I also feel like the same thing is happening to Snapchat.
1,862 karma · joined May 29, 2016
> Consider for example, behaviours reported by [5]. In their study of teenagers and their virtual possessions, participants reported that part of the value of photos posted on Facebook was the metadata associated with them: comments and ‘likes’ were so pertinent that they were sometimes printed out alongside photos and pasted onto bedroom walls as a collection. This materialisation of the digital is indicative of a difficulty associated with the current technological landscape.
> It is not clear how one would digitally export a Facebook photo in order to view it in this way with another computer program or application, and this remains so despite recent innovations in the Facebook service. Yet it is not surprising that users should want to treat these entities in the way they treat a file. If they can upload their photos to Facebook, and given that they do so the photos are file-like objects, why can they not download them again, while retaining the value they have accrued, but still with the benefits of file-like properties? Although it is now easier for users to export their data from Facebook, these exports, once represented simply as ‘a file’ on a hard disk, lose their potency.
Certainly what we don't need is more meta-data attributes on files.
IMO one should either
1. Create a simple file format that bundles the contents of a post. For example a zip file with the media, comments, and likes and such, or
2. Have the post (for example as JSON) and media in separate files and store the references to the other files in the post, sort of like in HTML. Perhaps have the computer system be able to extract such references and let you easily operate on files that "belong together".
They even mentioned databases and relationships earlier, and grouping files together in different ways.
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> This bundle, this new ‘file’ type, is not merely a complex data type; the important thing from the users’ point of view is that it is a mirror of the social life that the file enables.
I have no idea what they are trying to say here.
If you create a file format like I said that contains all of the data that made up the original post then you can represent that at a later point and you can choose to render it just like facebook would. Surely that's exactly what the users want?
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> However, this immediately raises complexities. For instance, images posted to Facebook might be copied not only by the person who posted them, but also by others. In these circumstances, should these others be able to copy the metadata, the tags as well as the thing-itself? If so, what of the rights of the owner or, if you prefer, the maker of the initial file? When people copy an originating file, would they be creating a new file or would their new entity be a version of the original one? Is there an order of precedence that we are proposing and ought this to be reflected in the concept of a file that might apply?
Bits don't have color. http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23
Trying to accurately track origin of a post is going to lead to nothing but trouble.
Don't try to build a technical solution for something that is not a technical problem. If someone breaks copyright laws you take them to court and sort it out there.
>It seems to us that there is a distinction that ought to be made between things that are put on the web, which the originator wants to have file-like properties (even as that thing develops a social life once on the web), and those things that are posted that the user does not want to have file-like properties. The properties we are thinking of have to do with questions like whether ‘ making a copy’ means making a copy, a version of the thing itself, or having and owning (as it were) the originating thing itself and all that has ensued in that thing’s social life.
WHAT??? Just, WHATT??? Are they purposely trying to ruin the internet? It's not up to one person to decide in which manners others copy it or not. Once again, if someone is doing something illegal, take them to court. And if they're not doing something illegal, don't try and restrict what other people are trying to this.
Fuck this. No, really. I'm done reading that paper.
The first time I was confronted with the notion of a file was certainly when I had painted something in MS Paint and I had clicked the save button. I think I had been told to not click "My Computer", which makes sense -- you don't want a child to accidentally move, delete or rename files on your computer. Hence I had no notion of the file system. All that was know to me was the desktop, the start menu, and a select few programs accessible through either icons on the desktop or in the start menu.
I had played a couple of games on the computer, and in those I could save the game and then the next time I could resume the game someplace near to where I had last been -- or rather, I could have my father help me resume the game. So when I managed to save the painting I sort of expected that it would just show up on screen the next time I started MS Paint. When it didn't I was a befuddled for a moment but I just concluded that I didn't understand what had happened and didn't give much more thought to it. I think this is pretty typical of how most children treat situations that confuse them.
This is user level 0. You are able to move the cursor and to type a little bit on the keyboard and to run some specific programs, but that's it.
During the next few years I learn how to work with files in MS Paint and other specific applications.
However, not all files are equal. If I try to open a file that was made in one application with another application it will often either result in an error message or in garbage on the screen.
This TIED my notion of a file to specific programs, and to the content that is shown on screen for the LONGEST time. It is a bit difficult to explain what I mean here but I think that to the majority of the population of a whole, this is what a file is to them. They view a file as an icon that you can open in a SPECIFIC program. And they call that file a "<name of program> file", or they call it by the extension, but they have no idea, or they have the wrong idea, about what is the contents of the file. If you give a regular Windows user two files which are both named say .dat, (a commonly used generic file extension for data,) then they will think that those two files necessarily must be of the same kind "somehow" and that they are to be opened, both of them, with some specific, unknown program. This is bad and harmful in my opinion.
Likewise, I was quite confused for the longest time about "My Documents" and "My Pictures". I was confused by why things were being put in "My Documents" by default when those things were not things that I considered to be "documents".
Furthermore it was quite mystical to me for a long time how "My Computer" could be on the desktop at the same time as my desktop was under a folder that was within "My Computer" itself. This however is not a huge deal. Just yet another thing that didn't make sense to me while I was trapped with the graphical representation of the system.
The paper is arguing a point of view that a different abstraction should be used than the hierarchical file system. I agree to some extent but not for the same reason perhaps.
I think that the desktop metaphor is inherently harmful as a first introduction to computing. The desktop is fine ONCE you've understood how the system works from a bit of a different point of view (though perhaps NOT necessarily a lower level as such), but until then the desktop metaphor will trick you into believing very many things that are simply not true, and which are going to come back and bite you in ways like those mentioned in the paper.
As for the doing away with the hierarchical file system, I agree. Throw it out. I enjoy Unix, but I don't hold the hierarchical file system particularly dear. In fact, I think Unix has some very powerful ideas, and it sucks a lot less than Windows, but Unix is just a local optimum and nothing more.
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Finally, on a bit of a different note, I'd like to state how I tend to think of files now.
To me, a file is data. Often that data will have been structured in a particular way, and sometimes it will have been structured in no particular way. A valid python program has a structure that allows the python interpreter to execute it. A text file that someone wrote using a plain text editor has a certain encoding but no structure beyond that. A file that was created by putting random data into it will not have any structure. A file that was corrupted will have some data that does not conform to the intended structure.
I am aware that the order of the bytes and their property of being one single, continuous unit, in persistent storage might don't match the order that is presented to applications by the operating system, but in my use of computers this has not yet mattered so I choose to ignore that fact. So I too am living a bit of a "lie" with regards to how I think about files, I admit that.
Some files are not really files, but they are convenient because they offer you a simple interface to some useful functionality. I am speaking of course of /dev/urandom and friends.
Regular files are representations of "something". Like a text, or a photo, or anything else that you can create a meaningful representation of. You can load the data into a program as long as that program has been programmed to understand the structure that is used in the file that stores your representation of your data. If the program that you would like to use does not understand that file format you either convert the file to some other format if an acceptable conversion is possible with an existing piece of software. If none exists, you implement it yourself, either into the program that you are using, because it's open source as is the vast majority of the rest of your software, or as a standalone program that does just conversion, in both cases you are able to do this because the file format is sufficiently simple, or at least the subset of the format that you need is, and the format is open. If you are using proprietary software (including using multiple pieces of proprietary software) in combination with proprietary file formats, then either
1. The proprietary piece(s) of software is/are able to do absolutely everything that you need to do (or at least, you think so), or
2. The data is not sufficiently important to you to warrant building better tools yourself, or
3. It's so difficult to build these tools that you don't have an alternative. For example, the data might come from very complicated equipment that you couldn't build yourself even if given a million years to do so, and the data is so complex that you aren't able to understand it from inspection nor from reverse engineering, or
4. The requirements changed (see also point one about thinking that the software did everything that you needed it to do), or
5. You've done fucked up. You didn't do your research and now you've stuck with this. (See also point one about thinking that the software did everything that you needed it to do.)
Anyway, once you've loaded your data into a piece of software that is able to read it, something happens, and it brings us back to what we were talking about.
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Once you've loaded your data into a piece of software that is able to read it, or "opened a file" as is often the way that this is achieved, I would argue that you are not operating on a file. You are working on the data that was in the file. This is a very important distinction.
When you hit save, you are not saving the file. You are requesting that parts of the application state to persistent storage. Again, a very important distinciton.
If people knew this and understood this, computers would make more sense to them. They are right in the paper that the mismatch between what developers, computer scientists and others think of as files is the cause of a lot of the kinds of problems that people have when they are dealing with files.
But where did the users gain their misinformed ideas about files from? I've said it already, I think the desktop metaphor is to blame. Again, it's an ok metaphor as long as it's not the only metaphor.
If it's not done already one could probably save a little bit of space by extending Inkscape to define an SVG symbol for each letter used.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/SVG/Element/sym...
Besides the old repo URL will still redirect to the new location after you've renamed the repo on GitHub by going into settings and changing it there.
If you have the budget for it, consider hiring a professional artist.
Well, it certainly was in the beginning but I think at present time bitcoin has had so much coverage in mainstream media that certainly a lot of people have put their money in bitcoin without much understanding as to how any of it works.
I've had a few people ask me about blockchain and I've given them some handy links.
A couple of people have asked me about whether or not they should buy bitcoins and I say the same thing to everyone; don't invest any money in anything unless you're prepared to lose that money.
I've seen what happens when you offer technical support to friends and family. They mess it up and then it's your fault because you touched the machine last, right. Yeah I'm not going to be the scapegoat to blame for the ill-advised investments done by someone else. Least of all for free.
I see where they're coming from though. Since their intended customer is startups, $1800 is money that a lot of their future customers will probably not even have to think twice about spending.
But they really shouldn't compare it to the rpi.
If the former, the 10x10 puzzle for today (solved in parent comment) is classified as "very hard".
If you leave the smart-TV without a network connection it'll be mostly like a plain TV.
> try buying non-smart phone
There are some feature phone Nokia models available, I use one such.
The thing I miss the most about having a smartphone is GPS and a map app. For everything else except mobile internet, which I can do without, that a smartphone would give me I have an iPod touch.
People say that, but usually the reason their scripts are not working is that they are using bashisms while retaining
#!/usr/bin/env sh
#!/bin/sh
#!/usr/bin/env bash
I write most of my shell scripts targeting bash, but I always use the hashbang that invokes to bash, and I also name my scripts like somescript.bash when it's a bash script and somescript.sh when it's POSIX shell.
> Nets is split up in two divisions: Nets, which manages the Danish market, and Teller, which handles all international markets. This means that Nets processes all Dankort transactions, while Teller processes all transactions by international cards.
http://www.epay.eu/acquirer-internet/nets-teller.asp
https://www.nets.eu/en/payments/
http://netseu.23video.com/secret/12342399/64f0568391b3ebaa58...
Here are archived versions of the URLs mentioned in the issue:
Without "partner extension": http://archive.is/anu2E
With "partner extension": http://archive.is/bp93l
As is evident, what their "partner extension" does is in fact maliciously hijacking and replacing ad-space on websites visited by the user.
Strangely, searching for their name among the issues on GitHub does not show other such results. I guess they usually make contact directly and that the person at that company who filed this issue did not realize it would be visible to the public.
Here is the full text of the issue:
> Adnow is interested in byuiing your extension traffic #1
> Dear Kyong Tsu,
> My name is Anastasia, I am a manager from international advertising network Adnow.
> Extension traffic is a hot trend nowadays, and we are interested in buying traffic from Facebook Video Downloader extension and the others. We are ready to share an idea of monetization extensions with you and give you a method.
> We offer:
> * high payouts
> * 100% fill rate (we buy traffic from all over the world)
> * Integration through JS Tag / XML / JSON feed
> * Integration method
> That's how the page looks without partner extension: https://gyazo.com/5d635a9dc7bdc142e18e6775a1d1340d
> And that's how it looks for user with our plugin/code in extension: https://gyazo.com/a2b48b16d304a3ba37cdf6967fa4d9d8
> Please contact me in case you are interested in monetization your extensions.
> I am looking forward to your answer.
> Thank you in advance.
> Best regards,
> --
> Anastasia Nova
> Sales manager | Adnow LLP
> e.: tasya@sales.adnow.com
> Skype: tasya@adnow.com
[1]: https://github.com/KyongTsu/TabMemorySaver/issues/1
Archived snapshot of above issue: http://archive.is/Z5mJl
I still host my own e-mail but I no longer do catch-all. There are only a few sites and services I care about. For those I have trusted them with my e-mail address. For all others I use 3rd-party throwaway mail services.
I get less spam now than I did with catch-all.