Thunderbolt isn't only Display Port. Thunderbolt is also PCIe.
The idea is that to drive a 5k monitor, you need a 5k-capable source. i.e.: a quite big GPU.
But instead of putting the big discreet CPU inside the laptop and have a regular 5k picture over the display port (which would have negative impact on battery life, weight and thickness - which doesn't seem to align with Apple's current goals which seem to boil down to "Make a laptop thin enough that you can cut cheese with it") You put a huge honking GPU inside the screen (say a Nvidia Pascal or AMD Polaris), and have the PCIe link to the laptop. Thus when you the laptop is connected to the screen, on its PCIe bus, it has access to a big enough GPU, but when you disconnect it, the etra weight and power consumption stays inside the monitor and the marketing department can continue touting the Mac Air being so thin you can almost see-through.
Plus it has the nice advantage to lock you even further into Apple's hardware: you need to buy Apple's Monitor+GPU combo in order to use it with Apple's Mac Airs. You won't get 5k out of a regular 5k monitor with vanilla DisplayPort or HDMI inputs.
But this also raises a big security problem: as the GPU is inside the monitor, the texture uploads happen to RAM located *on the graphic card inside the monitor*. If the monitor isn't powered down between uses, a hostile could plug the monitor and instead of uploading new texture/windows to it dump its memory content and get a good idea of what was displayed latest. And remember that nowadays games aren't the only things uploading textures to a GPU. Desktop Composers (including like Apple's Quartz Extreme) do use it to composite the desktop too.
Nvidia does have their own solution coupled with an ARM Core. The platfrom is called Tegra, and it's one of the few Nvidia GPU for which, every once in a blue moon, the do throw a bone at Nouveau (opensource) driver developpers. I have no peculiar informations regarding Nvidia's official (closed source) drivers for Tegra.
At least that's a platform that you can find on actual hardware released now.
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AMD is planning to release their own *home-made* ARM Core by 2017. The platform is called K12 and unlike other ARM on the market, won't be based on a standard Cortex A7x by ARM, it will be AMD's own design.
There's a current technology preview for the platform called "Opteron A1110" (That one still uses a stock Cortex A53 core, but already demonstrates the kind of server AMD plans to build once K12 is finalized). Currently they aim to target small servers (e.g.: NAS, etc.), so do not expect to see soon tablets and smartphones running on AMD K12 (Though eventually some high-end applications might be interested in using AMD K12s)
AMD has the best open source track of any GPU manufacturer: - currently, with latest GPUs and APUs, the Linux kernel driver (i.e.: the DRM module) is completely open-source. - the only difference is what the user runs atop of it. - user can either run a full open-source stack on it (Mesa/Gallium3D) - (officially supported by AMD) - or run the official closed source openGL library (which has replaced the former full closed source stack fglrx). - eventually, they plan the consumer stack (i.e.: games and desktop) to be fully opensource (i.e.: integrate everything into Mesa, like Intel does already), and only keep the closed source stack for pro/workstation crowds (people running CAD software with weird needs). - there are RadeonSI opensource driver developpers *on AMD's own payroll* (and conversly AMD regular driver developpers are also dumping opensource code - though not with the same quality level - see the controversy around their HAL)
This sound *very interesting* for the future, but as of today is limited to expensive (server) development boards based around still-cortex-based Opterons.
Alternatively, you could employ a low-latency eye tracker and selectively degrade the parts of the picture that are currently in the peripheral regions of the user's field of vision.
Current solution don't work at a sufficient speed with a low enough latency.
Come to think of it, even *HEAD*-tracking is suffering from latency and rendering speed problems, to the point of being one of the big bullet point of the current crop of VR research.
Eye speed can be said to be too fucking fast for current-day VR solution to be able to keep up with it. (Also currently, no rendering system I know of is designed to handle variable resolution. But it's not my area of expertise. And also, the kind of tile-based defered rendering that's popular on mobile GPU - see PowerVR - should be easier to adapt to variable resolution)
Is it a third rate company? I've not played Angry Birds in a while (I quite when I managed to nuke it and lose my progress), but I though it was a very well done game.
I would guess the poster complained because while Angry Birds was a very well done game actually nothing much has happened since (except for a few glorified additional level packs). Rovio really looks like a single-trick pony.
On the other hand, given the tendency of all the major AAA studios to only exclusively release titles like "Cash Cow Franchise, episode VIII" and not take the slightest risk trying something new or different, Rovio doesn't seem that much abnormal to me.
Actually it stems not that much from systemd itself, than from Linux being not POSIX, but having lots of extensions over it: seats, namespaces, cgroups, containers, etc.
Systemd simply tries to manage them (there's no other tool that attempts to do it right now).
And BTW, quite the contrary, this kind of strict compartmentalization actually enables you to have *multiple* users using multiple *seats*.
E.g: having 3 users each running their own desktop environment on the same workstation, as long as the GPU has enough monitor outputs and enough USB keaboards and mice are plugged in.
Anyone who's ever been disconnected from a server 2 hours into a 3 hour process knows the importance of using screen.
...and would also know not to use Debian Sid on a critical server, BTW.
And even on distro with auto-cleaning-up activated in logind (e.g.: SailfishOS on Jolla), screen DOES work as intended as long as you care to correctly start it in its own seat/session/namespace/container (and all those non-POSIX-y stuff that Linux handles and that systemd manages)
One, no one has credibly stated that screen/tmux are left alive. There are people reporting that screen/tmux sessions are killed.
I do. On a stock Jolla phone, SailfishOS has the same clean-up option activated that the Debian systemd packager has activated in TFA.
If I type: ssh jolla -t -- su -l nemo -c "'screen'" My screen session survives without getting killed.
(Note: - nemo is the main user on a Jolla smartphone. - su starts this screen session in its own separate session (in a different CGroup, and all the various non-POSIX/Linux-specific seats & namespaces & containers, etc.) (there's also a systemd-specific way to start a shell in a new sessions, using some "machinectl shell" construction, but su does the job and is more compact)
Or you, know, you could stop complaining on forum, turn the damn option "off" in Debian-Sid like virtually every single other distribution does, and file a ticket on debian's bug tracker to ask the packager to make back the default not to clean-up the session like everyone else is doing. (and BTW, what are you doing complaining about Debian-Sid ? It's supposed to be unstable and rough edges by design. Things breaking under Sid like this are supposed to be common. Use some LTS distro if you want peace of mind).
Or if you want to go the systemd route, I would encourage you to read a little bit about the various "--user" option, and ".service" (and/or ".timer", etc.) syntax. That will help you cover most of the "need process in the background" situation that aren't covered by screen's "I need my long-running computation to survive between ssh remote sessions". (e.g.: for any end-user daemon). I've managed to convert most of my background tasks this way on the various systemd-powered installation I've been using (openSUSE Leap 42.1, openSUSE Tumbleweed, CentOS 7, and Debian's own Jessie release which doesn't have the "KillUserProcesses" toggle set as mentionned for Sid in TFA).
How about doing anything that takes a long time and you don't want to remain logged in for it to complete?
You use screen for that. (My phone, SailfishOS powered Jolla, has this kind of session clean-up enabled on its systemd. Screen is *the* way to do long-duration running).
Or nohup (though I'm not sure if that one is considered as a separate login-session)
so you redirect stdin to/dev/null, stdout to one file, stderr to either the same file or another file,
If you just muck around with redirections and process in background, chances are it won't be correctly dettached/disown.
And in what way does this new mechanism "enhance security"? Running something in the background after you log out doesn't give you any more privileges than if you remained logged in.
It's 2016. We're at the Internet Age. You don't need root privileges to wreck havok on the network. And End-User's privilege level is far enough.
Same to do shit on a user's home directory: A ransom ware doesn't need root privileges to encrypt all end-users' data neither.
e.g.: a Firefox browser of which you've closed the main windows, thus quitted the GUI. But for some reasons there's still a process running in the background. (It does happen from time to time, when its clean-up procedure is stuck in some loop).
Such a process, which is clearly *not a daemon* would still linger around under older rules, and if that daemon has network access still open and could be hacked, then damage could be done. The setting in logind.conf is one way to handle this kind of scenario (and apparently the debian packagers have decided to turn this on).
But normally, there are clear rules that one must follow to create a daemon: - old style, pre-systemd: double-fork so the grand-child process gets assigned to PID1, along the necessary file descriptor handling. - systemd-style: normal process, but launched using a.service conf file that defines it as a daemon.
But once it's running, yes it does work. And can't directly be taken down.
Note: Some onion proxies like http://tor2web.org/ *DO* block ThePirateBay. It's not ThePirateBay server being down, it's the relay service refusing it on some legal grounds.
You need your actual tor node to be running and access it directly without relying on external 3rd party relays.
And your analogy shows even better the problems of VB6.
A tool is a tool. And can easily be used with your bare hands. A hammer is still a hammer, no matter what. If you have a nail that you need to hammer into a wall, you can go to any hardware store and buy one. And you know that you'll be able to use it. You have the confidence that you'll be able to user it. It might be an expensive solid tool that will last a quater of centurs. Or a cheap one that will break by the end of the third nail. But you know how to use it. (unless it's a PHP Hammer:-P)
Standard language (like C/C++ when standard compliant) are like this.
If Bjarne Stroustrup goes banana and decides that the next version of C++ standard will be a mix of (worsts parts of) Java / PHP / COBOL and BrainFuck. You can still ignore him and use any sane compiler implementing a standard that you like (say C++11)
VB6 is as much of a tool as a razor with a custom head that you can swap instead of more or less rasor blade. Yes, you can also do things with it. But you're at the mercy of the brand making these razors. Maybe tomorrow they'll decide to change everything or plain stop producing razors and you'll be left alone with a useless razor handle that you can't use with any other razor heads (Unless you go for some cheap chinese clone from some shaddy part of TaoBao), (or unless you've stashed a huge supply of replacement heads in case this happens). It's not a tool, it's an embodiment of the lock-in marketing trick (and rasors with weird heads is a common metaphor for it).
You're at mercy of whatever goes through the head of Microsoft's heads. And Microsoft *has gone* bonkers and *DID* decide to throw away VB6 and bet everything on VB.Net (a distant cousin of Java, but instead with a much more verbose syntax than C# - the flahship language of Microsoft's "I can't believe it's not Java".NET platform). And now you're left with a huge bunch of legacy code that contains all your important business logic that you've painstakingly build over years, investing huge amounts of money to get more or less into a working state. Your only solution is trying to improvise something with one of the approximately "more-or-less comptaible" open source re-implementation like Gambas. And hope that fixing your VB6 code to work under these conditions won't cost way much more than paying for a full re-write (and re-testing / re-certifying the rewritten shit). Or alternatively, learn the necessary necromancy skills, to be still able to keep the old hardware alive, so you can run the older Windows XP on it that seems to be the only one on which you can run your VB6 monstruosity.
Yup, VB6 doesn't have much the same portability and absence of lock-in that hammer has.
Apple's hardware isn't know to target the same kind of geeky professionals (e.g.: admins) that Lenovo does. They tend to target more e.g.: artists. People who won't remember whatever weird Escape-Meta-Alt-Control-Shift-F12 sequence is the sortcut to the function they need (they won't even remember it in their muscle memory).
Thus their system is designed less around keyboard shortcuts.
And thus people mostly use this row of key for the advanced alternate functions (volume control) (probably not even like backlight control or external monitor switching as these can be handled automatically).
There's a logic to apple's switch to a touch bar: - Mac users use less shortcuts, F-keys don't need to be physical (even less mechanical). - Making it OLED will make a bright low-power adaptable *icon* bar.
- People who use the volume key will be happy: there are possibility to put even more adaptable functionnality - say VLC (or more likely QuickTime or whatever is the iVersion of an iMovie iPlayer in i-Land) could automatically put its control as glowing icon on the touch bar while the movie is playing full screen. (Again, typically Mac users aren't shortcut oriented and probably don't use shortcuts to play/pause)
- Artists are going to go completely banana about it. Not only because they are more "reality-distortion field"-sensitive than the rest and automatically adore everything that Apple's marketing department tells them to, but also because instead of having to remember complex short-cuts for their most beloved function, they have new icon appearing on the touch bar (say a less used key like "exposé" - which is now handled by a multi-finger touch-pad gesture anyway and thus doesn't make sense - getting replaced with an important tool icon) or even more complex behaviour (replacing all the estate taken by "keyboard -light down / -light up", "screen back-light down/up" with 2 horizontal slider).
- Seems to me like the closest thing to Microsoft's "Ribbon" icon panes done wright, if it was possible to actually do a ribbon right.
Like everything that Apples does (they didn't in fact invent it themselves) there has been some precedent of some adaptive keyboards: Art Lebedev studios (which leans on the heavily side of apple adoration) They did design a couple of keyboard and keypads featuring LCD and OLED screens to have the face of the keys changed on the flight. They received positive review, though didn't see widespread adoption given the price of the technology back then.
Apple *might* be onto something though none of us/. dweller are their target market. (ME ? I'm busy using shortcuts on my mechanical Unicomp (formerly IBM) keyboard)
Some day in the future Russia may sell a nuclear cruise ship so it's possibly SF and not fantasy.
Well for one special case, that day was in 2007, it's more modern-day history than SF, and you can still as of today book a cruise around the north pole.
(and actually, that is one of the applications of cruise ship where nuclear energy is mandatory. It's not as if *that* ship could dock in a city every couple of day to re-fuel several tons of fuel. this kind of polar cruise is in the middle of nowhere away from civilisation, so the ship needs a form of propulsion that can be self sufficient for months).
Yup, they even built this one you're mentionning - offering arctic cruise (apparently at 25'000$ a pop) - as recently as 2007.
And on this kind of cruises, nuclear propulsion is mandatory.
It's not like this ship is stopping in a port every couple of days to re-stock several hundreds tons of fuel. This ship is cruising in the middle of nowhere. By definition it's going to need a form of propulsion that can be autonomous for a couple of months between refuelling (which only nuclear is going to fulfil. Unless the cruise ship is a part of a flotilla, with at least 3-4 tanker ships constantly following around)
I don't think terrusts would try to steal an aircraft carrier or a submarine. A cruise ship, though...
I feel like your thinking about the wrong creator.
These cruise ship are insanely huge, about twice the size of the biggest aircraft carrier. They are the equivalent of a small city on a ship. To take a city, it requires a bit more organisation and man power than what a loose band of terrorist. It will be closer to a small well organised military operation.
So more a "Michael Bay" or "Roland Emmerich" than a "Tom Clancy" kind of plot.
How many cities do you think would permit the enty of a nuclear powered vessel? {...} It's way to easy to get rid of nuclear waste by just dumping it somewhere
We need to compare apples to apples. Yup, a nuclear powered vessels is going to have nuclear waste to manage. The thing is, the current NON-nuclear version of these behemoths cruise ships do currently produce order of magnitude more pollution: they currently burn insane amount of diesel, and not exactly the refined diesel that you pump into your truck, but whatever crude shit they can get the cheapest. And they manage this pollution by the worst imaginable way: by just dumping it into the atmosphere.
(I'm ready to bet that once you compute the crazy amount of waste dumped into the atomosphere, the trace amounts of radio-active isotopes present in the fuel and released into the atmosphere are probably causing more radio-active pollution than any nuclear reactor, even if they are proportionally less concentrated per volume of fuel).
We're not speaking of plain introducing nuclear waste, we're speaking about exchange potential nuclear waster against current mega-tons of pollution.
not to mention other cost-cutting arangements that would decrease safety. Nuclear power on carriers and subs work because of high standards in personel enforced by military discipline. Good luck getting that on a random cruise ship.
Yup, that is something to be more afraid of. (The current shit pumped into these vessels and passed as "diesel" is a nice example).
On the other hand, given the massive amount of energy required, I'm not sure if switching to nunclear isn't already a massive cutting of operational costs.
(But on the other hand, the MBAs might start to think, "while we are cutting our costs 99x by switching to nuclear, why not cut a lot on safety just to raise it to 100x-cost-cutting ?")
I quickly looked up on Wikipedia, apparently there ARE nuclear powered civilian vessels (though most were built Russia, mostly back when it was still called Soviet Union - None built by France which is were Oasis-class cruise ships seems to be built).
What I liked most of mine (Palm Pre and HP Pre3) wasn't as mush the size as the physical keyboard and the wonderful card-based/touch-based UI. (apparently so good that even iOS and Android are currently attempting pale copies of it).
I dont appreciate the Android UI, it mostly reminds me of a cluttered windows desktop (with dozens of icon).
Jolla's SailfishOS (different kind of cards, and another way to do touch-based UI) is the closest thing to come nearly webOS's UI's usability. (My main gripe is that it still lacks the "tabs as separate cards" metaphor that webOS had. In sailfishOS, each application either introduce its own different logic for tabs (like browsers) or can't open multiple windows (like e-mail). In webOS, tabs are opened as extra cards that get automatically grouped together in "hands")
And aircraft carriers and russian icebreakers tend to be nuclear powered and don't burn a single drop of diesel (the biggest thing that can be compared - makes sense to take "airport on a ship" when comparing to "small city on a ship").
This monster has (if a read correctly) twice the tonnage of the biggest of them (so roughly the same number of zeros), but use instead an archaic power method designed for much smaller ship, that requires to carry around (heavy !) and burn insane amounts of polluting fuels.
Well no shit, it's the biggest ship of the world. If you want to impress me, tell how how much fuel per passager it burn and compare it to others cruise ship.
Well, if you compare to other ship this is a *really inefficient* ship. And it's really weird, when you take just a couple of minute to think about it. Don't forget that the world doesn't stop at cruise ships.
When you look at other ships with similar order of magnitude of tonnage ("similar" as in "roughly the same number of zeroes in the 'tonnage' item"),
you find aircraft carriers, which are almost exclusively nuclear-powered and thus burn not a single drop of diesel and ridiculously small quantities of nuclear fuel - that's the whole point of nuclear energy, it consume amounts of fuel which are order of magnitudes smaller. (Though, okay, the aircrafts themselves on the carrier do burn conventionnal fuels). And we're speaking here about vessels whose tonnage is at most, approximately half of this monster (I might be wrong, I'm not very fluent in the various maritime units).
Even *civilian* nuclear powered vessels do exist (though most seem to come out of Russia - back when it was URSS) - and we're speaking here of smallership, around an order smaller than this behemot.
All these ship consume not a single drop of diesel. So, why the hell those this monster to burn that much fuel ?!?
The drawback I see with thorium is that it is currently only *researched* by the military navies.
I.E.: if gargantuan civilian "floating cities" ships decide to adopt it, it will be completely new technology. It won't have been tested and proven since long time, with all the drawbacks and caveat very well known, and the whole design perfected over several revision like current maritime nuclear generator used by navies.
I'm not sure that these kind of companies will be able to spend as much as government/military to perfect the technology. They'll probably spare on the R&D side of things. To avoid nuclear catastrophes, it might be better to re-use older/proven/known reactors for the cruise ships, and let those with deeper pocket manage to bring thorium reactors to reality.
Nearly every modern carrier (which is technically a "small airport/military base on a ship") uses nuclear power. Why the hell is this monster (which is compared to a "small city on a ship") does need to burn diesel ?!?
But then probably there are some weird non-proliferation treaties that limit the application of this kind of technology to non-government/non-military ships. And/or treaty about nuclear use in international waters (where this ship operates most of the time).
my box is kept secure enough that it's probably not worth the bother of breaking into on the slight off-chance that there might be something valuable here.
It's not worth dedicating time of a pro hacker, to specifically find a way into your box, yes.
But it's worth every script kiddie's time to try generic attacks (like bugs of openssl that you haven't had the time to patch yet) against the target groups you appear in. Again, you only are going to be a number on their list, not a concrete person, but they'll constantly deploy every trick in their sleeve to try to get at you (and at any other number on their target list against whom the trick-of-the-day happened to work). Luckily, as you try as hard as possible to secure your box, you're getting hacked less frequently than your neighbours, and as you're more savvy than random users, you're more likely to notice when a hack succeeded.
Think of it a little bit as the locked door to your house. It's certainly not proof against government. If they want, they can take down the whole house. But it's protected against random vandals that might degrade your property. So it basically looks secure. Until the day some burglar decides to pay a visit on the chance he might manage to steel something of value. His not targetting you personally, your house happened to be the one he targeted. You my get a guard dog, an alarm, etc. it is going to lower the chance of your stuff getting stolen, but there's always someone motivated enough with access to enough tricks and techniques.
The big difference between your house and the internet is the accessibility. A real-world burglar can only be in front of one house of a time. He can break into only one house simultaneously. Whereas, on the internet, everything is simultaneously accessible to anyone. It's as if all the houses of the world were all in the same small street and every single wannabe theif could quickly move from one to the other.
The only real secure machine is turned of. And unplugged. And stored into a safe.....
But your practices are as close as possible to safe, while staying convenient.
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Thunderbolt isn't only Display Port.
Thunderbolt is also PCIe.
The idea is that to drive a 5k monitor, you need a 5k-capable source.
i.e.: a quite big GPU.
But instead of putting the big discreet CPU inside the laptop and have a regular 5k picture over the display port
(which would have negative impact on battery life, weight and thickness - which doesn't seem to align with Apple's current goals which seem to boil down to "Make a laptop thin enough that you can cut cheese with it")
You put a huge honking GPU inside the screen (say a Nvidia Pascal or AMD Polaris), and have the PCIe link to the laptop.
Thus when you the laptop is connected to the screen, on its PCIe bus, it has access to a big enough GPU, but when you disconnect it, the etra weight and power consumption stays inside the monitor and the marketing department can continue touting the Mac Air being so thin you can almost see-through.
Plus it has the nice advantage to lock you even further into Apple's hardware:
you need to buy Apple's Monitor+GPU combo in order to use it with Apple's Mac Airs.
You won't get 5k out of a regular 5k monitor with vanilla DisplayPort or HDMI inputs.
But this also raises a big security problem:
as the GPU is inside the monitor, the texture uploads happen to RAM located *on the graphic card inside the monitor*.
If the monitor isn't powered down between uses, a hostile could plug the monitor and instead of uploading new texture/windows to it dump its memory content and get a good idea of what was displayed latest.
And remember that nowadays games aren't the only things uploading textures to a GPU. Desktop Composers (including like Apple's Quartz Extreme) do use it to composite the desktop too.
Nvidia does have their own solution coupled with an ARM Core.
The platfrom is called Tegra, and it's one of the few Nvidia GPU for which, every once in a blue moon, the do throw a bone at Nouveau (opensource) driver developpers.
I have no peculiar informations regarding Nvidia's official (closed source) drivers for Tegra.
At least that's a platform that you can find on actual hardware released now.
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AMD is planning to release their own *home-made* ARM Core by 2017.
The platform is called K12 and unlike other ARM on the market, won't be based on a standard Cortex A7x by ARM, it will be AMD's own design.
There's a current technology preview for the platform called "Opteron A1110" (That one still uses a stock Cortex A53 core, but already demonstrates the kind of server AMD plans to build once K12 is finalized).
Currently they aim to target small servers (e.g.: NAS, etc.), so do not expect to see soon tablets and smartphones running on AMD K12
(Though eventually some high-end applications might be interested in using AMD K12s)
AMD has the best open source track of any GPU manufacturer:
- currently, with latest GPUs and APUs, the Linux kernel driver (i.e.: the DRM module) is completely open-source.
- the only difference is what the user runs atop of it.
- user can either run a full open-source stack on it (Mesa/Gallium3D) - (officially supported by AMD)
- or run the official closed source openGL library (which has replaced the former full closed source stack fglrx).
- eventually, they plan the consumer stack (i.e.: games and desktop) to be fully opensource (i.e.: integrate everything into Mesa, like Intel does already), and only keep the closed source stack for pro/workstation crowds (people running CAD software with weird needs).
- there are RadeonSI opensource driver developpers *on AMD's own payroll* (and conversly AMD regular driver developpers are also dumping opensource code - though not with the same quality level - see the controversy around their HAL)
This sound *very interesting* for the future, but as of today is limited to expensive (server) development boards based around still-cortex-based Opterons.
Alternatively, you could employ a low-latency eye tracker and selectively degrade the parts of the picture that are currently in the peripheral regions of the user's field of vision.
Current solution don't work at a sufficient speed with a low enough latency.
Come to think of it, even *HEAD*-tracking is suffering from latency and rendering speed problems, to the point of being one of the big bullet point of the current crop of VR research.
Eye speed can be said to be too fucking fast for current-day VR solution to be able to keep up with it.
(Also currently, no rendering system I know of is designed to handle variable resolution. But it's not my area of expertise. And also, the kind of tile-based defered rendering that's popular on mobile GPU - see PowerVR - should be easier to adapt to variable resolution)
Is it a third rate company? I've not played Angry Birds in a while (I quite when I managed to nuke it and lose my progress), but I though it was a very well done game.
I would guess the poster complained because
while Angry Birds was a very well done game
actually nothing much has happened since (except for a few glorified additional level packs).
Rovio really looks like a single-trick pony.
On the other hand, given the tendency of all the major AAA studios to only exclusively release titles like "Cash Cow Franchise, episode VIII" and not take the slightest risk trying something new or different, Rovio doesn't seem that much abnormal to me.
Actually it stems not that much from systemd itself,
than from Linux being not POSIX, but having lots of extensions over it:
seats, namespaces, cgroups, containers, etc.
Systemd simply tries to manage them (there's no other tool that attempts to do it right now).
And BTW, quite the contrary, this kind of strict compartmentalization actually enables you to have *multiple* users using multiple *seats*.
E.g: having 3 users each running their own desktop environment on the same workstation, as long as the GPU has enough monitor outputs and enough USB keaboards and mice are plugged in.
Anyone who's ever been disconnected from a server 2 hours into a 3 hour process knows the importance of using screen.
...and would also know not to use Debian Sid on a critical server, BTW.
And even on distro with auto-cleaning-up activated in logind (e.g.: SailfishOS on Jolla), screen DOES work as intended as long as you care to correctly start it in its own seat/session/namespace/container (and all those non-POSIX-y stuff that Linux handles and that systemd manages)
One, no one has credibly stated that screen/tmux are left alive. There are people reporting that screen/tmux sessions are killed.
I do.
On a stock Jolla phone, SailfishOS has the same clean-up option activated that the Debian systemd packager has activated in TFA.
If I type:
ssh jolla -t -- su -l nemo -c "'screen'"
My screen session survives without getting killed.
(Note:
- nemo is the main user on a Jolla smartphone.
- su starts this screen session in its own separate session (in a different CGroup, and all the various non-POSIX/Linux-specific seats & namespaces & containers, etc.)
(there's also a systemd-specific way to start a shell in a new sessions, using some "machinectl shell" construction, but su does the job and is more compact)
Or you, know, you could stop complaining on forum, turn the damn option "off" in Debian-Sid like virtually every single other distribution does, and file a ticket on debian's bug tracker to ask the packager to make back the default not to clean-up the session like everyone else is doing.
(and BTW, what are you doing complaining about Debian- Sid ? It's supposed to be unstable and rough edges by design. Things breaking under Sid like this are supposed to be common. Use some LTS distro if you want peace of mind).
Or if you want to go the systemd route, I would encourage you to read a little bit about the various "--user" option, and ".service" (and/or ".timer", etc.) syntax.
That will help you cover most of the "need process in the background" situation that aren't covered by screen's "I need my long-running computation to survive between ssh remote sessions".
(e.g.: for any end-user daemon).
I've managed to convert most of my background tasks this way on the various systemd-powered installation I've been using (openSUSE Leap 42.1, openSUSE Tumbleweed, CentOS 7, and Debian's own Jessie release which doesn't have the "KillUserProcesses" toggle set as mentionned for Sid in TFA).
How about doing anything that takes a long time and you don't want to remain logged in for it to complete?
You use screen for that. (My phone, SailfishOS powered Jolla, has this kind of session clean-up enabled on its systemd. Screen is *the* way to do long-duration running).
Or nohup (though I'm not sure if that one is considered as a separate login-session)
so you redirect stdin to /dev/null, stdout to one file, stderr to either the same file or another file,
If you just muck around with redirections and process in background, chances are it won't be correctly dettached/disown.
And in what way does this new mechanism "enhance security"? Running something in the background after you log out doesn't give you any more privileges than if you remained logged in.
It's 2016. We're at the Internet Age.
You don't need root privileges to wreck havok on the network.
And End-User's privilege level is far enough.
Same to do shit on a user's home directory:
A ransom ware doesn't need root privileges to encrypt all end-users' data neither.
e.g.: a Firefox browser of which you've closed the main windows, thus quitted the GUI. But for some reasons there's still a process running in the background.
(It does happen from time to time, when its clean-up procedure is stuck in some loop).
Such a process, which is clearly *not a daemon* would still linger around under older rules, and if that daemon has network access still open and could be hacked, then damage could be done. The setting in logind.conf is one way to handle this kind of scenario (and apparently the debian packagers have decided to turn this on).
But normally, there are clear rules that one must follow to create a daemon: .service conf file that defines it as a daemon.
- old style, pre-systemd: double-fork so the grand-child process gets assigned to PID1, along the necessary file descriptor handling.
- systemd-style: normal process, but launched using a
For anything else, you should use at best screen.
Note: It's a Tor .onion service.
Thus you need your tor installation up and running.
But once it's running, yes it does work.
And can't directly be taken down.
Note: Some onion proxies like http://tor2web.org/ *DO* block ThePirateBay. It's not ThePirateBay server being down, it's the relay service refusing it on some legal grounds.
You need your actual tor node to be running and access it directly without relying on external 3rd party relays.
meanwhile:
http://uj3wazyk5u4hnvtk.onion/
still works and has never been taken down.
(And maybe they also have a .bit namecoin and a few other trendy stuff)
Liechtenstein is under EU jurisdiction
Nope.
Same situation as Switzerland: both countries are not members of the EU, but sign some treaties with the EU (like Schegen).
But now, C# and PowerShell are the tools to get things done in windows in my opinion.
Nope. Bash is.
And your analogy shows even better the problems of VB6.
A tool is a tool. And can easily be used with your bare hands. :-P)
A hammer is still a hammer, no matter what.
If you have a nail that you need to hammer into a wall, you can go to any hardware store and buy one. And you know that you'll be able to use it.
You have the confidence that you'll be able to user it.
It might be an expensive solid tool that will last a quater of centurs. Or a cheap one that will break by the end of the third nail. But you know how to use it.
(unless it's a PHP Hammer
Standard language (like C/C++ when standard compliant) are like this.
If Bjarne Stroustrup goes banana and decides that the next version of C++ standard will be a mix of (worsts parts of) Java / PHP / COBOL and BrainFuck.
You can still ignore him and use any sane compiler implementing a standard that you like (say C++11)
VB6 is as much of a tool as a razor with a custom head that you can swap instead of more or less rasor blade.
Yes, you can also do things with it.
But you're at the mercy of the brand making these razors. Maybe tomorrow they'll decide to change everything or plain stop producing razors and you'll be left alone with a useless razor handle that you can't use with any other razor heads (Unless you go for some cheap chinese clone from some shaddy part of TaoBao), (or unless you've stashed a huge supply of replacement heads in case this happens).
It's not a tool, it's an embodiment of the lock-in marketing trick (and rasors with weird heads is a common metaphor for it).
You're at mercy of whatever goes through the head of Microsoft's heads. .NET platform).
And Microsoft *has gone* bonkers and *DID* decide to throw away VB6 and bet everything on VB.Net (a distant cousin of Java, but instead with a much more verbose syntax than C# - the flahship language of Microsoft's "I can't believe it's not Java"
And now you're left with a huge bunch of legacy code that contains all your important business logic that you've painstakingly build over years, investing huge amounts of money to get more or less into a working state.
Your only solution is trying to improvise something with one of the approximately "more-or-less comptaible" open source re-implementation like Gambas. And hope that fixing your VB6 code to work under these conditions won't cost way much more than paying for a full re-write (and re-testing / re-certifying the rewritten shit).
Or alternatively, learn the necessary necromancy skills, to be still able to keep the old hardware alive, so you can run the older Windows XP on it that seems to be the only one on which you can run your VB6 monstruosity.
Yup, VB6 doesn't have much the same portability and absence of lock-in that hammer has.
Yup exactly my though.
Apple's hardware isn't know to target the same kind of geeky professionals (e.g.: admins) that Lenovo does.
They tend to target more e.g.: artists.
People who won't remember whatever weird Escape-Meta-Alt-Control-Shift-F12 sequence is the sortcut to the function they need (they won't even remember it in their muscle memory).
Thus their system is designed less around keyboard shortcuts.
And thus people mostly use this row of key for the advanced alternate functions (volume control) (probably not even like backlight control or external monitor switching as these can be handled automatically).
There's a logic to apple's switch to a touch bar:
- Mac users use less shortcuts, F-keys don't need to be physical (even less mechanical).
- Making it OLED will make a bright low-power adaptable *icon* bar.
- People who use the volume key will be happy: there are possibility to put even more adaptable functionnality - say VLC (or more likely QuickTime or whatever is the iVersion of an iMovie iPlayer in i-Land) could automatically put its control as glowing icon on the touch bar while the movie is playing full screen.
(Again, typically Mac users aren't shortcut oriented and probably don't use shortcuts to play/pause)
- Artists are going to go completely banana about it. Not only because they are more "reality-distortion field"-sensitive than the rest and automatically adore everything that Apple's marketing department tells them to, but also because instead of having to remember complex short-cuts for their most beloved function, they have new icon appearing on the touch bar (say a less used key like "exposé" - which is now handled by a multi-finger touch-pad gesture anyway and thus doesn't make sense - getting replaced with an important tool icon) or even more complex behaviour (replacing all the estate taken by "keyboard -light down / -light up", "screen back-light down/up" with 2 horizontal slider).
- Seems to me like the closest thing to Microsoft's "Ribbon" icon panes done wright, if it was possible to actually do a ribbon right.
Like everything that Apples does (they didn't in fact invent it themselves) there has been some precedent of some adaptive keyboards:
Art Lebedev studios (which leans on the heavily side of apple adoration)
They did design a couple of keyboard and keypads featuring LCD and OLED screens to have the face of the keys changed on the flight.
They received positive review, though didn't see widespread adoption given the price of the technology back then.
Apple *might* be onto something though none of us /. dweller are their target market.
(ME ? I'm busy using shortcuts on my mechanical Unicomp (formerly IBM) keyboard)
Some day in the future Russia may sell a nuclear cruise ship so it's possibly SF and not fantasy.
Well for one special case, that day was in 2007, it's more modern-day history than SF, and you can still as of today book a cruise around the north pole.
(and actually, that is one of the applications of cruise ship where nuclear energy is mandatory. It's not as if *that* ship could dock in a city every couple of day to re-fuel several tons of fuel. this kind of polar cruise is in the middle of nowhere away from civilisation, so the ship needs a form of propulsion that can be self sufficient for months).
Yup, they even built this one you're mentionning - offering arctic cruise (apparently at 25'000$ a pop) - as recently as 2007.
And on this kind of cruises, nuclear propulsion is mandatory.
It's not like this ship is stopping in a port every couple of days to re-stock several hundreds tons of fuel.
This ship is cruising in the middle of nowhere.
By definition it's going to need a form of propulsion that can be autonomous for a couple of months between refuelling
(which only nuclear is going to fulfil. Unless the cruise ship is a part of a flotilla, with at least 3-4 tanker ships constantly following around)
I don't think terrusts would try to steal an aircraft carrier or a submarine. A cruise ship, though...
I feel like your thinking about the wrong creator.
These cruise ship are insanely huge, about twice the size of the biggest aircraft carrier.
They are the equivalent of a small city on a ship.
To take a city, it requires a bit more organisation and man power than what a loose band of terrorist.
It will be closer to a small well organised military operation.
So more a "Michael Bay" or "Roland Emmerich" than a "Tom Clancy" kind of plot.
How many cities do you think would permit the enty of a nuclear powered vessel? {...} It's way to easy to get rid of nuclear waste by just dumping it somewhere
We need to compare apples to apples.
Yup, a nuclear powered vessels is going to have nuclear waste to manage.
The thing is, the current NON-nuclear version of these behemoths cruise ships do currently produce order of magnitude more pollution: they currently burn insane amount of diesel, and not exactly the refined diesel that you pump into your truck, but whatever crude shit they can get the cheapest.
And they manage this pollution by the worst imaginable way: by just dumping it into the atmosphere.
(I'm ready to bet that once you compute the crazy amount of waste dumped into the atomosphere, the trace amounts of radio-active isotopes present in the fuel and released into the atmosphere are probably causing more radio-active pollution than any nuclear reactor, even if they are proportionally less concentrated per volume of fuel).
We're not speaking of plain introducing nuclear waste, we're speaking about exchange potential nuclear waster against current mega-tons of pollution.
not to mention other cost-cutting arangements that would decrease safety. Nuclear power on carriers and subs work because of high standards in personel enforced by military discipline. Good luck getting that on a random cruise ship.
Yup, that is something to be more afraid of.
(The current shit pumped into these vessels and passed as "diesel" is a nice example).
On the other hand, given the massive amount of energy required, I'm not sure if switching to nunclear isn't already a massive cutting of operational costs.
(But on the other hand, the MBAs might start to think, "while we are cutting our costs 99x by switching to nuclear, why not cut a lot on safety just to raise it to 100x-cost-cutting ?")
I quickly looked up on Wikipedia, apparently there ARE nuclear powered civilian vessels (though most were built Russia, mostly back when it was still called Soviet Union - None built by France which is were Oasis-class cruise ships seems to be built).
What I liked most of mine (Palm Pre and HP Pre3) wasn't as mush the size as the physical keyboard and the wonderful card-based/touch-based UI.
(apparently so good that even iOS and Android are currently attempting pale copies of it).
I dont appreciate the Android UI, it mostly reminds me of a cluttered windows desktop (with dozens of icon).
Jolla's SailfishOS (different kind of cards, and another way to do touch-based UI) is the closest thing to come nearly webOS's UI's usability.
(My main gripe is that it still lacks the "tabs as separate cards" metaphor that webOS had. In sailfishOS, each application either introduce its own different logic for tabs (like browsers) or can't open multiple windows (like e-mail). In webOS, tabs are opened as extra cards that get automatically grouped together in "hands")
And aircraft carriers and russian icebreakers tend to be nuclear powered and don't burn a single drop of diesel (the biggest thing that can be compared - makes sense to take "airport on a ship" when comparing to "small city on a ship").
This monster has (if a read correctly) twice the tonnage of the biggest of them (so roughly the same number of zeros), but use instead an archaic power method designed for much smaller ship, that requires to carry around (heavy !) and burn insane amounts of polluting fuels.
Well no shit, it's the biggest ship of the world. If you want to impress me, tell how how much fuel per passager it burn and compare it to others cruise ship.
Well, if you compare to other ship this is a *really inefficient* ship. And it's really weird, when you take just a couple of minute to think about it.
Don't forget that the world doesn't stop at cruise ships.
When you look at other ships with similar order of magnitude of tonnage ("similar" as in "roughly the same number of zeroes in the 'tonnage' item"),
you find aircraft carriers, which are almost exclusively nuclear-powered and thus burn not a single drop of diesel and ridiculously small quantities of nuclear fuel - that's the whole point of nuclear energy, it consume amounts of fuel which are order of magnitudes smaller.
(Though, okay, the aircrafts themselves on the carrier do burn conventionnal fuels).
And we're speaking here about vessels whose tonnage is at most, approximately half of this monster (I might be wrong, I'm not very fluent in the various maritime units).
Even *civilian* nuclear powered vessels do exist (though most seem to come out of Russia - back when it was URSS) - and we're speaking here of smaller ship, around an order smaller than this behemot.
All these ship consume not a single drop of diesel.
So, why the hell those this monster to burn that much fuel ?!?
The drawback I see with thorium is that it is currently only *researched* by the military navies.
I.E.: if gargantuan civilian "floating cities" ships decide to adopt it, it will be completely new technology. It won't have been tested and proven since long time, with all the drawbacks and caveat very well known, and the whole design perfected over several revision like current maritime nuclear generator used by navies.
I'm not sure that these kind of companies will be able to spend as much as government/military to perfect the technology. They'll probably spare on the R&D side of things. To avoid nuclear catastrophes, it might be better to re-use older/proven/known reactors for the cruise ships, and let those with deeper pocket manage to bring thorium reactors to reality.
Yup, that's also what I was thinking:
Nearly every modern carrier (which is technically a "small airport/military base on a ship") uses nuclear power.
Why the hell is this monster (which is compared to a "small city on a ship") does need to burn diesel ?!?
But then probably there are some weird non-proliferation treaties that limit the application of this kind of technology to non-government/non-military ships.
And/or treaty about nuclear use in international waters (where this ship operates most of the time).
my box is kept secure enough that it's probably not worth the bother of breaking into on the slight off-chance that there might be something valuable here.
It's not worth dedicating time of a pro hacker, to specifically find a way into your box, yes.
But it's worth every script kiddie's time to try generic attacks (like bugs of openssl that you haven't had the time to patch yet) against the target groups you appear in.
Again, you only are going to be a number on their list, not a concrete person, but they'll constantly deploy every trick in their sleeve to try to get at you (and at any other number on their target list against whom the trick-of-the-day happened to work).
Luckily, as you try as hard as possible to secure your box, you're getting hacked less frequently than your neighbours, and as you're more savvy than random users, you're more likely to notice when a hack succeeded.
Think of it a little bit as the locked door to your house. It's certainly not proof against government. If they want, they can take down the whole house.
But it's protected against random vandals that might degrade your property.
So it basically looks secure.
Until the day some burglar decides to pay a visit on the chance he might manage to steel something of value. His not targetting you personally, your house happened to be the one he targeted. You my get a guard dog, an alarm, etc. it is going to lower the chance of your stuff getting stolen, but there's always someone motivated enough with access to enough tricks and techniques.
The big difference between your house and the internet is the accessibility. A real-world burglar can only be in front of one house of a time. He can break into only one house simultaneously.
Whereas, on the internet, everything is simultaneously accessible to anyone. It's as if all the houses of the world were all in the same small street and every single wannabe theif could quickly move from one to the other.
The only real secure machine is turned of. And unplugged. And stored into a safe.....
But your practices are as close as possible to safe, while staying convenient.