Hmm, TOR is a nice project and all, but it has its benefits and drawbacks. I think IETF need to give quite a bit of thought before adopting some technology as a standard.

I'm all for anonymous communication with encryption though. I hate what corporations and governments are doing to the internet. I do believe internet is the most important human discovery since fire, and its freedoms need to be preserved...

--Coder

There are plenty of alternatives to the official Google App Store.

I'm not sure if it's a good thing they removed it from the official store or not. If it was up to me I'd probably allow it with big red letters saying "THIS WILL VOID YOUR WARRANTY AND MIGHT BRICK YOUR PHONE". OTOH people installing stuff from official Google App Store don't expect these things to happen, so maybe it's a good thing for the masses that this app was removed... And tech-savy people will find ways to get Cyanogen installed anyway.

--Coder

Who in their right mind could trust USA? Unicorns are more real than trust in USA. Spying, 2 wars based on lies and deceit, lots of profiteering at everyone's expense, patent trolling and other IP based litigation nonsense, shoving harmful legislation down everyones throats- all of that is coming from US.

Well, unless it's "trust" as in "I trust US to screw everyone at every opportunity".

--Coder

Even though time and time again studies show that well rested employees are more productive, people in USA keep working longer hours with fewer holidays. And that is the reason for 80% of those last minute flights.

Why cannot the state mandate that each employee gets X days of holiday per year guaranteed, and is forced to take them? That's how it works in quite a few countries in Europe.

--Coder

I wish there were more sites that doing Linux benchmarks than Phoronix.

Or if not, I wish more sites would benchmark workloads that are more than some synthetics, office/browser use, transcoding and games.

What about the things software developers have to deal with day-to-day? Application/web server performance? IDE performance? Compiler performance? Database performance? LibreOffice performance? Interpreter/VM performance for different languages? Latency/performance of variuous desktop environments, GNOME, KDE, XFCE? Performance of various servers- FTP, email, Samba etc.?

Phoronix does some of that, but nowhere near enough.

--Coder

Hello,

I just wanted to say that I'm on AAISP and it does not block anything. It does not use IWF filters, nor any blocklists as far as I know.

And most of the big ISPs that block stuff do that because of "gentleman's agreement", not because of explicit court orders. So basically they do it because they didn't have the balls to contest/refuse the requests by special interest groups.

And AAISP is the only ISP I know where you can get support via IRC channel. They do limit internet usage, but increasing your non-working hours limits is very cheap, and I never max them out anyway. Other than that, I'm very happy with AAISP. Oh, and they have IPv6!

--Coder

It's not a robot until it can make me a full English breakfast :)

Get the one from F-Droid. There is an open-source package repository and it has a bunch of useful open-source apps for Android.

You can be quite sure whatever you get from F-Droid is not an ad-ladden spyware. It doesn't have many apps, but there are some very good ones, and signal-to-noise ratio is much better than official app store.

--Coder

Well, in case you didn't get the memo, the definition of World Wide Web has changed dramatically since the 1990s.

World Wide Web is no longer about seeing pages to present you with information. It's about running applications to give you functionality. This effectively turned the web browser into a not-so-thin application client.

I believe this whole thing happened because Microsoft had control of what gets installed on desktop for a long while, and the only application-client technology installed on all machines was a web browser. If all machines were shipped with an X server or a VNC client or some other application-client technology, maybe things could have been different. But we are where we are, and because of that features like Canvas, HTML5, WebGL, NaCl, very fast JavaScript JIT engines get added to the browser to make it more efficiant APPLICATION client, not a page browser.

--Coder

I'm sick and tired of hearing "what about unemployment" when every new piece of technology is developed. They will have to find something else to do, that's what. Do we need millions of blacksmiths making horseshoes today? Where are millions of unemployed blacksmiths? Do we need millions of cotton pickers? Do we need millions of farmers with scythes?

Long term, developing technology and improving efficiency and reducing labour is always beneficial.

There are slightly different problems. One is availability of said technology to people (only industrialists can afford robots, plus technology can be proprietary, patented and restricted). And another problem is that only few people (ones providing capital) often benefit from the fruits of technology. First can be mitigated with different legislation (although unlikely to happen since industry interests control most governments). The former? I don't know... I believe this is where cracks start showing in capitalism as a system...

--Coder

I don't believe Oracle can kill off Java. Several reasons:

• Oracle is dependent on Java ecosystem. They push enterprise apps now, not just databases. And those apps, at least quite a big number of them is written in Java.
• Oracle is selling Java servers, like WebLogic or Coherence.
• OpenJDK is GPL anyway, and they cannot really close it off.
• Oracle database users often implement their software in Java. Screw up Java- your database sales go down.
• Java is part of Oracle Database.

So for Oracle ruining Java would not make any financial sense, neither short term nor long term. If they have at least 2 brain cells working, they will not do it. Although big companies do not always act rationally.

--Coder

I've seen plenty of bad Java code, but then again I've seen plenty of bad non-Java code.

It's not Java's fault that people are using it wrong. It's easy to do the right thing with Java, but it's also quite easy to do the wrong thing and get SOMETHING kinda working. In a way that can be a curse. Bad C/C++ apps will crash and burn immediately quite often, thus forcing people to fix things. Bad Java apps will creep along and be somewhat usable.

On the other hand, you can get something working quicker with Java, and you can get reasonably good results with good design and supervision and a team of mediocre developers. So Java software is quite cost-effective.

--Coder

Unless you do your crypto on your own machine, and your machine is not compromised, any such service is insecure. As soon as your cloud storage provide has your crypto keys, you need to assume your encryption compromised. There are several ways to implement it:

1. Use GPG and ecrypt each file before storing it on-line.
2. Pay for a normal Linux hosting server with ample storage. Export the raw block device using NBD (network block device). Encrypt it on your device using dm-crypt or luks and mount it. This encrypts the entire disk.
3. Use some kind of cloud storage, but do encryption in javascript on the browser, in your machine, without sending encryption keys anywhere. Look at http://openpgpjs.org/ I don't know any cloud services that would allow doing that.

--Coder

I do agree with a lot of points listed here. Rolling your own development team is not easy, nor cheap.

However, when you hire companies to do contracts this big, you end up with horrible horrible mess. First, you get to hide the bigest contractors available (because the project is big), like Accenture or similar. And they are the worst, and have the worst (cheapest) people available working for them. The only selling point they have is the headcount, not quality of developers. And they will assemble a new team for this project, from random guys, with flaky qualifications and skills, and often no prior experience.

And all those companies are for-profit. Which means they will find ways to overcharge you by A LOT. Like 10x-20x the cost of a good sized team for several years.

In the end, a project like this that has been outsourced to big IT companies is almost guaranteed to cost you a fortune, and end up a failure.

Now it's possible (and likely) to end up with a failed project with an in-house team, but choosing in-house development vs contracting is not as clear cut as you seem to suggest.

--Coder

Maybe that 1% of time Oracle DB is the right solution, and then you need it and you need to pay DBAs and consultants to do the tuning.

But in other cases, Oracle is an overkill. And Postgres with minimal effort will Just Work, while just the effort to set up Oracle and keep it running is going to be expensive (DBAs, consultants) and horrible. Especially if you can spend all the money you saved on licences on proper hardware. And I have experienced more bugs in Oracle than in Postgres, both in weird query optimizer behaviour, and outright incorrect data handling. And there is no way to get them fixed, at least in timely manner, not even with most expensive support options.

And don't get me started on Oracle enterprise applications- they are horrible. And given the history of company of overcharging their customers and delivering crap, I wouldn't trust them with any project.

About the only thing produced by Oracle that I enjoy is Java. And I still shudder every time I think that it is owned by Oracle, although they seem to be doing a reasonably good job getting new versions out of the door.

--Coder