How does that in any way imply they are dumb...

Effective as advertising, not effective at generating profit.

I get that there's a reason generic "targeted" advertising took over. Arranging rental of ad space on a website was a pain for both parties and a much higher bar for entry than copy+pasting some code. This combined with the ongoing death of the topic specific website ensure the days of a website owner hand picking advertisements they think their audience might go for are probably not coming back.

As far as the advertisements actually generating effect, I think the old way was way better. Companies like google are succeeding on pure scale.

No, but I haven't had all the sense of whimsy ground out of me yet.

* sitting there

There actually was a time, when sites hosted their own ads, and advertisers payed a flat rate! You'd see the same ad over and over again, sitting their in the corner.

If it was interesting or confusing, eventually you'd break down and _have_ to click it to find out what the hell they were even trying to sell. At the very least if it was interesting it stuck in your head.

I actually think this was far more effective than all this targeted advertising we've got now.

* key words are
* their

hey .. I just got up!

I have no idea, but I'm not a creative person!

I tend to lean towards the "pro version" model of funding as long as the free version isn't totally crippled and they don't start moving free functionality to the pro version. Come up with some neat but not essential extras (I'd probably pay money to be able to group contacts together and send snaps to "everyone in group 'work friends'") and there's probably plenty of people like me who's buy it.

Key word is: supposed to.

Yes we all know it would be trivial to store every bit of data that goes through that service. There's no end-to-end encryption mechanism that I'm aware of or anything else that would prevent them from logging everything.

But there service is still predicated on their insistence that they don't. To sell advertising (especially if they sell it as targetted advertising) or to show targeted advertising to users (hey, I talked about dildo swings the other day, and here's an ad for one, what a coincidence!) would basically be admitting that they do keep stuff, which would probably cause an epic shitstorm.

Handful of friends and I use snapchat mainly to send stupid shit to each other. It's kinda fun, but none of us are really using it to chat or anything.

I might have considered paying a buck or two for the app (we've had some fun with it), but deal with ads, fuck that shit. The stupid random "live from Oktoberfest" shit that's been showing up lately is annoying enough.

I always wondered how they intended to fund/make money from this. I was kinda hoping for something more creative than "once it's popular, we'll show ads!".

Yikes! Yup.

I've used gentoo for a long damn time, so my ability to objectively gauge it's difficulty is probably long gone.

That said, I for one think gentoo has gotten far easier to install and especially maintain. The default profiles are no longer the joke they once were, and most packages are using more generic high-level use flags so you have one --with-feature-x instead of the old --with-compat-mode-z --with-doublefork --with-some-other-unrelated-but-required-flag type stuff you had years ago, which translates into much simpler USE flags. You can actually leave make.conf relatively untouched and still end up with a decently functional system, especially if you want a desktop and go for one of the desktop profiles.

Portage is also a lot smarter these days, being able to resolve many issues that it previously would have died on. When it does run into problems, the descriptions these days are much nicer than before!

I'm being completely honest when I say that systemd has been the first major gentoo headache I've had in a while. Everything was just dandy then suddenly I'm having to switch packages around (udev being the big one), and having to blacklist udev and systemd because so much random shit pulls them in (and a -systemd use flag isn't enough), and then uninstalling a bunch of random packages (like some power management widget that got pulled in by god knows what for some reason).

I know you've probably written off gentoo at this point, here's a completely random bit of usage advice:

- Set use flags as you need them, even if this means re-installing the same thing multiple times. This avoids big important packages being pulled in as mere dependencies (though you can add them to the world list afterwards) and more importantly lets you set up and configure everything one at a time and makes it more likely that you'll notice error messages.
- Don't be afraid of package.keywords, especially for very specific use flags.
- Avoid gnome if possible. I don't know wtf it is with gnome, but it seems to be the poster child for weird and hard to diagnose issues as well as crazy dependency trees.
- Pay attention to what virtual packages are doing. Usually they are in your best interest, but not always.
- Don't bother using ebuilds for web apps

A very well written proposal that outlines many of the concerns I (as a non-Debian user) and I suspect most have about systemd. It’s worming it’s way into everything for the sake of better integration, which it may deliver on, but this goes against much of the traditional Linux spirit of small self-contained bits that can be swapped out at will.

In my mind, this comes down to whether we want a better functioning OS or an OS that adheres to the mindset that I think attracted many of us to Linux in the first place. Personally I want a hackers OS that I can play with and tweak as I feel like, but I accept that many people basically want open source windows or even just zero cost windows (i.e. free as in my wallet).

I hope Debian rolls back on their decision. I doubt this will happen, but at least we’ll get some more discussion in a somewhat visible forum. I may not agree with a lot of the Debian mentality, but they are very good at thinking about and discussing things, so I think this will be good overall.

And before someone says "just use gentoo", I do, and have for almost a decade (I started using it fairly soon after it came out). The problem is that systemd, being basically a virus at this point, is causing exactly the kind of problems mentioned in the proposal. I've had to use the blacklist for the first time in a while because *McBane voice* the use flags, they do nothing!

Thus the invention of the "mobile version", which I think generally works out a lot better than a page designed to serve both (and _way_ better than a mobile version designed to look ok on a desktop).

But that said, I don't do much web dev. I'd certainly never do it professionally. Not just because I think it's an absolute mess of an industry, but because my skillset in that area is about 10 years out of date (as you probably guessed) and was never that solid to begin with.

It _kinda_ does if you do as was said and define all the common properties for both and then the specific properties for each individually.

It's not really inheritance as you would find in c++ or java, and not nearly as flexible, but it is kinda there.

I still just use tables when I delve into the wonderful world of web dev. CSS has replaced coloring and styling of text, but positioning.. screw that. Proper or not, tables worked fine then, and they still work fine.