It also highlights an unreasonable dependence on Google - how is it than one provider making a small change can cause a 45% drop in traffic?
The 45% figure also presumably assumes that everything else stays the same. What if, for example, Bing (or whoever) decide they will license news content because it drives worthwhile ad revenue for them, and so can provide higher-quality search results for news than Google does?
I expect the EU will take an approach that quality news is a public good and either arrange for providers to be compensated in some way (probably by something crappy like a broadband tax), or fund public media (BBC etc) directly. Or, the news business will adopt a model like the music business, where a single body collects royalties for use of content.
The fine is not about restrictions to the end user, it is about Google leveraging its dominance to enforce anti-competitive practices. From a Register article about the fine:
"Android is locked down in a Google-controlled ecosystem," said Vestager. She said manufacturers were interested in licensing Amazon's FireOS Android. But by making even one FireOS phone, the OEM would have lost the ability to include Google Play Store on its other devices.
I've owned both Android and iOS phones over the years... an HTC, an original iPhone (which I inherited), a Nexus 4, a OnePlue One, and finally an iPhone 6S.
The Android phones were flagships of their time and a lot cheaper than iPhones. That doesn't seem to be true any more, or at least, the prices for a top-of-the-range iPhone or Samsung are so absurd that I treat them both as luxury goods not meant for me, and the price difference is irrelevant. It's probably still true that you can get better specs in an Android phone at the price points of each iPhone.
The Android UI kept changing significantly over the time I owned Android phones. It was probably a combination of Google changing the design and the fact that every time I changed phone I was getting a different manufacturer's skin, but the net effect was that it felt like there wasn't really such thing as "the Android UI". When I got my second iPhone the UI hadn't changed much since the first, and hasn't in the time I've had it, and I expect it'd be pretty similar if I bought another down the line.
On my Android phones, updates stopped after about a year, maybe 18 months tops. I'm coming up to 18 months on the iPhone and still get updates. I'm not sure how longer that will go on but I'm guess it'll be for a little longer, so that seems to be an improvement. I gather the situation on Android is finally improving.
In the end the reason I got an iPhone was because of network effects - most of my closest friends and family happen to use iPhones, and it was convenient for iMessage and FaceTime which get a lot of use. I bought it shortly before the iPhone 8 launched (I think - might have been earlier, it was a Black Friday deal) and it was more expensive than any of my previous phones. Having said that, I've owned the iPhone longer than I owned any Android phone. Being an older model it wasn't stupidly expensive, and perversely Apple's absurd pricing on later models (plus idiocy like removing the headphone jack) has also meant I don't really think about getting a new phone, so that bit of me that was always checking out the latest phones has switched off.
The iPhone is the first phone I expect to keep until it dies. Not sure what I'll do after that -- I'm happy with Apple's software, but their poor hardware design choices (mobile and desktop, frankly) and bonkers pricing mean that I probably won't unless they introduce "budget" versions.
Anyway I'm not really concerned about image (if you saw me I think you'd be inclined to agree). The iPhone's capability is sufficient for what I do with it, so I'm happy with it.
You may be interested in my ICO, "ModCoin". We have found a novel way to mine mod points using AI, deep learning and graphene, and by investing you will be helping us to bring this innovation to market.
He should probably have used East Germany rather than the Soviet Union for his comparison. The Stasi not only conducted surveillance but relied on a climate of fear and suspicion in which people informed on one another, either to escape suspicion themselves or to gain some advantage.
Even if you do not consent to your data being collected, as soon as someone else puts it out there (e.g. your photo, phone number, email, twitter handle and date of birth in their contacts list) and consents to it being collected, you're shafted.
superMHL was something I stumbled across a while ago when looking for a compute stick that might be bus-powered. It's a standard developed for connecting mobile devices to displays.
It doesn't address the wireless portion of the question, but it does provide power-over-HDMI (to charge mobile devices while plugged in) and supports USB-C, so a wireless receiver could in principle both transmit video and receive power over a single cable.
It doesn't seem to have achieved adoption, but I don't know if that's just because it's still too new.
This is what frustrates me about the argument against nationalising the railway (here in the UK). Opponents proclaim that if the states run it, it will run at a loss, and therefore the state should not run it. But that ignores the secondary benefits - running a frequent and free train service would, for example, allow people to live further away, increasing the supply of viable housing and so easing the housing crisis in urban areas. People would save money, not just in travel costs but on things like nursery care, because they might actually be able to get home at a reasonable hour. The state might lose money on the train service but get it back from economic boosts (of people spending their extra disposable income, increased productivity as some people use their time savings to do more work) or reduced costs (e.g. the health costs of pollution, the cost of social housing when housing is scarce, etc).
I subscribed for a while, but as a largely non-contributing casual reader who doesn't need immediate Linux news, I actually found it better to read the articles a week later. This was because the readership seems knowledgeable and the comments after a week would be informative. So when my subscription lapsed, I didn't renew it.
What I enjoy about LWN is that it is very technical. I've never looked at a kernel source file, but reading the articles tests my memory of all those university lectures about cache coherency, processor pipelining, scheduling etc.
I'd love it if there were something with a more Slashdot-like breadth of coverage (i.e. more than just Linux), but a more LWN-like readership.
The second method of enabling FPI is by modifying parameters in the about:config settings page. To access this page, users must type about:config in the address bar and press Enter.
Once they reached the about:config page, they can search for "firstparty," and the two FPI parameters will appear.
To enable FPI, users must set "privacy.firstparty.isolate" to true by double-clicking it. The second parameter — "privacy.firstparty.isolate.restrict_opener_access" — works by lowering some of the "isolation" rules. Users can set this parameter to false if they're having problems logging into websites.
I am having many!! such ideas. In fact I have been a succesfull businesman more than 23 years and am in possession of a substantial!! quantity of monies. But, unfortunately I, am most Sorrowfully in dispute with the Ghanaian tax authorities who have frozen my accounts. However my esteemed solicitor, Dr Goodlove Simons III has assured me that through the payment of a fine of no more than $250US I will be able able to transfer these monies with much expeditiousness to an overseas bank account. I am prepared to offer a reward of $2500 in exchange for your immediate trnafser of $250US to the following account: IBAN002300203 Acct holder Ghanaian Tax Authorities, Apt 3b Rhodes House N2389 Lagos, Nigeria
In anticipation of your excellent assistance, and with many!! thanks, Rev Alfons Dauphine
I wonder whether, in today's climate of tearing down statues of famous slavers and imperialists (Jackson, Rhodes etc), people would advocate tearing down the pyramids which, for all their architectural genius, were built at a cost of thousands of lives. They're like Qatari football stadia x1000.
I've tried to formulate a rule of thumb for the situations in which blockchain might be the right answer, given that it seems hideously inefficient.
I think it boils down to:
* there is a transaction between two parties who don't trust eachother * there is no mutually trusted third party who could manage the transaction ledger, or there is but the costs of such a third party exceed the costs of blockchain
In this case blockchain becomes the third party.
So for example in countries with strong institutions and rule of law, blockchain wouldn't at first blush make sense for a land registry (because a government agency performs that job) but in countries where there is endemic corruption the blockchain criteria are met.
I'm still unclear how disputes and corrections to the ledger would be managed in the absence of a trusted third party, though.
Geniune question: is being anti-Trump a biased position? What would he have to do for it to stop being bias, and simply be the reasonable position given the facts?
Should one have to scrape around for some positive story about Trump, to give an artificial semblance of balance?
If I write about Hitler gassing children, should I devote equal space to, say, the notion that he was a vegetarian for animal rights reasons, in an attempt at balance?
I googled extensively at the time I was setting up my home NAS (~4 years ago). If it's possible without doing the spanning using something outside ZFS (e.g. hw RAID as others have suggested) I'd be really interested, as from time to time I grow the storage and have to partition the disks in interesting ways.
For example, as far as I know it can't use a disk span within an RAID set. I.e. You can't mirror a 4TB drive, say, with 2x2TB drives spanned to present as a 4TB device. (Which is the kind of thing that would make a small home NAS be able to really easily re-use small disks.) If I'm not wrong then I can only assume that's too niche a case to be interesting in the enterprise environment.
Assuming the $3bn is a one-off incentive (i.e. not spread out over multiple years) Population of Wisconsin: 5,778,708 (2016 est.) - Wikipedia Cost per resident: $519 Median household income: $42,041 (2009-2013) - Wikipedia
So it's roughly a 1.2% one-off tax on the median earner.
I don't know how this offsets against the projected benefits.
The knee-jerk reaction is that all telemetry is a privacy nightmare.
As a thought experiment, what kind of telemetry might be acceptable?
For example, suppose it were 2 integers collected weekly: * number of HTTPS sites visited * number of HTTP sites visited
Unavoidably, there would be metadata: IP address and date/time of data collection. So as well as the intended analytics ("what proportion of the sites users are visiting are HTTPS sites?") it would be possible to build a per-IP profile of number of sites visited over time.
Is this level of telemetry unacceptable?
If it is acceptable, then we've established that it is not telemetry per se that is bad but rather the data being collected.
Ongoing telemetry would require trust ("when I consented you were collecting two integers, but now you're collecting all sorts of other things") unless totally transparent, but perhaps even with total transparency the burden of verification that then falls on the user is too onerous.
I wonder if there could be a role for someone like the EFF to be the guardian of telemetry info, i.e. Firefox sends telemetry data to the EFF and they then decide whether it's ok or not, or anonymize it (e.g. strip out IP addresses in the above example), before sending it on to Mozilla. Of course, they'd want to be paid for this service, and since users reject the notion of paying for a browser the obvious payer would be Mozilla, but that creates moral hazard. Given that it'd be a public good, the government could run and/or fund it, but I suspect there's a large overlap between the set of people who have a problem with telemetry and the set of people who distrust their government.
Yeah - what's the point of having 16GB of RAM if applications are going to use it? I want my browser to use as little RAM as possible so that when I flick to an old tab it doesn't have it cached, it has to fetch and re-render the whole thing.
Slashdot Mirror
It also highlights an unreasonable dependence on Google - how is it than one provider making a small change can cause a 45% drop in traffic?
The 45% figure also presumably assumes that everything else stays the same. What if, for example, Bing (or whoever) decide they will license news content because it drives worthwhile ad revenue for them, and so can provide higher-quality search results for news than Google does?
I expect the EU will take an approach that quality news is a public good and either arrange for providers to be compensated in some way (probably by something crappy like a broadband tax), or fund public media (BBC etc) directly. Or, the news business will adopt a model like the music business, where a single body collects royalties for use of content.
I heard about it somewhere online (possibly slashdot even) and responded.
The fine is not about restrictions to the end user, it is about Google leveraging its dominance to enforce anti-competitive practices. From a Register article about the fine:
"Android is locked down in a Google-controlled ecosystem," said Vestager. She said manufacturers were interested in licensing Amazon's FireOS Android. But by making even one FireOS phone, the OEM would have lost the ability to include Google Play Store on its other devices.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/...
I don't know about the Apple question; perhaps they just don't have sufficient market dominance to be considered a monopoly.
Fortunately laser rifles are exceptionally effective against straw men.
I've owned both Android and iOS phones over the years... an HTC, an original iPhone (which I inherited), a Nexus 4, a OnePlue One, and finally an iPhone 6S.
The Android phones were flagships of their time and a lot cheaper than iPhones. That doesn't seem to be true any more, or at least, the prices for a top-of-the-range iPhone or Samsung are so absurd that I treat them both as luxury goods not meant for me, and the price difference is irrelevant. It's probably still true that you can get better specs in an Android phone at the price points of each iPhone.
The Android UI kept changing significantly over the time I owned Android phones. It was probably a combination of Google changing the design and the fact that every time I changed phone I was getting a different manufacturer's skin, but the net effect was that it felt like there wasn't really such thing as "the Android UI". When I got my second iPhone the UI hadn't changed much since the first, and hasn't in the time I've had it, and I expect it'd be pretty similar if I bought another down the line.
On my Android phones, updates stopped after about a year, maybe 18 months tops. I'm coming up to 18 months on the iPhone and still get updates. I'm not sure how longer that will go on but I'm guess it'll be for a little longer, so that seems to be an improvement. I gather the situation on Android is finally improving.
In the end the reason I got an iPhone was because of network effects - most of my closest friends and family happen to use iPhones, and it was convenient for iMessage and FaceTime which get a lot of use. I bought it shortly before the iPhone 8 launched (I think - might have been earlier, it was a Black Friday deal) and it was more expensive than any of my previous phones. Having said that, I've owned the iPhone longer than I owned any Android phone. Being an older model it wasn't stupidly expensive, and perversely Apple's absurd pricing on later models (plus idiocy like removing the headphone jack) has also meant I don't really think about getting a new phone, so that bit of me that was always checking out the latest phones has switched off.
The iPhone is the first phone I expect to keep until it dies. Not sure what I'll do after that -- I'm happy with Apple's software, but their poor hardware design choices (mobile and desktop, frankly) and bonkers pricing mean that I probably won't unless they introduce "budget" versions.
Anyway I'm not really concerned about image (if you saw me I think you'd be inclined to agree). The iPhone's capability is sufficient for what I do with it, so I'm happy with it.
Let's rein in the puns, ok? Feels like we're flogging a dead horse.
You may be interested in my ICO, "ModCoin". We have found a novel way to mine mod points using AI, deep learning and graphene, and by investing you will be helping us to bring this innovation to market.
He should probably have used East Germany rather than the Soviet Union for his comparison. The Stasi not only conducted surveillance but relied on a climate of fear and suspicion in which people informed on one another, either to escape suspicion themselves or to gain some advantage.
Even if you do not consent to your data being collected, as soon as someone else puts it out there (e.g. your photo, phone number, email, twitter handle and date of birth in their contacts list) and consents to it being collected, you're shafted.
superMHL was something I stumbled across a while ago when looking for a compute stick that might be bus-powered. It's a standard developed for connecting mobile devices to displays.
It doesn't address the wireless portion of the question, but it does provide power-over-HDMI (to charge mobile devices while plugged in) and supports USB-C, so a wireless receiver could in principle both transmit video and receive power over a single cable.
It doesn't seem to have achieved adoption, but I don't know if that's just because it's still too new.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
http://www.mhltech.org/technol...
Mono a mono
This is what frustrates me about the argument against nationalising the railway (here in the UK). Opponents proclaim that if the states run it, it will run at a loss, and therefore the state should not run it. But that ignores the secondary benefits - running a frequent and free train service would, for example, allow people to live further away, increasing the supply of viable housing and so easing the housing crisis in urban areas. People would save money, not just in travel costs but on things like nursery care, because they might actually be able to get home at a reasonable hour. The state might lose money on the train service but get it back from economic boosts (of people spending their extra disposable income, increased productivity as some people use their time savings to do more work) or reduced costs (e.g. the health costs of pollution, the cost of social housing when housing is scarce, etc).
Some porn for you... 48 MIPS cores on a PCIe board:
http://parpro.com/product/o3e-...
I subscribed for a while, but as a largely non-contributing casual reader who doesn't need immediate Linux news, I actually found it better to read the articles a week later. This was because the readership seems knowledgeable and the comments after a week would be informative. So when my subscription lapsed, I didn't renew it.
What I enjoy about LWN is that it is very technical. I've never looked at a kernel source file, but reading the articles tests my memory of all those university lectures about cache coherency, processor pipelining, scheduling etc.
I'd love it if there were something with a more Slashdot-like breadth of coverage (i.e. more than just Linux), but a more LWN-like readership.
Later in the article:
The second method of enabling FPI is by modifying parameters in the about:config settings page. To access this page, users must type about:config in the address bar and press Enter.
Once they reached the about:config page, they can search for "firstparty," and the two FPI parameters will appear.
To enable FPI, users must set "privacy.firstparty.isolate" to true by double-clicking it. The second parameter — "privacy.firstparty.isolate.restrict_opener_access" — works by lowering some of the "isolation" rules. Users can set this parameter to false if they're having problems logging into websites.
If you right click the gap and click Customize, it seems these gaps are "flexible space" and can be removed.
Sir,
I am having many!! such ideas. In fact I have been a succesfull businesman more than 23 years and am in possession of a substantial!! quantity of monies. But, unfortunately I, am most Sorrowfully in dispute with the Ghanaian tax authorities who have frozen my accounts. However my esteemed solicitor, Dr Goodlove Simons III has assured me that through the payment of a fine of no more than $250US I will be able able to transfer these monies with much expeditiousness to an overseas bank account. I am prepared to offer a reward of $2500 in exchange for your immediate trnafser of $250US to the following account: IBAN002300203 Acct holder Ghanaian Tax Authorities, Apt 3b Rhodes House N2389 Lagos, Nigeria
In anticipation of your excellent assistance, and with many!! thanks, Rev Alfons Dauphine
I wonder whether, in today's climate of tearing down statues of famous slavers and imperialists (Jackson, Rhodes etc), people would advocate tearing down the pyramids which, for all their architectural genius, were built at a cost of thousands of lives. They're like Qatari football stadia x1000.
I've tried to formulate a rule of thumb for the situations in which blockchain might be the right answer, given that it seems hideously inefficient.
I think it boils down to:
* there is a transaction between two parties who don't trust eachother
* there is no mutually trusted third party who could manage the transaction ledger, or there is but the costs of such a third party exceed the costs of blockchain
In this case blockchain becomes the third party.
So for example in countries with strong institutions and rule of law, blockchain wouldn't at first blush make sense for a land registry (because a government agency performs that job) but in countries where there is endemic corruption the blockchain criteria are met.
I'm still unclear how disputes and corrections to the ledger would be managed in the absence of a trusted third party, though.
Geniune question: is being anti-Trump a biased position? What would he have to do for it to stop being bias, and simply be the reasonable position given the facts?
Should one have to scrape around for some positive story about Trump, to give an artificial semblance of balance?
If I write about Hitler gassing children, should I devote equal space to, say, the notion that he was a vegetarian for animal rights reasons, in an attempt at balance?
I googled extensively at the time I was setting up my home NAS (~4 years ago). If it's possible without doing the spanning using something outside ZFS (e.g. hw RAID as others have suggested) I'd be really interested, as from time to time I grow the storage and have to partition the disks in interesting ways.
ZFS is mature, but has some curious omissions.
For example, as far as I know it can't use a disk span within an RAID set. I.e. You can't mirror a 4TB drive, say, with 2x2TB drives spanned to present as a 4TB device. (Which is the kind of thing that would make a small home NAS be able to really easily re-use small disks.) If I'm not wrong then I can only assume that's too niche a case to be interesting in the enterprise environment.
Old programmers don't die, they just RETURN.
Assuming the $3bn is a one-off incentive (i.e. not spread out over multiple years)
Population of Wisconsin: 5,778,708 (2016 est.) - Wikipedia
Cost per resident: $519
Median household income: $42,041 (2009-2013) - Wikipedia
So it's roughly a 1.2% one-off tax on the median earner.
I don't know how this offsets against the projected benefits.
The knee-jerk reaction is that all telemetry is a privacy nightmare.
As a thought experiment, what kind of telemetry might be acceptable?
For example, suppose it were 2 integers collected weekly:
* number of HTTPS sites visited
* number of HTTP sites visited
Unavoidably, there would be metadata: IP address and date/time of data collection. So as well as the intended analytics ("what proportion of the sites users are visiting are HTTPS sites?") it would be possible to build a per-IP profile of number of sites visited over time.
Is this level of telemetry unacceptable?
If it is acceptable, then we've established that it is not telemetry per se that is bad but rather the data being collected.
Ongoing telemetry would require trust ("when I consented you were collecting two integers, but now you're collecting all sorts of other things") unless totally transparent, but perhaps even with total transparency the burden of verification that then falls on the user is too onerous.
I wonder if there could be a role for someone like the EFF to be the guardian of telemetry info, i.e. Firefox sends telemetry data to the EFF and they then decide whether it's ok or not, or anonymize it (e.g. strip out IP addresses in the above example), before sending it on to Mozilla. Of course, they'd want to be paid for this service, and since users reject the notion of paying for a browser the obvious payer would be Mozilla, but that creates moral hazard. Given that it'd be a public good, the government could run and/or fund it, but I suspect there's a large overlap between the set of people who have a problem with telemetry and the set of people who distrust their government.
Yeah - what's the point of having 16GB of RAM if applications are going to use it? I want my browser to use as little RAM as possible so that when I flick to an old tab it doesn't have it cached, it has to fetch and re-render the whole thing.