Mir is the one I still find a bit mystifying. I'm sure it's nice technology, developed by smart people, I'm just surprised Canonical started on it so enthusiastically and so early.
The only reason Mir exists is because Canonical wanted to slap their dual GPL / proprietary licence on it. It lets them release Ubuntu branded phone handsets with any proprietary display driver, DRM or extensions they like in the display stack but competitors are hamstrung by the GPL part. I recall reading a blog which justified Mir with some fairly dubious technical reasons that Wayland wasn't suitable but it seems clear to me it was more than that..
Anyway, the licencing has become a double edged sword. Contributors like Intel walked away from the project, other open source projects adopted Wayland (which uses the same licence as X and so is a slot-in replacement) and Canonical left with all the work of writing backends for QT, GTK and porting apps.
Deluge isn't very well integrated with windows (e.g. magnet links) but it's adequate and infinitely preferable to a client which installs unwanted software.
Yes of course it would be bad. Google is the new Microsoft and Chrome is the new Internet Explorer. Without competition or choice they would be just as inclined to throw half baked standards as Microsoft. They've already done it a multiple times with SPDY, WebM, NaCl etc. and without competition to reject, criticise, formalize or standardize these things would have been a fait acompli.
It is better for everyone to have strong competing implementations of web standards. Firefox is still a great browser (better IMO than Chrome) and takes privacy far more seriously. I have no inclination to switch browser at this time.
You can thank Mozilla for being the first browser to seriously disrupt Internet Explorer's monopoly and bring us back to a standards based internet. It did plenty more besides that and continues to do so.
The day when we have self drive cars capable of navigating from one point to another in a timely fashion with no intervention from the passenger is so ludicrously far off that yes of course there will be a driver, and yes of course that driver will require a licence, and yes of course that driver will have to be concious and not under the influence of anything.
It is trivial to envisage situations that occur every single day during a commute that would baffle a self drive vehicle and would cause it to want to hand control back to to a human.
The closest that we are likely to come to driverless cars are those operating on closed loops, e.g. between airport terminals where the road layout and the number of parameters is manageable. Even then there is probably some guy sat in a booth somewhere who can take over the controls if the car does something dumb or gets confused.
X is arcane. There is a strong desire to get rid of it because it's inefficient (network, CPU, GPU), filled with obsolete APIs that nobody uses and an increasing number of extensions designed to work around this brain damage.
Hence the drive to replace it with Wayland. People who still need X can run X over Wayland.
Compiz has to jump through the hoops of an arcane windowing system and deal with broken and sometimes proprietary GPU drivers. It's a miracle it works at all.
I'm not even sure what a "classic object oriented compiled language" is meant to mean or why it should be the criteria for programming something, but given the choice of C++ or Obj-C then C++ is the answer in virtually every case. Obj-C only makes sense when targetting iOS / OS X or some niche like OpenStep and whatever merits Obj-C might have as a language it would be insane to use it anywhere else.
Most SoCs have encryption circuitry so I doubt it has any appreciable effect on performance or battery providing its done through hardware. In Linux disk encryption is via dm-crypt which in turn is via the crypto api so Android could probably use that to provide blanket crypto in addition to whatever crypto is done higher up by apps or user storage.
I think G+ looks great visually and in terms of what it is (a Twitter/Facebook a-like) I guess it's okay.
The problem for me is that it nags me constantly. Do I know these people? Do you want to connect to these people? Are these groups of interest to you? Tell us about yourself. Naturally it doesn't offer options to hide these panes or put them away in a "discover" section where they're out of sight. They're always there nagging me.
I don't expect to give my fucking life story over for a glorified feed and so I don't use it much at all. Another issue for me is that I used to use iGoogle as my home page. They canned that service and some other related ones, presumably because they thought people would use G+ instead if they removed the alternatives. It didn't work for me because I want a page with news headlines and some other RSS stuff I read and some wall of stuff is simply not what I want - so I use My Yahoo instead.
I have an Core i5 CPU in a tablet. It's clocked so low and steps down so fast that it may as well be in a different CPU family for all the comparison it bears to one in a desktop PC.
The first mistake made by email clients is they added support for a broken-by-design protocol called S/MIME which used asymmetric encryption through the entire message and was thus cripplingly slow. The ciphers were also covered by patents and had weak key lengths. Messages were signed with a cert like https, and were required to be signed by a CA. And you couldn't get a key unless you paid a CA for one. Oh and keys expired meaning you might have multiple dead keys to maintain if you wanted to open an old email. And no email client or ISP actually offered to give you a key or set you up with one so you had to figure this all out for yourself. And functionality like search / filtering broke on encrypted mail because the client never bothered to maintain an encrypted index of the plaintext that could have allowed it to work.
Then PGP / GPG solved a lot of this bullshit, starting with generating keys for free but email clients never bothered to give it proper support. Instead they offered up some plugin APIs and unsurprisingly PGP / GPG ended up with half assed implementations too. Even fairly good extensions like Enigmail didn't integrate with the client as closely as they should.
And by this point cloud based email took off and crypto fell by the way side. If you want to use crypto in GMail then you have to cut and paste and clearly it's too much effort.
So I really don't blame GPG here. If the first thing an email did during setup was ENCOURAGE a user to create a key; and by default published that key; and attached the key sig to outgoing emails; and automatically looked up incoming email addresses; and automatically encrypted content when all recipients had their own key; and didn't hobble functionality for any of this (e.g. search still worked). THEN this wouldn't even be a problem. Encryption would have been the default and it would be an irrelevance if it was PGP or GPG was under the covers.
So then it's the politicians fault. Not the prisons. Vote in politicians (and justice officials) who are motivated by the idea of reforming felons and applying proportionate sentences instead of merely punishing them.
It's quite different. Anyone doing work for mossad wouldn't announce it in any way, shape or form whether they took the page down later or not. If they took the page down it might be because they are the centre of a shitstorm at the moment.. You can't rationalize around this because no rationalization makes any sense. Spy agencies would not and do not do this.
The state pays the prison to operate under certain parameters and if it so wished one of them could be recidivism rates. e.g. by requiring prisons to offer certain facilities, training, eduction and certain living standards.
So I don't it being relevant who runs the prison providing it abides by standards. What is more important is the political recognition that putting the time into ensuring people don't reoffend will pay off in the future.
I believe a far bigger issue is that the US has the most fucked up justice system anywhere in the western world.
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Mir is the one I still find a bit mystifying. I'm sure it's nice technology, developed by smart people, I'm just surprised Canonical started on it so enthusiastically and so early.
The only reason Mir exists is because Canonical wanted to slap their dual GPL / proprietary licence on it. It lets them release Ubuntu branded phone handsets with any proprietary display driver, DRM or extensions they like in the display stack but competitors are hamstrung by the GPL part. I recall reading a blog which justified Mir with some fairly dubious technical reasons that Wayland wasn't suitable but it seems clear to me it was more than that..
Anyway, the licencing has become a double edged sword. Contributors like Intel walked away from the project, other open source projects adopted Wayland (which uses the same licence as X and so is a slot-in replacement) and Canonical left with all the work of writing backends for QT, GTK and porting apps.
I've never read such irrational and ludicrous objections to a piece of infrastructure.
Yes it's all a vast conspiracy. Meanwhile back on planet earth...
And this horseshit is modded insghtful?
Deluge isn't very well integrated with windows (e.g. magnet links) but it's adequate and infinitely preferable to a client which installs unwanted software.
It is better for everyone to have strong competing implementations of web standards. Firefox is still a great browser (better IMO than Chrome) and takes privacy far more seriously. I have no inclination to switch browser at this time.
You can thank Mozilla for being the first browser to seriously disrupt Internet Explorer's monopoly and bring us back to a standards based internet. It did plenty more besides that and continues to do so.
It will have a boss battle.
It is trivial to envisage situations that occur every single day during a commute that would baffle a self drive vehicle and would cause it to want to hand control back to to a human.
The closest that we are likely to come to driverless cars are those operating on closed loops, e.g. between airport terminals where the road layout and the number of parameters is manageable. Even then there is probably some guy sat in a booth somewhere who can take over the controls if the car does something dumb or gets confused.
Google does it too - very annoying it is as well. At least by splitting accounts across providers it limits the amount it can happen.
I bet the performance hit on battery or IO would be neglible if it were functioning properly. Maybe Google has had problems with some chipsets.
Hence the drive to replace it with Wayland. People who still need X can run X over Wayland.
Compiz has to jump through the hoops of an arcane windowing system and deal with broken and sometimes proprietary GPU drivers. It's a miracle it works at all.
I'm not even sure what a "classic object oriented compiled language" is meant to mean or why it should be the criteria for programming something, but given the choice of C++ or Obj-C then C++ is the answer in virtually every case. Obj-C only makes sense when targetting iOS / OS X or some niche like OpenStep and whatever merits Obj-C might have as a language it would be insane to use it anywhere else.
Most SoCs have encryption circuitry so I doubt it has any appreciable effect on performance or battery providing its done through hardware. In Linux disk encryption is via dm-crypt which in turn is via the crypto api so Android could probably use that to provide blanket crypto in addition to whatever crypto is done higher up by apps or user storage.
The problem for me is that it nags me constantly. Do I know these people? Do you want to connect to these people? Are these groups of interest to you? Tell us about yourself. Naturally it doesn't offer options to hide these panes or put them away in a "discover" section where they're out of sight. They're always there nagging me.
I don't expect to give my fucking life story over for a glorified feed and so I don't use it much at all. Another issue for me is that I used to use iGoogle as my home page. They canned that service and some other related ones, presumably because they thought people would use G+ instead if they removed the alternatives. It didn't work for me because I want a page with news headlines and some other RSS stuff I read and some wall of stuff is simply not what I want - so I use My Yahoo instead.
I have an Core i5 CPU in a tablet. It's clocked so low and steps down so fast that it may as well be in a different CPU family for all the comparison it bears to one in a desktop PC.
You might not give a shit now but 15 years ago, the speed of S/MIME was so cripplingly slow it DID matter.
Then PGP / GPG solved a lot of this bullshit, starting with generating keys for free but email clients never bothered to give it proper support. Instead they offered up some plugin APIs and unsurprisingly PGP / GPG ended up with half assed implementations too. Even fairly good extensions like Enigmail didn't integrate with the client as closely as they should.
And by this point cloud based email took off and crypto fell by the way side. If you want to use crypto in GMail then you have to cut and paste and clearly it's too much effort.
So I really don't blame GPG here. If the first thing an email did during setup was ENCOURAGE a user to create a key; and by default published that key; and attached the key sig to outgoing emails; and automatically looked up incoming email addresses; and automatically encrypted content when all recipients had their own key; and didn't hobble functionality for any of this (e.g. search still worked). THEN this wouldn't even be a problem. Encryption would have been the default and it would be an irrelevance if it was PGP or GPG was under the covers.
Yes I find reaching into my pocket and fiddling with a phone to find out the time to be extremely liberating.
They already know what they say - "Software failure. Guru meditation #00000004.0000AAEF"
"I am the serenest!"
So then it's the politicians fault. Not the prisons. Vote in politicians (and justice officials) who are motivated by the idea of reforming felons and applying proportionate sentences instead of merely punishing them.
It's quite different. Anyone doing work for mossad wouldn't announce it in any way, shape or form whether they took the page down later or not. If they took the page down it might be because they are the centre of a shitstorm at the moment.. You can't rationalize around this because no rationalization makes any sense. Spy agencies would not and do not do this.
So I don't it being relevant who runs the prison providing it abides by standards. What is more important is the political recognition that putting the time into ensuring people don't reoffend will pay off in the future.
I believe a far bigger issue is that the US has the most fucked up justice system anywhere in the western world.