I have children, and I enjoy them. Both my wife and I have well paid jobs in the tech industry.
Having children requires sacrifices. As with any decision, there is an inevitable cost of opportunity, but what we get from caring for these loved little human beings... Is priceless!
I understand the narrative of the author. This is a narrative of an individual whose core values are "success", material accumulation as proof of it, and individual freedoms. It is true, having children will require a lot of "operation expenses", and much of the time available for "yourself" needs to be invested into your children. I respect that for some people it is not a sacrifice that they are willing to do, and I don't think people should have children because it is the next step.
But I see a problem in this narrative, and it is that it describes having children as a mistake. Again, it is a mistake for the author, but I can hardly see how it is a "universal mistake". It reminds me a bit of game theory, and the idea of "Nash's equilibrium": Players are the society as a whole, some choose to have kids, some choose not to have kids, both have a penalty, yet in the long run they both benefit from their choices (individually and mutually).
I am also concerned about empathy. Daily I realize how difficult it is for some people without children to understand my choice, and the sacrifices it requires. Yes I am happy with my choice, but lack of empathy makes it particularly difficult to avoid choices with a larger cost than it should: Should I stay with my kids when they are sick? Or go to that meeting that is (as most meetings) better done as an email ;). My kids need me, emotionally. If I am with them, I am making a world of a difference for them... and in the future for society, because they will have safe attachment!
The reality is Humanity needs people to choose to have children, not all of us, some of us. We, having children, need empathy, recognition, and help from society. I don't think science and technology are going to solve the need for childhood anytime soon.
But I understand, you don't want to have kids. Good for you! Some people will even thank you, don't succumb to the pressure to have them "because it is next", and most importantly... Please don't forget you are here because someone did the best they could to bring you to this world (and probably made some mistakes, but mostly, they just wanted the best for you).
PS: It also comes to mind "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind" by Yuval Harari... Not so much on topic, but I like the door it opens for empathy via the understanding of different narratives, and how they are just constructs.
> what we get from caring for these loved little human beings... Is priceless!
And yet you can't express what it is that you get. All the arguments brought forth in the article are objectively true, and you counter by saying "Yeah, that's the price for... well... you know?" That's not much of an argument. Depending on what exactly it is you call priceless, others may well think it's worthless.
> Daily I realize how difficult it is for some people without children to understand my choice, and the sacrifices it requires.
Childfree people fully understand the sacrifices your choice requires. They just aren't obliged or inclined to subsidize it.
Many OS out there take advantage of RAM Disks. Alpine Linux for instance allows you to boot your root device on ram as a default. SmartOS runs a boot image completely on RAM, and keeps your storage free for a few configs and VMS.
Virtually all network booted computers run their OSs from RAM. If you have never pxe booted a machine, it is a beautiful experience once you overcome a few challenges: easy upgrades and rollbacks, being able to use a machine with different contexts/platforms by just rebooting, and having your servers cleaned up just by cycling (assuming you don't have local storage)
If you enjoy the idea of RAM root devices, please try pxe/ipxe to boot your computer from a network. Also, if you have a sufficiently fast network... it is probably faster than booting from disk!
EDIT: I missed the word "all" on the second paragraph, and another typo... sorry!
Couldn't agree more, I've got at least a couple of dozen computers (from workstations and thin clients through 486s and Pi's) at home and only the main server and its backup have persistent storage.
Especially useful for Windows; it is rather slower diskless (compared to BSD/linux) but it makes Windows instances disposable.
Takes a bit of effort (more these days, FUVM systemd) but having a RAMdisk + diskless RO /usr is a great way of having computers everywhere all singing the same song.
Ditto the love for PXE — booting from a SAN appliance stocked with a few dozen fast SSDs is amazing. When I was doing big VMWare deployments, I had a PXE bootstrap setup that helped me build an entire 40-node cluster from bare metal in an hour.
Even in the event you have to use some secure zone crap, it’s pretty trivial to build since all PXE requires are dhcpd and tfptd — which are often available by default on nearly any *nix variant.
PXE boot FTW! I use to work on a project that used LTSP to make a couple dozen thin clients. The thin clients were slow, but the OS was fast. This isn't entirely the OS in RAM as a big chunk of the file system was mounted over the network, but most of the OS was in RAM.
Sadly PXE boot of a modern Linux OS is easier said than done. Gone are the days of just handing out the kernel over tftp and providing a NFS root. SystemD gets super cranky and you can't even boot the thing without setting some undocumented flags.
A little tooting of my own horn here, but nyble[1] allows you to build a ramdisk bootable image and kernel, that you can serve trivially with any http server and iPXE. A related project, tiburon[2] allows you to make this JSON db controlled. Still working on documenting them in greater depth, but you can see an example of what nyble can do[3].
I highly recommend using pixiecore as an iPXE server -- your remote machines only need to have PXE enabled. Previously, it was a pain in the ass to install the TFTP server and get a DHCP server capable of not binding to every request (and only PXE requests like the standard allows). pixiecore does everything for you in like 10 seconds: https://github.com/danderson/netboot/tree/master/pixiecore. We're using it on-premise to spin up a server rack into stateless Kubernetes nodes. None of the blades have a hard-drive/ssd :)
PXE booting Linux live media is fairly straight-forward. Grub/syslinux syntax translates pretty easily to iPxe (which is simply a different type of bootloader). You just provide a kernel,a ramdisk, and whatever kernel arguments you need. If you're trying to roll your own ramdisk environment from scratch you may run into trouble but in general network booting Linux isn't any trickier than making a bootable iso.
I'm not entirely sure of everything, but problems with UUIDs (which we expected), and some dbus signals not being generated when run over a NFS mounted root causing the boot to hang. We hacked some timeouts to get around the problem but never figured out exactly where the signals were supposed to be generated from.
A hint if you're doing this on Linux. We PXEBoot an iPXE loader to boot the machines. Doesn't work properly on UEFI unfortunately, gotta use BIOS boot.
If it helps, I have notes on how to set that up:
Go to http://rom-o-matic.net and choose gPXE git. Click on the "Customize"
button to expand all of the options.
Gentlepeople... the time to try Haiku is now! get an image, and boot it. Out of 10 machines with different ages, all but one get to desktop in a few seconds.
For the one that gets to a blank screen equally fast, make sure to press <space> on boot and choose vesa.
Browsers? Usable for the focused mind, lots of wip... For me, I have text editors, compilers, a terminal, and aws cli... I can wish for more, but I am happy with this.
Is it safe to boot on an expensive laptop like a MacBook? I remember when Linux had missing drivers there were risks that you'd overheat your machine because the laptop manufacturer was controlling a system fan in some nonstandard way.
2012 and earlier Macbooks pretty much work, I'm told (though you will hit the remaining NEC/Renesas bug I mentioned in the blog post, so use a USB2 drive until we manage to debug that.)
But yes, generally our hardware support is not quite as good as Linux's, so you will have a mixed bag in Macbooks. High-end PC laptops (e.g. Dell XPS 13) are fine.
EDIT: According to the comment below, it seems I was misremembering, and these problems occur on 2015-and-up Macbooks, not 2013-and-up.
I run Haiku natively on MacBook Pro 2014 (11.3), on SSD with EFI boot. Have working audio (headphones only), wired ethernet (no WiFi), very usable Hi-DPI display (2880x1800) with basic framebuffer driver. Retina MBP up to 2015 should all work like mine. Good enough for developing apps.
MacBooks still control the fans in some nonstandard way so you need to install some software to control the fans for you, not sure if it exists for haiku though
I just tried it for a few weeks, ending last week. It wasn't bad at all, though individual apps had various bugs such that the experience often came down to same-app-on-Haiku vs. same-app-on-Linux. Also, while I liked being able to join different apps into one tabbed window, the other workspace features in Linux DE's seemed even more useful.
So: I was surprised at how easy it was to end the experiment early and try out another Linux distro, even though I'll probably try out other Haiku releases in the future. The boot time and single-user configuration was definitely a nice break.
Yes, I think it's the full-featured aspect that made a lot of difference in this case. Though I didn't have any _workspace_ problems in Haiku, it was more like the panel concept in e.g. XFCE is simply more refined.
A really basic difference example though was that the default window move/resize RMB shortcut modifier is simply Alt in my Linux install, as opposed to Ctrl+Alt on Haiku. On a cramped keyboard this combination was fiddly. I also swap caps and CTRL on this keyboard in Linux and I hadn't checked yet if this could be accomplished. There were lots of things to look into.
I appreciate your response, and will probably try out Haiku again in the future. I liked that it was easy to install and test. Also as someone who uses QMMP a lot, I was very pleasantly surprised at the neat Be-style skin that came in its Haiku install. :-)
> I also swap caps and CTRL on this keyboard in Linux and I hadn't checked yet if this could be accomplished. There were lots of things to look into.
This you can already do; see Keymap preferences: https://www.haiku-os.org/docs/userguide/en/preferences/keyma... -- you should be able to just drag & drop the keys around to swap them. Or you can edit the keymap file directly to completely customize it.
> the default window move/resize RMB shortcut modifier is simply Alt in my Linux install, as opposed to Ctrl+Alt on Haiku. On a cramped keyboard this combination was fiddly.
We have a ticket somewhere to revamp the hardcoded shortcuts into the "Shortcuts" preferences pane; but nobody's done this yet. Eventually...
I've been using haiku as my main work os for a couple of months now. Granted, there are issues, but none of them too annoying to prevent me from getting things done... except for xhci.
It would seem like this specification has been a pain point for many other projects before. For a os with only a few contributors doing work on their freetime, I think it is going great. (My opinion, like mouths... everybody has one)
USB 3 support seems.. Basic at this point? The post mentions 2012 when chips became prevalent so this isn't new.
I also seem to recall an issue with getting a decent web browser recently?
"For a os with only a few contributors doing work on their freetime, I think it is going great "
Oh definitely, I bear no ill will, and would like the project to succeed. But can you make a full featured desktop OS in your free time. There's another comment on this thread pointing out the spec is 600 pages long. I can understand how if you're doing it as a hobby that would take time.
If someone built a car in their garage I'd be impressed. It may have taken 10 years, look ugly and leak oil but its still an achievement. I wouldn't buy it though, I don't want a car that leaks oil, and doesn't have crumple zones etc.
I guess what I'm (slowly) stumbling towards asking is, is this a hobby OS or a 'big professional' OS? Reading between the lines you seem to be happy with a hobby OS, if so great, but that isn't what I want, I'm not sure that is what it was hyped to be.
It is a massive achievement just like the home made car I mentioned.
The car has to compete against Tesla, Ford, Toyota though, does it cut it?
Does Haiku cut it against Linux, Windows, the BSDs?
Maybe I have unreasonable expectations that it should.
The car can exist for its own sake. The builder had fun making it after all. I thought the idea was that we were all going to be driving round in our own home made cars.
So am I judging it on the engineering skill of the builder, as his hobby project? Or an I judging it as my next potential car?
I can forgive that home built car not having crumple zones, radio, opening windows. They are hard to do, as a car buyer they are basic things I expect.
My two cents, do one thing well. Monitoring is as hard to tackle as good, and meaningful dashboarding.
I would focus on working on integrating with third party monitoring keeping the core in the dashboards. Coming from and industrial control & instrumentation background I like dashboards that show all elements in a system and how they interact with each other (Look for SCADA dashboards of a turbine, for example)
You need to add a lot more generic icons that are not tied to specific cloud providers. I found it very difficult to map out a system I built in a datacenter.
Sure - what extactly would you be looking for? There's also a section in Arcentry labelled "Generic & Customizable Components" which has 56 generic servers, databases, PCs and basics like cubes and triangles.
It should be already well understood that free services aren't free. To me the moral issue of the story is how Facebook isn't upfront about "the cost" of the services they provide.
You want to use facebook to get in touch with friends? We all now know that you will be targeted by ads customized with every piece of information that you reveal (and some bits that you are not even aware you are revealing...)
Assume that an extra layer of security is also costing you some privacy. Interesting dilemma...
It is not well understood that they are a service.
To many people it is more like a place, and places are free. Sure, technically you can buy a place and own it and charge for access, and technically somebody owns almost all places you might care to go to, but mostly we think of them as free.
The fact that it costs nothing, monetarily, to access… that very thing often makes something seem like it has no cost.
I suspect most people don’t get as far as “thinking” that in a conscious, deliberative, system-2 sense of the word — They see no price tag, so it’s free.
Also, it's one thing to willingly give up your own data in exchange for using Facebook etc for free, but often the data they collect could reasonably considered other people's - for instance uploading your contact book to "find friends" tells Facebook what names to associate with phone numbers and helps them build "shadow profiles" (or whatever the term they use is) for users who haven't given them anything.
This is particularly an issue when minors are present in the photo, videos, comments, etc... Dad/Mom/Uncle/Grandma shares a photo of a young family member, and without a doubt a new individual has been added to Facebook's records.
It's worse than that. You can't even buy privacy-respecting Facebook service if you wanted to, even at the ARPU/LTV that Facebook would be happy to get, and network effects mean that you suffer when your friends and family choose to use Facebook but you opt out.
This is fantastic! For non-tech (or even tech focused!) organizations it is very useful to be able to outsource the operation of their cloud infrastructure. Do what you do best, let others take care of the rest.
Not really. Even in a world where HFT is limited, cross connections provide consistent connections between trading entities. While AWS provides over-the-Internet or "black boxed" networking on a best efforts basis, Lucera's connections are point to point.
http://ftp.lanet.lv/ftp/unix/mini-linux/minilin.txt