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Comment WTF? (Score 1, Insightful) 184

by Arker (#47953189) Attached to: KDE's UI To Bend Toward Simplicity
"KDE Software is often criticized for being too complicated for an average user to use. "

By whom? Since when?

"Try setting up Kmail and you would know what I mean. "

Havent used it lately but I dont remember it being much different from more common GUI email apps. What are you getting at?

"The KDE developers are aware of it and now they are working on making KDE UI simpler. "

Thinking of GNOME, which was once somewhat useful and useable before the developers started talking like this, a shiver runs down my spine.

"KDE usability team lead Thomas Pfeiffer Thomas prefers a layered feature exposure so that users can enjoy certain advanced features at a later stage after they get accustomed to the basic functionality of the application. He quotes the earlier (pre-Plasma era) vision of KDE 4 â€" "Anything that makes Linux interesting for technical users (shells, compilation, drivers, minute user settings) will be available; not as the default way of doing things, but at the user's discretion."

Ugh. *Minute user settings* are actually very important to many non-technical users. This does sound like GNOME, unfortunately.

Comment Re:And there's the reason why... (Score 0) 226

by Arker (#47951107) Attached to: Google's Doubleclick Ad Servers Exposed Millions of Computers To Malware
No, I wont.

As sites, one by one, go insane, I quit going to them.

The nice thing is, the internet is still very useful without them.

If you are tired of facebook bling and mindrot, if you are looking for the informative web that we used to have, you have only to open your eyes. Turn off ecmascript, and when you hit an address that refuses to return a web-page, just hit your back button and go somewhere else.

It's a good thing in a way. I used to have to spend some time reading to figure out that a site was worthless. Now I just notice that it isnt actually a webpage right off and save some time.

Comment Re:Business (Score 0, Troll) 275

by Arker (#47950401) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: How To Avoid Becoming a Complacent Software Developer?
"Umm... JSON is a pretty significant force behind modern Web design."

Exactly why it needs to be nuked from orbit.

"Umm...Objective-C is the ONLY [good] way (besides Swift, which you'd hate even more) to write software for iOS devices, and the best language for programming Macs."

Neither of which is a good reason to use it, but it's actually a great language despite the failed attempt to defend it - it was the one thing on his list that did not fit.

"However, some folks still wear mullets and pine for the trash-80..."

And some of us use computers for practical reasons, rather than as fashion accessories.

Comment Re:Are you even aware of SystemD works? (Score 0) 385

by Arker (#47940465) Attached to: Torvalds: No Opinion On Systemd
"With systemd, setup/startup/stop/teardown responsibilities are concentrated with PID1 and it's helpers.
Before, you'd have the same concept spread into a dozen of different systems, each only doing part of that functionnality."

Which is exactly how it should be.

PID1 only needs a small subset of those capabilities to do its job. And because it is PID1, because everything after has to rely on it, it's essential that it be well behaved and stable. Therefore it is essential that it have only the required set of capabilities and absolutely nothing else should be added or linked to it.

Other things can and should be done by other systems, not concatenated together and poured into PID1 where an error can bring the house down.

Comment Re:Simple set of pipelined utilties! (Score -1) 385

by Arker (#47932223) Attached to: Torvalds: No Opinion On Systemd
"My data are important to me. I shouldn't need to buy a server to prevent my data from being corrupted."

But you do nonetheless. My current machine was bought for one reason - price - and lacks it. When I've built my own systems in the past I have always used it. Scoping out parts to build a new one, I see the price of sane memory has only gotten further out of line than I remember. :(

This is one aspect of a market where the buyer does not understand the product well enough to make intelligent choices. If computer buyers understood the technology, at least 70% of them would insist on ECC, and as a result economy of scale would have eliminated the price premium long ago. Instead, manufacturers continue to skimp a few pennies on the RAM by default, creating an economy of scale advantage in the other direction, which only reënforces the bad allocation and ensures it continues.

Instead of ECC memory they should call it 'sanity-checking memory.' Maybe then people would understand what it is enough to realize they want it. But since no one in particular stands to make a windfall by doing it, no one promotes it.

Comment Re:Simple set of pipelined utilties! (Score 0) 385

by Arker (#47930659) Attached to: Torvalds: No Opinion On Systemd
I am saying that its design sacrifices robustness in favor of performance and features at every turn. It might be more crashy, but the bigger problem is it ensures you have no usable logs when it crashes. And it doesnt have to be a crash for it to be troublesome, for a single example in the quest for shorter boot times it starts services without making sure that dependencies are actually working - that normally wont cause the entire system to crash but so what?

Still not what I want on my system. I dont really care how long it takes to boot, I just want to make sure that when it's finished it's really finished. Systemd in so many ways copies windows concepts instead - like how they make it supposedly boot faster - by rushing along to draw a GUI before things are actually ready to use.

Not saying systemd is as bad as windows - and the massive improvements in boot speed are not all illusory! but they do come at the cost of reliability and correctness, and that's simply not a good tradeoff for people using the OS in a traditional manner.

Comment Re:Yes, pipelined utilities, like the logs (Score 3, Insightful) 385

by Arker (#47928363) Attached to: Torvalds: No Opinion On Systemd
"You don't have to. If you really want your old way then just have journald pass everything along to syslog and it's back to normal."

Unfortunately that's not quite true. You *can* configure systemd to spit out text logs as well as the binaries but that is a delayed process, so in the one case where you MOST want text logs (where a crash has occured with the file open) it's absolutely worthless.

Comment Re:Simple set of pipelined utilties! (Score 4, Insightful) 385

by Arker (#47926405) Attached to: Torvalds: No Opinion On Systemd
I think there is a major difference between having a big possibly over-complicated application program in userspace, and putting something like that in a critical spot in the system itself.

If your application program has a flaw, it's probably not a huge deal. Maybe it crashes occasionally. You save often, you have autosave, it's not a big deal.

But a system component that can crash the system, render it unbootable, hand control to a hostile third party, etc - it's much more important in that case to keep things clean and proper to keep the machine itself stable.

Part of the disconnect between the Sysd cabal and the traditionalists here is about what we mean by the machine. We are often running linux on bare metal as our workstation. From what I have been told, they typically run it in virtual machines on server farms instead, and use Apple workstations. So from their point of view, it is just another application, and it shouldnt be a big deal to restart it occasionally - especially after they put so much work into improving boot times. But from our point of view, we dont care much about fast boot times, we want a stable system that doesnt need to be rebooted all the time.

Comment Re:Holy cow ... (Score 0) 142

by Arker (#47858717) Attached to: Private Police Intelligence Network Shares Data and Targets Cash
Most commonly they were simply routed around.

OK, maybe I made that sound more simple than it was. When every route is covered by 'bandits' of one stripe or another, 'just route around' is easier said than done... but, what happened is that the bandits started competing.

There were two routes that could be taken to market, each harbored a different gang. One year, gang A simply took everything that tried to pass. Big gains for them that year. The same year, gang B was a little more restrained, and only 'taxed' caravans but let them go on through after coughing up a fee. Their gains were smaller that year, but the next year, caravans came through their territory and contributd to their coffers again. Gang A's territory received no merchants. Gang A got no gain from this, and would see no gains from it again for a decade or more, until they were finally driven out by a new gang which behaved differently. Gang B, on the other hand, gained more than the first year, as they now had all the traffic rather than half of it passing through their territory.

And thus was born taxation. Eco-friendly theft, sustainable banditry. The first guy to try it was no doubt considered an imbecile by his peers, at first, but it soon proved to be an advantage that only increases over time and the taxers not only held on but soon enough put the old-school bandits at a permanent disadvantage that continues to this day.

And so over time the taxer chiefs became Barons, and the Baronies were organized into Kingdoms, and the Kingdoms into Empires, and the the Empires fell apart into Baronies and Kingdoms again, a cycle that in some older areas has probably repeated a dozen times, and then after much time all of these groups were swept away by the new secular religion of nationalism, and Nations were invented to replace them. But the scam remains essentially the same regardless of the time and place.

How would that translate today? Well if we could get a clear corridor through the country of jurisdictions that repudiated this and other forms of robbery clearly, a lot of travellers would be willing to detour significantly in order to remain within that corridor. The jurisdictions that continued the robbery would, like gang A, effectively be cut out of the game, and even though travellers would make it through with most of their belongings each one would certainly drop a few dollars in taxes on these jurisdictions as they passed through. But getting the ball rolling, getting the initial free corridor on line, I got nothing practical on that at the moment, I am sorry.

It probably was not easy to do that the first time around either though. We may have existed as a species for a couple of hundred thousand years before we actually progressed to the point where travelling more than a few miles did not involve a likelihood of mortal combat to begin with.

Comment Re:Science creates understanding of a real world. (Score 1, Insightful) 770

by Arker (#47855375) Attached to: How Scientific Consensus Has Gotten a Bad Reputation
"The global warming people haven't shown us the value of anything, so far as I can see."

That's because your definition of value and theirs are different.

Their work has inestimable value - both in terms of promoting their own careers, and their own political and pseudoreligious goals.

The fact that it does not serve YOUR goals is not really their concern, now is it?

Comment Re:ELI5 please (Score 0) 354

by Arker (#47841715) Attached to: DMCA Claim Over GPL Non-Compliance Shuts Off Minecraft Plug-Ins
That appears to be the matter in dispute. There are many posters on the company blog saying "what's this then?" and making it a link. When I follow the link, I get a notice saying it's been removed due to DMCA notice.

It's my understanding that *if* this company owns the original code, and included it, in binary or source, with the GPA build, which they then shipped, they have either invoked the license or they are violating his copyright. And it appears the company is saying they did not do this but a lot of users are saying they sure did. At this point, since they have taken whatever was being linked to down, I cannot tell for sure.

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