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Comment FreeBSD is what all servers should run (Score 1) 107

FreeBSD powers my personal infrastructure and has for decades. It is easy to use, not bloated (too badly, though you now have to take steps to keep that damn Wayland out of a server, WTF, but you can with /etc/make.conf). Having eventually made the shift to Poudriere, the package and code management is very good. Fixes for maintained packages are an overnight thing, but some of the major upstream dependencies have the same level of responsiveness as in Linux - better than any commercial software, but not as good as pure FreeBSD.

Moving from SVN to git kinda sucked, but now it works well enough and gets the job done and keeps the Linux heads happy.

Comment Several benefits (Score 2) 140

Exactly!

My standing desk* takes 1–2 seconds to shift between different heights, so it's very easy to switch between standing and sitting. I've been standing for 1½–2 hours each day (not always consecutively) — which by an amazing coincidence seems about the optimum according to that survey.

There are other benefits, though. I first got it after hurting my back, and found that standing really helps with that. (Disclaimer: back problems vary, this is not medical advice, etc.) And standing encourages you to move more, which also seems beneficial.

(* Actually, a ‘standing desk converter’, an adjustable spring-loaded platform that sits atop my existing desk — much cheaper and less disruptive than a full desk replacement.)

Comment Re:The human brain does the same thing... (Score 1) 182

Yes!

We must build an absolute monopoly on inventions which is permanent and heritable even if by so doing retard the progress of science and the useful arts. Without legislative protection, innovation would be like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point; and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement, or exclusive appropriation. Society must give a permanent exclusive right to the profits arising from them, lest they be denied by their nature the status of property.

Comment Don't expect teenage dating apps to be more (Score 5, Insightful) 54

Email is, by far, the best communications modality yet devised. I have never heard a remotely coherent argument against it but am inundated with endless marketing invective and paid articles decrying it and extolling the virtues of yet another short lived, idiotic alternative, inevitably proprietary and VC funded still in the burning OPM stage.

It is a transparently disingenuous hype machine desperately intent to lock up commercial ownership of private communications.

Don't breathe that crappy free air, try our UltraChat brand premium air! All the hip kids have switched, they all hate free air and get so much more done on UltraChat! If you were actually cool you'd already be breathing UltraChat Air, boomer. And your first 10,000 breaths are free*!!!

* $8/month after the first 10k up to 5 Gbreaths, contact your corporate sales executive to continue breathing after 5G.

Don't wait for your contact to "expire"

No seriously, you'll die. Pay up.

What makes a good text coms system:
Global interoperability
portability
adherence to open standards
Reliability
store & forward
Local storage and background sync
fast, indexed search
save draft and resume later
structured formatting
Organizational mechanisms like folders
centralized directory

What has all that and more? email. always has, always will. Chat is for children trying to hook up and well-suited to that level of complexity, but nothing more. I don't get how any company or team can be so flabbergastingly idiotic as to willingly cede control of their core intelligence to strategically misaligned scammers trying to lock it up for profit.

If you want a chat interface with the features of an email backend, try delta-chat. I'm not entirely happy with their PGP protocol, but there is some slow progress: https://support.delta.chat/t/a...

Comment About the only possibly way to botch Glass more (Score 2) 193

Don't forget that after abandoning Glass and the Explorers who paid a significant overcharge with the expectation of above-average service and support, Glass was "transitioned" to Fadell.

Look where that got Glass - even more dead than it was when the Explorers program was canned with a device that was LESS functional than it was when it shipped to most users. (KitKat on Glass was a clusterfuck of epic proportions, it destroyed battery life, stability, and performance, and they never got it to perform anywhere close to what it delivered when running ICS. What's worse, the fixes they DID managed to get in over the summer of 2014 to make it suck less all got reverted out for the final software update in September/October 2014 or so, which rendered units near-useless. When delivered, my Glass unit easily got 24 hours of battery life with my typical usage patterns. After the final software update - my unit would usually run out of battery in 8 hours of sitting on a shelf doing absolutely nothing.)

Comment Doomed from the beginning (Score 3, Informative) 62

"One aspect of its refreshed strategy is to have two co-presidents, with two distinct strategies for China and the rest of the world."

This should have been the strategy from the beginning. The Chinese domestic market and the global market are vastly different. Cheap unmaintained crap with a glossy UI painted over a broken core does great in China, but Westerners hate it.

Similarly, the "clean" UI preferred by Westerners is hated in Asian countries, especially China.

Moto declined because its customers began seeing evidences of "Chinaficiation" - Lenovo fired Motorola's applications team who knew how to make "value add" additions to Android without falling into the "Touchwiz Trap", and then continued with a rapid-fire string of early EOLs from a manufacturer whose recent successes in the West entirely were due to a reputation of "affordable but not crap with rapid updates".

Comment Re:If not now... (Score 5, Insightful) 1023

Yup. This isn't really a valid argument against increasing the minimum wage.

At worst, it merely hastens the inevitable by a few years, but this is going to happen.

This is relevant to the current election cycle for multiple reasons - free trade agreements are a major source of contention, and Trump talks about bringing manufacturing jobs back to the US - the problem is, as the recent massive Foxconn layoffs proved, the majority of those jobs are NEVER coming back no matter what you do, unless you enact a New Jersey-style law against automation. (New Jersey requires all gas stations to be full-service, you cannot pump your own gas. One of the reasons for this rather unique law is to create jobs.)

Comment Re:Zuckerman suppresses evidence? (Score 1) 346

Everything about this story is that it's a hit attempt by someone who got laid off.

1) FORMER employees
2) ANONYMOUS former employees - even though they are no longer employed by the company, they are not willing to identify themselves. It's pretty clear they know they would lose a libel lawsuit if their identity became known.

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