My problem with systemd is not the features. It's the way they are implemented.

I'm not sure that a slightly faster boot-up or easier package maintenance can ONLY come about by completing abandoning every vestige of a well-established init system. And I'm pretty sure that if we wanted to, someone could make the same features work with SysVInit too.

Feature-creep is the real problem. For the cost of slightly faster bootup, I lose an awful lot of old functionality that's been around forever, for no reasonable reason. There's no reason logs have to be binary, etc. in order to make that work.

And as has been discussed here before, most of systemd's nice features come about because of things like cgroups and other new functionality, not systemd itself. Make SysVInit cgroup-aware and things could be an awful lot nicer.

Standardising on a format for init files isn't worth completely abandoning all the previous init system and every Unix principle for. But the only people who care about that are the programmers and geeks, not the "so long as it just works" desktop users (of which Linux apparently has a surprising amount nowadays).

I think it takes a much braver person, mid-flow, knowing they are going to attract vitriol, to stand up and say "Sorry, I don't think I can do this". Only cowards are subject to peer pressure like yours.

How many large projects would be saved (maybe we couldn't say they weren't delayed or hindered, but still saved) by someone stopping in the middle saying "It's too much, I can't do it". Rather than the management-ese of "Let's push on through anyway", I'd much rather someone said.

It's also an indication of the state of the project. Say you have poured your heart into a project. And then realised that it's not going to work, it's not what you thought it was, it's too much work for such an outcome. Are you saying that you shouldn't say "stop"? Or at the very least "Sorry, I'm out". If things aren't heading where you thought they would be, and you can't steer the ship back to the right course, it's better to abandon it than help it crash into the rocks.

Sure, it sucks to be the guy that takes over, but that's not his concern because he WAS the guy that was doing all that stuff already - and they are all volunteers, anyway. I believe it says in the various Debian stuff about how nobody should feel obliged to continue in their post if they don't want to.

A coward would keep their heads down, run the ship into the rocks, then quietly slip away. Or even just say nothing and not do any more work. It takes a person of character to announce "I'm abandoning" and jumping into the ocean first, alone. At least then, everyone knows where they stand.

Take nothing except a bare-bones computer.

By hook or by crook, with the tools you have, build a compiler, then from there build up libraries. Then build up what you can with no external help.

Thousands of people have done this in the past, on new platforms, custom hardware, and just because nothing existed at the time. It's not impossible. And I think you'll learn more from doing that than anything you can carry on a Kindle could teach you.

Programming is about DOING. Any idiot can read a C++ book and understand it. Try applying it and it's a different matter.

You'll understand more about a computer than any book can teach you by having to get it going yourself.

Question:

Why are we not designing these buildings with the "robots" built-in?

Surely it can't be that hard to include "self-cleaning window system" in the multi-million dollar installation costs?

"pre-release copies they gave game reviewers came with an embargo that lasted 17 hours into the release date"

Always an encouraging sign to any sensible buyer.

STOP BUYING STUFF ON RELEASE. Wait a day. A week. A month. Until then, I have no sympathy for people lumbered with a buggy release based on paid-for or embargoed reviews.

Okay.

You buy an SSL certificate.

But then you discover that 50% of browsers don't accept it as SSL.

It's no longer "fit for purpose". If you have a single brain cell, and read a wiki page about your local consumer law, you will get a refund or a better certificate.

If, however, you live only by the vague wording of the contract, ignore all consumer and contract law, and because it's a large company you are terrified they might wriggle out of it, you might not.

You can, and will, argue that an IP is not fit for purpose if it's blocked for spam email - the only cause of that is the ISP not managing the IP properly. No different to a credit card that nobody will take anywhere because fraud on it is so high and shops won't risk taking it - it's up to them to stop the fraud.

They are not holding up their end of the contract - the paper contract is only 1% of what they have to do. They have to also provide services fit for purpose. If you have a business that needs to reliably send email, this service is NOT fit for purpose. They are failing to manage their own network and thus impacting on you because they are doing it so poorly that third parties don't want to deal with you PURELY because of that reputation.

Which is why, in any ISP of any significant size, arguing here will get you moved to another IP range in a second. I know. I've done it.

Or you could practice "I'm not a lawyer and that looks scary" and pay them another year's money for doing bugger-all.

Say you hired an e-marketing firm to send out email on your behalf. And they come back and say they couldn't send any emails because their server was blocked (e.g. by their supplier ComCast) but here's our bill anyway. Do you still think you have zero recourse there?

Your contract is worthless in the face of consumer law and a legal interpretation of "reasonable". It's unreasonable to expect your business customers to not be able to send email to three of the largest email outfits on the planet, just because you can't be bothered to throw spammers off your network.

Their IP is their management problem. If they were on a spam blocklist, you'd expect to move to another.

You tell them if you can't send mail from your business account, it's pointless having it.

Then you terminate the contract because it's now useless and the conditions you can use it under have changed - you can NO LONGER SEND EMAIL.

Then it's in their court. They can either fix it, or let you out of the contract. If they do neither, you terminate the contract and let them chase you.

Apart from the obviously correct outcome;

I've found that what matters most about a job is who I work under. I can't properly work under idiots. The person above me - getting on with them, not having to put on a front with them, having them understand or have done my job themselves - is the most important aspect of my selecting a job. And, sorry, but I select jobs as much as they choose whether they want me.

If you want me to work for you, you have to have done - or could do in a pinch - my job. It's a simple rule.

My favourite time was working under a boss who was technically literate if not complete expert (but good enough to spot the difference between technical mumbo-jumbo and actual technical solutions) who answered to only one person - who was also technically literate if not expert. Between the two of them, they rebuilt an entire school network after a disappointing experience with some contracted-out IT. They were literally there pushing the Windows CD's into the servers and bringing up the AD themselves from scratch.

Though their effort was far from perfect, it did the job, and THEY UNDERSTOOD that it was only ever a stopgap. And, in fact, hired me to clean it up. That was brilliant. I was there for several years. When the boss's boss left to retire (and his retirement gift was a Mini-ITX PC loaded up with DosBOX and Linux and his favourite games!), my boss still kept the place good to work for.

After a while, he was forcibly removed from his job (he nearly had a heart attack from work stress, and quit to work elsewhere encouraging me to follow suit) because his boss did not appreciate or understand what he did for a living. From that point on, I was managed by someone with no clue about what I did for a living. I delivered all the promises I'd made, and got the hell out of there.

I took a six-month hiatus of taking only temporary work for places I liked (including taking a "demotion" and working for someone who was in the same job role as I was previously - it was fabulous, I think we both loved it, we're still friends on Facebook etc.) because I was promised a job.

My boss had spoken to his friend, who worked in the same position at a place nearer to my home, to contact me after they got into IT trouble. I was available but it wasn't the "right time" for the other place (they needed to get rid of someone first!), yet I was hired on the basis of starting the next April. Promises were delivered upon, and I was more than happy to hold out for the right job rather than be dumped into a job under someone who doesn't understand what I do for a living.

My new boss knows what I do for a living, understands it, works with it, can't be duped by my waffling, and knows what's reasonable and what's not. In a pinch, he could do my job. The new job is great. His own boss may not know much about IT, but it doesn't matter - his boss could do his job in a pinch. It works. It makes for a perfect work environment.

I still talk to my old boss regularly. I still keep in contact with the temporary boss I had in between. And my new boss and I have a laugh almost every day. Everyone else? Pah. Who cares?

Work for someone who could do your job. Maybe not forever. Maybe to the same depth of skill. But understands what you do because they've been there or know enough.

So that's one, then, from several replies. And pretty much the only project suggested.

Not a great endorsement.

Next question: Could someone have written Docker in other languages just as easily?

Can anyone name a large (non-Google) project written in Go?

If you're worried about encryption, a protocol designed to be able to strip the encryption at any stage and pass it on to other servers, servers which may be out of your control, is not really encryption at all.

Email just isn't designed to do what you might want. Email encryption is either that of the message (which requires all recipients to have keys you can use and knowledge to use them) or merely securing transit to your first-hop email server. If anyone thinks that email you can read in your client without decrypting it is in any way secure, they have zero understanding of the system (which is the most dangerous security flaw you can have).

The problem is, as always, that we're forcing old protocols to do things they were never designed to, and relying on the goodwill of other people to follow our rules. Even if we published a policy "refuse any email server without STARTTLS en-route", it's easily ignored or bypassed in the case of a single malicious operator in the path of the message.

The solution is really for all domains to publish a public key via DNS, for the client or first-hop server to encrypt the message to the recipient's domain with their domain key, then it DOES NOT MATTER who you hand it off to. The data is encrypted so it cannot be revealed except to the proper desired recipient.

All we have is transit security to the first hop. We would still need that (otherwise I could easily still get an email server that sniff my credentials and uses them to spam people) but it's not the same as message encryption - not by a long shot.

Transit security to the first hop, so your login is protected, so you can authenticate that it's YOUR email server, etc. Then send an encrypted message. Then it doesn't matter what your email server chooses to do with it - either the desired recipient receives an email only they can open, or they receive nothing at all.

The problem is, email DOES NOT DO THIS. And backward compatibility with plain-text email means we can't do this without breaking half-the-world. The time will come, like SSH over telnet, or SFTP over FTP, when we decide that we do need to do this. But it's not happened yet.

Sadly, when it does happen, it makes mass-spam-filtering much more difficult, vastly increases load on mail-servers and still doesn't stop spam.

On to a loser.

Gnome is a generic word, so we'll just lose all trademark ability.

Just being in "computer-related" trademarks isn't broad enough to cover everything from POS down to specific desktop environments. If they used "For GNOME" or based it on GNOME or were creating a desktop environment called Gnome, then yes, possibly.

But really, this is nothing more than Apple Computers vs Apple Records.

ChromeOS. And Android.

Tell me, what OS do those things run on? And what parts of that OS aren't an application framework (e.g. Dalvik) but actual hardware drivers? So the graphics cards for those devices would need a driver for what OS?

So all of the work Valve are doing will be wasted - except on ChromeOS and Android who can benefit from all their work?

Desktops may be "dead" - but it's more likely their use has shifted so that device and UI are different but the OS is still the same.

What's a disc? Haven't installed a game from disc in nearly ten years.

I'm not in front of a PC I can load Steam up on at the moment (work), but:

Flash-conversions? Few.
Indie-games? Lots. And Lots. And Lots. Hell, the indie bundles are basically all-Linux nowdays.
Generic engines? Lots.

Just off the top of my head based on games I've actually played and which Google suggests were released in the last two years? Defense Grid 2. Space Hulk. Cities in Motion 2. Sanctum 2.

XCOM: Enemy Unknown just misses on the dates, but there's DLC that is newer. As does CS:GO but that's Valve so you probably class it as cheating.

I don't think that's bad just from memory. The fact is that if you want AAA titles on there, Valve are doing exactly what's necessary - pick the low-hanging fruit and the stuff they can easily get the source to / put pressure on the developers, tune the systems for those titles and then work from the bottom up to capture the bigger studios. To dismiss that because CoD 2014 doesn't support it is to be ignorant of not only gaming as a genre (and not your "gamer" clique) but of simple business and politics. Shall we do it by a different metric? How about games ranked by hours played, and their Linux support? Bang, you've just sucked in some of the most populous and active gaming communities in the world in one fell swoop. It's easy to cheat at statistics.

However, just your attitude is telling. Because something comes from an engine never was cause to dismiss it. In fact there was a time (and still is) where publishers advertise that an engine was used - it suggest they aren't reinventing the wheel but instead extending an existing, proven engine.

Flash based conversions - fair enough if that's not your game, but there are plenty of good indie games out there that might look like that but aren't. If you don't class them as games, that's your lookout.

But, "almost all" of those Linux games are not Flash conversions. Maybe generic engines feature highly but I don't see how that's a problem. Gosh, someone based their game on a cross-platform engine, how dumb of them! In fact, if you wanted to argue, technically more of my games are Mac compatible at the moment. I don't even own a Mac, however, and the cost of one is prohibitive.

And, sorry, but personally I haven't bought a game in the first year of release since I was stung a long time ago. This has since saved me from atrocities like Aliens:CM, Duke Nukem Forever, and saved me god-knows-how-much money.

There's "gamers" and "people who play games". The latter is actually MORE profitable for many companies. Sorry, but your gaming industry is full of grannies playing PvZ and spending more than you are. You might be buying graphics cards and top-end machines, but they are pumping cash into F2P games and to get their next farm.

Chicken meet egg. Egg meet chicken.

Both of you meet your chaperone, Valve, who are actually doing something to solve the problem of nobody bothering to port to Linux because "there are no other games on it", and thus nobody bothering to optimise for games "because nobody is porting to Linux".

More has happened in Linux gaming in the last couple of years thanks, almost exclusively, to the push from Valve than has happened in all the years before.

Something like a third of my 800-game Steam library runs on Linux now. That's bloody amazing. And they are all double-click-and-it-just-runs from the Steam client.

Those publishers too lazy to do this - are you telling me that they don't spot bugs in nVidia drivers and report them on Windows? Are you saying they don't spend a lot of their time working around bugs in drivers? Because for damn sure I've seen a lot of big releases have to patch like mad on day one when they hit all the ATI and nVidia and Intel bugs, and get bad performance reviews on certain chipsets etc.

Valve are DOING SOMETHING ABOUT IT. Whatever you perceive the current state to be, that's something to be applauded. And, to my eye, they've done a damn good job and not once have bitched about Linux beyond "look at this odd performance bug we found where a manufacturer never bothered to turn the optimisation on for Linux machines".