Well, I can tell you with my Windows 8 experiences, a lot of functionality went away with the loss of the Start Menu, especially when it comes to reopening previously-opened documents. Sometimes it can be difficult to locate the document in question by just browsing the filesystem.

Okay, I can believe that. I'm still rather surprised that there weren't any other posts though. Your friend must have Slashdot on an RSS feed or something to know when the next new story goes live.

The concept of being able to 'just fork' the system sounds great on the surface, but init is not your average package. I'd argue that init is just as important as the kernel itself, and possibly more important as it impacts how all init-aware applications and daemons will be developed. The use of System V init allowed Linux to be comfortablef for UNIX admins looking for a less expensive or more widely installable solution, and the end of the use of System V init means that Linux is starting to head away from the UNIX operating systems.

It's been said that Ubuntu switched to systemd because they anticipated that Debian was going to do so, not because they really wanted to, but since Ubuntu re-forks Debian for a lot of its packages and development, as a derivative work it really doesn't have a lot of choice unless they want to make a clean break of it. With other distros also going systemd, inevitably like when Slackware was extremely late to the party with the whole libc5/glibc2 switch, a bunch of us will end up on Slack again, even without the advanced package tools that we've come to like with more modern distros.

I'm a little skeptical of this "anonymous reader" that Slashdot cites as the submitter of the article truly being anonymous when the subject of the article manages to get the first word in. No "omg f1rst p0st!", no commentary on the situation, literally the subject himself posting about it.

I'm well aware of NeXT's fusion with Apple, but the fact remains, the computers are Apple, not NEXT, the OS was able to emulate the environment for MacOS9 and to run most MACOS9 software, and MACOSX ran on pre-NeXT Macintoshes with all of the Apple-specific features of those machines. NeXT as an entity ended, even if its intellectual property and managers ended up at Apple.

There are three approaches to computing.

There's the commercial-ubiquitous approach. This is Microsoft's approach. Try to support (or to get manufacturers to support) as much hardware as possible. Be the default solution. Things generally look good (I can't fault Microsoft over their years for most of their UI decisions), stability may not always be terribly good though, and that's the sacrifice, ubiquity over stability, but the gain is to run on just about all hardware in existence. Android is also mostly falling into this category too now.

There's the commercial-restricted approach. Sell your hardware and your software, and only allow a select-few others to sell hardware or software that is compatible with your products. The upside is that the platforms are highly stable, but the downsides are that users will sometimes find they simply can't do something because it's disallowed. It also requires the company to be ever-vigilant about pushing more features and capabilities, as stagnation will mean death. Apple currently leads this community, but SGI, Sun, NeXT, Commodore, and a whole bunch of computer companies throughout the years have tried it and ultimately closed up shop.

The Open-Source method is the third approach, and it's both leading edge (ie, research projects by major universities) and completely behind (many user applications simply don't exist or are only partially functional).


I use Windows, OSX, and Linux daily as desktop environments. Linux is stable and fast, but often not compatible with developments out of Redmond and with a lot of work to make some features function. OSX is very smooth, very stable, and awkwardly locked-down to where some things simply aren't options. Windows is compatible with just about everything and requires weekly reboots to keep it running.

They all suck. All of them.

It just depends on how far you are looking to travel. If you're going from Boston to Washington DC then the time and hassle for security and boarding may make the train faster. If you're going from Boston to Chicago then even with the extra overhead imparted at the beginning of a flight, you're still going to get there more quickly flying than you would by high-speed rail, even if the train doesn't stop anywhere else along the way.

Out west high-speed rail is less practical until you get all of the way to the west coast, and even there, most of the cities are oriented toward driving, not walking or mass transit. You're probably not going to get a lot of benefit for high-speed rail servicing Albuquerque or Phoenix or Denver, the cities are too far apart to make high-speed rail any more practical than flying, and would probably have too much environmental impact in the process of construction to make it worthwhile.

That's what going camping is for.

I'm not joking. Going camping is a way for a person to reconnect with the natural world to an extent. We are challenged to live with only that which we can bring with us, and some choose to bring very little with them.

Note, if you go out into the wilderness in a fully self-contained RV with enough water supply to bathe, you're not camping.

If you really want your house to be clean, some things should be done daily. Cleaning the bathrooms, vacuuming the carpets and cleaning the floors, wiping down the surfaces in the kitchen, cleaning the sink and the cooktop, etc.

That's what I'd want automated, the daily maintenance that doesn't look like anything is being accomplished because the difference between before-and-after is so small, but where if it's neglected then things do get worse over time.

Someone would take out that aircraft because they just got their hands on a SAM battery for the first time and are trigger-happy to use it and lack the training to distinguish friend, foe, and noncombatant, and don't have any idea how international air corridors work or are laid-out.

Another aircraft as close as the doctored image shows would be close enough to identify the airliner as being painted in commercial livery, not painted as a military vehicle. Plus the vehicle had already flown 90% of the way across Ukraine and was just about to leave Ukrainian airspace, so it would have been in communication with Ukrainian air traffic control the whole time. Ukraine would have known what it was and wouldn't have needed to scramble fighters to intercept it on its way out of the country.

Separatist fighters, regardless of who's backing them, wouldn't have known anything about the plane to start with, and if they weren't listening for transponders then they simply would have seen a subsonic jet flying high over the area they control. If through their lack of training they didn't bother to research the situation (ie, air corridors, contact on civilian frequencies, listening for transponder traffic and having equipment to display it) then they could have interpreted the situation as they wanted to interpret it, as a military incursion, rather than for what it actually was. So they saw something fly in and they shot it down. Didn't ID it, didn't try to contact it, just fired on it.

And now Russia is adding insult to injury. They should simply shut up and stop mentioning it altogether.

Or the VP in charge figured that if he didn't assign a job to send them out to anyone, that few enough customers would complain that it wouldn't be a big deal to handle those few that would.

Unfortunately many companies can stand to have a layer of incompentency between those that make decisions and those that actually do work. One can even argue that when the workers actually know what they're doing and are actually working toward a goal, most of Management's job should be to keep obstacles out of their way, to anticipate the needs of the project, and to handle the company-external communications and initial deal-making. While it's true that some companies do make their earnings using entry-level workers or are structured to be profitable even with incompetent workers making up sizable portions of their ranks (Walmart, Fry's Electronics, and just about all fast-food come to mind), that should not hold true for companies that employ primarily skilled workers.

It's really aggrevating when skilled workers are both treated as if they're unskilled workers, and when they're managed by a former unskilled worker that somehow managed to get promoted up to lower-level management. Those kinds of managers tend to push everyone down to the lowest level, and to treat the skills of the talented workers as if they are unimportant. Ironically though, even good workers can often make for terrible managers, as often they cannot accept someone working in a different way than they did/do.

I will say that I have been happiest when I've had bosses that were better at the job than I was, that I could learn from, that actually respected what I was able to do even when it was not necessarily what they would have done. I felt that they trusted me to do the damn job and to get a positive result, without worrying about my methods so long as they didn't make things worse in the process. Those bosses have been very, very few and far between though.

...one ping only...

As opposed to the Gnome Foundation's people pronouncing it, "guh-nome"?

I HATE that. They claim it's from pronouncing GNU as "guh-new". When I point out that the animal gnu is pronounced "new" and that since that animal is the mascot of the GNU project and that it too should be "new", they get all butt-hurt.

At least no one has called it "guh-rep" yet.

Honestly I don't think it would be as bad as one might think. Most people, including criminals, are not homicidal to begin with, so police officers and their families would be relatively bodily safe, and given the effort needed to case a home to verify no one is home in order to break in and vandalize or burglarize, it's unlikely that a police officer's home would be targeted for vandalism or theft either, over and above statistical average.

If anything, if criminals are paying attention to where police officers live, the neighbors of cops might find less problems, as there's a possibility for a quicker response by calling a neighbor (ie, the cop) and more effort into an investigation relative to the importance of the crime, to appease the neighbor. Or it could come to nothing.