The part that worries me was: "The hardest challenge was explaining the language of the test to a five-year-old. But he seemed to pick it up and has a very good memory."

Sounds like the kid is pretty bright, might well be pretty impressive in a few years; but 'explaining the language of the test' is pretty much a (much easier) equivalent to 'identifying the problem to be solved'.

As an exercise in mental capacity, I'm definitely not going to knock the kid, I certainly wouldn't have managed it at 5, and those capabilities will likely come in handy, I hope for him that they do.

For the MCP, on the other hand, it seems pretty dire that it can be passed by somebody with an excellent memory; but a need to be coached on what the questions mean. Real life is an open book (and/or google) test; but it is notably unsympathetic about telling you what the questions mean, what sort of answer a given question requires, which questions are actually on the test, which answers trigger a surprise exam about disaster recovery 18 months from now...

If somebody is a 'Certified Professional' I'd much rather seem them have an elegant grasp of what the problem is and what the solution should look like; but check the manual for some registry settings, than be conceptually befuddled but have a perfect grasp of the details.

Yes, yes they are.

Yes, yes they will, because once systemd becomes the default init system, init scripts will suffer.

The base Debian system should use the basic init system. If they want to offer the option to switch to another init, so be it, but making something new and not fully tested the default is daft and we all know it. Debian is the rock that many of us depend on whether we run Debian or a downstream distribution. It's been my go-to for ages specifically because of this stability. Debian stable is boring and I love it.

Riiiiight, the team that's been pushing for its default inclusion?

I have this argument with my lady periodically, she speaks spanish fluently, italian moderately, and greek a bit. She claims that English is "stupid" because there's no consistency to it. I agree, but claim that's also what makes it powerful. English is never afraid to adopt a loanword, probably bastardizing it in the process. There's a lesson about the English and their colonies there, I imagine, but let us continue. Since the words come from so many different sources, there are many different rulesets depending on whether the word is from greek, latin, french, german... But since we unabashedly copy any word we like, we have words for anything. And when we don't, the influence of context on a word (down to something so simple as the order in which we construct the sentence) lets us say anything anyway.

Of course, the language is still frustrating and confusing for a lot of people. Hence the importance of reading in mass quantities. Simply making it familiar while the brain is at its squishiest pays massive dividends, which is why I wish I'd been exposed to many languages at a young age. I got a little bit of spanish education very young, but then got packed off to a public school and... sigh.

That's not a problem. Who cares if a check happens every 30 seconds? Who cares if it's done by a script? The system is designed to do stuff like let a script step every 30 seconds. The system is also designed with cheap process creation in mind; the time to fork a process is comparable to the time necessary to create a thread.

Well, in theory to me anyway, it would make sense to use a runlevel for sleep. This isn't what is normally done, but there's really no reason why you couldn't do that with init, and I think that might well make more sense. Any services which needed to stop themselves could do so, the network could be reconfigured on resume, et cetera. All without any ugly hacks. We would still run a bunch of scripts, but shell scripting and cheap process creation are central features of the Unix environment. Shell scripting is not a hack. Unix was invented for single-digit-MHz computers, and we can afford to toss off a few shells.

And yet, you have not addressed the claim that overprovisioning affects the need to use the TRIM command.

There's nothing wrong with run levels. Dependencies aren't handled through run levels alone, they're also handled through start order. But the proper answer is to add something to /etc/default/package or directly to the init script to handle dependency checking, it's actually really simple.

init doesn't control the network, and it never has. it only starts the network. you use a network managing daemon to handle rejoining previously-seen access points and the like.

That's not what happened, however. A very small group of people, divided in itself, reluctantly came to a decision that affects others — and these others do not clearly support that decision in the majority either.

So you're saying that systemd is a mistake?

Think again — people are uploading that footage even when it's boring. Just take a look at youtube. Some guy uploaded a video of him riding a motorcycle over the 175 Hopland Grade slower than I've whipped it in an Astro, and I told him so :) But seriously, people are uploading every total yawn of a video they shoot, and other people are watching them and even giving them the thumbs-up.

I was hoping that Meta's device would be an Eyetap, every time I see someone say "Me, I'm hoping..." in one of these discussions, that's what I'm hoping for. Simply not having to correct for parallax would be better than clever schemes which don't always work well. Although probably at this point we'll have to wait for it to be implemented as a contact lens

Can you tell me how awesome it would be to have to look at it through a big box on your head that creates false perspective?

How about a trackball next to your other input devices that scrolls you around a desktop like that?

Here's the problem with that story: the cell phone companies can't string the fiber, the telcos have the monopoly on doing that, and anywhere they don't, the cable companies do — or the two of 'em split a monopoly on running fiber.

What we really need is a mesh network that lets the endpoints be the carrier fabric, acting as repeaters for one another. But we aren't going to get it from the cellphone companies, because they are nothing without centralization. We're going to have to build it ourselves, and just start using it. For the foreseeable future, it will be necessary for someone to pay for connection to the internet for it to be useful, but with enough users (and dedicated repeater sites, especially while growing the network and always for some areas with low node density) it ought to be a feasible solution to the last mile problem with the fancy pants new wireless technologies coming "soon"

Some would argue that a "properly designed" SSD is one which permits me to control the amount of over-provisioning, which is the primary reason you don't need to TRIM one of those drives. Other drives have controllers which do the same job.

The problem there is that disabling kext signing is global. Apple should provide a facility to disable it for a single kext.

It reminds me of how they used to disable any built-in CD recording features on systems that CD burners; but not Apple-blessed CD burners.

Given the teething issues of SSDs, I don't doubt that an example could be provided of some drives where 'TRIM support' means 'the intern tested it all day on his win7 box and nothing bad happened' and It Would Be Bad if OSX tried to interact with the feature. Aside from that, though, you don't make profits like Apple does without providing a little encouragement to buy high-margin upgrades.

No, I actually read the mailing list archives to see that the patch had been contributed, they had complained about it, and then it was contributed again. Then there were no responses. If someone posting a working patch has no chance to get a positive response, what chance do I have? The mailing list archives told me it would be a fat fucking waste of time. Someone actually handed them a working patch which broke nothing and they decided it wasn't worth committing. But the patch no longer applies and I don't care enough to figure it out. I just installed Linux, and now the system is working. If they don't care enough to take on patches that people hand them, then they don't care. And since they don't care, I don't care.

I didn't describe the situation in enough detail to make that assessment until this comment, at which point it clearly isn't the case. You shouldn't make assumptions, because you're an asshole.