That's precisely why this is not Star Trek. The crew are supposed to be "infallible and near-perfect". The whole point is to show an optimistic future where humanity has overcome its petty differences and started actually working for the betterment of all. This is the core principle of Star Trek. Everything else is a side-effect of that. If you want to watch people squabble over inconsequential things and torture animals for their benefit, go watch something that isn't Star Trek. There's tons of it, and lots of it is great if that's what you're looking for.
This isn't Star Trek, this is "Generic action sci-fi show #48911" with a Star Trek sticker slapped on it so that people will buy it.
Fair points, I suppose. But I'm willing to bet that a $15 logitech wireless keyboard (and a couple of rechargeable AAA batteries) would have a better feel and would outlast the apple keyboard:)
And if it's Apple branded the batteries are not replaceable and you have to throw away the keyboard when the batteries don't charge.
...AND he's saying that the built-in keyboard on his overpriced machine is so poor that he had to buy another keyboard for it to be usable. So he gave Apple more money for something half-way decent. Just like they want.
And this is somehow "In Apple's defense".
Meanwhile I still have the same keyboard from 1997.
1997? pfft, lightweight. Model M with a 1989 manufacture date here;)
Right now I'm re-reading Echopraxia by Peter Watts, the sequel to Blindsight ( <-- link to the full book online under a CC license!), which I just re-read. Blindsight is fantastic (I've read it twice now, both times I did it in one sitting), I didn't enjoy Echopraxia quite as much, but it's still pretty damn good.
Sounds to me like he already trusts the addon since he was already using it and went to the trouble of installing an older version of firefox specifically for it.
Sounds to me like Mozilla thinks it knows what a user wants better than he does.
I came here to say the same thing. The "new operating systems" wording is a nice little loophole if you're planning on going to a rolling release model.
The appropriate place for Mozilla to Listen to their users is on their bug tracker (as opposed to closing things with the good old WONTFIX or NOTABUG). Or the 'submit feedback' option in the help menu. Listening to users can easily be done without resorting to data mining. If you're that desperate for feedback, open up a "we need feedback" tab every now and then when people upgrade. You could even use the existing feedback infrastructure for that, it should take less than 10 lines of code to implement. If you want to get really fancy, you could whip up a survey on your feedback website. Perhaps a day's work.
But they won't do this because then they'd be bombarded with a million messages saying "everything you're doing is wrong. If I wanted chrome, I'd install chrome". And that's not what they want to hear.
Sony's Jim Ryan suggested that, in the case of Minecraft, Sony was wary to expose that game's young players to "external influences we have no ability to manage or look after."
Sooooooo... what you're saying is that the PS4 doesn't do web browsing? I could have sworn it did...
It's not even that. Openmoko killed it themselves by focusing on making sure the interface had pretty animations. Rather than, you know, actually making it work as a phone. No conspiracy or user apathy needed.
I was really enthusiastic about an open phone, to the point that I organised a group buy for people in my area (we bulk-purchased a bunch of devices and paid for them before launch to bring down shipping costs and so that we'd be among the first to have the devices). I contributed, I was very active in the community and wrote a couple of useful tools for the device. I tried to use my freerunner as a phone for the best part of 2 years. In the end I gave up and reverted to a nokia. Openmoko seemed more intent on making the interface shiny than giving us a functional phone. I remember the "upgrade" from 2007.2 to 2008.1 particularly unkindly - I went from having a mostly usable phone with a somewhat clunky interface and a few fairly-serious bugs that I coped with in the hope they'd soon be fixed (the biggest ones being the broken suspend, making the battery life abysmal, and the echo heard by everyone I talked to) to having a pretty animated interface which was much less reliable while still having all the same old bugs (battery life was even worse because the animations were more expensive and suspend still didn't work).
I strongly agree with the sentiment of the article that it would have been better to make it reliable phone with rock-solid core functionality (phone, SMS, PIM) and then work on the interface. I said as much at the time.
There was also quite a strong element of fanboyism in the community. You couldn't criticise openmoko, because they had made an open source phone! I should be grateful! If I want suspend to work, I should fix it myself! It's not up to openmoko to actually make their product work! It's totally my fault if ~8 hours of battery life isn't enough for me, that's what I get for having the audacity to not be near a power outlet for such a long time! Despite the fact that before I bought the device I was told it was a consumer-grade device which would work as a phone (unlike the neo1973, which was marketed at developers). With the exception of a few notable people, this made rational discussion and any attempt to get openmoko to focus on the important things impossible. On the occasions where openmoko did engage with the community, they were met with an echo chamber where dissenting (i.e: rational) voices were drowned out by flames. Part of me felt vindicated when openmoko died because of this, but mostly I was just sad that I never got my open phone.
Openmoko released a bunch of increasingly pretty but less useful software rather than focusing on core functionality, which led to an explosion of distros, none of which got everything right (though some did have some good ideas). Qtopia came along and seemed like a good thing for a while, but the maintainer was totally arrogant and basically gave responses which were the equivalent of "you're holding it wrong" when we made suggestions for UI improvements (in particular the keyboard was pretty much unusable), assisted by the echo chamber. Then, shockingly, qtopia died. A while after this qtmoko came along thanks to the herculean efforts of one guy (whos name I should remember but can't) and gave us something pretty close to a usable phone (so I'm told). But by that point I and many others had given up on ever using it as a phone and our devices were sitting in drawers and we'd stopped contributing to the community. Also around the same time the (already not-blazingly fast) hardware was starting to get really dated, and then openmoko folded and we never got a successor (the gta04 and neo900 look great, but they're waaay too expensive for what they are. I'd pay a hefty premium for an open phone, but I'm not paying 3x as much for something with less capability, particularly after my openmoko experience).
A couple of years later I did some hacking and turned my freerunner into a dedicated GPS device running foxtrotgps with a bunch of map data stored on the SD card. It was really good at this and it still does this job today. I still take it with me as a backup when I go on trips (it seems to be more accurate wrt gps logging than my cyanogenmod phone). But this is just me using lemons to make lemonade. I wanted an open source phone, and Openmoko screwed that up over and over again.
I have almost the opposite opinion, I think the books keep getting better and better. Except for Dune Messiah. I particularly love books 4-6.
It's a pity that the cliffhanger of Chapter House was never resolved. But I guess that's better than a couple of hacks taking over and tying it into their fanfic.
I assume that the parent means "built-in basic" on both machines.
CBM BASIC was MS 6502 BASIC under the hood. The C128 even included a Microsoft copyright message. There is an easter egg in basic v2 on the PET which displays "Microsoft!" on the screen. The story goes that Bill Gates had an argument with Jack Tramiel and wanted to be able to prove that it was MS basic.
According to the first link, the basic on the Apple II was called integer basic and was written by Woz. Though MS basic was available on tape and built into the Apple II Plus.
This is what I was going to say. You see it ALL THE TIME. Your boss is NOT going to let you go back and clean stuff up later unless there's an imminent business need to do so. Do it right the first time. Don't commit sloppy code.
The only time it's ever acceptable to tell yourself this is on a personal project, and only if you have the discipline to make it be true.
Yuuup. And it's not the first time, either. Try sending a GPG-signed email via ebay. You'll get a response back telling you that your email has been blocked "for security reasons".
Wrong. ALSA supports software mixing with the dmix module. And as a bonus if you have a sound card which does hardware mixing you won't be forced to do software mixing like you are with pulseaudio.
Further, pulseaudio emulates ALSA - programs targeting ALSA can use pulseaudio seamlessly. So the benefit of targeting pulseaudio rather than ALSA is exactly nil.
Nah, you can use the modern.ie VMs for something like 30 days without phoning home to MS. And when that time limit is up you can just revert to the snapshot you took before booting for the first time (you did take a snapshot before booting for the first time, right?;) ).
Personally, 30 days using windows sounds like 30 days too long. It was certainly long enough for me to do compatibility testing for Edge.
Sorry if I offended your inner zealot. I never said or thought virtualbox was the only solution. It's the one I used when I needed to do this. You can use any virtualisation tool you want, even completely proprietary ones like vmware.
Yep, you run win10 in virtualbox on a linux host. You can then disable networking completely or use iptables to restrict access to only the things you need:
(copy-pasted from a thing I wrote a while back)
How to make a Windows 10 VM secure with a Linux host
Simple! Restrict all intarwebs access to everything that you don’t absolutely need:
sudo iptables -A OUTPUT -m owner --gid-owner vboxusers -j DROP
4. In windows you’ll need to edit c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts to add an entry for the sites you want, since DNS won’t work. Or you could look at allowing DNS with more iptables rules. But I wouldn’t.
If you follow these simple steps, you never have to worry about your testing VM reporting everything you do back to Microsoft.
For extra security, i recommend disconnecting the virtual network cable before you close the VM. That way if you accidentally start it without the vboxusers group it still won’t be able to access the internet.
If you’re running windows on bare metal in 2015 I have no advice for you, you deserve whatever happens.
Slashdot Mirror
That's precisely why this is not Star Trek. The crew are supposed to be "infallible and near-perfect". The whole point is to show an optimistic future where humanity has overcome its petty differences and started actually working for the betterment of all. This is the core principle of Star Trek. Everything else is a side-effect of that. If you want to watch people squabble over inconsequential things and torture animals for their benefit, go watch something that isn't Star Trek. There's tons of it, and lots of it is great if that's what you're looking for.
This isn't Star Trek, this is "Generic action sci-fi show #48911" with a Star Trek sticker slapped on it so that people will buy it.
Fair points, I suppose. But I'm willing to bet that a $15 logitech wireless keyboard (and a couple of rechargeable AAA batteries) would have a better feel and would outlast the apple keyboard :)
I think I want to have your babies.
And if it's Apple branded the batteries are not replaceable and you have to throw away the keyboard when the batteries don't charge.
...AND he's saying that the built-in keyboard on his overpriced machine is so poor that he had to buy another keyboard for it to be usable. So he gave Apple more money for something half-way decent. Just like they want.
And this is somehow "In Apple's defense".
Meanwhile I still have the same keyboard from 1997.
1997? pfft, lightweight. Model M with a 1989 manufacture date here ;)
Yeah, I looked into that because it sounded good. It's using Google's speech to text service. Thanks but no thanks.
Right now I'm re-reading Echopraxia by Peter Watts, the sequel to Blindsight ( <-- link to the full book online under a CC license!), which I just re-read. Blindsight is fantastic (I've read it twice now, both times I did it in one sitting), I didn't enjoy Echopraxia quite as much, but it's still pretty damn good.
Sounds to me like he already trusts the addon since he was already using it and went to the trouble of installing an older version of firefox specifically for it.
Sounds to me like Mozilla thinks it knows what a user wants better than he does.
we're seeing dramatic performance improvements coming up...
It's easy to improve performance when you remove functionality. A fast car with no steering wheel isn't much use to me.
In fact the power previously given to extensions could be considered dangerous
It could more correctly be considered liberating.
I came here to say the same thing. The "new operating systems" wording is a nice little loophole if you're planning on going to a rolling release model.
The appropriate place for Mozilla to Listen to their users is on their bug tracker (as opposed to closing things with the good old WONTFIX or NOTABUG). Or the 'submit feedback' option in the help menu. Listening to users can easily be done without resorting to data mining. If you're that desperate for feedback, open up a "we need feedback" tab every now and then when people upgrade. You could even use the existing feedback infrastructure for that, it should take less than 10 lines of code to implement. If you want to get really fancy, you could whip up a survey on your feedback website. Perhaps a day's work.
But they won't do this because then they'd be bombarded with a million messages saying "everything you're doing is wrong. If I wanted chrome, I'd install chrome". And that's not what they want to hear.
Sony's Jim Ryan suggested that, in the case of Minecraft, Sony was wary to expose that game's young players to "external influences we have no ability to manage or look after."
Sooooooo... what you're saying is that the PS4 doesn't do web browsing? I could have sworn it did...
It's not even that. Openmoko killed it themselves by focusing on making sure the interface had pretty animations. Rather than, you know, actually making it work as a phone. No conspiracy or user apathy needed.
This. A thousand times this. I was there.
I was really enthusiastic about an open phone, to the point that I organised a group buy for people in my area (we bulk-purchased a bunch of devices and paid for them before launch to bring down shipping costs and so that we'd be among the first to have the devices). I contributed, I was very active in the community and wrote a couple of useful tools for the device. I tried to use my freerunner as a phone for the best part of 2 years. In the end I gave up and reverted to a nokia. Openmoko seemed more intent on making the interface shiny than giving us a functional phone. I remember the "upgrade" from 2007.2 to 2008.1 particularly unkindly - I went from having a mostly usable phone with a somewhat clunky interface and a few fairly-serious bugs that I coped with in the hope they'd soon be fixed (the biggest ones being the broken suspend, making the battery life abysmal, and the echo heard by everyone I talked to) to having a pretty animated interface which was much less reliable while still having all the same old bugs (battery life was even worse because the animations were more expensive and suspend still didn't work).
I strongly agree with the sentiment of the article that it would have been better to make it reliable phone with rock-solid core functionality (phone, SMS, PIM) and then work on the interface. I said as much at the time.
There was also quite a strong element of fanboyism in the community. You couldn't criticise openmoko, because they had made an open source phone! I should be grateful! If I want suspend to work, I should fix it myself! It's not up to openmoko to actually make their product work! It's totally my fault if ~8 hours of battery life isn't enough for me, that's what I get for having the audacity to not be near a power outlet for such a long time! Despite the fact that before I bought the device I was told it was a consumer-grade device which would work as a phone (unlike the neo1973, which was marketed at developers). With the exception of a few notable people, this made rational discussion and any attempt to get openmoko to focus on the important things impossible. On the occasions where openmoko did engage with the community, they were met with an echo chamber where dissenting (i.e: rational) voices were drowned out by flames. Part of me felt vindicated when openmoko died because of this, but mostly I was just sad that I never got my open phone.
Openmoko released a bunch of increasingly pretty but less useful software rather than focusing on core functionality, which led to an explosion of distros, none of which got everything right (though some did have some good ideas). Qtopia came along and seemed like a good thing for a while, but the maintainer was totally arrogant and basically gave responses which were the equivalent of "you're holding it wrong" when we made suggestions for UI improvements (in particular the keyboard was pretty much unusable), assisted by the echo chamber. Then, shockingly, qtopia died. A while after this qtmoko came along thanks to the herculean efforts of one guy (whos name I should remember but can't) and gave us something pretty close to a usable phone (so I'm told). But by that point I and many others had given up on ever using it as a phone and our devices were sitting in drawers and we'd stopped contributing to the community. Also around the same time the (already not-blazingly fast) hardware was starting to get really dated, and then openmoko folded and we never got a successor (the gta04 and neo900 look great, but they're waaay too expensive for what they are. I'd pay a hefty premium for an open phone, but I'm not paying 3x as much for something with less capability, particularly after my openmoko experience).
A couple of years later I did some hacking and turned my freerunner into a dedicated GPS device running foxtrotgps with a bunch of map data stored on the SD card. It was really good at this and it still does this job today. I still take it with me as a backup when I go on trips (it seems to be more accurate wrt gps logging than my cyanogenmod phone). But this is just me using lemons to make lemonade. I wanted an open source phone, and Openmoko screwed that up over and over again.
I have almost the opposite opinion, I think the books keep getting better and better. Except for Dune Messiah. I particularly love books 4-6.
It's a pity that the cliffhanger of Chapter House was never resolved. But I guess that's better than a couple of hacks taking over and tying it into their fanfic.
Have you read Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut?
I assume that the parent means "built-in basic" on both machines.
CBM BASIC was MS 6502 BASIC under the hood. The C128 even included a Microsoft copyright message. There is an easter egg in basic v2 on the PET which displays "Microsoft!" on the screen. The story goes that Bill Gates had an argument with Jack Tramiel and wanted to be able to prove that it was MS basic.
See here and here
According to the first link, the basic on the Apple II was called integer basic and was written by Woz. Though MS basic was available on tape and built into the Apple II Plus.
Yup. I called commodore once because I wanted to mod my C128. They didn't even ask me to pay the postage on the schematics they sent me.
This is what I was going to say. You see it ALL THE TIME.
Your boss is NOT going to let you go back and clean stuff up later unless there's an imminent business need to do so. Do it right the first time. Don't commit sloppy code.
The only time it's ever acceptable to tell yourself this is on a personal project, and only if you have the discipline to make it be true.
Yuuup. And it's not the first time, either. Try sending a GPG-signed email via ebay. You'll get a response back telling you that your email has been blocked "for security reasons".
but those are fringe uses
All of which can be done by ALSA, just without the pretty GUI.
dammit, I meant to reply to #54060713
Wrong. ALSA supports software mixing with the dmix module. And as a bonus if you have a sound card which does hardware mixing you won't be forced to do software mixing like you are with pulseaudio.
Further, pulseaudio emulates ALSA - programs targeting ALSA can use pulseaudio seamlessly. So the benefit of targeting pulseaudio rather than ALSA is exactly nil.
Nah, you can use the modern.ie VMs for something like 30 days without phoning home to MS. And when that time limit is up you can just revert to the snapshot you took before booting for the first time (you did take a snapshot before booting for the first time, right? ;) ).
Personally, 30 days using windows sounds like 30 days too long. It was certainly long enough for me to do compatibility testing for Edge.
Sorry if I offended your inner zealot. I never said or thought virtualbox was the only solution. It's the one I used when I needed to do this. You can use any virtualisation tool you want, even completely proprietary ones like vmware.
Yep, you run win10 in virtualbox on a linux host. You can then disable networking completely or use iptables to restrict access to only the things you need:
(copy-pasted from a thing I wrote a while back)
How to make a Windows 10 VM secure with a Linux host
Simple! Restrict all intarwebs access to everything that you don’t absolutely need:
1. run virtualbox with the vboxusers group:
sudo -g vboxusers virtualbox
2. allow access to the site you want:
sudo iptables -A OUTPUT -m owner --gid-owner vboxusers -d [ip address] -j ACCEPT
3. block everything else:
sudo iptables -A OUTPUT -m owner --gid-owner vboxusers -j DROP
4. In windows you’ll need to edit c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts to add an entry for the sites you want, since DNS won’t work. Or you could
look at allowing DNS with more iptables rules. But I wouldn’t.
If you follow these simple steps, you never have to worry about your testing VM reporting everything you do back to Microsoft.
For extra security, i recommend disconnecting the virtual network cable before you close the VM. That way if you accidentally start it without the vboxusers group it still won’t be able to access the internet.
If you’re running windows on bare metal in 2015 I have no advice for you, you deserve whatever happens.