The civil rights lawyer in the White House is busy handing our ass#s over to multinational corporations. You don't want the current political crowd to engage such topics, because what you're likely to get are 'deals' that in no way help the odds of 99% of the population.
The sad truth is that the public has to get choosier about it leaders before we can act on such issues.
It goes well beyond any specific products. The selling of consumerism as a way of life is a real phenomenon that can be traced back to Edward Bernays and his work for the federal government. His work is chronicled in the BBC series "Century Of The Self".
There is a firefox extension that shares Google cookies. I think its from the same people who made Ghostery.
Personally, I think that approach is very fussy. People concerned with real privacy should try to conduct more of their online communications on networks like Tor and i2P.
People who are interested in security won't stop at buying just software to get it. And the hardware isn't all that hard to come by anyway; just make sure the system has Intel sandy bridge or newer and also supports vPro.
You can get the capability with AMD systems, but they are harder to come by (atthough Wikipedia is at least one place with a guide to AMD systems that support IOMMU).
then one could still consider the device to be a security risk. Even Linux tends to use many vendor-supplied firmwares.
Operating the devices under Qubes OS would help greatly in reducing the risk: It can use IOMMU (if present) to operate questionable hardware and drivers within VMs and even has a GUI for managing this.
Go to the freesound.org project and download audio recordings of streams and waterfalls. I have used these to muffle out unwanted noise in a smilar situation to the OP (roommates).
Nowadays, most techies have a low-power device (laptop or smaller) they use as a server... no reason it can't act as an ambient playback device at the same time.
Beyond that, some combination of Brown Bread, soundproofing wall hangings / curtains / blinds and carpeting (and, yes, headphones) can help as well. But you'd be surprised what a raging river or waterfall can do to block out sonic intrusions without anything else.
I don't think active noise cancelling headphones (like Bose) will help much because they're made for repetitive sounds like engines. But I did once come across a pair of Panasonic headphones that did a better job than Bose partly because they had a lot of passive noise isolation in addition to the active circuitry.
A very pernicious aspect of the smartphone market is that platform developers like Microsoft and Apple have drifted toward anti-Web attitudes and practices in an effort to give primacy to their tools (I suggest reading some of the/. commentary from when Apple banned adblockers). So the app markets for these platforms has been marred by an "apps not sites" tension that is often unnecessary.
It is very bad for the web if an advertising dichotomy is created between web and native apps. Its a signal that mobile app developers should give up on the web. It hardly matters that users can choose alternative app stores to get OS-level blockers, because authors will fear a majority who might not bother to switch.
the ARM nodes offered slightly better throughput at lower power use, although from the looks of it you'd just be giving money to the server manufacturer instead of the power company.
So then... GIVE your money to the server manufacturer instead for crissesake. There seems to be an obvious environmental benefit to be had.
Wikileaks was being actively supported by several media outlets at the time (which IIRC included the Associated Press). As such, they were acting agents of the press doing work that the papers themselves hadn't dared for decades.
However it was the Guardian's blunder that caused the real breech, IMO. There is no denying they bungled it.
In any case, you can complain about the implementation in OS X (maybe it does suck). It doesn't change the fact that it would be idiotic to try and use X11 for the purpose of conferencing when you could use Windows.
Not quite. Linux users do rely on a large amount of other users making it viable and interesting to make applications, drivers, etc. for the platform. The more Ubuntu succeeds in gathering Linux users to their Ubuntu OS, the smaller the rest of the Linux market becomes.
Just. WOW.
It's amazing that a zero-sum assessment of desktop Linux would be modded up like this. Ubuntu is trying to get past distro-itis or the Linux distro curse that has made the genre so repellent to most desktop users and app developers. If none of the distros are able to enlarge Linux' overall share of the desktop, its because none of them have quite figured out personal computing.
In any case, it should be becoming clear by now that 'Linux' is not an operating system by any means that a typical desktop user could recognize. If the community knew what was good for it, they would go back to using the moniker as a reference to the kernel only... the way Android does. Otherwise, it is impossible to have sane conversations about what is expected in terms of compatilibility, features, etc.
Canonical wants to go their own way in order to distinguish themselves from other distributions in order to gather more Linux market share (larger slice), rather than attempt to cooperate with others to grow the market (larger cake).
"With others" refers to the current desktop distro community who, to be perfectly honest, have their collective heads up their posteriors. No one but a hobbyist wants a bunch of ill-fitting pieces presented to them in a random pile. That is what the typical distro repository looks like to most prospective users. Sorry. The community are essentially hobbyists themselves and its really no one's loss for anyone to diverge from them; not when there is no marketshare to speak of.
If Ubuntu want to be the ones who show the way, they will have to stop being another "Linux distro" because that identity doesn't stand for much of anything definite. Google recognized this early on with Android.
Yes, because Apple were just a bunch of hackers... not.
X11 poses more problems than it solves. For one, it insists on being an independant entity so pressing archetictural concerns will always be denigrated (or not recognized at all) in favor of the status quo.
We can see the results of this in how, for decades, desktop environments struggled with the actually simple task of managing display settings (because the service did not ever save config info itself and the config file format was so open-ended, there was no canonical way for third parties to interpret or write the config data which means they all had a tendency to bungle it). And also the fact that X11, that whiz of "network transparency", ignored the need to efficiently *share* displays over the Internet (demerits for cluelessness if you reply and mention VNC); OS X and Windows got this capability back around 2000.
The config handling issue is partially fixed now (though not if multiple displays are involved). As for sharing and Internet-worthiness, there is the development of NX/freeNX but X.org seems indifferent to mainlining any of it.
If an entity like Canonical wants to have a go at supplanting X11, I say 'go for it'! I don't agree with all of Shuttleworth's positions (he still misses the point of personal computing), but in his insistence on copying Apple's footsteps he is at least marginally advancing the coherence and usability of Ubuntu (the Dash thing was a step back, however... OS X still makes it easy for a user to browse Apps heirarchically whereas Ubuntu 12.04 strips that ability).
That's the car that will save local businesses, letting them compete with Amazon on convenience and beat them on speed.
That's my future.
LOL!! It amazes me how people get high on this crap. Human drivers do not hobble small business any more than they do big business (hint: Amazon relies on human drivers). If anything, driverless cars would enable giants like Amazon to expand with myriad small distribution centers and put carriers like UPS out of business.
The only types of business they would be a boon to would be the ones that rely on production that is both local and diffuse-- like restaurants or dry cleaners. Even then, I'm not so sure these businesses would count driver pay as a huge chunk of their expenses.
Re: flying cars FWIW computers are going in the opposite direction than the childish fantasies of armchair aviators-- more specialization.
Since it is the aim of the flying car enthusiasts to build a vehicle that can take off and land in a very short distance, then why not just design such an airplane and be done with it?? If being in the air is so good and feasible, what is the overriding need to hug the surface of roads at all?
Re: innovation I increasingly get the impression mysticism or religion being preached to the converted with 'Innovation' used as a buzzword used to evoke esteem or reverence for the people who apply it; Its like 'Amen'.
There is no substantial difference in our day-to-day physical lives since the 1970s except for the following: The proliferation of microprocessors, an expansion of prescribed antipsychotic and antibiotic drugs, skyrocketing suburban sprawl and travel times, the expansion of the prison system and police powers in preference over schools, and the offshoring of labor. Add the effects of global warming to the list of what is increasingly noticeable. This is not the stuff of Futurism or Sci-Fi or the old technologists "progress" because nearly all of that was fantasy of the sort that could barely be given the veneer of scientific plausibility.
With a flow of dollars acting like prayer, the goal is to conjure up a second coming of the halcyon days and to finally fulfill the old prophecies (swarming cars to swarming flying cars to swarming spaceships) all the while further removing people's frame of mind from any sort of ecological context. And like some of the worst examples of religion today, we are told and suggested on many levels that all of this consumer fantasizing is scientific when mostly its dangerous bunk.
These switches are just MX blues with a stiffer spring so they can be used in space bars, escape keys and such. They have the same problems that the blues have, making them fall far short of a buckling spring replacement:
First, there is the shrill "tink-tink" sound that they make which seems to be intentionally made to be audible on a busy factory or sales floor (not at home or in the office).
Second is the hysteresis or "reset point" which is higher up (on the way back up) than the actuation point itself. This creates an odd feel when pressing a key more than once in succession.
I'd tell anyone who wants a firmer (but not 80g) switch with good tactile feedback to try Matias corp's new mechanical switches. You can choose between clicky (but not shrill) and quiet versions.
Actually NX was designed for "gedit, vim, emacs, xterm, etc." and you can even see examples of those programs running on their website. A vanilla Debian system was used at Nomachine for years as a template to demonstrate how well it works on remote systems.
I see the word Linux purged from anything Ubuntu is involved with.
Interesting... I certainly hope that is the case. There's no reason why anyone outside of OS-level developers should even know about "Linux", which has become a by-word for confusion. The moniker sets unrealistic expectations that only a kernel and a small handful of utilities can create compatibility across many distributions trying to offer their users sophisticated features.
Thank god Android didn't promote itself as another Linux distro!
What I see are half-baked half-fulfilled promises.
These are the only possible kind of promises/results when you pretend the entire extant variety of PCs are possibly/probably compatible with your OS. Its OK with a server OS because in that case users=techies, but its deadly in the consumer desktop and mobile spaces. This is something Canonical still needs to learn: To be a bit exclusive in the brands or hardware configurations they will support, and to offer top-tier tech support only for hardware that falls under partnerships with the producers of that equipment. (BTW this isn't the "Apple" way... MS has hardware certification as well.) And stop giving people the impression that 2 minutes running a Live CD is an indication of how well the OS will work on just any system... it sets people up for becoming infuriated with details lurking just beneath the surface.
I can give a certain amount of respect to a distro (I won't call them OSes) that offers different desktops, but not nearly as much as a distro that promotes a standard UI with a decent level of vertical integration. Techies can always change or cut away the desktop elements they don't like (this is even the case on Windows), so there's no reason to deprive average users of a dependable UI reference frame. That way they can get proper tech support where the techs don't say things like: "Now locate your desktop environment's XYZ feature. You can usually find it in Control Panel or System Settings or Preferences or something like that".
Rendering with local hardware acceleration and sending the results over the network in the form of compressed video, a la VNC, RDP, XPRA, and the plans for remote Wayland, is much more efficient, and actually transparent to the application.
That's only because X11 is so crappy at doing *efficient* network graphics. NoMachine came out with NX (and freeNX) to handle this, but most of the community just ignores it even though it works great IMO.
Both Apple and MS refactored their graphics subsystems long ago so they could not only have Internet efficiency (not idiotic bitmap-tossing ala VNC) but efficient *sharing* of apps and screens as well. Sharing is a fairly common and extremely important business use case that the X11 people are completely indifferent to.
I think you make a good point about warranty clauses, and it would be hard to imagine HD manufacturers singling out their SSDs with an inferior warranty in this respect.
Considering the paper cited by TFA won't spill the beans on which models were tested, it may be a safer bet to purchase SSDs from traditional HD makers (at least I hope that is the case with my Samsung).
These countries you cited have universal healthcare-- Very important to the investment and entrepreneurial landscape, actually. Americans try to stay with corporate day jobs until they are old enough to get Medicare, and this consumes much of our energy and attention until we retire.
Elsewhere in the developed world, adults from a wider demographic range can more easily choose the lifestyle and occupation of market researcher and investor without being hammered by healthcare costs.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't be naive.
There are tried and true statistical methods that can filter out falsified data. It isn't just for multiple choice questionaires, you know.
It is far better to curtail the amount of tracking that can reach you.
No, not yet.
The civil rights lawyer in the White House is busy handing our ass#s over to multinational corporations. You don't want the current political crowd to engage such topics, because what you're likely to get are 'deals' that in no way help the odds of 99% of the population.
The sad truth is that the public has to get choosier about it leaders before we can act on such issues.
It goes well beyond any specific products. The selling of consumerism as a way of life is a real phenomenon that can be traced back to Edward Bernays and his work for the federal government. His work is chronicled in the BBC series "Century Of The Self".
There is a firefox extension that shares Google cookies. I think its from the same people who made Ghostery.
Personally, I think that approach is very fussy. People concerned with real privacy should try to conduct more of their online communications on networks like Tor and i2P.
People who are interested in security won't stop at buying just software to get it. And the hardware isn't all that hard to come by anyway; just make sure the system has Intel sandy bridge or newer and also supports vPro.
You can get the capability with AMD systems, but they are harder to come by (atthough Wikipedia is at least one place with a guide to AMD systems that support IOMMU).
then one could still consider the device to be a security risk. Even Linux tends to use many vendor-supplied firmwares.
Operating the devices under Qubes OS would help greatly in reducing the risk: It can use IOMMU (if present) to operate questionable hardware and drivers within VMs and even has a GUI for managing this.
Go to the freesound.org project and download audio recordings of streams and waterfalls. I have used these to muffle out unwanted noise in a smilar situation to the OP (roommates).
Nowadays, most techies have a low-power device (laptop or smaller) they use as a server... no reason it can't act as an ambient playback device at the same time.
Beyond that, some combination of Brown Bread, soundproofing wall hangings / curtains / blinds and carpeting (and, yes, headphones) can help as well. But you'd be surprised what a raging river or waterfall can do to block out sonic intrusions without anything else.
I don't think active noise cancelling headphones (like Bose) will help much because they're made for repetitive sounds like engines. But I did once come across a pair of Panasonic headphones that did a better job than Bose partly because they had a lot of passive noise isolation in addition to the active circuitry.
A very pernicious aspect of the smartphone market is that platform developers like Microsoft and Apple have drifted toward anti-Web attitudes and practices in an effort to give primacy to their tools (I suggest reading some of the /. commentary from when Apple banned adblockers). So the app markets for these platforms has been marred by an "apps not sites" tension that is often unnecessary.
It is very bad for the web if an advertising dichotomy is created between web and native apps. Its a signal that mobile app developers should give up on the web. It hardly matters that users can choose alternative app stores to get OS-level blockers, because authors will fear a majority who might not bother to switch.
the ARM nodes offered slightly better throughput at lower power use, although from the looks of it you'd just be giving money to the server manufacturer instead of the power company.
So then... GIVE your money to the server manufacturer instead for crissesake. There seems to be an obvious environmental benefit to be had.
Wikileaks was being actively supported by several media outlets at the time (which IIRC included the Associated Press). As such, they were acting agents of the press doing work that the papers themselves hadn't dared for decades.
However it was the Guardian's blunder that caused the real breech, IMO. There is no denying they bungled it.
I've used OS X for over seven years.
In any case, you can complain about the implementation in OS X (maybe it does suck). It doesn't change the fact that it would be idiotic to try and use X11 for the purpose of conferencing when you could use Windows.
Apple at least gets points for trying here.
Not quite. Linux users do rely on a large amount of other users making it viable and interesting to make applications, drivers, etc. for the platform. The more Ubuntu succeeds in gathering Linux users to their Ubuntu OS, the smaller the rest of the Linux market becomes.
Just. WOW.
It's amazing that a zero-sum assessment of desktop Linux would be modded up like this. Ubuntu is trying to get past distro-itis or the Linux distro curse that has made the genre so repellent to most desktop users and app developers. If none of the distros are able to enlarge Linux' overall share of the desktop, its because none of them have quite figured out personal computing.
In any case, it should be becoming clear by now that 'Linux' is not an operating system by any means that a typical desktop user could recognize. If the community knew what was good for it, they would go back to using the moniker as a reference to the kernel only... the way Android does. Otherwise, it is impossible to have sane conversations about what is expected in terms of compatilibility, features, etc.
Canonical wants to go their own way in order to distinguish themselves from other distributions in order to gather more Linux market share (larger slice), rather than attempt to cooperate with others to grow the market (larger cake).
"With others" refers to the current desktop distro community who, to be perfectly honest, have their collective heads up their posteriors. No one but a hobbyist wants a bunch of ill-fitting pieces presented to them in a random pile. That is what the typical distro repository looks like to most prospective users. Sorry. The community are essentially hobbyists themselves and its really no one's loss for anyone to diverge from them; not when there is no marketshare to speak of.
If Ubuntu want to be the ones who show the way, they will have to stop being another "Linux distro" because that identity doesn't stand for much of anything definite. Google recognized this early on with Android.
Yes, because Apple were just a bunch of hackers... not.
X11 poses more problems than it solves. For one, it insists on being an independant entity so pressing archetictural concerns will always be denigrated (or not recognized at all) in favor of the status quo.
We can see the results of this in how, for decades, desktop environments struggled with the actually simple task of managing display settings (because the service did not ever save config info itself and the config file format was so open-ended, there was no canonical way for third parties to interpret or write the config data which means they all had a tendency to bungle it). And also the fact that X11, that whiz of "network transparency", ignored the need to efficiently *share* displays over the Internet (demerits for cluelessness if you reply and mention VNC); OS X and Windows got this capability back around 2000.
The config handling issue is partially fixed now (though not if multiple displays are involved). As for sharing and Internet-worthiness, there is the development of NX/freeNX but X.org seems indifferent to mainlining any of it.
If an entity like Canonical wants to have a go at supplanting X11, I say 'go for it'! I don't agree with all of Shuttleworth's positions (he still misses the point of personal computing), but in his insistence on copying Apple's footsteps he is at least marginally advancing the coherence and usability of Ubuntu (the Dash thing was a step back, however... OS X still makes it easy for a user to browse Apps heirarchically whereas Ubuntu 12.04 strips that ability).
That's the car that will save local businesses, letting them compete with Amazon on convenience and beat them on speed.
That's my future.
LOL!! It amazes me how people get high on this crap. Human drivers do not hobble small business any more than they do big business (hint: Amazon relies on human drivers). If anything, driverless cars would enable giants like Amazon to expand with myriad small distribution centers and put carriers like UPS out of business.
The only types of business they would be a boon to would be the ones that rely on production that is both local and diffuse-- like restaurants or dry cleaners. Even then, I'm not so sure these businesses would count driver pay as a huge chunk of their expenses.
Re: flying cars
FWIW computers are going in the opposite direction than the childish fantasies of armchair aviators-- more specialization.
Since it is the aim of the flying car enthusiasts to build a vehicle that can take off and land in a very short distance, then why not just design such an airplane and be done with it?? If being in the air is so good and feasible, what is the overriding need to hug the surface of roads at all?
Re: innovation
I increasingly get the impression mysticism or religion being preached to the converted with 'Innovation' used as a buzzword used to evoke esteem or reverence for the people who apply it; Its like 'Amen'.
There is no substantial difference in our day-to-day physical lives since the 1970s except for the following: The proliferation of microprocessors, an expansion of prescribed antipsychotic and antibiotic drugs, skyrocketing suburban sprawl and travel times, the expansion of the prison system and police powers in preference over schools, and the offshoring of labor. Add the effects of global warming to the list of what is increasingly noticeable. This is not the stuff of Futurism or Sci-Fi or the old technologists "progress" because nearly all of that was fantasy of the sort that could barely be given the veneer of scientific plausibility.
With a flow of dollars acting like prayer, the goal is to conjure up a second coming of the halcyon days and to finally fulfill the old prophecies (swarming cars to swarming flying cars to swarming spaceships) all the while further removing people's frame of mind from any sort of ecological context. And like some of the worst examples of religion today, we are told and suggested on many levels that all of this consumer fantasizing is scientific when mostly its dangerous bunk.
'There is no such thing as society^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hthe free market.'
A little updating for you.
Indeed, Greens are meant for *thumbs*. They are too heavy as a general switch for most people.
These switches are just MX blues with a stiffer spring so they can be used in space bars, escape keys and such. They have the same problems that the blues have, making them fall far short of a buckling spring replacement:
First, there is the shrill "tink-tink" sound that they make which seems to be intentionally made to be audible on a busy factory or sales floor (not at home or in the office).
Second is the hysteresis or "reset point" which is higher up (on the way back up) than the actuation point itself. This creates an odd feel when pressing a key more than once in succession.
I'd tell anyone who wants a firmer (but not 80g) switch with good tactile feedback to try Matias corp's new mechanical switches. You can choose between clicky (but not shrill) and quiet versions.
Actually NX was designed for "gedit, vim, emacs, xterm, etc." and you can even see examples of those programs running on their website. A vanilla Debian system was used at Nomachine for years as a template to demonstrate how well it works on remote systems.
NX wasn't designed for Chromium.
I see the word Linux purged from anything Ubuntu is involved with.
Interesting... I certainly hope that is the case. There's no reason why anyone outside of OS-level developers should even know about "Linux", which has become a by-word for confusion. The moniker sets unrealistic expectations that only a kernel and a small handful of utilities can create compatibility across many distributions trying to offer their users sophisticated features.
Thank god Android didn't promote itself as another Linux distro!
What I see are half-baked half-fulfilled promises.
These are the only possible kind of promises/results when you pretend the entire extant variety of PCs are possibly/probably compatible with your OS. Its OK with a server OS because in that case users=techies, but its deadly in the consumer desktop and mobile spaces. This is something Canonical still needs to learn: To be a bit exclusive in the brands or hardware configurations they will support, and to offer top-tier tech support only for hardware that falls under partnerships with the producers of that equipment. (BTW this isn't the "Apple" way... MS has hardware certification as well.) And stop giving people the impression that 2 minutes running a Live CD is an indication of how well the OS will work on just any system... it sets people up for becoming infuriated with details lurking just beneath the surface.
A greybeard opinion if I ever saw one.
I can give a certain amount of respect to a distro (I won't call them OSes) that offers different desktops, but not nearly as much as a distro that promotes a standard UI with a decent level of vertical integration. Techies can always change or cut away the desktop elements they don't like (this is even the case on Windows), so there's no reason to deprive average users of a dependable UI reference frame. That way they can get proper tech support where the techs don't say things like: "Now locate your desktop environment's XYZ feature. You can usually find it in Control Panel or System Settings or Preferences or something like that".
Rendering with local hardware acceleration and sending the results over the network in the form of compressed video, a la VNC, RDP, XPRA, and the plans for remote Wayland, is much more efficient, and actually transparent to the application.
That's only because X11 is so crappy at doing *efficient* network graphics. NoMachine came out with NX (and freeNX) to handle this, but most of the community just ignores it even though it works great IMO.
Both Apple and MS refactored their graphics subsystems long ago so they could not only have Internet efficiency (not idiotic bitmap-tossing ala VNC) but efficient *sharing* of apps and screens as well. Sharing is a fairly common and extremely important business use case that the X11 people are completely indifferent to.
I think you make a good point about warranty clauses, and it would be hard to imagine HD manufacturers singling out their SSDs with an inferior warranty in this respect.
Considering the paper cited by TFA won't spill the beans on which models were tested, it may be a safer bet to purchase SSDs from traditional HD makers (at least I hope that is the case with my Samsung).
It isn't bias if he is right. It may be unprofessional to call bad things bad names, but it doesn't make it biased or wrong, just unprofessional.
This!
These countries you cited have universal healthcare-- Very important to the investment and entrepreneurial landscape, actually. Americans try to stay with corporate day jobs until they are old enough to get Medicare, and this consumes much of our energy and attention until we retire.
Elsewhere in the developed world, adults from a wider demographic range can more easily choose the lifestyle and occupation of market researcher and investor without being hammered by healthcare costs.