Re: The brain
Did the cat answer?
782 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
It'd ne fair to say most Windows & Apple users are only interested in the applications. I don't think that is accurate of most Linux users. A lot of Linux users are shepherding servers and thus really actually do care about the init system and daemon MGMT and networking MGMT and so on. A lot of desktop Linux users are interested in the guts of the system.
On the face of it, guy, if Linux users really just care about applications then why are Linux users opinionated about the part of the system you think they don't care about. If they did not have to interact with it they would not care. You know, nobody gets hot under the collar about fstab... except when systemd raises it's head by being unable to figure out that changes have been made to it.
Distro makers like it as it is fairly turn-key.
Also, one of the major desktops - Gnome IIRC - hooked systemd code, direct link level library dependency. I think this has been rolled back but for quite a while you could not ship Gnome without also shipping systemd. So that kind of made it hard to not ship systemd.
Poettering was quoted years ago as saying his intent was to replace the Linux kernel by surrounding it with the entire init system and then burrowing in (very loose paraphrase). I think the time has come for him to put up or fuck off. Release an OS and leave UNIX to it's "primitive outdated stupid philosophy" and it's shell scripts, and free Linux from this systemd cruft.
Systemd is the product of a grudge Poetering seems to hold against Linus because Linus told Poetering to be consistent and improve his code quality. So we are saddled with an init system that expresses P's desire to destroy L, but which P does not appear to have the talent to actually push over the edge into being a kernel. It's more than an init system and it is less than an OS and it is slowly borging user space.
Many new init systems keep the script philosophy - just imagine! being able to just read what the system is doing - but use hard to read languages. Guile - FFS. ((Can (0)((((((()(())()())()actually)))read ((a(ny) of)this)?
What ever happened to Python?
We have laws governing extradition. It is not the case that Trump says "grab that woman and send her to me" and we do it no questions asked.
We should arrange her release though, because the Americans had 4 years already to make their case and that's long enough. Trump used her as a tool to push a wedge between Canada and China: he did not want us making a diplomatic deals (especially a trade deal) with China because that would call into question his claims of being a great deal maker.
It took me years to warm up to this language. It was difficult to accept indentation-as-syntax. Once I did, it became one of my two go-to languages (C++ being the other). Prior to accepting Python if I needed to prototype an idea or write a moderately complex script I would use PHP CLI, which remains a good scripting language IMO.
But whois often does not contain useful information for a given IP or domain. Otoh it seems to be used as a source of cold leads for hordes of Indian web dev shops.
I don't think the latter is a good reason to start hiding info: let's hope the former improves with the new scheme.
IDK about this being a huge issue qua security hole.
If a server's BMC is accessible from the public Internet then the server's owner has worse problems than what are described in this article.
This seems like some of the "holes" described last year where the attacker has to achieve root level access to a box to exploit. If an attacker has root on your box then how likely are they to exploit obscure holes rather than just do bad stuff, stop syslog, clean up the logs and restart syslog?
Same thing, except it was in person. I was doing Novell & NT4 sysadmin in a biz school in Canada. This one guy - the executive director of an institute consisting of a single professor and an executive director - would always ask me how to do MS Office crap and of course I'd no idea about MS Office. But one time he asked me a Photoshop question and I did know something about Photoshop. I looked, he was trying to flood fill some space in a poster, and I asked him to click the paint bucket icon; for some damned reason he reached over and clicked the power switch on the PC to "Off", and looked up at me all doe-eyed and expectant. I just turned on my heel and left the room.
BTW @Editors - I like the nested comment scheme.