405 karma · joined July 22, 2015
My experience managing many different flavors of *nix has been that the GNU utils are far superior, so I don’t understand wanting to replace them.
My first guess is this is targeted at embedded use, but that’s pure conjecture.
I mean what's the alternative, silence? For all we know, there may have been additional private communication and if there was I'm pretty sure it's none of our business.
And they quickly reveal their bad faith, at which point they can safely be ignored.
Or, if you don't feel like discussing it, it's easy enough to say "I don't know about that, but the anti-vaccine stuff sounds like lies to scare people so I decided to trust my doctor."
If honest questions are met with hostility, while the anti-vaxxers are friendly and "helpful", guess who's going to be more influential?
Instead of singling out a single person, I think it's more accurate to say the security community in general dropped the ball by not bringing concerns earlier to the maintainer who performed the merge(s).
But after reading Douglas Adam’s, I’m personally hesitant to read unpublished item from any other authors. After finishing The Salmon of Doubt I felt vaguely embarrassed, like I’d barged into his house and found him relaxing on the couch in his boxers. I’m a fan, not a scholar, and there were reasons he wasn’t ready to share the material yet.
I'd compare "Java as solution to everything" to the more recent "web scale" and "NoSQL" crazes, but with the backing of a PR firm instead of Internet echo chambers.
Do you include git SHAs in your bug tracking system? Or perhaps your department wiki links to a specific commit to document lessons learned? Maybe you're using Sentry and find including the git SHA of the build to be invaluable for troubleshooting?
For some organizations, rewriting history would be a non-event and for others it would be a major disruption.
In my judgement, he has done marginally more good than harm. Under his leadership the FSF has had only limited impact. Mirroring his own behavior, it has instead often wasted money and good will tilting at windmills instead of of effecting change.
I support the ideals of software freedom, but I do not support the FSF or Richard Stallman. He was key to getting the ball rolling decades ago, but has mostly been a distraction and impediment since then. Other projects, such as Debian and Mozilla, have made far larger contributions over the past couple decades.
If you’d like to hear a lawyer read and comment on their complaint, I recommend https://youtu.be/FL7r-Nt5j50
When I started using Linux a couple decades ago, "we ship when it's ready" was the dominant FOSS approach, and I thought it was the most sensible approach.
Then I got my first job and experienced the realities of enterprise support and planning. Today I wish more projects were as predictable as Ubuntu, and I'm gratefully for every one that is.
Ubuntu is far from my favorite distro technically, but the predictability of its LTS releases makes it my recommendation for most uses.
Updating a personal server every 6 months may be easy, but in a mature business it often makes sense to wait 5 years or more before upgrading certain infrastructure so that time and effort can be invested in other areas instead.
Don't discount Nadella's political astuteness. I think it would be more accurate to say he is not merely politically astute, but instead able to combine his skill at internal politics with customer empathy and technical intelligence.
Rewriting in a more efficient language might seem even cheaper, but you have to factor in risk and opportunity cost. At some point it does become smarter to rewrite, but your app needs to be pretty simple or your server bill pretty huge before it’s actually the best option.
I observed the same thing in a different context in my previous gig doing Linux training. We strived to make our books as clear and simple as possible. When we discovered streps in our labs that confused students, we would rewrite them to avoid repeating the problem in future classes. Eventually I started noticing a tipping point where if the lab did too much hand holding students would disengage mentally and start having more problems instead of fewer.
I’ve tried sharing this insight with the UX designers at my current gig, but for some reason they’re skeptical when I suggest making our UI harder for customers to use. ;-)
I love that with Erlang I can throw an experimental app on Digital Ocean for just $5/mo and see if it gets traction. How much more resource intensive is Orleans and what kind of resource usage should I expect as I scale up the number of actors?
Or at least how often my peers do that. Obviously all of my systems and code are perfect.
I would be much more upset to find out a governemnt employ on a deadline used Google Sheets or Airtable to share my medical data instead of an Excel doc on a secure government file server.
"Anti-competitive" is a matter for courts to decide. Epic could have taken Apple to court without violating Apple's ToS, but they decided to use their fans as leverage in hopes of forcing Apple into an agreement faster than the traditionally slow legal system.
"Draconian" is an inflammatory label a reasonable person could easily dismiss.
"Victim" depends on whether Apple's ToS are actually anti-competitive. Reasonable people can make arguments to support either position, which is why we have a legally system to resolve conflicts like this. Only time will tell which is legally true.
Until then, it's just as true that Epic is an irresponsible aggressor abusing their fans in the hopes of gaining leverage in a negotiation.
It's hard to feel bad for either company, only the fans deserve sympathy, but I don't see how any reasonable person could claim that Epic couldn't foresee the consequence of their strategy.
Sadly, this feels more like Trump’s perverse “everything Obama did was bad so I’ll do the opposite” logic, instead of acknowledging that Edward Snowden made a difficult choice to protect our republic.