If you need open, Linux-based and hackable, try getting a Jolla. http://jolla.com/
It is not available in US yet, and it's a bit pricy, but it's being developed at a good pace, and I hope it will get there. I'll get one when I retire my current phone, just because Google is closing up Android more and more with each release.
I wonder how Jolla would cope with low-end hardware like in this 35$ phone. It's supposedly faster than recent Androids on same hardware, not sure how low can you go though.
GPS is a RECEIVER UNIT ONLY. Unless your phone keeps GPS always on and transmits your GPS location via wireless or mobile connection, GPS is useless for tracking.
And government, your network provider and emergency services can track your phone just fine without GPS by using triangulation and comparing signal strengths from several mobile towers surrounding you.
Slashdot of all places should know the difference.
Hackable- I can install Debian on it and tweak the engine to play mp3s.
Insecure- Some asshat will ruin your day because the vendor doesn't provide timely patches, or the patches they provide make things worse so you cannot install them, or there is no way to patch things at all, or it's so tedious nobody does it.
Like they "took care" of Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians, Chechens, Tatars, Hungarians, Germans, Poles, lots of other people who weren't slavs but weren't liked by Stalin. Millions of them ended up dead in Siberia.
Be glad that Russia never reached as far as Western Europe. Not for the lack of trying though... They planned to "bring the communism to Europe on the tips of bayonets" since 1920s, but their hands were too short. Oh, and then there was this guy Hitler who got 20 million of them killed... And then there were nukes.
Yes, in theory government should check the power of corporations. However, in most capitalist democracies sooner or later corporations gain enough power and influence and governments stop serving people and starts serving interests of big business.
That happens especially easily in small countries when huge multinationals come in. Or in places like USA where lobbying (aka bribes for politicians) is fully legal and two party system makes it impossible to get the corrupt politicians out of government.
I used to believe that communism doesn't work. Well, it doesn't. But what they forgot to tell us is that capitalist democracies don't work that well either... They degenerate into corporate oligarchies...
Ads are demanded by business, espcially big business. It doesn't matter if society wants ads, if ads are harmful by distorting society's views, creating false demand (see broken window fallacy), or at least wasting everyone's time.
If corporations pay for ads, ads will happen. And corporate money matters much more than society does in today's world.
Sorry for late response, but where did I say "blame the worker"?
I did point out that IMO main causes of accidents are stress,fatigue,haste and inexperience/incompetence/lack of training and "gung-ho" attitude.
Stress, fatigue and haste are mostly down to failed project management- workers are pushed to do long hours, and frustrated or stressed because of lack of progress or bad management or low pay. This is all down to management. Lack of training/inexperience/incompetence is also quite often a management failure- either you train your people, or you don't give them tasks they are not ready to cope with. Gung-ho attitude is mainly cultural or youth thing. It's only down to worker if they should have known better, and decided to cut corners themselves without any reason.
And I do believe safety equipment should be available when the occasion calls for it. Although I have done my share of soldering without feeling the need to wear glasses- but there weren't any people around me to bump into me or disturb me.
Yes, wrap everything in red tape and "health and safety", wear a helmet and a high visibility jacket all the time inside the university and even going to bed... That's the answer. Oh, and more stupid courses on how not to break your neck sitting at a desk.
Labs are more dangerous, because they are doing non-standard groundbreaking stuff in the labs, not some conveyor repetitive stuff that people have been doing for 100 of years and every move is known. That's why it's a lab and not a factory- you do risky unproven stuff there. Also, you get young hotshot students/postdocs working in labs, not professionals with experience and a mortgage and a family, so they are more accident prone as well.
I'm not working in a lab, but in my experience accidents happen in following circumstances:
* People are too tired or stressed out.
* People are being rushed too much.
* People don't know what they are doing.
* Well, small number of "Hold my beer and watch this" moments. I guess students are somewhat more prone to those.
So if you want less accidents to happen, make working hours reasonable first (I know post-docs and students in universities work insane hours). And train them better. Of course safety equipment should be available when needed. But more red tape is not the answer, and getting higher-ups involved will wrap everything in so much red tape that getting anything done will require even more hours and frustration, probably leading to more accidents.
I cannot survive without mc as well. First thing I install on a new Linux machine. And I judge distros based on if they ship mc with base distro or if I need to get it off the net:) Configuring network without mc is a pain.
And I do install Far Manager first thing on any windows machine I run across as well.
My habit probably comes back from old DOS and Volkov Commander days... Two panels, Text User Interface, F-key shortcuts for everything and efficient operation without mouse was quite a good way to develop user interface. Current GUIs are horrible if you need to use them without a mouse.
There are several JavaEE servers that are open source, Jboss and Glassfish are the biggest two. As far as I remember, Glassfish is the reference implementation. It's as open-source as it can be.
Or are you talking about Technology Compatibility Kits? Or Java trademark? Development model itself? Or what?
Radeon performance increases by ~20% in each new Mesa release. I think it should be ~60-80% Windows performance with Mesa 10 and Linux 3.12. It still doesn't support OpenGL 4.x, but it's getting quite good. Latest Mesa also has VDPAU video decoding acceleration (still a bit buggy), better power management, PRIME switching between integrated/discrete GPU also works. Unfortunatelly no crossfire yet.
Given that I don't play latest and greatest games (there are plenty of good 3 year old games), performance is sufficient for me.
While I've seen exceptional incompetence in Government officials, I've seen things not much better in big corporations. They are a bit better since they kinda need to support themselves, but not by much.
Management is ncompetent- check
Feuds between departments- check
Covery your arse attitude to everything- check
Lots of red tape and internal regulations- check
Endless meetings- check
And I can definitely use "frustration" as a word describing my experience in one of the places where I tried to "cut through the rubbish" and get things done. Right now I don't think there is much difference between government and big corporations- both are big organizations with way too much power to screw with people's lives.
While the world watches the researchers and tourists being "rescued", these guys stay to save the ship if that is at all possible. These are the guys who are doing all the work and should be getting all of the attention and respect they deserve.
Before you start reading anything, do read Sagan's Demon-Haunted World first. It's a good introduction into telling lies and bullshit apart from stuff you can believe. I think scepticism and logic and scientific method are very lacking from today's education and peoples minds. This book takes a small step in fixing that.
As for other books worth reading- other comments have plenty of good suggestions.
Hmm, TOR is a nice project and all, but it has its benefits and drawbacks. I think IETF need to give quite a bit of thought before adopting some technology as a standard.
I'm all for anonymous communication with encryption though. I hate what corporations and governments are doing to the internet. I do believe internet is the most important human discovery since fire, and its freedoms need to be preserved...
There are plenty of alternatives to the official Google App Store.
I'm not sure if it's a good thing they removed it from the official store or not. If it was up to me I'd probably allow it with big red letters saying "THIS WILL VOID YOUR WARRANTY AND MIGHT BRICK YOUR PHONE". OTOH people installing stuff from official Google App Store don't expect these things to happen, so maybe it's a good thing for the masses that this app was removed... And tech-savy people will find ways to get Cyanogen installed anyway.
Who in their right mind could trust USA? Unicorns are more real than trust in USA. Spying, 2 wars based on lies and deceit, lots of profiteering at everyone's expense, patent trolling and other IP based litigation nonsense, shoving harmful legislation down everyones throats- all of that is coming from US.
Well, unless it's "trust" as in "I trust US to screw everyone at every opportunity".
Even though time and time again studies show that well rested employees are more productive, people in USA keep working longer hours with fewer holidays. And that is the reason for 80% of those last minute flights.
Why cannot the state mandate that each employee gets X days of holiday per year guaranteed, and is forced to take them? That's how it works in quite a few countries in Europe.
I wish there were more sites that doing Linux benchmarks than Phoronix.
Or if not, I wish more sites would benchmark workloads that are more than some synthetics, office/browser use, transcoding and games.
What about the things software developers have to deal with day-to-day? Application/web server performance? IDE performance? Compiler performance? Database performance? LibreOffice performance? Interpreter/VM performance for different languages? Latency/performance of variuous desktop environments, GNOME, KDE, XFCE? Performance of various servers- FTP, email, Samba etc.?
Phoronix does some of that, but nowhere near enough.
I just wanted to say that I'm on AAISP and it does not block anything. It does not use IWF filters, nor any blocklists as far as I know.
And most of the big ISPs that block stuff do that because of "gentleman's agreement", not because of explicit court orders. So basically they do it because they didn't have the balls to contest/refuse the requests by special interest groups.
And AAISP is the only ISP I know where you can get support via IRC channel. They do limit internet usage, but increasing your non-working hours limits is very cheap, and I never max them out anyway. Other than that, I'm very happy with AAISP. Oh, and they have IPv6!
Get the one from F-Droid. There is an open-source package repository and it has a bunch of useful open-source apps for Android.
You can be quite sure whatever you get from F-Droid is not an ad-ladden spyware. It doesn't have many apps, but there are some very good ones, and signal-to-noise ratio is much better than official app store.
Well, in case you didn't get the memo, the definition of World Wide Web has changed dramatically since the 1990s.
World Wide Web is no longer about seeing pages to present you with information. It's about running applications to give you functionality. This effectively turned the web browser into a not-so-thin application client.
I believe this whole thing happened because Microsoft had control of what gets installed on desktop for a long while, and the only application-client technology installed on all machines was a web browser. If all machines were shipped with an X server or a VNC client or some other application-client technology, maybe things could have been different. But we are where we are, and because of that features like Canvas, HTML5, WebGL, NaCl, very fast JavaScript JIT engines get added to the browser to make it more efficiant APPLICATION client, not a page browser.
Slashdot Mirror
If you need open, Linux-based and hackable, try getting a Jolla. http://jolla.com/
It is not available in US yet, and it's a bit pricy, but it's being developed at a good pace, and I hope it will get there. I'll get one when I retire my current phone, just because Google is closing up Android more and more with each release.
I wonder how Jolla would cope with low-end hardware like in this 35$ phone. It's supposedly faster than recent Androids on same hardware, not sure how low can you go though.
--Coder
GPS is a RECEIVER UNIT ONLY. Unless your phone keeps GPS always on and transmits your GPS location via wireless or mobile connection, GPS is useless for tracking.
And government, your network provider and emergency services can track your phone just fine without GPS by using triangulation and comparing signal strengths from several mobile towers surrounding you.
--Coder
Slashdot of all places should know the difference.
Hackable- I can install Debian on it and tweak the engine to play mp3s.
Insecure- Some asshat will ruin your day because the vendor doesn't provide timely patches, or the patches they provide make things worse so you cannot install them, or there is no way to patch things at all, or it's so tedious nobody does it.
--Coder
New gedit is completely unusable. I abandoned GNOME years ago in favour of XFCE, but I kept using gedit when I needed an editor with a GUI.
Now even that is useless, and I've switched to kate. Maybe I should give geany a shot...
--Coder
Like they "took care" of Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians, Chechens, Tatars, Hungarians, Germans, Poles, lots of other people who weren't slavs but weren't liked by Stalin. Millions of them ended up dead in Siberia.
Be glad that Russia never reached as far as Western Europe. Not for the lack of trying though... They planned to "bring the communism to Europe on the tips of bayonets" since 1920s, but their hands were too short. Oh, and then there was this guy Hitler who got 20 million of them killed... And then there were nukes.
I agree, do go and read some history books
--Coder
Yes, in theory government should check the power of corporations. However, in most capitalist democracies sooner or later corporations gain enough power and influence and governments stop serving people and starts serving interests of big business.
:)
That happens especially easily in small countries when huge multinationals come in. Or in places like USA where lobbying (aka bribes for politicians) is fully legal and two party system makes it impossible to get the corrupt politicians out of government.
I used to believe that communism doesn't work. Well, it doesn't. But what they forgot to tell us is that capitalist democracies don't work that well either... They degenerate into corporate oligarchies...
Sorry for the rant
--Coder
Ads are demanded by business, espcially big business. It doesn't matter if society wants ads, if ads are harmful by distorting society's views, creating false demand (see broken window fallacy), or at least wasting everyone's time.
If corporations pay for ads, ads will happen. And corporate money matters much more than society does in today's world.
--Coder
Sorry for late response, but where did I say "blame the worker"?
I did point out that IMO main causes of accidents are stress,fatigue,haste and inexperience/incompetence/lack of training and "gung-ho" attitude.
Stress, fatigue and haste are mostly down to failed project management- workers are pushed to do long hours, and frustrated or stressed because of lack of progress or bad management or low pay. This is all down to management. Lack of training/inexperience/incompetence is also quite often a management failure- either you train your people, or you don't give them tasks they are not ready to cope with. Gung-ho attitude is mainly cultural or youth thing. It's only down to worker if they should have known better, and decided to cut corners themselves without any reason.
And I do believe safety equipment should be available when the occasion calls for it. Although I have done my share of soldering without feeling the need to wear glasses- but there weren't any people around me to bump into me or disturb me.
--Coder
Yes, wrap everything in red tape and "health and safety", wear a helmet and a high visibility jacket all the time inside the university and even going to bed... That's the answer. Oh, and more stupid courses on how not to break your neck sitting at a desk.
Labs are more dangerous, because they are doing non-standard groundbreaking stuff in the labs, not some conveyor repetitive stuff that people have been doing for 100 of years and every move is known. That's why it's a lab and not a factory- you do risky unproven stuff there. Also, you get young hotshot students/postdocs working in labs, not professionals with experience and a mortgage and a family, so they are more accident prone as well.
I'm not working in a lab, but in my experience accidents happen in following circumstances:
* People are too tired or stressed out. * People are being rushed too much. * People don't know what they are doing. * Well, small number of "Hold my beer and watch this" moments. I guess students are somewhat more prone to those.
So if you want less accidents to happen, make working hours reasonable first (I know post-docs and students in universities work insane hours). And train them better. Of course safety equipment should be available when needed. But more red tape is not the answer, and getting higher-ups involved will wrap everything in so much red tape that getting anything done will require even more hours and frustration, probably leading to more accidents.
--Coder
I cannot survive without mc as well. First thing I install on a new Linux machine. And I judge distros based on if they ship mc with base distro or if I need to get it off the net :) Configuring network without mc is a pain.
And I do install Far Manager first thing on any windows machine I run across as well.
My habit probably comes back from old DOS and Volkov Commander days... Two panels, Text User Interface, F-key shortcuts for everything and efficient operation without mouse was quite a good way to develop user interface. Current GUIs are horrible if you need to use them without a mouse.
--Coder
I think if you do computations, these things should help as well. As far as I know, they should be on Java roadmap somewhere already...
--Coder
Java itself is open-source already- OpenJDK.
There are several JavaEE servers that are open source, Jboss and Glassfish are the biggest two. As far as I remember, Glassfish is the reference implementation. It's as open-source as it can be.
Or are you talking about Technology Compatibility Kits? Or Java trademark? Development model itself? Or what?
--Coder
Radeon performance increases by ~20% in each new Mesa release. I think it should be ~60-80% Windows performance with Mesa 10 and Linux 3.12. It still doesn't support OpenGL 4.x, but it's getting quite good. Latest Mesa also has VDPAU video decoding acceleration (still a bit buggy), better power management, PRIME switching between integrated/discrete GPU also works. Unfortunatelly no crossfire yet.
Given that I don't play latest and greatest games (there are plenty of good 3 year old games), performance is sufficient for me.
--Coder
AFAIK authors had to fork and rename it to "Jenkins" after Oracle filed for trademark for original name "Hudson".
I hate Oracle with passion, although they seem to be doing OK job with Java.
--Coder
While I've seen exceptional incompetence in Government officials, I've seen things not much better in big corporations. They are a bit better since they kinda need to support themselves, but not by much.
Management is ncompetent- check
Feuds between departments- check
Covery your arse attitude to everything- check
Lots of red tape and internal regulations- check
Endless meetings- check
And I can definitely use "frustration" as a word describing my experience in one of the places where I tried to "cut through the rubbish" and get things done. Right now I don't think there is much difference between government and big corporations- both are big organizations with way too much power to screw with people's lives.
--Coder
While the world watches the researchers and tourists being "rescued", these guys stay to save the ship if that is at all possible. These are the guys who are doing all the work and should be getting all of the attention and respect they deserve.
--Coder
Before you start reading anything, do read Sagan's Demon-Haunted World first. It's a good introduction into telling lies and bullshit apart from stuff you can believe. I think scepticism and logic and scientific method are very lacking from today's education and peoples minds. This book takes a small step in fixing that.
As for other books worth reading- other comments have plenty of good suggestions.
--Coder
Hmm, TOR is a nice project and all, but it has its benefits and drawbacks. I think IETF need to give quite a bit of thought before adopting some technology as a standard.
I'm all for anonymous communication with encryption though. I hate what corporations and governments are doing to the internet. I do believe internet is the most important human discovery since fire, and its freedoms need to be preserved...
--Coder
There are plenty of alternatives to the official Google App Store.
I'm not sure if it's a good thing they removed it from the official store or not. If it was up to me I'd probably allow it with big red letters saying "THIS WILL VOID YOUR WARRANTY AND MIGHT BRICK YOUR PHONE". OTOH people installing stuff from official Google App Store don't expect these things to happen, so maybe it's a good thing for the masses that this app was removed... And tech-savy people will find ways to get Cyanogen installed anyway.
--Coder
Who in their right mind could trust USA? Unicorns are more real than trust in USA. Spying, 2 wars based on lies and deceit, lots of profiteering at everyone's expense, patent trolling and other IP based litigation nonsense, shoving harmful legislation down everyones throats- all of that is coming from US.
Well, unless it's "trust" as in "I trust US to screw everyone at every opportunity".
--Coder
Even though time and time again studies show that well rested employees are more productive, people in USA keep working longer hours with fewer holidays. And that is the reason for 80% of those last minute flights.
Why cannot the state mandate that each employee gets X days of holiday per year guaranteed, and is forced to take them? That's how it works in quite a few countries in Europe.
--Coder
I wish there were more sites that doing Linux benchmarks than Phoronix.
Or if not, I wish more sites would benchmark workloads that are more than some synthetics, office/browser use, transcoding and games.
What about the things software developers have to deal with day-to-day? Application/web server performance? IDE performance? Compiler performance? Database performance? LibreOffice performance? Interpreter/VM performance for different languages? Latency/performance of variuous desktop environments, GNOME, KDE, XFCE? Performance of various servers- FTP, email, Samba etc.?
Phoronix does some of that, but nowhere near enough.
--Coder
Hello,
I just wanted to say that I'm on AAISP and it does not block anything. It does not use IWF filters, nor any blocklists as far as I know.
And most of the big ISPs that block stuff do that because of "gentleman's agreement", not because of explicit court orders. So basically they do it because they didn't have the balls to contest/refuse the requests by special interest groups.
And AAISP is the only ISP I know where you can get support via IRC channel. They do limit internet usage, but increasing your non-working hours limits is very cheap, and I never max them out anyway. Other than that, I'm very happy with AAISP. Oh, and they have IPv6!
--Coder
Get the one from F-Droid. There is an open-source package repository and it has a bunch of useful open-source apps for Android.
You can be quite sure whatever you get from F-Droid is not an ad-ladden spyware. It doesn't have many apps, but there are some very good ones, and signal-to-noise ratio is much better than official app store.
--Coder
Well, in case you didn't get the memo, the definition of World Wide Web has changed dramatically since the 1990s.
World Wide Web is no longer about seeing pages to present you with information. It's about running applications to give you functionality. This effectively turned the web browser into a not-so-thin application client.
I believe this whole thing happened because Microsoft had control of what gets installed on desktop for a long while, and the only application-client technology installed on all machines was a web browser. If all machines were shipped with an X server or a VNC client or some other application-client technology, maybe things could have been different. But we are where we are, and because of that features like Canvas, HTML5, WebGL, NaCl, very fast JavaScript JIT engines get added to the browser to make it more efficiant APPLICATION client, not a page browser.
--Coder