Totally. Competition is the whetstone which sharpens these tools. Also, Chakra is aiming to run on more diverse platforms (think IoT, etc), so that's also good: encouraging V8 devs to step up their game.

It's the same reason I used to cheer on Opera and why I'm rather sad they just threw in the towel. Who's going to set the ACID benchmarks now? Especially as FF loses ground?

Competition is required for successful evolution (:

Whilst I applaud the effort (and welcome alternatives), Chakra isn't quite ready for prime-time on other platforms yet -- more specifically, node-chakra. What it does, it does blazingly fast -- outpacing the v8 core on 6.3.1 -- but there are some specific use-cases which just end in fail, and a commonly-occurring message about buffers not being used in an expected manner.

Next release maybe? V8 needs the competition and I'll gladly take whatever is tops out stability, then features, then speed. I'm not a brand-whore.

This was certainly the case with the state-owned Telkom in South Africa. Privatization of that particular behemoth led to better service and prices for consumers.

So there ya go! Proven (in my one, totally-proves-everything case (: )

Seriously though, I'd side with you mostly, but not in Africa where government is an infrastructure to facilitate back-scratching and palm-greasing, all the while conning the masses into voting for the same criminals over and over. It's taken South Africa over 2 decades to get to the point where the majority are starting to lose their trust in the criminals they voted in.

Hell YES.

I'm a dev. I'm not afraid of some shit breaking. The day that I'm afraid of shit breaking on machines which only affect me (and have no alternative plan!), I should quit being a dev. Because chances are, that shit broke because of me (:

But honestly, though, I use the Win10 fast ring on my work machine (and 1/2 the dual-boot at home). Updates at least once a week -- and the current builds boot mofo fast and are more responsive -- so I'm getting a pay-off.
If something goes super-south, I can always find respite on a secondary machine (my laptop, unused workstation at work) because the code is not isolated to my "primary" machines. My development environments are available on all machines that I can access (or can be installed trivially).
I also use nightly CM builds on my phone -- because, if worst comes to worst, I can restore (from Titanium Backup) onto a prior build which I can download at anytime; time cost: around an hour, of which only about 15 minutes actually requires my attention. Once again, I get a pay-off: my ancient i9300 is running the latest Marshmallow builds and hasn't been faster (or more secure).

The cry to avoid bleeding-edge OS builds because of security is faulty -- where do you think the security fixes happen first? Certainly, I get to see the fix commit logs when I update my Android device. I also get to see them in Win10 build logs. I don't have to bother for Debian because stable is normally patched quite quickly for security threats.

I don't install previews on my pre-schooler's gaming laptop -- because then I'd have to maintain it. I don't install a testing Linux distro on my home machine's Linux boot because that has to (reliably) keep my tv series up to date and no-one wants to face the wrath of the wife when we don't have the current series (and I have, thanks to some creative fuxing by Poettering. I used to run Ubuntu latest (and before that, Debian testing) when there weren't people hell-bent on breaking the fundamentals of the OS).

But on my machines -- hell yes.

Disclaimer: I am a complete Update Whore.

Can I now have a dark theme without needing a high-end GPU?

Because that was an unexpected requirement previously.

TFA seems to suggest that 32-bit compat is out too (by the suggestion to run 32-bit processes in containers / virtual machines).

If this is also the plan, they can take a long walk off a short pier. There are plenty of 32-bit images still out there (Steam games? Other stuff) which work just fine.

I've already ditched Ubuntu, going back to Debian simply because my system rotted through updates to the point where sound was a hit and miss affair. This just gives a solid reason not to care about Ubuntu any more. Pity, as it's "home-grown" for me )':

For a short 7 years if the reserve is all that it's cracked up to be and if consumption doesn't increase (ha! not a likely behaviour from our species).

Basically all functionality comes from extensions (even the 'built-in' functionality). And extensions *can* be written as 64-bit (https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/ricom/2016/01/04/64-bit-visual-studio-the-pro-64-argument/). So what's the big deal, fellas? The built-in extensions don't need the extra address space -- it's normally costly (but often helpful) extensions like R# that do. Even in a solution with > 100 projects, I wasn't even pushing a gig.

This is much ado about nuffin.

Boo-hoo, some people don't like show [X]

If a woman rated some "made for men, show boobies and do crass jokes" show as shit, that's her right to do so. For her, it IS shit. For a lot of men, so is Sex In The City. Or are you only allowed to air your opinion if the creator deems you worthy?

Retro-futuristic. It's a style that has worked successfully for many films and games. Perhaps the sub-conscious clash intrigues our primitive brains?

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.