I felt getting ripped off by just reading the article. My recent PC build has 32 GB, is cheaper and the upgrade to 64 GB (meaning additional pair of 16 GB) only costs me around 100 Euros. It's nice that their devices are probably more effective and need less RAM, which the iPhones proved to be correct. But that does not mean the cost of the additional RAM units are more expensive. Apple chose to make them expensive.
Sure thing…now GPL/Creative Commons all your code involved in any way for your models, documentation, parameters, data sets, and allow full unlimited integration and modification by any parties to any portion of it.
tl;dr the author never actually gets to the point stated in the title about what the “problem” is with the direction of Linux and/or how knowing the history of UNIX would allegedly solve this. The author mainly goes off on a tangent listing out every UNIX and POSIX system in their history of UNIX.
If I understand correctly, the author sort of backs into the argument that, because certain Chinese distros like Huawei EulerOS and Inspur K/UX were UNIX-certified by Open Group, Linux therefore is a UNIX and not merely UNIX-like. The author seems to be indirectly implying that all of Linux therefore needs to be made fully UNIX-compatible at a native level and not just via translation layers.
Towards the end, the author points out that Wayland doesn’t comply with UNIX principles because the graphics stack does not follow the “everything is a file” principle, despite previously admitting that basically no graphics stack, like X11 or MacOS’s graphics stack, has ever done this.
Help me out if I am missing something, but all of this fails to articulate why any of this is a “problem” which will lead to some kind of dead-end for Linux or why making all parts of Linux UNIX-compatible would be helpful or preferable. The author seems to assume out of hand that making systems UNIX-compatible is an end unto itself.
Im very interested in an officially supported linux phone, however the fitmware seems not to be upstream(yet?). I hope it will be upstreamed, or else were back to square one with linux mobile hardware support if they stop working on it!
Hong Kong only recently became part of China. (This was not correct, it became part of China in 1997). I’m sure the protests are fresh in people’s minds still. If anywhere would want private phones it would be HK.
China didn’t “conquer” anything. They had an agreement that would keep them independent until a certain date and that date passed. So HK now belongs to China, as was agreed.
I was a little misinformed, it turns out HK has belonged to China since 1997, and the recent protests were just because of some policy changes that make China’s influence stronger in regards to their ability to extradite people into mainland China.
This needs to have multiple levels of “openness” to distinguish between having access to the code, the dataset, a documented training procedure, and the final weights. I wouldn’t consider it fully open unless these are all available, but I still appreciate getting something over nothing, and I think that should be encouraged.
I’m always amazed how people come out of the woodwork to defend Signal any time any criticism of it comes up. It’s become a sacred cow that cannot be questioned. Whatever you may think of Telegram should bear zero weight on your views of Signal.
The reality is that developers of Signal have close ties to US security agencies. It’s a centralized app hosted in US and subject to US laws. It’s been forcing people to use their phone numbers to register, and this creates a graph of real world contacts people have. This alone is terrible from security/privacy perspective. It doesn’t have reproducible builds on iOS, which means you have no guarantee regarding what you’re actually running. These are just a handful of things that are publicly known.
And then we know stuff like this happens. NSA suggested using specific numbers for encryption that it knew how to factor quickly. The algorithm itself was secure, but the specific configuration of how the algorithm was implemented allowed for the exploit thehackernews.com/…/nsa-crack-encryption.html
These kinds of backdoors are very difficult to audit for because if you don’t know what to look for then you won’t have any reason to suspect a particular configuration to be malicious. Given the relationship between people working on Signal and US government, this is a real concern.
The same kind of scrutiny people apply to Telegram and other messaging apps should absolutely be applied to Signal as well.
I’d just like to add that you can use a temporary phone number service to sign up to Signal as you only need a phone number to register, not to actually use Signal.
Seriously, I don’t understand the point of the article, if there is one.
It seemed more like a confused enumeration of systems which are POSIX conform and in the end it talks about Wayland.
Is the point that Wayland breaks compatibility with X11/X.org and is mostly a Linux thingy? (AFAIK FreeBSD is working on a Wayland port, but no one else.)
Anyway, I am a happy Wayland user for several years now, although I am of course unhappy about the split with the *BSDs, OTOH most 'NIX software nowadays uses so many Linux APIs, that Wayland is IMHO no big game changer when talking about portability anyway.
Is anyone even running anything besides maybe FreeBSD on desktops? Most advantages of BSD over Linux seem to be relevant for servers, but not really for typical desktop usage.
Additionally, apps use toolkits anyway, which provides backends for Wayland and X11. If at some point X really isn’t viable anymore, people will put in the work and port Wayland from FreeBSD to other BSDs.
In my impression OpenBSD is used at least as much as FreeBSD on the desktop, if not even more.
Nowadays I agree with your point, that for the ‘typical desktop usage’ the BSDs are not very viable (I try from time to time and always have to give up, because of missing hardware support or missing software.).
Still, IMHO it is a great loss that the BSDs are not really an alternative on the desktop for most users. BSDs are extremely good engineered, when hardware is supported, it just works™, the base system is clean and has great documentation.
FreeBSD isn’t working on a Wayland port, that’s already happened. The Plasma Wayland session has supported it for quite a while… KDE even runs a CI job on FreeBSD for every merge request, where kwin_wayland autotests are run.
Considering the amount of complaints we got when something broke recently though (which is to say, none), it doesn’t look like it has a lot of users
Man it’s crazy how these fuckers basically get to ignore copyright law whenever it’s inconvenient to them but if you have one too many Windows machines provisioned they’ll send the Spanish Inquisition after you.
theregister.com
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