Holy crap, dude. It was a joke. Things like "magical" and "zero runtime overhead" and "including ones that haven't been written yet" didn't clue you in?

The OpenBSD developers are so awesome that they've found a magical way to make modules unnecessary: Magical code compression with zero runtime overhead. As a result of this new approach, every possible kernel module (including ones that haven't been written yet) is stored in less space than an otherwise completely stripped kernel from the prior revision.

I said what I said because I had believed some of the myths promulgated about systemd. In fact, it's highly modular, and the main init process is actually quite small and not as much of a risk for crashes as people say it is. The main difference between systemd and sysvinit is that systemd is not based on shell scripts. Other than that, it is a collection of system services that are started up on demand and in logical order of dependencies, which was already a feature of Gentoo's OpenRC. Systemd's main objective seems to standardize and optimize many things about Linux that were previously (unnecessarily) inconsistent between distributions. Other than that, the main UNIX philsophy of making lots of specialized tools is not changed. Moreover, it's improved on the basis of sharing more code (in shared object libraries, I presume) between tools, such as code to parse configuration files and communicate with other components (which is based on dbus). They've taken the best UNIX features from various independent tools and system services and put them together into a single coherent implementation.

You really should read the page dispelling myths here, as pointed out by someone who replied to my earlier post: http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/the-biggest-myths.html

The more I look into this, the more I see the anti-systemd people being like creationists. Their view of the world is out-dated and replaced by better science (creationism isn't science at all, while sysvinit is not stupid, merely out-dated). Nevertheless, they fight to protect their old religion. And they deal with the new science mostly on the basis of total lies about their opposition.

I really have nothing invested in this, though, so my opinion my change yet again. I'm sure there are some disadvantages to systemd, but so far, all of the disadvantages I've seen people talk about have been fabrications, and it makes the adherents to the old religion of sysvinit look like luddites who can't separate fact from fiction and are merely afraid that their way of life is going to be taken from them, even when the new ways are better than the old ways. Quite possibly, some of the systemd opponents are INTENTIONALLY fabricating these things, and when things get to that point, I feel that their cult needs to die purely on principle.

Let's start by saying that the death threats against Lennart Poettering are ridiculous and should not be tolerated.

That being said, the design of systemd confuses me. It seems ripe for all manner of stability and security problems. As I understand it, it bundles a large number of services into a single process, which takes place of the init daemon. That's guaranteed to cause all kinds of system crashes.

What I don't get is why it isn't split up into multiple processes. All the same functionality could be provided by having a simple core init daemon that loads a set (perhaps a small set) of child processes. It wouldn't take longer to load. The services and behavior would be identical. But it would be a lot more stable, because a child process could be restarted if it crashes, keeping init to a bare minimum.

What's even more surprising is that someone with some sense hasn't done exactly that: Make a wrapper for the systemd build that patches a few things and just compiles it differently, into a slightly larger number of binaries. This way, we can benefit from the unification of services, while maintaining stability, and Poettering would have to be intentionally self-destructive to try to keep breaking that wrapper every release.

Instead of writing off creationism as pseudo-scientific clap-trap, why don't we start referring to it as a sport? Kinda like how curling and checkers are sports. When I was a student at Ohio State, studying computer science, I stayed way away from the campus during every football event. The traffic was a nightmare, and you'd have to park miles away and walk to every game, probably getting a ticket because where you parked was vaguely marked, and Ohio cops will use any excuse to get more ticket revenue. Hell, parking for a football game at the Ohio stadium was in itself a sport on many levels!

Anyhow, so how interested we are in sports, as scientists, varies quite a lot. Some of us care. Some of us could take it or leave it. Either way, a sport is mostly an event of mindless brutes kicking balls around and running into each other. Either that or it's comically painful like curling. Or self destructive like base jumping. So if we start referring to creationism as a sport, we'll be able to be clear about just how we think about it: A generally pointless exercise that makes whoever runs the event an ungodly amount of money. The debate as to whether or not creationism is serious science is about the same as the debate over whether or not it's possible to have a sport that involves ice skating and sweeping at the same time without being reduced to uncontrollable laughter.

You're assuming that there was already substantial diversity in feet size among lizards prior to the invasion. I'm not sure that that was the case.

Admittedly, the R code was probably horrible, but I inherited some of it, so I can't take all the blame. On the other hand, I'm really good at squeezing good performance out of C++.

This reminds me of the big hullabaloo Paul Graham made about how superior Lisp is because he was able to make more quickly adapt web back-ends for some website he'd done. I think attribution of this success to the language is misplaced -- his implenentation was more adaptable simply because he was a superior programmer, and Lisp probably only helped a little bit.

R syntax is a lot better. In Matlab, the dimensions of a 3D array are Y,X,Z. That's just one of the many papercuts that makes Matlab difficult and unintuitive to use. R makes a hell of a lot more sense to me.

That being said, R is also very slow. For one project, I used R and ended up having to use a supercomputer (I only needed a few hundred Opertons out of the 4096 available) to get all the work done in time. For a followup project, I rewrote it in C++ and reran all the same stuff in the same period on a Core 2 Duo. R is really that slow.

But then, R is an interpreted language, so that's not a surprise. And I was able to rewrite my code in C++ because we didn't need any special libraries; if we had, I wouldn't have had the expertise to reimplement it. R is really convenient to use for many things, and it's also faster than Matlab for everything I've tried in both. Matlab is a dog, and the Mac version crashes at the drop of a hat too. I can't believe people pay money for that crap, except that it's pushed on universities, so people get used to it.

What kind of courses do you think are bullshit? While I as in grad school, an undergrad I knew complained about having to take poetry course. I told him his complaint was stupid. For sure, this guy needed to have his horizons broadened. When I took grad CS courses (at Ohio State, BTW), they were certainly challenging, but when I took courses in Psych, Linguistics, and Cog Sci, I had to think about things in entirely new ways, so I came away feeling like I had expanded my mind more fundamentally.

I've known a few intellectually brilliant people who still live off their parents because they can't take care of themselves. They are "so in the clouds" that they are worthless, unproductive members of society. Sure, they're fun to discuss philosophy with, but I would never want to have one as a room mate or depend on them in any way. I don't care how smart or left-wing you are, every person has the responsibility to find a niche in society that allows them to work and TAKE CARE OF THEMSLVES.

These "creative C students" are exactly the people we DON'T want in college, creativity having nothing to do with it. They the sorts of people who can't complete simple tasks or do anything practical. How the hell do you expect them to not just completely fail out of college? A college degree program that does not require students to GET EDUCATED in a range of areas (literature, foreign language, basic math & science, fine arts, etc.) is not a good educational program, and these C students will not have the discipline to make it through classes in subjects they're not interested in.

Nobody will suggest that we give them a free ride through those classes either. So they're GOING TO FAIL.

I'm biased because I am one, but the creative types I respect the most are college professors, especially in fields where you have to seek your own funding. You HAVE to be creative to publish new science. But you also have to be able to teach, present ideas clearly and logically, manage people, promote yourself, stay focused on specific productive problem areas, etc. Some of them (such as myself) had industry experience prior to going into academia. These people are WELL ROUNDED.

Well-rounded is what we want to get into college. People who can manage their time and money, think about more than one type of thing, work on problems they don't necessarily prefer, etc. The most successful people are those most willing to do well at the less interesting parts of the job. And THOSE people are not C students.

For some reason, when I see the name Elon Musk, I first think of Tesla, not SpaceX. It must be more prevalent in the news lately. What's it like to be the CEO of two of the coolest companies in the world?

The theory behind Christianity is that everyone is a sinner and needs Jesus to redeem them lest they suffer some kind of punishment. Many Christians are flexible enough to believe that Jesus has appeared in many forms with many names, and as such, many other religions are also perfectly valid. If we generalize this, "original sin" is an abstraction, representing the idea that all sapient creatures have the ability to choose to do evil and need redemption. Extended to advanced alien civilizations, the assumption is that at some point in their evolution, they too will have developed the ability to choose to do wrong (harm others in some way, etc.) and therefore need a redeemer. If God has appeared on Earth in some form many times, logically, He will have appeared on every civilized planet many times, offering every advanced intelligent creature an opportunity to repent and ask for forgiveness.

On the other hand, this is probably an exceptional viewpoint, and many religious people who believe that believers in other religions (or none at all) are infidels will decide that this is an opportunity to either convert or kill off those evil godless aliens.

Incidentally, Thomas E. Hanna (http://tehanna.com) is one of the most intellectual Christians I've ever known. Although I don't necessarily agree with all of his beliefs, debating philosophy and religion with him is downright enjoyable, because he doesn't try to shove a set of rigid beliefs down your throat. He just reasons. I can't be offended by that. I'm not really into going to church, but if I lived in Lakeland, I'd go to his. His blog tackles a lot of concepts that may be esoteric to non-Christians, but for those who are, he pushes the envelope and as a result gets under the skin of many conservatives. I enjoy anything that challenges established idiologies even in small ways.

Learning more than one system of measurement doesn't sound like such a huge burden, especially if there's an emphasis on how to convert. I don't have a good intuitive sense for conversions between US and metric systems because they were taught to me separately. If, when they were initially introduced, there had been an emphasis on conversion, that would have helped. Also, teaching the conversions helps with some simple math too.

I've been complaining for years that the default KDE window manager not only looks ugly but also clashes with the rest of the theme. If they made windows look like plasma widgets, then they would look sleek, and they would look like they were designed to fit with the rest of the theme. But KDE devs seem to have no idea what I'm talking about. How can thing go so right in so many ways and then fall apart in one so conspicuous area?

On first glance, the new Gnome window decorations actually look pretty good. Maybe I'll change my mind later, but it looks like someone developed a sense of style.

Verilog vs. VHDL. I find that the verboseness of VHDL (which requires like 3 times as much typing) actually impedes readability. Sure, there are situations where VHDL can catch a bug at synthesis time that Verilog can't, but the rest of the time, it just makes VHDL unwieldy.