Posts by AdamWill 1612 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Nov 2010
This isn't really a change for Fedora at all - so far as RHEL is concerned, Fedora has *always* been the "far upstream", and that's not changing in any way. (With a Fedora hat on, Fedora is certainly not *just* RHEL's far upstream, but *if you're thinking from a RHEL perspective*, that's what it is to RHEL).
So far as CentOS is concerned, sure, that's a valid question. I've seen some answers to it internally but I dunno if I'm allowed to post them publicly so I'll hold off.
Sure, it's still a change, and whether it makes sense to use the CentOS name for this thing is a legitimate question. I just wanted to highlight there's a substantial delta between CentOS Streams and Fedora. As far as RHEL is concerned they serve different purposes, and will rarely be similar at all.
So since yesterday I found out (from https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/faq-centos-stream-updates#Q6) that we'll actually have one CentOS Stream per stable RHEL branch - there won't be just one. Right now only CentOS Stream 8 exists, but from Q2 2021, CentOS Stream 9 will also exist. Basically as long as a RHEL release is in active support (until 5 years from release), development for it will be done in a numbered "CentOS Stream X" branch. If you're on CentOS Stream 8 when CentOS Stream 9 appears, you don't get kicked over, or anything, you can stay on 8.
If you think about it, though, it should be clear the CentOS Stream branches will usually be quite a way "behind" Fedora, in general terms. Right when RHEL X forks from Fedora, that CentOS Stream X branch will obviously be very similar...but then Fedora will roll along keeping up with stuff while that CentOS Stream X branch will stabilize. CentOS Stream will be where release stabilization and minor release development happen - going from fork to .0, and then from .0 to .1, .1 to .2 and so on. Major feature development won't be happening in CentOS Stream branches. It's just the same as RHEL stable branches today, really - if you think what's in RHEL 8.3 and what you'd expect to be in RHEL 8.4, it's "behind" current Fedora in most ways, for instance. CentOS Stream 8 is where those bits that will make up 8.4 are going. So it's a "development" branch in that sense, but the kinds of development being done there are the changes you get between minor stable releases of RHEL. Not the kinds of changes that go into Fedora Rawhide.
FWIW, the official line on this (mmcgrath, who is more or less in charge of this whole thing, has stated it on LWN, so I think I'm OK to state it here too) is that we don't object to clones existing. We apparently (I work for RH, but definitely am not in charge of this whole thing) decided that *owning* one wasn't such a great idea any more, but we do expect that others will (re-)emerge and are not intending to try and stop that or anything. We're just not letting any of them be called CentOS.
CentOS Stream isn't "not quite Fedora", it's something pretty different (though obviously we haven't explained this very well).
CentOS Stream isn't the development branch for RHEL in the sense that "right now, it's getting stuff destined for RHEL 9". It's where development on *current stable RHEL* happens. So right now, the latest RHEL release is 8.3; CentOS stream is where the bits that will make up RHEL 8.4 are landing.
When RHEL 9 forks from Fedora, CentOS Stream will be where development on RHEL 9.1, 9.2 etc. happen.
tl;dr: they're both "development", but at much different parts of the cycle, and Fedora is much further ahead.
"Wrapping up, the ASA said that although it recognised the intention was merely to talk up features of black cabs that "might be particularly attractive to consumers in the context of COVID-19", because it could not be guaranteed that riders would be "over" two metres nor "completely separated from the driver", the ad was deemed to exaggerate its coronavirus-stymying properties."
i.e., "yes, we get you were sort of just trying to push a warm fuzzy feeling, but the actual things you said are not, in point of fact, strictly true, and that's sort of the thing we're here to deal with, so."
"there's a simple process to remove offensive names"
yes, it's called "use a standardized format based on essentially random numerical strings, which are almost impossibly unlikely to cause any such issues". Which is what we do already. So let's just ditch this whole nonsensical idea and stick with CVE-YYYY-NNNN...
Cute names only work when there are only a few of them. Heck, Ubuntu's only up to what, 35 or so? And most non-ubuntu-fanatics can't remember most of those. No-one's going to use and remember "cute" names for *every* vuln.
You can do that on Fedora, but it's not a very good idea. (On SUSE *or* Fedora). You should at least run the command from a screen or tmux instance running *outside* of your desktop environment, so the chances of the environment the upgrade is running in being crashed by the upgrade process are lower.
Still, it seems the concern people have is not really about the upgrade process itself but about the impact of any changes introduced by the upgrade. Which is a perfectly reasonable concern. If you prefer an OS with a slower pace of change, that's a good reason not to use Fedora (or one of the faster-moving SUSE editions).
"Even Red Hat says Fedora is and will be a beta version of RedHat"
We do not say that, and it is not that.
"and every upgrade/update *will break things*."
We don't say that either. Of course *sometimes* *something* will break on an update or upgrade. This is true of all general purpose operating systems. We do not say all updates or upgrades "will break things" because it is not true, they do not.
Well, I mean, it's kind of a spectrum. Or a set of overlapping spectrums.
It's true we couldn't test a room full of hardware on our current release schedule. But then we also probably couldn't test it if we released every two years, either. There's a *lot* of hardware. We have like a dozen paid QA folks and maybe the equivalent in volunteer person-hours. We'd probably need till the heat death of the universe to test all combinations of hardware.
Ditto for "software combinations". There are thousands of SRPMs that make up Fedora. Just the possible combinations of those packages are effectively infinite - never mind the confounding factors of configuration and what you actually do with them.
If you spend much time thinking about this, like QA people do, the conclusion you tend to come to is that it's a miracle that anything works as well as it does. And there's kind of less difference than you might think between a six month release cycle and a two year one, in terms of what it's possible to test as a percentage of all the things that possibly *could* be tested: the answer is "infinitesimally small" either way.
Realistically, the only way you can really 'comprehensively' test software is to have that piece of software be very small and be required to do only a small and very clearly defined set of operations. This is how you do things when you *really really really need* the software to be reliable. Like when it's running a plane or a dam or a spacecraft, for instance. But you can't do this for general purpose operating systems, because they're...well...general purpose.
So yeah, stuff breaks. Fedora sure does. And so does RHEL, and macOS, and Windows, and Ubuntu, and SUSE. They *all* break. They're all in a perpetual state of some stuff being broken. It's not practically possible to achieve any other state, really.
I don't honestly think any given Fedora release would be substantially more "stable", in the sense you mean, if we went to a one year or two year release cycle. We don't run out of time to test the stuff we test, these days, and we haven't for some time. What would make Fedora more "stable" would be to slow down the pace of changing bits of it and adopting new things, but then it wouldn't be Fedora any more. And indeed if that's not what you want, you shouldn't run it; there are, as you note, other choices.
"For all I know Fedora may be have a far more rigorous release process now"
I mean, we've had a fairly rigorous release process for years, but I'm not gonna lie, we do not have a giant warehouse full of every webcam model known to man which we rigorously test on every release, no. I cannot undertake to guarantee your random webcam will work on every upgrade. Sorry :)
"Fedora - I don't want to have to upgrade every year"
Out of curiosity: why not? I mean, I'm obviously biased (I'm the QA lead for Fedora) but these days a typical Fedora desktop version upgrade barely takes longer or is any more disruptive than a regular system update. Have you had bad experiences with upgrades?
For me it's not even the length; the crucial thing is that Quibi was trying to do "high quality" video, by which they mostly meant sort of "TV-lite" or "movie-lite" stuff, with some kind of structure. The problem with that is, if I'm killing a few minutes in a queue or waiting for a bus or something, I don't want to watch something that requires me to pay full attention for ten or even five minutes, and is negatively affected by me having to stop watching it after three minutes. Because that's what happens in queues. Sometimes they move faster than you expected. You have to pay attention to what's going on around you.
Structure-light stuff like Youtube and Tiktok videos are ideal for that. You can play one and half pay attention to it while also keeping an eye on the queue and deciding what you want to drink. If you get to the front in three minutes you just pause it or forget about it. You can't really do that with a ten minute mini-movie or mini-house-flipping-show or whatever that has a structure that really wants you to watch and pay attention to all of those ten minutes of Content. For me that was always the issue with this whole idea.
"It wasn't particularly sensible to use the name 'The Real Facebook Oversight Board'. While I can sympathise with the intent, it is rather difficult to defend yourself against an assertion of 'passing off'."
AIUI, this kind of parodic / protest use is already *specifically* allowed and protected under the relevant laws.
I mean, that's not a magic incantation. That's just the documented way to run a system upgrade. Of course we aren't going to try and convert your filesystems silently during an upgrade, we're not insane.
If you're doing a fresh install and you don't want btrfs, just use custom partitioning and pick something else. Still no magic incantations needed...
Up front: I work for Red Hat on Fedora - I lead the QA team.
Just wanted to emphasize something on the btrfs front: btrfs being default (for desktop spins, *not* Server especially) for new installs in Fedora 33 does not at all imply this will happen in RHEL. *Some* things that happen in Fedora are definitely driven by RH folks and you can look at them as things that are likely to land in RHEL later if they work out well. But not *everything* that happens in Fedora is like that. As Mike is quoted as saying, the btrfs Change was driven by "the community", i.e. not by anyone at RH in an official capacity. Specifically the main folks behind it are Josef Bacik, Chris Murphy and Neal Gompa - this isn't a secret, the names are right there on https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/BtrfsByDefault - none of whom works for RH. The RHEL storage folks are still focused on the same strategy as they have been for a while.
Still, the change seems to be working out fine so far. Honestly, better than I expected, I was expecting fireworks. :P
I'm not a lawyer or an accountant, but:
1. This is an international site. Not everyone reading here is in the UK. I'm in Canada, for instance. There are lots of Americans here too, and the IRS is notoriously...grabby.
2. It's not just about you paying your income tax. Various taxes your employer pays or credits they claim might depend on your physical location or tax residence (which, as you note, aren't the same thing).
3. Your employer might have rules and policies that, while they aren't laws, you're still going to have to consider. Mine, for instance, only allows you to work from another country while getting paid at the scale for your "home" country for two years. After that your pay gets changed to scale for whatever the new country is, which if you're in the Caribbean is going to be "lots lower", most likely. And if you don't tell them you moved, you're in trouble.
I'm not saying anyone shouldn't do it, I'm just saying it's not as simple as "get visa then bog off to beachside paradise". You're at least going to want to tell your employer about it first, and yes, they *can* raise hell if you do it without agreeing it with them, unless it's somehow written into your contract that you can do it.
Sure there is!
However, it involves taxing the money from the people who saved it - well-paid workers, upper management, and companies themselves - and giving it to the people who lost out.
Now, go check out the results of the last several elections and consider the likelihood of this actually happening.
"And before people start with the conspiracy theories that this is government tech gone wrong, LAX is about 100 miles from Edwards Air Force Base, 160 miles from Vandenberg Air Force Base, and 270 miles from Area 51 – and all would likely be well outside the range any wearable flying device would be able to travel."
Well, that's all *you* know...
That's not what they "suggested", though. They "suggested" that as long as the division of childcare and other domestic work is documented to be substantially unequal at a national scale, the legal point that scheduling work events outside of contracted work hours has the effect of indirect gender discrimination holds.
This has nothing to do with anybody "judging" you or your partner.
1. $20bn? Twenty freaking billion dollars?
2. How do you even buy "the US operations" of a determinedly international social network? What *are* the "US operations"? Does the network split into a US one and an international one? This whole "US operations" thing keeps getting mentioned like it's a perfectly reasonable concept, but I'm yet to read a convincing explanation of what it's actually going to *mean*.
3. Microsoft and...Wal-Mart for some reason? What?
4. A 'profit-sharing' deal? Does TikTok actually make any profits? I thought the answer was no.
Plus, you know, it's important to keep a sense of perspective about just how terrible the consequences of so-called 'cancel culture' are.
I'm familiar with some of the specific examples that open letter cited and I do think a few of them could've been handled better. Sure. But, you know, perspective. A handful of generally extremely privileged white people got punished kinda clumsily for pretty minor alleged transgressions. This is a bit regrettable, yeah. AFAIK, most or all of them 'fell' immediately into similarly cushy and privileged jobs to the ones they had before.
This is hardly the worst human tragedy of our times.
For most people, the alleged evils of cancel culture don't even amount to this, they amount to "some people were mean to me on Twitter", which, you know, again, perspective. Some people have been way meaner to JK Rowling on Twitter than she really deserves (and that whole newspaper front page thing was a really bad idea on someone's part), but she has not been 'cancelled' in any practical way. She still has a giant platform to say whatever she thinks. She still has multiple publishing contracts. She's still, AFAIK, working on multiple major movies that are coming out in future. She's not exactly been banished from society, has she? Ditto Atwood, Chomsky and co - they all don't exactly seem to have any trouble getting their perspective in the news any time they feel like doing it...
What I like is that the branding company cunningly built obsolescence into the new name. In five years they'll be back to get paid another eye-wateringly large sum of money to change it to "Rackspace Solutions".
"Have you ever tried to play a Blu-Ray DVD in Linux or *BSD? What about streaming 4K Video from Amazon? How about playing "The Division" or "Mount and Blade 2: Bannerlord" or "Destiny 2"? All of these will required breaking the T&C's to work, if they work at all."
Sure, but none of them are things you need to do (or ought to be doing, if your employer is paying...unless you work for a game developer...) on a professional workstation.
I dunno, I used to care about that stuff a lot more, but a decent blu-ray player costs like a hundred bucks, and everyone streams movies these days anyway, don't they? Plus a PS4 plays blurays just fine. Plus it or just about any cellphone can stream video fine. I gave up worrying about whether I can play movies or games on my desktop/laptop computers, oh, I dunno, a decade ago or so. I have other things for doing that.
"You must be Barking and Dagenham, the east London borough"
You could just say "you must be Dagenham", which is already (fairly obscure) slang for "completely mad". The (possibly apocryphal) story is that it was a nickname of Margaret Thatcher's, because Dagenham is two stops on from Barking...
to be a bit fair here: the 'smart' functionality of all the 'smart' appliances I've seen so far has been basically bolt-on extras. My fridge has some 'smart' features, so does my washing machine, so does my range. I haven't set any of them up or ever actually connected them to the internet and they still cool things, wash things, and burn the eggs (respectively) perfectly well, so far.
The price points cited also seem kinda misleading because, in general, 'smart' features go along with other upgrades. There isn't usually a choice between two models with identical features otherwise, but with/without an internet connection; the model with 'smart' features likely also has several other upgrades over the model without.
I believe your objection is covered under "5. I personally only ever need to fly to New Zealand non stop with an entourage of 500 people and my race horses."
Magnix is based in the Pacific Northwest, and is working with small local air carriers. The geography of the Pacific Northwest is such that we have quite a lot of small planes doing short runs with a small number of passengers and very limited luggage. Vancouver to Victoria, for instance, is a 30 minute flight which Harbour Air runs with 19-passenger seaplanes:
https://www.harbourair.com/about/aircraft-fleet/
they run various other short flights out of Vancouver and up the coast, and there are similar operators down in Portland and Oregon running similar short flights with small planes.
Those are exactly the operations that Magnix is targeting. Their goal is not to fly a 747 at full load for several hours.
They are already working on this, but you have to jump through a *ton* more regulatory hoops to fly a brand new plane design with batteries than you do to fly an existing, extremely-well tested plane with the power source changed out. They're doing these tests with retrofitted existing planes to work on what they can until all the relevant approvals are in place for the planned purpose-built electric plane models. And to get a bit of publicity, of course.
"Finally and definitively, NASA boffins call it duct tape and it saved Apollo 13. As boffin Ed Smylie, who designed the CO2 scrubber mod, said "One thing a Southern boy will never say is, 'I don't think duct tape will fix it.'""
Unless that quote was written down, you can't tell what spelling the boffin in question would have used, because spoken aloud "duct tape" and "duck tape" tend to sound exactly the same (you can't presume that anyone who thinks of it as "duct tape" will carefully pronounce that final t). So what you're getting is the spelling of the journalist who wrote down the quote, not the spelling of the person who said it.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
