Drinks are a legit business expense. Why shouldn't I expense the drinks when I take a client out?
A better question is why the fuck should you get away with that?
If you or your company want to bribe the employees of potential customers or suppliers (i.e. other companies) with fancy meals, booze-ups and titty bars then you should fucking pay for your bribes yourselves, and not expect taxpayers to subsidise it by writing it off as a "legitimate business expense".
I don't care much about power consumption. I don't give a damn whether a CPU is going to cost me $30 for a year's power consumption vs $60 or even $80. It's a trivial difference - the remainder of the system (motherboard, ram, disks, gpu, monitor, etc) will add up to twice as much or more than the CPU anyway. Caring about it makes as much sense as caring about the daily ups and downs of petrol prices....an extra 2c or even 10c per litre makes exactly fuck-all difference over an average 50-80 litre tank.
I care a lot more about the fan noise, but even that's cheap and easy to mitigate or eliminate.
What I care about is a) the price, and b) the price:performance ratio. AMD shits all over Intel for both of those. It always has and the Ryzen looks like it's continuing that pattern.
Sure, Intel has the top end CPUs. But paying 5 times or more the price for a CPU barely twice as fast is just plain stupid unless you're doing something where every cycle of performance really matters (like building a HPC or VM-hosting cluster) and you have a huge budget. The new top end Ryzen CPUs look like being almost as fast as Intel's top end CPU for about half the price.
BTW, Intel doesn't much care what AMD do. They'll make minor attempts to compete, but the fact is that they need AMD to exist so that they can avoid anti-monopoly lawsuits and regulations. They'll cede the low-end and some of the middle of the market to AMD because the massively over-priced top-end is their cash cow.
Also agree. I've thought on several occasions over the last few years that it might be worth switching to Intel but every time I've crunched the numbers on specs & pricing, it works out to spending nearly $1000 AUD (for new CPU, motherboard, and RAM) to get performance not much better than what I get now from my collection of Phenom II 1090T and FX-8xx0 machines. All of which are more than adequate for any task I throw at them, from compiling software to running LAN and internet-facing services to watching vids, listening to music, playing games and web browsing.
It's not even worth it to me to upgrade to current-gen AMD CPUs on most of my machines. My main desktop is a 6-core AMD 1090T (on an Asus Sabertooth 990FX m/b). I would get a noticable benefit from upgrading it to an 8-core FX-8320 or FX-8350, but it isn't *enough* of a benefit to be worth even the ~ $225 AUD it would cost....so spending around $1000 for a similar benefit would be completely insane.
For games, the GPU counts for far more than the CPU. A 6-core 1090T with a GTX-970 runs every game I have at 1440p at maximum or near-maximum settings, including the latest games released within the last few months. This will be good enough for me until 1070 or 1080 GPUs or better are cheap enough to be worth the price of upgrading from my 970....as a rule of thumb, for a GPU upgrade I want at least double the performance for, preferably, under $300 - which is why I stuck with my GTX-560Ti for years until the 970 was cheap enough.
Over the last few years, the *ONLY* thing which Intel has that I really want is DDR4 RAM. It's significantly cheaper than DDR3 now, and readily & cheaply available in larger sizes - the most I can get on DDR3 at a reasonable price is 32GB. While 16GB is more than enough on my win7 gaming machine (used solely as a games "console"), for my main desktop and on my servers (all linux), I'd like to upgrade from 32GB to 64GB or more - firefox and especially chromium are both RAM pigs, and file-servers always benefit from more RAM for caching.
(I usually run both chromium and firefox simultaneously for weeks or months at a time, each with a dozen or three windows open and each windowing having anywhere from 2 or 3 up to 30 or 40 tabs. This consumes a shitload of RAM. After a fairly ruthless tab & window cull this morning, chromium is using about 9GB RAM, and firefox about 4GB. Saving session state and restarting both would probably halve that, they both "leak" memory. They would both be many times worse AND consume far more CPU cycles if I didn't run both uBlock Origin and uMatrix to block ads and javascript)
PCI-e 3.0 would also be nice, but aside from nvme SSDs there really aren't any devices that benefit significantly from pci-e 3 over pci-e 2. The bandwidth improvement is huge and real but almost nothing actually uses it.
I'm happy that AMD now has a PCI-e 3 and DDR4 chipset. I'll probably upgrade to Ryzen later this year or early next year after the guinea-pig early adopters willing to pay the must-have-it-now price premium for first release gear have discovered any bugs, but I'm still in no great hurry to upgrade.
Upgrading to Ryzen will be almost as expensive as switching to mid-range Intel, but a) i'll get a significant upgrade in performance for a price that would get me, at best, a mediocre performance increase with Intel and b) based on past history with AMD chipsets, I'll have an upgrade path for many years that won't require me to toss out motherboard and RAM for almost every new CPU model that comes out.
Before the current FX-era doldrums that AMD have been stuck in for years, I used to upgrade my CPUs every 2 or 3 years, sometimes more often on particularly good CPU releases. I hope AMD makes it possible to get back into the same upgrade pattern with the new Ryzen gear.
Monty has had a habit of playing silly buggers with the GPL (and FOSS licensing in general) right from the earliest days of MySQL - he wanted the PR and code-contribution benefits of the GPL but liked to deceive people that, even though mysql was GPL, a commercial license was required if the software was used for commercial purposes. This lie was pushed for many years on the official mysql web site, in documentation and other support material, and by mysql employees on forums and mailing lists.
On second thoughts, BSL isn't just more of the same. It's worse than that. BSL isn't a Free Software license covered with lies to confuse people, to trick them that it isn't actually Free Source, that they don't have the rights granted to them by the license. It's a non-open license with lies to pretend that it is open.
I'm as amused as anyone that Monty scammed $1B out of Sun/Oracle and then went on to build another company based around the exact same software he sold to them. But that doesn't make him a nice or even likeable person, or ethical, reputable, or trustworthy...or anything else but a scammer. Just another self-serving businessman.
Most individuals at borders are not employees or agents of any US law enforcement agency or intelligence agency and are not exempted by this provision.
Forums are crap for questions(*). Even if you do get an answer, it'll be buried somewhere in the 70+ pages of morons waffling on with worthless and irrelevant crap...with each post having an irritating animated avatar that was tiresome at best the first time you saw it, rage-inducing the 10,000th time.
Specific questions are best asked on Q&A sites (like Stack Exchange, or one of the many clones).
Good answers get upvoted, bad answers get downvoted, abusive ones get deleted. And there's a good chance that your question, or something very similar, has already been asked and answered before.
(*) They mostly suck for discussions too. Mailing lists work better, especially if subscribers understand that top-posting is a crime against humanity.
stock trades as a form of gambling need to fuck right off.
the stock market is supposed to be for investing, not speculative gambling and pump-and-dump operations on the share price.
anything other than that is mere parasitism, producing nothing of value to anyone - just transferring value to some and destroying value in the process for everyone else.
and yet, even with all that unfathomable and incalculable complexity, humans manage to play and win the game against other humans
An AI doesn't have to analyse the game situation perfectly, it just has to do it better than humans. and that's a hell of a lot easier than perfection.
I, for one, will be glad to see the macho bullshit associated with the idiotic practice of poker disappear - there's no pseudo-testosterone in being thrashed by a computer, or in being - at best - a second-rate poker player.
That's why the article's talking about 5G AND IoT - so that the average consumer has absolutely no control over how their toaster or fridge or light-bulb connects to the internet, no ability to change IP address or routes, no LAN or WiFI DHCP server to configure, and no ability to turn it off.
With a 5G modem built in to the device, it'll be always-on, always spying.
Amazon did it with Kindle & built-in 3G modem years ago, so that people could buy and download books from Amazon. They made bulk deals wherever possible to minimise the cost - and mobile data is a lot cheaper now,
Two of the inevitable outcomes from this are:
1. a series of blog posts, articles and how-tos on hardware hacking to disable the 5G modems built in to various appliances.
Manufacturers will probably retaliate with a patch to break your fridge or TV if it can't get a 5G connection.
They'll also make use of short-range wireless networking (e.g. bluetooth and similar) to look for nearby devices from the same (or allied) manufacturers. If one of them can get to the internet with their payload of spy-data then all of them can. They'll use the same wireless protocol for in-home control (remote control, home-automation hub, etc) so that consumers won't want to disable it.
2. a similar series of how-tos describing how to hack your fridge's firmware to make use of the "free" bandwidth available (as was done for the Kindle 3G).
This will probably be slightly more difficult than it would be for criminals to turn your IoT device into a spam or DDOS bot because the manufacturers will probably make some minimal incompetent effort to secure something that will cost THEM money.
> A Linux system without a bunch of proprietary software is almost unusable
Bullshit.
> MP3 and MP4 playback come to mind
There are dozens of FOSS music and video players, capable of playing pretty much any common (and most uncommon) format. including mp3, mp4 and many others.
> Nvidia drivers.
The proprietary nvidia driver is currently much better than nouveau. for AMD cards, it's much harder to tell. radeon is better for some things, fglrx is better for others.
BTW, the nvidia driver and steam (plus some games - both native linux and with WINE) are the ONLY proprietary software I have installed on my machines, and i've been using linux as my "desktop" OS since the early 90s - switched from OS/2 to MCC Linux and never looked back.
In all that time, I've never had any need or use for any other proprietary software. Don't need it, don't want it, don't care at all about it.
and i couldn't care less about what other people choose or need to run on their computers - aside from the security risk they pose if they connect garbage software to the internet, it's none of my business.
> Especially CUDA
CUDA is almost completely irrelevant outside of a tiny niche of scientific computation, computer-science research, and other very parallelisable number-crunching jobs. I happen to do a lot of work in fields that use it, but I'm well aware that it's a very tiny niche.
> These sort of if idiot thoughts are why I moved to BSD from Linux.
yeah, because any/all of the *BSDs can run lots more proprietary software than Linux.
Your sort of idiot thoughts are why people think you're both a liar and a moron.
> Pretty much exactly the same arguments could be made for cruise control.
no, they can't. cruise control is just automated control of the accelerator and gears for long-distance highway driving - it exists to avoid repetitive strain on ankles and tendons, and requires the driver to be in full control of the vehicle at all times...even a light tap on the accelerator or brake disables it. it doesn't pretend to navigate or have any kind of situational awareness, there's not even any hint of claim to being 'self-driving'.
this is a point that very few americans ever get. they love to whinge about allegedly "absurd" court cases where people sue for what they consider to be trivial injuries.
what they never realise - or acknowledge - is that such cases are absolutely necessary with a private, grossly over-priced health system.
people don't need to sue to have their medical costs covered if they have a public health system, if an injury doesn't put them at risk of bankruptcy and homelessness.
if you ever wondered why the level of litigation is so much higher in the US than in the rest of the western world, now you know.
practically speaking, you have a choice between corporations or governments.
at the moment, due to decades of anti-government propaganda by corporations, you americans have abdicated control of your government to corporations so there's little distinction between them.
that's not inherent, though. although you have NO chance of ever influencing or controlling corporations (except through government regulation - which is why you've been bombarded with decades of corporate propaganda railing against the evils of regulation), you DO have some small chance of taking back your government and making it work for the people rather than for the corporations - artificial life forms which both run on and corrupt the legal system that enables them to exist....remember, corporations only exist as legal entities because governments say they do, and they only provide shielding from liability for shareholders because governments say they do.
vote wisely. vote socialist.
and when you succeed, remember that constant vigilance is required to ensure that governments isn't taken over by corporations again.
This so-called "backup driver" is merely a passenger.
As for the identities of the the legal drivers of their self-driving cars, that can only be Uber's CEO & senior management team, and all members of the board. They're the ones who made the decision, they bear the responsibility.
How long will their scofflaw attitude last when it's them personally at risk of being charged with vehicular homicide rather than some underpaid peon?
> but there are thousands and thousands of forum links that will literally break over night
so, no significant change to standard behaviour then?
web forums suck, always have and always will. even if you find what you're looking for after wading through pages 1-73 (of 160) of bullshit, stupid questions & comments from cretins, and really fucking irritating animated avatars (the worst of which end up in my block list, either individually or if i'm lucky there'll be a consistent url prefix to turn into a blocking pattern), the download link to whatever it was you were after will almost invariably be broken.
to make it worse, most web forums default to disabling search unless you register an account with them. they can fuck right off.
and if by some chance you find a link and it actually still works, then just like most of the broken links, it will be to one of those shitty file + malware/spyware services that spam you with ads and requests to register/pay for an account, require you to run who-the-fuck-knows-what javascript and add countdown timers to delay each individual download....just to make it more irritating to encourage you to register and pay for an account. they can fuck right off too, i'm not paying or registering with anyone that goes out of their way to annoy me.
> and would need the authors to go back and edit said links to point to the new storage locations.
which never happens. even if the authors cared about it and wanted to (they typically don't), they probably can't even find the posts themselves to update the links.
to use the modern eternal-september internet, i have to be aware that various entities will attempt to do all those things (spying, spamming, malware, etc) but I am under no obligation to allow them.
I don't have to accept their cookies or local storage, or run their javascript, or download/display their banner ads.
I can and will take whatever steps required (mostly as simple as installing ublock origin and umatrix, sometimes requires writing little CSS or js overrides with stylish or greasemonkey) to avoid the evil shit and bypass attempts to prevent me from avoiding evil shit (anti-adblock crap is easy to work around, for example)
it might be easy and convenient for the person who uploads the files, but it's a massive pain in the arse for everyone downloading them.
downloading a shared file from dropbox requires you to enable scripts from half a dozen different domains (i use umatrix because it gives much better, more fine-grained control over permissions than noscript. also it works in both chromium and firefox) and then dropbox constantly nags you on every fucking download to register with their service and give them your personal details.
and if you're downloading multiple files, you have to click and download each one individually with a tedious and laborious manual click-through-several-pages process. you can't just get a page with a bunch of href links on it a bulk downloader plugin (or a bash+wget or curl script) can use.
because it's a fucking great idea to replace basic web functionality like href links with javascript-based spyware.
you can't trust cloud service providers, especially cloud storage providers. at all.
if you want to host something - files, web sites, whatever - host it yourself. it's not hard.
even if you don't have a reliable internet connection at your office or home, a VPS is cheap (but make sure you backup everything on it regularly, at least nightly, to another machine on a different network so that you can host it elsewhere if you ever need to - you can't trust hosting providers either, but at least you have direct access to all the files and configuration details).
btw, i found your comment by searching for "smooth" to see if anyone else had mentioned the annoyance of crappy javascript implementing its own smooth-scrolling. I turn that off in every browser because it shits me, I don't want it turned on again - but slower and more cpu intensive and even more annoying - because of some shitty javascript library for wanky designers
Fortunately, this crap is only common on sites that don't display anything at all without javascript enabled (an almost sure sign of a page I don't want to read, so can be closed immediately without regret)
I'd like to make a product just annoying and threatening enough to the dominant player in a field that I can sell it to them for a few hundred million.
To do that, I need your support. Please fund my project - if I go through normal (regulated) investment channels, I'll have to share the proceeds with my investors and I don't want to do that....so crowdfunding is perfect.
Backer rewards include branding "sucker" on the forehead with a hot iron for $1000.
Thanks. You have my undying gratitude, loyalty, and respect.
All of my machines are running debian, and the only ones running systemd are those where I've deliberately installed it. All the others are running sysvinit - and that includes machines that were built years ago, and machines built since systemd became the default.
If you're going to whinge about systemd, whinge about a real problem.
Hint: that means one that actually exists - which should be no great difficulty, there are many systemd problems to choose from.
The people who think this are a good idea are those who want hundreds of millions of portable microphones recording everything around them and uploading the time-stamped and GPS-located recordings to their servers.
it's a good thing that nobody's dumb enough to routinely dose cattle and chicken and other livestock with anti-biotics. that would enable resistant bugs to evolve and spread everywhere.
Slashdot Mirror
A better question is why the fuck should you get away with that?
If you or your company want to bribe the employees of potential customers or suppliers (i.e. other companies) with fancy meals, booze-ups and titty bars then you should fucking pay for your bribes yourselves, and not expect taxpayers to subsidise it by writing it off as a "legitimate business expense".
I don't care much about power consumption. I don't give a damn whether a CPU is going to cost me $30 for a year's power consumption vs $60 or even $80. It's a trivial difference - the remainder of the system (motherboard, ram, disks, gpu, monitor, etc) will add up to twice as much or more than the CPU anyway. Caring about it makes as much sense as caring about the daily ups and downs of petrol prices....an extra 2c or even 10c per litre makes exactly fuck-all difference over an average 50-80 litre tank.
I care a lot more about the fan noise, but even that's cheap and easy to mitigate or eliminate.
What I care about is a) the price, and b) the price:performance ratio. AMD shits all over Intel for both of those. It always has and the Ryzen looks like it's continuing that pattern.
Sure, Intel has the top end CPUs. But paying 5 times or more the price for a CPU barely twice as fast is just plain stupid unless you're doing something where every cycle of performance really matters (like building a HPC or VM-hosting cluster) and you have a huge budget. The new top end Ryzen CPUs look like being almost as fast as Intel's top end CPU for about half the price.
BTW, Intel doesn't much care what AMD do. They'll make minor attempts to compete, but the fact is that they need AMD to exist so that they can avoid anti-monopoly lawsuits and regulations. They'll cede the low-end and some of the middle of the market to AMD because the massively over-priced top-end is their cash cow.
Also agree. I've thought on several occasions over the last few years that it might be worth switching to Intel but every time I've crunched the numbers on specs & pricing, it works out to spending nearly $1000 AUD (for new CPU, motherboard, and RAM) to get performance not much better than what I get now from my collection of Phenom II 1090T and FX-8xx0 machines. All of which are more than adequate for any task I throw at them, from compiling software to running LAN and internet-facing services to watching vids, listening to music, playing games and web browsing.
It's not even worth it to me to upgrade to current-gen AMD CPUs on most of my machines. My main desktop is a 6-core AMD 1090T (on an Asus Sabertooth 990FX m/b). I would get a noticable benefit from upgrading it to an 8-core FX-8320 or FX-8350, but it isn't *enough* of a benefit to be worth even the ~ $225 AUD it would cost....so spending around $1000 for a similar benefit would be completely insane.
For games, the GPU counts for far more than the CPU. A 6-core 1090T with a GTX-970 runs every game I have at 1440p at maximum or near-maximum settings, including the latest games released within the last few months. This will be good enough for me until 1070 or 1080 GPUs or better are cheap enough to be worth the price of upgrading from my 970....as a rule of thumb, for a GPU upgrade I want at least double the performance for, preferably, under $300 - which is why I stuck with my GTX-560Ti for years until the 970 was cheap enough.
Over the last few years, the *ONLY* thing which Intel has that I really want is DDR4 RAM. It's significantly cheaper than DDR3 now, and readily & cheaply available in larger sizes - the most I can get on DDR3 at a reasonable price is 32GB. While 16GB is more than enough on my win7 gaming machine (used solely as a games "console"), for my main desktop and on my servers (all linux), I'd like to upgrade from 32GB to 64GB or more - firefox and especially chromium are both RAM pigs, and file-servers always benefit from more RAM for caching.
(I usually run both chromium and firefox simultaneously for weeks or months at a time, each with a dozen or three windows open and each windowing having anywhere from 2 or 3 up to 30 or 40 tabs. This consumes a shitload of RAM. After a fairly ruthless tab & window cull this morning, chromium is using about 9GB RAM, and firefox about 4GB. Saving session state and restarting both would probably halve that, they both "leak" memory. They would both be many times worse AND consume far more CPU cycles if I didn't run both uBlock Origin and uMatrix to block ads and javascript)
PCI-e 3.0 would also be nice, but aside from nvme SSDs there really aren't any devices that benefit significantly from pci-e 3 over pci-e 2. The bandwidth improvement is huge and real but almost nothing actually uses it.
I'm happy that AMD now has a PCI-e 3 and DDR4 chipset. I'll probably upgrade to Ryzen later this year or early next year after the guinea-pig early adopters willing to pay the must-have-it-now price premium for first release gear have discovered any bugs, but I'm still in no great hurry to upgrade.
Upgrading to Ryzen will be almost as expensive as switching to mid-range Intel, but a) i'll get a significant upgrade in performance for a price that would get me, at best, a mediocre performance increase with Intel and b) based on past history with AMD chipsets, I'll have an upgrade path for many years that won't require me to toss out motherboard and RAM for almost every new CPU model that comes out.
Before the current FX-era doldrums that AMD have been stuck in for years, I used to upgrade my CPUs every 2 or 3 years, sometimes more often on particularly good CPU releases. I hope AMD makes it possible to get back into the same upgrade pattern with the new Ryzen gear.
BSL seems like more of the same to me.
Monty has had a habit of playing silly buggers with the GPL (and FOSS licensing in general) right from the earliest days of MySQL - he wanted the PR and code-contribution benefits of the GPL but liked to deceive people that, even though mysql was GPL, a commercial license was required if the software was used for commercial purposes. This lie was pushed for many years on the official mysql web site, in documentation and other support material, and by mysql employees on forums and mailing lists.
On second thoughts, BSL isn't just more of the same. It's worse than that. BSL isn't a Free Software license covered with lies to confuse people, to trick them that it isn't actually Free Source, that they don't have the rights granted to them by the license. It's a non-open license with lies to pretend that it is open.
I'm as amused as anyone that Monty scammed $1B out of Sun/Oracle and then went on to build another company based around the exact same software he sold to them. But that doesn't make him a nice or even likeable person, or ethical, reputable, or trustworthy...or anything else but a scammer. Just another self-serving businessman.
Most individuals at borders are not employees or agents of any US law enforcement agency or intelligence agency and are not exempted by this provision.
Forums are crap for questions(*). Even if you do get an answer, it'll be buried somewhere in the 70+ pages of morons waffling on with worthless and irrelevant crap...with each post having an irritating animated avatar that was tiresome at best the first time you saw it, rage-inducing the 10,000th time.
Specific questions are best asked on Q&A sites (like Stack Exchange, or one of the many clones).
Good answers get upvoted, bad answers get downvoted, abusive ones get deleted. And there's a good chance that your question, or something very similar, has already been asked and answered before.
(*) They mostly suck for discussions too. Mailing lists work better, especially if subscribers understand that top-posting is a crime against humanity.
hallelujah!
stock trades as a form of gambling need to fuck right off.
the stock market is supposed to be for investing, not speculative gambling and pump-and-dump operations on the share price.
anything other than that is mere parasitism, producing nothing of value to anyone - just transferring value to some and destroying value in the process for everyone else.
and yet, even with all that unfathomable and incalculable complexity, humans manage to play and win the game against other humans
An AI doesn't have to analyse the game situation perfectly, it just has to do it better than humans. and that's a hell of a lot easier than perfection.
I, for one, will be glad to see the macho bullshit associated with the idiotic practice of poker disappear - there's no pseudo-testosterone in being thrashed by a computer, or in being - at best - a second-rate poker player.
That's why the article's talking about 5G AND IoT - so that the average consumer has absolutely no control over how their toaster or fridge or light-bulb connects to the internet, no ability to change IP address or routes, no LAN or WiFI DHCP server to configure, and no ability to turn it off.
With a 5G modem built in to the device, it'll be always-on, always spying.
Amazon did it with Kindle & built-in 3G modem years ago, so that people could buy and download books from Amazon. They made bulk deals wherever possible to minimise the cost - and mobile data is a lot cheaper now,
Two of the inevitable outcomes from this are:
1. a series of blog posts, articles and how-tos on hardware hacking to disable the 5G modems built in to various appliances.
Manufacturers will probably retaliate with a patch to break your fridge or TV if it can't get a 5G connection.
They'll also make use of short-range wireless networking (e.g. bluetooth and similar) to look for nearby devices from the same (or allied) manufacturers. If one of them can get to the internet with their payload of spy-data then all of them can. They'll use the same wireless protocol for in-home control (remote control, home-automation hub, etc) so that consumers won't want to disable it.
2. a similar series of how-tos describing how to hack your fridge's firmware to make use of the "free" bandwidth available (as was done for the Kindle 3G).
This will probably be slightly more difficult than it would be for criminals to turn your IoT device into a spam or DDOS bot because the manufacturers will probably make some minimal incompetent effort to secure something that will cost THEM money.
you're lucky. i wish I could forget. it's been years, and i still have terrible flashbacks.
> A Linux system without a bunch of proprietary software is almost unusable
Bullshit.
> MP3 and MP4 playback come to mind
There are dozens of FOSS music and video players, capable of playing pretty much any common (and most uncommon) format. including mp3, mp4 and many others.
> Nvidia drivers.
The proprietary nvidia driver is currently much better than nouveau. for AMD cards, it's much harder to tell. radeon is better for some things, fglrx is better for others.
BTW, the nvidia driver and steam (plus some games - both native linux and with WINE) are the ONLY proprietary software I have installed on my machines, and i've been using linux as my "desktop" OS since the early 90s - switched from OS/2 to MCC Linux and never looked back.
In all that time, I've never had any need or use for any other proprietary software. Don't need it, don't want it, don't care at all about it.
and i couldn't care less about what other people choose or need to run on their computers - aside from the security risk they pose if they connect garbage software to the internet, it's none of my business.
> Especially CUDA
CUDA is almost completely irrelevant outside of a tiny niche of scientific computation, computer-science research, and other very parallelisable number-crunching jobs. I happen to do a lot of work in fields that use it, but I'm well aware that it's a very tiny niche.
> These sort of if idiot thoughts are why I moved to BSD from Linux.
yeah, because any/all of the *BSDs can run lots more proprietary software than Linux.
Your sort of idiot thoughts are why people think you're both a liar and a moron.
> Pretty much exactly the same arguments could be made for cruise control.
no, they can't. cruise control is just automated control of the accelerator and gears for long-distance highway driving - it exists to avoid repetitive strain on ankles and tendons, and requires the driver to be in full control of the vehicle at all times...even a light tap on the accelerator or brake disables it. it doesn't pretend to navigate or have any kind of situational awareness, there's not even any hint of claim to being 'self-driving'.
this is a point that very few americans ever get. they love to whinge about allegedly "absurd" court cases where people sue for what they consider to be trivial injuries.
what they never realise - or acknowledge - is that such cases are absolutely necessary with a private, grossly over-priced health system.
people don't need to sue to have their medical costs covered if they have a public health system, if an injury doesn't put them at risk of bankruptcy and homelessness.
if you ever wondered why the level of litigation is so much higher in the US than in the rest of the western world, now you know.
practically speaking, you have a choice between corporations or governments.
at the moment, due to decades of anti-government propaganda by corporations, you americans have abdicated control of your government to corporations so there's little distinction between them.
that's not inherent, though. although you have NO chance of ever influencing or controlling corporations (except through government regulation - which is why you've been bombarded with decades of corporate propaganda railing against the evils of regulation), you DO have some small chance of taking back your government and making it work for the people rather than for the corporations - artificial life forms which both run on and corrupt the legal system that enables them to exist....remember, corporations only exist as legal entities because governments say they do, and they only provide shielding from liability for shareholders because governments say they do.
vote wisely. vote socialist.
and when you succeed, remember that constant vigilance is required to ensure that governments isn't taken over by corporations again.
This so-called "backup driver" is merely a passenger.
As for the identities of the the legal drivers of their self-driving cars, that can only be Uber's CEO & senior management team, and all members of the board. They're the ones who made the decision, they bear the responsibility.
How long will their scofflaw attitude last when it's them personally at risk of being charged with vehicular homicide rather than some underpaid peon?
> but there are thousands and thousands of forum links that will literally break over night
so, no significant change to standard behaviour then?
web forums suck, always have and always will. even if you find what you're looking for after wading through pages 1-73 (of 160) of bullshit, stupid questions & comments from cretins, and really fucking irritating animated avatars (the worst of which end up in my block list, either individually or if i'm lucky there'll be a consistent url prefix to turn into a blocking pattern), the download link to whatever it was you were after will almost invariably be broken.
to make it worse, most web forums default to disabling search unless you register an account with them. they can fuck right off.
and if by some chance you find a link and it actually still works, then just like most of the broken links, it will be to one of those shitty file + malware/spyware services that spam you with ads and requests to register/pay for an account, require you to run who-the-fuck-knows-what javascript and add countdown timers to delay each individual download....just to make it more irritating to encourage you to register and pay for an account. they can fuck right off too, i'm not paying or registering with anyone that goes out of their way to annoy me.
> and would need the authors to go back and edit said links to point to the new storage locations.
which never happens. even if the authors cared about it and wanted to (they typically don't), they probably can't even find the posts themselves to update the links.
not quite correct.
to use the modern eternal-september internet, i have to be aware that various entities will attempt to do all those things (spying, spamming, malware, etc) but I am under no obligation to allow them.
I don't have to accept their cookies or local storage, or run their javascript, or download/display their banner ads.
I can and will take whatever steps required (mostly as simple as installing ublock origin and umatrix, sometimes requires writing little CSS or js overrides with stylish or greasemonkey) to avoid the evil shit and bypass attempts to prevent me from avoiding evil shit (anti-adblock crap is easy to work around, for example)
it might be easy and convenient for the person who uploads the files, but it's a massive pain in the arse for everyone downloading them.
downloading a shared file from dropbox requires you to enable scripts from half a dozen different domains (i use umatrix because it gives much better, more fine-grained control over permissions than noscript. also it works in both chromium and firefox) and then dropbox constantly nags you on every fucking download to register with their service and give them your personal details.
and if you're downloading multiple files, you have to click and download each one individually with a tedious and laborious manual click-through-several-pages process. you can't just get a page with a bunch of href links on it a bulk downloader plugin (or a bash+wget or curl script) can use.
because it's a fucking great idea to replace basic web functionality like href links with javascript-based spyware.
you can't trust cloud service providers, especially cloud storage providers. at all.
if you want to host something - files, web sites, whatever - host it yourself. it's not hard.
even if you don't have a reliable internet connection at your office or home, a VPS is cheap (but make sure you backup everything on it regularly, at least nightly, to another machine on a different network so that you can host it elsewhere if you ever need to - you can't trust hosting providers either, but at least you have direct access to all the files and configuration details).
agree on every point.
btw, i found your comment by searching for "smooth" to see if anyone else had mentioned the annoyance of crappy javascript implementing its own smooth-scrolling. I turn that off in every browser because it shits me, I don't want it turned on again - but slower and more cpu intensive and even more annoying - because of some shitty javascript library for wanky designers
Fortunately, this crap is only common on sites that don't display anything at all without javascript enabled (an almost sure sign of a page I don't want to read, so can be closed immediately without regret)
I'd like to make a product just annoying and threatening enough to the dominant player in a field that I can sell it to them for a few hundred million.
To do that, I need your support. Please fund my project - if I go through normal (regulated) investment channels, I'll have to share the proceeds with my investors and I don't want to do that....so crowdfunding is perfect.
Backer rewards include branding "sucker" on the forehead with a hot iron for $1000.
Thanks. You have my undying gratitude, loyalty, and respect.
It always has.
All of my machines are running debian, and the only ones running systemd are those where I've deliberately installed it. All the others are running sysvinit - and that includes machines that were built years ago, and machines built since systemd became the default.
If you're going to whinge about systemd, whinge about a real problem.
Hint: that means one that actually exists - which should be no great difficulty, there are many systemd problems to choose from.
The people who think this are a good idea are those who want hundreds of millions of portable microphones recording everything around them and uploading the time-stamped and GPS-located recordings to their servers.
it's a good thing that nobody's dumb enough to routinely dose cattle and chicken and other livestock with anti-biotics. that would enable resistant bugs to evolve and spread everywhere.
and stop using corporate-vendor encryption - it's too good and we can't spy on it.
-- FBI Agent Brer Rabbit