-
Staying in a cabin in the Michigan backwoods. Weather is calling for a few rainy days, so likely I’ll be playing old SNES games on my Raspberry Pi :)
-
-
What a cool bit of history!
-
Very cool, I love that the remixes of Carmack projects never seem to end
-
Mex
1 month ago
|
link
| on:
Atlassian announces new partnership with Slack, will discontinue Hipchat and Stride
Does anyone have any experience with Microsoft Teams? We are looking at it as a potential replacement.
-
My team (roughly ~40 people) transitioned from Slack to Teams a bit over a year ago. It’s gone well and speaking in terms of productivity, it’s been an improvement. There are a lot of cool integration features with Teams but they’re more oriented to the Microsoft ecosystem whereas Slack was more open. We do everything w/ Microsoft here (Azure, VSTS, .NET, Office 365, etc)so it worked out well.
Slack has more ‘fun’ features like custom emojis - we had to give up all the funny faces of team members in the transition.
If your company isn’t in the Micorosft ecosystem I don’t think I would recommend it.
-
It’s reliable and has plenty of good features, especially on the management side, but the UX is not excellent. Some people even claim to hate it, but I haven’t figured out how serious those feelings are.
They have been improving it in a nice pace in 2018. It feels to me that the Teams team in Microsoft is culturally similar to the Visual Code Studio folks – i.e. part of the new Microsoft.
Like dsschnau says, you can probably find better solutions if you’re not in the Office365 bearhug already. But they won’t be massively better (unless you want the burden of hosting yourself, in which case there are plenty of choices). If you are paying for office365 (not to mention Azure/VSTS/TFS) already, getting another chat solution in addition to Teams would be just stupid.
-
-
-
-
dsschnau
1 month ago
|
link
| on:
Atlassian announces new partnership with Slack, will discontinue Hipchat and Stride
And Nothing Of Value Was Lost!
-
Cory always scares me.
-
This was from 2012. Arguably, we’re already there. Tons of popular computers run signed bootloaders and won’t run arbitrary code. Popular OS vendors already pluck apps from their walled garden on the whims of freedom-optional sovereignties.
The civil war came and went and barely anyone took up arms. :(
-
It’s not like there won’t always be some subset of developer- and hacker-friendly computers available to us. Sure, iPhones are locked down but there are plenty of cheap Android phones which can be rooted, flashed with new firmware, etc. Same for laptops, there are still plenty to choose from where the TPM can be disabled or controlled.
Further, open ARM dev boards are getting both very powerful and very cheap. Ironically, it might even be appropriate to thank China and its dirt-cheap manufacturing industry for this freedom since without it, relatively small runs of these tiny complicated computers wouldn’t even be possible.
-
This is actually the danger. There will always be a need for machines for developers to use, but the risk is that these machines and the machines for everyone else (who the market seems to think don’t “need” actual control over their computers) will diverge increasingly. “Developer” machines will become more expensive, rarer, harder to find, and not something people who aren’t professional developers (e.g. kids) own.
We’re already seeing this happen to some extent. There are a large number of people who previously owned PCs but who now own only locked down smartphones and tablets (moreover, even if these devices aren’t locked down, they’re fundamentally oriented towards consumption, as I touched on here).
Losing the GPC war doesn’t mean non-locked-down machines disappearing; it simply means the percentage of people owning them will decline to a tiny percentage, and thus social irrelevance. The challenge is winning the GPC war for the general public, not just for developers. Apathy makes it feel like we’ve already lost.
-
-
Develop for, yes, within the bounds of what Apple deems permissible. But you can’t replace iOS and port Linux or Android to it because the hardware is very locked down. (Yes, you might be able to jailbreak the phone through some bug, until Apple patches it, anyway.)
Mind you, I’m not bemoaning the fact or chastising Apple or anything. They can do what they want. My original point was just that for every locked-down device that’s really a general-purpose computer inside, there are open alternatives and likely will be as long as there is a market for them and a way to cheaply manufacture them.
-
Absolutely! Even more impressive is that with Android, Google has made such a (mostly) open architecture into a mass market success.
However it’s interesting to note that on that very architecture, if you buy an average Android phone, it’s locked down with vendorware such that in order to install what you want you’ll likely have to wipe the entire ecosystem off the phone and substitute an OSS distribution.
I get that the point here is that you CAN, but again, most users don’t want the wild wild west. Because, fundamentally, they don’t care. They want devices (and computers) that work.
-
Google has made such a (mostly) open architecture into a mass market success.
Uh, I used to say that until I looked at the history and the present. I think it’s more accurate that they made a proprietary platform on an open core a huge success by tying it into their existing, huge market. They’ve been making it more proprietary over time, too. So, maybe that’s giving them too much credit. I’ll still credit them with their strategy doing more good for open-source or user-controlled phones than their major competitors. I think it’s just a side effect of GPL and them being too cheap to rewrite core at this point, though.
-
-
-
-
This is not completely true. There are some features you can’t use without an Apple developer account which costs $100/yr. One of those features is NetworkExtension.
-
-
-
-
-
Over half a million people or 2 out of 100 Americans died in the Civil War. There was little innocent folks in general public could do to prevent it or minimize losses Personally, I found his “civil war” to be less scary. The public can stamp these problems out if they merely care.
That they consistently are apathetic is what scares me.
-
Agreed 100%.
I have no idea what to do. The best solution I think is education. I’m a software engineer. Not the best one ever, but I try my best. I try to be a good computing citizen, using free software whenever possible. Only once did I meet a coworker who shared my values about free software and not putting so much trust in our computing devices - the other 99% of the time, my fellow devs think I’m crazy for giving a damn.
Let alone what people without technical backgrounds give a damn about this stuff. If citizens cared and demanded freedom in their software, that would position society much better to handle “software eating the world”.
-
The freedoms guaranteed by free software were always deeply abstruse and inaccessible for laypeople.
Your GNOME desktop can be 100% GPL and it will still be nearly impossible for you to even try to change anything about it; even locating the source code for any given feature is hard.
That’s not to say free software isn’t important or beneficial—it’s a crucial and historical movement. But it’s sad that it takes so much expertise to alter and recompile a typical program.
GNU started with an ambition to have a user desktop system that’s extensible and hackable via Lisp or Scheme. That didn’t really happen, outside of Emacs.
-
Your GNOME desktop can be 100% GPL and it will still be nearly impossible for you to even try to change anything about it; even locating the source code for any given feature is hard.
I tried to see how true that is with a random feature. I picked brightness setting in the system status area. Finding the source for this was not so hard, it took me a few minutes (turns out it is JavaScript). Of course it would have been better if there was something similar to browser developer tools somewhere.
Modifying it would probably be harder since I can’t find a file called
brightness.json my machine. I suppose they pack the JavaScript code somehow…About 10 years ago (before it switched to ELF) I used Minix3 as my main OS for about a year. It was very hackable. We did something called “tracking current” (which apparently is still possible): the source code for the whole OS was on the disk and it was easy to modify and recompile everything. I wish more systems worked like this.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
This idea comes up from time to time. It’s an old idea. Here are two rms articles that address it.
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/hessla.html
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/programs-must-not-limit-freedom-to-run.html
Basically: if you’re evil enough to do evil stuff, violating copyright is something you won’t think is very evil at all. So even without the argument about how impossible it is to define evil, a copyright-based license isn’t going to stop anyone from doing evil.
-
I don’t think this holds up in countries with established rule of law. It’s easy to forget that you can sue the government in court in the US and then the government will stop (at least most of the time). It’s just the overton window has shifted so much that we only think of “evil” in terms of things that don’t happen in this day and age, when terrible things are happening all the time and continue to be enabled by technology.
If there’s anything that unities most people, it’s the fear of having all their assets frozen. And the spectrum of evil stops way before “evil mastermind with 1000 offshore accounts and 20 fake identies”.
-
I agree. Julian Sanchez made this point about the NSA/CIA recently, that the bulk of their abuses of power inside the USA are either legal. If they’re not obviously legal, they often fall into a legal grey area, but the right person in the chain of command said that they were legal.
Career government officials tend to have a habit of following most rules of the organizations they inhabit, but may do a lot of shady things that don’t obviously violate those rules.
-
I think I should have read my own links. rms also argues that such restrictions on use based on copyright are likely unenforcible. I don’t recall ever reading about a case where someone violated a license’s conditions on usage (e.g. using Java in a nuclear reactor) and was thus found to be violating copyright. Has that happened?
-
Also: trying to sue the US government for copyright infringement because they used some software to facilitate torture (for example) doesn’t seem to me like a fruitful approach. Maybe with some optimism something could be done about human rights abuses in the US, but going the copyright infringement path doesn’t seem likely to work.
-
-
Glad to hear it’s been addressed already by gnu. I was thinking along similar lines, like “Eh, I see the problem, but I don’t think giving up freedom zero is the answer.” Of course, I don’t have a good solution either, other than a better more democratic government with well-informed citizens and a functioning justice system.
-
-
I’m not too worried about me, its my kids I worry about the most. I have some hope for clean energy to become more cost effective than coal/gas and that will just solve the problem but idk.
-
It’s not much of a surprise people took “what have you tried” and became jerks about it. It helped me a ton, though. My career started in 2011 and this article was published in 2013, I remember reading it. I was struggling to get traction in my work and this article enlightened me on how to get my superiors to help me.
That’s not to say it should have or should not have been posted, but its hardly some terrible crime against the software development industry. It at least helped one developer.
-
what is this site?
-
This is E2! Back in the day, years and years ago, it was a sort of cross between a wiki and a message board—this was before wikipedia was so popular. It was inspired by the hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy ( much like www.h2g2.com )—a site that would contain everything. In practice some people treated it like an encyclopedia, some people submitted creative writing and poetry, and some people used it like livejournal. It also had a very active offline component; lots of people meeting up, living together, sometimes getting married and having babies.
If you want to know what I was like when I was 15, here’s my profile: https://everything2.com/user/Crux
-
-
foxyjackfox
1 month ago
|
link
| on:
There was a time when search engines were a thing. And it seems they still are
The internet search experience suffered a setback when the major browsers abandoned the separate search box for the combined address/search box. Only FireFox retains this feature, where your default search engine is the first choice in a list.
In the days before Alta Vista became better than Yahoo, and then Google crushed all other search options, there were meta-search engines that combined, filtered, and formatted results from several search engines of your choice. IIRC Magellan was one of these. I’ve toyed with the idea of reviving this idea for my own use. Google and Bing are pretty similar, but not perfectly similar, and provide different results depending on whether you are signed-in or anonymous. DDG usually provides different enough results to be important. There’s a lot of room for innovation in meta-search.
Finally there are still all sorts of specialized search options. In this category I would start with Amazon and Wikipedia. There are also sites like noodle.com, specializing in education related searches.
-
-
-
-
-
-
I don’t know. I switched to DDG at home and I’ve always been able to find what I’m looking for. I still use Google at work so I’m able to compare and contrast. About the only place where Google is better (in my opinion) is in image search, and that may be due to how Google displays them vs. DDG.
-
Here’s a concrete example. Let’s say I’m trying to remember the name of the project that integrates Rust with Elixir NIFs.
First result for me for the query “elixir rust” on Google is the project in question: https://github.com/hansihe/rustler
After scrolling through three pages of DDG results, that project doesn’t seem to be listed or referenced at all, and there are several Japanese and Chinese-language results despite the fact that I have my location set to “United States”. I will forgive all the results about guitar strings since DDG doesn’t have tracking data to determine that I’m probably not interested in those (although the usage of the word “rust” in those results is in the term “anti-rust” which seems like a bad result for my query).
That query is admittedly obtuse, but that’s what I’ve become accustomed to using with Google. These results feel generally characteristic of my experience using DDG. I end up using the
!gcommand a lot rather than trying to figure out how to reframe my query in a way that DDG will understand.-
I think you did that wrong. You were specifically interested in NIF but left that key word off. Even Lobsters search engine, which is often really off for me, gets to Rustler in the first search when I use these: elixir rust nif. Typing it into DDG like this gives me Rustler at Page 1, Result 2.
Just remember these high-volume, low-cost engines are pretty dumb when not backed by a company the size of Google or Microsoft. You gotta tell them the words most likely to appear together. “NIF” was critical in that search. Also, remember that you can use quotes around a word if you know for sure it will appear and minus in front of one to eliminate bogus results. Put “site:” in front if you’re pretty sure which place or places you might have seen it. Another trick is thinking of other ways to say something that authors might use. These tricks 1990’s-early2000’s searches get me the easy finds I submit here.
-
I disagree that “NIF” was essential to that query. There are a fair number of articles and forum posts on Google about the Rustler library. It’s one of the primary contexts that those two languages would be discussed together. DDG has only one of those results as far as I see. Why? Even if I wasn’t looking for Rustler specifcally, I should see discussions of how those two languages can be integrated if I search for them together.
-
There are a fair number of pages where Elixir and Rust will show up without Rustler, too. Especially all the posts about new languages. NIF is definitely a keyword because you’re wanting a NIF library specifically instead of a page about Rust and Elixir without NIF. It’s a credit to Google’s algorithms that it can make the extra connection to Rustler pushing it on the top.
That doesn’t mean I expect it or any other search engine to be that smart. So, I still put every key word in to get consistently accurate results. Out of curiosity, I ran your keywords to see what it produces. The results on the top suck. DuckDuckGo is usually way better than that in my daily use. However, instead of three pages in, DuckDuckGo has Rustler on page 1, result 6. Takes about 1 second after hitting enter to get to it. Maybe your search was bad luck or something.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Finally there are still all sorts of specialized search options. In this category I would start with Amazon and Wikipedia.
DuckDuckGo has a feature called “bangs” that let you access them. Overview here. Even if not using DDG, their list might be a nice reference of what to include in a new, search engine.
-
-
I thought that was clear. What I like about the old style dedicated search box is it that its is so easy to switch between search engines.
-
-
-
With keyword searching (a feature I first used in Opera, and which is definitely present in Firefox; I can’t speak to any other browsers), it’s “so easy” to switch between search engines—in fact, far easier than with a separate search box. I type “g nephropidae” to search Google, or “w nephropidae” for Wikipedia, “i nephropidae” for image search, or even “deb nephropidae” for Debian package search (there’s no results for that one).
-
This is not completely obvious from the user experience. Without visual cues, much available functionality is effectively hidden. You must have either taken the initiative to research this, someone told you, or you stumbled upon it some other way. This also effectively requires you to have CLI-like commands memorized, the exact opposite of what GUIs purport to do. And adding new search engines? That’s non-obvious.
-
I use YubNub to get large library of such keywords that is the same on every device.
-
-
-
-
-
Good on you. It’s worth mentioning here that Microsoft is going in the other direction. https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/06/19/microsoft-defends-ties-with-ice-amid-separation-outcry/amp/
-
In response to questions we want to be clear: Microsoft is not working with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement or U.S. Customs and Border Protection on any projects related to separating children from their families at the border, and contrary to some speculation, we are not aware of Azure or Azure services being used for this purpose. As a company, Microsoft is dismayed by the forcible separation of children from their families at the border.
Maybe I’m missing something, but it seems they are going in the exact same direction…
-
It’s a very confusing article; my best guess is that they are working with ICE, but not on “projects related to separating children from their families at the border”.
-
-
But that perspective is very un-nuanced. Is everything ICE does wrong? It’s a large organization. What if the software the company that @danielcompton denied service to is actually just trying to track down violent offenders that made it across the border? Or drug trafficking?
To go even further, by your statement, Americans should stop paying their taxes. Are you advocating that?
-
-
-
From https://splinternews.com/tear-it-all-down-1826939873 :
The thing that is so striking about all three items is not merely the horror they symbolize. It is how easy it was to get all of these people to play their fascistic roles. The Trump administration’s family separation rule has not even been official policy for two months, and yet look at where we are already. The Border Patrol agent is totally unperturbed by the wrenching scenes playing out around him. The officers have sprung to action with a useful lie to ward off desperate parents. Nielsen, whom the New Yorker described in March as “more of an opportunist than an ideologue” and who has been looking to get back into Donald Trump’s good graces, is playing her part—the white supremacist bureaucrat more concerned with office politics than basic morality—with seeming relish. They were all ready.
I’m going to just delegate all arguments to that link, basically, with a comment that of it’s not exceedingly obvious, then I probably can’t say anything that would persuade you. Also, this is all extremely off-topic for this forum, but, whatevs.
-
-
-
There’s always a nuance, sure. Every police force ever subverted for political purposes was still continuing to fight petty crime, prevent murders and help old ladies cross the street. This always presented the regimes a great way to divert criticism, paint critics as crime sympathisers and provide moral leeway to people working there and with them.
America though, with all its lip service to small government and self reliance was the last place I expected that to see happening. Little did I know!
-
Is everything ICE does wrong? It’s a large organization.
Just like people, organizations should be praised for their best behaviors and held responsible for their worst behaviors. Also, some organizations wield an incredible amount of power over people and can easily hide wrongdoing and therefore should be held responsible to the strictest standard.
-
Its worth pointing out that ICE didn’t exist 20 years ago. Neither, for that matter did the DHS (I was 22 when that monster was born). “Violent offenders” who “cross the border” will be tracked down by the same people who track down citizen “violent offenders” ie the cops (what does “violent offender” even mean? How do we who these people are? how will we know if they’re sneaking in?) Drug trafficking isn’t part of ICEs institutional prerogative in any large, real sense, so its not for them to worry about? Plenty of americans, for decades, have advocated tax resistance precisely as a means to combat things like this. We can debate its utility but it is absolutely a tactic that has seen use since as far as I know at least the Vietnam war. Not sure how much nuance is necessary when discussing things like this. Doesn’t mean its open season to start dropping outrageous nonsense, but institutions which support/facilitate this in any way should be grounds for at the very least boycotts.
-
Why is it worth pointing out it didn’t exist 20 years ago? Smart phones didn’t either. Everything starts at some time.
To separate out arguments, this particular subthread is in response to MSFT helping ICE, but the comment I responded to was referring to the original post, which only refers to “border security”. My comment was really about the broader aspect but I phrased it poorly. In particular, I think the comment I replied to which states that you should not support anything like this indirectly basically means you can’t do anything.
-
Its worth pointing out when it was founded for a lot of reasons; what were the conditions that led to its creation? Were they good? Reasonable? Who created it? What was the mission originally? The date is important because all of these questions become easily accessible to anyone with a web browser and an internet connection, unlike, say, the formation of the FBI or the origins of Jim Crow which while definitely researchable on the net are more domains of historical research. Smart phones and ethnic cleansing however, not so much in the same category.
-
If you believe the circumstances around the formation of ICE are worth considering, I don’t think pointing out the age of the institution is a great way to make that point. It sounds more like you’re saying “new things are inherently bad” rather than “20 years ago was a time with a lot of politically questionable activity” (or something along those lines).
-
dude, read it however you want, but pointing out that ICE is less than 20 years old, when securing a border is a foundational issue, seems like a perfect way to intimate that this is an agency uninterested in actual security and was formed expressly to fulfill a hyper partisan, actually racist agenda. Like, did we not have border security or immigration services or customs enforcement prior to 2002/3? Why then? What was it? Also, given that it was formed so recently, it can be unformed, it can be dismantled that much easier.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
No, it requires you to acknowledge that using any currency is unacceptable.
Of course not using any currency is also unacceptable. When faced with two unacceptable options, one has to choose one. Using the excuse “If I follow my ethics I can never do anything” is just a lazy way to never think about ethics. In reality everything has to be carefully considered and weighed on a case by case basis.
-
Of course not using any currency is also unacceptable.
Why? Currency is just a tool.
Using the excuse “If I follow my ethics I can never do anything” is just a lazy way to never think about ethics.
I completely agree.
Indeed I think that we can always be ethical, but we should look beyond the current “public enemy”, be it Cambridge Analytica or ICE. These are just symptoms. We need to cure the disease.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
I can get by without any Google services with the exception of Maps. I think if OSM could become useful for the layperson it would be a huge benefit to society.
-
Its been a bit since I read one of your articles but I enjoyed this one. Thanks Itamar! Hope sales are doing well.
-
That’s rad. I didn’t even realize noise with fans and stuff was an issue until one day I took my headphones off after some gaming and realized that my wife had to turn the TV up to blast because my computer, two rooms over, was so damn loud. Should I ever find myself with both time and money, I’d love to build a liquid-cooled gaming rig.
-
My favorite F-Droid app is Vanilla Music. Its my daily driver mp3 player. https://f-droid.org/en/packages/ch.blinkenlights.android.vanilla/
-
Vanilla Music’s [mostly inactive] co-maintainer here. Thanks for the shout out!
Be sure to check out the various Vanilla plugins too. https://staging.f-droid.org/search?q=vanilla
-
-
-
An anonymous feedback bot reminds me too much of Yik Yak and could easily lead to a very toxic work environment
-
Behavioral control (for lack of a better term, help me here) is the responsibility of the team. If toxic pattern arise, people could abstain from such a bot, or even reach to a conclusion that such a device is not a cultural fit for their team in the end because it promotes the wrong type of behavior.
This is not something that could work with every Slack team anyway. I find it interesting. It reminded me of days past, when there were IRC bots that implemented “private” channels maintaining named and anonymous conversations in a similar manner.
-
-
dsschnau
4 months ago
|
link
| on:
Richard Stallman: A radical proposal to keep your personal data safe
I wish I could live in the same world RMS lives in.
-
-
this is gold
Wow - Avalonia sounds like exactly what I needed for a new desktop-oriented project. Thanks for sharing