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Latest Comments by F.Ultra
Unity to 'merge' with ironSource with a buzzword salad press release
13 Jul 2022 at 11:02 pm UTC

Unity seems to bleed money and it's getting worse with each new quarter while IronSource on the other hand is a profitable company. Now we will have to wait and see what the merger details will be if this is an actual mutual merger or if this is IronSource buying Unity by taking on their debt.

edit: Latest news is that this is no longer a merger but Unity is buying IronSource for $4.4bn in Unity stocks where share holders in IronSource will receive 0.1089 shares in the new company for each 1 share in IronSource that they currently own while Unity share holders will receive 1 share in the new company for each 1 share in Unity that they currently own.

Will be interesting to see who will be CEO and Chairman in the new combined company, my take is still that this is IronSource buying Unity with Unity:s own stock but we'll see.

Worthy of Better, Stronger Together for Reproductive Rights bundle live on itch.io
7 Jul 2022 at 4:26 pm UTC

Quoting: Salvatos
Quoting: scaine
Quoting: Salvatos
Quoting: scaineEveryone who has access to this site... they're all (myself included) so unbelievably privileged, we have no right to voice our opinions on this subject. We lack the context and (hopefully) life experience of being able to contribute to this "debate".
Only people without Internet access can have opinions on abortion or politics?
Ah, is that what I said? Not really, but you're right, it was poorly worded. I was suggesting that this law change will affect the least privileged people. Those with no recourse. People so far from our existence that it's crass to have strong views about "what it must be like" to have this change forced.upon them.

Hopefully that's a clearer explanation of what I was trying to say.
Yes, thank you. I still feel like that's a broad assumption to make about everyone who visits the site, because even lower middle class people could have a very challenging time e.g. taking time off work to travel to another state or country to get the necessary procedures, not to mention the social fallout, especially in states that offer bounties for intel on women who get abortions.
It can get way worse than "social fallout". In Texas there is "Texas Senate Bill 8" that allows any private citizen in Texas to sue anyone who may have helped facilitate an abortion.

And

The National Association of Christian Lawmakers, an antiabortion organization led by Republican state legislators, has begun working with the authors of the Texas abortion ban to explore model legislation that would restrict people from crossing state lines for abortions, said Texas state representative Tom Oliverson (R), the charter chair of the group’s national legislative council.
Now the Biden administration have said that they would fight any such attempts since it would violate the federal interstate commerce rights, and that is probably why they have moved on to instead allow private citizens to make civil suits since that would no longer be the state violating the interstate commerce rights.

Worthy of Better, Stronger Together for Reproductive Rights bundle live on itch.io
6 Jul 2022 at 6:08 pm UTC Likes: 3

Quoting: denyasis
Quoting: F.Ultra
Quoting: TherinS
Quoting: GBGamesAnd yet the rhetoric keeps getting repeated, and it sounds so innocent and earnestly about freedom when in fact it is often double-speak for driving the opposite outcome.

In a country that claims to value freedom as a whole, it makes no sense to say "And we'll turn it to the states to let the people decide if YOU get to have the same freedoms." We, in fact, tried that, and it turned out to be a terrible idea.
Unfortunately, that is the POINT of free states allowing its citizens to vote how they want thier state run, within the confines of some basic rules set in place at a Federal level. No one is being forced to remain in thier state (there's 48 easy to travel to) or being prevented from traveling to another state.

If one city decides jaywalking is legal and another decides its punishable by jail time, then don't jaywalk in the illegal areas. Nothing is keeping you from walking all you want, but jaywalking is viewed differently in the two cities. If the population of one city wants to make jaywalking legal, then vote into office the officials who will make that legal.

This decision is, in SPIRIT, no different than the example of jaywalking. The people can now vote for/against it as they wish and majority rules.
So hypothetically, what about repealing the second amendment and let each state decide on guns, gun control and even total gun ban?
Up until the most recent Supreme Court Decision, gun control was largely left up to local jurisdictions. Even down to the city level. Some cities banned handguns. Others required registration of firearms or set rules of the discharge if guns. States still set age restrictions, prohibitions, carry requirements, and licensing. What's legal in one city is not in another with regards to guns. If you have a license to carry in your state, it does not mean another state will honor it. If you are allowed to carry in your state without a license, you'll still need one to carry in a state that has a license requirement.

...Not confusing at all....

Over the last 20+ years, a lot of restrictions have been removed, often by courts or legislatures, but it's still very much locally controlled. The most recent decision combined with the ideological makeup of the court does throw into question how many of those regulations will still exist in the future, but for now, each state can regulate guns independently to some extent.

Sorry for the double post.
To some extent yes, but I'm talking total control. AKA allow all the blue states (and some more) to 100% outlaw guns and enforce extreme border checks to make sure that no gun from "allow states" could flow through. Just curious how the "states rights" advocates would stand behind that.

But it's quite moot anyway since we all know that once the GOP gets majority control and a new president the whole issue of states rights will be dropped like a hot potato and abortions will be outlawed on a federal level. That have been their stated goal since long ago and all the talk about "states rights" right now is only empty semantics.

Worthy of Better, Stronger Together for Reproductive Rights bundle live on itch.io
5 Jul 2022 at 10:40 pm UTC Likes: 5

Quoting: TherinS
Quoting: GBGamesAnd yet the rhetoric keeps getting repeated, and it sounds so innocent and earnestly about freedom when in fact it is often double-speak for driving the opposite outcome.

In a country that claims to value freedom as a whole, it makes no sense to say "And we'll turn it to the states to let the people decide if YOU get to have the same freedoms." We, in fact, tried that, and it turned out to be a terrible idea.
Unfortunately, that is the POINT of free states allowing its citizens to vote how they want thier state run, within the confines of some basic rules set in place at a Federal level. No one is being forced to remain in thier state (there's 48 easy to travel to) or being prevented from traveling to another state.

If one city decides jaywalking is legal and another decides its punishable by jail time, then don't jaywalk in the illegal areas. Nothing is keeping you from walking all you want, but jaywalking is viewed differently in the two cities. If the population of one city wants to make jaywalking legal, then vote into office the officials who will make that legal.

This decision is, in SPIRIT, no different than the example of jaywalking. The people can now vote for/against it as they wish and majority rules.
So hypothetically, what about repealing the second amendment and let each state decide on guns, gun control and even total gun ban?

Check out the new demo for Casebook 1899 - The Leipzig Murders
31 May 2022 at 11:53 am UTC

Looks a bit like The Slaughter: Act One, I hope the dev will make Act Two some day now (6 years in the making).

An interview with Ken VanDine, Ubuntu desktop lead at Canonical
25 May 2022 at 12:23 am UTC Likes: 2

Quoting: Eike
Quoting: ShabbyX
Quoting: Lycurgus87And learn to use your system, because probably (about 99%) you are the problem, not your machine, nor the software.
Oh no no no, never say that. Take any device (a computer, a door, a hose, whatever), and if most users have trouble using it, that's definitely a design flaw of the device.

Here, see this: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yY96hTb8WgI [External Link]
At work we've got, on a single walk through a single floor, doors that
* are just opened manually,
* must be opened manually, but only after you show your entrance card to some device,
* open automatically after you show your entrance card to some device, and must not be moved by the handle they've got, because otherwise, most probably, world explodes.

Please, if you constructed a door so stupidly that it must not be moved by its handle, AT LEAST DON'T GIVE IT A FU**ING HANDLE!
Probably designed by the same geniuses that designs the self scanning check out stations that have a touch screen and then either a IR reader for a card (drivers license in this case) or VISA/Mastercard touchless reader and if you accidentally scan your card before touching the screen it locks with a "you must touch the screen to begin before you scan your card". Ok so why is the damn scanner even active before I touch the screen if this is so important and secondly why is it so important?

Not to mention how completely AI-less they are, here I am using a machine that requires me to have a visa card (which the banks over here only hands out if you are 18+) and have the shop member card (which again they only hand out if you are 18+) and I have bought stuff for say €200 but I no I also have bought a few energy drinks (which the store on it's own have decided to have a 15 age limit on) so now it have to blink red until some underpaid clerk 15 minutes later can come to my aid and logon, click "age verified" so I can continue.

Because the modus operandi of some pre-teen wanting to buy an energy drink (which is not illegal. again the age limit is set by the store) is to steal some one else visa card, their store membership card and then also spend €200 on other stuff...

An interview with Ken VanDine, Ubuntu desktop lead at Canonical
25 May 2022 at 12:10 am UTC

Quoting: GuestTo be fair, I've had continued problems with PulseAudio that were entirely resolved by purging it from the system and relying on ALSA more directly, or using apulse as PA proxy. These were not ALSA driver problems, these were "no sound, no possibility to get sound, pulse was seemingly doing whatever the hell it wanted regardless of configuration or attempts to restart the service". My favourite was ignoring the mono sink and outputting to speakers that didn't exist.
While your problems very much could be related to pulse (I do not want to convey the idea here that it's the most bug free software out there [somewhat due to the complex nature of the problem it is trying to solve which pipewire have demonstrated since some people for whom pulse worked perfectly well pipewire doesn't at all]) even problems like this could be due to errors on ALSA; the whole architecture in pulse depends upon the rewind functionality of ALSA, something that no other software uses and it turned out that a lot of drivers therefore also had massive problems with it (aka completely untested feature in the drivers). Granted one can blame pulse for using that feature when it was so badly supported.

Quoting: GuestAnd true enough that internal QA cannot hope to cover all the myriad configurations and setups out there, there was still a level of rolling out that could have been handled better. A response to buggy software by saying what is akin to "deal with it" will never sit well with me.
If that indeed was the answer then yes that is both a horrible and idiotic answer. Just like you I would be without customers if I had that attitude (basically also why we gain customers from competitors, but I digress).

Quoting: GuestI am, however, rather concerned about the code complexity and just how susceptible it is to security flaws, especially given the level of control over the rest of the system.
And I would argue that the old way with lines upon lines of bash scripts was a way more complex and error prone world. But yes there will always be a tradeoff between functionality and more chance of security problems due to more lines of and more complex interactions of code. And there are no objective truth here, myself I subjectively like the features more than I'm afraid over the added complexity, others are free to do a different tradeoff analysis and that is of course fine.

Quoting: GuestSure, security flaws are elsewhere too, but I'm one who suscribes to the old unix philosophy of keeping everything as simple as possible, do one thing and that one thing right, and systemd does away with that. I'm also against the kind of spread of scope - there's software that now relies on systemd (init) that ideally shouldn't have to know about the init system at all.
Does those softwares really rely on the systemd as init or are they relying on some D-BUS interface provided by various applications in the systemd project? In any case this is of course due to the project providing functionality and services that other software writes find useful, I get that it sucks for people not wanting to run systemd or not wanting to write software providing similar functionality using the same D-BUS namespace but at the same time should be forbid developers from providing great features?

Quoting: GuestI've also personally suffered systems that refused to boot because systemd wasn't recovering properly. Root cause was not systemd, but it was clobbered far too easily and locked up everything else. On non-init, I've had problems with logging, I don't even know what was going on with timesync and ended disabling the entire damn thing until a full OS reinstall was done, and a bunch of other problems that probably bias me against the whole project.
I can see how such a situation can be frustrating enough to be mad at the entire project, I've had similar experience with various pieces of software (hello macOS) that made me hope that they would freeze in hel. The irony of it all though is that if something, systemd brought excellent logging to Linux with the journal (I'm not a friend with how it handles tab-completion though) so unfortunate that we don't have a time machine so we could get back to your machine with the systemd-timesyncd so figure out what it was, perhaps sitting behind the machine the both of us would have showed you exactly why I like systemd and how I see the journal as a life save. Or the result would have been the same, who knows when it comes to software :)

In any case I asked for your reasons and I thank you for providing them. I fully understand that you don't want to make this into a debate and I see no reason for it to be that either. As I said I was simply interested in your experience since you sounds like a sane person (you don't want to know how many insane anti-systemd people I have talked to on Slashdot or Phoronix over the years) and I'm glad that I was right :).

An interview with Ken VanDine, Ubuntu desktop lead at Canonical
24 May 2022 at 1:54 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: Guest
Quoting: Eike
Quoting: scaineb) I wondered if it was just Poettering-hate.
That was my impression as well.

And while I can't say much about this person, in general I'm of the opinion that social competence does matter, not only technical one, as open source should be about working together.
Actually I think this was the core of the problem. PulseAudio was not ready for primetime, but it was forced upon everyone, and it had (has) some major issues - which is why pipewire is taking over.
Systemd has some design decisions that I personally find design flaws, and was something similar - pushed on people, and then grown to encompass more functionality than emacs. I think by now it's probably stable enough to be acceptable (I still won't allow it on my rig), but you're absolutely correct - had there been more social competence, more engagement with the community, perhaps the drama would have been less or avoided.

I still recall a talk, I forget by who, where a question was asked about the instability of systemd at the time, and the response was "oh but it's software and that happens". That kind of response was indicitive of a software engineer who obviously doesn't care about professional development and probably hadn't heard of test suites and CI setups. It did not inspire confidence in any project they were involved in.
Yes pulse was pushed out by Ubuntu before every single ALSA driver (the main problems lied with the ALSA drivers and not with pulse itself) worked great with it, but then if one want's to hold off a new piece of software until it's perfect then you have to hold it off indefinitely. As someone that works in the software industry (kinda), the real QA only comes once you have released the version in the wild, until then you can do all sorts of crazy tests and still the first customer will find 1000 ways to crash it. Just look at how often MS have to go back on their updates to Windows 10/11 because it breaks things for end users and don't say that MS doesn't spend millions on QA.

systemd was pushed on users by distro maintainers since they saw the extreme benefits it had for them over sysv. I would very much like if you could find that interview though because AFAIK instability have never been a case for systemd, it working as a replacement for init have been rock solid since day one.

comparing it with emacs is reaching to be honest, it's not systemd the init replacement that have grown functionality, it's systemd the project (that consists of several binaries) but it's easy to conflate the two due to them using the same name and the systematic denial to see them as separate things by the anti-systemd people.

Would be interesting to hear what you think are design flaws in systemd, not to start some flame war but to hear what your thoughts are. I'm not a systemd dev so have no stake in the design choices.

An interview with Ken VanDine, Ubuntu desktop lead at Canonical
23 May 2022 at 6:02 pm UTC Likes: 5

Quoting: scaine
Quoting: SoltrummanAs a Ubuntu user since 06.06 snaps are probably the biggest misstep up there with MIR and we all know how well that NiH-project turned out.
I've covered before how ridiculous calling things "NIH" is. It's literally how Linux evolves and becomes better. Weird that Canonical gets hate for that, but no-one bats an eyelid when Redhat decide to replace the entire sound system, or indeed, the entire fucking init system.
While I basically agree with your post as such this last part does not compute at all. Just like Canonical, Red Hat got a lot of irrational hate for pulse and systemd to the point that it now have become a conspiracy theory of it's own where evil Red Hat in cahoots with eviler IBM are working behind the scenes for total world domination of Linux systems by replacing sysvinit with systemd...

But it still proves your point, many times, if not close to frickin always, when some one does something new or different in Linux it will always bring out the Knights of NIH on forums.

I'm a huge defender of DEB over any of these new forms of distribution package formats due to the inherent problem of embedded libraries, overhead, security issues and so on. That said, snap is probably the better one of them due to the sand-boxing (which have unfortunate side effects for desktop users that are used to be able to compromise their entire system from within Firefox) and Firefox is also most likely the perfect candidate (and so is Steam and games) for such a distribution format since Firefox embeds so many special versions of otherwise shared libraries anyway that there are basically no benefits of using a DEB (with my concerns) unless of course on would have managed to unbundle those libs for Firefox but as I have written before it would probably be easier to solve world hunger and peace (not to mention much better benefit for humanity).

Quoting: RandomizedKirbyTree47
"Anyone can create an alternate store that supports snaps. The API is completely open as is snapd.
Can you have multiple Snap stores configured on the same system? If so, great. If not, this seems like a bad-faith argument.

You can have multiple APT repositories on the same system together: if you want one deb package that isn't in the main repository, you can add another repository without losing access to the stuff in the main repository. Likewise, you can have multiple Flatpak remotes available on the same system.

Last time I checked, I couldn't figure out a way to do this with Snap. So while someone could theoretically make another snap store, no one could use it unless they completely gave up the ability to use Canonical's store. That's a <i>massive</i> barrier to entry for any potential new store, and it also means there's no way to add a store just for a few apps that Canonical doesn't like. Unless I am mistaken and it actually is possible, in which case I would be grateful if someone corrected me.

It sort of feels like if Meta said "WhatsApp isn't a closed ecosystem! The Signal Protocol is open source, so anyone can make another messaging service similar to WhatsApp." While it is possible to make another messaging app with the signal protocol (including Signal itself), the lack of federation means new messaging apps can't communicate with the 2 billion+ people on WhatsApp.

For now, this isn't a serious issue, because Snap can coexist with all the other package formats. It will only become an issue if Snap ends up becoming the dominant means of distributing apps on Linux.
What he means is that it's possible for anyone to write their own competing snap utility that supports their own store, or to create their own fork of snap that supports both Canonicals store and 3d party stores. There are no requirement that a 3d party snap store use the /usr/bin/snap binary.

Canonical seek Software Engineers for the 'Ubuntu Gaming Experience' team
20 May 2022 at 6:14 pm UTC

Quoting: ElamanOpiskelija
Quoting: scaineSeparately, I work in Finance, and you'll never, ever, get salaries even mentioned until the second round of interviews, unless the position is (extremely) senior. It doesn't even come up in first-round interviews.
Happy GOL cake day, person on the internet!

A bit off-topic, but I believe salaries should always be mentioned as soon as possible. Lots of time and effort would be saved.
It would, however for all the jobs that I've ever applied the salary has always been a negotiation.