I had Ubuntu bug me every day for the last week or so to upgrade to 16.04. Fortunately, I had my anti-twisting panties on, so I just dismissed the reminder. And reloaded with good old Debian to get boot times an order of magnitude better and no more crashing pulseaudio. Still, I managed, until now, to refrain from even mentioning it. Because who fucking cares.

The allure of the movies (extending to other formats like television and online media) is that they offer the consumer a temporary reprieve from the dullness of their own life. It's about bringing a story to life and convincingly so. The moment the media stops convincing the consumer, it's lost it's lustre.

As many have noted, it's not about the CGI per se. It's about bad CGI breaking the immersion that the consumer is seeking in the media. Even when a practical effect is a little primitive, it's very obviously still real, so there's a little more leniency from the audience (but that too can only go so far).

Age of Ultron is a classic example of bad CGI losing the audience before the story even had a chance to get out of the gate. That intro scene hurt my head.

Stating that LILO and GRUB were "confusing and broken", Lennart Poettering has announced that SystemD will take over MBR management. "It's just a small step towards complete system domination", the great leader was heard to muse, "After all, PulseAudio did so well and everyone is loving how much easier SystemD is than init scripts. What could possibly go wrong?".

I only switched to GRUB because of installed defaults and my laziness. LILO was, imo, always simpler, cleaner, made more sense.

GRUB works, but it feels like it's been engineered to be way more than it needs to be, and, in the process, it starts to suck. As an example, I started looking into GRUB theming (hey, a pretty boot screen would be nice). Turns out I could never convince GRUB to use a TTF font and display the table (and items in the table) correctly. That's a feature that may as well not be in there -- if it doesn't work, turf it. I didn't *need* it, but I spent a bit of time trying to get it to work and failing, which I wouldn't have bothered with if it just weren't there. Or there's the interactive boot -- works if you already know by rote all of the GRUB internals, at the currently installed level; completely useless otherwise. That being said, it does still work, and I still use it to select an OS -- I just miss LILO.

Also, LILO was quite explicit about the "you need to run me to update the MBR" ruling. Which I found kind of comforting: if you didn't make the active choice to update your MBR, you didn't make the active choice to break it with a bad config.

Also, diversity leads to better overall design across the spectrum. Any time a competitor is lost, it's sad for the ecosystem as a whole.

So the KB has a few hiccups and reboots and then fails to install. Not the end of the world -- you're back at being logged in with the system asking you to update.

Sucks you don't get the KB, but you can carry on with life until this is fixed. This is no "reboot loop". For one of those, you really need to install a shitty custom Android ROM. True boot loops have no way out for the user without low-level access.

Rubbish.

After installing updates, Windows 10 recommends a reboot and /defaults/ to wanting to reboot at some supposedly quiet time like 03h30. But you can just tell it that you'll reboot manually when you feel like it, from the same dialog you had open to confirm the installation of the updates.

If your win10 machine is rebooting "all the time" and you "can't stop it", you're not reading the text in front of you. It's perfectly reasonable to schedule a reboot by default at a quite time if said reboot is required to install updates -- after all, you clicked the "install" button, so you obviously want those updates?

I've used KDE for a while, from 3 through 5. 4 worked really well and when I got the upgrade to 5, I thought that I finally had the perfect desktop - if it worked like 4 and looked like 5, I'd be ecstatic.
Unfortunately, I found it to be overall a little sluggish to start and that deteriorated over time to the often reported states of coming out of screensaver to a black screen with cursor for a minute before anything would show; a programs menu which would take 30 seconds to open the first time, no matter how long ago the machine booted - and 1-5 seconds thereafter; to finally booting to a black desktop with just a mouse cursor. Deleting cache files makes the problem simmer down a little, for a while, but they never truly to away and they creep right back up to full size within a few days.
I also had the applet that controls wireless refuse to ever connect to my AP after once inadvertently touching the flight mode toggle. I could connect from the cli, but no amount of pushing and prodding on the applet would get me there.
Not to mention that this isn't the first time it's the "gpu driver's fault". The built in dark theme only works on machines with great graphics cards. Older machines get a white-on-white panel.

And let's not forget the xembed debacle. Way to force your philosophical outlook on the people who can't change anything - end users.

I don't know what happened, but the kde guys, imo, lost the plot. I've had to switch to xfce to be able to use my desktop. I've ditched Linux for win10 in my laptop and have a fast boot and os. That ditch was done as a rage-quit of KDE because of the aforementioned wireless issues - I just had enough of trying to work around the beautiful, but ultimately brain-damaged plasma5.

My laws say "no stabby".

Heart, back, dick, I don't care. NO. STABBY.

Having been (rather recently) roped into the interview process, I can tell you that:

1) Recruiters often get it wrong: since they have no actual knowledge of the required skillset, they have to go on the CV alone; which in itself is very open to manipulation and interpretation
2) Someone may be amazing on paper and then just simply not produce when given a technical test (see #1)
3) Someone may have all of the technical skills but just not align with the culture of the company; for example, our company is big on TDD and dedicated time to learn and improve our skillset during what would otherwise be work time -- both of these 'non-negotiables' in our culture have opponents.

Without reading too deeply, I want to just raise a paw to remind everyone that no-one owes you anything and you don't DESERVE a job. You are granted a place to earn your salary at the discretion of the employer. If the Me-Me-Millenials could just stop for a moment to consider that, that would be great. Some of the older generation has seen that mindset working for the younger generation and thinks they can get away with it too.

On a parallel: if a company really doesn't want you to work there, why are you hung up on forcing them to? Personally, I'd hate to work in an environment where I'd forced myself in, especially when there are (guaranteed) places where you'll be just the right cog in the machine. I've actually left companies where I didn't feel 100% valued based solely on that premise. If you're good enough, you'll place somewhere.

Just one little problem with your analogy:

In the case of software, another distributed copy costs the coder nothing. The soda, on the other hand, cost the company > 5 cents, so they made a loss that day. Which is to say that your general gist is completely right (for software): a pirated download represents ZERO lost and a potential for gain as some who get the software for free and try it out will feel obliged to pay for it and will do so; however, without the "free full trial", they never would have even gone down that path.

Would anyone switch from a device and platform where you are the commander of the system to one where you are forced into subservience as a consumer of what has been deemed fit for your consumption?

People are sheeple. I'll never grok this thing called the human race.

Plasma4 worked well on my desktop for a long time. Not perfectly, because nothing is. But better than plasma5. At least there was support for legacy notifications. And autostart worked - I've just figured out that it your autostart entry isn't a .desktop, it won't be run: /. The programs menu launched quicker and recents actually worked instead of throwing a kio error.
Don't get me wrong - I'm glad that this is the default somewhere so that this shit and ideology (of how being pretty is more important than the user experience with legacy apps - there's not even a fallback widget for legacy notifications: you have to go back a decade with wmsystray and lose the icons to wherever) will be corrected. Plasma5 is well pretty too. But a functional step up from 4 - no. Sideways perhaps.

So if the plan sounds insanely stupid... perhaps it's not the plan?

Perhaps it's time to stop hating on BillG just because he's not *nix-ey enough? Perhaps it's time to stop feeding the conspiracy theorists? Perhaps?

Naw, what am I thinking. This is /., home of the terminally insane.

Expect the disk to be faster. For the privileged few who bothered to RTFA, you'll understand. The high-level languages used tend to degrade on the specific instructions (string concat) as the number of ops increases; I also wager that this problem is more prevalent on Windows where the memory manager is about as good useful as a clown who thinks he has an eye for fashion. So, distilled, this article should read:

"Researchers find an obtuse way to defy a well-established rule-of-thumb".

Bravo. Or not.

Or sometimes, we just listen to our paeds because we don't know better. My paed suggested staying away from peanuts because the "wisdom" at the time was that it might provoke an allergy. I'm not a doctor and I'd prefer to listen to a professional, as I'd prefer my clients to not think that they are master coders who have a clue.