Two houses helps prevent tyranny of the majority. Consider the United States. Each state gets 2 senators no matter what, but the proportion of House of Representatives seats each state gets is calculated based on the state's population.
This quirk means that even small states like Wyoming have equal Senate representation as the populous states like California, Texas or New York.
This arguably undemocratic over-representation gives the smaller states much more power in certain areas, but this is by design. It provides incentive to keep large rural states part of a single nation. Compromises like that makes a country as a whole stronger.
Another interesting aspect is US Senate terms are long (6 years), with a third of members up for reelection happening every TWO years. Compared to the House of Representatives which has 4 year terms, and half up for reelection every 2 years. The net effect is it requires several election cycles to have a big impact on the passage of laws. This contributes to stability.
But don't you end up with tyranny of the minority? Small states, that fit a very niche demographic, end up being pivotal in decisions that affect the lives of millions of Americans, often due to the intense lobbying that is targeted at these senators.
What you call a 'tyranny of the minority' is in fact an equal representation of classes... that the rural proletariat is represented in government rather than yielding all decisions to the urban bourgeoisie. The American form of government was designed specifically to ensure a balance of interests rather than allowing one class to run roughshod over the other. It's a design feature, and a good one at that, no matter how much it distresses imperialists who'd prefer to simply dictate the course of affairs to the working class.
"What you call a 'tyranny of the minority' is in fact an equal representation of classes..."
Arbitrary geographical lines don't define classes. Every state has both rural and urban segments. Is the "rural proletariat" of California better represented than the "urban bourgeoise" of Rhode Island in this system? It's an 18th century compromise where the justifications where invented after the fact. This seems to be true for a lot of things about the founding of the United States. Lots of mythology around the motives of the founding fathers and their supposedly great designs that don't really hold up to any scrutiny.
No, but urbanization does, and some states are more suitable to dense settlement than others.
> Lots of mythology around the motives of the founding fathers and their supposedly great designs that don't really hold up to any scrutiny.
Likewise the jabs aimed at the founding fathers by people who have an obvious axe to grind (namely an imperialist one). You'll forgive me if I prefer not to reject constitutionalism because it conflicts with someone's preferred method of exploitation.
It’s not. Rural voters work the same types of jobs that their urban counterparts do. Rural doesn’t mean agriculture because that is a tiny fraction of the workforce. Poor rural voters work the same jobs that poor urban voters do (largely service or manufacturing).
The urban “bourgeoisie” isn’t big enough to dictate anything as a voting bloc, but the “equal representation of classes” angle is a great way to justify suppressing urban political representation.
Lol, tech and finance is not the majority of workers anywhere, even in San Francisco or New York.
In rural and urban areas, the split between service and manufacturing is pretty similar. Obviously, agriculture makes a bigger contribution but not by much.
What are you talking about suburbia? The suburbs of every major city are full of white collar workers in high finance, or tech. Even in New York, people commute from Westchester or Greenwich to their finance jobs in Manhattan. Most of the tech industry in Silicon Valley is literally in the suburbs. What a weird thing to say.
unfortunately such situations often degenerate into a tyranny of the minority, the UK house of lords as a mechanism for the aristocracy to keep holding power with a veneer of democracy is a good example, which is why it has steadily lost political legitimacy through time.
I don't think there is good evidence that the senate has in fact made the USA stronger as a nation, the only thing I have ever seen on the topic is how it theoretically might be the case, but history has shown it to long be a blocker of reforms that end up happening anyways, with a great deal more political bullshit than necessary.
I'd argue Joe Manchin (Democratic Senator of West Virginia) has single-handedly changed an eye-watering $3.5 trillion dollar spending bill into what appears to be a slightly less eye-watering $1.5 trillion package. The lower number (and thus lower taxes) makes it much more acceptable to a broader fraction of US society. Assuming the bill passes, it's an example of compromise working (but within negotiations of a single party).
The key thing is if one party wants to be able to pass the larger number without that pivotal vote, they need to appeal to a greater fraction of society and win more seats so they don't require that particular vote.
Well, that first of all depends on whetehr the budget cut is a good thing for the US and the world. From what I understand, this package is about fighting the climate change and investing into infrastructure and economy. Yes, government spending always bears the risk of taxes, but the idea behind government spending is to get neccessary things done. As an outsider, it is not obvious to me, that this resistance was a good thing. Neither for the US nor the world, as we are facing an existential crisis.
Also, as the sums are spent over many years, the numbers appear higher than they might be. Like people calculating how much money it costs to replace every single car in a country with an electric car. That numer is eye-watering too. What often isn't told, is that this amount of money is spent on new cars in the same time frame anyway. Choosing an electric instead of a combustion engine car the next time you buy a new car has actually little extra cost.
And you should sum up just the military budget in the same time frame :)
Sorry, I meant the text based Clonezilla User interface, and even its command line switches.
For a project, I once made a bootable usb stick config of clonezilla that automatically started up restore of an image to the one ssd in the machine. To get that to work I had to bring up stuff with the boys down in Taiwan (clonezilla team) because there were several things that were documented wrong or did other things than what it said on the tin. The difference is pretty huge between the old and venerable Powerquest Drive Image versus Clonezilla.
hosted.weblate.org is only free for open-source projects, but it shouldn't be hard to find alternative hosting, or launch a Docker container in the cloud??
The key is probably to make the community onboarding and experience as easy as possible, to allow for spontaneous community translation projects like the one in the article.
(perhaps expanding that could be one meta-method for improving the accessibility and suitability of Weblate for situations like this. agree that hosting -- or having something available online that works already -- can often be an obstacle to adoption too)
Why do you think Intel will succeed in selling leading edge fab services to fabless companies when GlobalFoundries (the chip making business of AMD) was unable to compete?
To me, it seems like the same story is playing out again.
One could easily flip that question around right? "Why would Intel try to sell fab services like Global Foundry which didn't work out well?"
But more importantly, Intel actually has way more foundry expertise than Global did/does. In the case of AMD selling off Global it was more like cutting loose an under performing part of the company rather than empowering the a significant asset of the company.
The new Sourceforge team has generally done a great job. Here is a review that might help some people.
Pros:
For general project discussion, Sourceforge's traditional discussion forum is far superior to Github/GitLab issues (though I haven't tried Github Discussions beta yet). The forum can be configured for users to be able to post without creating an account (though only as a specific user named "Anonymous", not arbitrary names) which is as important feature when creating software for users who aren't likely to have Github or Sourceforge accounts.
Sourceforge download statistics tracking of releases (including graphing per country and with arbitrary timestamps) is far superior to Github, which doesn't offer even private tracking of download numbers without directly using their API. This is actually a really ridiculous situation.
Cons:
Sourceforge recently added the ability for the project administrator to mark any review as spam, which automatically hides it. This single change has completely ruined the trustworthiness of Sourceforge's reviews, as unscrupulous application authors are able to mark all poor reviews as spam so users only see good reviews. Because of this, I recommend AlternativeTo (http://alternativeto.net/), as they have better review non-interference policy.
Sourceforge's entire website seems to go into maintenance mode for a few minutes every 24 hours, which is frustrating for those in less favorable timezones.
Even after using it for a long time, Sourceforge user-interface and settings/permissions is overly complex, confusing and non-intuitive. I find Github's well designed settings page much easier. Though admittedly Github has its share of UI quirks. New Github users are understandably initially confused by the concept of Pull Requests (which should have been called Merge Requests) and the fork user-interface. As a developer familiar with both tools (and git, PRs etc) I find Github easier to use than Sourceforge, which is saying something.
Many Sourceforge projects tend to have their source code mirrored on a rarely updated Github project, which then gets forked and developed without changes being upstreamed, which causes fragmentation.
Many third-party tools (like CircleCI) tend to target only Github (and to a lesser degree GitLab/Bitbucket) and ignore Sourceforge entirely.
It's too easy for newbie users to download older releases (Github has the same issue unless you create a Github Pages site to highlight the most recent release).
Conclusion:
Sourceforge is actually a reasonable tool to develop open-source software in 2021.
For new projects I would generally suggest sticking with Github and GitLab, but for existing projects on Sourceforge changing hosting to Github may not be required.
The real killer is lack of integration of third-party tools like CircleCI. That's enough to switch to Github. But you will likely miss the excellent download statistics, anonymous support forum and user review system.
The author of i3 Windows Manager has a series of interesting blog posts about his pain points with Debian project. [1] Well worth reading the blog series.
He also has a research distribution named 'distri' that tries to fix certain aspects of those pain points. [2]
This is really an excellent post. While I'm not a debian developer, some of those challenges enumerated affect end users directly as well. Like plenty of packages being single-maintainer fiefdoms, with wildly different quality of maintenance.
I thought they were both excellent, thoughtful posts. Not being an i3 user, I wasn’t previously aware of Michael Stapelberg but I like the way he’s willing to work on solutions that he has identified, e.g., he offered to create proper archives for the Debian mailing lists.
His proposal for speeding up package management also seems like a useful project. If only he had the same political clout as other prominent FOSS developers.
Ubuntu at least does it in alphabetical order of the first letter of the codename. Eg, the release after Ubuntu 20.04 Focal was Ubuntu 20.10 Groovy. This means that hearing the Ubuntu codename "Bionic" provides some information: it was 4 releases before Focal.
But Debian codenames are arbitrarily based on characters from the movie Toy Story, so there's no relation to the Debian release.
To fix this, I propose for future releases the Debian codename naming scheme be replaced with numbers written out in words. Eg.
Debian 14 (fourteen)
Debian 13 (thirteen)
Debian 12 (twelve)
Debian 11 (bullseye)
Debian 10 (buster)
Debian 9 (stretch)
Debian 8 (jessie)
This retains the ability to easily search for eg, "Debian Thirteen", while making it much easier to remember earlier codenames as time goes on.
Also unlike Ubuntu's alphabetical naming scheme, the number approach doesn't have any overflow issues (which isn't as big of an issue anyway because Debian's provides new releases every 2 years instead of 6 monthly).
Sure; but (IMHO) I think the code names provide an visible and fun reminder that this operating is a operating system for hackers, and this is a tiny bit of personality from that ethos baked into the system.
Debian labels itself the 'universal operating system', and makes no aspirations to cater to the lowest common denominator of users.
Universal operating system for a wide variety of hardware, but some expertise is assumed for the user.
Kind of a novel choice now that I think about it... most projects aim for more users, which means less assumed knowledge, which necessitates more limits on hardware. Not a bad choice, just different.
Since debian both provide version numbers and codenames, I don't think making codename same as the release version makes any sense.
When I google Debian 5, I get results to Debian Lenny (which is 5). Also Debian denotes versions in official notices and it's widespread in internet so, codenames are not hindering anything in practice.
OTOH, codenames play a bigger role in the ecosystem. It adds motivation, fun and sense of originality. I love to have them, I love they're in fact Toy Story characters.
It makes it almost lifelike and masks the burden of maintaining one of the biggest distro projects in the existence.
While I love minimalism and utility, I think Debian should keep these. It's fun, memorable and original.
As someone who doesn't use Debian as my only (or even main) OS, but does manage a few Debian servers, I completely disagree on memorable. I can never remember the order of code names and whenever I read something like "stretch or later" I always have to Google to find out if the servers I have qualify or not.
Other than that, I have zero complaints about Debian
Well, they're really irresponsible if they're writing like that. All of the places I've seen, downloaded debs either write Debian 9+ or Debian 9+ (Stretch and later) or any similar fashion.
I didn't encounter any Debian $codename only compatibility notes. I also don't write $codename only readme files, etc.
Yep, the United States government gaining the ability to directly block the licensing of ARM reference designs from companies like Huawei's HiSilicon (and the fabless chip designers such as Rockchip) is a VERY big deal. It's a very different situation to the US government having to pressure Japan's SoftBank, UK's ARM Holdings (or their respective governments).
This quirk means that even small states like Wyoming have equal Senate representation as the populous states like California, Texas or New York.
This arguably undemocratic over-representation gives the smaller states much more power in certain areas, but this is by design. It provides incentive to keep large rural states part of a single nation. Compromises like that makes a country as a whole stronger.
Another interesting aspect is US Senate terms are long (6 years), with a third of members up for reelection happening every TWO years. Compared to the House of Representatives which has 4 year terms, and half up for reelection every 2 years. The net effect is it requires several election cycles to have a big impact on the passage of laws. This contributes to stability.