For the past 10 years we've been buying computers and phones loaded with useless crapware. Why should now be any different, and also what makes you think any other company is any different?... Unfortunately they come back when you do an OS upgrade because the apps themselves are part of the OS image.
That's how it's different. If you get a new computer loaded with crapware, you can still uninstall it within Windows, or just reinstall the OS entirely if you wish. With the Android crapware, you can't uninstall them, and if the phone has a locked bootloader, you can't replace the OS either. It's very much a question of how much control you have over what runs on your device.
Why not? To take the US as an example, the per capita GDP has increased more than three-fold since the 1950s. That means that it should easily be possible for a population with a 40/90 productive lifespan to sustain itself.
Of course, this assumes that the increased productivity has translated directly to increased wealth for the average person. But that not being the case means you have a wealth distribution problem, not one of resource constraints.
On the one hand, I kind of agree, but on the other hand if the problem is to transmit a file securely your first thought really shouldn't be what kind of file type it is.
I think the difference is more fundamental - it's to do with how you perceive the system. Someone who sees files as being closely connected to the programs that work with them is more likely to consider built-in encryption features first, while someone who sees files as just being a bunch of bytes would consider a generic approach first. IMO, someone with a Unix background is more likely to fall into the latter category.
You are wrong. RTFA... they state directly that JTAG debuggers would work on this. The idea is that JTAG debuggers are expensive. Some are
Which is a terrible defence when you're talking about a single key used for the entire industry (it has to be burned into the CPU, so good luck updating it.)
Hey, why make it human readable at all? We could encode the program in instructions of word each, and limit the no. of available registers so that they could be represented by a simple 6-bit integer. We could even generate such code from the existing, inefficient code using a compiler...
But contrary to python or ruby code, for example, most Java code is not written by hand.
If most of the code is generated, then the language is broken - the generation should be integrated into the compiler, so as to both formalize the rules of generation, and also to reduce the amount of code that needs to be read when debugging. A good example of this is the property syntax in C# - you can just define it as {get; set;} and the compiler fills in the boiler-plate. Even C's macros are superior to the Java approach of just dumping the generated code among the rest of the source.
I've wondered for a while if I could hook up an Arduino or something to my old minicomputer keyboard and use it. Probably even more complicated and know nothing about coding it:( Sure would be fun, it is an awesome keyboard (and weapon like that IBM) 32 function keys would be cool too. Hmm, might it be simpler since the keyboard is already expecting a computer to interpet for it?
The tricky part is getting it to understand the old keyboard protocol. If it's a standardized one, it shouldn't be too hard, otherwise you'd need to reverse engineer it (hope you have a logic analyzer or are handy with a 'scope). Once that's done, the rest should be pretty easy - the standard library* contains functions for simulating a USB keyboard, although I believe the Teensy microcontrollers are more popular for USB HID applications.
* Note that this only works with some of the Arduino devices, and notably not the Uno.
For PC parts, the standard needed for full compatibility can be boiled down a single name, sometimes accompanied by a version number. e.g. RAM is DDR3, CPU socket is AM3+, drives are SATA rev. 3, graphics cards are PCIe x16, USB3, etc. These are easy for consumers to understand because all of the relevant information for inter-compatibility can be stored in a short, memorable string. This can be contrasted with power supplies, where you need to look at the power rating, number of SATA connectors, 6 and 8 pin connectors, motherboard connector, etc. (For power supplies this is largely mitigated by almost all the differences being obvious the moment you take it out of the box, as well as most people only needing a few SATA connectors and maybe one connector for their graphics card.)
Unless there are very clear diagrams on the website to show which models support which features, there will be considerable confusion, and most people will have to assume the minimal feature set to play it safe.
Just because an organization is privately owned, doesn't mean they get a free pass from health and safety regulations. In other words, I'm saying the requirement for vaccinations shouldn't just be a matter of policy (for public schools), it should be a legal requirement for all schools.
You know what I've noticed? We're no less reliable, overall, than the bank was. Yes we have issues, but they tend to be noticed, and fixed, much much faster. When you change everything all at once you run the risk of not being able to figure out what broke when inevitably something does. Rollback is painful because you have so many interdependent changes - in the end you have to pull the whole release to avoid one small issue in a single module. When you roll frequently the scale of change is small so isolating the bug is trivial, and rolling it back the same. Now of course there are huge differences in risk when you're handling people's money vs their cat photos, but I think the view that people working on an agile schedule don't care about stability, and that the only way to achieve stability is through reducing the frequency of change, is demonstrably wrong.
This is something that all Gentoo users know, either intuitively or from experience. Gentoo is an interesting case study as it's a rolling release distro (so no discrete releases) where updates have a non-trivial cost (compile time), relative to other distros. The result of this is that users delay non-critical updates significantly, which means that the Gentoo community has a fair bit of experience on the trade-offs of different update granularities. (I believe most people follow a weekly cycle.)
The short version is that the more time passes between upgrades, the more likely a bug is to occur and the more difficult it can be to identify and fix. You can upgrade as often as you'd like, but the longer you put those upgrades off the more maintenance debt accumulates, and eventually you might not have a choice if a security fix is only released for newer versions.
So parents can't treat their kids like "property", but the government can?
Not vaccinating your kids is stupid. But forcing people to do it to send their kids to public school, then forcing them to attend said public school unless they're rich enough to pay for a private school, is class warfare. I hope these states have charter schools and/or a voucher program.
Why should private schools get a pass? If kids not being vaccinated is a health risk (to themselves and their peers), then that requirement should be applied to all kids attending school.
Why is the Libertarian view on this particular narrow situation not the correct view?
Put simply, it's the result of black and white thinking. Pure libertarianism is impractical (consumer protection is a good thing to have), but so are excessively regulated systems (nothing will ever improve). What you really want is a compromise between the two.
The legacy industry is overregulated in that the number of taxis is artificially limited. Uber is (effectively) underregulated as they are operating without required things like commercial licenses and insurance.
The ideal solution would be if the no. of taxis were unlimited, but the regulations were enforced, such that the legacy industry and Uber were competing on the same playing field.
The evidence is phenomenally consistent that the online self-paced stuff works great for professional people who've mastered college-level skills in reading, writing, and math... but falls on its face for people who don't have that. For example, every attempt at getting the horde of people who need algebra remediation through online course has been a disaster. UDacity tried it at San Jose state and was suspended after one semester. Community colleges in Philadelphia tried it and concluded "The failure rates were so high that it seemed almost unethical to offer the option". So I highly doubt you can replace elementary/secondary schools with this method; at that level, most student need a personal face and hand-holding through the material, especially with technical stuff like using, interpreting, and debugging online resources in the first place.
I think there is a bit of selection bias here. Each course has pre-requisite knowledge, and I suspect a large part of the reason people can struggle with a course (and therefore need a remedial course) is because they don't have a solid grasp of the assumed knowledge. This is especially true for subjects like math, where all the different subdisciplines are inter-connected (e.g. consider how often log and trig laws turn up in calculus).
This problem arises partly because students are not held back a year if they perform poorly in one or two subjects, but are then assumed to have the same knowledge as everyone else in the year. The primary advantage of an online system is that the content can be tailored to each student. e.g. you can force a student to re-do a unit of math until they are able to pass without impacting their ability to take higher level units in other subjects.
Of course, this doesn't in any way negate the need for one-on-one time with remedial students. But by automating the more repetitive parts of the knowledge transfer process, it frees up the educator to spend more one-on-one time with struggling students.
There are also issues with the increased need for students to have self-motivation and drive, but I suspect it would be beneficial to imbue them with those traits from a young age anyway.
.Jesus Tap Dancing Christ on a damned cracker are the FOSSies on this site so dang ignorant that they are actually gonna bitch that when A NEW OS IS INSTALLED it actually gives you a motherfucking way to boot the damned thing? Really? Does Grub ask if you wanna keep the Windows bootloader?
Pretty much every distro installer I've used asks whether you want to install the bootloader, and to which drives (usually right after the partitioning step). The Windows installer doesn't give you a choice - it just overwrites the boot sector on C:, which makes restoring the original bootloader a pain. The complaint is not that Windows installs a bootloader, it's that there is no way to prevent it from doing so. It's also worth noting it hasn't been just a consumer OS since XP - it's also an enterprise OS and the ability to load things like RAID drivers during the installation reflects that.
Think of it this way: who needs to read the manual when they get a new car? You just figure it out because it is largely intuitive. A TON of non-intuitive thought went into making the car easy to use.
Driving a car is not intuitive - there's a reason it takes a while to graduate from a learner's permit to a full license. What is it is familiar - most cars are driven the same way with some minor variations (which side the indicator is on, where the handbrake is, etc.) and only one major one (manual vs. automatic transmission). I'm not convinced that anything is truly intuitive, given that even simple things like handwriting need to be taught.
I agree that there is something to be said for making technology better to use. However, the problem is needs to be approached at both ends - the most powerful programs do require above average ability from their users. e.g. there are scheduling programs on Android that let you perform arbitrary tasks like toggling wifi when multiple conditions are met, but you need to understand basic boolean logic to use them. Coding is probably overkill, but it does encapsulate those concepts in a concrete manner.
Most people don't even truly come to understand mathematics, even though we attempt to teach it everywhere. I don't see any good reason to believe they could have the sort of critical thinking skills required to become truly great programmers, or truly outstanding when it comes to anything.
We're not talking about creating 'truly great programmers' though, any more than we teach literacy with the expectation of everyone being Pulitzer prize winners, or maths with the expectation that everyone understand complex analysis. I think the desired base level of ability is along the lines of simple Python scripts that do things like resize all the images in a folder.
Of course most people aren't outstanding - the idea they could be is inherently contradictory. The point of this discussion is what skills we want the average person to have in order to maximise productivity.
Also, could you explain the connection between critical thinking and programming? I've been thinking a lot lately about whether they're connected or not, and I'd like to hear your opinion on it.
You can quite easily disable updates in Steam per game. Are you saying they push updates even after you've disabled them?
Steam's current setup is that you can disable automatic updates on a per-game basis, however, only until you try to play it next at which time it forces the update on you. You can run in offline mode for up to 6 months, losing a huge chunk of Steam/some games in the process, but after 6 months you have to go online to re-validate your DRM and bam - updates.
Just make a backup copy of the game before you run Steam. Last I checked, they let you cancel the update if you want to play *right now*.
I hope they didn't try this stunt on Australian customers. We have "parallel importation" legislation
For now, anyway. There have been attempts to put provisions blocking parallel legislation into the TPP and other treaties, although thankfully they've been unsuccessful so far.
To counter your anecdote with my own, I got Left 4 Dead 2 for free on Steam at one point. Prices fluctuate all the time, and a brick and mortar store is subject to different pressures than an online store. Steam is popular because it frequently discounts games, and will even email you if a game on your wishlist is discounted.
I seriously felt that way until just a couple days ago, too. Wired had this piece about Satya Nadella and what's going on in Microsoft, specifically about the HoloLens project. It was the first time in a long time that I read something about Microsoft and thought "Oh wow, that is really cool," instead of "LOL."
Microsoft has a history of announcing some very cool things from their research division, but failing to follow through. I'm not getting my hopes up until they at least have a shipping date...
You can add that to a context menu item. At least in Linux (KDE), it is easy to add. I don't have a Windows machine around, but they say that Windows is easy to use.
You might be thinking of the Play store and other Google apps, which as you say are not free. You can download and install them for free as a user, but if you want to ship them pre-installed on a device then there are licence agreements.
Out of curiosity, how exactly do you download the Play store before you have it installed?
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For the past 10 years we've been buying computers and phones loaded with useless crapware. Why should now be any different, and also what makes you think any other company is any different? ...
Unfortunately they come back when you do an OS upgrade because the apps themselves are part of the OS image.
That's how it's different. If you get a new computer loaded with crapware, you can still uninstall it within Windows, or just reinstall the OS entirely if you wish.
With the Android crapware, you can't uninstall them, and if the phone has a locked bootloader, you can't replace the OS either.
It's very much a question of how much control you have over what runs on your device.
That's not going to work out, people.
Why not? To take the US as an example, the per capita GDP has increased more than three-fold since the 1950s. That means that it should easily be possible for a population with a 40/90 productive lifespan to sustain itself.
Of course, this assumes that the increased productivity has translated directly to increased wealth for the average person. But that not being the case means you have a wealth distribution problem, not one of resource constraints.
On the one hand, I kind of agree, but on the other hand if the problem is to transmit a file securely your first thought really shouldn't be what kind of file type it is.
I think the difference is more fundamental - it's to do with how you perceive the system. Someone who sees files as being closely connected to the programs that work with them is more likely to consider built-in encryption features first, while someone who sees files as just being a bunch of bytes would consider a generic approach first. IMO, someone with a Unix background is more likely to fall into the latter category.
You are wrong. RTFA... they state directly that JTAG debuggers would work on this. The idea is that JTAG debuggers are expensive. Some are
Which is a terrible defence when you're talking about a single key used for the entire industry (it has to be burned into the CPU, so good luck updating it.)
Hey, why make it human readable at all? We could encode the program in instructions of word each, and limit the no. of available registers so that they could be represented by a simple 6-bit integer. We could even generate such code from the existing, inefficient code using a compiler...
But contrary to python or ruby code, for example, most Java code is not written by hand.
If most of the code is generated, then the language is broken - the generation should be integrated into the compiler, so as to both formalize the rules of generation, and also to reduce the amount of code that needs to be read when debugging. A good example of this is the property syntax in C# - you can just define it as {get; set;} and the compiler fills in the boiler-plate. Even C's macros are superior to the Java approach of just dumping the generated code among the rest of the source.
I've wondered for a while if I could hook up an Arduino or something to my old minicomputer keyboard and use it. Probably even more complicated and know nothing about coding it :( Sure would be fun, it is an awesome keyboard (and weapon like that IBM) 32 function keys would be cool too.
Hmm, might it be simpler since the keyboard is already expecting a computer to interpet for it?
The tricky part is getting it to understand the old keyboard protocol. If it's a standardized one, it shouldn't be too hard, otherwise you'd need to reverse engineer it (hope you have a logic analyzer or are handy with a 'scope).
Once that's done, the rest should be pretty easy - the standard library* contains functions for simulating a USB keyboard, although I believe the Teensy microcontrollers are more popular for USB HID applications.
* Note that this only works with some of the Arduino devices, and notably not the Uno.
How is it any different from a pc?
For PC parts, the standard needed for full compatibility can be boiled down a single name, sometimes accompanied by a version number. e.g. RAM is DDR3, CPU socket is AM3+, drives are SATA rev. 3, graphics cards are PCIe x16, USB3, etc. These are easy for consumers to understand because all of the relevant information for inter-compatibility can be stored in a short, memorable string. This can be contrasted with power supplies, where you need to look at the power rating, number of SATA connectors, 6 and 8 pin connectors, motherboard connector, etc. (For power supplies this is largely mitigated by almost all the differences being obvious the moment you take it out of the box, as well as most people only needing a few SATA connectors and maybe one connector for their graphics card.)
Unless there are very clear diagrams on the website to show which models support which features, there will be considerable confusion, and most people will have to assume the minimal feature set to play it safe.
Just because an organization is privately owned, doesn't mean they get a free pass from health and safety regulations. In other words, I'm saying the requirement for vaccinations shouldn't just be a matter of policy (for public schools), it should be a legal requirement for all schools.
Not to mention Gentoo.
Kmail defaults to plain text as well. In fact, a lot of its design seems to indicate that its authors use mailing lists quite heavily...
You know what I've noticed? We're no less reliable, overall, than the bank was. Yes we have issues, but they tend to be noticed, and fixed, much much faster. When you change everything all at once you run the risk of not being able to figure out what broke when inevitably something does. Rollback is painful because you have so many interdependent changes - in the end you have to pull the whole release to avoid one small issue in a single module. When you roll frequently the scale of change is small so isolating the bug is trivial, and rolling it back the same. Now of course there are huge differences in risk when you're handling people's money vs their cat photos, but I think the view that people working on an agile schedule don't care about stability, and that the only way to achieve stability is through reducing the frequency of change, is demonstrably wrong.
This is something that all Gentoo users know, either intuitively or from experience. Gentoo is an interesting case study as it's a rolling release distro (so no discrete releases) where updates have a non-trivial cost (compile time), relative to other distros. The result of this is that users delay non-critical updates significantly, which means that the Gentoo community has a fair bit of experience on the trade-offs of different update granularities. (I believe most people follow a weekly cycle.)
The short version is that the more time passes between upgrades, the more likely a bug is to occur and the more difficult it can be to identify and fix. You can upgrade as often as you'd like, but the longer you put those upgrades off the more maintenance debt accumulates, and eventually you might not have a choice if a security fix is only released for newer versions.
So parents can't treat their kids like "property", but the government can?
Not vaccinating your kids is stupid. But forcing people to do it to send their kids to public school, then forcing them to attend said public school unless they're rich enough to pay for a private school, is class warfare. I hope these states have charter schools and/or a voucher program.
Why should private schools get a pass? If kids not being vaccinated is a health risk (to themselves and their peers), then that requirement should be applied to all kids attending school.
Why is the Libertarian view on this particular narrow situation not the correct view?
Put simply, it's the result of black and white thinking. Pure libertarianism is impractical (consumer protection is a good thing to have), but so are excessively regulated systems (nothing will ever improve). What you really want is a compromise between the two.
The legacy industry is overregulated in that the number of taxis is artificially limited.
Uber is (effectively) underregulated as they are operating without required things like commercial licenses and insurance.
The ideal solution would be if the no. of taxis were unlimited, but the regulations were enforced, such that the legacy industry and Uber were competing on the same playing field.
The evidence is phenomenally consistent that the online self-paced stuff works great for professional people who've mastered college-level skills in reading, writing, and math... but falls on its face for people who don't have that. For example, every attempt at getting the horde of people who need algebra remediation through online course has been a disaster. UDacity tried it at San Jose state and was suspended after one semester. Community colleges in Philadelphia tried it and concluded "The failure rates were so high that it seemed almost unethical to offer the option". So I highly doubt you can replace elementary/secondary schools with this method; at that level, most student need a personal face and hand-holding through the material, especially with technical stuff like using, interpreting, and debugging online resources in the first place.
http://www.angrymath.com/2013/06/online-remedial-courses-considered.html
http://www.angrymath.com/2013/...
I think there is a bit of selection bias here. Each course has pre-requisite knowledge, and I suspect a large part of the reason people can struggle with a course (and therefore need a remedial course) is because they don't have a solid grasp of the assumed knowledge. This is especially true for subjects like math, where all the different subdisciplines are inter-connected (e.g. consider how often log and trig laws turn up in calculus).
This problem arises partly because students are not held back a year if they perform poorly in one or two subjects, but are then assumed to have the same knowledge as everyone else in the year. The primary advantage of an online system is that the content can be tailored to each student. e.g. you can force a student to re-do a unit of math until they are able to pass without impacting their ability to take higher level units in other subjects.
Of course, this doesn't in any way negate the need for one-on-one time with remedial students. But by automating the more repetitive parts of the knowledge transfer process, it frees up the educator to spend more one-on-one time with struggling students.
There are also issues with the increased need for students to have self-motivation and drive, but I suspect it would be beneficial to imbue them with those traits from a young age anyway.
.Jesus Tap Dancing Christ on a damned cracker are the FOSSies on this site so dang ignorant that they are actually gonna bitch that when A NEW OS IS INSTALLED it actually gives you a motherfucking way to boot the damned thing? Really? Does Grub ask if you wanna keep the Windows bootloader?
Pretty much every distro installer I've used asks whether you want to install the bootloader, and to which drives (usually right after the partitioning step).
The Windows installer doesn't give you a choice - it just overwrites the boot sector on C:, which makes restoring the original bootloader a pain.
The complaint is not that Windows installs a bootloader, it's that there is no way to prevent it from doing so. It's also worth noting it hasn't been just a consumer OS since XP - it's also an enterprise OS and the ability to load things like RAID drivers during the installation reflects that.
Think of it this way: who needs to read the manual when they get a new car? You just figure it out because it is largely intuitive. A TON of non-intuitive thought went into making the car easy to use.
Driving a car is not intuitive - there's a reason it takes a while to graduate from a learner's permit to a full license. What is it is familiar - most cars are driven the same way with some minor variations (which side the indicator is on, where the handbrake is, etc.) and only one major one (manual vs. automatic transmission). I'm not convinced that anything is truly intuitive, given that even simple things like handwriting need to be taught.
I agree that there is something to be said for making technology better to use. However, the problem is needs to be approached at both ends - the most powerful programs do require above average ability from their users. e.g. there are scheduling programs on Android that let you perform arbitrary tasks like toggling wifi when multiple conditions are met, but you need to understand basic boolean logic to use them. Coding is probably overkill, but it does encapsulate those concepts in a concrete manner.
Most people don't even truly come to understand mathematics, even though we attempt to teach it everywhere. I don't see any good reason to believe they could have the sort of critical thinking skills required to become truly great programmers, or truly outstanding when it comes to anything.
We're not talking about creating 'truly great programmers' though, any more than we teach literacy with the expectation of everyone being Pulitzer prize winners, or maths with the expectation that everyone understand complex analysis. I think the desired base level of ability is along the lines of simple Python scripts that do things like resize all the images in a folder.
Of course most people aren't outstanding - the idea they could be is inherently contradictory. The point of this discussion is what skills we want the average person to have in order to maximise productivity.
Also, could you explain the connection between critical thinking and programming? I've been thinking a lot lately about whether they're connected or not, and I'd like to hear your opinion on it.
> I entered my debit card
Are you nuts? You should never use debit with a questionable merchant. Always credit (so you can chargeback if necessary)
Depends on your card processor. I know that here in Australia, the Visa debit cards have all of the same protections as their credit cards.
You can quite easily disable updates in Steam per game. Are you saying they push updates even after you've disabled them?
Steam's current setup is that you can disable automatic updates on a per-game basis, however, only until you try to play it next at which time it forces the update on you. You can run in offline mode for up to 6 months, losing a huge chunk of Steam/some games in the process, but after 6 months you have to go online to re-validate your DRM and bam - updates.
Just make a backup copy of the game before you run Steam. Last I checked, they let you cancel the update if you want to play *right now*.
I hope they didn't try this stunt on Australian customers. We have "parallel importation" legislation
For now, anyway. There have been attempts to put provisions blocking parallel legislation into the TPP and other treaties, although thankfully they've been unsuccessful so far.
To counter your anecdote with my own, I got Left 4 Dead 2 for free on Steam at one point.
Prices fluctuate all the time, and a brick and mortar store is subject to different pressures than an online store.
Steam is popular because it frequently discounts games, and will even email you if a game on your wishlist is discounted.
I seriously felt that way until just a couple days ago, too. Wired had this piece about Satya Nadella and what's going on in Microsoft, specifically about the HoloLens project. It was the first time in a long time that I read something about Microsoft and thought "Oh wow, that is really cool," instead of "LOL."
Microsoft has a history of announcing some very cool things from their research division, but failing to follow through. I'm not getting my hopes up until they at least have a shipping date...
$ du -sh *
You can add that to a context menu item. At least in Linux (KDE), it is easy to add. I don't have a Windows machine around, but they say that Windows is easy to use.
Or you could just Right Click -> Properties.
You might be thinking of the Play store and other Google apps, which as you say are not free. You can download and install them for free as a user, but if you want to ship them pre-installed on a device then there are licence agreements.
Out of curiosity, how exactly do you download the Play store before you have it installed?