Most of the Wayland maintainers have also been working on X.org for a long time, and I trust the developers to know better than the users when a rewrite is due. From what I've read, in addition to the issue of maintainability, X.org is inherently insecure (any app is allowed to draw over / screencapture / keylog any other app), contains a lot of code that is never used anymore (e.g. the builtin font rendering and GUI toolkit in X), while modern developments such as DRI and compositing were bolted on as ugly extensions. So if the X.org maintainers say it's cleaner to rewrite it than to keep bolting on new features on top, then I believe them.
If you're genuinely interested in why people are developing Wayland, I recommend looking at this talk:).
It's not necessarily that it's a long way from prime time. But it's definitely not stable enough at the moment to be the default in an LTS version, which has to run stable for the next 3 years without relying on any major upgrades.
The US has been riling up NATO against Russia for some time now. You had the whole debacle of trying to force all NATO countries to spend 2% of their GDP on their defence budget, even though the US alone has an ~8x larger military budget than Russia. Then you have the new military activity along their border, such as the deployment of US soldiers to Værnes in Norway, even though there are already NATO bases along most of the Russian border. Then the US spent most of the past couple of years accusing Russia of "hacking their election", still without rigorous proof of their claims. When Obama wanted to expel Russian diplomats from their soil after the election problems, the Russians responded by inviting the US diplomats to a Kremlin Christmas Party.
So what do you expect? The Cold War is resuming, and Russia is the scared underdog. If the US was in the situation that Russia had an 8x larger military budget, had military bases all along the border in Canada and Mexico and maybe some rockets on Cuba, tried to up the military spending of their allies, spent the last couple of years yelling at you for meddling in their elections, and expelled your diplomats, how would you react?
The computer uses as much RAM as you have available, but that doesn't mean it doesn't work fine with less. I'm using Ubuntu Mate on my laptop with 8GB, and at the moment only require 4GB, even though the machine hasn't been rebooted for 10 days. (That's 3GB used by Firefox, and 1GB used by the desktop environment, syncthing, evince, etc. Technically, 3GB of the "available" space is used for caching, but you can do without that if needed).
I guess the conclusion is that the main hog is the web browser; limit the number of tabs you keep open, and 5GB should be fine. Go old-school and disable tabbed browsing completely (using bookmarks for things you want to revisit, and browsing the internet sequentially instead of in parallel), and 5GB should be plenty.
In case you do need one at some point: CopperheadOS. Unfortunately, it only supports Nexus phones at the moment, but they provide a Google-free security-hardened android distribution with regular updates and no proprietary components. I'm not saying it's bullet-proof, but getting rid of the telemetry Google has built into Google Play Services and providing regular security updates is orders of magnitude better than the competition.
If you want such a system: build it around the second and lightnanosecond. Since the second is already in common use, and one lightnanosecond is 0.9836 feet, it would be somewhat backwards-compatible with Imperial Units, while making the numerical value of the speed of light exactly one billion (c=10^9 lns/s). But instead of using inches and gallons, you of course have to rationalize it by using SI-like prefixes, such as kilo = 10^3.
The mole and kilogram are linked through Avogadro's number. Define it to be a clean number like N=10^26 (making 10^26 atomic mass units correspond to 1 macroscopic mass unit, where the latter then becomes ~0.366 lbs).
Also, don't make current a fundamental unit (like the Ampere), make charge one instead (which should be an integer multiple of the electron charge). Just define it to be a clean number like e.g. 10^18 electron charges.
The Kelvin/Centigrade are are quite convenient though, and the Candela doesn't deserve to be a fundamental unit.
Make it simple enough to work with by relating the macroscopic units to the fundamental physical units, and you might actually have a chance of beating the French:).
I recommend trying out Firefox Focus instead of the regular Firefox app (here or here). While the regular Firefox app is horribly slow and inefficient compared to the Chrome app, Firefox Focus is fast and snappy, blocks ads and trackers, and automatically clears history and cookies.
These days, if your kid doesn't have a phone, it inhibits their socialization at school. Kids used to arrange in person when they want to meet and play after school, or sometimes just show up and ring the doorbell — now they text each other on some messaging app to arrange stuff. Kids used to invite to their birthday parties by passing around a note in class, or just telling people in person when it was — now they use social media for that. Kids used to meet up much more often in person to socialize — now a large chunk of it actually happens online.
I'm not saying it's a good thing, but it's just the way things are. It's like any other piece of technology, it starts out being optional, but after it becomes the norm, avoiding it comes at a cost. If you live somewhere everyone has a phone and a computer, good luck these days getting a job interview without a phone number or email address. If you live somewhere everyone has a car and a computer, you can't expect a variety of shops in walking distance from your house. Sometimes these things seem a bit like the good old "tragedy of the commons". It's becoming the same for kids and smartphones — when every kid has one, your kid loses out on something by being the only exception.
Also, casual users are satisfied with browsing the internet using their smartphone and playing games on a console, and therefore don't need a traditional computer. Desktops and laptops are now for work and hardcore gaming.
It's good as long as all the languages are in the same language family, meaning that they share grammatic logic but have different vocabulary. But try translating English into a non-Indo-European language like Korean, with a fundamentally different way of expressing ideas, and it fails miserably. It's often not understandable at all.
(For instance: English sentences require a subject in every sentence to be complete, meaning that you say "John is growing up" even though it's obvious who we're talking about. In Korean, you mention who you're talking in the beginning, and then it's implicit from context until you start talking about someone else, so you drop the subject in following sentences. Machine learning systems so far don't understand this distinction, so translating from Korean to English they keep inventing people in the sentences, so that "is growing up" might become "Dave is growing up" or "Alice is growing up", even though no Dave or Alice has been mentioned in the previous sentences, while they were mentioned a few times in the training material.)
So everyone in the country should send their traffic through a single VPN? How does that scale to 300m citizens, and what will stop the VPN company from throttling webpages that don't pay their internet baksheesh?
Their new mobile browser Firefox Focus is actually quite good, and has replaced Chrome as my main mobile browser. It's much faster than their regular Firefox app, and is configured to block ads and trackers by default.
There was a recent interesting paper, "Concordance cosmology without dark energy", which explained how dark energy was actually not required to explain the structure of the universe, if one just used a more accurate numerical model to simulate how the universe evolved. They even resolved a long-standing issue in cosmology whereby different ways of estimating the Hubble constant from observations gave different results. I'm looking forward to seeing how this theory develops, and how their findings are received by the rest of the cosmology community.
I'm the same way: it usually takes a few hours of focusing to really get in the zone and reach peak productivity, and it usually requires that I'm especially well rested before I start. My most productive days are therefore when I wake up without an alarm clock, overdose on energy drinks, put on some music, and procede to pull an intensive all-nighter. Under ideal conditions, one such burst can easily be more productive than a week of 9-5 days.
It annoys me that Microsoft, a company I want nothing to do with, put their Office apps on every Samsung phone, AND THOSE APPS PHONE HOME ALL THE TIME. I don't use their app, I don't want their app, Microsoft paid to put that crap on the phone with network, camera, microphone permissions.
If you don't use the app, there is actually a simple solution. Even though you can't remove preinstalled apps without rooting your phone, you are usually allowed to disable the apps, which prevents it from working and thereby from phoning home. Disabling intrusive preinstalled apps is the first thing I do when I get a new Android phone; check out the menu Settings -> Apps ->... -> Disable. If you have installed any updates to the app, you may have to uninstall these before you can disable the app.
For stronger privacy controls, you might be interested in rooting your phone, in which case you can actually remove the app entirely, and also use stuff like XPrivacy.
You mean such as the Initial Better Ads Standard, which mandates e.g. no pop-ups, no sounds, no flashy animations, and an ad density below 30%? They've finally realized that their business model is vanishing, so e.g. Google are now trying to save ads by following this standard.
Academic here. Most of my programming are physics simulations programs, which are a bit too heavy to run on a laptop, but can be tested comfortably on a workstation, and are then run on a supercomputer to produce the final results. However, I still do most of my programing from a laptop. What I typically do then, is that I ssh from my laptop to my office desktop computer, and keep open a terminal with one nvim tab for development, one cmake tab for recompiling, one tmux tab for running test simulations, and one tab where I tail -f the output logs and plot any resulting data (relying on X forwarding).
The main reason I do this, is that I find a typical office setting very uncomfortable over time — I much prefer switching rooms, furniture, and working positions every few hours when doing longer programming sessions. That's something you can do with a laptop with a decent battery, but not with a desktop computer. Also, I do a lot of work from home, where I haven't even had a desktop computer for the past 5 years, as a decent laptop now does everything I want from it.
If you don't mind paying $3/month, I highly recommend KolabNow. They offer both webmail and IMAP access, the software they develop is open source, the company's privacy policy is great, and they're hosted in Switzerland which also has sane laws regarding privacy. The few times there's been issues (DDoS attacks, Heartbleed bug) they've been upfront about it and sent out a mail immediately explaining the situation and what they're doing to address it. I've used them for four years now, and I'm quite satisfied.
I also don't store contact information in my phone.
So your phone doesn't know your phone number?
Your email? Your Gmail / Facebook / WhatsApp account? Your mom's phone number? Your colleagues email addresses? Login cookies for any websites such as Amazon or EBay? WiFi password for your home network, which can be geographically located thanks to Google's positioning system? Text messages where someone casually mentions your name?
If you answered yes to any of the above, a sufficiently determined attacker can probably figure out who you are. If you answered no to everything, why do you have a smartphone in the first place?
I'm doing theoretical physics, and for the last couple of years, roughly half of my time has been comprised of numerical simulations. I'm free to choose the language I want for the programming part, since the main results that I'm paid to produce are not the simulation codes themselves, but the physical predictions they result in. (In practice, I started this project using Matlab, but it was too slow so I ended up rewriting it in Fortran 2008 for computation and Python for data visualization.)
Slashdot Mirror
Most of the Wayland maintainers have also been working on X.org for a long time, and I trust the developers to know better than the users when a rewrite is due. From what I've read, in addition to the issue of maintainability, X.org is inherently insecure (any app is allowed to draw over / screencapture / keylog any other app), contains a lot of code that is never used anymore (e.g. the builtin font rendering and GUI toolkit in X), while modern developments such as DRI and compositing were bolted on as ugly extensions. So if the X.org maintainers say it's cleaner to rewrite it than to keep bolting on new features on top, then I believe them.
:).
If you're genuinely interested in why people are developing Wayland, I recommend looking at this talk
It's not necessarily that it's a long way from prime time. But it's definitely not stable enough at the moment to be the default in an LTS version, which has to run stable for the next 3 years without relying on any major upgrades.
The US has been riling up NATO against Russia for some time now. You had the whole debacle of trying to force all NATO countries to spend 2% of their GDP on their defence budget, even though the US alone has an ~8x larger military budget than Russia. Then you have the new military activity along their border, such as the deployment of US soldiers to Værnes in Norway, even though there are already NATO bases along most of the Russian border. Then the US spent most of the past couple of years accusing Russia of "hacking their election", still without rigorous proof of their claims. When Obama wanted to expel Russian diplomats from their soil after the election problems, the Russians responded by inviting the US diplomats to a Kremlin Christmas Party.
So what do you expect? The Cold War is resuming, and Russia is the scared underdog. If the US was in the situation that Russia had an 8x larger military budget, had military bases all along the border in Canada and Mexico and maybe some rockets on Cuba, tried to up the military spending of their allies, spent the last couple of years yelling at you for meddling in their elections, and expelled your diplomats, how would you react?
The computer uses as much RAM as you have available, but that doesn't mean it doesn't work fine with less. I'm using Ubuntu Mate on my laptop with 8GB, and at the moment only require 4GB, even though the machine hasn't been rebooted for 10 days. (That's 3GB used by Firefox, and 1GB used by the desktop environment, syncthing, evince, etc. Technically, 3GB of the "available" space is used for caching, but you can do without that if needed).
I guess the conclusion is that the main hog is the web browser; limit the number of tabs you keep open, and 5GB should be fine. Go old-school and disable tabbed browsing completely (using bookmarks for things you want to revisit, and browsing the internet sequentially instead of in parallel), and 5GB should be plenty.
In case you do need one at some point: CopperheadOS. Unfortunately, it only supports Nexus phones at the moment, but they provide a Google-free security-hardened android distribution with regular updates and no proprietary components. I'm not saying it's bullet-proof, but getting rid of the telemetry Google has built into Google Play Services and providing regular security updates is orders of magnitude better than the competition.
If you want such a system: build it around the second and lightnanosecond. Since the second is already in common use, and one lightnanosecond is 0.9836 feet, it would be somewhat backwards-compatible with Imperial Units, while making the numerical value of the speed of light exactly one billion (c=10^9 lns/s). But instead of using inches and gallons, you of course have to rationalize it by using SI-like prefixes, such as kilo = 10^3.
:).
The mole and kilogram are linked through Avogadro's number. Define it to be a clean number like N=10^26 (making 10^26 atomic mass units correspond to 1 macroscopic mass unit, where the latter then becomes ~0.366 lbs). Also, don't make current a fundamental unit (like the Ampere), make charge one instead (which should be an integer multiple of the electron charge). Just define it to be a clean number like e.g. 10^18 electron charges.
The Kelvin/Centigrade are are quite convenient though, and the Candela doesn't deserve to be a fundamental unit. Make it simple enough to work with by relating the macroscopic units to the fundamental physical units, and you might actually have a chance of beating the French
I recommend trying out Firefox Focus instead of the regular Firefox app (here or here). While the regular Firefox app is horribly slow and inefficient compared to the Chrome app, Firefox Focus is fast and snappy, blocks ads and trackers, and automatically clears history and cookies.
These days, if your kid doesn't have a phone, it inhibits their socialization at school. Kids used to arrange in person when they want to meet and play after school, or sometimes just show up and ring the doorbell — now they text each other on some messaging app to arrange stuff. Kids used to invite to their birthday parties by passing around a note in class, or just telling people in person when it was — now they use social media for that. Kids used to meet up much more often in person to socialize — now a large chunk of it actually happens online.
I'm not saying it's a good thing, but it's just the way things are. It's like any other piece of technology, it starts out being optional, but after it becomes the norm, avoiding it comes at a cost. If you live somewhere everyone has a phone and a computer, good luck these days getting a job interview without a phone number or email address. If you live somewhere everyone has a car and a computer, you can't expect a variety of shops in walking distance from your house. Sometimes these things seem a bit like the good old "tragedy of the commons". It's becoming the same for kids and smartphones — when every kid has one, your kid loses out on something by being the only exception.
Also, casual users are satisfied with browsing the internet using their smartphone and playing games on a console, and therefore don't need a traditional computer. Desktops and laptops are now for work and hardcore gaming.
It's good as long as all the languages are in the same language family, meaning that they share grammatic logic but have different vocabulary. But try translating English into a non-Indo-European language like Korean, with a fundamentally different way of expressing ideas, and it fails miserably. It's often not understandable at all.
(For instance: English sentences require a subject in every sentence to be complete, meaning that you say "John is growing up" even though it's obvious who we're talking about. In Korean, you mention who you're talking in the beginning, and then it's implicit from context until you start talking about someone else, so you drop the subject in following sentences. Machine learning systems so far don't understand this distinction, so translating from Korean to English they keep inventing people in the sentences, so that "is growing up" might become "Dave is growing up" or "Alice is growing up", even though no Dave or Alice has been mentioned in the previous sentences, while they were mentioned a few times in the training material.)
So everyone in the country should send their traffic through a single VPN? How does that scale to 300m citizens, and what will stop the VPN company from throttling webpages that don't pay their internet baksheesh?
It turns out that humans need about 2 hours of real dark per night or else there can be deadly consequences.
That's why you buy proper bedroom curtains that are thick enough to block the light.
Regarding plugins, my current setup is:
now if I can find a way to share bookmarks that will operate in the office I'll switch completely.
Google isn't the only one offering this. Perhaps your office permits using Firefox sync or Opera sync?
Their new mobile browser Firefox Focus is actually quite good, and has replaced Chrome as my main mobile browser. It's much faster than their regular Firefox app, and is configured to block ads and trackers by default.
So you're referring to Diamond about diamonds...
There was a recent interesting paper, "Concordance cosmology without dark energy", which explained how dark energy was actually not required to explain the structure of the universe, if one just used a more accurate numerical model to simulate how the universe evolved. They even resolved a long-standing issue in cosmology whereby different ways of estimating the Hubble constant from observations gave different results. I'm looking forward to seeing how this theory develops, and how their findings are received by the rest of the cosmology community.
I'm the same way: it usually takes a few hours of focusing to really get in the zone and reach peak productivity, and it usually requires that I'm especially well rested before I start. My most productive days are therefore when I wake up without an alarm clock, overdose on energy drinks, put on some music, and procede to pull an intensive all-nighter. Under ideal conditions, one such burst can easily be more productive than a week of 9-5 days.
It annoys me that Microsoft, a company I want nothing to do with, put their Office apps on every Samsung phone, AND THOSE APPS PHONE HOME ALL THE TIME. I don't use their app, I don't want their app, Microsoft paid to put that crap on the phone with network, camera, microphone permissions.
If you don't use the app, there is actually a simple solution. Even though you can't remove preinstalled apps without rooting your phone, you are usually allowed to disable the apps, which prevents it from working and thereby from phoning home. Disabling intrusive preinstalled apps is the first thing I do when I get a new Android phone; check out the menu Settings -> Apps -> ... -> Disable. If you have installed any updates to the app, you may have to uninstall these before you can disable the app.
For stronger privacy controls, you might be interested in rooting your phone, in which case you can actually remove the app entirely, and also use stuff like XPrivacy.
You mean such as the Initial Better Ads Standard, which mandates e.g. no pop-ups, no sounds, no flashy animations, and an ad density below 30%? They've finally realized that their business model is vanishing, so e.g. Google are now trying to save ads by following this standard.
Academic here. Most of my programming are physics simulations programs, which are a bit too heavy to run on a laptop, but can be tested comfortably on a workstation, and are then run on a supercomputer to produce the final results. However, I still do most of my programing from a laptop. What I typically do then, is that I ssh from my laptop to my office desktop computer, and keep open a terminal with one nvim tab for development, one cmake tab for recompiling, one tmux tab for running test simulations, and one tab where I tail -f the output logs and plot any resulting data (relying on X forwarding).
The main reason I do this, is that I find a typical office setting very uncomfortable over time — I much prefer switching rooms, furniture, and working positions every few hours when doing longer programming sessions. That's something you can do with a laptop with a decent battery, but not with a desktop computer. Also, I do a lot of work from home, where I haven't even had a desktop computer for the past 5 years, as a decent laptop now does everything I want from it.
If you don't mind paying $3/month, I highly recommend KolabNow. They offer both webmail and IMAP access, the software they develop is open source, the company's privacy policy is great, and they're hosted in Switzerland which also has sane laws regarding privacy. The few times there's been issues (DDoS attacks, Heartbleed bug) they've been upfront about it and sent out a mail immediately explaining the situation and what they're doing to address it. I've used them for four years now, and I'm quite satisfied.
I also don't store contact information in my phone.
So your phone doesn't know your phone number? Your email? Your Gmail / Facebook / WhatsApp account? Your mom's phone number? Your colleagues email addresses? Login cookies for any websites such as Amazon or EBay? WiFi password for your home network, which can be geographically located thanks to Google's positioning system? Text messages where someone casually mentions your name? If you answered yes to any of the above, a sufficiently determined attacker can probably figure out who you are. If you answered no to everything, why do you have a smartphone in the first place?
The title says it all. I have basically the same setup on my workstation and laptop, which both have an Intel Core i7 and 16gb ram.
I'm doing theoretical physics, and for the last couple of years, roughly half of my time has been comprised of numerical simulations. I'm free to choose the language I want for the programming part, since the main results that I'm paid to produce are not the simulation codes themselves, but the physical predictions they result in. (In practice, I started this project using Matlab, but it was too slow so I ended up rewriting it in Fortran 2008 for computation and Python for data visualization.)