Lol I see what you mean on this week's episode. It sounds like he's really under the weather unfortunately. To my ear Skinner is Harry's "default" timbre in most airings. Love it when he throws in off the cuff voice gags.

Hilarious news read to you by Principal Skinner himself. It's the one and only podcast/radio show I've ever been inclined listen to.

Me, Simon. I'm using it right now. It's alright...

Mouse lags under memory pressure but I suspect that's an x11/linux bug. It seems strange from an NT developer perspective that memory paging can bring an operating system's UI and HID inputs to a dead crawl -- you'd think there'd be some sort of priority scheduling to keep a basic desktop and input devices responsive, above user processes. Other than that Elementary OS gets out of my way for running an IDE + browser + terminal and letting me get work done, without looking like garbage/inconsistent/blurry as other linux UIs I've seen so far appear to be.

Came up against this for my first foray into the Universal Windows Platform/Microsoft store late last year for shits and giggles, consisting of a non-profit "at cost" virtual mobile sms/voip app for windows desktops/mobiles. Essentially you're prohibited from having any app that receives any money through any means other than their own payment system, even if it's non-profit. So I just let people side-load the appx package and use a traditional "website" delivery method instead. Incidentally the WinRT/UWP platform itself is garbage and non-deterministic at runtime in terms of reliability (their own components inexplicably crash internally after running suspended for long durations) and it's incapable of reliably maintaining TCP connections using its socket broker for connected-standby.

Looks entertaining, thanks for the tip! Under Civil Money "time robbing" can't play out fortunately :) It wouldn't be a worthwhile endeavour for any miscreant to bother with because a "brand new" account flush with USD$60k of UBI is just as valid as an established one, and also there's no financial reason to decline a person for anything. One of the aims is to gently guide people into communicating with one another again, mending trust and creating real human relationships. At which point your Civil Money balance is basically immaterial -- you're always "good for it", even if your perpetually replenishing UBI is expended. Every seller is a bank manager who has no incentive to decline a patron, regardless of their account balance, which can go into the negative. More important is what useful, exciting or worthwhile endeavour is this person working on in my community or for humanity at large?

Agreed. None of these crypto currencies do anything to address the underlying problem of zero-sum economics, which forces people into a toxic and (in my personal view uncilivised) social contract which obliges everyone to waste a bunch of resources and pollute the planet in the interest of quarterly earnings and doing "something" to merely put food on the table. I submit as a solution to the current social and environmental train wreck we call that we economics, we let go of zero-sum accounting and switch to time stored on an open distributed public ledger. Time being an equal common denominator that everybody has an ability to expend, at least in some form or anther. In doing so it affords the ability to invert taxation and make that the "money creation" process (instead of 90%+ being created by banks in the form of debt as it is today) as well as a practical and sustainable UBI model. I've already had a crack at the implementation here https://github.com/civilmoney/...

They already do. "Export Control Regulations" sometimes appearing in software licensing agreements for government contractors already disallow transfer or release of a piece of software to US embargoed countries. Basically the same thing.

+1 The Dish.

What the parent poster is referring to is fractional reserve banking, see banking 101 -- https://positivemoney.org/how-...

Essentially (depending on your currency) ~90%+ of all money in circulation today exists in no form other than banking debt (computer data) created from thin air each time loans and credit are issued. The physical fiat currency you hold in your hand is immaterial.

I wouldn't say "selling debt" is a particularly accurate analogy for using cash, more like moving debt around, or kicking the can down the road. When you pay back a debt you delete/destroy money from the volume of money in circulation, meanwhile the bank has created some for itself (interest) under the guise of having performed a useful function of lending you money it never had in the first place.

My wife studied nutrition recently and your notes are basically the take away. Drink more water. Cholesterol and fat are perfectly fine. Avoid sugars. Eat your veggies. Simply drinking more water and cutting out processed food will tend to fix a lot of maladies.

The UK's NHS seem to have a good idea with their "eat five a day" mantra. I wish Health Canada would promote the same.

We prep-cook 4x nights worth of meals at a time and plan ahead accordingly... much less work/cooking that way and it saves a little money on groceries getting more of the things that just happen to be on sale put into each 4 day meal. Also usually aim for 80/20 split for veg/meat for the meal portions, and couple times a month do an "all veg" meal. Diversity in the microbiome seems to be important.

This is accurate on a lot of levels. The Windows Runtime (WinRT) is borderline non-deterministic for projects written in .NET, relying on the ABI wrappers, as object lifetime/garbage disposal can take place "at the wrong time" internally within standard UWP components all on their own. Essentially your app can instantiate for example a virtualized ListViewItem which spins up internal UWP visual elements, app suspends for a while, a GC occurs within WinRT, and then the app crashes with a COM access violation immediately upon app restore. Microsoft's recent Modern C++ push has been by and large a welcome development. The syntax is nice and asynchronous barriers between portions of background/UI code I actually like a lot better than C#'s "async" keyword + obligatory ".ConfigureAwait(true|false)" for whether to return on the UI thread or not .. it's too easy to miss a ConfigureAwait(false) line and then call something on the UI or perhaps a method which you don't immediately know off hand (until tested 10 minutes later) whether it actually demands a UI context. Example: Launcher.LaunchUriForResultsAsync(..). Has nothing to do with a dispatcher/UI? should be safe to call from any thing thread, huh? It sure isn't.

But hey! At least crashes are caught and reported automatically with all the telemetry, so it's easy to find issues out in the wild? You would think. Unfortunately everything is basically enforcing async patterns from start to finish under UWP. Good for saturating CPU cores and responsiveness, but your call stack is now non-existent. The sum total for a crash report in the field (including stack data) winds up as:

Unhandled exception: The text associated with this error code could not be found.
System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException (0x80004005): Error HRESULT E_FAIL has been returned from a call to a COM component.

Good luck!

The only UWP app I bothered to put out I opted to *not* put in the store and let people sideload it instead. Thankfully Microsoft have made inroads in allowing us to let people download codesigned *.appxbundle files which will even ping your own server and deliver updates gracefully, on newer Win 10 builds at least. I regret releasing the UWP app, should have just used Win32, but I wanted to run it on my WinPhone though (since it's a wifi-only phone replacement.) It'd be great except the Windows Broker Infrastructure has a bug with regards to "energy debt" calculations even when an app is configured to "Always allow in background"... so this particular app doesn't fuckin ring reliably when an SMS/Call arrives anyway. Actually explains why skype never worked on it reliably either. Unfortunately the windows phone team have given up on life so I don't see it being addressed ever.

Yep. In response the last increase I simply lowered my account tier and started watching Netflix less so that someone else in the family can use the account instead if they feel like it. I expect if Netflix increases the price again I'll drop down to its "single screen" tier or just cancel it completely. Netflix is not *that* valuable to me.

This was the best thing I read all day.

Around 2013 I came the same conclusion and removed GA from all of my websites. It's my opinion that there is no excuse for using cookies for any reason other than a single https-only one for the purpose of keeping people logged in. Server side IP address alone is accurate enough to gauge rough visitor behaviour patterns and the acquisition point (HTTP referrer) is the single only useful metric I personally pay attention to. Ergo, my "analytics" consists of a few lines of C# code which runs against a folder of daily nginx logs, filters out bots/referrer spam and produces a simple table of what's been going on. It's not rocket science.

One nagging question I've always wondered is whether or not google internally demotes websites containing no tracker scripts, on a presumption that "its owner is not working to track visitors/revenue, therefor it is not a serious candidate for these search terms." Even though a product landing page is clean, simple, succinct, and the end product is well received by real users in actually. I'm curious whether or not it's why earlier projects of mine seemed to gather regular organic search traffic and associated business without me even lifting a finger, other than braindead obvious correct usage of search index friendly html markup throughout, contrast to post 2013, when I build a new software product, launch a site for people to find and download it, making sure it looks clean and presentable, mobile friendly, loads quickly, ticks all the best practice boxes - it might as well not even exist. Pretty much the only search term it's considered for is the product name itself through word of mouth.

Hey cool, cheers Mandrel. I like the spirit of DevWheels, thanks for the link. I think the execution might be a bit too wordy, with all the bullet points, caveats and instructions etc. I prefer simple things :)

For developers who build on top of other people's code rather than rolling their own from scratch all of the time, it makes sense that there should be a clear and obvious way for dependency authors to be paid as well. Perhaps a key aspect of a PML could be that licensing only applies to end-user products or server applications. If you're using another author's PML licensed work as part of your own PML library, what you'd do is basically nothing. The other author's code source files remain alongside yours. Downstream products using your library are obliged to pay the other author + you, so they should have two *.pml receipts in their source tree. Simples. Perhaps as a courtesy if components end up with a bunch of PML dependencies, the readme should list them in bullet point form so "consumer" developers don't have to go fishing through every file in the source tree. Or something like GitHub will have already scanned the source tree and have PMLs listed in the clear up front.

Where it all falls apart is when an upstream author drops off the face of the planet and companies can no longer get a license. There's a gap there for GitHub or some company to provide a simple and familiar licensing experience and collect licensing fees in trust. So the purchase link becomes something like: https://github.com/sichbo?pml=.... And there's a tidy little familiar form so you just tick what you need, pay the bill, and receive your *.pml file and get on with life. Maybe throw on a deadman's switch such that *.pmls are issued for $0 when the original author is no longer able to accept payment (destination bank account closed) and a payment transfer issue isn't resolved after 12 months or whatever.