Good targeted ads aren't that bad. I get information on products that interest me. Such as the recent slew of slashdot e-learning offerings. I actually bought one. Very nice. As for the standard mass-marketing rubbish: I hate it. It's the web and they're tracking me front, left and center (when I'm not using ghostery that is) - they should be able to target ads at me even with the big news sites.
of the most efficient clean energy production we're aware of.
Wrong. Sorry pal, nuclear fission is *not* efficient. It may be effective, but not efficient. Mixing up those two on this matter is a recipe for disaster. Fukushima style, if you catch my drift.
If you factor out cross-funding of fission reactors with huge gobs of taxpayers money and factor in insurance for running the reactors including the timespan in which nuclear fission waste is dangerous and factor in human fuckups and their resulting disasters - which *do* happen btw. - nuclear fission turns in to a techno-romantics pipe-dream or, more precisely, an economists nightmare. No matter how new or old the reactors are.
If people would simply do the math this silly discussion could finally end and we could move on to doing useful things again.
At the current state of our knowlege and tech, nuclear fission does not work as a feasible energy resource. That's a simple fact. It's only still around due to billions and billions of dollars, deutschmarks, euros, whatnot being pumped into it since the 70ies oil crisis.
We would be best of if we'd decommion that shit inmediately, globally, totally and finally. Germany - one of the most high-tech countries in the world, is doing it right now. It's only a matter of time that the rest will follow. I only hope it happens in an orderly matter and before we totally lose control of the waste problem or of some reactor near the place I live.
It is believed that modern society in the West developed by the upper-middle and upper classes' excess kids effectively outbreeding the lower classes over hundreds of years, resulting in gains in health, IQ and longer time preferences. That's a fusion of nature and nurture reinforcing one another....
Interesting, but I'm not buying that at face value.
First of all, it's the working/lower class that has the most children throughout most of human history. Only a lot died early, while others developed pathogen resistance which led to the ancient population of the americas dying out (google "Guns, Germs and Steel").
Second of all, there is the effect called "Wohlstandsverwahrlosung" in German which roughly translates to "Neglect/deterioration by wealth". In short it describes the phenomenon that wealth does not automatically mean better education or better childhood - it also can mean the opposite. A rich kid might be good off because he went to a high-profile school and has a high rank in current society, but a poor kid might have had kind parents and self-taught skills that the rich kid totally lacks. A rich kid can also experience neglect at the same rate as a poor kid. Under circumstances even more so, if the parents rather by the kid a new toy that dealing with it.
Another point against your case: History is filled with geniuses that lived as bums, didn't get a girl (or themselves were a girl and thus rarely got acknowleged at all) or even children and, once they died, are recognised as ultimate geniuses in their field. Van Gogh, by just about all measures, was a miserable whiny and stuborn bum in his lifetime. Today he's one of the greatest painters that ever existed. He did not get the chance to have children. Leonardo Da Vinci is somebody simular, all though he was somewhat respected.
Likewise I'm sure there's a notable amount of really intelligent people around who have no interest in taking part in society. Since they're intelligent, they can live like a king while generally regarded as slackers or dropouts. Those types used to be called "Stoics" in ancient Greece (from "Stoa" - "Porch" as in "Sitting on the porch all day and discussing life"). Today they're called "the new rich" or "digital nomads" or "bohemians". Example: I work part-time. Why? Because I'm smart enough to make a living with that amount of work. The rest of the day I spend lying around, reading books, having endless philosophical discussions with friends, cooking, pondering my digital-nomad ambitions, fiddling with FOSS, doing Yoga, dancing Tango and occasionally boneing a hot cutie I picked up at one of the two latter activities:-) . A near perfect life, if you ask me.... I guess you could count me in on the Stoic department.
Likewise again, the is a solid amount of notably dumb people and dimwits with wealth and "upperclass" rank wandering about, simply because they don't think to hard and just do and/or deliver what's in demand. Or aren't smart enough to exit the hamster-wheel.
Bottom line: While your conclusion is worth considering, I don't think it's the only valid one, as it has quite a few holes in it.
They actually had a settings window you *coudln't* resize??? WTF? I didn't understand all the hype & rage in the last 15 years but not having your settings window (or *any* window for that matter) resizable is abysmally retarded. I've been making fun of Windows for this shit for the last 20 years. What harebrain had the briliiant idea to make a window in Gnome non-resizable?... This is really unbelievable.
I'd be ashamed to brag about a window now being resizable again.
If the person suffering is a man, deride and ridicule them. Men with mental illnesses are CREEPY and DANGEROUS. Report them to the police!
If the person suffering is a woman, be supportive even if they are displaying anti-social behavior. Women are BRAVE and VICTIMS. Give them money!
Woa, somebody is sexually frustrated.
Dude, get laid!
Hint: Wether a man approaching a woman is seen as creepy, awkward, retarded, repulsive, sexy, kind, forthcoming or masculine depends on relatively trivial technical parameters. Such as: How well is he kempt? How aggressive is he doing the approach? In what mood is the women? How is her current self-esteem level? How is his current self-esteem level? How much does he convey emotional independance of the/any womans affection? In what setting and under what circumstances does the man approach the woman? etc.
GNU/Linux: Let it go. We all know what GNU has done for FOSS, but your Branding sucks.
FS vs. OS: Seriously, let it go. Keep on fighting, but stop the infighting.
Your branding and marketing sucks big time, across the board. Get some professionals and listen to them.
FOSS Projects: E-Mail needs a replacement. Start building one. Encryption and anonymity as core of the specs. Build Branding, marketing, professional UX and proper Clients for all Plattforms. Yes, including Apple. Lets get going with this overdue problem.
We need a feasible distributed Facebook Killer. Diaspora is Meh, with shitty branding and UX and others are even worse.
Those two endeavors would have a huge positive impact.
Piracy getting harder? That's not a problem. Videogame abundance and the mass-move towards indie-development makes pirating obsolete anyway.
I get all my Games for 10 Euros or less out of the bargain bin. The occasional totally DRM-free 15 Euro download for Shadowrun Hong Kong (Kickstarter Project / Indie Game) adds to that. I'm OK giving 15 Euros for a very neat DRM-free game to an indie studio. It's still dirt-cheap.
Currently I'm playing Deus Ex:Human Revolution for XBox 360. Cost me 9.99 for an original mint copy of the directory cut special edition. Awesome game, pricepoint is a steal.
No one needs piracy or the triple-a publishers in a time where Gamedevs are going indie left, right and center (Hideo Kojima anyone?) and games drop hard off the 60 dollar benchmark as soon as they're published on non-current gen platforms or mobile or the novelty effect has worn off.
This is about Uber pissing all over labour and transport regulations and getting in serious trouble because of that.... And competing against dependable and solid public transport networks. Well, OK, scratch that... sort-of-dependable here in Düsseldorf. If only Rheinbahn could sync their online, offline and station timetables, that would be a huge plus... idiots.
There's also a cottage industry of ride-sharing going on in Germany for quite some time now (roughly a decade) with platforms such as mitfahrgelegenheit.de or blahblahcar.de covering some interesting parts of the market that Uber tries to target. In terms of ride-sharing Uber is actually quite late in the game by German standards.
As for transportation and labour laws: I took a taxi just this moring because I'd've been late with the tram & bike combo I usually use. The ride took approx. 16 minutes and costed 22 euros, tip included. The car was a Mercedes (almost all Taxis are Mercedes in Germany), the drive has to have a special training and "Personentransport" (it's what you think it is) drivers licence, he gets paid - not very big but he can live - and is tied in to healthcare and all the other stuff every citizen enjoys in Germany.
Bottom line: With public transport and the occasional luxurious taxi ride when time is short I see not that much of a market for Uber. And as for them getting legal flak for not following regulations - that's a thing I'm quite OK with.
Sorry pal, but what you want totally blows the lid off generic e-book specs. E-Books are a mess as it is - it's difficult enough doing such simple things as getting usable layouts across various readers and devices, despite the whole e-book thing being based on web-technologies. Or should I say 'because'? And it's things like that that should be easy with ebooks.
What you want to do is build an app for tablets and phlablets. There perhaps web technologies are the best way to go - you'd build your mulitmedia 'book' (streching the term, are we?) with web tech (HTML 5, CSS 3, JS, etc.) and then package and distribute it to android and ios using cordova or some other web-2-app process.
The other alternative would be to build native apps for both plattforms - but that seems like overkill.
You C++ and Python skills may be neat, but of no use to this project. You're biggest issue will be packaging a webapp for deployment via the app-store and getting it to build and run correctly using cordova or something like that. Perhaps a commercial IDE for this sort of thing (Titanium?... Don't know - ask the all-knowing landfill) would be of use to you and the extra few hundred bucks for such a thing a good investment.
Bottom line: Adjust your requirements to what ebooks actually can do - not what they claim to do (test this) - which would mean ditching about 99% of the interaction extravaganza you have in mind or build an app that resembles your multimedia experience, preferably with the web-tech method mentioned above. All else you had in mind won't fly. That's a fact.
Yes, a lot of people in tech show autistic behaviours. Some of it is because autism and tech go well together, another I'd say is that dealing with tech makes you somewhat autistic and difficult to bear in social situations, simply because most of your brainpower goes into tech and not into social interaction.
It's true: Good social interaction takes work and energy. Energy that is then missing solving hard tech problems. I'd say this is the case for most humans.
As for bad behaviour in FOSS towards women: It probably exists in places and perhaps prominently so, but I consider it habitual more than disorder related. Some of the notably juvenile remarks of Linux Torwalds come to mind as an example. He's married to a nice wife and has children. And while he's a tech expert he doesn't seem that inept in social things to me. I'd subscribe potentially misogynistic remarks simply to bad behaviour and lack of sensibility in the communication department I would also consider these problems to be largely a US thing and perhaps a phenomenon of certain 'old-school' FOSS communities.
I can hardly imagine such behaviour passing beyond a thread and more than once in more modern/hip FOSS communities such as WordPress or some other current-tech web-dev community. Gimp too has women working on the project for decades and the CCC has many women, some of them doing serious high-tech work and leading expert projects. I was at the local Duesseldorf CCC Chapter just the other day, watching Chaos Communication Congress Videolivefeeds of talks and there at least 3 women in a room of less than ten. No way would misgyny go by unnoticed or without inmediate repurcussions, and the CCC has been around for decades and is about as nerdy a community it gets.
No, the problem exists on a per-project basis. Some FOSS crews, including the kernel team, just have to learn not to write like idiots or use juvenile wording when expressing their opinions. That would solve about 95% of the issues causing all the bad press lately.
Conclusion: TFA goes overboard with this problem. No need to fall back into the silly autism or Linus' abysmally poor '"I'm from a disfunctional family" excuse. I know autistic people who are perfectly well behaved around women. Tell the crews to learn some manners, give Linus some flak for his wording and lets make this embarrasing episode a thing of the past ASAP.
I have a diploma in performing arts which I got in the 90ies. '99 was my fittest year, I had completely compensated the nerd posture problem including ditching my back pain and the need for medical insoles and felt great. I did a career switch into IT, with my posture getting worse again. In 2008 I picked up Tango dancing and improved my posture on the fast track again, with people close to me wondering how strait I stand.
I can attest: We are cousins of primates - how we stand and walk severely affects how we are percieved and how we can influence people around us. I see this effect in interaction with women, in the workplace and in everyday life. My social standing has notably improved since then and I attest this also to the way I stand, walk and with which posture I face people in public and private settings.
When the PC came out it was a toy. Litterally. 3 decades later its the only computer architecture worth talking about. Why? Its open and there is no single entity controlling it.
Linux was a toy back then. Now it owns everything in computing that isn't controlled by marketing. And it secretly owns those rebranded platforms like android, which is Linux in disguise.
LAMP is a toy. A toy everyone can use. Now it runs 70% of the web.
WordPress is a toy. A toy everyone can use and tinker with. It runs 25% of the web.
Technolog wise the web stack is a silly joke. But it just killed a technology dead that was something like 15-20 years ahead and orders of magnitude less shittier: Flash. Why? Proprietary and controlled by Adobe, a company interested in profit, not technology. If Adobe would've FOSSed Flash at the beginning of the touch revolution, it would've stood a chance. Now it's dead.
What's remaining of the web is technology that was hip 20 years ago - you know, that time when XML was better than anything else, because at least it was a standard.... Until HTML came along that is.
The Web is a toy. But it runs everywhere and my grandma can learn to write for it in 10 minutes. Its a slow-as-hell buggy meta-plattform - but its the only one we've got in a time where fragmentation - especially in the mobile space - is rampant.
My Website from 15 years ago will still render on todays browsers, even on mobile. On screens and platforms we didn't even dream of back then. Try that with a windows or mac app.
The Web is a toy that is laughed out of the room, especially here on slashdot. It's laughed out of the room like the PC was in the early 80ies.But , as a toy, it's open and everyone can tinker with it. That's why it will win.
So yes, native mobile apps will most probably become a specialty and web-tech-based apps the norm. Toys win.
100 Million installs, 8000 succsessful hacks with the method mentioned in TFA - I'd say thats a pretty good security record. Even if WP is a mess - its a mess thats works.
- 'Rename Login' Plugins - there are various. Use them. - Use random character strings for usernames, especially admin users. Rename the nicename and the displayname to the role using a db tool. - use a db prefix other than wp_ , I use random strings.
Do all this upon or directly after the WP installation. This very basic security stuff deters attacks like the one mentioned in TFA and mitigates most of its effects.
Poor kid in Germany: - Can't get the newest Nike AirMax Special Sneakers for 180 Euros a pop, must wear brandless and/or sturdy all-rounder shoes. ("BoooHoooo") - Has a cheap 130€ Huawei Phone vs. the 650€ iPhone its comrades have - can do the exact same things with said cheap phone. (again "BoooHooo") - Has to use said smartphone for 3 years instead of getting a new one every year. - Get's fresh clothing roughly twice a year, some of it second-hand or brandless and cheap, vs. the rich comrades that go binge shopping at H&M every two months. ("Booo..."... you get the picture) - Can't go on long-distance vacation in the mediteranian, has to spend hollydays at the dug-out lake or visiting grandma by buss. Will catch up on traveling as soon as schools over with a backpack and an international youth-hostel card. Will have at least as much fun as its rich comrades. - Lives on welfare that is frugal and not always pleasant but is enough to get by with its rich comrades able to do notable frivolous spending on all kinds of stuff (This can actually be pretty tough) - is entitled to relief from public library fees and simular things. - Has to go and work to extend its allowance vs. the rich comrades that just have to bug daddy for and extra 100€ (this actually sucks quite a bit - but it teaches a useful discipline and work-ethic)
- Get's the exact same education as its rich comrades. - Uses the exact same public transport as its rich comrades. - Can ride from Düsseldorf to Dortmund on its school PT ticket for free, just like its rich comrades. - Can go to college for free, just like everybody else
Poor kid in the US: Get's nothing? Lives on laughable wellfare? Has to pay through the nose to go to college? Can't go to college because it's prohibitively expensive?... I don't know - you tell me.
Long in the tooth?? WTF is that supposed to be? You mean mature, right?
And Thunderbird will most likely never be "discontinued". The moment Mozilla abandons it (simply splitting it off is way more likely) there will be an alternative project with the identical codebase up and running. Faster than you can say "Clone on GitHub".
When it comes to FOSS GUI Mailclients, Thunderbird is just about the best there is.
Stick with Thunderbird. Better yet, join the project and help them out. It doesn't have to be coding. Simply advocating, helping out in the forums or maintaining the project website can be help too.
WTF is this suposed to be??!? Some half-assed attempt to blurr the real issue? The new epitome of the Chewbacca defense? Seriously?
Who the fuck cares about some marginal greenhouse gas per calorie consumed ratio when meat 'production' is proven to have an abysmal eco-balance-sheet over all?? Water polution, megacorp-driven livestock food monoculture, pathogens, the meat-industry driven anti-biotics disaster, etc.
Water polution with meat production alone is actually close to that of a chemical plant.
The truth is, no matter how you spin it, the eco-balance of meat production is abysmal. Period.
Letuce is a filler - you don't eat it for calories. Calories per weight wise letuce is a serious underperformer. That's what potatoes or plant proteins are for. Or meat, if you prefer.
More and more people are cutting back their meat consumption and vegan is the new vegetarian. Because our planet is going to hell and meat and its production has becomedangerous for yourhealth.
Bottom line: This article is meat industry propaganda non-sense and beyond pointless for any reasonable debate on the real issues of mass-meat production.
In my opinion Firefox OS is the only thing that stands between us and the enternal rule of giant Megacorps in the mobile space. It get's way to little attention and not enough support. Jolla is struggling to survive and last their OS wasn't fully FOSS and the Ubuntu Phones are not approachable as a plattform. A FOSS web-centric mobile OS is a truely feasible thing. If I had the time and resources, I'd build a kickstarter prototype for a high-end Firefox OS phone.
systemd get's the credit for raising hell amoung the FOSS crowd. Couldn't say I particulalry like or hate it, but the attention it has gotten definitely make it the most talked about project.
Atom and Electron are both neat too.... Love that video-ad for Atom.:-)... I like Atom for the hippster vibe it brings to FOSS with UIs and usability that don't look or feel dated.... It does still have some issues though.:-) And, btw., unlike.Net Atom did start off as a true FOSS project done by GitHub. These folks put their money where their mouth is - unlike some other folks in the industry.
HHVM is an improvement for FB, because they have a small army maintaining their Pipeline and save 40% of their Servers using Hack and HHVM. For regulÃr Php szenarious hhvm is utterly pointless. I'll trust the zend engine for all that stuff, thank you.
Slashdot Mirror
What's this "US Infratstucture" Thing you keep talking about? :-)
SCNR
Because that would be truely creepy. And no way would I ever be getting into one of those cars.
Aren't they a permanent annoyance?
Good targeted ads aren't that bad. I get information on products that interest me. Such as the recent slew of slashdot e-learning offerings. I actually bought one. Very nice. As for the standard mass-marketing rubbish: I hate it. It's the web and they're tracking me front, left and center (when I'm not using ghostery that is) - they should be able to target ads at me even with the big news sites.
My 2 cents.
News? Daimler-Benz has been doing this since the 70ies - at least.
of the most efficient clean energy production we're aware of.
Wrong.
Sorry pal, nuclear fission is *not* efficient. It may be effective, but not efficient.
Mixing up those two on this matter is a recipe for disaster. Fukushima style, if you catch my drift.
If you factor out cross-funding of fission reactors with huge gobs of taxpayers money and factor in insurance for running the reactors including the timespan in which nuclear fission waste is dangerous and factor in human fuckups and their resulting disasters - which *do* happen btw. - nuclear fission turns in to a techno-romantics pipe-dream or, more precisely, an economists nightmare. No matter how new or old the reactors are.
If people would simply do the math this silly discussion could finally end and we could move on to doing useful things again.
At the current state of our knowlege and tech, nuclear fission does not work as a feasible energy resource. That's a simple fact.
It's only still around due to billions and billions of dollars, deutschmarks, euros, whatnot being pumped into it since the 70ies oil crisis.
We would be best of if we'd decommion that shit inmediately, globally, totally and finally. Germany - one of the most high-tech countries in the world, is doing it right now. It's only a matter of time that the rest will follow. I only hope it happens in an orderly matter and before we totally lose control of the waste problem or of some reactor near the place I live.
It is believed that modern society in the West developed by the upper-middle and upper classes' excess kids effectively outbreeding the lower classes over hundreds of years, resulting in gains in health, IQ and longer time preferences. That's a fusion of nature and nurture reinforcing one another. ...
Interesting, but I'm not buying that at face value.
First of all, it's the working/lower class that has the most children throughout most of human history. Only a lot died early, while others developed pathogen resistance which led to the ancient population of the americas dying out (google "Guns, Germs and Steel").
Second of all, there is the effect called "Wohlstandsverwahrlosung" in German which roughly translates to "Neglect/deterioration by wealth". In short it describes the phenomenon that wealth does not automatically mean better education or better childhood - it also can mean the opposite. A rich kid might be good off because he went to a high-profile school and has a high rank in current society, but a poor kid might have had kind parents and self-taught skills that the rich kid totally lacks. A rich kid can also experience neglect at the same rate as a poor kid. Under circumstances even more so, if the parents rather by the kid a new toy that dealing with it.
Another point against your case: History is filled with geniuses that lived as bums, didn't get a girl (or themselves were a girl and thus rarely got acknowleged at all) or even children and, once they died, are recognised as ultimate geniuses in their field. Van Gogh, by just about all measures, was a miserable whiny and stuborn bum in his lifetime. Today he's one of the greatest painters that ever existed. He did not get the chance to have children. Leonardo Da Vinci is somebody simular, all though he was somewhat respected.
Likewise I'm sure there's a notable amount of really intelligent people around who have no interest in taking part in society. Since they're intelligent, they can live like a king while generally regarded as slackers or dropouts. Those types used to be called "Stoics" in ancient Greece (from "Stoa" - "Porch" as in "Sitting on the porch all day and discussing life"). Today they're called "the new rich" or "digital nomads" or "bohemians". Example: I work part-time. Why? Because I'm smart enough to make a living with that amount of work. The rest of the day I spend lying around, reading books, having endless philosophical discussions with friends, cooking, pondering my digital-nomad ambitions, fiddling with FOSS, doing Yoga, dancing Tango and occasionally boneing a hot cutie I picked up at one of the two latter activities :-) . A near perfect life, if you ask me. ... I guess you could count me in on the Stoic department.
Likewise again, the is a solid amount of notably dumb people and dimwits with wealth and "upperclass" rank wandering about, simply because they don't think to hard and just do and/or deliver what's in demand. Or aren't smart enough to exit the hamster-wheel.
Bottom line: While your conclusion is worth considering, I don't think it's the only valid one, as it has quite a few holes in it.
They actually had a settings window you *coudln't* resize??? WTF? ... This is really unbelievable.
I didn't understand all the hype & rage in the last 15 years but not having your settings window (or *any* window for that matter) resizable is abysmally retarded. I've been making fun of Windows for this shit for the last 20 years. What harebrain had the briliiant idea to make a window in Gnome non-resizable?
I'd be ashamed to brag about a window now being resizable again.
Essay/Article
TED Talk: Nich Hanauer - The Pitchforks are coming for us.
If the person suffering is a man, deride and ridicule them. Men with mental illnesses are CREEPY and DANGEROUS. Report them to the police!
If the person suffering is a woman, be supportive even if they are displaying anti-social behavior. Women are BRAVE and VICTIMS. Give them money!
Woa, somebody is sexually frustrated.
Dude, get laid!
Hint: Wether a man approaching a woman is seen as creepy, awkward, retarded, repulsive, sexy, kind, forthcoming or masculine depends on relatively trivial technical parameters. Such as: How well is he kempt? How aggressive is he doing the approach? In what mood is the women? How is her current self-esteem level? How is his current self-esteem level? How much does he convey emotional independance of the/any womans affection? In what setting and under what circumstances does the man approach the woman? etc.
GNU/Linux: Let it go. We all know what GNU has done for FOSS, but your Branding sucks.
FS vs. OS: Seriously, let it go. Keep on fighting, but stop the infighting.
Your branding and marketing sucks big time, across the board. Get some professionals and listen to them.
FOSS Projects: E-Mail needs a replacement. Start building one. Encryption and anonymity as core of the specs. Build Branding, marketing, professional UX and proper Clients for all Plattforms. Yes, including Apple. Lets get going with this overdue problem.
We need a feasible distributed Facebook Killer. Diaspora is Meh, with shitty branding and UX and others are even worse.
Those two endeavors would have a huge positive impact.
Piracy getting harder? That's not a problem.
Videogame abundance and the mass-move towards indie-development makes pirating obsolete anyway.
I get all my Games for 10 Euros or less out of the bargain bin. The occasional totally DRM-free 15 Euro download for Shadowrun Hong Kong (Kickstarter Project / Indie Game) adds to that. I'm OK giving 15 Euros for a very neat DRM-free game to an indie studio. It's still dirt-cheap.
Currently I'm playing Deus Ex:Human Revolution for XBox 360. Cost me 9.99 for an original mint copy of the directory cut special edition. Awesome game, pricepoint is a steal.
No one needs piracy or the triple-a publishers in a time where Gamedevs are going indie left, right and center (Hideo Kojima anyone?) and games drop hard off the 60 dollar benchmark as soon as they're published on non-current gen platforms or mobile or the novelty effect has worn off.
This is about Uber pissing all over labour and transport regulations and getting in serious trouble because of that. ... ... sort-of-dependable here in Düsseldorf. ... idiots.
And competing against dependable and solid public transport networks.
Well, OK, scratch that
If only Rheinbahn could sync their online, offline and station timetables, that would be a huge plus
There's also a cottage industry of ride-sharing going on in Germany for quite some time now (roughly a decade) with platforms such as mitfahrgelegenheit.de or blahblahcar.de covering some interesting parts of the market that Uber tries to target. In terms of ride-sharing Uber is actually quite late in the game by German standards.
As for transportation and labour laws: I took a taxi just this moring because I'd've been late with the tram & bike combo I usually use. The ride took approx. 16 minutes and costed 22 euros, tip included. The car was a Mercedes (almost all Taxis are Mercedes in Germany), the drive has to have a special training and "Personentransport" (it's what you think it is) drivers licence, he gets paid - not very big but he can live - and is tied in to healthcare and all the other stuff every citizen enjoys in Germany.
Bottom line: With public transport and the occasional luxurious taxi ride when time is short I see not that much of a market for Uber. And as for them getting legal flak for not following regulations - that's a thing I'm quite OK with.
"... I'm really exited about the new Samsung. ... Not the phone, the refrigerator."
Watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
U.S. official turns on brain and acts like a first world authority -> Gets first world results.
Who would've thunk that?
Sorry pal, but what you want totally blows the lid off generic e-book specs.
E-Books are a mess as it is - it's difficult enough doing such simple things as getting usable layouts across various readers and devices, despite the whole e-book thing being based on web-technologies. Or should I say 'because'? And it's things like that that should be easy with ebooks.
What you want to do is build an app for tablets and phlablets. There perhaps web technologies are the best way to go - you'd build your mulitmedia 'book' (streching the term, are we?) with web tech (HTML 5, CSS 3, JS, etc.) and then package and distribute it to android and ios using cordova or some other web-2-app process.
The other alternative would be to build native apps for both plattforms - but that seems like overkill.
You C++ and Python skills may be neat, but of no use to this project. You're biggest issue will be packaging a webapp for deployment via the app-store and getting it to build and run correctly using cordova or something like that. Perhaps a commercial IDE for this sort of thing (Titanium? ... Don't know - ask the all-knowing landfill) would be of use to you and the extra few hundred bucks for such a thing a good investment.
Bottom line: Adjust your requirements to what ebooks actually can do - not what they claim to do (test this) - which would mean ditching about 99% of the interaction extravaganza you have in mind or build an app that resembles your multimedia experience, preferably with the web-tech method mentioned above. All else you had in mind won't fly. That's a fact.
Good luck with your project - sounds interesting.
I think this analysis is overinflated.
Yes, a lot of people in tech show autistic behaviours. Some of it is because autism and tech go well together, another I'd say is that dealing with tech makes you somewhat autistic and difficult to bear in social situations, simply because most of your brainpower goes into tech and not into social interaction.
It's true: Good social interaction takes work and energy. Energy that is then missing solving hard tech problems. I'd say this is the case for most humans.
As for bad behaviour in FOSS towards women:
It probably exists in places and perhaps prominently so, but I consider it habitual more than disorder related. Some of the notably juvenile remarks of Linux Torwalds come to mind as an example. He's married to a nice wife and has children. And while he's a tech expert he doesn't seem that inept in social things to me. I'd subscribe potentially misogynistic remarks simply to bad behaviour and lack of sensibility in the communication department I would also consider these problems to be largely a US thing and perhaps a phenomenon of certain 'old-school' FOSS communities.
I can hardly imagine such behaviour passing beyond a thread and more than once in more modern/hip FOSS communities such as WordPress or some other current-tech web-dev community. Gimp too has women working on the project for decades and the CCC has many women, some of them doing serious high-tech work and leading expert projects. I was at the local Duesseldorf CCC Chapter just the other day, watching Chaos Communication Congress Videolivefeeds of talks and there at least 3 women in a room of less than ten. No way would misgyny go by unnoticed or without inmediate repurcussions, and the CCC has been around for decades and is about as nerdy a community it gets.
No, the problem exists on a per-project basis.
Some FOSS crews, including the kernel team, just have to learn not to write like idiots or use juvenile wording when expressing their opinions. That would solve about 95% of the issues causing all the bad press lately.
Conclusion: TFA goes overboard with this problem. No need to fall back into the silly autism or Linus' abysmally poor '"I'm from a disfunctional family" excuse. I know autistic people who are perfectly well behaved around women. Tell the crews to learn some manners, give Linus some flak for his wording and lets make this embarrasing episode a thing of the past ASAP.
My 2 cents.
I have a diploma in performing arts which I got in the 90ies. '99 was my fittest year, I had completely compensated the nerd posture problem including ditching my back pain and the need for medical insoles and felt great. I did a career switch into IT, with my posture getting worse again. In 2008 I picked up Tango dancing and improved my posture on the fast track again, with people close to me wondering how strait I stand.
I can attest: We are cousins of primates - how we stand and walk severely affects how we are percieved and how we can influence people around us. I see this effect in interaction with women, in the workplace and in everyday life. My social standing has notably improved since then and I attest this also to the way I stand, walk and with which posture I face people in public and private settings.
My 2 cents.
I call it the first law of IT: Toys win.
When the PC came out it was a toy. Litterally.
3 decades later its the only computer architecture worth talking about.
Why? Its open and there is no single entity controlling it.
Linux was a toy back then. Now it owns everything in computing that isn't controlled by marketing.
And it secretly owns those rebranded platforms like android, which is Linux in disguise.
LAMP is a toy. A toy everyone can use. Now it runs 70% of the web.
WordPress is a toy. A toy everyone can use and tinker with. It runs 25% of the web.
Technolog wise the web stack is a silly joke. But it just killed a technology dead that was something like 15-20 years ahead and orders of magnitude less shittier: Flash. Why? Proprietary and controlled by Adobe, a company interested in profit, not technology. If Adobe would've FOSSed Flash at the beginning of the touch revolution, it would've stood a chance. Now it's dead.
What's remaining of the web is technology that was hip 20 years ago - you know, that time when XML was better than anything else, because at least it was a standard. ... Until HTML came along that is.
The Web is a toy. But it runs everywhere and my grandma can learn to write for it in 10 minutes. Its a slow-as-hell buggy meta-plattform - but its the only one we've got in a time where fragmentation - especially in the mobile space - is rampant.
My Website from 15 years ago will still render on todays browsers, even on mobile. On screens and platforms we didn't even dream of back then. Try that with a windows or mac app.
The Web is a toy that is laughed out of the room, especially here on slashdot. It's laughed out of the room like the PC was in the early 80ies.But
, as a toy, it's open and everyone can tinker with it. That's why it will win.
So yes, native mobile apps will most probably become a specialty and web-tech-based apps the norm.
Toys win.
Language?
100 Million installs, 8000 succsessful hacks with the method mentioned in TFA - I'd say thats a pretty good security record. Even if WP is a mess - its a mess thats works.
- 'Rename Login' Plugins - there are various. Use them.
- Use random character strings for usernames, especially admin users. Rename the nicename and the displayname to the role using a db tool.
- use a db prefix other than wp_ , I use random strings.
Do all this upon or directly after the WP installation. This very basic security stuff deters attacks like the one mentioned in TFA and mitigates most of its effects.
Poor kid in Germany: ..." ... you get the picture)
- Can't get the newest Nike AirMax Special Sneakers for 180 Euros a pop, must wear brandless and/or sturdy all-rounder shoes. ("BoooHoooo")
- Has a cheap 130€ Huawei Phone vs. the 650€ iPhone its comrades have - can do the exact same things with said cheap phone. (again "BoooHooo")
- Has to use said smartphone for 3 years instead of getting a new one every year.
- Get's fresh clothing roughly twice a year, some of it second-hand or brandless and cheap, vs. the rich comrades that go binge shopping at H&M every two months. ("Booo
- Can't go on long-distance vacation in the mediteranian, has to spend hollydays at the dug-out lake or visiting grandma by buss. Will catch up on traveling as soon as schools over with a backpack and an international youth-hostel card. Will have at least as much fun as its rich comrades.
- Lives on welfare that is frugal and not always pleasant but is enough to get by with its rich comrades able to do notable frivolous spending on all kinds of stuff (This can actually be pretty tough)
- is entitled to relief from public library fees and simular things.
- Has to go and work to extend its allowance vs. the rich comrades that just have to bug daddy for and extra 100€ (this actually sucks quite a bit - but it teaches a useful discipline and work-ethic)
- Get's the exact same education as its rich comrades.
- Uses the exact same public transport as its rich comrades.
- Can ride from Düsseldorf to Dortmund on its school PT ticket for free, just like its rich comrades.
- Can go to college for free, just like everybody else
Poor kid in the US: ... I don't know - you tell me.
Get's nothing? Lives on laughable wellfare? Has to pay through the nose to go to college? Can't go to college because it's prohibitively expensive?
Long in the tooth??
WTF is that supposed to be?
You mean mature, right?
And Thunderbird will most likely never be "discontinued". The moment Mozilla abandons it (simply splitting it off is way more likely) there will be an alternative project with the identical codebase up and running. Faster than you can say "Clone on GitHub".
When it comes to FOSS GUI Mailclients, Thunderbird is just about the best there is.
Stick with Thunderbird. Better yet, join the project and help them out. It doesn't have to be coding. Simply advocating, helping out in the forums or maintaining the project website can be help too.
WTF is this suposed to be??!? Some half-assed attempt to blurr the real issue? The new epitome of the Chewbacca defense? Seriously?
Who the fuck cares about some marginal greenhouse gas per calorie consumed ratio when meat 'production' is proven to have an abysmal eco-balance-sheet over all??
Water polution, megacorp-driven livestock food monoculture, pathogens, the meat-industry driven anti-biotics disaster, etc.
Water polution with meat production alone is actually close to that of a chemical plant.
The truth is, no matter how you spin it, the eco-balance of meat production is abysmal. Period.
Letuce is a filler - you don't eat it for calories. Calories per weight wise letuce is a serious underperformer.
That's what potatoes or plant proteins are for. Or meat, if you prefer.
More and more people are cutting back their meat consumption and vegan is the new vegetarian. Because our planet is going to hell and meat and its production has become dangerous for your health.
Bottom line:
This article is meat industry propaganda non-sense and beyond pointless for any reasonable debate on the real issues of mass-meat production.
In my opinion Firefox OS is the only thing that stands between us and the enternal rule of giant Megacorps in the mobile space. It get's way to little attention and not enough support. Jolla is struggling to survive and last their OS wasn't fully FOSS and the Ubuntu Phones are not approachable as a plattform. A FOSS web-centric mobile OS is a truely feasible thing. If I had the time and resources, I'd build a kickstarter prototype for a high-end Firefox OS phone.
systemd get's the credit for raising hell amoung the FOSS crowd. Couldn't say I particulalry like or hate it, but the attention it has gotten definitely make it the most talked about project.
Blender gets far to little credit.
Atom and Electron are both neat too. ... Love that video-ad for Atom. :-) ... I like Atom for the hippster vibe it brings to FOSS with UIs and usability that don't look or feel dated. ... It does still have some issues though. :-) And, btw., unlike .Net Atom did start off as a true FOSS project done by GitHub. These folks put their money where their mouth is - unlike some other folks in the industry.
HHVM is an improvement for FB, because they have a small army maintaining their Pipeline and save 40% of their Servers using Hack and HHVM. For regulÃr Php szenarious hhvm is utterly pointless. I'll trust the zend engine for all that stuff, thank you.