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Comment I wonder what the iCar would be then? (Score 1) 287

Comparing the Apple Newton and the iPhone... I'd say that the iCar would be a car that's well connected and essentially controlled by Apple. It would not work on roads not approved by Apple. It would probably be controlled by a touch screen or voice. However it would not drive by itself, as that feature has been proven to be complicated. Of course it won't have a driving wheel, instead it'll have a software driving wheel on a large touch screen in front of you.

Functionality wise, the iPhone was a _huge_ step back from what the Newton could do.

Comment Well there are many "fad languages" (Score 1) 547

In short you can expect most languages younger than 30 years to disappear soon.
If a language doesn't have it's special reason to exist, it won't.

In case of COBOL and FORTRAN that was a huge amount of business critical code, as well as the possibility to simply run it on your next computer. C is seen as a "smart assembler". LISP and its family are great for logical processing. Java seems to become the new COBOL.

And there are 2 languages on the List which do have those special reasons. One is Perl, which is just a great tool for dealing with strings in a quick and dirty way, the other one is "Object Pascal" which, in it's original form with Delphi is dead, but lives in in FOSS projects like FreePascal and Lazarus, it has the great opportunity of having native code plus platform independent native GUIs. In short their way of doing GUI means that you can write a program on Linux, compile it on a Mac and it'll look and feel like a Mac program.

What will die soonish is of course the .net world as it completely depends on a single company... which doesn't use it for their important products.

Comment Such things should be forbidden (Score 1) 192

After all its artificially limiting what you can do with the hardware. Plus it'll mean you'll have to run closed source firmware from the manufacturer on the device, which means that it'll probably contain malware. Why else would you distribute software in object code only? (No, competitors probably have reverse engineered it years ago.)

Comment Well yes you can prolong the life of a light blub, (Score 1) 602

but this would mean it's efficiency would drop. If you make the filament thicker it won't get as hot and it'll last longer, however since it'll be cooler even more of it's radiation will be in the infrared and therefore lost for it's purpose. So if a manufacturer was to make longer lasting light blubs, they would be considerably dimmer and redder at the same power consumption.

The reason why LED lights give out quicker than advertised is because they are more heat sensitive. If you have a light fixture designed for light bulbs, chances are they are not well designed to keep them cool. However if your LED lights get to hot for extended periods of time, they will eventually break. Plus particularly with low quality ones, you have the problem of bad external components. However those failures are typically trivial to fix.

Comment Re:min install (Score 1) 221

Well with systemd that probably will be a thing of the past. My guess is that for such minimalistic systems, people will go towards having their own simplified init. After all Linux is designed to allow you to have init as a shell script.

Comment Re:I'm open to it (Score 1) 826

Well Apache, OpenOffice and PostgreSQL are perhaps not the prime examples of the Unix philosophy however...
Apache stores all its logs and configuration, as well as much of its data in text files. It has one function and one function only, to reply to HTTP requests.
OpenOffice isn't really Unix software, it's an office package. People following the Unix philosophy see those as a violation of it.
PostgreSQL also does one thing. It processes SQL databases... and while it's using a binary format internally, all the interfaces are text based... in fact even the backup format is text.

But let's refute Poetterling while we are there:

"If you build systemd with all configuration options enabled you will build 69 individual binaries.":
Yes, but how are the dependencies? Do they share the same huge set of bloated libraries? What will happen if, for example the DBUS library gets corrupted for some reason? How many vital libraries are there?

"Myth: systemd's fast boot-up is irrelevant for servers." He refutes that himself a few lines down: "Of course, in many server setups boot-up is indeed irrelevant"

I stopped reading there. Seriously Poetterling hasn't understood Unix, if he would he would understand that binary software is something only to be done if there's a serious reason for it.

Comment Re:Eevolution (Score 1) 826

1. Ever had to use AIX, Solaris or MacOSX? Do you know why so comparatively few people use those systems by choice?

2. Well yes, it's about the opinion that systems should be working well. So far there have been few systems getting you as much "bang for the buck" as Unix. And none of those use binary data formats with C or C++.

Comment Re:not reasonable at all (Score 1) 826

Well standard SysV init will only fail unless there are some serious problems... like being unable to mount the root file system... in those cases it will give you a helpful message on the console.
And even if it fails, you are still typically left with /bin/sh if that can be loaded. That's good enough to diagnose and fix any SysV init problem.

The problem with systemd is that it is going back to the time when there were complex systems talking via binary interfaces. It introduces complexity without benefit. For example why does systemd have to be a binary? What advantage does that bring?

In a way systemd is the line that has to be drawn when it comes to useless bloat. People did tolerate pulseaudio and DBus to some degree, those are absolutely non essential services, but booting and logging is something essential. If your system won't boot and you won't have a decent way to fix it, you'll have a serious problem.

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It's a naive, domestic operating system without any breeding, but I think you'll be amused by its presumption.

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