It's very nice for 2 in 1 devices - laptops that convert into tablets. I don't use the latter feature often, but when I do it's a godsend. The same thing is why I haven't switched my brand new laptop to GNU/Linux yet, despite the latter being an OS I massively prefer. None of the major desktops that support the desktop paradigm (that is GNOME 2, Cinnamon, and MATE - both GNOME 3 and Unity go some way to avoid being that) are particularly touch friendly, and the concept of the UI switching modes depending on environment seems to be foreign to FOSS developers right now.
Other than that, and the ability to run Ubuntu command line applications, it's not much better than 7 and has a lot of downsides, particularly the UI latency which in some areas, such as the Start menu, is ridiculous.
I'm sure some people who really think they are small government proponents will chime in here and claim they exist, but if you look at it on a macro level, so-called "small government proponents" usually just want laws they agree with, and not ones they oppose, and think there's something unusual about that position.
The reality here is that a State wants AirBnB type businesses to succeed and wants nothing to stand in their way. This isn't about empowering residents against supposedly totalitarian cities, it's about one entity deciding what the law should be, and making sure that law covers everyone it has power over.
Nobody is doing this because of a belief that city governments should or shouldn't have particular powers. They just don't want a city government to disagree with them.
Sure, because HOAs are famous for being democratic and accountable to the homeowners, rather than infamous for imposing draconian rules on members and being virtually completely unaccountable.
Oh, wait...
I'd like to see HOAs abolished, not given even more powers. Cities, at least, provide services and - given their role in planning - have every right to want to control what buildings function as hotels. HOAs have pretty much no responsibilities whatsoever, they have absolutely no need to regulate homes being used as hotels, they're just a way for neighbors to find ways to hurt one another. Fuck 'em. They shouldn't exist.
It isn't. This is seriously a problem with politics, not technology.
PulseAudio, initially, had some bugs, and as a result large numbers of GNU/Linux users don't trust it (or trust systemd: yes, PulseAudio is seriously 90% of the reason Slashdot is full of diatribes about systemd - it was written by the same person, therefore is tainted by so-called neckbeards.)
PA, today, works fine. systemd had minor, really pathetically minor, problems in the early days but it works great and is a huge improvement on init scripts. There's no good reason to be upset about distros supporting both, nor on major desktop applications having hard dependencies on these technologies.
Sound, on virtually every mainstream distro, works out of the box and has done for the best part of a decade. It's just politically a sizable portion of GNU/Linux so-called neckbeards disagree with the choices of software used to provide sound.
If this sounds silly, that's because it is. Something doesn't work? Don't blame you if you don't like it, or if you get pissed wasting hours trying to get it to work. But boycotting something ten years later, long after it's become a proven technology, because it once didn't work is absurd.
This is not a lawsuit, it's a criminal investigation. It's a criminal investigation because law enforcement believes that the perpetrator performed their act with the intention of causing a seizure to a specific victim.
What you're arguing is the equivalent of someone defending a violent felon beating a baby to death with a baseball bat by arguing somehow that this impedes your right to use baseball bats for anything at all, and that really it's the baby's fault for being weaker than everyone else.
No, you can't do that. You cannot perform an act knowing it'll cause serious physical harm to someone specific (except in self defense) no matter what technology you choose to use, and justifying it because, hey, the technology allows it, and evolution amirite, is repugnant.
Yeah, change normal office working hours from 7-8am to 4pm-4.30pm. Everyone goes to bed at 6pm-7pm (kids), 9pm-10pm everyone else. The TV watershed is reduced to 10p... no, 7pm, because it shouldn't be that late in the first place.
Quite why we can't do that, and have to change the clock instead, is a mystery to me! We could even continue to do it during sunnier parts of the year if there really does turn out, despite TFA, to be some reason for "daylight savings".
And what if I disagree to very concept on owning exclusive rights to any sort of media?
Then you have the freedom to treat media that was created only because people were paid to make it, by other people who expected people who consumed that media to pay them, as if it never existed.
It's the "I don't believe in IP, so I'm going to download {Insert Hollywood blockbuster here}" position that's unsustainable in practice. Without IP, you wouldn't have that blockbuster, nobody's just going to throw quarter of a billion dollars (or even $60M, for less blockbustery movies) unless they think viewers will pay for it. You can very much still oppose IP, but it has to be on the understanding that available media will change, and the vast majority of the stuff being copied without permission will cease to be made.
When I grew up, my teachers blamed the farmers for DST too. So imagine my surprise when I found out they're actually among the loudest opponents of DST - they generally oppose it because their work is synchronized to daylight hours, and DST means the entire world moves one hour out and expects deliveries, staffing, etc, an hour earlier for half the year.
That problem was already solved with Java,.NET, and LVM, albeit to varying degrees. The latter doesn't have much in the way of a cross platform API, and.NET is pretty bad when it comes to cross platform GUIs, but the latter is possible, if not beautiful.
I think WebAssembly could work well if it were seen as a replacement for Javascript, with the latter's increasingly severe memory and speed issues (it's just not scaling well any more, and browsers are creaking under the strain.) Unfortunately, contrary to TFH, that's not what it is - it doesn't currently have access to the DOM, for example.
So, in the end, it's another competitor to Java, and the question I have is why is that necessary? Is that what we want or do we want better web support for one of the existing bytecode platforms? Java, for all its flaws, is a known quantity, we know where the major flaws are (well, most of them) and we've fixed them (well, most of them.) This is starting again from scratch, and apparently isn't even managed code. I don't have high hopes for it.
There's no evidence Clinton was trying to avoid FoIA requests.
As for the last sentence, perhaps the Republicans shouldn't have run that orange lunatic in the first place. Are you seriously going to blame Democrats for that? That's absurd.
All Verizon and AT&T plans are scams. Other operators have tended to be more consistent. T-Mobile, for example, was zero rating all video feeds (from any source) that matched a particular profile they knew wouldn't clog the network. Now that they've rolled out LTE to enough of the country, and as a result have the capacity, they're zero-rating everything, even higher bandwidth video.
That strikes me as being consistent and reasonable.
Zero rating really isn't, by itself, a problem; what's a problem is what you're choosing to zero-rate. People were kinda in an uproar about T-Mobile doing it because they felt they should be - but actually T'Mo was using it entirely legitimately, making an application practical and possible that would otherwise be impossible to deliver without causing massive problems for everyone else.
(And the funny thing was that T-Mobile was following a precedent that Slashdotters had agreed with in the past, when virtually every ISP decided to block port 25, even though the latter was vastly more draconian and broke far more things than T-Mobile's throttling was doing.)
As long as people focus on the zero rating part, rather than discriminating by source, the debate ends up going off track. It's the discrimination that needs to be tackled, whether it's throttling a rival to make their service unusable, or allowing your customers to use services they buy from related companies for free while charging for services from rivals.
The "feature" that annoys me is the ten second delay before letting me find out I typed the wrong password. If you're really doing that to prevent some kind of automated keyboard trying every possible password, make the delay 1/10 of a second, and increase it to 10 after, say, the user has entered the wrong password 100 times.
Ordinary, normal, people accidentally type the wrong password from time to time. We don't do it a 100 times, but we sometimes do it three or four times in a row. It's already frustrating when we do this, don't raise our blood pressure even more!
If it were my job to choose the questions, I'd just speed along the process of making sites abandon them by making the choices:
What is your favorite breakfast meat? Who is your favorite movie music composer? In what century were your parents born? What drugs related TV series starring Bryan Cranston is your favorite?Cake or death?
* Responses must be at least eight characters in length
* Responses must contain at least one digit, one uppercase letter, one lowercase letter, and one of #, ?, !, $, or %.
* You must not reuse the same response that you have used in the last three posts.
I can't even begin to quantify the confusion of ideas needed to believe there's no problem with AT&T and Verizon Wireless forcing customers to pay for Netflix, Vudu, Hulu, Fandango/GO, Amazon Video, but zero-rating their own services, if the two companies are allowed to own a duopoly.
It's certainly available in the US - they do both Amazon Video and Amazon Music apps. The latter, unfortunately, doesn't provide access to Prime Music, but the former does do Prime Video and works pretty well. Just logged into the Channel Store and it's one of the highlighted apps, to confirm that it's available for new users.
Also the Roku remotes for the last few years have a dedicated Amazon Video button (together with Vudu, Netflix, and the integrated service whose name I forget. You don't expect me to get up and go to the living room to find out do you? Tsk.)
Roku has always been fairly neutral so it gets mostly decent support from Google and Amazon. I don't think Microsoft or Apple support it, but I think the latter is trying to use its service to sell AppleTVs (I'm not sure I've ever seen an Apple content player outside of the Apple ecosystem with the exception of iTunes for Windows) and Microsoft seems to be unsure what it's trying to do.
Well, that might be true, I don't know, I don't pirate, but I suspect a bigger part of it is that it's about actually being able to watch what you want. Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, and the other streaming services rarely actually have the content you're looking for. They're a lightyear away from being the "Watch anything you want, at any time" services they were originally intended to become. Netflix has given up. Prime was probably never meant to be that. Hulu is permanently beleaguered.
It's a little rich to complain about piracy "despite" legal alternatives when those legal alternatives aren't alternatives.
No. It can be implemented in hardware but it is not hardware
Yes, it can be in hardware. I'm wondering if you're one of the people (I was once too, there's no shame in it) that I'm discussing in the second half of my comment.
Codecs convert from one format to another. They can be hardware or software. They are not to be confused with the formats themselves.
Slashdot Mirror
That's what Big Utility wants you to think.
It's very nice for 2 in 1 devices - laptops that convert into tablets. I don't use the latter feature often, but when I do it's a godsend. The same thing is why I haven't switched my brand new laptop to GNU/Linux yet, despite the latter being an OS I massively prefer. None of the major desktops that support the desktop paradigm (that is GNOME 2, Cinnamon, and MATE - both GNOME 3 and Unity go some way to avoid being that) are particularly touch friendly, and the concept of the UI switching modes depending on environment seems to be foreign to FOSS developers right now.
Other than that, and the ability to run Ubuntu command line applications, it's not much better than 7 and has a lot of downsides, particularly the UI latency which in some areas, such as the Start menu, is ridiculous.
I don't think we've ever liked him, and we still don't.
I'm sure some people who really think they are small government proponents will chime in here and claim they exist, but if you look at it on a macro level, so-called "small government proponents" usually just want laws they agree with, and not ones they oppose, and think there's something unusual about that position.
The reality here is that a State wants AirBnB type businesses to succeed and wants nothing to stand in their way. This isn't about empowering residents against supposedly totalitarian cities, it's about one entity deciding what the law should be, and making sure that law covers everyone it has power over.
Nobody is doing this because of a belief that city governments should or shouldn't have particular powers. They just don't want a city government to disagree with them.
Sure, because HOAs are famous for being democratic and accountable to the homeowners, rather than infamous for imposing draconian rules on members and being virtually completely unaccountable.
Oh, wait...
I'd like to see HOAs abolished, not given even more powers. Cities, at least, provide services and - given their role in planning - have every right to want to control what buildings function as hotels. HOAs have pretty much no responsibilities whatsoever, they have absolutely no need to regulate homes being used as hotels, they're just a way for neighbors to find ways to hurt one another. Fuck 'em. They shouldn't exist.
Yeah, damn it Luxembourg, you should be paying as much as the US on foreign aid!
It isn't. This is seriously a problem with politics, not technology.
PulseAudio, initially, had some bugs, and as a result large numbers of GNU/Linux users don't trust it (or trust systemd: yes, PulseAudio is seriously 90% of the reason Slashdot is full of diatribes about systemd - it was written by the same person, therefore is tainted by so-called neckbeards.)
PA, today, works fine. systemd had minor, really pathetically minor, problems in the early days but it works great and is a huge improvement on init scripts. There's no good reason to be upset about distros supporting both, nor on major desktop applications having hard dependencies on these technologies.
Sound, on virtually every mainstream distro, works out of the box and has done for the best part of a decade. It's just politically a sizable portion of GNU/Linux so-called neckbeards disagree with the choices of software used to provide sound.
If this sounds silly, that's because it is. Something doesn't work? Don't blame you if you don't like it, or if you get pissed wasting hours trying to get it to work. But boycotting something ten years later, long after it's become a proven technology, because it once didn't work is absurd.
This is not a lawsuit, it's a criminal investigation. It's a criminal investigation because law enforcement believes that the perpetrator performed their act with the intention of causing a seizure to a specific victim.
What you're arguing is the equivalent of someone defending a violent felon beating a baby to death with a baseball bat by arguing somehow that this impedes your right to use baseball bats for anything at all, and that really it's the baby's fault for being weaker than everyone else.
No, you can't do that. You cannot perform an act knowing it'll cause serious physical harm to someone specific (except in self defense) no matter what technology you choose to use, and justifying it because, hey, the technology allows it, and evolution amirite, is repugnant.
Are you saying that on March 12th, the Sun suddenly rose 1 hour earlier than it did on March 11th?
Because that's not how it works. Really.
Yeah, change normal office working hours from 7-8am to 4pm-4.30pm. Everyone goes to bed at 6pm-7pm (kids), 9pm-10pm everyone else. The TV watershed is reduced to 10p... no, 7pm, because it shouldn't be that late in the first place.
Quite why we can't do that, and have to change the clock instead, is a mystery to me! We could even continue to do it during sunnier parts of the year if there really does turn out, despite TFA, to be some reason for "daylight savings".
Then you have the freedom to treat media that was created only because people were paid to make it, by other people who expected people who consumed that media to pay them, as if it never existed.
It's the "I don't believe in IP, so I'm going to download {Insert Hollywood blockbuster here}" position that's unsustainable in practice. Without IP, you wouldn't have that blockbuster, nobody's just going to throw quarter of a billion dollars (or even $60M, for less blockbustery movies) unless they think viewers will pay for it. You can very much still oppose IP, but it has to be on the understanding that available media will change, and the vast majority of the stuff being copied without permission will cease to be made.
"But it's so nice to go home after work and it's still light outside" - literally everyone I've expressed my disdain of DST in person to.
When I grew up, my teachers blamed the farmers for DST too. So imagine my surprise when I found out they're actually among the loudest opponents of DST - they generally oppose it because their work is synchronized to daylight hours, and DST means the entire world moves one hour out and expects deliveries, staffing, etc, an hour earlier for half the year.
That problem was already solved with Java, .NET, and LVM, albeit to varying degrees. The latter doesn't have much in the way of a cross platform API, and .NET is pretty bad when it comes to cross platform GUIs, but the latter is possible, if not beautiful.
I think WebAssembly could work well if it were seen as a replacement for Javascript, with the latter's increasingly severe memory and speed issues (it's just not scaling well any more, and browsers are creaking under the strain.) Unfortunately, contrary to TFH, that's not what it is - it doesn't currently have access to the DOM, for example.
So, in the end, it's another competitor to Java, and the question I have is why is that necessary? Is that what we want or do we want better web support for one of the existing bytecode platforms? Java, for all its flaws, is a known quantity, we know where the major flaws are (well, most of them) and we've fixed them (well, most of them.) This is starting again from scratch, and apparently isn't even managed code. I don't have high hopes for it.
There's no evidence Clinton was trying to avoid FoIA requests.
As for the last sentence, perhaps the Republicans shouldn't have run that orange lunatic in the first place. Are you seriously going to blame Democrats for that? That's absurd.
Do you think the answers to these particular questions will be interest to many (or any) advertisers?
All Verizon and AT&T plans are scams. Other operators have tended to be more consistent. T-Mobile, for example, was zero rating all video feeds (from any source) that matched a particular profile they knew wouldn't clog the network. Now that they've rolled out LTE to enough of the country, and as a result have the capacity, they're zero-rating everything, even higher bandwidth video.
That strikes me as being consistent and reasonable.
Zero rating really isn't, by itself, a problem; what's a problem is what you're choosing to zero-rate. People were kinda in an uproar about T-Mobile doing it because they felt they should be - but actually T'Mo was using it entirely legitimately, making an application practical and possible that would otherwise be impossible to deliver without causing massive problems for everyone else.
(And the funny thing was that T-Mobile was following a precedent that Slashdotters had agreed with in the past, when virtually every ISP decided to block port 25, even though the latter was vastly more draconian and broke far more things than T-Mobile's throttling was doing.)
As long as people focus on the zero rating part, rather than discriminating by source, the debate ends up going off track. It's the discrimination that needs to be tackled, whether it's throttling a rival to make their service unusable, or allowing your customers to use services they buy from related companies for free while charging for services from rivals.
The "feature" that annoys me is the ten second delay before letting me find out I typed the wrong password. If you're really doing that to prevent some kind of automated keyboard trying every possible password, make the delay 1/10 of a second, and increase it to 10 after, say, the user has entered the wrong password 100 times.
Ordinary, normal, people accidentally type the wrong password from time to time. We don't do it a 100 times, but we sometimes do it three or four times in a row. It's already frustrating when we do this, don't raise our blood pressure even more!
If it were my job to choose the questions, I'd just speed along the process of making sites abandon them by making the choices:
What is your favorite breakfast meat?
Who is your favorite movie music composer?
In what century were your parents born?
What drugs related TV series starring Bryan Cranston is your favorite? Cake or death?
Response not accepted.
* Responses must be at least eight characters in length
* Responses must contain at least one digit, one uppercase letter, one lowercase letter, and one of #, ?, !, $, or %.
* You must not reuse the same response that you have used in the last three posts.
Please enter a new response and try again.
I can't even begin to quantify the confusion of ideas needed to believe there's no problem with AT&T and Verizon Wireless forcing customers to pay for Netflix, Vudu, Hulu, Fandango/GO, Amazon Video, but zero-rating their own services, if the two companies are allowed to own a duopoly.
It's certainly available in the US - they do both Amazon Video and Amazon Music apps. The latter, unfortunately, doesn't provide access to Prime Music, but the former does do Prime Video and works pretty well. Just logged into the Channel Store and it's one of the highlighted apps, to confirm that it's available for new users.
Also the Roku remotes for the last few years have a dedicated Amazon Video button (together with Vudu, Netflix, and the integrated service whose name I forget. You don't expect me to get up and go to the living room to find out do you? Tsk.)
Roku has always been fairly neutral so it gets mostly decent support from Google and Amazon. I don't think Microsoft or Apple support it, but I think the latter is trying to use its service to sell AppleTVs (I'm not sure I've ever seen an Apple content player outside of the Apple ecosystem with the exception of iTunes for Windows) and Microsoft seems to be unsure what it's trying to do.
Well, that might be true, I don't know, I don't pirate, but I suspect a bigger part of it is that it's about actually being able to watch what you want. Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, and the other streaming services rarely actually have the content you're looking for. They're a lightyear away from being the "Watch anything you want, at any time" services they were originally intended to become. Netflix has given up. Prime was probably never meant to be that. Hulu is permanently beleaguered.
It's a little rich to complain about piracy "despite" legal alternatives when those legal alternatives aren't alternatives.
Yes, it can be in hardware. I'm wondering if you're one of the people (I was once too, there's no shame in it) that I'm discussing in the second half of my comment.
Codecs convert from one format to another. They can be hardware or software. They are not to be confused with the formats themselves.