"What Does Systemd Mean to Me?"
By
eldavojohn

Systemd has a nice ring to it. The way the syllables roll off my tongue pleases me greatly. It could be the title of a great anime series. It could even be the lost name of an ancient forgotten god-king. It might even be the name I give my first born. It sounds much more authoritative and genuine than sysvinit or upstart or inetd. For instance from my non-technical fourth grade perspective this is what I interpret the others to mean:

• sysvinit - A cheap knockoff of systemd. Sounds sort of like a sexually transmitted disease phase like syphilis virus initialization.
• upstart - Sounds like you don't know what the hell is going on. "This young upstart" ... leave it to the pros, greenhorn. Leave it to systemd.
• inetd - What are we, fishing here? You netted? You netted what? At least tell us what you netted. Is it a record breaking fish? Also, nice try with the cheap 'd' knockoff at the end. Leave it to the originals. Leave it to ... systemd.

Contrary to your base assumptions, systemd does not actually boot faster on my Pentium II (Intel inside) system. I just like the way it sounds.

• Personal Experience - I actually stood up at dinner last night and slammed my fist down on the table and yelled at my wife that "WE WILL ONLY USE SYSTEMD IN THIS HOUSE FROM NOW ON" and I flung her iPad against the wall, shattering it. And then I got down on my knees in tears -- having seen the light -- and swore fealty to systemd.
• Working Examples - Three nights ago I stole away into the night across town to the Olafsen's house (a predominantly Norwegian family) and (being predominantly of Swedish descent myself) spray painted on the front of their new home: "SYSTEMD BOOT HOME" in blood red paint. This was a Nice Thing in a "never forget" sorta way. I then got down on my knees in tears and applied the spray paint liberally to my upper lip -- the same condition in which I write this post for you, dear reader.
• Links to Supporting Documentation - [1]

Very much this.

The problem I have with this article is that it's basically pointing out a tautology. The kind of fusion created by slamming atoms together at high speed (in other words, high temperature fusion) can't be done at low temperatures. OK, but we have empirical evidence of other mechanisms for causing fusion.

Other forms of catalyzed fusion, if they exist, probably also require some pretty exotic physics, or we'd see lots of evidence of unusually high energy output in nature.

The summary seems to have left out the most interesting tidbit:

Where were they found? Next to the plants set up by Western companies that filled them in Iraq, of course. Who has control of those plants now? Why, ISIS of course. Don't worry, though, the people who thought it was better we didn't know about these things are assuring us that all those weapons were hurriedly destroyed.

*holds up mirror for Florian to gaze into*

You were a valuable unbiased source of information on software patents and patent litigation. Particularly the German court's struggle with them. However it came to light -- in a rather surprising way -- that you were paid or possibly employed by Microsoft and Oracle. I have heard much about this and it often casts a negative light on your blogging but I would like to hear your side of these relationships. I can conceivably understand how you could accept money that furthers your ideals but it is difficult to comprehend how I can be assured this does not influence your writing, position, selected details and bias. Are you able to lay my concerns to rest?

I understand this point of view, but on the other hand, I think that the VR killer app hasn't been found yet. The 'mainstream' equation works both ways. Sure there's a bigger potential customer base for VR apps running on Windows and OSX, but I think there's a bigger 'idea base' for new VR apps with hackers running Linux.

The Oculus SDK license specifically forbids using it to connect to non-Oculus hardware. On the other hand, they've recently released the full specs of the DK1 as open source, so it's now possible to legally build a piece of hardware that the SDK itself can't distinguish from the real thing. Hypothetically speaking, since the most recent version of the SDK relies on a runtime to communicate with the hardware, if you could spoof the runtime communication (which happens over a socket) then you could use any IMU you want to at all, as long as you replicated the mechanism that the runtime uses to send tracking data to a Rift enabled application. This is probably a violation of SDK / Runtime the license, but if you do a clean-room reverse engineering of the runtime you might be ok? IANAL.

Thank Captain Hindsight. Sure, technically anybody could have done it. But no one else actually did it, despite the numerous Linux developers complaining about the total lack of positional support for them. It's pretty easy to look at someone else's work and say "Oh, yeah, that's obvious" once they've actually done it. I don't really see why you've bothered commenting since you seem to be of the opinion that the entire exercise was pointless. If you don't buy into the entire premise of the article how can you be bothered to have an opinion of whether one of the participants in the work received proper credit?

Never mind. They've corrected the article.

Anyone with the SDK can get these codes. Oh, and you made a thread on Reddit.

Really? Oliver explicitly said he'd had no luck in getting the codes. The SDK doesn't contain them, btw. Only the Oculus runtime, which is closed source, now communicates with the hardware. So, anyone who had the SDK and could also figure out how to write a DLL to intercept the HID calls made by the runtime (not the SDK, which doesn't contain the codes anywhere) could get the codes.

I think that the article kind of unfairly glosses over my contribution. I posted the original reddit thread, and I'm the one who discovered the codes required to actually enable the LEDs on the device. I appreciate that Oliver is an actual VR researcher, but I did this in part to get some visibility for the book I'm writing on Oculus Rift development.

What? I pored over the article and the US BLS link in it to find the source of these statements. Aside from a pull quote that appears as an image in the article but isn't even in the article itself and is unattributed, could someone find me the source of this statistic?

Because I'm a software developer in the United States with a Masters of Science in Computer Science. All of my coworkers have at least a bachelor's degree in one field or another. And my undergrad very much so started with a sink-or-swim weed out course in Scheme and then another in Java. Yes, they were both easy if you already knew how to code but ... this article almost sounds like it's written by someone with no field experience. Granted that's a low sample set, I'd like to know where the other half of us are. Everyone keep in mind that a Computer Science degree is a relatively new thing and there very well may be elderly coders doing a great job without technically a degree in computer science.

The only way I can see the misconception spreading is that people who use Wix to drag and drop a WYSIWYG site (for you older readers that's like FrontPage meets Geocities) erroneously consider themselves "software developers".

You founded 4chan. Care to elaborate on any of the undoubtedly countless times shit has gotten real?

You know, things you wouldn't tell WSJ when you were seeking solvency but are juicy crazy stories?

We're super big fans of C&Ds here and I would like to know what happened with your C&D to Moot.it. How did it come about and what was the resolution?