Maybe just let people read different news sources and decide.
There is a truth to this. And I'm not here to argue that folks shouldn't consult multiple sources. However, I think the problem is that there isn't an agreed upon definition of "fake news" since we currently have a President that tosses that term around anytime he doesn't like a particular story. Pre-Trump, we had "fake news" but let's be honest, it has become a very vogue term since Trump assumed office. And that hits on the first part of your comment there.
You can't really win when 50% of the population considers one news fake, and the other 50% considers the opposite news to be fake.
The thing is, that's just debate and happens all the time. Where "fake news" in my usage of the term comes into play is things that conspire to be legit for things that are 100% false claims. The "Lolita Express", "Sandy Hook Crisis Actors", and the "Pizza-gate" stories come to mind when I think of "fake news". These aren't stories where it's an open debate, they're plainly false. And yes, all it would take is some basic researching skills to show them contrived stories. But here's my rub on that.
Eisenstein's basis for gravity and the formulas that it builds upon doesn't accurately address the lack of unicorns. That does not mean we should entreat the notion to test for unicorns and their relationship to gravity because, well, unicorns (in the sense that someone would make an argument for) do not exist. Giving credence to the notion of unicorns detracts from the limited resources that researchers have to dispense for other pursuits, that may or may not have overall value. And one might say, "well that's science and that is a wholly different field in which criteria for fact and reasoning is vastly different than that which makes up news worthiness." But I would argue that journalist, much like scientist, have limited resources in which to get facts and perspectives into printed/audio/internet media. Random unicorn stories that are hyped with little to no cost on social media, instill a urgency in the public for media to address these unicorns, which in turn detracts from the limited resources that journalist have to dispense for other news worthy stories.
So while it is indeed popular to attach the label of "fake news" to things that are in turn "debatable", which our current President clearly has a penchant to do. I think it is safe to apply and it is my hope that people understand that the label for "fake news" is pretty much the "chase of the unicorn", so to say. And there needs to be a fundamental understanding between the difference between that which is debatable and that which is completely fabricated before a more fulfilling discussion can be had on "hey are social media sites doing something about fake news?" Something that's honestly debatable that you may or may not agree with, isn't fake news, it's just a point of view. Something that is so completely mired in falsehoods is distinctly not debatable, is not a point of view, is not something worthy of time for research since it decreases the overall time allotted to other things. That is what "fake news" is and it would be incredibly helpful if everyone, everywhere understood that if the position is "well this is a thing that just depends on how you view things/what political party you ascribe to", that we refrain from trying to attach the label fake news to such.
People are misapplying the label because it's popular to do so. That in turn makes it harder to have an honest discussion about what is a concerted effort to either misinform the public or have news reporters running in so many circles as to be reduced to being ineffective. It is worthwhile to discuss, that with the advent of social media we have, in essence, given a megaphone to each and every member of the planet. And for some that have been handed this, they seek to sow uncertainty about anything and, quite honestly, everything with a seem
Well the problem is, for metals, we went from a depressed priced market to a limited monopoly market.
Out of the fryer and into the pan is what overnight "fixing" the market has done. The policy would have been better had the President actually allowed markets to naturally progress via small changes in policy over a course of several decades.
But nah, let's just change course 180 right now deal with fall out later. All it will do is cause smaller players to exit, while larger players get an even tighter grip on the market. Prices will continue to rise and then consumers seeking relief will lobby Congress to open borders. You know, kind of the reason we got into the mess to begin with.
This is pretty much the only argument that you make that has worth. To enforce something equally we would need to have sort some of "thing" (for lack of a better term) that we agreed on that could judge when a policy is being applied equally. In law, we have the court system (for better or worse) that does that (at least in theory, I'm not trying to make this an argument about the shortcomings of the US judicial system). We'd need something for that in things like EULAs and what not. The only problem is that currently those kinds of things aren't seen as have the same weight of enforcement like laws. So you're going to have this, "we don't have a system to ensure equal application" and "we can't even agree that we can compel people to abide by these rules." Long story short, if anyone wants to get anywhere on this point, we're going to need a massive overhaul to the laws currently on the books. I cannot think of anyone in US Congress ready to go down that road, but November is coming soon, so there you go.
B) if they were responsible for the content posted on their platform (hint: they're not, otherwise they'd be shut down the moment someone posted child pornography there)
Social Media sites are held responsible and liable for "some" things. I'm not going into a laundry list of what those things are, but they all ultimately require someone to attach that failing to something that is currently illegal as defined by US law. Also, there's about 500 different steps in between being a site in operation and being shutdown by the law. Posting of child porn on Facebook doesn't mean Facebook has to shut its doors. It means that Facebook needs to take reasonable steps to prevent it and remove it when found. If they didn't do at least that, then yes, we start getting into shutdown territory. It's not the binary state system that this point tries to make.
C) if they weren't (with Twitter and Youtube) the equivalent of the new town square in which people used to communicate
Well they aren't and even if they were, you can be escorted off the property of town square and into a cell at any rate depending on how egregious your act is. The town square is paid for by tax dollars and thus the public (vis-a-vis law makers) ultimately get to dictate the going and coming on the town square, but the dollars that built social groups wasn't tax payers. Now, if we have qualms with "the Internet town square" being owned by a private company, well that's going to require all of us to look deep into our hearts and really start questioning how "free" we've allowed the free market to become. There's a lot of soul searching that's really needed in the US about how much we've allowed private companies to become pretty much everything around us. But all of that aside, they're private companies and, yeah, we don't get a say to an extent. So you're point about them being a public square for information exchange is pretty lacking since we all pretty much allowed this whole thing to exist in the first place by allowing free market to trump basic rights. That's not saying free market and rights are opposites, that saying that since they aren't exact polar opposites, it becomes easy to mix the two with unexpected results. Unexpected results like leading to this wonderful thing that a lot of folks use being dictated by just a handful of people with zero recourse from the users.
Because the web has caused the privatization of public discourse
No. That was clearly done by TV before the web. That was clearly done by radio before TV. That was clearly done by newspapers before radio. That was clearly done by monarchs before free press. Shall I continue? Each iteration has allowed the creation of platforms to become easier, but let's not kid ourselves here, the big ones that everyone notices are organized because unorganized ones don't tend to become massively big things since they just reduce down to pretty much background noise. With that organization comes rules and policies and so forth that inherently censor some groups. What Facebook et al are doing isn't unique, only its medium is. Does that make censorship in general right or wrong? That's a point that's debatable for the ages, but what social media groups are "currently" doing is inline with what has come before and we have seen progress from kings of yore to Internet with that system. So I'd argue that while it would be great to have completely open everything in theory, the actual implementation of that would be horrible, and that the current implementation is balanced enough to get us to whatever the next point on the tech tree of the universe is.
I need you and everyone to understand that this whole topic is arguing a topic that's been brought up since the Classical and Hellenistic Period. How does one allow the free exchange of ideas without the entire thing devolving into madness? Guess what, thirty-six centuries later, we still haven't figured it out. And it's starting to seem like the answer is to the "where does it stop?!" question you are asking is, "somewhere, people need to keep their heads up, but ultimately it stops somewhere." Blanket openness is clearly not an answer, because that's just saying "society as a whole is just lazy and if we don't have complete openness, then we're just a slippery slope away from having all our rights taken away."
Don't worry, I'm sure you'll change your tune once it's taken over and turned against you, though
That is the entire point. It stops at some point because as much as we on Slashdot like to diss the general public, they do ultimately seem to understand when basic rights are being trampled unjustly, Who determines that? Well we all sort of do, there's not a hard and fast rule to that and I get it, that makes some of the hard liner type folks a little uneasy. Society doesn't have clear distinct lines for every single thing. So there's two things a person can do about that.
One, accept that society doesn't have clearly defined boundaries and that you'll have to do your part if and when the time comes.
Two, don't accept that and get all upset that humanity seemingly just can't get its crap together and live your entire life in frustration.
If you are intent on hanging your hat on the latter, well there's not much anyone can do to help you. We're basically always going to be having this discussion until the end of time. Advocacy for human rights isn't a spectator sport. But if you're willing to consider the first point, then you'll have to first start working on the whole, "am I ready to die on this hill or not?" thing. Once you've got a good grasp on that, you'll need to ditch the "slippy slope" argument every time something you don't agree with comes up and work on the whole "persuasive argument" thing. And trust me, there is tons of room in this debate for a rational argument, like the seemingly inequitable application of those policies, and so on. But you are going to fall far and fast if what you lead with is, "They'll be coming for you soon too! Just you watch!"
The position that SF (and other local and state governments) take of obstructing the enforcement of those laws is just that: obstruction
Okay so you might not be savvy to this debate, but the Federal government wants local law enforcement to enforce immigration laws because the Federal government "feels"... You know what I'll just cut the crap. The Federal government doesn't want to really pay for it. Now there's been some cities that are totally okay with "helping" out the Federal government, there's some that give the Feds the middle finger, and then there are the majority that are like, "Sure we'll do that, how much are you going to give us?" And when the answer back is a big fat zero, those cities are content to sit on their hands. Now there are some cities like our current topic, SF, that see through this BS and openly aggravate and that's fine if you view that as obstructing, but ultimately enforcing those laws are up to the Feds and we've had a few court cases that have indicated that cities don't have to lift a finger for doing law enforcement for the Fed if they aren't getting paid to do it. In short, like most things, it mainly comes down to money for the majority. But yes, SF is one of those that are in the minority and sit on the sideline saying "neener-neener-neener".
I suspect that if a company in SF denied enforcement officials access to their corporate campus on humanitarian grounds, SF city officials will not be amused.
Again you're doing the tie things together that aren't related. SF can do that to the Feds because they're a government. Companies cannot because they distinctly aren't forms of government. It's a really simply concept to follow. If A SF company denied enforcement officials anything, they'd get a court order and come in anyway. That's because the court recognizes that the government is, wait for it... A government! (insert mind blown sound) And that's not my opinion on the matter that's literally me just pointing out our form of governance, since late 1700s.
Cities don't have to put up with companies antics. They put up with it, because they bring in money, but they only do so as a courtesy. So if a city doesn't care about the money are they see the company as a bad fit, they can run them out of town and there's not really a legal recourse for the company unless some contract was signed between them and the city. That's why you see companies sign deals with cities before they move in. That's a CYA move by the company, so that they gain something resembling some form of rights. But outside of those contracts, companies are the city's/state's bitch if the state or city so wished it.
TL;DR summary. SF can thumb the Feds because they're elected officials, they are recognized by the courts as being a legally binding government. Companies don't get to thumb anyone unless they signed a contract allowing them to do that, that's because unlike SF and the US, they are recognized by the courts for squat in these matters that we speak of.
I am not making a value judgment on SF choosing to regulate corporate cafeterias. If they want to let them. The voters there in SF can decide if they like it or not.
I do agree with this part of your comment, so thumbs up random Internet person. I doubt you care though, but at least we agree on something, so I'll have a beer to that and call it a night. Cheers person!
See if we can get people who immigrate to the United States to respect the laws, learn the language, and integrate into the culture and society.
Whoa there buddy. You are all over the radar and trying to tie things that don't go together. Let's unpack it just a bit.
who immigrate to the United States to respect the laws
Those that do so legally, and I'm going to assume that's what you are talking about but what do I know, respect the law or they loose their status. That includes anyone and everyone who is not a natural born citizen. Though rare, even naturalized citizens can be deported for breaking the law if serious enough.
learn the language
Last I checked there wasn't a law that required any particular language. While I get that the majority of folks speak English in the US, there's not a strict requirement by any law to speak it anywhere. And I understand your point here but then that understanding gets derailed when you say:
Why is it OK to force a company (a voluntary association of people) to respect the laws but not actual individuals?
See you are making your argument here that not speaking English is against the law and well that's not true.
integrate into the culture and society
Again, there's not a strict law for any of that. And if there was it would beg the question of "Whose?" I can tell you from traveling around the country that there's a huge difference in "culture" between say, California, New York, Iowa, Texas, and so on. And hells bells there's big difference within States themselves. So you ask someone to "integrate" and what exactly are they supposed to integrate into? It's left really wide open there as to what your question is there, almost to a degree of bigotry, just saying. When you start saying things like, "Person ABC there isn't "American" enough" that's going to raise eyebrows as to what exactly you're meaning there.
How come cities like SF like to think that they can thumb their noses at federal laws they don't like and then turn around and brow beat companies (and, indirectly, tax-paying citizens) with their own local laws?
Because that's how our system of government works. Last I checked Congress hadn't regulated cafeterias within corporate buildings and so that ability to do so devolves, first to States, and then on down the chain of command there. Now I'm not saying that you have to like that law or anything and if it rubs you raw enough, I'll just give you the answer that my State currently has for those that don't like the current batch of abortion laws. Just move somewhere else. That's kind of how it's worked here in the US since like the start of the US. I really don't know what else to tell you there. If you don't like a city doing that, then don't live there or vote or both or neither, I don't really care what you do.
Will they applaud when those companies stand up to the inhumane overreach of the city government in the same way the city has stood up to the federal government?
Those aren't like things. Here's a rough outline for you.
Federal Government = A recognized form of public government within the US.
City Government = A recognized form of public government within the US.
Company = Not a recognized form of government within the US.
See how companies are slightly different? And it's been trending lately to try and treat companies much like citizens or even like organized government, and that's usually proven to be a bad idea, but if that's what the public wants, who am I to argue? Not me, because that's not really a point I honestly care about. Point being, you can't say "Will A blah to B, like B blah to C", when A is something that is completely unlike B and C. Those aren't equal things.
In short, I really had to say something here because the
What kind of statement is that even? Like are you seriously expecting there to be some sort of data collection of what students ate in the past versus what they made in the present? What exactly are you trying to get at here? Are you trying to apply a stereotype to draw some conclusion like "all college kids eat diets of only ramen, some college kids become successful, ergo, an all ramen diet cannot be all that bad"? Do you understand how nonfactual, illogical, and just plain wrong that kind of basis for an argument is? And finally, using your loose argument for college, it would be more than fair to point out that a lot of tech giants dropped out of college as well, so I guess we should conclude that college isn't necessary? Which I do hope you see that, that argument is also equally flawed. We should not take a few successes as evidence of some underlying truth. That's not building a fact based argument.
I don't think you understand how companies work. If saving 10% here and 8% there adds up, it adds up. If automating trucks reduces lawsuits for pain and injury in a wreck by xx% and the cost of rolling out that automation is less than that xx%, then only stupid companies wouldn't roll it out. So the massive question is, "Will the automation ever drop in price?" And the answer is undoubtedly yes, it will. If there is one thing about technology is that the cost of implementing it always goes down.
Also good luck with your 'better driver than a teenager' advertising campaign
Yeah, I get that's not the best way parent could of put it, but the sentiment is still true. As soon as the technology is "good enough/cost effective enough" companies will start rolling it out. That has always been the case since the 1700s, and there is always nay sayers that go "nuh-uh", and those nay sayers are always wrong. This isn't a "oh well your opinion is incorrect and this is why I think that" kind of thing, this is a "there is literally three centuries of history that strongly points to XYZ being an outcome of this." Now that's not a 100% sure fire thing, and I'll admit that, but I think it's a pretty safe bet that ultimately truck drivers are going to be "mostly" gone within the next four to five decades. And I'm just going to point to the last 300 years of "if there is some device/machine that's cheaper and slightly better than man at doing something, that device/machine always wins."
There is significant economic investment in this kind of thing and while Uber leaving might cast some doubts into the continued economic investment, in the trucking company industry. Uber wasn't even a bit player. They were a non-existent "oh hey let's try this out" player. Their departure should be seen with about as much regard as one might think about blood loss from a single mosquito bite. There are other people doing this very thing of automating a truck while it is on the road, 3PL providers looking at getting easy on/off access to highways, auto makers developing tracks that mimic some of the most used corridors such as I80/I90/I40, and the list goes on of people who are investing hand over fist more than Uber ever had hoped to dream of injecting into the industry. And the investments aren't fruitless, there are test trucks that are driving down large stretches of Interstate 80 with only a person in the cab to observe. Yes it is easy to point out flaws in something that is so infantile and wonder "How on Earth could that ever take the place of a human driver?" And then one day, that job no longer exists. This has been the norm of how things "do" in this world since the Industrial Revolution and I find it humorous how everyone just thinks that somehow this is some exception, that driving is some sort of endeavour to which only humans can do, which is something that they thought of Chess and Go and sewing and paralegals and programming and so many other things and then machine started doing those things. I get it, it is difficult to accept new things and it is made that much harder for things that are not yet "in production". But there is motion, there is investment, there is research, and there is so many other things that point toward an outcome that will soon spell the end of this profession for a large majority. 100%, maybe not, but 80%, oh yeah you better believe it.
And there are those who would point to something like an 80/20 rule for driving. "Yeah, we can automate the 80% but the 20% is the hard stuff." If an investment of $x solves at least 90% of that 20% that's difficult, then companies are going to do that investment. If Amazon thinks they'll be able to convince the government to paint the far right lane blue to indicate automation traffic only, then Amazon is going to make an investment to convince the government to get some blue paint ready. If a logistics company can purchase the land right off
Just curious, what happens when you plug the phone into the PC via USB? Mine sees it as a USB mass storage and I can play audio from there. Also, you had to bring in an audio cable to plug into your device. Also couldn't just bringing in a tiny USB to Bluetooth adapter instead and stream audio that way work roughly the same? I'm not say that's what you *should* do, just curious here, thanks.
Don't forget that when people get privacy in the USA, megacorps get it too. You will be less able than ever to keep them in check.
Not saying you are wrong but devil's in the details here. The right to privacy, at least offline, for a citizen is enshrined in the Constitution. The right to privacy for a company is only if Congress so wills it. So the question is how willing would Congress be to grant such a right to companies? Yeah, I mean we know how it will turn out, but I guess I just wanted to point out that it doesn't have to turn out that way.
This kind of stuff has been long time coming. At the moment the laws on the book are incredibly mute on what happens if a company loses your data. Hell even losing credit card information is pretty iffy in a court of law, unless you can show that your stolen credit card information was used to directly harm you financially. It is time that criminal liability was held to those who lose sensitive information. However, I will admit, that I myself don't have really firm ideas for what that restitution should look like. For the theft of credit card data, I think there definitely should be something that the company has to pay into to payout claims for a number of years and the amount per year and length of time be sliding values based on the depth of the breach. I think an out dated system that gets breached should have willful negligence tacked on to it and there be punitive damages awarded.
But all of those are just things I think and I can easily see lots of cons that can crop up from those things. I think this is going to be a difficult topic to get a good balance between the pros and cons, but that difficult task shouldn't stop us. Lawmakers have looked at this and seen the complexity and dizzying task before them and have opted to take a pass continually on it. It is time that we sat down and began talking about how we bring law and order to the Internet and do it in a fair and balanced way. We won't solve the problems overnight but we're just never going to solve them with a mentality of "Don't regulate the Internet!". I don't want to trample free speech and I don't think anyone else "truly" wants to do that. I don't want to remove anonymity either. But I feel we need to stop using those as arguments on why we can't bring under control other things that we all clearly do not want. I get it, we're going to screw those things among others up in the short term, but we ought to take the long view on this and that indicates that whatever we do indeed screw up, we will eventually correct that so long as we do not allow inertia to hold us back. Loosey Goosey has just become all too common with online security and it is time that there is some culpability for those who do not hold consumer data to the same standard as those whom it might affect if it is stolen.
If this is how they plan to deal with the Spectre/Meltdown issues permanently, I'm ok with that.
HT has nothing to do with that issue. That's part of the instruction pipeline within the CPU. The core of it is a thing called speculative execution, where a CPU goes and fetches things before the actual instruction hits the core. The true fix will be to detect unprivileged instructions in the pipe (because actually getting rid of the pipe is *NOT* ever going to be an option) and then act on that.
And the end of the day, if I can still play my games, I really don't care what's inside that hunk of silicon, as long as my games still work as good as they always have.
Yeah I think that's ultimately what matters most here so I wouldn't worry too much about it anyway, just stay up to date on patches, which I'm sure you do.
So to recap the 8th gen of Intel. The i7 had the most cores at six with HT enabled. i5 was just like the i7 but with HT turned off. The i3 had HT in gen 7 so it was two cores/four threads, in 8th gen they gave it two more cores and turned off HT. So: i7=6/12, i5=6/6, i3=4/4. The i9 in gen 8 was really weird. The clock would scale down the more cores you used, it was very odd and minus the fact that the 18 core version was roughly the price of a used car, it was expensive. The price per performance with the i9 was incredibly low. A 3.4 Ghz i7 would give you a better CPU mark / $ by almost 200%, not to mention that an AMD six core FX-6300 would give you better CPU mark/$ by almost 800%. So clearly the i9 wasn't going to win you an award for price sensitive consumers.
So all that said, and this is my opinion so it's literally worth whatever value you choose to give it, I think Intel is going to reposition the line up to disable HT on all "consumer" processors and focus on just keeping HT and "pro" features in the i9. I personally think it's a back hand to Intel consumers, but I'm an AMD fanboy so full disclosure there. But yeah, I think the i3, i5, and i7 are all going to eventually be labelled as the "cheapy", "actual desktop", "gamer" CPUs in that order and the i9 is going to be viewed as "workstation" and thus the i9 isn't going to focus on price/performance balance. So, i3 will be 4/4, i5 will be 6/6, and i7 will be 8/8 with the i9 being whatever crazy numbers they throw at the chips with hopefully not any of that weird scaling core/HT/Ghz stuff.
That's just my hot take on this, open to hear what others think.
Well I can only comment on the RSS reader that I use which is Liferea. Let me first start out by saying, I'm not saying everyone should move to a desktop reader, but you ought to give it a try. But I'll admit, it's definitely not for everyone so YMMV. Now with that said, you can setup the middle mouse button in Liferea so that when you middle mouse click a headline, it opens that up in a browser. You check that out and see if that works for you, if of course you're on a Linux box that is.
The RSS feature is not very good in Firefox. You should really switch over to a desktop RSS feed reader. The parser in the Firefox RSS feed reader is hacked together and on a lot of feeds will silently error and give you garble or no feed entry at all. Usually happens with feeds that mix media in with the XML, such as podcasts, but even an RSS feed that uses images can sometimes make the parser go haywire.
I get you, and it's really disappointing that they never went back to update the RSS feature to be better. But yeah, the code is old (like seven years old) and no one really wants to fix all the problems it had. It was a pretty neat feature in Firefox, but once I switched over to a desktop based (Liferea) the difference in how the content was rendered was pretty obvious. Additionally, it supported Podcasts as well so that was a nice plus. So it's a shame that the Feed feature never got the polish it should have, but yeah you at least owe it to yourself to try a desktop client and compare it to Firefox RSS. I don't know what feeds you use and if they're pretty Plane Jane, you might never know the difference, but the Firefox RSS just never got the love it should have. Maybe someone will rewrite it into a plugin or something? Maybe make it the client it should of been?
I don't think Microsoft would have much to stand on.
If you remember the Oracle v Google suit. APIs are copyrightable. So yeah, being a compatible API, even via reverse engineering and clean room, can be brought into court as copyright infringement.
Google provides AOSP without restrictions. You do not have to bundle Google's app store with AOSP
AOSP is dead. You literally cannot build anything useful with it. Pretty much any hardware post 2011 requires binary blobs with commercial fees to make AOSP even bootable. You can literally ask anyone who has done core Android development this, AOSP is dead.
you do not need to license the Play Store.
Play store isn't what this is about. Google Play Services. Long story, short: Everything useful for a functioning phone is in Google Play Services. Slightly longer version: Yes you can call down to do things, but the c libs that handle that in AOSP is literally written to make doing so a lesson in how painful you can make an API. Additionally, much like systemd developers, any interface you use in code is subject to inevitable change or complete abandonment in the next patch. Quite literally you could build an app that calls the C for GPS and in three months, they'll change the interface to something completely different with matching confusing name and your app just gets to segfault. This is why Google always threw a fit when device makers wouldn't update their image, which they fixed with Google Play Services. Addendum: If you've built an app using Android Studio recently, you most likely are making a call to Google Play Services. They've literally made the toolchain to force your app into their ecosystem.
Microsoft even has an app called Bing that, when installed on Android, replaces the Google search infrastructure completely.
No, that's totally not how it works. It intercepts the call but ultimately Google's callback has to be fulfilled or else it cancels the request for hardware access. So while yes, Bing is fulfilling the request, Google has to know about it too "for security purposes". So yeah, when you use Bing, you're just using Bing and Google. You literally cannot opt-out without recompiling your image.
it easier to access the same website all useful mobile phones would default to anyway because they already have a monopoly there
No one is disputing the search giant's monopoly on the web. What they are disputing is that Google has moved all of the previous functionality of their OS into a closed off and highly regulated set of libraries. And they did that to tighten control over their OS. Now if Google made the OS and made the hardware and they were the only ones in town selling Android, who cares? But Google is literally fucking with third parties here. That's the deal here. Apple sells their phones direct to the public, so if they make a change and people hate it, their voting dollars moving away directly affect them, Apple. Now if Google makes a change and people hate it, the public voting dollars indirectly affect Google, but directly messes with the profits of other companies. That's where the anti-competitive nature comes into play. Google knows that if a vendor doesn't agree with them, they can literally twist the API enough to screw the vendor over. It's not like the vendor can sit there and redo an entire access API between releases. Now had Google done that from start, then we'd be in a different story and I'd just say, well they got what they deserve. But no, Google has slowly killed off "open" and "free" Android and did so when vendors were too deep to escape.
Now here's the argument point and this is the thing you know we could debate and I don't think we'd ever come to a "correct" answer on. Google says that they've done this, that they've become this way, to prevent fragmentation. I don't buy that excuse because they knew that fragmentation is the name of the FOSS game. So it's an open debate if preventing fragmentation = being an evil monopolistic company (which it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that I feel Google is pure evil now.) But do not, do not for one moment think that AOSP is some s
Just one more point. If you ever hear about bringing laws up to date to match technology. Well, this is an incredible good example of that need. Bundling software and limiting choice isn't good, but we literally have to use 1800s era law about 3rd party business and direct/indirect goods and services to bring about a case on Google. Updating laws to indicate that bundling software and limiting choice is bad would greatly make the jobs of prosecutors a whole world easier.
you mean the same stuff where apple is even worse and i dont see them getting picked on.
First, that's whataboutism. But I'll let it pass because it's got a bit of a point here but there's also a fine distinction. So, starting out, you aren't wrong to an extent. You've got a pretty good point and it's worth talking about.
Direct and indirect. Google is indirect, so changes they make affect them indirectly. Apple is direct so changes they make directly affect them. Now that doesn't invalidate the bundling issue you bring up, b-u-t, we don't have a really clear legal guidance on that... YET. But what we do have is when a company has an indirect relationship with their end product, forcing terms and conditions that limit choice, is anti-competitive.
So that's not saying Apple's bundling is bad, just that we don't have any legal precedent in international trade about anti-competitiveness for end products that have direct relationships with the maker. That's not barring anyone from filing suit, just makes the legal outcome a fuck-ton of murky. Google's abuse has a ton of prior case law, when you look at it as a manufacture with an indirect relationship to distributors. And that's why you don't see a lot ever being brought on to Apple. Not that it's not anti-competitive, just that there's no telling how the case would play out.
It just has only drivers enabled for the hardware it is run on, which seems normal to me.
It's optimization more than anything.
You are correct, Google's mainline is a tree shake of the kernel.org tree for only the target platforms they support. However, that makes it really difficult because that "pair down" process isn't just a simple "diff/some/file > out.patch" between kernel.org and AOSP, some of the directory layout has been altered and some of the build process isn't as clear cut. Hell even the AOSP site still has the Jack build instructions up and Jack died with Android 6.0.
So you really have to be careful if you want to wade out into waters that are uncharted. Say you have your own board with an SoC that's not blessed Google hardware, say like a custom RISC-V you're testing out. Your time to build is going to be somewhat nightmarish. It's not impossible, but you can really see that Google just don't give a damn over on AOSP, since the instructions there wouldn't successfully build anything on a newer tool chain and a recent Java VM.
As for kernel numbers, if you ever look at the kernels they use and the kernels that get their patch waves accepted in mass, you'll see the correlation. They can submit to mainline but that doesn't mean their patches get merged in 1-to-1 fashion with mainline on every LTS. Google uses kernels they know that's got a lot of their honey in the source. That don't always mean it's the LTS one.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe just let people read different news sources and decide.
There is a truth to this. And I'm not here to argue that folks shouldn't consult multiple sources. However, I think the problem is that there isn't an agreed upon definition of "fake news" since we currently have a President that tosses that term around anytime he doesn't like a particular story. Pre-Trump, we had "fake news" but let's be honest, it has become a very vogue term since Trump assumed office. And that hits on the first part of your comment there.
You can't really win when 50% of the population considers one news fake, and the other 50% considers the opposite news to be fake.
The thing is, that's just debate and happens all the time. Where "fake news" in my usage of the term comes into play is things that conspire to be legit for things that are 100% false claims. The "Lolita Express", "Sandy Hook Crisis Actors", and the "Pizza-gate" stories come to mind when I think of "fake news". These aren't stories where it's an open debate, they're plainly false. And yes, all it would take is some basic researching skills to show them contrived stories. But here's my rub on that.
Eisenstein's basis for gravity and the formulas that it builds upon doesn't accurately address the lack of unicorns. That does not mean we should entreat the notion to test for unicorns and their relationship to gravity because, well, unicorns (in the sense that someone would make an argument for) do not exist. Giving credence to the notion of unicorns detracts from the limited resources that researchers have to dispense for other pursuits, that may or may not have overall value. And one might say, "well that's science and that is a wholly different field in which criteria for fact and reasoning is vastly different than that which makes up news worthiness." But I would argue that journalist, much like scientist, have limited resources in which to get facts and perspectives into printed/audio/internet media. Random unicorn stories that are hyped with little to no cost on social media, instill a urgency in the public for media to address these unicorns, which in turn detracts from the limited resources that journalist have to dispense for other news worthy stories.
So while it is indeed popular to attach the label of "fake news" to things that are in turn "debatable", which our current President clearly has a penchant to do. I think it is safe to apply and it is my hope that people understand that the label for "fake news" is pretty much the "chase of the unicorn", so to say. And there needs to be a fundamental understanding between the difference between that which is debatable and that which is completely fabricated before a more fulfilling discussion can be had on "hey are social media sites doing something about fake news?" Something that's honestly debatable that you may or may not agree with, isn't fake news, it's just a point of view. Something that is so completely mired in falsehoods is distinctly not debatable, is not a point of view, is not something worthy of time for research since it decreases the overall time allotted to other things. That is what "fake news" is and it would be incredibly helpful if everyone, everywhere understood that if the position is "well this is a thing that just depends on how you view things/what political party you ascribe to", that we refrain from trying to attach the label fake news to such.
People are misapplying the label because it's popular to do so. That in turn makes it harder to have an honest discussion about what is a concerted effort to either misinform the public or have news reporters running in so many circles as to be reduced to being ineffective. It is worthwhile to discuss, that with the advent of social media we have, in essence, given a megaphone to each and every member of the planet. And for some that have been handed this, they seek to sow uncertainty about anything and, quite honestly, everything with a seem
Well the problem is, for metals, we went from a depressed priced market to a limited monopoly market. Out of the fryer and into the pan is what overnight "fixing" the market has done. The policy would have been better had the President actually allowed markets to naturally progress via small changes in policy over a course of several decades. But nah, let's just change course 180 right now deal with fall out later. All it will do is cause smaller players to exit, while larger players get an even tighter grip on the market. Prices will continue to rise and then consumers seeking relief will lobby Congress to open borders. You know, kind of the reason we got into the mess to begin with.
Isn't dropbox sync a userland application? Why does it care about the underlying FS?
It doesn't. Someone at Dropbox basically did this.
select fstype, isencrypted, count(1) from dropboxusers where ispaying='Y' and ostype='linux' group by fstype, isencrypted
And the answer was overwhelmingly the configuration they are moving to.
A) they enforced their own rules equally
This is pretty much the only argument that you make that has worth. To enforce something equally we would need to have sort some of "thing" (for lack of a better term) that we agreed on that could judge when a policy is being applied equally. In law, we have the court system (for better or worse) that does that (at least in theory, I'm not trying to make this an argument about the shortcomings of the US judicial system). We'd need something for that in things like EULAs and what not. The only problem is that currently those kinds of things aren't seen as have the same weight of enforcement like laws. So you're going to have this, "we don't have a system to ensure equal application" and "we can't even agree that we can compel people to abide by these rules." Long story short, if anyone wants to get anywhere on this point, we're going to need a massive overhaul to the laws currently on the books. I cannot think of anyone in US Congress ready to go down that road, but November is coming soon, so there you go.
B) if they were responsible for the content posted on their platform (hint: they're not, otherwise they'd be shut down the moment someone posted child pornography there)
Social Media sites are held responsible and liable for "some" things. I'm not going into a laundry list of what those things are, but they all ultimately require someone to attach that failing to something that is currently illegal as defined by US law. Also, there's about 500 different steps in between being a site in operation and being shutdown by the law. Posting of child porn on Facebook doesn't mean Facebook has to shut its doors. It means that Facebook needs to take reasonable steps to prevent it and remove it when found. If they didn't do at least that, then yes, we start getting into shutdown territory. It's not the binary state system that this point tries to make.
C) if they weren't (with Twitter and Youtube) the equivalent of the new town square in which people used to communicate
Well they aren't and even if they were, you can be escorted off the property of town square and into a cell at any rate depending on how egregious your act is. The town square is paid for by tax dollars and thus the public (vis-a-vis law makers) ultimately get to dictate the going and coming on the town square, but the dollars that built social groups wasn't tax payers. Now, if we have qualms with "the Internet town square" being owned by a private company, well that's going to require all of us to look deep into our hearts and really start questioning how "free" we've allowed the free market to become. There's a lot of soul searching that's really needed in the US about how much we've allowed private companies to become pretty much everything around us. But all of that aside, they're private companies and, yeah, we don't get a say to an extent. So you're point about them being a public square for information exchange is pretty lacking since we all pretty much allowed this whole thing to exist in the first place by allowing free market to trump basic rights. That's not saying free market and rights are opposites, that saying that since they aren't exact polar opposites, it becomes easy to mix the two with unexpected results. Unexpected results like leading to this wonderful thing that a lot of folks use being dictated by just a handful of people with zero recourse from the users.
Because the web has caused the privatization of public discourse
No. That was clearly done by TV before the web. That was clearly done by radio before TV. That was clearly done by newspapers before radio. That was clearly done by monarchs before free press. Shall I continue? Each iteration has allowed the creation of platforms to become easier, but let's not kid ourselves here, the big ones that everyone notices are organized because unorganized ones don't tend to become massively big things since they just reduce down to pretty much background noise. With that organization comes rules and policies and so forth that inherently censor some groups. What Facebook et al are doing isn't unique, only its medium is. Does that make censorship in general right or wrong? That's a point that's debatable for the ages, but what social media groups are "currently" doing is inline with what has come before and we have seen progress from kings of yore to Internet with that system. So I'd argue that while it would be great to have completely open everything in theory, the actual implementation of that would be horrible, and that the current implementation is balanced enough to get us to whatever the next point on the tech tree of the universe is.
I need you and everyone to understand that this whole topic is arguing a topic that's been brought up since the Classical and Hellenistic Period. How does one allow the free exchange of ideas without the entire thing devolving into madness? Guess what, thirty-six centuries later, we still haven't figured it out. And it's starting to seem like the answer is to the "where does it stop?!" question you are asking is, "somewhere, people need to keep their heads up, but ultimately it stops somewhere." Blanket openness is clearly not an answer, because that's just saying "society as a whole is just lazy and if we don't have complete openness, then we're just a slippery slope away from having all our rights taken away."
Don't worry, I'm sure you'll change your tune once it's taken over and turned against you, though
That is the entire point. It stops at some point because as much as we on Slashdot like to diss the general public, they do ultimately seem to understand when basic rights are being trampled unjustly, Who determines that? Well we all sort of do, there's not a hard and fast rule to that and I get it, that makes some of the hard liner type folks a little uneasy. Society doesn't have clear distinct lines for every single thing. So there's two things a person can do about that.
One, accept that society doesn't have clearly defined boundaries and that you'll have to do your part if and when the time comes.
Two, don't accept that and get all upset that humanity seemingly just can't get its crap together and live your entire life in frustration.
If you are intent on hanging your hat on the latter, well there's not much anyone can do to help you. We're basically always going to be having this discussion until the end of time. Advocacy for human rights isn't a spectator sport. But if you're willing to consider the first point, then you'll have to first start working on the whole, "am I ready to die on this hill or not?" thing. Once you've got a good grasp on that, you'll need to ditch the "slippy slope" argument every time something you don't agree with comes up and work on the whole "persuasive argument" thing. And trust me, there is tons of room in this debate for a rational argument, like the seemingly inequitable application of those policies, and so on. But you are going to fall far and fast if what you lead with is, "They'll be coming for you soon too! Just you watch!"
The position that SF (and other local and state governments) take of obstructing the enforcement of those laws is just that: obstruction
Okay so you might not be savvy to this debate, but the Federal government wants local law enforcement to enforce immigration laws because the Federal government "feels"... You know what I'll just cut the crap. The Federal government doesn't want to really pay for it. Now there's been some cities that are totally okay with "helping" out the Federal government, there's some that give the Feds the middle finger, and then there are the majority that are like, "Sure we'll do that, how much are you going to give us?" And when the answer back is a big fat zero, those cities are content to sit on their hands. Now there are some cities like our current topic, SF, that see through this BS and openly aggravate and that's fine if you view that as obstructing, but ultimately enforcing those laws are up to the Feds and we've had a few court cases that have indicated that cities don't have to lift a finger for doing law enforcement for the Fed if they aren't getting paid to do it. In short, like most things, it mainly comes down to money for the majority. But yes, SF is one of those that are in the minority and sit on the sideline saying "neener-neener-neener".
I suspect that if a company in SF denied enforcement officials access to their corporate campus on humanitarian grounds, SF city officials will not be amused.
Again you're doing the tie things together that aren't related. SF can do that to the Feds because they're a government. Companies cannot because they distinctly aren't forms of government. It's a really simply concept to follow. If A SF company denied enforcement officials anything, they'd get a court order and come in anyway. That's because the court recognizes that the government is, wait for it... A government! (insert mind blown sound) And that's not my opinion on the matter that's literally me just pointing out our form of governance, since late 1700s.
Cities don't have to put up with companies antics. They put up with it, because they bring in money, but they only do so as a courtesy. So if a city doesn't care about the money are they see the company as a bad fit, they can run them out of town and there's not really a legal recourse for the company unless some contract was signed between them and the city. That's why you see companies sign deals with cities before they move in. That's a CYA move by the company, so that they gain something resembling some form of rights. But outside of those contracts, companies are the city's/state's bitch if the state or city so wished it.
TL;DR summary. SF can thumb the Feds because they're elected officials, they are recognized by the courts as being a legally binding government. Companies don't get to thumb anyone unless they signed a contract allowing them to do that, that's because unlike SF and the US, they are recognized by the courts for squat in these matters that we speak of.
I am not making a value judgment on SF choosing to regulate corporate cafeterias. If they want to let them. The voters there in SF can decide if they like it or not.
I do agree with this part of your comment, so thumbs up random Internet person. I doubt you care though, but at least we agree on something, so I'll have a beer to that and call it a night. Cheers person!
See if we can get people who immigrate to the United States to respect the laws, learn the language, and integrate into the culture and society.
Whoa there buddy. You are all over the radar and trying to tie things that don't go together. Let's unpack it just a bit.
who immigrate to the United States to respect the laws
Those that do so legally, and I'm going to assume that's what you are talking about but what do I know, respect the law or they loose their status. That includes anyone and everyone who is not a natural born citizen. Though rare, even naturalized citizens can be deported for breaking the law if serious enough.
learn the language
Last I checked there wasn't a law that required any particular language. While I get that the majority of folks speak English in the US, there's not a strict requirement by any law to speak it anywhere. And I understand your point here but then that understanding gets derailed when you say:
Why is it OK to force a company (a voluntary association of people) to respect the laws but not actual individuals?
See you are making your argument here that not speaking English is against the law and well that's not true.
integrate into the culture and society
Again, there's not a strict law for any of that. And if there was it would beg the question of "Whose?" I can tell you from traveling around the country that there's a huge difference in "culture" between say, California, New York, Iowa, Texas, and so on. And hells bells there's big difference within States themselves. So you ask someone to "integrate" and what exactly are they supposed to integrate into? It's left really wide open there as to what your question is there, almost to a degree of bigotry, just saying. When you start saying things like, "Person ABC there isn't "American" enough" that's going to raise eyebrows as to what exactly you're meaning there.
How come cities like SF like to think that they can thumb their noses at federal laws they don't like and then turn around and brow beat companies (and, indirectly, tax-paying citizens) with their own local laws?
Because that's how our system of government works. Last I checked Congress hadn't regulated cafeterias within corporate buildings and so that ability to do so devolves, first to States, and then on down the chain of command there. Now I'm not saying that you have to like that law or anything and if it rubs you raw enough, I'll just give you the answer that my State currently has for those that don't like the current batch of abortion laws. Just move somewhere else. That's kind of how it's worked here in the US since like the start of the US. I really don't know what else to tell you there. If you don't like a city doing that, then don't live there or vote or both or neither, I don't really care what you do.
Will they applaud when those companies stand up to the inhumane overreach of the city government in the same way the city has stood up to the federal government?
Those aren't like things. Here's a rough outline for you.
Federal Government = A recognized form of public government within the US.
City Government = A recognized form of public government within the US.
Company = Not a recognized form of government within the US.
See how companies are slightly different? And it's been trending lately to try and treat companies much like citizens or even like organized government, and that's usually proven to be a bad idea, but if that's what the public wants, who am I to argue? Not me, because that's not really a point I honestly care about. Point being, you can't say "Will A blah to B, like B blah to C", when A is something that is completely unlike B and C. Those aren't equal things.
In short, I really had to say something here because the
Ahhh. I see. Yes that would be a bit of a problem there. Okay, thanks for the clearing up.
What kind of statement is that even? Like are you seriously expecting there to be some sort of data collection of what students ate in the past versus what they made in the present? What exactly are you trying to get at here? Are you trying to apply a stereotype to draw some conclusion like "all college kids eat diets of only ramen, some college kids become successful, ergo, an all ramen diet cannot be all that bad"? Do you understand how nonfactual, illogical, and just plain wrong that kind of basis for an argument is? And finally, using your loose argument for college, it would be more than fair to point out that a lot of tech giants dropped out of college as well, so I guess we should conclude that college isn't necessary? Which I do hope you see that, that argument is also equally flawed. We should not take a few successes as evidence of some underlying truth. That's not building a fact based argument.
then slack isnt going to have any packages soon as every distro and dev is doing away with 32bit
Clearly you haven't used Slackware.
The next 20% needs to be solved.
I'm honestly curious, what's this mythical 20% that needs to be solved?
I don't think you'll sell many.
I don't think you understand how companies work. If saving 10% here and 8% there adds up, it adds up. If automating trucks reduces lawsuits for pain and injury in a wreck by xx% and the cost of rolling out that automation is less than that xx%, then only stupid companies wouldn't roll it out. So the massive question is, "Will the automation ever drop in price?" And the answer is undoubtedly yes, it will. If there is one thing about technology is that the cost of implementing it always goes down.
Also good luck with your 'better driver than a teenager' advertising campaign
Yeah, I get that's not the best way parent could of put it, but the sentiment is still true. As soon as the technology is "good enough/cost effective enough" companies will start rolling it out. That has always been the case since the 1700s, and there is always nay sayers that go "nuh-uh", and those nay sayers are always wrong. This isn't a "oh well your opinion is incorrect and this is why I think that" kind of thing, this is a "there is literally three centuries of history that strongly points to XYZ being an outcome of this." Now that's not a 100% sure fire thing, and I'll admit that, but I think it's a pretty safe bet that ultimately truck drivers are going to be "mostly" gone within the next four to five decades. And I'm just going to point to the last 300 years of "if there is some device/machine that's cheaper and slightly better than man at doing something, that device/machine always wins."
There is significant economic investment in this kind of thing and while Uber leaving might cast some doubts into the continued economic investment, in the trucking company industry. Uber wasn't even a bit player. They were a non-existent "oh hey let's try this out" player. Their departure should be seen with about as much regard as one might think about blood loss from a single mosquito bite. There are other people doing this very thing of automating a truck while it is on the road, 3PL providers looking at getting easy on/off access to highways, auto makers developing tracks that mimic some of the most used corridors such as I80/I90/I40, and the list goes on of people who are investing hand over fist more than Uber ever had hoped to dream of injecting into the industry. And the investments aren't fruitless, there are test trucks that are driving down large stretches of Interstate 80 with only a person in the cab to observe. Yes it is easy to point out flaws in something that is so infantile and wonder "How on Earth could that ever take the place of a human driver?" And then one day, that job no longer exists. This has been the norm of how things "do" in this world since the Industrial Revolution and I find it humorous how everyone just thinks that somehow this is some exception, that driving is some sort of endeavour to which only humans can do, which is something that they thought of Chess and Go and sewing and paralegals and programming and so many other things and then machine started doing those things. I get it, it is difficult to accept new things and it is made that much harder for things that are not yet "in production". But there is motion, there is investment, there is research, and there is so many other things that point toward an outcome that will soon spell the end of this profession for a large majority. 100%, maybe not, but 80%, oh yeah you better believe it.
And there are those who would point to something like an 80/20 rule for driving. "Yeah, we can automate the 80% but the 20% is the hard stuff." If an investment of $x solves at least 90% of that 20% that's difficult, then companies are going to do that investment. If Amazon thinks they'll be able to convince the government to paint the far right lane blue to indicate automation traffic only, then Amazon is going to make an investment to convince the government to get some blue paint ready. If a logistics company can purchase the land right off
Just curious, what happens when you plug the phone into the PC via USB? Mine sees it as a USB mass storage and I can play audio from there. Also, you had to bring in an audio cable to plug into your device. Also couldn't just bringing in a tiny USB to Bluetooth adapter instead and stream audio that way work roughly the same? I'm not say that's what you *should* do, just curious here, thanks.
hope your happy "freedom advocates". Remember XP requires just a Pentium and 64MB RAM.
Slackware only needs a 486 and 64MB. With 128MB and WindowMaker, the system purrs for the most part. Of course, that's not my daily driver.
Don't forget that when people get privacy in the USA, megacorps get it too. You will be less able than ever to keep them in check.
Not saying you are wrong but devil's in the details here. The right to privacy, at least offline, for a citizen is enshrined in the Constitution. The right to privacy for a company is only if Congress so wills it. So the question is how willing would Congress be to grant such a right to companies? Yeah, I mean we know how it will turn out, but I guess I just wanted to point out that it doesn't have to turn out that way.
This kind of stuff has been long time coming. At the moment the laws on the book are incredibly mute on what happens if a company loses your data. Hell even losing credit card information is pretty iffy in a court of law, unless you can show that your stolen credit card information was used to directly harm you financially. It is time that criminal liability was held to those who lose sensitive information. However, I will admit, that I myself don't have really firm ideas for what that restitution should look like. For the theft of credit card data, I think there definitely should be something that the company has to pay into to payout claims for a number of years and the amount per year and length of time be sliding values based on the depth of the breach. I think an out dated system that gets breached should have willful negligence tacked on to it and there be punitive damages awarded.
But all of those are just things I think and I can easily see lots of cons that can crop up from those things. I think this is going to be a difficult topic to get a good balance between the pros and cons, but that difficult task shouldn't stop us. Lawmakers have looked at this and seen the complexity and dizzying task before them and have opted to take a pass continually on it. It is time that we sat down and began talking about how we bring law and order to the Internet and do it in a fair and balanced way. We won't solve the problems overnight but we're just never going to solve them with a mentality of "Don't regulate the Internet!". I don't want to trample free speech and I don't think anyone else "truly" wants to do that. I don't want to remove anonymity either. But I feel we need to stop using those as arguments on why we can't bring under control other things that we all clearly do not want. I get it, we're going to screw those things among others up in the short term, but we ought to take the long view on this and that indicates that whatever we do indeed screw up, we will eventually correct that so long as we do not allow inertia to hold us back. Loosey Goosey has just become all too common with online security and it is time that there is some culpability for those who do not hold consumer data to the same standard as those whom it might affect if it is stolen.
If this is how they plan to deal with the Spectre/Meltdown issues permanently, I'm ok with that.
HT has nothing to do with that issue. That's part of the instruction pipeline within the CPU. The core of it is a thing called speculative execution, where a CPU goes and fetches things before the actual instruction hits the core. The true fix will be to detect unprivileged instructions in the pipe (because actually getting rid of the pipe is *NOT* ever going to be an option) and then act on that.
And the end of the day, if I can still play my games, I really don't care what's inside that hunk of silicon, as long as my games still work as good as they always have.
Yeah I think that's ultimately what matters most here so I wouldn't worry too much about it anyway, just stay up to date on patches, which I'm sure you do.
So to recap the 8th gen of Intel. The i7 had the most cores at six with HT enabled. i5 was just like the i7 but with HT turned off. The i3 had HT in gen 7 so it was two cores/four threads, in 8th gen they gave it two more cores and turned off HT. So: i7=6/12, i5=6/6, i3=4/4. The i9 in gen 8 was really weird. The clock would scale down the more cores you used, it was very odd and minus the fact that the 18 core version was roughly the price of a used car, it was expensive. The price per performance with the i9 was incredibly low. A 3.4 Ghz i7 would give you a better CPU mark / $ by almost 200%, not to mention that an AMD six core FX-6300 would give you better CPU mark/$ by almost 800%. So clearly the i9 wasn't going to win you an award for price sensitive consumers.
So all that said, and this is my opinion so it's literally worth whatever value you choose to give it, I think Intel is going to reposition the line up to disable HT on all "consumer" processors and focus on just keeping HT and "pro" features in the i9. I personally think it's a back hand to Intel consumers, but I'm an AMD fanboy so full disclosure there. But yeah, I think the i3, i5, and i7 are all going to eventually be labelled as the "cheapy", "actual desktop", "gamer" CPUs in that order and the i9 is going to be viewed as "workstation" and thus the i9 isn't going to focus on price/performance balance. So, i3 will be 4/4, i5 will be 6/6, and i7 will be 8/8 with the i9 being whatever crazy numbers they throw at the chips with hopefully not any of that weird scaling core/HT/Ghz stuff.
That's just my hot take on this, open to hear what others think.
Well I can only comment on the RSS reader that I use which is Liferea. Let me first start out by saying, I'm not saying everyone should move to a desktop reader, but you ought to give it a try. But I'll admit, it's definitely not for everyone so YMMV. Now with that said, you can setup the middle mouse button in Liferea so that when you middle mouse click a headline, it opens that up in a browser. You check that out and see if that works for you, if of course you're on a Linux box that is.
The RSS feature is not very good in Firefox. You should really switch over to a desktop RSS feed reader. The parser in the Firefox RSS feed reader is hacked together and on a lot of feeds will silently error and give you garble or no feed entry at all. Usually happens with feeds that mix media in with the XML, such as podcasts, but even an RSS feed that uses images can sometimes make the parser go haywire.
I get you, and it's really disappointing that they never went back to update the RSS feature to be better. But yeah, the code is old (like seven years old) and no one really wants to fix all the problems it had. It was a pretty neat feature in Firefox, but once I switched over to a desktop based (Liferea) the difference in how the content was rendered was pretty obvious. Additionally, it supported Podcasts as well so that was a nice plus. So it's a shame that the Feed feature never got the polish it should have, but yeah you at least owe it to yourself to try a desktop client and compare it to Firefox RSS. I don't know what feeds you use and if they're pretty Plane Jane, you might never know the difference, but the Firefox RSS just never got the love it should have. Maybe someone will rewrite it into a plugin or something? Maybe make it the client it should of been?
I don't think Microsoft would have much to stand on.
If you remember the Oracle v Google suit. APIs are copyrightable. So yeah, being a compatible API, even via reverse engineering and clean room, can be brought into court as copyright infringement.
Google provides AOSP without restrictions. You do not have to bundle Google's app store with AOSP
AOSP is dead. You literally cannot build anything useful with it. Pretty much any hardware post 2011 requires binary blobs with commercial fees to make AOSP even bootable. You can literally ask anyone who has done core Android development this, AOSP is dead.
you do not need to license the Play Store.
Play store isn't what this is about. Google Play Services. Long story, short: Everything useful for a functioning phone is in Google Play Services. Slightly longer version: Yes you can call down to do things, but the c libs that handle that in AOSP is literally written to make doing so a lesson in how painful you can make an API. Additionally, much like systemd developers, any interface you use in code is subject to inevitable change or complete abandonment in the next patch. Quite literally you could build an app that calls the C for GPS and in three months, they'll change the interface to something completely different with matching confusing name and your app just gets to segfault. This is why Google always threw a fit when device makers wouldn't update their image, which they fixed with Google Play Services. Addendum: If you've built an app using Android Studio recently, you most likely are making a call to Google Play Services. They've literally made the toolchain to force your app into their ecosystem.
Microsoft even has an app called Bing that, when installed on Android, replaces the Google search infrastructure completely.
No, that's totally not how it works. It intercepts the call but ultimately Google's callback has to be fulfilled or else it cancels the request for hardware access. So while yes, Bing is fulfilling the request, Google has to know about it too "for security purposes". So yeah, when you use Bing, you're just using Bing and Google. You literally cannot opt-out without recompiling your image.
it easier to access the same website all useful mobile phones would default to anyway because they already have a monopoly there
No one is disputing the search giant's monopoly on the web. What they are disputing is that Google has moved all of the previous functionality of their OS into a closed off and highly regulated set of libraries. And they did that to tighten control over their OS. Now if Google made the OS and made the hardware and they were the only ones in town selling Android, who cares? But Google is literally fucking with third parties here. That's the deal here. Apple sells their phones direct to the public, so if they make a change and people hate it, their voting dollars moving away directly affect them, Apple. Now if Google makes a change and people hate it, the public voting dollars indirectly affect Google, but directly messes with the profits of other companies. That's where the anti-competitive nature comes into play. Google knows that if a vendor doesn't agree with them, they can literally twist the API enough to screw the vendor over. It's not like the vendor can sit there and redo an entire access API between releases. Now had Google done that from start, then we'd be in a different story and I'd just say, well they got what they deserve. But no, Google has slowly killed off "open" and "free" Android and did so when vendors were too deep to escape.
Now here's the argument point and this is the thing you know we could debate and I don't think we'd ever come to a "correct" answer on. Google says that they've done this, that they've become this way, to prevent fragmentation. I don't buy that excuse because they knew that fragmentation is the name of the FOSS game. So it's an open debate if preventing fragmentation = being an evil monopolistic company (which it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that I feel Google is pure evil now.) But do not, do not for one moment think that AOSP is some s
Just one more point. If you ever hear about bringing laws up to date to match technology. Well, this is an incredible good example of that need. Bundling software and limiting choice isn't good, but we literally have to use 1800s era law about 3rd party business and direct/indirect goods and services to bring about a case on Google. Updating laws to indicate that bundling software and limiting choice is bad would greatly make the jobs of prosecutors a whole world easier.
you mean the same stuff where apple is even worse and i dont see them getting picked on.
First, that's whataboutism. But I'll let it pass because it's got a bit of a point here but there's also a fine distinction. So, starting out, you aren't wrong to an extent. You've got a pretty good point and it's worth talking about.
Direct and indirect. Google is indirect, so changes they make affect them indirectly. Apple is direct so changes they make directly affect them. Now that doesn't invalidate the bundling issue you bring up, b-u-t, we don't have a really clear legal guidance on that... YET. But what we do have is when a company has an indirect relationship with their end product, forcing terms and conditions that limit choice, is anti-competitive.
So that's not saying Apple's bundling is bad, just that we don't have any legal precedent in international trade about anti-competitiveness for end products that have direct relationships with the maker. That's not barring anyone from filing suit, just makes the legal outcome a fuck-ton of murky. Google's abuse has a ton of prior case law, when you look at it as a manufacture with an indirect relationship to distributors. And that's why you don't see a lot ever being brought on to Apple. Not that it's not anti-competitive, just that there's no telling how the case would play out.
It just has only drivers enabled for the hardware it is run on, which seems normal to me. It's optimization more than anything.
You are correct, Google's mainline is a tree shake of the kernel.org tree for only the target platforms they support. However, that makes it really difficult because that "pair down" process isn't just a simple "diff /some/file > out.patch" between kernel.org and AOSP, some of the directory layout has been altered and some of the build process isn't as clear cut. Hell even the AOSP site still has the Jack build instructions up and Jack died with Android 6.0.
So you really have to be careful if you want to wade out into waters that are uncharted. Say you have your own board with an SoC that's not blessed Google hardware, say like a custom RISC-V you're testing out. Your time to build is going to be somewhat nightmarish. It's not impossible, but you can really see that Google just don't give a damn over on AOSP, since the instructions there wouldn't successfully build anything on a newer tool chain and a recent Java VM.
As for kernel numbers, if you ever look at the kernels they use and the kernels that get their patch waves accepted in mass, you'll see the correlation. They can submit to mainline but that doesn't mean their patches get merged in 1-to-1 fashion with mainline on every LTS. Google uses kernels they know that's got a lot of their honey in the source. That don't always mean it's the LTS one.