ksangeelee

I don't see why working for Google would make someone irrelevant. There's every reason to think that his choice was a reasoned one.

He gave a talk recently, broadcast by the BBC, which he used to raise the issues we have with tracking, click-bait, and misinformation. His audience looked to comprise quite influential people.

The fact is he saw the potential his software had; that the combination of server, browser, and markup could revolutionise the world, even before anyone was using it.

It would seem foolish to silence someone like that, and careless to advise people not to listen. I'm certainly not saying that we accept his opinions without question, and I'm sure he would agree.

While I'm glad these efforts exist, it's wrong to have to fight my operating system in this way. In my experience, it's a losing battle. Microsoft seem intent on having full control of your system, and they are in a position to take that control as and when they like.

The occasional nods towards the technical crowd, for example WSL & VSCode are distracting us from the very large elephant in the room.

Roland perhaps deserve some credit for the JP-8000 which, while sporting a two line display, was also accompanies by knobs, buttons, and sliders to control pretty much everything.

To my ear, it never quite had the smooth richness of sound that, for example, the SH-101 had (manually tweaking the cutoff always seemed to generate some aliasing clicks), but it still gave great tweakability.

Having the PRUs as supporting microcontrollers can be great where timing is critical. For example, it's possible to decode signals from an AM receiver and pass them to the host, or monitor sensors and have immediate responses (such as triggering a shut-off via GPIO).

There's nothing particularly difficult about wiring a microcontroller up to a single board computer to do these jobs, I've done exactly that for reading my weather station and heating oil tank level. But it's messy and I think the cohesion of being able to do it directly on one board is a worthwhile advantage.

I think so, yes, though I do think it's nicely drawn and not unartistic (e.g. the kiss being implied). In my opinion it's offensive, for a few reasons.

First is that the woman's pose derives from images of 'feeble' femininity (e.g. old Marilyn Monroe films; sexy, innocent, willing). I don't think there's any need to hark back to such absurd stereotypes.

Second, it assumes my preferred aesthetic isn't, for example, big bearded men. They are equally capable of giving or blowing a kiss. The logo could have been more generic, if it was appealing to the intimate.

Third, I don't really like sexualised or intimate imagery mixed with productivity tools. It's jarring and distracting.

At the end of the day, it's just a logo, though it made me switch off.

There's a lovely Sean Carrol podcast interview with Kip Thorne where he discusses the people and the work that led to the discovery.

https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2018/11/26/epis...

Warning: that site is definitely NSFW. Please remember to mark as such. It's also not what I am aiming for.

It's hard to say, since this is really just scratching an itch. It'll be on GitHub as soon as the first meaningful version is available, contributions will be welcome.

I recently registered 'twitbook.uk' when the .uk TLD opened for general registrations, with the intention of running a satirical social network that would blatantly ask for personal information, allow open bidding to access the data, and provide features such as 'make me angry' or 'validate my opinions'. Just for fun of course, no real information would be solicited or sold.

I wonder if such a site would be considered a violation of this trademark, were it to be granted.

In a way, you are buying commercial. The Ardour people are selling downloads of their binary builds for $1 per download (or more, if you choose), along with some access to support I think.

It's also possible to, for example, 'apt-get install ardour' and get a similar version in Debian Buster. I presume there are lots of other operating systems that this is built for, so Ardour does make a significant contribution to free software.

This what I did to replace my iRiver running Rockbox. One problem to watch out for with cheap phones is that the audio can be noisy, even if only when charging, which will be particularly annoying when listening to audio books or talks.

I found an Android app called MortPlayer which is very close to Rockbox in terms of functions and configurability. It hasn't been updated in a years, but still works well.

Thanks, that was interesting. If anyone is excited enough to try driving peripherals in userspace via hardware registers, I can recommend starting with a Raspberry Pi, since it has several well documented peripherals (UART, SPI, I2C, DMA, and of course lots of GPIO), and the techniques described in this talk are transferable.

A search for 'raspberry pi mmap' will yield a lot of good starting points.

That is good fun. What's interesting is the amount of thought I'm willing to give something that's virtually hanging on a wall over an onscreen sentence in a list.

On a different note, one of the images from a Bloomberg post was simply showing "We've detected unusual activity from your computer network" and the usual reCaptcha "I'm not a robot" box.

Please join me in condemning such hostile behaviour of web sites. Of course it's 'unusual activity', it's unusually creative, and it's what the Internet used to be about.

The first Linux distribution I remember using was Slackware on floppy disks, at a time when building a kernel was pretty much necessary to get a working system. A great learning experience, all in all.

However, the point I'd like to make is that it was clear back then just how much was contributed directly by the GNU project, and also how favored GNU's GPL was by developers who wanted to contribute their work.

GNU really did seem like it was everything that made the Linux kernel act and feel like a Unix system, though I had no proper appreciation of that at the time.

Whether or not Microsoft has changed, I don't think this talk is has much bearing on that question.

I believe that Microsoft's foray into free and open-source software is simply a response to the increasing irrelevance of their operating system to many developers who no longer have any specific need for anything Microsoft has to offer.

The Dead Malls site links to another treasure trove of retail history - http://pleasantfamilyshopping.blogspot.com/

For example, the clip in this post is a fascinating glimpse of Los Angeles in 1954. http://pleasantfamilyshopping.blogspot.com/2012/02/shopping-...

To be fair, it's Gvim that's listed, which presumably is bundled with the main vim package.

I had some vague awareness there was a GUI version of Vim, but only just checked it out after spotting it in the list. The menus serve as a handy reference for common commands. Quite good really.

I use Gandi - yes they offer auto-renewal of domains, configurable on a per-domain basis.

If the purpose of the project is learning and experimentation, then there's not much to recommend veroboard. I have to think so carefully about how to place components, where to cut tracks to make connections, how best to route jumpers, etc. and after all that, it's difficult to change things when debugging or just to tinker.

Breadboards offer a huge amount of flexibility over veroboard, at the expense of size and permanence.

From experience, Akismet works well, so reCaptcha is not the only anti-spam measure that works for WordPress.

On a purely technical note, it's factual to say a group is over-represented in prison, because there are records to back this up. However unless you know the entirety of crimes committed, you can't say that a group is over-represented in crime.

It may be that certain groups are pursued more vigorously, less likely to mount a strong defence (therefore more likely to be convicted), or just more narrowly focused on.

I struggle to see how the past five or ten years could ever be seen as a "golden age", if so then the future must be bleak.

I would argue that too much of the content that is paid for is created purely to generate page-views to carry advertising.

Those people who are motivated to share knowledge and opinions sincerely are crowded out by click-bait.

In that light, I agree with your original comment, though it's amusingly ironic that their portal site was negatively impacted by mitigation measures against the kind of things their public site engages in.

I just visited the AutoTrader site (from the UK), and uBlock Origin blocked 34 requests related to ads and tracking. I recall in the past having been surprised at the number of extra requests being made via their site. They don't serve only vehicle listings.

I think there's more involved than simply undoing a change. Apart from the obvious tedium of chasing upstream code changes, the extensions themselves have to be installed from a willing (and trusted) repository. The chrome web store can omit extensions that use an API in an unsupported way.

Brave already integrates ad-blocking at a lower level than the webRequest API, so this is less of an issue, but you sacrifice your choice in blocker.

https://brave.com/improved-ad-blocker-performance/

The recent Chromium’s Manifest v3 controversy around the overheads of the various extensions using the WebRequest API to inspect and potentially block undesired requests did not affect Brave as requests are processed natively, deep within the browser’s network stack.

The very existence of 'things of value' is what motivated people to build crawlers and search engines in the first place. There are many reasons to create 'a great piece of content', even if nobody else is likely to see it (e.g. for my personal reference, consolidating my understanding, just for fun, etc.). Filling it with fluff simply reduces its 'greatness'.

I think the problem is figuring out how we systematically identify things of value.

My personal feeling is that the solution lies in having good 'seed' URLs with which to build indexes. This might be done using curated lists, as a number of people here suggest, or perhaps through crawling and scoring the content.

It is curious. The company website for Gopher Protocol Inc. says very little in a lot of words.

It reads like they want to impress investors with buzzwords and acronyms, in the hope that they're daft enough fall for it.

Such gems as: "In order to manage the complexity of the system, Gopher is using validation techniques and methodologies in which functionality is verified by simulating and validating processes according to the system's description."

Also: "The hardware (CPU, RTC, more) and on-board software need to be synchronized together in order to execute a decision when to listen, go to sleep, wake up or remain in idle state."

I suppose that any increase in search traffic for 'Gopher Protocol' might get conveniently, though incorrectly, attributed to their company, which they can take to investors of a gullible disposition.

The article states only that sugar was ubiquitous among the dishes of those who could afford it, not that it was generally ubiquitous.

  Domain Name: THISWEBSITEDOESNOTEXIST.COM
  Creation Date: 2005-08-26-T19:04:47Z
  Updated Date: 2018-08-23-T01:12:14Z
  Registrar Registration Expiration Date: 2019-08-26

And I'm pleased to say that (as I write this, at least) the registrant has done exactly what I had intended to do with it.

I agree, it never deserved to be taken seriously. When my wife deleted her account, I found it quite bizarre that people were asking questions like 'how are you coping?'.

To me, it's just a website - I wondered how absurd that same question would sound had it been a pistonheads or mumsnet account she was deleting.