Slashdot videos: Now with more Slashdot!

congratulations to you and chris. do you think it would do as a base for implementing 802.22 whitespace broadband? i have a draft version of the spec available. and what would one of these boards cost?

that's not a problem if you only need a one-time (or limited) campaign. or a IED remote trigger device for example. or you have a dead-drop location (online or otherwise) with up-to-date numbers. or a whole number of other scenarios that are probably and have been standard practice *anyway* for decades.

tell me... how come in a simple public discussion slashdot readers can come up with simple practical scenarios why mass-surveillance "solutions" like this will be completely ineffective, yet the people considering (or actually) deploying them cannot? and: why can the pakistani government not see that this knee-jerk response will have the terrorists celebrating the success of bringing awareness of their campaign to every single mobile phone user across pakistan in a very personal way.

i heard of someone who bought a prius: they live in scotland (south west, near ayr). they noticed a huge drop in fuel economy (down to 30mpg) so recorded it, and year after year they found a clear correlation between winter and the drop in fuel economy. the extra cost of the vehicle, the insane pricing for replacement batteries (over $1200 per battery and there are 30 of them), and, finally, the fact that they were not actually getting better fuel economy than an equivalent ICE car, they sold it... and used their daughter's 10-year-old VW diesel Polo which got a consistent 55mpg all year round.

you are _brainwashed_. absolutely brainwashed. read the independent assessment here:
http://www.softpanorama.org/Co...

FUCK you. fuck you and your attitude thinking you have the right to tell me or ANYONE that i should bow down to other people's decisions. FUCK you and fuck off. you have NO right to tell me that i must worship the ground on which other people walk.

*I* have the freedom to make my *own* assessment. that is my right. and it's people like you who are not helping, by saying "yeah we should all trust someone else to make our decisions for us".

historically we know that when we abdicate responsibility to others for important decisions, it doesn't go so well, does it? what is _wrong_ with you??

sorry, but... you really gave me a shock there, i couldn't believe what you wrote.

... and they're taking everyone else down with them in the short to medium term...

not "supposedly" - *really*. if you run apt-rdepends -r libsystemd0 | a bit of awk | sort | uniq there are four *THOUSAND* five hundred packages that, if you were ever to do "apt-get --purge remove libsystemd0" you would NEVER be able to install. that's a whopping FIFTEEN PERCENT of the entire debian package repository that you are prevented and prohibited from installing, should you ever make the decision that you wish to keep libsystemd0 off of machines that you manage!

the reason for this insane level of *hard* dependency is because lennart pottering is both the developer of libsystemd0 *and* many other packages such as pulseaudio... so of *course* he decided that pulseaudio had to include - as a hard dependency - one of his projects, libsystemd0. libsdl likewise also uses it as a hard compile-time dependency, along with about 100 other applications and libraries.

those applications and libraries then quickly spread as further hard dependencies to include the gimp, apache2-dev, php5 (??!), erlang, libreoffice, cups, bluez/bluetooth (because of the links to pulseaudio), *all* the games that use libsdl (i.e. pretty much all of them), *all* the music software available for GNU/Linux (because of the link to pulseaudio), openjdk7, the eclipse IDE, apache tomcat, the android SDK, i mean.... the list is a _real_ eye-opener. you can review it here for yourself:

      http://lkcl.net/reports/removi...

so yeah, not even _close_ to "supposedly", mate!

*thumbs-up* to both these things. thank you.

that's in.... *counts on fingers*... 9? days? :)

ok so let's look it up... a random google search shows these:

1. Of, on, relating to, involving, or affecting only one side: "a unilateral advantage in defense" (New Republic).
2. Performed or undertaken by only one side: unilateral disarmament.
3. Obligating only one of two or more parties, nations, or persons, as a contract or an agreement.
4. Emphasizing or recognizing only one side of a subject.
5. Having only one side.
6. Tracing the lineage of one parent only: a unilateral genealogy.
7. Botany Having leaves, flowers, or other parts on one side only.

yep. definitions 1 through 5 are perfectly relevant. unilateral. meaning that pottering made the decision and (2) did not consult any of us. he claims to be "listening to users" yet (4) in fact ignores everything they tell him and carries on regardless. he has therefore violated the implicit software freedom contract (3) between users and developers who choose to be of service to others.

so yeah. it would appear that yes i really do know english, if only by accident.

a *fraction* of the extent of the problem is actually illustrated here:
http://anfo.slavino.sk/libsyst...

those packages that i recompiled (policykit-1, d-bus, pulseaudio and util-linux) have a huge range of dependencies that cover something like 98% of the most commonly used software in the linux world. cups-daemon, the gimp, vlc, mplayer, and others too numerous to mention: all come under the fascist rule of libsystemd thanks to the unilateral decision making of a handful of people.

and i'll repeat it again because it seems not to be getting through: the problem is that there *is no alternative*. it's their way or fuck off: you are not permitted to argue your case even reasonably (because it will be ignored). and that's just... wholly unacceptable. *i don't care* who is techically right or wrong: i care that this is a situation that has become like the Microsoft Monopoly: dominate, dominate, dominate.

so that's the deadlock that i seek to break, by demonstrating that you *can* have a working desktop system without having a single part of the code written by people who do not listen and who act in such highly irresponsible ways.

your post is particularly insightful - i hope it is recognised as such by moderators. i wanted to emphasise what you said, because NT 3.5 and 4.0 used a recursive login system based on DCE/RPC function calls. a "domain" logon was (is) actually no diffferent from a "local" logon: the only difference being that the SAM database was running locally (and was marked in the registry as being the same name as the machine). as a result of this, there were actually simple registry hacks for NT 3.51 to turn a workstation into a Primary Domain Controller!

so thanks to DCE/RPC, all that happened with a Domain Logon was that the incoming function call would make an (identical) recursive *outgoing* login function call to the nearest PDC/BDC/Trusted Domain. that Trusted Domain Controller would, in turn, on receipt of the incoming function call, make an (identical) recursive outgoing function call to the nearest PDC/BDC... and eventually, through this chain, the answer would be "login success or fail".

incredibly neat, and technically brilliant... but the actual number of people in the world who really truly understand that must be limited to under a hundred people at most. *not all of them* work at microsoft....

no, i disagree: i feel you pretty much nailed it but didn't realise it. the problem i feel really *is* that they're not listening... in combination with there being no alternative. if there was an alternative - a less disruptive one - then the fact that these key high-impact decisions were being made would *not matter*. why? because we would be able to use the alternatives and the people who were not listening could go screw themselves, and nobody would care.

it really *is* the fact that these people have such disproportionate influence and effect, and that they really *are* ramming "Their Way" down everyone's throats in such a cavalier way.

they may well perfectly be technically right (i have seen multiple analyses of systemd which indicate that they are not), but that *doesn't matter*, because it's the fact that they gave us no choice that is of far greater priority.

of all the arguments that i've seen, i have never seen one presented to the systemd team that gets this across to them clearly. the majority of arguments are either technical or abusive. it's only when you take a step back and think "what's really going on here"..

that's precisely why i actually worked hard and risked destroying my business by losing access to all data on a critical business laptop, documented the process of removing libsystemd0 from it, and *then* wrote the article.

unlike the people you refer to, i actually *did something*.

then, i contacted the devuan team and informed them about what i had done, so that they may consider properly replicating what i'd done as maintainable debian packages. so they now have a way forward where previously they would have been worried that their efforts would result in many people still having to remove huge numbers of packages - desktop GUIs, sane-utils, cups-daemon, pulseaudio and anything that depends on it, clamav and many many more. i've demonstrated that you *don't* have to remove all those packages and that you *can* still have a functioning debian desktop... without libsystemd0 even being on it.

can you please do me a favour and make those thoughts known on the following wine bugreport? http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bu...

  the reason i ask is because there is critical functionality in wine that should never have been allowed to go so long without being implemented, and it's Named Pipes "Message Mode". the problem with message-mode is that there really is no good POSIX equivalent, and AJ - the paid-up employee - is in such a dominant and abusive position of authority that nobody may challenge his dictatorship. the only option left to implement anything remotely resembling message-mode under the extreme and fascist technically-tight conditions dictated by AJ is a non-portable hack using a little-known feature of TCP sockets that is *only* implemented in the linux kernel.

i mention this in the context of what you say to illustrate that the problem you highlight is not just restricted to one piece of software (systemd), but is a common problem across many of the critical pieces of software that we are using today. and the worst part is that *in each case* it is extremely difficult to gain sufficient technical expertise in order to engage with these people.... but even if you *do* have the technical expertise they often are so entrenched in their day-to-day mindset as absolute... "gods of their world" that even a reasonable and rational argument is completely ignored.

the long and short of it is that GNU/Linux software is getting out of hand, and is becoming so complex as well as so prevalent that the dominance and arrogance of just one person or company can have massive detrimental consequences for a *lot* of people. i'm really not sure what can be done about this, if anything.

for the average end-user or sysadmin? yes.

and what skills must the average end-user or sysadmin have in order to install that replacement functionality? do you think that the average end-user has the time to learn how to modify debian packaging correctly in the way that i documented? if you wanted to install mdev or eudev as a debian package, what do you think it would take for the average end-user to successfully do that, even assuming that they were capable of (a) finding those replacement packages and (b) having the courage to risk destroying their system by installing them.

not even *i* will install such low-level replacements for udev on mission-critical systems. i'm investigating them, looking for something suitable, but i sure as hell won't risk putting them on any of the systems i manage without a proper audit.

and that's the problem, there, that there *isn't* a packaged alternative to udev yet. a unilateral decision was taken some time back to integrate systemd and udev, with blatant disregard for the consequences. now in order to have a working system i am forced to *entirely disable* udev - that's insane!

not everyone in the world is as intelligent as you or i, dude.

we can't. the reason is simple: security updates and software updates will be incompatible. i actually maintain a hell-on-earth system for a client. the choice to do so is entirely mine, i have to point out. it's hell because i disagreed with putting KDE 4 in front of clients who are used to the simplicity of KDE 3.5, and i disagreed with moving them over to Gnome because, well Gnome is a different kind of hell (for me), involving being completely unable to remotely ssh in and hand-edit config files in a pinch. with KDE 3.5 it is still possible to do that.

so i ended up upgrading to Trinity Desktop, but this is after leaving the system running debian 6 for as long as possible. the upgrade was... fraught. then i had (in December 2014 - so only a couple of months ago) to buy and install a new printer (because we couldn't get the old one). that new HP printer wasn't recognised by the version of hplip that was on the system (3.12).

so i did an "apt-get upgrade hplip" - and what do you think happened? it said "to satisfy your request we require to remove Trinity Desktop and install KDE 4".

the reason was because the Trinity Desktop Team do *not have the manpower* to keep such a large old software base completely up-to-date with debian/testing. ... so i was forced to compile hplip from scratch, from source code! *fortunately* HP saw fit to include an extremely well-written and well-thought-out script that detected the OS, installed the build dependencies and generally got on with the job. i was really impressed.

now, the only reason i could contemplate this was because i am an experienced GNU/Linux systems administrator, but do you *really* think that the average person will be satisfied to "use older software" as you suggest?

this is the crux of the situation: that we *are* forced to such extreme polarising choices. and that's why i did what i've done - demonstrate that it's possible to remove libsystemd0 which is being shoved down our throats. i *don't care* if libsystemd0 is good or not: i object to it being forced onto people.