well, yeah, it is misogynistic when you use phrasing like that "men and women are different and have different abilities and interests".
it's not misogynistic if you say, instead, something like "individuals have different abilities and interests".
making it about gender, as if all individuals of a given sex are the same and have the same interests and abilities, is what makes it misogyny, you dumb fuck.
I see the point of your analogy - it's a good one, except that it's undermined by the fact that while what you say about death and meaning is true, Damore's memo was just misogynist bullshit.
He's just another brotard (one of many who have crawled out from under their rocks in the wake of gamergate and the rise of trumpist nazi-ism) who accidentally stumbled into a little notoriety with some offensive disparagement of women and is now using autism as an excuse for his arsehole behaviour.
Autism may well make human interaction difficult for him, but he lives in a world full of humans and it's up to him to figure out - by himself, or with help if he needs it - how to live in it without clumsily pissing other people off.
Claiming autism as an excuse is the "trigger" defence of the brotard and (just as those who are easily triggered have no right to expect that others will know about - or give a fuck about - their triggers), he has no right to expect that others will know or give a fuck that his obnoxiousness is connected to his autism. It's certainly not an excuse that deserves instant forgiveness, he'll have to do a fuck of a lot more than that.
right, and businessmen who don't "ruin their friendship" with the local gangster to avoid having their businesses "accidentally" burn down are firemen.
I'm not 100% sure he's a rapist but (having met him during one of his visits to Australia in the 90s) I am 100% sure he's an arsehole, and a creepy one too.
You wonder why some of us resist the idea of socialized medicine.
I don't wonder. I know it's because Americans have been brain-washed with decades of pro-corporate and anti-government propaganda into believing bullshit like this:
"Residents on strike. Nurses paid like burger flippers. Not enough hospital beds. Wait lists for cat scans. Wait lists for hip surgery. Wait lists for HEART surgery."
Waiting lists in public health systems are for non-urgent conditions. Anyone with an urgent condition will be treated immediately (which also has the side-effect of increasing waiting times for non-urgent conditions). And yeah, it ain't perfect, and there are never enough resources, and our government is bowing to the pressure from american corporations who want it privatised so they can loot our sick like they do yours, but i am so fucking glad I live in a country with a public health system than in some barbaric fucking hellhole of privatised health.
Priority is assigned by medical need and available resources, not by how fucking rich someone is, or how much the private hospital and the insurance company can make between them with criminal collusion to artificially inflate prices, like hundreds of dollars each or more for simple pills like paracetamol - "acetaminophen" to yanks - a drug that you can at any chemist in Australia for under $3 AUD for a box of 100 pills, and that's without being subsidised by our Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme - which American multinationals have been trying to get killed off for years, fortunately without success so far because even our corporate lick-spittle "conservative" (actually, radical right-wing reactionaries, same as yours but better at hiding it) party knows it would be political suicide.
The weirdest thing about your shitty health system is that many Americans actually believe that it's the best in the world ("of course it is, it's American"). It's not. Far fucking from it. Your system is worse even than that of many third world countries.
I bet you even believe the bullshit about "government death panels". You know who actually has "death panels"? private medical insurance companies trying to welch out of the bet they made.
And something that would be hilariously ironic if it wasn't so scary is that you've been propagandised with this shit for so long that you accept it as part of your identity now. It's the identity politics of the enthusiastically and willingly exploited - "Fuck me over please, I'm American and proud of it. I'll fight to the death to preserve a corporation's right to shaft me any way it wants".
that makes perfect sense - if you want to view the content made by an advertising company it would be totally insane to do it on a browser made by another advertising company.
better option: disable all DRM bullshit, boycott companies that depend upon DRM (and bribe it into web standards), and refuse to watch their programs.
if you really must view videos made by such a company, there's always bit torrent.
true, but it's about more than just "blame". If your business isn't viable you shouldn't exploit your employees and require them to subsidise it.
a business crying poor and whining that they can't afford to pay fair wages is doing exactly that. if a business can't survive without ripping off its workers then it deserves to go under.
and whining that their customers won't pay 5 cents extra for a coffee or whatever it is they're buying is bullshit too - customers don't have a right to have their purchases subsidised by exploited workers either.
it's not just "wealthy chinese investors". it's almost everyone involved in bitcoin.
bitcoin is finance industry scam practice for little con-men - for basement dwellers who wish they had the resources to rip off everyone else on a huge scale like the big boys in the finance industry. they look with envy rather than outraged horror at the financial industry manipulations that leave other people bankrupt and homeless...they may not get to scam hundreds of billions and government bailouts as well but they get to play the same scams on a smaller scale. yippee!
> Sorry to put it so offensively, but I won't take shit arguments
Was I making an argument about Android? No, I was pointing out for the benefit of other readers that neither GPS nor gapps are required. Your disclaimer doesn't diminish the fact that you're an arsehole.
In fact, it was you who was making a (demonstrably false) argument: "Let's get this out of the way: Android isn't open source (outside of China at least, where Google is blocked). Period. No discussion. When you have a market so flooded by Android devices shipping with a closed source module, with super user powers, that responds to remote requests, it's not open source. That's Google Play Services for you."
1. Android is open source. Everywhere, inside and outside of China (WTF?)
2. Google Play Services is not required. There may be some fucking around to install a non-corporate version (which will involve careful selection of hardware so you don't pay for shit hardware that the manufacturer still "owns" rather than you), and some on-going inconvenience involved (i.e. some apps that won't work) but if you really want to, you can have an android device without it. It's up to the user to decide which is more important, convenience or privacy.
> who admitedly doesn't have apps installed for the simple fact he can't find a use for them
It's not so much that I can't find a use for them, it's that I actually have no use for them. If I have no use for something, why would I have it installed? I only install stuff that I actually use, or that I might use (most of those get uninstalled because they don't meet my needs). e.g. I don't use Youtube on my phone or tablet because viewing videos on tiny screens pisses me off (it also uses up all my quota in no time - and, strangely, I'm not keen to pay more for a larger quota just to do something that pisses me off), and I have a desktop PC with a 28" screen (and a 42" TV connected to my main myth box) for when I want to watch videos.
I also have a policy of NEVER installing site-specific apps because WTF would I want to install some website's spyware when I could use a browser (something that I have a LOT more control over than a dedicated app)? e.g. I don't and won't ever install Facebook's app on my phone or tablet because I do not want them tracking my location or having access to all the other data on my phone and tablet, including my call log and SMS history and access to the microphone.
> Common people use apps, lots of them,
Well, that's great for them. If they need apps that use GPS then they should use it. No skin off my nose, the software that other people choose to use is none of my business.
**I** don't use lots of apps, and I don't particularly care what other people use - I'm completely indifferent to that unless it affects me directly (which it typically doesn't). I only care about what I use.
> You are not the first person on slashdot (certainly not the last) bringing about the "I don't want my phone to do more than this" argument. It's moot. It screams "I'm old-fashioned and likely an 80's-bred engineer who no longer copes with change"
No, it means that i actually give a fuck about my privacy. That i'm not willing to sacrifice it for some minor convenience in accessing corporate services.
And it's not that "I don't want my phone to do more than this", it's that there are some things that I do not want my phone to do under any circumstances. I do not want it to spy on me, and I do not want it to advertise shit at me. I do not want to compromise my principles just for the sake of some fleeting convenience.
> I'm gonna give you one example of something you can't do because you decided to be out o
Yeah, there is a problem, and it's Chromium. It uses easily 2-4 times as much RAM as Firefox for far fewer tabs/windows. The multi-threaded model uses a LOT of memory. Firefox is getting worse though recently as it is also starting to use multiple threads/processes...a few versions ago, FF averaged around 2-4GB, now it's using 4-6GB. OTOH, it performs better and hopefully one day it will have a task manager view like chromium's so I can see which tabs are using the most CPU or RAM.
My browsers and other desktop stuff add up to about 20GB (give or take a few - most of that is the browsers, chromium especially, it occasionally gets up to about 14GB and then I start closing tabs & windows). Xorg uses around a gig.
ZFS ARC takes 4-8 (when I upgrade to 64GB, I'll change that setting so it uses 8-16GB. BTW, this is RAM that linux would ordinarily use for buffers/cache but since this machine is ZFS only, it's all ARC. It has zfs pools for local storage and a backup pool for backups of all machines on my home network).
ZRAM for compressed ram swap-space uses up to 8GB (currently using 3.7GB). This uses RAM of course but is a net win because it typically gets at least 2:1 compression for swapped out pages.
I also run several server daemons (apache, postfix, bind9, dhcpd, hostapd, squid, postgresql, mysql, asterisk, etc), and a variety of kvm VMs from time to time, and some docker containers (gitlab in particular uses about 2GB...with some effort I could reduce that to about 1.5GB. Steam hardly uses any unless I'm actually playing a game). fail2ban is a bloated pig - it starts out using only 40MB or so but ends up using 1 to 2GB after just a few days (so i have a cron job to restart it weekly)
With all that, it's not uncommon for this machine to be using 32GB or more.
So more RAM and more cores/threads will definitely be useful to me. I'll be upgrading from 32GB RAM and 6 cores/6 threads to 64GB RAM and (haven't decided yet) 8, 12, or 16 cores (and 16, 24, or 32 threads). With a TR motherboard, I'll also have the option to upgrade to 128GB in future if I need it. And I'll have more PCI-e lanes than I actually need (one of the reasons I haven't switched to Intel over the last several years is because their motherboards just don't have enough PCI-e lanes, and the Ryzen 7 motherboards aren't any better. With the exception of some 4x 3.0 slots for NVMe SSDs and maybe a 10gbps NIC sometime in the future, I'd much rather have more pci-e 2.0 slots than fewer 3.0 slots....very few things can actually make practical use of 16 pci-e 3.0 lanes, even for a GPU the difference between 16x 2.0 & 16x 3.0 is barely noticeable)
As I mentioned, I did consider just building a new desktop machine. That's been on my TODO list for many years, because it's just plain wrong to share server & desktop functions on one machine....but once again, I get so much better value for money by upgrading my current desktop/server machine that a separate desktop machine doesn't make financial sense (partly because all my other machines effectively get a free upgrade from all the re-usable parts, partly because not having to buy new case, psu, gpu, drives, etc saves me hundreds of dollars). Value for money wins over "correctness", at least on my home systems (there's no way I'd run production server & desktop stuff on the same machine for $work)
---
BTW, I used to use rsync for backups but now use ZFS almost exclusively. All my machines are now running ZFS - partly because I would be using RAID-1 at minimum anyway, but mostly because 'zfs send' is so much better/faster/less load than rsync.
rsync has to recurse the directories of whatever it's transferring and compare at least the timestamps (or, much worse, the block checksums) of each file on both source and destination sides of the backup. ZFS doesn't need to do any of that, it already knows exactly which blocks have changed since the last snapshot and just sends them. Backups that used to take 10s of minutes or even hours now complete in a few minutes, and I can keep hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly snapshots for each backup....without the abysmal performance of something like rdiff-backup.
That's actually a big part of the motivation for my upcoming upgrade to a Threadripper CPU with 64GB RAM.
I use both chromium and firefox (simultaneously, for different things), currently chromium has 14 windows open with a total of 91 tabs. firefox has 16 windows open with a total of 216 tabs. chromium ( v61.0.3163.100) is currently using 11GB of RAM, and Firefox (v56.0) is using 5GB....that's a large chunk of my 32GB. With everything else that's running on my system, I'm always on the edge of running out of RAM.
Also, even with ublock origin blocking ads and umatrix blocking most javascript, upgrading to 8 or 12 or 16 cores and doubling the RAM to 64GB will make both browsers and my system a lot more responsive and usable.
I've been waiting for years for AMD to come up with something worth upgrading to from my Phenom II 1090T (the FX-8xxx CPUs were fine for new systems, and I have a few of them, but they didn't provide enough performance improvement to be worth the price of upgrading from a 1090T) - I've considered switching to Intel CPUs a few times over the years, but every time I researched it I would find that with new motherboard and RAM I'd need to spend about $1000 just to get slightly better performance than what I already had and a real performance boost would cost well over $2000. A threadripper will cost the same but at least there'll be an upgrade path for the next few years, the motherboard won't be a disposable one-use item that's obsoleted the next time Intel releases a new CPU.
A Ryzen 7 would be a lot cheaper, but I need more than 20 PCI-e lanes...my desktop machine also doubles as my ZFS file server and my two M1015 SAS cards need an 8-lane slot each...and if I just build a new ryzen 7 desktop machine, by the time I add a case, X370 m/b, PSU, video card, and a pair of SSDs the price of a Ryzen 7 system gets very close to the price of just upgrading my current system with an X399 M/B + 64GB RAM + TR4 1920X CPU. Upgrading the current system would also give me 32GB of DDR3 RAM and other parts to distribute to the other systems on my home network (another 1090T box, an FX-8150, and FX-8320. Also a Phenom II x4 940 which could get the motherboard and 1090T cpu from my current fileserver/desktop box).
I'm just waiting for supply lines to ramp up, and prices to drop a bit once all the early-adopter guinea-pigs have rushed in to pay the premium prices for the opportunity to discover all the v1.0 bugs. Maybe the post-christmas sales in january. or maybe there'll be good deals pre-xmas. dunno, i'm in no great hurry....i've been waiting for years, a few months longer is no big deal.
> Let's get this out of the way: Android isn't open source (outside of China at least, where Google is blocked). Period. No discussion. When you have a market so flooded by Android devices shipping with a closed source module, with super user powers, that responds to remote requests, it's not open source. That's Google Play Services for you.
True, but there are ways around that. Google Play Services isn't mandatory on FOSS releases of android like Lineage.
My current tablet (a lenovo yoga tab 3, bought in june to finally replace my ancient 2012 model nexus 7) was wiped within hours of purchase, so that Lineage OS could be installed. I chose the "no gapps" version of Lineage, because I don't use or want most google apps, in fact I hardly have any apps at all installed (because 99.9999999% of all apps in the store are either worthless shit or spyware/malware or both). It doesn't have Google Play Services installed, instead it has microG which is a mostly compatible clone of GPS without the spyware.
I probably could have used the nexus 7 for a few more years if it wasn't for all the useless gapps crap like the youtube app that couldn't be uninstalled. Every time i turned on wifi on the tablet (i leave it turned off when not actually using it, to save battery and to prevent apps from phone home. Mostly I just enabled it every so often to check whether there was an update to FBReader, or to allow my calendar to sync), a thundering herd of google spyware all trying to phone home at once made the tablet almost completely unusable for about 10-20 minutes, not responding to touch events for 10s of seconds or more....including apps like youtube that I never used - dialogs would pop up saying that the youtube or whatever app wasn't responding and would i like to kill it? by "kill" they meant "kill and restart" causing the outage to last even longer, the right option was to ignore the question.
(BTW, I haven't got around to doing it yet but it's on my TODO list to install Lineage or something on my nexus 7. It'll probably become usable again. I've become used to the 10" screen on my new tablet but the 7" screen on my nexus 7 is still good for a secondary ebook reader and it takes up a lot less space in my bag.)
The new tablet is a lot faster and has a lot more RAM but it would also suffer similarly if i had all that gapps shit installed...and eventually that shit would become even more bloated until even it became unusable.
With F-Droid I have replacements for everything that I actually used my tablet for, and YALP lets me install stuff (the tiny handful of apps that I actually use) easily from the google play store - so far I haven't found one app that YALP says "requires Google Play Services" that doesn't work with microG, but as I said, I hardly install any apps so YMMV.
In short, it's entirely possible to use android tablets without gapps and without google play services, with entirely open source software (except for the binary blob GPU driver on most models...and even that will be replaced by free software eventually).
> AMP is just another tool for Google to keep a trendy brand on the dev community, while achieving secondary goals in the process [...]
It seems to me that AMP exists so that google gets to run javascript on yet more 3rd party sites. There are a few sites out there that don't have google's spyware on them yet, which must be pissing them off.
I already disable js from google.com (and all subdomains including app.google.com - if you enable js from there just for jquery or whatever, you're enabling ALL js from that domain. most sites still work acceptably without any js enabled at all, and those that don't aren't worth viewing anyway, so full of pointless bling and animations and effects and spyware that they're too annoying to tolerate), so I'm not going to
Two drives is no big deal - anyone who cares at all about their data always stores it on, at minimum, two mirrored drives.
Storage costs are effectively doubled but since disk drives are the least reliable part of any computer, mirroring removes the biggest/worst single-point-of-failure on any desktop or laptop or server system.
(backups are still essential to cope with other potential disasters/failures, but mirroring keeps the system running for the common disk-failure case)
and if you're going to have RAID-1 on all your drives, you may as well use ZFS rather than mdadm and get all the benefits of ZFS as well (subvolumes aka datasets, zvols, snapshots, error detection and correction, compression, zfs send/receive, and more)
or if you want to stick with mainline kernel code, use btrfs and get many, but not all, of those benefits (and one really useful one that ZFS doesn't offer, rebalancing)
He/she's arguing that this should not be patented because it's too obvious. Then you're asking why they didn't patent it? Uhh..
For the same reason that Amazon shouldn't have been granted this patent: patents are for actual inventions (and novel, non-obvious ones at that), not ideas.
Well-described ideas can be "prior art" invalidating a patent (e.g. Heinlein's description of a waterbed in, IIRC, the 30s or 40s invalidated someone's attempt to patent waterbeds in the 60s or 70s) but can not be patented themselves.
Ideas are just ideas, not inventions.
At most, this patent is for the idea of combining:
* transfer of electricity from one battery to another (trivially obvious and certainly not novel)
and:
* authorisation/authentication of the transaction (again obvious and been done a billion times before - the facts that the auth is being done remotely, over wifi, and by a drone are also obvious and not in the least bit novel)
with:
* a drone (wow, a drone can carry a battery and fly around with it - carrying a battery, or any other cargo, is NOT novel).
This would not add up to a patentable invention, even if it were an actual invention and not just an idea.
I'll be switching to Stylus, instead. An open source fork maintained on github. And already updated for FF 57 - which is good, because the web would suck even more if it wasn't possible to fix the worst of the CSS abominations perpetrated by web designers with little CSS overrides and mark them " !important;".
TOTAL RSS SWAP NAME
3.46G 3.46G 0.00 firefox.real
7.46G 7.46G 1.04M chromium
Firefox, using 3.46GB, has 15 windows open, with a total of 138 tabs.
Chromium, using more than twice as much RAM at 7.46GB, only has 6 windows open with a total of 32 tabs.....and that's after I closed about half a dozen windows, saved my session and restarted, because it was using 15 fucking GB of RAM on my 32GB system.
Firefox is a bit more sluggish than chromium, and because of the mostly-single-threaded execution (something that has improved recently) tends to freeze when some crappy javascript(*) soaks up 100% CPU, but it uses a fuck of a lot less RAM than chromium.
I don't think I've ever seen FF go above 8 or perhaps 10GB RAM. I routinely see Chromium using 15 or 18GB or more. I leave both of them running for weeks or months at a time.
(*) invariably doing something tremendously "useful" like spying on me, running some evil fucking animated slide show to distract from the text or, worst of all, forcing smooth-scrolling on me via jquery even though I disable smooth scrolling in the browser prefs because I fucking hate it.
UX designers who think they are entitled to control how something displays on someone else's machine are very much in the long list of people vying for first place up against the wall when the revolution comes.
I used NoScript extensively for years, since it was first released (I've been blocking ads and unwanted javascript for much longer, using my own redirector script on squid proxy since the mid 90s - having a 2nd layer of blocking in the browser itself was useful). Not any more.
I switched to uMatrix about a year ago because it's much better than NoScript (amongst other improvements, it's much easier to figure out the minimal set of javascript that needs to be enabled to make a site that requires way too much fucking javascript work properly. It also works identically on Chromium, which I also use).
Anyway, I don't really GAF about most extensions. I do care about uBlock Origin, uMatrix, Stylish, and Session Manager. Grease Monkey too, for some things, but (unlike Stylish) I could live without it if i had to. NoSquint Plus is good too, but that hasn't worked 100% reliably for some time now (it interacts oddly with FF's own page-zooming functions AFAICT)
Of those, only uBlock Origin by the same author as uMatrix is being updated for FF 57. No sign yet of the same happening for uMatrix or the others. Hopefully that will change. I'll be holding off on upgrading to 57 until at least those extensions have been updated.
That has an amazingly strong Somebody Else's Problem field around it.
1. I don't (and won't ever) use gmail for anything of any importance.
2. I run my own mail server and do my own spam filtering (and have done so since long before gmail or even google existed). I wouldn't trust an ISP (or anyone but me) to handle my mail.
Slashdot Mirror
well, yeah, it is misogynistic when you use phrasing like that "men and women are different and have different abilities and interests".
it's not misogynistic if you say, instead, something like "individuals have different abilities and interests".
making it about gender, as if all individuals of a given sex are the same and have the same interests and abilities, is what makes it misogyny, you dumb fuck.
I see the point of your analogy - it's a good one, except that it's undermined by the fact that while what you say about death and meaning is true, Damore's memo was just misogynist bullshit.
He's just another brotard (one of many who have crawled out from under their rocks in the wake of gamergate and the rise of trumpist nazi-ism) who accidentally stumbled into a little notoriety with some offensive disparagement of women and is now using autism as an excuse for his arsehole behaviour.
Autism may well make human interaction difficult for him, but he lives in a world full of humans and it's up to him to figure out - by himself, or with help if he needs it - how to live in it without clumsily pissing other people off.
Claiming autism as an excuse is the "trigger" defence of the brotard and (just as those who are easily triggered have no right to expect that others will know about - or give a fuck about - their triggers), he has no right to expect that others will know or give a fuck that his obnoxiousness is connected to his autism. It's certainly not an excuse that deserves instant forgiveness, he'll have to do a fuck of a lot more than that.
I used to sometimes wonder what the combination of severe retardation and tourette's syndrome would look like. now i know, and wish i didn't.
right, and businessmen who don't "ruin their friendship" with the local gangster to avoid having their businesses "accidentally" burn down are firemen.
victim blaming is so much fun.
I'm not 100% sure he's a rapist but (having met him during one of his visits to Australia in the 90s) I am 100% sure he's an arsehole, and a creepy one too.
that's a pretty fantasy. tell that to someone who's really good at operating a sewing machine. or repairing a car.
I don't wonder. I know it's because Americans have been brain-washed with decades of pro-corporate and anti-government propaganda into believing bullshit like this:
Waiting lists in public health systems are for non-urgent conditions. Anyone with an urgent condition will be treated immediately (which also has the side-effect of increasing waiting times for non-urgent conditions). And yeah, it ain't perfect, and there are never enough resources, and our government is bowing to the pressure from american corporations who want it privatised so they can loot our sick like they do yours, but i am so fucking glad I live in a country with a public health system than in some barbaric fucking hellhole of privatised health.
Priority is assigned by medical need and available resources, not by how fucking rich someone is, or how much the private hospital and the insurance company can make between them with criminal collusion to artificially inflate prices, like hundreds of dollars each or more for simple pills like paracetamol - "acetaminophen" to yanks - a drug that you can at any chemist in Australia for under $3 AUD for a box of 100 pills, and that's without being subsidised by our Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme - which American multinationals have been trying to get killed off for years, fortunately without success so far because even our corporate lick-spittle "conservative" (actually, radical right-wing reactionaries, same as yours but better at hiding it) party knows it would be political suicide.
The weirdest thing about your shitty health system is that many Americans actually believe that it's the best in the world ("of course it is, it's American"). It's not. Far fucking from it. Your system is worse even than that of many third world countries.
I bet you even believe the bullshit about "government death panels". You know who actually has "death panels"? private medical insurance companies trying to welch out of the bet they made.
And something that would be hilariously ironic if it wasn't so scary is that you've been propagandised with this shit for so long that you accept it as part of your identity now. It's the identity politics of the enthusiastically and willingly exploited - "Fuck me over please, I'm American and proud of it. I'll fight to the death to preserve a corporation's right to shaft me any way it wants".
that makes perfect sense - if you want to view the content made by an advertising company it would be totally insane to do it on a browser made by another advertising company.
better option: disable all DRM bullshit, boycott companies that depend upon DRM (and bribe it into web standards), and refuse to watch their programs.
if you really must view videos made by such a company, there's always bit torrent.
great news for spyware developers, advertisers, and websites who think they have a right to spy on their visitors.
shit news for actual humans.
have you ever heard the term "false dichotomy"?
because, you know, internet spyware and $1000 dongles are not the only alternatives.
true, but it's about more than just "blame". If your business isn't viable you shouldn't exploit your employees and require them to subsidise it.
a business crying poor and whining that they can't afford to pay fair wages is doing exactly that. if a business can't survive without ripping off its workers then it deserves to go under.
and whining that their customers won't pay 5 cents extra for a coffee or whatever it is they're buying is bullshit too - customers don't have a right to have their purchases subsidised by exploited workers either.
it's not just "wealthy chinese investors". it's almost everyone involved in bitcoin.
bitcoin is finance industry scam practice for little con-men - for basement dwellers who wish they had the resources to rip off everyone else on a huge scale like the big boys in the finance industry. they look with envy rather than outraged horror at the financial industry manipulations that leave other people bankrupt and homeless...they may not get to scam hundreds of billions and government bailouts as well but they get to play the same scams on a smaller scale. yippee!
Was I making an argument about Android? No, I was pointing out for the benefit of other readers that neither GPS nor gapps are required. Your disclaimer doesn't diminish the fact that you're an arsehole.
In fact, it was you who was making a (demonstrably false) argument: "Let's get this out of the way: Android isn't open source (outside of China at least, where Google is blocked). Period. No discussion. When you have a market so flooded by Android devices shipping with a closed source module, with super user powers, that responds to remote requests, it's not open source. That's Google Play Services for you."
1. Android is open source. Everywhere, inside and outside of China (WTF?)
2. Google Play Services is not required. There may be some fucking around to install a non-corporate version (which will involve careful selection of hardware so you don't pay for shit hardware that the manufacturer still "owns" rather than you), and some on-going inconvenience involved (i.e. some apps that won't work) but if you really want to, you can have an android device without it. It's up to the user to decide which is more important, convenience or privacy.
It's not so much that I can't find a use for them, it's that I actually have no use for them. If I have no use for something, why would I have it installed? I only install stuff that I actually use, or that I might use (most of those get uninstalled because they don't meet my needs). e.g. I don't use Youtube on my phone or tablet because viewing videos on tiny screens pisses me off (it also uses up all my quota in no time - and, strangely, I'm not keen to pay more for a larger quota just to do something that pisses me off), and I have a desktop PC with a 28" screen (and a 42" TV connected to my main myth box) for when I want to watch videos.
I also have a policy of NEVER installing site-specific apps because WTF would I want to install some website's spyware when I could use a browser (something that I have a LOT more control over than a dedicated app)? e.g. I don't and won't ever install Facebook's app on my phone or tablet because I do not want them tracking my location or having access to all the other data on my phone and tablet, including my call log and SMS history and access to the microphone.
Well, that's great for them. If they need apps that use GPS then they should use it. No skin off my nose, the software that other people choose to use is none of my business.
**I** don't use lots of apps, and I don't particularly care what other people use - I'm completely indifferent to that unless it affects me directly (which it typically doesn't). I only care about what I use.
No, it means that i actually give a fuck about my privacy. That i'm not willing to sacrifice it for some minor convenience in accessing corporate services.
And it's not that "I don't want my phone to do more than this", it's that there are some things that I do not want my phone to do under any circumstances. I do not want it to spy on me, and I do not want it to advertise shit at me. I do not want to compromise my principles just for the sake of some fleeting convenience.
Yeah, there is a problem, and it's Chromium. It uses easily 2-4 times as much RAM as Firefox for far fewer tabs/windows. The multi-threaded model uses a LOT of memory. Firefox is getting worse though recently as it is also starting to use multiple threads/processes...a few versions ago, FF averaged around 2-4GB, now it's using 4-6GB. OTOH, it performs better and hopefully one day it will have a task manager view like chromium's so I can see which tabs are using the most CPU or RAM.
My browsers and other desktop stuff add up to about 20GB (give or take a few - most of that is the browsers, chromium especially, it occasionally gets up to about 14GB and then I start closing tabs & windows). Xorg uses around a gig.
ZFS ARC takes 4-8 (when I upgrade to 64GB, I'll change that setting so it uses 8-16GB. BTW, this is RAM that linux would ordinarily use for buffers/cache but since this machine is ZFS only, it's all ARC. It has zfs pools for local storage and a backup pool for backups of all machines on my home network).
ZRAM for compressed ram swap-space uses up to 8GB (currently using 3.7GB). This uses RAM of course but is a net win because it typically gets at least 2:1 compression for swapped out pages.
I also run several server daemons (apache, postfix, bind9, dhcpd, hostapd, squid, postgresql, mysql, asterisk, etc), and a variety of kvm VMs from time to time, and some docker containers (gitlab in particular uses about 2GB...with some effort I could reduce that to about 1.5GB. Steam hardly uses any unless I'm actually playing a game). fail2ban is a bloated pig - it starts out using only 40MB or so but ends up using 1 to 2GB after just a few days (so i have a cron job to restart it weekly)
With all that, it's not uncommon for this machine to be using 32GB or more.
So more RAM and more cores/threads will definitely be useful to me. I'll be upgrading from 32GB RAM and 6 cores/6 threads to 64GB RAM and (haven't decided yet) 8, 12, or 16 cores (and 16, 24, or 32 threads). With a TR motherboard, I'll also have the option to upgrade to 128GB in future if I need it. And I'll have more PCI-e lanes than I actually need (one of the reasons I haven't switched to Intel over the last several years is because their motherboards just don't have enough PCI-e lanes, and the Ryzen 7 motherboards aren't any better. With the exception of some 4x 3.0 slots for NVMe SSDs and maybe a 10gbps NIC sometime in the future, I'd much rather have more pci-e 2.0 slots than fewer 3.0 slots....very few things can actually make practical use of 16 pci-e 3.0 lanes, even for a GPU the difference between 16x 2.0 & 16x 3.0 is barely noticeable)
As I mentioned, I did consider just building a new desktop machine. That's been on my TODO list for many years, because it's just plain wrong to share server & desktop functions on one machine....but once again, I get so much better value for money by upgrading my current desktop/server machine that a separate desktop machine doesn't make financial sense (partly because all my other machines effectively get a free upgrade from all the re-usable parts, partly because not having to buy new case, psu, gpu, drives, etc saves me hundreds of dollars). Value for money wins over "correctness", at least on my home systems (there's no way I'd run production server & desktop stuff on the same machine for $work)
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BTW, I used to use rsync for backups but now use ZFS almost exclusively. All my machines are now running ZFS - partly because I would be using RAID-1 at minimum anyway, but mostly because 'zfs send' is so much better/faster/less load than rsync.
rsync has to recurse the directories of whatever it's transferring and compare at least the timestamps (or, much worse, the block checksums) of each file on both source and destination sides of the backup. ZFS doesn't need to do any of that, it already knows exactly which blocks have changed since the last snapshot and just sends them. Backups that used to take 10s of minutes or even hours now complete in a few minutes, and I can keep hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly snapshots for each backup....without the abysmal performance of something like rdiff-backup.
That's actually a big part of the motivation for my upcoming upgrade to a Threadripper CPU with 64GB RAM.
I use both chromium and firefox (simultaneously, for different things), currently chromium has 14 windows open with a total of 91 tabs. firefox has 16 windows open with a total of 216 tabs. chromium ( v61.0.3163.100) is currently using 11GB of RAM, and Firefox (v56.0) is using 5GB....that's a large chunk of my 32GB. With everything else that's running on my system, I'm always on the edge of running out of RAM.
Also, even with ublock origin blocking ads and umatrix blocking most javascript, upgrading to 8 or 12 or 16 cores and doubling the RAM to 64GB will make both browsers and my system a lot more responsive and usable.
I've been waiting for years for AMD to come up with something worth upgrading to from my Phenom II 1090T (the FX-8xxx CPUs were fine for new systems, and I have a few of them, but they didn't provide enough performance improvement to be worth the price of upgrading from a 1090T) - I've considered switching to Intel CPUs a few times over the years, but every time I researched it I would find that with new motherboard and RAM I'd need to spend about $1000 just to get slightly better performance than what I already had and a real performance boost would cost well over $2000. A threadripper will cost the same but at least there'll be an upgrade path for the next few years, the motherboard won't be a disposable one-use item that's obsoleted the next time Intel releases a new CPU.
A Ryzen 7 would be a lot cheaper, but I need more than 20 PCI-e lanes...my desktop machine also doubles as my ZFS file server and my two M1015 SAS cards need an 8-lane slot each...and if I just build a new ryzen 7 desktop machine, by the time I add a case, X370 m/b, PSU, video card, and a pair of SSDs the price of a Ryzen 7 system gets very close to the price of just upgrading my current system with an X399 M/B + 64GB RAM + TR4 1920X CPU. Upgrading the current system would also give me 32GB of DDR3 RAM and other parts to distribute to the other systems on my home network (another 1090T box, an FX-8150, and FX-8320. Also a Phenom II x4 940 which could get the motherboard and 1090T cpu from my current fileserver/desktop box).
I'm just waiting for supply lines to ramp up, and prices to drop a bit once all the early-adopter guinea-pigs have rushed in to pay the premium prices for the opportunity to discover all the v1.0 bugs. Maybe the post-christmas sales in january. or maybe there'll be good deals pre-xmas. dunno, i'm in no great hurry....i've been waiting for years, a few months longer is no big deal.
> Let's get this out of the way: Android isn't open source (outside of China at least, where Google is blocked). Period. No discussion. When you have a market so flooded by Android devices shipping with a closed source module, with super user powers, that responds to remote requests, it's not open source. That's Google Play Services for you.
True, but there are ways around that. Google Play Services isn't mandatory on FOSS releases of android like Lineage.
My current tablet (a lenovo yoga tab 3, bought in june to finally replace my ancient 2012 model nexus 7) was wiped within hours of purchase, so that Lineage OS could be installed. I chose the "no gapps" version of Lineage, because I don't use or want most google apps, in fact I hardly have any apps at all installed (because 99.9999999% of all apps in the store are either worthless shit or spyware/malware or both). It doesn't have Google Play Services installed, instead it has microG which is a mostly compatible clone of GPS without the spyware.
here's a good summary of no-gapps and microG: https://shadow53.com/android/n...
I probably could have used the nexus 7 for a few more years if it wasn't for all the useless gapps crap like the youtube app that couldn't be uninstalled. Every time i turned on wifi on the tablet (i leave it turned off when not actually using it, to save battery and to prevent apps from phone home. Mostly I just enabled it every so often to check whether there was an update to FBReader, or to allow my calendar to sync), a thundering herd of google spyware all trying to phone home at once made the tablet almost completely unusable for about 10-20 minutes, not responding to touch events for 10s of seconds or more....including apps like youtube that I never used - dialogs would pop up saying that the youtube or whatever app wasn't responding and would i like to kill it? by "kill" they meant "kill and restart" causing the outage to last even longer, the right option was to ignore the question.
(BTW, I haven't got around to doing it yet but it's on my TODO list to install Lineage or something on my nexus 7. It'll probably become usable again. I've become used to the 10" screen on my new tablet but the 7" screen on my nexus 7 is still good for a secondary ebook reader and it takes up a lot less space in my bag.)
The new tablet is a lot faster and has a lot more RAM but it would also suffer similarly if i had all that gapps shit installed...and eventually that shit would become even more bloated until even it became unusable.
With F-Droid I have replacements for everything that I actually used my tablet for, and YALP lets me install stuff (the tiny handful of apps that I actually use) easily from the google play store - so far I haven't found one app that YALP says "requires Google Play Services" that doesn't work with microG, but as I said, I hardly install any apps so YMMV.
In short, it's entirely possible to use android tablets without gapps and without google play services, with entirely open source software (except for the binary blob GPU driver on most models...and even that will be replaced by free software eventually).
> AMP is just another tool for Google to keep a trendy brand on the dev community, while achieving secondary goals in the process [...]
It seems to me that AMP exists so that google gets to run javascript on yet more 3rd party sites. There are a few sites out there that don't have google's spyware on them yet, which must be pissing them off.
I already disable js from google.com (and all subdomains including app.google.com - if you enable js from there just for jquery or whatever, you're enabling ALL js from that domain. most sites still work acceptably without any js enabled at all, and those that don't aren't worth viewing anyway, so full of pointless bling and animations and effects and spyware that they're too annoying to tolerate), so I'm not going to
Two drives is no big deal - anyone who cares at all about their data always stores it on, at minimum, two mirrored drives.
Storage costs are effectively doubled but since disk drives are the least reliable part of any computer, mirroring removes the biggest/worst single-point-of-failure on any desktop or laptop or server system.
(backups are still essential to cope with other potential disasters/failures, but mirroring keeps the system running for the common disk-failure case)
and if you're going to have RAID-1 on all your drives, you may as well use ZFS rather than mdadm and get all the benefits of ZFS as well (subvolumes aka datasets, zvols, snapshots, error detection and correction, compression, zfs send/receive, and more)
or if you want to stick with mainline kernel code, use btrfs and get many, but not all, of those benefits (and one really useful one that ZFS doesn't offer, rebalancing)
For the same reason that Amazon shouldn't have been granted this patent: patents are for actual inventions (and novel, non-obvious ones at that), not ideas.
Well-described ideas can be "prior art" invalidating a patent (e.g. Heinlein's description of a waterbed in, IIRC, the 30s or 40s invalidated someone's attempt to patent waterbeds in the 60s or 70s) but can not be patented themselves.
Ideas are just ideas, not inventions.
At most, this patent is for the idea of combining:
* transfer of electricity from one battery to another (trivially obvious and certainly not novel)
and:
* authorisation/authentication of the transaction (again obvious and been done a billion times before - the facts that the auth is being done remotely, over wifi, and by a drone are also obvious and not in the least bit novel)
with:
* a drone (wow, a drone can carry a battery and fly around with it - carrying a battery, or any other cargo, is NOT novel).
This would not add up to a patentable invention, even if it were an actual invention and not just an idea.
It turns out Stylish is now spyware, the new maintainer of Stylish made some deal with some analytics vermin called SimilarWeb.
https://www.ghacks.net/2017/01/04/major-stylish-add-on-changes-in-regards-to-privacy/
I'll be switching to Stylus, instead. An open source fork maintained on github. And already updated for FF 57 - which is good, because the web would suck even more if it wasn't possible to fix the worst of the CSS abominations perpetrated by web designers with little CSS overrides and mark them " !important;".
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/styl-us/
https://github.com/openstyles/stylus
Stylus is also available for chromium.
Here's one reason for using FF:
TOTAL RSS SWAP NAME
3.46G 3.46G 0.00 firefox.real
7.46G 7.46G 1.04M chromium
Firefox, using 3.46GB, has 15 windows open, with a total of 138 tabs.
Chromium, using more than twice as much RAM at 7.46GB, only has 6 windows open with a total of 32 tabs .....and that's after I closed about half a dozen windows, saved my session and restarted, because it was using 15 fucking GB of RAM on my 32GB system.
Firefox is a bit more sluggish than chromium, and because of the mostly-single-threaded execution (something that has improved recently) tends to freeze when some crappy javascript(*) soaks up 100% CPU, but it uses a fuck of a lot less RAM than chromium.
I don't think I've ever seen FF go above 8 or perhaps 10GB RAM. I routinely see Chromium using 15 or 18GB or more. I leave both of them running for weeks or months at a time.
(*) invariably doing something tremendously "useful" like spying on me, running some evil fucking animated slide show to distract from the text or, worst of all, forcing smooth-scrolling on me via jquery even though I disable smooth scrolling in the browser prefs because I fucking hate it.
UX designers who think they are entitled to control how something displays on someone else's machine are very much in the long list of people vying for first place up against the wall when the revolution comes.
I used NoScript extensively for years, since it was first released (I've been blocking ads and unwanted javascript for much longer, using my own redirector script on squid proxy since the mid 90s - having a 2nd layer of blocking in the browser itself was useful). Not any more.
I switched to uMatrix about a year ago because it's much better than NoScript (amongst other improvements, it's much easier to figure out the minimal set of javascript that needs to be enabled to make a site that requires way too much fucking javascript work properly. It also works identically on Chromium, which I also use).
Anyway, I don't really GAF about most extensions. I do care about uBlock Origin, uMatrix, Stylish, and Session Manager. Grease Monkey too, for some things, but (unlike Stylish) I could live without it if i had to. NoSquint Plus is good too, but that hasn't worked 100% reliably for some time now (it interacts oddly with FF's own page-zooming functions AFAICT)
Of those, only uBlock Origin by the same author as uMatrix is being updated for FF 57. No sign yet of the same happening for uMatrix or the others. Hopefully that will change. I'll be holding off on upgrading to 57 until at least those extensions have been updated.
$7000 is good but an xbox seems like a bit of a consolation prize - why not a ps4?
I might be movin' to Montana soon
Just to raise me up a crop of
crypto coins
[...]
Movin' to montana soon
Gonna be a bitcoin tycoon
[...]
By myself I wouldn't
Have no boss,
But I'd be raisin' my lonely
crypto coins
Raisin' my lonely
crypto coins
godwin's law hasn't changed at all. it's still about mentioning nazis.
That has an amazingly strong Somebody Else's Problem field around it.
1. I don't (and won't ever) use gmail for anything of any importance.
2. I run my own mail server and do my own spam filtering (and have done so since long before gmail or even google existed). I wouldn't trust an ISP (or anyone but me) to handle my mail.