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Comment Re:Accept, don't fight, systemd (Score 1) 533

by IllusionalForce (#46958231) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Practical Alternatives To Systemd?

While I do agree that the post was essentially decently-disguised flamebait, there's one point he really does make: "Whether you love, hate, or are ambivalent about systemd, I think you have to accept it at this point."

I see nobody working on an alternative init system. openlaunchd is both dead and limited to FreeBSD, upstart is likely to die with the march of systemd (Which, as you'll need to understand, is not an init system anymore, but literally a system daemon. It owns, controls and plays with your machine at its own volition and there's nothing you can do to stop it.), OpenRC isn't taken seriously because the gentoo folks propose it and now that both Debian and Red Hat, the two major players on the market, have both decided to play along with the systemd game (one of them was more or less forced into it, but no matter), systemd is omnipresent and impossible to stop.

We would've needed to have a concrete, working answer that made systemd pale in performance, code quality AND documentation back in 2012. If Apple had released launchd as open source back when Ubuntu started writing upstart, things might have ended differently. If upstart wasn't pushed too early, things might have ended differently. However, at this point of time, the UNIX way on Linux is dead. Irrecoverably. I wish I didn't have to paint such a black picture, but it's too tightly-coupled with the rest of the Linux ecosystem to ever remove it again.
Unix

If UNIX Were a Religion 392

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the gnu-slash-heretic dept.
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Charles Stross has written a very clever article where he describes the religious metaphor he uses with non-technical folks to explain the relationship between Mac OS X and UNIX. There is one true religion in operating systems says Stross and it is UNIX although there's also an earlier, older, more arcane religion with far fewer followers, MULTICS, from which UNIX sprang as a stripped-down rules-deficient heresy. If MULTICS is Judaism then UNIX is Christianity. By the mid-1970s there were two main sects: AT&T UNIX, which we may liken unto the Roman Catholic Church, and BSD UNIX, which we may approximate to the Orthodox Churches. In an attempt to control the schisms, the faithful defined a common interoperating subset of the one true religion that all could agree on—the Nicene Creed of UNIX which is probably POSIX. Stross says that today the biggest church in the whole of UNIX is Mac OS X, which rests on the bedrock of Orthodox BSD but "has added an incredible, towering superstructure of fiercely guarded APIs and proprietary user interface stuff that renders it all but unrecognizable to followers of the Catholic AT&T path." But lo, in the late 1980s, UNIX succumbed to the sins of venality, demanding too much money from the faithful and so, in 1991 Linus Torvalds nailed his famous source code release to the cathedral door and kicked off the Reformation. 'The Linux wars were brutal and unforgiving and Linux itself splintered into a myriad of fractious Protestant churches, from the Red Hat wearing Lutherans to the Ubuntu Baptists.' More recently, a deviant faith has sprung from Linux. 'Android is the Church of Latter Day Saints of UNIX: hard-working, sober, evangelizing the public, and growing at a ferocious rate. There are some strange fundamentalist Mormon Android churches living in walled communities under the banners of Samsung and Amazon, but for the most part the prosperous worship at the Church of Google.' Stross notes that as with all religion, those sects with most in common are the ones who hold the most vicious grudges against one another. 'Is that clear?'"

Comment Re:Local webapp (Score 1) 209

by IllusionalForce (#45499233) Attached to: Google Is Building a Chrome App-Based IDE

Another argument frequently used is portability; you just port the browser and all the web apps run, at least somewhat. Your examples, however, aren't all that convincing in that direction. While C# works somewhat with Mono on Linux and OS X (though the (Free)BSD port isn't actually officially part of Mono) when using WinForms, WPF is not supported and Mono has no plans to support it. C++ with Qt and/or Boost is reasonable, though there are some pitfalls here and there to watch out for. As for Delphi, I'm not sure how mature Kylix is and if it runs on the BSDs.

Generally, if you say portability is more than just x86 with Windows/OS X/Linux, you'll hit a brick wall really fast, and browsers are surprisingly frequently ported.

Submission + - How to start reading other's code?

Submitted by BorgeStrand
BorgeStrand writes: I'm reviving an open source project and need to read up on a lot of existing code written by others. What are your tricks for quickly getting to grips with code written by others? The project is written in C++ using several APIs which are unknown to me. I know embedded C pretty well, so both the syntax, the APIs and the general functionality are things I wish to explore before I can contribute to the project.
IBM

SCO v. IBM Is Officially Reopened 104

Posted by timothy from the living-dead-sequel dept.
stoilis writes "Groklaw reports that the SCO vs IBM case is officially reopened: 'The thing that makes predictions a bit murky is that there are some other motions, aside from the summary judgment motions, that were also not officially decided before SCO filed for bankruptcy that could, in SCO's perfect world, reopen certain matters. I believe they would have been denied, if the prior judge had had time to rule on them. Now? I don't know.'"

Submission + - SCO v. IBM Is Officially Reopened (groklaw.net)

Submitted by stoilis
stoilis writes: Groklaw reports that the SCO vs IBM case is officially reopenened: "The thing that makes predictions a bit murky is that there are some other motions, aside from the summary judgment motions, that were also not officially decided before SCO filed for bankruptcy that could, in SCO's perfect world, reopen certain matters. I believe they would have been denied, if the prior judge had had time to rule on them. Now? I don't know.".

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