PCI compliance is a joke really, I also doubt that AWS does everything that PCI compliance actually says you have to do, because there are contradictory things in there and beside that, do they truly scan all of their data-centres and networks for any 'unauthorised wireless activity', etc.? It's a bunch of smoke and mirrors.

The problem with that, is that very few applications are now isolated these days. You typically have a DB back-end, data export/import and RPC to other system services. Setting a different locale is error prone since some data might be simply misinterpreted and end up corrupted. And that is real problem, since lots of user data are actually stored in textual form (even in DB!).

IME, the per-application locale has its uses, but in real world it causes more problems than it solves. In fact, since most Linux distros support quick account switching, the cheapest solution right now is to use two accounts with different locales.

There is no sane way to solve that problem on the level of OS. (Even "primary language; secondary language" is not enough, since for example I have to deal daily with three languages (Russian, English, German).) Most of the time this ends up being in the responsibility of the application developers: if they care enough, they offer a possibility to use a language different from the system one.

Think of the flip-side: you might accidentally force all Japanese and all English iPhones to download both English and Japanese locale data. And this is pretty large amount of the data to just sit around idly, just in case when user might once decide to hear the street names in different language.

- ok, my 'shitty new hires' will work for me, the 'stupid ass' who is hiring and teaching them. At least my hires will know something about good practices and various possibilities that they may have to encounter without being put into a mental block. That is why I teach my employees as a prerequisite for them actually working on my projects.

Desktop applications.

For example, you change time zone or locale in system settings and your organizer app automatically picks up the changes.

Pottering is maintainer of all of them. So he brought it under the systemd umbrella.

Applications "need" the services. They do not care who provides the services. As was said many times, the daemons - with few irrelevant changes to the source code to remove hardcoded systemd depedency - run fine without systemd.

Yes.

Pottering also enjoys the confusion he has seeded with the organization of the systemd. He claims simultaneously (depending on the context; and to his advantage) that systemd is modular and monolithic. While in fact systemd has monolithic architecture and modular design. Pretty much the worst combination possible - prominently featured in the MSWindows, why comparison with Windows is highly relevant. (Ideally you want modular architecture, while design could be either monolithic (e.g. Linux kernel, optimized for performance) or modular (e.g. GIMP with the tons of the plug-ins, geared toward extensibility). But monolithic architecture is pretty much the worst thing you could ever do to a software project.)

For applications. To handle properly when user changes the system settings.

These daemons are primitive at best. There were more comments written about them then there is source code lines in them.

Note, I'm in no favor of systemd itself. Debian in the past exemplified that you can actually use GNOME on a system without systemd, with only slightly patched up systemd-*d daemons. Which makes a lot of sense to me. But their maintainer is Poeterring, and he merged that all into the systemd, and there is no replacement for the daemons, so...

Nobody dismisses the multi-user-ness of the *NIX. In fact, the services should improve that by allowing a user to easily change his own locale/time zone without the need for log-out/log-in cycle.

The blank the services are filling is allowing application to perform application-specific tasks *when* user changes the locale or time zone. Editing a text config, and then restarting everything is, sorry, but horribly outdated. (We can update kernel on the fly - but not locale!? WTF?)

See previous reply to my comment.

The systemd-timedated is harmless - the systemd-timesyncd is a different story.

So the rumors were true that in V2.0 systemd would finally offer integration with ntoskrnl.exe, along with rewrite to take full advantages of the CLR.

The three services are actually needed.

The systemd-localed is simple: it provides the user with capability to change the locale on the fly (and applications with the ability to react on the locale change).

The systemd-timedated does almost the same for the date and time.

And the systemd-logind is basically a dbus wrapper to provide access to log-out/shutdown/etc functions.

The usefulness of logind can be argued, but centralized management of date/time and locale changes were long overdue. Linux is pretty much the only OS remaining, where application, if needed, can't really know if/when date/time or locale has changed.

In no way the services itself depend on the systemd - they are simply part of the systemd package. Nothing more.

What any of that has to do with the network time protocol?

FreeBSD folks do the same thing Debian did for some time before adopting the systemd: instead of the systemd, provide the teeny-tiny services, applications actually depend on.

I just wish there was a way to pass all that wonderful caffeine that gets extracted from decaf to people like me who appreciate it.

Cheers,
Dave

- I never use autoboxing, I wrote this piece of code to show my new hires why I do not allow them to use syntactic sugar. Shame on me? Whatever.

Ok, you are not sure that the problem is autoboxing, well here, this code:

Integer a = new Integer(2);
        Integer b = new Integer(3);
        for (int i=0;i<10000;i++) {
            System.out.println( a.intValue() + b.intValue());
        }

will print 5 every time under the same conditions.

Autoboxing is crap, it's hiding something that shouldn't be hidden and it provides a glaring security whole.
Generics are crap, I can't reuse the same Iterator for different loops? Fuck that nonsense. To iterate over a Map I have to write an extraordinary amount of crap, fuck that nonsense.
"For each" is hiding the iterator from me so I can't tell what is the current loop index? Fuck that nonsense.

Basically near all syntactic sugar is garbage.

Ah. The science. The scientific process. But science is precisely the example of the branch with closed environment, discrimination and elitism, which abhors and rejects any innovation or change. Unless it comes from a prof with a fat grant, of course.

That's why, for example, computer science, effectively branched off and doesn't use the scientific process. Likewise, most of the industries: the scientific process is way too expensive and way too wasteful when applied to tangible things. Some areas do it because all low hanging fruits are already gone and there is simply no alternative. But again, due to the costs, it is applied in a very very limited fashion.

In the end, in this particular context, it is OK to ignore science because your definition of innovation is simply different. Heck, you measure "innovation" in number of published papers.

Not in my experience, though.

But of course professional pride kicks in even before the first round of applause fades, and after that it is "of course it was very very hard work!!!"

That's precisely the type of innovation I was talking about. (Facebook thingies happen by throwing stuff against the wall and seeing what sticks. When lots of people do it simultaneously, there is a chance that some of it sticks.)

The thing about big R&D centers is that nobody really sees what's going on behind the closed doors. Behind the closed doors in the most "productive" labs you would find chaos and disorder - precisely the environment where errors and accidents occur. But it certainly takes dedication (to field or problem) to actually make out of that a "Eureka!" moment.

Otherwise, if innovation was that easy to achieve by simply good planning, then it would have been done a long time ago.

Except that you would rarely see new people.

More innovation happens by accidents, mistakes and misunderstandings. Or the ever silly questions of the newcomers.

Without inflow of new people, the "village" would suffer mental rot pretty quickly.

In a sense, a maker fairs are already better "startup villages", IMO.