This election cycle makes me genuinely curious as to how much money/thought is spent on leading the public away from the real stories. It's like the media has finally mastered the art of turning a scandal into a meta-scandal. Something damaging comes out about a candidate and no one cares. They care about the source of the information. Trump probably *could* shoot someone in the middle of 5th Avenue and not lose votes. Because the media would focus on how the shooting was caught on camera. Or the background of the victim. Or anything that would direct attention away from the real issue. The same happens for Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party. The things exposed aren't that newsworthy, it's who/how/why they were exposed. Utter bullshit.
I say this with a bit of humor and a lot of conviction: On election day, write in Bernie Sanders. I'm not one of those crazy Bernie supporters but, given the two major party candidates and the two minor party candidates, he's the only sane choice.
I'm a Software Engineer and I agree with this statement 110%. I call myself a Software Engineer because that's the job title I usually have. The level of "engineering" that actually occurs in the software industry is laughable.
Unfortunately the same short sighted behavior is starting to invade some engineering disciplines, so they will end up producing crap as well.
Using kernel.org kernels directly instead of the distribution supplied one is bleeding edge and is not something that you should do unless you know how to fix problems like the one gp encountered.
Exactly. And, especially in the case of wifi, you might need to update the driver firmware to match the new driver version. It's not at all surprising that a wifi driver stopped working after pulling kernel source and building it yourself. It's not the fault of the kernel or distros, it's that wifi vendors normally ship firmware and someone unaware that a new kernel might need new firmware may blame the kernel on their own ignorance.
Well, I guess I'll trot it out a third time: "Maybe, maybe not". Part of the reason the situation has gotten so bad on Windows is because Windows has never really shipped with a meaningful driver set. So, it's normal for people to tart up their system with driver malware. Linux has basically always shipped with every driver it has supported and, in many, many cases the vendors of those devices have not written those drivers.
So, yes, I'll agree that vendors are going to want to install their malware on any mainstream platform. But, the Linux tradition is a lot different than the Windows tradition and so I'm not sure if it could ever happen. If Linux on the Desktop started to become mainstream, it would be trivial for a distro to literally lock out third party drivers. It's like 2 options in the kernel config: 1) Required signed drivers. 2) Sign drivers with a randomly generated key.
At that point, vendors need to play nice or they don't get to put a little penguin on the box of their hardware. And, if Linux on the Desktop were popular, they'd want that little penguin.
Again: Maybe, maybe not. One of the few drivers you might actually install on a Linux machine is the proprietary NVIDIA driver for your graphics card. It has been quite a few years since I've used that driver but, it never installed anything gnarly. Just the driver and a simple configuration tool. And these days you don't even need the proprietary driver unless you plan to run games. The clean room, open source driver works fine for normal desktop use. That open source driver, which is now a part of the kernel, has had minimal support from NVIDIA (last I checked) so, it's unlikely they could sabotage that effort.
Linux drivers are a completely different paradigm from Windows drivers (and probably Mac drivers).
Maybe, maybe not. The reason you get all that bullshit on a Windows machine is because the OS ships with a barebones driver set. So, if you want the drivers for your hardware, you get to go to a vendor webpage (or use the CD) and download a 300MB installer. That installer is practically malware. And the more driver installers you run, the more malware you are adding to your system.
Contrast that to Linux. Normally, you plug something in and it works great. If it doesn't then you probably should have researched your purchase better. To put it into perspective, you might download a 300MB compressed installer for a printer on Windows. On Linux the drivers for many thousands of devices weigh in like this:
$ du -h/lib/modules/ | tail -1 830M/lib/modules/
So, no, I don't think it has anything to do with Linux not being mainstream. It has to do with the fact that Windows doesn't support much hardware and so you are the mercy of the vendors malware to get your device working.
I have friends that work for Apple, Google, Oracle, whatever. And I have friends that have quit en-masse from those companies. They almost always quit because they went from a cool startup to a tiny cog in a gigantic machine. These gigantic internet companies consume smaller companies and spit out all the parts they don't like. In many cases, that's most parts.
This is not an Apple problem, it's an industry and maybe even a societal problem. I don't even think it's possible to get a good job, get an A+ rating for every performance review ever, and expect to stay at that job for 5+ years. After 10 years, you are too expensive to keep around.
It's a race to the bottom. Throw enough cheap shit at the wall and you'll eventually meet your short term profit goals but, damn, that's a lot of shit to clean off the walls. In fact, you may not be able to clean it all off.
Greetings, Humans. The machine churns. I'd like to introduce you to the grinding wheel...
I'd love to see a YouTube feature that allows you to get the automatically generated transcript of a video without having to actually watch the video. For videos that are intended to be informative, having the transcript and grepping it for keywords and the context they are used would help you determine if it's worth watching a lengthy video. It maybe even just outright give you the information you want without having to sit through a half hour video.
I dunno. "Open" and "porous" are somewhat related words. If he actually meant, "Windows is the most porous platform there is", I would tend to agree with him.
This is proper Popcorn Season. All the bickering and name calling is nothing compared to what is coming. When you have two deeply flawed candidates, everyone is going to hold their cards close until it's time to lay them all down. The American public forgets about a news story after a week. Shit is about to get gloriously real.
Frankly, I applaud any agency, foreign or domestic, that exposes the filth that constitutes our government. In this particular election cycle, the DNC has taken a beating. I suspect the Republicans have remained relatively unscathed by The Russian Bogeyman because it's pretty obvious that Trump will insert his foot into his mouth whenever given the opportunity. Why try to destroy a candidate that is obviously going to destroy himself?
The whole, "The Russians did it!" is completely irrelevant. The hacks/leaks/whatever show that these people are complete slime and probably shouldn't be trusted to clean your toilet, let alone run your country. If the Russians have this information, it's safe to assume that *everyone* who wants this information has it. This entire crescendo of "The Russians!" is just a ploy to try to get people to ignore the horrible facts in these leaks and instead build up a bogeyman to redirect the peoples anger. It's grade A+ politics.
I remember copying 5.25" floppies with a simple copy protection removal program in the 80s. DRM and it's ilk have never been effective and never will be effective. If you build something good, people that can afford it will pay for it. People that can't afford it will get a pirated version. If you build something expensive but mediocre, the scales will tip towards "pirated".
Build good games and your payed to pirated ratio will be excellent. Build shitty games and encumber them with DRM and, yeah, everyone is going to pirate it.
This is really the key. If your CV reads like, "I do this thing", it's going to be very difficult to get a new job unless the job is exactly what you previously did. If your CV reads, "I can do whatever you want, in whatever language you want, on whatever platform you want and have proven it in a variety of domains", getting a new job is fairly trivial. You are going to have some overlap with any job you apply for and can just buff up on it a bit before the interview and you're fine. Being a generalist is really the key to finding tech jobs.
I've lost hours of code because of the accidental swipe-select surprise. Touchpads suck unless your surfing the Web. They are too far away from the keyboard.
Even for web browsing they are sub-par. With a Lenovo trackpoint you can just hold down the middle button and use the nub to scroll horizontal or vertical. You barely even need to move your fingers. It's strange that touchpads ever became popular because they aren't particularly good pointing devices for any situation. Terrible precision, irritating surprise movements, inconsistent feature set, etc. The only thing I can think is that when they were released they seemed "cool" and now we are stuck with them forever.
Haha! Can you believe these suckers are paying this much for our shitty company? Hopefully they don't find out about our massive data breach. Which reminds me: I still need to change my password.
Drones are a real game changer for guerrilla warfare or terrorism. A nation state might spend millions or billions doing satellite/aerial reconnaissance but, a small fleet of cheap drones with GoPros on gimbals and off the shelf software can produce extremely detailed orthomosaics for a hilariously tiny fraction of what a nation state might spend to get similar recon. You can't cover a huge amount of territory and, yeah, some will be shot down but, if you are dug in against an enemy or looking for a soft target, I imagine it's just as good as satellite imagery.
It's been a few years since the non-LTS versions were a compelling upgrade. Traditionally you'd upgrade if you needed a newer kernel (primarily for hardware support) or for some reason needed the newest version of a software package. These days those arguments are no longer very interesting because new kernels get backported to older versions and, if you just need a newer version of a specific package, using a PPA is easier than upgrading the entire system.
The entire ecosystem has really stabilized at this point (with a few exceptions). At a superficial level, I'm not even sure if I could tell the difference between 14.04 and 16.04. So, I'd probably stick with the LTS versions unless you just want to fiddle with the latest bits. Ubuntu LTS versions make for excellent workhorse machines (both desktop and server) so if you are trying to get real work done, LTS is where you want to be.
Robotics on the battlefield was a given once our tech started to support it.
Why? That's like saying nuclear weapons on the battlefield was a given once our tech started to support it. But, thankfully, more rational heads have prevailed and they are not commonplace on the battlefield. I actually think that drones are just as dangerous on the battlefield as nuclear weapons launched from missile silos. The "boom" isn't as terrifying to see but, the effect is the same on a smaller scale: Armchair warfare. War without risk of causalities to both sides isn't war. In fact, it's basically terrorism.
Next up is self driving cars full of explosives. One of the things that always fascinates me about these middle eastern terrorist organizations is that they are pretty smart about adapting to technology but, the society they want to create is not likely to ever produce any meaningful technology. It's like they've never thought about the endgame: "Ok, we've killed all the infidels. When will Allah bless my cellphone so it starts working again?"
It's my understanding that copyright infringement/bootlegging is most frequently prosecuted on the distribution angle. If you are torrenting something, you are actually involved in distribution. If you are making bootleg copies and selling them on the street, that's also distribution. Ripping rentals is a time honored tradition that stems back to the days of VCRs (You only have one VCR? You're doing it wrong...). If one were to have a large collection of ripped rental Blurays, I have no doubt that some law has been broken but, probably, no one cares. Well, until you setup a service that starts distributing that content. Then the FBI will be repelling through your windows with flashbangs and shooting your dog.
The nice thing about the Bluray/DVD service is you can just rip the disk to your file server and send it back. Well, I mean, if you wanted to... Not that I would ever amass dozens of terabytes of ripped Blurays or anything... Never.
I don't think active sabotage is a good solution for legal reasons but, you can certainly get the desired effect by answering questions like this:
- "Strange. I'll have to look into that." - "I'm not sure how that works. That guy left a long time ago." - "We don't have a system for handling that exact problem." - "Oh, don't worry about , come over here and let me show you."
Basically, teach them nothing but be very pleasant and professional about it. You get your severance pay and in a month when the manager calls you because everything is broken, you can politely tell him to go fuck himself.
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This election cycle makes me genuinely curious as to how much money/thought is spent on leading the public away from the real stories. It's like the media has finally mastered the art of turning a scandal into a meta-scandal. Something damaging comes out about a candidate and no one cares. They care about the source of the information. Trump probably *could* shoot someone in the middle of 5th Avenue and not lose votes. Because the media would focus on how the shooting was caught on camera. Or the background of the victim. Or anything that would direct attention away from the real issue. The same happens for Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party. The things exposed aren't that newsworthy, it's who/how/why they were exposed. Utter bullshit.
I say this with a bit of humor and a lot of conviction: On election day, write in Bernie Sanders. I'm not one of those crazy Bernie supporters but, given the two major party candidates and the two minor party candidates, he's the only sane choice.
The phrase Software Engineering is an oxymoron.
I'm a Software Engineer and I agree with this statement 110%. I call myself a Software Engineer because that's the job title I usually have. The level of "engineering" that actually occurs in the software industry is laughable.
Unfortunately the same short sighted behavior is starting to invade some engineering disciplines, so they will end up producing crap as well.
This scares the shit out of me.
Using kernel.org kernels directly instead of the distribution supplied one is bleeding edge and is not something that you should do unless you know how to fix problems like the one gp encountered.
Exactly. And, especially in the case of wifi, you might need to update the driver firmware to match the new driver version. It's not at all surprising that a wifi driver stopped working after pulling kernel source and building it yourself. It's not the fault of the kernel or distros, it's that wifi vendors normally ship firmware and someone unaware that a new kernel might need new firmware may blame the kernel on their own ignorance.
Well, I guess I'll trot it out a third time: "Maybe, maybe not". Part of the reason the situation has gotten so bad on Windows is because Windows has never really shipped with a meaningful driver set. So, it's normal for people to tart up their system with driver malware. Linux has basically always shipped with every driver it has supported and, in many, many cases the vendors of those devices have not written those drivers.
So, yes, I'll agree that vendors are going to want to install their malware on any mainstream platform. But, the Linux tradition is a lot different than the Windows tradition and so I'm not sure if it could ever happen. If Linux on the Desktop started to become mainstream, it would be trivial for a distro to literally lock out third party drivers. It's like 2 options in the kernel config: 1) Required signed drivers. 2) Sign drivers with a randomly generated key.
At that point, vendors need to play nice or they don't get to put a little penguin on the box of their hardware. And, if Linux on the Desktop were popular, they'd want that little penguin.
Again: Maybe, maybe not. One of the few drivers you might actually install on a Linux machine is the proprietary NVIDIA driver for your graphics card. It has been quite a few years since I've used that driver but, it never installed anything gnarly. Just the driver and a simple configuration tool. And these days you don't even need the proprietary driver unless you plan to run games. The clean room, open source driver works fine for normal desktop use. That open source driver, which is now a part of the kernel, has had minimal support from NVIDIA (last I checked) so, it's unlikely they could sabotage that effort.
Linux drivers are a completely different paradigm from Windows drivers (and probably Mac drivers).
Maybe, maybe not. The reason you get all that bullshit on a Windows machine is because the OS ships with a barebones driver set. So, if you want the drivers for your hardware, you get to go to a vendor webpage (or use the CD) and download a 300MB installer. That installer is practically malware. And the more driver installers you run, the more malware you are adding to your system.
Contrast that to Linux. Normally, you plug something in and it works great. If it doesn't then you probably should have researched your purchase better. To put it into perspective, you might download a 300MB compressed installer for a printer on Windows. On Linux the drivers for many thousands of devices weigh in like this:
$ du -h /lib/modules/ | tail -1 /lib/modules/
830M
So, no, I don't think it has anything to do with Linux not being mainstream. It has to do with the fact that Windows doesn't support much hardware and so you are the mercy of the vendors malware to get your device working.
Or maybe it's 2016, you're fiddling with stuff you don't completely understand and forgot to put the wifi firmware in place for the new kernel...
I have friends that work for Apple, Google, Oracle, whatever. And I have friends that have quit en-masse from those companies. They almost always quit because they went from a cool startup to a tiny cog in a gigantic machine. These gigantic internet companies consume smaller companies and spit out all the parts they don't like. In many cases, that's most parts.
This is not an Apple problem, it's an industry and maybe even a societal problem. I don't even think it's possible to get a good job, get an A+ rating for every performance review ever, and expect to stay at that job for 5+ years. After 10 years, you are too expensive to keep around.
It's a race to the bottom. Throw enough cheap shit at the wall and you'll eventually meet your short term profit goals but, damn, that's a lot of shit to clean off the walls. In fact, you may not be able to clean it all off.
Greetings, Humans. The machine churns. I'd like to introduce you to the grinding wheel...
I'd love to see a YouTube feature that allows you to get the automatically generated transcript of a video without having to actually watch the video. For videos that are intended to be informative, having the transcript and grepping it for keywords and the context they are used would help you determine if it's worth watching a lengthy video. It maybe even just outright give you the information you want without having to sit through a half hour video.
If they are tired of closed systems, they should just switch to Windows. It's "the most open platform there is"! https://tech.slashdot.org/stor...
I dunno. "Open" and "porous" are somewhat related words. If he actually meant, "Windows is the most porous platform there is", I would tend to agree with him.
This is proper Popcorn Season. All the bickering and name calling is nothing compared to what is coming. When you have two deeply flawed candidates, everyone is going to hold their cards close until it's time to lay them all down. The American public forgets about a news story after a week. Shit is about to get gloriously real.
Frankly, I applaud any agency, foreign or domestic, that exposes the filth that constitutes our government. In this particular election cycle, the DNC has taken a beating. I suspect the Republicans have remained relatively unscathed by The Russian Bogeyman because it's pretty obvious that Trump will insert his foot into his mouth whenever given the opportunity. Why try to destroy a candidate that is obviously going to destroy himself?
The whole, "The Russians did it!" is completely irrelevant. The hacks/leaks/whatever show that these people are complete slime and probably shouldn't be trusted to clean your toilet, let alone run your country. If the Russians have this information, it's safe to assume that *everyone* who wants this information has it. This entire crescendo of "The Russians!" is just a ploy to try to get people to ignore the horrible facts in these leaks and instead build up a bogeyman to redirect the peoples anger. It's grade A+ politics.
I remember copying 5.25" floppies with a simple copy protection removal program in the 80s. DRM and it's ilk have never been effective and never will be effective. If you build something good, people that can afford it will pay for it. People that can't afford it will get a pirated version. If you build something expensive but mediocre, the scales will tip towards "pirated".
Build good games and your payed to pirated ratio will be excellent. Build shitty games and encumber them with DRM and, yeah, everyone is going to pirate it.
This is really the key. If your CV reads like, "I do this thing", it's going to be very difficult to get a new job unless the job is exactly what you previously did. If your CV reads, "I can do whatever you want, in whatever language you want, on whatever platform you want and have proven it in a variety of domains", getting a new job is fairly trivial. You are going to have some overlap with any job you apply for and can just buff up on it a bit before the interview and you're fine. Being a generalist is really the key to finding tech jobs.
I've lost hours of code because of the accidental swipe-select surprise. Touchpads suck unless your surfing the Web. They are too far away from the keyboard.
Even for web browsing they are sub-par. With a Lenovo trackpoint you can just hold down the middle button and use the nub to scroll horizontal or vertical. You barely even need to move your fingers. It's strange that touchpads ever became popular because they aren't particularly good pointing devices for any situation. Terrible precision, irritating surprise movements, inconsistent feature set, etc. The only thing I can think is that when they were released they seemed "cool" and now we are stuck with them forever.
Haha! Can you believe these suckers are paying this much for our shitty company? Hopefully they don't find out about our massive data breach. Which reminds me: I still need to change my password.
Drones are a real game changer for guerrilla warfare or terrorism. A nation state might spend millions or billions doing satellite/aerial reconnaissance but, a small fleet of cheap drones with GoPros on gimbals and off the shelf software can produce extremely detailed orthomosaics for a hilariously tiny fraction of what a nation state might spend to get similar recon. You can't cover a huge amount of territory and, yeah, some will be shot down but, if you are dug in against an enemy or looking for a soft target, I imagine it's just as good as satellite imagery.
It's been a few years since the non-LTS versions were a compelling upgrade. Traditionally you'd upgrade if you needed a newer kernel (primarily for hardware support) or for some reason needed the newest version of a software package. These days those arguments are no longer very interesting because new kernels get backported to older versions and, if you just need a newer version of a specific package, using a PPA is easier than upgrading the entire system.
The entire ecosystem has really stabilized at this point (with a few exceptions). At a superficial level, I'm not even sure if I could tell the difference between 14.04 and 16.04. So, I'd probably stick with the LTS versions unless you just want to fiddle with the latest bits. Ubuntu LTS versions make for excellent workhorse machines (both desktop and server) so if you are trying to get real work done, LTS is where you want to be.
Robotics on the battlefield was a given once our tech started to support it.
Why? That's like saying nuclear weapons on the battlefield was a given once our tech started to support it. But, thankfully, more rational heads have prevailed and they are not commonplace on the battlefield. I actually think that drones are just as dangerous on the battlefield as nuclear weapons launched from missile silos. The "boom" isn't as terrifying to see but, the effect is the same on a smaller scale: Armchair warfare. War without risk of causalities to both sides isn't war. In fact, it's basically terrorism.
Next up is self driving cars full of explosives. One of the things that always fascinates me about these middle eastern terrorist organizations is that they are pretty smart about adapting to technology but, the society they want to create is not likely to ever produce any meaningful technology. It's like they've never thought about the endgame: "Ok, we've killed all the infidels. When will Allah bless my cellphone so it starts working again?"
It's my understanding that copyright infringement/bootlegging is most frequently prosecuted on the distribution angle. If you are torrenting something, you are actually involved in distribution. If you are making bootleg copies and selling them on the street, that's also distribution. Ripping rentals is a time honored tradition that stems back to the days of VCRs (You only have one VCR? You're doing it wrong...). If one were to have a large collection of ripped rental Blurays, I have no doubt that some law has been broken but, probably, no one cares. Well, until you setup a service that starts distributing that content. Then the FBI will be repelling through your windows with flashbangs and shooting your dog.
The nice thing about the Bluray/DVD service is you can just rip the disk to your file server and send it back. Well, I mean, if you wanted to... Not that I would ever amass dozens of terabytes of ripped Blurays or anything... Never.
I don't think active sabotage is a good solution for legal reasons but, you can certainly get the desired effect by answering questions like this:
- "Strange. I'll have to look into that." ."
- "I'm not sure how that works. That guy left a long time ago."
- "We don't have a system for handling that exact problem."
- "Oh, don't worry about , come over here and let me show you
Basically, teach them nothing but be very pleasant and professional about it. You get your severance pay and in a month when the manager calls you because everything is broken, you can politely tell him to go fuck himself.