Being nice is only valuable as an additional asset to your others.

You don't hire people just because they are nice even if they make terrible workers, salesman or whatever (being nice does not guarantee sales, maybe customer relations, but not sales).

Therefore, being nice - once you remove the ideology that a lot of people have - is not necessary to succeed (by whatever definition you care to choose - wealth, charity, etc.). Some of the most fun, intellectual, influential people I know are not "nice" at all. When they are nice, it's because - and they will admit this - they are falsifying it to get their way. Some actually consider "niceness" only a way to appease YOU and get what THEY want, even if that's on a tiny social level and they're not being mean or trying to get something from you.

Being unable to nice isn't a serious disability, but it can hinder. Precisely because of the above - you need to be able to "fake" nice at the very least. But, at the end of the day, being nice doesn't solve an awful lot of everyday problems. In fact, being nice can actually create those problems in the first place (e.g. taking on everyone's work etc.).

"Criminals" - to lump entire millions of people together - do tend to lack in empathy. But they are also rather good at faking "nice" in a lot of cases. This is the basis of the confidence trickster, for instance. Internally, they aren't "at war", they're doing exactly what the human race does and is based on. Though we may have come from tribal origins, inter-tribe relations are never "nice". And intra-tribe relations were much like the great apes now... fight to set a pecking order and then peace to maintain it without expending unnecessary energy.

Sorry, but all the "nice" people I know get the piss taken out of them, work-wise and socially. They will be the ones that can't say no to their boss, will go out of their way for people who will never return that favour, and will never be top of the hierarchy - whatever that is.

Being "nice" is not necessary. Being civil is a different matter. But if you're always "nice", people genuinely don't know what degree of positivity/negativity you have towards their ideas.

To be honest, I much prefer people who let their feelings known. They are the people that you know generally won't be bullshitting you. And people who are nice? I just always believe that have ulterior motives.

And no desktop user will deploy it as when they delete their 20Gb games folder, it'll still be in the history on the disk taking up space. Even Windows has "Shadow Copies", but you can't keep everything around forever.

WORM disks are used for backup for a reason. And, again, we're pushing this to the filesystem layer, where permissions can already prevent any kind of deletion if you want. But nobody does that.

When a home user deletes files, they expect them to be deleted. When you remove your root folder, chances are whatever percentage of space you allocated to history will mean you've wiped out most of your files anyway, even with it enabled.

Files can be opened append only.

This involves writes on the underlying device.

Files can be deleted.

This involves writes on the underlying device.

Files can be overwritten with junk content.

This involves writes on the underlying device.

The underlying device has no concept of what it's actually DOING with the data it's given. That's up to the filesystem. So devices have precisely two "permissions". Read. Write.

The safeguards should be in the filesystem, but the filesystem people will tell you "That's what filesystem permissions are for." And they're right.

Notice that the flaw only allows you to remove files OWNED by the same user as the Steam client is run. Past that, you need SELinux, or some form of container to isolate files you own that are data you've created, and files you own that are parts of your games.

Honestly, the facilities are there to lock this stuff down (why is it not run as a special use "user_steam" where "user_" is the name of the user running it?)... we just don't use them as they hinder "desktop" use, same as Vista UAC, etc.

Steam no more needs access to your LibreOffice-created office files in /home than it does the root. But nobody partitions their systems that finely, except system administrators (hence why all your services run as their own users so that, even if they run amok, they can only damage their own service and not others).

"I keep seeing this argument, but never counter arguments to Lennart's counter."

He and others have differing opinions on what the UNIX philosophy is, and whether or not it's important to maintain.

That's the counter-argument.

From my point of view, the counter-argument is really that what he wants to do can ALL be done in a UNIX philosophy-compatible way. Everything. Every piece of his code could be done that way, get the same benefits, the same control, etc. But he doesn't like it. So he hasn't.

When that's the argument FOR systemd, the argument AGAINST that element will be just as political.

Give me systemd. Just give it to me in a way that's manageable and compatible with POSIX. All it's doing is using in-kernel features to do the same things we always did, but in a different way. cgroups etc. can be done in the old init style, no problem at all.

The first fork project that does this, will kill systemd AND SysVInit overnight.

Because when you rip-out the entire init system, your ONLY concern is bootup and shutdown speed, isn't it?

Silly boy.

And, your experience is not necessarily generalised. Many people who do the above on working systems have ended up with non-working systems. And those who customise their machines rather than use only stock installs are also likely to fall afoul of other problems, aren't they? And, just because it boots faster, does not mean it boots reliably does it (many have reported that boots become faster but sometimes unpredictable - or even unbootable - because of various timing / dependency issues)? And even if the software is wonderful and does all the above, it doesn't mean that it's actually better for even a minority of users.

You've considered only the desktop aspect, in a perfect virtual machine, from a clean distro (by the sounds of it), in one instance.

Something tells me, replacing the entire Linux init-system globally might just possibly generate more problems than your contrived example. No?

Quantum physics was entirely theoretical and not tied to any particular material, nor did it ever claim to. Like relativity, it took nearly a hundred years to PROVE that it was anything more than an hypothesis. And - in the last decade or so - its effects have to be countered in every high-end integrated circuit in the world.

This is a discussion of a material, one we can make, one which is produced all over the world (quite easily, comparatively), which is making lots of very SPECIFIC materials-based promises, and yet producing nothing out of them. We can make it, we can study it, we can combine it, we can test it, we can claim it does all these things but NOT ONCE has someone shown that it could ever been actually useful.

Hell, even the materials safety data sheets don't exist. We don't even know if this stuff is toxic yet. This could easily be another asbestos in the making. But yet people continue to make SPECIFIC, materials-based claims based on a substance they are holding in their hands and can see with their eyes.

It's a whole different ball game.

Yet to see a graphene product in the wild.

Until then, this is interesting science research and nothing more.

Has been the same for, what, 11 years now?

The Wiki says: "While as of 2014, graphene is not used in commercial applications, many have been proposed and/or are under development, in areas including electronics, biological engineering, filtration, lightweight/strong composite materials, photovoltaics and energy storage.... adhesive, elastomer, oil and aqueous and non-aqueous solutions... advanced composites, paints and coatings, lubricants, oils and functional fluids, capacitors and batteries, thermal management applications, display materials and packaging, inks and 3D-printersâ(TM) materials, and barriers and films."

Stop making promises. Start making a single, viable product from it. At the moment, I have more products dependent on quantum interactions and radiation than I do on a substance we're told can be produced by pulling a strip of sellotape off a block of graphite.

Or you could have just said "Gravity" - the movie plot is basically this, over-exaggerated a little.

UK opinion here:

Liability is not the only concern.

We have child protection to take into account (in the UK, if you're under 18, you're a child even if the age of consent is 16 - so it's possible a photo of yourself performing a legal sex act with a consenting adult is actually illegal in itself!) and, no, we can't force you or your parents to take similar actions at home. However, we don't run child protection and eSafety workshops for the sake of it, nor are we required to do so in many cases.

It's not about liability. It's about protection. I can no more stop you from jumping railings or smoking outside of school that I can stop you getting on Facebook or Snapchat outside of school. But while you're in our property, under our "duty of care", and we have the ability to limit your behaviour and put in safeguards, we will.

I don't block Facebook / Snapchat for the fun of it. I block it because you're in school. You're not SUPPOSED to be on it. In some cases, you're not ALLOWED to be on it (e.g. if under 13, etc.). You're in school to learn, not to post selfies. If you want to just talk to your mates there are a million and one ways to do so, and each one I discover I will block. Because you're not supposed to be chatting to your mates in school for the majority of the time and we're under no obligation to provide the resources for you to do so at the expense of, say, lessons going on and staff getting to online resources.

In the same way I block game websites, violent or not, cartoons and funny websites, offensive or not, and other time-wasting crap. I have no legal obligation to *block* some of the above. But I do. Because a) it's safer for the younger kids, b) you're supposed to be using my (limited) resources for working towards an education and not distracting others, and c) because the parents would go ape-shit if they found out you were on Facebook / Snapchat (by whatever access) all day while you were at school.

Now, in the UK, school has a different meaning, but I've worked in primary (3-11), secondary (11-16/18) and sixth form (17/18 when it existed separately) schools, both state and private. And I can see no reason why even a college /university (18+) would be obliged - under liability or not - to actually block most such websites. They are worried about misuse of their resources as well as what you go on, but we don't want you going on that crap and we CERTAINLY don't want you bypassing our systems to go on that crap. Hell, it's all logged and monitored whether we block it or not.

This is possibly the worst article ever. No, I do not, would not, and never would - even under anonymity - suggest that you should be doing this stuff on your phone so that I'm not liable. Fuck that. This is about child protection, and getting your school work done. Neither of those factors are aided by your doing it on some other device or illicitly. But whether it's banned or not... that sends a message.

Fucking Americans. Everything is about not getting sued. Protect the damn kids, not by suggesting they can avoid child pornography charges by doing things on ephemeral systems but by NOT TAKING PORNOGRAPHIC IMAGES.

Don't think of the easy solution, think of the worst-case scenario.

For instance, now you have gun-cases juried only by people knowledgeable about - and presumably pro - weapons. Or finance cases juried only by people who work in finance. Or cases against the judiciary juried by the judiciary themselves.

The idea of a jury is to be "the man on the street". If you can't explain the crime committed to the man on the street, when he's forced to do nothing BUT listen to you for weeks on end, then maybe that law is too complex to enforce anyway.

Juries are, and always have been, required to understand things way out of their normal scopes. Any half-decent defence/prosecution will get them to the level of knowledge they need quickly. Imagine juries on complex financial fraud cases, or in cases steeped in the interpretation of thousands of separate by-laws. It has to be done, it can be done, and if you can't do it then you won't find much of a career as a lawyer.

If you can't explain the crime committed in simple enough terms for average people to get their head around within a matter of weeks, how do you expect average people to stay on the right side of the law in their daily lives?

Tor can be explained quite quickly. I could get a bunch of schoolkids to understand it in an hour, with zero computing knowledge at all. To get that into the heads of a bunch of non-computing 60-year-olds will take longer but not THAT much longer.

And, at the end of the day, even the judge has to understand what case they are trying. If they don't, they can't possibly guide the jury if they are ever required to.

If you or your opposition can't explain why what you did was, or was not, illegal in a matter of weeks to the majority of a bunch of average people, then the case is so grey-area that it's likely to collapse anyway.

The problem I have with VR and 3D movies is that it's not immersive enough. If I do want to put myself into the game/movie then it has to be convincing. Sound has to move around too (rather than appearing to come from a fixed set of points). If I can't dip my head and have top-originating sounds come from "above" my head, it's not immersive.

This is the problem with 3D - it might be 3D from where you are, but it's not actually 3D. You can't walk around it. It's a 2D window onto a 3D world. The guy that jumps out of the screen can never be behind me, I can never be behind him, etc.

VR suffers similar problems with audio, etc.

But I believe one day we'll sort most of those things and it will be the perfect escape - come home exhausted from work and immerse yourself in games completely, forgetting the outside world and work in the process.

Unfortunately, we're decades away from that still.

Most Olympic coaches are former Olympians themselves.

The problem is not whether they can keep on the cutting edge of IT now, it's whether they have knowledge worth imparting to students. Years of experience in Perl will carry you further than having played with Logo once, many years ago - no matter WHAT language you're teaching the kids.

In the same way I don't expect an Olympic coach to do the 100m in under 10, I don't expect the IT teachers to be able to know the ins-and-outs of every cutting edge technology. But if they don't know more than the students, in the areas of the curriculum that they are supposed to be teaching, quite who is doing the teaching and of what? They then become - like many parents when their kids bring home homework they couldn't do themselves - a babysitter while the kids do the work. That's not what you pay teachers for (or, at least, shouldn't be).

And though the kids might know more about Whatsapp, Facebook and how to swipe on an iPad, it doesn't mean they have greater grasp of the subject itself. That's what's worrying - not that a teacher has never used Office 365 before, but that they can't learn how to do so before they have to teach their students to - with years of education, a degree, and years of experience of similar programs advantage.

Additionally, if you're lucky your class may have that special pupil who pushes even your limits, but you should still know more than they do - generally and from experience. You might not have as in-depth knowledge of their particular niche passion, but we're talking extra-curricular work anyway, and you can surely benefit from your experience to aid their path. Without such experience, that's not really possible.

You can be a babysitter, or a teacher. To teach, you need something worth teaching. The problem here is that, for years, teaching "IT" was about teaching "Computing". How to use Word. Now all kids have grown up with it and submit their homework in it, so it's a core skill, not a particular subject. And so a lot of "Computing" teachers have suddenly realised that their skills are obsolete unless they decide to update their knowledge into more "IT" side of things. And that's not easy.

Hell, I pushed all my teachers limits when I was younger. I broke and then fixed the school network for them. I took my own A-Level computer science classes because the teacher recognised I knew more than them when it came to programming (and not just "had done it more" but actually was aware of theory they'd never encountered). But, still, they had something to offer in the other areas of teaching IT that I'd not been exposed to. And, still, they were able to keep up with what I did and were interested in it. They were just confident that I knew enough to help everyone else in the class, the same as them.

The problem is that people are teaching "beyond their means", and have been coasting for many years. Now they are being asked to actually update their skills.

Imagine a maths teacher that had never taught calculus and was suddenly asked to - you either learn / revise your calculus, or get out of teaching it.

I got there by recovering state schools from ludicrous amounts of IT poverty, despite legal requirements for computer:pupil ratios on the order of 1:4 or 1:2 depending on the school.

I also got there by, in the process of that employment, SAVING them more money than I ever cost to employ (by reusing kit, getting rid of consultants, stopping them paying extortionate amounts of money on worthless IT services, offering free alternatives - not even necessarily open source, etc. - and bailing them out when they had crises). I have a clear conscience. I've also worked with every age group, every type of school, every IT teacher along the way.

There's nothing to distinguish independent from state education in this respect. Sure, independent schools are 2-3 years AHEAD of the state schools in terms of intellectual prowess among the kids. But they are 5-10 years BEHIND in the IT because they don't believe it improves education and aren't bound by stupid computer:pupil ratios. Additionally, although they may be "ahead", their teachers are the same amount ahead, not necessarily geniuses. I've worked with one Dr and she was a librarian. Everyone else has Bachelor's or - at absolute best - Masters.

It's not about independent vs state. I can argue and prove all sides of any argument in that case if you like (I am state-school educated from one of the poorest and most working-class areas of London, I thought the same as you once. Fact is, independent education is merely a head-start, not an ongoing advantage). It's about having appropriate teaching staff. An independent school teacher is just teaching the state-school Year 8 stuff to their Year 5. That's all. Mainly because of zero discipline problems and pupils/parents having a vested interest in their education (cash!).

But even in a state school, a Year 8 IT teacher needs to know - at minimum - how to teach Year 8. And in any sensible school Years 7-11/13 are the same IT teacher, so you need to be able to be several years ahead of almost all the pupils anyway. Not only that, you should really be several years ahead of the top-set of the highest years, otherwise how do you expect to make a difference?

Please note, my current place being an exception, some of the best IT teaching staff I've seen have been state. One of my previous independent schools, the IT was fine technically but the IT teaching was a shower. Kids copying/pasting into Word was considered as high as Year 7 could ever attain, the lesson plans were 15+ years old (had URL's in them that nobody noticed had stopped working 6 years previously, according to archive.org), etc.

So, please, attack me all you want - but we're not talking funds and facilities here. Often the more IT-literate staff are the staff that refuse to conform to curricula, hate teaching the out-of-date stuff, want to go off-topic all the time, and get frustrated with both state and independent schools that adhere too tightly to "the known" from 20 years ago.

Hell, one of the places I worked in with one of the best IT teachers I know couldn't afford exercise books one year. Literally. They were shutdown the next year and merged with another school. Don't know where that guy went, but wherever it was I bet he's driving the curriculum forward whether he has zero budget or unlimited.

Then stop teaching.

Seriously, I work in schools - I'm an IT Manager for independent (private) schools. The good teachers are the ones that have knowledge to impart to the kids, the other type generally do not know anything until they have to teach it and then they learn it badly and, thus, teach it badly. Can you imagine being a science or maths teacher and never having done "chemical reactions" or "simultaneous equations"? Sure, there's always an answer that even the teacher won't know but it shouldn't be something so far out of your reach that you can't a) take an educated guess on the spot and b) come back the next day with the properly researched answer.

With the best IT teachers, I can discuss electronics, computer science and mathematics at a level where neither of us need explain ourselves. They've probably done my job in the past, for the most part, too. And, very deliberately, they will refer to themselves as IT teachers or CS teachers and not ICT teacher (which involves using a computer to do word processing, not anything the kids couldn't pick up on their own in ten minutes).

The last lot of students that went through the school I'm at were building drones running on Raspberry Pi's and .NET Gadgeteer, they were cobbling together Z80 and 6502 circuits in their lunch break, and they were programming in C#, C and assembler. Some of it wasn't stuff we'd done before, but we managed to teach them new stuff all the way through, based on extensive knowledge of the subject and actually SITTING AND LEARNING the stuff they wanted to learn in advance so they could be taught effectively. And, there, it's really more of a "I've never done C# but it's a programming language that I just need to learn the quirks and syntax of and all my old knowledge then comes back into play".

If you can't do this, as an IT teacher, then you probably should go back to school yourself. This is no more insulting than suggesting that a French teacher know French, or a Maths teacher know Maths.

If you're not the one teaching, why bother to have you there?

Er... yes they can.

And if they do not want to make money is not the same as if they want to lose the money they have.

Releasing things anything near recent versions of Windows or Office will destroy all their future sales overnight.

Besides, they already offer the source, and developers will be around to make patches for it. Just not for free, not under open licences, and not from Microsoft. When you tell people that, they tend to think that a migration to a supported OS is probably better for them.

That said, 7 is supported for several years yet, just not mainstream support. XP has ONLY JUST just come out of extended support itself and that was long overdue. 7 will be in extended support for ages yet. And by then, Windows 8 will be old, Windows 10 will be available generally and Windows 11 will be on the horizon anyway.

Sorry, I'm not a proprietary software fan, but suggesting that MS just destroy their biggest revenue stream overnight so that you can get a security patch either while it's still being security-patched or MANY years after it was released, is just ridiculous.

Microsoft no longer care what version you use. All their big customers have annual renewals nowadays anyway. The consumer market is tiny and mostly get their Windows via their OEM anyway. Nobody "buys" a box at a store with Windows disks in it any more.

If they don't care what version you use, they have no need to keep dragging on old software past what they've already promised.