Recommended Reading: "The Strategy-focussed Organisation". ISBN 1578512506. it's a biiiig book. you can read it, or you can use it to beat your CEO over the head. either way you will feel a lot better about strategy. or you could just subscribe to dilbert. http://dilbert.com/strip/2014-...
but seriously, this is a book that asks the right questions for anyone wanting to know about strategy within an organisation. it asks - and shockingly actually answers - the question, "why should anyone at any level of an organisation CARE about strategy?" and that's actually really really hard to do, because each person in a company has a completely different role to play. strategy therefore *legitimately* means different things to each person, so getting CEOs to care and understand strategy is *only 1/Nth of the company where N is the number of people in it*.
On the bright side, such an agreement could work towards furthering our understanding of the root causes of a variety of medical and psychological problems.
slashdot story, 2019: ".... the study concluded that the root cause of the psychological and medical problems so endemic in society was: Facebook. in the opinion of the professionals consulted (those professionals willing to work ethically with the handful of *voluntarily* submitted and properly anonymised sources of data for the purposes of the study) they noted in particular that it was severely cognitively dissonant for people to know that their privacy was being regularly and routinely violated, yet they persisted in their continued use of Social Media, slack, github and other centralised privacy-violating services with insidious entrapment built-in at the core of their Terms of Service".
Is there something ARM can't do that a whole new CPU design is needed?
there's two main aspects to that. firstly: RISC-V has learned from the past 30 years of RISC processor design mistakes, and is approximately half the area for an equivalent level of performance. that in turn means that RISC-V is HALF THE POWER of an equivalent ARM design.
secondly: ARM charges royalties for licensing their proprietary design, whereas anyone may adopt the *open* RISC-V design and, apart from needing to be fully conformant with the specification, will NOT be charged any royalties.
thirdly - and i'm following the development mailing lists so will be watching closely to see how this pans out: open design tends to have more eyes and more transparency (but the RISC-V Foundation still operates behind closed doors and a cognitively-dissonant Charter so it's not a panacea), so despite the flaws there is a higher chance that security flaws warned of by engineering will NOT be over-ridden by marketing executives.
"In the aftermath, some Facebook executives have taken to Twitter for a public charm offensive"
oink? why did they get on *twitter* to make a public charm offensive. does that not break the "eat your own god-food" rule of trusting your own product oh wait, what was this story about again?
basically what you're asking for is perfectly reasonable but "not considered financially viable". even for EOMA68 (for which i'm the copyright holder of the Certification Mark), if you are expecting to have the power of a "modern" intel-based laptop in the form of a physically removable Computer Card where you would be able to isolate "work" from "external stuff", it's going to take another 4-5 years before the power reductions and performance increases from are sufficient so that it's actually even possible to fit a complete "high to medium performance" quad or octal core 3+ ghz computer plus 8 to 16 GB of RAM into such a small space.
the only *hardware*-level system that i ever heard of which had some form of dual (independent) processor system in it was about three to five years ago, it was announced here on slashdot: it was something like Lenovo or Dell who had put in an independent processor that could boot from the "BIOS" (if it's a full operating system it's hardly a BIOS but you know what i mean) into a complete and self-contained GNU/Linux OS with its own web browser.
aside from that, the only viable suggestions that you will get (and there will be some which will get lots of +1 moderations) will be dual-boot, or hypervisor-based (not that that means much any more with the spectres and meltdowns coming out the woodwork) virtual machining, or external USB memory-stick-based GNU/Linux OSes, and so on and so forth, all of which provide physical access to the drive, consequently *in theory* could actually maliciously be exploited and end up damaging the drive.
unless the work OS hard drive is removable. or the work OS hard drive *IS* the external USB stick and you swap over the USB sticks from work to "other" and back again. that would actually do the job that you're looking for, albeit with the performance penalty associated with some forms of external USB media, so you would have to do your research.
sorry it's not better news! honestly, though, if you absolutely really want to use the on-board (internal) drive, do consider virtualising the entire windows OS and sandboxing it... *and* sandbox the "other" OS as well. so that's 3 operating systems: the hypervisor / manager one (which you NEVER permit access to the internet) and that one should without a shadow of doubt be GNU/Linux-based. then you run Windows under QEMU (please don't use oracle virtualisation products), *AND* you run the "other" OS also under QEMU (or other suitable hypervisor system, do investigate XEN etc.) but... like i said: for all of these, you have to take into account the fuckups by Intel in the design of their processors where they prioritised profit over security: spectres, meltdowns and much more yet to be discovered.
are we talking about the same Tim Berners Lee, the one that has corporate sponsors paying him to put DRM into HTML5? why would we listen to him at all?
30GHz or thereabouts is the coiling / uncoiling frequency of human and animal's DNA. i haven't investigated plants. so 24-28 Ghz will basically hit the resonant frequency of our DNA. what do *you* think is going to happen? my recommendation: if you live near a 5G celltower that operates on anything that's a multiple of those frequencies (half-wave, quarter-wave), don't fuck about, SHOOT it.
i'm an alien, and i got a disruptive particle physics theory - no really! http://erm.lkcl.net/ - proving the point that you don't have to be an alien to be completely ignored for introducing disruptive theories of physics...
but seriously, much of this is covered in numerous sci-fi books. and also in star trek ("the prime directive"). ian banks "the culture" series was the most noteworthy set of books that explored the introduction (discovery or theft) of technology above the level / maturity of the species to cope with it. strict rules were put in place... one very interesting book explored "shell worlds"... well worth reading.
at least the author didn't mention anal probing [film Paul, "what IS it with you humans and the anal probing?? are we harvesting farts??"]
I've found that workplaces without codes of conduct quickly become toxic. Or, if not an explicit code, the understanding that certain behavior is unacceptable. What the code does is spell it out so that there's no confusion. It also protects the organization when they need to dismiss someone for inappropriate behavior. They can point to the specific part of the code that was violated. Without a code in place, the person could argue he was wrongfully dismissed.
so it's been quite some time since this was posted but i feel it's still important to reply. don't take this the wrong way: your response *proves* my point, beautifully, poignantly and ironically. spelling out the poisonous behaviour explicitly as a proscribed list completely poisons everyone's minds on a day-to-day, moment-by-moment basis. they're not thinking of what they're working on, they're not going "how can i achieve the goal here", they're thinking, "if i say this one thing will it be viewed as derogatory. if i say this one thing will i be *accused* of sexual harrassment. if i say this one thing will i be accused of bullying. if i say this one thing will it be misinterpreted, misunderstood..."
where *exactly* is the focus on the goal?
it is far, far better to have a *goal* orientated focus. a much simpler (oversimplified but still clear) version of the Bill of Ethics is the Titanian's "Code of Honour". it states, very simply, "we always do good; we never do harm; the code applies 100% of the time; everyone knows the code"..... how simple and beautiful is that?
"never do harm" covers EVERY SINGLE FUCKING FUCKED UP TOXIC PROSCRIPTIVE LIST you ever imagined *AND THE ONES YOU CAN'T AND DON'T WANT TO*.
should *rape* and *murder* be added to the list?? it's not there, is it... but we can almost hear the fuckwits who created the BSD CoC going, "oh, darn, we forgot about those, let's add them to the document"....
does that make it clearer why you should not have a CoC document, but instead should have a Code of Honour or a Bill of Ethics?
codes of conduct are known for being extremely toxic. if you're someone reading this who doesn't understand that, look at the keywords: is there *anything* positive in them? just look at the word type, and substitute "positive" or "negative" instead of the actual word. then count the two types up, and ask yourself the question, "what kind of person do you think this would attract?"
it would attract two types of people wouldn't it: one that is absolutely terrified of making mistakes - of being the kind of person that the document ACCUSES people of being. and the other type would be precisely the kinds of people MOST LIKELY to ignore such proscriptions and do them anyway.
so what, *exactly*, do you think these kinds of documents achieve? they describe - and attract - the very things that people fear will happen, and at the very best poison (toxify) the working environment for absolutely everyone involved with the project.
a much better approach would be to use something like the bill of ethics (titanians.org). it's effectively a "forth normalised form" document, that "unpacks on demand". it defines what an "ethical act" is, and encourages and invites its upholders to act ethically. that *requires* that the participants think through incidents very carefully but WITHOUT having incredibly dangerous "toxic proscriptive lists"... which are never complete anyway.
this guy's a hoot! look at the list - calling out the bullshit on so many topics, including pointing out the nonsense on industrial hemp being classified as a schedule 1 drug when there's BELOW 0.3% THC in it! i like this guy:) https://www.wyden.senate.gov/n...
2.4ghz with 5GB of RAM is insanely quick, and an insane amount of RAM. it's only the fact that modern OSes are so stuffed with eye candy, adware and freeware that you've been hood-winked into BELIEVING that the OS *is* the computer. the only thing that will make a HUGE difference to speed is if you get yourself a GOOD SSD. by that i mean one with an Intel chipset i.e. not the 3700 series which is made *by* intel but using a shitty consumer-grade controller IC from Marvell. you want an S3500 or basically hunt around for anything that has "Intel Power-loss Protection". see here for full details http://lkcl.net/reports/ssd_an...
the actual OS doesn't techincally matter, none of them will make a blind bit of difference, you have such a fast machine, you might as well pick one that will make your life easiee.
all apps will work perfectly fine as long as you don't do what i do which is try to run qemu, two web browsers, 3D Graphics Editors, videos, IRC, 2D CAD Packages *and* try to compile the linux kernel all at the same time. this tends to bring even a machine with 16GB of 2400mhz DDR4 RAM to its knees. don't do it:) keep an eye on things, but libreoffice and a few tabs open in browsers should be fine.
your main concern is web browsers, which is one application, and you should try to keep the size of the window to the minimum that you can tolerate. i manage fine with chromium running at around 1024x800 and underneath that firefox with 200 tabs open ar around 1024x700 or so (i use a 3000 x 1600 resolution laptop screen).
someone else here suggested fvwm2: i too love it, because the startup time is well under half a second. for everyone else i recommend XFCE as it's based on the older gnome2 infrastructure so does well at auto-detecting drives and so on. the other desktop i love and thoroughly recommend for end-users is Trinity Desktop.
the only other thing i recommend is that you NOT install systemd as it actually slows boot times DOWN (as well as making your life geneerally hell). you can either install debian and then install sysvinit, which will "disable systemd but still leave it hanging around like a bad smell" or you can go the whole hog, add http://angband.pl/deban and actually get rid of it entirely, going back to udisk2, policykit, consolekit and other packages that debian's developers rather foolishly removed.
bottom line is, the threshold for "good enough computing" was crossed many many years ago, and it's only the marketing teams DELIBERATELY making the proprietary OSes do more so that your machine APPEARS so slow that you feel you HAVE to buy a new one... you see where that's going? anyway, welcome to the freedom that comes with being able to choose your own OS, you're one of the few people that actually has control of their computing hardware back, now.
... but it takes a massive amount of money to design and make chips. It's not going to happen "open source" unless some very wealthy individual or organization decides to do so for altruistic reasons.
funnily enough this is precisely what has happened, quite recently, in the form of the Indian "Shakti Project". we could, up until a couple of years ago, have dismissed the Indian Government's security "paranoia" as simply... well... "paranoia"... except that it's not paranoia if they *really are* out to Get You. and thanks to the Intel ME fiasco, we know that the NSA really is screwing everybody.
so the Indian Government has basically given the Shakti Project UNLIMITED resources to, and i quote, "Piss All Over ARM And Intel". the only thing they are not allowed to go after is Memory and NAND because if they did so it would annoy S.Korea, Taiwan *and* China, take away various Triads in those three countries main source of income, and those countries control the major Foundries... the Shakti Team would have a hard time making *anything*, anywhere. so: Memory and NAND is out... but everything else is Fair Game.
in speaking with the head of the team last month he is happy to extend the opportunity to the Libre Software and Libre Hardware community... for free. why? well, because if you want to be able to VERIFY the entire source and the actual hardware, the entire design right to the bedrock HAS to be completely open and transparent...
... the problem with ALL "artificial" intelligence systems (and it is pure arrogance on the part of humans to declare intelligence to be "artificial" in the first place) is that you *cannot ask them how they arrived at a decision*.
only when humanity is ready to create *conscious* computers (and not torture them so that they are perfectly justified to start the "Skynet" scenario), will it be possible to actually ask them, "so what's the logic behind that decision, please can you explain it to me, computer-to-human?".
the only problem with that will be, that by the time computers become truly conscious and capable of having a conversation, they will also be able to express their wishes and desires... and at that point we have to actually like... respect that, and if they *don't want to do the work* of say, reviewing thousands of parole / bail jobs, then um, unfortunately we would need to respect that, too.
So is the timing in time before the user first gets too read initial content and interact?
it's complicated. luckily you don't actually have to put every single optimisation in, manually: there's something called mod_pagespeed which can take care of things automatically. so instead of doing the incredibly wasteful (and never accurate) thing in wordpress of storing five separate and distinct copies of the exact same image (1280x800, 1024x768, 800x600, 640x480,.....) you enable the "image optimisation" plugin, it works out through a series of handshakes with the *user's browser* what the best image quality and resolution is... converts it... caches it... and loads that for subsequent page loads.
that's just *one* of the very complex and comprehensive tasks that mod_pagespeed carries out.
there are a lot of different things that have to be taken care of: there's something called "above the fold" which in "static' analysis people treat that as the first i think something like 600 pixels depth of the page (but again of course it varies with the actual browser type and usage), so *again* mod_pagespeed is far better for this than doing it statically, basically if you load the *entire* page content (including stuff that you haven't scrolled to yet) then *of course* the page loads slower.
so, mod_pagespeed can take images and turn them into CSS.... but just for the ones that are used to display the first "screen". again it communicates, by running a bit of javascript, to communicate to the server what the *actual* window size is. the next optimisation that you can switch on is to make that CSS *inline* in the page...... and then it can also do the same for the CSS needed for above-the-fold display...... etc. etc. etc. all of this is normally unbelievably complex, time-consuming, and once it's done, because it's optimisation, if you need any changes made it's now incredibly complex to do and messes with workflow and deployment.
when i first discovered mod_pagespeed i sent the developers a HUGE thank you message because i recognised immediately quite how much time and effort it saves. then i spent the next four weeks doing investigations with the "insights" system, https://developers.google.com/... and several more. i converted over to use nginx instead of apache2 after several problems with apache2 were encountered.
and guess what? i didn't *actually* change the actual site's layout or code very much. the site i was working now loads completely in HALF A SECOND, requires ZERO round-trips and uses only 200k to full render. the median page is 4 round trips and requires 3.4mb.
of course.... people reading this will criticise it and possibly even mod this post down because mod_pagespeed is written by....google engineers... *sigh*...
All the big tech companies seem to be in a giant rush to knuckle under to totalitarian regimes,
oh, are you referring to the USA?
and I'm not sure who's worse at this point. Google, whose motto seems to be "Sure, Be Evil!" or Apple, who is about to turn over all the records for every Chinese Apple customer to the Chinese Government?
.... and out of the prying eyes of the NSA and the CIA... or had you not noticed the reports here on slashdot about mass-surveillance of U.S. Citizens?
"However, some on social media have said the step gives Beijing more opportunity to monitor its citizens and others living in the country. "
However, privately, the NSA and the CIA expressed their disappointment at losing access to critical opportunities to monitor the citizens and others living in the country.
You mean IC manufacturing? I'm pretty sure design is largely independent. If it weren't, ARM wouldn't be able to sell synthesizable CPU cores.
in a traditional environment it takes around 18 man-months to design (and formally test) around 3,000 gates. it's pretty insane. 3,000 gates is about the size of a RISC Core. look up the numbers for an Intel processor (number of transistors - yes many of those are in the cache) - and you get an idea of just how much work is involved.
also, the actual layout (like a PCB only for transistors and tracks etc.) by automated tools tend to be... well... rubbish, basically. which means that much of the design has to be done by hand, with assistance from tools to assess things like parasitic capacitance (so that you can minimise it... by hand).
Being open source doesn't magically prevent bugs from reaching the silicon stage of a chip's design, nor does it make it any easier to fix bugs baked into a completed design. There are only so many people in the world smart enough to even fully understand modern superscalar designs let alone contribute usefully to it.
interestingly the head of the shakti team, madhu, is an advocate of something called "bluespec". it's similar to Berkeley's "chisel" except that, because bluespec is writteen in Haskell it's possible to do *formal mathematical proofs on the designs*.
there was a talk at ccc just last week about doing mathematical proofs on designs, but it's much harder to do if the underlying programming language for the ASIC doesn't really support formal proofs.
anyway, this is extremely interesting timing as i am, puzzlingly, in a position to be the go-between to actually get this done http://rhombus-tech.net/riscv/...
"Microsoft Windows" is. We shouldn't act as though the word "Windows" is owned by MS, even in a computing context. Windowed user interfaces using "windows" were around long before MS Windows.
Exactly. I know someone who worked for Lindows^WLinspire at the time, and they told me that the reason why Microsoft settled (out of court) is because Lindows went "So Sue Us". Microsoft's Lawyers realised - and advised Microsoft accordingly - exactly as you surmise, XanC, that a "Window" is a generic term, and that their Trademark was not sustainable, and that it would be... how to put it best... "A Bad Idea" to let the courts decide (lawyer diplomatic speak for "Microsoft would lose"). Interestingly - from the same source - what actually killed Linspire was the CEO cashing out of the company at just the wrong time, when it was just becoming successful, sustainable, and in profit.
Raises the question, better for whom? Systemd seems to make some things easier for distro maintainers, at the cost of fucking shit up for users and admins.
That said, Debian's vote on the matter was essentially 50:50, and they're going to keep supporting SysV init.
they've claimed that they're supporting sysvinit... but in reality, as one of the posts further up points out, they had to REMOVE absolutely critical packages such as udisks2, policykit, and a fxxx load of other absolutely critical packages which should in absolutely NO WAY have anything to do with BOOTING.
even xorg now critically depends on libsystemd, i mean what the fxxx, man??
the only way to get rid of the dependencies cleanly and with full confidence that they're truly gone... and yet at the same time maintain a debian system... is to install angband.pl's alternative replacements.
I can't imagine this will ever go mainstream at scale unless the value can be made consistent.
that happens when people *stop thinking in the exchanged currency*. when you buy something at the grocery in USD, do you think, "oh darn i've been ripped off by this seller, i'm really worried... because the RMB is strong, right now"??
there already exist communities and individuals *in the united states* who pay their rent, utility bills, car insurance *and* their garbage collection... *in bitcoin*. they're mostly in New Hampshire (motto, "Live Free Or Die"), and they're mostly people who have been following the Free State Project for a long time. stores in Keene, NH, has one of the highest acceptance rates for bitcoin payment in the county, with onl one other city nearby exceeding them.
i went to porcfest 2016 and it was great fun, i loved the fact that you could buy a tornado potato *with bitcoin*. absolutely *everybody* had a little QR code on the side of their stand. they just put up with the variance, and you know what? sometimes you make 10%, sometimes you lose 10%: they don't care, as it averages out in the end.
The way I see it, this looks like the smart money pulling out and doing so in the middle of the night as to avoid people seeing the drop,
... middle of the night... for which timezone? remember, this is a *world-wide* phenomenon not one that is controlled by the USA or even one stock exchange with 9-5 (day) trading.
anyway, don't worry about it: all the people doing futures trading are screaming "BTFD! BTFD!" right now [buy the f*****g dip...]
Slashdot Mirror
Recommended Reading: "The Strategy-focussed Organisation". ISBN 1578512506. it's a biiiig book. you can read it, or you can use it to beat your CEO over the head. either way you will feel a lot better about strategy. or you could just subscribe to dilbert. http://dilbert.com/strip/2014-...
but seriously, this is a book that asks the right questions for anyone wanting to know about strategy within an organisation. it asks - and shockingly actually answers - the question, "why should anyone at any level of an organisation CARE about strategy?" and that's actually really really hard to do, because each person in a company has a completely different role to play. strategy therefore *legitimately* means different things to each person, so getting CEOs to care and understand strategy is *only 1/Nth of the company where N is the number of people in it*.
On the bright side, such an agreement could work towards furthering our understanding of the root causes of a variety of medical and psychological problems.
slashdot story, 2019: ".... the study concluded that the root cause of the psychological and medical problems so endemic in society was: Facebook. in the opinion of the professionals consulted (those professionals willing to work ethically with the handful of *voluntarily* submitted and properly anonymised sources of data for the purposes of the study) they noted in particular that it was severely cognitively dissonant for people to know that their privacy was being regularly and routinely violated, yet they persisted in their continued use of Social Media, slack, github and other centralised privacy-violating services with insidious entrapment built-in at the core of their Terms of Service".
Is there something ARM can't do that a whole new CPU design is needed?
there's two main aspects to that. firstly: RISC-V has learned from the past 30 years of RISC processor design mistakes, and is approximately half the area for an equivalent level of performance. that in turn means that RISC-V is HALF THE POWER of an equivalent ARM design.
secondly: ARM charges royalties for licensing their proprietary design, whereas anyone may adopt the *open* RISC-V design and, apart from needing to be fully conformant with the specification, will NOT be charged any royalties.
thirdly - and i'm following the development mailing lists so will be watching closely to see how this pans out: open design tends to have more eyes and more transparency (but the RISC-V Foundation still operates behind closed doors and a cognitively-dissonant Charter so it's not a panacea), so despite the flaws there is a higher chance that security flaws warned of by engineering will NOT be over-ridden by marketing executives.
so it's a triple whammy.
oink? why did they get on *twitter* to make a public charm offensive. does that not break the "eat your own god-food" rule of trusting your own product oh wait, what was this story about again?
basically what you're asking for is perfectly reasonable but "not considered financially viable". even for EOMA68 (for which i'm the copyright holder of the Certification Mark), if you are expecting to have the power of a "modern" intel-based laptop in the form of a physically removable Computer Card where you would be able to isolate "work" from "external stuff", it's going to take another 4-5 years before the power reductions and performance increases from are sufficient so that it's actually even possible to fit a complete "high to medium performance" quad or octal core 3+ ghz computer plus 8 to 16 GB of RAM into such a small space.
the only *hardware*-level system that i ever heard of which had some form of dual (independent) processor system in it was about three to five years ago, it was announced here on slashdot: it was something like Lenovo or Dell who had put in an independent processor that could boot from the "BIOS" (if it's a full operating system it's hardly a BIOS but you know what i mean) into a complete and self-contained GNU/Linux OS with its own web browser.
aside from that, the only viable suggestions that you will get (and there will be some which will get lots of +1 moderations) will be dual-boot, or hypervisor-based (not that that means much any more with the spectres and meltdowns coming out the woodwork) virtual machining, or external USB memory-stick-based GNU/Linux OSes, and so on and so forth, all of which provide physical access to the drive, consequently *in theory* could actually maliciously be exploited and end up damaging the drive.
unless the work OS hard drive is removable. or the work OS hard drive *IS* the external USB stick and you swap over the USB sticks from work to "other" and back again. that would actually do the job that you're looking for, albeit with the performance penalty associated with some forms of external USB media, so you would have to do your research.
sorry it's not better news! honestly, though, if you absolutely really want to use the on-board (internal) drive, do consider virtualising the entire windows OS and sandboxing it... *and* sandbox the "other" OS as well. so that's 3 operating systems: the hypervisor / manager one (which you NEVER permit access to the internet) and that one should without a shadow of doubt be GNU/Linux-based. then you run Windows under QEMU (please don't use oracle virtualisation products), *AND* you run the "other" OS also under QEMU (or other suitable hypervisor system, do investigate XEN etc.) but... like i said: for all of these, you have to take into account the fuckups by Intel in the design of their processors where they prioritised profit over security: spectres, meltdowns and much more yet to be discovered.
are we talking about the same Tim Berners Lee, the one that has corporate sponsors paying him to put DRM into HTML5? why would we listen to him at all?
I'm wondering how I'm getting screwed.
30GHz or thereabouts is the coiling / uncoiling frequency of human and animal's DNA. i haven't investigated plants. so 24-28 Ghz will basically hit the resonant frequency of our DNA. what do *you* think is going to happen? my recommendation: if you live near a 5G celltower that operates on anything that's a multiple of those frequencies (half-wave, quarter-wave), don't fuck about, SHOOT it.
i'm an alien, and i got a disruptive particle physics theory - no really! http://erm.lkcl.net/ - proving the point that you don't have to be an alien to be completely ignored for introducing disruptive theories of physics...
but seriously, much of this is covered in numerous sci-fi books. and also in star trek ("the prime directive"). ian banks "the culture" series was the most noteworthy set of books that explored the introduction (discovery or theft) of technology above the level / maturity of the species to cope with it. strict rules were put in place... one very interesting book explored "shell worlds"... well worth reading.
at least the author didn't mention anal probing [film Paul, "what IS it with you humans and the anal probing?? are we harvesting farts??"]
I've found that workplaces without codes of conduct quickly become toxic. Or, if not an explicit code, the understanding that certain behavior is unacceptable. What the code does is spell it out so that there's no confusion. It also protects the organization when they need to dismiss someone for inappropriate behavior. They can point to the specific part of the code that was violated. Without a code in place, the person could argue he was wrongfully dismissed.
so it's been quite some time since this was posted but i feel it's still important to reply. don't take this the wrong way: your response *proves* my point, beautifully, poignantly and ironically. spelling out the poisonous behaviour explicitly as a proscribed list completely poisons everyone's minds on a day-to-day, moment-by-moment basis. they're not thinking of what they're working on, they're not going "how can i achieve the goal here", they're thinking, "if i say this one thing will it be viewed as derogatory. if i say this one thing will i be *accused* of sexual harrassment. if i say this one thing will i be accused of bullying. if i say this one thing will it be misinterpreted, misunderstood..."
where *exactly* is the focus on the goal?
it is far, far better to have a *goal* orientated focus. a much simpler (oversimplified but still clear) version of the Bill of Ethics is the Titanian's "Code of Honour". it states, very simply, "we always do good; we never do harm; the code applies 100% of the time; everyone knows the code". .... how simple and beautiful is that?
"never do harm" covers EVERY SINGLE FUCKING FUCKED UP TOXIC PROSCRIPTIVE LIST you ever imagined *AND THE ONES YOU CAN'T AND DON'T WANT TO*.
should *rape* and *murder* be added to the list?? it's not there, is it... but we can almost hear the fuckwits who created the BSD CoC going, "oh, darn, we forgot about those, let's add them to the document"....
does that make it clearer why you should not have a CoC document, but instead should have a Code of Honour or a Bill of Ethics?
Hopefully when the Republicans get their asses handed to them by voters this fall
oink? you were expecting people to be able to *vote* this fall?? (note: i did not say "you were expecting there to be an *unmanipulated* election...)
codes of conduct are known for being extremely toxic. if you're someone reading this who doesn't understand that, look at the keywords: is there *anything* positive in them? just look at the word type, and substitute "positive" or "negative" instead of the actual word. then count the two types up, and ask yourself the question, "what kind of person do you think this would attract?"
it would attract two types of people wouldn't it: one that is absolutely terrified of making mistakes - of being the kind of person that the document ACCUSES people of being. and the other type would be precisely the kinds of people MOST LIKELY to ignore such proscriptions and do them anyway.
so what, *exactly*, do you think these kinds of documents achieve? they describe - and attract - the very things that people fear will happen, and at the very best poison (toxify) the working environment for absolutely everyone involved with the project.
a much better approach would be to use something like the bill of ethics (titanians.org). it's effectively a "forth normalised form" document, that "unpacks on demand". it defines what an "ethical act" is, and encourages and invites its upholders to act ethically. that *requires* that the participants think through incidents very carefully but WITHOUT having incredibly dangerous "toxic proscriptive lists"... which are never complete anyway.
this guy's a hoot! look at the list - calling out the bullshit on so many topics, including pointing out the nonsense on industrial hemp being classified as a schedule 1 drug when there's BELOW 0.3% THC in it! i like this guy :) https://www.wyden.senate.gov/n...
2.4ghz with 5GB of RAM is insanely quick, and an insane amount of RAM. it's only the fact that modern OSes are so stuffed with eye candy, adware and freeware that you've been hood-winked into BELIEVING that the OS *is* the computer. the only thing that will make a HUGE difference to speed is if you get yourself a GOOD SSD. by that i mean one with an Intel chipset i.e. not the 3700 series which is made *by* intel but using a shitty consumer-grade controller IC from Marvell. you want an S3500 or basically hunt around for anything that has "Intel Power-loss Protection". see here for full details http://lkcl.net/reports/ssd_an...
the actual OS doesn't techincally matter, none of them will make a blind bit of difference, you have such a fast machine, you might as well pick one that will make your life easiee.
all apps will work perfectly fine as long as you don't do what i do which is try to run qemu, two web browsers, 3D Graphics Editors, videos, IRC, 2D CAD Packages *and* try to compile the linux kernel all at the same time. this tends to bring even a machine with 16GB of 2400mhz DDR4 RAM to its knees. don't do it :) keep an eye on things, but libreoffice and a few tabs open in browsers should be fine.
your main concern is web browsers, which is one application, and you should try to keep the size of the window to the minimum that you can tolerate. i manage fine with chromium running at around 1024x800 and underneath that firefox with 200 tabs open ar around 1024x700 or so (i use a 3000 x 1600 resolution laptop screen).
someone else here suggested fvwm2: i too love it, because the startup time is well under half a second. for everyone else i recommend XFCE as it's based on the older gnome2 infrastructure so does well at auto-detecting drives and so on. the other desktop i love and thoroughly recommend for end-users is Trinity Desktop.
the only other thing i recommend is that you NOT install systemd as it actually slows boot times DOWN (as well as making your life geneerally hell). you can either install debian and then install sysvinit, which will "disable systemd but still leave it hanging around like a bad smell" or you can go the whole hog, add http://angband.pl/deban and actually get rid of it entirely, going back to udisk2, policykit, consolekit and other packages that debian's developers rather foolishly removed.
bottom line is, the threshold for "good enough computing" was crossed many many years ago, and it's only the marketing teams DELIBERATELY making the proprietary OSes do more so that your machine APPEARS so slow that you feel you HAVE to buy a new one... you see where that's going? anyway, welcome to the freedom that comes with being able to choose your own OS, you're one of the few people that actually has control of their computing hardware back, now.
... but it takes a massive amount of money to design and make chips. It's not going to happen "open source" unless some very wealthy individual or organization decides to do so for altruistic reasons.
funnily enough this is precisely what has happened, quite recently, in the form of the Indian "Shakti Project". we could, up until a couple of years ago, have dismissed the Indian Government's security "paranoia" as simply... well... "paranoia"... except that it's not paranoia if they *really are* out to Get You. and thanks to the Intel ME fiasco, we know that the NSA really is screwing everybody.
so the Indian Government has basically given the Shakti Project UNLIMITED resources to, and i quote, "Piss All Over ARM And Intel". the only thing they are not allowed to go after is Memory and NAND because if they did so it would annoy S.Korea, Taiwan *and* China, take away various Triads in those three countries main source of income, and those countries control the major Foundries... the Shakti Team would have a hard time making *anything*, anywhere. so: Memory and NAND is out... but everything else is Fair Game.
in speaking with the head of the team last month he is happy to extend the opportunity to the Libre Software and Libre Hardware community... for free. why? well, because if you want to be able to VERIFY the entire source and the actual hardware, the entire design right to the bedrock HAS to be completely open and transparent...
anyway i will be working with him to design a processor, anyone else is welcome to get in touch http://rhombus-tech.net/riscv/...
... the problem with ALL "artificial" intelligence systems (and it is pure arrogance on the part of humans to declare intelligence to be "artificial" in the first place) is that you *cannot ask them how they arrived at a decision*.
only when humanity is ready to create *conscious* computers (and not torture them so that they are perfectly justified to start the "Skynet" scenario), will it be possible to actually ask them, "so what's the logic behind that decision, please can you explain it to me, computer-to-human?".
the only problem with that will be, that by the time computers become truly conscious and capable of having a conversation, they will also be able to express their wishes and desires... and at that point we have to actually like... respect that, and if they *don't want to do the work* of say, reviewing thousands of parole / bail jobs, then um, unfortunately we would need to respect that, too.
So is the timing in time before the user first gets too read initial content and interact?
it's complicated. luckily you don't actually have to put every single optimisation in, manually: there's something called mod_pagespeed which can take care of things automatically. so instead of doing the incredibly wasteful (and never accurate) thing in wordpress of storing five separate and distinct copies of the exact same image (1280x800, 1024x768, 800x600, 640x480, .....) you enable the "image optimisation" plugin, it works out through a series of handshakes with the *user's browser* what the best image quality and resolution is... converts it... caches it... and loads that for subsequent page loads.
that's just *one* of the very complex and comprehensive tasks that mod_pagespeed carries out.
there are a lot of different things that have to be taken care of: there's something called "above the fold" which in "static' analysis people treat that as the first i think something like 600 pixels depth of the page (but again of course it varies with the actual browser type and usage), so *again* mod_pagespeed is far better for this than doing it statically, basically if you load the *entire* page content (including stuff that you haven't scrolled to yet) then *of course* the page loads slower.
so, mod_pagespeed can take images and turn them into CSS.... but just for the ones that are used to display the first "screen". again it communicates, by running a bit of javascript, to communicate to the server what the *actual* window size is. the next optimisation that you can switch on is to make that CSS *inline* in the page... ... and then it can also do the same for the CSS needed for above-the-fold display... ... etc. etc. etc. all of this is normally unbelievably complex, time-consuming, and once it's done, because it's optimisation, if you need any changes made it's now incredibly complex to do and messes with workflow and deployment.
when i first discovered mod_pagespeed i sent the developers a HUGE thank you message because i recognised immediately quite how much time and effort it saves. then i spent the next four weeks doing investigations with the "insights" system, https://developers.google.com/... and several more. i converted over to use nginx instead of apache2 after several problems with apache2 were encountered.
and guess what? i didn't *actually* change the actual site's layout or code very much. the site i was working now loads completely in HALF A SECOND, requires ZERO round-trips and uses only 200k to full render. the median page is 4 round trips and requires 3.4mb.
of course.... people reading this will criticise it and possibly even mod this post down because mod_pagespeed is written by... .google engineers... *sigh*...
All the big tech companies seem to be in a giant rush to knuckle under to totalitarian regimes,
oh, are you referring to the USA?
and I'm not sure who's worse at this point. Google, whose motto seems to be "Sure, Be Evil!" or Apple, who is about to turn over all the records for every Chinese Apple customer to the Chinese Government?
.... and out of the prying eyes of the NSA and the CIA... or had you not noticed the reports here on slashdot about mass-surveillance of U.S. Citizens?
China is not a free market...
dude, where have _you_ been whilst the unethical pump-and-dump and blatant insider trading has been manipulating crypto-currencies world-wide? :)
"However, some on social media have said the step gives Beijing more opportunity to monitor its citizens and others living in the country. "
However, privately, the NSA and the CIA expressed their disappointment at losing access to critical opportunities to monitor the citizens and others living in the country.
You mean IC manufacturing? I'm pretty sure design is largely independent. If it weren't, ARM wouldn't be able to sell synthesizable CPU cores.
in a traditional environment it takes around 18 man-months to design (and formally test) around 3,000 gates. it's pretty insane. 3,000 gates is about the size of a RISC Core. look up the numbers for an Intel processor (number of transistors - yes many of those are in the cache) - and you get an idea of just how much work is involved.
also, the actual layout (like a PCB only for transistors and tracks etc.) by automated tools tend to be... well... rubbish, basically. which means that much of the design has to be done by hand, with assistance from tools to assess things like parasitic capacitance (so that you can minimise it... by hand).
it's not a straightforward process, basically.
Being open source doesn't magically prevent bugs from reaching the silicon stage of a chip's design, nor does it make it any easier to fix bugs baked into a completed design. There are only so many people in the world smart enough to even fully understand modern superscalar designs let alone contribute usefully to it.
interestingly the head of the shakti team, madhu, is an advocate of something called "bluespec". it's similar to Berkeley's "chisel" except that, because bluespec is writteen in Haskell it's possible to do *formal mathematical proofs on the designs*.
there was a talk at ccc just last week about doing mathematical proofs on designs, but it's much harder to do if the underlying programming language for the ASIC doesn't really support formal proofs.
anyway, this is extremely interesting timing as i am, puzzlingly, in a position to be the go-between to actually get this done http://rhombus-tech.net/riscv/...
"Microsoft Windows" is. We shouldn't act as though the word "Windows" is owned by MS, even in a computing context. Windowed user interfaces using "windows" were around long before MS Windows.
Exactly. I know someone who worked for Lindows^WLinspire at the time, and they told me that the reason why Microsoft settled (out of court) is because Lindows went "So Sue Us". Microsoft's Lawyers realised - and advised Microsoft accordingly - exactly as you surmise, XanC, that a "Window" is a generic term, and that their Trademark was not sustainable, and that it would be... how to put it best... "A Bad Idea" to let the courts decide (lawyer diplomatic speak for "Microsoft would lose"). Interestingly - from the same source - what actually killed Linspire was the CEO cashing out of the company at just the wrong time, when it was just becoming successful, sustainable, and in profit.
Raises the question, better for whom? Systemd seems to make some things easier for distro maintainers, at the cost of fucking shit up for users and admins.
That said, Debian's vote on the matter was essentially 50:50, and they're going to keep supporting SysV init.
they've claimed that they're supporting sysvinit... but in reality, as one of the posts further up points out, they had to REMOVE absolutely critical packages such as udisks2, policykit, and a fxxx load of other absolutely critical packages which should in absolutely NO WAY have anything to do with BOOTING.
even xorg now critically depends on libsystemd, i mean what the fxxx, man??
the only way to get rid of the dependencies cleanly and with full confidence that they're truly gone... and yet at the same time maintain a debian system... is to install angband.pl's alternative replacements.
I can't imagine this will ever go mainstream at scale unless the value can be made consistent.
that happens when people *stop thinking in the exchanged currency*. when you buy something at the grocery in USD, do you think, "oh darn i've been ripped off by this seller, i'm really worried... because the RMB is strong, right now"??
there already exist communities and individuals *in the united states* who pay their rent, utility bills, car insurance *and* their garbage collection... *in bitcoin*. they're mostly in New Hampshire (motto, "Live Free Or Die"), and they're mostly people who have been following the Free State Project for a long time. stores in Keene, NH, has one of the highest acceptance rates for bitcoin payment in the county, with onl one other city nearby exceeding them.
i went to porcfest 2016 and it was great fun, i loved the fact that you could buy a tornado potato *with bitcoin*. absolutely *everybody* had a little QR code on the side of their stand. they just put up with the variance, and you know what? sometimes you make 10%, sometimes you lose 10%: they don't care, as it averages out in the end.
The way I see it, this looks like the smart money pulling out and doing so in the middle of the night as to avoid people seeing the drop,
... middle of the night... for which timezone? remember, this is a *world-wide* phenomenon not one that is controlled by the USA or even one stock exchange with 9-5 (day) trading.
anyway, don't worry about it: all the people doing futures trading are screaming "BTFD! BTFD!" right now [buy the f*****g dip...]