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wjoe

674 karma · joined May 23, 2013

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wjoe··on Vint Cerf sees his invention reflected on Black Mirror
I've noticed that American articles cite Vint Cerf as the "father/inventor of the internet", while British press give the same titles to Tim Berners-Lee. Of course both were instrumental, but as you say, many people and teams were involved in the creation of what we know as the Internet today.
wjoe··on Family fun with deepfakes
One headline I saw yesterday said that these fake videos had been "deleted from the internet". I don't think they know how the internet works.
wjoe··on UK mass digital surveillance regime ruled unlawful
Watson is one of very few British politicians who seems to care about privacy, surveillance, and internet issues. He was also a big part of the "phone hacking" case against the Murdoch press. It's a shame we don't have more politicans like him. And it's not even a partisan issue - it doesn't surprise me that the Conservatives want to bring in more surveillance and internet laws, but even their biggest opponents on the left rarely oppose it.

>is this guy eventually going to replace Corbyn?

Not likely. He seems more of a background figure who does best focusing on the issues he cares about, and not so much of a leadership type. He's also more in the 'centre ground' of British politics, and has been quite critical of Corbyn over the past few years. It's likely that the next Labour leader would be someone with similar views to Corbyn.

wjoe··on The Lost Art of Staying Put
Depends on your definition of wealthy, and your location. In the UK and Europe there are a number of low cost airlines, and you can easily get flights to other European countries for under £100. Obviously it's a luxury and probably not something you could afford if you're on minimum wage and struggling to pay the rent, but easily affordable with an average income and a bit of planning.

Of course, things are different in the USA where travelling to any other country (aside from Canada or Mexico if you live near the borders) is going to cost hundreds of dollars for a flight. And I guess even leaving your state even has considerable costs in car fuel or coach/train journeys.

wjoe··on Slack comes to Linux as a snap
Similarly been using it on Arch for a few years. Looks like they only advertise downloads for Ubuntu and Fedora on their sites, but in the end they're just deb and rpm files. And in the end deb and rpms are just archives of files.

I guess snaps, flatpak, etc remove the step of needing someone to make a package or otherwise work out the dependencies and steps needed to install it on a given other distro, but chances are non-deb/rpm based distros either have their own maintaners that do these things, or the users are happy to work it out themselves.

Technologies like snaps do solve the issue of developers having to think about supporting different distros, but they add extra overhead too. I'd rather they just provide a tar and a list of dependencies and use a package from AUR myself.

wjoe··on Neopets HTML Guide
Yep, back then it was very hard to get any free hosting that supported any sort of scripting language. Of course, as a 12 year old on the internet, paying for anything was unheard of.

I remember wanting to set up some forum that required CGI. I had some sort of hosting account that required using their own dialup service to connect to their FTP. Probably cost more on the phone bill than some cheap hosting service, but it was easier to get that by the parents than asking to use their credit card when the internet was still a mystery to them.

wjoe··on Bitcoin Cash deals frozen as insider trading is probed
While it's valid to question insider trading in cryprocurrency, I don't think that's what made the difference here.

Coinbase had said they would add BCH to their exchange before the end of the year months ago. And people had noted BCH appearing in their API a day or two ago, and then the trading pages were up for an hour or two before the official announcement, with some very large orders being placed in advance of trading going live, with the price already set at $1000 dollars higher than any other exchange was offering.

Add to this the fact that anyone who held BTC on Coinbase in August receiving BCH, plenty of people still holding BCH from the last time the price spiked, and the exceptionally deep pockets of certain people/groups who are supporting BCH.

You didn't need to be a Coinbase employee to know this was coming, and that it would, at least short term, have a significant effect on the price. Crypto traders live on big news and swings like this, and it was inevitable that it would be a big event.

wjoe··on SSH Escape Sequences
Aside from the common dislike for AMP centralising everything on Google's servers, I also dislike AMP links for the same reason I dislike mobile links to sites when I'm using a desktop PC.

The AMP versions usually lose formatting and links, and are designed to be read on a small mobile screen. I'd rather have the full version when I have a big screen available.

wjoe··on Microsoft Becomes Sponsor of Open Source Initiative
Don't agree with that at all. I have over 300 Linux games on Steam, and there's a wide variety of games. Sure, it's lacking the big AAA releases that make the headlines, but in my opinion, those are the 'cookie-cutter' type games that don't have much intellectual value. There are many indie and small developers creating interesting games, and with Unity and other big engines supporting Linux now, it's a relatively small hurdle for them to release their games on Linux, and there are many of them.

I also had a GPU passthrough VM setup, but the only time I used it in the last year was to play Overwatch - a cookie-cutter shooter. I play the occasional game in Wine, but there's no shortage of engaging native Linux games.

wjoe··on W3C abandons consensus, standardizes DRM, EFF resigns
Not sure how it works on other OSs, but in my experience on Linux, Chromium is installed without Widevine DRM, Flash, or any proprietary stuff, and if you want that you have to install it separately.
wjoe··on Atom 1.20
>Honestly, work with Atom open for a day or two on the same project, that's not uncommon right? Prepare yourself for some serious type lag.

I dunno, I have the same Atom instance open on Linux for weeks with 20+ files open, I haven't experienced any noticeable lag. Maybe I'm just not as sensitive to the sort of lag you're experiencing.

wjoe··on How YouTube perfected the feed
The example at the top of the article is actually an example of what makes me dislike the YouTube feed. I watch one video review of a game, and now I'm getting 20 videos suggested about the same game which I only had a passing interest in.

Sure, show me a few related videos, but often it can be a large percentage of the home page taken up by a section like this.

The same over-personalisation is an issue in a lot of Google platforms. On the Google news feed in Android, when I enabled personalisation it became dominated by unimportant articles about games, films, or TV shows I'd looked up recently, and hardly any general news. Not to mention the filter bubble of Google searches in general. I find this trend of over personalisation inconvenient, and not to mention a bit creepy.

wjoe··on uBlock Origin Maintainer on Chrome vs. Firefox WebExtensions
>Unrelated, but the fact that the developer doesn't get the extension AMO approved and uses eval() all over the place should give some pause as well.

He does, it is in the official add-on site, but their approval process is slow, and a few times a Firefox update has broken it and I've had to download the update from the dev's site because it takes a long time to update on the official site.

wjoe··on Internet Draft: Let 'localhost' be localhost
But Firefox has the option to disable search functionality in the URL bar - not sure if it still asks you or if it's hidden behind an about:config option these days though. It's also significantly better at matching parts of URLs and titles from your history in my experience.
wjoe··on Europe mostly ends mobile roaming fees from today
Same with EE in the UK. I did previously pay for an EU roaming addon which cost £3/day in the EU, they've said that that's removed from the account, and charges in the EU will be the same as at home, no extra charges.
wjoe··on Kerbal Space Program Acquired by Take-Two Interactive
Doubtful. Take Two have released a fair number of Linux games already, at least from 2K's catalog - Borderlands, Bioshock Infinite, XCOM, etc. I guess much of this is down to the individual developers rather than the parent company, but it is at least evidence that Take Two has no inherent issue with their games being on Linux.

Not to mention the game being in Unity, already running on Linux, and I assume a higher than average proportion of Linux players (I have no numbers for this, but I'd be surprised if this wasn't the case), I can't any reason why they'd want to drop support.

wjoe··on Microsoft to Deliver Microsoft Cloud from Datacenters in Africa
My company handles live video streaming, so slow speeds and high latency tends to result in a lot of buffering. You're looking at about 200ms latency minimum from Europe to South Africa, and when you need to download a ~2MB video chunk in 2000ms, it's pretty hard to get a reliable stream, especially when you add in generally slower/less reliable connections along the route.

It can be mitigated somewhat by reducing the quality of the video and using CDNs, but even edge nodes are scarce in that are of the world.

I imagine it would be fine for normal applications, aside from being a little slower, but video is a challenge.

wjoe··on Microsoft to Deliver Microsoft Cloud from Datacenters in Africa
Yep. We've had to do some work for clients in Africa in my job. One we did in Morocco was fine from EU data centers on AWS, but South Africa has been very difficult to serve with acceptable latency from any data centre we've tried.

We're 90% AWS here, but would probably use Azure for those clients if they had a data centre in that region.

wjoe··on Opera is Reborn
Same for me. Some of the changes Opera have been making are interesting, and they do seem to be doing more with the UI than Firefox and Chrome, who are removing as much UI as possible. But the social messenger stuff doesn't interest me, and having stuff like Facebook hard wired into a browser without having the source to know what it's actually sending to them really puts me off. I know Chromium is open source, but the interesting bits are in the stuff they've added on top, which is not.
wjoe··on Iaito – A Qt and C++ GUI for radare2 reverse engineering framework
It depends. Obviously if you're an experienced front end web developer then Electron is an easy choice, and the benefits of using your existing knowledge probably outweighs the speed/resource benefits of a native app, especially for something simple.

A lot of people think Electron is easy to use for everyone though. I fell into this trap last year, I've been doing HTML/CSS since I was in school, and I'm comfortable enough in JS. But once things started getting complex with my project, I realised I was going to need to use some of the bigger frameworks that I'm not familiar with. I started trying to build something with React, Redux, and all the various things that go with it, got overwhelmed, and gave up.

I've recently gone back to the original idea I had, and started from scratch in Qt, with no knowledge of it. It was a bit of a learning curve at the start, but overall the learning experience has been a lot easier than trying to learn the entire current JavaScript ecosystem.

I would say Electron is a good choice for JS experts or simple programs, but otherwise I'd recommend at least giving Qt a try.

wjoe··on Show HN: Ctxt.io – share context of whatever you see with others in seconds
I can't see any such option in Atom, Sublime, or Eclipse to copy as rich text.

To be fair I didn't really expect it to work with automagically copying the syntax highlighting from my IDE, but it made it sound like it could.

It's definitely a useful project, and surprising that nothing else like it exists, but may be worth making it clearer that it's designed for rich text, and may or may not work with formatting when pasting for various programs.

wjoe··on Rents in Megacities Can't Go Up Forever
I think it's mostly just because the concentration of the industry is convenient.

In the UK, there are tech jobs all over the country. But there are probably more in London than everywhere else combined, especially if you're looking for the start-up unicorn types. I lived in a smaller city for a while after university, but there were very few jobs to choose from that interested me.

I moved to London for one job in particular at the time, but also safe in the knowledge that it would be easy to find another job. I've had 4 different jobs in London since then, and it's never been very hard for me to find something else that's suitable and interesting for me.

The same holds true for most of my friends from university - many of the moved to London because it was the most obvious option for finding a tech job. So it has a further concentrating effect, that people are more likely to know others who are working in the capital city than elsewhere in the country.

If I was seeking a new job and open to moving anywhere in the country, I could find one somewhere outside of London. But if I was already living in another city, it might be harder to find a job without moving. It might not be quite the same in US, where there are a number of cities around the country that are a similar size to London, but in the UK there are maybe only 2-4 other cities that are large enough to have a wide selection of jobs in one industry, and none besides London with a population of over 1 million.

wjoe··on Gitlab 9.0
I agree with the parent about the sidebar. I already disliked the change to make it hidden by default with the pin option since it was a bit inconsistent for me, but it at least gave the option for best of both worlds.

Ideally this should be an option. I get that 'modern UX' is all about more screen space and whatnot, but I'm not a fan of that trend personally. It seems that all that's been gained from that change is more empty space at the side of pages. Personally, I'm the type that would rather have more information and convenience on the page than extra space.

Would it be that hard to add an option to enable the side bar if people want it? That's what I like about GitLab, that it's very configurable.

wjoe··on Great Progress with DX11 Games Support with WINE 2.3
It's getting there. I saw a video last week of someone running Overwatch in wine at about 45 FPS with a patched version of Wine. Not sure how easy it is to get running or if/when those patches will be merged in, but it's making good progress.

From what I remember, Overwatch doesn't use much of DX10/11, possibly just a few minor things, so it's mostly just a case of getting it not to crash when those features don't exist, and the rest should perform ok.

wjoe··on Scotland to seek second independence referendum
>My only concern for Scotland is that they wouldn't be able to gain (re-gain?) EU membership then would be left out on their own for many years. So I definitely think the Scottish leadership needs to better plan out EU entry relative to the last referendum.

Previously they said that if the UK left the EU, and Scotland left the UK, they could take on the UK's EU membership. This seems to be what they're aiming for with saying they want the referendum before the Brexit process is complete.

That said, it's never been confirmed that would actually be allowed, and with the UK government likely to trigger Article 50 this month, I'm not sure the door is even open for that. And given the EU's fairly strict and slow entry process, as you say, Scotland could be left outside of both unions for many years. I'm not sure if they'd even satisfy the EU's economic requirements on their own.

wjoe··on Window Maker 0.95.8 released
Cinnamon has similar "drag to edge" tiling as Windows, and you can also configure keyboard shortcuts for it - I have win+arrow keys configured to move windows to the edges/corners.
wjoe··on Post-Olympic Abandonment
One interesting use of a Winter Olympic venue - the sports arena in Hamar, which was used as an ice skating arena in the Lillehammer Winter Olympics is used once a year for The Gathering, a massive LAN party with around 5000 attendees, and it's also used throughout the year for winter sports too, they add and remove the ice as needed.
wjoe··on Opera Neon concept browser
On Linux, it says for Windows too, with no mention of the Mac version (and presumably no Linux version exists)
wjoe··on The “Faster Zombies” blog post
It's a shame if the biggest impact of Steam on Linux has been to encourage Microsoft to improve DirectX performance. I wasn't aware of Valve layoffs particularly hitting the Linux team, but it doesn't surprise me. Valve's efforts towards Linux have been quite minimal in the last year or so. Perhaps they're working on something behind the scenes, but SteamOS/Machines were effectively dead on arrival, and even Steam VR/HTC Vive still doesn't support Linux.

The "faster zombies" blog post mentioned was very big news at the time for Linux gaming, but since then, not a single OpenGL game has replicated the performance of L4D2. It's an accepted fact that games will see an FPS hit on Linux - not the end of the world, but not something that's ever going to attract gamers to switch to Linux unless they have other reasons.

Vulkan may change things, Dota 2 and Talos Principle benchmarks have been promising, and showing signs of the Windows beating (or at least matching) performance they promised 5 years ago.

wjoe··on Linux on the Mac – state of the union
High DPI on Linux is indeed a mess, but I find running the screen at a lower resolution preferable to Apple's implementation of DPI scaling anyway.

Bluetooth is very broken too. Not sure if that's an issue with the drivers or the Linux bluetooth stack in general. Fortunately I only use it for my wireless headphones, which I can live without.

WiFi used to be a big problem when I tried Linux on a Mac at a previous job, thanks to terrible Broadcom drivers, but that all seems fine now.

Been running Linux on a Mac for 2 and a half months now, for me personally the improvements are significant and the issues minor.

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