"Maybe the issue is that the sites have no motivation to obey "no autoplay" because it would cost developer time to satisfy a very small group of visitors."
I think the issue is that adtech people are really pushing "internet tv" hard, and every autoplay video is one more they can add to the "number of times this video was played" score (regardless of whether anybody actually wanted to watch it, or what proportion of the site visitors cursed aloud and smashed the "STOP PLAYING" button as hard as they could), so they can scam all the advertisers into thinking all the money they're being asked to dump into video advertising is worthwhile.
If autoplay wasn't forced, the "number of times this video was viewed" numbers would be much, much lower and nobody would want to put money in it.
I'll second the vote for AntennaPod, the author seems to be doing a good job with it. It's even available in F-Droid.
(Supports high-quality lower-bandwidth opus format, too, if you're on at least "Marshmallow" on Android.)
Getting really tired of what ought to be a standard web interface demanding instead that I must install their special "app".
I *do* have a phone, but I still don't want yet another special "app" running in the background for just one more special website.
At the risk of committing heresy in public: I actually kind of like the Slack-style chat functionality.
I hate the idea of letting some third party proprietary host (like Slack) decide how and when it should work for me, though.
Personally, I'm running a Rocket.Chat instance - very Slack-like (and "Slack-compatible" if you have any bots you've developed for Slack's API that you want to use). Mattermost is another, similar option.
Only about 30% or so of people produce methane as a component of flatulence - it's only known to be produced by a group of methanogenic archaea that only some people have among their gut flora.
What surprises me is they don't include a sensor that picks up sulfide gases like H2S.
In my experience over the last half-decade or so with opus, the rough "approximate quality of various codecs at different bitrates" chart on the opus-codec.org site (http://opus-codec.org/comparison) seems to be pretty accurate - and, yeah, stereo opus at 64kbps really is pretty equivalent to old-and-crusty MP3 at twice the size (128kbps) in general. Or, at least, that's been my experience.
why on earth would anyone want to use power shell on other platforms?
Well, I originally thought the answer would be "so that you can do some of the useful Special Windows Things (like WMI queries of Windows machines) from other platforms", but it turns out the "Special Windows Things" remain proprietary and not included in cross-platform Powershell port so...I'm not really sure. Besides "because Microsoft wants you to", I mean.
Powershell's actually got some neat tricks, and is really handy on Windows systems, but so far I feel like I'd rather just use Python instead, in general. Python's not installed by default on Windows, though...
Windows 10 that may just see the retirement of Putty
[...]a "DOS Box (? not sure what it is called now).[...]
In my experience, for masses of low-end Windows admins, it's called a "command prompt" (or "DOS Prompt" if the admin is old), and refers to that black-square icon you "run as administrator" in order to paste in the magic incomprehensible line of text that some website says fixes the problem you're trying to fix.
For more skilled Windows admins, it's a "powershell session", which, to be fair, also often is "that blue-square icon you 'run as administrator' in order to paste in the magic incomprehensible line of text that some website says fixes the problem you're trying to fix", but at this level there's at least a chance that the admin in question understands what the line of text is supposed to do...
"Hopefully the Microsoft OpenSSH server will accept clients other than their's."
It does - or at least it did last time I tried it.
This project appears to be the Powershell team doing an honest port of the "Portable OpenSSH" code to native Windows, apparently including legitimate efforts to upstream the port to the main "Portable OpenSSH" project, and it seems (or at least seemed) to be as compatible as one would expect.
When I last tried it, the only issue I ran into was oddities in the terminal emulation, due to Microsoft's shell environment being "special" (things like backspace/del behaving oddly etc.), but it otherwise seemed to work just the same as OpenSSH on my Linux boxen. It's probably been nearly a year since I tried to seriously play with it, so I imagine a lot of improvements have taken place since then.
One nice thing about this project is that there seem to be rumors that "Powershell remoting" will eventually use SSH as its authentication and transport mechanism, which is a major hole in the current port of Powershell to non-Windows platforms. (You *can* do "powershell remoting" from e.g. Linux to Windows, but *only* if you substantially downgrade the security on the Windows side to allow it, because apparently it currently depends on one of the many special "Windows-only" features in powershell to do otherwise. Switching to SSH for this would fix that problem.)
I applied for an awesome-sounding "general-purpose nerd" job (i.e. "handle all the IT and helpdesk stuff for a small-mid-sized company") for a local company, their HR executive sent me a link to do one of these one-way online improvisational-acting interviews through "Hire-Vue" (they present you, one at a time, with around 5-10 of those now-standard screening-questions, e.g. "What do you know about this company?" or "How would you describe the color yellow to someone who was blind?", etc., then you get 30 seconds to think about the question, then 3 minutes to answer it on video. No advance warning of what the questions might be, nor do you get to re-take.). Then afterwards you get a typical automated "someone will contact you if Hire-Vue decides you're good enough at doing whatever the heck Hire-Vue's algorithms are looking for in your face and voice" email and wait. Unless HR is kind enough to tell you (probably not), you'll never have any idea how you did, and will have a difficult time ever getting better at it without that feedback.
Hire-Vue's schtick seems to be that their mysterious proprietary algorithm does magical "machine learning" analysis of your face and voice in the video answers it took, then it generates a magical "insight score" to tell the HR people whether or not you suck, along with how "confident" and "enthusiastic" and who knows how many other attributes Hire-Vue thinks it can detect (seems to also be special proprietary information, so I don't even really know what it was looking for.) I expect most people get marked down for not making "eye contact" with the webcam (rather than looking at the "person" - i.e. your own live video - on the screen like a normal human being.)
I will say that the process was more fun than I expected, but I'm not at all confident that Hire-Vue's robot won't sabotage my attempt to find gainful employment.
Also note that this format just coincidentally makes it easy to conveniently get an idea of whether you're "old", what your racial background and gender may be, etc., so if they are so inclined, HR can conveniently throw out your application if there's something there that they don't feel like talking to.
It's only been a week, so no idea yet how it went. Job-hunting these days is itself one of the worst jobs right now.
Samsung's QA, in my experience, has been a major problem for many years. I don't think any of the Samsung gadgets I've bought have ever worked reliably.
Samsung Fridge/Freezer: Seemed to work fine for a year or so, then we noticed that after any power outage, it would tend not to cool things when it turned back on. We'd notice that the temperature indicators on the front were happily announcing that the fridge was at 60F and the freezer at 40+. (Unplugging it and plugging it back in again would usually get it working again). Now it's even worse, the temperature indicators show things working just fine, but the actual temperature inside is either way too warm or way too cold and everything in the refrigerator is frozen. Unplugging and plugging back in will usually make the temperature sensors show the actual temperatures, but there seems to be no guarantee that the actual problem will be resolved and it may need to be unplugged and plugged back in a few times before it works correctly for a while. Getting rid of this awful thing very soon.
Samsung "point-and-shoot" camera, seemed to work great when I picked it up and took it on vacation, but when I got back and downloaded the photos to look at them on a real screen, a circular area in the center of every picture was out of focus: Lens defect. Got it RMA'd right at the end of the warranty period, the third-party losers they outsource it to kept the camera for two weeks, then sent it right back with a note to "make sure the battery is charged when you use it.". WTF?
Samsung "Mesmerize" phone (Galaxy S variant), cell/wifi/bluetooth would all just die and stop working until completely powered off (not just rebooted). To be fair, the one that I got as a replacement worked reasonably well.
Samsung Galaxy S4: I actually mostly like it (still using it), but sometime in the six months after I got it, the USB data port stopped working. I'm not sure when it happened because I can still CHARGE over USB, and I usually do file transfers by SFTP rather than a cable so it was some time before I even noticed. Haven't bothered trying to get it replaced because it otherwise is working okay on "Optimized Cyanogenmod".
Before anyone asks "If they suck so bad, why do you have so many Samsung devices", it was a few years between the fridge, camera, and Mesmerize phone before the pattern became obvious. I actually was reluctant to get the S4 but it was the only model my cell carrier had that was moddable.
tl;dr:Samsung's hardware quality control sucks, and they plainly don't really care.
The latest release apparently also shuts out anyone with a non-stock ROM or root access to their own devices.
They had made hints of threatening to do that to Ingress some time back but never got that heavy-handed. I suspect Pokemon has a much higher profit margin and they figure they can shut out a whole bunch of players and still rake in tons of money, at least for a while.
I hope they reconsider - there is plenty of room to complain about problems with the gameplay and its limitations, but I'm not going to lie, it's still kind of fun. I'll keep playing it as long as they allow me to - I'll probably even break my usual rule of not wasting real-world money on "virtual" crap once in a while (already done it once). If they shut me out, though, I guess I'm done playing.
(I literally can't go back to the old unmaintained S4 firmware any more for any reason, let alone just to play a game - Samsung's notoriously bad hardware QC bit me again, my USB port no longer works for data, though it still charges for some reason. Not sure how long it was broken before I noticed since I do file transfers over the network via sftp instead of using a data cable, but it means I can't use heimdall/odin to even put back the original firmware and recovery partition any more even if I wanted to.)
It would be kind of nice to be able to go back to a nice, reliable Linux system but still be able to do WMI queries against all those poor Windows boxes on our network.
The one *really* slow thing that I've had to fight with in Powershell isn't really Powershell's fault so much as Windows and/or.NET - there's no way to configure the TCP connection timeout, so anything involving an attempted connection takes forever to timeout and fail if there's nothing at the other end.
I find it kind of handy a times to be piping objects instead of just text, but it does get really annoying having to remember to add ".ToString()" so so many outputs.
Even more annoying when that results in the text "System.Object[]"...
I've been messing with it for a while now and I'm moderately productive with it, but I agree. It's like the powershell team has some people that really like BASH, some that really like Python, and some that really like c#, maybe one or two that like Visual Basic...and each group was assigned to work on different parts of Powershell.
The trick is that they're (probably) not actually violating the law in most of these cases. I'm under the impression that it's not the employer that normally hires the H1B replacement. Instead, they decide to "outsource" IT from their own employees to Wipro or Infosys or similar Indian company whose US subsidiaries are the ones bringing in all the H1B-visa employees.
Obviously a violation of the spirit of the law, but unless someone has some relatively damning evidence leaked from inside one of the outsourcing firms, there's nothing to stick a letter-of-the-law violation to.
You don't need the presidency. It'd certainly be nice, but I don't think it's where reforms would make the most difference. It's kind of obscene the way people are led by media coverage to believe that the presidential race is the only important one.
I honestly suspect Sanders always knew his presidential campaign was a longshot. I think the only reason he's campaigning so hard is to preserve and build influence over the party platform and to keep similarly-inclined voters engaged.
Now comes the endorsing of politically-similar senator and representative candidates, fundraising, and campaigning for the more-important (but much less promoted) races for the legislature, and influencing the party platform (and maybe an influential position on one or more congressional committees). He'd be a lot less able to accomplish anything in those areas is he had been "the guy who saw he couldn't possibly win so he quit" rather than "the guy who fought hard all the way to the end, kept visibility on the issues that he'll be fighting for in the party platform, and made the establishment candidate work for the nomination in spite of the party establishment support."
If I'm right about that, there's no way he'll "Nader" the presidential election, that'd be counter-productive to what I'm assuming his real political goals are.
Oh, and to expand on this: a "chimera", in this context, means it's one organism with some cells that are genetically one organism and other cells that are genetically the other, not some sort of "genetic modification" that mixes genes from two different organisms. (If you were to breed the pigs referred to in this project, you'd get plain old pigs - who would presumably end up dying not too long after being born because they have no pancreas without the human [or, hypothetically, from some other organism] cells being transplanted in to form one.)
From what little detail was in the article there on the Irritable Bowel Times, it sounds like they're talking about growing a normal wholly-human organ in wholly-"animal" pigs. (The pigs in this case being bred/modified just enough to not grow their own pigly pancreas, so that the human cells can form a human-compatible pancreas instead).
This doesn't make the pigs "half-human, half animal" any more than Escherichia coli cells modified to produce human insulin protein are "half-human, half-bacteria" (or a human with a prosthetic leg is "half-human, half-machine").
Ridiculous sensationalism. Bah.
Personally, I'd argue "humanity" is a state of mind rather than a bundle of body-parts, but that's a whole separate issue.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the issue is that adtech people are really pushing "internet tv" hard, and every autoplay video is one more they can add to the "number of times this video was played" score (regardless of whether anybody actually wanted to watch it, or what proportion of the site visitors cursed aloud and smashed the "STOP PLAYING" button as hard as they could), so they can scam all the advertisers into thinking all the money they're being asked to dump into video advertising is worthwhile.
If autoplay wasn't forced, the "number of times this video was viewed" numbers would be much, much lower and nobody would want to put money in it.
Sounds like Motorola hasn't changed since the Motorola "CLIQ with MOTOBLUR". They were pretty awful.
I've been wondering what the heck was in this for Google that makes them push so hard for it.
I'll second the vote for AntennaPod, the author seems to be doing a good job with it. It's even available in F-Droid. (Supports high-quality lower-bandwidth opus format, too, if you're on at least "Marshmallow" on Android.)
Getting really tired of what ought to be a standard web interface demanding instead that I must install their special "app". I *do* have a phone, but I still don't want yet another special "app" running in the background for just one more special website.
I hate the idea of letting some third party proprietary host (like Slack) decide how and when it should work for me, though.
Personally, I'm running a Rocket.Chat instance - very Slack-like (and "Slack-compatible" if you have any bots you've developed for Slack's API that you want to use). Mattermost is another, similar option.
What surprises me is they don't include a sensor that picks up sulfide gases like H2S.
In my experience over the last half-decade or so with opus, the rough "approximate quality of various codecs at different bitrates" chart on the opus-codec.org site (http://opus-codec.org/comparison) seems to be pretty accurate - and, yeah, stereo opus at 64kbps really is pretty equivalent to old-and-crusty MP3 at twice the size (128kbps) in general. Or, at least, that's been my experience.
why on earth would anyone want to use power shell on other platforms?
Well, I originally thought the answer would be "so that you can do some of the useful Special Windows Things (like WMI queries of Windows machines) from other platforms", but it turns out the "Special Windows Things" remain proprietary and not included in cross-platform Powershell port so...I'm not really sure. Besides "because Microsoft wants you to", I mean.
Powershell's actually got some neat tricks, and is really handy on Windows systems, but so far I feel like I'd rather just use Python instead, in general. Python's not installed by default on Windows, though...
Windows 10 that may just see the retirement of Putty
[...]a "DOS Box (? not sure what it is called now).[...]
In my experience, for masses of low-end Windows admins, it's called a "command prompt" (or "DOS Prompt" if the admin is old), and refers to that black-square icon you "run as administrator" in order to paste in the magic incomprehensible line of text that some website says fixes the problem you're trying to fix.
For more skilled Windows admins, it's a "powershell session", which, to be fair, also often is "that blue-square icon you 'run as administrator' in order to paste in the magic incomprehensible line of text that some website says fixes the problem you're trying to fix", but at this level there's at least a chance that the admin in question understands what the line of text is supposed to do...
It does - or at least it did last time I tried it.
This project appears to be the Powershell team doing an honest port of the "Portable OpenSSH" code to native Windows, apparently including legitimate efforts to upstream the port to the main "Portable OpenSSH" project, and it seems (or at least seemed) to be as compatible as one would expect.
When I last tried it, the only issue I ran into was oddities in the terminal emulation, due to Microsoft's shell environment being "special" (things like backspace/del behaving oddly etc.), but it otherwise seemed to work just the same as OpenSSH on my Linux boxen. It's probably been nearly a year since I tried to seriously play with it, so I imagine a lot of improvements have taken place since then.
One nice thing about this project is that there seem to be rumors that "Powershell remoting" will eventually use SSH as its authentication and transport mechanism, which is a major hole in the current port of Powershell to non-Windows platforms. (You *can* do "powershell remoting" from e.g. Linux to Windows, but *only* if you substantially downgrade the security on the Windows side to allow it, because apparently it currently depends on one of the many special "Windows-only" features in powershell to do otherwise. Switching to SSH for this would fix that problem.)
Hire-Vue's schtick seems to be that their mysterious proprietary algorithm does magical "machine learning" analysis of your face and voice in the video answers it took, then it generates a magical "insight score" to tell the HR people whether or not you suck, along with how "confident" and "enthusiastic" and who knows how many other attributes Hire-Vue thinks it can detect (seems to also be special proprietary information, so I don't even really know what it was looking for.) I expect most people get marked down for not making "eye contact" with the webcam (rather than looking at the "person" - i.e. your own live video - on the screen like a normal human being.)
I will say that the process was more fun than I expected, but I'm not at all confident that Hire-Vue's robot won't sabotage my attempt to find gainful employment.
Also note that this format just coincidentally makes it easy to conveniently get an idea of whether you're "old", what your racial background and gender may be, etc., so if they are so inclined, HR can conveniently throw out your application if there's something there that they don't feel like talking to.
It's only been a week, so no idea yet how it went. Job-hunting these days is itself one of the worst jobs right now.
Samsung Fridge/Freezer: Seemed to work fine for a year or so, then we noticed that after any power outage, it would tend not to cool things when it turned back on. We'd notice that the temperature indicators on the front were happily announcing that the fridge was at 60F and the freezer at 40+. (Unplugging it and plugging it back in again would usually get it working again). Now it's even worse, the temperature indicators show things working just fine, but the actual temperature inside is either way too warm or way too cold and everything in the refrigerator is frozen. Unplugging and plugging back in will usually make the temperature sensors show the actual temperatures, but there seems to be no guarantee that the actual problem will be resolved and it may need to be unplugged and plugged back in a few times before it works correctly for a while. Getting rid of this awful thing very soon.
Samsung "point-and-shoot" camera, seemed to work great when I picked it up and took it on vacation, but when I got back and downloaded the photos to look at them on a real screen, a circular area in the center of every picture was out of focus: Lens defect. Got it RMA'd right at the end of the warranty period, the third-party losers they outsource it to kept the camera for two weeks, then sent it right back with a note to "make sure the battery is charged when you use it.". WTF?
Samsung "Mesmerize" phone (Galaxy S variant), cell/wifi/bluetooth would all just die and stop working until completely powered off (not just rebooted). To be fair, the one that I got as a replacement worked reasonably well.
Samsung Galaxy S4: I actually mostly like it (still using it), but sometime in the six months after I got it, the USB data port stopped working. I'm not sure when it happened because I can still CHARGE over USB, and I usually do file transfers by SFTP rather than a cable so it was some time before I even noticed. Haven't bothered trying to get it replaced because it otherwise is working okay on "Optimized Cyanogenmod".
Before anyone asks "If they suck so bad, why do you have so many Samsung devices", it was a few years between the fridge, camera, and Mesmerize phone before the pattern became obvious. I actually was reluctant to get the S4 but it was the only model my cell carrier had that was moddable.
tl;dr:Samsung's hardware quality control sucks, and they plainly don't really care.
The latest release apparently also shuts out anyone with a non-stock ROM or root access to their own devices.
They had made hints of threatening to do that to Ingress some time back but never got that heavy-handed. I suspect Pokemon has a much higher profit margin and they figure they can shut out a whole bunch of players and still rake in tons of money, at least for a while.
I hope they reconsider - there is plenty of room to complain about problems with the gameplay and its limitations, but I'm not going to lie, it's still kind of fun. I'll keep playing it as long as they allow me to - I'll probably even break my usual rule of not wasting real-world money on "virtual" crap once in a while (already done it once). If they shut me out, though, I guess I'm done playing.
(I literally can't go back to the old unmaintained S4 firmware any more for any reason, let alone just to play a game - Samsung's notoriously bad hardware QC bit me again, my USB port no longer works for data, though it still charges for some reason. Not sure how long it was broken before I noticed since I do file transfers over the network via sftp instead of using a data cable, but it means I can't use heimdall/odin to even put back the original firmware and recovery partition any more even if I wanted to.)
Rocket.Chat and MatterMost come to mind.
It would be kind of nice to be able to go back to a nice, reliable Linux system but still be able to do WMI queries against all those poor Windows boxes on our network.
.NET - there's no way to configure the TCP connection timeout, so anything involving an attempted connection takes forever to timeout and fail if there's nothing at the other end.
The one *really* slow thing that I've had to fight with in Powershell isn't really Powershell's fault so much as Windows and/or
I find it kind of handy a times to be piping objects instead of just text, but it does get really annoying having to remember to add ".ToString()" so so many outputs. Even more annoying when that results in the text "System.Object[]"...
I've been messing with it for a while now and I'm moderately productive with it, but I agree. It's like the powershell team has some people that really like BASH, some that really like Python, and some that really like c#, maybe one or two that like Visual Basic...and each group was assigned to work on different parts of Powershell.
Therefore, it really ought to be "GNU/NT" (pronounced "guh-nunt", because that amuses me for some reason.)
Obviously a violation of the spirit of the law, but unless someone has some relatively damning evidence leaked from inside one of the outsourcing firms, there's nothing to stick a letter-of-the-law violation to.
(...it's obvious I'm joking, right?...)
I honestly suspect Sanders always knew his presidential campaign was a longshot. I think the only reason he's campaigning so hard is to preserve and build influence over the party platform and to keep similarly-inclined voters engaged.
Now comes the endorsing of politically-similar senator and representative candidates, fundraising, and campaigning for the more-important (but much less promoted) races for the legislature, and influencing the party platform (and maybe an influential position on one or more congressional committees). He'd be a lot less able to accomplish anything in those areas is he had been "the guy who saw he couldn't possibly win so he quit" rather than "the guy who fought hard all the way to the end, kept visibility on the issues that he'll be fighting for in the party platform, and made the establishment candidate work for the nomination in spite of the party establishment support."
If I'm right about that, there's no way he'll "Nader" the presidential election, that'd be counter-productive to what I'm assuming his real political goals are.
Oh, and to expand on this: a "chimera", in this context, means it's one organism with some cells that are genetically one organism and other cells that are genetically the other, not some sort of "genetic modification" that mixes genes from two different organisms. (If you were to breed the pigs referred to in this project, you'd get plain old pigs - who would presumably end up dying not too long after being born because they have no pancreas without the human [or, hypothetically, from some other organism] cells being transplanted in to form one.)
This doesn't make the pigs "half-human, half animal" any more than Escherichia coli cells modified to produce human insulin protein are "half-human, half-bacteria" (or a human with a prosthetic leg is "half-human, half-machine").
Ridiculous sensationalism. Bah.
Personally, I'd argue "humanity" is a state of mind rather than a bundle of body-parts, but that's a whole separate issue.
I'm guessing that's got to be a typo and they meant "year" - $370/year sounds reasonably plausible.