Would it be futile to expect that if I similarly flew into Canberra and requested an audience with George Brandis - as a citizen - I would be given equal access as Apple execs are likely getting - non-citizen representatives of a foreign corporation who have not the slightest interest in the welfare of Australians?
How about citizen representatives of a public interest group such as Linux Australia or FSF?
Silly me! We only exist to promote the interests of US corporations.
Agreed.
As for setting a benchmark price, I recall the heady days of the high street video shop (sadly gone).
Sure you could pay $5 for a recently released film but if you stock up on Cheap Tuesdays, you could get it for $2. Older films for $1.
I used to rip them to disc, take them back the next day and watch and delete at leisure.
So that's my benchmark - I would pay $2 for a new film, $1 for an old one, accept the costs of distribution myself (my ISP monthly fee) and expect the company to be able to make a healthy profit by not having the expense of high street rentals, staff etc
Instead, at least here in Oz, we can't stream stuff legally for a reasonable fee.
Heck, I'd even accept $5 for a new movie (I rarely watch 'em anyway) as long as I could watch the old stuff for $1 a go.
There was something called apulse (https://github.com/i-rinat/apulse) which allowed skype to keep working with alsa when they made skype pulse-only
Maybe it would work with firefox too?
I'm also a pulse-hater - my sound use-case is very simple. A single simple speaker or headphones and a single mike. Alsa works just fine for that. Why mess it up with a huge pile of code like pulse?
They always had it the wrong way around - pulse should have been left as an optional install for those with advanced/complex sound needs.
Even better solution would have been a re-write and simplification of alsa's arcane and baroque configuration logic.
tl;dr; = short term gain, long term pain and shareholders should beware - it's not cost cutting, it's cutting off your right hand
capgemini, accenture etc etc all have a similar outdated business model. They offer to replace a $100k first world engineer with a third world engineer for $50k. In the short term this looks good for the CEO - he's a bottom-line hero, just saved the company $50k x # engineers per year.
Long term, it's a mess.
The outsourcing company only pays the third world engineer $10k and pockets the $40k. This was fine a few years ago as there was a huge number of talented engineers in eg India, Philippines etc who really could do the job. Today it's not so easy. The cream of them have already emigrated to the first world on the back of their talents. The local job market has risen so that really talented people can't be found for $10k any more, so the bottoms landing on the empty chairs are attached to increasingly mediocre talent. The better ones move on quickly.
Add to that the difficulties of working with the time zone difference, the language problems, the cultural disconnect and the profound impossibility of communicating the intricacies of a mature IT infrastructure - and you get a project that is quickly going nowhere.
My direct experience of these changes (I've seen a few) is that the organisation keeps going on momentum alone for a few years - the existing old IT systems soldier on with only minor maintenance work being done, just enough to lurch from week to week.
No major development is possible because the talent that put the system together has been sacrificed - so the company fails to respond to new challenges and does not innovate. Unless the enterprise's business is completely unchanging, it's a slow glide path to oblivion - but the ground is just as hard for all that.
Now the really important thing is that by the time the shareholders realise the dirty deed they've been dealt, the genius CEO who gave them that short term gain has moved on to more triumphs elsewhere, no doubt at ever higher remunerations.
it's not about our freedom to drive - it's about our freedom to be able to travel without yahoos trying to kill us on the roads. I would make driverless cars compulsory for under 25's, over 75's and anyone who's ever had a drink driving or dangerous driving conviction.
Read Mr Poettering's own account of systemd at http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html
Features are listed in legions but only one tangible, significant benefit: it's supposed to be faster.
Only one real benefit and then only to laptop owners. What would a server admin care if it takes 2 minutes to boot or 15 seconds or 10 minutes? Who cares?
Now, if you google the first major distro to go systemd ie fedora-15, you'll see that it's not faster at all in practice. So all that change, all the obfuscation of hiding in compiled code what used to be clear (in bash-scripts), all the complexity, confusion, breakages, fear, uncertainty and doubt amounts to - no advantage at all.
I'm not sure if it's enough to have me bail out of the fedora world - but surely this won't find its way into RHEL?!?!? Please tell me not!!!
You young schmucks should listen up!
When you hit 40-50 years old your eyes will seize up and you'll be able to focus at exactly one distance. You get glasses, then you have a choice of distance (TV or driving) and reading (books or monitors) as well as whatever your eyes can do by themselves.
One thing you'll notice is that at the closer distances, the focal depth is very small - it makes a big difference if the monitor is 40cm away or 50cm - at one you can focus. At the other you can't. Brutal as that.
Now sit down at a 75cm (30") widescreen monitor and WTF - if you can focus at the centre, you can't focus at the edge. Unless, of course you sit 2m away or more.
That's why I'm sitting exactly 45cm from my good old 43cm (17") diagonal 1920x1440 Philips 107P4 CRT monitor. It beats the crap out of the Dell 2001FP 51cm (20") 1600x1200 monitor at work both in the quality of the image, the number of vertical lines of code in emacs and my ability to focus on it. When they offered me an upgrade to a rootin tootin 27" wide-screen, I tried it and sent it back - just couldn't focus all the way to the edges.
If any monitor manufacturers are listening here, WE WANT VERTICAL PIXELS _AND_ A NICE COMPACT FORMFACTOR - around 43cm, thank you very much!! I'm not talking a small demographic here - it's the baby boomers!!
As said previously, scripts are scripts and don't often need a GUI. But for grep's sake, make them consistent!!! The only spicing up _really_ needed are some standards:
o output errors to STDERR; normal output to STDOUT
o include (-h, --help) processing - and send it to STDOUT so the help can be piped to 'less'
o use getopt(1) or process-getopt(1) so that options on the CLI parse in a predictable and standard way
o keep it terse except for errors so that the user can easily see if it worked or not without scanning vast output
o provide a --verbose option to help with tracking down those errors
... and the most annoying thing of all - make sure --help _always_ works, even if the script body itself can't - at least the user can then be told about what the prerequisites are.
Head over to http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashFAQ for much wisdom on how to write better bash scripts.
Reason I ask is there is a similar thing called rPath which I used on a project a couple of years ago. It spun off from RedHat (Eric Troan, Michael Johnson et al). Mr Johnson was kind enough to explain (http://lwn.net/Articles/283070/) that although it used usernames/passwords to control access to the software this was not "DRM", and that it contained proprietary code - I was never quite clear if that meant the source code was available or available only to paying customers.
If a crim wants to pinch my old fashioned paper id, they just take it or fake it.
If a crim wants my biometric, they take my finger, eye whatever. Not nice.
Bottom line - there are some things I'd lose an eye or a finger for, but not many.
To hell with biometrics.
For my sins, I've used Linux since SoftLanding days (1992) and UNIX since 1981 and can only say that having had time to mess with FreeBSD relatively recently over the last couple of years, I'm amazed that it isn't already way ahead of Linux in applications - including the desktop.
The reason for my surprise is that FreeBSD is much kinder to the people that make all the applications - the developers.
I'd cite:
* documentation - the man pages and the handbook in FreeBSD are a dream of clarity and completeness.
* API's - stable and (again) well documented. Including the kernel API's.
* Solid driver support - eg my wireless link runs roughly 2x the speed on FreeBSD vs Linux since FreeBSD-4.x days (and, yes, I'm up to date with my Gentoo linux machine).
* The code - the kernel code in FreeBSD is logical, neat, elegant and just makes sense.
Compare Linux - the documentation is a mess frankly, albeit a lovable mess. It's all over the place and incomplete.
The linux API's are a complete nightmare - Linus HimSelf famously proclaims and maintains his right to change any kernel API as and how he sees fit. For a driver developer that's a nightmare, even if the kernel team keep the current kernel-supplied drivers up to date with the ever-changing API. Third-party kernel driver developers (I was one for 7 years on Linux, SCO (!), AIX, HPUX, Solaris and FreeBSD) shudder at that - anyone care to remember the kiobufs DMA fiasco around Linux 2.4.12???
As for the huge monolithic kernel source, Linux is getting close to really, really, really needing to be broken up into a microkernel architecture, just for maintainability issues alone.
As for Gnome (shudder) just look what they did with documentation (man pages anyone - forget it!) never mind supporting the command-line properly (who gave them the right to obsolete the good old-fashioned, universal X "-geometry" etc options).
All that said, FreeBSD is not ahead as most of the posts here testify. So why is that?
Technical inferiority? I don't think so... I can only think it must be the license. Commercial interests should surely like the FreeBSD model better but the GPL just "Keeps Them Honest" and prevents the balkanization that commercial UNIX always suffered.
BTW - as a hint to any FreeBSD developers out there, some things that would really help Linux'ers to have the confidence to explore FreeBSD would be:
* a decent disc format that can be properly shared with Linux - ext2 just about works but can't be exported by NFS on FreeBSD - and when I boot back to Linux I invariably get heaps of file system corruptions to fix up - not nice. While I'm at it, what about ext3? Maybe my ignorance here - perhaps there is JFS or XFS available and compatible on both - but people need to be sure that they can dual-boot a FreeBSD system and still see their data and be _sure_ it's safe. Don't bother me with Reiser - too many scars on that one.
* a live-CD version of FreeBSD, like Knoppix - I started my FreeBSD adventure with Freesbie, a 4.x (now -5.3) live-CD. Anything like that for 6.1?
Slashdot Mirror
How about citizen representatives of a public interest group such as Linux Australia or FSF?
Silly me! We only exist to promote the interests of US corporations.
Agreed. As for setting a benchmark price, I recall the heady days of the high street video shop (sadly gone). Sure you could pay $5 for a recently released film but if you stock up on Cheap Tuesdays, you could get it for $2. Older films for $1. I used to rip them to disc, take them back the next day and watch and delete at leisure. So that's my benchmark - I would pay $2 for a new film, $1 for an old one, accept the costs of distribution myself (my ISP monthly fee) and expect the company to be able to make a healthy profit by not having the expense of high street rentals, staff etc Instead, at least here in Oz, we can't stream stuff legally for a reasonable fee. Heck, I'd even accept $5 for a new movie (I rarely watch 'em anyway) as long as I could watch the old stuff for $1 a go.
Finish in 3 weeks: "it was an easy project after all! Your estimate cheated us"
Finish in 5 weeks: "you're a crappy engineer! you cheated us by pretending you could do the job"
Finish in 4 weeks: "that's suspicious! you obviously finished early and then goofed off. You cheated us"
Moral: you can say how many or how long but never both! Or: it'll take between 2 weeks and 2 months, depending.
Methinks I sniff the odour of a payout. Mozilla would be a lot cheaper to persuade than Google.
There was something called apulse (https://github.com/i-rinat/apulse) which allowed skype to keep working with alsa when they made skype pulse-only Maybe it would work with firefox too? I'm also a pulse-hater - my sound use-case is very simple. A single simple speaker or headphones and a single mike. Alsa works just fine for that. Why mess it up with a huge pile of code like pulse? They always had it the wrong way around - pulse should have been left as an optional install for those with advanced/complex sound needs. Even better solution would have been a re-write and simplification of alsa's arcane and baroque configuration logic.
capgemini, accenture etc etc all have a similar outdated business model. They offer to replace a $100k first world engineer with a third world engineer for $50k. In the short term this looks good for the CEO - he's a bottom-line hero, just saved the company $50k x # engineers per year.
Long term, it's a mess.
The outsourcing company only pays the third world engineer $10k and pockets the $40k. This was fine a few years ago as there was a huge number of talented engineers in eg India, Philippines etc who really could do the job. Today it's not so easy. The cream of them have already emigrated to the first world on the back of their talents. The local job market has risen so that really talented people can't be found for $10k any more, so the bottoms landing on the empty chairs are attached to increasingly mediocre talent. The better ones move on quickly.
Add to that the difficulties of working with the time zone difference, the language problems, the cultural disconnect and the profound impossibility of communicating the intricacies of a mature IT infrastructure - and you get a project that is quickly going nowhere.
My direct experience of these changes (I've seen a few) is that the organisation keeps going on momentum alone for a few years - the existing old IT systems soldier on with only minor maintenance work being done, just enough to lurch from week to week.
No major development is possible because the talent that put the system together has been sacrificed - so the company fails to respond to new challenges and does not innovate. Unless the enterprise's business is completely unchanging, it's a slow glide path to oblivion - but the ground is just as hard for all that.
Now the really important thing is that by the time the shareholders realise the dirty deed they've been dealt, the genius CEO who gave them that short term gain has moved on to more triumphs elsewhere, no doubt at ever higher remunerations.
it's not about our freedom to drive - it's about our freedom to be able to travel without yahoos trying to kill us on the roads. I would make driverless cars compulsory for under 25's, over 75's and anyone who's ever had a drink driving or dangerous driving conviction.
Read Mr Poettering's own account of systemd at http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html Features are listed in legions but only one tangible, significant benefit: it's supposed to be faster. Only one real benefit and then only to laptop owners. What would a server admin care if it takes 2 minutes to boot or 15 seconds or 10 minutes? Who cares? Now, if you google the first major distro to go systemd ie fedora-15, you'll see that it's not faster at all in practice. So all that change, all the obfuscation of hiding in compiled code what used to be clear (in bash-scripts), all the complexity, confusion, breakages, fear, uncertainty and doubt amounts to - no advantage at all. I'm not sure if it's enough to have me bail out of the fedora world - but surely this won't find its way into RHEL?!?!? Please tell me not!!!
You young schmucks should listen up! When you hit 40-50 years old your eyes will seize up and you'll be able to focus at exactly one distance. You get glasses, then you have a choice of distance (TV or driving) and reading (books or monitors) as well as whatever your eyes can do by themselves. One thing you'll notice is that at the closer distances, the focal depth is very small - it makes a big difference if the monitor is 40cm away or 50cm - at one you can focus. At the other you can't. Brutal as that. Now sit down at a 75cm (30") widescreen monitor and WTF - if you can focus at the centre, you can't focus at the edge. Unless, of course you sit 2m away or more. That's why I'm sitting exactly 45cm from my good old 43cm (17") diagonal 1920x1440 Philips 107P4 CRT monitor. It beats the crap out of the Dell 2001FP 51cm (20") 1600x1200 monitor at work both in the quality of the image, the number of vertical lines of code in emacs and my ability to focus on it. When they offered me an upgrade to a rootin tootin 27" wide-screen, I tried it and sent it back - just couldn't focus all the way to the edges. If any monitor manufacturers are listening here, WE WANT VERTICAL PIXELS _AND_ A NICE COMPACT FORMFACTOR - around 43cm, thank you very much!! I'm not talking a small demographic here - it's the baby boomers!!
As said previously, scripts are scripts and don't often need a GUI. But for grep's sake, make them consistent!!! The only spicing up _really_ needed are some standards:
... and the most annoying thing of all - make sure --help _always_ works, even if the script body itself can't - at least the user can then be told about what the prerequisites are.
o output errors to STDERR; normal output to STDOUT
o include (-h, --help) processing - and send it to STDOUT so the help can be piped to 'less'
o use getopt(1) or process-getopt(1) so that options on the CLI parse in a predictable and standard way
o keep it terse except for errors so that the user can easily see if it worked or not without scanning vast output
o provide a --verbose option to help with tracking down those errors
Head over to http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashFAQ for much wisdom on how to write better bash scripts.
ccrypt: http://ccrypt.sourceforge.net/
So is the SuSE offering completely FOSS?
Bob
If a crim wants to pinch my old fashioned paper id, they just take it or fake it. If a crim wants my biometric, they take my finger, eye whatever. Not nice. Bottom line - there are some things I'd lose an eye or a finger for, but not many. To hell with biometrics.
The reason for my surprise is that FreeBSD is much kinder to the people that make all the applications - the developers.
I'd cite:
* documentation - the man pages and the handbook in FreeBSD are a dream of clarity and completeness.
* API's - stable and (again) well documented. Including the kernel API's.
* Solid driver support - eg my wireless link runs roughly 2x the speed on FreeBSD vs Linux since FreeBSD-4.x days (and, yes, I'm up to date with my Gentoo linux machine).
* The code - the kernel code in FreeBSD is logical, neat, elegant and just makes sense.
Compare Linux - the documentation is a mess frankly, albeit a lovable mess. It's all over the place and incomplete.
The linux API's are a complete nightmare - Linus HimSelf famously proclaims and maintains his right to change any kernel API as and how he sees fit. For a driver developer that's a nightmare, even if the kernel team keep the current kernel-supplied drivers up to date with the ever-changing API. Third-party kernel driver developers (I was one for 7 years on Linux, SCO (!), AIX, HPUX, Solaris and FreeBSD) shudder at that - anyone care to remember the kiobufs DMA fiasco around Linux 2.4.12???
As for the huge monolithic kernel source, Linux is getting close to really, really, really needing to be broken up into a microkernel architecture, just for maintainability issues alone.
As for Gnome (shudder) just look what they did with documentation (man pages anyone - forget it!) never mind supporting the command-line properly (who gave them the right to obsolete the good old-fashioned, universal X "-geometry" etc options).
All that said, FreeBSD is not ahead as most of the posts here testify. So why is that?
Technical inferiority? I don't think so... I can only think it must be the license. Commercial interests should surely like the FreeBSD model better but the GPL just "Keeps Them Honest" and prevents the balkanization that commercial UNIX always suffered.
BTW - as a hint to any FreeBSD developers out there, some things that would really help Linux'ers to have the confidence to explore FreeBSD would be:
* a decent disc format that can be properly shared with Linux - ext2 just about works but can't be exported by NFS on FreeBSD - and when I boot back to Linux I invariably get heaps of file system corruptions to fix up - not nice. While I'm at it, what about ext3? Maybe my ignorance here - perhaps there is JFS or XFS available and compatible on both - but people need to be sure that they can dual-boot a FreeBSD system and still see their data and be _sure_ it's safe. Don't bother me with Reiser - too many scars on that one.
* a live-CD version of FreeBSD, like Knoppix - I started my FreeBSD adventure with Freesbie, a 4.x (now -5.3) live-CD. Anything like that for 6.1?