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Comment They'll try again (Score 1) 229

by John Allsup (#49930659) Attached to: After Uproar, Disney Cancels Tech Worker Layoffs
Economic reality makes cheap labour too tempting. They will try again. They only need to try once, with insufficient negative reaction, for the move to go through. Then a move in the reverse direction will seem so expensive as to be unworkable.

"Today we were unlucky, but remember we only have to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always." -- IRA after the Brighton bombing failed to kill Margaret Thatcher.

Comment Hunter gatherers (Score 1) 637

by John Allsup (#49889485) Attached to: Why Our Brains Can't Process the Gravest Threats To Humanity
For most of the past 100 millennia we were Hunter gatherers. That's what we're still primarily adapted to. We lack adaptations for large scale population survival, since there was no need for that sort of thing in the Hunter gatherers days. Now there is insufficient individual survival pressure for us to adapt to post Hunter gatherer life.

Comment Re:Great for linux desktop and gaming (Score 2) 54

If you don't have an SSD, consider having a ramdisk /tmp via tmpfs, and a nice -19 background process that runs on boot and copies all the often used files from /bin, /ilb, /usr/bin and /usr/lib to the same file in /tmp before deleting it. This forces just about anything you are about to run into the cache, and once you get to the sage of having 16GB RAM (like one of my HP boxes), it is a while before those files get forced out of cache. In the case of my second hand HP Z800 with 48GB of RAM, it takes a while for that to happen. (Of course pre-caching say 4GB of data of a spinning HDD takes time, but making it a nice -19 process means that you can use the machine at HDD speed when it's booted, and after a while it speeds up with all the binaries cached in memory). I wrote a 20 line bash script to do this.

Comment Until Google closes it... (Score 5, Interesting) 175

The trouble with the 'backup' claim is that a Google cloud service may suffer a permanent failure upon a behind-closed-doors business decision, with potentially little warning. If Seagate, say, could instruct your usb hdd to brick itself, would you use it for backup? The Cloud is convenient in the short term, but business reality means it must be thought of as 'may fail for no reason'.

Comment Re:Different perspectives... (Score 1) 253

Likewise spectacles like WWE wrestling present a similarly unrealistic picture of both human physiques, and human fighting, and indeed set a poor example of how to behave if people are looking for examples of how to live. Similarly, superhero movies (very popular at the moment) present a heavily distorted picture of reality. Then professional sports give a simiilary fantastical picture of human fitness and how sports are played, compared to what average players of these sports would be like (and it is unrealistic to expect than any amount of training would get my tennis to the level of Djokovic or Federer). Then in fashion and marketing, unrealistically good looking people and unrealistically good images of products are used to sell things.

Unreality is omnipresent in today's world, and porn is just one example. If we instinctively think that 'this sort of thing only happens in porn movies, not real life', and likewise 'only top football teams can get away with playing this way -- when I play, I stick to what is realistic', then the many of the issues that porn 'causes' go away. The 'sex addiction' that is sometimes seen with porn can just as readily happen with an overactive imagination, and in any case, anything that placates a strongly dissatisfied sex drive and end up becoming an obsession. (And there are far worse obsessions than porn.)

The big problem of teaching children to tell fantasy and fiction from reality is one which our education systems desperately need to tackle, but probably won't. Likewise how to prevent the problem of attaching too much unnecessary meaning to things like sex and nudity. In the present world, bringing a new human being into the world is a 20+ year process (building a home, fertilisation, bringing the pregnancy to term, safe delivery, raising the child to maturity). Fertilisatiion is pretty much the most trivially easy of that process, but it is the one to which we have a natural instinctive drive, and it is the one stage over which it is easy to make broad controlling statements from a position of power.

The european countries have a far better attitude to sex and nudity than the US or UK, and we should seriously learn from them.

Comment History is frustrating (Score 1) 85

by John Allsup (#49773533) Attached to: Attackers Use Email Spam To Infect Point-of-Sale Terminals
The case for the 'principle of least authority' has been made many times. People have even tried to design operating systems around it. But when the dominant PC operating system is simply designed to make its maker money and give them market dominance, stuff like this happens. PCs vulnerable to this sort of thing are the product of laziness and the business obsession with (and present-day necessity of) short time-to-market. Unfortunately modern business reality means people often cannot afford to make things properly anymore.

Comment Re:The art of doing more with less (Score 2) 175

The biggest benefit of learning how to do hand optimisation is not the hand optimised code that results. It's having a clue, when writing higher level code, what that code will end up asking the processor to do. If you don't understand assembly, you are throwing abstract language into a magic black box, and the thinking and reasoning about what happens next often comes to resemble magical thinking. On the other hand, if you are familiar enough with assembly to actually see what your C compiler does with your code, you tend to reason out how to solve programs with the end result in mind, and this leads to better programs.

Comment Re:Fuck you. (Score 1) 618

by John Allsup (#49711257) Attached to: Editor-in-Chief of the Next Web: Adblockers Are Immoral
Not that simple. If ad-funded business effectively sew up the market, so that you have to turn to one of them for supply, then it isn't really a free exchange. It's an effect that happens as the market evolves due to competition: site A offers good content, with a small amount of advertising to survive; site B uses more advertising, then uses the increased revenue to produce better content than site A; site A loses visitors and disappears; then site C comes along and does the same, and site B has to compete; then sites B and C use large scale advertising to support their content production, and gradually move more and more to whatever will bring in visitors to see the ads. This squeezes sites that use less advertising out of the market.

If the possible means of advertising were heavily restricted, then yes revenues and ad-funding would drop. But then there would be a market vacuum in which sites and services could develop. At present, those sites and services get out-competed by ad-funded sites, then use more and more intrusive advertising to bring in the money. If you offer competitors in a market the opportunity to use marketing techniques that increase their revenue, they will be pushed towards using them. A crash in advertising revenue caused by heavy and widespread ad--blocking may cause a seismic shift in the web in the short term, but then alternative revenue and business models would find a market to move into.

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