I am actually glad you pointed that out. I had glanced on the page and read this article as Walmart Putting 17,000 Octopuses.. and was really confused (and admittedly interested). Glad to know it was probably due to my eyes seeing that second article title in the same glance, and I wasn't just having a stroke.
It was a great system that Sony gave up support on way too early in its lifetime (at least in the US). There was only a handful of first party "AAA" type games that were released prior to that, but when it didn't gain major third party support it became the home of some niche genres and indies. The AAA games that did come out like Killzone & Uncharted were excellent and greatly surpassed anything I'd ever seen on mobile platforms prior to them and for quite a while after. The system had an amazing screen (particularly the first generation which was OLED) and optional 3G radio capabilities for gaming on the go.
Sony did their usual BS like requiring these ridiculously expensive proprietary memory cards and a proprietary charging port (at least in the first gen). They also didn't offer an HDMI or DisplayPort out port which was a shame as it could have been like the Switch. Finally, while some games supported cross-saves and/or cross buys (i.e. you get both the Vita & PS4 version in one purchase), that was inconsistent and eventually pretty rare.
For a while, if you liked either indies or the limited genres that flocked to it (JRPGs, Visual Novels, "fan service", etc.) then it was an excellent system. It also received some great games from PS+ over the years including pretty much all its AAAs so many people might have large libraries if they were smart enough to add those games even when they didn't own the system. Overall, it was a great little system that never really received it's fair shake.
Doom (2016) is a very much a modern interpretation of old school shooters like Quake - way more than other modern FPSs like CoD, BF, Halo, etc. It captured the over the top speed, action, fun factor, etc. perfectly and the changes they introduced fit perfectly. The new Wolfenstein is also quite good, but I enjoyed the new Doom more.
Agreed, just turned 34 and am in the same boat. Actually, for the most part, I don't even know what channel number most of the shows I watch these days are on as it's Tivo's job to know for me. I have had a Tivo since Netflix was dvd only so this certainly isn't caused by streaming video.
Growing up pre-time shifting (well besides VCRs), I had slightly more awareness. For example I am pretty sure TGIF was on ABC, and I know the Simpsons were on FOX. However like you said, I didn't care as the network was basically the container and as long as I could access it, it made no difference what network it was on.
Personally I lost my faith in E&Y after I saw some of their creative accounting techniques around the sale and depreciation of virtual goods for companies like Zygna.
I definitely mark the beginning of their decline as their transition away from KDE3. Several excellent, mature apps were either effectively killed (i.e. Konqueror) or neutered (i.e. Amarok). Lots of customizability (arguably KDE's key feature) disappeared, and for a long time, lots of core functionality was broken. This wouldn't have been as much of a problem had certain distros not decided to jump to KDE4 way too early in its life cycle leading to bad experiences for both new and existing users. I don't know if KDE ever recovered their previous momentum from that transition.
Sadly, I think the worst part about it was that the Gnome devs watched the whole thing and clearly learned nothing as seen by their Gnome 3 transition.
This will almost certainly lead to a law suite by some large shareholder claiming the board of directors failed to perform their fiduciary duties (specifically their "duty of care" which basically says the board has to perform due diligence on all alternatives and choose the one that's best for the company). Since what's "best" is subjective, this is actually fairly typical and borderline inevitable with any large M&A transaction. There's very often some party that feels the board should have taken some alternate deal and by not doing so they've been materially damaged. If this goes to court, the board will demonstrate that their investment banking advisor (Qatalyst Partners if I recall correctly) demonstrated to them that they took the best deal on the table, and the other party will come up with arguments against it. Regardless of the outcome, and barring something crazy, the transaction will with MS will still go through regardless of this lawsuit's outcome.
I work for a very large bank heavily invested in Java and while we are largely a Java shop for the Web tiers, most of what's done is no longer J2EE but rather Java in a servlet container with frameworks like Spring or Hibernate. In fact, we're largely shifting off of full fledged Java app servers (WebLogic, WebSphere, etc.) to simpler containers (e.g. Tomcat) as the needs are no longer there. Talking to my peers at the other big bank, it sounds like this is an industry trend.
A quick glance at the Vigile's submission history shows that every one of his or her post links to pcper.com. Never heard of the site, and definitely not going to check them out now. If you're going to submit posts like this, at least making your conflict of interest be clear.
As much as I want to like Pebble, I just can't get behind their aesthetics. I feel this is an issue about most smart watches in general, but Pebble with their shape, bands, and plastic casings feel particularly toy-like in my opinion. I would love to see their screen technology in a more formal form. Their metal line is a step in the right direction, but still has a ways to go before I'd wear one to work.
Correct, the latest stable release (VLC 2.2. 2) doesn't compile due to API changes on the FFMPEG side however the latest VLC in their Git repository works with it. I am the Gentoo proxy-maintainer for VLC, and I have looked at the changes to make VLC 2.2.x work with FFMPEG 3.0, and they're not trivial or backwards compatible. My recommendation for folks on Gentoo at least is to use VLC-9999 (the Gentoo name of the latest upstream commit) if you need FFMPEG 3.0. One other thing to note is that FFMPEG >= 2.9 also breaks hardware acceleration in VLC (i.e. vdpau or vaapi), and if you need those, either stay on FFMPEG 2.8.6 or switch to libav.
Correct, Atari failed to place any controls on the platform and the market eventually imploded. In particular, since there was no controlling body limiting the number of the games or ensuring any quality standards, the market got flooded with shovelware (making the platform unattractive to customers). To make matters worse for the few good games, copy protection didn't exist so there were rampant cases of games being cloned by competitors (which led to quality original developers exiting the platform).
Nintendo on the other hand took great strides in controlling everything, and likewise was able to dominate for so long. Nintendo did things such as only allowing licensed games which they enforced with a rudimentary copy protection chip that only they could install (so all games came through them and they could ensure quality). They limited the number of games each company could publish per year to five (creates an incentive for those companies to make it their five best games), and they forced third party developers to sign platform exclusivity agreements for a couple years (severely hurting competitors). They took several other steps as well to do things like control distributors who were mostly companies much larger than them - it's actually quite impressive). In fact, they were so successful that case studies on Nintendo are taught as part of the core strategy class for graduate business schools.
They are regulated [1], but the price isn't FIXED at an exact value. I have been paying Comcast $2/mo for mine since 2008, and my first card is now free since I don't have a Comcast STB (in my area, the first STB is included with service). This is substantially cheaper than both their STB and DVR.
Actually, the board of directors for a non-profit is arguably the most critical component, and having a bad director can have major consequences. Board members have fiduciary duties, usually summarized as the "three Ds". A quick summary is as follows:
Duty of care: Board members are expected to actively participate in organizational planning and decision-making and to make sound and informed judgments.
Duty of loyalty: When acting on behalf of the organization, board members must put the interests of the nonprofit before any personal or professional concerns and avoid potential conflicts of interest.
Duty of obedience: Board members must ensure that the organization complies with all applicable federal, state, and local laws and regulations, and that it remains committed to its established mission.
(Source)
In this particular case, the "duty of obedience" is a real concern given the new board memeber's history of violating anti-trust laws through non-poaching policies. For example, while those tech companies involved in the non-compete scandle had enough cash on hand to pay for the settlement, the impact to Wikipedia could have been much more substantial.
That's my understanding as well, and I generally agree with your sentiment for home use however it is still a pretty significant bug. For most folks that always connect to the same systems that you trust, it's not a big issue. However if you're in a position where you're constantly connecting to new servers (i.e. at a large company), the fact that your private key can be leaked is very scary. Normally the biggest risk of connecting to an unknown server is getting your password stolen (i.e. A bad actor with dtrace access can debug sshd), but they would normally still not get your private key. With this but, a bad actor can easily get both.
I have a couple first generation US Nintendos (NES) that still work fine. One of them needs to have the game inserted in the game genie to work (I guess the game genie was slightly wider than a standard game so that has widened the interface so games without the game genie are loose). I can't say it has had consistent or daily use for some time although it has been pulled out a couple times a year, and I've never had a problem of it not working (I'm sure the lack of moving parts helps).
I believe my dad has a couple old Atari 400/800s in the garage somewhere that I'd love to try and set up one day. When I was very young (2-3) he would set it up on the TV with two controllers and we'd play games like Star Raiders together. What I didn't know at the time was that the second controller didn't even work, not that it mattered as it was really about spending the time together.
Systemd has taken an all or nothing approach for its components, and it has enveloped several significant components such as udev/upower/udisks. What this means in practice is you either have to take all of systemd (i.e. replace your init system, syslog, etc.) to use any of the components it has absorbed or you need to fork and maintain what you need yourself.
Here's a personal example: I use Gentoo an MATE as a desktop which in turn uses upower for suspend & hibernate. The latest version of MATE requires the latest upower (now dependent on systemd) to support those functions. So now if I upgrade MATE, I have to either replace my init system (OpenRC) with systemd or not have those upower features on my laptop.
Forcing their users(or distros) hand like that is not playing well with other software and I applaud Busybox for standing up.
This is not a breach of contract (and likewise can't be used to get out of your contract without paying the ETF) because it doesn't go into effect until the contract ends for the folks that are still under contract. Now most folks who have unlimited data are not under contract but there still a number of them that use loop holes that allow you to continue with unlimited data and get subsidize phones but make you sign up for a contract. Generally the loopholes involve transferring the upgrade to a second line, doing the upgrade on that line, and transferring the new phone back.
I still highly recommend the Thinkpad T-series line, now owned by Lenovo, for running Linux on a laptop. I've been running Linux on various generations of the T-series since when IBM introduced the line (T21 running Fedora Core 1-4, then Gentoo), and I've never had any significant or insurmountable problems. They use mostly Intel parts and Intel tends to be fairly open source friendly which leads to them being easy to support. My current laptop is a T430s running Gentoo, and my prior laptop was a T400 also running Gentoo. Sleep/hibernate both work as does all the other features (video camera, ultrabay, etc.). The build quality is quite solid too (I only replaced my T400 because I wanted more than 8GB of RAM).
I have less experience with the other Thinkpad lines, but I would imagine both the X-series & W-series would also work well. If you go with a different brand, I generally recommend going straight to the business line (i.e. Dell Latitues, etc.) of the laptops for better build quality.
I am not sure if it fits your size requirement, but I hear the Sony Xperia Z2 LTE tablet is quite good. I didn't need LTE access so I went with the Galaxy Tab S, but I was considering the Xperia prior to my purchase. I was on VZW'so site last night, and they definitely still sell/support it.
I went from a Nexus 7 (2012) to a Tab S 10.5 this year, and I am very satisfied. The original Nexus 7 was woefully underpowered in my opinion (particularly in terms of RAM) so the Tab S feels substantially quicker. As others have mentioned, the screen is gorgeous; it's also easy to root and has a decent rom community. The new model (Tab S2) just came out however it's not much of an upgrade (lower resolution, no flash, slightly smaller & faster) so you stand a good chance if scoring a deal on the original Tab S right now. On a side note, I am coincidentally typing this post from my Tab S.
It will be interesting to see how this impacts third party retailers like Best Buy, Costco, etc. I doubt the higher price per customer will make up for the volume of customers who will delay or avoid purchases at full price (particularly at the mid-to-high end). Will retailers continue to offer discounts on phones as a loss leader or take the hit to their revenue? Likewise, I expect demand for second hand phones to increase as well (leading to higher prices there).
It will also be interesting to see how this impacts VZW's customer numbers in the long run. They're somewhat safe in the short term as people are going to still be on their current contracts for a while. As the LTE phones are substantially more portable than the previous generations of CDMA phones and now new customers are no longer in a monthly contract, I would expect a decrease over time. I think they're over estimating their market power, but I guess only time will tell.
I completely agree; systemd is in my opinion one of the greatest threats to Linux in particular and open source in general. From a competitive strategy perspective, systemd appears to me as a deliberate envelopment attack(pdf) to give RH substantial control over a huge portion of the Linux stack; in fact it's so strategically targeted that I wouldn't be surprised to find out years later that a Big 3 consulting firm recommended it to Red Hat. I have a lot of respect for what RH has done for Linux (and OSS in general), but if everyone switches to systemd, their level of control over the Linux ecosystem will be too much. Personally, I'm on Gentoo (have been for over a decade) and run OpenRC and eudev, but if Gentoo/Slackware fall, then I'm off to the BSD land.
Slashdot Mirror
I am actually glad you pointed that out. I had glanced on the page and read this article as Walmart Putting 17,000 Octopuses.. and was really confused (and admittedly interested). Glad to know it was probably due to my eyes seeing that second article title in the same glance, and I wasn't just having a stroke.
It was a great system that Sony gave up support on way too early in its lifetime (at least in the US). There was only a handful of first party "AAA" type games that were released prior to that, but when it didn't gain major third party support it became the home of some niche genres and indies. The AAA games that did come out like Killzone & Uncharted were excellent and greatly surpassed anything I'd ever seen on mobile platforms prior to them and for quite a while after. The system had an amazing screen (particularly the first generation which was OLED) and optional 3G radio capabilities for gaming on the go.
Sony did their usual BS like requiring these ridiculously expensive proprietary memory cards and a proprietary charging port (at least in the first gen). They also didn't offer an HDMI or DisplayPort out port which was a shame as it could have been like the Switch. Finally, while some games supported cross-saves and/or cross buys (i.e. you get both the Vita & PS4 version in one purchase), that was inconsistent and eventually pretty rare.
For a while, if you liked either indies or the limited genres that flocked to it (JRPGs, Visual Novels, "fan service", etc.) then it was an excellent system. It also received some great games from PS+ over the years including pretty much all its AAAs so many people might have large libraries if they were smart enough to add those games even when they didn't own the system. Overall, it was a great little system that never really received it's fair shake.
Doom (2016) is a very much a modern interpretation of old school shooters like Quake - way more than other modern FPSs like CoD, BF, Halo, etc. It captured the over the top speed, action, fun factor, etc. perfectly and the changes they introduced fit perfectly. The new Wolfenstein is also quite good, but I enjoyed the new Doom more.
Agreed, just turned 34 and am in the same boat. Actually, for the most part, I don't even know what channel number most of the shows I watch these days are on as it's Tivo's job to know for me. I have had a Tivo since Netflix was dvd only so this certainly isn't caused by streaming video.
Growing up pre-time shifting (well besides VCRs), I had slightly more awareness. For example I am pretty sure TGIF was on ABC, and I know the Simpsons were on FOX. However like you said, I didn't care as the network was basically the container and as long as I could access it, it made no difference what network it was on.
Don't forget your extended warranty, only $49.99 + 10% deductible.
So is oil, and while they're not #1 right now, Exxon, Chevron, Shell, Aramco, Pemex, etc. are not exactly hurting too badly.
Personally I lost my faith in E&Y after I saw some of their creative accounting techniques around the sale and depreciation of virtual goods for companies like Zygna.
I definitely mark the beginning of their decline as their transition away from KDE3. Several excellent, mature apps were either effectively killed (i.e. Konqueror) or neutered (i.e. Amarok). Lots of customizability (arguably KDE's key feature) disappeared, and for a long time, lots of core functionality was broken. This wouldn't have been as much of a problem had certain distros not decided to jump to KDE4 way too early in its life cycle leading to bad experiences for both new and existing users. I don't know if KDE ever recovered their previous momentum from that transition.
Sadly, I think the worst part about it was that the Gnome devs watched the whole thing and clearly learned nothing as seen by their Gnome 3 transition.
This will almost certainly lead to a law suite by some large shareholder claiming the board of directors failed to perform their fiduciary duties (specifically their "duty of care" which basically says the board has to perform due diligence on all alternatives and choose the one that's best for the company). Since what's "best" is subjective, this is actually fairly typical and borderline inevitable with any large M&A transaction. There's very often some party that feels the board should have taken some alternate deal and by not doing so they've been materially damaged. If this goes to court, the board will demonstrate that their investment banking advisor (Qatalyst Partners if I recall correctly) demonstrated to them that they took the best deal on the table, and the other party will come up with arguments against it. Regardless of the outcome, and barring something crazy, the transaction will with MS will still go through regardless of this lawsuit's outcome.
I work for a very large bank heavily invested in Java and while we are largely a Java shop for the Web tiers, most of what's done is no longer J2EE but rather Java in a servlet container with frameworks like Spring or Hibernate. In fact, we're largely shifting off of full fledged Java app servers (WebLogic, WebSphere, etc.) to simpler containers (e.g. Tomcat) as the needs are no longer there. Talking to my peers at the other big bank, it sounds like this is an industry trend.
A quick glance at the Vigile's submission history shows that every one of his or her post links to pcper.com. Never heard of the site, and definitely not going to check them out now. If you're going to submit posts like this, at least making your conflict of interest be clear.
As much as I want to like Pebble, I just can't get behind their aesthetics. I feel this is an issue about most smart watches in general, but Pebble with their shape, bands, and plastic casings feel particularly toy-like in my opinion. I would love to see their screen technology in a more formal form. Their metal line is a step in the right direction, but still has a ways to go before I'd wear one to work.
Correct, the latest stable release (VLC 2.2. 2) doesn't compile due to API changes on the FFMPEG side however the latest VLC in their Git repository works with it. I am the Gentoo proxy-maintainer for VLC, and I have looked at the changes to make VLC 2.2.x work with FFMPEG 3.0, and they're not trivial or backwards compatible. My recommendation for folks on Gentoo at least is to use VLC-9999 (the Gentoo name of the latest upstream commit) if you need FFMPEG 3.0. One other thing to note is that FFMPEG >= 2.9 also breaks hardware acceleration in VLC (i.e. vdpau or vaapi), and if you need those, either stay on FFMPEG 2.8.6 or switch to libav.
Correct, Atari failed to place any controls on the platform and the market eventually imploded. In particular, since there was no controlling body limiting the number of the games or ensuring any quality standards, the market got flooded with shovelware (making the platform unattractive to customers). To make matters worse for the few good games, copy protection didn't exist so there were rampant cases of games being cloned by competitors (which led to quality original developers exiting the platform).
Nintendo on the other hand took great strides in controlling everything, and likewise was able to dominate for so long. Nintendo did things such as only allowing licensed games which they enforced with a rudimentary copy protection chip that only they could install (so all games came through them and they could ensure quality). They limited the number of games each company could publish per year to five (creates an incentive for those companies to make it their five best games), and they forced third party developers to sign platform exclusivity agreements for a couple years (severely hurting competitors). They took several other steps as well to do things like control distributors who were mostly companies much larger than them - it's actually quite impressive). In fact, they were so successful that case studies on Nintendo are taught as part of the core strategy class for graduate business schools.
They are regulated [1], but the price isn't FIXED at an exact value. I have been paying Comcast $2/mo for mine since 2008, and my first card is now free since I don't have a Comcast STB (in my area, the first STB is included with service). This is substantially cheaper than both their STB and DVR.
[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/cf...
Actually, the board of directors for a non-profit is arguably the most critical component, and having a bad director can have major consequences. Board members have fiduciary duties, usually summarized as the "three Ds". A quick summary is as follows:
Duty of care: Board members are expected to actively participate in organizational planning and decision-making and to make sound and informed judgments.
Duty of loyalty: When acting on behalf of the organization, board members must put the interests of the nonprofit before any personal or professional concerns and avoid potential conflicts of interest.
Duty of obedience: Board members must ensure that the organization complies with all applicable federal, state, and local laws and regulations, and that it remains committed to its established mission.
(Source)
In this particular case, the "duty of obedience" is a real concern given the new board memeber's history of violating anti-trust laws through non-poaching policies. For example, while those tech companies involved in the non-compete scandle had enough cash on hand to pay for the settlement, the impact to Wikipedia could have been much more substantial.
That's my understanding as well, and I generally agree with your sentiment for home use however it is still a pretty significant bug. For most folks that always connect to the same systems that you trust, it's not a big issue. However if you're in a position where you're constantly connecting to new servers (i.e. at a large company), the fact that your private key can be leaked is very scary. Normally the biggest risk of connecting to an unknown server is getting your password stolen (i.e. A bad actor with dtrace access can debug sshd), but they would normally still not get your private key. With this but, a bad actor can easily get both.
I have a couple first generation US Nintendos (NES) that still work fine. One of them needs to have the game inserted in the game genie to work (I guess the game genie was slightly wider than a standard game so that has widened the interface so games without the game genie are loose). I can't say it has had consistent or daily use for some time although it has been pulled out a couple times a year, and I've never had a problem of it not working (I'm sure the lack of moving parts helps).
I believe my dad has a couple old Atari 400/800s in the garage somewhere that I'd love to try and set up one day. When I was very young (2-3) he would set it up on the TV with two controllers and we'd play games like Star Raiders together. What I didn't know at the time was that the second controller didn't even work, not that it mattered as it was really about spending the time together.
Systemd has taken an all or nothing approach for its components, and it has enveloped several significant components such as udev/upower/udisks. What this means in practice is you either have to take all of systemd (i.e. replace your init system, syslog, etc.) to use any of the components it has absorbed or you need to fork and maintain what you need yourself.
Here's a personal example: I use Gentoo an MATE as a desktop which in turn uses upower for suspend & hibernate. The latest version of MATE requires the latest upower (now dependent on systemd) to support those functions. So now if I upgrade MATE, I have to either replace my init system (OpenRC) with systemd or not have those upower features on my laptop.
Forcing their users(or distros) hand like that is not playing well with other software and I applaud Busybox for standing up.
This is not a breach of contract (and likewise can't be used to get out of your contract without paying the ETF) because it doesn't go into effect until the contract ends for the folks that are still under contract. Now most folks who have unlimited data are not under contract but there still a number of them that use loop holes that allow you to continue with unlimited data and get subsidize phones but make you sign up for a contract. Generally the loopholes involve transferring the upgrade to a second line, doing the upgrade on that line, and transferring the new phone back.
I still highly recommend the Thinkpad T-series line, now owned by Lenovo, for running Linux on a laptop. I've been running Linux on various generations of the T-series since when IBM introduced the line (T21 running Fedora Core 1-4, then Gentoo), and I've never had any significant or insurmountable problems. They use mostly Intel parts and Intel tends to be fairly open source friendly which leads to them being easy to support. My current laptop is a T430s running Gentoo, and my prior laptop was a T400 also running Gentoo. Sleep/hibernate both work as does all the other features (video camera, ultrabay, etc.). The build quality is quite solid too (I only replaced my T400 because I wanted more than 8GB of RAM).
I have less experience with the other Thinkpad lines, but I would imagine both the X-series & W-series would also work well. If you go with a different brand, I generally recommend going straight to the business line (i.e. Dell Latitues, etc.) of the laptops for better build quality.
I am not sure if it fits your size requirement, but I hear the Sony Xperia Z2 LTE tablet is quite good. I didn't need LTE access so I went with the Galaxy Tab S, but I was considering the Xperia prior to my purchase. I was on VZW'so site last night, and they definitely still sell/support it.
I went from a Nexus 7 (2012) to a Tab S 10.5 this year, and I am very satisfied. The original Nexus 7 was woefully underpowered in my opinion (particularly in terms of RAM) so the Tab S feels substantially quicker. As others have mentioned, the screen is gorgeous; it's also easy to root and has a decent rom community. The new model (Tab S2) just came out however it's not much of an upgrade (lower resolution, no flash, slightly smaller & faster) so you stand a good chance if scoring a deal on the original Tab S right now. On a side note, I am coincidentally typing this post from my Tab S.
It will be interesting to see how this impacts third party retailers like Best Buy, Costco, etc. I doubt the higher price per customer will make up for the volume of customers who will delay or avoid purchases at full price (particularly at the mid-to-high end). Will retailers continue to offer discounts on phones as a loss leader or take the hit to their revenue? Likewise, I expect demand for second hand phones to increase as well (leading to higher prices there).
It will also be interesting to see how this impacts VZW's customer numbers in the long run. They're somewhat safe in the short term as people are going to still be on their current contracts for a while. As the LTE phones are substantially more portable than the previous generations of CDMA phones and now new customers are no longer in a monthly contract, I would expect a decrease over time. I think they're over estimating their market power, but I guess only time will tell.
I completely agree; systemd is in my opinion one of the greatest threats to Linux in particular and open source in general. From a competitive strategy perspective, systemd appears to me as a deliberate envelopment attack(pdf) to give RH substantial control over a huge portion of the Linux stack; in fact it's so strategically targeted that I wouldn't be surprised to find out years later that a Big 3 consulting firm recommended it to Red Hat. I have a lot of respect for what RH has done for Linux (and OSS in general), but if everyone switches to systemd, their level of control over the Linux ecosystem will be too much. Personally, I'm on Gentoo (have been for over a decade) and run OpenRC and eudev, but if Gentoo/Slackware fall, then I'm off to the BSD land.