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isthatforreal
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Mozilla files arguments against the FCC – latest step in fight to save net neutrality
As a European, I don’t quite get it: Americans seem to be concerned with net neutrality, meanwhile not protesting huge monopolistic corporations(the gatekeepers) removing some controversial users on their own judgement and with no way to appeal. Are individuals excluded from the net neutrality?
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I’m not very familiar with the legal details, but I assume the distinction is general access to the internet being considered a utility, while access to platforms being considered something like a privilege. E.g. roads shouldn’t discriminate based on destination, but that doesn’t mean the destination has to let you in.
edit: As to why Americans don’t seem as concerned with it (which is realize I didn’t address): I think most people see it as a place, like a restaurant. You can be kicked out if you are violating policies or otherwise disrupting their business, which can include making other patrons uncomfortable. Of course there are limits which is why we have anti-discrimination laws.
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Well, they’re also private, for-profit companies that legally own and sell the lines. So, there’s another political angle where people might vote against the regulations under theory that government shouldn’t dictate how you run your business or use your property, esp if it cost you money. Under theory of benefiting owners and shareholders, these companies are legal entities specifically created to generate as much profit from those lines as possible. If you don’t like it, build and sell your own lines. That’s what they’d say.
They don’t realize how hard it is to deploy an ISP on a shoe-string budget to areas where existing players already paid off the expensive part of the investment, can undercut you into bankruptcy, and (per people claiming to be ISP founders on Hacker News) will even cut competitors’ lines “accidentally” so their own customers leave them. In the last case, it’s hard to file and win a lawsuit if you just lost all your revenue and opponent has over a billion in the bank. They all just quit.
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Which ones?
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One of them described a situation with a contracted, construction crew with guy doing the digging not speaking English well. They were supposedly digging for incumbent but dug through his line. He aaid he pointed that it was clearly marked with paint or something. The operator claimed he thought that meant there wasnt a line there.
That’s a crew that does stuff in that area for a living not knowing what a line mark means. So, he figured they did it on purpose. He folded since he couldnt afford to sue them. Another mentioned them unplugging their lines in exchanges or something that made their service appear unreliable. Like the rest, they’d have to spend money they didnt have on lawyers who’d have to prove (a) it happened snd/or (b) it was intentional.
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The landmark case in the United States is throttling of Netflix by Comcast. Essentially, Comcast held Netflix customers hostage until Netflix paid (which they did).
It’s important to understand that many providers (Comcast, AT&T), also own the channels (NBC, CNN, respectively). They have an interest in charging less for their and their partners content, and more for their competitors content, while colluding to raise prices across the board (which they have done in the past with television and telephone service).
Collectively, they all have an interest in preventing new entrants to the market. The fear is that big players (Google, Amazon) will be able to negotiate deals (though they’d probably prefer not to), and new or free technologies (like PeerTube) will get choked out.
Net neutrality is somewhere where the American attitude towards corporations being able to do whatever to their customers conflicts with the American attitude that new companies and services must be able to compete in the marketplace.
You’re right to observe that individuals don’t really enter into it, except that lots of companies are pushing media campaigns to sway public opinion towards their own interests. You’re seeing those media campaigns leaking out.
Switching to the individual perspective.
I just don’t want to pay more for the same service. In living memory Americans have seen their gigantic monopolistic telecommunications company get broken up, and seen prices for services drop 100 fold; more or less as a direct consequence of that action.
As other posts have noted, the ISP situation in the US is already pretty dire unless you’re a business. Internet providers charge whatever they can get away with and have done an efficient job of ensuring customers don’t have alternatives. Telephone service got regulated, but internet service did not.
Re-reading your post after diving on this one… We’re not really concerned about the same gatekeepers. I don’t think any American would be overly upset to see players like Amazon, Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Netflix go away and I wouldn’t be surprised to see one or more of those guys implode as long as they don’t get access to too much of the infrastructure.
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Right-leaning US Citizen here. I’ll attempt to answer this as best as I can.
Net neutrality is being pushed by the media because it “fights discrimination”, and they blame the “fascist, nazi right” for it’s repeal (and they’re correct, except for the “fascist, nazi” bit). But without net neutrality, the ISPs still have an incentive to provide equal service, because otherwise they’ll lose customers (for obvious reasons).
I can’t speak to why open-source advocates are also pushing for net neutrality, because (in my opinion) the government shouldn’t be involved in how much internet costs. I do remember this article was moderately interesting, saying that the majority of root DNS servers are run by US companies. But, that doesn’t really faze me. As soon as people start censoring, that get backlash whether the media covers it or not
Side note, the reason you don’t see the protests against the “gatekeepers” is that most of the mainstream media isn’t accurately covering the reaction of the people to the censorship. I bet you didn’t know that InfoWars was the #1 news app with 5 stars on the Apple app store within a couple of weeks of them getting banned from Facebook, etc. I don’t really have any opinion about Alex Jones (lots of people on the right don’t agree with him), but you can bet I downloaded his app when I found out he got banned.
P.S. I assumed that InfoWars was what you were referring to when you said “removing some controversial users” P.P.S. I just checked the app store again, and it’s down to #20 in news, but still has 5 stars.
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But without net neutrality, the ISPs still have an incentive to provide equal service, because otherwise they’ll lose customers (for obvious reasons).
I think this is too optimistic. I live in Chicago, the third biggest city in the country and arguably the tech hub of the midwest. In my building I get to choose between AT&T and Comcast. I’m considered lucky: most of my friends in the city get one option, period. If their ISP starts doing anything shady they don’t have an option to switch, because there’s nobody they can switch to.
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I think this is too optimistic. I live in Chicago, the third biggest city in the country and arguably the tech hub of the midwest. In my building I get to choose between AT&T and Comcast. I’m considered lucky: most of my friends in the city get one option, period. If their ISP starts doing anything shady they don’t have an option to switch, because there’s nobody they can switch to.
It’s interesting to contrast this to New Zealand, where I live in a town of 50,000 people and have at least 5 ISPs I can choose from. I currently pay $100 NZ a month for an unlimited gigabit fibre connection, and can hit ~600 mbit from my laptop on a speed test. The NZ government has intervened heavily in the market, effectively forcing the former monopolist (Telecom) to split into separate infrastructure (Chorus) and services (Telecom) companies, and spending a lot of taxpayer money to roll out a nationwide fibre network. The ISPs compete on the infrastructure owned by Chorus. There isn’t drastic competition on prices: most plans are within $10-15 of each other, on a per month basis, but since fibre rolled out plans seem to have come down from around $135 per month to now around $100.
I was lucky to have decent internet through a local ISP when I lived in one of Oakland’s handful of apartment buildings, but most people wouldn’t have had that option. I think the ISP picture is a lot better in NZ. Also, net neutrality is a non-issue, as far as I know. We have it, no-one seems to be trying to take it away.
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I’m always irritated that there are policies decried in the United States as “impossible” when there are demonstrable implementations of it elsewhere.
I can see it being argued that the United States’s way is better or something, but there are these hyperbolic attacks on universal health care, net neutrality, workers’ rights, secure elections, etc that imply that they are simply impossible to implement when there are literally dozens of counterexamples…
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At the risk of getting far too far off topic.
One of the members of the board at AT&T was the CEO of an insurance company, someone sits on the boards of both Comcast/NBC and American Beverages. The head of the FCC was high up at Verizon.
These are some obvious, verifiable, connections based in personal interest. Not implying that it’s wrong or any of those individuals are doing anything which is wrong, you’ve just gotta take these ‘hyperbolic attacks’ with a grain of salt.
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Oh yeah it’s infuriating. It helps to hit them with examples. Tell them the media doesn’t talk about them since they’re all pushing something. We all know that broad statement is true. Then, briefly tell them the problems that we’re trying to solve with some goals we’re balancing. Make sure it’s their problems and goals. Then, mention the solution that worked else where which might work here. If it might not fit everyone, point out that we can deploy it in such a way where its specifics are tailored more to each group. Even if it can’t work totally, maybe point out that it has more cost-benefit than the current situation. Emphasize that it gets us closer to the goal until someone can figure out how to close the remaining gap. Add that it might even take totally different solutions to address other issues like solving big city vs rural Internet. If it worked and has better-cost benefit, then we should totally vote for it to do better than we’re doing. Depending on audience, you can add that we can’t have (country here) doing better than us since “This is America!” to foster some competitive, patriotic spirit.
That’s what I’ve been doing as part of my research talking to people and bouncing messages off them. I’m not any good at mass marketing, outreach or anything. I’ve just found that method works really well. You can even be honest since the other side is more full of shit than us on a lot of these issues. I mean, them saying it can’t exist vs working implementations should be an advantage for us. Should. ;)
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Beautifully said.
My family’s been in this country since the Mayflower. I love it dearly.
Loving something means making it better and fixing its flaws, not ignoring them.
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Thanks and yes. I did think about leaving for a place maybe more like my views. That last thing you said is why I’m still here. If we fix it, America won’t be “great again:” it would be fucking awesome. If not for us, then for the young people we’re wanting to be able to experience that. That’s why I’m still here.
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arguably the tech hub of the midwest.
Only if you can’t find Austin on a map… ;)
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Native Texan/Austinite here. Texas is the South, Southwest, or just Texas. All the rest of y’all are just Yankees. ;)
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But if their ISP starts doing anything shady, they’ll surely get some backlash, even if they can’t switch they can complain.
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They’ve been complaining for decades. Nothing happens most of the time. The ISP’s have many lobbyists and lawyers to insulate them from that. The big ones are all doing the same abusive practices, too. So, you can’t switch to get away from it.
Busting up AT&T’s monopoly got results in lower costs, better service, better speeds, etc. Net neutrality got more results. I support more regulation of these companies and/or socialized investment to replace them like the gigabit for $350/mo in Chattanooga, TN. It’s 10Gbps now I think but I don’t know what price.
Actually, I go further due to their constant abuses and bribing politicians: Im for having a court seizetheir assets, converting them to nonprofits, and putting new management in charge. If at all possible. It would send a message to other companies that think they can do damage to consumers and mislead regulators with immunity to consequences.
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The problem is that corporate fines are generally a small percentage of profits.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/apr/03/us-bank-mexico-drug-gangs https://www.huffingtonpost.com/dana-radcliffe/should-companies-obey-the-law_b_1650037.html
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Net neutrality is being pushed by the media because it “fights discrimination”, and they blame the “fascist, nazi right” for it’s repeal
Nobody says this. It’s being pushed because it prevents large corporations from locking out smaller players. The Internet is a great economic equalizer: I can start a business and put a website up and I’m just as visible and accessible as Microsoft.
We don’t want Microsoft to be able to pay AT&T to slow traffic to my website but not theirs. It breaks the free market by allowing collusion that can’t be easily overcome. It’s like the telephone network; I can’t go run wires to everyone’s house, but I want my customers to be able to call me. I don’t want my competitors to pay AT&T to make it harder to call me than to call them.
But without net neutrality, the ISPs still have an incentive to provide equal service, because otherwise they’ll lose customers (for obvious reasons).
That assumes people have a choice. They very often don’t. Internet service has a massively high barrier to entry, similar to a public utility. Most markets in the United States have at most two providers (both major corporations opposed to net neutrality). Very, very rarely is there a third.
More importantly, there are only five tier-1 networks in the United States. Five. It doesn’t matter how many local ISPs there are; without Net Neutrality, five corporations effectively control what can and can’t be transmitted. If those five decide something should be slowed down or forbidden, there is nothing I can do. Changing to a different provider won’t do a thing.
(And of those five, all of them donate significantly more to one major political party than the other, and the former Associate General Counsel of one of them is currently chairman of the FCC…)
I can’t speak to why open-source advocates are also pushing for net neutrality, because (in my opinion) the government shouldn’t be involved in how much internet costs.
Net neutrality says nothing about how much it costs. It just says you can’t charge different amounts based on content. It would be like television stations charging more money to Republican candidates to run ads than to Democratic candidates. They’re free to charge whatever they want; they’re not free to charge different people different amounts based on the content of the message.
Democracy requires communication. It does no good to say “freedom!” if the major corporations can effectively silence whoever they want. “At least it’s not the government” is not a good defense of stifling public debate.
And there’s a difference between a newspaper and a television/radio station/internet service. I can buy a printing press and make a newspaper and refuse to carry whatever I want. There are no practical limits to the number of printing presses in the country.
There is a limited electromagnetic spectrum. Not just anyone can broadcast a TV signal. There is a limit to how many cables can be run on utility polls or buried underground. Therefore, discourse carried over those media are required to operate more in the public trust than others. As they become more essential to a healthy democracy, that only becomes more important. It’s silly to say “you still have freedom of speech” if you’re blocked from television, radio, the Internet, and so on. Those are the public forums of our day. That a corporation is doing the blocking doesn’t make it any better than if the government were to do it.
Side note, the reason you don’t see the protests against the “gatekeepers” is that most of the mainstream media isn’t accurately covering the reaction of the people to the censorship.
There’s a big difference between Twitter not wanting to carry Alex Jones and net neutrality. Jones is still free to go start up a website that carries his message; with Net Neutrality not only could he be blocked from Twitter, but the network itself could make his website inaccessible.
There is no alternative with Net Neutrality. You can’t build your own Internet. Without mandating equal treatment of traffic, we hand the Internet over solely to the big players. Preventing monopolistic and oligarchic control of public discourse is a valid use of government power. It’s not censorship, it’s the exact opposite.
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That assumes people have a choice. They very often don’t.
This was also brought up by @hwayne, @caleb and @friendlysock, and is not something that occurred to me. I appreciate all who are mentioning this.
More importantly, there are only five tier-1 networks in the United States.
Wow, I did not know that. I can see that as a legitimate reason to want net neutrality. But, I also think that they’ll piss off a lot of people if they can stream CNN but not InfoWars.
It just says you can’t charge different amounts based on content.
I understood it to also mean that you also couldn’t charge customers differently because of who they are. Also, don’t things like Tor mitigate things like that?
“At least it’s not the government” is not a good defense of stifling public debate.
I completely agree. But in the US we have a free market (at least, we used to) and that means that the government is supposed to stay out of it as much as possible.
Preventing monopolistic and oligarchic control of public discourse is a valid use of government power.
I also agree. But these corporations (the tier-1 ISPs) haven’t done anything noticeable to me to limit my enjoyment of conservative content, and I’m pretty sure that they would’ve by now if they wanted to.
The reason I oppose net neutrality is more because I don’t think that the government should control it than any more than I think AT&T and others should.
not only could he be blocked from Twitter, but the network itself could make his website inaccessible.
But they haven’t.
edit: how -> who
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Even though I’m favoring net neutrality, I appreciate you braving the conservative position on this here on Lobsters. I did listen to a lot of them. What I found is most had reasonable arguments but had no idea about what ISP’s did, are doing, are themselves paying Tier 1’s, etc. Their media sources’ bias (all have bias) favoring ISP’s for some reason didn’t tell them any of it. So, even if they’d have agreed with us (maybe, maybe not), they’d have never reached those conclusions since they were missing crucial information to reflect on when choosing to regulate or not regulate.
An example is one telling me companies like Netflix should pay more to Comcast per GB or whatever since they used more. The guy didn’t know Comcast refuses to do that when paying Tier 1’s negotiating transit agreements instead that worked entirely different. He didn’t know AT&T refused to give telephones or data lines to rural areas even if they were willing to pay what others did. He didn’t know they could roll out gigabit today for same prices but intentionally kept his service slow to increase profit knowing he couldn’t switch for speed. He wasn’t aware of most of the abuses they were doing. He still stayed with his position since that guy in particular went heavily with his favorite, media folks. However, he didn’t like any of that stuff which his outlets never even told him about. Even if he disagrees, I think he should disagree based on an informed decision if possible since there’s plenty smart conservatives out there who might even favor net neutrality if no better alternative. I gave him a chance to do that.
So, I’m going to give you this comment by @lorddimwit quickly showing how they ignored the demand to maximize profit, this comment by @dotmacro showing some abuses they do with their market control, and this article that gives nice history of what free market did with each communications medium with the damage that resulted. Also note that the Internet itself was an open, free-if-you-have-a-wire system that competed with the proprietary, charge-per-use, lock-them-in-forever-if-possible systems the private sector was offering. It smashed them so hard you might have even never heard of them or forgotten a lot about them depending on your age. It also democratized more goods than about anything other than maybe transportation. Probably should stick with the principles that made that happen to keep innovation rolling. Net neutrality was one of them that was practiced informally at first then put into law as the private sector got too much power and was abusing it. We should keep doing what worked instead of the practices ISP’s want that didn’t work but will increase their profits at our expense for nothing in return. That is what they want: give us less or as little improvement in every way over time while charging us more. It’s what they’re already doing.
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I read the comments, and I read most of the freecodecamp article.
I like the ideal of the internet being a public utility, but I don’t really want the government to have that much control.
I think the real problem I have with government control of the internet, is that I don’t want the US to end up like china with large swaths of the internet completely blocked.
I don’t really know how to solve our current problems. But, like @jfb said elsewhere in this thread, I don’t think that net neutrality is the best possible solution.
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Also note that the Internet itself was an open, free-if-you-have-a-wire system that competed with the proprietary, charge-per-use, lock-them-in-forever-if-possible systems the private sector was offering. It smashed them so hard you might have even never heard of them or forgotten a lot about them depending on your age.
I might recognize a name, but I probably wasn’t even around yet.
So, I’m going to give you…
Thanks for the info, I’ll read it and possibly form a new opinion.
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But without net neutrality, the ISPs still have an incentive to provide equal service, because otherwise they’ll lose customers (for obvious reasons).
What obvious reasons? Because customers will switch providers if they don’t treat all traffic equally? That would require (a) users are able to tell if a provider prioritizes certain traffic, and (b) that there is a viable alternative to switch to. I have no confidence in either.
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I don’t personally care if the prioritize certain websites, but I sure as hell care if the block something.
As far as I’m concerned, they can slow down Youtube by 10% for conservative channels and I wouldn’t give a damn even though I watch and enjoy some. What really bothers me is when they “erase” somebody or block people from getting to them.
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well you did say they have an incentive to provide “equal service” so i guess you meant something else. net neutrality supporters like me aren’t satisfied with “nobody gets blocked,” because throttling certain addresses gives big corporations more tools to control media consumption, and throttling have similar effects to blocking in the long term. i’m quite surprised that you’d be fine with your ISP slowing down content you like by 10%… that would adversely affect their popularity compared to the competitors that your ISP deems acceptable, and certain channels would go from struggling to broke and be forced to close down.
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Well, I have pretty fast internet, so 10% wouldn’t be terrible for me. However, I can see how some people would take issue with such a slowdown.
I was using a bit an extreme example to illustrate my point. What I was trying to say was that they can’t really stop people from watching the content that they want to watch.
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I recall, but didn’t review, a study saying half of web site users wanted the page loaded in 2 seconds. Specific numbers aside, I’ve been reading that kind of claim from many people for a long time that a new site taking too long to load, being sluggish, etc makes them miss lots of revenue. Many will even close down. So, the provider of your favorite content being throttled for even two seconds might kill half their sales since Internet users expect everything to work instantly. Can they operate with a 50% cut in revenue? Or maybe they’re bootstrapping up a business with a few hundred or a few grand but can’t afford to pay for no artificial delays. Can they even become the content provider your liked if having to pay hundreds or thousands extra on just extra profit? I say extra profit since ISP’s already paid for networks capable of carrying it out of your monthly fee.
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yeah, the shaping of public media consumption would happen in cases where people don’t know what they want to watch or don’t find out about something that they would want to watch
anti-democratic institutions already shape media consumption and discourse to a large extent, but giving them more tools will hurt the situation. maybe it won’t affect you or me directly, but sadly we live in a society so it will come around to us in the form of changes in the world
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But without net neutrality, the ISPs still have an incentive to provide equal service, because otherwise they’ll lose customers (for obvious reasons).
Most customers have exceedingly limited options in their area, and they’re not going to switch houses because of their ISP. Especially in apartment complexes, you see cases where, say, Comcast has the lockdown on an entire population and there really isn’t a reasonable alternative.
In a truly free market, maybe I’d agree with you, but the regulatory environment and natural monopolistic characteristics of telecomm just don’t support the case.
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Most customers have exceedingly limited options in their area, and they’re not going to switch houses because of their ISP.
That’s a witty way of putting it.
But yeah, @lorddimwit mentioned the small number of tier-1 ISPs. I didn’t realize there were so few, but I still think that net neutrality is overreaching, even if its less than I originally thought.
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But without net neutrality, the ISPs still have an incentive to provide equal service, because otherwise they’ll lose customers (for obvious reasons).
Awkward political jabs aside, most of your statements imply that you believe customers are free to choose who they get their internet from, which is just plain incorrect. Whatever arguments you want to make against net neutrality, there is one indisputable fact that you cannot just ignore or paper over:
ISPs do not operate in a free market.
In the vast majority of the US, cable and telephone companies are granted local monopolies in the areas they operate. That is why they must be regulated. As the Mozilla blog said, they have both the incentive and means to abuse their customers and they’ve already been caught doing it on multiple occasions.
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most of your statements imply that you believe customers are free to choose who they get their internet from, which is just plain incorrect
I think you’re a bit late to the party, I’ve conceded that fact already.
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All of that is gibberish. Net Neutrality is being pushed because it creates a more competitive marketplace. None of it has anything to do with professional liar Alex Jones.
But without net neutrality, the ISPs still have an incentive to provide equal service, because otherwise they’ll lose customers (for obvious reasons).
That’ s not how markets work. And it’s not how the technology or permit process for ISPs work. There is very little competition among ISPs in the US market.
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Hey, here’s a great example from HN of the crap they pull without net neutrality. They advertised “unlimited,” throttled it secretly, admitted it, and forced them to pay extra to get actual unlimited.
@lorddimwit add this to your collection. Throttling and fake unlimited been going on long time but they couldve got people killed doing it to first responders. Id have not seen that coming just for PR reasons or avoiding local, govt regulation if nothing else.
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I can’t speak to why open-source advocates are also pushing for net neutrality, because (in my opinion) the government shouldn’t be involved in how much internet costs.
It’s not about how much internet costs, it’s about protecting freedom of access to information, and blocking things like zero-rated traffic that encourage monopolies and discourage competition. If I pay for a certain amount of traffic, ISPs shouldn’t be allowed to turn to Google and say “want me to prioritize YouTube traffic over Netflix traffic? Pay me!”
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Net neutrality is being pushed by the media because it “fights discrimination”, and they blame the “fascist, nazi right” for it’s repeal (and they’re correct, except for the “fascist, nazi” bit).
Where on earth did you hear that? I sure hope you’re not making it up—you’ll find this site doesn’t take too kindly to that.
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I might’ve been conflating two different political issues, but I have heard “fascist” and “nazi” used to describe the entire right wing.
A quick google search for “net neutrality fascism” turned this up https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/kbye4z/heres-why-net-neutrality-is-essential-in-trumps-america
“With the rise of Trump and other neo-fascist regimes around the world, net neutrality will be the cornerstone that activists use to strengthen social movements and build organized resistance,” Wong told Motherboard in a phone interview. “Knowledge is power.”
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You assume that net neutrality is a left-wing issue, which it’s not. It actually has bipartisan support. The politicians who oppose it have very little in common, aside from receiving a large sum of donations from telecom corporations.
As far as terms like “fascist” or “Nazi” are concerned—I think they have been introduced into this debate solely to ratchet up the passions. It’s not surprising that adding these terms to a search yields results that conflate the issues.
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Ill add on your first point that conservatives who are pro-market are almost always pro-competition. They expect the market will involve competition driving whats offered up, its cost down, and so on. Both the broadband mandate and net neutrality achieved that with an explosion of businesses and FOSS offering about anything one can think of.
The situation still involves 1-3 companies available for most consumers that, like a cartel, work together to not compete on lowering prices, increasing service, and so on. Net neutrality reduced some predatory behavior the cartel market was doing. They still made about $25 billion in profit between just a few companies due to anti-competitive behavior. Repealing net neutrality for anti-competitive market will have no positives for consumer but will benefit roughly 3 or so companies by letting them charge more for same or less service.
Bad for conservative’s goals of market competition and benefiting conservative voters.
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I would like to request that people don’t post “we” as a hyperlink, without saying who “we” is. It’s much easier to read through the various posts that way. Please put the name of the company as the name of the link, or at least right next to it.
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Atlassian is hiring anybody interested in functional programming in Bengaluru. I’ll be available for training in any FP topics you want to learn. Haskell and Scala experience are beneficial but not necessary.
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Nix and/or NixOS experience is super useful too. We use it to ship all of our team’s software.
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We build Docker images from Nix then deploy them to Atlassian’s internal PaaS.
The benefits we get:
- I can build any image we ship to production, byte-for-byte
- When we change 1 line of code, we’re 100% confident only what we changed will be shipped
- All of our services use the same build commands
The problems we have:
- Documentation is not great, so Nix is hard to teach
- Very common things like pinning cause lots of questions (e.g. what’s problems are caused by Import From Derivation?)
- Therefore most team members rely on the few people who have invested the time reading nixpkgs and the Nix source
I think the problems are mostly solvable and the benefits can’t be obtained from any existing tools.
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This shows the Nix and Docker tooling: http://lethalman.blogspot.com/2016/04/cheap-docker-images-with-nix_15.html
The PaaS part is mostly a docker push to a repo.
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Atlassian will support relocation to offices, including Bengaluru.
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I am located in bangalore. How can we discuss this further?
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Sent you a direct message
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Hi, I’m jfb and I switch static site generators more often than I post at the executive orc house.
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Headed to the lake with the family. We’re meeting up with friends from California and should have a noisy but fun weekend, with five kids between six and 18mo.
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Another wonderful article.
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A funny thing I realized a while back is that, for me, there’s very little difference between Linux and the BSDs, and to some extent even OSX.
Most of the software I use on a daily basis (Emacs, StumpWM, SBCL, Chromium, rxvt, zsh, etc.) is virtually identical between systems. There are some nuances, like GNU vs BSD userland tools, but for the most part it doesn’t affect me much.
OSX has a different UI, but even there most of my time is spent in Emacs, Chromium, or the terminal (with zsh), so it ends up being nearly the same, too.
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I feel that’s only true for the time spent coding? As soon as you have to deploy or manage a service/system, things get interesting. Though I guess it’s less of a problem for any kind of code that only runs locally?
Lobsters has me all hyped for OpenBSD, and there’s openbsd.amsterdam now offering VMs, which is really interesting. But at the same time, I don’t want to spend a lot of time on the maintenance of private little side-projects. I currently take a single VM from a generic provider, run Debian on it, and set it update and reboot automatically. If I can get to that point with OpenBSD, I’d be even more interested in trying. (But I’ve only spent a little time researching so far.)
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I feel that’s only true for the time spent coding? As soon as you have to deploy or manage a service/system, things get interesting. Though I guess it’s less of a problem for any kind of code that only runs locally?
Yeah, I suppose that’s true, but almost everything I write lately is just loaded into a Lisp image and launched from the REPL, so it’s largely the same every where.
I think administration is definitely where there are the biggest user noticeable differences between all the systems.
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I’m interested in the pretty impressive performance delta – I wouldn’tve thought that Zen could outperform Broadwell quite so handily!
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This is really nifty. Thanks!
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If you want secure and rather fast x86, look at Opterons 62xx and 63xx. They are still pretty fast and not vulnerable to many CVE’s. Coupled with Coreboot, they make for a nice desktop or a server.
If you want something faster, more secure and are not limited to x86, POWER9 with Talos II motherboard is a great choice.
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It looks like a new single CPU Talos board is still $2500. I mean, that’s far cheaper than they were last time I looked, but still not entirely practical for many enthusiasts.
One biggest issue with other architecture is video deciding. A lot of decoders are written in x86_64 specific assembly. Itanium never had a lot of codecs ported to EPIC, making it useless in the video editing space. There are hardware decoders on a lot of amd/nvidia GPUs, but then it comes down to drivers (amdgpu is open source and you have a better shot there on power, but it’d be interesting to see if anyone has gotten that working).
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You can hardware decode but you generally don’t want to hardware encode for editing. HW encoders have worse quality at the same bitrate vs. software.
Mesa support for decode on AMD is good, encode is starting to work but it’s pretty bad right now (compared to windows drivers).
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Decoding isn’t the problem. All modern lossy codecs ate strongly biased towards decode performance, and once you’re at reasonable data rates, CPUs handle it fine. Encoding would be misery, because all software encoders are laboriously hand tuned for their target platform, and you really don’t want to use a hardware encoder unless you absolutely have to.
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The only reason you’d be stuck with x86
When I last saw it debated, everyone agreed x86 stumped all competitors on price/performance, mainly single-threaded. Especially important if you’re doing something CPU-bound that you can’t just throw cores at. One of the reasons is only companies bringing in piles of money can afford a full-custom, multi-GHz, more-work-per-cycle design like Intel, AMD, and IBM. Although Raptor is selling IBM’s, Intel and AMD are still much cheaper.
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That sounds pretty high end. Is that true for regular desktop CPU’s? Ex: I built a friend a rig a year or so ago that could do everything up to the best games of the time. It cost around $600. Can I get a gaming or multimedia-class POWER9 box for $600 new?
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“But you can look at it otherwise - the PC you assemble will be enough for you for 10-15 years, if you have enough money to pay now :)”
The local dealership called me back. They said whoever wrote the comment I showed them should put in an application to the sales department. They might have nice commissions waiting for them if they can keep up that smooth combo of truth and BS. ;)
“$600 PC will not make it for that long.”
Back to being serious, maybe and maybe not. The PC’s that work for about everything now get worse every year. What they get worse at depends on the year, though. The $600-700 rig was expected to get behind on high-end games in a few years, play lots of performance stuff acceptably for a few years more, and do basic stuff fast enough for years more than that. As an example (IIRC), both tedu and I each had a Core Duo 2 laptop for seven or more years with them performing acceptably on about everything we did. I paid $800 for that laptop barely-used on eBay. I’m using a Celeron right now since I’m doing maintenance on that one. It was a cheaper barter, it sucks in a lot of ways, and still gets by. I can’t say I’d have a steady stream of such bargains with long-term usability on POWER9. Maybe we’ll get it after a few years.
One other thing to note is that the Talos stuff is beta based on a review I read where they had issues with some stuff. Maybe the hardware could have similar issues that would require a replacement. That’s before considering hackers focusing on hardware now: I’m just talking vanilla problems. Until their combined HW/SW offering matures, I can’t be sure anything they sell me will last a year much less 10-15.
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Steve could also be ruthless with his feedback. In my first meeting with him to present what I had been working on (which was held on a Saturday morning), he looked at the demo for 5 minutes and told me I had “ruined NeXTSTEP” (the software platform).
What a garbage human being. I’m glad he’s dead–he promoted toxic culture and practices that as a sector we’re all still working to purge.
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I strongly recommend Pirates of Silicon Valley if you want to see more of their personalities. Wozniak says it’s the only one that depicts them accurately. Here’s clips of jobs.
Regarding OP, the next thing he does is go on stage getting applauded for others’ work. Bill Burr did my favorite standup on Steve Jobs talking about that. It applies to a lot of other leaders in the tech industry, too.
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Both the TV movie and the book it’s based on, Fire in the Valley, are quite wonderful.
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At work, it’s review time, so I have to do that. I’m in a good position where my team is extremely good, and we’re getting loads of cool shit done, so it’s not that I have to have The Talk with any of my people; but it’s still this sort of ugly kabuki nonsense. I’m looking forward to being done with it for another six months as soon as humanly possible.
At home, I had the baby to myself all weekend as the wife and the big girl went camping. It was amazing, but I’m very glad that everybody is home now. We’re in a really good spot with the girls; they’re 18m and 3y and are tight as thieves.
I’ve started assembling a “new” PC out of parts I’ve had lying around, and I got it all hooked up and … bupkis. The motherboard is getting power (there are LEDs on the ethernet jack that light up) but the fans don’t start and the power switch does nothing. So I have a couple of evenings “fun” swapping parts around to try and narrow down what’s busted. At the very least, it’s not the CPU, so that’s a $1200 relief.
I’m also playing around with NixOS on the one working computer; I stand by my declaration that this is the only sensible way to configure and maintain a computer, but I am increasingly disenchanted with the nix/nixos specific experience. I hate the language, and the tooling is pretty weak, and the documentation is not good at all. I think I should start blogging about it, so that someone coming after me will have additional documentation, but that smacks of work and I am so very tired.
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I’m also playing around with NixOS on the one working computer; I stand by my declaration that this is the only sensible way to configure and maintain a computer, but I am increasingly disenchanted with the nix/nixos specific experience. I hate the language, and the tooling is pretty weak, and the documentation is not good at all. I think I should start blogging about it, so that someone coming after me will have additional documentation, but that smacks of work and I am so very tired.
I’ve been meaning to try GuixSD/NixOS for a while as it seems a lot more sane than the current way of doing things. Have you tried GuixSD? What are the problems you’ve found with the nix language/NixOS? To me it seems that
guile lispis better than thenixlanguage, but I don’t know how the ecosystem compares between both systems.-
nix-the-language is just a shittier, untyped version of Haskell, with terrible, terrible documentation. The tooling is bad, but improving. I haven’t tried Guix, which I would expect to like better because scheme, but be less useful to me because of maturity and the strict approach to software freedom.
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nix-the-language is just a shittier, untyped version of Haskell, with terrible, terrible documentation. The tooling is bad, but improving.
As a newbie trying really hard to figure things out in NixOS, this si so damn true.
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I don’t know. The people behind nix and NixOS are very smart, however, so I would expect them to have a good reason (Chesterton’s Fence, and all).
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This comment reminded me to submit this story, which pretty much summarized my Nix experience; while the idea of declarative OS config did seem cool at first, it quickly gave way to frustration with the obscure and under documented tooling…
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This comment reminded me to submit this story, which pretty much summarized my Nix experience; while the idea of declarative OS config did seem cool at first, it quickly gave way to frustration with the obscure and under documented tooling…
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This is just the most amazingly Sisyphean project I’ve ever encountered. They’re never, ever going to hit their goal; and yet, they keep cranking away.
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I felt that way about Haiku, and it’s actually turning into a fairly pleasant little desktop that can run some significant applications. It’s almost to the point that if I didn’t need to run VMs and videoconference in Google Hangouts, it could be my full-time desktop.
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The three things that kept me from going Haiku as a real desktop the last time I looked were a lack of drivers, general instability, and a lack of a good modern web browser. Have any of those been addressed? I don’t honestly need VMs or video conferencing, but being on a super old version of Firefox or WebKit were definite blockers.
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It seems pretty stable. Driver-wise, it handles everything on my reasonably recent laptop; it can load FreeBSD wifi drivers. WebPositive has I think been updated to WebKit 2.
Really, I wish Haiku had simply targeted source code compatibility and not binary compatibility with BeOS. Binary compatibility shackled them to a custom version of GCC and binutils, which took a lot of engineering resources. They also added a lot of features, some of which are better than any other extant desktop OS (e.g. PackageFS), but which again took resources away from basic stability.
At the end of the day, they’ve accomplished amazing stuff and Haiku is really a usable and pleasant environment. I just think they would’ve hit usability ten years ago if they’d made a few decisions differently.
(This is not to disparage their work, which is really awesome. I was never in their shoes, so I’m armchair quarterbacking.)
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I’m not a Go programmer (nor interested in becoming one) but this was a fantastic article. I think it’s almost perfectly generalizable to other toolchains. The part about observability is in particular excellent.
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One of the things that I like about using a tiling window manager rather than a desktop environment is that I never see icons. That’s not quite true — I see them in Firefox — but it’s mostly true. Rather than constantly finding little things to point & click on, I just use my computer all day long.
What I’m trying to say is that maybe obsessing over icons is the wrong answer. Maybe what we need is to radically reimagine the human-computer interface. Tiling iconless WMs are probably not the answer for most people, but — maybe something new is.
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What do you use besides icons in that setup? Menus and search/command line?
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I have StumpWM commands set up for command functions like ‘switch to emacs,’ ‘switch to Firefox,’ ‘switch to JavaScript-enabled Firefox,’ ‘switch to console’ &c.; I bind the really-commonly-used ones to keys and just use StumpWM’s
colon(prefix ;) to execute them quickly. For other stuff I’ll either execute them directly with prefix !, or use the console or emacs shell.It’s not terribly discoverable, which is why I won’t say that it’s the wave of the future. But it’s so much faster than e.g. scrolling through macOS, Windows, Android or GNOME stuff.
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Customers do not care what deals Intel/AMD have made with whom.
The second a competitor comes along that doesn’t have this nonsense built-in, companies that sell computers will begin to source their CPUs from them. It has already begun with RISC-V, some ARM CPUs, POWER9, etc.
Computer security has never been more important than it is now, and its importance is only increasing. Security experts, IT experts, their friends, and their families, etc., will vote with their money.
Meanwhile, these companies will be dealing with lawsuits for intentionally selling customers faulty, backdoored malware. Have fun with that.
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Getting end users to care about security, even when the lack of it directly harms them, isn’t easy.
I am optimistic because it’s simply the reality. The “users don’t care about privacy/security” refrain is just one of those things some people like to say. It’s total nonsense.
People use insecure, poorly designed technologies only when well designed, secure versions of those technologies do not exist. It’s just a market cycle. Poorly designed tech where engineers cut corners comes out first, and then the properly designed versions come out later. The instant they go on the market everyone abandons what’s broken and upgrades to the newer and better tech. This has always been the case.
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The second a competitor comes along that doesn’t have this nonsense built-in, companies that sell computers will begin to source their CPUs from them.
There’s been competitors to Intel without the nonsense built in, with simpler architectures, faster at one point, and so on. Many went bankrupt, the products were withdrawn, or the company got acquired. So, your claim has to be assumed false by default given the market history is exactly the opposite. The combo of monopolistic tactics by Intel/IBM/Microsoft and the lock-in to x86 software made that happen. On x86 side, it was mostly the same with AMD happening because IBM forced it to happen. There’s one, surviving, third party that focused on lowest, energy usage. The Centaur’s were sold by VIA but VIA was losing boatloads of money. So, you don’t have a lasting, success story that was able to do non-coerced license of x86 for high-performance chips.
The good news is the prevalence of doing everything in the browser already got hardware diversity in via netbooks and tablets. The new architecture having excellent browser and codec support might be enough to get some of that market. Throw in sync with all devices plus online, private backups. There’s some potential. I’ve also been toying with ideas about cloud servers (esp for web stuff), network appliances, kiosks, and so on. Whereas, taking down Intel/AMD will require x86 support for legacy, x86-optimized apps. Intel publicly threatened to use patent suits on any company that does that.
“People use insecure, poorly designed technologies only when well designed, secure versions of those technologies do not exist.”
That’s nonsense. There are easy-to-use, private solutions in a number of areas. Let’s just say search, chat, email, and backups. The market at large uses the insecure offerings, even those with harder UI. That’s because they thought they were a good deal for every reason but the one you gave: truly private or secure. They don’t care about that. I think the easiest counterpoint is that the top providers of email and ways to hang out with friends are surveillance companies. They know it, private IM’s or group messages aren’t so hard, and they still use the surveillance platforms anyway. That’s hundreds of millions to billions of people. Where’s your market data backing your point a similarly-sized number of people cared enough to switch to DuckDuckGo, Signal, or SpiderOak? I’m cherry-picking things advertised as private that are easy to use with media coverage.
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I doubt it. We’ll see how far that goes given the performance difference. Also, we goes from one sue-happy, ISA monopoly to another. Least the SoC’s themselves are more diverse.
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re: performance — it’s not intended to be the primary way to run apps, it’s more of a transitional step, like Rosetta was for Apple. The plan is probably something like:
- Microsoft says to customers: “you can buy this, this is real Windows, not like RT was. It runs Photoshop!”
- People buy the devices, get somewhat disappointed with the performance of heavier apps, but still keep the devices
- Developers port their apps to AArch64 and ship native compiled versions to increase performance
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Now, that’s a great idea! There’s still going to be a legacy base whose stuff won’t port. I think the larger part of the market is using stuff that’s still getting updated. So, that strategy could gradually pull them off x86 if ARM chips get good enough for those users. I’m thinking more like cost-effective with nifty features their SoC’s support more than performance. The multimedia and sensor stuff on a SnapDragon is an example.
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There’s been competitors to Intel without the nonsense built in, with simpler architectures, faster at one point, and so on. Many went bankrupt, the products were withdrawn, or the company got acquired. So, your claim has to be assumed false by default given the market history is exactly the opposite.
I’m pretty sure you’re making an elaborate strawman argument to my point. The Intel ME thing is only recently in the news relative to the timeline you’re considering. It was not a factor back then. Now it is.
Where’s your market data backing your point a similarly-sized number of people cared enough to switch to DuckDuckGo, Signal, or SpiderOak? I’m cherry-picking things advertised as private that are easy to use with media coverage.
DuckDuckGo’s search results were (and are) historically poor compared to Google’s. So it’s not “well designed”. I chose my words and criteria carefully.
As far as Signal goes, it has a very large and growing userbase, but it too, doesn’t offer the same (or better) level of quality that the popular messaging services offer. It’s pretty darn buggy. Nevertheless, I use it almost exclusively with all of my friends. These technologies don’t go from zero to out-competing incumbents in a day. It obviously takes some amount of time. Facebook is losing users (to a service that advertises privacy as its #1 feature, albeit misleadingly), Signal and Telegram are gaining users.
As for SpiderOak, I can’t comment on that. Apple’s Time Machine backups are a better idea than cloud backups, no matter who your provider is, and I’m guessing Apple’s Time Machine has more users than whatever it is you have in mind.
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The Intel ME thing is only recently in the news relative to the timeline you’re considering.
People have been talking about Intel and DRM for a long time. I have a comment in this thread with links. That the markets ignored the risks to keep buying Intel isn’t a strawman so much as what they actually did. You were talking the hypothetical stuff that might cut into whatever their current, public revenues are. Hasn’t panned out yet if you’re talking secure processors or something like that.
re competition had issues. Most of the big, tech companies had products with issues when they started. Some of the biggest were trash-talked as garbage by many developing for them. They still got tons of users because those wanted or had to use what they offered. It seems like anywhere from most to all the companies focused on privacy or security that actually works vs checklist BS have failed to accomplish anything. You can get rich via sales or VC off a shitty, non-security app many times over before one, secure app will get high uptake. Must be some underlying principle or principles at work, yeah?
It’s why these days I tell people wanting private/secure apps to hide or embed that in a product sold on every other kind of benefit that people actually jump on. Enough people doing that might give us what we need. It will probably take a lot of time and cooperation, too.
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People have been talking about Intel and DRM for a long time. I have a comment in this thread with links. That the markets ignored the risks to keep buying Intel isn’t a strawman so much as what they actually did.
This is not true. I repeat myself: the problems of Intel ME were unheard of and out of the public’s consciousness only until recently, and even now, still, many are unaware of its existence. This is fact.
Likewise it is fact that Facebook is losing users to more private platforms, again proving the point that users do care about privacy and security.
One need only look at the security of computers over time to see that it’s constantly improving, just as it is with every other technology, be it cars, trains, spaceships, airplanes, whatever.
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You’re right that there’s increased awareness. You’re right that this could affect sales. The thing you’re leaving off is that anyone that cared about privacy could’ve just googled the AMT thing on their box to find out it was a backdoor. They didn’t care enough to do that. Whereas, privacy-conscious, lay people were already avoiding that shit years ago. They used to show up in forums talking about it, running SandboxIE, using NoScript for surfing, and so on.
My argument is most didn’t care, don’t, and won’t. If they buy a private-ish alternative, it will be for other reasons like apps, features, luxury, etc. Apple iPhone being pushed for privacy is an example. Apple succeeded for every other reason. That’s just after the fact that might bump sales up a bit.
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One cannot care about something that one is unaware of. So increased awareness = more caring, because of course users care about privacy and security. Many of them just aren’t computer experts like you and I who have the time to sift through all of the b.s. “privacy” marketing claims that companies like Facebook make.
So, again, users do care very much, and once they’re made aware they’ve been lied to, precisely because they care they will ditch these companies.
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Many of them just aren’t computer experts like you and I
That’s right. So, the ones that cared asked us on security forums what we thought. They’d get a basic assessment of overall risks, what defense to use, which products were better, and so on. Again, I’m talking about what privacy-conscious laypeople were doing for the past ten years or so I’ve been on security forums. They also usually found it hard to get friends and family using the better stuff. It didn’t have feature X, shiny emoji Y, and so on. They didn’t care. Same with literally over a 1,000 people I’ve tried to market that stuff to face-to-face.
“ So increased awareness = more caring, “
This can happen. I’m even hoping for it. The general public does respond to what’s in the media, esp scary stuff. The thing is, it’s not really an informed response so much as a reaction. They jump at buzzwords and false assurances en masse. So, what privacy-pushing suppliers need to do is keep good products ready for those events. Then, when it makes waves, they have media campaigns targeted at those people. The bullshitters already do this. The honest suppliers will only get so many amidst the competition. The numbers can gradually go up with each media wave while they do more positive type of marketing on a regular basis advertising features, privacy, and good service. Sales from that can drive new products. Even better if they’re nonprofits or public benefit corporations to reduce odds they themselves become the villains down the line.
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DuckDuckGo’s search results were (and are) historically poor compared to Google’s. So it’s not “well designed”. I chose my words and criteria carefully.
How about StartPage? Exact same results as Google. Where are all their users?
Consumers won’t care about additional choice if everything they care about is packaged into what they already use.
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Apple gets paid for the search engine default. I don’t know if I’d call that ‘collusion’. I think it’s bad – it’s one of many small profit seeking behaviours that Apple engages in to the detriment of their users and their platform as a whole (see also: the 30% cut they take on the App Store).
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For default on iOS, I can give you three, billion reasons they’d keep Google. ;)
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I think Apple foresees that there would be user backlash. At this point, Google is expected as a default, and providing anything to the contrary is considered presumptive. That would be a huge change; perhaps one day it will be in the forefront of Apple’s attention to take on that change, but for now, we will have to wait, and perhaps do the best we can do as individuals.
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I doubt that’s the reason. Apple’s users would praise Apple for the switch. It must be something else, and I’m guessing it’s more along the lines of what @jfb said.
I’ll note one other thing, and that’s that even if users are aware of StartPage, that’s often not enough for them to use it. It isn’t clear at all how to change the default search engine in Safari, especially on iOS, and iOS doesn’t even allow StartPage in Safari AFAIK. So companies like Apple deliberately put roadblocks to adoption.
This doesn’t mean users don’t care. It means big profit-seeking companies don’t care about their users, and this creates an opening for competitors to do a better job. This is why browsers like Brave are a thing and are taking users away from Safari, IE, Firefox, etc.
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Apple’s users would praise Apple for the switch.
See the headphone jack debacle. Everything is an inconvenience to somebody; you don’t know how many until you ask.
…companies like Apple deliberately put roadblocks to adoption.
Where would you place that feature in order to guarantee discoverability? Do you think that change would make for a good user experience?
Anecdote: I personally use Safari because it uses the least battery life on my computer, responsiveness stays the same up to a given number of tabs, and the user interface is understandable and consistent; as opposed to Chromium derivatives, which are huge CPU/battery hogs, tend to lag a bit at times, and don’t really mesh well with the rest of macOS (my use of which I could defend similarly). I admire the steps taken by other options such as Brave or qutebrowser, but they forego some basic QoL considerations that are important to users like me. I think that is Apple’s primary consideration.
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Reverse engineering and suppressing my cat litter box’s DRM to allow me to refill the soap cartridge.
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Having PRIMARY and CLIPBOARD is a good thing and once you get used to it, it’s like having two clipboards.
Shame he never tells how to actually use them both. Afaict only the primary selection is usable with the default binds.
XTerm.VT100.translations: #override \n\ Ctrl Shift <Key>C: copy-selection(CLIPBOARD) \n\ Ctrl Shift <Key>V: insert-selection(CLIPBOARD)Now if only I could get all the other software to support them both as well.
EDIT: Another tip. If you find the font sizes available in the menu to be ridiculous, they’re pretty easy to change.
XTerm*faceSize1: 8 XTerm*faceSize2: 10 XTerm*faceSize3: 13 XTerm*faceSize4: 16 XTerm*faceSize5: 20 XTerm*faceSize6: 26faceSize1 corresponds to “Unreadable.”
Now would someone give me key binds to decrease/increase font size? :-)
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You might want to read X Selections, Cut Buffers, and Kill Rings for how to use the PRIMARY and CLIPBOARD selections in X Windows.
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It doesn’t, and can’t really explain how to use them because there is no way to use them in X. Instead, you have to use them in applications running under X and each application does its own thing. I still don’t know if there’s a way to copy to clipboard in xterm without creating a custom bind.
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I’m pretty sure “X Windows” is much older than that (as is MS Windows). I vaguely recall reading about “X Windows” in Byte magazine in 1993 or so.
The comp.windows.x newsgroup goes back to at least 1987 (https://groups.google.com/forum/message/raw?msg=comp.windows.x/TtNRIfTKqsw/i7hzWBiDfkgJ), a month after X11 was created. They even refer to it as “x-windows”.
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Could it have been a different implementation? Cuz I remember doing the RTFM thing way back when, and it was very clear about not being “X Windows”, though didn’t specify why.
Sorry if this is explained in the link. Can’t be arsed with Google. Usenet used to come without opt-in spying.
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Now would someone give me key binds to decrease/increase font size? :-)
i have the following
*VT100*translations: #override \ Meta <Key> minus: smaller-vt-font() \n\ Meta <Key> plus: larger-vt-font() \n\ Super <Key> minus: smaller-vt-font() \n\ Super <Key> plus: larger-vt-font() \n\and either meta/super keys work as expected.
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Kinesis Advantage. I’ve been using them for almost twenty years, and other than some basic remapping, I don’t customize.
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Also Kinesis Advantage for over a decade. On the hardware side I’ve only mapped ESC to where Caps Lock would be. On the OS side I’ve got a customized version of US Dvorak with scandinavian alphabet.
I’d like to try a maltron 3d keyboard with integrated trackball mouse. It’s got better function keys too, and a numpad in the middle where there’s nothing except leds on the kinesis.
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My only “problem” with the Kinesis, and it’s not even my problem, was that the office complained about the volume of the kicks while I was on a call taking notes.
So I switch between the Kinesis and a Apple or Logitech BT keyboard for those occasions.
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Yeah, its not that click, it’ the other one from the switches :-)
I can be a heavy typer and for whatever reason, these keys stand out more than I expected to others behind the microphone.
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similar, largely I like that I can put the magic trackpad in between the two halves and have something that feels comparable to using the laptop keyboard. I got rid of my mouse years ago but I’m fairly biased on a trackpad’s potential.
I’ve sometimes thought about buying a microsoft folding keyboard and cutting/rewiring it to serve as a portable setup. Have also thought of making a modified version of the nyquist keyboard to be a bit less ‘minimal’ - https://twitter.com/vivekgani/status/939823701804982273
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The thread of security issues unveiled during the last few months in Intel CPU and similar architectures is an industrial nightmare. It’s difficult to accept that a whole industry could have been built on a such fragile basis…
I mean, have you seen the software the world runs on?
See also car software.
For me, it was easy after seeing how much better older stuff was that they ignored for money. Intel did try to make their own better stuff which failed repeatedly. They tried three times with i432, i960, and Itanium. Each had good and bad (i960 my favorite) but Intel was punished hard for all of them. Customers did buy billions in x86’s based on performance (most important), cost, and watts. Predictably, Intel decided to keep doing what people paid billions for instead of what cost them billions. I blame the buyers as much as them given I’ve tried to sell lots of them on secure, usable products that were free or cost almost nothing. Usually unsuccessful due to some aspect of human nature.
Like in most other tech products. It was surprising to me that Intel’s products weren’t worse than they are. Well, maybe they were as the bugs keep coming in as those assessing them predicted. They weren’t designed for strong security since market doesn’t pay for that. So, they have a lot of security problems. The hackers ignored them way longer than I thought they would, though.
What shocks me most is how long we have been using these techniques without widespread awareness of these issues or the potential for this class of issues.
Some people predicted these problems, sure, but their concerns were mostly dismissed. So over the course of decades, we’ve seen other chip makers and architectures adopt the same techniques and thus enable these same bug classes.
For a young initiative like RISC-V, this is a great opportunity. They have not sunk years and years of development in features which may never be entirely safe to implement (speculative execution, hyperthreading, …) and are now able to take these new threats into account, quite early in their development. This could be a boon for industrial adoption, especially while many competitors are forced to rethink so many man-years of performance improvements.