I have been a Firefox user since before it was called Firefox, starting with the first buggy milestones during the final days of Netscape. I never bought into the whole Chrome thing as it had that distinct Internet Explorer feel to it.
Then, when Firefox Quantum rolled around, I saw myself forced to jump ship if I wanted to keep using the plugins and extensions I had come to rely on, including some extensions which I had written myself, but could not be ported to WebExtensions due to missing APIs.
That's when I decided to switch to Pale Moon, which is essentially a Firefox fork, but with significant differences, far less cruft and a truly free and open source model, without commercial involvement, like with Mozilla.
The Basilisk browser is the current preview of the next iteration of Pale Moon, and it will add some new features to Pale Moon, but retain the lean, low memory profile nature. I could honestly not be happier and would recommend that others switch to Pale Moon, Basilisk, or WaterFox (another Firefox fork).
Speaking as a native Dutch person who recently moved to Germany, I call complete BS to this. Since they privatised the Dutch healthcare system it has completely gone downhill. Worse care, and skyrocketing costs with reduced coverage.
The German system is dual: with both private insurance and public. Not ideal, but at least it pretty much always functions, without the horrors of privatisation.
There is a way to fix Windows and remove all control from Microsoft. This way also doesn't involve Linux and kin.
If the ReactOS project got even 10% of the commits and money that Linux receives, it might soon become the Open Source alternative to even Windows 10, allowing everyone to ditch Windows without having to change the software they use.
Everyone would be better off, except for Microsoft, of course, but that's their own problem.
I have been trying to position ReactOS as an option for 'Windows' VMs at work for running very specific applications. It does have promise there, but the main issue I stumbled over is that it still identifies as Windows 2003 internally, with for example frameworks like Qt5 having moved on and requiring Windows 7 at the very least (IIRC).
Having tracked the ReactOS project since the late 90s and participated in it in some manner during those years, I can honestly say that there are a lot of highly skilled and motivated individuals behind the project, who absolutely want to make it right.
The main problem is - just like with Linux in the beginning and projects like Haiku - that such an OS project requires a lot of hours of work and money. Since all developers on the project just work on it part-time and the ROS foundation doesn't have nearly the amount of cash Linux had even in '99, things move somewhat slowly.
What would help a lot is if the ROS project would get a major financial backer, so that people could work on it full-time, hire developers and find commercial applications for the OS. That'd kick-start the project like nothing else.
So far the Russian government has shown interest in backing ROS as an alternative for Windows, as have others. Who knows what will happen there?
I personally hope that come 2020, ReactOS will at least be on the level where Windows 7 is today, so that I can say farewell to Windows as Windows 7 support runs out. While I absolutely need to run 'Windows' for various applications, I refuse to submit to the horror that is Windows 10.
Star Trek as well as many other sci-fi series covered this topic from a variety of angles. The take-away message is that until we can say with absolute certainty what 'life' entails - even if it's outside our own narrow definition - we stand to only destroy life, not create it.
The article bashed nuclear in general, which is unfair. Bashing Hinkley Point is however totally fair. No idea why making this point suddenly got my post modded 'Troll', but ah well =/
The author of the article seems to have an issue with Hinkley Point, which is understandable, but to use it as 'proof' that nuclear is not viable, here's a counter-article, also from the Telegraph:
"Until now, the absurd story of Hinkley has been as vivid an example of the self-deluding power of groupthink as could be imagined. All those ministers swept along by it, such as Ed Miliband, Chris Huhne and Ed Davey, should hang their heads in shame. This culminated in that humiliating spectacle last year (as also noted by Mr Timothy in April) when David Cameron and George Osborne invited the President of China to London, to beg him to lend us billions of pounds towards buying a reactor design so flawed that it could almost certainly never be built.
Nothing should have brought this home more forcefully, as I noted last year, than the contrast between the Hinkley project and the way South Korea is building four nuclear reactors for the United Arab Emirates, to an already proven design and at only a fraction of the cost.
Although the UAE only began talks with Korea in 2009, the year we began negotiating with EDF for its two 1600 megawatt (MW) reactors at Hinkley, the four 1400MW reactors for the UAE (hence their name APR1400s) are already under construction, with the first due onstream next year and the rest to follow by 2020. For £15 billion, they will thus supply 5600MW of electricity, much more than Hinkleyâ(TM)s 3200MW, so grotesquely subsidised that even Decc admits its cost could eventually be £37 billion."
I got a Xiaomi Mi 5 smartphone a while ago (bought via HonorBuy) and found out that the reseller had put a hacked (internationalised) Chinese ROM on my phone. This meant that my phone would not be getting any official Xiaomi updates, let alone frequent updates from the reseller.
To solve this I had to create a Xiaomi account, ask Xiaomi permission to unlock bootloaders on their phones (received this after a few days) and perform a fastboot upgrade to the latest available Xiaomi international ROM.
After this I can update to the latest international ROM without issues, fortunately, which currently is 7.5.2.
Facts be damned, indeed. When about 3,200 of the plant species we consume today are created through mutagenic breeding (nuking seeds with radiation or chemicals, basically), but nobody complains about those, we have already passed the point for a sane discussion: Mutagenic breeding: why irradiating seeds is better than GMOs
I have been doing C/C++ development primarily on Linux/QNX (embedded) for a while, but recently figured that I'd try this new-fangled VS 2015 (Community Edition) after having used VS 2005 and 2010 (Pro) in the past with no complaints.
Even though I am using a modern, high-end system with Windows 7 Ultimate, I didn't get VS 2015 to even install. It'd just flake out with a cryptic error message about a problem with a module or something, then after that I couldn't get the installer to get past that point, despite multiple reboots, nuking any trace of VS from the registry, etc.
I also tried to install the stand-alone MSVC toolchain (why was it removed from the SDKs anyway?!) using the Beta installer, but that one presented its own nightmare with having to tweak the entire system so that tools and headers were even found. Definitely no GCC sysroot-like ease of use.
In the end I just went back to my preferred workflow on Windows: writing code in Notepad++ and using Makefiles to compile my projects using MinGW (5.x, currently) in MSYS2 shell. Simple, easy and powerful.
As far as I'm concerned there's no use case for Visual Studio or MSVC any more. GCC/MinGW, LLVM/Clang have passed it by years ago (especially with C support) and as an IDE it's passed the bloatware point multiple times. If one thinks they need Visual Studio/MSVC, they badly need to refactor their projects and their way of thinking.
As someone who got started on programming back in the early 90s with QBasic, then moved through a VB and Java phase until ending up at C/C++, it's fairly obvious what has happened over the years. Basically ongoing abstraction and proliferation of scripting languages is making people forget about actual programming.
Where programming involves the actual manipulation of hardware, drivers and bytes, scripting merely involves being able to use pre-existing APIs proficiently. See for example applications which use C++ at the core and use Lua for automating or customising certain tasks in a dynamic fashion.
Having used scripting languages like PHP, JavaScript (Vanilla mostly), Perl and Python for well over a decade, and most recently having taught young children to create simple games in Scratch, it's not hard to see what has changed: we stopped teaching how to program.
When even CS courses at school involve nothing more than being able to glue the right Java libraries together (hello Apache Commons and Spring!), and 'JavaScript development' is basically more of the same, it doesn't take a genius to see that they are no longer writing in system languages (BASIC, QBasic, C/C++, Pascal, etc.) like students of yesteryear.
Real computer science and programming involves understanding hardware, knowing how to get reasonable performance out of limited hardware, understanding that hardware is not perfect and how to compensate for this, as well as resource management.
Or more succinctly: programming is being able to write the runtime, scripting is being able to write scripts for said runtime.
I got the MSI Seahawk version of the GTX 980 Ti. It's (probably still) the fastest GTX 980 Ti out there, with the integrated watercooling keeping things cool. I think I'll be fine with it for another year or two at least.
It'll be interesting to see how much of an improvement Pascal will be relative to the previous gen of Nvidia GPUs, in particular among the flagship models. The 1080 Ti better be amazing with what they have been promising:)
"most expensive" is of course only true in post-1970s Western countries. Meanwhile countries like South-Korea, India and China are pushing ahead with cheap, safe nuclear power, with the latter implementing a fully closed fuel loop, meaning no nuclear waste at all.
The whole problem with nuclear power in the West is simply that it's stuck in the 1960s with crushing regulatory burdens worsening the problems of maintaining 60+ year old reactors and preventing any improvement there.
If we stick to this 14-day limit, then we will never know how things work exactly after this point. The question is thus whether we can use that knowledge for the benefit of humanity, to which the answer appears to be 'yes'.
What I find most tantalising about this is the prospect this opens of artificial uteruses, and with it the elimination of the need to carry one's unborn child along inside one's natural incubator for nine months, at least for humans of the female persuasion. This would also enable same-sex couples to have a child with their DNA, without requiring anyone else to carry the child to term.
This in addition to the things we can learn from studying the development of embryos and stem cells in general, for both current and future humans.
The possible positive impact these advances may have to me at least far outweigh the philosophical musing some people seem to be absorbed in.
I agree with the only knowledgeable person in that 'article' that this is just a type of art, with no scientific or social usefulness. Without the data being recorded (was the sensor calibrated?) known, realising how useless official 'safe limits' for radiation are (often lower than naturally occurring background radiation), and the Linear Non-Threshold (LNT) model having been discredited decades ago, one can at most say that they put it together in a pretty fashion.
But since we're talking about Greenpeace here, the PR mouthpiece for both the fossil fuel and solar/wind industries, I'm not shocked at this.
The Android Browser is one of those components which Google has specifically said won't be getting security updates when a few big holes were uncovered recently. Unless this has changed I will continue to treat the Galaxy Nexus as a solidly EOLed and insecure device.
Not that it matters that much, though, as the GNexus is far too slow for general usage anyway. For anyone complaining about the iPhone 4S slowing down with iOS updates, it's clear that they haven't tried to use a GNexus with 4.3 with a normal amount of apps installed.
A flagship device only a few years ago, it's not received patches or any form of updates for years now and is now too unsafe to even consider using as a smartphone any more.
Meanwhile the iPhone 4S I also use is up to date on the latest iOS with no sign of support being dropped just yet, despite this phone being of a similar age as the Galaxy Nexus.
The lesson I have learned out of owning a Google Android device is to never buy Android again. Apple and even Windows update their devices for as long as reasonably possible, while Android is a walking security risk, even on Nexus devices.
My approach to mobile development (Android & iOS) is to write all of the logic and everything else I can in C++ ('Objective-C++'), then use some glue logic in Java/Objective-C/Swift where needed and native APIs aren't available.
Writing an entire app in Java, Objective-C or Swift seems illogical, even if the app isn't intended to be cross-platform. Just being able to debug the core logic with mature C/C++ tools on a Linux/BSD PC is a godsend, and reusing the same code across two (or three, or four) mobile platforms is just awesome.
Last December I took an extensive look at ASM.js and WebAssembly, from the point of view of an old-school C/C++ developer, and wrote an article about it: A look at asm.js and the future with WebAssembly.
The short of it is that while interesting, the JavaScript runtime both asm.js and WebAssembly run in impose such major limitations on the applications being written that its actual uses outside of game ports is fairly limited.
It's not just mental health which needs to become a topic less shunned in today's society, but many others as well. I have been diagnosed over the past years with PTSD, as well as DID (Dissociative Identity Disorder), both of which are a consequence of my intersex condition.
Or more specifically: the traumatic events resulting from the abhorrent treatment of my intersex condition by doctors and psychologists, who insisted I had to be transsexual instead, attempted to force me into 'normalisation' surgeries, lied about results and so on for more than a decade. Funnily enough I only tried to commit suicide once in all that time.
This is a common thing for those who are unlucky enough to be born intersex, and there are many more 'conditions' which are prime candidates for causing severe depression and the risk of suicide if not handled correctly. Homosexuality has more or less left that stage in most countries now, as well as transsexuality, due to increasing knowledge and acceptance of something which is actually natural, and not a disorder (as some are trying to rename 'intersex' into now...).
In short, society needs to stop bullying people with whom is nothing wrong. Just like how bullying at schools has led in the past and will continue to lead to suicides, so does bullying by society in general result in the same.
Slashdot Mirror
I have been a Firefox user since before it was called Firefox, starting with the first buggy milestones during the final days of Netscape. I never bought into the whole Chrome thing as it had that distinct Internet Explorer feel to it.
Then, when Firefox Quantum rolled around, I saw myself forced to jump ship if I wanted to keep using the plugins and extensions I had come to rely on, including some extensions which I had written myself, but could not be ported to WebExtensions due to missing APIs.
That's when I decided to switch to Pale Moon, which is essentially a Firefox fork, but with significant differences, far less cruft and a truly free and open source model, without commercial involvement, like with Mozilla.
The Basilisk browser is the current preview of the next iteration of Pale Moon, and it will add some new features to Pale Moon, but retain the lean, low memory profile nature. I could honestly not be happier and would recommend that others switch to Pale Moon, Basilisk, or WaterFox (another Firefox fork).
Speaking as a native Dutch person who recently moved to Germany, I call complete BS to this. Since they privatised the Dutch healthcare system it has completely gone downhill. Worse care, and skyrocketing costs with reduced coverage.
The German system is dual: with both private insurance and public. Not ideal, but at least it pretty much always functions, without the horrors of privatisation.
There is a way to fix Windows and remove all control from Microsoft. This way also doesn't involve Linux and kin.
If the ReactOS project got even 10% of the commits and money that Linux receives, it might soon become the Open Source alternative to even Windows 10, allowing everyone to ditch Windows without having to change the software they use.
Everyone would be better off, except for Microsoft, of course, but that's their own problem.
I have been trying to position ReactOS as an option for 'Windows' VMs at work for running very specific applications. It does have promise there, but the main issue I stumbled over is that it still identifies as Windows 2003 internally, with for example frameworks like Qt5 having moved on and requiring Windows 7 at the very least (IIRC).
Having tracked the ReactOS project since the late 90s and participated in it in some manner during those years, I can honestly say that there are a lot of highly skilled and motivated individuals behind the project, who absolutely want to make it right.
The main problem is - just like with Linux in the beginning and projects like Haiku - that such an OS project requires a lot of hours of work and money. Since all developers on the project just work on it part-time and the ROS foundation doesn't have nearly the amount of cash Linux had even in '99, things move somewhat slowly.
What would help a lot is if the ROS project would get a major financial backer, so that people could work on it full-time, hire developers and find commercial applications for the OS. That'd kick-start the project like nothing else.
So far the Russian government has shown interest in backing ROS as an alternative for Windows, as have others. Who knows what will happen there?
I personally hope that come 2020, ReactOS will at least be on the level where Windows 7 is today, so that I can say farewell to Windows as Windows 7 support runs out. While I absolutely need to run 'Windows' for various applications, I refuse to submit to the horror that is Windows 10.
Star Trek as well as many other sci-fi series covered this topic from a variety of angles. The take-away message is that until we can say with absolute certainty what 'life' entails - even if it's outside our own narrow definition - we stand to only destroy life, not create it.
The article bashed nuclear in general, which is unfair. Bashing Hinkley Point is however totally fair. No idea why making this point suddenly got my post modded 'Troll', but ah well =/
Saved in the Nick of time from the worldâ(TM)s most expensive power station
To then bet on power storage to save solar and wind (both white elephants in their own right), seems rather comical.
I for one am glad that Uber at least found a new study after discovering that it doesn't decrease drunk driving.
I got a Xiaomi Mi 5 smartphone a while ago (bought via HonorBuy) and found out that the reseller had put a hacked (internationalised) Chinese ROM on my phone. This meant that my phone would not be getting any official Xiaomi updates, let alone frequent updates from the reseller.
To solve this I had to create a Xiaomi account, ask Xiaomi permission to unlock bootloaders on their phones (received this after a few days) and perform a fastboot upgrade to the latest available Xiaomi international ROM.
After this I can update to the latest international ROM without issues, fortunately, which currently is 7.5.2.
Facts be damned, indeed. When about 3,200 of the plant species we consume today are created through mutagenic breeding (nuking seeds with radiation or chemicals, basically), but nobody complains about those, we have already passed the point for a sane discussion: Mutagenic breeding: why irradiating seeds is better than GMOs
I have been doing C/C++ development primarily on Linux/QNX (embedded) for a while, but recently figured that I'd try this new-fangled VS 2015 (Community Edition) after having used VS 2005 and 2010 (Pro) in the past with no complaints.
Even though I am using a modern, high-end system with Windows 7 Ultimate, I didn't get VS 2015 to even install. It'd just flake out with a cryptic error message about a problem with a module or something, then after that I couldn't get the installer to get past that point, despite multiple reboots, nuking any trace of VS from the registry, etc.
I also tried to install the stand-alone MSVC toolchain (why was it removed from the SDKs anyway?!) using the Beta installer, but that one presented its own nightmare with having to tweak the entire system so that tools and headers were even found. Definitely no GCC sysroot-like ease of use.
In the end I just went back to my preferred workflow on Windows: writing code in Notepad++ and using Makefiles to compile my projects using MinGW (5.x, currently) in MSYS2 shell. Simple, easy and powerful.
As far as I'm concerned there's no use case for Visual Studio or MSVC any more. GCC/MinGW, LLVM/Clang have passed it by years ago (especially with C support) and as an IDE it's passed the bloatware point multiple times. If one thinks they need Visual Studio/MSVC, they badly need to refactor their projects and their way of thinking.
As someone who got started on programming back in the early 90s with QBasic, then moved through a VB and Java phase until ending up at C/C++, it's fairly obvious what has happened over the years. Basically ongoing abstraction and proliferation of scripting languages is making people forget about actual programming.
Where programming involves the actual manipulation of hardware, drivers and bytes, scripting merely involves being able to use pre-existing APIs proficiently. See for example applications which use C++ at the core and use Lua for automating or customising certain tasks in a dynamic fashion.
Having used scripting languages like PHP, JavaScript (Vanilla mostly), Perl and Python for well over a decade, and most recently having taught young children to create simple games in Scratch, it's not hard to see what has changed: we stopped teaching how to program.
When even CS courses at school involve nothing more than being able to glue the right Java libraries together (hello Apache Commons and Spring!), and 'JavaScript development' is basically more of the same, it doesn't take a genius to see that they are no longer writing in system languages (BASIC, QBasic, C/C++, Pascal, etc.) like students of yesteryear.
Real computer science and programming involves understanding hardware, knowing how to get reasonable performance out of limited hardware, understanding that hardware is not perfect and how to compensate for this, as well as resource management.
Or more succinctly: programming is being able to write the runtime, scripting is being able to write scripts for said runtime.
I got the MSI Seahawk version of the GTX 980 Ti. It's (probably still) the fastest GTX 980 Ti out there, with the integrated watercooling keeping things cool. I think I'll be fine with it for another year or two at least.
:)
It'll be interesting to see how much of an improvement Pascal will be relative to the previous gen of Nvidia GPUs, in particular among the flagship models. The 1080 Ti better be amazing with what they have been promising
Time to upgrade from this now totally obsolete, highly OCed GTX 980 Ti, I guess. The upgrade gods demand their blood sacrifice :)
"most expensive" is of course only true in post-1970s Western countries. Meanwhile countries like South-Korea, India and China are pushing ahead with cheap, safe nuclear power, with the latter implementing a fully closed fuel loop, meaning no nuclear waste at all.
The whole problem with nuclear power in the West is simply that it's stuck in the 1960s with crushing regulatory burdens worsening the problems of maintaining 60+ year old reactors and preventing any improvement there.
If we stick to this 14-day limit, then we will never know how things work exactly after this point. The question is thus whether we can use that knowledge for the benefit of humanity, to which the answer appears to be 'yes'.
What I find most tantalising about this is the prospect this opens of artificial uteruses, and with it the elimination of the need to carry one's unborn child along inside one's natural incubator for nine months, at least for humans of the female persuasion. This would also enable same-sex couples to have a child with their DNA, without requiring anyone else to carry the child to term.
This in addition to the things we can learn from studying the development of embryos and stem cells in general, for both current and future humans.
The possible positive impact these advances may have to me at least far outweigh the philosophical musing some people seem to be absorbed in.
I agree with the only knowledgeable person in that 'article' that this is just a type of art, with no scientific or social usefulness. Without the data being recorded (was the sensor calibrated?) known, realising how useless official 'safe limits' for radiation are (often lower than naturally occurring background radiation), and the Linear Non-Threshold (LNT) model having been discredited decades ago, one can at most say that they put it together in a pretty fashion.
But since we're talking about Greenpeace here, the PR mouthpiece for both the fossil fuel and solar/wind industries, I'm not shocked at this.
No kidding. Even more fun is that the site doesn't even show content with JavaScript disabled while one can read the page source just fine.
The Android Browser is one of those components which Google has specifically said won't be getting security updates when a few big holes were uncovered recently. Unless this has changed I will continue to treat the Galaxy Nexus as a solidly EOLed and insecure device.
Not that it matters that much, though, as the GNexus is far too slow for general usage anyway. For anyone complaining about the iPhone 4S slowing down with iOS updates, it's clear that they haven't tried to use a GNexus with 4.3 with a normal amount of apps installed.
My Galaxy Nexus with Android 4.3 says 'hi' :)
A flagship device only a few years ago, it's not received patches or any form of updates for years now and is now too unsafe to even consider using as a smartphone any more.
Meanwhile the iPhone 4S I also use is up to date on the latest iOS with no sign of support being dropped just yet, despite this phone being of a similar age as the Galaxy Nexus.
The lesson I have learned out of owning a Google Android device is to never buy Android again. Apple and even Windows update their devices for as long as reasonably possible, while Android is a walking security risk, even on Nexus devices.
My approach to mobile development (Android & iOS) is to write all of the logic and everything else I can in C++ ('Objective-C++'), then use some glue logic in Java/Objective-C/Swift where needed and native APIs aren't available.
Writing an entire app in Java, Objective-C or Swift seems illogical, even if the app isn't intended to be cross-platform. Just being able to debug the core logic with mature C/C++ tools on a Linux/BSD PC is a godsend, and reusing the same code across two (or three, or four) mobile platforms is just awesome.
Last December I took an extensive look at ASM.js and WebAssembly, from the point of view of an old-school C/C++ developer, and wrote an article about it: A look at asm.js and the future with WebAssembly.
The short of it is that while interesting, the JavaScript runtime both asm.js and WebAssembly run in impose such major limitations on the applications being written that its actual uses outside of game ports is fairly limited.
As a sidenote: Hitler's Mein Kampf has passed into the public domain last year without too much of a fuss.
That Anne Frank's diary is currently mired in copyright disputes thus could be seen as a kind of very painful irony.
It's not just mental health which needs to become a topic less shunned in today's society, but many others as well. I have been diagnosed over the past years with PTSD, as well as DID (Dissociative Identity Disorder), both of which are a consequence of my intersex condition.
Or more specifically: the traumatic events resulting from the abhorrent treatment of my intersex condition by doctors and psychologists, who insisted I had to be transsexual instead, attempted to force me into 'normalisation' surgeries, lied about results and so on for more than a decade. Funnily enough I only tried to commit suicide once in all that time.
This is a common thing for those who are unlucky enough to be born intersex, and there are many more 'conditions' which are prime candidates for causing severe depression and the risk of suicide if not handled correctly. Homosexuality has more or less left that stage in most countries now, as well as transsexuality, due to increasing knowledge and acceptance of something which is actually natural, and not a disorder (as some are trying to rename 'intersex' into now...).
In short, society needs to stop bullying people with whom is nothing wrong. Just like how bullying at schools has led in the past and will continue to lead to suicides, so does bullying by society in general result in the same.
Thanks :)
I haven't worked on that UDS project in a while... if you have any issues with it, please let me know.