Well, yes. And no. "Jessie" is testing. IN many cases you need to run Debian testing to get newer software. So this is a mixed blessing.

There is also some hope it will never be "rock solid" (in fact it pretty much cannot be, but the issue is whether the people responsible for this move will be able to see that), and that it will get ripped out a gain. Come to think of it, if that happens, it could be the best solution. A resounding "this is a piece of trash" after Debian really tried to make systemd work would be a really good outcome.

Well they teach that for good reason. If you rest upon your laurels for a long time, then a startup will come from nowhere with a better product that you couldn't even dream of and your userbase will drop you like a sack of potatoes.

Except the cases where such a thing has happened over a _UI_ change are few and far between. In the case of Mozilla, the browser was offering new useful features (namely Extensions/Add-Ons) -- the interface/UI for the most part was identical to IE (I'm sure that was intentional to win over IE users).

This is the standard hypocritical bullshit that the copyright cartels try to push. They want copyrighted materials to be treated as a purchase, when it comes to their own obligations, but they want it to be treated as a license contract when it comes to your rights. So they get to "sell" you "products" (after which they have minimal responsibility for ensuring that the product continues to work, etc.), but they can revoke or modify your "license" and they restrict how you use it (including prohibition on resale/gifting, which is normally allowed under the doctrine of first sale). They're trying to take the must consumer-unfriendly (not "customer-unfriendly" because customers actually get to *buy* things) of both property law and contract law, while ignoring the obligations or limitations of either.

Except no, you're full of shit, compromise doesn't have to happen. Humble Bundle games are sold DRM-free. Good Old Games sells all their games DRM-free, including ones that had DRM at initial release and even ones that are brand new, concurrently under sale through other vendors, and are DRMed there. Both of them allow unlimited re-downloading. There are other

Friends lists and audio chat and such have nothing to do with Steam. There's nothing very special about Steam's implementation of those features, either; I've been using online game services, with friends lists that tell me who is in what game and server lists and all that jazz, since the mid-90s. None of them required any DRM, either...

Steam doesn't allow re-sale, and it doesn't allow gifting. It doesn't allow sharing games (sharing *accounts* is not the same thing; even other DRM systems let me play X while my roommate plays Y even if we only have one copy of each between us). When (not if; it has happened multiple times) Steam servers go down, the games stop working. Steam can, at any time, modify or prohibit your access to their service and to the games you have "purchased". Steam can (and has before) modify their "license agreement" for the service - which of course means for all games running on it, as well - and there's fuck-all you can do about it except walk away and lose all your "investment".

SRM is shit. Steam is DRM. Steam is shit. QED.

"Your signature project has been in development hell for over 20 years, how do you respond?"

You're making stuff up. Making up things is generally known as lieing. I'll be generous and assume that you're merely staggeringly ignorant and perfer to regurgitate anti-GNU talking points you've culled from various message boards and have never bothered to actually find out much about the GNU project yourself.

The HURD kernel is not and has never been the "signature" project. The project is the GNU project (est. 1983) and has been progressing quite nicely. The kernel was not worked on until about 1990. When Linux came along in '91, it was rapidly adopted as the GNU kernel of choice, since it is under an appropriate license.

The goal is to be able to run computers entirely from copyleft software. The fact that some of these were achieved externally is neither here nor there. The GNU project has in fact achieved its major goal: you can now run a computer on completely copyleft software.

It was the moribund state of development 23 years ago which motivated Linus to write his own kernel.

I'm not sure what your point is or if "morbiund" is even right. The Hurd was only started a year before Linux.

So in a sense we should thank Hurd for being so badly mismanaged, mired in politics and kernel correctness that it drove someone to produce something better and more useful.

Do you have any citiaions that the hurd was mired in politics and mismanagement in late 1990/early 1991, before Linux was released?

As far as I know the main problem was adopting the idea of a microkernel before it was really ready for the prime time. That's hardly the daming criticism you are giving.

just shows that Stallman doesn't seem to know when he is in over his head,

Yay. Today is "make shit up about Stallman day" just like every other day.

Let's go for an RMS quote on the HURD:

"finishing it is not crucial" for the GNU system because a free kernel already existed (Linux), and completing Hurd would not address the main remaining problem for a free operating system: device support.

Having a project like HURD reflects poorly on Open Source/Free software.

Rubbish. It's a hobby/research project for a few people at the moment. This no more reflects poorly on Open Source software than my crap github account.

Stallman should just kill it. It's pointless.

Tell you what, I'll petition Stallman to ask them to stop (RMS doean't have to power to tell people what to do in their spare time and I doubt he'd weald it if he did) if you agree to cease all your hobbies since you're not pro-level at any of them.

That aside, it's actally beginning to get to the interesting stage. Things are beginning to work quite well. It's soon going to be able to use all of the Linux drivers (i.e. no hardware support problems). The capabilities are interesting because it can do all of this without hacks or root. This gives a much smaller attack surface.

It's also interesting because the difficult and complex security concious important system code can be written in something other than C very easily. In facy you can cobble together all sorts of stuff in all sorts of languages if desired.

That is public access. Any member of the public can obtain it by simply buying the article, or a subscription. "Public access" doesn't always mean "must provide everyone a free copy."

You can easily divide a foot, for example, into thirds, halves, quarters. Not so much with base 10.

You're right! It's much easier to divide 1"1/16 into thirds than it is to divide 27mm into thirds (they're the same length to a good approximation).

And if you're going to complain about me cherry-picking silly values, I'll point to the 2400mm sizes that wood is sold in which is every bit as dividisible as imperial units since it's a multiple of 12.

mass, etc came about in the same way.

Ah yes. 16 oz to the pound, 14 pounds to the stone, 8 stone to the cwt, 20 cwt to the ton. That's long tons of course, not short ones. But you guys seem to have abandoned stones and hundredweights, leaving the ton as a nice, tractable 2240lb. That's a lovely number to do mental arithmetic with.

Er, or are you working with short tons, where it's 100lb to the short hundredweight and 20 of them to the short ton.

etc

And what about volume? Do you work in cu Ft or gallons? That's a conversion factor of 6.22883288. Real easy to use. Quick: anser in two seconds or less: how many cubic inches to the cubic foot?

Come on it's only 12x12x12. Which is uhh 144*12 which is er 1440+288... 162.. er 172... er 1728! got it! Did that really take you under 2 seconds?

Oh yeah and BTUs. Heater at 220V, 2A is how many BTU/hr again? I have no fucking clue. Seriously. Not a clue. Not even slightly. Now try some more complex conversions like figuring out how long it would take to heat up a room's worth of air by one degree. Or if you prefer, some container of water.

Or it it takes a turning force of 0.1 foot pounds to turn (er or is that about an inch pound or a foot ounce???) a shaft on a bearing, how much heat must the bearing be able to dissipate at 100RPM?

See, all these calculations are really REALLY hard with imperial. The famed divisibility only helps if you happen to be working with whole feet. For everything else (mass, energy, force) and calculations involving unit conversions, it's a massive PITA.

Nature isn't base 10, other than the number of fingers and toes we have.

It's not base 2, 3, 4, 12 or anything else, either.