The author should really consider Hanlon's razor. The article minces "deliberate" and "malicious" as if they are synonyms, someone is far more likely to "deliberately" leak information without realising it could be used against the company they work for.
Out of curiosity: what is that software that you need, that is not available under Linux? I do not doubt your assertion, but I would like to know more.
Software isn't the real problem (honestly that stuff just appears once users reach critical mass), the problem is that Linux doesn't have "lack of choice", and it never will because it's not a product. Linux doesn't need anything more to attract users, instead the prospective users need to value something that is actively shunned in consumerism: an extreme abundance of choice, as the inevitable consequence of the freedoms that underpin the GNU/Linux world.
This is not compatible with consumerism because it requires a different currency (personal investment), the user must first choose how much time they are willing to invest and the level of choice they want to invest in. I can't see that changing any time soon for the 99% of other OS users that are not technically interested, to most people Linux looks like the complete opposite of a "comfortable" product that they can exchange some moneys for and expect a polished, consistent and unified product... and to be clear, it's not that Linux can't be that, it's that the world that it lives in (it's branding if you like) portrays the something very fragmented and confusing from the point of view of someone who is not interested in investing anything other than money. Even though "Ubuntu" or "Canonical" are about as close to a Linux like product that we can get, they are still considered Linux and part of that confusing world, and so that is still a disadvantage from a branding point of view.
You mean HSV isn't a thing? And of course it's a physical description of color, as much as "red" or "Hershey Squirts Brown" is.
I mean It's not "physically based", as in, it's a high level abstraction based on observation rather than a physically based description of light based upon a theory. I'm not saying it's invalid, just that it serves a different purpose, one that's unsuitable when you are making assertions about the physics of light.
The only objective physical description of "color" would be frequency or wavelength and perhaps intensity (due to how it affects how we perceive things).
I think "common physical description" would be more correct... Like I said it depends if you are talking about the resultant light or the specific interaction with an object, and seeing as we are talking about the colour of objects (unless you want to limit the scope of description to emitters only), an absorbance based description is equally objective... just not very common. Where more than aesthetics are concerned the absorbance properties of a material independent from a specific light source is a much more usefully accurate description than the resultant colour in an arbitrary environment. Now this has little relevance to anything here but you forced me to argue my point.
As another thought experiment, consider what happens when you project a magenta light onto a leaf... what colour will the leaf be? so what colour is the leaf?
Walter is talking about "hue" which is not a physical description of colour and has more relevance in an artistic domain. However even in the physical sense it can depend on what the "colour" is being attributed to... if you are talking about the light received by your sensor/receptors (alternately the object's or light source's appearance) then white is indeed a uniform mixture of the visible spectrum (or a mix of narrow bands red blue and green as a hack exploiting our eye's limited cone receptors i.e LED lighting), this is obviously what people almost always mean.
On the other hand, If you are talking about the actual object that diffused/reflected the light then it could be valid to talk about the opposite: For an object that appears to be ideally white, consider the fact that it actually absorbs no colour, and therefor the properties of the material might be considered "colourless"... and vice versa for an object that appears to be ideally black.
This of course is the same for arbitrary colours: as the most common example, plants chlorophyll are green because they absorb mostly reds and blues, in that sense chlorophyll might be considered to be magenta.
It is not an "artificial intelligence", it is a tool built to analyse text, trained on a mass of text written by biased humans. Now if it had something resembling a conscience or critical thinking it might have a chance at identifying and balancing prejudice to defend it's "sentiment" weighting, but right now it's a "dumb" (in the AI sense) tool... So if it's biased against "Jews" and "gays", all it tells us is on average the humans who wrote the training data are biased against "gays" and "Jews".
I think we are talking about completely different aspects, GUI design is not uniquely part of "having linux on a phone", sure it's important to consumers, but we are talking about running arbitrary linux distros, not another "phone OS" attempt to compete with the likes of android.
A few companies have put a huge amount of effort into making GNU/Linux usable on a smart phone and have failed spectacularly
Those companies were working at the problem from the hardest possible angle... if you are doing software only then you have to reverse engineer all the device drivers. If you ARE the hardware vendor on the other hand you have significantly more power over manipulating this effort (albeit at other cost).
Samsung have opted for the most economical option possible here by actually sidestepping that whole hardware support issue, but it's a pretty big compromise (kernel level virtualisation)... By using the same kernel that comes on the phone the device driver work comes free and they retain control over the primary system running on their hardware (yes I said their hardware), that last part is probably more important to them than you might realise.
What I and I imagine most OSS people want is for phone manufacturers to make their hardware more OSS friendly by helping people write drivers rather than letting us mostly scurrying around in the dark. We want freedom to port whatever the we want to our hardware (that's when it starts along the road towards become OUR hardware). We have just about gotten used to this on notebooks (albeit with a number of irritating flaky reverse engineered drivers for certain chipsets that are best avoided), but that has taken a long time. Most phone companies don't have the incentive to help or change here because many of the various chipsets integrated into that monolithic slab of silicone in the middle of it all are closed source which tend to come with closed source binary blob drivers. To even start to care, they would have to be very selective when building their hardware or make less economical deals to free up certain parts... This is exactly what purism does (I'ts only economically viable for them right now because it's their unique selling point), like them or not, they are the closest you will get to having a truly free choice of open source operating system on a phone unless you build one yourself.
I live in the UK, any mobile phone use (including talking) while driving has been outright banned here for a number of years now. Never the less you occasionally see someone on the phone, and even worse using the screen - people using screens is always apparent from the outside by fact that their driving is clearly distracted, they often wander all over the road, fail to notice other drivers, traffic lights, pedestrians, given way signs etc etc.
I've had people almost collide with me head on from wandering onto the wrong side of the road (head starring down), people go through red lights in front of me (head staring down), go through zebra crossings while people are crossing (head staring down), forget to use the hand brake at traffic lights and roll forwards through lights without noticing while everyone around them is violently beepeing them (head staring down).
Laws do not prevent stupidity. People don't see how dangerous it is to attempt to use a computer screen a drive at the same time, they are fundamentally incompatible. If laws don't stop it, then it needs to be built into the tech.
Ya, I've been to China, the rate they make changes when an issue like pollution plagues their cities is inspiring, some provinces are all electric scooters and all electric taxies already. I know a lot of it is due to government heavily intervening, but the thing is that when a change is forced fast then it become economical more quickly due to scale, it's one of the few positive aspects of such a type of government.
You are aware, of course, that the success and convenience of Linux package repositories was both the inspiration and proof of concept that caused app stores to exist, right? On an OS built by developers for developers, "go make your own apps" actually works.
All closed source commercially controlled software takes queues from open source software, some even just take the software verbatim... that doesn't mean it retains the open and non-commercially controlled aspect of it. The whole point of this phone is not "another phone OS" or "another app store" it's about choice and freedom, if you don't give a crap about that stuff and want maximum choice of utility at this very moment in time at any cost, then this phone is not for you.
Seriously. Most of us have cores sitting idle. Instead of being abused / tracked / annoyed / occasionally infected by advertising, why not let sites do a small amount of mining while we visit?
You're not paying in cores, your paying in watts, usually a directly quantifiable cost to the user. Alternatively you are also paying in battery life for mobile devices.
I don't mean to be alarmist but this sounds like another one to add to the list of warming runaway effects, or is this supposed to be a more frequent and normal occurrence?
We don't need another "phone OS"... instead we need the hardware to mature to make porting existing OS to it feasible, there are plenty of OS out there already, the phone functionality is then mostly down to user level apps and touch UI (not saying that there isn't a lot of work that goes into that of course). The closest we are going to get to this in the immediate future is https://puri.sm/shop/librem-5/
The way I see it, smart phones are currently in the 1980's stage of personal computers, Amigas', Ataris', Acorns', BBCs', Amstrads' etc, sometimes they use the same CPU architecture, but there is little similarity in terms of a compatible hardware platform and all current consumer hardware vendors do not provide open source drivers anyway.
I recall that while I enjoyed working in an open room, I would often stop thinking and just stare at my screen, waiting for a nearby conversation to conclude. When I had to think deeply, I found that I could not - and so I would go home, do the deep thinking
omg this! I enjoy the company of my colleagues, but the downside is that sometimes you have to wait for the "end of the working day" or WFH to get serious work done... headphones can work for me sometimes if I am driven enough and clear about what I am doing, but when as you say "deep thought" is needed, then it must be in a quiet environment. But I find this to be a huge dilemma for software development, because coding is only one part of it, sure it's the most important, but communication is necessary, and huge meetings are a waste of time and continuous interruptions are a waste of brain power... the solution seems to be to find a natural break in between coding to discuss things with managers, designers and others who happen to be in the "disturb me" mode. maybe if some perfectly noise cancelling headphones for silence came with open plan offices it would all work out...
...But somehow I'm still not distracted, probably because I usually have mobile data turned off and no audible or tactile notifications for messages. Therefore I mostly do not get messages all the day and when I do, I don't notice until I'm deciding to look.
Try it, it's great to have control over your life.
Yes, It seems like this is key (controlling the flow of information coming in), even though I don't have a smart phone I do get fed up with text messages sometimes and i'm not exactly a socialite. Often when I get home I turn it off or leave it in another room, in a sort of "collection" mode, that way it's more like me in control of it's attention rather than it in control of my attention, I know it's silly to describe a phone as if it's animate, but it illustrates the point.
My boss beats me at this!! He had tens of thousands of unread emails, so doesn't notice when a new one comes in. I keep it at 0 and when the thunderbird icon shows a little red number, I have to click it to make it go away, or else.
(Or else what? Fuck if I know. Don't ask me to explain that; ask a psychiatrist.)
Yeah I can see this one, I think maybe not having a smart phone has allowed me to escape this, also even on the desktop, I ether keep it in my i3 scratchpad - out of sight, or close it all together if I need some high quality uninterrupted coding time.
That reminds me of another actually, slack - I love and hate that thing, I hate it's huge size and It now absolutely must be close when i'm trying to get work done, other times it's indispensable when fast communication is needed between colleagues. Just gotta remember it's always an option to kill the thing, even email - i know that sounds crazy for some people, especially hard if you are a boss or manager.
Slashdot Mirror
The author should really consider Hanlon's razor. The article minces "deliberate" and "malicious" as if they are synonyms, someone is far more likely to "deliberately" leak information without realising it could be used against the company they work for.
Don't worry, vowels have not been completely depreciated, you can buy them as a dongle now.
(as in "courage" but thinner, less the (obsolete) vowels)
Out of curiosity: what is that software that you need, that is not available under Linux? I do not doubt your assertion, but I would like to know more.
Software isn't the real problem (honestly that stuff just appears once users reach critical mass), the problem is that Linux doesn't have "lack of choice", and it never will because it's not a product. Linux doesn't need anything more to attract users, instead the prospective users need to value something that is actively shunned in consumerism: an extreme abundance of choice, as the inevitable consequence of the freedoms that underpin the GNU/Linux world.
This is not compatible with consumerism because it requires a different currency (personal investment), the user must first choose how much time they are willing to invest and the level of choice they want to invest in. I can't see that changing any time soon for the 99% of other OS users that are not technically interested, to most people Linux looks like the complete opposite of a "comfortable" product that they can exchange some moneys for and expect a polished, consistent and unified product... and to be clear, it's not that Linux can't be that, it's that the world that it lives in (it's branding if you like) portrays the something very fragmented and confusing from the point of view of someone who is not interested in investing anything other than money. Even though "Ubuntu" or "Canonical" are about as close to a Linux like product that we can get, they are still considered Linux and part of that confusing world, and so that is still a disadvantage from a branding point of view.
You mean HSV isn't a thing? And of course it's a physical description of color, as much as "red" or "Hershey Squirts Brown" is.
I mean It's not "physically based", as in, it's a high level abstraction based on observation rather than a physically based description of light based upon a theory. I'm not saying it's invalid, just that it serves a different purpose, one that's unsuitable when you are making assertions about the physics of light.
The only objective physical description of "color" would be frequency or wavelength and perhaps intensity (due to how it affects how we perceive things).
I think "common physical description" would be more correct... Like I said it depends if you are talking about the resultant light or the specific interaction with an object, and seeing as we are talking about the colour of objects (unless you want to limit the scope of description to emitters only), an absorbance based description is equally objective... just not very common. Where more than aesthetics are concerned the absorbance properties of a material independent from a specific light source is a much more usefully accurate description than the resultant colour in an arbitrary environment. Now this has little relevance to anything here but you forced me to argue my point.
As another thought experiment, consider what happens when you project a magenta light onto a leaf... what colour will the leaf be? so what colour is the leaf?
Walter is talking about "hue" which is not a physical description of colour and has more relevance in an artistic domain. However even in the physical sense it can depend on what the "colour" is being attributed to... if you are talking about the light received by your sensor/receptors (alternately the object's or light source's appearance) then white is indeed a uniform mixture of the visible spectrum (or a mix of narrow bands red blue and green as a hack exploiting our eye's limited cone receptors i.e LED lighting), this is obviously what people almost always mean.
On the other hand, If you are talking about the actual object that diffused/reflected the light then it could be valid to talk about the opposite: For an object that appears to be ideally white, consider the fact that it actually absorbs no colour, and therefor the properties of the material might be considered "colourless"... and vice versa for an object that appears to be ideally black. This of course is the same for arbitrary colours: as the most common example, plants chlorophyll are green because they absorb mostly reds and blues, in that sense chlorophyll might be considered to be magenta.
It is not an "artificial intelligence", it is a tool built to analyse text, trained on a mass of text written by biased humans. Now if it had something resembling a conscience or critical thinking it might have a chance at identifying and balancing prejudice to defend it's "sentiment" weighting, but right now it's a "dumb" (in the AI sense) tool... So if it's biased against "Jews" and "gays", all it tells us is on average the humans who wrote the training data are biased against "gays" and "Jews".
I think we are talking about completely different aspects, GUI design is not uniquely part of "having linux on a phone", sure it's important to consumers, but we are talking about running arbitrary linux distros, not another "phone OS" attempt to compete with the likes of android.
A few companies have put a huge amount of effort into making GNU/Linux usable on a smart phone and have failed spectacularly
Those companies were working at the problem from the hardest possible angle... if you are doing software only then you have to reverse engineer all the device drivers. If you ARE the hardware vendor on the other hand you have significantly more power over manipulating this effort (albeit at other cost).
Samsung have opted for the most economical option possible here by actually sidestepping that whole hardware support issue, but it's a pretty big compromise (kernel level virtualisation)... By using the same kernel that comes on the phone the device driver work comes free and they retain control over the primary system running on their hardware (yes I said their hardware), that last part is probably more important to them than you might realise.
What I and I imagine most OSS people want is for phone manufacturers to make their hardware more OSS friendly by helping people write drivers rather than letting us mostly scurrying around in the dark. We want freedom to port whatever the we want to our hardware (that's when it starts along the road towards become OUR hardware). We have just about gotten used to this on notebooks (albeit with a number of irritating flaky reverse engineered drivers for certain chipsets that are best avoided), but that has taken a long time. Most phone companies don't have the incentive to help or change here because many of the various chipsets integrated into that monolithic slab of silicone in the middle of it all are closed source which tend to come with closed source binary blob drivers. To even start to care, they would have to be very selective when building their hardware or make less economical deals to free up certain parts... This is exactly what purism does (I'ts only economically viable for them right now because it's their unique selling point), like them or not, they are the closest you will get to having a truly free choice of open source operating system on a phone unless you build one yourself.
I live in the UK, any mobile phone use (including talking) while driving has been outright banned here for a number of years now. Never the less you occasionally see someone on the phone, and even worse using the screen - people using screens is always apparent from the outside by fact that their driving is clearly distracted, they often wander all over the road, fail to notice other drivers, traffic lights, pedestrians, given way signs etc etc.
I've had people almost collide with me head on from wandering onto the wrong side of the road (head starring down), people go through red lights in front of me (head staring down), go through zebra crossings while people are crossing (head staring down), forget to use the hand brake at traffic lights and roll forwards through lights without noticing while everyone around them is violently beepeing them (head staring down).
Laws do not prevent stupidity. People don't see how dangerous it is to attempt to use a computer screen a drive at the same time, they are fundamentally incompatible. If laws don't stop it, then it needs to be built into the tech.
Ya, I've been to China, the rate they make changes when an issue like pollution plagues their cities is inspiring, some provinces are all electric scooters and all electric taxies already. I know a lot of it is due to government heavily intervening, but the thing is that when a change is forced fast then it become economical more quickly due to scale, it's one of the few positive aspects of such a type of government.
It's the internet gremlins! They a word and then poop them out in some other random part of the eat sentence. Gremlins I tells ya!
Sounds people are still living in the cold war.
Oh suck... this is what happens when I dont read the quote, sorry. I read your response from the other side.
You are aware, of course, that the success and convenience of Linux package repositories was both the inspiration and proof of concept that caused app stores to exist, right? On an OS built by developers for developers, "go make your own apps" actually works.
All closed source commercially controlled software takes queues from open source software, some even just take the software verbatim... that doesn't mean it retains the open and non-commercially controlled aspect of it. The whole point of this phone is not "another phone OS" or "another app store" it's about choice and freedom, if you don't give a crap about that stuff and want maximum choice of utility at this very moment in time at any cost, then this phone is not for you.
He must have meant 'wifi'
Ahh, now I can empathise.
Seriously. Most of us have cores sitting idle. Instead of being abused / tracked / annoyed / occasionally infected by advertising, why not let sites do a small amount of mining while we visit?
You're not paying in cores, your paying in watts, usually a directly quantifiable cost to the user. Alternatively you are also paying in battery life for mobile devices.
I don't mean to be alarmist but this sounds like another one to add to the list of warming runaway effects, or is this supposed to be a more frequent and normal occurrence?
And for those of us who prefer atomic units it's...
An area of about 32.7 Nonillion (32.7e30) rBohr square, or about 326 Octillion (326e27) cesium atoms in a 2d latice.
because he was unhappy with this wife
Damn
We don't need another "phone OS"... instead we need the hardware to mature to make porting existing OS to it feasible, there are plenty of OS out there already, the phone functionality is then mostly down to user level apps and touch UI (not saying that there isn't a lot of work that goes into that of course). The closest we are going to get to this in the immediate future is https://puri.sm/shop/librem-5/
The way I see it, smart phones are currently in the 1980's stage of personal computers, Amigas', Ataris', Acorns', BBCs', Amstrads' etc, sometimes they use the same CPU architecture, but there is little similarity in terms of a compatible hardware platform and all current consumer hardware vendors do not provide open source drivers anyway.
I recall that while I enjoyed working in an open room, I would often stop thinking and just stare at my screen, waiting for a nearby conversation to conclude. When I had to think deeply, I found that I could not - and so I would go home, do the deep thinking
omg this! I enjoy the company of my colleagues, but the downside is that sometimes you have to wait for the "end of the working day" or WFH to get serious work done... headphones can work for me sometimes if I am driven enough and clear about what I am doing, but when as you say "deep thought" is needed, then it must be in a quiet environment. But I find this to be a huge dilemma for software development, because coding is only one part of it, sure it's the most important, but communication is necessary, and huge meetings are a waste of time and continuous interruptions are a waste of brain power... the solution seems to be to find a natural break in between coding to discuss things with managers, designers and others who happen to be in the "disturb me" mode. maybe if some perfectly noise cancelling headphones for silence came with open plan offices it would all work out...
...But somehow I'm still not distracted, probably because I usually have mobile data turned off and no audible or tactile notifications for messages. Therefore I mostly do not get messages all the day and when I do, I don't notice until I'm deciding to look. Try it, it's great to have control over your life.
Yes, It seems like this is key (controlling the flow of information coming in), even though I don't have a smart phone I do get fed up with text messages sometimes and i'm not exactly a socialite. Often when I get home I turn it off or leave it in another room, in a sort of "collection" mode, that way it's more like me in control of it's attention rather than it in control of my attention, I know it's silly to describe a phone as if it's animate, but it illustrates the point.
The arrival of a new email, maybe?
My boss beats me at this!! He had tens of thousands of unread emails, so doesn't notice when a new one comes in. I keep it at 0 and when the thunderbird icon shows a little red number, I have to click it to make it go away, or else.
(Or else what? Fuck if I know. Don't ask me to explain that; ask a psychiatrist.)
Yeah I can see this one, I think maybe not having a smart phone has allowed me to escape this, also even on the desktop, I ether keep it in my i3 scratchpad - out of sight, or close it all together if I need some high quality uninterrupted coding time.
That reminds me of another actually, slack - I love and hate that thing, I hate it's huge size and It now absolutely must be close when i'm trying to get work done, other times it's indispensable when fast communication is needed between colleagues. Just gotta remember it's always an option to kill the thing, even email - i know that sounds crazy for some people, especially hard if you are a boss or manager.