Font integration? - Only since a few years back and only with awkward CSS that doesn't compile fonts and brings along licencing issues.
Relyable Layout behaviour? - Only with hacks and tricks and JS stunts. And not even then do we have the power of a usefull layout engine.... OK, we've got justify, which no one else offers.... I remember clearly Flash and the assh*les at Adobe screwing us over with in a fraudulent sale of a fake non-feature in Flash CS 5. In this small detail HTML actually is better than everything else that is out there, admitted.
Intelligent Image handling? - Meeh.
Asnchronous loading of content and further pages? - Yeah, we have Ajax and DOM manipulation which is, like I said, one large tacked on Hack. HTML was clearly not built with that in mind.
Audio? - Laughable. Yeah, it finally works, after 15+years. Sort of. Great. I am over-fucking-welmed.
Video intetration? - Not even today in 2015 are we seeing it as it should be. Instead the HTML Video idiots are wasting our time with DRM and other crap.
Just about all these things can be done better by orders of magnitude. And could have been done better for a long time, for instance with Flash.... And no, I'm not presenting Flash as the solution to this - I'm giving a living proof that it can be done significantly better, prorietary tech aside.
No referers. No script. Just plain doc data. Problem solved.
If you have client-side logic on by default, somene will use it to track you. It's that simple.
Another approach would be fresh private tabs for every session and perhaps spoofing of plattform data.
I use Gostery and don't care to much about super-cookies. I use multiple browsers for multiple personas and tasks, which mitigates the problem a little more.
I don't use facebook and stuff like that, but I'm pretty deep in Googles camp, with my Android devices and my various Google Accounts.... It's a trade-off. I might try to cut lose entirely sometime in the future.
No script, no referers. No google. Problem solved.
The problem is HTML. HTML is for documents, not the living application-like multimedia canvases we've all been using since 2000. Flash was pointing in the right direction, but it was proprietary and Adobe screwed it up.
Simply setting up a usefull canvas layout is pure torture in HTML, with tons of libraries, JS and CSS hacks, just to get the thing sort of running. Ginormous hacks such as Googles Polymer try to pry some sort of sanity from this plattform with a huge effort and enable modern age development, but the simple fact is, HTML is at least 15 years behind what Flash or similar approaches had to offer. And don't even get me started on building a usefull web-application with useful clientside logic without a bizar convoluted mess of tie-ins and callbacks.
Example: This multimedia website in Flash is 16 years old. That is sixteen years.... It's from freakin' 1999!!. It's parely possible to make such a thing with todays HTML, without becoming an all-out programming and browser expert and spending a forbidding amout of time getting it right.
HTML, CSS and client side logic - wether with JS or something else - need a massive redesign for modern day multimedia and multi-screen requirements. When that happens, performance will be sane again. I expect web components and web assembly to get us back on track a little, but that's gonna take at least another five years.
Bottom line: The web is a mess, and frickin' HTML and the ignorant smelly boring nerds that still push it as a cure-all are to blame.
Disclaimer: I'm a senior web-developer with focus on FOSS technologies.
Wind-power, a concept as old as ancient greece vs. ultra-volatile highly infrastructure dependant uranium powered nuclear fission that reqiures tons of stuff, material, equipment, regulation, controls and billionsof taxdollars just to get started.... And thats not even counting the wasteproblem yet.
I'm a techno-romantic as much as the next guy here, but the simple truth is: nuclear fission is a techno-romantics pipe-dream from the 60ies that didn't pan out in just about every way imagined. It's to expensive, to complicated, runs into serious problems way more often before reaching breask-even and has a serious deal-breaking waste-problem that no sane responsible person can dismiss. We ought to keep one or two reactors running for science and r&d purposes and shut down all the rest.
Germany is doing the only right thing in this regard. Kudos to Merkel - and I'd never thought I'd say that. And no, I did not vote for her.
... communication and wording are far from professional in the kernel team. Most core-devs would be dismissed on their style of interaction alone if applying to any serious professional elite position. Imagine applying for an astronauts programm with Linus style of talk for instance. He wouldn't stand a chance.
Of course, professionally, Linus is right just about 100% of the time and also can rightfully be super annoyed if some dimwit wastes his and everybody elses time, but the discourse in the kernel team is notably imature at a measurable pace. That includes Linus. Such, that it actually makes it into the news.
He'res an example, the first line a Linux quote from memory: "You're so dumb you couldn't find your mothers tit as a baby" vs. "This is a very very stupid idea and A,B and C are blatant beginners mistakes and no one on the mainline will even attempt to merge it. I suggest you look into your stuff more thouroughly before sending out pull requests and perhaps redo your review process. This is the second time and if this happens again I'll ask X to take your branch out of branch YZ. Your wasting my and everyone elses time. Stop that. - EOM"
See? The second line is about the most shaming rundown you can get as a professional or elite kernel dev. It's actually more harsh then the first.... But it is way more professional.
Bottom line: I can totally see why she left the kernel team.
Sound's to me like you're ready for virtualisation at a professional scale.
Why don't you just swap all your PC trinkets for one single extremely powerfull box and a single big fat screen and virtualize all the rest?
And with powerfull I'm talking 3+GHz Quad-Core i7, 32GB of RAM and a 1 TB SSD or something. And by big screen I'm talking extra wide, as in, seriously *extra* *wide*.
I'm using a pimped out Cirrus 7 Nimbus, which has those sort of performance specs and runs completely fanless.... And it's pretty small and not even that expensive.
Conclusion: Before you spend a large sum on a special KVM solution, you should definitely consider a professional VM setup on a single machine.... It's 2015 - you get supercomputers of the shelf, on a shoestring budget these days. It may be just a a few hundred dollars more and way more future safe.... All my KVMs from back in the day are collecting dust in the cellar.
... but I know enough about scales that I can find the notes and I also know that they are historically grown - much like the computer keyboard. I also can sing and recite some classic songs from Schubert and Loewe. I learned all this in school, in regular music class. I also learned poetry and what a jambus rythm is. These are all small but valuable cornerstone of my education.
Long story short: No one in his right mind expects everybody to be able to code a well-architected appserver or an asynchronous website that runs on all browsers or whatever. Or, hell no, how to deal with those bazillion quirks modern IT comes with.... That is the job of people who are grown up and earn their money with this sort of thing.
What people should learn in school is the difference between a variable and a value and a constant/literal. They should also have some basic concept of a digital network such as the internet and what a client and a server are and what their differences are and how these two relate to each other. CUAS and a few regular expressions or simply knowing that such things exist would be neat too. If they can write an if statement and roughly know how a function looks in some easy but useful PL such as Python - that would be something someone knows after having "accelerated IT" in school as a kid or something.
The big problem is that even professionals today don't know the CUAS, don't know how to use the clipboard or that a computer is there for automating stuff and that somewhere within their word processor there probably is some function for a more adanced search & replace. This is the problem we have to fix. If members of the bundestag are to dumb to handle computers and the entire site gets infected by malware and bots - that's an exact result of people not even learning the very basics of computing - something someone would learn in less than two hours in their initial lesson with a computer professional.
Bottom line: Proper computer classes in school won't magically transform society into an utopia, but teach children the very basics of how to handle computers and smartphones and tablets and "cloud-services" correctly. And that would be a very big plus.
Managers don't need to now tech beyond basic principal levels. They just should do their job properly, which actually does include just freaking come to me when there's a techical issue at hand or a deal with technical details to sign or the technical part of a project that needs evaluating. And all that has nothing to do wether a maneging position is techie or not, it has to do wether the manager is a good one or a bad one. If management sells something to the customer that tech can't deliver within the set parameters and managers havn't ask tech before, then they've screwed up and aren't worth the salary they're raking in.
I don't care wether my boss can do PHP, MySQL or Linux CLI. I can show him some good parts whenever those may be useful, but heaven forbid that he wastes his time with PHP LDAP or some strange MySQL bug or something else. That's my frickin job! I'm the one doing those extra hours to make it work - he's supposed to put in those extra hours to get a hold of new customers and sell them gigs... and *then* ask me how the margins are and what hours we have to expect to put into the project.
To be honest, I'd trust a car from Apple more than I'd trust one from GM.
Apple knows how to do nigh impossible feats in product development, I'd trust they'd do a car right aswell.
However, I'm still wondering where these Apple car rumours are coming from. It seems way out there, imho.... Why would they build a car? A professional camera or something is far more likely imho.
One of the few non-mac laptops with simular resellability are the ThinkPads. A refurbished one will come way less than half the original price and still have all the quality. Get a high-end refurbished thinkpad, max ou the memory, replace the hdd with an ssd and you've got yourself a high-end linux laptop for a bargain-deal. I use a pimped out refurbished TP W510 as my main linux machine - it's the best I ever had.
It's "basic income". Emphasis on basic. You'll get to keep your studio appartment and they won't be much richer. If they want your lifestyle, they'll have to work/earn money anyway.
It's about "basic income" - which means basically consolidating all transfer-payments into one generic monthly income for every citizen alive. It would also work as a automatic monthly paid negative income tax.
One of the arguments for this sort of thing is that by simply reducing the bureaucratic workload it would basically pay for itself. There is quite some truth to that. The other part of the argument is, that this would offer a slight distribution of the automation dividend. Which is a good thing too.
... that I have to get my lazy ass moving and see to it that I finally enroll in one of the countless tution-free universities in the rhine-ruhr area to ooph my education and academic rank for zero personal costs. I've been dragging this out for months now since I left the local GED evening high-school with a neat score.
Curiously, my indecisiveness is partially actually due to the abundance of choices available. I'm still not 100% sure which field to study in.... First world luxury problems I guess.
BTW: How is that two-party gridlock and effed-up electorial and campaing financing system over there working out for you guys? *aaaah rub it in*... Have you started supporting Lessig/Mayday yet? How about it? Get your lazy asses moving! *cheering from across the pond*
Are you serious about that? If you are, it should be perfectly acceptable to hand in assignments as plain ascii text. In fact, it should be a requirement. If that is the case, people can salvage an old DOS or lightweight Linux PC for free from somewhere and use that for their typing assignments.
If you'd require regular internet access and/or pro-level processing power from a student without funding plans I'd smack you.
The worst are those idiot teachers requireing assigments to be handed in in MS Word. My daughter has a Acer Aspire One Netbook with Ubuntu - which, for a teenager - already counts as a luxury item in my book. And I'm a computer expert.
Anything you can't do with a computer that costs a few dollars or can be aquired for free from a junk yard or a donation center shouldn't be on a school curriculum. Kids should learn the basics of computing, not that abyssmal subscription MS junk.
Basic computer stuff can be done with FOSS on anything that runs on electricity nowadays. Or an emulator running in a browser on a library computer. The only two acceptable options for such school assignments - period.
And, btw., handing in handwritten stuff should still be allowed as an option, especiall in a country with a borderline third-world educational system such as the US.
I'd love to develop applications for linux. The fuss of developing a half-decent GUI app on and for Linux is a huge turn-off though.
Anjuta crashes on me, code blocks doesn't run and gives me awkward compiler messages, Kdevelop requires a bazillion libs and still looks really tacky around the edges. The only two IDEs that are halfway professional for sorta-kinda native Linux apps are Monodevelop/Xamarin and QT Designer - ironically both commercially supported x-plattform kits - all though I think the latter also got pissy with me upon compiling.
This is all on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS on a neat Lenovo W510 Thinkpad.
The plain and simple truth is, development and deployment on Linux is a freaking mess.
Developing useful GUI stuff for Linux is a complete and utter disaster, with no way to know how your programm will compile, let alone run on the countless distros out there. Until that is fixed and Gnome, KDE and whatnot finally get their shit together, unify and fix this, it will remain to be seen as a toy in the desktop/gui department.
I once knew a women with em field sensitivity. One of the things she can feel pretty distinctly is a cellphone handshake. She annouced incoming calls before the cellphones rang in her vincinity. Her life is quite unpleasant, also because quite a few people don't take her for granted - especially those she seeks out for help.
I personally would like to know if her sensitivity has to do with palladium alloy tooth fillings and acidic saliva or if it really is her inner ear or her brain or something sensing EM pulses and fields.
Bottom line: I personally wouldn't rule out em sensitivity in humans completely just yet. It's not that intensely researched just yet, AFAICT.
Thats an easy one. This one happens like all the rest, as usual: Marketeers decide without asking the Techies. Techies have to solve issues in record time with no say.
When all comes crashing down, the techies save the day with the secret auto-backup they've been pulling off the cloud for the last 6 months.
I've done a massive amount of deployments with various PHP based web-CMSes, mostly Joomla and Wordpress. And while they're all built on ancient hacks of incredibly crappy architecture and application models, the type that lets you stand back in awe and amazement vis-a-vis the utter shittyness of each of these webapp-hodgepodge behemoths, I like WordPress the best, because at least I don't feel dirty when building a quick hack with it *and* I actually *can* build a quick hack with it.. Unlike, for instance, Typo3, which is truely FUBARed.
WP is an entire hack in itself - sort of like an extension of the non-existant PHP philosophy it's built with.
However, as for the WP security record, I am honestly suprised how good it is. And before you start laughing, keep in mind that there are an estimated 50 million actively used installs of WordPress running on the web, with more than 80 million in total.
Yes there are security updated every odd month, yes the plugins are a mess and yes the people deveoping for and with WP and building extensions for it couldn't code a proper class if their life depended on it. And they should be prohibited by law to approach a keyboard. But they do get the job done and it's exactly for that very reason that I'm suprised how well the core team keeps up with stuffing the most prominent and dangerous holes, often before anybody else discovers them.
I'm quite certain this hole will be plugged in the next few days aswell.
Bottom line: Measured by it's install base, WordPress security actually is quite impressive. There is no other WebCMS with such a marketshare out there and I doubt any other product would be measurably safer.... My 2 cents.
"Spending a lot of time on Github"... WTF is that supposed to be? As far as I can tell, Github is way better than the classic mailinglist, because it has a web-ui you can use everywhere and the code is right next to the discussion you're having. If anything, I spend less time on github than on mailinglists. I can post a bug in an instant, if I run into one and it get's resolved faster than ever because Github is a godsend of a ubiquitous FOSS pipeline.
If you think Github is a "new hoop" you have a problem. Github is a breeze of fresh air for the FOSS and dev community and all it does is put your coding skills under public scrutiny and two clicks away from review with no need for anybody to install any dev-software what-so-ever.
If you're such a seasoned pro, that shouldn't bother you at all.
Everything else is free IDEs, awesome new PLs, great FOSS software that reduce the gruntwork of back in the days to tweaking a few things here and there, advanced supercomputers that cost half a months wage and sit on your desk, slowly ditching pixel-based screenresolution. The team around me is a bunch of younger people that wet their pants if they see or have to look at a CLI and come running for my help.... And tell emphasise all around that I'm indispesable.
Like academic "artists" actually can do art. Right.
One of the reasons the art of videogames is so innovative is because of its significant lack of academic bullshitters involved in it.
Even the biggest, most successfull studios (Eidos Montreal comes to mind) still have that 80ies underground subculture vibe to them. They all have more in common with street art than academia - luckyly. They don't give a flying f*ck wether you have academic rank or not. They're actually interested in your art and wether you can deliver or not.
That's why games make billions and modern academic conceptional bullshit art doesn't and can only survive as some bizar sort of giant scam in rich societies with too much money.
I have to say, everytime I visit a beach somewhere it's nigh impossible not to see some garbage littered here and there. Either by visitors or by garbage washed ashore. Back in the 80ies I remember seeing nice beaches without garbage, but I'd bet money that they have become rare in the mean time.
We are fucking up our planet for no good reason - to me there is no doubt about it.
I'm a seasoned pro webdev and havent touched Windows or PS in years. Gimp does most of the gfx work just fine, especially with the modern flatty designs. As does Inkscape for the vector work.
I do use a mac though - less hassle with the gui and some neat tools unavailable on Linux (SourceTree, Kaleidoscope, Transmit, etc.) but those are tools you definitely don't need for learning.
My advice: Move to Ubuntu LTS right now and set up one Mac Mini in every classroom if you must teach your students PS filters and the Adobe Suite. Although I wouldn't.... Train your students on Atom or Brackets and learn and teach Grunt, Gulp or both and build a webdev pipeline with those. Build a pipeline that your students can take with them on their career. Way more worth than learning Adobe crap.
The one thing desperately missing on Linux is a FOSS Git gui that doesn't suck. You'll have to get a bundle licence for SmartGit - it's Java, but it's OK. As a full blow IDE Netbeans and the Netbeans Chrome extension + perhaps FF WebDev Edition are are the tools of the trade. All FOSS, all perfectly at home on Ubuntu.
For testing set up VBox on every PC and pull the official Windows Browser Webdev Testing VMs. They only run an hour before needing a virtual restart, but they're perfect for Testing IE and Spartan.
What ever you do, spare yourself and you Students the hassle with remote desktop.
Slashdot Mirror
Font integration? - Only since a few years back and only with awkward CSS that doesn't compile fonts and brings along licencing issues.
Relyable Layout behaviour? - Only with hacks and tricks and JS stunts. And not even then do we have the power of a usefull layout engine. ... OK, we've got justify, which no one else offers. ... I remember clearly Flash and the assh*les at Adobe screwing us over with in a fraudulent sale of a fake non-feature in Flash CS 5. In this small detail HTML actually is better than everything else that is out there, admitted.
Intelligent Image handling? - Meeh.
Asnchronous loading of content and further pages? - Yeah, we have Ajax and DOM manipulation which is, like I said, one large tacked on Hack. HTML was clearly not built with that in mind.
Audio? - Laughable. Yeah, it finally works, after 15+years. Sort of. Great. I am over-fucking-welmed.
Video intetration? - Not even today in 2015 are we seeing it as it should be. Instead the HTML Video idiots are wasting our time with DRM and other crap.
Just about all these things can be done better by orders of magnitude. And could have been done better for a long time, for instance with Flash. ... And no, I'm not presenting Flash as the solution to this - I'm giving a living proof that it can be done significantly better, prorietary tech aside.
No referers. No script. Just plain doc data. Problem solved.
If you have client-side logic on by default, somene will use it to track you. It's that simple.
Another approach would be fresh private tabs for every session and perhaps spoofing of plattform data.
I use Gostery and don't care to much about super-cookies. I use multiple browsers for multiple personas and tasks, which mitigates the problem a little more.
I don't use facebook and stuff like that, but I'm pretty deep in Googles camp, with my Android devices and my various Google Accounts. ... It's a trade-off.
I might try to cut lose entirely sometime in the future.
No script, no referers. No google. Problem solved.
The problem is HTML. HTML is for documents, not the living application-like multimedia canvases we've all been using since 2000.
Flash was pointing in the right direction, but it was proprietary and Adobe screwed it up.
Simply setting up a usefull canvas layout is pure torture in HTML, with tons of libraries, JS and CSS hacks, just to get the thing sort of running.
Ginormous hacks such as Googles Polymer try to pry some sort of sanity from this plattform with a huge effort and enable modern age development, but the simple fact is, HTML is at least 15 years behind what Flash or similar approaches had to offer.
And don't even get me started on building a usefull web-application with useful clientside logic without a bizar convoluted mess of tie-ins and callbacks.
Example: This multimedia website in Flash is 16 years old. That is sixteen years . ... It's from freakin' 1999!!. It's parely possible to make such a thing with todays HTML, without becoming an all-out programming and browser expert and spending a forbidding amout of time getting it right.
HTML, CSS and client side logic - wether with JS or something else - need a massive redesign for modern day multimedia and multi-screen requirements. When that happens, performance will be sane again. I expect web components and web assembly to get us back on track a little, but that's gonna take at least another five years.
Bottom line:
The web is a mess, and frickin' HTML and the ignorant smelly boring nerds that still push it as a cure-all are to blame.
Disclaimer: I'm a senior web-developer with focus on FOSS technologies.
Wind-power, a concept as old as ancient greece vs. ultra-volatile highly infrastructure dependant uranium powered nuclear fission that reqiures tons of stuff, material, equipment, regulation, controls and billionsof taxdollars just to get started. ... And thats not even counting the wasteproblem yet.
I'm a techno-romantic as much as the next guy here, but the simple truth is: nuclear fission is a techno-romantics pipe-dream from the 60ies that didn't pan out in just about every way imagined. It's to expensive, to complicated, runs into serious problems way more often before reaching breask-even and has a serious deal-breaking waste-problem that no sane responsible person can dismiss. We ought to keep one or two reactors running for science and r&d purposes and shut down all the rest.
Germany is doing the only right thing in this regard. Kudos to Merkel - and I'd never thought I'd say that. And no, I did not vote for her.
... communication and wording are far from professional in the kernel team. Most core-devs would be dismissed on their style of interaction alone if applying to any serious professional elite position. Imagine applying for an astronauts programm with Linus style of talk for instance. He wouldn't stand a chance.
Of course, professionally, Linus is right just about 100% of the time and also can rightfully be super annoyed if some dimwit wastes his and everybody elses time, but the discourse in the kernel team is notably imature at a measurable pace. That includes Linus. Such, that it actually makes it into the news.
He'res an example, the first line a Linux quote from memory:
"You're so dumb you couldn't find your mothers tit as a baby"
vs.
"This is a very very stupid idea and A,B and C are blatant beginners mistakes and no one on the mainline will even attempt to merge it. I suggest you look into your stuff more thouroughly before sending out pull requests and perhaps redo your review process. This is the second time and if this happens again I'll ask X to take your branch out of branch YZ. Your wasting my and everyone elses time. Stop that. - EOM"
See? The second line is about the most shaming rundown you can get as a professional or elite kernel dev. It's actually more harsh then the first. ... But it is way more professional.
Bottom line:
I can totally see why she left the kernel team.
Sound's to me like you're ready for virtualisation at a professional scale.
Why don't you just swap all your PC trinkets for one single extremely powerfull box and a single big fat screen and virtualize all the rest?
And with powerfull I'm talking 3+GHz Quad-Core i7, 32GB of RAM and a 1 TB SSD or something.
And by big screen I'm talking extra wide, as in, seriously *extra* *wide*.
I'm using a pimped out Cirrus 7 Nimbus, which has those sort of performance specs and runs completely fanless. ... And it's pretty small and not even that expensive.
Conclusion: ... It's 2015 - you get supercomputers of the shelf, on a shoestring budget these days. It may be just a a few hundred dollars more and way more future safe. ... All my KVMs from back in the day are collecting dust in the cellar.
Before you spend a large sum on a special KVM solution, you should definitely consider a professional VM setup on a single machine.
... but I know enough about scales that I can find the notes and I also know that they are historically grown - much like the computer keyboard. I also can sing and recite some classic songs from Schubert and Loewe. I learned all this in school, in regular music class. I also learned poetry and what a jambus rythm is. These are all small but valuable cornerstone of my education.
Long story short: No one in his right mind expects everybody to be able to code a well-architected appserver or an asynchronous website that runs on all browsers or whatever. Or, hell no, how to deal with those bazillion quirks modern IT comes with. ... That is the job of people who are grown up and earn their money with this sort of thing.
What people should learn in school is the difference between a variable and a value and a constant/literal. They should also have some basic concept of a digital network such as the internet and what a client and a server are and what their differences are and how these two relate to each other. CUAS and a few regular expressions or simply knowing that such things exist would be neat too. If they can write an if statement and roughly know how a function looks in some easy but useful PL such as Python - that would be something someone knows after having "accelerated IT" in school as a kid or something.
The big problem is that even professionals today don't know the CUAS, don't know how to use the clipboard or that a computer is there for automating stuff and that somewhere within their word processor there probably is some function for a more adanced search & replace. This is the problem we have to fix. If members of the bundestag are to dumb to handle computers and the entire site gets infected by malware and bots - that's an exact result of people not even learning the very basics of computing - something someone would learn in less than two hours in their initial lesson with a computer professional.
Bottom line: Proper computer classes in school won't magically transform society into an utopia, but teach children the very basics of how to handle computers and smartphones and tablets and "cloud-services" correctly. And that would be a very big plus.
My 2 cents.
... and neither should anybody else.
Managers don't need to now tech beyond basic principal levels.
They just should do their job properly, which actually does include just freaking come to me when there's a techical issue at hand or a deal with technical details to sign or the technical part of a project that needs evaluating. And all that has nothing to do wether a maneging position is techie or not, it has to do wether the manager is a good one or a bad one.
If management sells something to the customer that tech can't deliver within the set parameters and managers havn't ask tech before, then they've screwed up and aren't worth the salary they're raking in.
I don't care wether my boss can do PHP, MySQL or Linux CLI. I can show him some good parts whenever those may be useful, but heaven forbid that he wastes his time with PHP LDAP or some strange MySQL bug or something else. That's my frickin job! I'm the one doing those extra hours to make it work - he's supposed to put in those extra hours to get a hold of new customers and sell them gigs ... and *then* ask me how the margins are and what hours we have to expect to put into the project.
My 2 cents.
To be honest, I'd trust a car from Apple more than I'd trust one from GM.
Apple knows how to do nigh impossible feats in product development, I'd trust they'd do a car right aswell.
However, I'm still wondering where these Apple car rumours are coming from. It seems way out there, imho. ... Why would they build a car? A professional camera or something is far more likely imho.
My 2 cents.
One of the few non-mac laptops with simular resellability are the ThinkPads. A refurbished one will come way less than half the original price and still have all the quality. Get a high-end refurbished thinkpad, max ou the memory, replace the hdd with an ssd and you've got yourself a high-end linux laptop for a bargain-deal. I use a pimped out refurbished TP W510 as my main linux machine - it's the best I ever had.
It's "basic income". Emphasis on basic.
You'll get to keep your studio appartment and they won't be much richer. If they want your lifestyle, they'll have to work/earn money anyway.
It's about "basic income" - which means basically consolidating all transfer-payments into one generic monthly income for every citizen alive. It would also work as a automatic monthly paid negative income tax.
One of the arguments for this sort of thing is that by simply reducing the bureaucratic workload it would basically pay for itself. There is quite some truth to that. The other part of the argument is, that this would offer a slight distribution of the automation dividend. Which is a good thing too.
Mint Nazi Propaganda on Slashdot, modded +2?
Well, that's a first.
... that I have to get my lazy ass moving and see to it that I finally enroll in one of the countless tution-free universities in the rhine-ruhr area to ooph my education and academic rank for zero personal costs . I've been dragging this out for months now since I left the local GED evening high-school with a neat score.
Curiously, my indecisiveness is partially actually due to the abundance of choices available. I'm still not 100% sure which field to study in. ... First world luxury problems I guess.
BTW: How is that two-party gridlock and effed-up electorial and campaing financing system over there working out for you guys? *aaaah rub it in* ... Have you started supporting Lessig/Mayday yet? How about it? Get your lazy asses moving! *cheering from across the pond*
My 2 cents.
Are you serious about that? If you are, it should be perfectly acceptable to hand in assignments as plain ascii text. In fact, it should be a requirement. If that is the case, people can salvage an old DOS or lightweight Linux PC for free from somewhere and use that for their typing assignments.
If you'd require regular internet access and/or pro-level processing power from a student without funding plans I'd smack you.
The worst are those idiot teachers requireing assigments to be handed in in MS Word. My daughter has a Acer Aspire One Netbook with Ubuntu - which, for a teenager - already counts as a luxury item in my book. And I'm a computer expert.
Anything you can't do with a computer that costs a few dollars or can be aquired for free from a junk yard or a donation center shouldn't be on a school curriculum.
Kids should learn the basics of computing, not that abyssmal subscription MS junk.
Basic computer stuff can be done with FOSS on anything that runs on electricity nowadays. Or an emulator running in a browser on a library computer. The only two acceptable options for such school assignments - period.
And, btw., handing in handwritten stuff should still be allowed as an option, especiall in a country with a borderline third-world educational system such as the US.
My 2 cents.
I'd love to develop applications for linux. The fuss of developing a half-decent GUI app on and for Linux is a huge turn-off though.
Anjuta crashes on me, code blocks doesn't run and gives me awkward compiler messages, Kdevelop requires a bazillion libs and still looks really tacky around the edges. The only two IDEs that are halfway professional for sorta-kinda native Linux apps are Monodevelop/Xamarin and QT Designer - ironically both commercially supported x-plattform kits - all though I think the latter also got pissy with me upon compiling.
This is all on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS on a neat Lenovo W510 Thinkpad.
The plain and simple truth is, development and deployment on Linux is a freaking mess.
Developing useful GUI stuff for Linux is a complete and utter disaster, with no way to know how your programm will compile, let alone run on the countless distros out there. Until that is fixed and Gnome, KDE and whatnot finally get their shit together, unify and fix this, it will remain to be seen as a toy in the desktop/gui department.
The kisses I send from my messenger look way cuter than the one my girlfriend receives on hers. ... I'm not even joking.
I don't think we need more emoji, if literacy isn't supposed to go down the drain, but an international standardised set would help a lot.
I once knew a women with em field sensitivity. One of the things she can feel pretty distinctly is a cellphone handshake. She annouced incoming calls before the cellphones rang in her vincinity. Her life is quite unpleasant, also because quite a few people don't take her for granted - especially those she seeks out for help.
I personally would like to know if her sensitivity has to do with palladium alloy tooth fillings and acidic saliva or if it really is her inner ear or her brain or something sensing EM pulses and fields.
Bottom line: I personally wouldn't rule out em sensitivity in humans completely just yet. It's not that intensely researched just yet, AFAICT.
Thats an easy one. This one happens like all the rest, as usual: Marketeers decide without asking the Techies. Techies have to solve issues in record time with no say.
When all comes crashing down, the techies save the day with the secret auto-backup they've been pulling off the cloud for the last 6 months.
I've done a massive amount of deployments with various PHP based web-CMSes, mostly Joomla and Wordpress. And while they're all built on ancient hacks of incredibly crappy architecture and application models, the type that lets you stand back in awe and amazement vis-a-vis the utter shittyness of each of these webapp-hodgepodge behemoths, I like WordPress the best, because at least I don't feel dirty when building a quick hack with it *and* I actually *can* build a quick hack with it.. Unlike, for instance, Typo3, which is truely FUBARed.
WP is an entire hack in itself - sort of like an extension of the non-existant PHP philosophy it's built with.
However, as for the WP security record, I am honestly suprised how good it is. And before you start laughing, keep in mind that there are an estimated 50 million actively used installs of WordPress running on the web, with more than 80 million in total.
Yes there are security updated every odd month, yes the plugins are a mess and yes the people deveoping for and with WP and building extensions for it couldn't code a proper class if their life depended on it. And they should be prohibited by law to approach a keyboard. But they do get the job done and it's exactly for that very reason that I'm suprised how well the core team keeps up with stuffing the most prominent and dangerous holes, often before anybody else discovers them.
I'm quite certain this hole will be plugged in the next few days aswell.
Bottom line: ... My 2 cents.
Measured by it's install base, WordPress security actually is quite impressive. There is no other WebCMS with such a marketshare out there and I doubt any other product would be measurably safer.
"Spending a lot of time on Github" ... WTF is that supposed to be?
As far as I can tell, Github is way better than the classic mailinglist, because it has a web-ui you can use everywhere and the code is right next to the discussion you're having. If anything, I spend less time on github than on mailinglists. I can post a bug in an instant, if I run into one and it get's resolved faster than ever because Github is a godsend of a ubiquitous FOSS pipeline.
If you think Github is a "new hoop" you have a problem. Github is a breeze of fresh air for the FOSS and dev community and all it does is put your coding skills under public scrutiny and two clicks away from review with no need for anybody to install any dev-software what-so-ever.
If you're such a seasoned pro, that shouldn't bother you at all.
Everything else is free IDEs, awesome new PLs, great FOSS software that reduce the gruntwork of back in the days to tweaking a few things here and there, advanced supercomputers that cost half a months wage and sit on your desk, slowly ditching pixel-based screenresolution. The team around me is a bunch of younger people that wet their pants if they see or have to look at a CLI and come running for my help. ... And tell emphasise all around that I'm indispesable.
Really no problem here for seasoned devs, AFAICT.
As for ageism - quit whining and grow up. ... Here's a comment on that issue from me from about a year ago (modded +5), if you need a hint or two on how to do that.
My 2 cents.
Like academic "artists" actually can do art. Right.
One of the reasons the art of videogames is so innovative is because of its significant lack of academic bullshitters involved in it.
Even the biggest, most successfull studios (Eidos Montreal comes to mind) still have that 80ies underground subculture vibe to them. They all have more in common with street art than academia - luckyly. They don't give a flying f*ck wether you have academic rank or not. They're actually interested in your art and wether you can deliver or not.
That's why games make billions and modern academic conceptional bullshit art doesn't and can only survive as some bizar sort of giant scam in rich societies with too much money.
I have to say, everytime I visit a beach somewhere it's nigh impossible not to see some garbage littered here and there. Either by visitors or by garbage washed ashore. Back in the 80ies I remember seeing nice beaches without garbage, but I'd bet money that they have become rare in the mean time.
We are fucking up our planet for no good reason - to me there is no doubt about it.
I'm a seasoned pro webdev and havent touched Windows or PS in years. Gimp does most of the gfx work just fine, especially with the modern flatty designs. As does Inkscape for the vector work.
I do use a mac though - less hassle with the gui and some neat tools unavailable on Linux (SourceTree, Kaleidoscope, Transmit, etc.) but those are tools you definitely don't need for learning.
My advice: ... Train your students on Atom or Brackets and learn and teach Grunt, Gulp or both and build a webdev pipeline with those. Build a pipeline that your students can take with them on their career. Way more worth than learning Adobe crap.
Move to Ubuntu LTS right now and set up one Mac Mini in every classroom if you must teach your students PS filters and the Adobe Suite. Although I wouldn't.
The one thing desperately missing on Linux is a FOSS Git gui that doesn't suck. You'll have to get a bundle licence for SmartGit - it's Java, but it's OK. As a full blow IDE Netbeans and the Netbeans Chrome extension + perhaps FF WebDev Edition are are the tools of the trade. All FOSS, all perfectly at home on Ubuntu.
For testing set up VBox on every PC and pull the official Windows Browser Webdev Testing VMs. They only run an hour before needing a virtual restart, but they're perfect for Testing IE and Spartan.
What ever you do, spare yourself and you Students the hassle with remote desktop.
Good luck with your business.
... and testing for the fix on live at the same time. Noticing after an hour of desperation. .... Arrrrrgh!!!!
Allow anonymous users.
Instant success.
Sit back and watch Facebook turn to #2 in social networks.
It's really that easy.