When that machine is on its own and doing fuck-all? No.

When that machine is needed to join onto, say the UK NHS backbone and thus present a Windows XP machine into the midst of everyone's medical records? Yes.

Want to know why I think this? The doctor that lives with me and works in labs with JUST THIS KIND OF THING is always pushing for them to be thrown out for not just security reasons (i.e. they can't join to the backbone because of shit like this), but because they become rapidly unusable, have to be serviced and re-imaged all the time, have to be kept on separate networks, meaning they have to transfer files on intermediary drives all the time (meaning virus transfer possibilities), and they also CANNOT BUY THE DAMN PARTS for them because nobody can stick the £200 of (in her case) genetics software back on because the company will charge £10,000 to give you a new IDE hard drive with it on instead.

This is EXACTLY the sort of shit that should be binned, and replaced with a government- or lab-specified standard interface and rolling contract to update/support as necessary rather than literally paying through the nose for ingrained suppliers to send hospitals old shit from junkyards to keep old Windows 98 software running that should have been binned decades ago because it doesn't even support long filenames and every patient is GENE0001.DAT, GENE0002.DAT and a FUCKING GENETICIST has to piss about moving them one by one into the proper NHS backbone under the right patient name manually because nobody else is allowed to certify that that data belongs to that exact patient (because it tells them shit like if they have cancer, etc. and one fuck one means the lab gets the blame, not the technician).

So, fuck yes. Join the real world.

Obligatory XKCD:

http://xkcd.com/250/

The people on my Facebook who post anything I consider junk, we either have a reasoned discussion about, or I couldn't care less about their updates.

The people who post the "It's such-and-such a day because of this number and this number and it only happens once in a lifetime" (which are almost invariably wrong anyway)... I can't stand that sort of junk anyway.

The religious nuts? I block, or set to ignore so they don't get offended by my blocking and cause me more of a nuisance than they already are.

The virus / hack hoaxes? I work in IT. These people either respect my opinion in that area (and thus stop posting that junk after I've explained that it's junk), or don't (in which case their posts are ignored / blocked). Once had one try to tell all their friends that iPhones tag every photo with your GPS location and how this was dangerous for your baby photos because "paedophiles might get hold of them". (First, if a paedophile has your baby photos, that's problematic from the start. Second, if knowing the location of where your baby once had a photo taken is enough for a paedophile to do something other than their intention anyway - that's quite hard to imagine. Third, you can turn the option off - though only Apple seems to have it on by default. Fourth - it affects ALL devices with GPS and camera where you haven't turned it off. Fifth - posting those photos on Facebook etc. isn't a risk anyway as they strip the EXIF information anyway). The discussion that resulted was a lot more useful, a lot less hyperbolic, and a lot more accurate and informative anyway. And nobody on my friends list has cared or bothered to propagate that nonsense since.

The other stuff, I'm happy to discuss and FRIENDS (you know, those people who like you and you like them) won't be offended by such discussions or even a disagreement anyway so I'm unlikely to block in preference to making some sarcastic comment anyway.

Just don't tag everyone you've ever met in your life on Facebook - you do not treat or consider the majority of them as friends anyway, so stop it. And if they're going to spread that junk, they either need it explained why they shouldn't until they stop, or to be ignored anyway. Problem solved, without need for a special "button".

Wine is great. As a supporter of Crossover Office, etc. it can be a great product. For personal use.

I'm not sure I'd ever use it for anything commercial - the risks of a crash at an inopportune (and, by definition, unusual) moment are quite high. You have no way of testing every codepath and it'll be those codepaths that you only do once a year or in special circumstances that will matter. And those will tend to be your important ones that can cause damage if the behaviour isn't exactly as expected.

I ran Office on Crossover for many years, for compatibility with my employer's systems. I have run any number of utilities, functions, games, and other software through Wine and its derivatives. But I'm not sure I'd ever use it as part of a supported deployment.

It's not because it's open-source, or free, or anything else - I happily deploy MySQL, etc. on networks that I support. But Wine is just too complex and the parts where it's incomplete may well only affect your application and no others. And finding those problems and patching them to fix it requires not just programming skill, but deep knowledge of Windows and deep knowledge of the application in question.

Wine is fabulous. But not for work. Sorry. I've deployed OpenOffice/LibreOffice to entire schools when we had Microsoft Office paid for already, but equally I've decommissioned Linux thin-clients that weren't fit for purpose. And Wine is not one of the things I'd use except for where it really doesn't matter.

And, sorry, but if something's running on Windows Server, it matters. (Equally, however, I would not allow it to have lingered on 2003 this long anyhow, for the same reasons - it matters).

End of life - when it's no longer secure (comments above on your statements to this effect... your concept of a "now fully secure" OS is just laughable - there have been OS in place since the 60's and ALL are either still receiving updates or - more likely - have known holes. Nobody has yet made anything "secure" at all).

End of life - when it no longer boots (UEFI vs BIOS, 32 vs 64bit, IDE vs SATA, no certified SAS drivers for the RAID controller so you can't run proper failover clusters, etc.) XP died at my last workplace when we were unable to get XP drivers for off-the-shelf components any more and had to pick-and-choose suppliers carefully, argue with BIOS manufacturers to retain compatibility, etc. Hell, try buying a PC that still has IDE and that's not that old.

End of life - when none of the software you use will still run on the old OS.

End of life - when you have to employ tech staff with out-of-date skills that they don't have the opportunity to update because of your policy, and then realise the next upgrade means new staff and having to fix the problem anyway.

End of life - when the software is a dead do-do that nobody wants to touch, let alone guarantee support for, let alone work on, let alone ensure compatibility with.

Sorry, but everything has an end-of-life. Sure, you could probably run a mom-n-pop shop on some old DOS accounting software. But that's not "IT", that's just "Computing".

If you want your business to interact with others, to not have to manually pass off information to your auditors, to be considered secure enough to pass PCI-DSS so you can take credit cards, etc. or even just to be used by users without specialist "backwards" training, then there is most certainly an end-of-life, and it correlates rather well with the MS end-of-life in this case.

I agree that computers "don't get slower", they are always the same speed as the day you bought them, that software "doesn't get worse", it's the same software as the day you bought it. I get the comparative nature of this. But that's NOT anything but anecdote in the real world, no matter how small an outfit you are.

When you can't log into your damn bank because it's said that IE6 is too old, your system is end-of-life. That's the end of it. Because to fix it, bodge it, fake it, or upgrade it costs more than just following the rest of the world in their lowest-accepted technology standard.

You wrote (or used) software that only works on Server 2003 / Windows XP / etc.

Then it's your own fault.

No doubt your replacement project will rely on .NET 4.5 or whatever and then when that stops being supported you'll have to do the same things all over again in a few years.

Or you could, you know, not use software that is tied to any particular manufacturer, technology, etc.

I'm just not sure what most places get out of being tied into MS technologies like this. Sure, if you're doing some heavy Office integration all the time with this, that, the other then you've tied yourself in, but where is that necessary compared to your software churning out some intermediate format and then just having the intermediate format converted to the one you need?

I don't get it, honestly, and supposedly "clever" IT businesses still fall for it every time.

Nobody is saying that software is immortal, but really it's blinkered to still be running stuff that's dependent on - what? ActiveX and IE6? Come on!

There's no excuse now. I get frustrated when I still see CCTV units for £50 sold with ActiveX components to do their web-view, when they have Android apps and all the rest working already. Stop it. Seriously. And that's at the cheap-junk end of the market.

If you can't abandon Server 2003 because of the applications you use, DON'T fall into the trap next time. Get yourself something that runs pretty independent of the OS already. There's very, very, very little that can't be done with web-based stuff (without requiring plugins) or just sheer open-ness at the intermediary layer so you can get someone in in ten years time to write a new "XML -> whatever" interface that bolts on to your existing system to replace the "XML -> Win64" interface you have now.

Seriously, people, stop it. If you're going to break the endless cycle of annual renewal of MS licences, you have to get off their locked-in development tools and technologies too. The same with Apple. But there is NOTHING stopping you making something that will work with Windows, Apple, Linux, Android, iPad, Windows Phone, etc. all in one hit now, and could be run FROM any of the above too if you needed it to.

Virtualised environments mean that someone handing you a VM with a Linux Guest OS as their entire product is not uncommon in my industry (Smoothwall, etc.), and it means you can run anything on anything nowadays.

If you're still on 2003, I judge you on so many levels, but the stupid decisions you may be about to make are COMPLETELY AVOIDABLE here, now, today before you make the same mistake again.

And in the same response I have for people who point me at YouTube links to "teach me how to do something":

You're telling me it wouldn't be quicker to google a page of tips for the game?

Fuck sitting through a ten-minute video about how to click on a certain combination of buttons in some software, and double-fuck watching random streams to pick up game tactics as opposed to PLAYING THE FUCKING GAME against/with those same people.

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.