The problem probably just finally got escalated inside Groupon. Before it was some stupid desk clerk thinking: Oh, some hobbyists I've never heard of are mad that their little programming club has the same name as our new terminal. No big deal. Then it was "Sue them into next wednesday!" "Burn Groupon to the ground!" "Hang them higher!" and their response being "OMFG! It's a project that's FOSS and Linux and they are all friends with IBM, Oracle and Google. And they've got lawyers!"
Probably some exec with a clue got wind of the situation and concluded that "... yeah, they do have a case and this Gnome Project acutally isn't that small of a deal as one might think. And we have enough bad press as it is. Back down.".
Smart move I'd say. And they even get a little neat publicity for playing nice.
I love it. Hipster-hate, in all it's forms, is the latest new thing! It's the latest trend.
What's wrong with hippster?... I love hippster. Nerdyness becoming the über-chique. That's awesome. For once, fashion has caught up with nerd-culture and not the other way around. In the 80ies it was Grundge and oversized, today it's hippster. Different name, same thing, basically. I can get huge and stable plastic frame glasses that are sturdy, cheap and let me see everything and I'm right ahead with the avantgarde.
The best thing about it is, that if you want to dress extra classy, a *normal* suit and tie will do just fine, becaue everybody else is wearing chucks and NBs anyway. And, to be honest, girls all dressed up like chicas in high-heels and tons of makeup all day never was my thing. I thing they look really cute with their baggy smurf-woolen caps, doc martens and oversized parkas.... It's all been there in the 60ies and 80ies already and I love it whenever it comes around.
Sorry to be raining on your parade, folks, but seriously, no one really cares.
If Windows 8 has become a utility OS for Steam and Valve is OK with that and is dropping Linux as a foundation - so effing what? Valve would've built yet another dodgy distro of Linux (a shabby Debian fork I'd guess) and I think we all can agree that we have enough of those. And if you think that Valve would've put effort into the community - think again. Their a business.
With Android and Chrome OS we already have to large Linux distros comparatively tightly controlled by a MegaCorp. And from what I can tell, Android is going to be the next gen gaming OS. Convergence is upon us and once that's through, no one will give a damn about the "Desktop" - it was a crappy metaphor anyway - or PC gaming. Aside from a few enthusiasts and development professionals perhaps. You'll plug your phone into your TV/Monitor grab your favorite independantly manufactured gaming controller and play Assasins Creed 12 you've just downloaded and bought a 32-hour gaming ticket for.
NVidia Shield anyone? Did you see the gaming demo in the iPhone 6 presentation? Gaming on smartphones and tablets is just taking of and there are enough experts in gaming who've expressed their feeling that the current gen of consoles will be the last. XBone is bombing, Wii has significantly slowed and the PS4 is one step away from becoming Sonys all-in media and home computing center - if they don't screw this one up that is.
No one want the Linux desktop, because the Desktop is on the way out. Utility OSes like iOS, Chrome and Anroid is where the parties at now. End of Story.
How are they gonna get him out again? Cut the snake open?
How about giving the beast some real food and/or just leave it alone?
Or film it from a distance and watch it eat some of its natural prey. Isn't that what discovery channel usually does?
And, btw, AFAIK boa constrictors - which include anacondas - prefer their prey not breathing anymore. And they don't really care if it's bottled air you're breathing or not. They constrict you 'till you stop breathing. Hence the name. Duh.
To be honest, I kinda hope this snake teaches the guy a lesson and get's away with it. Now *that* would be some news.:-)
No. Chromebook is actually the better package for most people.
8 hrs. battery time. Boots in 8 seconds. Zero maintenance. Zero worries about backups. Zero worries about installing programms. Zero virii. Zero synching your photos, videos, audios, whatnot with your tablet and/or phone. Everything in the cloud. Drop your laptop, have it stolen, pour coffee into it - no problem. Order a new one, log on, all your stuff is there and you didn't even have to archive. While the the one is being shipped you can use your friends computer or your cellphone to do the most important stuff until it arrives. I gave my fiance a laptop (IBM Thinkpad, Ubuntu 14.04, all ready and set up) and an android tablet. She used the laptop once. The tablet she uses constantly. Just watching her is a real eye opener.
Anther Point in case: I'm your type A slashdot computer geek and even *I* would prefer a chromebook over a windows laptop (typing this on Linux btw.)
I'm quite convinced that my next portable computer will either be an android tablet with an extra bluetooth keyboard or a chromebook - routing a chromebook with crouton and installing linux on it is quite easy, and 8 hrs battery time for 299 has a nice ring to it.
The truth is: Google is set to bring the second half of humanity online. They are basically the budget Apple. You pay significantly less with at least as much convenience, if not even more. Google takes care of you and all your computing stuff for free and in turn the may observe you 24/7. That's the basic deal and there is no upside MS can offer to that.
With MS it's pay premium, and get observed, and functionality degraded over time and virii and we want to know all your details before you can use windows unencumbred. Oh, and MS Office is a subscription now.... Who the eff wants that?... MS only has a chance to do that for historical reasons, and those are wearing off quickly.
No one I know would want this ugly laptop with windows on it.
You are NO Linux guy! A Linux guy cares about all things Linux, however slightly.
Wrong. A Linux guy cares more about Linux than any other OS and is one who's judgement perhaps has a little weight. Like, if he's been programming since '85 or something like that and has been using *nix during the times when the only usable editor on it was Emacs or Vi.
You may not believe it, but I, and quite a few others who do computing for a living, actually have a life outside of computers and fiddling with init-scripts and xconfig. Partly because I've done that to death already back in the day when there was nothing else to do and making Gnome 1.x , Nautilus and GKrellm look like Star Trek was a cool way to spend your time.
Seriously, I've been a Linux Guy since the 90ies and I honestly couldn't care less. Anything I know about init is about runlevels - and those are a really neat thing. I mean really cool. You can fiddle with those using mc (Midnight Commander) and debian has a stack of 4-6 of those preconfigged and set up by default - last time I checked, some 7 years ago or something anyway. Point is, my grandma can set up a runlevel that ex- or includes the LAMP stack in it's 'launch', 'init' or whatever-it's-called sequence and I can set my box to it by typing "init [simple Int here]" for my box to go there.
Again, that is pretty neat and cool and the best working solution I've run into so far. Way better than anything in the Windos world, that's for sure.
If this "systemd" thing - whatever that is - doesn't break this or offers a neater improvement on that runlevel stuff or a way better concept that's worthwhile moving into, perhaps like the SVN vs. Git thing in which Git comes out on top IMHO - without requiring some bullshit GUI tool to be usable, that's all very fine and dandy with me.
If, on the other hand, you're going to push this new fad and hurt me wile doing so, I'm coming for you some time in the future. With a baseball club and my mafia friends. Other than fucking around with one of the best filemanagers ever - Konqueror - and replacing it with an inferior dolphin - this isn't some GUI toy you should fiddle with. This is Linux at a level where it's actually *the* industry standard. As in 'no other even comes close to this level of reliability and quality". Fucking that up would be a really stupid idea.
Otherwise I really positively couldn't care less - and that's how it should be, no? Except for, maybe, if I were a System Developer or Distro Release Manager or something.
I don't see a point in todays smartwatches and I'm not an Apple Fanboy but the truth is, I'd bet money that Apples Smartwatch is the first worth looking at if you're into this sort of gadget and have no problem entering Apples golden cage.
Their recent retina display iMac says it all: Apple implents things before others even think about it. I recently bought a ThinkPad as my Linux Workstation and to avoid Apple. The whole device feels like from a different era. Clunky crappy plastic, strange features and behaviour, a boot screen that looks like some highschool kid designed it, in the 80ies... a "Think Button" - WTF??? etc. And, of course, don't get me started on the default windows installation.... That's how backwards it is compared to the stuff Apple builds.
Say what you want about Apple, but these guys know how to do hardware and they know how to do software and they know how to integrate both. The amount of detail that went into the Apple Watch is staggering - as usual, I have to ad. For instance: The display is so small, they added pressure as a metric to touch, to have a wider range of input.
This summer I looked at a Sony Smartwatch, out of curiosity - it felt like a prototype from 2004, with a low-res screen and some flaky widgets on it. I have no doubt apples watch will be a few generations ahead, because that's what apple does. Innovate to sell their shiny stuff.
Then again, I'm steering clear of Apple for a while now. Their iPads and iPhone are just to damn expensive to be a viable alternative to android tablets and phones and my 3 year old MB Air is going to last at least another 5 years. Who knows what comes then...
My smartwatch I'm getting as soon as it has an AI built in and I can unhook it from Google, Apple or whatever Megacorp is ruling the world then.
This is one of the laws that cause the pirate party to rise in Germany a few years ago. This australian law seems like a 1on1 rippoff of the German law that was brought upon us by the likes of Sith-Lord Schäuble himself.
Yepp, it's Germany folks. Better beer, better cars and even our surveillance laws make you potiticians envious.
We found out that aspestos causes a variation of diseases that are quite mean. We removed asbestos from the buildings, decommissioned the ships built with and had a generation of sailors and construction workers where bad lung diseases and some other sicknesses caused quite a few to live and die in agony.
If we find out that cellphones cause some form of super-agressive brain cancer that pops up quickly after 15-20 years of exposure to GSM microwaves, then tomorrow all cell-towser will be on the ground and our generation will the the one with brain cancer. No big deal. Some first world kids die off, humanity can live with that easyly.
Same with Nucler Power. Even such disasters as chernobyl or fukushima are compareatively contained.... Ok, I'm sounding cynical here, fukushima isn't contained, it's a hideous mess, but one can still see this possibly retreating in the next few thousand years.... errrm, well... anyway...
All, or most of it, quite simple, lesson learned and humanity moves on. Aspestos is regulated, Germany drops nuclear, 3 more fukushimas and the rest will follow, all more or less fine and dandy.
However - big however - add in biotech and things look vastly different. Only one haywire designed bacterium has to get into the wild and we're all dead 5 months later. All humans on the entire planet. Think "Planet of the Apes Prevolution" style, only without remaining protagonists.
Nuclear is kinda so-so (except for some idiot at the nuke warfare trigger of course), but biotech - no way. One wrong move and fukushima looks like a walk in the park. Imagine Ebola, but with the brakes removed.
Bottom line: Basically he's right. You don't fuck with biotech. And we need serious regulations in place for that. I second.
In short: If your project is (re)presented properly, you'll have people falling over each other to claim gouvernance over it. I'd put it into a foundation - after refurbishing it's outward representation!
Example: Typo3's architecture looks like it's designed by monkees on crack, it's config language TypoScript is so bizar - in concept and in implementaion - I can't even describe it and there are a countless other strange things about this software. Yet it has a professional website, ressonable documentation and a solid brand, brandbook included(!). I doubt the Typo3 Foundation has problems finding heralds for it's project. There even are Oreilly's on it.
Hope I could help. And good luck finding a heir for your project.
The 15 Jobs Where Women Earn More Than Men [forbes.com]
OMG! Female visagists earn 12 dollars more per month on average than their male counterparts! 608$ vs. 596$! Stop the presses!... I am over-fucking-welmed!
Seriously, I'd bet about hald of those links are smoke and mirrors or biased pointless BS However I *do* believe part of the pay-equality discussion to be hysteria and good sources on that to be valuable.
Perhaps you should curate that list for quality a little - half of the links would be enough. My 2 cents.
I find the idea that nerds would ever chase off women particularly amusing. Hell, most of us would KILL to have women around. If women are electing to not pursue the field, it's certainly not because they're unwelcome. On every team that I've ever been on with women, the guys went out of their way to be nice to them.
Anecdotal counter-'evidence': I'm a programmer and IT expert. Regular 80ies computerkid (zx81, Sharp PC 1402, Basic, Peek & Poke, etc. growing up in parallel with microcomputers... you know the drill). Computers and programming from there on out. I'm also quite good with women. A late bloomer. like most of us, I've gotten the hang of it in the last decade. I dance Tango and have had a measure of affairs since roughly the age of 35. And I enjoy the embrace of a cute women very much. It's also fun to learn how nerdy and insecure women themselves are! And sexually frustrated in just about the same amount as men!... Only better at hiding it.:-)... anyway:
I also run into female IT and Tech experts. Sadly not that often, for the known reasons, but occasionally I do. On at least two occasions I've caught myself being slightly disrespectful to women in tech, albeit with no bad intent. Once was explaing my tango partner - a women in her late 20ies on her way to a PHD in electronics - how I would use a dual-cinch-to-3,5mm jack audio adapter to hook a player to loudspeakers. Roughly 20 seconds in it dawned to me that, if anything, she would explain to me how to do it. I inmediately appologised and we resolved the awkward situation with some humor. It was embarrasing none-the-less.
On another occasion I was basically explaining my smartphone in very simple terms to a female PHD in CS with expert Java knowledge - a team-lead. It was an Android phone. She'd actually just wanted to know which Android version it was running when she asked "What is that?". With a cliche computer guy or male web-hipster asking it, I might have caught the gist. The simple fact that she was quite young and good-looking had triggered male dominance behaviour in me and had me look like somewhat like a jerk. Again, I noticed it about 10 seconds in, but by then I'd already done it. She handled it very professionally, but I felt like a total douche. Still do actually, when thinking back.
Bottom line: You may think you're treating women respectfully while you're actually appearing quite condescending. Observe yourself if you get the chance - I've alway thought the same as you did, but since discovered some fine-tuning requirements in my behaviour towards women in our profession. QED.
"... (who can't all afford the cost of conventional prostheses)..."
USA - the only supposed first-world country where children have to be able to afford a prostheses. Creepy.... Or actually f*cking outrageous if you think about it for a minute.
Just reading this gives me the creeps and makes me sad.
Note: I've been a FOSS advocate since the 90ies and have used Linux since '99. It's my only OS of choice for Inet facing servers and just recently, after years of x86 Linux neglegt and OS X usage (typing this on my MB Air) have finally again bought a Linux-only computer - a refurbished Thinkpad W510, pimped out with 18GB of memory and a 256GB SSD. With Ubuntu 14.04 LTS installed. I expected it to be a tad of a step backwards.
It was.
What I saying is, that one of the very neat advantages of Apples products is the prime qualtiy integration of hard- and software. With installing Ubuntu I was back to fiddling around with NVidia drivers a la 2003, annoying non-memorised bluetooth settings, praying for my extra Logitech Mousebuttons to work (they do, thanks to manual X-configability) shoddy/broken compiz desktop acceleration and other fussing around. I'm an expert, so I very well know that I would have the same mess on a Windows system and much more so and no way to fix it. And I also do have very good reasons for moving away from Apple (walled garden, non-turing complete iOS computers/devices, etc.) but I also have to say that FOSS utility computing still being stuck with problems we had back in 2002 really depresses me at times.
Timothys post brings up all images that show what's wrong and anoying with FOSS.
I'd so whish for one vendor to say: OK, we're building expert, top-quality utility computing hardware and going fully FOSS with it - 100% HW/SW integration and all. Personally I'm whishing for a MB Air/Ultrabook like device with low-power CPU and 20+hrs of battery life, fully open-speced HW and some neat and bold features like custom non-tiling setups for the UI, special functions supported out of the box and stuff like that.... But then again, it's 2014 with computers a dime a dozen and such a project just one successful kickstarter campaing away. Maybe I should get of my ass and start one...?
Anyhow, I'm sick of fiddling with stuff that should be basic comodity in 2014 and having to deal with issues like the one timothy has. Just had to let that out.
Plain and simple: Patents are assets. Put them into a company. A company that you own 51% in at minimum of course.
Make it clear to any potential employer, that in terms of patents it's a)... out of your hands to give your prospective emloyer access to IP owned by [YOUR_PATENT_HOLDING_COMPANY] and b)... whenever they're negotiating about your patents they're talking to you not as an employee but as CEO/Owner of [YOUR_PATENT_HOLDING_COMPANY]
This not just keeps the fronts clear but also opens you up to potentially lucrative deals with you and possible employers. Hope I could help.
Rolexes are the best currency for larger sums and are actually used for exactly that. You wear them on your wrist and if you clothe accordingly they're not even suspicious when crossing a border.
For VPN it's just the same. I've been dealing with Cisco AnyCrap VPN for the last 4 months and our problem - establishing a network-transparent VPN access to a remote share to deploy software without Cisco Malware (TM) hijacking our netconfig - still hasn't gone away. Naturally. The fuss is mostly politics (90%) with 3 parties and 15 individuals involved pushing responsibility around and fussing with bullshit that would be fixed in 30 minutes if they'd actually deliver what we need, but I guess that's the usual problem.
Moral to the story, once again, as has been for the past 2 decades: Never, ever go with proprietary solutions and vendor/service lock-in for mission critical stuff!
That aside, how does your contract look? Is it Lawyer-time yet? Perhaps you should start playing 'legal-ball' or at least start writing snail-mail solicited letters as to indicate that you're pissed and won't take this much longer. Can actually work wonders.
Good luck. And don't forget to add "OpenVPN Compatible" into your next contracts.
In two years this sort of phone will be on par with mine, an HTC Desire HD. It's 3.5 years old and does all I could ever want from a Phone. Appart from being a little sluggish at times maybe. But that's hardly an issue, given that it is very sturdy and has a replaceable battery - which most modern phones don't.
When robots have advanced far enough into manufacturing, we'll have the equivalent of iPhone 6es come out of vending machines and the likes, for prices simular to that of this model. The predecessor to my current phone was a Blackberry Curve 8310. The superiour keyboard and battery runtime aside, the entire device seems way outdated and strangely anachronistic to me, like from a different era - and it's only 7 years old!
It's actually quite realistic when Google claims that they want to put the second half of humanity on to the internet within the next 5 years.
Imagine we would find a lifeform like in Lems' Solaris. Not many species but one single one occuping a planet. A Super-Amobea that won the evolutionary race some hundred million years ago or something. Would it have a conscience? If yes, what kind of conscience? Would scientists discuss, wether it is ethical to take a probe or not? Would we be hurting a being? Would be deem it ethical (or not) to send probes into it/down there?... Interesting questions.
But then again, I'd say it's probably just land exposed and covered by tides. Meeeh. Boooooring.
Use static HTML, CSS, the F4Player and see the lectures catch on. Once you've got content, choose/buid you system based on that. That might even be Wordpress or Joomla or something.
With all this hassle nowadays - I remember the times when nVidia was the only company supporting Linux and was something like the darly child of the FOSS community - which company actually *is* the most FOSS friendly today? Intel? AMD/ATI? Some other company?
Slashdot Mirror
The problem probably just finally got escalated inside Groupon. Before it was some stupid desk clerk thinking: Oh, some hobbyists I've never heard of are mad that their little programming club has the same name as our new terminal. No big deal.
Then it was "Sue them into next wednesday!" "Burn Groupon to the ground!" "Hang them higher!" and their response being "OMFG! It's a project that's FOSS and Linux and they are all friends with IBM, Oracle and Google. And they've got lawyers!"
Probably some exec with a clue got wind of the situation and concluded that "... yeah, they do have a case and this Gnome Project acutally isn't that small of a deal as one might think. And we have enough bad press as it is. Back down.".
Smart move I'd say.
And they even get a little neat publicity for playing nice.
I love it. Hipster-hate, in all it's forms, is the latest new thing! It's the latest trend.
What's wrong with hippster? ... I love hippster. Nerdyness becoming the über-chique. That's awesome. For once, fashion has caught up with nerd-culture and not the other way around. In the 80ies it was Grundge and oversized, today it's hippster. Different name, same thing, basically. I can get huge and stable plastic frame glasses that are sturdy, cheap and let me see everything and I'm right ahead with the avantgarde.
The best thing about it is, that if you want to dress extra classy, a *normal* suit and tie will do just fine, becaue everybody else is wearing chucks and NBs anyway. And, to be honest, girls all dressed up like chicas in high-heels and tons of makeup all day never was my thing. I thing they look really cute with their baggy smurf-woolen caps, doc martens and oversized parkas. ... It's all been there in the 60ies and 80ies already and I love it whenever it comes around.
Yay for Hippster!
Sorry to be raining on your parade, folks, but seriously, no one really cares.
If Windows 8 has become a utility OS for Steam and Valve is OK with that and is dropping Linux as a foundation - so effing what? Valve would've built yet another dodgy distro of Linux (a shabby Debian fork I'd guess) and I think we all can agree that we have enough of those. And if you think that Valve would've put effort into the community - think again. Their a business.
With Android and Chrome OS we already have to large Linux distros comparatively tightly controlled by a MegaCorp. And from what I can tell, Android is going to be the next gen gaming OS. Convergence is upon us and once that's through, no one will give a damn about the "Desktop" - it was a crappy metaphor anyway - or PC gaming. Aside from a few enthusiasts and development professionals perhaps.
You'll plug your phone into your TV/Monitor grab your favorite independantly manufactured gaming controller and play Assasins Creed 12 you've just downloaded and bought a 32-hour gaming ticket for.
NVidia Shield anyone? Did you see the gaming demo in the iPhone 6 presentation? Gaming on smartphones and tablets is just taking of and there are enough experts in gaming who've expressed their feeling that the current gen of consoles will be the last. XBone is bombing, Wii has significantly slowed and the PS4 is one step away from becoming Sonys all-in media and home computing center - if they don't screw this one up that is.
No one want the Linux desktop, because the Desktop is on the way out.
Utility OSes like iOS, Chrome and Anroid is where the parties at now. End of Story.
How are they gonna get him out again? Cut the snake open?
How about giving the beast some real food and/or just leave it alone?
Or film it from a distance and watch it eat some of its natural prey.
Isn't that what discovery channel usually does?
And, btw, AFAIK boa constrictors - which include anacondas - prefer their prey not breathing anymore. And they don't really care if it's bottled air you're breathing or not. They constrict you 'till you stop breathing. Hence the name. Duh.
To be honest, I kinda hope this snake teaches the guy a lesson and get's away with it. Now *that* would be some news. :-)
And? They obviously are in pain for developers of this rare language. Show some pitty!
No. Chromebook is actually the better package for most people.
8 hrs. battery time. Boots in 8 seconds. Zero maintenance. Zero worries about backups. Zero worries about installing programms. Zero virii. Zero synching your photos, videos, audios, whatnot with your tablet and/or phone. Everything in the cloud. Drop your laptop, have it stolen, pour coffee into it - no problem. Order a new one, log on, all your stuff is there and you didn't even have to archive. While the the one is being shipped you can use your friends computer or your cellphone to do the most important stuff until it arrives. I gave my fiance a laptop (IBM Thinkpad, Ubuntu 14.04, all ready and set up) and an android tablet. She used the laptop once. The tablet she uses constantly. Just watching her is a real eye opener.
Anther Point in case:
I'm your type A slashdot computer geek and even *I* would prefer a chromebook over a windows laptop (typing this on Linux btw.)
I'm quite convinced that my next portable computer will either be an android tablet with an extra bluetooth keyboard or a chromebook - routing a chromebook with crouton and installing linux on it is quite easy, and 8 hrs battery time for 299 has a nice ring to it.
The truth is: Google is set to bring the second half of humanity online. They are basically the budget Apple. You pay significantly less with at least as much convenience, if not even more. Google takes care of you and all your computing stuff for free and in turn the may observe you 24/7. That's the basic deal and there is no upside MS can offer to that.
With MS it's pay premium, and get observed, and functionality degraded over time and virii and we want to know all your details before you can use windows unencumbred. Oh, and MS Office is a subscription now. ... Who the eff wants that? ... MS only has a chance to do that for historical reasons, and those are wearing off quickly.
No one I know would want this ugly laptop with windows on it.
My 2 cents.
You are NO Linux guy! A Linux guy cares about all things Linux, however slightly.
Wrong. A Linux guy cares more about Linux than any other OS and is one who's judgement perhaps has a little weight.
Like, if he's been programming since '85 or something like that and has been using *nix during the times when the only usable editor on it was Emacs or Vi.
You may not believe it, but I, and quite a few others who do computing for a living, actually have a life outside of computers and fiddling with init-scripts and xconfig. Partly because I've done that to death already back in the day when there was nothing else to do and making Gnome 1.x , Nautilus and GKrellm look like Star Trek was a cool way to spend your time.
*the old rooster ruffles his feathers*
Seriously, I've been a Linux Guy since the 90ies and I honestly couldn't care less.
Anything I know about init is about runlevels - and those are a really neat thing. I mean really cool. You can fiddle with those using mc (Midnight Commander) and debian has a stack of 4-6 of those preconfigged and set up by default - last time I checked, some 7 years ago or something anyway.
Point is, my grandma can set up a runlevel that ex- or includes the LAMP stack in it's 'launch', 'init' or whatever-it's-called sequence and I can set my box to it by typing "init [simple Int here]" for my box to go there.
Again, that is pretty neat and cool and the best working solution I've run into so far.
Way better than anything in the Windos world, that's for sure.
If this "systemd" thing - whatever that is - doesn't break this or offers a neater improvement on that runlevel stuff or a way better concept that's worthwhile moving into, perhaps like the SVN vs. Git thing in which Git comes out on top IMHO - without requiring some bullshit GUI tool to be usable, that's all very fine and dandy with me.
If, on the other hand, you're going to push this new fad and hurt me wile doing so, I'm coming for you some time in the future. With a baseball club and my mafia friends. Other than fucking around with one of the best filemanagers ever - Konqueror - and replacing it with an inferior dolphin - this isn't some GUI toy you should fiddle with. This is Linux at a level where it's actually *the* industry standard. As in 'no other even comes close to this level of reliability and quality". Fucking that up would be a really stupid idea.
Otherwise I really positively couldn't care less - and that's how it should be, no? Except for, maybe, if I were a System Developer or Distro Release Manager or something.
My 2 cents.
I don't see a point in todays smartwatches and I'm not an Apple Fanboy but the truth is, I'd bet money that Apples Smartwatch is the first worth looking at if you're into this sort of gadget and have no problem entering Apples golden cage.
Their recent retina display iMac says it all: ... a "Think Button" - WTF??? etc. And, of course, don't get me started on the default windows installation. ... That's how backwards it is compared to the stuff Apple builds.
Apple implents things before others even think about it. I recently bought a ThinkPad as my Linux Workstation and to avoid Apple. The whole device feels like from a different era. Clunky crappy plastic, strange features and behaviour, a boot screen that looks like some highschool kid designed it, in the 80ies
Say what you want about Apple, but these guys know how to do hardware and they know how to do software and they know how to integrate both. The amount of detail that went into the Apple Watch is staggering - as usual, I have to ad. For instance: The display is so small, they added pressure as a metric to touch, to have a wider range of input.
This summer I looked at a Sony Smartwatch, out of curiosity - it felt like a prototype from 2004, with a low-res screen and some flaky widgets on it. I have no doubt apples watch will be a few generations ahead, because that's what apple does. Innovate to sell their shiny stuff.
Then again, I'm steering clear of Apple for a while now. Their iPads and iPhone are just to damn expensive to be a viable alternative to android tablets and phones and my 3 year old MB Air is going to last at least another 5 years. Who knows what comes then ...
My smartwatch I'm getting as soon as it has an AI built in and I can unhook it from Google, Apple or whatever Megacorp is ruling the world then.
This is one of the laws that cause the pirate party to rise in Germany a few years ago. This australian law seems like a 1on1 rippoff of the German law that was brought upon us by the likes of Sith-Lord Schäuble himself.
Yepp, it's Germany folks. Better beer, better cars and even our surveillance laws make you potiticians envious.
We found out that aspestos causes a variation of diseases that are quite mean. We removed asbestos from the buildings, decommissioned the ships built with and had a generation of sailors and construction workers where bad lung diseases and some other sicknesses caused quite a few to live and die in agony.
If we find out that cellphones cause some form of super-agressive brain cancer that pops up quickly after 15-20 years of exposure to GSM microwaves, then tomorrow all cell-towser will be on the ground and our generation will the the one with brain cancer. No big deal. Some first world kids die off, humanity can live with that easyly.
Same with Nucler Power. Even such disasters as chernobyl or fukushima are compareatively contained. ... Ok, I'm sounding cynical here, fukushima isn't contained, it's a hideous mess, but one can still see this possibly retreating in the next few thousand years .... errrm, well ... anyway ...
All, or most of it, quite simple, lesson learned and humanity moves on. Aspestos is regulated, Germany drops nuclear, 3 more fukushimas and the rest will follow, all more or less fine and dandy.
However - big however - add in biotech and things look vastly different.
Only one haywire designed bacterium has to get into the wild and we're all dead 5 months later. All humans on the entire planet. Think "Planet of the Apes Prevolution" style, only without remaining protagonists.
Nuclear is kinda so-so (except for some idiot at the nuke warfare trigger of course), but biotech - no way. One wrong move and fukushima looks like a walk in the park. Imagine Ebola, but with the brakes removed.
Bottom line:
Basically he's right. You don't fuck with biotech. And we need serious regulations in place for that. I second.
I thought sexual harassment involved touching somebody? No?
Maybe I didn't get the memo?
Or is this some US thing I don't get?
Please fill me in.
Said this already a while back on a simular problem:
It's called marketing.
In short:
If your project is (re)presented properly, you'll have people falling over each other to claim gouvernance over it.
I'd put it into a foundation - after refurbishing it's outward representation!
Example: Typo3's architecture looks like it's designed by monkees on crack, it's config language TypoScript is so bizar - in concept and in implementaion - I can't even describe it and there are a countless other strange things about this software. Yet it has a professional website, ressonable documentation and a solid brand, brandbook included(!). I doubt the Typo3 Foundation has problems finding heralds for it's project. There even are Oreilly's on it.
Hope I could help. And good luck finding a heir for your project.
The 15 Jobs Where Women Earn More Than Men [forbes.com]
OMG! Female visagists earn 12 dollars more per month on average than their male counterparts! ...
608$ vs. 596$! Stop the presses!
I am over-fucking-welmed!
Seriously, I'd bet about hald of those links are smoke and mirrors or biased pointless BS
However I *do* believe part of the pay-equality discussion to be hysteria and good sources on that to be valuable.
Perhaps you should curate that list for quality a little - half of the links would be enough.
My 2 cents.
I find the idea that nerds would ever chase off women particularly amusing. Hell, most of us would KILL to have women around. If women are electing to not pursue the field, it's certainly not because they're unwelcome. On every team that I've ever been on with women, the guys went out of their way to be nice to them.
Anecdotal counter-'evidence': ... you know the drill). Computers and programming from there on out. I'm also quite good with women. A late bloomer. like most of us, I've gotten the hang of it in the last decade. I dance Tango and have had a measure of affairs since roughly the age of 35. And I enjoy the embrace of a cute women very much. It's also fun to learn how nerdy and insecure women themselves are! And sexually frustrated in just about the same amount as men! ... Only better at hiding it. :-) ... anyway:
I'm a programmer and IT expert. Regular 80ies computerkid (zx81, Sharp PC 1402, Basic, Peek & Poke, etc. growing up in parallel with microcomputers
I also run into female IT and Tech experts. Sadly not that often, for the known reasons, but occasionally I do. On at least two occasions I've caught myself being slightly disrespectful to women in tech, albeit with no bad intent. Once was explaing my tango partner - a women in her late 20ies on her way to a PHD in electronics - how I would use a dual-cinch-to-3,5mm jack audio adapter to hook a player to loudspeakers. Roughly 20 seconds in it dawned to me that, if anything, she would explain to me how to do it. I inmediately appologised and we resolved the awkward situation with some humor.
It was embarrasing none-the-less.
On another occasion I was basically explaining my smartphone in very simple terms to a female PHD in CS with expert Java knowledge - a team-lead. It was an Android phone. She'd actually just wanted to know which Android version it was running when she asked "What is that?". With a cliche computer guy or male web-hipster asking it, I might have caught the gist. The simple fact that she was quite young and good-looking had triggered male dominance behaviour in me and had me look like somewhat like a jerk. Again, I noticed it about 10 seconds in, but by then I'd already done it. She handled it very professionally, but I felt like a total douche. Still do actually, when thinking back.
Bottom line:
You may think you're treating women respectfully while you're actually appearing quite condescending. Observe yourself if you get the chance - I've alway thought the same as you did, but since discovered some fine-tuning requirements in my behaviour towards women in our profession. QED.
... they're worrying a bit about the sea-level when they put it to water.
" ... (who can't all afford the cost of conventional prostheses) ..."
USA - the only supposed first-world country where children have to be able to afford a prostheses. ... Or actually f*cking outrageous if you think about it for a minute.
Creepy.
Just reading this gives me the creeps and makes me sad.
Note: I've been a FOSS advocate since the 90ies and have used Linux since '99. It's my only OS of choice for Inet facing servers and just recently, after years of x86 Linux neglegt and OS X usage (typing this on my MB Air) have finally again bought a Linux-only computer - a refurbished Thinkpad W510, pimped out with 18GB of memory and a 256GB SSD. With Ubuntu 14.04 LTS installed. I expected it to be a tad of a step backwards.
It was.
What I saying is, that one of the very neat advantages of Apples products is the prime qualtiy integration of hard- and software. With installing Ubuntu I was back to fiddling around with NVidia drivers a la 2003, annoying non-memorised bluetooth settings, praying for my extra Logitech Mousebuttons to work (they do, thanks to manual X-configability) shoddy/broken compiz desktop acceleration and other fussing around. I'm an expert, so I very well know that I would have the same mess on a Windows system and much more so and no way to fix it. And I also do have very good reasons for moving away from Apple (walled garden, non-turing complete iOS computers/devices, etc.) but I also have to say that FOSS utility computing still being stuck with problems we had back in 2002 really depresses me at times.
Timothys post brings up all images that show what's wrong and anoying with FOSS.
I'd so whish for one vendor to say: OK, we're building expert, top-quality utility computing hardware and going fully FOSS with it - 100% HW/SW integration and all. Personally I'm whishing for a MB Air/Ultrabook like device with low-power CPU and 20+hrs of battery life, fully open-speced HW and some neat and bold features like custom non-tiling setups for the UI, special functions supported out of the box and stuff like that. ... But then again, it's 2014 with computers a dime a dozen and such a project just one successful kickstarter campaing away. Maybe I should get of my ass and start one ...?
Anyhow, I'm sick of fiddling with stuff that should be basic comodity in 2014 and having to deal with issues like the one timothy has. Just had to let that out.
My 2 cents.
Plain and simple: Patents are assets. Put them into a company. A company that you own 51% in at minimum of course.
Make it clear to any potential employer, that in terms of patents it's ... out of your hands to give your prospective emloyer access to IP owned by [YOUR_PATENT_HOLDING_COMPANY] ... whenever they're negotiating about your patents they're talking to you not as an employee but as CEO/Owner of [YOUR_PATENT_HOLDING_COMPANY]
a)
and
b)
This not just keeps the fronts clear but also opens you up to potentially lucrative deals with you and possible employers.
Hope I could help.
Rolexes are the best currency for larger sums and are actually used for exactly that. You wear them on your wrist and if you clothe accordingly they're not even suspicious when crossing a border.
For VPN it's just the same. I've been dealing with Cisco AnyCrap VPN for the last 4 months and our problem - establishing a network-transparent VPN access to a remote share to deploy software without Cisco Malware (TM) hijacking our netconfig - still hasn't gone away. Naturally. The fuss is mostly politics (90%) with 3 parties and 15 individuals involved pushing responsibility around and fussing with bullshit that would be fixed in 30 minutes if they'd actually deliver what we need, but I guess that's the usual problem.
Moral to the story, once again, as has been for the past 2 decades:
Never, ever go with proprietary solutions and vendor/service lock-in for mission critical stuff!
That aside, how does your contract look? Is it Lawyer-time yet? Perhaps you should start playing 'legal-ball' or at least start writing snail-mail solicited letters as to indicate that you're pissed and won't take this much longer. Can actually work wonders.
Good luck. And don't forget to add "OpenVPN Compatible" into your next contracts.
Tech moves fast.
In two years this sort of phone will be on par with mine, an HTC Desire HD. It's 3.5 years old and does all I could ever want from a Phone. Appart from being a little sluggish at times maybe. But that's hardly an issue, given that it is very sturdy and has a replaceable battery - which most modern phones don't.
When robots have advanced far enough into manufacturing, we'll have the equivalent of iPhone 6es come out of vending machines and the likes, for prices simular to that of this model. The predecessor to my current phone was a Blackberry Curve 8310. The superiour keyboard and battery runtime aside, the entire device seems way outdated and strangely anachronistic to me, like from a different era - and it's only 7 years old!
It's actually quite realistic when Google claims that they want to put the second half of humanity on to the internet within the next 5 years.
Imagine we would find a lifeform like in Lems' Solaris. Not many species but one single one occuping a planet. ...
A Super-Amobea that won the evolutionary race some hundred million years ago or something.
Would it have a conscience? If yes, what kind of conscience?
Would scientists discuss, wether it is ethical to take a probe or not? Would we be hurting a being? Would be deem it ethical (or not) to send probes into it/down there?
Interesting questions.
But then again, I'd say it's probably just land exposed and covered by tides.
Meeeh. Boooooring.
The problem with any system is content.
Bingo.
Use static HTML, CSS, the F4Player and see the lectures catch on. Once you've got content, choose/buid you system based on that. That might even be Wordpress or Joomla or something.
With all this hassle nowadays - I remember the times when nVidia was the only company supporting Linux and was something like the darly child of the FOSS community - which company actually *is* the most FOSS friendly today? Intel? AMD/ATI? Some other company?
Educated opinions on this needed.