Comment Re:Then when it crashes (Score 2) 194
That parts gonna happen anyway.
Comment Re:Silly. (Score 2) 75
Even if battery energy density started getting close to that of liquid hydrocarbons, and thats a looong way off still, youd still need more batteries than you would fuel because batteries dont get lighter as they discharge like burned fuel does, rocket equation stuff. A 747 carries ~150k kilograms of fuel, if that didnt burn off thats an extra 37k kg the first quarter of the flight, an extra 75k kg the first half of the flight and so on...
Battery planes may never make widespread sense, if we ever start generating enough carbon free energy cheaply enough and even if all ground transport goes battery electric or whatever, at some point it might still be worth it to just make carbon neutral jet fuel with air fuel synthesis. That seems closer on the horizon than the battery tech needed for large planes to be feasible, hard to beat jet turbines for that application.
Comment Re:Big Mistake (Score 2) 26
A steam gift card can be laundered entirely within the steam economy tho, a dunkin gift card doesnt let you buy and resell special donut skins.
Comment Re:Gee... (Score 1) 44
Oh thats already happening. https://www.reddit.com/r/simps...
Comment Re:Damage control (Score 1) 6
The alerts are so much worse too like "Hey, looks like you slept like shit, should probably take it easy today." thanks google but not really up to either of us. Already knew that and fitbit was a lot gentler about it...
Comment Re:Exactly 10x (Score 1) 89
I know everybody turns off any new features immediately upon release, but with the new(ish) agent the way some of the various bits and pieces have come together has been pretty great.
Credits are global now, so youre watching something "why does he look familiar?", you click down to the actor now it shows you their whole filmography, you can watchlist stuff right there, and even a little category 'Youve seen them in' with anything with them in any of your libraries youve watched by recent. Not just other shows if youre watching a show or only other movies if youre watching movies. And since you can just search and browse through anything/anyone now, its actually replaced IMDB for me just because its sooo much cleaner. https://watch.plex.tv/person/n... vs https://www.imdb.com/name/nm00...
And speaking of the watchlist, thats universal now, you can search and add stuff you dont have, from any service, even stuff thats not on any service, and the watchlist can interface directly with the *arrs, so youre looking up that guy from that thing, watchlist another of his movies, radarr goes and does its thing. You can add upcoming stuff too and they even have trailers now, so i dont have to go to Youtube anymore cuz it doesnt make me wade through 20 fake AI trailers before finding the one on the actual studios channel and then it doesnt autoplay some assholes reaction or breakdown of the trailer i just watched right after.
AND if your users have their watchlists public, you can monitor theirs too, so friends and family can just watchlist stuff you dont have without leaving the plex app, so you dont need to try to convince them to use a third party app like Omni to request stuff.
All the other social features still suck tho, their own lack of features makes you abuse the rating system as a filter for other things instead of as a rating system, but replacing IMDB and youtube for at least my purposes has been pretty nice. Some of my users dont have their watchlists public either so i still have a facebook group chat for requests cuz who wants to use some third party app for requests. .
$750 is ridiculous tho, i paid $100 during a 50% off sale a couple of black fridays ago, but with all my collections and playlists and everything and especially all my users switching to Jellyfin wouldnt be as simple as everyone pretends, but if in the future they roll out Plex2 to loophole my lifetime or try to charge my users individually ill figure it out.
Comment Re:Working on Sopwith, AMA (Score 1) 42
Hi, I'm the lead dev so I can also answer:
1. Nothing specific to Linux/BSD. The hardest part of the codebase to work with is probably the movement/collision/AI code which is very hard to follow. It's hard to change because any change can break things in subtle ways.
2. Nope
3. Probably the networking code. Sopwith always had network code (it was written as a tech demo for an early LAN) but almost nobody ever got the chance to really use it. Seeing it finally working over TCP/IP was very satisfying.
4. I'm planning on adding a level editor which I think should really open up the game to expansion.
5. Fun and comical gameplay. Trying to avoid debris as everything around you is exploding in complete chaos is hilarious to me.
6. No plans for these at all, I'd personally be against adding them. I want to keep it as a great old game, not a lame modern one. I could talk at length about this kind of thing but that's the brief summary.
7. I've actually considered this, yes. The original HUD is very ambiguous and hard to read; effectively just some small lines with no labels. I've actually gone as far as to mock up some better graphics but there's no integration into the game yet.
8. Yes, support for custom levels was actually added recently and the latest release includes an example level. There is not yet a level editor, however, which is a big obstacle for modders. I also think that to make modding interesting the game will need expanding to support different gameplay types, new types of planes, enemies and items, etc. I have some ideas but a level editor should be the first priority.
9. I've personally lost interest in the modern game scene. There have been a couple of recent games I've enjoyed, Elite: Dangerous is one example. I suspect it's partly because I'm old now and don't have the time to follow this stuff. In general I tend to prefer playing (and modding) older games and have had fun recently introducing my daughter to them.
Comment Re:Abandoned or Actve. Pick one. (Score 1) 42
Calling it abandonware seems like a strange choice of phrase: it has been open source (GPL2) since the early 2000s, and SDL Sopwith (linked in the post) is based on that source. So it very much still is in active development.
Comment Re:Active? (Score 4, Informative) 42
Sure. The SDL port (I'm the maintainer) is still under development, and new features continue to be added. The original graphics and sound are deliberately preserved - the goal is to make it a great old game and not a lame new one. The project was admittedly dormant for a number of years and I've just recently come back to start working on it again.
The most significant development recently is the addition of support for custom levels. Until now there's only ever been a single level that can be played over and over. Other features added in previous versions include medals, swappable palettes (to emulate old displays), the in-browser version and TCP/IP networking.
Submission + - Veteran PC game celebrates 40th anniversary (github.io)
sfraggle writes: Biplane shoot-'em up is celebrating 40 years today since its first release back in 1984. The game is one of the oldest PC games still in active development today, originating as an MS-DOS game for the original IBM PC. The 40th anniversary site has a detailed history of how the game was written as a tech demo for the now-defunct Imaginet networking system. There is also a video interview with its original authors.
Submission + - WebKit introduces new tracking prevention policy (webkit.org)
AmiMoJo writes: WebKit, the open source HTML engine used by Apple's Safari browser and a number of others, has created a new policy on tracking prevention. The short version is that many forms of tracking will now be treated the same way as security flaws, being blocked or mitigated with no exceptions.
While on-site tracking will still be allowed (and is practically impossible to prevent anyway), all forms of cross-site tracking and covert tracking will be actively and aggressively blocked.
While on-site tracking will still be allowed (and is practically impossible to prevent anyway), all forms of cross-site tracking and covert tracking will be actively and aggressively blocked.
Is Believing In Meritocracy Bad For You? (fastcompany.com) 480
An anonymous reader quotes Fast Company:
Although widely held, the belief that merit rather than luck determines success or failure in the world is demonstrably false. This is not least because merit itself is, in large part, the result of luck. Talent and the capacity for determined effort, sometimes called "grit," depend a great deal on one's genetic endowments and upbringing.
This is to say nothing of the fortuitous circumstances that figure into every success story. In his book Success and Luck, the U.S. economist Robert Frank recounts the long-shots and coincidences that led to Bill Gates's stellar rise as Microsoft's founder, as well as to Frank's own success as an academic. Luck intervenes by granting people merit, and again by furnishing circumstances in which merit can translate into success. This is not to deny the industry and talent of successful people. However, it does demonstrate that the link between merit and outcome is tenuous and indirect at best. According to Frank, this is especially true where the success in question is great, and where the context in which it is achieved is competitive. There are certainly programmers nearly as skilful as Gates who nonetheless failed to become the richest person on Earth. In competitive contexts, many have merit, but few succeed. What separates the two is luck.
In addition to being false, a growing body of research in psychology and neuroscience suggests that believing in meritocracy makes people more selfish, less self-critical, and even more prone to acting in discriminatory ways.
The article cites a pair of researchers who "found that, ironically, attempts to implement meritocracy leads to just the kinds of inequalities that it aims to eliminate.
"They suggest that this 'paradox of meritocracy' occurs because explicitly adopting meritocracy as a value convinces subjects of their own moral bona fides."
This is to say nothing of the fortuitous circumstances that figure into every success story. In his book Success and Luck, the U.S. economist Robert Frank recounts the long-shots and coincidences that led to Bill Gates's stellar rise as Microsoft's founder, as well as to Frank's own success as an academic. Luck intervenes by granting people merit, and again by furnishing circumstances in which merit can translate into success. This is not to deny the industry and talent of successful people. However, it does demonstrate that the link between merit and outcome is tenuous and indirect at best. According to Frank, this is especially true where the success in question is great, and where the context in which it is achieved is competitive. There are certainly programmers nearly as skilful as Gates who nonetheless failed to become the richest person on Earth. In competitive contexts, many have merit, but few succeed. What separates the two is luck.
In addition to being false, a growing body of research in psychology and neuroscience suggests that believing in meritocracy makes people more selfish, less self-critical, and even more prone to acting in discriminatory ways.
The article cites a pair of researchers who "found that, ironically, attempts to implement meritocracy leads to just the kinds of inequalities that it aims to eliminate.
"They suggest that this 'paradox of meritocracy' occurs because explicitly adopting meritocracy as a value convinces subjects of their own moral bona fides."
Submission + - AmigaOS 3.1.4 released for classic Amiga (hyperion-entertainment.com)
Mike Bouma writes:
The new, cleaned-up, polished Amiga operating system for your 68K machine fixes all the small annoyances that have piled up over the years. Originally intended as a bug-fix release, it also modernizes many system components previously upgraded in OS 3.9.
Contrary to its modest revision number, AmigaOS 3.1.4 is arguably as large an upgrade as OS 3.9 was, and surpasses it in stability and robustness. Over 320K of release notes cover almost every aspect of your favourite classic AmigaOS — from bootmenu to datatypes.
Feed Techdirt: The World's Email Encryption Software Relies On One Guy, Who Is Going Broke (google.com)
The man who built the free email encryption software used by whistleblower Edward Snowden, as well as hundreds of thousands of journalists, dissidents and security-minded people around the world, is running out of money to keep his project alive.
Werner Koch wrote the software, known as Gnu Privacy Guard, in 1997, and since then has been almost single-handedly keeping it alive with patches and updates from his home in Erkrath, Germany. Now 53, he is running out of money and patience with being underfunded.
"I'm too idealistic," he told me in an interview at a hacker convention in Germany in December. "In early 2013 I was really about to give it all up and take a straight job." But then the Snowden news broke, and "I realized this was not the time to cancel."
Like many people who build security software, Koch believes that offering the underlying software code for free is the best way to demonstrate that there are no hidden backdoors in it giving access to spy agencies or others. However, this means that many important computer security tools are built and maintained by volunteers.
Now, more than a year after Snowden's revelations, Koch is still struggling to raise enough money to pay himself and to fulfill his dream of hiring a full-time programmer. He says he's made about $25,000 per year since 2001 — a fraction of what he could earn in private industry. In December, he launched a fundraising campaign that has garnered about $43,000 to date — far short of his goal of $137,000 — which would allow him to pay himself a decent salary and hire a full-time developer.
The fact that so much of the Internet's security software is underfunded is becoming increasingly problematic. Last year, in the wake of the Heartbleed bug, I wrote that while the U.S. spends more than $50 billion per year on spying and intelligence, pennies go to Internet security. The bug revealed that an encryption program used by everybody from Amazon to Twitter was maintained by just four programmers, only one of whom called it his full-time job. A group of tech companies stepped in to fund it.
Koch's code powers most of the popular email encryption programs GPGTools, Enigmail, and GPG4Win. "If there is one nightmare that we fear, then it's the fact that Werner Koch is no longer available," said Enigmail developer Nicolai Josuttis. "It's a shame that he is alone and that he has such a bad financial situation."
The programs are also underfunded. Enigmail is maintained by two developers in their spare time. Both have other full-time jobs. Enigmail's lead developer, Patrick Brunschwig, told me that Enigmail receives about $1,000 a year in donations — just enough to keep the website online.
GPGTools, which allows users to encrypt email from Apple Mail, announced in October that it would start charging users a small fee. The other popular program, GPG4Win, is run by Koch himself.
Email encryption first became available to the public in 1991, when Phil Zimmermann released a free program called Pretty Good Privacy, or PGP, on the Internet. Prior to that, powerful computer-enabled encryption was only available to the government and large companies that could pay licensing fees. The U.S. government subsequently investigated Zimmermann for violating arms trafficking laws because high-powered encryption was subject to export restrictions.
In 1997, Koch attended a talk by free software evangelist Richard Stallman, who was visiting Germany. Stallman urged the crowd to write their own version of PGP. "We can't export it, but if you write it, we can import it," he said.
Inspired, Koch decided to try. "I figured I can do it," he recalled. He had some time between consulting projects. Within a few months, he released an initial version of the software he called Gnu Privacy Guard, a play on PGP and an homage to Stallman's free Gnu operating system.
Koch's software was a hit even though it only ran on the Unix operating system. It was free, the underlying software code was open for developers to inspect and improve, and it wasn't subject to U.S. export restrictions.
Koch continued to work on GPG in between consulting projects until 1999, when the German government gave him a grant to make GPG compatible with the Microsoft Windows operating system. The money allowed him to hire a programmer to maintain the software while also building the Windows version, which became GPG4Win. This remains the primary free encryption program for Windows machines.
In 2005, Koch won another contract from the German government to support the development of another email encryption method. But in 2010, the funding ran out.
For almost two years, Koch continued to pay his programmer in the hope that he could find more funding. "But nothing came," Koch recalled. So, in August 2012, he had to let the programmer go. By summer 2013, Koch was himself ready to quit.
But after the Snowden news broke, Koch decided to launch a fundraising campaign. He set up an appeal at a crowdsourcing website, made t-shirts and stickers to give to donors, and advertised it on his website. In the end, he earned just $21,000.
The campaign gave Koch, who has an 8-year-old daughter and a wife who isn't working, some breathing room. But when I asked him what he will do when the current batch of money runs out, he shrugged and said he prefers not to think about it. "I'm very glad that there is money for the next three months," Koch said. "Really I am better at programming than this business stuff."
Related stories: For more coverage, read our previous reporting on the Heartbleed bug, how to encrypt what you can and a ranking of the best encryption tools.
Republished from ProPublica. ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for their newsletter .
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Submission + - 'Star Wars: Episode VII' has a title: 'The Force Awakens' (ew.com)
schwit1 writes: If you feel a disturbance in the Force, it’s millions of voices suddenly crying out the new title of Star Wars: Episode VII — The Force Awakens. The reveal comes as the movie finishes its final day of shooting (with many more months of post-production to come.)
Although there were still a few days left of shooting, the cast of the J.J. Abrams film already celebrated their wrap party last weekend, following a bumpy few months of principal photography thrown into crisis when Han Solo himself, Harrison Ford, broke his leg on set in an accident involving a falling door on the Millennium Falcon.
Although there were still a few days left of shooting, the cast of the J.J. Abrams film already celebrated their wrap party last weekend, following a bumpy few months of principal photography thrown into crisis when Han Solo himself, Harrison Ford, broke his leg on set in an accident involving a falling door on the Millennium Falcon.
