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What you should try is:

youtube-dl

http://rg3.github.com/youtube-...

A lot of people post to [The Official Tor Blog] saying with each new TBB release, "Flash still doesn't work!" No kidding? We don't know that already?

Check youtube-dl's list of supported sites at their website. You don't need a browser plugin/addon/extension for this.

I don't know if torify/torsocks is included in the TBB (Tor Browser Bundle), but in TAILS I run at the command line (after downloading youtube-dl and a quick verify of the md5/sha1 or sha256 checksums):

chmod a+rx youtube-dl

^ the chmod command only once, then:

torsocks ./youtube-dl URLtovideoorpagewithvideo

Easy. There are other options such as the "User Agent" you may wish to use.

Again, if you use TBB instead of TAILS, programs like youtube-dl may need an additional option, the website for youtube-dl explains it very well.

##

"We also provide a Windows executable that includes Python.

youtube-dl should work in your Unix box, in Windows or in Mac OS X. It is released to the public domain, which means you can modify it, redistribute it or use it however you like."

- Supported Sites:
https://rg3.github.io/youtube-...

What you should try is:

youtube-dl

http://rg3.github.com/youtube-...

A lot of people post to [The Official Tor Blog] saying with each new TBB release, "Flash still doesn't work!" No kidding? We don't know that already?

Check youtube-dl's list of supported sites at their website. You don't need a browser plugin/addon/extension for this.

I don't know if torify/torsocks is included in the TBB (Tor Browser Bundle), but in TAILS I run at the command line (after downloading youtube-dl and a quick verify of the md5/sha1 or sha256 checksums):

chmod a+rx youtube-dl

^ the chmod command only once, then:

torsocks ./youtube-dl URLtovideoorpagewithvideo

Easy. There are other options such as the "User Agent" you may wish to use.

Again, if you use TBB instead of TAILS, programs like youtube-dl may need an additional option, the website for youtube-dl explains it very well.

##

"We also provide a Windows executable that includes Python.

youtube-dl should work in your Unix box, in Windows or in Mac OS X. It is released to the public domain, which means you can modify it, redistribute it or use it however you like."

- Supported Sites:
https://rg3.github.io/youtube-...

What you should try is:

youtube-dl

http://rg3.github.com/youtube-...

A lot of people post to [The Official Tor Blog] saying with each new TBB release, "Flash still doesn't work!" No kidding? We don't know that already?

Check youtube-dl's list of supported sites at their website. You don't need a browser plugin/addon/extension for this.

I don't know if torify/torsocks is included in the TBB (Tor Browser Bundle), but in TAILS I run at the command line (after downloading youtube-dl and a quick verify of the md5/sha1 or sha256 checksums):

chmod a+rx youtube-dl

^ the chmod command only once, then:

torsocks ./youtube-dl URLtovideoorpagewithvideo

Easy. There are other options such as the "User Agent" you may wish to use.

Again, if you use TBB instead of TAILS, programs like youtube-dl may need an additional option, the website for youtube-dl explains it very well.

##

"We also provide a Windows executable that includes Python.

youtube-dl should work in your Unix box, in Windows or in Mac OS X. It is released to the public domain, which means you can modify it, redistribute it or use it however you like."

- Supported Sites:
https://rg3.github.io/youtube-...

What you should try is:

youtube-dl

http://rg3.github.com/youtube-...

A lot of people post here [at the Official Tor Blog] saying with each new TBB release, "Flash still doesn't work!" No kidding? We don't know that already?

Check youtube-dl's list of supported sites at their website. You don't need a browser plugin/addon/extension for this.

I don't know if torify/torsocks is included in the TBB*, but in TAILS I run at the command line (after downloading youtube-dl and a quick verify of the md5/sha1 or sha256 checksums):

chmod a+rx youtube-dl

^ the chmod command only once, then:

torsocks ./youtube-dl URLtovideoorpagewithvideo

Easy. There are other options such as the "User Agent" you may wish to use.

Again, if you use TBB instead of TAILS, programs like youtube-dl may need an additional option, the website for youtube-dl explains it very well.

Need to download videos while using Tor?

What you should try is:

youtube-dl

http://rg3.github.com/youtube-...

A lot of people post here [at the Official Tor Blog] saying with each new TBB release, "Flash still doesn't work!" No kidding? We don't know that already?

Check youtube-dl's list of supported sites at their website. You don't need a browser plugin/addon/extension for this.

I don't know if torify/torsocks is included in the TBB*, but in TAILS I run at the command line (after downloading youtube-dl and a quick verify of the md5/sha1 or sha256 checksums):

chmod a+rx youtube-dl

^ the chmod command only once, then:

torsocks ./youtube-dl URLtovideoorpagewithvideo

Easy. There are other options such as the "User Agent" you may wish to use.

Again, if you use TBB instead of TAILS, programs like youtube-dl may need an additional option, the website for youtube-dl explains it very well.

Script to disable UseRoaming in Apple OS X https://gist.github.com/logica...

I always use Staxrip
https://github.com/stax76/stax...

* I have sole ownership of intellectual property rights to my Submissions and I am not making Submissions in the course of work for my employer.

* I am making Submissions in the course of work for my employer (or my employer has intellectual property rights in my Submissions by contract or applicable law). I have permission from my employer to make Submissions and enter into this Agreement on behalf of my employer.

Copyright License. You grant Microsoft, and those who receive the Submission directly or indirectly from Microsoft, a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, irrevocable license in the Submission to reproduce, prepare derivative works of, publicly display, publicly perform, and distribute the Submission and such derivative works, and to sublicense any or all of the foregoing rights to third parties.

Patent License. You grant Microsoft, and those who receive the Submissiondirectly or indirectly from Microsoft, a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, irrevocable license under Your patent claims that are necessarily infringed by the Submission or the combination of the Submission with the Project to which it was Submitted to make, have made, use, offer to sell, sell and import or otherwise dispose of the Submission alone or with the Project ..

Notice to Microsoft. You agree to notify Microsoft in writing of any facts or circumstances of which You later become aware that would make Your representations in this Agreement inaccurate in any respect. ref

ChakraCore Contributor License Agreement (CLA)

The missing bindings are expected. The browser bindings expose Windows APIs into the JS engine within the browser ("standard + extensions"), and the COM bindings on the debug API not being present are there to make it platform agnostic.

The part that I find really amazing is that they are targeting x86, x64, and ARM binary support, with two levels of JIT, with feedback optimization. That's a pretty cool thing to have out there in the wild, under an MIT license:

https://github.com/Microsoft/C...

I think that some of the first contributions need to be buildability support on other platforms, which means CLang/LLVM and GCC support. Ideally, it would handle agnostic conversion from some common representation into both the project build mechanism in Java ("Jenkins"), and Makefiles. Not sure if I'm willing to jump on this, since it would mean a familiarity with both, and I'm not sure they'd accept something like that back (it looks like they specifically picked Jenkins for its cross-platform-ness, even though it adds a Java dependency).

This would enable someone external to Microsoft to run *at least* nightly builds and regression testing for other platforms.

I really have to wonder if it's been thought through, however, to enable people to identify the JavaScript engine, and decide *not* to use the Microsoft specific extensions to the Core platform, so as to keep the things that try to use it portable, or if that's of interest to them. A long time ago, I tried, and failed, to get a common cross-platform ABI adopted, and one of the *key* requirements for it would have been the ability to *turn off* vendor extensions in the runtime, so that you could build cross-platform software targeting it, by causing it to error out when the software used a vendor private API/ABI component.

Without something like that, I fear, it will become an "embrace -- then extend and make incompatible", similar to gcc'isms being incorporated into otherwise portable source code, or the bash extensions to the Bourne shell that resulted in shell scripts actually not being runnable on any shell, but instead only runnable on bash due to bash'isms.

A nice barrier enforcement mechanism that extended up through browser space to enable committing to portability would be nice. Otherwise, when a remote website sent JavaScript content down because of the runtime it though it was hitting, it could include them, unintentionally or no, and non-Microsoft browsers based on the Core implementation would fail to operate.

Would Linux be so popular

If Linux were GPL it would most definitely not be so popular, it's popularity stems from some of the clauses in the GPLv2 combined with the explicit exclusion of GPL provisions in the license preamble. The GPL is good in some respects and bad in others. Linux would also not have been anywhere near as popular had the GPLv3 provisions regarding Tivoization existed in the GPLv2.

As Linus has repeatedly said, Linux isn't about Free Software ideals, it is about "tit-for-tat" code contributions (hence the reason he sees Tivoization as a good thing) and the GPLv2 offers that.

Whenever I look at the licenses in proprietary devices, I always find a GPL cut and paste job.

That's not a useful datum, even if it weren't anecdotal. How do you compare the "success" of GPL as evidenced by its presence in embedded devices with "success" of Mozilla license, for example, as evidenced by firefox or LibreOffice? You can't...

And if you compare the licenses by the sheer number of projects — useful and otherwise — using them, then MIT-license is the clear winner these days.

False. Even with all the settings turned off, Windows 10 sends your personal information to over 100 domains. They have to be blocked from the router (Win10 bypasses its firewall and hosts file, so those don't work): https://github.com/WindowsLies...

Next time, on slashdot, replace every occurrence of "Oracle" with "my butt".

We've had three butt stories in a row!

AC here, mind if I hijack first post... for great justice?

https://github.com/dhowe/AdNau...

Start running this on sites with shitty ad blocking policies. Whitelist the sites you support.
Adblock is designed as a defensive measure, adnauseam is offensive.

How about this http://www.postgres-xl.org/ and this https://github.com/postgres-x2 ?

The PS4's security does appear to have been at least partially compromised, however. A recent video appears to show Linux running on a PS4, along with a version of Pokemon. Note that we don't yet have independent verification of this, so there's a chance (albeit probably a slim one given the track record of the group in question) that this is a hoax.

Yes, they got in through a FreeBSD security vulnerability. The Pokemon game is running in a Gameboy Advance emulator. No, it's not a hoax. Team Fail0verflow has a GitHub repository with all the patches needed for Linux and its GPU drivers. You can follow their Twitter account for updates.

It's not just Firefox that has become a bug-ridden disaster. Mozilla has managed to do the same with much newer projects like Rust and Servo.

It's particularly funny in the case of Rust. Rust is supposed to be a programming language that, according to its website, "prevents segfaults", "guarantees thread safety", and should make writing buggy code much, much harder. Yet the Rust compiler and standard library, much of which are implemented in Rust by the people who know Rust the best, suffers from thousands of open bugs!

Servo, which is supposed to be Mozilla's next-generation browser engine, also has over 1,000 open bugs. Servo is written in Rust, so theoretically it should have far fewer bugs than that, but because Rust is a disaster then Servo ends up being a disaster, too. And this is the foundation that Mozilla wants to build future versions of Firefox on!

Instead of wasting so much time and effort on Rust and Servo, both of which are proving to be quite lousy, Mozilla should have just taken Gecko and gradually transitioned it to C++14. C++14 is already well-supported by multiple C++ compiler systems which run on all of the major platforms, and it offers pretty much all of the benefits of Rust. As part of this transition they could have focused on fixing bugs.

Firefox OS needs to go. Rust needs to go. Servo needs to go. Mozilla needs to focus on salvaging Firefox, their only remaining project that still has users. Firefox's share of the market is now only about 7%, across all versions and platforms, and it's dropping each month. Soon it will be sub-5%. Once it gets there, Mozilla's influence will dwindle to next to nothing. Lucrative search deals will be pointless. Mozilla's say on web standards will evaporate.

It's not just Firefox that has become a bug-ridden disaster. Mozilla has managed to do the same with much newer projects like Rust and Servo.

It's particularly funny in the case of Rust. Rust is supposed to be a programming language that, according to its website, "prevents segfaults", "guarantees thread safety", and should make writing buggy code much, much harder. Yet the Rust compiler and standard library, much of which are implemented in Rust by the people who know Rust the best, suffers from thousands of open bugs!

Servo, which is supposed to be Mozilla's next-generation browser engine, also has over 1,000 open bugs. Servo is written in Rust, so theoretically it should have far fewer bugs than that, but because Rust is a disaster then Servo ends up being a disaster, too. And this is the foundation that Mozilla wants to build future versions of Firefox on!

Instead of wasting so much time and effort on Rust and Servo, both of which are proving to be quite lousy, Mozilla should have just taken Gecko and gradually transitioned it to C++14. C++14 is already well-supported by multiple C++ compiler systems which run on all of the major platforms, and it offers pretty much all of the benefits of Rust. As part of this transition they could have focused on fixing bugs.

Firefox OS needs to go. Rust needs to go. Servo needs to go. Mozilla needs to focus on salvaging Firefox, their only remaining project that still has users. Firefox's share of the market is now only about 7%, across all versions and platforms, and it's dropping each month. Soon it will be sub-5%. Once it gets there, Mozilla's influence will dwindle to next to nothing. Lucrative search deals will be pointless. Mozilla's say on web standards will evaporate.

For me last year (and one or two before that) it's been Go (golang) that's taken over my programming life. I've taken it from a "spare time" thing to getting many services into production using Go last year, as well as getting 3 dev teams at work using it and it's already proving more productive than java, which we've all used until now, in some cases for decades.

Look here https://github.com/trending and you will see that golang features highly now, pretty much every day. When I list the most exciting projects I've started using in the last few years, about 70% of them are in Go. When I look around me at software startups, they mostly use Go. I was also told that about 80% of startups working with Adrian Cockcroft are using Go (and he spends a lot of his time with startups in his current work)

Also, it's really fun. Seriously. Learn Go and use it.

Or you could start with one of the many open source drone firmwares that run on a variety of platforms and can power anything from a car or boat all the way to a octacopter, or a variety of strange propeller configurations.

Possibly useful if you have old Apple ][ disks laying around:

Many years ago I graduated and lost access to Apple ][ machines at school, but still had a bunch of floppy disks for them.

Then just a few years ago I happened to stumble across a tool called disk2fdi http://www.oldskool.org/disk2fdi for MS-DOS, that can read Apple disks using IBM hardware. I was able to use the trial version of that (from MS-DOS on an old IBM compatible) to recover images of my disks.

I transferred the images to a newer Linux machine, and was able to use dos33fsprogs https://github.com/deater/dos33fsprogs to extract individual files and confirm that the recovery was successful. I also tested some of the disk images in an Apple ][ emulator.

I also have a couple of old TRS-80 disks (possibly a version of CPM?) that I have not been able to recover, although I haven't really tried very hard either.

The esp8266 is already arduino compatible using the board manger in the arduino IDE. https://github.com/esp8266/Ard... Why go through the trouble making a board that has 2 microcontrollers on it when the ESP8266 has wifi, runs at 80 MHz and commonly comes in packages with 1,2 or 4 mb of flash memory for your program. Seems to me to be to little too late. http://www.banggood.com/NodeMc... http://www.banggood.com/ESP826... http://www.banggood.com/3Pcs-E... I feel like there needs to be a whole article on the ESP8266 on here.

Remember, kids: SRL is the usurper Arduino that secretlyfiled the Arduino copyright and started dicking Banzi and Co (arduino.cc) out of royalties. This issue from April 2015 ("Rename this fork and use less confusing versioning") had its most recent comment 17 days ago.

no, sigil. https://github.com/Sigil-Ebook... calibre is wonderful for sorting a finished product, but the conversion tool usually does more harm than good.

If you want equations to come out reasonably, you have to use EPUB 3 or iBooks Author (which isn't open source). The problem you're going to find with EPUB 3 is that most readers don't support it yet, and you might have to distribute it yourself. I have a small publishing company and we recently did a book full of equations and ended up publishing it only on iTunes/iBooks and our own site. It has the equations done in MathML so you can copy and paste them into other things. Most of your other features are things we haven't tried to implement, but I suspect will cause the old EPUB 2.x validators to barf (even if it's valid EPUB 2, many distributors are using old validators).

As far as tools, we tend to export things from Indesign (because a lot of our books are in dead tree format, too) and then fix them up with BBEdit, TextMate, or Sigil. Sigil is nice because it will render the book for you. BBEdit will open a properly zipped up epub file package and let you hand edit things inside, but it doesn't do any of the cross-file updating that Sigil does (e.g. if you change a file name it will get updated where appropriate in Sigil, but you have to do it by hand in BBEdit). TextMate doesn't open epub packages directly, but it's useful as an editor (and any other text editor with regex support will serve you about the same). BBEdit and TextMate both have good regex support (more so than Sigil). I'm partial to BBEdit, while our other editor is partial to TextMate. We have a little "tech tips" section on our main site that describes how we export a word file and make an epub from it (it should be about the same with OO), as well as how we do references. Unfortunately there aren't any good epub editors available yet that support references in a reasonable way. Assuming you can figure out the EPUB 3 implementation of the features you want, you should be able to do most of what you need with a good text editor that has good regex support.

You can run your final product through Epubcheck 3 (or whatever version you want) and verify that it's valid. Most distributors use some flavor of epubcheck 2.x and will reject it if your file throws any errors. They may or may not accurately tell you the errors, and like any compiler, you can sometimes fix 30 pages of errors by putting in the correct bit of punctuation just before where the first error is thrown.

Eh... 100% self-taught programmer here, fwiw.

So let's say someone contributes a basically useful pull request to one of my projects. But it doesn't have any test coverage, and some aspect of the code is less than ideal. There are a couple ways I could respond.

I could say "fuck you, get lost you incompetent shitlord!" and refuse the PR.

Or I could say something more or less like this:

This is a great contribution! However it does not include any test coverage for the new functionality.

Please check out my comment on the code, and let me know your thoughts. Also please add unit tests. Then I will be happy to merge this PR.

The former response gets me: a) no new functionality for my package; and b) at least one formerly-supportive person who now hates my guts and wants nothing to do with helping my project.

The latter response gets me: a) cool new functionality; and b) a contributor who (hopefully) has a fairly good impression of the project.

Seems obvious to me, at least, which is the more beneficial approach.

Not for long you won't.

As the summary states, Khan follows Twitter's patent pledge. This is a good first step as far as it goes, but it still explicitly allows for offensive litigation if the "inventor" agrees. That's not sufficient. At the very minimum, Khan should adopt a clear, irrevocable policy never to enforce patents against open source projects, like many Patent Commons participants. Ideally it should partner with Creative Commons to work out an even stronger patent license, consistent with its mission. CC has previously developed model patent licenses and I'm sure they'd be happy to help.

If the Khan Academy user who originally posted in Slashdot in response is reading this -- please bring these resources to the attention of management.

It was fun while it lasted https://github.com/apple/swift...

(nevermind the fact that the rootkit scanner in MS Sysinternals hasn't been updated in how many years?)

Hopefully software like Detekt[1][2] will remain and continue to push out updates.

[1] http://github.com/botherder/de...
[2] https://github.com/botherder/d...

(nevermind the fact that the rootkit scanner in MS Sysinternals hasn't been updated in how many years?)

Hopefully software like Detekt[1][2] will remain and continue to push out updates.

[1] http://github.com/botherder/de...
[2] https://github.com/botherder/d...

The original code references a "Jeter" filter -- presumably Derek Jeter. (see README.md).

The Github link in the code and in the github readme says to do this:
git clone https://robspectre/Trump-Filte...

Actually you want to include the host name and do this:
git clone https://github.com/RobSpectre/...

It would have been nice if instead of replacing almost all references to Jeter with Trump
the code would have allowed entering any number of character strings, such as
Trump, Clinton, Kardashian, and Fogle :)

Ehud

For the most part, Microsoft CLR users already don't care. Have you heard of IKVM? They're already yo-ho-ho-ing code like Zookeeper libraries and other stuff at a prodigous rate. And given that the CLR has versioning that lets it update its binary engine without deprecating the entire universe that came before, they're doing it with a language with features at least 5 years ahead of what the Java working groups are even considering.

Given the open sourcing and license of the .NET core libraries, CoreCLR and compiler... Quite frankly the community would be better served if Google used the CLR. Microsoft actually doesn't need a lot of buy-in. They're already leading one of the top 5 most deployed binary platforms in the world. What they want is developers to recognize their platform is actually the technically superior and most open option.

For the most part, Microsoft CLR users already don't care. Have you heard of IKVM? They're already yo-ho-ho-ing code like Zookeeper libraries and other stuff at a prodigous rate. And given that the CLR has versioning that lets it update its binary engine without deprecating the entire universe that came before, they're doing it with a language with features at least 5 years ahead of what the Java working groups are even considering.

Given the open sourcing and license of the .NET core libraries, CoreCLR and compiler... Quite frankly the community would be better served if Google used the CLR. Microsoft actually doesn't need a lot of buy-in. They're already leading one of the top 5 most deployed binary platforms in the world. What they want is developers to recognize their platform is actually the technically superior and most open option.

For the most part, Microsoft CLR users already don't care. Have you heard of IKVM? They're already yo-ho-ho-ing code like Zookeeper libraries and other stuff at a prodigous rate. And given that the CLR has versioning that lets it update its binary engine without deprecating the entire universe that came before, they're doing it with a language with features at least 5 years ahead of what the Java working groups are even considering.

Given the open sourcing and license of the .NET core libraries, CoreCLR and compiler... Quite frankly the community would be better served if Google used the CLR. Microsoft actually doesn't need a lot of buy-in. They're already leading one of the top 5 most deployed binary platforms in the world. What they want is developers to recognize their platform is actually the technically superior and most open option.

If you're developing for Android it is worth checking out Kotlin along with the Anko libs from Jetbrains.

Kotlin, by the company that provides the Android Studio platform, is built on the Java platform and adds a modern, fashionable multi-paradigm (OO, functional) syntax, fixes some gaps in the Java standard libs, adds optionals that are (IMHO) easier to read than Swift's. It seems to be the best bet for getting a modern, fashionable language on Android, ie does not add to download size, seamless operation with other libs, etc.

You can also use Kotlin as a backend language, eg with Spring Boot, and it compiles to JavaScript too, so can be used client-side. You could even use it on iOS if you wanted, with RoboVM.

I've spent the last few years developing focusing almost 100% on iOS, but am willing to give Android another try in 2016

.

Sure, why not?.

I'm sorry, if the names of the peoples involved aren't on the list of bitcoin/bitcoin contributors with at least 3 commits, then they're probably not anywhere near core developers of Bitcoin. That doesn't make them not Bitcoin developers, but in that same capacity, I'm just as a much of "Bitcoin developer". Hell, at least I've got a commit in Bitcoin Core.

This appears to be a press release from a company that got some of the btcd implementors to join it. btcd is an implementation of bitcoin in Golang.

new standard bytecode

That will be WebAssembly. With WebAssembly and a compiler that supports it you can conceivably take a desktop application, compile it to wasm and run it in your web browser.

We really need something like XUL or XAML made in to a web standard.

I don't think we do. For a WebAssembly application we can use 2D canvas or WebGL for the GUI. Any development environment built for making cross platform GUI applications (like Qt or Delphi) is in a good position to take advantage of WebAssembly in this way once wasm makes its way into browsers.

Funny, I just installed OTP Authenticator on my phone. Sounds like the aussies need to get a clue. Euther that or never come back from vacation. https://github.com/0xbb/otp-au...

Also, the UI is very efficient for brainstorming then rearranging things (including an improvement I'm about 2/3 done with). And because it is structured underneath, one can "model" one's knowledge to represent what "is". One of the nearer-future features I hope for will use that structure to allow sharing between models: if one person develops info in a structure and makes it available, others could monitor it for changes (subscribe in a way if desired), and copy or link to pieces of the model. But not on a page basis, rather on an entity basis, where an entity is a "thing", a knowledge unit. And many more features I hope can be provided because the fundamental data structure is not piles of words, but computable numbers and relationships.

Another application I'd like, which could also be done w/ wikis but I think not as well because of the lack of general computability, is to collaboratively create a maturity model for all of life. There's a John Wooden quote that goes something like "the problem with all the good new books is that they keep us from reading all the good old books". On any topic, there is too much material or not enough available, and one has to wade through much to find what one needs. But if there's a generalized maturity model, and one can query it to learn "here's where I am right now in all kinds of levels of development", then the system could provide info on "here are things you can do next to grow, to become a more balanced person, to progress further as a whole individual or to serve & mentor for others", and provide the "whys", the very best references w/ more info, and tracking or reminders to help strengthen traits or review material (like Anki), all in a very structured way that would not be possible if the knowledge is primarily captured as tons of words. I.e., best practices tailored to one's own situation, where you only need to see what is most helpful to you right now, instead of everything at once, enabled by structured, computable, modeled knowledge.

Yes, I really need to get some docs filled in and posted.

I think as a civilization we need to look at recording, manipulating, computing, and otherwise using knowledge much more efficiently, and trying to process endless words is a large hindrance. Ideally and ultimately, it's about making knowledge computable by detaching it from the words, the words are a superstrate but not the core -- and everything we could do with that.

Maybe the github README file helps a little also ( https://github.com/onemodel/on... ). I wish I were explaining it better.

Note that the article URL, blockadblock dot com, is that of some sort of anti-adblock piranha (cf. https://github.com/sitexw/Bloc...) so you might want to think twice before clicking it.

A little bit. The author as stated in the article is also the author of the sync tool, Syncoid and does consulting. He doesn't really have a horse in the race for the company he's reviewing and his tools are looking to support Btrfs, so he's not necessarily married too ZFS or the solution the company the review is mostly about. Actually pretty nice article to read.

From some of the benchmarks in the article it didn't seem like rsync had any strength over syncoid, other than his tool requiring ZFS on both ends while rsync being more flexible.

Are you for real AC, or just trolling?

Your Synology "reference" is a classic "appeal to authority", only it's a really bad choice of authority due to its complete lack of any technical detail or substance of any kind. That link is to a marketing page for a company which makes money selling hardware. It's just a few bullet points (snapshotting, checksumming in essence), without any discussion of the actual tradeoffs or comparison with other systems. It's worthless. It's only purpose is to tick a feature box to act as an incentive to purchase their systems; as for the actual performance and reliability of those features--that's the customer's problem. Caveat emptor.

I've done more than casual work and development with Btrfs. For example, from back when I was a Debian developer, here's the original inital support for Btrfs snapshotting in schroot. This lets you create virtual environments from Btrfs snapshots, as well as other types such as LVM and overlays. You can then plug this into other tools such as sbuild, and then build the whole of Debian using snapshotted clean build environments. Doing this, Btrfs fails hard around every 18 hours, going read-only. Why? Creating and deleting 18000 snapshots for 8 parallel builds quickly unbalances the filesystem, requiring a manual rebalance. You don't see that unfortunate detail in the Synology fluff page, do you?

You can also get snapshots and decent recovery (albeit without block-level checksums) from LVM and mdraid. In my experience, its recovery behaviour after real hardware failure is vastly more reliable than Btrfs. Simply put, it has always resynched the data without problem, while Btrfs has caused irrecoverable data loss, despite it theoretically being much better. LVM snapshots have very different tradeoffs as well. And on modern Linux with udev, we had to abandon using them due to races in udev/systemd making them randomly fail.

The point I'm making is that the reality of the chosen tradeoffs between performance, reliability and featureset of the different filesystems is a subtle one. You can't reduce it down to "Btrfs is better" or "ZFS is better". That's marketing. But I have spent over seven years pushing Btrfs to its limits, and have found it sorely lacking. It's unacceptable that it unbalances itself to the point of unusability. It's unacceptable that it has led to irrecoverable dataloss on several occasions. It's also unacceptable that in its eight years of existence, none of the developers could be bothered to write any decent documentation. The dataloss was down to bugs, some of which are fixed, but it does leave you in a position of lacking trust in it in the face of such problems. If you compare this with ZFS, while it's not fair to say it has been totally bug free, it has been almost bug free, and the number of dataloss incidents is small. I've yet to encounter any problems with ZFS myself, but I've encountered many serious issues with Btrfs.

Anyone who uses Btrfs or ZFS on a NAS system does so at their own risk after researching the various options and their tradeoffs. Just because a vendor decides to make and market a system using Btrfs does not make that system the best choice. It just means they thought they could make some profit from it.

Markov chain generator, seeded from whatever Project Gutenberg books you can find. Makes a nice Pride & Prejudice and Tale of Two Cities crossover, where everyone is in the same room doing trying to figure out how to marry, while observing Jaques killing the same person twice. ...

Okay, just picked a random "novel", and it reads more like a CRPG combat output log rather than an actual story. So instead of announcing that the contest is over and the books can be read, it's probably better to show which ones are technically the best so that we can focus on how they can be further improved if desired.

There is nothing stopping one from making a similar translator for running Linux-binaries under Windows

I seem to remember it having been attempted, but one project ran into the difficulty that the granularity of mmap is such that Linux can simulate Windows but not vice versa. Some Internet searching turned up Foreign Linux.

On ageism, it's not just whether programmers work, it is the quality of the work and the independence of the workers. Where might that matter? Consider the democratic need for programmers to follow ethical standards about privacy and democracy and openness and user empowerment (in their designs) that much centralized proprietary behind-closed-doors big data CS just ignores.

As I found in academia (for example in the PU CE&OR department in the late 1980s), when half or more of the graduate students in an academic department are foreign nationals being paid by their governments to get degrees, where when going back home without a degree would be a huge disgrace and maybe loss of career, the atmosphere of the place changes. That might explain why dealing with systematic financial risk was not a big topic at the time then.

So, if most programmers are nervous about their jobs with tons of H1Bs and cheap young labor, what effect is that going to have on taking a stand for important issues? And these are not just ethical issues, they are even issues like pushing back on inefficient or brittle designs, or designs users won't like, or whatever. It takes a certain level of confidence to do that (a confidence that includes knowing you can always easily get a job elsewhere, which may be true for a fifty year old civil engineer but is less true for a fifty year old programmer). And I'm not talking the brash confidence of youth or even a willingness for self-sacrifice like Snowden or Manning -- which is a different thing. I'm talking about a well-earned confidence in the context of a supportive community which is the basis of day-to-day successes by a democracy accountable to the needs of citizens.

See also:
"Smile or Die" (which discusses the financial crisis in part resulting from no one being able to point out systemic risks without losing their jobs)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

And:
http://conceptualguerilla.com/...

And even my other post here mentioning John Taylor Gatto who talks about compulsory schools as being designed specifically to shape compliant workers.

My latest folly is based on remembering what computers and our democratic culture were like in the 1970s and 1980s, is to want to help create software that respects a citizen's needs for private data controlled locally and shared peer-to-peer (like via email) instead of a typical web business' needs (like Slack or gmail) to centralize and control other people's data: :-) Here is that project:
https://github.com/pdfernhout/...

I started that with the news that Mozilla, supposedly about internet freedom and privacy and user empowerment, is going to kiss off Thunderbird, meanwhile billions of dollars are poured into the web space to make the opposite of Thunderbird (and some of those dollars are going to Mozilla in a way as a conflict-of-interest). See also my post here:
http://it.slashdot.org/comment...

The USA should be funding thousands of people to work on such FOSS tools. Meanwhile, Thunderbird suffers for lack of a funding model. Volunteers and open source go together well -- but relying on volunteers is problematical when you have literally one gigabyte of legacy C++ and XUL source code that need to track every security issue in Firefox.

If this was really about increasing interest in computers, just give green cards instead of H1Bs, insist on overtime for programmers, require every employee have a window (like in parts of Europe) and do basic stuff like that. It might also help if we reduced the churn in "new" technologies that are often not as good as the old one (still waiting for something a lot better than 1980s Smalltalk, for example). Getting rid of software patents would a

Unless you're using Tails and keeping your identities separate, you're trackable. Even if you do, there are still good ways to track you if someone is so inclined.

At my company, a major online retailer, we use EverCookie to redundantly persist user ids on the frontend across the different browsers on your machine, Etag tracking to match sessions on the backend when JavaScript is disabled, device fingerprinting / panopticlick methods to track any users who've successfully blocked all of the above, and Signal TAG to stitch those identities together and exchange them with data partners server-side so that consumer privacy measures can't disrupt our data collection. For the rare cases where all of that fails, partners like Experian Advertising and SimilarWeb get data from the major ISPs on what pages you're actually visiting and fill in the gaps in our advertising dataset.

Projects like Panopticlick are doing a great job at public education about privacy issues and informing the global debate. But, make no mistake about it, we're in a global arms race between ad tech and privacy tech that can't truly be won, given the pace at which these technologies evolve. Disabling JavaScript, installing ad blockers, enabling do-not-track, private browsing, using multiple browsers, etc won't do much more than make you *feel* safer; advertisers and publishers can and will continue collecting and sharing data for profit, regardless of what privacy settings you have on your browser or OS.

The way this battle is won, to everyone's benefit, is through education and public policy / industry standards. Consumers need to understand the limitations of their privacy online, the legitimate cases where advertisers need to track them, and how everyone wins in a world with *some* tracking under specific use-cases; advertisers, publishers and exchanges will continue to track to the greatest extent of their abilities so long at that remains profitable, which means industry standards and/or government policy will need to be put in place to impose costs on the cost-benefit analysis of tracking.

AC wrote: "We've lost the arms race for content over presentation in this medium. Pages with perhaps a kilobyte of text take over a megabyte to download and 10 seconds to render. Firefox is mortally wounded. Safari and Opera are hobbled. Chrome is a trojan horse. Guys, I think the Gopher people were right."

This is a very insightful AC post. That is a big part part of why for the last week (since hearing about the Thunderbird uncertainty) as a sprint, I've been working towards a webapp / server called Twirlip as a proof-of-concept for a server version of Thunderbird. The idea is to support the same functionality as Thunderbird (and more) but use standard Firefox as the client loading a Thunderbird-like webapp from a local Node.js server. The project repository is currently here:
https://github.com/pdfernhout/...

The sprint is not "blessed" by Mozilla or the Thunderbird Council at the moment. It is just my own take on things and to demonstrate what is possible. And given I just blew all our cash/credit writing another FOSS project (NarraFirma, a webapp in TypeScript/Mithril/D3 with Node.js and WordPress backends) over the past year or so, financially, this is so stupid for me to be doing right now instead of finding a paying job. :-)

That said, the leader of the Thunderbird Council (Kent James) suggested in September considering making Thunderbird into a webapp, so the idea is not completely new, or presumably unwelcome as a proof-of-concept demo:
"Future Planning: Thunderbird as a Web App"
https://mail.mozilla.org/piper...
"As we are discussing our future, both in relation to radical changes expected in the Mozilla platform, and our need to express where we are going to potential partners and donors, we need to discuss and agree on some big-picture issues. One of those was end-to-end encryption that we discussed recently. I want to discuss here our future platform, and how it related to users and their needs.
tl;dr Thunderbird over the next 3 years needs to convert to being a web app that can run on any browser that supports ES6 Javascript and HTML5. (web app does not imply cloud-based, only that the underlying platform is js/html)."

Here is an update on my last week's progress sent to the Thunderbird Planning list.
https://mail.mozilla.org/piper...

I've used Thunderbird for over a decade, and have a million messages in it totaling over 15 GB (mainly from a bunch of mailing lists). I know of others who have 50 GB in it. So, I'm obviously concerned about its future.

All that said, there is no immediate reason to panic. Thunderbird still works well for what it does.

In looking into this issue though, maintaining Thunderbird is apparently difficult though because the codebase includes a copy of Firefox, which bloats the source code by 20X or more up to about a gigabyte of mostly C++.Any security patch to Firefox needs to be evaluated and then likely integrated into Thunderbird to keep it secure. That may be the biggest issue -- and it is worse now that Mozilla has essentially defunded Thunderbird over the last few years to make it a "community" project, so synergy has been lost with the Firefox development team. (SeaMonkey, formerly the Mozilla application suite, is in the same boat and uses essentially the same codebase.) Thunderbird itself also has a lot of XUL to define UI functionality, but Mozilla has deprecated XUL (not reasonably, but there are consequences) creating an obvious future maintenance issue of sizable proportions. Thunderbird plugins likewise are written with XUL. So, while Thunderbird can be maintained, given that codebase and the size and the need to closely track Firefox, maintenance is hard and probably not a lot of fun (given the C++ and XUL) as a legacy thing.

As others have said, this i

Optimizing: have you tried using hhbc/repo-auth-mode? This can gets you tens of percents, though isn't compatible with all code. Additionally, are you excluding JIT warm-up time?

Standard disclaimer: we are not faster at everyone's code. In particular, PHP tends to be faster if you have a load of code just in files, but not in functions/methods.