otis_inf

Same here :) I was a lucida console user for years (and before that Courier) but as I passed 40 my eyes told me it would be better to use something else. Consolas it was, and I have to admit, it's great.

I tried hack, it looked OK (in vs.net) but the 0 (zero) didn't render with the fill-in but open. That of course sucks, as for a programmer a 0 has to be different from O. Perhaps it's something related to vs.net's rendering, not sure.

That was a great read, thanks for sharing!

I'd still be interested what massive probs other distros have on e.g. VMWare?

I use Mint 17.2 inside VMWare and didn't have a single problem. Not sure what VMWare version you're using, but 'hands down' suggests other distros have a lot of problems, but I don't see them.

AFAIK you can disable it but it will enable it automatically after a while again, so it's not indefinitely disabled.

Enterprise. Pro has the 'delay till we say it's time' option.

Yeah I ran into that wall 2 weeks ago. I tried to switch to Linux for the host and run my Windows 8 VMs in VMWare on Mint. After fighting with the nvidia drivers at install for a bit I got it working but VMWare using dual monitors is super slow on nvidia (780 here) in mint: the windows in the guest VM were drawn as if it was done by a single core on half the speed, instead of on the GPU. Single monitor, no problem.

Had to roll back to windows for the host to make the VMs work nicely. A bummer, considering moving away from Windows takes that first step and I now have to stick around for longer. Perhaps next year...

> Online surveillance has better arguments against it but 90% of Internet surveillance is by permission (possibly given by people who are not fully aware they are giving it). It is not as bad as this hyperbole makes it out to be.

No it isn't. Please read up on GCHQ and their pals NSA and what they do, e.g. 'dragnets' and other mass surveillance which absolutely isn't 'by permission' but is happening at a massive scale.

Also, you can claim you're one of the most paranoid people you know, but your whole post sounds like a post written by one of the 'I have nothing to hide so nothing to fear' group. If you'd be even a little bit paranoid, you wouldn't be ok with whatever surveillance, CCTV cameras etc.

You don't have to edit the files directly on github in the browser, really ;) Just edit locally, commit even! It's magic!

> these aren't the world's reserve currency. U.S could just pay its debt to China by 'printing money'

China isn't the entity which holds the US debt, the US citizens do. Besides, printing money doesn't make you able to pay debt, it just devaluates the money you already have. The early 20th century has shown us all that printing money won't help you.

for android users it doesn't settle anything. "Photos: We will never access your photos without explicit permission", but what does that mean? When the app is installed the user has to give permission to the app to access photos otherwise it won't install. So there's no state in which, on Android at least, the user can deny access to photos to the app, as the app has been given permission already at install.

So this 'sorry' is really a lot of hoopla which changes nothing: Android users still have to trust them that they won't access my photos if I don't use them in their app and won't access any other elements on my phone when I am just listening to some music.

On unmodded phones? If not, that could be a problem ;)

Not really, it's a limitation Spotify has to deal with if they want to offer 'services' which require these permissions. Access to photos is not needed to stream music, last time I checked ;)

That Android has 'one-ticket-for-everything-LOL' security flags is sad, but that doesn't mean Spotify then thus has the responsibility to work with that and if they are so serious regarding privacy of their users, offer a way to make me control what they can see / do, however I can't: at install I have to give permissions and after that I can't control what they can see / do or not, not in the app, not in my account, nowhere. I just have to trust them.

That last part is a bit difficult at the moment.

> Well, actually, they want you to be able to set a photo as the cover of a playlist, and there is no difference between "Allow user to upload 1 photo" and "Have access to all of users photo" in terms of mobile permissions.

There's no way I as a user can prevent other usage of my photos after I give them permission to access them all. I therefore have to trust Spotify that they won't abuse their access to my (and all the other people who install the app)'s photos.

Now I understand you trust them completely, and that's your right, I don't trust them at all especially considering their strong ties with Facebook.

Regarding their public 'Sorry' posted this afternoon: https://news.spotify.com/us/2015/08/21/sorry-2/ it's still vague. They state "Photos: We will never access your photos without explicit permission", but there's no state possible where the user can use the app and _not_ have given permission, as the app is only installable if the user gives access to the photos through the Android access rights at install time. After that the app already has access to the photos, and Spotify can state that they won't access the photos 'without explicit permission' but that's moot: to not give them explicit permission I have just 1 option: not install the app (otherwise I have to, see above). Which is a bit of a shit option, really, if you pay for the service (like I did) and want to listen to music.

For my understanding: why is my post downmodded to -1? Could someone explain that to me please so I can avoid the mistakes in the future? Thanks.

Only chapter 5 and 6, the rest isn't. Are we talking about the same book?

Yes, I used 'Palas' as a base template for my company's site. Support is in general good, I'd say: lots of elements are worked out so you can build your layout with building blocks very rapidly, and configurability is often high. You still need to do work if you want to have your site look like something unique, but in general these templates are a great way to start.

And they are the same thing, templates from bootstrap or from 3rd parties: you get an example site with several pages, pages with building blocks on them, less based customization css on top of bootstrap, documentation which block does what so it's easy to find where to customize e.g. a header color / font.

> When it comes to relational databases, I can’t help thinking that something is missing. They’re used everywhere. There are many different databases: from the small and useful SQLite to the powerful Teradata. But, there are only a few articles that explain how a database works.

That's because the inner workings are really old, as in: emerged before blogging etc. was popular, hell before the internet was invented.

In the 'before/early internet days', we read books like 'An introduction to Database Systems' by C.J. Date. (I had to blow the dust off my copy to read the exact title ;)), which are more in depth than this article, but I like the article better, because it's more to the point and easier to understand. Well done!

There are much cheaper, well made templates available for bootstrap, e.g.: http://themeforest.net/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&term=bootstrap

> I highly doubt they added a Google account requirement to improve ad targeting.

Ad delivery networks, and google is one of the biggest, have one core business: delivering ads. Everything is setup to make that as big and as solid as possible. Whatever it takes (and we all know how far ad delivery networks will go: almost infinitely far).

Now they ship a piece of hardware, require signing up with an account, and it's not for prolonging / helping their core business? If you believe that, I have a piece of land I want to sell to you, special price.

Interesting! Thanks for the info. :)

"Could you come up with a counter-example to the hypothesis that drummers are actually natural intellectuals?"

"Lars Ulrich"

"..."

In an article which states "..IBM's z13 mainframe computer, which had been designed for high-volume mobile transactions.", all bets are off with respect to reality. I mean, what does 'designed for high-volume mobile transactions' even mean in the context of having Linux running on the hardware?

You shouldn't. The cloud is just someone else's computer. You can mitigate things by encrypting a lot but there's no way you can't know they don't peek at your data.

So if you can't trust the company offering the service, you shouldn't do business with them. It's the same with food and food supplies: if they can't be trusted to serve/sell you stuff that doesn't make you ill, don't do business with them. Very simple.

In the post-Snowden era, USA tech corporations, like Microsoft, felt the downturn on trust from non-USA companies and citizens in their online offerings. With Microsoft betting more and more on their cloud services, I find it strange (or maybe it isn't strange, but let's be naive for a minute here) that Microsoft goes against this and actually gives people _more_ reasons to not trust them than less.

As if they're thinking we all don't give a shit. But if we all didn't, why the downturn in trust in USA tech corporations post-Snowden?

I can't help but think that this is either massively naive from their part (people/companies won't care, they will buy our stuff and services regardless) or very short-sighted (as it will hurt their cloud services offerings in the long run, the more they hammer down the trust from their own users in MS' wares.)

Modern day Lava Lamp. Very nice!

Why whitelist ads at all? Ads are evil, the ad agencies track you, you run the risk of viruses / malware (like the recent 0-day exploit on a russian news site through ads), and there's zero gain for the person visiting the site.

It might be me, but the article seems to make the same point as "The Web we have to save" https://medium.com/matter/the-web-we-have-to-save-2eb1fe15a4...

IMHO a lot of people stop with twitter because they don't get the right social circle going: they follow a bunch of people but don't gain much followers and who they gain aren't really engaging in any activity, so it feels as if they're posting text in a document they store on their own computer: no-one really sees it nor cares.

Twitter has the downside that it's really 'in the moment': stuff that's tweeted now is interesting now, not tomorrow. This gives a problem with people who open twitter occasionally: they're likely not on twitter when something happens IRL and everyone's tweeting about it. With Facebook this is different, as things aren't really 'in the moment', or at least aren't depending on that that much: it's perfectly fine to read someone's post 2 days after it's been posted.

> Surprisingly most normal folks don't really get what "follow" means, and the slightly arcane terminology of twitter. The learning curve is a bit steep - and most users sign up, hang around for a while, don't really invest in discovering and following the right people, and soon just give up and never come back.

Question, do these people who find it hard to grasp how twitter works have facebook accounts? As facebook is way more complicated than twitter is (which is just a textbox, a submit button and that's basically it).