That is a feature, not a problem.

There are multiple programs out there to restart demon processes, if needed, with varying amounts of notifications to the admin, and varying interfaces. You pick which works best for you. An embedded appliance may need a 'restart at all costs, write a log and forget about it' program. You may want your restart program to email you, while someone else may prefer a web interface to check status. Maybe some programs should only be restarted in specific circumstances.

The Unix way is not to try to be everything to everybody, but to pick a specific function and do it really well, in a way that lets others do the same thing in a different way if they find the need to do so.

(I'll admit the biggest red flag to me about Systemd is binary logs - that prevents many useful things, in my experience.)

D'oh. Sorry, yeah, my bad fingers. VMS, not VAX.

VAX was already on 64-bit for ages when Linux was still in it's earliest versions. It's not going 'x86'. It's going 'x86-64', which didn't exist when Itanium was created. IA-64 was Intel's vision of the future - a complete overhaul of the instruction set. It bombed, but AMD64 wasn't written until several years later - and AMD does nice chips, but they don't really compete in that segment. (Or they didn't in 2001, at least.) It made perfect sense to port to what was supposed to be the new enterprise-class processor, instead of porting to an outdated desktop-class processor.

Linux on x86 can do lots of things, and is a very good system for many situations. If you need big iron (and the capabilities it provides - things like being able to upgrade or replace CPUs on running machines without downtime), VAX is better. In many cases you don't actually need big iron - a cluster of Linux boxes will do just fine. But when you need it, nothing else will do.

Exactly: I'm sure there are tons of custom apps written for VMS in banks, insurance companies, railroads, etc. These are places where 'if it works, don't break it' rules, and VMS is working, and has worked for decades. Being able to buy support and replace hardware is valuable to them, and I wouldn't switch platforms in their place unless there was no other option.

BBEdit gets a fair amount of use as well. Some versions of xcode will even emulate BBEdit commands, if you set the right option. (And may have the option to directly substitute BBEdit as the main text editor.)

But I get your point: If you are writing in Obj-C, you are probably using xcode, because you are almost certainly developing for either Mac or iOS, and that is where you need to be.

Efficiency is a big selling point in refrigerators; one of the first things people will look at. (And it will be posted very obviously on every one in the store.) Cable boxes... Not so much. I’m not sure what the big selling points on them are - probably how easily it is for the cable company to monitor their usage.

Electric water heaters are probably big users in houses that have them - but I'm not sure that's even a majority of houses in the USA; gas-powered heaters are common, and more efficient.

Never played the game. Didn't even know the concept was discussed in it.

And, on a relative scale, yes it's not hard. It's certainly far easier than sending a ship to trade with someone that far away. In fact, nearly all of the problems of interstellar travel go away in this case - the basic fact is that not having to slow down when you get there (and not caring about the safety of any occupants in the vehicle) makes the issue massively easier. You don't have to worry about fuel, or shielding, or long-term biological maintenance. Just accelerate it up to speed and have a few final maneuvering thrusters on an automatic system.

Of course, if you are traveling around you've solved those problems, and can if you wish launch from within your target's solar system. Which makes targeting much easier, though you may give yourself away as you get the weapon up to speed.

On the other hand, hiding isn't as hard as you might think, especially if life (but not sentient life) is moderately common. Most of it even makes economic sense: Keep your transmissions low powered and focused so there isn't much leakage, and keep the atmosphere fairly clean. That will make it nearly impossible to tell an 'inhabited' system from a 'life-bearing' system from any distance.

Of course any aliens could be proactive and be striking at any life-bearing system, although that's a lot of wasted effort. Still, even then if we were to move into space-based colonies and asteroids we could hide fairly effectively. (Again, communication would be the biggest leaker, but economics and the square cubed law help the hider out.)

This is a reasonable fear - and the problem is unless you are sure the universe isn't that competitive, it actually makes sense to assume it is. Because it's not hard to build a relativistic weapon your target would never see coming, and would wipe them out with one hit. (And we wouldn't see much evidence of them out there, even if they were fairly common - they look like any other floating rock, really.)

So the moment you announce yourself you could become a target for an unknown assailant who will kill you before you know they are there. Run the odds on whether you want to chance announcing yourself then, and realize everyone else who might be out there is doing the same...

This. The sheriff said he'd rather have a more police-oriented armored vehicle for his SWAT team, but they cost $300,000, and this only cost $5,000. It's bigger, slower, and uses more gas, but it's cheaper overall. He's working within a budget and it's budget-effective.

The rest is window dressing and statements to appease the press.

I tend to plink-hole the site with the ad to 0.0.0.0 in resolv.conf. Sometimes I'll give a site I've visited in the past a second chance, on the assumption that some ad was slipped into their ad-delivery network without them knowing about it, but in general if the site thinks it can play a sound without me specifically asking for that sound it's not a site I ever want to visit again.

'State of the art' public domain is not the same as 'viable' public domain.

One of the points of patents is to keep the public domain relatively current - New/current ideas are patented, but ideas a generation or so old are public domain. This is verses the previous system, where either it was open (anyone who could figure out how you did something did) or it was closed forever (anything you couldn't figure out from looking at it) - and occasionally lost.

In a good, healthy patent system the patent is a reward for innovation, and rent-seeking on those patents is difficult or impossible. The debate is about how healthy our current patent system is: There are a a lot of patents that are arguably not innovative, and there is a fair amount of rent-seeking using patents. It's probably impossible to have a system without any of that, but it's also probably possible to have a system with less than we currently have.

Well, I was actually clarifying a question from two posts above me - where the poster specifically said they didn't know enough to answer. I'm in the same boat on the general question actually.

In general, yes a book store gets to choose which books to sell - as does any other store. On the other hand, if the store is the only store in town and there's no easy way to leave town, well that's what the anti-trust laws were originally written for. Market position matters: If you have a small slice of the market you can get away with a lot of things you aren't allowed to do if you totally dominate it. (Oh: And 'sell' isn't the same as 'stock' - the local bookstore will usually happily sell you plenty of books they don't stock - they'll order them from the publisher for you.)

The question I posted above has two parts: Whether the reason for the refusal matters, and whether the market position is strong enough for it to matter. Amazon is probably borderline on both cases, but only just, and which side of the line they are on isn't something I have the knowledge or experience to say.

I don't necessarily see that putting in workarounds that allow a few pageviews a month for a non-paying user as being dishonest - it's advertising. 'If you like these articles, we have more that you would need to pay for' - and they usually tell you exactly that when you hit the free limit.

The market position is 'bookstore' - so the question is 'is refusing to carry one book or one publisher's book out of dislike for the subject abusing it's position as a bookstore'?

Also: There's a degradation in video quality when you stream, according to the notes. Not major, and would still allow the game to play, but it would mean that people would notice if a game is available natively for the steambox.

So it's a two-part system: Valve gets to let people play their games on their TV without having them have to buy new high-end computers, and the manufacturers will get some pushback to make it so the games run natively on the TV game-boxes.