Two words - LEGO Midstorms - it would be so awesome if they were around when I was seven... but I am thirty four. Anyway - LEGO Mindstorms - I can't think about better way to show how seemingly simple drag and drop programing can influence real world objects (robots man!).
First of all You haven't said what country you are working in so I assume USA. Somehow USA people assume that everybody else lives here. Whatever. But it is important since the stuff you are asking is related to work conditions in given country.
> getting credit for their work
Probably irrevelant - they know their value, what they do and did so they need no patting on back.
> always having the break room fridge stocked
Also - whatever - people at certain age (I guess 30+) usualy tend to have own specific diet and also tastes so if you stock fridge with junk food or whatever it makes no difference since they probably go to lunch or ourder preffered food anyway. Just have a high-end coffe machine, loads of tea (you drink tea in US?) and maybe a blender. Food is individual choice.
> But I'd like to hear about the other things, big and small
1. As a manager - stand by them - whatever happens, if they do great, id they have some concerns, if they fuck up - stand for them as they are your people. Speak your mind to them but if it comes to relations with other business departmens you are the man to stand for the team.
2. Personally in my workplace I like a little flexibility in work hours - f.e. three times a week I go to work out at gym in work time - then I stay late the time I was at gym but I like it.
Severely depressed person wouldn't be able to get up from bed and go to work. Not speaking of performing such act which requires planning, energy, will power and courage. These are features that severely depressed persons simply lack. If all this is true the co-pilot was for sure psychopatic and had some other mental issues but IMO it wasn't depression.
Redmine is great. I use it for all our internal IT projects and also service desk. On desktop computer there is not really a need for native client as web based version works OK. For tablet and phones there are few native clients that use Redmine API and once I checkd them RedminePM worked very well for us.
Around 2008 when there was this all netbook craze I've owned E90x (the early one with 4GB+16GB flash storage). For the price and form factor it was OK but it had lots of flaws for me - slow processor (Atom @900MHz as I recall), small and slow storage (onboard 4GB was ok but the additional 16GB sucked) also I needed to plug wacky USB dongle to get 3G Internet acces which was inconviniently sticking out on the side. After few months I've given it to my mother so she could play Mahjong and got Lenovo S10...
Lenovo S10 - best netbook I owned EVER. I've modified it a little - swaped hard drive for slightly faster that I've got laying around, maxed out RAM, bought big-ass china made battery (biggest possible) and expresscard 3G modem that was sticking out just about 1cm on the side. I recall this was the best portable laptop I ever owned (this was pre tablet and pre ultrabook era) - enough power to run Linux decently (Atom @1600MHz, 2GB RAM), plenty of storage (fast 320GB HDD), great connectivity with 3G Internet, 9hr battery life (YES! 9 HOURS!), most of software I use ran localy and for work I was RDPing to my workstation anyway. And it also looked and feeled great reminiscent of ThinkPad industrial design (the later S10 editions were awful).
That was great laptop for that era (early 3G internet, pre-tablet, pre-ultrabook).
> Now if google would just announce no more flash allowed in ads, we'd be set.
If you are using Chrome you can set "Click to play" policy for all plugins in chrome://settings/content - as result you won't see any Flash ads (or any other plugins) without clicking on the placeholder. This way you get rid of Flash ads and it is also way more secure to just do not run plugins if you don't explicitly want to. You can also turn on plugins on a white list per site basis.
Ads are actually coming from Google's ContentID. ContentID scans uploaded media against signatures. The signatures are of licensed artwork like f.e. "Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up" - so if you are Rick Astley and upload your signature video to Google then you can set policy if somebody f.e. posts video in which the licensed artwork is used and ContentID matches it. The policy can be AFAIK to: just inform you about match but do nothing; block the content entirely or display an ad before the content - the revenue from ads goes partialy to Google and to Rick Astley. So here is why sometimes you have ads on YouTube and sometimes not. IMO it is a fair system.
IMO the best (but not the cheapest) option would be to use personal NAS server with some level of mirrored RAID. Configure backup from all machines/data you wish to backup to the NAS server. Then sync it with cloud provider. Of course when picking cloud provider do check to have strong data encryption, 2F authentication, account/data access audit and DO backup your encryption case (in case you loose it there would be no way to acces your data) - just print it in plain text form and store somewhere safe.
If you do it right everything would be automated and you won't need to do any manual actions with it. Just monitor its status. And do test recoveries from time to time.
And YES - I've noticed you are against the cloud which is in my opinion silly. Decent cloud provider's DC will by much more secure (as in physical security, data mirroring) than any homegrown solution. What you are afraid of? If you are afraid of automated attacks like malware they will target your personal machine anyway, not your backup, backup is not the weakest link here. Also any profiled attacks on your person will target your client machine. So what is your practical point against using cloud storage?
Also worth mentioning that NAS server is not mandatory in such setups. Just it speeds up things a little and gives more control. Also it provides the "oops" factor protection (like incidentaly deleting something - which is satistically the most often case to need backup recovery anyway).
Still if you oppose to use cloud just exchange cloud option for offline media stored offsite (like safe at your friends house or bank). Which media to use is entirely up to you. As you haven't stated what your need are (like how much data, how often it changes, what would be your preffered policy as weekly, monthly etc.) I can't recommend anything. An uneducated guess would be to use external HDD drives in enclosures and rotate them. Or for the cheapest option BlueRay discs.
> IMO Firefox are doing this right. [...] I've worked in more than one organisation > that was doing MITM on their staff's SSL sessions (unknown to the staff) by silently > pushing "trusted" DIY certs to the workstations by policy.
1) I don't belive that the organisation was doing it secretly or they were complete legal morons. Almost any larger organization has policies which you as employee/user accept. These policies are in place to inform you of such practices so you cannot sue them back for privacy breaches. 2) If organisation has the power to install certificates on client machines it basically administeres these machines. As an administrator it is safe to assume that they also got the means to block Fx or whatever unsupported software. Also usually serious organizations maintain a policy list of allowed software.
So in fact there is nothing that Fx did right in this scenatrio.
I am personally a Chromium user and as an administrator Fx states to piss me off. We support Fx on workstations, we push new releases form ERS channel via GPO and MSI installs. This usually works but once in a while it stops working and requires manual tweaking - and it is not our fault but Mozillas pushing undocumented new options or different defaults. We do test so it is not a major problem but it is more work that it should be.
> On the one hand, forking is what drives Free Software. It allows us to innovate, > adapt software to new needs, etc. Without it, the FOSS community would not be > as strong as it is.
Of course the ability of forking is great. I would compare it to a relationship - if at some point you realize that your goals or whatever are not in sync then you fork it is not easy comes with attached looses to both sides but it is but doable. And an obvious way to go if you can't go together.
BUT this is not a fork in my opinion. A fork it will be if we can get anything usable from it like a working distro in this case. But now it is just an other act of DRAMA. Like in relationship - you know I am forking right now! look this is my fork website! look i WILL fork. Geeesh than do fork and get over it.
These guys are behaving like overly attached boy/girl friend who in fact DOES NOT want to fork but uses threats that she/he will fork to force something on the other side.
I know it is simplification but really right now from my point of view it just looks like emotional drama.
As for techical merits in my own opinion. I dont care. I am not by any means a white bearded system admin. I use Linux profesionally and I like it. I really haven't noticed the whole systemd drama until it popped out in media. Professinaly I use RHEL and CentOS because I can run software on it for my employer and it is OK. We use Oracle, SAP, Zimbra and other products so for me it makes no real difference as what init system is used as far as it works.
In my personal systems I've used RH from like 5.0 release and I liked it. I used it till it separated into RHEL and Fedora - then I've used Fedora but around release 14 or some it becamed very annoying (lots of problems with distro upgrade, hardware etc.). Then I've started to evaluate other distros. Also got a RaspberryPi and tried Pidora on that. More annoyng than ever. Then I've tried Arch Linux and I got hooked imediately - works well on my home systems (server, workstation, laptop) and also on RaspberryPi. And it uses systemd in more fashinable way than Fedora (but things may have gone better - I've not touched it since 14). So I don't really get this systemd "controversy".
First of all - thanks for an interesting comment. Your insight on licensing issues regarding use of systemd never occured to me.
Regarding your comment - I cant validate all your claims right now but I trust they are valid - in Your opinion why there is NO mention about licensing on the new fork site? The site is TL;DR to me as it is in my opinion yet another meaningless fork of Debian but I tried to search the site for terms like "license", "gpl" and there are exactly zero occurances of such terms. It seems to me as the authors of the fork didn't find your arguments about licensing as interesting to mention it.
So how exactly this fork is better for your goals?
If I was in situation in which licensing was critical to me I would use Gentoo since as far as I know it is only decent and recent distro that actually lets you choose init system to your liking.
Mozilla is loosing it. Fx gets more and more irrelevant between various UI changes and more bloat added. Usage is declining. And yet they try to reinvent themselves with such ideas. What for? Just make a decent browser and build developer tools into it like everybody else does. What is the point of such product? To have yet another browser/platform to build and test for?
And exactly what aspect of control is taken from you by systemd?
> Apparently, systemd replaces all that and more with a single monolithic > structure, which seems more akin to the Windows way of doing things.
No it isn't. Lots of commercial unix like operating systems had moved on to some form of init system not based on shell scripts f.e. Solaris, Mac OS X etc.
> It's main selling point appears to be boot-up speed
No it isn't.
> IMO the cost that we must all pay for that extra speed is just too high
And what is the cost exactly? What exactly do you have against systemd? Only thing you stated is that it is monolithic and non unix way. I don't rally care about it. What practical limitation does it cause? Only valid complains about systemd I've read so far is that is not standard as it is an implementation and in theory this shouldn't be done like that. And I agree but still it exist, it works and it is not going anywhere. The second complaint is that it uses binary log file. It does in fact but I also don't care about that. I can config it to forward to syslog so it is no problem. Actually by using such architecture it can start logging earlier than sysvinit system which is better. These two flaws do exist but they do not rule against systemd in general. It is still a step forward in right dimension.
Look at CoreOS and its components like fleet - this is what systemd was designed for and it is strictly server operating system.
> The init process is a critical stage: failure tends to leave you with no access to > the system to diagnose the failure.
Nowdays not really a problem. If this is a desktop system then just hook up a LiveCD with your choosen distro or an USB stick and go on from the live system. With live system images you have all the tools you need and as far as the system's storageis not damaged you can do whatever you wish. As for servers - well remote lights out, management cards, flash addons, consoles etc. you can do whatever to rescue the system. Or if you cant afford it just use serial console to the bootloader and add a failsafe recovery system partition with an image containing all the needed tools and you are ready to go. Mind that these means were used like long time ago even before systemd happened.;) If you are thinking about disaster then get ready for it when your systems work.
> Shell scripts and plaintext log files may be primitive, but they have the advantage of being easy > to read with minimal access and not requiring complex stuff to run
Look above - complex stuff to run is not as complex as you see it. You can easly run even an graphical desktop system to recover your system even if you wish for doing so (most live cds do so). You just need to plan it ahead.
> mainly they just require that basic binaries be available in the path
Systemd does not depend on these tiny binaries. In my opinion it is an advantage. It still needs to get unit information from somewhere (like local filesystem or fleet).
> Until I've got at least a basic system up and running enough to log in and work
This is probably the old or wrong way of doing stuff. Just boot from something else and chroot to the system and then check the problem.
> text-based tools will probably run to decipher binary logfiles
You reall don't need to decipher anything as the log files are not ciphered. You just need to open them with specialised tool (avaiable on your rescue media from which you have booted). You don't quite get why people have problem with binary log files do you? The problem is not about tools for accessing them - the main problem is if they get corrupt they are much harder to recover than plain text files.
> and modify configurations
With systemd you do not need any special binary tool to modify configuration.
> The only change I'd make is to make systemd use syslogd like everything else
But it does.
> SysV init scripts may be clunky and primitive, but they've been around a long time.
So?
> People know how to manage them, and they've had the kinks worked out of them and > best practices established. systemd doesn't have that.
It does. But I get what you're getting at - writing a startup script yourself. So maybe try writing systemd unit for your need yourself and then compare it to sysv. IMVHO systemd units are easier (as more simple) to write than shell scipts for sysvinit. But YMMV.
> if Debian were to reverse their earlier decision and go back to sysvinit (or at least make > systemd optional), then I think we could see many sysadmins converting their RHEL > systems to Debian jessie
You are joking, right? The reason people use RHEL not Debian is primary because tons of commercial software built on SAP, Oracle and similar are *supported* on RHEL. That has little to do with RHEL or Debian being technically superior from each other. After all Debian and RHEL are just Linux distributions not so much different from technical standpoint you have similar technical limitations using these as both use Linux as kernel. People use RHEL because they need to have support for the apps they are running. Not because it uses this init system or other - none of RHEL admins really care about it as long as it is supported by the business apps they need to operate.
And also I don't quite get the shitstorm going on about systemd. I think compared to sysvinit it is a great step forward. And I'm a professional sysadmin administering just few Linux systems - couple of RHEL boxes (Oracle related stuff), some CentOS (for Zimbra and MariaDB which we use internally) and CoreOS with Docker and all of systemd glory mostly for my own amusement at our own webapps. All of these are systemd powered right now and I don't see any problem with that. Just works as an OS.
Oh and on home laptop, home nettop and few raspis automating stuff I use Arch Linux with systemd of course.
Re:Give it another decade - the problem will solve
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The Future of Stamps
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> You can fax legal documents (...) the state of Utah (...) New York allowed (...) Australia allows it [cnet.com], and anther New York [etc.]
But you are you aware that lots of other countries than USA or Austrialia exist and such even tend to have precedent or non-precedent legal systems? I know that general tendency is to go to electronic means where possible but I am quite sure that there still are and still be situations in which the new/current ways are not possible and you need to keep the old system running to support them. For example how do you deliver legal papers to inmates who cannot use email or Facebook?
> Requiring someone to buy a laser device to burn "stamps" onto envelopes and packages won't work.
This I fully agree. The idea is so stupid I don't even know how it got here to Slashdot.
Re:Give it another decade - the problem will solve
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The Future of Stamps
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· Score: 1
IDK how it is in the US but here in Poland the post is like an institution. Fe. if you have an invoice or legal paper you can send deliver it yourself, you can send it by private held company like TNT, UPS, whatever but only when you send it via Polish Post (national operator) it gets so called the power of postal stamp. Legally if you choose the right delivery type it is valid as delivery in court. Such postage is still deeply embodied in legal system and I think it has some merit. In Poland f.e. you could run a company and register its address for legal purposes as PO box in some large office complex where you just rented a PO box. In case of this special Polish Post delivery it is an obligation to the office complex administrator to deliver this postage physically as he gives the PO boxes to his clients he also has an obligation to deliver such postage.
I think Post Office isn't going anywhere and lots of people still send physical letters due to legal conditions and I don't think it is Polish only thing. Also people tend to send faxes. F.e. I was required to send signed legal papers via fax (snail mail would take longer but was also an option) when we was changing our DNS owner information due to company name change. This is silly but still it has some silly merit.
But as for the gadget in the article - laser postal stamps? It sounds quite cool but it makes no sense as in no real purpose. People who use snail mail en masse tend to have agreements with their posts to bulk send it with stamp or pre-printed stickers or pre-printed envelopes. In some countries to obtain a "stamp" to send an letter you just send an SMS to paid premium number and in reply you get a number which you just write on the envelope/card. In Poland you can get fancy stamps with your design on it etc.
(I've used to work at Polish Post IT department head office)
Cant wait to get my hands on one of these. Unfortunately Amazon doesn't ship to Poland so I can't get it here. I have two concerns regarding this:
I understand this is an amateur class device. Better (or is it?) than Authenticator app as you need to gain the physical key since a phone app can be accessed remotely at least in theory but still not hard security as corporate smart cards, RSA tokens etc. Just hardware two form auth for the masses and I guess it is a good thing to have (or is it?). But as I see the form of distribution of this hardware is quite loose. If I order it via Amazon (if I could) it goes through amazon warehouses, shipping company etc. - could this device be tampered with in shipping? Shouldn't it have a safer distribution method like physical store so you can randomly pick one and it couldn't be identified to your identity?
How does it work? It states that it requires supported browser (Chrome 38) on any platform it runs but does it also work in Chromium (I am using Chromium)? Can it be used in other applications f.e. VPN client, SSH client? Does it use some open source library, tools? How it works as a device - I plug it in and it registers as standard USB class device - what class is it?
I've tried to google these concerns for few seconds but couldn't find good information so please anybody could clarify on this?
Facebook filters your wall posts so not everything you post gets to everybody's feed. They are afraid people using Facebook get too many meaningless information from other people like look I just watched this Youtube video and you should too. So they use algorithms that select data you post to other people. I guess they select it by number of likes, views etc. So given that they DO censor what you post they are afraid that they could censor also such important information regarding your safety. But they are not afraid about you - they are afraid about legal issues surrounding this. So they invented a way to control whether you are allowed or not to post such critical information. In my opinion this is just about covering their asses, not about your safety.
Because from Facebook's POV (huh) such status update is not related to major disaster. As I see it they are doing it to omit liability in case your status update in fact would be real in case of serious incident. Right now they are doing serious filtering of what gets into your feed since they are shit crazed about people leaving Facebook getting sick of all the irrelevant crap they see. This (proposed in the article) way they can select on the basis of fact of some disaster happening who can post such updates and these updates would be omitted by their what-is-interesting-and-what-is-not filters.
> The a good thing to do with an iMac would be a decent SSD... as well > as an external drive appliance with RAID 1, or a volume with software > RAID that is similar.
To have backups is the good thing to do whatever OS or hardware you run.
That is similar to what is going on with PC laptops. Basically MacBook Air is an ultrabook in PC nomenclature. PC ultrabooks also tend to be less upgradeable and serviceable than bigger laptops. For example compare Lenovo ThinkPad 430 and 430u (u - as in ultrabook). The slim design just forces use of smalled perhaps nonremovable parts. IMO all PC laptops that match MacBook Air size are also as unupgradeble and unserviceable as MacBook Air - it is not a marketing choice by Apple but the size imples it. Also what is new that you can't upgrade or service your phone or tablet - any brand. Get over it.
The newest Mac OS X 2006 MacBook can run now is Lion (to be honest - you CAN run Mountain Lion but it involves hacking the install media, some voodoo with kexts etc. - I would not be sure about stability of such system). Which is now 3 releases old. Not a big deal if you really want to run it (simply put - you have no money for newer hardware) but it will certainly give you compability issues like recent versions of software not working at all. With PC laptops usually you can pop in recent-decent version of Windows even on much older hardware. It will run slowly (such as Lion on 2006 MacBook with 2Gs RAM) but it will run your software. With Mac you can't do that.
IMO you've mistaken political correctness and socialism terms for something else. Your first point about media censoring an opinion is in fact related to political correctness but after that you have no clue. Think about yourself - please answer this sincerely - if you or somebody close to you had contradicted Ebola abroad of your country would you wish your country to help you or not? After all you've had paid for your country's medical care in your taxes - and this is by no means socialism. So how would it be? Would you wish your country to help you or your close one or just leave you to certain death abroad perhaps in some uncivilized African country?
Slashdot Mirror
Two words - LEGO Midstorms - it would be so awesome if they were around when I was seven... but I am thirty four. Anyway - LEGO Mindstorms - I can't think about better way to show how seemingly simple drag and drop programing can influence real world objects (robots man!).
First of all You haven't said what country you are working in so I assume USA. Somehow USA people assume that everybody else lives here. Whatever. But it is important since the stuff you are asking is related to work conditions in given country.
> getting credit for their work
Probably irrevelant - they know their value, what they do and did so they need no patting on back.
> always having the break room fridge stocked
Also - whatever - people at certain age (I guess 30+) usualy tend to have own specific diet and also tastes so if you stock fridge with junk food or whatever it makes no difference since they probably go to lunch or ourder preffered food anyway. Just have a high-end coffe machine, loads of tea (you drink tea in US?) and maybe a blender. Food is individual choice.
> But I'd like to hear about the other things, big and small
1. As a manager - stand by them - whatever happens, if they do great, id they have some concerns, if they fuck up - stand for them as they are your people. Speak your mind to them but if it comes to relations with other business departmens you are the man to stand for the team.
2. Personally in my workplace I like a little flexibility in work hours - f.e. three times a week I go to work out at gym in work time - then I stay late the time I was at gym but I like it.
Severely depressed person wouldn't be able to get up from bed and go to work. Not speaking of performing such act which requires planning, energy, will power and courage. These are features that severely depressed persons simply lack. If all this is true the co-pilot was for sure psychopatic and had some other mental issues but IMO it wasn't depression.
Redmine is great. I use it for all our internal IT projects and also service desk. On desktop computer there is not really a need for native client as web based version works OK. For tablet and phones there are few native clients that use Redmine API and once I checkd them RedminePM worked very well for us.
> My personal foible: I stop and start videos a lot, and hunting with the slider to find out where I left off is a royal pain
In the PDF linked from this post there is a slide (on 20th page) showing just that functionality so I guess they wish to add it.
Around 2008 when there was this all netbook craze I've owned E90x (the early one with 4GB+16GB flash storage). For the price and form factor it was OK but it had lots of flaws for me - slow processor (Atom @900MHz as I recall), small and slow storage (onboard 4GB was ok but the additional 16GB sucked) also I needed to plug wacky USB dongle to get 3G Internet acces which was inconviniently sticking out on the side. After few months I've given it to my mother so she could play Mahjong and got Lenovo S10...
Lenovo S10 - best netbook I owned EVER. I've modified it a little - swaped hard drive for slightly faster that I've got laying around, maxed out RAM, bought big-ass china made battery (biggest possible) and expresscard 3G modem that was sticking out just about 1cm on the side. I recall this was the best portable laptop I ever owned (this was pre tablet and pre ultrabook era) - enough power to run Linux decently (Atom @1600MHz, 2GB RAM), plenty of storage (fast 320GB HDD), great connectivity with 3G Internet, 9hr battery life (YES! 9 HOURS!), most of software I use ran localy and for work I was RDPing to my workstation anyway. And it also looked and feeled great reminiscent of ThinkPad industrial design (the later S10 editions were awful).
That was great laptop for that era (early 3G internet, pre-tablet, pre-ultrabook).
A friend of mine still uses it.
> Now if google would just announce no more flash allowed in ads, we'd be set.
If you are using Chrome you can set "Click to play" policy for all plugins in chrome://settings/content - as result you won't see any Flash ads (or any other plugins) without clicking on the placeholder. This way you get rid of Flash ads and it is also way more secure to just do not run plugins if you don't explicitly want to. You can also turn on plugins on a white list per site basis.
Ads are actually coming from Google's ContentID. ContentID scans uploaded media against signatures. The signatures are of licensed artwork like f.e. "Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up" - so if you are Rick Astley and upload your signature video to Google then you can set policy if somebody f.e. posts video in which the licensed artwork is used and ContentID matches it. The policy can be AFAIK to: just inform you about match but do nothing; block the content entirely or display an ad before the content - the revenue from ads goes partialy to Google and to Rick Astley. So here is why sometimes you have ads on YouTube and sometimes not. IMO it is a fair system.
IMO the best (but not the cheapest) option would be to use personal NAS server with some level of mirrored RAID. Configure backup from all machines/data you wish to backup to the NAS server. Then sync it with cloud provider. Of course when picking cloud provider do check to have strong data encryption, 2F authentication, account/data access audit and DO backup your encryption case (in case you loose it there would be no way to acces your data) - just print it in plain text form and store somewhere safe.
If you do it right everything would be automated and you won't need to do any manual actions with it. Just monitor its status. And do test recoveries from time to time.
And YES - I've noticed you are against the cloud which is in my opinion silly. Decent cloud provider's DC will by much more secure (as in physical security, data mirroring) than any homegrown solution. What you are afraid of? If you are afraid of automated attacks like malware they will target your personal machine anyway, not your backup, backup is not the weakest link here. Also any profiled attacks on your person will target your client machine. So what is your practical point against using cloud storage?
Also worth mentioning that NAS server is not mandatory in such setups. Just it speeds up things a little and gives more control. Also it provides the "oops" factor protection (like incidentaly deleting something - which is satistically the most often case to need backup recovery anyway).
Still if you oppose to use cloud just exchange cloud option for offline media stored offsite (like safe at your friends house or bank). Which media to use is entirely up to you. As you haven't stated what your need are (like how much data, how often it changes, what would be your preffered policy as weekly, monthly etc.) I can't recommend anything. An uneducated guess would be to use external HDD drives in enclosures and rotate them. Or for the cheapest option BlueRay discs.
> IMO Firefox are doing this right. [...] I've worked in more than one organisation
> that was doing MITM on their staff's SSL sessions (unknown to the staff) by silently
> pushing "trusted" DIY certs to the workstations by policy.
1) I don't belive that the organisation was doing it secretly or they were complete legal morons. Almost any larger organization has policies which you as employee/user accept. These policies are in place to inform you of such practices so you cannot sue them back for privacy breaches.
2) If organisation has the power to install certificates on client machines it basically administeres these machines. As an administrator it is safe to assume that they also got the means to block Fx or whatever unsupported software. Also usually serious organizations maintain a policy list of allowed software.
So in fact there is nothing that Fx did right in this scenatrio.
I am personally a Chromium user and as an administrator Fx states to piss me off. We support Fx on workstations, we push new releases form ERS channel via GPO and MSI installs. This usually works but once in a while it stops working and requires manual tweaking - and it is not our fault but Mozillas pushing undocumented new options or different defaults. We do test so it is not a major problem but it is more work that it should be.
> On the one hand, forking is what drives Free Software. It allows us to innovate,
> adapt software to new needs, etc. Without it, the FOSS community would not be
> as strong as it is.
Of course the ability of forking is great. I would compare it to a relationship - if at some point you realize that your goals or whatever are not in sync then you fork it is not easy comes with attached looses to both sides but it is but doable. And an obvious way to go if you can't go together.
BUT this is not a fork in my opinion. A fork it will be if we can get anything usable from it like a working distro in this case. But now it is just an other act of DRAMA. Like in relationship - you know I am forking right now! look this is my fork website! look i WILL fork. Geeesh than do fork and get over it.
These guys are behaving like overly attached boy/girl friend who in fact DOES NOT want to fork but uses threats that she/he will fork to force something on the other side.
I know it is simplification but really right now from my point of view it just looks like emotional drama.
As for techical merits in my own opinion. I dont care. I am not by any means a white bearded system admin. I use Linux profesionally and I like it. I really haven't noticed the whole systemd drama until it popped out in media. Professinaly I use RHEL and CentOS because I can run software on it for my employer and it is OK. We use Oracle, SAP, Zimbra and other products so for me it makes no real difference as what init system is used as far as it works.
In my personal systems I've used RH from like 5.0 release and I liked it. I used it till it separated into RHEL and Fedora - then I've used Fedora but around release 14 or some it becamed very annoying (lots of problems with distro upgrade, hardware etc.). Then I've started to evaluate other distros. Also got a RaspberryPi and tried Pidora on that. More annoyng than ever. Then I've tried Arch Linux and I got hooked imediately - works well on my home systems (server, workstation, laptop) and also on RaspberryPi. And it uses systemd in more fashinable way than Fedora (but things may have gone better - I've not touched it since 14). So I don't really get this systemd "controversy".
First of all - thanks for an interesting comment. Your insight on licensing issues regarding use of systemd never occured to me.
Regarding your comment - I cant validate all your claims right now but I trust they are valid - in Your opinion why there is NO mention about licensing on the new fork site? The site is TL;DR to me as it is in my opinion yet another meaningless fork of Debian but I tried to search the site for terms like "license", "gpl" and there are exactly zero occurances of such terms. It seems to me as the authors of the fork didn't find your arguments about licensing as interesting to mention it.
So how exactly this fork is better for your goals?
If I was in situation in which licensing was critical to me I would use Gentoo since as far as I know it is only decent and recent distro that actually lets you choose init system to your liking.
Mozilla is loosing it. Fx gets more and more irrelevant between various UI changes and more bloat added. Usage is declining. And yet they try to reinvent themselves with such ideas. What for? Just make a decent browser and build developer tools into it like everybody else does. What is the point of such product? To have yet another browser/platform to build and test for?
> For me, Linux is about control.
And exactly what aspect of control is taken from you by systemd?
> Apparently, systemd replaces all that and more with a single monolithic
> structure, which seems more akin to the Windows way of doing things.
No it isn't. Lots of commercial unix like operating systems had moved on to some form of init system not based on shell scripts f.e. Solaris, Mac OS X etc.
> It's main selling point appears to be boot-up speed
No it isn't.
> IMO the cost that we must all pay for that extra speed is just too high
And what is the cost exactly? What exactly do you have against systemd? Only thing you stated is that it is monolithic and non unix way. I don't rally care about it. What practical limitation does it cause? Only valid complains about systemd I've read so far is that is not standard as it is an implementation and in theory this shouldn't be done like that. And I agree but still it exist, it works and it is not going anywhere. The second complaint is that it uses binary log file. It does in fact but I also don't care about that. I can config it to forward to syslog so it is no problem. Actually by using such architecture it can start logging earlier than sysvinit system which is better. These two flaws do exist but they do not rule against systemd in general. It is still a step forward in right dimension.
Look at CoreOS and its components like fleet - this is what systemd was designed for and it is strictly server operating system.
> The init process is a critical stage: failure tends to leave you with no access to
> the system to diagnose the failure.
Nowdays not really a problem. If this is a desktop system then just hook up a LiveCD with your choosen distro or an USB stick and go on from the live system. With live system images you have all the tools you need and as far as the system's storageis not damaged you can do whatever you wish. As for servers - well remote lights out, management cards, flash addons, consoles etc. you can do whatever to rescue the system. Or if you cant afford it just use serial console to the bootloader and add a failsafe recovery system partition with an image containing all the needed tools and you are ready to go. Mind that these means were used like long time ago even before systemd happened. ;) If you are thinking about disaster then get ready for it when your systems work.
> Shell scripts and plaintext log files may be primitive, but they have the advantage of being easy
> to read with minimal access and not requiring complex stuff to run
Look above - complex stuff to run is not as complex as you see it. You can easly run even an graphical desktop system to recover your system even if you wish for doing so (most live cds do so). You just need to plan it ahead.
> mainly they just require that basic binaries be available in the path
Systemd does not depend on these tiny binaries. In my opinion it is an advantage. It still needs to get unit information from somewhere (like local filesystem or fleet).
> Until I've got at least a basic system up and running enough to log in and work
This is probably the old or wrong way of doing stuff. Just boot from something else and chroot to the system and then check the problem.
> text-based tools will probably run to decipher binary logfiles
You reall don't need to decipher anything as the log files are not ciphered. You just need to open them with specialised tool (avaiable on your rescue media from which you have booted). You don't quite get why people have problem with binary log files do you? The problem is not about tools for accessing them - the main problem is if they get corrupt they are much harder to recover than plain text files.
> and modify configurations
With systemd you do not need any special binary tool to modify configuration.
> The only change I'd make is to make systemd use syslogd like everything else
But it does.
> SysV init scripts may be clunky and primitive, but they've been around a long time.
So?
> People know how to manage them, and they've had the kinks worked out of them and
> best practices established. systemd doesn't have that.
It does. But I get what you're getting at - writing a startup script yourself. So maybe try writing systemd unit for your need yourself and then compare it to sysv. IMVHO systemd units are easier (as more simple) to write than shell scipts for sysvinit. But YMMV.
> if Debian were to reverse their earlier decision and go back to sysvinit (or at least make
> systemd optional), then I think we could see many sysadmins converting their RHEL
> systems to Debian jessie
You are joking, right? The reason people use RHEL not Debian is primary because tons of commercial software built on SAP, Oracle and similar are *supported* on RHEL. That has little to do with RHEL or Debian being technically superior from each other. After all Debian and RHEL are just Linux distributions not so much different from technical standpoint you have similar technical limitations using these as both use Linux as kernel. People use RHEL because they need to have support for the apps they are running. Not because it uses this init system or other - none of RHEL admins really care about it as long as it is supported by the business apps they need to operate.
And also I don't quite get the shitstorm going on about systemd. I think compared to sysvinit it is a great step forward. And I'm a professional sysadmin administering just few Linux systems - couple of RHEL boxes (Oracle related stuff), some CentOS (for Zimbra and MariaDB which we use internally) and CoreOS with Docker and all of systemd glory mostly for my own amusement at our own webapps. All of these are systemd powered right now and I don't see any problem with that. Just works as an OS.
Oh and on home laptop, home nettop and few raspis automating stuff I use Arch Linux with systemd of course.
> You can fax legal documents (...) the state of Utah (...) New York allowed (...) Australia allows it [cnet.com], and anther New York [etc.]
But you are you aware that lots of other countries than USA or Austrialia exist and such even tend to have precedent or non-precedent legal systems? I know that general tendency is to go to electronic means where possible but I am quite sure that there still are and still be situations in which the new/current ways are not possible and you need to keep the old system running to support them. For example how do you deliver legal papers to inmates who cannot use email or Facebook?
> Requiring someone to buy a laser device to burn "stamps" onto envelopes and packages won't work.
This I fully agree. The idea is so stupid I don't even know how it got here to Slashdot.
IDK how it is in the US but here in Poland the post is like an institution. Fe. if you have an invoice or legal paper you can send deliver it yourself, you can send it by private held company like TNT, UPS, whatever but only when you send it via Polish Post (national operator) it gets so called the power of postal stamp. Legally if you choose the right delivery type it is valid as delivery in court. Such postage is still deeply embodied in legal system and I think it has some merit. In Poland f.e. you could run a company and register its address for legal purposes as PO box in some large office complex where you just rented a PO box. In case of this special Polish Post delivery it is an obligation to the office complex administrator to deliver this postage physically as he gives the PO boxes to his clients he also has an obligation to deliver such postage.
I think Post Office isn't going anywhere and lots of people still send physical letters due to legal conditions and I don't think it is Polish only thing. Also people tend to send faxes. F.e. I was required to send signed legal papers via fax (snail mail would take longer but was also an option) when we was changing our DNS owner information due to company name change. This is silly but still it has some silly merit.
But as for the gadget in the article - laser postal stamps? It sounds quite cool but it makes no sense as in no real purpose. People who use snail mail en masse tend to have agreements with their posts to bulk send it with stamp or pre-printed stickers or pre-printed envelopes. In some countries to obtain a "stamp" to send an letter you just send an SMS to paid premium number and in reply you get a number which you just write on the envelope/card. In Poland you can get fancy stamps with your design on it etc.
(I've used to work at Polish Post IT department head office)
Cant wait to get my hands on one of these. Unfortunately Amazon doesn't ship to Poland so I can't get it here. I have two concerns regarding this:
I understand this is an amateur class device. Better (or is it?) than Authenticator app as you need to gain the physical key since a phone app can be accessed remotely at least in theory but still not hard security as corporate smart cards, RSA tokens etc. Just hardware two form auth for the masses and I guess it is a good thing to have (or is it?). But as I see the form of distribution of this hardware is quite loose. If I order it via Amazon (if I could) it goes through amazon warehouses, shipping company etc. - could this device be tampered with in shipping? Shouldn't it have a safer distribution method like physical store so you can randomly pick one and it couldn't be identified to your identity?
How does it work? It states that it requires supported browser (Chrome 38) on any platform it runs but does it also work in Chromium (I am using Chromium)? Can it be used in other applications f.e. VPN client, SSH client? Does it use some open source library, tools? How it works as a device - I plug it in and it registers as standard USB class device - what class is it?
I've tried to google these concerns for few seconds but couldn't find good information so please anybody could clarify on this?
Facebook filters your wall posts so not everything you post gets to everybody's feed. They are afraid people using Facebook get too many meaningless information from other people like look I just watched this Youtube video and you should too. So they use algorithms that select data you post to other people. I guess they select it by number of likes, views etc. So given that they DO censor what you post they are afraid that they could censor also such important information regarding your safety. But they are not afraid about you - they are afraid about legal issues surrounding this. So they invented a way to control whether you are allowed or not to post such critical information. In my opinion this is just about covering their asses, not about your safety.
Because from Facebook's POV (huh) such status update is not related to major disaster. As I see it they are doing it to omit liability in case your status update in fact would be real in case of serious incident. Right now they are doing serious filtering of what gets into your feed since they are shit crazed about people leaving Facebook getting sick of all the irrelevant crap they see. This (proposed in the article) way they can select on the basis of fact of some disaster happening who can post such updates and these updates would be omitted by their what-is-interesting-and-what-is-not filters.
> The a good thing to do with an iMac would be a decent SSD... as well
> as an external drive appliance with RAID 1, or a volume with software
> RAID that is similar.
To have backups is the good thing to do whatever OS or hardware you run.
That is similar to what is going on with PC laptops. Basically MacBook Air is an ultrabook in PC nomenclature. PC ultrabooks also tend to be less upgradeable and serviceable than bigger laptops. For example compare Lenovo ThinkPad 430 and 430u (u - as in ultrabook). The slim design just forces use of smalled perhaps nonremovable parts. IMO all PC laptops that match MacBook Air size are also as unupgradeble and unserviceable as MacBook Air - it is not a marketing choice by Apple but the size imples it. Also what is new that you can't upgrade or service your phone or tablet - any brand. Get over it.
> For my 2006 Black MacBook, I maxed out...
The newest Mac OS X 2006 MacBook can run now is Lion (to be honest - you CAN run Mountain Lion but it involves hacking the install media, some voodoo with kexts etc. - I would not be sure about stability of such system). Which is now 3 releases old. Not a big deal if you really want to run it (simply put - you have no money for newer hardware) but it will certainly give you compability issues like recent versions of software not working at all. With PC laptops usually you can pop in recent-decent version of Windows even on much older hardware. It will run slowly (such as Lion on 2006 MacBook with 2Gs RAM) but it will run your software. With Mac you can't do that.
IMO you've mistaken political correctness and socialism terms for something else. Your first point about media censoring an opinion is in fact related to political correctness but after that you have no clue. Think about yourself - please answer this sincerely - if you or somebody close to you had contradicted Ebola abroad of your country would you wish your country to help you or not? After all you've had paid for your country's medical care in your taxes - and this is by no means socialism. So how would it be? Would you wish your country to help you or your close one or just leave you to certain death abroad perhaps in some uncivilized African country?