Affinity Designer Affinity Photo Corel Draw The Fusion Video Suite (professional video postproduction software, hideously expensive) Kaleidoskope App (diff tool for macOS) Transmit (FTP Client for macOS) everything from Jetbrains (developer tools) Adobes entire Flash related line of software
Games: Everything related to the line of "Tribes" games... Old school arena games desperately needed! Eve Online WoW + Server StarCraft 1&2 GuildWars 1&2 + Server Dota 2 MineCra(ft/ck) Some line of open world games,... Probably Watchdogs 1&2 or the entire GTA line including servers.
... is that no one of the super-rich investors in silicon valley seems to be attacking this problem.
How difficult can it be to build stacks of micro-homes and micro-appartments and instantly make a fat ROI while doing so. Not that much I figure. Why isn't that happening? Modern homes built of refubished oversea-containers aren't that difficult to build and done right have an abundance of comfort.
Seriously, this is the next big startup idea. Is anybody working on this?
I *do* like hugging cute ladies (who wouldn't?), I actually do it for pastime in Tango dancing and just the other week had the chance to dance with one of the best and IMHO most beautiful tango dancers of the world who also happens to have a body that is a perfect 10 (no that's not me holding her... sadly:-) ). However, whilst Diana Cruz (the aforementioned tango dancer) does 3 hours of Yoga and Pilates each day and has professional dance training, dances a few hours of Tango each day and has the body and l33t dancing skillz to show for it, I do get to see, experience and hug a fair amount of more feminine rounded bodies and even some ladies who are pretty pudgy these days.
Long story short, I notice my interests shifting towards more "early last century" body ideals, or at least including them. I still think Twiggy looked (looks) great and I like myself a hot lady that is only muscles, bones and posture - quite a few of those in Tango, but I do also like well-rounded classic female bodies these days. Also quite a few of those in Tango. Duh. Yesterday I hung out with a lady who was on the brink of fat. Definitely overweight anyway. But she did have a little something going for her. A little excercise and work on her posture and she'd be a beautiful lady, even with the Cup-D breasts and some extra body-fat.
I expect perception to change further and eventually spill into hollywood aswell.
1.) He did _NOT_ criticize Googles diversity efforts per se. In fact, he applauded them. He did however express concerns that the way they are executes isn't effective and/or counter-productive to the cause and provided educated conclusions for this presumption.
2.) He did _NOT_ claim that women are biologically less suited for tech jobs. He used solid state-of-the-art scientific research results to find explanations why women might not be interested in taking tech jobs other that the standard arguably totally insuifficient "OGM! WTF! WHITE MALE OPPRESSION OF WOMEN!" narrative/explanation.
Please quit the lying/irresponsible spreading of falsehoods and inform yourself. Just be an educated slashdotter and question the official group-think narrative. Thank you.
You don't get it, right? I really like women. That's why I actively seek them out in social dancing and any other occasions. In fact, the lack of women in my field is why I consider leaving it, because having a paying job isn't enough to attract the types I like. However, most women I know of in coding are the awkward shut-in nerdy ones OF WHICH THERE ARE CONSIDERABLY LESS THAT MEN because [see post above].
Your saying if the brothers stopped fucking fat chicks, some of them would learn to code from boredom?
That's not what I said, but, yes, that's a plausible theory. There are nerd women who get into coding, but they are fewer. I just met one two days ago. No make up, large glasses, worn-out chucks, skinny, pale, large ThinkPad covered with stickers (probably running Linux), not very talkative. I would've liked to get to know her more. Female nerd. Rare breed. Nice. Chances are she's better at coding than me, perhaps in some PL I haven't gotten into yet.
I get Sundars arguments and points, but this move is very wrong imho. Instead of writing a text debunking this guys conclusions and maybe disciplining him for releasing memos not related to his work and causing PR trouble he fires him. This is a very wrong signal IMHO and will cause backlash in the long term. Google as a company could've stomached an uncomfortable debate and lead the way into the next step in the gender debate and equality for women. Instead Googles C-level chose the safe path. That's a shame and not helpful.
Instead of you know, all the female, queer, non white, or disenfranchised employees / potential employees and other people who are actually speaking up about the discrimination they face. Not some whining man baby who feels threatened now that others are getting their chance.
Oh, Jebus H.B. Christ, give me an effing break already, will ya?
There is *NOTHING* preventing any women or team of women getting together and building the next Apple. There is *NOTHING* at all preventing any lady from getting a refurbished ThinkPad for 250 bucks, sitting down at her desk and coding the foundation of the next Oracle. There is no obstacle what-so-freakin-ever preventing any girl or woman of picking up a book on C and joining the kernel team. Or Gnome. Or getting into C++ and joining KDE. You can become a project lead and no one will even know that you're a woman. No one freakin' cares. It's the F*CKING internet! Know one knows who you are.
Why isn't it happening? For the very same reason that musical innovation of the last 200 years in the US didn't come from well educated, musically trained and compareativly priviliged and free white women of the middle and upper class but from BLACK MALE SLAVES. Why? Well, I'll take a wild guess here: There is a strong incentive for men to prove their worth to society. BECAUSE THEY HAVE TO! A young woman has already proven her worth: She has a womb and tits that give milk. Men are disposable women are not. Men have to fight to prove their worth. They have to pull way more than their own weight to prove worthy as a mate. The criminal justice system is biased against them and in favour of women ALL AROUND THE WORLD throughout history until today. Be young, beautiful, female and an asshole and get away with it. Be a male asshole and you better be a strong one capable of defending the tribe, otherwise you're kicked out or into jail faster that you can think.
I got some freakin news for you, you dunce: Tech innovation is driven by unattractive MALE SOCIETY DROPOUTS! They have nothing else to do but code.
And now cry me a river about gender inequality in tech. NOBODY is stopping any women of joining.... Gawd how I'd love to have some neat sex and discuss the pros and cons of Rust vs. Go afterwards while lying in bed and chilling.... Won't happen, no matter how much we wish for it BECAUSE *NEWFLASH* on average WOMEN AREN'T ALL THAT INTERESTED IN CODING!
I've said it before. Elon Musk is one of those people who actually get shit done to the benefit of the entire humanity. If he needs another 5 billion, give it to him, it's in good hands. Look at Space X and what they are doing. Look at the solar roof thing. And look at a Tesla and sit down in one. This guy and his crew are single-handedly decomissioning the IC engine! What a feat.
He deserves all the billions he can lay his hands on, earned or subsidized makes no difference.
The text is a very detailed well written and very nuanced opinion-piece and excellent food for an educated debate on the issue. He may make wrong assumptions and may be unable to cite resources, but the essay itself is well rounded and has some excellent talking points. If you don't agree or see flaws in his chain of thought, write and talk about it. If arguments or conclusions of his are wrong, debunk them. But please stop this public shaming and hysteria, this has nothing to do anymore with equal rights or neccesary gender issue discussions.
I really wish we could talk without this all-out hatered and PR assasination of people, mostly by feminists, some of whom seem to think of feminism of some sort of religious ideology.
If gedit is the mess that is described above, then it should be redone ASAP our die. Plain and simple.
People, it's a freakin' simple text editor, not the next coming of Photoshop. Redoing it in pure Vala should be a walk in the park for your type a gnome dev. Besides scintilla there has to be some default text widget on top which gedit is built or can be rebuilt in 2 weeks flat.
And Jesus, screw python. I love python, it's my favorite PL, but what douche had the brilliant idea to build a freakin'text editor with Python? Seriously? And screw macOS compatibility. They have their own editors. Literally no one uses gedit on macOS, trust a long time Mac and Linux user on this one.
If Vala and Gnome Builder were useable, I'd might even step up for the task. Sadly, even native IDEs on Gnome are a large type PITA. Anjura and Gnome Builder have fallen flat on their noses with me time and time again. Sad but true.
To me there is no doubt that the "age of cyperpunk", as I like to call it, is upon us and one of the most notable and heavy impacts it has is on society and the way modern humans can (not) function socialy. The most notable thing to me is to see a stark increase in people (surprisingly girls/women too) that are more nerdy than me. Not neccessarily in what they are interested in (I was into science fiction, fantasy, pen & paper roleplaying and your type A 80ies computer kid) but in their somewhat clumsy way in which they socially interact and in their shortcomings of experience in dealing with certain social situations.
I'm a *very* late bloomer in that regard but a diploma in and a talent for performing arts, raising a daughter, ~10 years of lots of social dancing, starting a psychoanalysis and a few other stretches of systematic work have brought a mid-40ies guy like me finally up to the point where I can say that I can meet a 25 year old woman and feel comfortable and at eye-level with her. I just had this experience in a 7-week romance with a lady I met earlyer this year. She had an ususal background aswell and had come to terms with her quirks which did help the experience. Likewise I see imaturities in others instantly, recognising myself in them and inmediately putting any problems in social interaction with that person into a level-headed perspective. An amazing experience that probably is some sort of wisdom that comes with age.
Modern times and technology have brought the age of cyberpunk upon us and one of it's most impactful effects is a full tilt of cultural borders from the vertical to the horizontal. Cities around the world look more and more the same due to globalisation and a melange of evergrowing sprawls and the allways-online culture have brought upon us what I would call an ongoing and more or less complete disintegration of society and social life as we know it. I just (finally) installed Tinder yesterday and am testing if it can remedy my loneliness a little (very meh results so far). Just think about that app and all that comes with it for a moment and what this says about society and where we are headed. Note I'm an old school geek, so I hate FarceBook & WhatsCrap with a passion, rather using IRC, Usenet and forums like/. .
A complete change is happening to which even todays abrahamic revelation cults ("religions") as some people still pratice them don't really have an answer either. The countermovement to what is happening is/will be what we all know already from reading Gibson and Stephenson: Newly formed tribal communities, orthogonal to the 'society' around them, and "quasi national entities", minimalist subcultures with their own rituals and the encounter between people turning into an emphasised religious liturgy with once again a victorian-style strict set of rules of engagement.... People paying other people to feel their touch (look at Japan people - the future of things to come) and a permanent media-driven attack on the self, our identity and humanity. Not just by smartphones, but by everything.
I've been seeing this happening ever since my teens. What bothers me the most is that now that I have come to terms with these changes I see people all around me struggling with the same problems only at a different stage because they arrived in this so much later than the nerds like us. This is perhaps something we nerds will observe more of in the future - that we, believe it or not, are actually well equiped to teach a new generation on how to punch trough the veil of tech towards other people because we ourselves were the first ones that had to fight this battle.
I tell younger ones I don't like to use Facebook because I consider it a global mental illness rather than anything like a social network. I do get weird looks, but sometimes I sense they somehow get what I mean.
... errrm, wait, they are already. Ok, scratch that.
Basically we're all living in a bubble already, it's only getting bigger and thicker, and China only is ahead a little bit because they have huge amounts of expendable labour to do this sort of thing manually and are a little more on the "single party" side of things that, for instance, the US. But to think that the society of the US is any free'er than that of China (it may be for a privileged group but that's about it) is almost absurd. Same goes for the bubbling void or reality that is the intarweb and it's surroundings here in Europe. Someone at Google just has to turn a few knobs and 2 weeks in a new belief will spread throughout society. This isn't really news.
The interesting thing is that this just emphasiszes what we all know already: The internet isn't the real world and reality in society happens where people meet in RL and interact with one another. No amount of internent communication (manipulated or otherwise) will change that.
Orwell would've been amazed at the ingenuity of people and technology and the new ways of manipulating society he never thought of. He would admit that Huxley was closer to reality than him.
... on to wikileaks or something? Preferably including subscription confirmations to porn-sites and such? Thanks.... Jesus H.B. Crickey, how I hate these idiots.
... it looks increasingly like you guys have some day-by-day ever more batshit crazy shitshow of an adminstration going on over there. A pretty bizarre sight, if you ask me.
Hang in there guys, and please don't let this get out of hand too far, ok?... Just saying.... Good luck.
Apple is ahead. For instance, the current MacBook is a marvel of technology and the exact notebook I would want. I *will* take others a few years to catch up. However, I don't want to spend 1400 Euros on a device like that, so my 2011 MB Air will have to do for another few years - which I know it will relyably do.
Same goes for iPhones. Yeah, some things are ahead, but then again, my Moto G5 Plus has a pretty good camera and pretty good software for handling the images. I couldn't really say the the iPhone offers everything I would want from a phone camera and besides, my G5+ costs less than half as much as an equivalent iPhone when considering all the specs, so there is no incentive for me to leave the Android space. Since I usually know what I'm doing when I get a new device and know what to look for.
I think we can all agree that most of what we use today is historically grown and more than just a little messy/haphazard. I don't know if we need to rebuild the entire internet - TCP/IP seems to be doing fine AFAICT - but a larger portion of its key services need a redo IMHO.
- DNS needs a redo, that's for sure. Whom am I paying 2 Euros a month just for an entry anyway? Namecoin uses the blockchain for naming, and that is the way to go. A state-of-the-art DNS replacement would use that and some central registration authority where you can get a batch of tokens to register/claim the domains of your choosing and be done with it once and for all.
- E-Mail. Well, being just about the oldest service ever and still in existance. It shows at every corner. Replacement desperately needed. Default built-in hard crypto signing, enveloping, all on top of a new DNS (see above). That would make spam go away in an instant and finally make E-Mail private. Add in referer prohibition, proper threading, echo-pooling and standardized non-prorpietary attachments and rendering standards and add everything else that Usenet offers that might be useful and Facebook would finally be obsolete. Facebook only exists because E-Mail is shite and FB actually is a better version of E-Mail for most people. I can't really blame them.
- Web needs a redo. True thing. The Web has outgrown HTML roughly 20 years ago. HTML / CSS today are just about unmanagable and have grown into humongous monsters and still fall short in building a neat current-day Web experience. Well-built Flash apps from 1999 still outpace and outperform websites from today - this is a problem, as it causes significant bloat in the HTML/CSS/JS department with no real performance gains. To the contrary, sites continue to bloat and ever increase in demand with no real improvement for the user. Not good.
- Offline. We need a net that takes offline into account more. This is IMHO the internets biggest downfall alltogether. Fidonet and the likes had and still have the advantage here. It would have to be something on top of TCP/IP but below the application protocols and services, AFAICT. But it's desperately needed. Especially with todays webpages clocking in at above 2MB in size on average. Insane. This allways-online thing was crazy back then and it still is today. Bandwidth is scarce and nobody needs to be online all the time. Why don't we have services that take this into account? Ok, we have (had) Usenet and E-Mail, but Web? Not really. A web replacement should take offline into account right from the get-go.
Slashdot Mirror
Affinity Designer
Affinity Photo
Corel Draw
The Fusion Video Suite (professional video postproduction software, hideously expensive)
Kaleidoskope App (diff tool for macOS)
Transmit (FTP Client for macOS)
everything from Jetbrains (developer tools)
Adobes entire Flash related line of software
Games: ... Old school arena games desperately needed! ... Probably Watchdogs 1&2 or the entire GTA line including servers.
Everything related to the line of "Tribes" games
Eve Online
WoW + Server
StarCraft 1&2
GuildWars 1&2 + Server
Dota 2
MineCra(ft/ck)
Some line of open world games,
That's from the top of my head.
Obviously.
... is that no one of the super-rich investors in silicon valley seems to be attacking this problem.
How difficult can it be to build stacks of micro-homes and micro-appartments and instantly make a fat ROI while doing so. Not that much I figure. Why isn't that happening? Modern homes built of refubished oversea-containers aren't that difficult to build and done right have an abundance of comfort.
Seriously, this is the next big startup idea. Is anybody working on this?
Captain Obvious strikes again!
I do see beauty ideals changing though.
The anorectic cique that burst on to the stage with 60ies Supermodel Twiggy is fading a bit, as far as I can tell.
I *do* like hugging cute ladies (who wouldn't?), I actually do it for pastime in Tango dancing and just the other week had the chance to dance with one of the best and IMHO most beautiful tango dancers of the world who also happens to have a body that is a perfect 10 (no that's not me holding her ... sadly :-) ). However, whilst Diana Cruz (the aforementioned tango dancer) does 3 hours of Yoga and Pilates each day and has professional dance training, dances a few hours of Tango each day and has the body and l33t dancing skillz to show for it, I do get to see, experience and hug a fair amount of more feminine rounded bodies and even some ladies who are pretty pudgy these days.
Long story short, I notice my interests shifting towards more "early last century" body ideals, or at least including them. I still think Twiggy looked (looks) great and I like myself a hot lady that is only muscles, bones and posture - quite a few of those in Tango, but I do also like well-rounded classic female bodies these days. Also quite a few of those in Tango. Duh. Yesterday I hung out with a lady who was on the brink of fat. Definitely overweight anyway. But she did have a little something going for her. A little excercise and work on her posture and she'd be a beautiful lady, even with the Cup-D breasts and some extra body-fat.
I expect perception to change further and eventually spill into hollywood aswell.
My 2 cents.
Recent findings brought to you by the Captain Obvious Research Institute.
1.) He did _NOT_ criticize Googles diversity efforts per se. In fact, he applauded them. He did however express concerns that the way they are executes isn't effective and/or counter-productive to the cause and provided educated conclusions for this presumption.
2.) He did _NOT_ claim that women are biologically less suited for tech jobs. He used solid state-of-the-art scientific research results to find explanations why women might not be interested in taking tech jobs other that the standard arguably totally insuifficient "OGM! WTF! WHITE MALE OPPRESSION OF WOMEN!" narrative/explanation.
Please quit the lying/irresponsible spreading of falsehoods and inform yourself.
Just be an educated slashdotter and question the official group-think narrative. Thank you.
Here's to help you out:
Jordan Peterson interview with James Demore (citations linked in the description of the video)
The actual paper/memo that James Demore wrote
You're welcome.
EOM
He's not conservative.
You don't get it, right? I really like women. That's why I actively seek them out in social dancing and any other occasions. In fact, the lack of women in my field is why I consider leaving it, because having a paying job isn't enough to attract the types I like. However, most women I know of in coding are the awkward shut-in nerdy ones OF WHICH THERE ARE CONSIDERABLY LESS THAT MEN because [see post above].
... straight from the Captain Obvious Research Institute.
Your saying if the brothers stopped fucking fat chicks, some of them would learn to code from boredom?
That's not what I said, but, yes, that's a plausible theory. There are nerd women who get into coding, but they are fewer. I just met one two days ago. No make up, large glasses, worn-out chucks, skinny, pale, large ThinkPad covered with stickers (probably running Linux), not very talkative. I would've liked to get to know her more. Female nerd. Rare breed. Nice. Chances are she's better at coding than me, perhaps in some PL I haven't gotten into yet.
I get Sundars arguments and points, but this move is very wrong imho. Instead of writing a text debunking this guys conclusions and maybe disciplining him for releasing memos not related to his work and causing PR trouble he fires him. This is a very wrong signal IMHO and will cause backlash in the long term. Google as a company could've stomached an uncomfortable debate and lead the way into the next step in the gender debate and equality for women. Instead Googles C-level chose the safe path. That's a shame and not helpful.
Instead of you know, all the female, queer, non white, or disenfranchised employees / potential employees and other people who are actually speaking up about the discrimination they face. Not some whining man baby who feels threatened now that others are getting their chance.
Oh, Jebus H.B. Christ, give me an effing break already, will ya?
There is *NOTHING* preventing any women or team of women getting together and building the next Apple. There is *NOTHING* at all preventing any lady from getting a refurbished ThinkPad for 250 bucks, sitting down at her desk and coding the foundation of the next Oracle. There is no obstacle what-so-freakin-ever preventing any girl or woman of picking up a book on C and joining the kernel team. Or Gnome. Or getting into C++ and joining KDE. You can become a project lead and no one will even know that you're a woman. No one freakin' cares. It's the F*CKING internet! Know one knows who you are.
Why isn't it happening? For the very same reason that musical innovation of the last 200 years in the US didn't come from well educated, musically trained and compareativly priviliged and free white women of the middle and upper class but from BLACK MALE SLAVES. Why? Well, I'll take a wild guess here: There is a strong incentive for men to prove their worth to society. BECAUSE THEY HAVE TO! A young woman has already proven her worth: She has a womb and tits that give milk. Men are disposable women are not. Men have to fight to prove their worth. They have to pull way more than their own weight to prove worthy as a mate. The criminal justice system is biased against them and in favour of women ALL AROUND THE WORLD throughout history until today. Be young, beautiful, female and an asshole and get away with it. Be a male asshole and you better be a strong one capable of defending the tribe, otherwise you're kicked out or into jail faster that you can think.
I got some freakin news for you, you dunce: Tech innovation is driven by unattractive MALE SOCIETY DROPOUTS! They have nothing else to do but code.
And now cry me a river about gender inequality in tech. NOBODY is stopping any women of joining. ... Gawd how I'd love to have some neat sex and discuss the pros and cons of Rust vs. Go afterwards while lying in bed and chilling. ... Won't happen, no matter how much we wish for it BECAUSE *NEWFLASH* on average WOMEN AREN'T ALL THAT INTERESTED IN CODING!
Did you FINALLY get the message?
I've said it before. Elon Musk is one of those people who actually get shit done to the benefit of the entire humanity. If he needs another 5 billion, give it to him, it's in good hands. Look at Space X and what they are doing. Look at the solar roof thing. And look at a Tesla and sit down in one. This guy and his crew are single-handedly decomissioning the IC engine! What a feat.
He deserves all the billions he can lay his hands on, earned or subsidized makes no difference.
The text is a very detailed well written and very nuanced opinion-piece and excellent food for an educated debate on the issue. He may make wrong assumptions and may be unable to cite resources, but the essay itself is well rounded and has some excellent talking points. If you don't agree or see flaws in his chain of thought, write and talk about it. If arguments or conclusions of his are wrong, debunk them. But please stop this public shaming and hysteria, this has nothing to do anymore with equal rights or neccesary gender issue discussions.
I really wish we could talk without this all-out hatered and PR assasination of people, mostly by feminists, some of whom seem to think of feminism of some sort of religious ideology.
... assume 'yes'.
... by now my toenails are probably more worth than Venezuelan money. No surprise here to be honest.
If gedit is the mess that is described above, then it should be redone ASAP our die. Plain and simple.
People, it's a freakin' simple text editor, not the next coming of Photoshop. Redoing it in pure Vala should be a walk in the park for your type a gnome dev. Besides scintilla there has to be some default text widget on top which gedit is built or can be rebuilt in 2 weeks flat.
And Jesus, screw python. I love python, it's my favorite PL, but what douche had the brilliant idea to build a freakin'text editor with Python? Seriously?
And screw macOS compatibility. They have their own editors. Literally no one uses gedit on macOS, trust a long time Mac and Linux user on this one.
If Vala and Gnome Builder were useable, I'd might even step up for the task. Sadly, even native IDEs on Gnome are a large type PITA. Anjura and Gnome Builder have fallen flat on their noses with me time and time again. Sad but true.
My 2 eurocents.
To me there is no doubt that the "age of cyperpunk", as I like to call it, is upon us and one of the most notable and heavy impacts it has is on society and the way modern humans can (not) function socialy. The most notable thing to me is to see a stark increase in people (surprisingly girls/women too) that are more nerdy than me. Not neccessarily in what they are interested in (I was into science fiction, fantasy, pen & paper roleplaying and your type A 80ies computer kid) but in their somewhat clumsy way in which they socially interact and in their shortcomings of experience in dealing with certain social situations.
I'm a *very* late bloomer in that regard but a diploma in and a talent for performing arts, raising a daughter, ~10 years of lots of social dancing, starting a psychoanalysis and a few other stretches of systematic work have brought a mid-40ies guy like me finally up to the point where I can say that I can meet a 25 year old woman and feel comfortable and at eye-level with her. I just had this experience in a 7-week romance with a lady I met earlyer this year. She had an ususal background aswell and had come to terms with her quirks which did help the experience. Likewise I see imaturities in others instantly, recognising myself in them and inmediately putting any problems in social interaction with that person into a level-headed perspective. An amazing experience that probably is some sort of wisdom that comes with age.
Modern times and technology have brought the age of cyberpunk upon us and one of it's most impactful effects is a full tilt of cultural borders from the vertical to the horizontal. Cities around the world look more and more the same due to globalisation and a melange of evergrowing sprawls and the allways-online culture have brought upon us what I would call an ongoing and more or less complete disintegration of society and social life as we know it. I just (finally) installed Tinder yesterday and am testing if it can remedy my loneliness a little (very meh results so far). Just think about that app and all that comes with it for a moment and what this says about society and where we are headed. Note I'm an old school geek, so I hate FarceBook & WhatsCrap with a passion, rather using IRC, Usenet and forums like /. .
A complete change is happening to which even todays abrahamic revelation cults ("religions") as some people still pratice them don't really have an answer either. The countermovement to what is happening is/will be what we all know already from reading Gibson and Stephenson: Newly formed tribal communities, orthogonal to the 'society' around them, and "quasi national entities", minimalist subcultures with their own rituals and the encounter between people turning into an emphasised religious liturgy with once again a victorian-style strict set of rules of engagement. ... People paying other people to feel their touch (look at Japan people - the future of things to come) and a permanent media-driven attack on the self, our identity and humanity. Not just by smartphones, but by everything.
I've been seeing this happening ever since my teens. What bothers me the most is that now that I have come to terms with these changes I see people all around me struggling with the same problems only at a different stage because they arrived in this so much later than the nerds like us. This is perhaps something we nerds will observe more of in the future - that we, believe it or not, are actually well equiped to teach a new generation on how to punch trough the veil of tech towards other people because we ourselves were the first ones that had to fight this battle.
I tell younger ones I don't like to use Facebook because I consider it a global mental illness rather than anything like a social network. I do get weird looks, but sometimes I sense they somehow get what I mean.
My 2 eurocents.
... errrm, wait, they are already. Ok, scratch that.
Basically we're all living in a bubble already, it's only getting bigger and thicker, and China only is ahead a little bit because they have huge amounts of expendable labour to do this sort of thing manually and are a little more on the "single party" side of things that, for instance, the US. But to think that the society of the US is any free'er than that of China (it may be for a privileged group but that's about it) is almost absurd. Same goes for the bubbling void or reality that is the intarweb and it's surroundings here in Europe. Someone at Google just has to turn a few knobs and 2 weeks in a new belief will spread throughout society. This isn't really news.
The interesting thing is that this just emphasiszes what we all know already: The internet isn't the real world and reality in society happens where people meet in RL and interact with one another. No amount of internent communication (manipulated or otherwise) will change that.
Orwell would've been amazed at the ingenuity of people and technology and the new ways of manipulating society he never thought of. He would admit that Huxley was closer to reality than him.
... on to wikileaks or something? Preferably including subscription confirmations to porn-sites and such? Thanks. ... Jesus H.B. Crickey, how I hate these idiots.
... it looks increasingly like you guys have some day-by-day ever more batshit crazy shitshow of an adminstration going on over there. A pretty bizarre sight, if you ask me.
Hang in there guys, and please don't let this get out of hand too far, ok? ... Just saying. ... Good luck.
My 2 eurocents.
Apple is ahead. For instance, the current MacBook is a marvel of technology and the exact notebook I would want. I *will* take others a few years to catch up. However, I don't want to spend 1400 Euros on a device like that, so my 2011 MB Air will have to do for another few years - which I know it will relyably do.
Same goes for iPhones. Yeah, some things are ahead, but then again, my Moto G5 Plus has a pretty good camera and pretty good software for handling the images. I couldn't really say the the iPhone offers everything I would want from a phone camera and besides, my G5+ costs less than half as much as an equivalent iPhone when considering all the specs, so there is no incentive for me to leave the Android space. Since I usually know what I'm doing when I get a new device and know what to look for.
I think we can all agree that most of what we use today is historically grown and more than just a little messy/haphazard. I don't know if we need to rebuild the entire internet - TCP/IP seems to be doing fine AFAICT - but a larger portion of its key services need a redo IMHO.
- DNS needs a redo, that's for sure. Whom am I paying 2 Euros a month just for an entry anyway? Namecoin uses the blockchain for naming, and that is the way to go. A state-of-the-art DNS replacement would use that and some central registration authority where you can get a batch of tokens to register/claim the domains of your choosing and be done with it once and for all.
- E-Mail. Well, being just about the oldest service ever and still in existance. It shows at every corner. Replacement desperately needed. Default built-in hard crypto signing, enveloping, all on top of a new DNS (see above). That would make spam go away in an instant and finally make E-Mail private. Add in referer prohibition, proper threading, echo-pooling and standardized non-prorpietary attachments and rendering standards and add everything else that Usenet offers that might be useful and Facebook would finally be obsolete. Facebook only exists because E-Mail is shite and FB actually is a better version of E-Mail for most people. I can't really blame them.
- Web needs a redo. True thing. The Web has outgrown HTML roughly 20 years ago. HTML / CSS today are just about unmanagable and have grown into humongous monsters and still fall short in building a neat current-day Web experience. Well-built Flash apps from 1999 still outpace and outperform websites from today - this is a problem, as it causes significant bloat in the HTML/CSS/JS department with no real performance gains. To the contrary, sites continue to bloat and ever increase in demand with no real improvement for the user. Not good.
- Offline. We need a net that takes offline into account more. This is IMHO the internets biggest downfall alltogether. Fidonet and the likes had and still have the advantage here. It would have to be something on top of TCP/IP but below the application protocols and services, AFAICT. But it's desperately needed. Especially with todays webpages clocking in at above 2MB in size on average. Insane. This allways-online thing was crazy back then and it still is today. Bandwidth is scarce and nobody needs to be online all the time. Why don't we have services that take this into account? Ok, we have (had) Usenet and E-Mail, but Web? Not really. A web replacement should take offline into account right from the get-go.
My 2 eurocents.