Posts by AdamWill 1611 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Nov 2010
....what the hell? You can 'win' any argument by coming up with some spectacularly ridiculous 'what if' scenario. What if it turned out James Damore was actually a Time Lord who was Genghis Khan, Robespierre, Hitler *and* (okay, fuzz the timelines with me a bit here, it's nothing the BBC hasn't done...) Mao in his former incarnations? Would you support him THEN?!?!? Huh? Huh?
I mean, jeez.
Jeez. I thought the point here was pretty obvious: this (the 'clarification' of the code of conduct) can only possibly affect Google employees. So why would it be an issue of public interest?
I mean, feel free to take a side on whether the guy is some kind of heroic truth teller (sigh) and whether or not he should have got fired. But it seems a bit odd to me that you'd demand Google 'clarify' its code of conduct to people who *aren't bound by it*. Hence my point: if you're a Google employee, then your request is perfectly reasonable, but surely you have better places to ask for a clarification of the code of conduct than a random internet forum. If you're not, it has precisely zero impact on you, so why do you think Google should be obliged to interpret its code of conduct for you, when you have no standing relative to each other at all?
You realize peppering your post with 'SJW' has the same effect on its credibility as doing the same thing with 'Micro$oft', right?
And no, he wasn't 'polite'. It's fundamentally not polite to question whether your female colleagues are biologically capable of doing their jobs.
Erm...why is this article talking about all this like it's new and uncertain when there've been like a dozen companies selling mesh wifi devices in the consumer market for a couple of years now?
https://eero.com/
https://madeby.google.com/wifi/
https://amplifi.com/
https://www.linksys.com/us/velop/
https://www.netgear.com/orbi/
Etc., etc., etc. I mean, you can already search and find *multiple* mesh wifi roundups from mainstream tech publications. Including one from six months ago calling mesh "the hottest trend in consumer wi-fi": http://bgr.com/2017/02/14/best-mesh-wifi-system-2017-mesh-network-router/
Actually, quite a lot of people with different political views think Rumsfeld's 'unknown unknowns' thing is a pretty sharp piece of analysis. It comes off as a bit absurd on a first, superficial reading but it's really pretty solid. Say you're a general from the Red country at war with the Blue country. A "known unknown" would be "I don't know exactly how many troops Blue has over in that base". An "unknown unknown" would be it turning out that Blue's been negotiating with Yellow for the last six months to launch a sneak attack next Wednesday and trap you in a war on two fronts, and you had no idea about it. It certainly *is* a wise policy to always be aware that there can be things you don't even know you don't know.
"So whatever one think's of the appropriateness of the move to sue Perens, it was always inevitable that they would do so in response to such a public post. They (and their customers) have no choice."
I think it's important to point out that this is, quite clearly, *absolute* claptrap. They most certainly did have a choice, and they made a terrible one. All your verbiage does nothing to change this.
Most of your other assertions are equally ridiculous. Perens will not have to 'defend his interpretation in court', because that's not what defamation is. He only has to prove he didn't defame anyone. He can do that perfectly well even if his interpretation is wrong.
Well, it doesn't seem that cut and dried, in either case, because there's what seems like a reasonable difference of opinion about whether this really *is* adding a restriction to the rights granted by the license. GR's position is that the license applies to the current code that actually exists, so a clause that adds a restriction that would only apply to future code which hasn't been written yet (and which the user certainly hasn't been given a license to yet) is OK.
But that's not really the point here. The point is that it's a complete dick move to sue someone for defamation merely because they stated their opinion about the license interpretation, *clearly marked as* a personal opinion. It doesn't really _matter_ whose interpretation is correct, that's still a crappy thing to do.
It doesn't exactly work like that, though, does it? Negative stereotypes don't necessarily "directly" affect people in the sense I think you mean. They have a more gradual, long-term, compounded effect. And it's often not an entirely obvious effect to observe at the level of a single person, because often the effect is to influence a person's perception of what roles (in terms of work, home life or anything else) are reasonable choices for them, and it's not easy to perceive when someone just doesn't even consider doing something because they've learned over time that it's not a thing that People Like Them do. After all, *most* people don't become astronauts or firefighters or Olympic athletes, so it's hard to look at *one* person who didn't do that and say "hmm, maybe media stereotyping played a role in this". You have to have a more sophisticated analysis.
One case I've found really interesting lately, which maybe isn't one you'd expect, is the show American Ninja Warrior in the U.S. It's an extremely popular sports-reality show (involving extremely fit people doing extremely hard obstacle courses), and to its credit it's made a conscious effort to promote female competitors. It's really fascinating to see the number of kids who see a woman doing well on a show like that and are inspired to take up the activity for themselves. I've seen more than one girl say something along the lines of they just didn't know it was *okay* for girls to be strong, muscular and powerful before seeing ANW or something like it: they just didn't see it as a choice. And indeed if you think about it, someone like Meaghan Martin (look her up, she's amazing) isn't a common sight in the media; if you think about the stereotype even of a 'fit' woman, it doesn't look like her. There's an overlap with tennis and all the shade that gets subtly thrown at players like Serena Williams who are unapologetically muscular and powerful; there's a strong current of belief that even elite female athletes must be somehow 'feminine', i.e. slender and pretty.
To put it simply: of *course* what you see around you, in the real world and in the media, affects your idea of what you yourself are capable of and 'allowed' to do, especially at the young ages where people often form their goals. It would be surprising if it were otherwise, wouldn't it? There are also of course obvious potential downsides to allowing what is effectively censorship, but I think it's nuts to deny the idea that widespread stereotyping can have this kind of effect.
The calls, 96 million of them in total, were presented on caller ID as coming from travel companies like TripAdvisor, Expedia, Hilton, and Marriott.
...
"Neighbor spoofing takes place when the caller falsifies the caller ID to match the area code and first three digits of the recipient's phone number, instead of the caller's number or the number where the call was actually originating."
So, er, which is it? Pretending to be TripAdvisor, or neighbour spoofing? I don't quite see how it could be *both* for the same call...
It seems to be Fraunhofer messaging - of course it's dead so far as *they're* concerned, they can't wring any more money out of it - that otherwise-mostly-sensible sites seem to be picking up uncritically. This isn't the only place I've seen that weird description of the actual news here ("some patents expired") - AV Club said almost the same:
http://www.avclub.com/article/rip-mp3s-255322
It is, according to these figures, selling a bit better than it did before.
Whether that makes it a success or a failure is sort of entirely up to your criteria, really, isn't it? I mean, presumably only Apple knows if they've, fr'instance, made back their R&D spend on it yet. But they may have other criteria for deciding whether it's a success.
I don't want one, and I've seen maybe two people wearing one. But then, I don't want a moped and I don't know anyone who rides one, but there are, I'm sure, moped manufacturers who consider themselves successful.
So, I dunno, just have a pint and relax? It doesn't seem terribly important.
"your browser that is under constant attack from craply-written ad scripts"
This is true, but remember the reason Firefox and Thunderbird shared code in the first place: HTML mail. You need a full rendering engine to show HTML mail, basically, and Thunderbird is using the Firefox one.
It follows that mail clients are usually vulnerable to nearly as many potential exploits as web browsers, only they often don't update their rendering engines as aggressively. Evolution, for instance, was stuck on an ancient Webkit version that was vulnerable to all sorts of stuff for years.
So your email client is subject to similar attacks. Yes, you can just turn HTML mail off, but you need to be really sure it *is* completely turned off (i.e. your client isn't making any attempt to interpret it, rather than just not displaying the HTML version by default).
It doesn't "assume" that. It just doesn't think the display server is the appropriate place to implement remoting. As the above commenter said, isn't the fashionable complaint about systemd that it wants to do everything? But X wanting to do everything is good and yet Wayland - which does less - is still somehow analogous to systemd? Hmm.
You realize the people developing Wayland are almost all the same people who've been maintaining X for the last decade or so, right? And they want to build Wayland because X's design is only getting more and more impractical for how graphics hardware and graphical applications are built these days?
"Red Hat made a massive mistake when they stopped offering free access to their desktop and pointed people at Fedora (free of charge but, not the same as RHEL and with a very short life cycle). That was the opening in the market that Ubuntu jumped into and helped them get their associated server distro established."
Hmm, let's see. I can't quite get back to 2003, but Red Hat's market cap in 2005 was $2.76bn; it's now $15.58bn. Revenue in 2005 was $196m; in 2015 it was $1.79bn (FY2016 should be north of $2bn).
What a terrible mistake! We'll just be over here, crying all the way to the bank. (I work for RH).
Actually, yeah, you would. Oregon is in the Pacific Northwest (just south of Washington state), typically one of the most 'liberal' (in US parlance) parts of the country. Its major city is Portland - the one that Portlandia is about.
It's not *quite* so simple because if you get out east into inland areas of any PNW region, things can get a bit bible-bash-y. But I doubt those folks have a lot do with the state's board of engineers or whatever they call themselves.
So I read the legal decision, not just the article.
There's a reasonable argument, at least, for regulating some specific status like "chartered engineer", as several other commenters have claimed. But indeed Oregon doesn't seem to do that - the bits of the code cited can be read as covering just the word "engineer", and the judgment actually seems to do so (by finding that he was in violation of it by calling himself a "Swedish engineer" and an "excellent engineer"). Which is pretty ballsy and difficult to defend in a world where most places don't do that.
But that's not even the worst part. The worst part (to me) is the definition of engineering itself:
"( 1) "Practice of engineering" or "practice of professional engineering" means
doing any of the following:
(a) Performing any professional service or creative work requiring
engineering education, training and experience.
(b) Applying special knowledge of the mathematical, physical and
engineering sciences to such professional services or creative work as
consultation, investigation, testimony, evaluation, planning, design and
services during construction, manufacture or fabrication for the purpose of
ensuring compliance with specifications and design, in connection with any
public or private utilities, structures, buildings, machines, equipment,
processes, works or projects * * * *."
That seems to be stating - and the board certainly seems to be interpreting it as stating - that you don't actually have to be performing any practical *work* to be 'practicing engineering'. You just have to be involved in some sort of "creative work", i.e., thinking about stuff and writing it down.
There's an exemption mentioned later on which exempts you if you don't offer your work to the public, but that's still patently absurd. It seems like basically anyone who thinks about traffic light timings and writes their thoughts on a comment thread, or forum, or Facebook post or something, would be in violation of this ridiculous rule. And it's pretty hard to see how *that's* not a clear violation of the First Amendment.
I think the opposition quite a lot of the comments here are assuming is a false one. This isn't a case of 'app developers are pushing Flatpak / Snappy to cut out those distribution packagers'.
Snappy is made by a distribution vendor (Canonical). Flatpak is supported by several distributions, notably Fedora (note: I work on Fedora). Distributions are actually quite interested in shipping stuff using these 'sandboxed blob' systems.
Fedora Workstation folks, for instance, are currently working on building an OStree-based version of the product, for which you'd install additional applications as Flatpaks. They envision shipping at least some first-party Flatpaks as part of this effort.
I believe Canonical is similarly interested in Snap as a distribution vector for software on Ubuntu IoT and cloud products.
What a weird story - would you report on, oh, a major TalkTalk outage and something going wrong with London buses in the same story? Cos that's basically what you're doing here. There's absolutely no link whatsoever between Shaw and the TTC besides "they're both in Canada" (the world's second-largest country by area, fact fans!) and "they both have computers". I dunno, just seems weird.
According to his write-up, they sent him an email 'challenging' him to demonstrate his claims...from one of their crappy devices, so it went to his spam folder. They didn't bother to verify receipt. Then twelve hours later they posted the claim that he hadn't been able to demonstrate.
https://twitter.com/Scott_Helme/status/857617936902754304
"Still wonder, anyway, how many people who loather - rightly - MS monopoly, are fully ready to accept other monopolies like Google or GitHub."
GitHub is a particularly delicious irony, given where git came from in the first place.
I'm always saddened and amazed to find out how many people don't know this, though.
(If you're one of them: look up "Bitkeeper".)
Sigh, so Andrew wrote his article again, for, what is this, the two hundredth time now?
Let's try a different response to it, this time.
Honestly, Andrew, I think you have quite a lot of a good point in general. Google, Facebook etc. certainly are doing a lot of benefiting from other people's work, and of course a lot of the reason they push for various legal changes is to let them keep doing this.
But you never seem to look at the *other* side of the question. You like to talk about copyright in very idealistic terms, about how it protects the rights of individual creators. And it *does* do this, and I agree that broadly speaking this is a social good, and we should frankly disregard the people whose argument is basically "I want to be able to take other people's stuff without paying for it". There's no need to accommodate those folks in a reasonable debate.
But there *is* a reasonable middle ground to this debate. You never seem to engage with the problem of cynical self-interest on the *other* end of the copyright debate spectrum. In just the same way as Google and Facebook aren't *really* going to bat for ordinary people in most of their IP lobbying, large media conglomerates aren't *really* going to bat for ordinary creators in most of *their* IP lobbying. When large media companies push for yet another extension of copyright terms - what are they up to, now, the life of the creator plus the heat death of the universe? - they're clearly not bothered about making sure creators get recompensed. They want to make sure that large media companies can continue to make money off the creator's work a century after all the creator's descendants have perished.
When large media companies push for laws that effectively ban format shifting, they're not concerned about individual creator's rights. They just want to try and make more money by compelling us to buy the same thing from them five times.
It'd be really nice if, in future, you could look at the topic in a more balanced way, and recognize that there are large, rich, cynical, self-interested lobbyists at *both* ends of most copyright debates, not just one end. And that those of us who object to some elements of maximalist copyright laws aren't all just a bunch of pirates or a bunch of saps who've been duped by Google. Some of us are just regular people who are perfectly happy to respect creator's rights but, at the same time, would like to be able to make our own choices about where and in what format we store and consume the content we're paying for.
It didn't work very well, didn't sell very well, lost money, and was quickly abandoned. This is clearly a failure. Companies don't make products in the hopes that they'll lose a ton of money but "inspire" a bunch of stuff to happen a decade later. They make products in the hopes they can sell a ton of them and make lots of money.
Kicking off the world's 16,789,345th pointless Linux vs. Windows thread in the comments of an article that really has nothing to do with it is certainly trolling.
This is about a museum of *failure*. You can dislike Windows, you can dislike Linux, but it's clearly absurd to call either of them failures.
systemd-free Devuan Linux hits version 1.0.0
A cynical person might suggest that this is in fact the effect they *want* this name change to have: they want the name 'Docker' to be associated with the for-profit products they sell, not the open source project. So they renamed the open source project to something else...
Not to mention that git was designed to be distributed, not really for an 'upstream / downstream' model. The standard git term for a repository somewhere else is a 'remote', an intentionally more generic term.
'upstream' has slipped into git docs here and there over time, I note, but 'remote' is definitely the original term.
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