...to its original audience. It is 2020 and the "news for nerds" site is publishing polls on software like this ignoring established and well known FOSS options like Jitsi Meet and Big Blue Button.

If you forget about Free and open-source software in this day and age your nerd card is revoked indefinitely. Sorry folks.

while I don't fully agree with the implementation of systemd I do think conceptually it is far superior to what it replaces, and though is more complex is not THAT complex, and in return you get more flexibility and can do more (setting up services to start in parallel, easily make services restart or trigger other actions on failure etc)

In my experience managing systemd unit files is GREAT! You can (and should) leave the ones installed by the package/source alone and maintain separate files with your own overrides. It is super easy to manage services when you actually take the time to learn how it works.

Systemd has its problems yes, and it was foisted upon users too quickly, but it is 2017, the gripes are overstated or outdated, and the old init.d stuff truly is an old rotten pile of crap. Jury is out on the other systemd stuff that does logging etc.

Also systemd is NOT really monolithic technically speaking...it is actually quite modular. It is the *project management* that is modular, and the modules are "tightly coupled" vs. old school loosely coupled though pipes etc. like I and many others prefer and/or are used to.

I wish half the effort that went into b!tching and moaning would go into a decent alternative but compatible alternative/fork to systemd (ie. works with same unit files etc). There are real reasons systemd came to be (and no, it isn't just some conspiracy by a certain Linux vendor)...if you do not like it DO something about it.

...they are just joining the rest of the world's pricing strategy:

* airlines set ticket prices largely based on willingness to pay, which is why a short flight between Calgary and Ft.McMurray in Canada full of oil workers costs more than a flight from Canada to Europe or Asia.

* hotels price their rooms based not only on demand but where their customers are visiting from...Americans often get better Vegas deals than Canadians and Europeans, and room prices go up during conventions so the "special convention rate" looks like a deal even though it is pretty much the same rate as non peak.

* Microsoft and most other closed source software companies charge higher prices in Europe and North America in isolation of actual demand because of their willingness to pay more in licensing.

Uber's pricing model was destined to become more complex and opaque...I'm sure bistro math is incorporated somehow at this point. It's like entropy really.

Except that technology exists today to scan your id...and even use face recognition to compare it to the user to make sure it isn't someone else's ID. It wouldn't be perfect but it would be more reliable than most clerks.

Given away. It is BS to say the use of personal information as currency is "clearly stated" in the terms of service. The Big Five make ZERO effort to ensure users have read and understand how they are paying for the services they offer for "free". They write long form legalese, and they present a little Web link labelled " as have read the terms of service" next to a checkbox in the sign up and there is no mechanism whatsoever to ensure a person has read it.

It is partly our fault for lying by checking the box without following the link, but companies do the absolute minimum required to inform users. They in fact go out of their way to hide their terms.

It's as if a store leaves their stuff on a shelf, without price tags, but a sign saying "take and enjoy!" with fine print saying "you agree to the terms of the agreement available at the customer service desk" underneath. Then when they get home they discover their bank account cleaned out. They go back to the store and they say sorry you agreed to the terms by taking the stuff. It's not our fault you didn't go to customer service desk to get the 5 page agreement stating we have full access to your bank account and can take whatever you want and that we do not take returns.

The point is they are using their services as bait, and their behaviour wouldn't be tolerated when the currency is cash and the product is tangible. Society does not yet appear to value personal information like cash. People give it freely, corporations leverage it however they please without regard to consequences and governments forcefully take whatever they want to further their agendas. Perhaps one day we will live in a Roddenberry style economy without cash and the new currency will be information and it will be valued and respected accordingly, but we are far from that point right now.

So basically what you are saying is that Obama was a pussy and would have accomplished a lot more by growing a pair and shoving his agenda through without compromise...

In short you want Trump except with Bernie Sanders' agenda. Interesting.

I think it is a bit lost on seasoned, technical computer users that if these modern UIs were actually terrible then they wouldn't persist. GNOME 3 is still around because it is actually pretty decent for normal people. It was released before it was complete but in the years since it has become very good.

Microsoft quickly got rid of Bob, and Aero became a flash in the pan. Apple moved past the sometimes awkward, resource intensive photorealistic apps. Some of the modern look is the trend of the day, but the central concepts seem to me to be evolutionary. Maturity coming into computer user interfaces.

I actually really like most of Material Design. I often have to design HMI displays (user interfaces for industrial automation). There are good reasons for much of the design:

* colours should be limited and subdued for user interface elements so as to focus attention on content. Bright colours and animation are intended to call attention to important information.

* textures, gradients, transparency and drop shadow effects for the sake of visual flare cause visual confusion and eyestrain. Important elements get lost in the clutter otherwise

* ability to customize is often good but there can be too much of a good thing. If there are 100 "themes" or "skins" and all controls can be moved around by the user on a whim it severely detracts from usability. There is no consistency with the system and it makes it very difficult to train a group of operators when they all can mess with the UI. Also all the code that goes into extreme customzing is bloat.

* Skeuomorphic Design has no business in UI Design. If it was ever a good idea then MS Windows would have fully embraced Microsoft Bob to this day. Making controls look like photorealistic pictures of real life objects just causes frustration unless they behave exactly as the real object does, and are usually more cumbersome than what can be done on a computing device. Skeuomorphism is especially bad when it badly emulates something that is bad to begin with. Using a Blaupunkt stereo from the 1990s is a miserable experience in real life. Who was the idiot who thought we should have an audio player skin that imitates that crap?!

Good riddance to Bob, to Fisher Price gummi Windows XP and glassy Vista and 7. If you have to sit in front of that kind of garbage continuously for 12 hours a day as an operator in a power plant or refinery or whatever it is refreshing to see this "modern" trend. There are some teething pains as designers evolve, such as obscuring too many options or the wrong ones, lacking visual cues as to what is a control and font choices that are form over function as examples, but I for one am very glad designers are "growing up" and dropping the useless toys.

I'm curious...please elaborate on how he is crazy and why you think this happened recently?

* he has ascribed to his outlook on life and ideology since before creating Dilbert...when he learned hypnosis techniques in his early 20s.

* though he never endorsed any candidate, he correctly observed Trump knew what he was doing and that he would become president...and it isn't the only correct call he has made

* in all his writings and interviews I've almost never seen a more reasoned, dispassionate insightful commentary.

Scott Adams is not crazy. He appears to be super smart...as in Einstein and Hawking smart. He even acknowledges that he doesn't know everything and can be an idiot at certain times, which is a sign of very high intelligence.

I suppose it is understandable that you think he is crazy then. Quite often people confuse intelligence with insanity. But I'm still curious as to what makes him appear crazy because to me he seems quite rational.

Of course, that might say something about me too...hmm...

Solar most definitely requires batteries. Super capacitor banks cannot store enough energy to meet household demand for most people in North America during the winter for example. The days are too short. Especially where I live where solar panels can only function six to seven hours a day in December and January.

Thanks for providing the reference. By disclosing that you have used a slanted, conspiracy-theory style source with no credibility whatsoever I can completely dismiss your comment with little effort!

China did not eliminate its one child policy because it wanted more population growth. It has in fact been relaxing it for years and did away with it entirely because of the social problems it causes:

* in traditional Chinese culture male offspring are highly valued and when allowed only one child many couples abort female fetuses. In rare but all too numerous cases newborn girls have even been killed just after birth. The result is that there are 10s of millions more men in China than women now. The one child policy has been relaxed for years to allow women to have a second child if their first was female to help balance the population. This has virtually eliminated infanticide but has been slow in re balancing population.

* measures to enforce one child policy have been very cruel, such as the common policy of denying anaesthetic to women in labour with their second child and clawback of social assistance and forced sterilisation of women without consent immediately after the birth of a child.

* the significantly greater number of young men to young women has been attributed to problems with sex crimes from human trafficking to gang rapes, though much of the evidence is anecdotal

* there are now a couple of generations of people in China raised as only children. These children have been doted upon and spoiled rotten by parents and grandparents all their lives, turning many of them into entitled "little emperors". The lack of empathy towards others and lack of respect towards elders has been unsettling to older Chinese where those traits are very important in traditional culture. It has led to institutionalisation of seniors that was almost unheard of as well as exploitation of workers and in extreme, occasional cases, incidents such as people ignoring a toddler run over by a car dying in the street while everyone goes on about their business.

Anyways population is self limiting as societies develop and direct population control has been shown to backfire. Allowing those with the means and desire to have fertility treatments to conceive is probably a net benefit to society on the whole when properly regulated. At least these parents really want to be parents and have the means and the drive to be good parents.

...except systemd is less monolithic since it is actually a suite of separate binaries that each do specific things where everything emacs does relies on the central interpreter ;-)

Really though this "UNIX way" dogma is tired and old and irrelevant on all modern computing systems. Yes the philosophy has its merits but it was abandoned many years ago. XOrg gave up on it ages ago. Android and MacOS have UNIX/Linux underpinnings and next to nothing that makes them the OSes they are have anything to do with the UNIX way.

I will get off this here lawn now before that old guy with the grey neckbeard finishes piping his log files 15 ways through cat/awk/sed and notices my presence. I guess he didn't hear me arrive over the clacking of his model M and he cant focus his eyes that far after so much close work in front of his amber monitor ;-)

Postgres is the predecessor of PostgreSQL. Postgres used a different query language when it was still a university project led by Stonebraker. Postgres was the next project after Ingres as the name suggests, and its query language was originally similar...called QUEL instead os SQL or something like that.

Postgres forked into two code bases after the university project ended. Stonebraker started a company called Illustra to sell a commercial version of Postgres. Informix eventually bought Illustra and called it Online Dynamic Server if i recall, and by the time IBM bought informix this sibling of Postgres was the flagship product.

The second fork of postgres was picked up by former students of Stonebraker (initially Joly Chen if i recall and one or two others..too lazy to google for the details). They introduced a SQL parser front end of their own and called the initial release Postgres95 v1.x since it was the fad MSFT started to use years in product names, and also resetting the version number given the changes in features and management (postgres was at version 4.x).

When it came time to release the next major version the name was looking dated and redundant since there was still a release number. So the name became PostgreSQL as it was more meaningful (the primary feature difference being the query language). The version number was then "un-reset" too...postgres95 1.x being considered as 5.x and the first PostgreSQL named release being 6.0.

So yes, postgres isn't the same as postgresql. It is mist accurately described as the father of PostgreSQL and Informix. Architecturally the latter two are essentially the same, but their SQL parsers are unrelated as they were each developed post fork, plus the codebases diverged quite significantly over the past 20 years.

They are both fantastic databases by the way...they wipe the floor with mysql. To say postgreSQL is not web scale are ignorant and probably last used it in the 1990s if at all. It truly kicks butt for full text search, geospatial data for mapping or survey data, astronomy and so on. It is 10+ years ahead of Microsoft SQL server or mysql at that stuff as well as things like multi version concurrency...i was spoiled by PostgreSQL MVCC when i had to contend with rows and tables being locked until transactions wete committed in other RDBMSes.

MySQL has no extensibility, nowhere near the rich set of data types or extensibility, and is not optimised for write heavy ACID transaction stuff. MySQL is great for your CD collection or your blog or whatever, but PostgreSQL is still far superior for accounting/erp/mapping/etc, though i do acknowledge MySQL/MariaDB has gotten "good enough" it is far frpm the best.

And dont start with me on noSQL. Its a great hammer but only some applications are nails, even at "web scale".

Congratulations to Dr Stonebraker. His legacy in the industry is impressive and his work has led to a Free database project that can truly take on the big O on many serious fronts.

Why explain anything? Anyone worth my time has my phone number and/or email. The only response required to queries about me and facebook can be "phone me" or "email me" or "text me".

If anything, using facebook is more trouble than picking up a phone or tapping out an email or sms, and NSA dragnets notwithstanding less intrusive as well. So after signing up years ago and getting poked and having sheep thrown at me for a couple months my account has been virtually dormant since.