Quit it with nuclear already, please. It is not cost effective. It only exists because it was a neat 60ies techno-romantic pipe-dream and we've dumped obscene amounts of tax-payers money into it. The reactors don't last nearly as long as people thought they, they're constantly faulty, cost bizar amounts of money and need to run for decades without a hitch to barely cover their own costs. One company with big hopes on travelling wave and new microstructure just went bankrupt a few months ago, scraping their entire idea because it apparently doesn't work in a feasible way either. Germany is exciting fission as we speak and even the French are starting to have second thoughts and they used to jerk off to pictures of the Catenom reactor complex.
Nuclear Fission does one thing well: put massive amounts of distribution power into the hands of a few and burdening the rest with risks, costs and a huge waste problem. And that's about it.
Nuclear fission isn't cost-effective and the fastest we're out, the better. So please quit the nuclear hype. It's out and over. Big time.
If you want to be scared out of your mind read the book "The Sixth Extinction". It's bottom line is that we are smack in the middle of Earths Sixth mass extinction of life and humanity is the driver. Basically the ecosystem that built is is already fubar, that's her premise. She also has a lecture or two on YouTube and Ted. We have to act now if we want any sort of feasible damage control, that's the only option left according to her. And she makes good points and has solid data. I tend to believe her.
Other than putting their employer in bad light this makes no sense to me. How about writing an internal letter to Sundar Pitchai or the board, if there are reasons to be upset? Or just quit citing the problem. That would gain some effective PR. This just seems silly and childish as many hashtag (pseudo) feminist actions these days. I honestly don't get it.
Our is it just some teenie service personnel looking for attention?
I've crossed ways with Xiaomi Hardware a few times in the last 15 months or so because their also starting to make inroads in Europe. The price-performance is through the effing roof. I'm considering switching from Motorola to Xiaomi for my Smartphone and am eyeing a Xiaomi Air notebook as my next portable computer. 170 Euros for a 6.3" phone with 4/64gb of memory, an Octacore CPU and edge to edge display plus all other current niceties is pretty darn impressive. And the build quality is good and every Xiaomi owner I've spoken to is happy.
Price to geo-stat orbit: 300 Euros per kilogram or less. Nice. We'd just assemble a massive spaceship and the first trip to mars would be an extended luxury cruise or something like that. Very nice. We'd be casually exploring the solar system and have a permanent residence on mars. Very nice indeed.
I don't know, but their knowlege looks just fine to me. That one drawing emphasises two fans - I presume you can hear and/or see them easyest - and just has simple connections between components, not even plus and minus, but let's be honest: Do *you* know how the north and southbridge play together? Or which faulty resistor makes your memory defunct and which one the USB? The last plan of a computer I saw was the C64 layout that came with the manual - and that was pretty much abstracted away too, containing only information that some tinkerer would need.
That someone thinks a piece of cheese is inside a computer is obviously someone who won't be an engineer but probably a manager or a farmer or something. But children think like that - no big deal.
Example: As a 4 year old kid I watched the Stan & Laurel piece where they take a rife and shoot at a house and at the same time it explodes because of some dynamite or something. That was the joke but as a 4 year old I didn't get it, couldn't connect the dots between one shot showing a burning fuse, them shooting and the house exploding. I went for a few years thinking that rifles have the power to blow up houses with one shot. Big deal. Children reason as good as they can, and if they learn the details behind things they correct their opinions. That's how reasoning works.
Bottom line: Open up a computer and show them the insides. They'll learn pretty quickly all the stuff software people like us know. Maybe even more.
I say maybe, because we all know we need him as society needs the crazy guy living in the mountains warning of how things can go bad.
But while Stallman is right 95% of the time he also needs to get over the fact that for most people - including me - free (as in speech) software and open source software are the same thing. In fact, open source is a more distinct term than "free" and thus much more precise. We all know that if MS offers some "open shared source" bullshit that restricts its users it is not open source, it's fake open source. Every single person I know when talking about FOSS thinks about software that is open source under some OSI certified FOSS license, be it GNU, BSD, MIT or whatnot. For a good society they are all equally valuable. As for douchebags still attempting a malicious lock-in with fake open source: We can call them out and ignore them. FOSS has won. MS knows this and if some manager at MS still thinks he can screw us over and expect us to learn a system that is no other than badly disguised corporate lock-in, then he can go and screw himself, die in a fire and have is software become obsolete technical liability in less than a decade (.Net anyone?).
This has been going on for 10-15 years now. DMCA and such. This is standard fare.
We're all just secretly hoping it won't happen to us. But if they want to get you, they will. They just need to make something up and take all your shit and fuck up your life big time. See this guy for details. And wether he's done something wrong or not doesn't matter. His life right now is fucked up bit time. True thing.
To me the solution is obvious:
Have a backup plan. Like a *real* backup plan.
Something like this: - Mirroring of your critical data to a remote unknown location. - Fallback computers hidden away. - All critical documents copied and stored in an unknown location. - Emergency cash. - Crypto key USB sticks hidden away. - Tried and tested disaster recovery scripts and procedures. - Fallback spoof Google/Apple/Whatnot accounts that also have access to your main stuff - to salvage what you can when they've already come for you. - Know where to go when they are after you. Where and how would you hide out / away?
Hardcore prepper style stuff (this is higher lever "society collapses" fallback): - Functioning pocket water filter. - Working digital radio with means to cheaply transfer digital data via SSB or something (PSK 31 handled with a Rasberry Pi or something)
As for the scenario this guy is in - a good way to prepare for this is to ask yourself: What would be my fallbacks if *right* *now* the police came, raided me and took all my stuff? And what can I do to prevent the worst from happening out of that? We've had this sort of thing in Germany on and off for a few decades, ever since the 80ies. The famous Chaos Computer Club and its members know these scenarios. There are some been-there-done-this talks on youtube on how they dealt with stuff like this. Enlightening - also the emotional aspect. (some are German, but probably subtitled so you'll get some info).
Bottom line: Be prepared. It's that simple and makes a huuuuge difference when the brown stuff hits the fan.
Truth be told: Apple can afford to drag their heels on hardware updates and offer sub-optimal support and repairability. Apple is by now a full blown fashion brand. Being expensive is a value in itself for Apple customers. Is their stuff bad? No, absolutely not. Do they care about is developers anymore? Nope, not really. It's up to Google and Microsoft to pick up that ball now I suppose.
I've stopped buying Apple hardware which I've been doing since 2003 (12" iBook G4 - legendary!) and if they want to win me back they better start delivering a minimum base of good price performance products. Which they stopped doing a few years back.
Bottom line: Apple is doing just fine for people who can't calculate or judge hardware by it's specs. Which is 99% of all people. Other than that, I'm moving towards custom/special Linux hardware once again.
Not really surprising. Google and Co. are large computers with large pieces of software on them - not much more. What are humans supposed to do in that context? Come up with Google Chat App #11? The novelty effect of silicon valley is wearing off and two decades from now the party will be in the far east or somewhere else. This is just how things like this go.
I don't get it. The FOSS-dev community right now seems like a bunch of whiny crybabies just because some 16-year old girlies and wannabees are pursuing a SJW/CoC/PC fad right now. Perhaps you're over-reacting?
I find the comment of the SQLite crew to this entire charade absolutely fitting and just about all that needs to be said to all this. The rest of you foaming at the mouth about some immature douchebags being stupid on twitter should be a tad more chill about all this. It will pass and if your code is good enough it will still be in use long after any overboard SJW stuff has fallen by the wayside. So please calm down.
What douchebag third-grade developer has any say in what others chose to do in terms of this CoC thing that is fashionable just now? Screw you buddy. Their choice is theirs to make and if it's a feasible CoC and a funny/whitty comment on this whole CoC fad at the same time, even so much the better.
F*ck either arrogant side of the camp and more power to this crew for lightening up this entire retarded entitled manner in which many a dimwit thinks they can tell others what to do in this entire era of dimwitted counter-productive over-bord PC non-sense, CoC fan or not!
Meaning: It should be a walk in the park to enforce compensation and damages due to violation of standard workplace regulations in a civil lawsuit. And before you go on with "own choice" jadijada, please note that in 99.9% of all times we're not talking "Valve exclusive top tag team working out the last glitches on Half Life 2" or "small indie crew building the next Super Meat Boy" but "regular coding monkey working for some EA joint with managers that couldn't plan a software project if their life depended on it and don't give a flying f*ck about the teams health". To emphasize: Germany has very strict workplace rules and is very productive not in spite but because of those - so there is no reason this couldn't work in the US too. EA and the likes would have their ass handed to them in court.
And we all know that humanity would be better of if we took EA and all its entire bunch of asshole execs, wrapped them in barbed wire and shot them into the sun.
Replacing stuff from 5.x that doesn't work is nigh trivial. Then again, if you did your homework and didn't code crap, 5.x is perfectly safe. Of course we all know that PHP is the favorite PL of many people who can't programm, so YMMV.
It's a huge jet turbine with wheels attached. Big fat hairy deal. I'm sure that was cool sometime in the early sixties or something, but come on, seriously?
Finally a process automator that doesn't use obscure bloated JSON/YAML stuff but a neat visual point-and-click modeller to build your pipeline. I'm definitely going to try it out. I wouldn't be surprised if you can even export the processes as JS or something.
As for MS, I like some of what they've been doing lately and they've even got a little Karma back with me. VS Code and TypeScript are two pretty neat FOSS projects, you have to give them that. And this from someone for whom the last MS thing he used was Win2K.
I know at least one high profile technology driven company that hosts *everything* on GitHub. I mean *everything*. Their secrets are encrypted though. But stored on GitHub.
They're doing pretty well and AFAICT their pipeline is as good as it gets.
The cool thing about Github is that it's hardly more than Git with a webgui that everybody knows. Meaning you can transition your entire pipeline to something else and self-hosted with a few mouseclicks and a little shell-scripting.
Dude, chill. It's a process automation tool like Apple Automator or Gulp or something. If they change functionality or start locking in, it takes less than an hour to migrate your stuff back to bash, Gradle, Python or whatever your pipeline is built on.
It's a critical bug that has gone largely undiscovered. Which is surprising, given the installbase of it's host-code. The hacker probably was careful not to exploit it to openly.
... on the Hardware Front. Prices going down, fast, and battery time going up. Big time. Nice. Got meself a Chromebook R13 for 400 Euros with a battery time of 9+hours. Very nice. Now if the Linux kernel would catch up with power management and perhaps some FOSS GUI project would grasp touch in a feasible way, that would be even more awesome.
Slashdot Mirror
It better be about as fast, at a similar price-point.
Quit it with nuclear already, please. It is not cost effective. It only exists because it was a neat 60ies techno-romantic pipe-dream and we've dumped obscene amounts of tax-payers money into it.
The reactors don't last nearly as long as people thought they, they're constantly faulty, cost bizar amounts of money and need to run for decades without a hitch to barely cover their own costs. One company with big hopes on travelling wave and new microstructure just went bankrupt a few months ago, scraping their entire idea because it apparently doesn't work in a feasible way either. Germany is exciting fission as we speak and even the French are starting to have second thoughts and they used to jerk off to pictures of the Catenom reactor complex.
Nuclear Fission does one thing well: put massive amounts of distribution power into the hands of a few and burdening the rest with risks, costs and a huge waste problem. And that's about it.
Nuclear fission isn't cost-effective and the fastest we're out, the better. So please quit the nuclear hype. It's out and over. Big time.
If you want to be scared out of your mind read the book "The Sixth Extinction". It's bottom line is that we are smack in the middle of Earths Sixth mass extinction of life and humanity is the driver. Basically the ecosystem that built is is already fubar, that's her premise. She also has a lecture or two on YouTube and Ted. We have to act now if we want any sort of feasible damage control, that's the only option left according to her. And she makes good points and has solid data.
I tend to believe her.
... make everybody happy *and* obscene amounts of cash on top of that.
Gee Wizz, who would've thunk that?
Extra bonus karma points for Rockstar execs who kick some EA officials in the balls at the next E3.
Other than putting their employer in bad light this makes no sense to me. How about writing an internal letter to Sundar Pitchai or the board, if there are reasons to be upset? Or just quit citing the problem. That would gain some effective PR. This just seems silly and childish as many hashtag (pseudo) feminist actions these days. I honestly don't get it.
Our is it just some teenie service personnel looking for attention?
I've crossed ways with Xiaomi Hardware a few times in the last 15 months or so because their also starting to make inroads in Europe. The price-performance is through the effing roof. I'm considering switching from Motorola to Xiaomi for my Smartphone and am eyeing a Xiaomi Air notebook as my next portable computer.
170 Euros for a 6.3" phone with 4/64gb of memory, an Octacore CPU and edge to edge display plus all other current niceties is pretty darn impressive. And the build quality is good and every Xiaomi owner I've spoken to is happy.
Oh, wait, /. is a US joint. Ok, forget about what I said.
And now attention: ... :-)
Getting modded into earths core in 3,2,1
Price to geo-stat orbit: 300 Euros per kilogram or less. Nice. We'd just assemble a massive spaceship and the first trip to mars would be an extended luxury cruise or something like that. Very nice. We'd be casually exploring the solar system and have a permanent residence on mars. Very nice indeed.
AFAIAC China should get right to it.
I don't know, but their knowlege looks just fine to me. That one drawing emphasises two fans - I presume you can hear and/or see them easyest - and just has simple connections between components, not even plus and minus, but let's be honest: Do *you* know how the north and southbridge play together? Or which faulty resistor makes your memory defunct and which one the USB? The last plan of a computer I saw was the C64 layout that came with the manual - and that was pretty much abstracted away too, containing only information that some tinkerer would need.
That someone thinks a piece of cheese is inside a computer is obviously someone who won't be an engineer but probably a manager or a farmer or something. But children think like that - no big deal.
Example: As a 4 year old kid I watched the Stan & Laurel piece where they take a rife and shoot at a house and at the same time it explodes because of some dynamite or something. That was the joke but as a 4 year old I didn't get it, couldn't connect the dots between one shot showing a burning fuse, them shooting and the house exploding. I went for a few years thinking that rifles have the power to blow up houses with one shot. Big deal. Children reason as good as they can, and if they learn the details behind things they correct their opinions. That's how reasoning works.
Bottom line: Open up a computer and show them the insides. They'll learn pretty quickly all the stuff software people like us know. Maybe even more.
I say maybe, because we all know we need him as society needs the crazy guy living in the mountains warning of how things can go bad.
But while Stallman is right 95% of the time he also needs to get over the fact that for most people - including me - free (as in speech) software and open source software are the same thing. In fact, open source is a more distinct term than "free" and thus much more precise. We all know that if MS offers some "open shared source" bullshit that restricts its users it is not open source, it's fake open source. Every single person I know when talking about FOSS thinks about software that is open source under some OSI certified FOSS license, be it GNU, BSD, MIT or whatnot. For a good society they are all equally valuable. As for douchebags still attempting a malicious lock-in with fake open source: We can call them out and ignore them. FOSS has won. MS knows this and if some manager at MS still thinks he can screw us over and expect us to learn a system that is no other than badly disguised corporate lock-in, then he can go and screw himself, die in a fire and have is software become obsolete technical liability in less than a decade (.Net anyone?).
My 2 eurocents.
... are more healthy!
Next up:
Water wet!
Pope catholic!
News brought to you by CORI - Captain Obvious Research Institute
This has been going on for 10-15 years now. DMCA and such. This is standard fare.
We're all just secretly hoping it won't happen to us. But if they want to get you, they will.
They just need to make something up and take all your shit and fuck up your life big time.
See this guy for details. And wether he's done something wrong or not doesn't matter.
His life right now is fucked up bit time. True thing.
To me the solution is obvious:
Have a backup plan. Like a *real* backup plan.
Something like this:
- Mirroring of your critical data to a remote unknown location.
- Fallback computers hidden away.
- All critical documents copied and stored in an unknown location.
- Emergency cash.
- Crypto key USB sticks hidden away.
- Tried and tested disaster recovery scripts and procedures.
- Fallback spoof Google/Apple/Whatnot accounts that also have access to your main stuff - to salvage what you can when they've already come for you.
- Know where to go when they are after you. Where and how would you hide out / away?
Hardcore prepper style stuff (this is higher lever "society collapses" fallback):
- Functioning pocket water filter.
- Working digital radio with means to cheaply transfer digital data via SSB or something (PSK 31 handled with a Rasberry Pi or something)
As for the scenario this guy is in - a good way to prepare for this is to ask yourself: What would be my fallbacks if *right* *now* the police came, raided me and took all my stuff? And what can I do to prevent the worst from happening out of that? We've had this sort of thing in Germany on and off for a few decades, ever since the 80ies. The famous Chaos Computer Club and its members know these scenarios. There are some been-there-done-this talks on youtube on how they dealt with stuff like this. Enlightening - also the emotional aspect. (some are German, but probably subtitled so you'll get some info).
Bottom line: Be prepared. It's that simple and makes a huuuuge difference when the brown stuff hits the fan.
My 2 eurocents.
Increasingly expensive? Absolutely. Increasingly abandoning opinion leaders (us)? Yep.
Truth be told: Apple can afford to drag their heels on hardware updates and offer sub-optimal support and repairability. Apple is by now a full blown fashion brand. Being expensive is a value in itself for Apple customers. Is their stuff bad? No, absolutely not. Do they care about is developers anymore? Nope, not really. It's up to Google and Microsoft to pick up that ball now I suppose.
I've stopped buying Apple hardware which I've been doing since 2003 (12" iBook G4 - legendary!) and if they want to win me back they better start delivering a minimum base of good price performance products. Which they stopped doing a few years back.
Bottom line: Apple is doing just fine for people who can't calculate or judge hardware by it's specs. Which is 99% of all people. Other than that, I'm moving towards custom/special Linux hardware once again.
My two eurocents.
Not really surprising. Google and Co. are large computers with large pieces of software on them - not much more. What are humans supposed to do in that context? Come up with Google Chat App #11? The novelty effect of silicon valley is wearing off and two decades from now the party will be in the far east or somewhere else. This is just how things like this go.
I don't get it. The FOSS-dev community right now seems like a bunch of whiny crybabies just because some 16-year old girlies and wannabees are pursuing a SJW/CoC/PC fad right now. Perhaps you're over-reacting?
I find the comment of the SQLite crew to this entire charade absolutely fitting and just about all that needs to be said to all this. The rest of you foaming at the mouth about some immature douchebags being stupid on twitter should be a tad more chill about all this. It will pass and if your code is good enough it will still be in use long after any overboard SJW stuff has fallen by the wayside. So please calm down.
My 2 cents.
What douchebag third-grade developer has any say in what others chose to do in terms of this CoC thing that is fashionable just now? Screw you buddy.
Their choice is theirs to make and if it's a feasible CoC and a funny/whitty comment on this whole CoC fad at the same time, even so much the better.
F*ck either arrogant side of the camp and more power to this crew for lightening up this entire retarded entitled manner in which many a dimwit thinks they can tell others what to do in this entire era of dimwitted counter-productive over-bord PC non-sense, CoC fan or not!
Meaning: It should be a walk in the park to enforce compensation and damages due to violation of standard workplace regulations in a civil lawsuit. And before you go on with "own choice" jadijada, please note that in 99.9% of all times we're not talking "Valve exclusive top tag team working out the last glitches on Half Life 2" or "small indie crew building the next Super Meat Boy" but "regular coding monkey working for some EA joint with managers that couldn't plan a software project if their life depended on it and don't give a flying f*ck about the teams health". To emphasize: Germany has very strict workplace rules and is very productive not in spite but because of those - so there is no reason this couldn't work in the US too. EA and the likes would have their ass handed to them in court.
And we all know that humanity would be better of if we took EA and all its entire bunch of asshole execs, wrapped them in barbed wire and shot them into the sun.
Replacing stuff from 5.x that doesn't work is nigh trivial. Then again, if you did your homework and didn't code crap, 5.x is perfectly safe.
Of course we all know that PHP is the favorite PL of many people who can't programm, so YMMV.
It's a huge jet turbine with wheels attached. Big fat hairy deal.
I'm sure that was cool sometime in the early sixties or something, but come on, seriously?
Finally a process automator that doesn't use obscure bloated JSON/YAML stuff but a neat visual point-and-click modeller to build your pipeline. I'm definitely going to try it out. I wouldn't be surprised if you can even export the processes as JS or something.
As for MS, I like some of what they've been doing lately and they've even got a little Karma back with me. VS Code and TypeScript are two pretty neat FOSS projects, you have to give them that. And this from someone for whom the last MS thing he used was Win2K.
I know at least one high profile technology driven company that hosts *everything* on GitHub. I mean *everything*. Their secrets are encrypted though. But stored on GitHub.
They're doing pretty well and AFAICT their pipeline is as good as it gets.
The cool thing about Github is that it's hardly more than Git with a webgui that everybody knows. Meaning you can transition your entire pipeline to something else and self-hosted with a few mouseclicks and a little shell-scripting.
Dude, chill. It's a process automation tool like Apple Automator or Gulp or something. If they change functionality or start locking in, it takes less than an hour to migrate your stuff back to bash, Gradle, Python or whatever your pipeline is built on.
... it's not zero-day.
It's a critical bug that has gone largely undiscovered. Which is surprising, given the installbase of it's host-code. The hacker probably was careful not to exploit it to openly.
... on the Hardware Front. Prices going down, fast, and battery time going up. Big time. Nice.
Got meself a Chromebook R13 for 400 Euros with a battery time of 9+hours. Very nice.
Now if the Linux kernel would catch up with power management and perhaps some FOSS GUI project would grasp touch in a feasible way, that would be even more awesome.
Is it not?