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Comment Re:Seagate (Score 3, Insightful) 161

I was thinking that the $5 discount coupon would only be given to people willing to spend 15 minutes filling out the forms to get it. The lawyers will collect the difference after the expiration.

I think it's more likely that there's lawyers sitting around somewhere who are reading news rags and looking for reviews which out this type of stuff. They then initiate the class action and make noise on sites like Slashdot to get people to sign up in order to establish the requirements for it to be considered a class action.

There are far too many people who would do something stupid like say "I clicked the link out of principle!"

Comment Re:Seagate (Score 2, Informative) 161

More accurately, nVidia could probably make it clear that 3.5 gigs is better than 3 gigs and 512megs is more expensive to add than the extra gig. So, a 4 gig card with 3.5 gigs active is the best you can expect right now. So the user with the 4 gig card can still expect better performance than a user with a 3 gig card.

Pretty sad

Comment prius in winter: 30mpg. prius in summer: 65mpg (Score 1) 212

i heard of someone who bought a prius: they live in scotland (south west, near ayr). they noticed a huge drop in fuel economy (down to 30mpg) so recorded it, and year after year they found a clear correlation between winter and the drop in fuel economy. the extra cost of the vehicle, the insane pricing for replacement batteries (over $1200 per battery and there are 30 of them), and, finally, the fact that they were not actually getting better fuel economy than an equivalent ICE car, they sold it... and used their daughter's 10-year-old VW diesel Polo which got a consistent 55mpg all year round.

Comment Class action lawsuit ? (Score 4, Interesting) 192

Should Gemalto be sued by people who use their cards & other products on the grounds that they did not adequately secure their computer systems and thus let in outside crackers to steal the encryption keys ? That the crack was done by GCHQ/NSA does not really alter things -- they were cracked. The point of this is that successful legal, and expensive, action would make all corporates treat security properly; this would have great benefits -- more than just keeping the spooks at bay.

The only problem is that to sue Gemalto the plaintiffs would need to demonstrate that they have suffered. This might be hard, although insisting that they were all given new SIMs might be a start.

Comment Re:Give it a rest (Score 1) 755

systemd is being implemented in distributions because a) it is good

you are _brainwashed_. absolutely brainwashed. read the independent assessment here:
http://www.softpanorama.org/Co...

and b) the people making that decision are the ones qualified to do so.

FUCK you. fuck you and your attitude thinking you have the right to tell me or ANYONE that i should bow down to other people's decisions. FUCK you and fuck off. you have NO right to tell me that i must worship the ground on which other people walk.

*I* have the freedom to make my *own* assessment. that is my right. and it's people like you who are not helping, by saying "yeah we should all trust someone else to make our decisions for us".

historically we know that when we abdicate responsibility to others for important decisions, it doesn't go so well, does it? what is _wrong_ with you??

sorry, but... you really gave me a shock there, i couldn't believe what you wrote.

Comment Re:Choice is good. (Score 1) 755

There are CONSTANT statements that if you do not use systemd you will not be able to use primary Linux distros in the future, because all software will supposedly be gobbled up by it as a dependency... To try and now make out like those dont exist is pretty silly.

not "supposedly" - *really*. if you run apt-rdepends -r libsystemd0 | a bit of awk | sort | uniq there are four *THOUSAND* five hundred packages that, if you were ever to do "apt-get --purge remove libsystemd0" you would NEVER be able to install. that's a whopping FIFTEEN PERCENT of the entire debian package repository that you are prevented and prohibited from installing, should you ever make the decision that you wish to keep libsystemd0 off of machines that you manage!

the reason for this insane level of *hard* dependency is because lennart pottering is both the developer of libsystemd0 *and* many other packages such as pulseaudio... so of *course* he decided that pulseaudio had to include - as a hard dependency - one of his projects, libsystemd0. libsdl likewise also uses it as a hard compile-time dependency, along with about 100 other applications and libraries.

those applications and libraries then quickly spread as further hard dependencies to include the gimp, apache2-dev, php5 (??!), erlang, libreoffice, cups, bluez/bluetooth (because of the links to pulseaudio), *all* the games that use libsdl (i.e. pretty much all of them), *all* the music software available for GNU/Linux (because of the link to pulseaudio), openjdk7, the eclipse IDE, apache tomcat, the android SDK, i mean.... the list is a _real_ eye-opener. you can review it here for yourself:

      http://lkcl.net/reports/removi...

so yeah, not even _close_ to "supposedly", mate!

Comment Re:fvwm is what I use, anyway (Score 1) 755

unix was supposed to be simple. systemd is an abortion and one that most of us do not want.

good to see this protest post with a hand-tweaked system; but the fact is, we should NOT have to flip over backwards to remove a stupid should-not-be-there-anyway daemon and its evil libs.

*thumbs-up* to both these things. thank you.

Comment Re:Do people who post on lkml actually know englis (Score 3, Insightful) 755

Really, someone should get a dictionary for their birthday and read the definition for "unilateral" lol.

that's in.... *counts on fingers*... 9? days? :)

ok so let's look it up... a random google search shows these:

1. Of, on, relating to, involving, or affecting only one side: "a unilateral advantage in defense" (New Republic).
2. Performed or undertaken by only one side: unilateral disarmament.
3. Obligating only one of two or more parties, nations, or persons, as a contract or an agreement.
4. Emphasizing or recognizing only one side of a subject.
5. Having only one side.
6. Tracing the lineage of one parent only: a unilateral genealogy.
7. Botany Having leaves, flowers, or other parts on one side only.

yep. definitions 1 through 5 are perfectly relevant. unilateral. meaning that pottering made the decision and (2) did not consult any of us. he claims to be "listening to users" yet (4) in fact ignores everything they tell him and carries on regardless. he has therefore violated the implicit software freedom contract (3) between users and developers who choose to be of service to others.

so yeah. it would appear that yes i really do know english, if only by accident.

Comment Re:What a load of crap (Score 1, Flamebait) 755

This is not even about systemd, it's a about libsystemd which is just a library for interfacing with systemd. You can have libsystemd installed and still don't have systemd itself installed. Debian has built some of their packages so that they depend on libsystemd, so installing them will bring libsystemd with them. Not a problem if you don't want to run systemd, but if you for some reason can't live with dpkg-query -l | grep systemd printing even a single line then this is apparently a problem.

a *fraction* of the extent of the problem is actually illustrated here:
http://anfo.slavino.sk/libsyst...

those packages that i recompiled (policykit-1, d-bus, pulseaudio and util-linux) have a huge range of dependencies that cover something like 98% of the most commonly used software in the linux world. cups-daemon, the gimp, vlc, mplayer, and others too numerous to mention: all come under the fascist rule of libsystemd thanks to the unilateral decision making of a handful of people.

and i'll repeat it again because it seems not to be getting through: the problem is that there *is no alternative*. it's their way or fuck off: you are not permitted to argue your case even reasonably (because it will be ignored). and that's just... wholly unacceptable. *i don't care* who is techically right or wrong: i care that this is a situation that has become like the Microsoft Monopoly: dominate, dominate, dominate.

so that's the deadlock that i seek to break, by demonstrating that you *can* have a working desktop system without having a single part of the code written by people who do not listen and who act in such highly irresponsible ways.

Comment Re:Contrary to opinion... (Score 3, Interesting) 755

In general, we already have a system that embraces many of the design principles observed in systemd and actually does a decent job of making the concepts work: Windows. Even with a great deal of talented investment over the course of decades, when a Windows system goes off the reservation in certain ways, no one will be able to bring it back because of how complicated the integration of the various components.

your post is particularly insightful - i hope it is recognised as such by moderators. i wanted to emphasise what you said, because NT 3.5 and 4.0 used a recursive login system based on DCE/RPC function calls. a "domain" logon was (is) actually no diffferent from a "local" logon: the only difference being that the SAM database was running locally (and was marked in the registry as being the same name as the machine). as a result of this, there were actually simple registry hacks for NT 3.51 to turn a workstation into a Primary Domain Controller!

so thanks to DCE/RPC, all that happened with a Domain Logon was that the incoming function call would make an (identical) recursive *outgoing* login function call to the nearest PDC/BDC/Trusted Domain. that Trusted Domain Controller would, in turn, on receipt of the incoming function call, make an (identical) recursive outgoing function call to the nearest PDC/BDC... and eventually, through this chain, the answer would be "login success or fail".

incredibly neat, and technically brilliant... but the actual number of people in the world who really truly understand that must be limited to under a hundred people at most. *not all of them* work at microsoft....

Comment Re:Pointless (Score 3, Insightful) 755

See, this is pretty much precisely my point. It's not that people's opinions are getting ignored. That happens all the time. It's that people aren't listening at all. And more to the point, that really critically important lessons of the past are being set aside merely because a small number of people have become convinced that they know a better way.

Again: in and of itself, that's not necessarily a problem. The problem here is that these particular people are wrong.

no, i disagree: i feel you pretty much nailed it but didn't realise it. the problem i feel really *is* that they're not listening... in combination with there being no alternative. if there was an alternative - a less disruptive one - then the fact that these key high-impact decisions were being made would *not matter*. why? because we would be able to use the alternatives and the people who were not listening could go screw themselves, and nobody would care.

it really *is* the fact that these people have such disproportionate influence and effect, and that they really *are* ramming "Their Way" down everyone's throats in such a cavalier way.

they may well perfectly be technically right (i have seen multiple analyses of systemd which indicate that they are not), but that *doesn't matter*, because it's the fact that they gave us no choice that is of far greater priority.

of all the arguments that i've seen, i have never seen one presented to the systemd team that gets this across to them clearly. the majority of arguments are either technical or abusive. it's only when you take a step back and think "what's really going on here"..

Comment Re:Choice is good. (Score 5, Informative) 755

Can't someone fork a version without systemd?

I agree, choice IS good. However, what I'm seeing so far is a bunch of vocal whiners on Slashdot bitching about systemd, and no one actually stepping up to make a distro that doesn't use it. So what it amounts to is a few loudmouths telling distro maintainers they're wrong, even though the loudmouths don't want to actually do any work on distros themselves.

that's precisely why i actually worked hard and risked destroying my business by losing access to all data on a critical business laptop, documented the process of removing libsystemd0 from it, and *then* wrote the article.

unlike the people you refer to, i actually *did something*.

then, i contacted the devuan team and informed them about what i had done, so that they may consider properly replicating what i'd done as maintainable debian packages. so they now have a way forward where previously they would have been worried that their efforts would result in many people still having to remove huge numbers of packages - desktop GUIs, sane-utils, cups-daemon, pulseaudio and anything that depends on it, clamav and many many more. i've demonstrated that you *don't* have to remove all those packages and that you *can* still have a functioning debian desktop... without libsystemd0 even being on it.

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