The customisation isn't flexible enough - I can't move some of the objects (like the address bar) or move tabs to the bottom where they used to be. My interface has been completely reworked with no way to restore it to what it was, as far as I can tell.
For some reason I had three different and separate updates I had to do to fix this:
1) Chrome automatically updated something and was running the latest version when I checked
2) The plugin that Firefox uses only seems to look for updates when I reboot. I found this guide to trigger the update manually, which basically then resulted in it just opening a browser window & making me download an update.exe.
3) Even after that, IE still reported running the older version. I ran Windows Update manually and discovered there was an separate patch in there for Flash for IE.
I've actually been working on a deployment script for our service (we have a VPS hosting business in Australia), which gets most of it up and running in a single-click-deploy kind of way ( https://www.binarylane.com.au/... if you're interested).
It still needs some work (haven't set it up with Nginx, yet) but I had a few people interested in trying it and this meant they could have it up and running in a few minutes to tinker with.
I'll have a think about it - as a VPS provider I am really big on the idea of "private cloud" stuff and I'd really like to make things like this simple for users so they can easily deploy stuff without having to become Linux sysadmins.
No explanation in the summary, so a quick copy/paste from the official site: "MediaGoblin is a free software media publishing platform that anyone can run. You can think of it as a decentralized alternative to Flickr, YouTube, SoundCloud, etc. "
Basically it's a "private cloud" (I hate myself for writing that) with which you can upload your photos, videos, songs, etc - so they live on/your/ server.
It is actually pretty neat. It has the usual marks of an open source product - a very, uh, functional interface that doesn't really grab you immediately. It's a little fiddly to install, but not too bad.
But it all works pretty well - I set up a test server reasonably quickly, and it performs as advertised. Getting photos and videos online is nice and easy, although there's no obvious way to upload albums - it's all one photo at a time (looks like it's at least on their TODO.
I think for it to get some solid mainstream acceptance they'll need to work on the design side - make it look beautiful and Apple-ish out of the box so that civilians are immediately awestruck with how pretty it is - otherwise they might struggle to find adoption outside of the hardcore OSS crowd.
But it's a cool idea, and it's good to see it got funding - the federation stuff will be interesting and if done correctly could really make it a good tool for media sharing.
The point of devops is not to take jobs away from developers. The point of devops is to provide an interface between system administration and development. Development and system administration have always been at odds with each other - system administrators not really understanding or caring how the application works, and developers treating the systems as an infinite resource pool with no real rules or resources past "does my code run?"
This.
We used to have a more DevOps approach when we were a startup (1999-2005ish?). After a while as our contracts got bigger and our client projects got more visibility, they wanted to move into a more change-request-managed style of development (this is despite the fact that we'd never (in my recollection) had any incidents as a result of our management process).
We created a strict separation of roles between Dev and Ops. Devs just wrote code, Ops pushed code to servers.
To this day, many years later, our Dev team still has poor visibility into our operational environment. Getting easy access to log files, looking at temporary files - really/basic/ operational stuff that Devs had done for years was denied to them and a "process" built around getting that stuff from Ops.
This process is slow and awkward. Arguably we could have done it better using tools but we'd bought into the process too much, it existed, so why bother changing it?
Similarly, from an Operations side, their workflow suffered because the devs would be off in a silo, then one day someone would pop up and say "OK I need a full staging and production environment for this project by tomorrow".
Again, not great project management on our part, but what was originally a natural flow of information between two teams who a) historically worked very closely and b) NEED to work very closely slowed to a trickle as the "DevOps" interface was basically shut down.
I have been pushing for a DevOps role for a few years, without success. For me DevOps is about lightening the burden of Dev and Ops teams by increasing the ability for information to flow between them quickly and easily.
IMHO (and little else), I've seen a lot of sysadmins able to step up to the DevOps plate, but very few developers that would be willing, let alone capable (most that I know prefer to write code, and not get their hands dirty with the business of playing server-monkey or wire-monkey.)
In our company it's almost the opposite - we have only three operations staff but 12 developers. Just by virtue of the fact we have more developers they have a wide range of experience doing some operational tasks, just for their own projects.
I'll make sure to let the 7,518,856 other people I play Dota 2 with every month know (that number from just loading the game and looking at the unique monthly players figure).
That is, if I can get their attention while they're all trying to be the next team to win $1m in cash.
(Related aside: check out Valve's Free to Play documentary; it's a great watch for some insight into the lives of professional gamers.)
I'm currently in Columbus, OH - currently undergoing a mumps problem, with almost 200 cases reported. The number is still growing. This is a dumb problem to have to worry about. Get your vaccinations.
I have visited several other societies and I can tell you that the United States is absolutely less corrupt than any other society that I have visited. Of course, I have only witnessed a few: Several Central American Countries, France, South Korea, India, China.
I always find it funny how often this is a (modded-up) defence to claims of corruption in Western society (generally the USA on Slashdot, but you'll see it almost everywhere else).
It doesn't mean that that you should stop striving to eliminate what corruption you do have. Or highlighting it at every opportunity and saying "that's wrong".
From the perspective of an outsider (Australian), the US increasingly looks like it's becoming an oligarchy where money is the only thing that matters. If this story were true it is a sad state of affairs.
So... Who cares if you have an accident that kills or maims someone else because you ignored the manufacturers instructions to modify something.... As long as someone else is around to pick up the bill?
It's not that simple. Marriage is not a right. For anyone. It's a social construct. You can't engage in the "active suppression of other people's rights" when there is no right involved.
It's a social construct that has been turned into legislation, which then defines the rights. Some people have the right to get married, and some don't.
I see both sides of the issue have valid arguments, but booting somebody out of an organization for having a different political opinion does not speak of a "culture of openness." It's open and inclusive until you vote in a way we don't like. Wow.
When your organisation is built on the concept of "openness and inclusiveness" then it seems strange to me for them to allow someone - their leader - to hold an opinion which is arguably not about those things.
Is the only thing worth being intolerant about, intolerance itself?
Anyway. This is a complicated issue; I still am not sure how I feel about it. I feel sorry for Brendan because of the situation he was put in - but I am probably more sorry for an entire class of people who are denied rights to engage in a social construct of their own free will for some arbitrary reason like the gender of the person they want to be with. I don't know how to do this kind of moral calculus.
As far as we know he just doesn't like the idea of Gay Marriage, that is a far cry from being a radical anti-gay advocate.
I was wondering this too, but unfortunately his blog post on the subject - which I would say is the only really authoritative source of information - is basically just gutless corporate-speak (e.g., "Mozilla will remain egalitarian blah blah blah").
It does nothing to explain his personal opinion or his history on the topic, so the only thing I can get out of it is that I'll have to remain largely in the dark about what his personal opinions are and hope it doesn't influence any decisions he makes for Mozilla.
I would like to see an honest, up front post on his blog where he lays out his opinion. Even if I disagree with it (as I suspect I would), at least then I'd respect him for being up-front about it.
Your two posts were fascinating, thanks. It has never crossed my mind to think about rats that much, but the sentence about humans effectively keeping them safe from other predators is one of those obvious-in-hindsight things that I probably never would have realised.
As an Australian that has recently relocated to the US, you have also inculcated a new fear of raccoons, which I will now go at lengths to avoid!
If it's used as some kind of vehicle to push FB onto the few who don't have it and don't loathe it on principle, then I can very well do without and am retroactively glad I decided against funding the kickstarter.
Out of interest, have any of Facebook's other acquisitions been used to force users onto the FB platform? In other words, do they have a strong precedent of doing this?
In the case of Oculus spending $2b and then immediately trying to alienate its core user base by somehow pushing FB on the tiny percentage of users that don't already have it seems like it would be a weird thing to do.
Yes, I guess Abrash really dropped the ball when he didn't do his due diligence on what language the parent company of the VR company he just accepted a job at build their website in!!!@@@
What an odd piece of techno-elitist whining. For what it's worth, Facebook's engineering acumen can be seen in some of the software they've released, including the Hiphop VM for PHP as well as the recently announced Facebook Hack. They have contributed to a huge variety of OSS ( https://code.facebook.com/proj... ) - and things like the OpenComputer project ( http://www.opencompute.org/).
The scale alone of Facebook is an impressive engineering feat. That is entirely the point of Abrash's post, really.
Making Snow Crash into a reality feels like a sort of moral imperative to a lot of programmers, but the efforts that have been made so far leave a lot to be desired.
It is almost painful for me to watch some of the VRML initiatives. It just seems so obviously the wrong way to do something. All of this debating, committee forming, and spec writing, and in the end, there isn't anything to show for it. Make something really cool first, and worry about the spec after you are sure it's worth it!
I do think it is finally the right time for this to start happening for real. While a lot of people could envision the possibilities after seeing DOOM or Quake, it is really only now that we have general purpose hardware acceleration that things are actually flexible enough to be used as a creative medium without constantly being conscious of the technical limitations.
The Metaverse of the Snow Crash world was basically an epic social virtual reality experience. I've always figured Carmack would be involved in making that a reality somehow, and the Oculus Rift certainly seems like it could be a critical part. Facebook actually makes sense from a social perspective as well.
I'm sure there's going to be a lot of people terrified because of imagined privacy implications, but I'm still fascinated to see where this ride takes us.
...that has recently moved to the USA, I am stunned by Amazon - I mean, I always knew it looked awesome but until I got here I didn't fully understand how much stuff was on there and how amazing it is to order basically anything.
Prime simply adds to my amazement - I can order (almost) anything and it will arrive (almost always) 2 days later. My shopping behaviour has changed significantly, to the point where I'll not buy something while it's right in front of me in a store because I can just have Amazon bring it to my house a few days later, saving me the effort of carrying it around or trying to get it home (I don't own a car yet).
Even at the new price it seems like a fantastic deal, and that's before I add the streaming video service, which I've also gotten a lot of use out of, despite having Netflix and Hulu.
I guess I am surprised by the people complaining about the price hike. I'm back in Australia right now for a couple weeks and from the wistful look everyone here gets when I explain how great it is, I know they'd happily pay twice the new fee just to never have to deal with the local retailers ever again.
Anyway, my 2c: this price raise would in no way dissuade me from renewing next year (if I'm still living in the usa).
American Senators sure have a lot of time to spend on impossible tasks and tilting at windmills, instead of learning about technology and displaying adaptability.
If he wants to look good for banning some scary technology thing, maybe he should start with something easier - like getting porn off the Internet.
TextSecure is an encrypted messaging tool - currently for Android, but iOS is in the works. It is open source and has a high focus on privacy and security.
I encourage people to check it out - if you want to Snapchat securely and privately, then using an open source tool that isn't maintained or built by some giant corporatrox that is simply trying to get bought out by Facebook might be a good idea.
Please make a news post about the issue. I'm glad you're finally responding to the comments but today has been a train wreck and failing to publicly acknowledge that will not help matters.
Give people an official thread to comment about the beta. Ensure that it has the feedback mechanisms - the survey and the email address, both of which I've used - prominently listed.
I'll try that. I actually have a Kobo reader - every book I've wanted on their store has been DRM'ed, so I haven't bought anything. I'll give it another crack.
Thanks. I just wish everyone was on Baen - that is exactly how I want to buy books.
Then I end up on a page like http://us.macmillan.com/thehum... which just gives me a list of normal retailers, like Amazon, Kobo, etc to choose from - with no evidence that I'm getting a DRM-free version.
I just want an epub, like what Baen deliver - is that possible?
In Australia it's reasonably common for the insurers to care about modifications - here's one common car insurance company's page on it: http://www.aami.com.au/custome... .
Slashdot Mirror
The customisation isn't flexible enough - I can't move some of the objects (like the address bar) or move tabs to the bottom where they used to be. My interface has been completely reworked with no way to restore it to what it was, as far as I can tell.
A 0-day for Adobe Flash was also patched today.
For some reason I had three different and separate updates I had to do to fix this:
1) Chrome automatically updated something and was running the latest version when I checked
2) The plugin that Firefox uses only seems to look for updates when I reboot. I found this guide to trigger the update manually, which basically then resulted in it just opening a browser window & making me download an update .exe.
3) Even after that, IE still reported running the older version. I ran Windows Update manually and discovered there was an separate patch in there for Flash for IE.
Pretty awesome.
Thanks for the reply.
I've actually been working on a deployment script for our service (we have a VPS hosting business in Australia), which gets most of it up and running in a single-click-deploy kind of way ( https://www.binarylane.com.au/... if you're interested).
It still needs some work (haven't set it up with Nginx, yet) but I had a few people interested in trying it and this meant they could have it up and running in a few minutes to tinker with.
I'll have a think about it - as a VPS provider I am really big on the idea of "private cloud" stuff and I'd really like to make things like this simple for users so they can easily deploy stuff without having to become Linux sysadmins.
No explanation in the summary, so a quick copy/paste from the official site: "MediaGoblin is a free software media publishing platform that anyone can run. You can think of it as a decentralized alternative to Flickr, YouTube, SoundCloud, etc. "
Basically it's a "private cloud" (I hate myself for writing that) with which you can upload your photos, videos, songs, etc - so they live on /your/ server.
It is actually pretty neat. It has the usual marks of an open source product - a very, uh, functional interface that doesn't really grab you immediately. It's a little fiddly to install, but not too bad.
But it all works pretty well - I set up a test server reasonably quickly, and it performs as advertised. Getting photos and videos online is nice and easy, although there's no obvious way to upload albums - it's all one photo at a time (looks like it's at least on their TODO.
I think for it to get some solid mainstream acceptance they'll need to work on the design side - make it look beautiful and Apple-ish out of the box so that civilians are immediately awestruck with how pretty it is - otherwise they might struggle to find adoption outside of the hardcore OSS crowd.
But it's a cool idea, and it's good to see it got funding - the federation stuff will be interesting and if done correctly could really make it a good tool for media sharing.
The point of devops is not to take jobs away from developers. The point of devops is to provide an interface between system administration and development. Development and system administration have always been at odds with each other - system administrators not really understanding or caring how the application works, and developers treating the systems as an infinite resource pool with no real rules or resources past "does my code run?"
This.
We used to have a more DevOps approach when we were a startup (1999-2005ish?). After a while as our contracts got bigger and our client projects got more visibility, they wanted to move into a more change-request-managed style of development (this is despite the fact that we'd never (in my recollection) had any incidents as a result of our management process).
We created a strict separation of roles between Dev and Ops. Devs just wrote code, Ops pushed code to servers.
To this day, many years later, our Dev team still has poor visibility into our operational environment. Getting easy access to log files, looking at temporary files - really /basic/ operational stuff that Devs had done for years was denied to them and a "process" built around getting that stuff from Ops.
This process is slow and awkward. Arguably we could have done it better using tools but we'd bought into the process too much, it existed, so why bother changing it?
Similarly, from an Operations side, their workflow suffered because the devs would be off in a silo, then one day someone would pop up and say "OK I need a full staging and production environment for this project by tomorrow".
Again, not great project management on our part, but what was originally a natural flow of information between two teams who a) historically worked very closely and b) NEED to work very closely slowed to a trickle as the "DevOps" interface was basically shut down.
I have been pushing for a DevOps role for a few years, without success. For me DevOps is about lightening the burden of Dev and Ops teams by increasing the ability for information to flow between them quickly and easily.
IMHO (and little else), I've seen a lot of sysadmins able to step up to the DevOps plate, but very few developers that would be willing, let alone capable (most that I know prefer to write code, and not get their hands dirty with the business of playing server-monkey or wire-monkey.)
In our company it's almost the opposite - we have only three operations staff but 12 developers. Just by virtue of the fact we have more developers they have a wide range of experience doing some operational tasks, just for their own projects.
I'll make sure to let the 7,518,856 other people I play Dota 2 with every month know (that number from just loading the game and looking at the unique monthly players figure).
That is, if I can get their attention while they're all trying to be the next team to win $1m in cash.
(Related aside: check out Valve's Free to Play documentary; it's a great watch for some insight into the lives of professional gamers.)
I'm currently in Columbus, OH - currently undergoing a mumps problem, with almost 200 cases reported. The number is still growing. This is a dumb problem to have to worry about. Get your vaccinations.
I have visited several other societies and I can tell you that the United States is absolutely less corrupt than any other society that I have visited. Of course, I have only witnessed a few: Several Central American Countries, France, South Korea, India, China.
I always find it funny how often this is a (modded-up) defence to claims of corruption in Western society (generally the USA on Slashdot, but you'll see it almost everywhere else).
It doesn't mean that that you should stop striving to eliminate what corruption you do have. Or highlighting it at every opportunity and saying "that's wrong".
From the perspective of an outsider (Australian), the US increasingly looks like it's becoming an oligarchy where money is the only thing that matters. If this story were true it is a sad state of affairs.
So... Who cares if you have an accident that kills or maims someone else because you ignored the manufacturers instructions to modify something.... As long as someone else is around to pick up the bill?
Are you American or something?
It's not that simple. Marriage is not a right. For anyone. It's a social construct. You can't engage in the "active suppression of other people's rights" when there is no right involved.
It's a social construct that has been turned into legislation, which then defines the rights. Some people have the right to get married, and some don't.
I see both sides of the issue have valid arguments, but booting somebody out of an organization for having a different political opinion does not speak of a "culture of openness." It's open and inclusive until you vote in a way we don't like. Wow.
When your organisation is built on the concept of "openness and inclusiveness" then it seems strange to me for them to allow someone - their leader - to hold an opinion which is arguably not about those things.
Is the only thing worth being intolerant about, intolerance itself?
Anyway. This is a complicated issue; I still am not sure how I feel about it. I feel sorry for Brendan because of the situation he was put in - but I am probably more sorry for an entire class of people who are denied rights to engage in a social construct of their own free will for some arbitrary reason like the gender of the person they want to be with. I don't know how to do this kind of moral calculus.
I do not understand what you're asking or where that quote is from. Wondering if you replied to me by mistake?
As far as we know he just doesn't like the idea of Gay Marriage, that is a far cry from being a radical anti-gay advocate.
I was wondering this too, but unfortunately his blog post on the subject - which I would say is the only really authoritative source of information - is basically just gutless corporate-speak (e.g., "Mozilla will remain egalitarian blah blah blah").
It does nothing to explain his personal opinion or his history on the topic, so the only thing I can get out of it is that I'll have to remain largely in the dark about what his personal opinions are and hope it doesn't influence any decisions he makes for Mozilla.
I would like to see an honest, up front post on his blog where he lays out his opinion. Even if I disagree with it (as I suspect I would), at least then I'd respect him for being up-front about it.
Your two posts were fascinating, thanks. It has never crossed my mind to think about rats that much, but the sentence about humans effectively keeping them safe from other predators is one of those obvious-in-hindsight things that I probably never would have realised.
As an Australian that has recently relocated to the US, you have also inculcated a new fear of raccoons, which I will now go at lengths to avoid!
If it's used as some kind of vehicle to push FB onto the few who don't have it and don't loathe it on principle, then I can very well do without and am retroactively glad I decided against funding the kickstarter.
Out of interest, have any of Facebook's other acquisitions been used to force users onto the FB platform? In other words, do they have a strong precedent of doing this?
In the case of Oculus spending $2b and then immediately trying to alienate its core user base by somehow pushing FB on the tiny percentage of users that don't already have it seems like it would be a weird thing to do.
Yes, I guess Abrash really dropped the ball when he didn't do his due diligence on what language the parent company of the VR company he just accepted a job at build their website in!!!@@@
What an odd piece of techno-elitist whining. For what it's worth, Facebook's engineering acumen can be seen in some of the software they've released, including the Hiphop VM for PHP as well as the recently announced Facebook Hack. They have contributed to a huge variety of OSS ( https://code.facebook.com/proj... ) - and things like the OpenComputer project ( http://www.opencompute.org/).
The scale alone of Facebook is an impressive engineering feat. That is entirely the point of Abrash's post, really.
This ./ article from 1999 has Carmack talking about Snow Crash:
Making Snow Crash into a reality feels like a sort of moral imperative to a lot of programmers, but the efforts that have been made so far leave a lot to be desired.
It is almost painful for me to watch some of the VRML initiatives. It just seems so obviously the wrong way to do something. All of this debating, committee forming, and spec writing, and in the end, there isn't anything to show for it. Make something really cool first, and worry about the spec after you are sure it's worth it!
I do think it is finally the right time for this to start happening for real. While a lot of people could envision the possibilities after seeing DOOM or Quake, it is really only now that we have general purpose hardware acceleration that things are actually flexible enough to be used as a creative medium without constantly being conscious of the technical limitations.
The Metaverse of the Snow Crash world was basically an epic social virtual reality experience. I've always figured Carmack would be involved in making that a reality somehow, and the Oculus Rift certainly seems like it could be a critical part. Facebook actually makes sense from a social perspective as well.
I'm sure there's going to be a lot of people terrified because of imagined privacy implications, but I'm still fascinated to see where this ride takes us.
...that has recently moved to the USA, I am stunned by Amazon - I mean, I always knew it looked awesome but until I got here I didn't fully understand how much stuff was on there and how amazing it is to order basically anything.
Prime simply adds to my amazement - I can order (almost) anything and it will arrive (almost always) 2 days later. My shopping behaviour has changed significantly, to the point where I'll not buy something while it's right in front of me in a store because I can just have Amazon bring it to my house a few days later, saving me the effort of carrying it around or trying to get it home (I don't own a car yet).
Even at the new price it seems like a fantastic deal, and that's before I add the streaming video service, which I've also gotten a lot of use out of, despite having Netflix and Hulu.
I guess I am surprised by the people complaining about the price hike. I'm back in Australia right now for a couple weeks and from the wistful look everyone here gets when I explain how great it is, I know they'd happily pay twice the new fee just to never have to deal with the local retailers ever again.
Anyway, my 2c: this price raise would in no way dissuade me from renewing next year (if I'm still living in the usa).
To be fair, some people might not be aware that substances are often made up of substance.
American Senators sure have a lot of time to spend on impossible tasks and tilting at windmills, instead of learning about technology and displaying adaptability.
If he wants to look good for banning some scary technology thing, maybe he should start with something easier - like getting porn off the Internet.
... because I can't see anything anywhere else (wtf is this post?) I figured maybe this might be worth mentioning:
Yesterday Moxie Marlinspike announced a new version of TextSecure: https://whispersystems.org/blo...
TextSecure is an encrypted messaging tool - currently for Android, but iOS is in the works. It is open source and has a high focus on privacy and security.
I encourage people to check it out - if you want to Snapchat securely and privately, then using an open source tool that isn't maintained or built by some giant corporatrox that is simply trying to get bought out by Facebook might be a good idea.
Please make a news post about the issue. I'm glad you're finally responding to the comments but today has been a train wreck and failing to publicly acknowledge that will not help matters.
Give people an official thread to comment about the beta. Ensure that it has the feedback mechanisms - the survey and the email address, both of which I've used - prominently listed.
I'll try that. I actually have a Kobo reader - every book I've wanted on their store has been DRM'ed, so I haven't bought anything. I'll give it another crack.
Thanks. I just wish everyone was on Baen - that is exactly how I want to buy books.
How do I buy DRM free books from Tor? Every few months I try again and I feel stupid because I can't figure out how to do it.
They have a "looking for Tor books?" module which takes you to http://us.macmillan.com/TorFor....
Then I end up on a page like http://us.macmillan.com/thehum... which just gives me a list of normal retailers, like Amazon, Kobo, etc to choose from - with no evidence that I'm getting a DRM-free version.
I just want an epub, like what Baen deliver - is that possible?
Is it possible to buy
In Australia it's reasonably common for the insurers to care about modifications - here's one common car insurance company's page on it: http://www.aami.com.au/custome... .