In fairness, by 'stopped short' they mean that the Kaspersky guys essentially said, 'We're not saying it's the NSA - we just can't imagine anyone else on the face of the earth who has the resources necessary to do this kind of thing.' So yes, the report was released with a nod in the direction of the NSA.

I won't dispute that. To suggest, as some have, that different is necessarily better than that dog's breakfast is another thing entirely, though. And that's where I rankle.

I meant that in a wider context than just Debian. It's abundantly clear that several of the developers at the heart of systemd simply do not play well with the other children, and reflexively treat dissent as opposition for its own sake, and use that excuse to ignore valid objections. I think you're probably right that Debian is merely collateral damage in their campaign, but I also think it's quite fortuitous for them. And let's face it: Debian is the refuge of a certain kind of sysadmin/developer who is conservative in nature and curmudgeonly in attitude. They're not the sole inhabitants of Debian-land, but they're a significant subset of the population.

Hence the crescendo of noise when Debian announced the move.

I'll grant you that the upstream developers often have the upper hand, but distros do have a role to play in adjudicating the popularity contests that inevitably arise when you've got competing products.

But I don't want to over-emphasise that. You're right that distros are sometimes circumscribed in terms of options. This is pretty much exactly why Debian moved when it did. If I understand correctly, they saw the writing on the wall—that GNOME was aligning and integrating with systemd—and decided to walk before they were forced to run.

Well to be fair, standards is a bit of a special case. But yes, you're right about that. Largely.

You mean managed processes in an operating system, right, and not systems development process management?

The departure that I spoke of was not from one particular init system to another. I was speaking of the move from heterogeneity to homogeneity. Poettering's goal is unification. Systemd is simply one means to that end. Read his blog for more about his grand design.

I'd dispute that. I don't think there ever was a decision to kill off big box Unix. Nor do I think there has been (until quite recently) any particularly concerted, coordinated effort to replicate the kind of functionality typically seen in mainframes and minis.

Managed processes are not intrinsically bad. But systemd is, because it's of questionable quality and design, and it's developed by people who treat dissent as enmity. Which is very much a Sin Of The (Unix) Father's that we, apparently, have failed to learn from.

No, I think that people should follow my fucking example and listen to others, perhaps learning a little humility in the process.

I already told you I write FOSS; I scratch that itch when I need to. I have a fucking right to talk about this because I've walked the fucking walk. And I won't do you the indignity of asking whether you have as well.

I am trying to suggest that writing code is not the only useful role to be played in FOSS development. I am trying to suggest that we can't write all the code, all the time, so it behooves all developers to listen to their peers, if only to learn from their mistakes.

And now, you can perhaps go back and respond to the main question, which is why you think numbers matter in FOSS development?

Well, given that I told you that I've been a distro maintainer, your assertion is incorrect. Not all of us have discarded these arguments. Your assertion is a textbook case of No True Scotsman. But don't take my opinion in isolation; why not go ask Ian what his reservations are?

See, this is pretty much precisely my point. It's not that people's opinions are getting ignored. That happens all the time. It's that people aren't listening at all. And more to the point, that really critically important lessons of the past are being set aside merely because a small number of people have become convinced that they know a better way.

Again: in and of itself, that's not necessarily a problem. The problem here is that these particular people are wrong.

You need to explain your reasoning here. You seem to think that minorities don't determine the outcome when it comes to designing FOSS. But the Freedom of FOSS is not populism. It never has been. It has always been the case that a vanishingly small minority of developers have decided the fate of thousands—and more recently, millions—of users.

It's a fact that Poeterring, Sievers and co. represent a tiny minority of Linux developers. Over 90% of the systemd code base has been written by 10 or so people. The groups that decided to include systemd in Debian and RedHat are also very small, and while Debian's is nominally consultative, they declined to send this particular decision to a popular vote.

So why do you think that numbers suddenly matter?

It's not that people are being ignored. It's that 20+ years of historical evidence is being cast aside.

Make no mistake: What we're talking about here is a fundamental change in our approach to systems software. The distros have been dragged along for numerous reasons, some of them technical, some of them ideological. But to pretend that the demographic that is being left behind is of no consequence is disingenuous arrogance at best.

You know, I've done that before. I've worked for a company that developed a Linux distro purpose-built for people who couldn't manage systems for themselves. I still write the bits and pieces that I need, when I need to.

I'm not philosophically opposed to what you're suggesting here. I am incensed, though, that it should be necessary. As someone who so clearly doesn't understand the first thing about how the FOSS ecosystem works, you should have a care before you begin discarding the viewpoints of those who have gone before you, and you should think twice before presuming to suggest what's good for us.

HTH HAND

EXACTLY.

It's a miracle they can speak at all. :-)

It's the fact that you used the plural that makes this true comedy.

Yep, you've got to worry about reductivist thinking like this. If that were the case, then A Tale of Two Cities would, in its entirety, be: 'Sydney Carton had a twin.'

The rest is mere extrapolation.

No, it appears to be the kind of cookie they're using. Every time I restart my browsers, I see this advertisement again. Clearly, the cookie is only being set for the session. Also, why the fuck is this not stored in the database, instead of in the cookie? It's trivially easy to associate this with the logged-in userid. Now, this is Slashdot, so odds are good that we can attribute this to incompetence rather than malice. But....

... But they also keep showing this to users (like myself) who have taken them up on their own offer to turn advertising off, which is really fucking stupid. As I wrote elsewhere, 'I probably wouldn't have cared about Slashdot Deals anyway, but now I fucking hate it. It's that asshole creep at the bar that won't leave your friend alone.'

Charlie Hebdo's next cover: Bomber Mohammed thrusting a lit stick of dynamite up an altar boy's ass. The slogan DEATH TO JEWS written in wet, splattery paint across the entire thing.

The 5D Mark II is a really nice little camera. It hits the sweet spot in so many ways that I can understand perfectly why you'd be content with it.

I'm a Nikon guy myself, and had much the same attitude about my last camera body. But then I got a D800 and realised that technology had moved on a long way from the D700 or D3. The dynamic range and light sensitivity is now better than the human eye. I can shoot up to about ISO 6400 and, thanks to the 32MP, full-frame CMOS, still get a useful shot. I generally size my photographs down to 6500 pixels on the wide side, just because more than that is usually overkill.

TL;DR: You don't need the newest generation of gear to do what you've always done. You can use the newest generation of gear to take photographs that you wouldn't have taken before.

South Korea's policy was struck down years ago by the Constitutional Court, which ruled that it was unconstitutional and ineffective.

Have you not been paying attention? The 'real names' thing was invented here. Except it was started by the private sector, not government.

Before you claim there's any difference between the two, I will direct you to The Dangers of Surveillance, a paper that first appeared in the Harvard Law Review, and is required reading for anyone who's interested in the legal principles at play here. I too used to think, 'Yeah, but you can walk away from a business, but you can't walk away from government.' The paper makes an excellent point that real name policies, no matter where they originate, are detrimental to human liberty:

In a nutshell, if a corporation has your data, then by hook or by crook, the government can get it too, often voluntarily, often in circumvention of the law.

Thi...

Oh fuck it.

I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you meant a 'consistent' API.

How is this unique to systemd? How is systemd a requirement for this to occur? A consistent API for what, exactly? For inter-process communication? For service-to-service communication? For communication of service state change?

Ah, for process management! Because that's never existed before!

Yes, because adding complexity has been the goal of sysadmins from Day One.

Raise the bar! Higher standards! More Bugs! But fuck that! Because we didn't write the bugs! We just made them possible!

To summarise: I find your ideas questionable, at best, and downright wrong, mostly.