Don't get me wrong, I was a pretty loud critic. Right now I work on embedded ARM where most COM vendors are still - in 2015 - selling brand new kit which can barely run kernel 3.2, let alone 3.7 required for cgroups/systemd - most systemd fanatics try to tell me to compile from mainline kernel sources, which ignores the fact that these things are all one-of-a-kind once-off type systems where I'd have to port the shitty once-off BSP code which barely made it over the wall in the first place (which I have done - and took weeks on my last attempt, due to shitty quirky b0rked interrupts on the MMC interface for that board), not just "yolo, git pull && recompile dawg # to hell with re-certification and customer revalidation" that web hipsters seem to assume is the case.

But honestly, the technical committee in Debian were the ones we entrusted to make this kind of decision, so it's a meta-lesson in community participation. You can make all the RedHat conspiracies you want but at the end of the day the technical committee volunteers decided it was too much work (read: they didn't have the help like you or I around) to take on spinning a distro with the option to install without systemd.

So all I'm saying is that the Linux ecosystem is shit, but we have only ourselves to blame.

No, you don't have to do it with preseed. Just sudo apt-get install sysvinit-core. At any time, for the entire lifecycle of your installation. You can switch back with sudo apt-get install systemd-sysv at any time too. Change back and forth at will; I have, and whilst I initially had big problems with it, Debian's packaging now even has filled in the gaps that the systemd project themselves seem uninterested in fixing, such as full crypttab support/compatibility that the old sysv/cryptmount ecosystem had supported.

...I think you're the first person in history to call Windows 8.1 "good" and Windows 2000 "bad." What's your secret?

There's no point in acting all surprised about it. All the planning charts and demolition orders have been on display at your local planning department in Alpha Centauri for fifty of your Earth years, so you've had plenty of time to lodge any formal complaints, and it's far too late to start making a fuss about it now.

What do you mean you've never been to Alpha Centauri? Oh, for heaven's sake, mankind, it's only four light years away, you know! I'm sorry, but if you can't be bothered to take an interest in local affairs, that's your own regard. Energise the demolition beams! God, I don't know⦠apathetic bloody planet, I've no sympathy at allâ¦

I think there's already a 2030 mission in the works to send the boulder back with flowers, chocolates, and an apology letter inscribed on a golden disc that reveals a YouTube compilation of Carl Sagan quotes if placed in a laserdisc player. (The instructions on the sleeve for constructing such a device simply say "This product has been discontinued" in a mixture of pulsar coordinates and atomic oscillations.)

Not that far from the truth.

As someone who went to a relatively unknown university (internationally at least), I can also say that the only part of my degree that I simply had to accept with blind faith ("unless you've done maths post-grad, we don't have time to teach why all this is so and how it's derived") was much of two control systems theory subjects. The rest, I could usually derive from first principles. We certainly also studied semiconductors (Si, SiC, GaN - in conjuction with a quantum mechanics subject) such that we could model transistors and other elements from physical fundamentals: exploring different quite complex models and computational approaches, down to simplified formulae, when and which to use for convenience or accuracy.

I get the point you're trying to make, but I'd say most good engineering programmes are throwing up disclaimers in the course material whenver a "recipe" (as opposed to principles) is being taught due to lack of time. Good courses should provide caveats around such things, and make the students understand that they're applying something they don't understand. And hopefully also show what branches of knowledge a "faith item" is derived from so that students can explore on their own if they wish (I hope mose EEs are being taught how to teach themselves and know the limits of their own knowledge). In order to give the physical sciences and mathematics the depth that you would apparently approve of, it would squeeze out so much of the EE domain knowledge and analytical/process/systematics part of the discipline I'm not sure you'd be left with much other than an applied science degree.

If terrorism is a way to guarantee people do your job for you, then perhaps we have discovered the secret eighth habit of highly effective managers?

No—I was limiting the scope of my concerns to this particular tax grab attempt and the corresponding infrastructure upgrade that it would fund. I apologize for the confusion.

Does "saving the country" not count as something to accomplish? You've got me confused here.

I bought my 2009 X61s, a 12" thing, with 8GB RAM. That model was released in 2007. My X230, bought early 2012, has 16GB RAM. I don't know why this 12-13" form factor noadays has gone *backwards* back-to-7-years-ago specs... is it because "UltraBook" has to mean "one DIMM slot"? It's infuriating. Instead of replacing my X230 (the X240 only does 8GB RAM) when the screen broke, I bought parts to repair it. Which was probably for the best anyway (my X230 still does the job), but it's still weird I no longer have any replacement options for this apparently unicorn piece of hardware.

Why do I want 16GB? Because I really enjoy being able to reproduce all my work on this tiny little magical piece of machinery which fits in my backpack with no effort whatsoever. It's the *future*. I shouldn't have to accept mediocrity in the place of something that currently already works. I shouldn't have to stand up more resources at work and VPN in when I already have a working solution. I enjoy being able to work offline; working from flaky 3/4G isn't fun.

...Someone from the back row shouts out "Because our AdSense profile has determined you were visiting websites about cigarettes recently, your health insurance premium has gone up by 5% and you will probably die slightly sooner. Remember, [i]f you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place!"

Is it cynicism if you're just using a Markov chain to predict what other Slashdotters will say?

(Although obviously this is auto insurance, so I'm sure someone can translate the threat appropriately.)

To be fair, I do actually do remote debugging in vim with vdebug, but I guess my vim is pretty blinged out. It's no VS of course. And perhaps I'm being ignorant about what it is you actually mean by multiple language support, the toolchains all do this with varying levels of success but I get that managing it can be painful (hence things like pootle).

Virtually my entire career of the last 8 years has been doing productivity software in *nix, so hearing about "THE major [foo]" seems a bit shrill. I did maintain a windows port for something at a previous company, though - Qt wasn't too bad, but again, not as painless as a greenfield app done in .NET would have been but windows wasn't the core business. It's a pity the gnome project has driven any decent devs out of the community, those windows-hating clowns have pretty much doomed Glade's future.

As someone who worked (reluctantly, initially) as a (mostly) Perl dev for nearly 4 years, and has now been doing python for nearly 2 years - I miss lexically scoped variables and the Moose OO system. Here's a comment I made on HN which summarizes my lament regarding pythonistas being unable to fathom the very concept of missing anything from the perl world. TL;DR - Perl+Moose gave me a taste for types and a more declarative programming style which is hard and inefficient to reproduce in python (to be fair, it's inefficient in perl too unles you code mostly immutable objects).