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Comment Re:How long is rent going to go up before?dun dun (Score 4, Insightful) 71

Because face time is important. Interacting with coworkers is important. Being able to go over a design at a whiteboard together rather than reading the same powerpoint slide separately is important. THe best ideas I've had in my career have been created as a result of talking to my coworkers over lunch/coffee break/tangent from another discussion. Telecommuting is a loss to productivity even if they are perfect about actually working (which having done it for a year- its not an easy thing to do, there's a lot of temptations). Its not only easily worth 15-30k, its worth 2-3 times that to have then onsite. That's ignoring the fact that a large number of people won't be on point when working from home- many without even meaning to cheat the system.

Comment Re:Keyboard (Score 1) 216

I doubt you paid much attention to this. I do, I've been developing keyboards for 5 years now. Some of those at Swype, some at a second startup (I left Swype a few months after the buyout and have had neither residuals nor stock in the company or its new owner since May 2012), and now well its still on keyboards but I'm under NDA preventing me from stating where. Do all Android users use continuous path input? Of course not. Not even a majority. But a very solid percentage do, and a majority of those wouldn't use a device without it for a phone sized device (answers differ on large tablets where swyping isn't as efficient). So no, I don't think I oversold the importance of the technology- its a blocking issue for millions of people moving to iOS. Would they have moved had it been available when they were making their OS choice? Some large percentage of them would have. Will they now? Who knows- now they're locked in by various apps and expected behavior. We'll see.

Comment Re: Keyboard (Score 1) 216

THe shift key changes state slightly- colors in blue when manually capped, outlines blue when in autocaps mode. But no, it doesn't show on the keys.

Comment Re:Just one question... (Score 2) 216

iOS terms of service prevent you from writing a service or daemon except under very specific circumstances. If you do, they'll reject your app from the store. So you have to do a lot of things that should run in the background only when you're in the foreground. Yes, its idiotic- in order to try and avoid a few badly written apps from draining battery power unnecessarily running in the background they've instead prevented entire categories of useful behavior.

Comment Re:Keyboard (Score 4, Interesting) 216

Highly doubt it. I worked at Swype. We had deals at the OEM level and shipped preinstalled. That means we made money on every phone shipped. (Some of those deals fell apart post buyout, because the buyer was hard to deal with). They won't get that deal from Apple. So they may make more money per download, or get more paid downloads. But they won't make more money overall.

Comment Re:Extensions are interesting (Score 0) 216

Did you know you're lieing? I have an Android phone, with Skype on it. Battery uneffected, lasts 2 days of moderate use or 1 day of heavy use including GPS. Skype does not take command of the camera like that, if it did then no other app would be able to claim it and you'd quickly see a problem.

Comment Re:Keyboard (Score 5, Insightful) 216

Anyone who ever used an android phone. Swype, Swiftkey, and others do an amazing job. Apple lacks continuous path typing (Swype-like paths to type) which is in every major Android keyboard these days and used by hundreds of millions of people as a faster alternative to thumb typing. Apple's autocorrect is mediocre, Swiftkey and Swype/Nuance kick its ass. And the keyboard does matter- its the most used app on the phone- you use it in texting, emails, even browsing. If it isn't a good experience people will not use your device. Apple lost millions of users who wouldn't consider switching due to the lack of options on iOS. The question is if they're now to embedded into the Android world to be willing to change. I'm guessing Apple lost them permanently by being 4 or 5 years too late with opening up the keyboards api.

Comment Re:Simple set of pipelined utilties! (Score 2, Informative) 385

Xorg, which on desktop is as critical as init to keep running, is not really simple.

Never go full retard. X is not even remotely as important as init. For one thing, if X dies, who will restart it? And do we really want computers that explode when the GUI dies? I, for one, would like network services to terminate gracefully. The whole idea of TCP/IP networks, the dominant network used with Unix, is peer-to-peer. I may well run both services and clients on my machine. If X dies, the clients may die (if they're not text and running in screen) but the servers won't.

kernel, which is also as critical as init to keep running, and it is *much* *much* more complex than systemd. systemd is not at the "bottom layer" of the system, there's the whole of kernel underneath still.

So the argument is that since the kernel is complex, we should add more complexity, or that more complexity won't matter? That's an ignorant, illogical argument.

And one common myth is that systemd has these so many features and systemd is pid 1 therefore pid 1 is this huge bloated monster that does udev, logging and NTP, right? Wrong; actually, just the core bits of systemd run in pid 1 and the rest is compartmentalized in a bunch of separate daemon processes.

Systemd still has to be more complicated so that it knows how to run these other processes, which wasn't even necessary. init was never meant to manage daemons. daemons were meant to manage themselves, or be run from inetd. If you want more complexity, inetd is the place to add it. And for handling daemons which don't adequately manage themselves, there's daemontools. There was simply no need whatsoever for this to happen.

So, this "increased complexity" issue is not really as bad as it sounds, realistically.

It is bad, because PID1 is now responsible for a bunch of things which could have existed in any other daemon. And rather than roll the things which actually make sense in together, everything is getting rolled together. So now not only do we depend on a complex kernel, but we depend on a needlessly complex init system. There was no good reason to put all of this stuff into the same daemon.

Comment Re:Simple set of pipelined utilties! (Score 3, Informative) 385

You can't seriously claim that systemd provides nothing that can't be done by script based init systems, shell scripts and existing daemons

Yes, yes I can. And I did.

logind is just one example

Does nothing a script can't do

But it would be an interesting project to make a Linux SysVinit distro that tried get feature parity with systemd, so that daemons could utilize the kernel "namespaces" and "capabilities"

Systemd doesn't even fucking use capabilities, just cgroups. Which we could use before systemd. Systemd manages permissions in lieu of using capabilities, e.g. apparmor or selinux.

Isn't that argument just trying to make a virtue out of the fact, that SysVinit and the like, are totally crude and primitive init systems that are unable to anything much of interest?

No. That is the virtue. They are simple. Simplicity is still a virtue.

All the analyses I have seen shows that moving crucial processes into PID2, just makes everything more fragile and opens up security holes.

Making PID1 more complex makes everything more fragile and opens up security holes.

I think that there are actually very good design reasons for why systemd is designed like it is.

NIH

It only runs one process as PID1, the daemon "systemd" which is rather small. This daemon however, is capable of "talking" with with several other processes, which gives it many advantages,

This is making init do stuff it doesn't need to do, which makes it more complex, which makes it more fragile. You should not need a detailed explanation to understand why this is a bad thing.

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