Posts by AdamWill 1645 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Nov 2010
"Overstreet's post is over 6,000 words long, but in The Reg FOSS desk's opinion, he does in fact make his case fairly well."
Um. Really? I disagree *heavily*.
As a general principle, I'd say that anyone who can't manage to make a simple apology for writing "Get your head examined. And get the fuck out of here with this shit." when asked to, but *can* bash out a 6000-word self-exculpatory blog post full of entirely irrelevant technical detail, is probably not someone I'd want to have to deal with at work.
If you do something jerkish, own up and say sorry, then move on. If you spend weeks or months, and thousands of words, on "actually I wasn't being a jerk but also I was right and lots of other people historically have been jerks so why am I being called out?! It's unfair! I'm the victim here!", um, that's a bit of a red flag for me.
Also:
"There's a big pool of free users on free products who get updates but no actual support, no guarantees"
You don't get "guarantees" of "support" for Ubuntu if you don't pay for it either, do you? I mean, just like Fedora, if it's broken, you get a 100% refund! If you need help, ask in the forum, and you might or might not get an answer.
If you want actual "support", you pay for it - https://ubuntu.com/support
Mandrake/iva already had this exact approach. It wasn't philosophically against anything non-F/OSS (in fact selling you non-F/OSS stuff was more or less the business model). It tried as much as possible to work on as wide a range of hardware as possible (ahh, the literal days I spent sifting through graphics card PCI IDs and wishing I had never been born) and be entirely GUI driven.
Of course, this being the early 2000s and the whole thing being run on a budget that might have bought *half* a shoestring in a liquidation sale, it didn't always succeed. But the idea was not new.
"The thing is that the paid-for-edition-which-funds-a-freebie thing still means there's a two-tier system: there are freeloaders, and there are Proper Users, the ones who paid for it, the real guys with the real product. Usually there is something else going on here, such as paid users get access to the support fora or something."
Well, sure, if you want to look at it that way, but...I didn't make any argument or claim about which approach is "better", that's not my point at all. My point was only ever frustration at Ubuntu acting like no kind of desktop Linux existed before they came along. If you want to argue that desktop Linux a rich guy gives you for free is "better" than desktop Linux with some kind of business model, sure, go ahead, but it's not an argument against my point, AFAICT.
I would just point out that the "rich guy gives it away for free" model has an obvious built-in flaw, which is that at some point the rich guy gets bored, or dies, or the big pile of money runs out. Canonical being a private company it is impossible to know a lot for certain about how this looks from the inside, but from where I'm sitting, it looks a lot like they've been cutting back on investment in the desktop side of Ubuntu for a while, and trying to come up with *some* kind of sustainable business model. There was a lot of noise about shopping it around to outside investors a few years ago, though I don't know where that went in the end, or if it's still going on.
(Liam knows this, but for anyone else following along, I now work for Red Hat, so am of course the furthest thing from an unbiased observer. Eat this comment with as large a pinch of salt as you like.)
"I did pay twice for Mandriva I think, but I think Mandrake and later always had free downloads too."
Yeah, to Liam's point about F/OSS principles, Mandrake/iva I think always (it's been a long time and we tried a lot of equally doomed business plans, there might have been some brief time when this wasn't true) had a "free" edition, which was 100% F/OSS across 3 CDs, and free of charge. The paid editions were more discs, but all the F/OSS stuff on them was available from online repos if you ran the Free edition. The only bits you were really *paying* for were proprietary things - principally NVIDIA drivers and other proprietary hardware drivers which were relevant at the time, also stuff like Flash (long time ago, like I said). I think the Free edition also came out (at least officially...) a bit later than the paid editions.
So Ubuntu didn't even really innovate giving away a F/OSS desktop distro for free. It innovated giving away one *with proprietary stuff in it* (especially the NVIDIA driver) for free. And mailing it to you if you didn't have the bandwidth to download it (another thing that was a consideration at the time).
But...the title of the blog post isn't "20 years of Free-As-In-Money Linux on the Desktop". It's "20 years of Linux on the Desktop". It starts out "Twenty years ago, I had an epiphany: Linux was ready for the desktop" and then tells a little story about how he'd go around with Debian and Knoppix CDs and all the problems he had trying to deploy a desktop using those, which makes an obvious implication that there was no better desktop Linux option available at the time. That paragraph concludes with "With GNOME 2.0, I felt that Linux was ready for the desktop. It was just really hard to install. And that could be fixed.", again implying that nobody else was already *doing* that. Which several of us were. The blog later says "When you have a good idea, it’s probably because this idea is already in the zeitgeist of the time", but then goes into a long story about UserLinux, as if that was the *only* other case of anyone else having the same "good idea" - again utterly failing to acknowledge that several companies had already been trying to make the same "good idea" work for several years at that point.
If the blog was about how 20 years ago he'd been fortunate enough to run into a guy with a giant pile of money who was willing to burn lots of it on giving desktop Linux away for free, I'd have no objections. That's essentially what you said in your comment, too. And hey, there are much *worse* things zillionaires could choose to use their giant piles of money for! On the whole, Mark doing that with his giant pile of money was good for a lot of people. I just wish they wouldn't constantly present it as if they invented desktop Linux from a blank slate in 2004, cos they didn't. They just - as you said - made it free. Using an approach nobody else could use, because nobody else had a giant pile of cash lying around, they all had to find *some* way to pay their workers.
(Also, insert 1990s diatribe about the different meanings of "free" here. The "free" in F/OSS is not "free as in cost". I disagree that making something available for zero dollars is a fundamental part of "the whole FOSS ethos".)
"The early years are described by Lionel Dricot in a blog post entitled 20 years of Linux on the Desktop"
....urgh.
As I never knowingly miss an opportunity to chew on these sour grapes: some pretty typical Ubuntu revisionism, there. Much as they'd like to pretend they invented Linux on the desktop, nope. There were plenty of desktop-focused Linuxes around long before Ubuntu. I worked for Mandrake. There was also SUSE (mainly aimed at the desktop at the time), Red Hat (which had been aimed at desktops for a while before and was in a sort of transitional phase at the time), Lycoris (yup, that was a thing) and probably some others I'm forgetting, it's been a while.
Ubuntu's primary innovation was to bring in a pile of money which was used for marketing and giving the product away for free. Everyone else had to charge money because, you know, they needed to figure out a way to pay people to work on it. Shuttleworth handily had a giant pile of money lying around, so he didn't have that problem.
Here's a random Mandrake 9.0 review from 2002 to make the point. Which was part of a week of "Linux on the desktop" reviews that also covered SUSE, Red Hat, Lycoris, and Libranet (which I'd entirely forgotten about). https://www.extremetech.com/archive/52240-review-mandrake-linux-90
No. In the many tournaments that already do this, the player can ask for the video to be played, just so they can watch a reconstructed ball hit or not hit a reconstructed line in the way the electronic voice based on the same reconstruction already said it did. They quite often do so, and you can analyze the psychology behind that at your leisure! (Sometimes they just do it to buy ten seconds to get their breath back).
I mean, we already know what the implementation is. Wimbledon has had it for years, it has just used a challenge system rather than using the ELC for all initial calls. Many other tournaments already use ELC for all calls, including the US and Australian Opens. There's nothing terribly novel here, it's just another tournament joining the list, albeit a big one.
Well, it's not replacing the umpire. It's replacing somewhere between six and nine line judges per court. The umpire is still there.
But no, it's not entirely about the money, ELC probably does cost more than humans indeed. Tournaments are going to ELC because it is substantially more accurate than humans, and players overwhelmingly like it because it removes what feels to them like a subjective, possibly-biased part of the game. They can just accept the 'objective' automated call and move on. Even if they think the robot maybe got it wrong, they don't feel like the robot might be unusually poor at its job or biased against them, because to them it feels like a robot. (There are actually quite a few humans behind the scenes in a typical ELC deployment, but the players don't see them standing on the court yelling "OUT", so it's not the same).
It's a bit late to get up in arms about this, since two slams (Australian and US Opens) and most other high-level tournaments already went to all-ELC anyway. So far just about nobody thinks it made things worse.
There *is* a money angle, but it's not the one you think: it's all about gambling, like everything in sports lately. See https://www.theverge.com/c/24225103/tennis-ai-electronic-line-calling-hawk-eye-sports-betting-gambling for a very deep and somewhat fascinating dive on that.
That's not how Hawkeye works, it's not trying to capture the split second of impact in a single frame from a single camera. It captures the entire flight of the ball (and the movements of the players) using multiple cameras, and determines from that exactly where the ball landed.
AFAIK, every test they've run has come out with ELC systems performing substantially better than humans. They are not perfect - Hawkeye's claimed margin of error is 2.2mm, independent researchers say it can sometimes be up to 10mm off - but humans are substantially *less* perfect. The numbers you figured out apply just as well to an extremely fallible human trying to see where the same 130mph serve landed from several feet away, with two eyes and one shot at it. They absolutely don't always get it right. Certainly not when it's within 10mm of the back of the line.
We do also *write* a lot of the free code in the first place. Then we "take" it, build it all, test it all against each other, and put it through about a zillion government/third party validations you need to have to deploy it anywhere serious. easy stuff, really!
https://www.redhat.com/en/about/open-source-program-office/contributions
"On the minus side is that VMM doesn't create or delete snapshots in the GUI itself"
Yes it does. The furthest right button on the toolbar, a picture of a monitor with the Play symbol in it, with the tooltip "Manage VM Snapshots".
If you don't have it, must be something off in your deployment, I guess, but it's there on a stock Fedora deployment.
It's a universal default, it doesn't depend on how big your disk is. We figured people like having more space, so long as it doesn't break anything. So far, it hasn't (we turned this feature on in F34 and I can't honestly recall a single bug related to it, amazingly enough).
Looking at the requirements, this likely doesn't count as one.
"A mass layoff is defined (under the WARN Act) as a situation where one of these criteria are filled:
500 employees: At least 500 employees lose their job during a 30-day period at a single employment site
50 employees: 50 employees are laid off (if the laid-off employees make up at least 1/3 of the workforce)
33% of the workforce: At least 33% of the workforce loses their jobs (excluding part-time employees) at a single employment site during a 30-day period."
seems fairly likely they're not laying off 500 people at any one site, or 33% of the workforce, and they definitely have more than 150 workers.
All the fully-automated systems in the world (including Skytrain) were designed to be such, though. It's much more complicated to retrofit an existing network to be fully-automated because of issues the OP mentioned, like the train and platform design. Skytrain stations are all dead straight and the platforms and trains were designed from the start so there is always no gap or height difference from the platform to the train. (And of course it's a closed-loop system with no interaction with any other train line and no grade crossings). Building a new system from scratch to be automated is a fairly simple thing at this point, that we know how to do and have done lots of times. Taking something like the original lines of the London or New York undergrounds and making them unattended would be harder.
The unique challenges for the shinkansen system, reading between the lines of the post, are all related to the bit where it *goes really fast*. That's where all the stuff about detecting unusual vibrations and things comes in.
the main practical limitation with drivers isn't cost, it's...drivers. if every train has to have a driver, it's very hard to run very frequent trains all the time (because not many people want to drive a train at 3am on a Sunday). with an automated system this is not a concern.
The mass transit rail system where I live is fully automated, which is a big reason why it can run very frequently (often every two or three minutes). if they had to find a driver for every train that would likely not be possible. the salary costs wouldn't be that much, it's more the sheer availability of people who want to do the (very boring, since you're not really doing anything) job.
"However, if that is so obvious, why nobody thought of that before? Shenanigans afoot. And compare to running VMs that can in theory already do that (or should be able to, upon the hypervisor itself?)."
Plenty of people have. Android phones have worked this way for several years, they have two separate boot chains, A and B. When you "install an update" it installs it to whichever is not currently active, then reboots to that one. If the boot is successful it then installs the same update to the first chain; if not, it rolls back to the first chain and removes the update from the other chain. See https://source.android.com/docs/core/ota/ab .
I'm in BC too. Our power is, indeed, very cheap. The numbers are a bit fuzzy because there's a lower rate for your first X units of power and a higher rate for units after that, and some misc fees slapped on top, but I paid C$120 for 1041kWh of power on my last bill, including all the random fees. That's 11.5 cents per kWh. The Reg is a historically British site, and a lot of the commenters are Brits; over there, the government artificially caps the price of electricity at 22.36 *pence* per kWh, which is 39.13 cents. They're paying nearly 4x as much as us.
Of course, it's somewhat tangential to the thread topic, which was solar and wind; our power is mainly hydro, which is extremely cheap on an ongoing basis but expensive up-front. We are currently benefiting from the outlays (and lax environmental and reconciliation policies) of our forebears. As power demands increase in the next few decades, and snowmelt flows to the existing dams decrease, we're going to have to pay more for power, one way or another.
It was fashionable to tout "too expensive" against wind and solar for a while, but awkward reality has mostly put the kibosh on those, since they both turn out to be *ridiculously* cheap.
Now the somewhat-sensible con is intermittency (which is why sensible folks are putting a lot of effort into storage tech) and the Ludicrous Orange Guy con (for wind) is "won't somebody, please, think about the birds?"
Well, see, it gets hard.
What if you install an NVIDIA card? What if you move your install to a system with an NVIDIA card? People hate it when we (distros, that is - I work on Fedora, but it's all the same) make installs not relocatable, but they also hate "bloat". So what's a distro to do?
There are a lot of tradeoffs like this. Quite a lot of space in modern distros is used by i18n-related stuff - fonts for displaying text in every script in the world, input methods for CJK languages, translations. You could 'save' a lot of space by making it impossible to read or type anything but ASCII US English. Is that "bloat" to an American who never reads anything but English? Maybe. Should we do that? Probably not. (Of course, these days these 'emoji' things are quite popular too).
"To be fair, a serious journalist should probably have known better than to sit down with Musk and expect the agreement to remain intact, yet the interview shows that while you can take a man out of CNN, it is considerably harder to take CNN out of a man."
I mean, of course he knew this.
He comes out ahead either way. Musk cans him - he gets a bunch of publicity and looks like a hero (current situation). Musk doesn't can him - he still looks like a hard-talking interviewer, and he still has a deal for his show.
There really wasn't a downside for Lemon anywhere in this. He knew what he was doing.
There is absolutely nothing anywhere in anything to do with Fedora where we claim to be "a unix-alike OS".
https://www.google.com/search?q=unix+site%253Afedoraproject.org
https://www.google.com/search?q=unix+site%253Afedoraproject.org/docs
https://www.google.com/search?q=unix+site%253Afedoraproject.org/wiki
fedoraproject.org says Fedora is "An innovative platform for hardware, clouds, and containers, built with love by you."
Writing that page is pretty difficult anyway because there's so many different...Fedoras. The "minimum spec" for a minimal console install is nothing like the minimum spec for a GNOME desktop install. But you can't really write a five page long doc covering all the options. So...it winds up being a bit of a compromise.
"Vast majority" is probably a bit of an overstatement. If you have a clean blank drive to use (or one you don't mind getting wiped), great. (really, I mean that: great. This is absolutely how you should install any OS if you possibly can.) Anything else starts to get a bit more complex. Lots of people want to install alongside Windows, or another Linux distribution. Some people have strong opinions about what partition layout they want (imagine that, El Reg readers - people with strong opinions!)
Yes. This is *absolutely* the hardest part.
I think everyone working on installers for every distribution would agree there is no good partitioning interface. Partitioning is a nightmare and nobody knows what the hell a biosboot partition is. All you can do is try to mitigate the pain a bit (or, yes, turn it into a "PICK A DRIVE FOR ME TO EAT WHOLE" operation).
Yeah. As soon as I read "The bank experiment examined what effect Copilot has on: Developer sentiment and productivity, as well as code quality and security. It required participating software engineers, cloud engineers, and data engineers to tackle six algorithmic coding challenges per week using Python. Those in the control group were not allowed to use Copilot but were allowed to search the internet or use Stack Overflow" I went into full rolleyes mode.
Software engineering is not algorithmic coding challenges. You are proving nothing with "studies" which just involve artificial scenarios that are extremely amenable to LLM training, but of very limited usefulness for your bottom line.
"It should also be noted that the vast majority of homes in cities in the UK cannot use individual heat pumps due to lack of space and/or noise from the fan units."
Er. Wot?
Have you ever been to literally anywhere in Asia? Or looked at a picture, even? Like this one, in Taipei?
https://www.alamy.com/taipei-taiwan-march-31-2018-the-exterior-of-a-weathered-apartment-building-in-the-city-of-taipei-taiwan-image337579264.html
Those are all heat pumps. If you can dangle hundreds of the things off a high rise building, I think we can work out attaching them to ground-level terraces.
Actually, I live in what is more or less a terrace - a townhouse - in Canada. So I can just tell you. My heat pump sits right outside the front wall, under the front room window. The pipes run up the wall, just like drainpipes. You can barely hear it from two feet away unless it's colder than -10 in winter or hotter than +35 in summer.
There's a good theory on this in another story I read on it: this isn't really a story about powertrain technology, it's a story about car manufacturers.
If you look at the overall reliability chart by manufacturer, there are some strong correlations. The most reliable manufacturers do not, yet, make a lot of EVs or even PHEVs. But they *do* make a lot of mild hybrids.
OTOH, the manufacturers that *do* make a lot of EVs and PHEVs seems to be the ones that just just generally suck at making reliable cars.
Or to put it another way: when Toyota et. al. start making more EVs and PHEVs, these results are likely to change.
The struggle is real, indeed, but the fix is not automatically "oh well, everyone work in offices forever".
If you try a new thing, encounter a problem and immediately go back to the old thing, you'll never move forward. Before giving up and going back to the old way, you need to look at ways to fix the problems you ran into. Onboarding is difficult if you just try and make it work exactly the way it worked before, only over Zoom? Okay, then that needs fixing. Fix the documentation! That will help out with much more than just onboarding. It's a perennial problem that nobody sees updating docs as important enough for it to get done - well, now it's more important, right? So get it done. Training videos suck? Well, make better ones. As an old codger (I'm 41, that counts, right?) I firmly believe this generation spends all its time glued to Tiktok and Youtube anyway, so it's not like the concept of "watching videos" is inherently a problem, right? Seems more likely the problem is "the videos suck".
Discussions between multiple employees on video chats are indeed generally terrible - so don't use video chats for casual discussions. Use chat. Again, it's not like people are against group chats, is it? We appear to voluntarily spend hours of our lives hanging out in them. Doesn't seem like doing this at work as well should be an insuperable problem. Heck, maybe some folks would like to use audio chats - chat systems all support those, these days. Both text and audio chat are much better than video chat for casual, unscheduled, and ongoing chatter because the social expectations around them are different: on a video call everybody expects everyone else to be 100% focused on that call, ideally staring at the camera all the time. This isn't how you behave when you're sitting with other people in an office, so it can't replace that experience. Group chats are much *more* like sitting with other people in an office in a lot of ways.
And heck, if you try all that and still find onboarding works better in person - then *do onboarding in person*. This is what my company does even for people who will subsequently work remotely - you go to an office for a week of onboarding that all happens in person, in a cross-functional group. The company can require some more experienced folks from your departments to be there to do the 'folk wisdom' stuff. It's much better to have to take a shift helping out onboarding for a group of new folks every so often than to be expected to be in the office three days a week forever just 'cuz.
I've worked fully remote for nearly 15 years now. It works fine because the work environment is set up to expect and handle this (because folks are very spread out geographically anyhow, even the ones in offices). We use chat systems for casual chatter. We use ticket systems for tracking work. We have in-person onboarding for new folks, and regular conferences for everyone to get in-person energy and the whole "new ideas to work on" thing. There isn't just a binary choice between "everyone comes into the office all the time" and "everyone sits in their house on video calls all the time".
If you get stuck with a company that doesn't want to make an effort to make remote work actually, you know, *work*, that indeed sucks. But it doesn't mean the concept is doomed.
"'Zoom fatigue is real,' says bigwig"
I think you missed a bit, there. Here, let me fix it:
"'Zoom fatigue is real,' says bigwig who can afford to live as close as he likes to the office and be chauffeured there every day"
The opinions of his underlings on Zoom fatigue vs. office fatigue were, unsurprisingly, not solicited.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
