> The state of development of the various GNU/ Linux distributions has reached a point where everything "just works".
Not really. I'd argue it has actually gotten worse in recent years, unless you enjoy using ancient hardware.
Support for 802.11ac chipsets in particular has been bad in my experience: Intel only works properly with very recent kernels, Broadcom and Qualcomm/Atheros tend to be buggy or they don't work at all. Or they're just barely working and essential features like, oh, using the 5 GHz band, are missing. And these are the three vendors whose chipsets you'll find most commonly in Laptops at the moment.
I guess it's possible I was just very unlucky.
OP also mentions Bluetooth, which I would agree is a bad joke on Linux. The whole stack seems to be garbage.
And of course, if you have a Laptop with anything other than Intel graphics, you might as well not even bother.
All of this – except maybe the Bluetooth part – is of course mostly a problem of hardware vendors being indifferent or even hostile towards Linux, but that does not change the fact that very often it does not "just work". You need to pick your hardware very carefully.
Mobile phones have always been more locked down than PCs, even before smartphones existed. As have other appliances such as microwave ovens, digital cameras, etc.
You can argue that smartphones shouldn't be treated as simple appliances any more, argue about the pros and cons of each approach... but the fact remains that this particular change in Android is fairly minute and doesn't affect the vast majority of users in any negative way, even the type of user that likes to tinker. In fact, it increases security.
Generally, no, I have not. That preachy, self-righteous subset of Americans I was referring to is usually very easy to tell apart from concerned Europeans. Which to be sure I've seen as well, but in much lower quantities.
And to be clear, I don't actually have much of an opinion on whether the immediate consequences of the ECJ ruling will be positive or negative ones for EU citizens. My issue is mainly with the way this topic was and is reported on in some of the US media – lots of fear mongering and misrepresentation of facts by mainstream press and high-profile bloggers alike. It smells like a PR campaign. (The completely unreflected freedom-of-speech-as-a-religion type forum commenter is really just a consequence and an extension of that.)
Larry Page happily confirms that suspicion. From the article:
“I wish we’d been more involved in a real debate . . . in Europe. That’s one of the things we’ve taken from this, that we’re starting the process of really going and talking to people” - Larry Page
Translation: "This whole ordeal made us realize we need to do a lot more lobbying in Europe and pay off more media outlets in non-english language markets, since our propaganda there didn't work nearly as well as we had hoped. Don't worry, we're working on it."
At the core of the ECJ decision – whether you consider it good or bad, or hilarious, or plain stupid – lie important questions about what privacy and human dignity mean in this age and how much of them we're willing to give up. These questions deserve more than being drowned in the overwhelming noise of corporate shills.
You're entitled to your opinion, but a single comment on a US-centric discussion forum does not convince me that it's a majority opinion as far as Europeans go. My observations so far indicate the opposite.
You sound bitter. Why do you get so worked up over 'nanny-state crap' that's going on on the other side of the world? Business interests in the EU and don't like to put in the extra effort? Or do you just enjoy that mode of righteous indignation?
I find it amusing that – even taking the Google shills out of the picture –, most of the 'debate' around this topic is along the lines of Americans preaching to Europeans about how they're 'doing it wrong', often with emotionally charged language, just like your comment here. Ever thought that Europeans just might have some slightly different values than you do?
> They are complaining that you are just removing it from google. The info is still there!
Which, as far as I can tell, is the point of the ruling.
The idea is to not have one particular thing that the world found interesting or newsworthy at some point in the past cast a shadow over an individual's life, so to speak. Yes, if you're really interested in someone's dirt, all the info is still there for you to dig up. Again, that's the idea.
Your point about google.com being unfiltered is, if true, somewhat valid. But the inability to enforce a good thing globally does not excuse not making an effort locally.
By the way, most countries in the EU do not use a `.co` domain for commercial entities.
I don't understand the point of it, either. Poems and the like could easily be handled by a special mode, similar to code blocks. Are there other situations where forced newlines would be useful? There may be, but I can't think of any.
Either way, severely restricting how text – source code – can be organized just to simplify some rare special cases seems like a bad idea. It's a shame, since the rest of it looks really nice.
1Password's keychain uses resource forks I think, which makes it inherently not cross-platform (or rather, not cross-filesystem) and could explain the incompatibilities.
Not sure what could be the issue with DMGs, though, since that exact issue is pretty much the reason for their existence.
That's kind of the whole point, isn't it? It's clearly meant to be a Dropbox replacement not for everybody, but for those who consider the lack of mandatory cloud storage a feature. So yeah, technically more a replacement for BitTorrent Sync than Dropbox, but not everybody knows about that.
Missing features can be added. Mobile clients by third party devs will surely crop up if/when this thing gets traction. The protocol is open, after all.
It looks like he just fed it a plain python gist, no Markdown, no nothing. On the site it says the service can be used "to elegantly share gists written in Markdown", so I don't know why he would expect that to work.
I guess a clear error message would be helpful, but then you would either have to rely on everyone using standard file endings, or do some pretty fancy (and unreliable) parsing to determine if it's actually Markdown.
* no qualifiers in parameter array declarators (`int x[static 10]`, etc.)
* no `restrict` keyword
* no compound literals
* no designated initializers
There's probably more.
On the web you'll find the same quote copy & pasted over and over saying that support for compound literals and designated initializers was supposedly added in VS2013, but it does not appear to be true. Either that, or I haven't found the hidden switch to enable it. By the way, C code still needs to be compiled as C++ to get anything beyond C89 to work, which should give you a clue as to how serious Microsoft is about C99.
What's true though is that stdbool.h was added. It's a start, I guess...
You have a funny way of making someone feel welcome, regurgitating memes and stereotypes propagated by Western media. Really, that last line in your post wasn't necessary.
Also, as the immigrant he will eventually be at the receiving end of at least some minor racism or xenophobia, no matter how progressive and open you think your society is. So lecturing him on that is kind of pointless as well.
It should be noted that the Pi is really, really slow. Too slow for this sort of application, IMHO.
An actual Time Capsule can be annoyingly slow sometimes, and I would expect it to be about five to ten times as fast as a Pi-based solution.
The link you posted has some good advice though. Like not using HFS+. Apart from HFS+ arguably being an antiquated filesystem, the Linux driver is in a horrible state and will cause corruption when used in rw mode. ext4 is the sensible choice.
> The first Atom processors actually had extremely competitive power characteristics. The only supporting chipset, however, was a) a power pig, because Intel just didn't bother despite it being a much easier task than making a processor
To add some numbers:
The most popular first generation Atom, the N270, had a TDP of 2.5 W. The accompanying chipset and I/O controllers however had a combined TDP of 9.3 W.
I feel that Apple was in a unique position to do that. As we all know, they make their money from hardware and don't have much interest in taking control of users' data (beyond what is necessery for some nice vendor lock-in of course; not unlike the Microsoft of the distant past).
Better yet, they already had popular consumer hardware in place on which they could have built a decentralized cloud service: Time Capsule and AirPort Extreme. They could have just iterated on those devices.
But no, they chose instead to build that stupid, useless iCloud thing with the faux linen website. And while they were at it, made their networking hardware worse than before.
Maybe there were sound technical reasons for not going the decentralized route (like crappy bandwidth and latency, or increased complexity), but it still feels like a missed opportunity.
Not really. I'd argue it has actually gotten worse in recent years, unless you enjoy using ancient hardware.
Support for 802.11ac chipsets in particular has been bad in my experience: Intel only works properly with very recent kernels, Broadcom and Qualcomm/Atheros tend to be buggy or they don't work at all. Or they're just barely working and essential features like, oh, using the 5 GHz band, are missing. And these are the three vendors whose chipsets you'll find most commonly in Laptops at the moment.
I guess it's possible I was just very unlucky.
OP also mentions Bluetooth, which I would agree is a bad joke on Linux. The whole stack seems to be garbage.
And of course, if you have a Laptop with anything other than Intel graphics, you might as well not even bother.
All of this – except maybe the Bluetooth part – is of course mostly a problem of hardware vendors being indifferent or even hostile towards Linux, but that does not change the fact that very often it does not "just work". You need to pick your hardware very carefully.