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Comment Re:Are you even aware of SystemD works? (Score 0) 385

"With systemd, setup/startup/stop/teardown responsibilities are concentrated with PID1 and it's helpers.
Before, you'd have the same concept spread into a dozen of different systems, each only doing part of that functionnality."

Which is exactly how it should be.

PID1 only needs a small subset of those capabilities to do its job. And because it is PID1, because everything after has to rely on it, it's essential that it be well behaved and stable. Therefore it is essential that it have only the required set of capabilities and absolutely nothing else should be added or linked to it.

Other things can and should be done by other systems, not concatenated together and poured into PID1 where an error can bring the house down.

Comment Re:Simple set of pipelined utilties! (Score -1) 385

"My data are important to me. I shouldn't need to buy a server to prevent my data from being corrupted."

But you do nonetheless. My current machine was bought for one reason - price - and lacks it. When I've built my own systems in the past I have always used it. Scoping out parts to build a new one, I see the price of sane memory has only gotten further out of line than I remember. :(

This is one aspect of a market where the buyer does not understand the product well enough to make intelligent choices. If computer buyers understood the technology, at least 70% of them would insist on ECC, and as a result economy of scale would have eliminated the price premium long ago. Instead, manufacturers continue to skimp a few pennies on the RAM by default, creating an economy of scale advantage in the other direction, which only reënforces the bad allocation and ensures it continues.

Instead of ECC memory they should call it 'sanity-checking memory.' Maybe then people would understand what it is enough to realize they want it. But since no one in particular stands to make a windfall by doing it, no one promotes it.

Comment Re:Simple set of pipelined utilties! (Score 0) 385

I am saying that its design sacrifices robustness in favor of performance and features at every turn. It might be more crashy, but the bigger problem is it ensures you have no usable logs when it crashes. And it doesnt have to be a crash for it to be troublesome, for a single example in the quest for shorter boot times it starts services without making sure that dependencies are actually working - that normally wont cause the entire system to crash but so what?

Still not what I want on my system. I dont really care how long it takes to boot, I just want to make sure that when it's finished it's really finished. Systemd in so many ways copies windows concepts instead - like how they make it supposedly boot faster - by rushing along to draw a GUI before things are actually ready to use.

Not saying systemd is as bad as windows - and the massive improvements in boot speed are not all illusory! but they do come at the cost of reliability and correctness, and that's simply not a good tradeoff for people using the OS in a traditional manner.

Comment Re:Yes, pipelined utilities, like the logs (Score 3, Insightful) 385

"You don't have to. If you really want your old way then just have journald pass everything along to syslog and it's back to normal."

Unfortunately that's not quite true. You *can* configure systemd to spit out text logs as well as the binaries but that is a delayed process, so in the one case where you MOST want text logs (where a crash has occured with the file open) it's absolutely worthless.

Comment Re:Simple set of pipelined utilties! (Score 4, Insightful) 385

I think there is a major difference between having a big possibly over-complicated application program in userspace, and putting something like that in a critical spot in the system itself.

If your application program has a flaw, it's probably not a huge deal. Maybe it crashes occasionally. You save often, you have autosave, it's not a big deal.

But a system component that can crash the system, render it unbootable, hand control to a hostile third party, etc - it's much more important in that case to keep things clean and proper to keep the machine itself stable.

Part of the disconnect between the Sysd cabal and the traditionalists here is about what we mean by the machine. We are often running linux on bare metal as our workstation. From what I have been told, they typically run it in virtual machines on server farms instead, and use Apple workstations. So from their point of view, it is just another application, and it shouldnt be a big deal to restart it occasionally - especially after they put so much work into improving boot times. But from our point of view, we dont care much about fast boot times, we want a stable system that doesnt need to be rebooted all the time.

Comment Farmers != Farm Workers (Score 0, Troll) 122

The headline says farmers. The text says farm workers. Very much not the same thing. A farmer is the owner of the farm. A farm worker is generally a hired hand, often (though not always) a migrant, and if so typically from Mexico or farther south.

The story suggests that the multi-drug-resistant bacteria are the result of antibiotic treatment of the animals at the farm. This misses another possibility:

In Mexico, most antibiotics are over-the-counter, much like asprin here in the US. People who feel ill or have some infection often buy and take them. Typically they use them until they no longer show symptoms - then stop, rather than taking a full regimin and killing off all the bacteria. (Why take more of the non-free drug once the symptoms are gone? Waste of money, right?) This is a recipe for creating drug-resistant bacteria.

Of course if an infection is resistant to one antibiotic, a paitent is likely to try another, and another, and so on until they find one that works. THAT's a recipe for maintaining and improving the bug's resistance to the front line antibiotics while breeding resistance to others.

As a result, a substantial fraction of the workers arriving from south of the Mexican border are carriers of multi-drug-resistant baceria.

Meanwhile, a farming operation is likely to give a limited number of antibiotics continuously, so non-resistant infections are wiped out before they can develop resistance, and if they do develop resistance it will be to the particular drugs used, rather than the universe of antibiotics.

Of course, infected workers can infect livestock, just as livestock can infect workers. And infected workers can trade infections around, just as livestock can. (More so, since the livestock tends to be kept separated, to reduce both disease spread and breeding by unintended pairings, limitations that farmers can't impose on their workers - and would be unlikely to try even if they could.)

So it seems to me that responsible researchers would go a bit farther before reporting: Like by doing genetic testing on the strains of bug in the various workers and the livestock, and running models on the results to try to identfy whether the bugs are from the herd or the workers.

I don't see any such work alluded to in this popularized reporting. It seems to just assume that the bugs were developed on the farm and spread to the workers. I hope this is a disconnect between the actual research and the report, rather than an accurate characterization of the research.

Comment Re:*shakes magic 8 ball* (Score 1) 148

That's harsh I remember when a 3 day weather forecast was crazy talk, not they do 10 day with reasonable accuracy.
Of course, the suffer from pedantics in they if they say it's going to be 93, and it's actually 94, people are like see, wrong again!

They do OK here in Colorado during the top of summer and the bottom of winter. Spring and fall they might get the current conditions right if they looked out the door... but it would probably change before they could report it. But they still try to do a 7 or 10 day forecast. Once in a while they get it right but don't plan on it.

Cheers,
Dave

Comment The answer is: neither (Score 1) 392

This is what they say, but what they really want is H1B and similar workers.

The value of a degree has never been less in this country.

Yes, they want (and NEED) people with critical thinking skills and a firm grasp on the fundamentals of science as per their field, but what they're saying they need with their money is something not even close to that mark in any regard... at least in IT/systems/storage/development.

Comment Re:Clarification (Score 1) 937

Two very different things: why does the universe exist and how did the universe come to exist. There is no why for the universe. It is. Looking for a why is what theists do.

Clarifying the clarification: I was only attempting to answer the question, "Why do atheists flock to science?" My answer was simply that, rather than arguing something vacuous, they simply say, "Meh, the scientific explanation will do for me." That is hardly flocking but just throwing a "good enough" explanation back at the theist that they will hopefully leave us alone.

Cheers,
Dave

Comment Re:Ready for spring already! (Score 1) 148

Last year's winter was not fun in PA. We had basically no summer, with very few hot days. I suspect this winter will be a little worse.

Same here in Colorado. We had a cool, wet summer. I think we only had one day that broke 100F. Saved a bunch on the water bill though. Barely had to water the lawn.

Cheers,
Dave

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