550 karma · joined November 8, 2009
To put it another way: if I'm in a situation where being able to type an easy-to-read long-form message is more important than it being end-to-end encrypted, I'd just use Gmail. I don't see why Signal needs to satisfy both use cases; at worst it's kind of ergonomically awkward, but it isn't making false promises of security, which is worse than useless.
I'm a programmer, but I'm not good at math. I know this. And yet, the Tau Day Manifesto explained the geometry of the circle to me more clearly and understandably than any of the math classes I've ever taken. And it's not just because it's a well-written work; the concept is genuinely simpler to understand.
Pi really is a pedagogical disaster, and tau really does help.
And in any case, I'm not saying we shouldn't try. I'm saying we should be respectful of what our audience actually wants as we do. The uphill battle is the social aspect of convincing users that the change is worthwhile, not the technical aspect of building it (which is easy).
I would love to see positive change in this area, but we need to be aware of what's really important to our intended audience if we're going to try. I could storm off of Facebook and leave a post behind to follow me to my self-hosted Diaspora pod, but I know no one's going to do it, so why bother? My friendships are worth more than my irritation at Facebook-the-company, and I can promise you that the vast majority of users will come to that exact same conclusion. Let's be honest with ourselves about that, before we try to fix this problem. Otherwise we'll only get as far as Diaspora did.
The fraction of users who actually do this is so tiny that they don't make a dent in Twitter's userbase. The vast majority of users don't care about "trust", or "privacy", or ads, or federation, or API limits, or the ability to leave the provider if it turns evil. They care about where their friends are. That's literally the only feature that draws users in the numbers that make a social network last. I wouldn't expect Ello to be able to convince enough people to join and stay without massive, enthusiastic, engaged adoption -- and what engagement it has is coming from the bandwagon effect, not its promise of no ads.
By the way, remember Diaspora[0]? It's an open-source, federated social network that anyone can host, that requires no trust in any individual provider, and with no ads. It still exists, after attracting quite a lot of attention and Kickstarter funding a few years ago. And it dropped almost entirely off the radar, because its selling points have nothing to do with people's friends actually being there.
In any case, is it a flaw of our government that our legislators write laws that the majority of people happen to want? The fact that the majority want something irrational is incidental; people want it, and that's why politicians do it.
I figure we'll soon see a tiered model letting users upload directly for a fee, which is probably a good move.
Either way, I don't think either of us is ever going to convince the other of anything on that score, so it's probably best to agree to disagree on it.
You might not think what Aaron did was morally wrong or deserving of negative repercussions, but others might reasonably disagree.
Is it really so much to ask that we criticize the government for things that we know it actually did?
The 7 train is still controlled entirely manually, with the old block-based signalling mechanism that can only be aware of the location of a train in very vague terms. It's currently having CBTC (Communications-Based Train Control)[0] installed, which will give dispatchers much higher resolution information about the location of every train, and go a very long way towards automating the entire system. CBTC installation is scheduled to be completed in 2016, and it's the reason why there are currently so many service disruptions afflicting it during weekends (it actually just began a series of 13 consecutive weekends during which it will not go into Manhattan). If I recall correctly from the posters, the total budget of the project is about $750 million.
If and when the line is fully automated someday, it will become possible to create a reliable barrier mechanism (like what currently exists on the very small automated portions of the NYC subway, which is really just the JFK AirTrain). Until then, human operators can't reliably get the train cars to stop in the same place.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications-based_train_cont...
This is why it uses MTP for storage, as explained by Android engineer Dan Morrill: http://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/mg14z/whoa_whoa_ics...
There are obvious good uses for it: Wikileaks in its heyday comes to mind (that is, the time when they were actually a wiki, releasing leaks while keeping their sources safe, not going out of their way to create PR nightmares for the US government). But the vast majority of other widely-defended use cases for it seem to be people using it as a license to do nasty things like jailbait/creepshots. Even VA recognized that a compromise of his identity would mean professional ruination, even as he exposed himself and his family to that risk by revealing himself to people he thought he could trust.
While Reddit definitely shouldn't start trying to "solve" the problem, clearly the use of vigilante "doxxing" as a weapon against people they don't like isn't a real solution either. Is there even a good middle ground? "Do distasteful things on peril of Gawker running a story about you"?
Gnome 2 was an excellent basis for a desktop because there were so many ways it could be used. It didn't limit you; you were free to trim out things you didn't want, or add things you wanted. Aside from that, it got out of the way.
Gnome 3 aims for the same demographic, but tries to force too many opinionated decisions on its users from the start. Distros that care about branding hate that because it makes it hard for them to differentiate (see Ubuntu). Many users hate that because it's too many things that they can't change without learning a new Javascript platform. It's certainly fair to say that typical Linux users (their target market, whether they like it or not) aren't used to that.
This post is wrong to blame tablets and smartphones for the decline. Linux users aren't abandoning desktops; they're abandoning Gnome 3, because it isn't giving them what they want. It's that simple.