Because microusb has an absolutely atrocious, finnicky connector. I hope they use practically anything but microusb.
MicroUSB was designed to put the wear on the plug (the cable), not the device. Or so they say. One year with Samsung Galaxy charging everyday - no problems so far.
Apples Lightning connector would be great, actually, or something very similar. Near unbreakably solid, easy to plug in our out, can be plugged in either way...
Yes. I pressed "Submit" too fast. The feature wasn't available in the first disk-less Mac OS X release, whatever it was (I'm still on 10.6). It was before the Mavericks. (When first Airs - without CD/DVD drives - were released. Friend of mine still has one of those.) Back then, Apple said simply "just go to the shop and they would reinstall the OS for you". What obviously caused uproar. Bit later they started selling the (overpriced) USB sticks with the OS. And now, it appears that users can actually make the USB stick by themselves. But it was definitely not possible before (and frankly I can't narrow it down because in the last 4 years there were too many Mac OS X versions released).
The update to the latest Mac OS X - Mavericks - is *free* as in "free beer".
Start the "App Store". The Mac OS X Mavericks is often displayed already on the front page. Click on it - and you would see that it is free of charge. Click Upgrade. (Disclaimer: haven't tried myself yet.)
Now the other question - Apple dropping external media as OS distribution media - is a valid concern. No one knows for how long Apple would host updates for older Mac OS X version, which are needed to update old Mac OS versions to the latest one.
With a monopoly everybody know where they stand. You either with them - or against them. And if the monopolist is really bad, then opposition would form in the industry.
Duopoly creates illusion of competition. It also sets the false perception of the choice and that anything beyond the two choices is not possible. The simulated market saturation also makes investors nervous about investing into alternatives. That allows participants of the duopoly to slow the innovation: there is no danger of competition; the only competitor is very likely thinking the same as you and also tries to maximize the profits by cutting the costs. Throw in the patent cross-licensing deals, and you literally have no way to crack the duopoly. For as long as they do not openly cooperate, you can't prosecute them under anti-trust laws.
The landscape has changed. And some people want to be optimistic about it.
But. Before it was MS vs. the world. And we thought it was bad. But right now it is effectively MS vs. Google, which might be much worse. Because duopolies generally are worse than monopolies.
You know you have a problem when an Apple iDevice out of box has *more* features than that of competitors.
P.S. To mess it all up, I think that Facebook should release their own (mobile) OS. That's probably the reason why Samsung tries hard to bring another open OS on the market: to prevent duopoly in the mobile market.
Yes. I thought the introduction of user forums would finally help MS to close the gap with the the users. But it didn't. Threads gets deleted. Bugs get labeled as "features". Botched OSes gets released.
Remember, she's the one who called the Internet 'virgin soil' last year.
USA's health.gov launch was very mature then?
As public agencies go, it is a virgin soil. EU wants to transition all of the bureaucracy to electronic form to make it accessible EU-wide. That is something nobody done yet. So yeah, it is virgin soil.
Every other week some European politician speaks up, demanding billions of tax payer's money to create an independent European IT industry.
Independent of USA - yes, why not. The investments into R&D around IT industry here in EU wouldn't harm. You see problem from the perspective of newswire headlines. Living in Germany, I see the problem from inside: education system is inadequate and there are simply not enough specialists. EU can build its own computers and OSs: knowledge is here, but the lack of specialists makes it very expensive and impractical. This is the chicken and egg problem all over again: no specialists, leads to no projects, no projects leads to no demand for specialists, leads to no specialists.
At the same time, these guys complain that they can't run their offices with Linux
I've seen few German offices using SUSE already 10 years ago.
The last time France (Alsace) and Germany (Saarland) trusted each other, what followed was the creation of EU.
The problem here is very simple. For the e-reforms EU wants to rely on Internet. They are simply forced to act, because they can't allow potentially sensitive data like tax information to flow via unreliable country like USA. The work in that direction was happening for some time now and I'm not really sure what current initiative entails. The only contentious point was the ICANN. One can see that EU and others want to fork it and if they are successful, the ICANN as we know it would be responsible exclusively for the Americas. IPv6 IMO has room for such actions.
That's actually one of the things he doesn't cover: good/better specialists end up doing the work, while the mediocre/lesser specialists have lots of spare time to act in a manager-like manner. Former for their achievements get more work. Later - get promoted.
Yeah. Now if you could just go ahead and make sure that your T.P.S. report has a cover sheet on it this week, that'd be greeeat.
Efficiency consultant: All right, Bill. Let me ask you this. How much time each week would you say you deal with these TPS reports?
That's actually one of the things he doesn't cover: good/better specialists end up doing the work, while the mediocre/lesser specialists have lots of spare time to act in a manager-like manner. Former for their achievements get more work. Later - get promoted.
10+ years in Germany - and I see no abundance of the alleged behavior.
You mean customers getting screwed by companies? Excessively high prices (including for insurance), high penalties for switching or terminating contracts, price fixing, barriers to entry, etc. Of course you don't see it: it would be politically unpopular to make it obvious, but it's there.
Concrete example? And the examples which are different to USA??
High price of insurance is probably the only one specific to Germany. Because Germans like to have everything ensured. Even their insurances.
Price fixing is probably the most ridiculous claim. Antitrust laws are pretty strict - and penalties are pretty high. In last 20 years I bet EU has prosecuted and forced into compliance with the law more USA corporations than the USA itself.
Yes, you put your finger on it: free markets require people to think and make informed decisions; informed buyers in a free market is what keeps companies honest.
That's just Ami talking. Trust nobody - be at each other's throat. Have them - before they can have you.
People like you find that uncomfortable and don't like think, you don't like to do your part to keep society going, you just rather leave that to the experts.
We have here a fully functional gov't so I really can rely on experts. And If that allows me to go with my own life - why not? Why should I care about every little piece of shit? - when there are people I can rely on? and who can rely on me? Oh wait, you gave the answer to that: "trust nobody!"
Funny to hear about that "abandon", esp after in USA, you got shafted of your *own* *pensions*.
10+ years in Germany - and I see no abundance of the alleged behavior. Frankly, I like that I do not have to think about it and can concentrate on my own life. Yes, I do not have to think about it. Welcome to the social state!
Otherwise, "simple" gives you something that takes less work to understand, requires less knowledge of the predecessor technology with makes it "easy" to bring in new talent that does not know the previous technology, and requires less work to customize because there is less to know.
The problem with the argument in context is that init system plays special role and bringing in "new talent" isn't precisely feasible in real world.
Even with the systemd, wrong.service might work most of the time while still break later in unpredicted ways. (And the amount of pre/post conditions/etc configuration options and dummy, OS-specific dependencies already provide more than enough rope.)
At least with upstart, wrong job would simply hang the boot of the system.
Debian isn't run by a company, they have all the time in the world to get this decision right. So forget what init has now, forget that lots of current administrators know init, forget that lots of current administrators know shell scripting. What replacement for init is the simplest way to get the features they want?
Wrong argument. Admins want their systems to manage themselves on auto-pilot as to not to distract them from their coffee breaks and solitaire.:)
(Admins do not want to deal in with init system directly - they want it work for intended purpose right out of the box, as shipped by vendor. (And I happen to work for a company which ships softwre on pre-configured *nix boxes.) Some vendors (even 1st party ones) do not even support tinkering with the init system.)
I suspect the very backwards compatibility that makes the transition to Upstart easier will hurt it in the long term. Systemd's break with the past makes a transition headache but may make more sense in the long term. Or maybe there are a number of other options that are superior but not well known.
I personally do not consider ability to freely edit init configuration to be of "backward compatibility" character. It is a feature.
I will not argue that upstart has no drawbacks. Still this is the first time I have actually seen an init system which tries to solve old forgotten problems. The problems for which often in past I had to give up and write a dummy two-line C program to wait for an event and trigger some action later.
IOW, I can have dumb scripts for normal services and event-driven jobs for special services. Both freely editable in a text editor.
P.S. I have no doubt that systemd would win in the end. Not because of some technical advantages, but primarily because upstart has tainted CLA. The tainted CLA already drove some people away from it. But if you want to have a technical argument in favor of systemd, then use the much better SMF (service management facility). Because one provided by upstart currently is really really barebone.
Oh and yes, and obviously/. headline is load of bull. In the first case, court hasn't said that resale is forbidden - it has said that Valve isn't obliged to facilitate it. I doubt very much that the second case arguments would be of much different character.
I'm working in software development, so our needs - and admin's tasks - are different.
In fact, most of the tweaking is done by the testers (who being on the receiving end of the pre-release software) often end up being responsible for making the software working as a whole.
Init script tweaking incidents went down considerably, but still happen.
In the end, and as we are concerned, even *single* incident enough to justify the hard requirement for tweakable init system.
Though, to give a balanced perspective, it's not like systemd is fully locked down. It is also tweakable, but to a lesser extent. I simply lack the professional experience with it to say whether it would be suitable or not.
P.S. With the embedded developer hat on, though I haven't done it in age, I can say that systemd is certainly unfit for embedded. I typically put into binaries only the minimum - for performance and resource consumption reasons - rest is in plain shell/etc scripts. One can easily patch a script - but to update a binary one literally has to start whole release cycle again.
No, it is loathed by a small, vocal, percentage of system administrators, who have very little in the way of technical arguments at their disposal.
I hear that argument a lot. The problem with it that systemd's approach likewise has "very little in the way of technical arguments". To the most questions you get blank non-responses which amount to "it is like it is".
There is very little to recommend init scripts. I dismiss arguments that they are any easier for any average mortal to deal with than any other piece of code, [...]
systemd moves to C what was historically done by shell scripts. Admins and testers - people who deal with the init system more than anybody else - can't C but can shell. What's more, on a typical systemd system, literally all the gritty bits of initialization are hidden in the binaries. If you need to modify some aspect of their behavior - tough luck. Pottering is one of the proponents of the 100% configuration-less system: majority of the binaries do not even have any command line options to customize their behavior.
If PulseAudio example taught us anything, systemd has a chance at being something - only after Pottering is done with it and leaves the project.
P.S. Do not take me as a upstart proponent. I have installed both Fedora and Ubuntu in VM and have to say that like none of them. Or rather. I do not like the Fedora. (But heck, GNOME 3 desktop is hard to like and it sets the mood from the beginning. Dysfunctional Alt-Tab alone is worth dismissing the whole distro.) Ubuntu in that respect is much more palatable. But then, upstart plays there only a small, albeit important, role of starting up basic system services - rest, including service management, is done by the usual sysvinit scripts. Fun fact: Fedora boots about twice slower than the Ubuntu, despite systemd's promise of faster boot times vs. Ubuntu's reliance on the slower sysvinit scripts. In the end, I'd still take sysvinit.
Of course jQuery is a hack - a hack around the out-dated, crufty and rigid thing called CSS. Oh yeah, jQuery has lots of other stuff included, but if one would look at the largest chunk of work it does, it is patching the layout, dynamically adding dynamic behavior what, as pragmatical person can easily notice, CSS can easily be made to do too. But everybody's stuck with the notion that CSS is only and solely a static abstract style definition. So the everybody is stuck with jQuery to patch it up during run-time.
Slashdot Mirror
What you describe (exaggerating a lot though) sound very much like the "drama queen" archetype.
Ironically, in workplace, all the drama queens I have met were male.
Because microusb has an absolutely atrocious, finnicky connector. I hope they use practically anything but microusb.
MicroUSB was designed to put the wear on the plug (the cable), not the device. Or so they say. One year with Samsung Galaxy charging everyday - no problems so far.
Apples Lightning connector would be great, actually, or something very similar. Near unbreakably solid, easy to plug in our out, can be plugged in either way...
I thought the same until I read on forums about lightning connector corrosion.
Note, I'm not arguing that MicroUSB is a good standard for charging. But IMO it is better than no standard at all.
Basically, you want to use Google's services? You gotta do it the way *they* want you to do it. It's their services and their terms.
Which is, if you think about it, is rather evil.
Person can't pay for the services - person can only access the services by buying the Google's approved product.
It is as if we have ended up with game consoles, not portable computers.
Also, everyone is buying tablets.
False.
I'm not buying one.
Until they start producing ones with a matte screen.
Yes. I pressed "Submit" too fast. The feature wasn't available in the first disk-less Mac OS X release, whatever it was (I'm still on 10.6). It was before the Mavericks. (When first Airs - without CD/DVD drives - were released. Friend of mine still has one of those.) Back then, Apple said simply "just go to the shop and they would reinstall the OS for you". What obviously caused uproar. Bit later they started selling the (overpriced) USB sticks with the OS. And now, it appears that users can actually make the USB stick by themselves. But it was definitely not possible before (and frankly I can't narrow it down because in the last 4 years there were too many Mac OS X versions released).
Thanks for the tip!
At the time of Maverick's release that wasn't available.
The update to the latest Mac OS X - Mavericks - is *free* as in "free beer".
Start the "App Store". The Mac OS X Mavericks is often displayed already on the front page. Click on it - and you would see that it is free of charge. Click Upgrade. (Disclaimer: haven't tried myself yet.)
Now the other question - Apple dropping external media as OS distribution media - is a valid concern. No one knows for how long Apple would host updates for older Mac OS X version, which are needed to update old Mac OS versions to the latest one.
With a monopoly everybody know where they stand. You either with them - or against them. And if the monopolist is really bad, then opposition would form in the industry.
Duopoly creates illusion of competition. It also sets the false perception of the choice and that anything beyond the two choices is not possible. The simulated market saturation also makes investors nervous about investing into alternatives. That allows participants of the duopoly to slow the innovation: there is no danger of competition; the only competitor is very likely thinking the same as you and also tries to maximize the profits by cutting the costs. Throw in the patent cross-licensing deals, and you literally have no way to crack the duopoly. For as long as they do not openly cooperate, you can't prosecute them under anti-trust laws.
Wow. That's deep.
3rd party products *depend* hard on Explorer's "feature" of stealing focus from the search input box?
Or inability to disable/reassign the Win-P keyboard shortcut??
Very deep indeed.
Guess which kind of person wrote this article?
The landscape has changed. And some people want to be optimistic about it.
But. Before it was MS vs. the world. And we thought it was bad. But right now it is effectively MS vs. Google, which might be much worse. Because duopolies generally are worse than monopolies.
You know you have a problem when an Apple iDevice out of box has *more* features than that of competitors.
P.S. To mess it all up, I think that Facebook should release their own (mobile) OS. That's probably the reason why Samsung tries hard to bring another open OS on the market: to prevent duopoly in the mobile market.
Yes. I thought the introduction of user forums would finally help MS to close the gap with the the users. But it didn't. Threads gets deleted. Bugs get labeled as "features". Botched OSes gets released.
Remember, she's the one who called the Internet 'virgin soil' last year.
USA's health.gov launch was very mature then?
As public agencies go, it is a virgin soil. EU wants to transition all of the bureaucracy to electronic form to make it accessible EU-wide. That is something nobody done yet. So yeah, it is virgin soil.
Every other week some European politician speaks up, demanding billions of tax payer's money to create an independent European IT industry.
Independent of USA - yes, why not. The investments into R&D around IT industry here in EU wouldn't harm. You see problem from the perspective of newswire headlines. Living in Germany, I see the problem from inside: education system is inadequate and there are simply not enough specialists. EU can build its own computers and OSs: knowledge is here, but the lack of specialists makes it very expensive and impractical. This is the chicken and egg problem all over again: no specialists, leads to no projects, no projects leads to no demand for specialists, leads to no specialists.
At the same time, these guys complain that they can't run their offices with Linux
I've seen few German offices using SUSE already 10 years ago.
The last time France (Alsace) and Germany (Saarland) trusted each other, what followed was the creation of EU.
The problem here is very simple. For the e-reforms EU wants to rely on Internet. They are simply forced to act, because they can't allow potentially sensitive data like tax information to flow via unreliable country like USA. The work in that direction was happening for some time now and I'm not really sure what current initiative entails. The only contentious point was the ICANN. One can see that EU and others want to fork it and if they are successful, the ICANN as we know it would be responsible exclusively for the Americas. IPv6 IMO has room for such actions.
That's actually one of the things he doesn't cover: good/better specialists end up doing the work, while the mediocre/lesser specialists have lots of spare time to act in a manager-like manner. Former for their achievements get more work. Later - get promoted.
Yeah. Now if you could just go ahead and make sure that your T.P.S. report has a cover sheet on it this week, that'd be greeeat.
Efficiency consultant: All right, Bill. Let me ask you this. How much time each week would you say you deal with these TPS reports?
Lumbergh: Yeah...
No.
That's actually one of the things he doesn't cover: good/better specialists end up doing the work, while the mediocre/lesser specialists have lots of spare time to act in a manager-like manner. Former for their achievements get more work. Later - get promoted.
Typical German [...]
LOL. I'm not even a German.
"Born in USSR!"
You mean customers getting screwed by companies? Excessively high prices (including for insurance), high penalties for switching or terminating contracts, price fixing, barriers to entry, etc. Of course you don't see it: it would be politically unpopular to make it obvious, but it's there.
Concrete example? And the examples which are different to USA??
High price of insurance is probably the only one specific to Germany. Because Germans like to have everything ensured. Even their insurances.
Price fixing is probably the most ridiculous claim. Antitrust laws are pretty strict - and penalties are pretty high. In last 20 years I bet EU has prosecuted and forced into compliance with the law more USA corporations than the USA itself.
Yes, you put your finger on it: free markets require people to think and make informed decisions; informed buyers in a free market is what keeps companies honest.
That's just Ami talking. Trust nobody - be at each other's throat. Have them - before they can have you.
People like you find that uncomfortable and don't like think, you don't like to do your part to keep society going, you just rather leave that to the experts.
We have here a fully functional gov't so I really can rely on experts. And If that allows me to go with my own life - why not? Why should I care about every little piece of shit? - when there are people I can rely on? and who can rely on me? Oh wait, you gave the answer to that: "trust nobody!"
Funny to hear about that "abandon", esp after in USA, you got shafted of your *own* *pensions*.
10+ years in Germany - and I see no abundance of the alleged behavior. Frankly, I like that I do not have to think about it and can concentrate on my own life. Yes, I do not have to think about it. Welcome to the social state!
Fine logic. The best one money can buy.
The goal of the laws is to make sure that companies can't shaft the customers.
And yes, I agree, it would make business much much more profitable if law allowed them to rip off customers left and right.
Otherwise, "simple" gives you something that takes less work to understand, requires less knowledge of the predecessor technology with makes it "easy" to bring in new talent that does not know the previous technology, and requires less work to customize because there is less to know.
The problem with the argument in context is that init system plays special role and bringing in "new talent" isn't precisely feasible in real world.
Even with the systemd, wrong .service might work most of the time while still break later in unpredicted ways. (And the amount of pre/post conditions/etc configuration options and dummy, OS-specific dependencies already provide more than enough rope.)
At least with upstart, wrong job would simply hang the boot of the system.
Debian isn't run by a company, they have all the time in the world to get this decision right. So forget what init has now, forget that lots of current administrators know init, forget that lots of current administrators know shell scripting. What replacement for init is the simplest way to get the features they want?
Wrong argument. Admins want their systems to manage themselves on auto-pilot as to not to distract them from their coffee breaks and solitaire. :)
(Admins do not want to deal in with init system directly - they want it work for intended purpose right out of the box, as shipped by vendor. (And I happen to work for a company which ships softwre on pre-configured *nix boxes.) Some vendors (even 1st party ones) do not even support tinkering with the init system.)
I suspect the very backwards compatibility that makes the transition to Upstart easier will hurt it in the long term. Systemd's break with the past makes a transition headache but may make more sense in the long term. Or maybe there are a number of other options that are superior but not well known.
I personally do not consider ability to freely edit init configuration to be of "backward compatibility" character. It is a feature.
I will not argue that upstart has no drawbacks. Still this is the first time I have actually seen an init system which tries to solve old forgotten problems. The problems for which often in past I had to give up and write a dummy two-line C program to wait for an event and trigger some action later.
IOW, I can have dumb scripts for normal services and event-driven jobs for special services. Both freely editable in a text editor.
P.S. I have no doubt that systemd would win in the end. Not because of some technical advantages, but primarily because upstart has tainted CLA. The tainted CLA already drove some people away from it. But if you want to have a technical argument in favor of systemd, then use the much better SMF (service management facility). Because one provided by upstart currently is really really barebone.
Oh and yes, and obviously /. headline is load of bull. In the first case, court hasn't said that resale is forbidden - it has said that Valve isn't obliged to facilitate it. I doubt very much that the second case arguments would be of much different character.
Except when a sale is a rental under a lease agreement, which is basically what the Steam EULA is.
In Germany, if you paid money for it - you bought it.
Unlike USA, in Germany, EULA can't override the (consumer protection) law.
My reading of the RTFA (the only linked by Muktware) is that the issue isn't as singular as "enforce the EULA":
1. (The first case.) Valve isn't obliged to facilitate the resale of games.
2. (This, the second, case) The judge decision isn't yet public so it is unknown why/how it was reasoned.
3. (Another pending case) Games are not only software, but in larger part are art work. And art work has its own protection laws.
I'm working in software development, so our needs - and admin's tasks - are different.
In fact, most of the tweaking is done by the testers (who being on the receiving end of the pre-release software) often end up being responsible for making the software working as a whole.
Init script tweaking incidents went down considerably, but still happen.
In the end, and as we are concerned, even *single* incident enough to justify the hard requirement for tweakable init system.
Though, to give a balanced perspective, it's not like systemd is fully locked down. It is also tweakable, but to a lesser extent. I simply lack the professional experience with it to say whether it would be suitable or not.
P.S. With the embedded developer hat on, though I haven't done it in age, I can say that systemd is certainly unfit for embedded. I typically put into binaries only the minimum - for performance and resource consumption reasons - rest is in plain shell/etc scripts. One can easily patch a script - but to update a binary one literally has to start whole release cycle again.
No, it is loathed by a small, vocal, percentage of system administrators, who have very little in the way of technical arguments at their disposal.
I hear that argument a lot. The problem with it that systemd's approach likewise has "very little in the way of technical arguments". To the most questions you get blank non-responses which amount to "it is like it is".
There is very little to recommend init scripts. I dismiss arguments that they are any easier for any average mortal to deal with than any other piece of code, [...]
systemd moves to C what was historically done by shell scripts. Admins and testers - people who deal with the init system more than anybody else - can't C but can shell. What's more, on a typical systemd system, literally all the gritty bits of initialization are hidden in the binaries. If you need to modify some aspect of their behavior - tough luck. Pottering is one of the proponents of the 100% configuration-less system: majority of the binaries do not even have any command line options to customize their behavior.
If PulseAudio example taught us anything, systemd has a chance at being something - only after Pottering is done with it and leaves the project.
P.S. Do not take me as a upstart proponent. I have installed both Fedora and Ubuntu in VM and have to say that like none of them. Or rather. I do not like the Fedora. (But heck, GNOME 3 desktop is hard to like and it sets the mood from the beginning. Dysfunctional Alt-Tab alone is worth dismissing the whole distro.) Ubuntu in that respect is much more palatable. But then, upstart plays there only a small, albeit important, role of starting up basic system services - rest, including service management, is done by the usual sysvinit scripts. Fun fact: Fedora boots about twice slower than the Ubuntu, despite systemd's promise of faster boot times vs. Ubuntu's reliance on the slower sysvinit scripts. In the end, I'd still take sysvinit.
Of course jQuery is a hack - a hack around the out-dated, crufty and rigid thing called CSS. Oh yeah, jQuery has lots of other stuff included, but if one would look at the largest chunk of work it does, it is patching the layout, dynamically adding dynamic behavior what, as pragmatical person can easily notice, CSS can easily be made to do too. But everybody's stuck with the notion that CSS is only and solely a static abstract style definition. So the everybody is stuck with jQuery to patch it up during run-time.