Posts by Doctor Syntax 33104 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
systemd with faint praise
"My tongue was so far in my cheek when I made that post that I looked like a hamster. I quite enjoy the times he tells like it is."
OK, cheers, mate.
"Plus, from the sound of things, the systemd guy probably wouldn't take criticism well."
I'm not sure he sees it. I think he has a program to handle bug reports. It's called wontfixd.
b) Gnome gets replaced in its leading position and distributions no longer include it.
I don't think "Gnome (another fine RH project)" in an earlier comment was intended to be a compliment.
Also, lets not forget udev which will have to be replaced with eudev through
OK by me.
"Would those applications not work on a non-systemd installation?"
I run KDE on Debian LTS which is sysv. I have GTK2 and a number of GTX-based applications - gimp being one, of course. I see a few GTK3 libraries are also installed - gedit (3.4.2) needs at least one of them so they're quite happy without systemd. Would more recent GTK3 packages will work? Don't know.
Consistently broken (with each new release upstream, in other words, not "broken at all times") is kind of the norm in the Linux world. While MS goes to great lengths to keep Windows backwards compatible every which way, the various Linux projects regularly break APIs and backwards compatibility.
I don't think things are as bad as you say and certainly not as bad as they were; and I think it was libc6 that was responsible for a lot of problems about 2.x > 4.x times. There's also an issue with config files specifying a far newer version of library than is necessary - you can find a situation where config will throw out a number of complaints but the program's author has a downloadable binary that runs perfectly well on the same system that won't compile it from source.
What you miss is that a huge amount of stuff is packaged with the distro. You don't have to worry about applicationx from vendorx will fail because dependencyy has changed and vendorx, if they're at all bothered, will want ££s for an update - applicationx and dependancyy both come from the distro and if a dependency gets changed then the maintainers, at least for stable distros, recompile against it and fix breakages. If, however, you insist on running on the bleeding edge...
None of my comments apply to systemd-land, of course. That's just an attempt to bring the ?joys of Windows to Linux.
"The niche occupied by the mosquito larvae is not unique, it will be filled by other mosquito larvae species."
I wouldn't think that's the concern. What could be an issue is the Wolbachia and whether it could infect wild life, both other mosquitoes and organisms further up the food chain.
"The IETF should reflect that the Internet and the RFC process worked without any government involvement other than the original research grant"
Very true. So the problem now is that government involvement has become an impediment to allowing the IETF to meet in one place, that one place being the US.
"Trump Travel ban. Not only is it great alliteration"
No it isn't. Two out of three might not be bad but it's not alliteration either.
And it's vilified not because "it's warped into* Islamophobia" but because it has already shown itself to be capricious which makes it impossible to reliably ensure that the it makes it impossible to guarantee that those who need to attend the meeting will be able to do so.
* Is "into" the right word here? I'd thought "from" might have been more appropriate but I admit to not understanding what passes for Trump's thought processes.
"Hello, the blinds in my office aren't closing properly."
That raises a whole lot of possibilities for dealing with Microsoft support calling about problems with your windows:
"It keeps sticking and I can't open it properly"
"The double glazing's all misted up inside"
The only problem is they never seem to call me.
"There are some shops that require support staff to be in trousers/shirt/tie/nice shoes because it is what looks professional."
I had a short gig setting up a system at my client's customer's site. Client insisted on my wearing a suit to promote their professional image. This was in the middle of that English rarity, a heat wave. The customer had a more relaxed approach to their head office staff. There's something a little bizarre about wearing an increasingly crumpled suit in a meeting with the customer manager in T-shirt, shorts & sandals.
"Historians reckon the device was designed to calculate a variety of astronomical positions."
Was that one you intended?
Feynman, inevitably, had his own story about the Antikythera mechanism. Back in the days before the museum had realised just what they'd got he was visiting Athens and introduced to the director. Being Feynman of course the mechanism, stored somewhere in the reserve collection, was the one thing he asked about. The director couldn't understand why, given all the beautiful art objects he wanted to see some dirty old bit of metal junk.
We could do with a few here. For a start they could maybe do something about the fly-tipping that's the inevitable consequence of the council's restrictions on use of the recycling centres dumps. And I'd like them to have caught whoever opened the farm gate down the road the other day - I am not happy about having the bull wandering loose on the lane.
"2 out of 10 trains per week were late or cancelled."
You were lucky. I used to commute from High Wycombe back when the Chiltern line used DMUs. As far as I could make out the outbound trains ran on no schedule, but depended on them finding enough working units to make a train. For fun they also tended to despatch a stopping service before an alleged non-stopping service. The tracks where the latter might pass a stopped train in stations such as Wembley had been taken up so no chance there. Mentioning Wembley reminds me that there were no extra trains for the extra crowds when there was an evening match.
Then there was the occasion when for some reason, one train came up behind another, somewhere like Penn and the two trains were coupled together to make one which was too long for the platforms. After a long while stationary at Wycombe those of us in the rear coaches eventually opened the doors and jumped out.
Being relocated to a location where commuting by car was a big relief.
And you can have that all, provided you're prepared to carpet bomb every city in a country flat to implement it. that's the dirty little secret of most "utopias," they start with a destructive event on an epic scale.
Not necessarily although we've gone a long way to making that the only option. But let's stop the idea of building houses on "brownfield sites". Brownfield sites are sites where people used to be employed and often within walking distance of simple public transport distance of home. Step one would be to stop change of use of such sites as remain; developers would have to redevelop them as places of employment. Crafty use of business rates could encourage employers to move out of city centres to occupy them. This leaves some vacant space in buildings in the cities. Those spaces then get planning permission for change of use to residential for those who want to work in the remaining in-city businesses.
Draconian? Overblown? No more so than the decades of planning policy that brought about the present mess. Make no mistake about it, the situation we have now has been planned. Not intended but planned.
"Parking only works because many households don't own any sort of road vehicle at all; something that has been a basic planning assumption for centuries."
Going back centuries... We'll count horses as vehicles. Some houses had garages stables. No change there. The rest walked to work and were able to do so because work places and homes were close together. In medieval and early modern urban settlements they were often the same thing.
The transport problem arises because urban growth, exacerbated by post-war planning, has steadily increased the distance between home and workplaces. That's the underlying issue. Searching for better transport is solving the wrong problem.
Obligatory Dilbert http://dilbert.com/strip/1998-10-13
"You had a dozen walkways running in parallel where each successive 'track' ran faster than the previous, so you just walk across the tracks to one travelling at a reasonable speed for your length of journey, and then back down again when your stop was coming up."
How did they handle intersections?
There'll need to be some smart logic a lot of investment in cars lying idle most of the day in the system so that maximum numbers of vehicles are available and charged at times of peak demand, but this is scarcely conceptually difficult.
That's assuming "maximum numbers" means "enough to meet demand". A private motorist might be prepared to invest in a car that lies idle most of the time because the journeys they make in it are important enough to them to justify that. An investor is going to want RoI over a short enough period to make it worth while.
"No such thing as an overnight return on scotrail, fork out for two singles even though it's literally the same as a dayshift worker's "go into work and back" just with AM and PM reversed."
That's the easy one One way for the first night, day returns work-home-work for the rest of the period, single the other way for the last night.
"For travelling in en-masse with a few hundred other people who are all going from Specific Place A to Specific Place B, mass transit is perfect."
Unfortunately going from Specific Place A to Specific Place C by mass transit is unmitigated hell when mass transit only leaves A towards B which is diametrically opposite the direction to C. The journey from Specific Place B then goes by separate service to Specific Place D after a 40 minute wait and arrives there, assuming it's on time, with a 2 minute window to catch the next service, which runs at 15 minute intervals, to Specific Place C.
"Things like [Crossrail] start to make sense: 160m long trains, 30 trains per hour each carrying 1,500 people."
Fine if you want to travel from somewhere near a station on thing like Crossrail to somewhere near another station on same thing like Crossrail. If you want to travel to somewhere on another line sharing a station with the first line it gets less convenient. By the time you've made a couple of changes of line it gets distinctly unpleasant.
"Second flaw in argument: where is the space where all these night - time charging stations can be installed?"
Your vehicle is currently being charged in Didcot. It will be returned in 3 hours time and will have 3 miles usable range left after it has driven itself back to your address in East London.
"Let not even mention the power stations needed to generate all this extra electricity."
More pixie dust Unicorns on treadmills.
Why is it that when I read articles about how wonderful the future will be with all-electric/autonomous/both cars I start feeling as if I'm Dilbert having the PHB expounding the company's latest idea?
Sorry, access to the code is a necessary condition. No need for the "access" to be open to everybody
It's a statistical thing. The more eyeballs that can access it the greater probability that the right pair (or single eyeball, let's not be binocularist about this) will come along.
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