I hope not because I’ve been doing my US taxes on Linux for 15 years.
It’s probably a specific windows desktop app, probably TurboTax by intuit, the company that lobbies to make filing your taxes hard and to destroy any free simple government app to file taxes.
So, not sure why they’d complain about not being able to help shoot their foot off but we all have preferences. :shrug:
My sister was the same, she brought her machine over, I booted a Ubuntu disk and did the disk config in the install and then she set the rest of the stuff up and I haven’t heard from her about it for 5 years, other than that I check if she’s still using it now and again.
If you do regulate. We currently have full regulatory capture in most industries and regulators that are doing their jobs are either hamstrung or the laws are so far behind the industries that they can’t or won’t work.
The key to proper regulation is to keep money and influence from pooling at the top, making it difficult for any single person to buy enough influence.
As it is, we have a dozen monopolies that should be broken up that are making a small section of the population so rich they are essentially above laws.
But, proper regulation can exist if people want it, and more specifically in the case of the USA, legislators want it. Unfortunately, Dems actively prevent it, and republicans are ripping it down, so the rest of us are kinda fucked.
Regulations can work if bypassing the regulation in question does not open up a market that is large enough to keep paying off the regulators.
For example, if there is only one regulator for a country, the companies can pay millions to get it eased up for them, because they can make billions from it.
But if there one regulator for each state, they equation will change and it might not be profitable to pay millions to a regulator of the state, because they cannot make enough profit from selling in the state to justify it.
That is the only way to make it work. Rules don't work forever. Incentives do.
Well, There's not going to be much because it would violate NDA, but, nothing is 'elastic'.
Somewhere, someone, has to buy a set amount of servers, based on a running capacity projection and build those into usable machines. The basis of a datacenter, is an inventory system, a dhcp server, a tftp server, and a DNS server that get used to manage the lifecycle of hardware servers. That's what everyone did at one point, and the best of them build themselves tooling.
What amazon has is built on what was available at the time both for tooling and existing systems that they'd have to integrate with. You almost certainly don't have to build anything that complex. Additionally, you can get an off the shelf DCIM that integrates with your DHCP and DNS servers and trigger ansible runners in your boot sequences that handle the lifecycle steps. It's considerably easier to do now than it was 15 years ago.
While they don't use AWS specifically for a lot of stuff, the internal tooling can still build thousands of boxes an hour though they don't really pay for UI work for that stuff.
You can put a host(s) in a fleet, tell it the various software sets you want installed and click go and you'll have a fleet when you come back, so don't think that what you're being asked to build is impossible or not being used under every single major cloud provider or VPS provider.
The slightly harder part is deciding what you're going to give to devs for a front end. Are you providing raw hosts, VMs, container fleets, all of it? how are you handling multi-zone or multi-region . . ., how are you billing or throttling resources between teams.
The beauty of this is you get a lot of stuff for free these days. You can build out a fleet, provide a few build scripts that can be pulled into some CI/CD pipeline in your code forge of choice and you don't really need to build a UI.
Provisioning tooling is hard, but it's a lot easier now that it was 15/20 years ago and all the parts are there. I've built it several times on very small teams. I would have loved to have 10 devs to build something like that, but the reality is that you can get 80% with a little glue code and a few open source servers.
Who’s using an experimental filesystem and risking critical data loss? Rule one of experimental file systems is have a copy on a not experimental file system.
The biggest dirty secret of the IT world is that everyone knows you should have more backups than God, but everyone runs with an average of about zero.
Sure, and when I go, 'I'm just going to slap this together and if it dies I'll rebuild it' I run on ext4 instead of an experimental service. If there is a reason that I need to run something 'experimental' you gonna bet your ass that I'm going to back things up.
He could release a patch that can be pulled by the people that need it.
If you’re using experimental file systems, I’d expect you to be pretty competent in being able to hold your own in a storage emergency, like compiling a kernel if that’s the way out.
Yeah the argument breaks down for me -- this project is so stable and mainstream, it's being used by a huge community of technically lay Linux users who can't boot a home built kernel temporarily to run a data recovery?
And yet simultaneously, it's a bleeding edge experimental system that needs a license to break the Linux rules on account of its experimental nature?
I just don't see how there's a critical mass of casual users that can't handle a complicated data recovery (as in, i won't generally believe this to be true, and if it is, those users should probably stick with something more mature), AND the system is still so experimental and developing so quickly that introducing features outside the merge window should be considered uncontroversial (or even necessary, as Kent seems to sometimes argue)
The inconvenience of this process is also addressed by the dev, as is the different definition of experimental that you're using (though your expectation re kernel doesn't follow even without the mismatch in definitions)
The kernel, even its bugs, should be stable (in that they shouldn't change unless it happens the correct way). If not, it starts introducing unexpected issues to users.
If someone's testing against these versions, adding their fixes and patches, stuff like this will break things for users. He can't assume all users will be regular desktop users, even on an experimental area of the code.
Things like 'RC' have meaning. Meaning that has been there for years. He can develop on a separate tree and users that want it can use it. This is used all over.
> The inconvenience of this process is also addressed by the dev, as is the different definition of experimental that you're using (...)
The only aspect of "experimental" that matters is what it means to the release process. If you can't meet that bar then debating semantics won't help either.
And by the way, the patch thread clearly stresses a) loss of data, b) the patch trying to sneak under the maintenance radar new features. That is the definition of unstable in anyone's book.
> Experimental has no defined meaning with respect to the release process.
Nonsense. And to make matters worse, you're commenting as if trying to sneak features in bug fixes late on the release process has no impact on quality assurance.
I do know that though that assumes some things about os and shell.
Run a full screen term on my machine for a good chunk of my workflow and I just like to have time and battery in my term. I render it as ‘(15:35) [80} <hostname> $ ‘ and for boxes without batteries it’s just ‘(15:35) <hostname> $ ‘
Some times I’ll go back through my scroll back and look at the time when I’m trying to figure things out. Or when I run a command that generates a ton of output, I’ll note the time and run the command then later search back to the time in scroll back to start at the top of the log.
None of these are features I truly miss on a vanilla box, I can look at a clock or watch and will put a comment into the scroll back to find later.
It’s probably a specific windows desktop app, probably TurboTax by intuit, the company that lobbies to make filing your taxes hard and to destroy any free simple government app to file taxes.
So, not sure why they’d complain about not being able to help shoot their foot off but we all have preferences. :shrug:
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