You may be surprised to learn that your face is your least identifying trait online. You network of friends/followers/likes identifies you far more readily—even if you use a random username.[1]
Managing your privacy is a lot like CPU side channel attacks. It forces you to re-evaluate your fundamental assumptions about what information can be exploited.
Surprised to see the author suggest that the C64 keyboard did not include the graphics glyphs on the keys.
Both the VIC-20 and the C64 both had them, albeit printed on the front vertical face instead of the horizontal face like the PET.
Moreover, the VIC-20 and the C64 keys include the box glyphs as well so you could see what character you’d get via CTRL and the ‘C=‘ (“Commodore”) key.
The Wikipedia page* states PETSCII includes 192 characters, but the author seems to suggest it’s at most a 7-bit charset. I was a little surprised to find that out after reading the article.
Given than Mono-the first open source C# implementation-was used to build banshee going back 15+ years, C# on *nix deserves more credit than is given here.
The Community Edition is open source, though the Enterprise Edition has some proprietary extensions.
It’s admittedly not at all obvious from the repo name, but the following is the top level repo for Couchbase Server (which uses Google’s `repo` tool): https://github.com/couchbase/manifest
My first touchscreen Garmin unit, circa 2007, definitely suffered from reliability issues in FL summer heat. Just keeping it on the dash in direct sunlight while driving was enough to affect its operation.
I’m guessing it didn’t effect their brand much because other companies like Tom Tom were aggressively targeting the entry-level market segment, and then the iPhone came out the same year.
The number people who had these higher-end units in hot southern states was likely just too small to significantly tarnish Garmin’s brand goodwill.
Soon enough most people switched to using their phone once the software was good enough (circa 2009 IIRC).
Xamarin and Microsoft alum Bryan Costanich got some friends together to rescue Netduino and “reboot” it.
They wanted to maintain that same sense of delight for .NET devs, but also modernize the aging hardware platform and replace the restricted .NET Micro Framework with full .NET Standard support on the software side.
Several friends from the old Xamarin docs team worked their magic on the Wilderness docs site—which is why it’s so good.
This sort of self-dealing has been going on since the 1940’s, and was just the kind of problem that President Eisenhower alerted us to in his prophetic speech* warning the country about the military-industrial complex:
“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”
I think the essay would have been better served getting to what appears to be the point much more directly:
- The VW scandal was so shocking because executives and engineers exploited a societal taboo against lying
- Was sustained for so long by exploiting another taboo against placing personal advantage over honesty
- Signs of fraud were dismissed because people assumed successful executives would never violate these taboos, leading them to accept misleading explanations and discounting the possibility of a cover-up.
I’m more than a little surprised nobody has chimed in advocating Openfire, which is Apache 2.0, standards based (XMPP et. al.), extensible, and also has some pretty nice browser clients out there (e.g. conversejs).
When I read this I thought it was sarcastically “proving the point” of the root comment.
MSNBC’s programming in the US evenings is largely opinion/political talk, and isn’t presented as news but as editorial. One can object to opinions, but it is unfair to criticize journalists for op/ed content—just like with newspapers. Very often the journalists personally disagree with opinion/editorial page content, but everyone understands that content isn’t bound by journalism’s standards.
The problem with that map is that the annual average obscures the wide seasonal variation, which was the main thrust of my comment. The high winds come during the dry season, then die down during the bulk of the wet season.
If you live on the East Coast then you take the wind for granted. On the Pacific Coast, the winds blow fast and furious, especially as you go up in altitude. Its very hard to control a burn here on most days, especially given the water cycle here. There is vastly more fuel in October and November than earlier in the year as the last rains are about 6 months past.
Controlled burns are probably done best during a short 1-2 month window when ground cover is dry enough, but those are also typically high wind months. To have any control of a burn here you need to be lucky (low winds for a few days), it needs to be a very small prescribed area, and probably needs to be at less than peak fuel.
This all amounts to a very small window for doing a prescribed burn. Given how big many of the forests are, and how much of the state is covered with them, I don’t see how you can have much of any control over a prescribed fire started there.
Certainly not without the heroic effort it takes to put out wildfires. I don’t know how we can ask firefighters to risk their life for a prescribed burn.
Microsoft skeptics fail to realize that most of the mid- and upper-level executives increasingly spent their entire career using, creating, and contributing to F/OSS software. Many of them were involved with early MSFT OSS efforts back in 2008-2010, and many came from deep Linux/OSS community via acquisition (Nat Friedman). Hell, the creator of GNOME, Miguel de Icaza, someone who bears the scars of the Microsoft War on OSS, now resides happily at Microsoft now.
For whatever faults MSFT has today, any sort of antipathy or guile towards OSS or Linux is not one among them. Credit where credit is due. Too many are stuck reliving past glories.
If you want an actual OSS bogeyman, you need only direct your attention to Oracle. Too many transferred their goodwill towards Sun to a company has, among other things, tried to claim Java’s APIs as their own intellectual property. That’s a company that still merits this kind of hand-wringing.
You can explain Apple’s problems with a much simpler albeit banal reason: its sheer size. It has grown massive.
They took over the old Sun campus in Sunnyvale while the UFO was under construction, and shortly thereafter the word was that those teams would be remaining there long term as the HQ was already overbooked. Apple also bought up a lot of space in San Jose a couple of years ago.
Apple pioneered small and fast teams of veterans. But it doesn’t scale well to this size. It’s a challenge to effectively coordinate hundreds (thousands?) of teams building various integrated hardware, software, and service components.
Its presumed lack of falsifiability has been one of its drawbacks and has been the source of some of the controversy around it.
Finding a potential test that could be conducted with telescopes instead of high energy particle accelerators would be a big moment in modern physics.