking of the U.K. here).
Hell, looked at from a certain perspective, we're already halfway *through* this change. 150 years ago a large majority of the population of any 'civilized' country had to work - whether actual paid employment, or some form of domestic labour - probably 72+ hours a week to give the country as a whole a standard of living quite a long way below what we enjoy today. I know there are still substantial numbers of people in some 'civilized' countries who have to work two jobs to keep the wolf from the door, but still, there's a hell of a lot more people who get by perfectly well on 40 hour working weeks and then don't have to hand wash their clothes or dishes when they get home.
Look at it that way and technology has _already_ reduced the amount of actual labour humans have to do by, say, 50%, and the world does not appear to have ended. What's terrible about getting rid of the other 50%?
"I wouldn't be suprised if it's just Bayes. The majority of messages with links leading to those registrars' domains were categorized by human readers as spam, so automated bayesian analysis picked it up."
Try reading the longer summary.
"It's conceivable that one or more of the domains might have gotten blacklisted as a result of Hotmail or Yahoo users clicking their "This is spam" button. However, Hotmail allows newsletter publishers to view data about what percent of their messages to Hotmail users are being flagged by users as "spam," and when I looked up the stats for our IP, they showed a "complaint rate" of less than 0.1% (usually the rest of people hitting 'Junk Mail' to unsubscribe from the list). Assuming that the complaint rates are similar for Yahoo Mail, it's unlikely that the domains got blacklisted as a result of user complaints, unless the blacklist trigger has a ridiculously low complaint threshold."
"A lot of tax avoidance strategies are based upon exploiting differences in tax codes in different countries, states and/or municipalities."
That's exactly what this story is about: the transfer of profits to no-tax or low-tax countries. According to its official accounts, Google makes about zero profit in the U.K. It officially makes a huge amount of money in Ireland, though, where its tax rate is - surprise! - rather low. All that money being 'made' in Ireland is being paid to Google by customers in the U.K., but let's not worry about such piffling details.
The tax issue here is very simple and nothing to do with loopholes in any single country's tax code, really - it's to do with the fact that international systems of tax and accounting are structured such that it's trivial for companies to report income pretty much wherever they want, regardless of where it occurred.
To pick up the very original OP's point: it's as if we were all allowed to buy a nameplate on a wall in the United Arab Emirates and then declare our income there instead of where we actually live, so we would pay 0% tax on it. Strange how individuals aren't allowed to do that.
Sigh. Again, people seem to be taking McAfee's description of Belize at face value.
Tip: don't. It's a former British colony with a by-and-large functional democracy and court system. And he _fricking well chose to live there_, to take advantage of its lax law enforcement regarding taxes and/or drugs. Seems a bit rich to start loudly protesting about said legal system once it stops serving your ends.
And the accepted way for people to be proven guilty is for them to be brought to trial. McAfee appears to believe not in 'innocent until proven guilty', as he's dead set against giving anyone a chance to prove him guilty in court. He appears to believe in 'innocent until caught'.
"For instance Red Hat exclusively gives source to paid enterprise customers"
This is not at all true.
Here, have all the SRPMs you like, on me:
http://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/enterprise/
We *could* only give source to paid enterprise customers, if we chose, but we choose to host it for anyone to download. You can actually get RHEL binaries free too, you have to sign up for an 'evaluation' though. We only make official update binaries available to paid enterprise customers, via the RH update network.
"At the moment it looks like email client support is dead" - Evolution is still actively maintained, there are at least two full-time developers on it that I know of. That's why it has bugs, funnily enough - because it's still getting major updates...
Evo has been pretty heavily touched in the last few release cycles, though most of the changes are 'under the hood' and right now the UI is still rather like a copy of Outlook from a decade ago (which actually suits me fine, but might not be what most people want). But stuff like the calendar backends have had heavy work and the entire IMAP backend was written over the last few versions.
I've always liked Evo, though there certainly was a Thunderbird-trend for a while. I use it with a personal server on a local network, so I wonder if those who have more trouble with it are using remote servers.
The 3.5 builds were _very_ buggy, but most of the mess got shaken out for 3.6.0 and now 3.6.2 is pretty decent for me. It still has a weird bug where it seems to get very sluggish after it's been running for a while (not RAM exhaustion), but that doesn't appear to be happening to everyone, so probably wouldn't affect you.
It has Google calendar integration which works pretty well for me (this is one of the things that was affected by recent rewrites; for a few releases it wasn't working very well at all, but in 3.6 it seems pretty good). It does CalDAV at least in theory, though I haven't tried it out much myself. It has all the other features listed as 'desired'.
Because after all, who can we trust to protect our privacy better than Facebook?!
Sports that don't involve massive brain trauma? Last I checked, Americans were pretty keen on several of those too.
"The term "football" is in reference to playing the game "on foot" as opposed to mounted on a horse like polo. Many early versions of games called football in the middle ages involved practically no kicking of a ball at all. The direct precursors to Association Football, or Soccer, allowed one to not only touch the ball with your hands, but catch it, too (i.e. the fair catch, which still survives with Soccer's cousins Rugby and American Football)."
You can put it even more simply than that: the North American football codes derive directly from the sport of rugby football, as it is formally known. You know, the sport whose UK governing body is the Rugby Football Union.
The UK spawned two football codes, rugby football and association football. Through various quirks of fate, the rugby code was the one mostly adopted in North America, and it gradually mutated into the sport played today. (Various CFL teams still had 'rugby' in their formal club names well into the 20th century, FWIW). Simple enough.
I always like to point this out to smirking Brits who say football should be called 'handegg', and invite them to go down to their local rugby club and politely explain to the nice friendly boys there why their game should be called 'handegg'...
The other factor to consider is that the U.S. has very liberal healthcare regulations. To put it more colorfully: the U.S. is very tolerant of people offering medical treatments which have no proven use whatsoever. So long as they don't actively hurt anyone, and you jump through the appropriate legal loopholes, you'll do fine.
The publicly-funded systems in Canada won't pay for you to receive a treatment for your disease which has been shown by clinical studies to be completely ineffective in treating that disease. obviously. There wouldn't be any fricking point.
But say the disease you have is a terminal one, and you read on the internet that this treatment REALLY WORKED because some dude in Florida had it and he ran a marathon the next week! Can you go the the U.S. and waste a ton of your own money on that treatment? Why yes, you absolutely can. It will be a waste of your (extremely precious) time and money, but you absolutely can do it.
Quite a lot of medical tourism to the U.S. falls in precisely this category of quacks taking advantage of the desperate. That doesn't seem like something the U.S. should be *proud* of.
...one of the things they teach you about in college is the value of anecdotal evidence...
"Doesn't an elevator know approximately how many people there are in it based on the weight of the cart?"
Weight of human beings varies from about 5lbs right up to 800lbs, so, no. Even if you discount people unlikely to be old enough to be making their own floor decisions, a very thin/short person can easily weigh in well under 100lbs, or 1/8th of a Biggest Loser candidate...
You mean, 'on your Windows RT device'. Which, if you don't want to deal with the restrictions on, you don't buy. Just like if you don't want to deal with the restrictions on an iPad, you don't buy an iPad.