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Engadget and others are reporting that contrary to the very spirit of the set-top box DVR, TiVo says all subscribers with select devices will see ads prior to playing recorded shows after a software update rolls out. TiVo says subscribers will be able to skip the ads coming in the next 90 days, but did not elaborate on this as a user says they had to fast forward through the ads. Many subscribers are angry and threatening to cancel, calling the ads a feature that devalues the service as they pay for the ability to skip ads altogether.
This prompts the question: will cable companies, losing subscribers and looking to replace that revenue, do the same with their DVRs?
Original article: https://www.engadget.com/2019/09/21/tivo-pre-roll-dvr-ads-for-all-users/.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday September 23 2019, @03:36PM (6 children)
Systemd is essentially replacing tiny simple predictable easy to use stuff, with the opposite, which is in itself a gigantic piece of performance art advertising for Redhat consulting services.
The idea is to get billable hours by creating a system thats unreliable and complicated where there was never a problem beforehand.
This process is known as featherbedding and is very common outside FOSS OS development; its not a new business model, only newly applied to FOSS OS stuff.
There's a lot of middlemen out there looking for billable hours and willing to nudge things in the direction of ever more billable hours; god help us if they ever get commit privs on something as simple as "ls" or "cat" or "cd". Can you imagine what our command lines and lives would look like if the middlemen "improved" the ls command?
SystemD IS in itself by design, an advertisement for RHAT consulting services.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday September 23 2019, @05:00PM
The virtues of systemd are predictability and reproducibility.
When nothing works, these two important conditions are met.
Every performance optimization is a grate wait lifted from my shoulders.
(Score: 2) by stormreaver on Monday September 23 2019, @05:31PM (4 children)
Before systemd, I had spent plenty of time poking around the startup scripts to get a lot of little things working. I was never very good at it, but spent a lot of time online looking for hints and tips on why booting was so flaky, and then editing run-level scripts using those hints and tips. Sometimes, they even solved the problem.
I haven't even touched the boot scripts since I installed my first systemd-based Linux. My computers boot so reliably now that I tend to forget that there is a specialized subsystem for that. I have no idea why people think the SysV boot system was so good, as my experience had always been one of crossing my fingers every time I rebooted a SysV-based computer. It worked most of the time, but it would sporadically require a lot of time figuring out why the computer didn't boot, and there would be no rhyme or reason to it.
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Tuesday September 24 2019, @12:07AM
+ 1 Insightful.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Tuesday September 24 2019, @11:02PM (1 child)
My experience is opposite. SystemD occasionally decides to drop to the emergency shell with the filesystem unmounted. Manually issuing the same mount command it should have issued works first try. There seems to be no way to make systemd issue the command imperatively.
Under the hood, it's hundreds of config files utilizing the same semantics as the joke "comefrom" instruction.
With SysV, the scripts can be as complex or as simple as you want them. RedHat tended to have crazy over-complicated ones.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 25 2019, @02:15AM
I've had that before. Its the parallel startup of target units. For some reason, on those particular boots, the target dependencies started or finished in a slightly different order, causing a later command to fail. The fix is to add a "Before" or "After" to the right unit file referencing the other unit file, but good luck figuring out which one it is as the error messages are less than helpful.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Friday September 27 2019, @11:15AM
That must be an unusual workload as I rarely had to do anything like that, and when I did there were dozens of working examples on the same system to compare to, and many explanatory websites; very rare to dive into an initscript alone...