Of course Mozilla employees deserve to be paid. Are you really saying the only way to ensure this happens is for them to sell the software or sell ads? (I write GPL-licensed software for a living and manage somehow to get paid. I also write some for free because I find it fun.) Further, Mozilla positions itself as a member of the free software community and as acting in the interests of its users.
My problem with this is that ideally, software I deign to run on my computer acts with only my interests in mind. The overarching goal of these changes is not to preserve my privacy, but rather to help advertising companies to learn something about how I interact with their ads. I don't care that Mozilla's particular implementation is not as bad for my privacy as it could be, I only care that their motivation has switched from acting in my interests to acting in the interests of advertising agencies.
Aside: figure 1 epitomizes everything that I hate about high-impact results-first journals: everything has to be packed into this one figure because nobody's expected to read anything else. No disrespect to the authors, these journals force you to express your work in this reader-hostile fashion where the most important parts of the paper wind up buried in the supplement.
Although I love IF, I'd never heard of Scott Adams and his games until now - so thank you! I noticed while reading this that at some point he began targeting a portable game engine, and went hunting for details. Eventually I found some documentation for the game file format (https://github.com/MikeTaylor/scottkit/blob/master/docs/note...), and oh my it's short and sweet. Not as capable as the Z-machine but at 1 page vs (checking) 64 for a practical but still-compact specification (https://www.ifarchive.org/if-archive/infocom/interpreters/sp...), it's an impressively simple game engine.
I'm a "normal person" who's never created a mastodon account, and just tried this. The original article (a "toot") has a "sign up now" button in the side pane, which I clicked, entered a username and email address and pressed submit. I immediately received an email with a confirmation link, which I clicked. Now I can toot.
Web app and IMAP/POP mail access affected. I've been with them for years and this is the first outage I've experienced. Feeling for the people tripping over themselves on a Friday afternoon to fix this!
How does this work for free software projects which aren't themselves commercial but list employees of big companies among their major contributors? E.g. the Linux kernel?
I remember attending a conference presentation back in the early 2000's by one of the FFTW authors. They claimed that the mapping between architecture and optimal FT algorithm was complex enough that the only sensible approach was implementing several and empirically determining the best one at runtime.
I agree, although it's never "cheating" to block ads on our own devices, unless we accept that it's okay to force people from looking away Clockwork Orange-style. (Even the term "blocking" seems wrong: it's not like the ads are coming down a pipe and my "ad blocker" is bouncing them away.)
LyX has the best system for entering maths into a computer that I've ever used. The combination of (a) understanding standard LaTeX (and amsmath etc) commands, (b) keeping track of grouping for me (no need to manually deal with curly braces) and (c) seeing everything appearing immediately means that I often use this over pen+paper for moderately complex derivations. Even if though I've never really used it for full LaTeX documents, for me it's worth having around just for this.
In practice they're not so different . There are plenty of people regularly publishing stuff over gopher that has nothing to do with retro-computing. Gemini also grew out of a gopher community.