Yes we all know it would be trivial to store every bit of data that goes through that service. There's no end-to-end encryption mechanism that I'm aware of or anything else that would prevent them from logging everything.
But there service is still predicated on their insistence that they don't. To sell advertising (especially if they sell it as targetted advertising) or to show targeted advertising to users (hey, I talked about dildo swings the other day, and here's an ad for one, what a coincidence!) would basically be admitting that they do keep stuff, which would probably cause an epic shitstorm.
Handful of friends and I use snapchat mainly to send stupid shit to each other. It's kinda fun, but none of us are really using it to chat or anything.
I might have considered paying a buck or two for the app (we've had some fun with it), but deal with ads, fuck that shit. The stupid random "live from Oktoberfest" shit that's been showing up lately is annoying enough.
I always wondered how they intended to fund/make money from this. I was kinda hoping for something more creative than "once it's popular, we'll show ads!".
I've used gentoo for a long damn time, so my ability to objectively gauge it's difficulty is probably long gone.
That said, I for one think gentoo has gotten far easier to install and especially maintain. The default profiles are no longer the joke they once were, and most packages are using more generic high-level use flags so you have one --with-feature-x instead of the old --with-compat-mode-z --with-doublefork --with-some-other-unrelated-but-required-flag type stuff you had years ago, which translates into much simpler USE flags. You can actually leave make.conf relatively untouched and still end up with a decently functional system, especially if you want a desktop and go for one of the desktop profiles.
Portage is also a lot smarter these days, being able to resolve many issues that it previously would have died on. When it does run into problems, the descriptions these days are much nicer than before!
I'm being completely honest when I say that systemd has been the first major gentoo headache I've had in a while. Everything was just dandy then suddenly I'm having to switch packages around (udev being the big one), and having to blacklist udev and systemd because so much random shit pulls them in (and a -systemd use flag isn't enough), and then uninstalling a bunch of random packages (like some power management widget that got pulled in by god knows what for some reason).
I know you've probably written off gentoo at this point, here's a completely random bit of usage advice:
- Set use flags as you need them, even if this means re-installing the same thing multiple times. This avoids big important packages being pulled in as mere dependencies (though you can add them to the world list afterwards) and more importantly lets you set up and configure everything one at a time and makes it more likely that you'll notice error messages. - Don't be afraid of package.keywords, especially for very specific use flags. - Avoid gnome if possible. I don't know wtf it is with gnome, but it seems to be the poster child for weird and hard to diagnose issues as well as crazy dependency trees. - Pay attention to what virtual packages are doing. Usually they are in your best interest, but not always. - Don't bother using ebuilds for web apps
A very well written proposal that outlines many of the concerns I (as a non-Debian user) and I suspect most have about systemd. It’s worming it’s way into everything for the sake of better integration, which it may deliver on, but this goes against much of the traditional Linux spirit of small self-contained bits that can be swapped out at will.
In my mind, this comes down to whether we want a better functioning OS or an OS that adheres to the mindset that I think attracted many of us to Linux in the first place. Personally I want a hackers OS that I can play with and tweak as I feel like, but I accept that many people basically want open source windows or even just zero cost windows (i.e. free as in my wallet).
I hope Debian rolls back on their decision. I doubt this will happen, but at least we’ll get some more discussion in a somewhat visible forum. I may not agree with a lot of the Debian mentality, but they are very good at thinking about and discussing things, so I think this will be good overall.
And before someone says "just use gentoo", I do, and have for almost a decade (I started using it fairly soon after it came out). The problem is that systemd, being basically a virus at this point, is causing exactly the kind of problems mentioned in the proposal. I've had to use the blacklist for the first time in a while because *McBane voice* the use flags, they do nothing!
Thus the invention of the "mobile version", which I think generally works out a lot better than a page designed to serve both (and _way_ better than a mobile version designed to look ok on a desktop).
But that said, I don't do much web dev. I'd certainly never do it professionally. Not just because I think it's an absolute mess of an industry, but because my skillset in that area is about 10 years out of date (as you probably guessed) and was never that solid to begin with.
I still just use tables when I delve into the wonderful world of web dev. CSS has replaced coloring and styling of text, but positioning.. screw that. Proper or not, tables worked fine then, and they still work fine.
You can only _somewhat_ adjust how things are positioned in relation to each other with CSS, which requires you to have multiple layers of nested <div id="random_section_that_you_might_use_for_something_or_not"> to give the kind of flexibility that CSS Zen Garden does.
That's actually no longer totally the case. There is even a comment in the code:
<!--
These superfluous divs/spans were originally provided as catch-alls to add extra imagery.
These days we have full::before and::after support, favour using those instead.
These only remain for historical design compatibility. They might go away one day.
-->
That said, I totally agree with everything else you said. CSS is an example of fixing a barely existent problem by introducing a bunch of major ones. Tables worked fine, and could have been cleaned up or replaced/augmented by something made for layout.
I'm not a web developer, so maybe you grow to like it, but I always found div based layout unintuitive as hell ("oh, I need to float left this div to make it centered and set the block to inline"). I still just use tables any time I dabble with that stuff. They still work!
I have not tested but it looks like you can swap it out for something else on at least Debian: https://packages.debian.org/je... [debian.org]
The problem is likely the same as on gentoo. Sure you don't have to install systemd, but a shit tonne of stuff will depend on it, or have dependencies that depend on it. I imagine the situation will be far worse on binary based distros as they tend to pull in a shit tonne of libraries and sometimes actual programs because of some minor but tightly coupled feature that didn't warrant a patch or a -non-<whatever> version. As I said in a prior post, on gentoo I had to straight up blacklist the systemd package and rely on portage failing because telling everything not to compile with systemd support isn't enough!
Slackware ditched gnome because it became too big of a pain to include it without including systemd.
You say that as if it's a bad thing that stuff can be made to work well together if it's developed together.
It's a trade-off. Mac, and to some degree Windows, benefit greatly from tight integration, but it comes at the cost of flexibility. The preference of flexibility over user friendliness and even functionality was what drew me to Linux and specifically Gentoo in the first place.
Systemd is probably not a terrible idea by itself, it just goes against the traditional linux mindset, which is probably why it's hitting so much resistance from people like me who bought into that mindset more so than the functioning system.
I accept that we have rules, and when dealing with people I work with, or in situations where someone else is going to be harmed if I don’t represent myself well I definitely make the effort. Here though, the only person who looks stupid if I use poor grammar is I, so I don’t feel particularly bad about it.
And as said, if you and your like minded peers want to think of me as an idiot, I'm totally cool with that.
It's not about learning grammar. I know the difference between possessive it's and contraction it's. It's not even about the effort associated with choosing the right one. Using a possessive without an apostrophe feels weird and unnatural, and as grammatical correctness in a casual context isn't a priority for me, I chose not to. It's just one of many completely random and arbitrary things I decided to do, and then stuck with because I'm like that.
The problem imo is specifically that it's not just an init system. It's morphing into it's own thing that wants to take over all routine system behaviour, and the attitude of the devs is not encouraging (too lazy to find the link, but an oft quoted comment regarding log file corruption illustrates this quite well).
Linux (at least in my opinion) is all about choice. Don't like the way something works, use something else or write your own. Systemd is becoming a huge chunk that can't easily be swapped out for something else. I'm really against that.
And importance is relative. If you just want a functioning system, I agree that none of this is really that important and I'd probably just use ubuntu or mint or hell just windows or mac. I use gentoo specifically because I like my system "just so". Most people probably fall somewhere in between these points, with some past where they care about systemd and some not. I think this is perfectly healthy. If no one cared about init systems or boot loaders, no one would be developing them!
I made the decision long ago to always use it's regardless of situation or grammatical correctness in casual conversation. It's a policy that has served me well throughout the years.
I'm sure it occasionally gives off the impression that I'm an idiot to people who pay attention to these things, but I can live with that.
As a fellow gentoo user who is also trying to avoid systemd, we've got a hell of a fight before us.
Systemd wants to be it's own platform and it's snaking it's way into everything. Running a non-systemd system on gentoo, even where openrc is the default and systemd is just an alternative, is becoming a pain. I've had to rejuggle packages and use the blacklist for the first time in many years because (McBain voice) THE USE FLAGS, THEY DO NOTHING!
As more and more stuff adds dependencies on the systemd virus, it's just gonna get worse.
Our only hope is that systemd implodes and everything just goes back to the way it was.
The interesting trend is that it seems to take losing users/slow adoption in droves and mass rioting to get the ball rolling.
Both gnome 3 and windows 8 have seen their user bases outright revolt over their UI changes, and both largely ignored it as "people hate change but they'll learn to love it" until numbers started actually dropping significantly and people started leaving.
You could say the same with slashdot beta. It took mass protests and the creation of an alternate site for dice to accept that people didn't like what they were doing and wern't going to learn to like it.
This all seems to reflect a growing mentality of "this is what the users want, we just have to wait until they realize it" and a kind of egotistical "we did everything right, so they must be wrong" attitude.
But lately, yes, it actually is becoming difficult! The culprits:
- lights that have a big piece of plastic in front of them (i.e. a monitor bezel) meaning you have to tape a huge section to block all the light - this new smart touch crap where the light comes from the same place you have to touch to turn the device on / adjust settings - lights that leak out through cracks / vent holes
I've gone to the extreme of opening things up and physically removing/cutting the LED, but even that is getting difficult as they are sometimes very tightly integrated with a control board and occasionally glued in place.
Why anyone wants a bright blue LED practically blinding them all the time I have no idea.
Slashdot Mirror
Key word is: supposed to.
Yes we all know it would be trivial to store every bit of data that goes through that service. There's no end-to-end encryption mechanism that I'm aware of or anything else that would prevent them from logging everything.
But there service is still predicated on their insistence that they don't. To sell advertising (especially if they sell it as targetted advertising) or to show targeted advertising to users (hey, I talked about dildo swings the other day, and here's an ad for one, what a coincidence!) would basically be admitting that they do keep stuff, which would probably cause an epic shitstorm.
Handful of friends and I use snapchat mainly to send stupid shit to each other. It's kinda fun, but none of us are really using it to chat or anything.
I might have considered paying a buck or two for the app (we've had some fun with it), but deal with ads, fuck that shit. The stupid random "live from Oktoberfest" shit that's been showing up lately is annoying enough.
I always wondered how they intended to fund/make money from this. I was kinda hoping for something more creative than "once it's popular, we'll show ads!".
Another long-time gentoo user here - the above file is used for mixing stable and unstable/testing packages. I'm sure the parent meant package.use.
Yikes! Yup.
I've used gentoo for a long damn time, so my ability to objectively gauge it's difficulty is probably long gone.
That said, I for one think gentoo has gotten far easier to install and especially maintain. The default profiles are no longer the joke they once were, and most packages are using more generic high-level use flags so you have one --with-feature-x instead of the old --with-compat-mode-z --with-doublefork --with-some-other-unrelated-but-required-flag type stuff you had years ago, which translates into much simpler USE flags. You can actually leave make.conf relatively untouched and still end up with a decently functional system, especially if you want a desktop and go for one of the desktop profiles.
Portage is also a lot smarter these days, being able to resolve many issues that it previously would have died on. When it does run into problems, the descriptions these days are much nicer than before!
I'm being completely honest when I say that systemd has been the first major gentoo headache I've had in a while. Everything was just dandy then suddenly I'm having to switch packages around (udev being the big one), and having to blacklist udev and systemd because so much random shit pulls them in (and a -systemd use flag isn't enough), and then uninstalling a bunch of random packages (like some power management widget that got pulled in by god knows what for some reason).
I know you've probably written off gentoo at this point, here's a completely random bit of usage advice:
- Set use flags as you need them, even if this means re-installing the same thing multiple times. This avoids big important packages being pulled in as mere dependencies (though you can add them to the world list afterwards) and more importantly lets you set up and configure everything one at a time and makes it more likely that you'll notice error messages.
- Don't be afraid of package.keywords, especially for very specific use flags.
- Avoid gnome if possible. I don't know wtf it is with gnome, but it seems to be the poster child for weird and hard to diagnose issues as well as crazy dependency trees.
- Pay attention to what virtual packages are doing. Usually they are in your best interest, but not always.
- Don't bother using ebuilds for web apps
A very well written proposal that outlines many of the concerns I (as a non-Debian user) and I suspect most have about systemd. It’s worming it’s way into everything for the sake of better integration, which it may deliver on, but this goes against much of the traditional Linux spirit of small self-contained bits that can be swapped out at will.
In my mind, this comes down to whether we want a better functioning OS or an OS that adheres to the mindset that I think attracted many of us to Linux in the first place. Personally I want a hackers OS that I can play with and tweak as I feel like, but I accept that many people basically want open source windows or even just zero cost windows (i.e. free as in my wallet).
I hope Debian rolls back on their decision. I doubt this will happen, but at least we’ll get some more discussion in a somewhat visible forum. I may not agree with a lot of the Debian mentality, but they are very good at thinking about and discussing things, so I think this will be good overall.
And before someone says "just use gentoo", I do, and have for almost a decade (I started using it fairly soon after it came out). The problem is that systemd, being basically a virus at this point, is causing exactly the kind of problems mentioned in the proposal. I've had to use the blacklist for the first time in a while because *McBane voice* the use flags, they do nothing!
Thus the invention of the "mobile version", which I think generally works out a lot better than a page designed to serve both (and _way_ better than a mobile version designed to look ok on a desktop).
But that said, I don't do much web dev. I'd certainly never do it professionally. Not just because I think it's an absolute mess of an industry, but because my skillset in that area is about 10 years out of date (as you probably guessed) and was never that solid to begin with.
It _kinda_ does if you do as was said and define all the common properties for both and then the specific properties for each individually.
It's not really inheritance as you would find in c++ or java, and not nearly as flexible, but it is kinda there.
I still just use tables when I delve into the wonderful world of web dev. CSS has replaced coloring and styling of text, but positioning.. screw that. Proper or not, tables worked fine then, and they still work fine.
You can only _somewhat_ adjust how things are positioned in relation to each other with CSS, which requires you to have multiple layers of nested <div id="random_section_that_you_might_use_for_something_or_not"> to give the kind of flexibility that CSS Zen Garden does.
That's actually no longer totally the case. There is even a comment in the code:
<!--
These superfluous divs/spans were originally provided as catch-alls to add extra imagery. ::before and ::after support, favour using those instead.
These days we have full
These only remain for historical design compatibility. They might go away one day.
-->
That said, I totally agree with everything else you said. CSS is an example of fixing a barely existent problem by introducing a bunch of major ones. Tables worked fine, and could have been cleaned up or replaced/augmented by something made for layout.
I'm not a web developer, so maybe you grow to like it, but I always found div based layout unintuitive as hell ("oh, I need to float left this div to make it centered and set the block to inline"). I still just use tables any time I dabble with that stuff. They still work!
Bah!
To make things worse, I think I originally typed it as "myself", which I felt was wrong so I changed it to I. :(
Interestingly enough I don't think I'd use the word at all, but if I did, maybe.
I'd be more likely to say "The steam shovel belonged to her" vice "The steam shovel was hers" or "It's her steam shovel".
I have not tested but it looks like you can swap it out for something else on at least Debian: https://packages.debian.org/je... [debian.org]
The problem is likely the same as on gentoo. Sure you don't have to install systemd, but a shit tonne of stuff will depend on it, or have dependencies that depend on it. I imagine the situation will be far worse on binary based distros as they tend to pull in a shit tonne of libraries and sometimes actual programs because of some minor but tightly coupled feature that didn't warrant a patch or a -non-<whatever> version. As I said in a prior post, on gentoo I had to straight up blacklist the systemd package and rely on portage failing because telling everything not to compile with systemd support isn't enough!
Slackware ditched gnome because it became too big of a pain to include it without including systemd.
The whole thing is just very anti-linux imo.
You say that as if it's a bad thing that stuff can be made to work well together if it's developed together.
It's a trade-off. Mac, and to some degree Windows, benefit greatly from tight integration, but it comes at the cost of flexibility. The preference of flexibility over user friendliness and even functionality was what drew me to Linux and specifically Gentoo in the first place.
Systemd is probably not a terrible idea by itself, it just goes against the traditional linux mindset, which is probably why it's hitting so much resistance from people like me who bought into that mindset more so than the functioning system.
You are illiterate and lazy
See the thing is I have no problem being either, especially not online.
And with any luck, someday you'll have a bootloader and a single binary named linux?
I'm sure they'll add a text editor sooner or later. The systemd operating system will rise if we don't slay it now!
I accept that we have rules, and when dealing with people I work with, or in situations where someone else is going to be harmed if I don’t represent myself well I definitely make the effort. Here though, the only person who looks stupid if I use poor grammar is I, so I don’t feel particularly bad about it.
And as said, if you and your like minded peers want to think of me as an idiot, I'm totally cool with that.
It's not about learning grammar. I know the difference between possessive it's and contraction it's. It's not even about the effort associated with choosing the right one. Using a possessive without an apostrophe feels weird and unnatural, and as grammatical correctness in a casual context isn't a priority for me, I chose not to. It's just one of many completely random and arbitrary things I decided to do, and then stuck with because I'm like that.
The problem imo is specifically that it's not just an init system. It's morphing into it's own thing that wants to take over all routine system behaviour, and the attitude of the devs is not encouraging (too lazy to find the link, but an oft quoted comment regarding log file corruption illustrates this quite well).
Linux (at least in my opinion) is all about choice. Don't like the way something works, use something else or write your own. Systemd is becoming a huge chunk that can't easily be swapped out for something else. I'm really against that.
And importance is relative. If you just want a functioning system, I agree that none of this is really that important and I'd probably just use ubuntu or mint or hell just windows or mac. I use gentoo specifically because I like my system "just so". Most people probably fall somewhere in between these points, with some past where they care about systemd and some not. I think this is perfectly healthy. If no one cared about init systems or boot loaders, no one would be developing them!
I made the decision long ago to always use it's regardless of situation or grammatical correctness in casual conversation. It's a policy that has served me well throughout the years.
I'm sure it occasionally gives off the impression that I'm an idiot to people who pay attention to these things, but I can live with that.
As a fellow gentoo user who is also trying to avoid systemd, we've got a hell of a fight before us.
Systemd wants to be it's own platform and it's snaking it's way into everything. Running a non-systemd system on gentoo, even where openrc is the default and systemd is just an alternative, is becoming a pain. I've had to rejuggle packages and use the blacklist for the first time in many years because (McBain voice) THE USE FLAGS, THEY DO NOTHING!
As more and more stuff adds dependencies on the systemd virus, it's just gonna get worse.
Our only hope is that systemd implodes and everything just goes back to the way it was.
The interesting trend is that it seems to take losing users/slow adoption in droves and mass rioting to get the ball rolling.
Both gnome 3 and windows 8 have seen their user bases outright revolt over their UI changes, and both largely ignored it as "people hate change but they'll learn to love it" until numbers started actually dropping significantly and people started leaving.
You could say the same with slashdot beta. It took mass protests and the creation of an alternate site for dice to accept that people didn't like what they were doing and wern't going to learn to like it.
This all seems to reflect a growing mentality of "this is what the users want, we just have to wait until they realize it" and a kind of egotistical "we did everything right, so they must be wrong" attitude.
I use adblock, but explicitly block by site and by ad provider.
Slashdot made it on the blacklist when they started experimenting with those annoying ads that slide in from the bottom.
Who diagnosis a DVD player these days beyond "it's broke, have another". Certainly not something a consumer would be doing.
And anyone stupid enough to need a light to tell them a device isn't plugged in deserves to pay for a service call.
This has been my go to solution for years.
But lately, yes, it actually is becoming difficult! The culprits:
- lights that have a big piece of plastic in front of them (i.e. a monitor bezel) meaning you have to tape a huge section to block all the light
- this new smart touch crap where the light comes from the same place you have to touch to turn the device on / adjust settings
- lights that leak out through cracks / vent holes
I've gone to the extreme of opening things up and physically removing/cutting the LED, but even that is getting difficult as they are sometimes very tightly integrated with a control board and occasionally glued in place.
Why anyone wants a bright blue LED practically blinding them all the time I have no idea.
I doubt they'd notice, but still might be a nice touch to have a few thousand files named along the lines of screw_you_adobe_00123.epub