systemd is bad for servers. It adds nothing, just makes everything brittle and clunky.
That's funny given that it was primarily designed with servers in mind.
Of course! That must be why the documentation is hosted on "freedesktop.org", which is self-described as "an open source / open discussion software projects working on interoperability and shared technology for X Window System desktops".
My understanding (which may be wrong) is that the impetus behind SystemD from the server side might be containers. Currently, these can't be managed centrally (AFAIK),
What supposedly prevents this? There are many packages for maintaining containers.
True. Even kubernetes can be installed with yum and can run under the dictatorship of systemd.
You forgot to add "Run Redhat through a shredder".
I like Red Hat and I appreciate all they've done for open-source in the enterprise, but the desktopification of core Linux aspects is a bad thing. It's fascinating to see how Microsoft took a desktop o/s and shoehorned it into a server product, while Red Hat is taking the perfect server and adding stuff like systemd to make it more convenient for desktop users.
systemd is bad for servers. It adds nothing, just makes everything brittle and clunky. Maybe it's awesome for plug & play devices and soundcards and window managers but none of that is relevant on servers. No wonder even in the CentOS docker images it's not enabled by default - it's USELESS.
My post doesn't try to take Linux over one feature at a time by replacing things that were not broken with more and more legs of the same octopus. I'm happy if systemd made your own life easier but that doesn't mean everyone should bend over and take it quietly.
1) run Lennart Poettering's hard drives through a shredder 2) track down every person who ever cloned the source repo and burn their computers, tape backup and usb sticks 3) track down every cloud provider used by every single person who cloned the repo and burn their datacenters.
Losing all those cloud providers could drive us back a few decades as a connected society but it would be worth it. We need to walk away from the madness and find a better way forward.
The word 'projection' when used by business or government s a fancy way of saying they can the future. Through enough numbers and fancy colorful graphs and people will believe anything.
And how is that any different from a typical IT project?
Maybe it's time they do agile infrastructure projects! I can already imagine user stories: "As a train passenger I need to get from Point A to Point B without paying $5,000 per mile and without breaking the laws of nature".
The one who said "yes, we can do this massive migration in a week or so."
That would be someone in management.
That's the usual team work; the manager makes crazy promises and the underpaid techies deliver. And usually everyone is rewarded; the manager gets a fat bonus check, and the techies get free pizza and Red Bull for working all weekend. Win-win!
So you see nothing wrong with blobs of callback after callback with making your own threading and scheduling from scratch?
Different problems are solved with different tools. If the problem to solve is answering as fast as possible a tsunami of lightweight requests (such as a typical web app), Nodejs is awesome. However if there are fewer, long-running requests that tap into heavier resources (such as crypto or image processing) then maybe it's best to consider alternatives.
But even if a web app is based on Nodejs, does that mean I would use it alone? Not at all; while Nodejs can do SSL and static content, I prefer to offload that part to nginx or Apache. Which doesn't reflect badly on Nodejs because that's what I would also do for a java webapp running in Tomcat. At that point though we're no longer talking about handling multi-threading inside or outside the app server, we're talking about solution architecture which is a totally different matter.
Why can't you use nginx or something else to handle your async calls rather than write your own crappy one in JavaScript? I see no point of reinventing threading and other things when technology exists that do that for you so you can focus on other things.
nginx is a web server. How exactly would you use it to "handle async calls" in a script? And in what way is JavaScript reinventing threading - it's single-threaded!
A typical JavaScript app is "async" in the sense that by using callbacks you escape from the rigid top-down execution of the lines of code, allowing you to build your workflow around events without having to interact with operating system level concepts like threads or processes. This is great because if two parts of your script must interact with external "slow" things like a database or the filesystem, you can run those time-consuming tasks in parallel instead of sequentially, and the end result is a faster script execution. But it's still in the same thread, you're just "cheating" to avoid being idle while you wait for that external thing to complete its part.
Throwing an external process in the mix would just slow things down and cause all the well-known issues that existing multi-process solutions like CGI are known for. There's a reason why over the last 20 years people have tried to work around CGI clunkiness, leading to stuff like baking the script engine in the web server process (a la mod_perl or mod_php).
You like JavaScript because it helped one of your bad developers? Are you a moron?
He's not a bad developer.
A bad developer is not someone with an imperfect knowledge of some aspects of software development. A bad developer is someone who can't see the big picture and can't deliver code that is fit for purpose in the specific context where that code is needed. From corporate drones who write code for legacy Oracle Forms applications to Chinese engineers who design on-screen menus for low-end plasma TV, from Wall Street mathletes writing micro-trading platforms to people who crank out heaps of custom Wordpress theme for small businesses, it's a big world with amazingly different requirements for time-to-market, quality and solution resilience.
I remember years ago we had this massive migration project with a brutal deadline. We had a "genius" on the team who went home to work on a perfect solution, using all the fancy languages and libraries. But he never finished; after a week the deadline was looming so while the genius was writing unit tests for his migration framework, as a Plan B an intern patched together a bunch of VBScripts crammed with "on error resume next" and hard-coded file paths that got the job done in a day. Who was the bad developer in that story?
I've worked with a lot of programmers (or pseudo-programmers) over the years, and the ones who like JavaScript tend to be the most ignorant of them all.
I have worked (not just for hobbies) with C, C++, Pascal, Java, C#, the whole Visual Basic family, Perl, Python, PHP and JavaScript. I even worked with RPG and COBOL. Plus a whole bunch of shell scripting languages, from csh to PowerShell and even (OMG) JCL. On all the possible platforms you can think of, from smartphones all the way to Z series.
And guess what? I like JavaScript. I like how it started as a clunky way to make dynamic HTML menus to how it's now powering insanely high-volume websites. Is it the prettiest language? No. Does it handle dates properly? Jesus fucking christ no. Is it a marvel of software engineering? Is it a pure delight for the intellect like lisp, or an unbreakable workhorse like Ada? No. But IT WORKS. It does the job, quickly. In browsers, and even on mainframes (yes, Nodejs is supported on IBM mini and mainframes).
And it can be a gateway drug. Especially on the Nodejs platform JavaScript forces you to think of functions as more than a subroutine and this can be a terrific way to open your mind to the world of lambdas and closures - something that people who don't have a strong computer science or math background often struggle with.
True story. I had a coworker who just couldn't wrap his mind around callbacks and asynchronous execution. Which was a serious problem because at the time big data was becoming a thing and this meant map-reduce and all that. You know what finally made things "click" for him? jquery and ajax calls. Seriously. When he started to realize that he could pass a function as a parameter that would be executed after the ajax call came back, it blew its mind. Very quickly he jumped on the Nodejs bandwagon and he finally was able to work on data projects involving R and math-intensive Python code.
So there you go. Piss on JavaScript all you like, but don't try to use the "real programmers don't like JavaScript" because I'm a real programmer and I LOVE it. Maybe not my absolute favorite but definitely in my top 3.
The amount of code needed to write a web application using Node.js is tiny compared to even PHP, which itself requires a lot less code than java or others. Performance is excellent, especially if you combine it with a web server for static content (like you would do with most web technologies).
Even without using frameworks (like Express), Nodejs is a technology that is well-suited for web applications. There is a learning curve because of the asynchronous paradigm (which can be mitigated if one uses promises) but overall the language is decent and favors good practices, such as MVC or code reuse. In the age of the API this is a fantastic platform to quickly put together a REST architecture.
Also, don't bash Nodejs for server-side code. Because of the self-contained nature of npm it can prove quite convenient for all kinds of applications and utilities, not just web applications. Whenever I need a quick script that involves database access or interacting with web services, I no longer use bash and tools like curl or wget, I get what I need a lot faster with Nodejs. There are so many excellent packages on npm it's just a no-brainer.
While the engineering purposes are valid I'm fairly sure that Microsoft are happily exploiting the commercial value of that data too.
They're pulling far too fucking much data for it to be purely engineering anyway.
Here's what their website says:
To help us decide which services are working well and which need improvement, we pay attention to how people use Windows. We can spot patterns in the problems our customers have, understand the cause, and fix the issues quickly. We can also focus our resources on upgrading the things that people use the most, and to improve or even retire those that don’t get used. This data, collectively called ‘telemetry’, can also help us understand gaps in our services so that we can help people use Windows more effectively.
When people choose to turn on location services, we get to improve our location services by collecting information about the location of mobile phone masts and WiFi access points. This information is stored in a database without data identifying the person or device from which it was collected.
I think you said a lot more about your own age than you did about Apple's market share...
What do you mean? Because I said younger than 34 is young? I'm not the one who defined Apple market segments, and in most cases 35 is usually the median.
Do you have a hot wife, or do you look rich enough to have one?
Having a Macbook sums it up!
I don't know about that. About 2/3 of Apple customers are male and 40% of Mac owners are younger than 34. The Apple market is a "young sausage fest", so to speak.
What about the illegal drugs and child pornography that the previous occupant left hidden in the wall, next to the water pipes?
Something like that happened to a friend of mine. He bought a warehouse and found a big stash of dvd players and car stereos in a walled-off closet when he gutted the office area. The warehouse had been owned by a bank (foreclosure) for a while, and if he hadn't needed a different office configuration the stuff could have stayed in the walls for a long time.
Firefox has the same kind of telemetry features. Chrome too. And pretty much everything else. But when it comes from Microsoft people freak out first, ask questions later.
Maybe that's because Firefox and Chrome don't try to trick and/or force you into upgrading. Ever.
Maybe because the "X" or "Close" control in Firefox and Chrome never magically change what they do to mean "yes" instead of "no".
You are right, but at the same time I can't help but wonder if those are not simply instances of "we know better" than truly tricking people for some nefarious goal.
What they need and what they ask for are two different things.
According to the Supreme court, the states are not even allowed to require a driver license to operate a motor vehicle:
The Right of the Citizen to travel upon the public highways and to transport his property thereon, by horse drawn carriage, wagon, or automobile, is not a mere privilege which may be permitted or prohibited at will, but the common Right which he has under his Right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Remember when everyone was complaining about Microsoft's security issues? Microsoft actually did an admirable job cleaning up that leaky ship.
This is true. And while I have no evidence to support it, I suspect that the whole telemetry stuff is meant to give them information about how the system behaves in various situations for engineering purposes, not ads. This impression is based in part on the fairly decent level of privacy in hotmail/outlook.com compared to other free mail providers like gmail or yahoo where they milk your inbox to tweak ads.
Firefox has the same kind of telemetry features. Chrome too. And pretty much everything else. But when it comes from Microsoft people freak out first, ask questions later.
This being said, once they started to push hard to have people use "Microsoft accounts" instead of local accounts to login on Windows it became obvious that something was changing so maybe they are truly a bunch of fuckers nowadays.
Slashdot Mirror
systemd is bad for servers. It adds nothing, just makes everything brittle and clunky.
That's funny given that it was primarily designed with servers in mind.
Of course! That must be why the documentation is hosted on "freedesktop.org", which is self-described as "an open source / open discussion software projects working on interoperability and shared technology for X Window System desktops".
My understanding (which may be wrong) is that the impetus behind SystemD from the server side might be containers. Currently, these can't be managed centrally (AFAIK),
What supposedly prevents this? There are many packages for maintaining containers.
True. Even kubernetes can be installed with yum and can run under the dictatorship of systemd.
Majority has no problem, it's only the vocal minority that distorts the picture.
And you know that how?
Someone got triggered by the snowflake.
You forgot to add "Run Redhat through a shredder".
I like Red Hat and I appreciate all they've done for open-source in the enterprise, but the desktopification of core Linux aspects is a bad thing. It's fascinating to see how Microsoft took a desktop o/s and shoehorned it into a server product, while Red Hat is taking the perfect server and adding stuff like systemd to make it more convenient for desktop users.
systemd is bad for servers. It adds nothing, just makes everything brittle and clunky. Maybe it's awesome for plug & play devices and soundcards and window managers but none of that is relevant on servers. No wonder even in the CentOS docker images it's not enabled by default - it's USELESS.
Your post however contributes nothing.
My post doesn't try to take Linux over one feature at a time by replacing things that were not broken with more and more legs of the same octopus. I'm happy if systemd made your own life easier but that doesn't mean everyone should bend over and take it quietly.
worked with my tuner devices (cx88 PCI cards and an xc5000 USB device) together with MythTV
You're like a wet dream for QA people
some fixes for systemd
There's only one fix for systemd: delete it.
Of course it has to be done right. 3 easy steps:
1) run Lennart Poettering's hard drives through a shredder
2) track down every person who ever cloned the source repo and burn their computers, tape backup and usb sticks
3) track down every cloud provider used by every single person who cloned the repo and burn their datacenters.
Losing all those cloud providers could drive us back a few decades as a connected society but it would be worth it. We need to walk away from the madness and find a better way forward.
The word 'projection' when used by business or government s a fancy way of saying they can the future. Through enough numbers and fancy colorful graphs and people will believe anything.
And how is that any different from a typical IT project?
Maybe it's time they do agile infrastructure projects! I can already imagine user stories: "As a train passenger I need to get from Point A to Point B without paying $5,000 per mile and without breaking the laws of nature".
The one who said "yes, we can do this massive migration in a week or so."
That would be someone in management.
That's the usual team work; the manager makes crazy promises and the underpaid techies deliver. And usually everyone is rewarded; the manager gets a fat bonus check, and the techies get free pizza and Red Bull for working all weekend. Win-win!
So you see nothing wrong with blobs of callback after callback with making your own threading and scheduling from scratch?
Different problems are solved with different tools. If the problem to solve is answering as fast as possible a tsunami of lightweight requests (such as a typical web app), Nodejs is awesome. However if there are fewer, long-running requests that tap into heavier resources (such as crypto or image processing) then maybe it's best to consider alternatives.
But even if a web app is based on Nodejs, does that mean I would use it alone? Not at all; while Nodejs can do SSL and static content, I prefer to offload that part to nginx or Apache. Which doesn't reflect badly on Nodejs because that's what I would also do for a java webapp running in Tomcat. At that point though we're no longer talking about handling multi-threading inside or outside the app server, we're talking about solution architecture which is a totally different matter.
Why can't you use nginx or something else to handle your async calls rather than write your own crappy one in JavaScript? I see no point of reinventing threading and other things when technology exists that do that for you so you can focus on other things.
nginx is a web server. How exactly would you use it to "handle async calls" in a script? And in what way is JavaScript reinventing threading - it's single-threaded!
A typical JavaScript app is "async" in the sense that by using callbacks you escape from the rigid top-down execution of the lines of code, allowing you to build your workflow around events without having to interact with operating system level concepts like threads or processes. This is great because if two parts of your script must interact with external "slow" things like a database or the filesystem, you can run those time-consuming tasks in parallel instead of sequentially, and the end result is a faster script execution. But it's still in the same thread, you're just "cheating" to avoid being idle while you wait for that external thing to complete its part.
Throwing an external process in the mix would just slow things down and cause all the well-known issues that existing multi-process solutions like CGI are known for. There's a reason why over the last 20 years people have tried to work around CGI clunkiness, leading to stuff like baking the script engine in the web server process (a la mod_perl or mod_php).
You like JavaScript because it helped one of your bad developers? Are you a moron?
He's not a bad developer.
A bad developer is not someone with an imperfect knowledge of some aspects of software development. A bad developer is someone who can't see the big picture and can't deliver code that is fit for purpose in the specific context where that code is needed. From corporate drones who write code for legacy Oracle Forms applications to Chinese engineers who design on-screen menus for low-end plasma TV, from Wall Street mathletes writing micro-trading platforms to people who crank out heaps of custom Wordpress theme for small businesses, it's a big world with amazingly different requirements for time-to-market, quality and solution resilience.
I remember years ago we had this massive migration project with a brutal deadline. We had a "genius" on the team who went home to work on a perfect solution, using all the fancy languages and libraries. But he never finished; after a week the deadline was looming so while the genius was writing unit tests for his migration framework, as a Plan B an intern patched together a bunch of VBScripts crammed with "on error resume next" and hard-coded file paths that got the job done in a day. Who was the bad developer in that story?
I've worked with a lot of programmers (or pseudo-programmers) over the years, and the ones who like JavaScript tend to be the most ignorant of them all.
I have worked (not just for hobbies) with C, C++, Pascal, Java, C#, the whole Visual Basic family, Perl, Python, PHP and JavaScript. I even worked with RPG and COBOL. Plus a whole bunch of shell scripting languages, from csh to PowerShell and even (OMG) JCL. On all the possible platforms you can think of, from smartphones all the way to Z series.
And guess what? I like JavaScript. I like how it started as a clunky way to make dynamic HTML menus to how it's now powering insanely high-volume websites. Is it the prettiest language? No. Does it handle dates properly? Jesus fucking christ no. Is it a marvel of software engineering? Is it a pure delight for the intellect like lisp, or an unbreakable workhorse like Ada? No. But IT WORKS. It does the job, quickly. In browsers, and even on mainframes (yes, Nodejs is supported on IBM mini and mainframes).
And it can be a gateway drug. Especially on the Nodejs platform JavaScript forces you to think of functions as more than a subroutine and this can be a terrific way to open your mind to the world of lambdas and closures - something that people who don't have a strong computer science or math background often struggle with.
True story. I had a coworker who just couldn't wrap his mind around callbacks and asynchronous execution. Which was a serious problem because at the time big data was becoming a thing and this meant map-reduce and all that. You know what finally made things "click" for him? jquery and ajax calls. Seriously. When he started to realize that he could pass a function as a parameter that would be executed after the ajax call came back, it blew its mind. Very quickly he jumped on the Nodejs bandwagon and he finally was able to work on data projects involving R and math-intensive Python code.
So there you go. Piss on JavaScript all you like, but don't try to use the "real programmers don't like JavaScript" because I'm a real programmer and I LOVE it. Maybe not my absolute favorite but definitely in my top 3.
The amount of code needed to write a web application using Node.js is tiny compared to even PHP, which itself requires a lot less code than java or others. Performance is excellent, especially if you combine it with a web server for static content (like you would do with most web technologies).
Even without using frameworks (like Express), Nodejs is a technology that is well-suited for web applications. There is a learning curve because of the asynchronous paradigm (which can be mitigated if one uses promises) but overall the language is decent and favors good practices, such as MVC or code reuse. In the age of the API this is a fantastic platform to quickly put together a REST architecture.
Also, don't bash Nodejs for server-side code. Because of the self-contained nature of npm it can prove quite convenient for all kinds of applications and utilities, not just web applications. Whenever I need a quick script that involves database access or interacting with web services, I no longer use bash and tools like curl or wget, I get what I need a lot faster with Nodejs. There are so many excellent packages on npm it's just a no-brainer.
Now send me all your money
No that sounds like Apple, not Microsoft.
for engineering purposes, not ads
While the engineering purposes are valid I'm fairly sure that Microsoft are happily exploiting the commercial value of that data too.
They're pulling far too fucking much data for it to be purely engineering anyway.
Here's what their website says:
To help us decide which services are working well and which need improvement, we pay attention to how people use Windows. We can spot patterns in the problems our customers have, understand the cause, and fix the issues quickly. We can also focus our resources on upgrading the things that people use the most, and to improve or even retire those that don’t get used. This data, collectively called ‘telemetry’, can also help us understand gaps in our services so that we can help people use Windows more effectively.
When people choose to turn on location services, we get to improve our location services by collecting information about the location of mobile phone masts and WiFi access points. This information is stored in a database without data identifying the person or device from which it was collected.
https://privacy.microsoft.com/...
Now if your position is that they lie in their privacy statement this becomes a different matter.
I think you said a lot more about your own age than you did about Apple's market share...
What do you mean? Because I said younger than 34 is young? I'm not the one who defined Apple market segments, and in most cases 35 is usually the median.
Do you have a hot wife, or do you look rich enough to have one?
Having a Macbook sums it up!
I don't know about that. About 2/3 of Apple customers are male and 40% of Mac owners are younger than 34. The Apple market is a "young sausage fest", so to speak.
Kiddie porn on a computer doesn't imply guilt for the owner.
True. Maybe the kid came onto him.
Why the heck would he need to login?!
Do you have a hot wife, or do you look rich enough to have one?
What about the illegal drugs and child pornography that the previous occupant left hidden in the wall, next to the water pipes?
Something like that happened to a friend of mine. He bought a warehouse and found a big stash of dvd players and car stereos in a walled-off closet when he gutted the office area. The warehouse had been owned by a bank (foreclosure) for a while, and if he hadn't needed a different office configuration the stuff could have stayed in the walls for a long time.
Firefox has the same kind of telemetry features. Chrome too. And pretty much everything else. But when it comes from Microsoft people freak out first, ask questions later.
Maybe that's because Firefox and Chrome don't try to trick and/or force you into upgrading. Ever.
Maybe because the "X" or "Close" control in Firefox and Chrome never magically change what they do to mean "yes" instead of "no".
You are right, but at the same time I can't help but wonder if those are not simply instances of "we know better" than truly tricking people for some nefarious goal.
What they need and what they ask for are two different things.
According to the Supreme court, the states are not even allowed to require a driver license to operate a motor vehicle:
The Right of the Citizen to travel upon the public highways and to transport his property thereon, by horse drawn carriage, wagon, or automobile, is not a mere privilege which may be permitted or prohibited at will, but the common Right which he has under his Right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse...
So I'm not holding my breath to see the States opening a public debate about the need to determine the gender of citizens.
Remember when everyone was complaining about Microsoft's security issues? Microsoft actually did an admirable job cleaning up that leaky ship.
This is true. And while I have no evidence to support it, I suspect that the whole telemetry stuff is meant to give them information about how the system behaves in various situations for engineering purposes, not ads. This impression is based in part on the fairly decent level of privacy in hotmail/outlook.com compared to other free mail providers like gmail or yahoo where they milk your inbox to tweak ads.
Firefox has the same kind of telemetry features. Chrome too. And pretty much everything else. But when it comes from Microsoft people freak out first, ask questions later.
This being said, once they started to push hard to have people use "Microsoft accounts" instead of local accounts to login on Windows it became obvious that something was changing so maybe they are truly a bunch of fuckers nowadays.