Thomas, I would love to get some insight on OS choice from someone so well respected in the security community, and maybe a short mention of why OpenBSD's security laurels may not be well deserved.
Some of the hype exceeds reality. I think the OpenBSD team at least tries to keep it level headed (but that's hard, everyone's biased in their own way), but the forum chatter version tends to eradicate subtlety. Second, what the operator does to a system matters at least as much as what they start with.
I don't know if it's what Thomas is referring to, but I ran OpenBSD in production for several years at a previous job. I found that, in practice, actually getting our platform to do what we wanted involved large amounts of ports (ie, outside the base system) to be installed. Sometimes, dozens of them. And this is where obviously your mileage will vary, because that depends what your servers are doing.
OpenBSD's incredible code quality quite obviously doesn't apply to the ports tree (and that's not their fault) but we quite often ran into less popular products and third party libraries where the ports were updated in the order of weeks later than things like RedHat RPM for the latest vulnerability.
At point I backported a hotfix myself, the requirement of which was not conducive to security.
Disclaimer: This was years ago, things may have changed.
The ports tree is obviously not audited by OpenBSD. The code comes from all over the net and the only thing OpenBSD does is enforce security mitigations/64bit time_t/arc4random/other coding practices in the base system, fix broken ports, send patches upstream and try to drag the whole open-source software community to better coding practices.
How does that sentence acknowledge income inequality as a problem? It just acknowledges it exists, it doesn't make any claim about whether or not it is a problem.
^Is intentionally sensationalized, the notion being that economic inequality in our society is generally viewed as a negative. Consider the following:
"...in times of great famine..."
Now you could try to make the argument that someone is merely stating a fact and picked an adjatiave which helps the reader picture what's going on, but I don't think anyone would assume the author considered famine to be a "neutral fact". Similarly, the end snippet is clearly addressing the elephant in the room given the title of the article, which was certainly chosen due to the subject matter, but also due the phrase which we are debating (income inequality), which is essentially another way or saying that a class of people are losing wealth to another class.
It acknowledges that some people think it is a problem, but it does not itself make any statement about whether or not it's a problem.
For those of us who believe economic inequality is both good and natural, this is a great rhetorical device for undermining the left -- "in this time of great economic inequality, life is better than it has ever been for the general populace."
A person on the left may use the opposite rhetorical device, "in this time of great economic freedom, people are increasingly poor."
As this is written, there is no way to know which rhetorical device they were using.
No, this work was done by the London based CEPR -- which is a bipartisan bank-funded research group for economists, not the leftist CEPR out of Washington, DC. They are completely unrelated.
And the research drew this back to Government health initiatives which would be described as "victim blaming" by American Progressives -- healthy eating education and anti-smoking initiatives.
Simplicity (not to be confused with ease of use) and stability. Slackware's one of the easiest to understand distros around, from the boot sequence to service and user management.
Not much is done for you, but nothing is hidden from you. As such, it takes work, but it rewards the user with the feeling of knowing the full system.
Rock-solid stability. Even running the -current (development) version, I've not seen any show-stopping bugs. The bugs I do see are all upstream, and are patched quickly by Pat and the Slackware team. If you are masochistic and enjoy the sometimes daily breakage of distros like Arch and Fedora Rawhide, you won't get your jollies here. But if you want a stable, fast, sysadmin-friendly OS with no surprises or NIH nonsense, give it a shot.
Speaking of patching, Slackware tries to stay as close as possible to the upstream developer's version of a package, with minimal patching. Patches are usually security related, and sometimes a package is patched to fix a bug found in testing, but there are no exotic tweaks like what you get with Ubuntu and other "flashy" distros.
Package management is as simple as it gets; there is no dependency resolution so the user is responsible for making sure they have everything they need for a particular package. Personally I prefer this approach, it reduces bloat and puts me in control of my system. That said, it's not for everyone, and there are some third-party package managers that enhance the existing system with dependency resolution and a pretty interface. You can also build from source just about any package you want to, as Slackware includes a complete dev toolchain for the most popular languages, and you can easily install support for less popular ones.
There is no systemd, which to me is a blessing as it makes for much easier and more familiar management.
Obviously I'm a fan, but there are some downsides I'm willing to admit. It's not flashy; the various desktops that come with it (KDE, Xfce, Fluxbox, Blackbox, WindowMaker, fvwm, twm) are bone-stock with no customization like you get with other OSes. This means a ton of tweaking on the user's part if you don't care for the default themes.
GNOME support is nil. Pat dropped GNOME in the mid-2000s when he got frustrated with building it, and while there are third-party solutions, none of them work 100% in my testing.
Unless you run -current, the stable version tends to get left behind. It's been nearly three years since 14.1 was released, and it was clearly showing its age, though some would consider that a good thing (I certainly do, especially for servers, which is what I use Slackware for on two systems).
There is no systemd, and for many people that makes it a non-starter.
-----
I say, give it a whirl. You may be pleasantly surprised! Then again, you may run screaming back to your bells-and-whistles eye candy OS. But at least you can say you tried it. :-)
"Speaking of patching, Slackware tries to stay as close as possible to the upstream developer's version of a package, with minimal patching."
Posting this from my Thinkpad X220 running Slackware 14.1.
Just check config files (*.new suffix) when a package is updated to a newer version. Debian/CentOS backport patches to packages so that the configs don't change during a release.
Quite happy with what I've had from Slackware for the past couple of years and I have subscribed. The distribution does not pretend to cater for all needs but can support many use cases.
Remember that there is now a live iso image to try before you install.
I find that it aligns very closely with OpenBSD; users familiar with one will soon be comfortable in the other. Slackware is by far the most BSD-like Linux distro.
I used to run it, and I'm not sure there's value in it anymore. They often don't stay on top of security updates, and compiling anything just got worse and worse.
The last straw was the fanboys at the linuxquestions forum. It was cultish and creeped me out.
Three negative comments on this submission, that's some impressive anti-cult thing you've got going.
Slackware doesn't do "security theatre" updates. Whenever there's both a credible risk and a reasonable fix, you'll see an update, and it'll be quicker than distros that are multiple steps downstream from Debian.
You know, I felt really troubled to have been using something for 20 years and realize things had changed and it was no longer right and no longer good for me. I felt like a fool for having stuck with it for quite so long.
I realize that sounds like someone talking about a bad marriage, and I suppose we can generalize usefully on relationships of whatever type.
I think we must end up with longer-lasting bad feelings about anything we used to value.
If you're going to learn another language, learn something from a different programming paradigm, or one which is lower level.
Learning Ruby would be an absolute waste of time.
This isn't a hip or cool answer, but I'd suggest learning Java. It's one of the most popular languages by a large margin, and knowing it will help you speak the object-oriented lingua franca. If you only write Python, you're probably mostly writing procedural code. Learning OO is a good idea.
Python has all of the constituent parts of an OO language, save explicit types, but it is never written in an OO style.
Using classes != OO.
Generally, Python programmers treat objects as structs with associated methods, basically the Go model. Python programmers rarely encapsulate at all. At best, they use a bunch of accessors (which is not itself OO). Implementation details are rarely hidden.
That's because dynamically-typed languages, the interpreter, and the Python culture, lend themselves more to exploratory programming, rather than a UML-design, with objects that relate to real-world entities, that are implemented after careful planning.
If you can show me a Python program where objects are really encapsulated, and aren't chock-full of accessors, I'll stand happily corrected.
I'd like to offer you the chance to buy one of my personal rock collection for $15m. As my rock collection contains only 5 rocks, this offer represents 1/5 of the total number available worldwide. This is a chance to get in on the ground floor of something big!
If you had spent a small amount of time and energy propping up the general sentiment that your rock collection was the next big thing, yet had bountiful positive results in the the rock hype cycle, and the rock hype cycle regularly paid out considerable profits on such investments, I would indeed consider buying one of your rocks had I the $15m.
People regularly spend millions on sculptures which are indeed just special rocks. The Guennol Lioness comes to mind.
Then, if you made the rock cost a negligible amount of money given the regular payouts on such ventures, I would really start considering it. Don't be a boob.
Because it sold out in 4 hours from their mailing-list-only announcement. So from a purely supply and demand perspective, it seems they could have gone higher.
Or maybe just a little higher. Their mailing list is comprised of the people most likely to buy this sort of thing. Selling to the general public might not result in many more sales than the mailing list alone, especially considering that the purpose/use of Urbit is so opaque.
Quite possible. Personally my decision to buy was based on a desire to finance the development of an interesting new operating system and p2p network -- so I paid cash to a company that is doing that -- so the purpose was clear from that angle.
Is there a verifiable record of which real-world entities bought in? It would be nice to have a way to rule out the possibility that they sold it to themselves to create the perception of demand.
In new schemes, you sell 10%, but claim you sold 100% in 4 hours so that you can start a new sale due to the "high demand" and try to really sell with fakely boosted "interested" abusing the greedy human nature.
Granted, I may not understand it at all, I only really started reading about it a few hours ago, but here it goes:
It's a decentralized internet, where your computer is the server, and it communicates directly with other computers by calling directly to their addresses.
As a result, e.g. your facebook data is stored on your computer, and other facebook users call your computer for posts.
Because the data is stored locally, and called through relatively universal APIs, any app can be written to call and display from those APIs, combine them, and let them inform each-other in any way you desire.
You can put your facebook in your reddit in your gmail.
That all runs inside a VM which ties your data to your address, so your identity (real or pseudonym) is singular, and uniform across all apps. This creates a real cost to ugly behavior, like spamming or trolling, as addresses are too limited to burn through willy-nilly.
Apps running on that VM are coded in a rather confusing functional language. Lots of people think he made it that confusing to stop newbs from writing for it.
It's a "decentralized" world wide web then.
The internet is already decentralized and since you need the internet for Urbit to work let's stop calling it "the internet" anything.
You'll have to take that up with the public at large. We use "internet" to refer to the world wide web. Try to sell someone a computer that has "the internet", but won't do tcp/IP, you'll get punched.
As for the infrastructure, that's a rather more esoteric concern. It needs a distinguishing term.
As a person who was raised very leftist, and only became a conservative (to the consternation of all friends and family) in my 20's, I really don't know how to talk someone out of the left's bubble. I count it a miracle that I found my way out of leftism. Their politics are so lush and their imagery vivid. Ours, on the right, are dull, utilitarian, and based on comparatively dry topics like economics and social psychology.
It's no wonder politics is swinging left, but it is profoundly frightening. Young Americans, just 5-10 years younger than myself, have reached a new extreme. I believe the US is about to take a hard dive to the left, and I don't want my kids to grow up impoverished by it.
I've been looking for a country, to move to, which is more dedicated to classical liberal/capitalist ideals, and who's young people know and understand the value of hardwork, sobriety and dedication. Somewhere in Asia, perhaps?
What does the left/right split have to do with anything?
The rent is too damned high, the wages are too damned low, and none of us stand a statistically-significant chance of getting a return on the value we would bring to a company in this economy (mostly because that's not how equity is split, anymore).
> I've been looking for a country, to move to, which is more dedicated to classical liberal/capitalist ideals, and who's young people know and understand the value of hardwork, sobriety and dedication.
I'm pretty sure we're just the confused ones here. left, liberal, democrat, republican, right, libertarian, socialist, conservative.
Those words are giant tents. I have a book that argues that Hitler was a "liberal" and another that says free-market military-backed imperialism is "liberal democracy". I have another that argues the state-communism of China and the USSR are "conservative".
So I have no idea what people mean when they use those words.
There is a lot of confusion -- no doubt. This has to do with the new usage of the term "liberal" to describe Democrats or people on the left, when historically, liberal meant people on the right, like Libertarians or Republicans. As a result, we now describe free-market liberalism as "classical liberalism", to distinguish it from modern "social liberalism".
To further complicate things, pundits on the left have attempted to associate the uglier side of left politics (namely, fascism) with the right, so you have a lot of people calling neo-nazis "far-right", when in reality, National Socialism was a leftist movement. Hitler was a "liberal", in terms of being a believer in large-scale government intervention in the markets.
Conversely, the USSR was and China is "conservative" in the classical sense. That is, they believe in government intervention in markets, which was called conservatism 100 years ago, and is called liberal today.
They mean nothing in practice because of bizarre narratives like that.
Before taking power, the Nazis caucused with the National Conservatives, the Free Conservative Party, and the German Conservative Party.
German leftists were first to the concentration camps under the Enabling Act of 1933. Under the Röhm Putsch, the Nazis killed and outlawed the left-leaning faction of their party. Under the Commissar Order, Hitler prioritized the death of leftists in conquered land. Socialists, leftists, liberals and communists got their own special badges at the death camps (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_concentration_camp_badge#...)
The USSR and China are autocratic state-run corporatists. They are conservative in that they are effectively industrialized reactionary feudalism with integrated propaganda to prevent populist revolution.
And finally, some may enjoy calling an intentionally plutocratic state liberal, but it's essentially autocracy without coronation ceremonies.
The confusion here isn't that the ideas themselves are confusing. The historical record is abundantly unambiguous. However some don't like it so they do revisionism and taxonomy hand-waving to try to confuse people. But that's the nature of power.
That's because they were reactionary monarchists. The nationalising was a throwback to 18th century imperialism. That's a rather extreme form of "conservative". Its not like we're talking worker self directed cooperatives regulated by government for the public good.
Marxist in first international was about extending democratic principles to the organization of labor. When you have a single party dictator snatching up enterprise, you don't have first international.
Besides, the terms are for camps more than anything. It's an affinity, not a taxonomy.
Monarchism is a sort of leftism. It's still about having the state own and manage industry, rather than spreading its ownership out among many people. In the end, leftism always ends up looking like Monarchism anyway, to go to your 'affinity not taxonomy' claim.
No again. It's about syndicalism. Modern monarchism is structurally capital enterprise. Always has been. Antiquity talks to this. You have hierarchy, autocracy, authoritarian systems... that's capitalism - combining it with statecraft and religion, you get monarchism
Calling Nazism, democracies, socialism, and monarchism the same thing is about as useful a classification as calling them nouns.
It sounds like you think a system free from government would be free from coercion.
As if places in actual war, without government, is free from coercion or as if the natural animal kingdom with its dog eats dog nature is free from coercion.
Almost as if you're making the fanciful objectivist argument where everyone is pathological and greedy, but also upstanding and moral...
Monarchism and capital enterprise may be similar in their internal hierarchy, outside of some corporate structures, but they are rather unlike monarchies in one very important way.
A capitalist enterprise (outside of a handful of extremely inelastic markets, like defense, catastrophic healthcare and public safety) require that people choose to purchase their product. That is Democratic in nature.
Anarchy is not free of coercion. Fortunately, free markets are not anarchic. Ballot and autocratic are not the only forms of government. Capitalism is itself a form of government -- the left intuits this, but are clouded on the internal forces.
The nature of ballot-organized government, even direct democracy, is less democratic than that of dollar-voting markets.
Ballot government has much more in common with monarchy. Generally -- you're choosing a single person,and that person makes choices ostensibly on your behalf for a number of years. Additionally -- you may get to choose on some issues once in a while, and watch as your choices are undone by the courts and legislature.
Conversely, in dollar voting, everyone is making all of the choices all of the time.
As a result, unencumbered capitalism is a purer form of direct democracy, which measurably produces a more responsive form of government.
It allows the public to vote directly for specific desires, producing an organizing impetus which is more respondent to the will of the public than any other form of government, even direct democracy.
What the left intuits as misrule by business, is actually the result of the votes of their fellow dollar-voters. It is the wisdom, or folly, of the people.
Thanks for the thoughts. Social Sciences are so indeterminable. I appreciate the civility. I need to disengage from this now however. Plenty to think about.
What is incredible is that you can't conceive of how an average of six hours of TV watching might allow for many people to watch zero hours of television.
But since you brought it up, maybe you should look into what kind of people watch >6 hours of television per day.
hodwik is calling the entire poor class lazy. If being uncivil is something that's not allowed here, then why isn't he being reprimanded for being uncivil to an entire class of people?
