Simple. Do you remember back when traditional media was laughing so hard at the thought of downloading music? And when CD and traditional media was dying slowly, but surely?
Do you remember when news became more popular on the internet than the printed Traditional media?
Do you remember why Netflix succeeded? Because they put YOU in control of what you see and when you want to see it. Same with the original youtube, the idea was the little person being able to share their experiences, life, friends with the world. If they had an idea, they could produce it themselves and upload it, and it would instantly become available to everyone.
In traditional media - this kind of freedom would be unthinkable, simply because they are used to a controlled audience, professional actors, journalists and other media professionals - all one big payroll machine, a club of people who "made it" through the censorship. It was a comfortable club of a life with good pay, friends who had the same social status as you, had the same schooling as you, background as you - and a safe job in the spotlight or not (depending on the position) for life.
They had guaranteed funding, either from the government, or by advertisement where they had TOTAL control of what gets published or not, no competition whatsoever. This also meant they could basically decide what you'd like to watch, because there weren't other alternatives.
They also had a much more sinister power, the power of information distribution. Traditional media has always conveyed to the public that they represent neutralism and honest journalism, but history has shown us over and over again, it's paid media - paid by our officials and those with money enough to control the influence, and them being the trusted traditional media - they don't really want to give that power away, without a world war class fight, this has been a comfy place for a certain amount of people - over 100 years.
Now - in less than 10 years, all of this changed so fast that the big boys didn't even know what hit them, people stopped buying traditional media, because they had tons of new alternatives. Sure - you didn't get in-debt journalism, you often had to sift through 1000s of hours of amateur-garbage, but this grew too - and people soon realized they could earn money on their content too.
For traditional media - this is a disaster, they KNOW this is the final nail in the coffin, and they're prepared to fight tooth and nail to cling to life - and they're about to actually do that.
HOW?
Did you see what happened in E.U not one month ago? A certain law was passed that would change personal journalism, free media and almost every independent youtube channel for all future. Same with free media on the internet. Just because most people slept during the class, the bill passed and traditional media won big-time.
What traditional media haven't counted on though, is that they're essentially digging their own grave. With the onslaught of planned programming, planned advertisement, and mind numbingly stupid content... we as the public, just got a taste how freedom really tasted like (I'm talking about the early era You Tube), we know what it feels like to just watch whatever we feel like - live in the moment so to speak.
I for once, find it nearly impossible to watch TV after this, even listen to radio in my car. I never turn it on anymore, because I know it's just going to be endless amounts of Casino / betting ads or loan offers, and the little content there is - will be 80's reruns (albeit I love the 80's) it's cheaper to push, and they already own all the licenses to all of this music anyway, remember - they're basically owned by the people BEHIND traditional media.
But it's going to be a breath of fresh air - literally - just entertain ourselves with things we really should be doing, learning something, going outdoors, talk more with friends - and just watch whatever you want to, whenever you want to. I also have a HUGE Dvd collection,
...passwords and two factor authentication simply because they'd chose such simple passwords to remember.
People hate having to learn something complex to remember, even if it just takes the effort of putting a small note in your wallet for 4 days to help you remember, you'd be SHOCKED if you just knew what passwords even professionals choose, it's hopeless.
So what we did at our big corporate, was to implement an Password A.I guide engine that helps people avoid bad passwords, so it picks stuff from a HUGE database of simpleton passwords (you know, guitar1234567) etc. it will simply explain to people why their passwords are not very good (we're polite, so we don't tell them that theyr'e simple and...essentially not very IT savvy, they're good at something else, right?)
People just want an easy life, most people working with computers as just a tool to get the job done, don't want a huge advanced routine to do their job, and when the password becomes a chore and hard to remember, it will stop them from doing their job, and since we're nagging people to change their password 4 times a year, with reminders that pop up every day for 14 days before it expires, people simply get seriously annoyed. And they will go through hellfire to find an easy to memorize password before they even try to train for a complex one (Here's a complex one for you, for those who simply don't get what that would be:
J4Al4&/rO1.P9DeErxL ) Yes, that's the kind of passwords you should use, even with a secondary two factor authentication device, and it's not hard to learn to remember it, sure - it's not as easy as guitar1234567, and it takes effort to learn it - but most people (if they just kept that note for a few days in the wallet, had to enter it 10 times a day) they WILL remember it, even the average Joe - and their personal security on the net would sky rocket in comparison.
It's of course based on Ubuntu, so credit is due where credit is due.
But that said, they made it look and feel better, more inclusive bells'n'whistles for life and fun, and of course everyday use. As an old 10+ year slackware user and a big fan of it, I was at some point going "I'm too old for this fixing the boat, compiling this and compiling that" life, and wanted the comfortable life of windows users without the disk trashing, endless registry garbage, and constant threat of viruses, Now - Linux is by far not free from worms, exploits and viruses, but since there's still not that many using it, it has the "Apple effect" of having very little malware to bother your every day life.
The functionality of Mint Linux is nothing short of amazing. I have boxes that have been going on for years, heck - I just moved my previous Mint linux installation from my older computer to a new one (always updating religiously though), but with completely new hardware, worked straight out of the box, even with the proprietary Nvidia drivers and steam gaming, everything was like before, all installations, years of fun stuff installed - just worked (try that with Windows!)
Mint Linux put the FUN back in Linux, it's still Linux with all the control you'd ever want over your (and yes, I say YOUR) operating system, but without the control of the "man" and "corporate", you're as free as you want to be, and can have all the fun Windows users are having (without the constant crashes and dish trashes).
So consider this a small but humble THANK YOU - to the ENTIRE Mint Linux team, every contributor - thanks a million for your efforts, making our lives so comfortable we almost take you for granted, this is just how GOOD a job you did.
You usually never hear the praise - just all the complaints, once you hear nothing - you can be pretty darn sure your job was insanely well done, because people tend to forget to say "THANKS" when they're just enjoying their experience, but something break? You'll have a queue of complaints, right there at your doorstep.
...it wasn't because of their astonishing content,
but rather the fact your average Joe now had a way to say goodbye to AD's forever, well - almost forever, because Netflix is in certain parts of the world re-introducing advertisement into their subscription plans.
Youtube had a similar scheme, while it DID not become the subscription boom they've hoped for, it did gather a rather substantial amount of actually faithful subscribers (we're talking Youtube premium here), and it keeps growing. Yes - you can use ad-blockers, but let's face it, that doesn't pay anyone's bills, let alone the content creators.
Personally I have both, simply as a way to opt-out of all the onslaught of senseless, mind numbing repetitive irrelevant ads. A.I will always have an opinion on what you want or need, regardless of what you really think, this makes people scramble towards AD-free solutions, even if they have to pay for it, and I'm no different in that regards, I simply HATE ads. And that's coming from a guy who used to work in advertisement.
The reason they want to offer you "free anything" is because there really is no such things in this world as a free meal, if you want something for free, you won't get that - but you can accept being a slave of the consumer audience, meaning you accept certain chores (such as having to watch an ad) in order to get something in return, so - nothing for free here. But you'll soon find yourself tired to death over it, or buying stuff you don't really need - if you're weak.
Ad free - is the future. Your time is valuable, way more valuable than any wasted time on useless products you'll never need. Every minute you waste or being distracted by things that annoy you, serves you no good at all. But it does bring other people jobs, and money, while you suffer through it all - nothing is for free.
We don't have any proof of it, but we can assume that ALL governments have some kind of "deals" with any major hardware maker, and if they don't want to play ball with who we call our "friends" today, then they're the evil ones, as always.
Huawei is only being targeted because they're so big, and it's a Chinese manufacturer, and a real threat to Apple and other major players elsewhere. It's a dirty game, but they're playing it against them because the "why not" factor, it's a dirty political game, nothing new - but consider the following, in case it was true:
Almost every component known to man, is being produced in China these days, complete chips - take the ever so popular ESP8266, ESP 32 and many other all-in-one chips that provide complete communication solutions, these chips are found inside millions of devices ALL over the world, and could very easily sport a back-door or two to sniff on the networks they serve (I'm in NO WAY accusing them of this), but if you were to point out someone just because they're an apparent product that everyone knows, you'd target the most obvious one that is known and popular with the population.
Nothing of this means that ANYONE have implemented backdoor technology that's widely available to any government, we KNOW of the ME inside the INTEL processors, and yet they're basically everywhere, also in China - so why don't we hear a public uproar against that then? Because we're the good guys? Says who?
You can pretty much assume that any mass produced hardware can be abused in one way or another, whether that was intended or not, that's an entirely different debate. I'm just getting SO sick and tired of these political FUD games that should be SO apparent to ANYONE thinking about it for just more than a few minutes. Stop buying into the FUD, buy what you want - and be smart about your personal safety instead.
If you truly want to know - get god at it, learn to code, learn to reverse engineer, get knowledge instead of walking into a cloud of populist hearsay, fake news and whatnot.
...All scrambling towards getting an cloud based gaming service up on running on their own flavor of the idea, has left out one big possible bottleneck they might not have thought of:
The Netflix problem! A huge problem Netflix faced when they had the problem with success, was bandwidth throttling. Netflix subscribers was a substantial load on every ISP's network, and while the idea of a cloud based subscription package - combined with the power of using server CPU's for the actual game processing is a good one, this is one that will come back to hunt and hit them big-time. History is going to repeat itself here.
The one company that get's the best deal with all ISP's and can provide them with enough funding to add the equipment needed to handle the massive increase in streaming loads, will be the ones to succeed with them. Wonder who get's that first?
...may not be to everyone's liking, and for my part - it's a PAIN to do what we do, and it costs tons of money too so it's a real problem, but here's what we do:
In most of Sweden, sorting your trash at home is MANDATORY. If you don't, you can get a fine billed to you for the extra work the recycling plant took sorting it for you, and it's usually am 80$ fine for each offense.
We have roughly 12 bins (2 major bins with 4 sections each), Metal, Plastics, Colored glass, Uncolored glass, Small cartoons, newspapers/ads, Food, batteries, lightbulbs, deposits, combustible and collectables (the collectables you'll have to call for, and they pick up like once a month or something).
It's crazy expensive too, I pay roughly 400$ a year for this "service" where I have to sort everything myself, yet - the recycling companies / garbies if you like... are fighting over the resources because to them, they're really valuable.
...because if everyone can "mod" the devices to let's say "outside" their designated frequency range, we're in for real trouble on the airwaves.
Before the non-radio amateur crowd thinks I'm on the "powers that be" side here, then I've got to tell you where I come from on this. I've been building and modifying radio transmission equipment pretty much all my life as an hobby, and a wet dream of mine as a kid, was to freely be able to build any kind of transmitter and receiver I wanted to, regardless of laws and regulations, but that's not very practical in the real world, the only way to do this legally (and even know what you're actually doing) is to become an electrical engineer with a degree in RF technology, or become an licensed radio amateur, why is that you might ask, you might even ask what the relevancy here is, well, it's not simple to explain - but I'll try my darnedest to explain it:
Imagine you have a piece of equipment that CAN go outside its designated range, and you mod it so you can transmit on a broader range, say - increasing the bandwidth so you can get more throughput and cover more frequency "ground" so to speak.
This can and will create all kinds of hell for existing communication devices, maybe even those used for emergency, alarm systems, medical equipment and much more.
The reason there's an requirement for a technical license to even be able to operate in certain bands (especially with modified devices, modified by you and other experimenters) is that through that technical knowledge you'll gain by becoming a licensed radio amateur, you'll learn how to deal with making filters to prohibit spurious emissions to leak through your own equipment, you'll also learn respect for design and how to avoid making serious mistakes on the airwaves, whether this is digital or simply as in the olden days "analog" with speech / Morse-code (which is very similar to digital transmissions, except, very slow and..old), you'll respect the band-plans already put aside for experimental use (which you're free to use, under respect for the rules, as long as you actually know what you're doing).
Now, imagine you modified a transmitter to cover so much of the bands that you interfere with medical equipment in a nearby band (frequency), now we have a real problem on our hands that can actually cause lives to be in danger, even if you don't notice anything yourself. You'll be creating all kinds of confusion for those using this equipment, and eventually get caught by your country's FCC team who constantly monitor all frequencies for unauthorized traffic, interference etc. It's hard to explain this to laymen who doesn't know the technology behind this, it's no joke - there are entire careers made out of understanding RF spurious / parasitic emissions, especially those designed in SOHO devices that has to meet the strictest FCC rules in order to be released to the market. Even small modifications can create equipment to misbehave, and you'll have equipment that no longer meets the criteria for acceptable spurious emissions into our wide spectrum of band-plans.
Radio amateurs have for the longest time, been the pioneers of such technology, and there's a reason we're allowed to do experiments like this, because we're qualified to do so (not everyone of course, some I've met, sadly - doesn't even understand the basics, but - at least they had to go through a long course learning about the basics, so they'll at least keep within the legal boundaries of what they CAN and CAN NOT do on the air).
Now - modify the software of your routers ALL you want, this isn't the issue, the issue is when you start modifying your hardware (especially the RF part) to go beyond what it was designed to do, even if you're good at coding - doesn't qualify you to be a RF technician that fully understands this, and this can be a dangerous combo).
RF interference is a real thing, and it's dangerous - only proper knowledge can remedy this, and there must be certain requirements met to ha
There was a consumer test program done by our national television station, they tested various sunglasses and what got you the most for your money. Interestingly enough, some of the fashion brands where actually protecting you less against the dangerous UV rays from the sun, than the 7$ dollar ones they got at our version of the dollar stores. So in fact, in this case - you where better off buying the off-brand rather than the mainstream fashion brands.
Kind of reminds of a certain PC vs Another brand war that still today is on-going, you purchase a lifestyle, the product, well...comes second.
>>The two hours following a walk were the most productive hours in everyone's day.
I agree, we have those walks too, mostly during spring/summer and autumn, usually initiated by co-workers though that likes to do it, and then others follows - inspired by their feelings of wellness and energy after the walks. I can highly recommend those walks you're referring to.
...I work at a large corporation with 150K+ coworkers, and albeit we have a time span where we're expected to be on the clock so to speak, out managers look more at the net results (KPI) of what we do and achieve rather than how many breaks we took. They're perfectly aware of it though, they will often say, well - these break interwall's could be you going to the bathroom, taking a break, or helping a colleague etc, we can't know for sure why you have so many breaks (I actually asked my manager this out of pure curiosity), and that's how he reasoned with it - because at our monthly development talks, he never mentions that I'm taking too many breaks, just how happy he is about my performance.
So I think Bradberry is onto something there.
But "breaks" takes on many shapes, for example - it might not count as a break when we talk with out colleagues during work about the new house, car, their kids, their gaming, my ideas or theirs - but they're actually breaks too. Our break layout is split into 3 parts, one small 15 minute break between morning and lunch, then lunch, and then another 15 minutes before we end our shift.
However, every person is different, and we have those who take "smoke breaks" for 5 minutes each hour, those don't take the longer 15 minute breaks, and prefer to do that instead.
I try to keep the 15 minutes, but admittedly sometimes it's 20+ minutes, 30 minutes and I get a really bad conscience and work like mad to get the work done, but then again - I have the energy to do so. But even despite this, I have some of our teams top performance numbers. We have overseas partners within the company, that literally get "whipped" if they don't put in 1 hour overtime, and skip breaks, but their "error" ratio on their tickets is through the roof, whereas we who have the "luxury" of many breaks. have some of the lowest error rates.
You identified problem that kids are unable to cope with adversity and your proposed solution is to further insulate them? How is that going to result in them growing up to become well-adjusted adults capable of coping with life? Kids eventually grow up and have to face adult life that is at best indifferent to your problems, and at worst cruel, mean, and full of unnecessary suffering.
Good parenting is the key. It's not our job to raise peoples kids, but it IS our job to find ways to project the masses from obvious abuse, it might not be ideal, but this is not a perfect world, and youtube is NOT your or my property. As it is now, it's basically just an entertainment platform made by their content creators, either for profit or for fun.
I'd like to live in a sensorship free world, that is my dream, yet as I get older, I realize we need some basic rules for things, for example - if we didn't have any kind of police, we'd basically be a society of survival-of-the-fittest and it'd be total anarchy. No, I don't always agree with the lawmakers, and I hate new rules as much as the next person in here.
But the bullying I've seen of kids, mostly BY other kids - tells me that there's certain media that we're not ready to handle properly yet, and we need some way of regulating it. If YouTube was open source, owned by the public, controlled by the public - it would be a different story, and maybe we'd have better ways of controlling the outcome of this kind of "overwhelming" success.
YouTube is truly victims of their own success, on one hand - they have massive server fees to pay for, on the other hand - they've got millions of entitled people who thinks that their services should remain free and uncensored. You really can't please them all.
I miss the "old" uncensored YouTube - but it ain't worth the life of a single kid, or adult for that matter.
But one of the major problems kids face today, is the endless onslaught of their peers who often will ridicule them, stalk them - too many times leading to possible suicide, because a kid can't handle snide comments as well as adults, will often hide this from their parents, and suffer in silence, shamed by their anonymous schoolmates and cyberbullies who also are kids, and don't quite understand how serious this is before suicide threats become real.
Personally, I think there should be an age-restriction on video uploads. And commenting should be something that could be in closed circuits only, like family and "approved" friends. Then it would be okay, much like a family album online with keys that only invited parties can get.
Where I work, (and I got the job at 40+, now in my 50's) we have an entirely different hiring policy and different techniques from almost every post above here. I read almost ALL of the above input, and I was not going to give my opinion in here, but after reading it all - I was wondering where all of that experience came from.
So this is what we do:
We don't care about your age, gender, preferences, race, religion, political beliefs, school background, grades etc. We just care about a few simple principles.
- Are you afraid of learning new things?
- Are you entirely honest? (Our hiring staff is VERY skilled at spotting someone who's not entirely honest).
- How do you fit in socially with others?
- Can you jump into something that seem impossible to solve, and admit you just can't do it, but will be humble enough to ask for help from your colleagues?
- Can you take responsibility and learn from your shortcomings and appreciate the talents of others? Admit your mistakes, and not be ashamed of it?
We don't care for the worlds fanciest resumé, we don't care about HR companies and hiring staff, we're the ones you're going to work next to every day of your life, we simply want to know WHOM we're sitting next to. You - as a person, not what you know or whom you knew.
We also use something called "mentoring technique", this means that someone in our team gets appointed to be your mentor during your hire here, our staff is you in the future, so we hope you adapt our mentality, not to point fingers at you and blame. We don't run the blame-culture here, we teach ourselves and learn from each other, very much self driven - and we're one of the biggest companies in the world.
This approach is immensely successful, because it doesn't matter to us what you knew when you came in, what matters to us is your willingness to adapt, drive yourself, your endless curiosity, your genuine interest in making life better for others (our end users), and see your colleagues as assets rather than the competition. Everyone work at their own pace, no one is whipped into reaching certain goals, they set their OWN goals.
This kind of freedom, makes people REALLY want to know what they're doing, because they take pride in having a team with this mentality, and no pressure from anyone encourages positivity and genuine interest in the craft they work with.
When I got the job, I was literally thinking, they must be joking - I did tell them the truth, I'm not that knowledgeable, I know SO many that I can't even compare myself to 1% of their skills, and I make mistakes ALL the time, but I OWN my work and my mistakes, and I'm never afraid to admit I was wrong, neither does my colleagues. We're open minded, totally ready for change - because our everyday consist basically of improvements and total change in some areas anyway, so we're used to that by now. We literally EAT re-organization for breakfast. But my colleagues have ONE thing in common, their passion for the company and their awesome colleagues.
I can't tell you where I work for obvious reasons, but right now - they're even expanding their staff of brand new coders, one of them is 55+ and have literally no coding experience. I came in too, knowing very little - years later, I've been told by my manager that I'm in the top 10 range, which I still find so hard to believe, but I take what I can get.
What I'm trying to tell you out there, with this wall of text above - is to just go for it if you dream of it, it's not impossible. Sure - it'll be DAMN hard, but challenges are fun, and that's probably why you would be interested in coding anyway, right? Age means nothing, attitude and passion is everything.
Blender, it's fully open source, free for everyone to use, for whatever purpose.
>What filaments do you like?
I love regular PLA, there are of course quality variations, but I've found that various colors have various temperature tolerances, too much to mention here, but the blue color PLA seems to be the most solid, and easiest to work with, gives the cleanest results. Not all blues are alike, the transparent ones tend to clog up the nozzles and I use those for transparent purposes, for example when I need a button on a device with a LED light behind it.
I like flexible filaments, but even they come in many variations, too many to mention, some are flexible, but won't flex "back" into their original form if they get flexed too much etc, I absolutely love the "glow-in-the-dark" filaments, I often use that for outlines and for special effects on various things - but they have their drawbacks too, such as being brittle and hard on the nozzles..
Resin printers tend to have the best surfaces of them all, but you still need to use some kind of solution to fixate them so they "dilute" the material, sort of "melt" them a little, you can also bake PLA in an oven around 100c to harden them, but they will shrink a little in size as the price for this.
You can achieve almost Resin like resolution on good commercial 3D printers, my flashforge can compete quite easily with a resin printer, but only when I make the printer print extremely slowly, I rarely need that as I usually print big - but i've made many tests, and it works, they're THAT good today, but it takes patience, learning to know the temperatures of the various filaments, and your printers nozzle quality play a part too, as well as your printers resolution of the stepper motors, accuracy etc. Don't get fooled into believing that a printer costing 10 x as much will give you better results, it's mostly up to you, experimentation and some patience.
For absolute accuracy, nothing beats a resin printer though. If you want to make jewellery models, a resin printer would be the way to go.
I love the speed of these 3D printers using Resin, but as a Long-time 3D printing fanatic, I never got one as they are messy, expensive (resin is still hideously expensive) and fairly toxic.
Normal PLA printing is slow, but not terribly slow for hobbyist, I can print a 14 x 14 x 14cm at 100my in less than 9 hours, and that's fairly speedy. If you ever want to have mass production of this, you can use it as a prop for injection molding later, and you can make as many copies as you want, dirt cheap.
PLA printers are a big hit with the consumers, just here where I live - our local hardware chain imports thousands of them every year because they're increasing in popularity, they're cheap, they're fairly easy to maintain now, the PLA filament is dirt-cheap but very environmentally friendly as it's just basically Corn Starch. You can have your commercial 3D printer next to your computer like you had your laser printer in the good old days, and have more fun than ever. I can't even imagine life without my little 3D printing workhorse now. Spare parts for the appliance that broke in the house? No problem. Last time I printed with flexible filament to make a couple of rubber fittings for my kitchen ventilator, the light fixture broke (it's over 30 years old), and the cover plastic that covers it, tabs broke. Took me 10-15 minutes to measure and design an improved flexible insert - 50 minutes to print with a traditional Fusion Filament printer, and done.
Same with my 3D characters, I've been wanting to hold those in my hands for 10+ years, and today it's as easy as a little patience. Takes way longer to order them somewhere and finally get them by mail. 3D printing speed issues isn't that much of an issue unless you're talking workshop speeds where you need it to meet the demands of visitors in eg. a store printing figurines or gimmicks on demand. Kind of like the old 1-hour photo for passports in the old days.
That said, I'd love a super speedy 3D printer (who wouldn't?) - but it has to be user friendly, non-messy and with cheap materials.
...to death for survival these days, anything goes it seems.
I'm older than 49 myself, and I def. do not trust general media, so I watch a lot of different media and make a "balanced" judgement based on observations from the various sources in order to figure out what "really" happens.
We've had numerous examples on how news-media can't be 100 percent trusted, for example - remember the independent journalist Tim Pool decided to see how it was in Sweden? Well, he traveled to the questionable areas that allegedly had lots of trouble, and he noticed that the police was following him around, warning him not to stick around.
Interestingly enough, that's not the story media in Sweden presented to the majority of the population on the national TV channel, they knew "nothing" of this, and denied everything, despite that - anyone who wanted could watch it on Tim Pool's youtube channel, uncut videos with 100% irrefutable evidence, because he was there, and filmed it all, nothing blurry, nothing cut or censored away, he just uncovered the pure reality.
And media lied it away, to make everything sound "Normal" to the Swedish population. From that day, those of us who wanted it - had clear evidence that it's being tampered with on a high level. To me - well, I suspected it all along, but - I had some kind of childish naive hope that in rich democratic countries like the Scandinavian countries, we would still be spared this, but no. Sadly not.
So who are we to trust? Trust no one - only your own down to earth judgement, don't buy the first story you hear, find a second opinion - and a third one, and absolutely NOT go by "popular opinion", always seek the truth, not opinions alone.
Yep, it's always "EVIL" when it's the other side spying. Now if they had total control themselves, they wouldn't cry "wolf" like this, but they'd shut up about it and tell the denizens to go back to their normal lives and live it as if nothing was afoot.
Truth is - we need open source processors and alternatives, so we have an alternative to big corporations that can be forced to make decisions based on the powers that be.
...there are PLENTY of Darkhat Youtube videos out there that will tell you in DETAIL how to do it, just with a little patience and 2 hours on your hands, you can do it to your OWN PHONE PLEASE just to get the idea of you being "protected" by a particular country out of your head, if you REALLY want to know - that is.
Anyway, I have a lot of smartphones, and I got the Huawei Pro 20 for the Camera, but what surprises me is how snappy it is in comparison to all the other phones, to me - that indicates less bloatware, and less processes bogging down the phone. I can have mine on 3 months in a row without the need to restart it, and it's still insanely snappy and smooth, can't say that for any other phone I've used, it even reports if there's a process somewhere that is drawing too much power during the time the particular process isn't being used for something I use, very nifty feature.
So this is just Government FUD. I love Murican's with all of my heart, they're an open minded people, who gladly gives more than they can afford (I've been there so many times), but their government - oh boy... something needs to happen there, fast.
Cell phones have been possible to listen in to, even by citizens (with some skills, and expensive equipment) for quite some time now.
The technology is the same that it has been using for the last 10-15 years, the encryption back then was too hard for that time, but today - with insanely strong GPU's and CPU's - heck...even FPGA's with a little specialized design - can crack that stream open like a tunnel wide gate, and there's even open source software so you can experiment with your "own" equipment and algorithms. Figure this - you can purchase a 2$ cellphone module complete with IMEI number, receiver/transceiver, data module, parser, encryption/decryption all-in-one-chips on eBay for the longest time. Did anyone really think these would have such processing capacity in 2018 that it couldn't be hacked today with our insane home computers (insane in comparison to 10+ years ago)?
There was even this instance where there were an old Nokia Telephone (33xx I think, not sure - but it's googleable), that had a bug that enabled you to get into monitoring mode, that phone was sought after for sinister purposes back then - and hard to find, but it was quite true.
How do I know? Because I spent most of my life in 3 scandinavian countries, and I can pretty much sum up the major differences, and what they have in common.
Norwegians: Very straightforward people, you sort of have to agree if something is funny, and you'll have to let them in on the joke, if you want to kid around. They're very much independent of E.U. for a reason, and that is because they have their own way of doing things. A word is a word, and there's never anything hidden behind it, they can also be a bit stale and boring when it comes to sarcasm and longer lasting jokes. They're fairly authoritarian but without the totalitarian style in them, they can loosen up quite a bit - generally likes to travel to Denmark to get wasted beyond recognition and make complete asses of themselves, and have an easy time understanding Swedish and Danish.
Danes: People with possibly the best sense of humor of all the Scandinavian countries (I'm Norwegian originally btw. so I might be biased here), but they generally never take themselves too seriously. One of the biggest trait Danes have is that if they really like you, they will take the jokes on you so far you'll go crying home wondering where you went wrong (I did for the longest time when new to Denmark), but 6 months later I realized they're really just masters of sarcasm and funny. Even their TV ads reflect this, if anyone can joke about themselves and anything, it's them. But when it comes down to brass tax (like money) the generic Dane changes in nature immediately, they take their personal economics seriously (My grandmother warned me about this before I moved to Denmark for 10+ years), and she was right, more than I'd ever care to admit. Danes in general will gladly be friendly with any strangers, but it'll take 3-6 years before you get "invited" into their private circle of friends and family. They might seem very open and free, but they're like...that on the surface, if you want to go deeper, you gotta fight and work for it. But then again, you probably have a very good friend. Their housing prices are through the roof, and overvalued in every single way, new players hardly have a chance of getting a foot in - without bringing the previous owners high evaluation and lifestyle with them, and paying for it later. Norwegians have this in common with them as well.
Swedes: These are supposed to be the neutral counterpart of the two, anyone who know just a little bit about history, know what happened to Norway during the second world war, but the Swedes are a bit ashamed of that, because they're a very open to everyone kind of people, and they are almost TOO open about that today, which is why there's trouble in paradise right now (clearly reflected by the rising Right wing over there), but the Swedes are like the Danes when it comes to long-term friendship...it generally takes a few years, but then you'll have a friend for life. However, Swedes are not that easy to impress - unlike the Danes they have this "thinking" way of everything, they literally overthink everything, this is why it's so hard to get a job in Sweden - but once you GOT a job, they will try everything else before letting you go - Danes, not so much, for the Dane it's all about how you blend in, for the Swede - it's all about what you bring to the table, and once you're in - you're gonna have a job for a VERY long time, as they tend to question themselves first, before questioning you. I'd say that the Swedes are the most Authoritarian of all the Scandinavians.
FInnish people: Oh boy, they're basically nothing like the Swedes, Danes or Norwegians. They are very direct (as the article suggest), don't like to small-talk too much, and they are VERY straightforward about basically everything. They're workhorses like NO ONE you've ever met. I've got some Finnish colleagues, known quite a lot of Finns, and you'll be pleasantly surprised that they're just as different from each other as the rest of the population, but they DO share this "seriousness
...I've lived in 3 countries in Europe, they all fight over the same thing.
Old timers remember they heydays and how "hard" it was to take the license, it was earned, not given etc... They tend to forget that there's a "maker" community today, that does at least as much technical stuff if not more than they ever did, and it's very hard to make the two meet. Old times despise the social media chat, because they see it too easy to just connect to the internet, and presto - you instantly chat with people all over the world.
To them - being a radio amateur means working hard to get some old school electronics theory, plus the mastery of morse code (which is actually pretty hard, it's easy to read on a piece of paper, but VERY hard to train the ear to listen to at 120 characters per minute), it was for me... I'm an "old timer" radio amateur myself, and I hardly use the radio anymore, I'm on the net like the rest of you - but I like to dabble in electronics, building robotics etc, and I feel it's sad that my fellow old timers have such a hard time adapting to the new times, especially when you can easily consider they where the pioneers of your "taken for granted" communications technology we enjoy today in such small formats.
I remember experimenting with my own BBS (Bulletin board system) which I set up with the help of a few transistors and a commodore 64 back in the early 80's when internet was relatively unknown. Then my fellow enthusiasts could leave messages to me or each other when I was at school. We even digitized images from scanning or video cameras, to send binaries or slow scan via the airwaves, that was our "instagram" back then.
But we did it - way before anyone else did. And fun times it was. But old timers (particularly way older than me) they just don't see it, and they don't "need" to see it, they will take their memories with them to the grave, good times were theirs, and they lived them to the fullest.
A pity really - because they have so much to give, so much to share, and yet - still - so much to learn.
...it's funny how you never actually see one of those around, anywhere.
I work for a large corporation, and people carry basically either all or 2 of 4 things:
- Their Apple or PC laptop.
- An Apple or Android phone.
I don't ever recall seeing even ONE of those surface laptop/table thingies anywhere, and I service most of the people's hardware, I don't even remember ONE single event when one of the coworkers came in with a surface, nor do I even see them in cafeterias, recreation rooms, workplaces, on the bus, train or anywhere.
I do however remember when I visited the PC store how sexy they always look, very sleek, well designed (don't like the fluffy looking keyboards that resemble the padding of a car door), but other than that - I always eyeball them, thinking....mmm i7...oooh in such a small package nice, errr..what sort of mobile version is that? And then I see the price tag (walks away, fast!) It's usually far up there in the clouds.
You gotta price these things so average people can afford them or even high-end users WANT to spend that kind of money on them. Because High-end users are usually very tech savvy and will think "hmm...for 4000 bucks I can get a super multimedia computer that I can do everything with", but with this thing...that basically is super thin and look great, will get me nowhere, but empty my wallet.
Slashdot Mirror
...how?
Simple. Do you remember back when traditional media was laughing so hard at the thought of downloading music? And when CD and traditional media was dying slowly, but surely?
Do you remember when news became more popular on the internet than the printed Traditional media?
Do you remember why Netflix succeeded? Because they put YOU in control of what you see and when you want to see it. Same with the original youtube, the idea was the little person being able to share their experiences, life, friends with the world. If they had an idea, they could produce it themselves and upload it, and it would instantly become available to everyone.
In traditional media - this kind of freedom would be unthinkable, simply because they are used to a controlled audience, professional actors, journalists and other media professionals - all one big payroll machine, a club of people who "made it" through the censorship. It was a comfortable club of a life with good pay, friends who had the same social status as you, had the same schooling as you, background as you - and a safe job in the spotlight or not (depending on the position) for life.
They had guaranteed funding, either from the government, or by advertisement where they had TOTAL control of what gets published or not, no competition whatsoever. This also meant they could basically decide what you'd like to watch, because there weren't other alternatives.
They also had a much more sinister power, the power of information distribution. Traditional media has always conveyed to the public that they represent neutralism and honest journalism, but history has shown us over and over again, it's paid media - paid by our officials and those with money enough to control the influence, and them being the trusted traditional media - they don't really want to give that power away, without a world war class fight, this has been a comfy place for a certain amount of people - over 100 years.
Now - in less than 10 years, all of this changed so fast that the big boys didn't even know what hit them, people stopped buying traditional media, because they had tons of new alternatives. Sure - you didn't get in-debt journalism, you often had to sift through 1000s of hours of amateur-garbage, but this grew too - and people soon realized they could earn money on their content too.
For traditional media - this is a disaster, they KNOW this is the final nail in the coffin, and they're prepared to fight tooth and nail to cling to life - and they're about to actually do that.
HOW?
Did you see what happened in E.U not one month ago? A certain law was passed that would change personal journalism, free media and almost every independent youtube channel for all future. Same with free media on the internet. Just because most people slept during the class, the bill passed and traditional media won big-time.
What traditional media haven't counted on though, is that they're essentially digging their own grave. With the onslaught of planned programming, planned advertisement, and mind numbingly stupid content... we as the public, just got a taste how freedom really tasted like (I'm talking about the early era You Tube), we know what it feels like to just watch whatever we feel like - live in the moment so to speak.
I for once, find it nearly impossible to watch TV after this, even listen to radio in my car. I never turn it on anymore, because I know it's just going to be endless amounts of Casino / betting ads or loan offers, and the little content there is - will be 80's reruns (albeit I love the 80's) it's cheaper to push, and they already own all the licenses to all of this music anyway, remember - they're basically owned by the people BEHIND traditional media.
But it's going to be a breath of fresh air - literally - just entertain ourselves with things we really should be doing, learning something, going outdoors, talk more with friends - and just watch whatever you want to, whenever you want to. I also have a HUGE Dvd collection,
...passwords and two factor authentication simply because they'd chose such simple passwords to remember.
People hate having to learn something complex to remember, even if it just takes the effort of putting a small note in your wallet for 4 days to help you remember, you'd be SHOCKED if you just knew what passwords even professionals choose, it's hopeless.
So what we did at our big corporate, was to implement an Password A.I guide engine that helps people avoid bad passwords, so it picks stuff from a HUGE database of simpleton passwords (you know, guitar1234567) etc. it will simply explain to people why their passwords are not very good (we're polite, so we don't tell them that theyr'e simple and ...essentially not very IT savvy, they're good at something else, right?)
People just want an easy life, most people working with computers as just a tool to get the job done, don't want a huge advanced routine to do their job, and when the password becomes a chore and hard to remember, it will stop them from doing their job, and since we're nagging people to change their password 4 times a year, with reminders that pop up every day for 14 days before it expires, people simply get seriously annoyed. And they will go through hellfire to find an easy to memorize password before they even try to train for a complex one (Here's a complex one for you, for those who simply don't get what that would be:
J4Al4&/rO1.P9DeErxL ) Yes, that's the kind of passwords you should use, even with a secondary two factor authentication device, and it's not hard to learn to remember it, sure - it's not as easy as guitar1234567, and it takes effort to learn it - but most people (if they just kept that note for a few days in the wallet, had to enter it 10 times a day) they WILL remember it, even the average Joe - and their personal security on the net would sky rocket in comparison.
But...people are ...simple.
It's of course based on Ubuntu, so credit is due where credit is due.
But that said, they made it look and feel better, more inclusive bells'n'whistles for life and fun, and of course everyday use. As an old 10+ year slackware user and a big fan of it, I was at some point going "I'm too old for this fixing the boat, compiling this and compiling that" life, and wanted the comfortable life of windows users without the disk trashing, endless registry garbage, and constant threat of viruses, Now - Linux is by far not free from worms, exploits and viruses, but since there's still not that many using it, it has the "Apple effect" of having very little malware to bother your every day life.
The functionality of Mint Linux is nothing short of amazing. I have boxes that have been going on for years, heck - I just moved my previous Mint linux installation from my older computer to a new one (always updating religiously though), but with completely new hardware, worked straight out of the box, even with the proprietary Nvidia drivers and steam gaming, everything was like before, all installations, years of fun stuff installed - just worked (try that with Windows!)
Mint Linux put the FUN back in Linux, it's still Linux with all the control you'd ever want over your (and yes, I say YOUR) operating system, but without the control of the "man" and "corporate", you're as free as you want to be, and can have all the fun Windows users are having (without the constant crashes and dish trashes).
So consider this a small but humble THANK YOU - to the ENTIRE Mint Linux team, every contributor - thanks a million for your efforts, making our lives so comfortable we almost take you for granted, this is just how GOOD a job you did.
You usually never hear the praise - just all the complaints, once you hear nothing - you can be pretty darn sure your job was insanely well done, because people tend to forget to say "THANKS" when they're just enjoying their experience, but something break? You'll have a queue of complaints, right there at your doorstep.
So again - THANK YOU!
...it wasn't because of their astonishing content,
but rather the fact your average Joe now had a way to say goodbye to AD's forever, well - almost forever, because Netflix is in certain parts of the world re-introducing advertisement into their subscription plans.
Youtube had a similar scheme, while it DID not become the subscription boom they've hoped for, it did gather a rather substantial amount of actually faithful subscribers (we're talking Youtube premium here), and it keeps growing. Yes - you can use ad-blockers, but let's face it, that doesn't pay anyone's bills, let alone the content creators.
Personally I have both, simply as a way to opt-out of all the onslaught of senseless, mind numbing repetitive irrelevant ads. A.I will always have an opinion on what you want or need, regardless of what you really think, this makes people scramble towards AD-free solutions, even if they have to pay for it, and I'm no different in that regards, I simply HATE ads. And that's coming from a guy who used to work in advertisement.
The reason they want to offer you "free anything" is because there really is no such things in this world as a free meal, if you want something for free, you won't get that - but you can accept being a slave of the consumer audience, meaning you accept certain chores (such as having to watch an ad) in order to get something in return, so - nothing for free here. But you'll soon find yourself tired to death over it, or buying stuff you don't really need - if you're weak.
Ad free - is the future. Your time is valuable, way more valuable than any wasted time on useless products you'll never need. Every minute you waste or being distracted by things that annoy you, serves you no good at all. But it does bring other people jobs, and money, while you suffer through it all - nothing is for free.
Your choice, essentially. Vote with your money!
We don't have any proof of it, but we can assume that ALL governments have some kind of "deals" with any major hardware maker, and if they don't want to play ball with who we call our "friends" today, then they're the evil ones, as always.
Huawei is only being targeted because they're so big, and it's a Chinese manufacturer, and a real threat to Apple and other major players elsewhere. It's a dirty game, but they're playing it against them because the "why not" factor, it's a dirty political game, nothing new - but consider the following, in case it was true:
Almost every component known to man, is being produced in China these days, complete chips - take the ever so popular ESP8266, ESP 32 and many other all-in-one chips that provide complete communication solutions, these chips are found inside millions of devices ALL over the world, and could very easily sport a back-door or two to sniff on the networks they serve (I'm in NO WAY accusing them of this), but if you were to point out someone just because they're an apparent product that everyone knows, you'd target the most obvious one that is known and popular with the population.
Nothing of this means that ANYONE have implemented backdoor technology that's widely available to any government, we KNOW of the ME inside the INTEL processors, and yet they're basically everywhere, also in China - so why don't we hear a public uproar against that then? Because we're the good guys? Says who?
You can pretty much assume that any mass produced hardware can be abused in one way or another, whether that was intended or not, that's an entirely different debate. I'm just getting SO sick and tired of these political FUD games that should be SO apparent to ANYONE thinking about it for just more than a few minutes. Stop buying into the FUD, buy what you want - and be smart about your personal safety instead.
If you truly want to know - get god at it, learn to code, learn to reverse engineer, get knowledge instead of walking into a cloud of populist hearsay, fake news and whatnot.
...All scrambling towards getting an cloud based gaming service up on running on their own flavor of the idea, has left out one big possible bottleneck they might not have thought of:
The Netflix problem! A huge problem Netflix faced when they had the problem with success, was bandwidth throttling. Netflix subscribers was a substantial load on every ISP's network, and while the idea of a cloud based subscription package - combined with the power of using server CPU's for the actual game processing is a good one, this is one that will come back to hunt and hit them big-time. History is going to repeat itself here.
The one company that get's the best deal with all ISP's and can provide them with enough funding to add the equipment needed to handle the massive increase in streaming loads, will be the ones to succeed with them. Wonder who get's that first?
...may not be to everyone's liking, and for my part - it's a PAIN to do what we do, and it costs tons of money too so it's a real problem, but here's what we do:
In most of Sweden, sorting your trash at home is MANDATORY. If you don't, you can get a fine billed to you for the extra work the recycling plant took sorting it for you, and it's usually am 80$ fine for each offense.
We have roughly 12 bins (2 major bins with 4 sections each), Metal, Plastics, Colored glass, Uncolored glass, Small cartoons, newspapers/ads, Food, batteries, lightbulbs, deposits, combustible and collectables (the collectables you'll have to call for, and they pick up like once a month or something).
It's crazy expensive too, I pay roughly 400$ a year for this "service" where I have to sort everything myself, yet - the recycling companies / garbies if you like... are fighting over the resources because to them, they're really valuable.
...because if everyone can "mod" the devices to let's say "outside" their designated frequency range, we're in for real trouble on the airwaves.
Before the non-radio amateur crowd thinks I'm on the "powers that be" side here, then I've got to tell you where I come from on this. I've been building and modifying radio transmission equipment pretty much all my life as an hobby, and a wet dream of mine as a kid, was to freely be able to build any kind of transmitter and receiver I wanted to, regardless of laws and regulations, but that's not very practical in the real world, the only way to do this legally (and even know what you're actually doing) is to become an electrical engineer with a degree in RF technology, or become an licensed radio amateur, why is that you might ask, you might even ask what the relevancy here is, well, it's not simple to explain - but I'll try my darnedest to explain it:
Imagine you have a piece of equipment that CAN go outside its designated range, and you mod it so you can transmit on a broader range, say - increasing the bandwidth so you can get more throughput and cover more frequency "ground" so to speak.
This can and will create all kinds of hell for existing communication devices, maybe even those used for emergency, alarm systems, medical equipment and much more.
The reason there's an requirement for a technical license to even be able to operate in certain bands (especially with modified devices, modified by you and other experimenters) is that through that technical knowledge you'll gain by becoming a licensed radio amateur, you'll learn how to deal with making filters to prohibit spurious emissions to leak through your own equipment, you'll also learn respect for design and how to avoid making serious mistakes on the airwaves, whether this is digital or simply as in the olden days "analog" with speech / Morse-code (which is very similar to digital transmissions, except, very slow and ..old), you'll respect the band-plans already put aside for experimental use (which you're free to use, under respect for the rules, as long as you actually know what you're doing).
Now, imagine you modified a transmitter to cover so much of the bands that you interfere with medical equipment in a nearby band (frequency), now we have a real problem on our hands that can actually cause lives to be in danger, even if you don't notice anything yourself. You'll be creating all kinds of confusion for those using this equipment, and eventually get caught by your country's FCC team who constantly monitor all frequencies for unauthorized traffic, interference etc. It's hard to explain this to laymen who doesn't know the technology behind this, it's no joke - there are entire careers made out of understanding RF spurious / parasitic emissions, especially those designed in SOHO devices that has to meet the strictest FCC rules in order to be released to the market. Even small modifications can create equipment to misbehave, and you'll have equipment that no longer meets the criteria for acceptable spurious emissions into our wide spectrum of band-plans.
Radio amateurs have for the longest time, been the pioneers of such technology, and there's a reason we're allowed to do experiments like this, because we're qualified to do so (not everyone of course, some I've met, sadly - doesn't even understand the basics, but - at least they had to go through a long course learning about the basics, so they'll at least keep within the legal boundaries of what they CAN and CAN NOT do on the air).
Now - modify the software of your routers ALL you want, this isn't the issue, the issue is when you start modifying your hardware (especially the RF part) to go beyond what it was designed to do, even if you're good at coding - doesn't qualify you to be a RF technician that fully understands this, and this can be a dangerous combo).
RF interference is a real thing, and it's dangerous - only proper knowledge can remedy this, and there must be certain requirements met to ha
There was a consumer test program done by our national television station, they tested various sunglasses and what got you the most for your money.
Interestingly enough, some of the fashion brands where actually protecting you less against the dangerous UV rays from the sun, than the 7$ dollar ones they got at our version of the dollar stores. So in fact, in this case - you where better off buying the off-brand rather than the mainstream fashion brands.
Kind of reminds of a certain PC vs Another brand war that still today is on-going, you purchase a lifestyle, the product, well ...comes second.
>>The two hours following a walk were the most productive hours in everyone's day.
I agree, we have those walks too, mostly during spring/summer and autumn, usually initiated by co-workers though that likes to do it, and then others follows - inspired by their feelings of wellness and energy after the walks. I can highly recommend those walks you're referring to.
...I work at a large corporation with 150K+ coworkers, and albeit we have a time span where we're expected to be on the clock so to speak, out managers look more at the net results (KPI) of what we do and achieve rather than how many breaks we took. They're perfectly aware of it though, they will often say, well - these break interwall's could be you going to the bathroom, taking a break, or helping a colleague etc, we can't know for sure why you have so many breaks (I actually asked my manager this out of pure curiosity), and that's how he reasoned with it - because at our monthly development talks, he never mentions that I'm taking too many breaks, just how happy he is about my performance.
So I think Bradberry is onto something there.
But "breaks" takes on many shapes, for example - it might not count as a break when we talk with out colleagues during work about the new house, car, their kids, their gaming, my ideas or theirs - but they're actually breaks too. Our break layout is split into 3 parts, one small 15 minute break between morning and lunch, then lunch, and then another 15 minutes before we end our shift.
However, every person is different, and we have those who take "smoke breaks" for 5 minutes each hour, those don't take the longer 15 minute breaks, and prefer to do that instead.
I try to keep the 15 minutes, but admittedly sometimes it's 20+ minutes, 30 minutes and I get a really bad conscience and work like mad to get the work done, but then again - I have the energy to do so. But even despite this, I have some of our teams top performance numbers. We have overseas partners within the company, that literally get "whipped" if they don't put in 1 hour overtime, and skip breaks, but their "error" ratio on their tickets is through the roof, whereas we who have the "luxury" of many breaks. have some of the lowest error rates.
You identified problem that kids are unable to cope with adversity and your proposed solution is to further insulate them? How is that going to result in them growing up to become well-adjusted adults capable of coping with life? Kids eventually grow up and have to face adult life that is at best indifferent to your problems, and at worst cruel, mean, and full of unnecessary suffering.
Good parenting is the key. It's not our job to raise peoples kids, but it IS our job to find ways to project the masses from obvious abuse, it might not be ideal, but this is not a perfect world, and youtube is NOT your or my property. As it is now, it's basically just an entertainment platform made by their content creators, either for profit or for fun.
I'd like to live in a sensorship free world, that is my dream, yet as I get older, I realize we need some basic rules for things, for example - if we didn't have any kind of police, we'd basically be a society of survival-of-the-fittest and it'd be total anarchy. No, I don't always agree with the lawmakers, and I hate new rules as much as the next person in here.
But the bullying I've seen of kids, mostly BY other kids - tells me that there's certain media that we're not ready to handle properly yet, and we need some way of regulating it. If YouTube was open source, owned by the public, controlled by the public - it would be a different story, and maybe we'd have better ways of controlling the outcome of this kind of "overwhelming" success.
YouTube is truly victims of their own success, on one hand - they have massive server fees to pay for, on the other hand - they've got millions of entitled people who thinks that their services should remain free and uncensored. You really can't please them all.
I miss the "old" uncensored YouTube - but it ain't worth the life of a single kid, or adult for that matter.
Fuck you and your rules, you goddamned spineless pussy.
...said Anonymous Coward.
...not only because of your "regular" suspects.
But one of the major problems kids face today, is the endless onslaught of their peers who often will ridicule them, stalk them - too many times leading to possible suicide, because a kid can't handle snide comments as well as adults, will often hide this from their parents, and suffer in silence, shamed by their anonymous schoolmates and cyberbullies who also are kids, and don't quite understand how serious this is before suicide threats become real.
Personally, I think there should be an age-restriction on video uploads. And commenting should be something that could be in closed circuits only, like family and "approved" friends. Then it would be okay, much like a family album online with keys that only invited parties can get.
Where I work, (and I got the job at 40+, now in my 50's) we have an entirely different hiring policy and different techniques from almost every post above here. I read almost ALL of the above input, and I was not going to give my opinion in here, but after reading it all - I was wondering where all of that experience came from.
So this is what we do:
We don't care about your age, gender, preferences, race, religion, political beliefs, school background, grades etc. We just care about a few simple principles.
- Are you afraid of learning new things?
- Are you entirely honest? (Our hiring staff is VERY skilled at spotting someone who's not entirely honest).
- How do you fit in socially with others?
- Can you jump into something that seem impossible to solve, and admit you just can't do it, but will be humble enough to ask for help from your colleagues?
- Can you take responsibility and learn from your shortcomings and appreciate the talents of others? Admit your mistakes, and not be ashamed of it?
We don't care for the worlds fanciest resumé, we don't care about HR companies and hiring staff, we're the ones you're going to work next to every day of your life, we simply want to know WHOM we're sitting next to. You - as a person, not what you know or whom you knew.
We also use something called "mentoring technique", this means that someone in our team gets appointed to be your mentor during your hire here, our staff is you in the future, so we hope you adapt our mentality, not to point fingers at you and blame. We don't run the blame-culture here, we teach ourselves and learn from each other, very much self driven - and we're one of the biggest companies in the world.
This approach is immensely successful, because it doesn't matter to us what you knew when you came in, what matters to us is your willingness to adapt, drive yourself, your endless curiosity, your genuine interest in making life better for others (our end users), and see your colleagues as assets rather than the competition. Everyone work at their own pace, no one is whipped into reaching certain goals, they set their OWN goals.
This kind of freedom, makes people REALLY want to know what they're doing, because they take pride in having a team with this mentality, and no pressure from anyone encourages positivity and genuine interest in the craft they work with.
When I got the job, I was literally thinking, they must be joking - I did tell them the truth, I'm not that knowledgeable, I know SO many that I can't even compare myself to 1% of their skills, and I make mistakes ALL the time, but I OWN my work and my mistakes, and I'm never afraid to admit I was wrong, neither does my colleagues. We're open minded, totally ready for change - because our everyday consist basically of improvements and total change in some areas anyway, so we're used to that by now. We literally EAT re-organization for breakfast. But my colleagues have ONE thing in common, their passion for the company and their awesome colleagues.
I can't tell you where I work for obvious reasons, but right now - they're even expanding their staff of brand new coders, one of them is 55+ and have literally no coding experience. I came in too, knowing very little - years later, I've been told by my manager that I'm in the top 10 range, which I still find so hard to believe, but I take what I can get.
What I'm trying to tell you out there, with this wall of text above - is to just go for it if you dream of it, it's not impossible. Sure - it'll be DAMN hard, but challenges are fun, and that's probably why you would be interested in coding anyway, right? Age means nothing, attitude and passion is everything.
>What software do you use for design?
Blender, it's fully open source, free for everyone to use, for whatever purpose.
>What filaments do you like?
I love regular PLA, there are of course quality variations, but I've found that various colors have various temperature tolerances, too much to mention here, but the blue color PLA seems to be the most solid, and easiest to work with, gives the cleanest results. Not all blues are alike, the transparent ones tend to clog up the nozzles and I use those for transparent purposes, for example when I need a button on a device with a LED light behind it.
I like flexible filaments, but even they come in many variations, too many to mention, some are flexible, but won't flex "back" into their original form if they get flexed too much etc, I absolutely love the "glow-in-the-dark" filaments, I often use that for outlines and for special effects on various things - but they have their drawbacks too, such as being brittle and hard on the nozzles..
Resin printers tend to have the best surfaces of them all, but you still need to use some kind of solution to fixate them so they "dilute" the material, sort of "melt" them a little, you can also bake PLA in an oven around 100c to harden them, but they will shrink a little in size as the price for this.
You can achieve almost Resin like resolution on good commercial 3D printers, my flashforge can compete quite easily with a resin printer, but only when I make the printer print extremely slowly, I rarely need that as I usually print big - but i've made many tests, and it works, they're THAT good today, but it takes patience, learning to know the temperatures of the various filaments, and your printers nozzle quality play a part too, as well as your printers resolution of the stepper motors, accuracy etc. Don't get fooled into believing that a printer costing 10 x as much will give you better results, it's mostly up to you, experimentation and some patience.
For absolute accuracy, nothing beats a resin printer though. If you want to make jewellery models, a resin printer would be the way to go.
I love the speed of these 3D printers using Resin, but as a Long-time 3D printing fanatic, I never got one as they are messy, expensive (resin is still hideously expensive) and fairly toxic.
Normal PLA printing is slow, but not terribly slow for hobbyist, I can print a 14 x 14 x 14cm at 100my in less than 9 hours, and that's fairly speedy. If you ever want to have mass production of this, you can use it as a prop for injection molding later, and you can make as many copies as you want, dirt cheap.
PLA printers are a big hit with the consumers, just here where I live - our local hardware chain imports thousands of them every year because they're increasing in popularity, they're cheap, they're fairly easy to maintain now, the PLA filament is dirt-cheap but very environmentally friendly as it's just basically Corn Starch. You can have your commercial 3D printer next to your computer like you had your laser printer in the good old days, and have more fun than ever. I can't even imagine life without my little 3D printing workhorse now. Spare parts for the appliance that broke in the house? No problem. Last time I printed with flexible filament to make a couple of rubber fittings for my kitchen ventilator, the light fixture broke (it's over 30 years old), and the cover plastic that covers it, tabs broke. Took me 10-15 minutes to measure and design an improved flexible insert - 50 minutes to print with a traditional Fusion Filament printer, and done.
Same with my 3D characters, I've been wanting to hold those in my hands for 10+ years, and today it's as easy as a little patience. Takes way longer to order them somewhere and finally get them by mail. 3D printing speed issues isn't that much of an issue unless you're talking workshop speeds where you need it to meet the demands of visitors in eg. a store printing figurines or gimmicks on demand. Kind of like the old 1-hour photo for passports in the old days.
That said, I'd love a super speedy 3D printer (who wouldn't?) - but it has to be user friendly, non-messy and with cheap materials.
...to death for survival these days, anything goes it seems.
I'm older than 49 myself, and I def. do not trust general media, so I watch a lot of different media and make a "balanced" judgement based on observations from the various sources in order to figure out what "really" happens.
We've had numerous examples on how news-media can't be 100 percent trusted, for example - remember the independent journalist Tim Pool decided to see how it was in Sweden? Well, he traveled to the questionable areas that allegedly had lots of trouble, and he noticed that the police was following him around, warning him not to stick around.
Interestingly enough, that's not the story media in Sweden presented to the majority of the population on the national TV channel, they knew "nothing" of this, and denied everything, despite that - anyone who wanted could watch it on Tim Pool's youtube channel, uncut videos with 100% irrefutable evidence, because he was there, and filmed it all, nothing blurry, nothing cut or censored away, he just uncovered the pure reality.
And media lied it away, to make everything sound "Normal" to the Swedish population. From that day, those of us who wanted it - had clear evidence that it's being tampered with on a high level. To me - well, I suspected it all along, but - I had some kind of childish naive hope that in rich democratic countries like the Scandinavian countries, we would still be spared this, but no. Sadly not.
So who are we to trust? Trust no one - only your own down to earth judgement, don't buy the first story you hear, find a second opinion - and a third one, and absolutely NOT go by "popular opinion", always seek the truth, not opinions alone.
Yep, it's always "EVIL" when it's the other side spying. Now if they had total control themselves, they wouldn't cry "wolf" like this, but they'd shut up about it and tell the denizens to go back to their normal lives and live it as if nothing was afoot.
Truth is - we need open source processors and alternatives, so we have an alternative to big corporations that can be forced to make decisions based on the powers that be.
...there are PLENTY of Darkhat Youtube videos out there that will tell you in DETAIL how to do it, just with a little patience and 2 hours on your hands, you can do it to your OWN PHONE PLEASE just to get the idea of you being "protected" by a particular country out of your head, if you REALLY want to know - that is.
Anyway, I have a lot of smartphones, and I got the Huawei Pro 20 for the Camera, but what surprises me is how snappy it is in comparison to all the other phones, to me - that indicates less bloatware, and less processes bogging down the phone. I can have mine on 3 months in a row without the need to restart it, and it's still insanely snappy and smooth, can't say that for any other phone I've used, it even reports if there's a process somewhere that is drawing too much power during the time the particular process isn't being used for something I use, very nifty feature.
So this is just Government FUD. I love Murican's with all of my heart, they're an open minded people, who gladly gives more than they can afford (I've been there so many times), but their government - oh boy... something needs to happen there, fast.
Cell phones have been possible to listen in to, even by citizens (with some skills, and expensive equipment) for quite some time now.
The technology is the same that it has been using for the last 10-15 years, the encryption back then was too hard for that time, but today - with insanely strong GPU's and CPU's - heck...even FPGA's with a little specialized design - can crack that stream open like a tunnel wide gate, and there's even open source software so you can experiment with your "own" equipment and algorithms. Figure this - you can purchase a 2$ cellphone module complete with IMEI number, receiver/transceiver, data module, parser, encryption/decryption all-in-one-chips on eBay for the longest time. Did anyone really think these would have such processing capacity in 2018 that it couldn't be hacked today with our insane home computers (insane in comparison to 10+ years ago)?
There was even this instance where there were an old Nokia Telephone (33xx I think, not sure - but it's googleable), that had a bug that enabled you to get into monitoring mode, that phone was sought after for sinister purposes back then - and hard to find, but it was quite true.
...from Scandinavians in general.
How do I know? Because I spent most of my life in 3 scandinavian countries, and I can pretty much sum up the major differences, and what they have in common.
Norwegians: Very straightforward people, you sort of have to agree if something is funny, and you'll have to let them in on the joke, if you want to kid around. They're very much independent of E.U. for a reason, and that is because they have their own way of doing things. A word is a word, and there's never anything hidden behind it, they can also be a bit stale and boring when it comes to sarcasm and longer lasting jokes. They're fairly authoritarian but without the totalitarian style in them, they can loosen up quite a bit - generally likes to travel to Denmark to get wasted beyond recognition and make complete asses of themselves, and have an easy time understanding Swedish and Danish.
Danes: People with possibly the best sense of humor of all the Scandinavian countries (I'm Norwegian originally btw. so I might be biased here), but they generally never take themselves too seriously. One of the biggest trait Danes have is that if they really like you, they will take the jokes on you so far you'll go crying home wondering where you went wrong (I did for the longest time when new to Denmark), but 6 months later I realized they're really just masters of sarcasm and funny. Even their TV ads reflect this, if anyone can joke about themselves and anything, it's them. But when it comes down to brass tax (like money) the generic Dane changes in nature immediately, they take their personal economics seriously (My grandmother warned me about this before I moved to Denmark for 10+ years), and she was right, more than I'd ever care to admit. Danes in general will gladly be friendly with any strangers, but it'll take 3-6 years before you get "invited" into their private circle of friends and family. They might seem very open and free, but they're like...that on the surface, if you want to go deeper, you gotta fight and work for it. But then again, you probably have a very good friend. Their housing prices are through the roof, and overvalued in every single way, new players hardly have a chance of getting a foot in - without bringing the previous owners high evaluation and lifestyle with them, and paying for it later. Norwegians have this in common with them as well.
Swedes: These are supposed to be the neutral counterpart of the two, anyone who know just a little bit about history, know what happened to Norway during the second world war, but the Swedes are a bit ashamed of that, because they're a very open to everyone kind of people, and they are almost TOO open about that today, which is why there's trouble in paradise right now (clearly reflected by the rising Right wing over there), but the Swedes are like the Danes when it comes to long-term friendship...it generally takes a few years, but then you'll have a friend for life. However, Swedes are not that easy to impress - unlike the Danes they have this "thinking" way of everything, they literally overthink everything, this is why it's so hard to get a job in Sweden - but once you GOT a job, they will try everything else before letting you go - Danes, not so much, for the Dane it's all about how you blend in, for the Swede - it's all about what you bring to the table, and once you're in - you're gonna have a job for a VERY long time, as they tend to question themselves first, before questioning you. I'd say that the Swedes are the most Authoritarian of all the Scandinavians.
FInnish people: Oh boy, they're basically nothing like the Swedes, Danes or Norwegians. They are very direct (as the article suggest), don't like to small-talk too much, and they are VERY straightforward about basically everything. They're workhorses like NO ONE you've ever met. I've got some Finnish colleagues, known quite a lot of Finns, and you'll be pleasantly surprised that they're just as different from each other as the rest of the population, but they DO share this "seriousness
...when someone just walks out with them, whoops - seems like I forgot to return those. "Roots Google Glasses".
...I've lived in 3 countries in Europe, they all fight over the same thing.
Old timers remember they heydays and how "hard" it was to take the license, it was earned, not given etc...
They tend to forget that there's a "maker" community today, that does at least as much technical stuff if not more than they ever did, and it's very hard to make the two meet. Old times despise the social media chat, because they see it too easy to just connect to the internet, and presto - you instantly chat with people all over the world.
To them - being a radio amateur means working hard to get some old school electronics theory, plus the mastery of morse code (which is actually pretty hard, it's easy to read on a piece of paper, but VERY hard to train the ear to listen to at 120 characters per minute), it was for me... I'm an "old timer" radio amateur myself, and I hardly use the radio anymore, I'm on the net like the rest of you - but I like to dabble in electronics, building robotics etc, and I feel it's sad that my fellow old timers have such a hard time adapting to the new times, especially when you can easily consider they where the pioneers of your "taken for granted" communications technology we enjoy today in such small formats.
I remember experimenting with my own BBS (Bulletin board system) which I set up with the help of a few transistors and a commodore 64 back in the early 80's when internet was relatively unknown. Then my fellow enthusiasts could leave messages to me or each other when I was at school. We even digitized images from scanning or video cameras, to send binaries or slow scan via the airwaves, that was our "instagram" back then.
But we did it - way before anyone else did. And fun times it was. But old timers (particularly way older than me) they just don't see it, and they don't "need" to see it, they will take their memories with them to the grave, good times were theirs, and they lived them to the fullest.
A pity really - because they have so much to give, so much to share, and yet - still - so much to learn.
...it's funny how you never actually see one of those around, anywhere.
I work for a large corporation, and people carry basically either all or 2 of 4 things:
- Their Apple or PC laptop.
- An Apple or Android phone.
I don't ever recall seeing even ONE of those surface laptop/table thingies anywhere, and I service most of the people's hardware, I don't even remember ONE single event when one of the coworkers came in with a surface, nor do I even see them in cafeterias, recreation rooms, workplaces, on the bus, train or anywhere.
I do however remember when I visited the PC store how sexy they always look, very sleek, well designed (don't like the fluffy looking keyboards that resemble the padding of a car door), but other than that - I always eyeball them, thinking....mmm i7...oooh in such a small package nice, errr..what sort of mobile version is that? And then I see the price tag (walks away, fast!) It's usually far up there in the clouds.
You gotta price these things so average people can afford them or even high-end users WANT to spend that kind of money on them. Because High-end users are usually very tech savvy and will think "hmm...for 4000 bucks I can get a super multimedia computer that I can do everything with", but with this thing...that basically is super thin and look great, will get me nowhere, but empty my wallet.