After watching the Japanese "Fafner" TV animation, I was quite intrigued by the whole "assimilation" idea. Tried to watch the Star Trek version of it - and was largely disappointed.
The "Q" are one hell of a plothole - but still pretty much the only "true" aliens in the Start Trek.
intent on keeping true to the spirit of Gene Roddenberry's television show.
That's just another way of saying "more of the same".
I can understand why the entertainment industry is so obsessed with the canons: to not dilute value of the original.
But I still can't grasp the why the fans are so obsessed with the "more of the same"?
P.S. I like how Japanese animes often parody and make fun of themselves. I like how they sometimes shuffle the roles and characters. Occasionally the shenanigans are way too transparent and shallow - but sometimes very brilliant and deeps ideas come out of it.
Dismantling the centralized institutions one by one - DNS, IANA/RIRs, hosting providers - whatever Maelstrom is capable of - is a step in the right direction.
If sufficient number of decentralized alternatives appears, one can try to nest them like a russian dolls. More layers of the nested services - higher the privacy (at the potential cost of reliability).
I dont know if its a bug, it makes navigation more simpler.
Any evidence to back up the claim?
When 10+ years ago I was moving from Linux to Windows, the case-sensitve file system was one of the major risk factors.
But even in the beginnng, I have encountered precisely zero problems with it. And I'm the type who works mostly on the terminal and should be directly impacted by the case-sensitive file names.
The thing is, these days, nobody types the filenames manually: it is either click in GUI with the mouse or filename completion on the command line. And even if the filenames needs to be typed manually, literally everybody universally uses the lower case. (That even on Windows. And I have helped in past correct the case handling in several Windows applications so that they create files with consistent upper/lower case names. Because users were complaining that it is inconvenient and kind of fugly that sometimes output filenames are upper case, sometimes lower case.)
As such, I consider case-insensitive file names to be a redundant feature.
A quiet, kid-friendly neighbourhood street becomes literally a meat grinder.
I have lived twice near such streets. Once - juat as the street was transitioning from the "quiet, kid-friendly" to "meat grinder". Two kids were killed by speeding cars. Road bumps had only limited (and largely negative) effect: an idiot crashes his car on the road bump, traffic jam forms on both sides of the street and the whole city quarter is effectively blocked: no car can get in or get out.
The final solution community found was to cut the one "through" street in the middle, making out of it two dead-end streets.
But most of the interesting content is quite static, changing relatively slowly. Consider Wikipedia or YouTube. Wikipedia updates relatively slowly. YouTube only adds new videos (and after Google's touches the comments and the recommendations are pretty useless anyway).
Search and the comments might need to stay dynamic - and centralized - but hosting costs would drop significantly if the bulk data transfers would be handled by the P2P network.
I have found a very good job near where I live and I have simply "canceled" their hiring "process" in the middle. Imagine: dozens phone calls to organize dozens of "interviews", scattered around the world. I have stopped around 5th or 6th "interview", which was around 9-12 month into the "process". In other words, I wasn't hired by Google on technicality that I got bored waiting (and found good job ~20min walking distance from home!)
All in all, I was pretty surprised to find that the hiring process in Google is so badly organized and is so poor in communication. Just like any other other employer, they let you wait and dangle, but the difference that they need 4-12 times more interviews and 4-12 times more waiting and dangling for weeks and months.
That whole thing doesn't make sense, unless your goal specifically is the magic "Google" badge on your CV.
Google engineers are just bunch of narcissistic douchebags. (Hey, I went through their hiring process - I know the types who would fit perfectly!)
GMail was one of the first indicators.
They fail to understand the purpose of e-mail, and as such we would never ever get the most basic and oldest of the e-mail client functions: folders.
But they would go on "reinventing" e-mail forever, with colors, tabs, bars, circles, ovals, shapes, and probably in far future odors. Because sitting down and making a finished product takes a commitment. But the only thing Google has ever apparently committed itself to.... Squirrel!
"monolithic in architecture" - that means its a single binary with no dependencies [...]
No. Single binary with no dependencies means monolithic design.
For example Linux kernel : single binary with no external dependencies, but internally its architecture is still modular. And the implementation of modules in Linux is still largely "monolithic", since kernel are just pieces of the live kernel, not compatible between different kernel version, which reside on hard drive, not in memory. And when they are loaded into the memory they pretend to be an integral part of the kernel.
[...] which is wrong otherwise every single binary with depending on a library is a monolith. this smart-ass mis-definition of "monolith" is one used by detractors of any system they don't like.
You seem to fail to grasp the difference between design and architecture. Your CS education has failed you. Pick a copy of Booch's OOAD and read it up.
Or I forgot to add "beardy" to "*NIX guys"? Who knows.
What people do not understand, do not grasp yet, is that SystemD brings Linux closer to the *BSD. Pretty soon, SystemD would start dictating kernel version and kernel configuration, turning the whole Linux ecosystem upside down, and making it just like the BSD: a system which contains not only the kernel, but also the whole shebang of userspace tools and libraries.
But it does it the Windows way, instead of the traditional *NIX/BSD way, and that is what provokes most of the protests.
Slashdot crowd is special and doesn't see that modern "Linux admin" is not much different from "Windows admin". RHEL and SLES already lock down the system (both with semi-proprietary software and support contracts) to the point where admin can only press the button to accomplish something. If there is no button - then it is impossible. In other words: just like the Windows. (In part, of course, because these days Windows too, similarly to Linux, allows some level of automation from command line or (Visual Basic or PowerShell) scripts.)
I used to be a sys admin, but that was years ago and currently I only use Linux on the desktop. I don't suppose that someone could explain to me (or just give me a link to an explanation): what is systemd exactly, what does it change, and why do people both love and hate it so much?
Systemd is a piece of software, modular in design, monolithic in architecture. It is, on top of being a replacement for init and the init.d scripts, replaces basically everything touching kernel and whatnot. It is also a service management and monitoring framework.
It is authored by the same guy who created PulseAudio and Avahi. Think a guy with enourmous ego and the GNOME attitude ("my way, or the highway").
I've seen enough of these stories now to kind of get the feeling that it's mostly admins who hate this, and they mostly hate it because it's change and it screws up their configs. Is that right? Is there any other reason to hate it? I have no idea what the motivation is on the other side.
It takes what worked and everybody knows (mostly written in shell), and replaces it with binary blobs (binary programs, written in C).
The majority of admins (think: ex-Windows white collars) are overjoyed to have a new toy. They never knew how init worked - and now they do not have to care anymore. Because anything written in C is magically better than everything written in shell.
The minority of admins (think: *NIX guys) are royally pissed that something they were taking for granted - the total control over the system *NIX always provided - is now basically locked down and given away to some guys from interwebs about whom they never heard before. All for the sake, wait for it, that GNOME can shutdown or restart computer smoothly.
What's wrong with you people. We are waiting already for 5+ MORE THAN FIVE fucking years. Still hasn't happened.
1TB HDD - 60-80€, 1TB SSD - >350€.
The problem is that once PC is turned on, there is not much use for the SSD speed. It's not like I'm moving terabytes of data around everyday. And even if I have to, I do not have to wait for it: I simply leave it overnight.
Another problem is that (some) SSD have the nasty habit, once failed, to deny you access to the data at all. I hoped that at least those jackasses would straighten out the SMART support and finally standardize the monitoring parameters. But few moronic manufacturers even proclaimed that their drives are so good that they don't need no stinking SMART support...
All in all, SSDs are developing too fast. And have pretty bad history of firmware bugs. And literally all manufacturers, instead of strengthening their stance of data safety, all like one doubled down on the "oh but look how fast it is!"
P.S. And TRIM support is still in shambles. After all the years, some drives still require a proprietary application/driver installed.
So buy a 4K/UHD display and regard it as two 1920x2160 portrait-mode displays? There are plenty of options, even up to 39" before you get into TVs, and then the sky's the limit.
Aspect ratio fanaticism is nothing but neo-luddism.
Think of them as two portrait-mode displays side-by-side with no annoying bezel.
Those are two *very* *small* portrait-mode displays.
I know some people do not mind squinting at monitor whole day - heck, some even like the light background. But I like my bgs dark and fonts large. And you can't fit that on a small display. Even if you have two of them.
WA displays are simply too wide. And in portrait orientation, they are too narrow.
I want my 4:3 or 5:4 back. 1:1 seems like a good compromise.
But I doubt that I will get one. For home, I want a WA for movies/etc. For office... I have little control over what junk IT buys. I bet the monitor would cost premium, and as such ordering one would be out of the question.
Ah. This "Software is hard" post again. All it talks about is the Red Hat (and GNU) own incompetence. They tend to overdesign greatly for no good reason, and then complain that they can't make the shit work together.
This is the signature of GNU (GNOME) and many things RH does: over-desgined and over-engineered solution, simplified and generalized to hell. (As if repeating sendmail.cf fiasco is their ultimate goal.) Getting done anything complicated is hard, because it is way too generalized and simplified. Getting it changed is hard because it is too large, since it is over-desgined and over-engineered.
Frankly, though, all this are signs of predominant immaturity and inexperience among the software developers. They grew in this GNU influenced culture where never finishing anything to the end is a norm of life. And thus they simply have no experience in making stuff work in the end and, instead of finishing it and learning from the mistakes of how it doesn't work, they generally choose the path of reinventing stuff by learning from the mistakes of how the (unproven) design didn't worked for them as developers. And that leads eventually to over-desgin and over-engineering. Most of the GNOME, SystemD, polkit, udev, avahi, a good deal of RH proprietary tools I had to deal with - are all very good examples of it.
Admit it, after the systemd has won the CTTE vote, you were just looking for a pretext to run away.;)
Because, politicking aside, there is a huge HUGE pile of work coming the way of Debian's systemd package.
And out of people who can actually shoulder the work, in any comprehensible fashion, most are actually in anti-systemd camp. That was visible already during the CTTE "discussions." The person who was fixing people's Debian installations, broken by GNOME/systemd dependency was actually the Vorlon, Steve Langasek, the upstart maintainer. Oh the irony. (While you and GNOME maintainers happily buried your heads in the sand and said "not our problem". That was pretty much the moment when systemd lost me, definitively.)
Still there are very few applications that are more “sticky” than databases, which after typically contains the keys to the kingdom.
DBs are rarely a problem. But DBAs and developers are the problem.
I had limited to exposure to Sybase and MySQL, before spending several years with a company deeply tied to Oracle RDBMS.
Most developers and DBAs are completely clueless about competitive alternatives. Over the years I have heard so much blatantly stupid crap, that it is even hard to believe that it can come from a person with higher education. MySQL can't transactions. Sybase locks completely everything for every update statement. You can't backup MySQL DB. There is no admin interface in Sybase. PL/SQL is Oracle specific, thus server side functionality can only be implemented with Oracle. Only Oracle implements server-side Java, thus you can connect from Java only to the Oracle DB. And so on.
With this mentality, several projects which required a local DB were stonewalled and simply buried. MySQL (aka MariaDB) was a viable candidate - in fact already successfully deployed by other R&Ds in other locations for the similar purpose - but people more or less refused to even learn how to work with it. Couple of open-minded developers within week actually ported the Java-based software to MySQL, but nobody was listening to them, because, duh, MySQL is impossible to work with.
Slashdot Mirror
3. Badly done aliens, with a lame explanation.
After watching the Japanese "Fafner" TV animation, I was quite intrigued by the whole "assimilation" idea. Tried to watch the Star Trek version of it - and was largely disappointed.
The "Q" are one hell of a plothole - but still pretty much the only "true" aliens in the Start Trek.
intent on keeping true to the spirit of Gene Roddenberry's television show.
That's just another way of saying "more of the same".
I can understand why the entertainment industry is so obsessed with the canons: to not dilute value of the original.
But I still can't grasp the why the fans are so obsessed with the "more of the same"?
P.S. I like how Japanese animes often parody and make fun of themselves. I like how they sometimes shuffle the roles and characters. Occasionally the shenanigans are way too transparent and shallow - but sometimes very brilliant and deeps ideas come out of it.
Still.
Dismantling the centralized institutions one by one - DNS, IANA/RIRs, hosting providers - whatever Maelstrom is capable of - is a step in the right direction.
If sufficient number of decentralized alternatives appears, one can try to nest them like a russian dolls. More layers of the nested services - higher the privacy (at the potential cost of reliability).
That coming on the heels of the decentralized web solution coming from BitTorrent, Inc.
Pretty exciting times.
I dont know if its a bug, it makes navigation more simpler.
Any evidence to back up the claim?
When 10+ years ago I was moving from Linux to Windows, the case-sensitve file system was one of the major risk factors.
But even in the beginnng, I have encountered precisely zero problems with it. And I'm the type who works mostly on the terminal and should be directly impacted by the case-sensitive file names.
The thing is, these days, nobody types the filenames manually: it is either click in GUI with the mouse or filename completion on the command line. And even if the filenames needs to be typed manually, literally everybody universally uses the lower case. (That even on Windows. And I have helped in past correct the case handling in several Windows applications so that they create files with consistent upper/lower case names. Because users were complaining that it is inconvenient and kind of fugly that sometimes output filenames are upper case, sometimes lower case.)
As such, I consider case-insensitive file names to be a redundant feature.
It has nothing to do with wealth.
A quiet, kid-friendly neighbourhood street becomes literally a meat grinder.
I have lived twice near such streets. Once - juat as the street was transitioning from the "quiet, kid-friendly" to "meat grinder". Two kids were killed by speeding cars. Road bumps had only limited (and largely negative) effect: an idiot crashes his car on the road bump, traffic jam forms on both sides of the street and the whole city quarter is effectively blocked: no car can get in or get out.
The final solution community found was to cut the one "through" street in the middle, making out of it two dead-end streets.
And the poor customers gets duped into buying a counterfeit pods without even realizing it!
That must be stopped!
Think of the customers!!
There is a reason why JPEG is blocky. The blocky nature of the encoding preserves details better.
BPG blurs everything heavily. Small details and fine textures literally disappear.(*)
JPEG is definitely outdated and web could gain from a worthy replacement. But BPG IMO doesn't appear to be "it".
(*) I wonder how JPEG would fare on the images, decoded from BPG. Since fine details are removed by BPG, the JPEG would be smaller too.
Most of the web might be dynamic.
But most of the interesting content is quite static, changing relatively slowly. Consider Wikipedia or YouTube. Wikipedia updates relatively slowly. YouTube only adds new videos (and after Google's touches the comments and the recommendations are pretty useless anyway).
Search and the comments might need to stay dynamic - and centralized - but hosting costs would drop significantly if the bulk data transfers would be handled by the P2P network.
I have found a very good job near where I live and I have simply "canceled" their hiring "process" in the middle. Imagine: dozens phone calls to organize dozens of "interviews", scattered around the world. I have stopped around 5th or 6th "interview", which was around 9-12 month into the "process". In other words, I wasn't hired by Google on technicality that I got bored waiting (and found good job ~20min walking distance from home!)
All in all, I was pretty surprised to find that the hiring process in Google is so badly organized and is so poor in communication. Just like any other other employer, they let you wait and dangle, but the difference that they need 4-12 times more interviews and 4-12 times more waiting and dangling for weeks and months.
That whole thing doesn't make sense, unless your goal specifically is the magic "Google" badge on your CV.
Google engineers are just bunch of narcissistic douchebags. (Hey, I went through their hiring process - I know the types who would fit perfectly!)
GMail was one of the first indicators.
They fail to understand the purpose of e-mail, and as such we would never ever get the most basic and oldest of the e-mail client functions: folders.
But they would go on "reinventing" e-mail forever, with colors, tabs, bars, circles, ovals, shapes, and probably in far future odors. Because sitting down and making a finished product takes a commitment. But the only thing Google has ever apparently committed itself to.... Squirrel!
Just do the "pulseaudio -k" to restart PA.
Since Pottering has left the PulseAudio project, at least the serviceability side of things has improved.
"monolithic in architecture" - that means its a single binary with no dependencies [...]
No. Single binary with no dependencies means monolithic design.
For example Linux kernel : single binary with no external dependencies, but internally its architecture is still modular. And the implementation of modules in Linux is still largely "monolithic", since kernel are just pieces of the live kernel, not compatible between different kernel version, which reside on hard drive, not in memory. And when they are loaded into the memory they pretend to be an integral part of the kernel.
[...] which is wrong otherwise every single binary with depending on a library is a monolith. this smart-ass mis-definition of "monolith" is one used by detractors of any system they don't like.
You seem to fail to grasp the difference between design and architecture. Your CS education has failed you. Pick a copy of Booch's OOAD and read it up.
Or I forgot to add "beardy" to "*NIX guys"? Who knows.
What people do not understand, do not grasp yet, is that SystemD brings Linux closer to the *BSD. Pretty soon, SystemD would start dictating kernel version and kernel configuration, turning the whole Linux ecosystem upside down, and making it just like the BSD: a system which contains not only the kernel, but also the whole shebang of userspace tools and libraries.
But it does it the Windows way, instead of the traditional *NIX/BSD way, and that is what provokes most of the protests.
Slashdot crowd is special and doesn't see that modern "Linux admin" is not much different from "Windows admin". RHEL and SLES already lock down the system (both with semi-proprietary software and support contracts) to the point where admin can only press the button to accomplish something. If there is no button - then it is impossible. In other words: just like the Windows. (In part, of course, because these days Windows too, similarly to Linux, allows some level of automation from command line or (Visual Basic or PowerShell) scripts.)
I used to be a sys admin, but that was years ago and currently I only use Linux on the desktop. I don't suppose that someone could explain to me (or just give me a link to an explanation): what is systemd exactly, what does it change, and why do people both love and hate it so much?
Systemd is a piece of software, modular in design, monolithic in architecture. It is, on top of being a replacement for init and the init.d scripts, replaces basically everything touching kernel and whatnot. It is also a service management and monitoring framework.
It is authored by the same guy who created PulseAudio and Avahi. Think a guy with enourmous ego and the GNOME attitude ("my way, or the highway").
I've seen enough of these stories now to kind of get the feeling that it's mostly admins who hate this, and they mostly hate it because it's change and it screws up their configs. Is that right? Is there any other reason to hate it? I have no idea what the motivation is on the other side.
It takes what worked and everybody knows (mostly written in shell), and replaces it with binary blobs (binary programs, written in C).
The majority of admins (think: ex-Windows white collars) are overjoyed to have a new toy. They never knew how init worked - and now they do not have to care anymore. Because anything written in C is magically better than everything written in shell.
The minority of admins (think: *NIX guys) are royally pissed that something they were taking for granted - the total control over the system *NIX always provided - is now basically locked down and given away to some guys from interwebs about whom they never heard before. All for the sake, wait for it, that GNOME can shutdown or restart computer smoothly.
We'll have to wait and see on that.
What's wrong with you people. We are waiting already for 5+ MORE THAN FIVE fucking years. Still hasn't happened.
1TB HDD - 60-80€, 1TB SSD - >350€.
The problem is that once PC is turned on, there is not much use for the SSD speed. It's not like I'm moving terabytes of data around everyday. And even if I have to, I do not have to wait for it: I simply leave it overnight.
Another problem is that (some) SSD have the nasty habit, once failed, to deny you access to the data at all. I hoped that at least those jackasses would straighten out the SMART support and finally standardize the monitoring parameters. But few moronic manufacturers even proclaimed that their drives are so good that they don't need no stinking SMART support...
All in all, SSDs are developing too fast. And have pretty bad history of firmware bugs. And literally all manufacturers, instead of strengthening their stance of data safety, all like one doubled down on the "oh but look how fast it is!"
P.S. And TRIM support is still in shambles. After all the years, some drives still require a proprietary application/driver installed.
So buy a 4K/UHD display and regard it as two 1920x2160 portrait-mode displays? There are plenty of options, even up to 39" before you get into TVs, and then the sky's the limit.
Aspect ratio fanaticism is nothing but neo-luddism.
"Well, that escalated quickly." (c)
Think of them as two portrait-mode displays side-by-side with no annoying bezel.
Those are two *very* *small* portrait-mode displays.
I know some people do not mind squinting at monitor whole day - heck, some even like the light background. But I like my bgs dark and fonts large. And you can't fit that on a small display. Even if you have two of them.
P.S. - Samsung, in no way, is a good company. They are bribery committing, price fixing, colluding, thieves - all convictions in a court of law.
Name one company which isn't.
All companies do it.
If found, pay fines, downplay it in media, and then proceed with the business as usual.
Would a square display be of any benefit to you?
Most definitely yes.
WA displays are simply too wide. And in portrait orientation, they are too narrow.
I want my 4:3 or 5:4 back. 1:1 seems like a good compromise.
But I doubt that I will get one. For home, I want a WA for movies/etc. For office... I have little control over what junk IT buys. I bet the monitor would cost premium, and as such ordering one would be out of the question.
Ah. This "Software is hard" post again. All it talks about is the Red Hat (and GNU) own incompetence. They tend to overdesign greatly for no good reason, and then complain that they can't make the shit work together.
This is the signature of GNU (GNOME) and many things RH does: over-desgined and over-engineered solution, simplified and generalized to hell. (As if repeating sendmail.cf fiasco is their ultimate goal.) Getting done anything complicated is hard, because it is way too generalized and simplified. Getting it changed is hard because it is too large, since it is over-desgined and over-engineered.
Frankly, though, all this are signs of predominant immaturity and inexperience among the software developers. They grew in this GNU influenced culture where never finishing anything to the end is a norm of life. And thus they simply have no experience in making stuff work in the end and, instead of finishing it and learning from the mistakes of how it doesn't work, they generally choose the path of reinventing stuff by learning from the mistakes of how the (unproven) design didn't worked for them as developers. And that leads eventually to over-desgin and over-engineering. Most of the GNOME, SystemD, polkit, udev, avahi, a good deal of RH proprietary tools I had to deal with - are all very good examples of it.
Admit it, after the systemd has won the CTTE vote, you were just looking for a pretext to run away. ;)
Because, politicking aside, there is a huge HUGE pile of work coming the way of Debian's systemd package.
And out of people who can actually shoulder the work, in any comprehensible fashion, most are actually in anti-systemd camp. That was visible already during the CTTE "discussions." The person who was fixing people's Debian installations, broken by GNOME/systemd dependency was actually the Vorlon, Steve Langasek, the upstart maintainer. Oh the irony. (While you and GNOME maintainers happily buried your heads in the sand and said "not our problem". That was pretty much the moment when systemd lost me, definitively.)
FreeBSD outperforms Linux only in certain scenarios. In most common cases you would hardly find any difference. Otherwise.
It is not the problem that Linux network stack sucks. The problem is that linux-netdev people believe that Linux network stack is already perfect.
AND. The biggest problem is with the certain Linus Torwalds who insists on perfect design for any net redesign.
That's why we still do not have interrupt polling/interrupt throttling or anything like pf.
That's why we have the technically perfect ip - but totally unusable to literally any human being. And the iptables with near O(n) performance.
It's basically the same story as with the sound subsystem. As long as the design is good, it doesn't matter that the end result sucks.
Quirky syntax - which unlike Perl in places is mandatory in Go! - killed my interest in it pretty early.
Still there are very few applications that are more “sticky” than databases, which after typically contains the keys to the kingdom.
DBs are rarely a problem. But DBAs and developers are the problem.
I had limited to exposure to Sybase and MySQL, before spending several years with a company deeply tied to Oracle RDBMS.
Most developers and DBAs are completely clueless about competitive alternatives. Over the years I have heard so much blatantly stupid crap, that it is even hard to believe that it can come from a person with higher education. MySQL can't transactions. Sybase locks completely everything for every update statement. You can't backup MySQL DB. There is no admin interface in Sybase. PL/SQL is Oracle specific, thus server side functionality can only be implemented with Oracle. Only Oracle implements server-side Java, thus you can connect from Java only to the Oracle DB. And so on.
With this mentality, several projects which required a local DB were stonewalled and simply buried. MySQL (aka MariaDB) was a viable candidate - in fact already successfully deployed by other R&Ds in other locations for the similar purpose - but people more or less refused to even learn how to work with it. Couple of open-minded developers within week actually ported the Java-based software to MySQL, but nobody was listening to them, because, duh, MySQL is impossible to work with.