as machines are getting closer to acquiring human-like language abilities
Nope, nothing like that is happening. Algorithms which work with speech are still stupid as fuck and have exactly zero understanding of the language.
Even the most talented translators have major troubles trying to translate things between dissimilar languages. The way people separate things in the world in order to call them differs so much between languages, proper translation is oftentimes simply impossible unless you describe a thing in one language using a paragraph in another.
It's not that people hate something that's mainstream. The problem is that mainstream is often a polished turd which companies or alternatively gifted individuals try to sell you as something which is better and novel, while being in an order of magnitude less usable and having tons of bugs.
We must have it or we're fucked. I've been telling this to Google for years, but they don't seem to be interested. As a result we have literally hundreds of millions of Android devices with dozens of remote vulnerabilities, the devices which aren't supported and cannot be upgraded to anything else. And it's getting worse day by day.
It's not about only Unity: Linux/GNU in general is one big mess of an OS.
If you ask people who actually use their PCs for work, most of them will tell you that the best DEs are reminiscent of Windows 95 with various small productivity improvements like Search in the Start Menu, icons only in task panel, vs. icon + application name, virtual desktops, widgets and good keyboard shortcuts. Also people generally cannot tolerate simplicity and scarcity in regard to customizability and features first introduced by Apple, now reduced to nothingness by Gnome 3/Unity/Windows 10. I know quite a lot of people who were relieved after migrating from Unity/Gnome to "old fashioned" XFCE.
For some reasons various UX wannabes try to reinvent the desktop every few years and they fail, fail and fail. The prime examples are well known: KDE4/5, Gnome 3, Unity and Windows 8/10 interfaces (yes, Windows 10 Start Menu is as horrible as Windows 8 apps start screen). It seems like modern designers are hell bent on turning your beautiful PC UIs first designed for display/mouse/keyboard, into some grayish mess of huge buttons, tons of white space and nondescript controls meant for tablets and phones. I cannot imagine a common UI which will work equally well on such distinct platforms. I suspect it just doesn't exist.
At least your ISP doesn't force you to install a keylogger, alone with voice recording and personal files scanning. Besides you can always "opt out" by using VPN/Opera VPN/Tor. Most people won't do, which is why a lot of websites nowadays employ SSL.
1. will allow to completely disable telemetry (or won't include it at all)
2. will not have any mention of UWP/Metro (right now it's even built into Explorer)
3. will allow to control updates and Windows Defender
4. will return Classic Control Panel along with all removed options like Glass, Classic UI, etc.
5. Will introduce Service packs back.
From the PR point of view this is a very bad move.
The less people remember about the Note 7 fiasco, the better. By reselling them, Samsung damages its reputation even further because people have exactly zero good associations with the fire catching Note 7s.
Do anything you want with them but don't create another yet another uncertainty and news material.
What's the best way for a newbie to get started with Linux?
Here's how it works in Linux.
Either you're very lucky and Linux works for you out of the box and you don't have problems with your hardware or you're very unlucky and you have troubles with your hardware and software.
I'd recommend that you download Xubuntu/Mint LiveCDs, run them and verify that your PC works (including your GPU/peripherals like printers and scanners/networking like Wi-Fi/LAN). After that you may proceed with the actual installation. If you want to spare yourself from frequent OS upgrades, please install an LTS version of a chosen distro.
Linux even in 2017 is not exactly a friendly OS with zero problems, the truth is to the contrary. Unless you're content with the software your distro provides, you'll have to teach yourself command line and Linux CLI commands.
Also make sure you read this article - it has a lot of wisdom in regard to Linux and its inner workings for a beginner like you.
That is a problem, but one that should be addressed by education, not by dumbing down the population even more, because that makes the majority of people even more helpless.
I quite agree with that, however just like I said, the Internet and computer devices are inherently insecure. How would you teach them not to trust DNS or their Internet connection? How would you teach them not to trust their OS or their computing device (now that we know that BIOS/UEFI/your NIC/HDD firmware can all be p0wned)?
As of 2017 we're all fucked. Some people naÃvely believe we aren't. The ones who usually run Windows without any decent AV. At the same time 100% of modern CPUs (x86/ARM) are rigged for remote control without you knowing. >98% of people in the world run software/firmware/integrated circuits (read CPUs, DSPs, etc. etc. etc) which only select people in the world can access and verify.
Normal people have no idea what https://paypal.com/ is. For them https://paypal.co/ looks perfectly fine (PayPal might have bought all second level domains but I highly doubt that). Normal people have no idea what "com" means, what domains levels are, what's the meaning of dot in the domain name. What's the meaning of HTTP or HTTPS whereas the former is now hidden by all major web browsers. I'm an IT pro and I've no idea why there are these three letters "://" after the protocol name. Why not "::" or "->" or any other arbitrary combination?
Normal people may want to visit paypal for the first time ever which means no AutoFill data or any indication they've arrived at the website they can really trust.
Idiots who say you should trust a website based on its name think too much of people. The Internet was designed for geeks and remains so, no matter what geeks say. And it wasn't designed with security/privacy/encryption/simplicity in mind - to the contrary, the first major protocols had nothing to do with encryption or remote party identification.
Here's an example from real life: my ISP transparently replaces IP records for DNS queries for forbidden websites (it's a usual practice even in the USA) - how on Earth you could trust a domain name, when your ISP can reroute your traffic at will? And no! I'm not using my ISP's DNS resolver - I have a recursive DNS server on my PC - which means they transparently replace my UDP traffic. The only way to be sure that my connection attempt is not spoofed is what? VPN? No, you cannot trust it either. DNSSEC hasn't really taken off and then you cannot really trust CAs nowadays.
Sorry, I've never seen so many idiots at/. simultaneously.
How on Earth would a non IT person "verify the legitimacy of emails and websites?"
Let's say, you entered paypal in Google and miraculously the second link leads to paypall.com (such a SEO "optimization" is entirely possible if your have enough resources) which is the exact same copy of paypal.com, which siphons your log in credentials. How would you know paypall.com is not PayPal? Extended validation is still better than nothing.
HTTPS was a badly realized afterthought and it bites people all the time. I wonder if this problem can be solved at all. There are way too many things you have to blindly trust when you're using the Internet: several layers of routing, DNS, SSL, etc. etc. etc. 99% of people in the world have no idea how this all works and how you can be sure you're safe. Then even your OS is not exactly without bugs and security vulnerabilities which allow the attacker to hijack your connection. Then you have various three/four letter agencies around the world who have ways of getting into your computer systems without you knowing.
Android has a lot more problems than you think and Google does nothing to solve it.
We need a standard ARM platform, just like we've had the x86 platform since roughly 1981. And Google has all the resources to create and enforce it. And since they don't I wonder if they are malicious or negligent or it's just part of their business plan which is called "planned obsolesce". Too bad, in Google's case this obsolesce involves even original Google devices like Nexus 5 (stopped receiving any updates since October 2016) and it will soon be joined by Nexus 6.
Sounds like, "I'm a physicist and I disagree to disagree because I believe I'm better than a philosopher".
I don't hold physics in contempt, in fact I love and respect it, but such statements make average people question physics and its methods. Please, don't do it unless you have a proof in your hands.
The brain is an information processing machine, with inputs and outputs.
This is pure BS. Not a single human being understands how the brain functions. There are input and outputs, that's for sure, but "information processing" is nothing more than a conjecture which hasn't been proven by anyone.
missing annotations are not the reason to put information down because certain people cannot properly digest it. While their situation is unfortunate, it's not an excuse to deprive 99.99% of other people of this knowledge.
Slashdot Mirror
It's been available for weeks already. I wonder how this post has made it to the front page. A slow news day?
Nope, nothing like that is happening. Algorithms which work with speech are still stupid as fuck and have exactly zero understanding of the language.
Even the most talented translators have major troubles trying to translate things between dissimilar languages. The way people separate things in the world in order to call them differs so much between languages, proper translation is oftentimes simply impossible unless you describe a thing in one language using a paragraph in another.
uBlock Origin.
I stopped using Adblock+ long ago, because it makes all my web browsers consume more RAM, than when running without it.
IOW pop music has turned to utter compressed shit.
Also among several dozen of people who I know quite well, I'm the only person who has his music collection on his HDD. Others don't bother.
Which one do you mean?
* Pulse Audio?
* Systemd?
* Unity/Gnome 3/KDE 4?
* Windows 8/10?
It's not that people hate something that's mainstream. The problem is that mainstream is often a polished turd which companies or alternatively gifted individuals try to sell you as something which is better and novel, while being in an order of magnitude less usable and having tons of bugs.
that the usual reviewers/tech websites got wind of the news like everyone else (from the official NVIDIA website). That doesn't happen too often.
We must have it or we're fucked. I've been telling this to Google for years, but they don't seem to be interested. As a result we have literally hundreds of millions of Android devices with dozens of remote vulnerabilities, the devices which aren't supported and cannot be upgraded to anything else. And it's getting worse day by day.
It's not about only Unity: Linux/GNU in general is one big mess of an OS.
If you ask people who actually use their PCs for work, most of them will tell you that the best DEs are reminiscent of Windows 95 with various small productivity improvements like Search in the Start Menu, icons only in task panel, vs. icon + application name, virtual desktops, widgets and good keyboard shortcuts. Also people generally cannot tolerate simplicity and scarcity in regard to customizability and features first introduced by Apple, now reduced to nothingness by Gnome 3/Unity/Windows 10. I know quite a lot of people who were relieved after migrating from Unity/Gnome to "old fashioned" XFCE.
For some reasons various UX wannabes try to reinvent the desktop every few years and they fail, fail and fail. The prime examples are well known: KDE4/5, Gnome 3, Unity and Windows 8/10 interfaces (yes, Windows 10 Start Menu is as horrible as Windows 8 apps start screen). It seems like modern designers are hell bent on turning your beautiful PC UIs first designed for display/mouse/keyboard, into some grayish mess of huge buttons, tons of white space and nondescript controls meant for tablets and phones. I cannot imagine a common UI which will work equally well on such distinct platforms. I suspect it just doesn't exist.
I absolutely loved this: Reg now behind invisible HTML5 Bitcoin paywall
Tender and kind. Just what the doctor prescribed.
What about being unable to
I still prefer to watch movies in the comfort of my home while nothing and no one are distracting me from them.
At least your ISP doesn't force you to install a keylogger, alone with voice recording and personal files scanning. Besides you can always "opt out" by using VPN/Opera VPN/Tor. Most people won't do, which is why a lot of websites nowadays employ SSL.
they could make their phones 2mm thicker and add 20-40% larger battery.
CPU and GPU performance increase is nothing to write home about despite the new 10nm fabrication process.
The screen to body ratio is just excellent. This is what we should have had years ago.
DEX is really cool or even more functional. Microsoft should start worrying about Windows dominance on the desktop right away.
VR has been and will remain a gimmick people will try and then forget about in a month.
Overall it's a very cool and functional phone Apple will be copying in the next three years. I'd buy one if not for its staggering price.
1. will allow to completely disable telemetry (or won't include it at all)
2. will not have any mention of UWP/Metro (right now it's even built into Explorer)
3. will allow to control updates and Windows Defender
4. will return Classic Control Panel along with all removed options like Glass, Classic UI, etc.
5. Will introduce Service packs back.
Until then Windows 7 is more than good for me.
From the PR point of view this is a very bad move.
The less people remember about the Note 7 fiasco, the better. By reselling them, Samsung damages its reputation even further because people have exactly zero good associations with the fire catching Note 7s.
Do anything you want with them but don't create another yet another uncertainty and news material.
Here's how it works in Linux.
Either you're very lucky and Linux works for you out of the box and you don't have problems with your hardware or you're very unlucky and you have troubles with your hardware and software.
I'd recommend that you download Xubuntu/Mint LiveCDs, run them and verify that your PC works (including your GPU/peripherals like printers and scanners/networking like Wi-Fi/LAN). After that you may proceed with the actual installation. If you want to spare yourself from frequent OS upgrades, please install an LTS version of a chosen distro.
Linux even in 2017 is not exactly a friendly OS with zero problems, the truth is to the contrary. Unless you're content with the software your distro provides, you'll have to teach yourself command line and Linux CLI commands.
Also make sure you read this article - it has a lot of wisdom in regard to Linux and its inner workings for a beginner like you.
I quite agree with that, however just like I said, the Internet and computer devices are inherently insecure. How would you teach them not to trust DNS or their Internet connection? How would you teach them not to trust their OS or their computing device (now that we know that BIOS/UEFI/your NIC/HDD firmware can all be p0wned)?
As of 2017 we're all fucked. Some people naÃvely believe we aren't. The ones who usually run Windows without any decent AV. At the same time 100% of modern CPUs (x86/ARM) are rigged for remote control without you knowing. >98% of people in the world run software/firmware/integrated circuits (read CPUs, DSPs, etc. etc. etc) which only select people in the world can access and verify.
Normal people have no idea what https://paypal.com/ is. For them https://paypal.co/ looks perfectly fine (PayPal might have bought all second level domains but I highly doubt that). Normal people have no idea what "com" means, what domains levels are, what's the meaning of dot in the domain name. What's the meaning of HTTP or HTTPS whereas the former is now hidden by all major web browsers. I'm an IT pro and I've no idea why there are these three letters "://" after the protocol name. Why not "::" or "->" or any other arbitrary combination?
Normal people may want to visit paypal for the first time ever which means no AutoFill data or any indication they've arrived at the website they can really trust.
Idiots who say you should trust a website based on its name think too much of people. The Internet was designed for geeks and remains so, no matter what geeks say. And it wasn't designed with security/privacy/encryption/simplicity in mind - to the contrary, the first major protocols had nothing to do with encryption or remote party identification.
Here's an example from real life: my ISP transparently replaces IP records for DNS queries for forbidden websites (it's a usual practice even in the USA) - how on Earth you could trust a domain name, when your ISP can reroute your traffic at will? And no! I'm not using my ISP's DNS resolver - I have a recursive DNS server on my PC - which means they transparently replace my UDP traffic. The only way to be sure that my connection attempt is not spoofed is what? VPN? No, you cannot trust it either. DNSSEC hasn't really taken off and then you cannot really trust CAs nowadays.
Sorry, I've never seen so many idiots at /. simultaneously.
How on Earth would a non IT person "verify the legitimacy of emails and websites?"
Let's say, you entered paypal in Google and miraculously the second link leads to paypall.com (such a SEO "optimization" is entirely possible if your have enough resources) which is the exact same copy of paypal.com, which siphons your log in credentials. How would you know paypall.com is not PayPal? Extended validation is still better than nothing.
HTTPS was a badly realized afterthought and it bites people all the time. I wonder if this problem can be solved at all. There are way too many things you have to blindly trust when you're using the Internet: several layers of routing, DNS, SSL, etc. etc. etc. 99% of people in the world have no idea how this all works and how you can be sure you're safe. Then even your OS is not exactly without bugs and security vulnerabilities which allow the attacker to hijack your connection. Then you have various three/four letter agencies around the world who have ways of getting into your computer systems without you knowing.
"Verify", my arse.
Android has a lot more problems than you think and Google does nothing to solve it.
We need a standard ARM platform, just like we've had the x86 platform since roughly 1981. And Google has all the resources to create and enforce it. And since they don't I wonder if they are malicious or negligent or it's just part of their business plan which is called "planned obsolesce". Too bad, in Google's case this obsolesce involves even original Google devices like Nexus 5 (stopped receiving any updates since October 2016) and it will soon be joined by Nexus 6.
That's just horrible.
Sounds like, "I'm a physicist and I disagree to disagree because I believe I'm better than a philosopher".
I don't hold physics in contempt, in fact I love and respect it, but such statements make average people question physics and its methods. Please, don't do it unless you have a proof in your hands.
What about more radical changes towards transparency?
Shadow banning (only you can see your own posts), censoring, strange moderation, etc. etc. etc. have become a bane of many subreddits.
This is pure BS. Not a single human being understands how the brain functions. There are input and outputs, that's for sure, but "information processing" is nothing more than a conjecture which hasn't been proven by anyone.
missing annotations are not the reason to put information down because certain people cannot properly digest it. While their situation is unfortunate, it's not an excuse to deprive 99.99% of other people of this knowledge.
Comparing apples and oranges makes a whole lot more sense than comparing two distinct OSes which run two distinct classes of devices.
This add-on also breaks Firefox. So far there are no functional status bar addons for this version. :-(