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Comment Not if you're global... (Score 3, Insightful) 183

the real capitalists are global. They benefit from us competing with cheaper labor. Marx predicted this but all anyone can remember about him is that a few dictators used his books for rhetoric.

As for Adam Smith, he actually as against this sort of naked capitalism. He wrote at a time of small merchant artisans. He didn't see the industrial revolution coming and if he had probably wouldn't have written the books he did. These days he's like Marx: all anybody remembers about him is what fits in with what they want.

Comment Um... huh? (Score 2) 183

Slaves were very expensive compared to immigrants. With immigrants you could treat them just as bad and when they got weak move on to the next batch. With slaves you had money sunk in. The south also had huge amounts of capital sunk into slaves. If you're selling someone's buying, and that costs money. It's one of the reasons they were so far behind the curve on the industrial revolution...

Comment Re:some renewable techs didn't pan out (Score 3, Informative) 198

South Australia is 30% renewable despite a current federal government that is openly hostile to clean energy. The reasoning behind that ideological hostility is not difficult to spot - coal is our #1 export. India has recently declared that large scale PV solar is cheaper than Australian imported brown coal and is switching 400M people to solar over the next decade or so. Prices for coal are way down and mines are currently being mothballed, even those mining the high quality coking coal used to make chinese steel have seen recent mine closures.

The anti-science luddites in charge of this country can see the writing on the wall for the global coal industry, the words "stranded assets" are scaring them shitless. They lack the wisdom and intellectual independence required to plan a smooth transition so they do what politicians do best, fight it tooth an nail with tabloid propaganda and rigged domestic markets.

Comment Naw, it's just profits (Score 1) 183

Motorola built a factory in the states and did just fine. They only moved it over seas because slave labor is still cheaper, but they were plenty profitable and selling the phones for competitive prices.

I've been filling the head of a good friend of mine with liberalism and it prompted his Dad to ask "What do you have against Profit". This. This is what I have against profit. It's _never_ enough.

Comment Re:Wave power can work (Score 1) 198

The slave trade would not have existed without property law. A market that is free of regulation is an oxymoron, what the "free" in free market actually means is that anybody can participate in the market, nothing to do with the type or number of rules that make the market possible.

Comment Re:Haters gonna hate (Score 1) 545

Wow, so you looked at a Surface pro with a small screen, perhaps the SP2 and you didn't like it because it had a smaller screen than a Mac Book. Why not look at one with a comparable size? You are one of those clever people, right? Your mom still ties your shoe laces?

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

I don't think people understand the Unix philosophy. They think it's about limiting yourself to pipelines, but it's not. It's about writing simple robust programs that interact through a common, relatively high level interface, such as a pipeline. But that interface doesn't have to be a pipeline. It could be HTTP Requests and Responses.

The idea of increasing concurrency in a web application through small, asynchronous event handlers has a distinctly Unix flavor. After all the event handlers tend to run top to bottom and typically produce an output stream from an input stream (although it may simply modify one or the other or do something orthogonal to either like logging). The use of a standardized, high level interface allows you to keep the modules weakly coupled, and that's the real point of the Unix philosophy.

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.

Comment Re:Are you even aware of SystemD works? (Score 5, Informative) 385

You don't seem to understand how SystemD actually works. The PID 1 is relatively simple -- it uses all sorts of separate (i.e. non-PID 1) helper processes to do all the heavy and complicated lifting.

Lifting which should not be done by PID 1. And PID 1 has to be more complex than it should be just to handle those external programs.

SystemD currently does a fuckton of stuff no other currently usable init system on Linux does.

It does a lot of stuff the init system shouldn't do.

(Reliable process supervision which cannot be evaded,

cgroups existed before systemd.

sane handling of process stdout/stderr

Up to the init script.

proper handling of dependencies at runtime

Already handled by several init systems.

socket activation

We call it inetd.

I don't particularly care which init system my system runs, but I want those features and currently only SystemD can deliver them.

That is ignorance at best, or perhaps a lie.

Please stop spreading FUD about things you know next to nothing about.

You have no idea about anything, that didn't stop you. I see why you didn't log in.

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