I'd say it is worse having to type something different for one log on the system, when the other 100+ are plain text and so accessible with the old tools we've all learned backwards. It means you don't have the necessary switches or key presses to hand because you don't do it often enough.
"journalctl" might be the best thing since sliced bread, but making it a hard requirement of systemd makes adoption of systemd that much harder. IMHO, systemd should "pick it's battles" and concentrate on managing system processes and worry about log formats another time.
I'm inclined to agree, BUT... I actually quite like system unit (files). It's a great way to daemonise a very simple program (perhaps one you got handed by your devs who know nothing about sysadmin, or perhaps some crap downloaded from the Internet because someone thought it would be useful). Getting simple stuff to work with systemd is actually super-easy. All those symlinks are really just enable/disable, although I'd love to see the actual files in some obvious directory - I'm not sure how much of that is systemd or distro vendor, but what the hell is multi-user-wants or whatever it's called? Either way, stopping every last daemon having to have its own watchdog process and letting "the system" take care of all that sort of thing seems like a really sensible move to me.
I have had horrendous trouble trying to get some esoteric daemons to work with systemd though. Trying to make an old init.d script work in systemd is a world of pain. Trying to have half a dozen 'linked' systemd units to fire up a half dozen daemons in the right order is really really horrible. It becomes easier to rewrite the launcher script to work on STDOUT and then run that with systemd. That's a problem because now you're not really using systemd, and so all of systemd is really just an overhead to what you're doing. Resolving this is partly the job of daemon writers, but partly the job of systemd itself (and could be solved there by allowing one system unit start multiple processes, conditionally run programs before startup, etc). Daemon writers aren't going to get onboard with systemd until it's easier for them to use it than to ignore it, so something's got to happen here (IMHO).
IMHO also, binary logs are crap - that's probably the single worst design item of it. We've all got along with plain text for years, we've got our log-shipping infrastructure and whatever else, and we've got a handful of aliases or scripts to do the sorts of cut-and-splice jobs we want. Having to use a different toolset for one or two log files is just a pain in the neck, and I have to go read the manpage or google every time I want to look at the bloomin' log because I've forgotten the command line options because I don't use them often enough.
If I had my way, I'd separate the binary logging stuff from systemd, and make it an optional system 'enhancement' for things that want to use it. In 5+ years of making cool tools for it (perhaps even implementing a log-shipping/aggregating solution), then start pushing that as the "next big thing" - until then, make it optional. Making binary logs a mandatory requirement for systemd just makes the "dislike surface" of systemd that much bigger and isn't a necessary dependency.
Whatever form of logging there is, systemd makes debugging really hard. It doesn't seem to suck up STDOUT/STDERR when you really need it to, it doesn't seem to tell you the command it ran that it thought had failed when you want it to, it doesn't give you the response code, it doesn't tell you why it considered it failed, etc etc. I can't even begin to think of incremental ways to change what it currently does because if I'm honest, I don't really understand it well enough. Bottom line: this is the worse experience of it, and probably the reason daemon writers will continue to resist systemd as much as they can. If systemd doesn't get this sort of thing fixed, then it's a huge barrier to entry, and means the likes of slashdot comments will continue to be negative.
In short: I think it came from a place of good sense, but then got too embroiled in things it shouldn't have. If it's really the "perfect awesome" that we all need, then we should have been given incremental steps to get there, rather than getting thrown in a the deep end with some software which has a few kinks in the pipes still.
Google already has a Mysql/Postgres compatible cloud SQL solution. If they added Oracle compatibility to that, it would be a good start (and no open sourcing required).
I know banks use Oracle, as do some wanna-be banks. Banks are slow to move, so your sales cycle mostly runs to years, so Oracle have at least another 5 years before they see any major decline there. I also know some companies who really shouldn't have ever used Oracle for their application, but thought that it would be a safe choice. Those are the people "someone" could peel away from Oracle onto a compatible alternative. The sales-cycle will be shorter, they're more price-sensitive than banks and they're less worried about regulators (although some are regulated, just not the same way as banks).
1) Is the company at fault a foreign brand? 2) Is the alleged perpetrator foreign, or have a foreign sounding name, or better still a foreign accent? ??? 4) Throw the book at him, and possibly make up a few extra books to ensure you really do get him
For what it's worth, the EU hasn't (yet) done too much about this, so it seems they too use much the same score sheet. You'll also note that the same is true of bankers in those two regions too. Something to think about before taking that job to "take our company International", isn't it!?
Ahh.. the Daily Mail - a source so reliable Wikipedia have stopped using them.
You wouldn't want to breathe the exhaust from a container ship, but as others note, at sea it's not much of a concern. If you happen to be on a cruise ship though, things are rather different.
Now we know what's going on - there's a company with some multi-billion dollar tech, there's the US government and a wonky foreign state. One tells the other to do something to the last one. We've been down this road before, and it didn't go terribly well.
Agreed - the headline could have just as easily read: "Over the last 5 years, GE has failed to adapt to changing market conditions".
Ultimately, GE's failed to perform. They're saying something that sounds plausible, and is 'du jour', but the truth of it goes back several years when they should have started to develop alternative products. It's not like we've had any drop in energy demand, so "energy' is still a growth market.
Indeed - summary is a bit light on critical thinking (I didn't RTFA, maybe that's better?). The important take-away here is: (Bronze age) Mankind a bit cleverer than we thought it was. It also highlights how far the knowledge of how to do this spread, and to some extent at what speed.
Yeah, I'm old too. I must be super-old, because I still expect news outlets to tell me stuff like that, perhaps by something as antiquated as a hyperlink to a product page, or wikipedia or something.
I did some googling and found this company: https://www.raden.com/ - even they don't seem to know what 'smart luggage' is, because their home page says almost nothing of any use. "Location awareness, proximity sensors leverage bluetooth technology" - say what now?
As far as I can tell, it's a normal case, but it's got built in scales, presumably has a GPS location beacon, and can use it's battery to charge your phone. It's got a phone app which you can "pair seamlessly" (I should hope so really, but what does the app do?). Sounds pretty pointless to me, but apparently 100,000 people use them.
Yeah, it feels like it'll be a lot of years before we see a 'content browser' that can search for something across Netflix, Amazon Video, Apple TV, Youtube and maybe 'the internet'.
Our Amazon FireTV box does reasonably - it's got a Netflix, iPlayer and (side-loaded) Kodi apps. so from there I can get to nearly all my content. Anything I've recorded on the TV still needs me to click the other button on the universal remote to fire up the ordinary TV box (which has Netflix and iplayer, but it's fairly terrible).
Let's say it'll cost $100 million to get the laws in place, and then to actually get all the tech companies to comply. Instead, just spend that money to 'motivate' those companies to do it for you without the laws and without the publicity.
In that particular case, the export restrictions also meant that the rest of the world couldn't have online banks. To resolve this problem, the rest of the world found their own solutions to those problems (most often in the form of a Java applet), and thus created their own software companies to do what the US wasn't able to do. The corporations duked it out, and eventually the export restrictions went away because it was extremely disadvantageous to American international business to have them in place. I seriously doubt 'security' ever really came into those discussions.
In this case, if the rest of the world can't have safe communications, then we'll just go ahead and make our own platforms. Hell, we don't even need to - there are enough around already, it's just that right now there's not much motivation to switch to them. Getting the meta out of the US companies is still better than getting precisely nothing, but of course the powers that be don't get that.
If you want America First, you have to play along with everyone else, otherwise you actually end up with America Last.
We used to do much the same with our twins. We'd pack up a bunch of toys and let them play with the other half. After a week or two, we'd rotate the toys around so they were seemingly playing with something new. It works really well when they have quite short memories. Now they're 4 we don't bother with that any longer. However, they're much better at finding something to do than when they were 1 (probably as well they can, because despite my best efforts, they do have a tonne of toys).
As for Press Here - I concur it's a great book. I'll raise you 'You Choose', which has almost no words in it, and just some very packed pages of pictures where they have to pick the things they like the best. Kids telling you that they want to be a horse rider in the day and an astronaut at night is kinda nice:-)
If it meant the bots of the world that all seem to resolve to China and Russia would lay off the rest of us, then I could see this as a good thing. Trouble is, this is just DNS, so it won't do that.
China and Russia have a pretty tight grip on their nations and so I can imagine that use of this alternative DNS will be mandatory. It will also have lots of government meddling in it, so will be something of a 'censored web' experience. It'll mean that casual Internet use won't accidentally trip over anything awkward the government would rather its people didn't know about. The savvier folks will still be able to access the dirty western Internet, but that'll naturally be a minority.
What it means for the rest of us is less clear. I'd imagine that your favourite destinations in those countries will still be accessible, but perhaps the lesser stuff won't be. That means we probably won't get (easy) access to the little personal site some activist sets up, so we won't get to hear about the indiscretions so easily without the data being "pushed" out of those nations to us.
Whatever happens, this is being pitched as 'independence of the US', which sounds like a good idea to many. However, it's really about control, and so changes the nature of that control into something more 'localised'. It of course does nothing to reduce the amount of data-vacuuming that's going on by all sides.
Well, enjoy your post-NN world when you (expensively) buy a 100Mb/s line to your local ISP so you can post on facebook like a teen, thinking that with that much bandwidth you'll always have plenty spare and will never use it all. Then you fire up Netflix and it stutters and scrapes like hell.
You call up your ISP and ask what's going on - they tell you "oh, for Netflix you have to pay extra", but then you protest that you're using less than 10% of your total bandwidth, and you even tried turning everything off so it was just Netflix running and it still didn't work. "Sorry sir, to use Netflix you have to pay extra".
Grudgingly, you pay the extra on top of your very hefty monthly fee for your "power user" connection. Then, magically, Netflix works just fine - yet none of the technology has changed. You don't get more bandwidth, no different equipment, you even get to keep your IP address. Somewhat confused, you try running a few other things at the same time as watching Netflix and it works just fine because you're still not actually saturating your bandwidth.
Helpfully though, your ISP tells you that you're on the "movie package", which also gives you super-fast access to uttershit.com, completetosh,com and braindumberingcrap.com, and over a hundred others. Sites you've never heard of, never want to use, but are now somehow paying for even though you never heard of them before.
Americans already pay way, way more for Internet access at home than pretty much any vaguely industrialised nation. It's about to get a whole world worse though - you're not going to get a discount because of NN going away, you're going to keep paying the same, but get worse service. To get better service, you'll have to pay for additional 'bundles' on top of your service.
It could be a way to provide cheap(ish) laptops to administrative staff at your company. Everyone else gets a proper laptop, but the receptionist and a few others get chromebooks.
The problem I've found (being at a windows-mostly, but macs for some people company) is that the mac version of O365 works well enough, but there are a few wrinkles which obviously Apple won't do anything about. Talking to Microsoft seems as much use as talking to yourself a lot of the time, and so there are apparently no solutions to some of the problems we have. Thus, one wonders if 'saving' on the OS and using a Mac or Chromebook isn't much of a saving after all, if you really, really need O365/one drive/sharepoint or whatever to work for everyone.
As for me personally, I find Libreoffice (fat client) on my Mac works beautifully well. The wife doesn't like it on her windows laptop because of 'compatibility issues', but then regularly seems to have problems with the Microsoft product as well. It seems like there isn't actually a 100% good office suite anywhere.
Oh yes, true. Now why on earth didn't the folks Los Alamos think of that!? They must be complete idiots. You should write to them and explain your ideas - they might give you a job as their chief architect, or maybe their Head of Cost Cutting.
New York (as an example) is going to be a lovely place with a 3.5 metre (11 foot) wall all the way around it. I can't wait to visit the Maldives with their wall around them - I'm sure it'll look just as lovely as it does today.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd say it is worse having to type something different for one log on the system, when the other 100+ are plain text and so accessible with the old tools we've all learned backwards. It means you don't have the necessary switches or key presses to hand because you don't do it often enough.
"journalctl" might be the best thing since sliced bread, but making it a hard requirement of systemd makes adoption of systemd that much harder. IMHO, systemd should "pick it's battles" and concentrate on managing system processes and worry about log formats another time.
I'm inclined to agree, BUT... I actually quite like system unit (files). It's a great way to daemonise a very simple program (perhaps one you got handed by your devs who know nothing about sysadmin, or perhaps some crap downloaded from the Internet because someone thought it would be useful). Getting simple stuff to work with systemd is actually super-easy. All those symlinks are really just enable/disable, although I'd love to see the actual files in some obvious directory - I'm not sure how much of that is systemd or distro vendor, but what the hell is multi-user-wants or whatever it's called? Either way, stopping every last daemon having to have its own watchdog process and letting "the system" take care of all that sort of thing seems like a really sensible move to me.
I have had horrendous trouble trying to get some esoteric daemons to work with systemd though. Trying to make an old init.d script work in systemd is a world of pain. Trying to have half a dozen 'linked' systemd units to fire up a half dozen daemons in the right order is really really horrible. It becomes easier to rewrite the launcher script to work on STDOUT and then run that with systemd. That's a problem because now you're not really using systemd, and so all of systemd is really just an overhead to what you're doing. Resolving this is partly the job of daemon writers, but partly the job of systemd itself (and could be solved there by allowing one system unit start multiple processes, conditionally run programs before startup, etc). Daemon writers aren't going to get onboard with systemd until it's easier for them to use it than to ignore it, so something's got to happen here (IMHO).
IMHO also, binary logs are crap - that's probably the single worst design item of it. We've all got along with plain text for years, we've got our log-shipping infrastructure and whatever else, and we've got a handful of aliases or scripts to do the sorts of cut-and-splice jobs we want. Having to use a different toolset for one or two log files is just a pain in the neck, and I have to go read the manpage or google every time I want to look at the bloomin' log because I've forgotten the command line options because I don't use them often enough.
If I had my way, I'd separate the binary logging stuff from systemd, and make it an optional system 'enhancement' for things that want to use it. In 5+ years of making cool tools for it (perhaps even implementing a log-shipping/aggregating solution), then start pushing that as the "next big thing" - until then, make it optional. Making binary logs a mandatory requirement for systemd just makes the "dislike surface" of systemd that much bigger and isn't a necessary dependency.
Whatever form of logging there is, systemd makes debugging really hard. It doesn't seem to suck up STDOUT/STDERR when you really need it to, it doesn't seem to tell you the command it ran that it thought had failed when you want it to, it doesn't give you the response code, it doesn't tell you why it considered it failed, etc etc. I can't even begin to think of incremental ways to change what it currently does because if I'm honest, I don't really understand it well enough. Bottom line: this is the worse experience of it, and probably the reason daemon writers will continue to resist systemd as much as they can. If systemd doesn't get this sort of thing fixed, then it's a huge barrier to entry, and means the likes of slashdot comments will continue to be negative.
In short: I think it came from a place of good sense, but then got too embroiled in things it shouldn't have. If it's really the "perfect awesome" that we all need, then we should have been given incremental steps to get there, rather than getting thrown in a the deep end with some software which has a few kinks in the pipes still.
Yeah, if it's not Max Headroom answering, then what's the point?
Google already has a Mysql/Postgres compatible cloud SQL solution. If they added Oracle compatibility to that, it would be a good start (and no open sourcing required).
I know banks use Oracle, as do some wanna-be banks. Banks are slow to move, so your sales cycle mostly runs to years, so Oracle have at least another 5 years before they see any major decline there. I also know some companies who really shouldn't have ever used Oracle for their application, but thought that it would be a safe choice. Those are the people "someone" could peel away from Oracle onto a compatible alternative. The sales-cycle will be shorter, they're more price-sensitive than banks and they're less worried about regulators (although some are regulated, just not the same way as banks).
Let's just do a scoping exercise;
1) Is the company at fault a foreign brand?
2) Is the alleged perpetrator foreign, or have a foreign sounding name, or better still a foreign accent?
???
4) Throw the book at him, and possibly make up a few extra books to ensure you really do get him
For what it's worth, the EU hasn't (yet) done too much about this, so it seems they too use much the same score sheet. You'll also note that the same is true of bankers in those two regions too. Something to think about before taking that job to "take our company International", isn't it!?
Ahh.. the Daily Mail - a source so reliable Wikipedia have stopped using them.
You wouldn't want to breathe the exhaust from a container ship, but as others note, at sea it's not much of a concern. If you happen to be on a cruise ship though, things are rather different.
..or just go with full-on propaganda - call it the PeaceMaker, or RainbowMaker or FluffyKitten, HammerDontHurtEm or BigHugs or some such.
...stimulate corporate progress
Now we know what's going on - there's a company with some multi-billion dollar tech, there's the US government and a wonky foreign state. One tells the other to do something to the last one. We've been down this road before, and it didn't go terribly well.
Agreed - the headline could have just as easily read: "Over the last 5 years, GE has failed to adapt to changing market conditions".
Ultimately, GE's failed to perform. They're saying something that sounds plausible, and is 'du jour', but the truth of it goes back several years when they should have started to develop alternative products. It's not like we've had any drop in energy demand, so "energy' is still a growth market.
Indeed - summary is a bit light on critical thinking (I didn't RTFA, maybe that's better?). The important take-away here is: (Bronze age) Mankind a bit cleverer than we thought it was. It also highlights how far the knowledge of how to do this spread, and to some extent at what speed.
Yeah, I'm old too. I must be super-old, because I still expect news outlets to tell me stuff like that, perhaps by something as antiquated as a hyperlink to a product page, or wikipedia or something.
I did some googling and found this company: https://www.raden.com/ - even they don't seem to know what 'smart luggage' is, because their home page says almost nothing of any use. "Location awareness, proximity sensors leverage bluetooth technology" - say what now?
As far as I can tell, it's a normal case, but it's got built in scales, presumably has a GPS location beacon, and can use it's battery to charge your phone. It's got a phone app which you can "pair seamlessly" (I should hope so really, but what does the app do?). Sounds pretty pointless to me, but apparently 100,000 people use them.
Yeah, it feels like it'll be a lot of years before we see a 'content browser' that can search for something across Netflix, Amazon Video, Apple TV, Youtube and maybe 'the internet'.
Our Amazon FireTV box does reasonably - it's got a Netflix, iPlayer and (side-loaded) Kodi apps. so from there I can get to nearly all my content. Anything I've recorded on the TV still needs me to click the other button on the universal remote to fire up the ordinary TV box (which has Netflix and iplayer, but it's fairly terrible).
Gardens? Is that a metaphor?
...and so it'll continue.
Let's say it'll cost $100 million to get the laws in place, and then to actually get all the tech companies to comply. Instead, just spend that money to 'motivate' those companies to do it for you without the laws and without the publicity.
In that particular case, the export restrictions also meant that the rest of the world couldn't have online banks. To resolve this problem, the rest of the world found their own solutions to those problems (most often in the form of a Java applet), and thus created their own software companies to do what the US wasn't able to do. The corporations duked it out, and eventually the export restrictions went away because it was extremely disadvantageous to American international business to have them in place. I seriously doubt 'security' ever really came into those discussions.
In this case, if the rest of the world can't have safe communications, then we'll just go ahead and make our own platforms. Hell, we don't even need to - there are enough around already, it's just that right now there's not much motivation to switch to them. Getting the meta out of the US companies is still better than getting precisely nothing, but of course the powers that be don't get that.
If you want America First, you have to play along with everyone else, otherwise you actually end up with America Last.
We used to do much the same with our twins. We'd pack up a bunch of toys and let them play with the other half. After a week or two, we'd rotate the toys around so they were seemingly playing with something new. It works really well when they have quite short memories. Now they're 4 we don't bother with that any longer. However, they're much better at finding something to do than when they were 1 (probably as well they can, because despite my best efforts, they do have a tonne of toys).
As for Press Here - I concur it's a great book. I'll raise you 'You Choose', which has almost no words in it, and just some very packed pages of pictures where they have to pick the things they like the best. Kids telling you that they want to be a horse rider in the day and an astronaut at night is kinda nice :-)
...and the best bit is, the more they complain the worse it gets for them. In that vein, let's get them as much air-time as we can! ;-)
If it meant the bots of the world that all seem to resolve to China and Russia would lay off the rest of us, then I could see this as a good thing. Trouble is, this is just DNS, so it won't do that.
China and Russia have a pretty tight grip on their nations and so I can imagine that use of this alternative DNS will be mandatory. It will also have lots of government meddling in it, so will be something of a 'censored web' experience. It'll mean that casual Internet use won't accidentally trip over anything awkward the government would rather its people didn't know about. The savvier folks will still be able to access the dirty western Internet, but that'll naturally be a minority.
What it means for the rest of us is less clear. I'd imagine that your favourite destinations in those countries will still be accessible, but perhaps the lesser stuff won't be. That means we probably won't get (easy) access to the little personal site some activist sets up, so we won't get to hear about the indiscretions so easily without the data being "pushed" out of those nations to us.
Whatever happens, this is being pitched as 'independence of the US', which sounds like a good idea to many. However, it's really about control, and so changes the nature of that control into something more 'localised'. It of course does nothing to reduce the amount of data-vacuuming that's going on by all sides.
All I really want to know is when can they laser-cool my beer?
But hey, at least you get 70 new emojis to write with now ;-)
Well, enjoy your post-NN world when you (expensively) buy a 100Mb/s line to your local ISP so you can post on facebook like a teen, thinking that with that much bandwidth you'll always have plenty spare and will never use it all. Then you fire up Netflix and it stutters and scrapes like hell.
You call up your ISP and ask what's going on - they tell you "oh, for Netflix you have to pay extra", but then you protest that you're using less than 10% of your total bandwidth, and you even tried turning everything off so it was just Netflix running and it still didn't work. "Sorry sir, to use Netflix you have to pay extra".
Grudgingly, you pay the extra on top of your very hefty monthly fee for your "power user" connection. Then, magically, Netflix works just fine - yet none of the technology has changed. You don't get more bandwidth, no different equipment, you even get to keep your IP address. Somewhat confused, you try running a few other things at the same time as watching Netflix and it works just fine because you're still not actually saturating your bandwidth.
Helpfully though, your ISP tells you that you're on the "movie package", which also gives you super-fast access to uttershit.com, completetosh,com and braindumberingcrap.com, and over a hundred others. Sites you've never heard of, never want to use, but are now somehow paying for even though you never heard of them before.
Americans already pay way, way more for Internet access at home than pretty much any vaguely industrialised nation. It's about to get a whole world worse though - you're not going to get a discount because of NN going away, you're going to keep paying the same, but get worse service. To get better service, you'll have to pay for additional 'bundles' on top of your service.
It could be a way to provide cheap(ish) laptops to administrative staff at your company. Everyone else gets a proper laptop, but the receptionist and a few others get chromebooks.
The problem I've found (being at a windows-mostly, but macs for some people company) is that the mac version of O365 works well enough, but there are a few wrinkles which obviously Apple won't do anything about. Talking to Microsoft seems as much use as talking to yourself a lot of the time, and so there are apparently no solutions to some of the problems we have. Thus, one wonders if 'saving' on the OS and using a Mac or Chromebook isn't much of a saving after all, if you really, really need O365/one drive/sharepoint or whatever to work for everyone.
As for me personally, I find Libreoffice (fat client) on my Mac works beautifully well. The wife doesn't like it on her windows laptop because of 'compatibility issues', but then regularly seems to have problems with the Microsoft product as well. It seems like there isn't actually a 100% good office suite anywhere.
Oh yes, true. Now why on earth didn't the folks Los Alamos think of that!? They must be complete idiots. You should write to them and explain your ideas - they might give you a job as their chief architect, or maybe their Head of Cost Cutting.
New York (as an example) is going to be a lovely place with a 3.5 metre (11 foot) wall all the way around it. I can't wait to visit the Maldives with their wall around them - I'm sure it'll look just as lovely as it does today.
+1 for being able to use "sextillion" in a sentence. -1 for using it in error ;-)
Either way, I very much enjoyed your comments :-)