So, after 34 years, in a world of on-demand entertainment, mobile devices, in-home electronics, video conferencing, etc., Stallman is using a decade-old laptop, watching no entertainment at all, presumably has nothing in the line of other devices (e.g. tablets, phones, CCTV, etc.) and can't talk to anyone who doesn't use the same kind of software as him (e.g. everyone on Skype, WhatsApp, etc.). And he also thinks you should go to jail for wanting to put a restrictive licence on things you own?
And we're supposed to follow this guy's ideals?
The guy's a moron. And that's coming from someone who does do an awful lot of things the open-source way, including my own programming.
If you want to fix this problem, rather than mouth off, try and fix some of the primary problems identified by the FSF - which has included open-source video conferencing for years. Hell, they're still talking about an open-source alternative for Flash which has lived and died in the time they've been trying to create one.
The sentiment is overblown, the direction is a good one, but the reality is so poor that everyone gave up waiting (e.g. for Hurd which only recently got SATA functionality...). And you're seriously advocating a years-old laptop as the way to live? That laptop stopped manufacture before millions of the users of things like iPads and WhatsApp were even born.
Not only are you bad at fixing the problem, you're bad at finding interim solutions, and bad at making suggestions, and nothing but bad press for people who DO still want free and open kit.
I'm incredibly disappointed that NOBODY with these large organisations with tons of skilled people on board has thought to monetise the exact thing they can do : Make a series of machines that are free and open from top to bottom. You can use sales from them to develop further. People would buy one just for a certified "open" tag.
But, no, the closest you can get is System76 who recycle old IBM laptops still and who have just thought about getting into the game of end-to-end production.
We could have been doing that since the 386 era when this guy first started mouthing off publicly, but nothing has been done in that direction.
I'm all for free software but, you know what, I have to talk to real people. That means a mobile phone. I have to use computers. That means ones I can buy in a shop today. I have to live and enjoy. And that means playing games on Steam and watching movies on Amazon.
Because there are precisely ZERO viable alternatives, short of a 10-year-old laptop and giving everything else up.
1) It's a mechanical device under huge manual and braking stress. They break. They can't not break. Maybe you haven't seen it, maybe you just don't use the break or own enough cars or care enough to check.
2) I used to buy old cars. 5-10 years old. Until recently, I never bought new. I used to change car when they didn't pass the relevant tests, so I bought a lot of second-hand cars. Almost ALL of them had parking brake problems. From "it doesn't do anything" to "it needs a serious amount of adjusting" to it literally could not be released once activated.
3) My dad does all my repairs/maintenance as he worked in the trade for decades. Ask him if mechanical parking brakes never fail.
4) My new car, a year or so old now, has electric parking brakes. I distrusted them, like you. When my car was new, I took it to a couple of off-road locations to test lots of things (I'm not a boyracer, speed was NOT one of them, I'm literally talking about "Oh, I don't like that... how does that work if..." scenarios) - best way to get to know and trust a car is to actually activate these things in a safe place.
Electronic parking brake? Massively outperforms a mechanical one. I could not make it not activate on demand. I could not make it activate inadvertently (it appears the button/toggle that controls it has debouncing that's undergone a lot of testing to avoid inadvertent activation, but yet work whenever you need it to). And there's a reason I couldn't make it work inadvertently... the parking brake is not just a parking brake but your only non-hydraulic method of stopping the car in an emergency.
I deliberately read the latest car design requirements from the government and, at least in my country, the parking brake must still operate independently so it can be used in the car of a brake failure. I was worried they were obsoleting a safety backup, but in fact the requirements are much more stringent now than most of the old cars I used to drive.
And so I took it on a non-public road. And I poodled along and pressed the parking brake. Holy shit did it stop. Even on gravel. Okay, so I got braver and braver and asked it to stop me from faster and faster speeds (never going stupid, but still - on a motorway this might need me to stop the car before it hits a line of traffic, late, after I realise the normal brakes don't work).
HOLY SHIT. You have no idea how effective it is compared to a traditional cabled parking brake (no handbrake turns, for sure, because you just don't get time, but then I would never attempt that anyway). I only avoided whacking my head on the steering wheel each time because I knew it was coming after building up from the slower speeds (presumably airbags would kick in in a collision, I'm not testing that though!).
I tested the "auto-release when you drive". I couldn't make it release when I didn't want it to. Literally, you have to have enough driver-instructed forward motion that you would hear the brakes screech anyway if you did move and it deactivates a fraction of a second AFTER you're actually moving against the brake.
Hill starts? I actually worry now that with electric parking brakes, you never have to be able to do one properly. They make it that reliable and easy. I've literally never rolled back, not even an inch, unless you are absolutely 100% negligent and wait for the brake to release and then suddenly let get of everything and it still takes a second or two to roll back because the car has to have been moving forward to release the brake.
And if I hold the foot-brake for a few seconds while stationary, it knows that and just puts on the parking brake too. It doesn't do it while moving at even a tiny speed where you can barely see the wheels moving even if you're doing that by holding the normal brake. It knows the difference.
Someone put a lot of testing, thought and effort into my car's electric parking brake. I couldn't make it do things I didn't want, even when I was completely abusing the mechanism
I'm not picking and choosing my metrics here. I gave you worst-case, real-world, observed. They don't take 4 minutes to load bloat because they're a managed system. Nothing on startup that doesn't need to be, everything works and loads in seconds when you want it.
And even 30 seconds isn't "too long" to wait for a computer to turn on. Normal working day, however? It never goes off so doesn't even figure.
If I wanted to Wake-on-LAN them just before people got in, they wouldn't even know. But they're so quick, it's not worth taking the time to write the script to do that.
P.S. Stock, commodity Lenovo clients. Nothing special. All same image.
Not one of them is slow enough to discourage a user (doesn't stop them trying to claim that).
Windows 8.1. 8Gb, SSD. EVERYWHERE. Everything you could want to do, office-wise, will fly. We have no power usage and EVERYONE has the same exact source image for their machine. Even IT.
The biggest restriction is really that we *only* have Gigabit to the desktop. Plenty of oomph on the switches, more than enough backbone, massive internet line, servers and storage sitting mostly idle, but sometimes the gigabit is a bottleneck (e.g. 1Gb profile takes 8 seconds to download!).
But turn the PC on, within 30 seconds you are at the logo-wallpaper of the logon screen. Type in your username/password, if it "knows" you (i.e. it's your computer or you logged in there recently), if gets to desktop in 10-20 seconds. If it doesn't know you, it's profile download and (possibly) GPO setup etc. which can take a minute or two admittedly. Applications launch and then work. You can open EVERYTHING on the image at once (I know, I've done it) and it still works just fine.
Last time someone claimed something was slow (after re-images and all sorts), we took the machine apart on their desk, "changed" the hard drive for the exact same drive through some sleight of hand, re-imaged it again. They still - months later - keep telling me how much faster it now is (than the previous re-image of an identical image on the exact same hardware? Really?).
It's all in their head. In the same way time slows when you are bored and speeds up when you're in a hurry, they perceive it differently when they're desperate to get something important done, but nobody's ever demonstrated an unreasonable logon, program startup, or response time.
After years of doing IT and actually collecting metrics on this (perflog etc.), I just take it in my stride now.
The irony: The IT Office machines - including my own - are their rejects from last year, that were deemed "slow". I put the exact same image back on them, put the IT software GPOs on (so they actually have MORE junk than a normal machine), and have been using them for 3 years now.
Eating your own dogfood kinda throws out all the crazy performance theories. And if it's bad enough to bug them for even ten minutes, I assure you it will bug me more using it for EVERYTHING every single day of my working life.
"Revenue was not a top priority -- a remarkable oversight for any company, and a particularly galling one for a payments company. Eventually, with cash running low, Tilt went looking for a buyer..."
Well - this is what happens when you just throw $65m at someone but don't provide them with a set of targets, metrics, viability tests, check-ups, performance reviews, performance-linked investment etc.
Of course revenue's not a priority if some idiot finances you to the tune of decades of operating income without ever needing to do anything specific to get that money.
And once the valuation hits 5 times that, which is ludicrous if they don't actually have money or technology at that moment, only "potential", they have even less incentive. Short of a clause or two, they could just sell up and disappear, having made millions doing nothing.
(Says it needs Quicktime, but if you're that desperate to open them, it shouldn't be a burden, and certainly easier than trying to load them in an emulator in a browser and somehow convert them).
A library might be allowed to preserve stuff, but giving away free copies of in-copyright works to every visitor is a bit different. Wikipedia says "120 years after creation or 95 years after publication" for works under corporate authorship.
This includes at least the Apple Mac ROMs (you see them load when you start the programs), as well the advertised software itself, which they're going to have to contest need to be given away to all and sundry who visit as part of... what? Fair use?
There's a point at which IA will have overstepped the mark. Maybe it's now, with Apple, but at some point it's going to come back to bite them.
So long as you aren't selling ROMs, pretty much the law has decided that it's not a problem.
Some emulators are available - for money - on things like Google Play Store and have been for years. For example, Spectaculator, etc.
Emulating isn't breaking the law. Only providing copyright code (e.g. roms, software, etc.), or misappropriating trademarks (e.g. a picture of Pacman) is.
You stand more chance of being sued for drawing Pacman on a sticker than selling a system intended for emulation.
To be honest, from that kit, I'd be more worried about patents on the shape of the SNES controller (and why did the guy use SNES controllers on an NES console?), but that's the manufacturer's problem, not the end user.
If you have to record every stop sign for the cars, you don't have AI. You have an expert system, at best, running on a database.
Also, you could just make the roads like railways. It would be infinitely safer to have driverless cars on driverless-only, fixed route highways. No pedestrians, no unexpected actions, no junctions to deal with, no need to "interpret" anything. Nobody has serious objection to automation. What we object to is pretending that these things are thinking or learning when they're following orders. And rather than try to make them "human" and learn how to read our roads, it would be much easier to just paint a giant magnetic-paint line on the road to indicate the middle of the lane and have done with it, rather than try to train a computer vision module to recognise white lines from a perspective-skewed camera image obscured by everything from rain to debris to garbage to other cars.
And we're assuming that we can teach machines to "learn" at all, which isn't true. If that was true, the best machines would be kicking our arses at everything by now, just from sheer amount of data input, speed of data input and processing capability. In actuality, they are winning - with our help - at a handful of board games when we spend years crafting a machine to do just that. That's it. That's the limit of "AI" and deep learning.
Hell, even Google's own search indexes have to be manually moderated and pruned still, because otherwise they get scammed in seconds - by other automated systems and a bunch of low-paid link-spammers on the Internet.
The problem with this kind of "AI" (it's not, but let's not go there) is that there's no understanding of what it's actually doing. We're creating tools, "training" them, and then we have no idea what it's basing decisions on past that point.
As such, outside of toys, they aren't that useful and SHOULDN'T BE used for things like self-driving cars. You can never imagine them passing, say, aviation verification because you have literally no idea what it will do.
And it's because of that very problem that they are also unfixable, and unguaranteeable. You can't just say "Oh, we'll train it some more" because the logical consequence of that is that you have to train it on virtually everything you ever want it to do, which kind of spoils the point. And even then, there's no way you can guarantee that it will work next time.
Interesting for beating humans at board games, recognising what you're saying for ordering online, or spotting porn images in image search. Maybe. Some day. But in terms of reliance, we can't rely on them which kills them for all the useful purposes.
It's actually one of the first steps of humans creating systems to do jobs, that the humans do not and cannot understand. Not just one individual could not understand, but nobody, not even the creator can understand or predict what it will do. That's dangerous ground, even if we aren't talking about AI-taking-over-the-world scenarios.
Expressing a sexual preference for young children can see you behind bars, in some jurisdictions. In the same way that expressing a preference for blowing up certain religions can.
For instance, child "grooming" is all done "with intent", no actual action takes place against the person of the child. But expressing the intent, or even just masquerading in a way which a court might perceive as being a prelude to an attack, can see you arrested.
Though, yes, you are technically correct for the most part.
But what he's doing is not only legal to think about, it's not even illegal to perform either. Or discuss. Or have online forums for. Or anything else. Whereas a sexual preference for young children, rape, etc. is entirely different and would be a quite valid reason to exclude him from a community as he would be expressing a desire to commit an offence.
In this case, however, no offence would be committed even if he were to perform the acts he's talking about. Hence, it's none of our, or anyone else's, business.
Personally, I'd be happier considering not having a device that acts on random audio prompts from things that are outside your control, which is connected to your Internet connection and your local network, sending the data to Google / Amazon / Microsoft / whoever, and has absolutely no security whatsoever.
Burger King are just doing what advertisers do - find a way to make you "click" on stuff. What you have is a device in your home that clicks on anything the advertisers tell it to. I know which one I think is the bigger problem.
If you live in a built-up area, chances are someone is currently advertising the fact that you have a wireless network, especially if it's only WEP or completely open.
And just wait until it's compromised and the firmware fault lets guests slip into your router and sniff all your traffic and/or enter your local network.
There's a reason that you put a router between your Internet connection and local network (and, no, the SuperHub / Home Hubs don't count because they are just waiting for a compromise).
But I literally bought a brand new car last year. It's petrol-based.
The reasons? The electric models cost twice as much. They didn't go as far. I'm not a boy racer so the thing they do win on (acceleration) doesn't interest me at all (in fact, I think it should be limited because people will start to rely on it and expect it and it's completely unsuitable for "around town" especially given that they are so quiet).
I wouldn't be able to kit out my house to charge it in any sensible time (solar in my area just isn't viable, I've had this discussion any number of times). I have a 100A charging socket on the outside wall, which runs an electric kiln. I'd have to seriously upgrade the house electrics and add another point to get to the stage I could sensibly charge an electric car even overnight. That would cost thousands, and mean getting someone to re-certify all my household electrics and maybe upgrade the incoming household power (100A, 220V max at the moment).
I can't take the car on driving holidays. Sure, I could use something else, but with hours of charging gaps, including hours of trying to FIND an electric charging point that doesn't trickle-charge, just destroys the concept of travelling by car rather than commuting.
I did 5000 miles around Europe in one trip, stopping only to camp. Even the camping time wouldn't be enough to charge at the standard rates, even if I paid the campsites for their standard charging points. That's only going to get worse when EVERYONE has an electric car as you'll need 400A feeds to multiple charging points, which is blowing all the green credentials out of the water (no, you can't "just charge on a schedule to reduce peak load" - peak load is peak because that's when most people want to use it!).
Also, I can't name many electric charging points near my house. There are some, I know, but I wouldn't know where they are because they are so unadvertised and rare. The only one I *know* is in a council car park that closes at 8pm. There's another in a supermarket down the road. That's in a town with hundreds of thousands of people. By comparison, if I was to drive to those two places I would pass 4-5 petrol stations. None of those stations have an electric charging point, by the way.
Then for most modern cars you need to lease the battery. Sorry, I don't do that. That's like DLC for a car. I buy outright, so that I own the vehicle.
So, without any serious moral objections to an electric car (hell, we had electric milkfloats in the 60's doing the rounds on every street), with the money to buy a new car outright, with the capability to upgrade my house to make a new charging point, within miles of central London, in a huge large town full of people, with the knowledge that oil is going to run out, but with standard usage of my vehicle as I've done since I learned to drive... electric just can't even figure in my plans, really.
Sure, I can accept tons of limitations. Use the car only for work. Use the car only in the day. Take the car and leave it charging every few days while I go shopping. Hope that there is always going to be a charging space. Spend a lot of money on my house. Always have to plan to use it for an airport run in the middle of the night.
But then I'm not only out lots of money, pretty much the same amount in fact, but I also have lots of inconvenience and life-changes to make. And I'm reliant on public transport, air travel, renting cars on holiday, etc. etc. etc.
Technically, it would actually translate to "stop using your car" as the most efficient way of helping, which I could have done 20+ years ago if that was something viable, and which I wanted to actually do.
I'm sure, in time, when the power companies wake up and put nuclear everywhere, we can all be upgraded to 1000A incoming power for ordinary housing, and then old cars will all die because there is no compelling reason to keep them. But, by my calculations, that's AT LEAST th
If his sexual preference was for young children, he's breaking the law. Entirely different matter. Stop being a dick and conflating "sexual kinks with consenting adults" into "sexual assault of a minor".
If he was a mysognist who refused to hire women - also MORE ILLEGAL than being into BDSM. If you have a problem with this, get the law changed.
As such, where the law - and these developers - have drawn a straight line along "what he did was perfectly legal and his own business", you and the people who are the target of this letter haven't. Your line is all squiggly and routes round personal prejudices tries to blur the line between legal and illegal, and draws huge boundaries around what YOU are into sexually as what is acceptable.
The facts of life are that people can pick the workers they like. WITHIN THE BOUNDARIES OF THE LAW. Don't like it? Get the law changed. And you can't just pick up Drupal developers off the street, so they can hold their employer hostage. Or, rather, insist that their employer upholds the law around employment. Never heard of unions? (P.S. I disagree insanely with the concept of unions, personally, but that's another matter entirely).
There is a "commercial reputation" element, yes, but you can't just let people set out on DELIBERATELY DESTROYING the commercial reputation of the company in order to GET BACK at someone whose legal and consenting sexual life you disagree with. No company wants dickheads like that on the staff.
If they were to let the staff go, they'd still not solve the problem. The problem is one of culture where it's acceptable to target and destroy the reputation of staff members. If that's acceptable, next thing you know, every piece of dirt on every "new" member of staff will come out too. Is that acceptable?
I honestly don't get why anyone's sex life matters whatsoever. Politicians, policemen, or cleaners. Who gives a shit. Their CRIMINAL life, yes. That matters. But their personal sexual life? No.
And dickheads like you are just reinforcing hatred because of personal sexual preferences. You're no different to a homophobe, a puritan or a prude.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah.
That'll work as well as the EU's "you must use micro-USB charging leads" for all phones.
Like the iPhones. Since, supposedly, the iPhone 5. By law.
http://www.geek.com/apple/appl...
Didn't happen, even if that's what they said was going to happen.
So, after 34 years, in a world of on-demand entertainment, mobile devices, in-home electronics, video conferencing, etc., Stallman is using a decade-old laptop, watching no entertainment at all, presumably has nothing in the line of other devices (e.g. tablets, phones, CCTV, etc.) and can't talk to anyone who doesn't use the same kind of software as him (e.g. everyone on Skype, WhatsApp, etc.). And he also thinks you should go to jail for wanting to put a restrictive licence on things you own?
And we're supposed to follow this guy's ideals?
The guy's a moron. And that's coming from someone who does do an awful lot of things the open-source way, including my own programming.
If you want to fix this problem, rather than mouth off, try and fix some of the primary problems identified by the FSF - which has included open-source video conferencing for years. Hell, they're still talking about an open-source alternative for Flash which has lived and died in the time they've been trying to create one.
The sentiment is overblown, the direction is a good one, but the reality is so poor that everyone gave up waiting (e.g. for Hurd which only recently got SATA functionality...). And you're seriously advocating a years-old laptop as the way to live? That laptop stopped manufacture before millions of the users of things like iPads and WhatsApp were even born.
Not only are you bad at fixing the problem, you're bad at finding interim solutions, and bad at making suggestions, and nothing but bad press for people who DO still want free and open kit.
I'm incredibly disappointed that NOBODY with these large organisations with tons of skilled people on board has thought to monetise the exact thing they can do : Make a series of machines that are free and open from top to bottom. You can use sales from them to develop further. People would buy one just for a certified "open" tag.
But, no, the closest you can get is System76 who recycle old IBM laptops still and who have just thought about getting into the game of end-to-end production.
We could have been doing that since the 386 era when this guy first started mouthing off publicly, but nothing has been done in that direction.
I'm all for free software but, you know what, I have to talk to real people. That means a mobile phone. I have to use computers. That means ones I can buy in a shop today. I have to live and enjoy. And that means playing games on Steam and watching movies on Amazon.
Because there are precisely ZERO viable alternatives, short of a 10-year-old laptop and giving everything else up.
1) It's a mechanical device under huge manual and braking stress. They break. They can't not break. Maybe you haven't seen it, maybe you just don't use the break or own enough cars or care enough to check.
2) I used to buy old cars. 5-10 years old. Until recently, I never bought new. I used to change car when they didn't pass the relevant tests, so I bought a lot of second-hand cars. Almost ALL of them had parking brake problems. From "it doesn't do anything" to "it needs a serious amount of adjusting" to it literally could not be released once activated.
3) My dad does all my repairs/maintenance as he worked in the trade for decades. Ask him if mechanical parking brakes never fail.
4) My new car, a year or so old now, has electric parking brakes. I distrusted them, like you. When my car was new, I took it to a couple of off-road locations to test lots of things (I'm not a boyracer, speed was NOT one of them, I'm literally talking about "Oh, I don't like that... how does that work if..." scenarios) - best way to get to know and trust a car is to actually activate these things in a safe place.
Electronic parking brake? Massively outperforms a mechanical one. I could not make it not activate on demand. I could not make it activate inadvertently (it appears the button/toggle that controls it has debouncing that's undergone a lot of testing to avoid inadvertent activation, but yet work whenever you need it to). And there's a reason I couldn't make it work inadvertently... the parking brake is not just a parking brake but your only non-hydraulic method of stopping the car in an emergency.
I deliberately read the latest car design requirements from the government and, at least in my country, the parking brake must still operate independently so it can be used in the car of a brake failure. I was worried they were obsoleting a safety backup, but in fact the requirements are much more stringent now than most of the old cars I used to drive.
And so I took it on a non-public road. And I poodled along and pressed the parking brake. Holy shit did it stop. Even on gravel. Okay, so I got braver and braver and asked it to stop me from faster and faster speeds (never going stupid, but still - on a motorway this might need me to stop the car before it hits a line of traffic, late, after I realise the normal brakes don't work).
HOLY SHIT. You have no idea how effective it is compared to a traditional cabled parking brake (no handbrake turns, for sure, because you just don't get time, but then I would never attempt that anyway). I only avoided whacking my head on the steering wheel each time because I knew it was coming after building up from the slower speeds (presumably airbags would kick in in a collision, I'm not testing that though!).
I tested the "auto-release when you drive". I couldn't make it release when I didn't want it to. Literally, you have to have enough driver-instructed forward motion that you would hear the brakes screech anyway if you did move and it deactivates a fraction of a second AFTER you're actually moving against the brake.
Hill starts? I actually worry now that with electric parking brakes, you never have to be able to do one properly. They make it that reliable and easy. I've literally never rolled back, not even an inch, unless you are absolutely 100% negligent and wait for the brake to release and then suddenly let get of everything and it still takes a second or two to roll back because the car has to have been moving forward to release the brake.
And if I hold the foot-brake for a few seconds while stationary, it knows that and just puts on the parking brake too. It doesn't do it while moving at even a tiny speed where you can barely see the wheels moving even if you're doing that by holding the normal brake. It knows the difference.
Someone put a lot of testing, thought and effort into my car's electric parking brake. I couldn't make it do things I didn't want, even when I was completely abusing the mechanism
Read the summary again.
Worst case. From BIOS cold-boot.
Hell, the BIOS can take 5-10 seconds if you turn off that default "hide all the useful info" option.
We deploy Classic Shell.
Same reasons, and fixes the Metro shite so it goes away unless someone really wants it (we tie it to Shift-Win-key instead).
Take off the delays, animations and other shite and stuff just appears when you click the button.
From cold boot, with BIOS, yes.
From normal Windows 8 "sleep" power off? Seconds.
I'm not picking and choosing my metrics here. I gave you worst-case, real-world, observed. They don't take 4 minutes to load bloat because they're a managed system. Nothing on startup that doesn't need to be, everything works and loads in seconds when you want it.
And even 30 seconds isn't "too long" to wait for a computer to turn on. Normal working day, however? It never goes off so doesn't even figure.
If I wanted to Wake-on-LAN them just before people got in, they wouldn't even know. But they're so quick, it's not worth taking the time to write the script to do that.
P.S. Stock, commodity Lenovo clients. Nothing special. All same image.
500+ users
150+ machines.
Not one of them is slow enough to discourage a user (doesn't stop them trying to claim that).
Windows 8.1. 8Gb, SSD. EVERYWHERE. Everything you could want to do, office-wise, will fly. We have no power usage and EVERYONE has the same exact source image for their machine. Even IT.
The biggest restriction is really that we *only* have Gigabit to the desktop. Plenty of oomph on the switches, more than enough backbone, massive internet line, servers and storage sitting mostly idle, but sometimes the gigabit is a bottleneck (e.g. 1Gb profile takes 8 seconds to download!).
But turn the PC on, within 30 seconds you are at the logo-wallpaper of the logon screen. Type in your username/password, if it "knows" you (i.e. it's your computer or you logged in there recently), if gets to desktop in 10-20 seconds. If it doesn't know you, it's profile download and (possibly) GPO setup etc. which can take a minute or two admittedly. Applications launch and then work. You can open EVERYTHING on the image at once (I know, I've done it) and it still works just fine.
Last time someone claimed something was slow (after re-images and all sorts), we took the machine apart on their desk, "changed" the hard drive for the exact same drive through some sleight of hand, re-imaged it again. They still - months later - keep telling me how much faster it now is (than the previous re-image of an identical image on the exact same hardware? Really?).
It's all in their head. In the same way time slows when you are bored and speeds up when you're in a hurry, they perceive it differently when they're desperate to get something important done, but nobody's ever demonstrated an unreasonable logon, program startup, or response time.
After years of doing IT and actually collecting metrics on this (perflog etc.), I just take it in my stride now.
The irony: The IT Office machines - including my own - are their rejects from last year, that were deemed "slow". I put the exact same image back on them, put the IT software GPOs on (so they actually have MORE junk than a normal machine), and have been using them for 3 years now.
Eating your own dogfood kinda throws out all the crazy performance theories. And if it's bad enough to bug them for even ten minutes, I assure you it will bug me more using it for EVERYTHING every single day of my working life.
"Revenue was not a top priority -- a remarkable oversight for any company, and a particularly galling one for a payments company. Eventually, with cash running low, Tilt went looking for a buyer..."
Well - this is what happens when you just throw $65m at someone but don't provide them with a set of targets, metrics, viability tests, check-ups, performance reviews, performance-linked investment etc.
Of course revenue's not a priority if some idiot finances you to the tune of decades of operating income without ever needing to do anything specific to get that money.
And once the valuation hits 5 times that, which is ludicrous if they don't actually have money or technology at that moment, only "potential", they have even less incentive. Short of a clause or two, they could just sell up and disappear, having made millions doing nothing.
To be honest: Never heard of them, don't care.
Spoken like a true American.
Funny.
I was around before you and that "Free" with a capital-F shite was either done in jest or not taken seriously for years.
1) It's maths. Sorry, America. You're wrong.
2) There is more than one "math" any way you look at it.
Algebra is a "mathematic" ...
Geometry.
Calculus.
Statistics.
Graph theory.
Hence, studying them all is to study "mathematics".
Tried Irfanview with its plugins?
http://www.irfanview.com/main_...
(Says it needs Quicktime, but if you're that desperate to open them, it shouldn't be a burden, and certainly easier than trying to load them in an emulator in a browser and somehow convert them).
A library might be allowed to preserve stuff, but giving away free copies of in-copyright works to every visitor is a bit different. Wikipedia says "120 years after creation or 95 years after publication" for works under corporate authorship.
This includes at least the Apple Mac ROMs (you see them load when you start the programs), as well the advertised software itself, which they're going to have to contest need to be given away to all and sundry who visit as part of ... what? Fair use?
There's a point at which IA will have overstepped the mark. Maybe it's now, with Apple, but at some point it's going to come back to bite them.
Its runs in the client browser.
This isn't anything new, to be honest. You can get DOSBox, Amiga, etc. in a browser and all sorts.
https://js-dos.com/
http://scriptedamigaemulator.n...
A 68000 isn't that special in these terms,
So long as you aren't selling ROMs, pretty much the law has decided that it's not a problem.
Some emulators are available - for money - on things like Google Play Store and have been for years. For example, Spectaculator, etc.
Emulating isn't breaking the law. Only providing copyright code (e.g. roms, software, etc.), or misappropriating trademarks (e.g. a picture of Pacman) is.
You stand more chance of being sued for drawing Pacman on a sticker than selling a system intended for emulation.
To be honest, from that kit, I'd be more worried about patents on the shape of the SNES controller (and why did the guy use SNES controllers on an NES console?), but that's the manufacturer's problem, not the end user.
Bugger: Missed off the link:
https://thepihut.com/collectio...
Worse than that, you can actually just buy bundles that are 100% this.
RPi, Retropie card, controllers.
Sigh.
If you have to record every stop sign for the cars, you don't have AI. You have an expert system, at best, running on a database.
Also, you could just make the roads like railways. It would be infinitely safer to have driverless cars on driverless-only, fixed route highways. No pedestrians, no unexpected actions, no junctions to deal with, no need to "interpret" anything. Nobody has serious objection to automation. What we object to is pretending that these things are thinking or learning when they're following orders. And rather than try to make them "human" and learn how to read our roads, it would be much easier to just paint a giant magnetic-paint line on the road to indicate the middle of the lane and have done with it, rather than try to train a computer vision module to recognise white lines from a perspective-skewed camera image obscured by everything from rain to debris to garbage to other cars.
And we're assuming that we can teach machines to "learn" at all, which isn't true. If that was true, the best machines would be kicking our arses at everything by now, just from sheer amount of data input, speed of data input and processing capability. In actuality, they are winning - with our help - at a handful of board games when we spend years crafting a machine to do just that. That's it. That's the limit of "AI" and deep learning.
Hell, even Google's own search indexes have to be manually moderated and pruned still, because otherwise they get scammed in seconds - by other automated systems and a bunch of low-paid link-spammers on the Internet.
The problem with this kind of "AI" (it's not, but let's not go there) is that there's no understanding of what it's actually doing. We're creating tools, "training" them, and then we have no idea what it's basing decisions on past that point.
As such, outside of toys, they aren't that useful and SHOULDN'T BE used for things like self-driving cars. You can never imagine them passing, say, aviation verification because you have literally no idea what it will do.
And it's because of that very problem that they are also unfixable, and unguaranteeable. You can't just say "Oh, we'll train it some more" because the logical consequence of that is that you have to train it on virtually everything you ever want it to do, which kind of spoils the point. And even then, there's no way you can guarantee that it will work next time.
Interesting for beating humans at board games, recognising what you're saying for ordering online, or spotting porn images in image search. Maybe. Some day. But in terms of reliance, we can't rely on them which kills them for all the useful purposes.
It's actually one of the first steps of humans creating systems to do jobs, that the humans do not and cannot understand. Not just one individual could not understand, but nobody, not even the creator can understand or predict what it will do. That's dangerous ground, even if we aren't talking about AI-taking-over-the-world scenarios.
Expressing a sexual preference for young children can see you behind bars, in some jurisdictions. In the same way that expressing a preference for blowing up certain religions can.
For instance, child "grooming" is all done "with intent", no actual action takes place against the person of the child. But expressing the intent, or even just masquerading in a way which a court might perceive as being a prelude to an attack, can see you arrested.
Though, yes, you are technically correct for the most part.
But what he's doing is not only legal to think about, it's not even illegal to perform either. Or discuss. Or have online forums for. Or anything else. Whereas a sexual preference for young children, rape, etc. is entirely different and would be a quite valid reason to exclude him from a community as he would be expressing a desire to commit an offence.
In this case, however, no offence would be committed even if he were to perform the acts he's talking about. Hence, it's none of our, or anyone else's, business.
Personally, I'd be happier considering not having a device that acts on random audio prompts from things that are outside your control, which is connected to your Internet connection and your local network, sending the data to Google / Amazon / Microsoft / whoever, and has absolutely no security whatsoever.
Burger King are just doing what advertisers do - find a way to make you "click" on stuff. What you have is a device in your home that clicks on anything the advertisers tell it to. I know which one I think is the bigger problem.
Check your house on https://wigle.net/
If you live in a built-up area, chances are someone is currently advertising the fact that you have a wireless network, especially if it's only WEP or completely open.
And just wait until it's compromised and the firmware fault lets guests slip into your router and sniff all your traffic and/or enter your local network.
There's a reason that you put a router between your Internet connection and local network (and, no, the SuperHub / Home Hubs don't count because they are just waiting for a compromise).
I have no problem with electric cars.
But I literally bought a brand new car last year. It's petrol-based.
The reasons? The electric models cost twice as much. They didn't go as far. I'm not a boy racer so the thing they do win on (acceleration) doesn't interest me at all (in fact, I think it should be limited because people will start to rely on it and expect it and it's completely unsuitable for "around town" especially given that they are so quiet).
I wouldn't be able to kit out my house to charge it in any sensible time (solar in my area just isn't viable, I've had this discussion any number of times). I have a 100A charging socket on the outside wall, which runs an electric kiln. I'd have to seriously upgrade the house electrics and add another point to get to the stage I could sensibly charge an electric car even overnight. That would cost thousands, and mean getting someone to re-certify all my household electrics and maybe upgrade the incoming household power (100A, 220V max at the moment).
I can't take the car on driving holidays. Sure, I could use something else, but with hours of charging gaps, including hours of trying to FIND an electric charging point that doesn't trickle-charge, just destroys the concept of travelling by car rather than commuting.
I did 5000 miles around Europe in one trip, stopping only to camp. Even the camping time wouldn't be enough to charge at the standard rates, even if I paid the campsites for their standard charging points. That's only going to get worse when EVERYONE has an electric car as you'll need 400A feeds to multiple charging points, which is blowing all the green credentials out of the water (no, you can't "just charge on a schedule to reduce peak load" - peak load is peak because that's when most people want to use it!).
Also, I can't name many electric charging points near my house. There are some, I know, but I wouldn't know where they are because they are so unadvertised and rare. The only one I *know* is in a council car park that closes at 8pm. There's another in a supermarket down the road. That's in a town with hundreds of thousands of people. By comparison, if I was to drive to those two places I would pass 4-5 petrol stations. None of those stations have an electric charging point, by the way.
Then for most modern cars you need to lease the battery. Sorry, I don't do that. That's like DLC for a car. I buy outright, so that I own the vehicle.
So, without any serious moral objections to an electric car (hell, we had electric milkfloats in the 60's doing the rounds on every street), with the money to buy a new car outright, with the capability to upgrade my house to make a new charging point, within miles of central London, in a huge large town full of people, with the knowledge that oil is going to run out, but with standard usage of my vehicle as I've done since I learned to drive... electric just can't even figure in my plans, really.
Sure, I can accept tons of limitations. Use the car only for work. Use the car only in the day. Take the car and leave it charging every few days while I go shopping. Hope that there is always going to be a charging space. Spend a lot of money on my house. Always have to plan to use it for an airport run in the middle of the night.
But then I'm not only out lots of money, pretty much the same amount in fact, but I also have lots of inconvenience and life-changes to make. And I'm reliant on public transport, air travel, renting cars on holiday, etc. etc. etc.
Technically, it would actually translate to "stop using your car" as the most efficient way of helping, which I could have done 20+ years ago if that was something viable, and which I wanted to actually do.
I'm sure, in time, when the power companies wake up and put nuclear everywhere, we can all be upgraded to 1000A incoming power for ordinary housing, and then old cars will all die because there is no compelling reason to keep them. But, by my calculations, that's AT LEAST th
If his sexual preference was for young children, he's breaking the law. Entirely different matter. Stop being a dick and conflating "sexual kinks with consenting adults" into "sexual assault of a minor".
If he was a mysognist who refused to hire women - also MORE ILLEGAL than being into BDSM. If you have a problem with this, get the law changed.
As such, where the law - and these developers - have drawn a straight line along "what he did was perfectly legal and his own business", you and the people who are the target of this letter haven't. Your line is all squiggly and routes round personal prejudices tries to blur the line between legal and illegal, and draws huge boundaries around what YOU are into sexually as what is acceptable.
The facts of life are that people can pick the workers they like. WITHIN THE BOUNDARIES OF THE LAW. Don't like it? Get the law changed. And you can't just pick up Drupal developers off the street, so they can hold their employer hostage. Or, rather, insist that their employer upholds the law around employment. Never heard of unions? (P.S. I disagree insanely with the concept of unions, personally, but that's another matter entirely).
There is a "commercial reputation" element, yes, but you can't just let people set out on DELIBERATELY DESTROYING the commercial reputation of the company in order to GET BACK at someone whose legal and consenting sexual life you disagree with. No company wants dickheads like that on the staff.
If they were to let the staff go, they'd still not solve the problem. The problem is one of culture where it's acceptable to target and destroy the reputation of staff members. If that's acceptable, next thing you know, every piece of dirt on every "new" member of staff will come out too. Is that acceptable?
I honestly don't get why anyone's sex life matters whatsoever. Politicians, policemen, or cleaners. Who gives a shit. Their CRIMINAL life, yes. That matters. But their personal sexual life? No.
And dickheads like you are just reinforcing hatred because of personal sexual preferences. You're no different to a homophobe, a puritan or a prude.