'Goodbye Photoshop' and 'Hello Krita' at University Paris 8 - <AUTHOR> https://krita.org/item/goodbye-photoshop-and-hello-krita-at-university-paris-8/ <comment><USER2> If you are doing art Krita is a fine Photoshop replacement. So I can understand the switch.

But I'm also a little amazed that there still isn't a good Photoshop replacement. I think that's because a lot of developers think Photoshop is layers and blend modes. But imho the real strength of Photoshop is the interface. Not only the GUI but also the interaction design.

I can do with Gimp what I can do with Photoshop but it will take a lot more time. In-place text editing, attaching effects to layers (drop shadows), non destructive editing, it's all missing from most Photoshop alternatives.

Also check out Natron (mentioned in the article): [https://natron.inria.fr/](https://natron.inria.fr/) I never heard of it but it's looking great!

<comment><USER3> For me the absolute killer feature for Gimp or Krita would be a way to save the editing history, which is currently lost with all the levels of 'undo' when you save in native format.

Versioning for image editing; I don't know how it would be done but by Jove it would be a time-saver.

<comment><USER4> I am the main developer of a new painting application called Leonardo ( [http://www.getleonardo.com](http://www.getleonardo.com) ) which include this feature for our native .LEO file format.

Leonardo is currently in early beta.

<comment><USER5> I gave the beta a try and it seems pretty nifty! Great job!

Since I'm an programmer who's an aspiring artist, I have a few questions:

1\. _Is there a way to turn off additive brush-layering (ie the opacity does not change when you stroke over the same place)[1]?_ I am used to Krita and Photoshop having an option to toggle this. The only way when the opacity increases is when the pressure increases.

2\. _Is there a way to create custom brushes?_ I'd love to be able to create my own. Also, Krita has some nice ways of "scripting" brushes which was nifty. The current ones are more than fine, but I usually make certain "helper" brushes to speed things up a little.

3\. _Do you plan to open-source certain parts of Leonardo?_ It'd be great if you open-sourced the specification for .leo and, the brush format, so it's easier to create conversion tools. I'm not a marketing expert, but I imagine having the ability to import brushes from Photoshop would be a _huge_ benefit.

4\. _Do you intend to support plugins?_

\--- [1]: [http://i.imgur.com/lqa6E9r.gif](http://i.imgur.com/lqa6E9r.gif)

P.S: Sorry for dumping ideas like this.

<comment><USER4> 1\. Yes, we have one parameter we call "flow" that does what your GIF shows. We also have a parameter called "opacity" that does what you want to do. To create a brush that behaves the way you want do the following: open brush settings panel (located on the upper right of the screen), go to the "flow" tab, change "flow pressure" to 100%, go to the opacity tab and change "opacity pressure" to 0%.

(we need to improve the brush settings)

2\. Yes, use the same brush settings as described above. You can click on "tip" (round circle for standard brush) to change brush tip.

3\. We might open source the brush format in the future.

4\. Maybe in a distant future. The problem with plugins is that you have one more API to keep backward compatible.

Thanks for testing Leonardo! Please feel free to email me if you have any more questions or feedback: henning.tegen 'at' getleonardo.com

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Offtopic : I recently visited paris 8 university, and eventhough i'm used to the insanely sad state of french universities, this one won by a large margin. This university is the closest thing you can imagine from a war zone leftover. I was attending a presentation of an intern, and i had to ask people if the building i was in really was still in use...

You probably have to read "inadequate support by adobe" as " we didn't have the money for the licence anymore, and adobe didn't want to give the software for free".

<comment><USER7> I, French, once chatted with a German and a Russian guy. We've all been students in excellent universities/schools.

The German said: "My studen room was so small, like 16sqm, you could just fit a desk, a bed, a shower and a sink."

I, French, said, believing I had a tougher experience: "I know what it looks like: We were 2 per room for the same size. In winter, heating was on and off, we had to pay attention not to touch the walls while sleeping, otherwise the dew would wet our blankets."

Then the Russian guy came... They were 3 people in the same surface. Heating was optional. At the coldest of the winter, the whole building's electricity would cut off for the night because it couldn't sustain the student's heating units. They didn't have showers at all. They had three common "bathrooms" for the building with sinks only. They could use them at will in the evening, but they had to take turns for the mornings. As in, Mondays and Thursdays. It was a reputated school in Russia.

Visiting a campus in Australia is surrealistic. I'm so speechless to describe the difference in living conditions that, when I want people to imagine the life in Sydney, I tell them to imagine banknotes falling from the sky. That's what the living conditions feel like _compared to the old continent_.

<comment><USER8> 16sqm isn't bad, that's about the size of most US dorms I've seen (2 people per room). Heat cutting out is completely unacceptable though. Why would you put up with that?

<comment><USER9> You ask as if it were some kind of voluntary choice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Krita actually resembles Photoshop quite a lot, and while the feature list is impressive, I don't think it replaces Photoshop 1:1 or is even meant too for that matter. Krita is more aimed at digital painting, Photoshop isn't a digital painting application, if anything, that's what Illustrator is for.

For a free application you have to give props to Krita, it looks fantastic and plenty of digital artists and illustrators have been raving on about how great it is since it came out. It definitely appeals to me more than Gimp, but I would still probably use Gimp over Krita for general photo touching and editing though. Even the about page on the Krita site itself speaks of illustrators and more drawing purposes. I mean if it works as a Photoshop replacement for some, then that's great. Undoubtedly a cool application.

<comment><USER11> > Photoshop isn't a digital painting application, if anything, that's what > Illustrator is for.

You're wrong here. If you really mean digital painting, then Photoshop is the tool of the trade, mostly because of the brushes "engine".

<comment><USER12> IMHO you can find a better brush engine in Corel Painter. Also, there is a vast amount of Digital Painting and Sketching apps out there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Krita's site is under a lot of pressure right now. If you've never heard of it, learn more here: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krita](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krita)

It's a Photoshop alternative in the same way Word is an alternative to vim. You _can_ use them both to make a text file, but they have very different specialisms. Krita is a very capable drawing package while Photoshop is a print finishing app that got _really_ bloated.

<comment><USER14> What do you mean by pressure?

<comment><USER13> A lot of people are trying to look at it just to find out what Krita is, which is putting a high additional load on their server. Hence the link to Wikipedia instead.

(Maybe it's because I'm English, but I really thought 'pressure' would be quite obvious in this context.)

<comment><USER15> "The Krita Web site is seeing very high traffic at the moment" might be better for a multi-lingual audience.

Glad to see free/open source software getting some exposure. My College makes GIMP, Inkscape, Audacity and LibreOffice available on its Windows desktops _alongside_ commercial alternatives. Students get used to both.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> If you are interested about Krita, may I also recommend checking out MyPaint? The two programs are similar but very different also, I routinely use them both.

What I like about Krita is that it's very powerful, its interface has a lot of stuff going on (not a bad thing, it's very easy to understand and use) and it's definitely the better digital painting application out of the two.

What I think works better in MyPaint is sketching and quick notes/drawing. It has the concept of infinite canvas where you can keep drawing and drawing and drawing. I also prefer its preset brushes over Krita's, but that's just personal preference. My normal workflow is, if I want to draw some painting with definite proportions and size and everything, I use Krita. If I just want to sketch something or jot down some notes, I use MyPaint. My last infinite canvas with MyPaint ended up being over 200MB of png with a very ridiculous resolution because I kept writing and writing and zooming and zooming all my notes and I didn't notice how big it actually became (I use it as a big whiteboard for sketching my projects).

<comment><USER17> +1 - the loved one does a lot of digital painting and generally uses MyPaint. Though Krita is pretty good too, and has specialised from being KDE's "me too!" for GIMP to being specifically tweaked for artists.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> While I think Krita looks really great what I've found is that artist and designers are some of the most entrenched software users around. The sentiment "you'll want to use Photoshop, because it's the industry standard" is tough to beat. I know some that use Manga Studio, but never without Photoshop to double-check the results.

<comment><USER19> That's what people said about Quark XPress, but failing to have a smooth transition to MacOSX doomed them. It didn't even have to be a very smooth one, since Adobe took forever to ship the ancestor of creative suite.

<comment><USER18> I'd agree that it's a precarious hold, but when it's lost I expect it'll be because Adobe did something, artists and designers I've talked to aren't interested in alternatives, or if they are they keep using photoshop alongside it, to check if the CMYK is the same etc, hesistant to trust a new product.

<comment><USER20> Adobe have done something - Creative Cloud and subscription-based purchasing - and it's given the indie Mac app market (Pixelmator etc.) a huge boost.

More, I suspect there's a delayed effect where people are still holding on to their non-subscription copies of CS. I'm a heavy Illustrator user; I'm still on CS 5.5, but when the time comes to upgrade it won't be to Illustrator CC.

<comment><USER18> I think the problem of staying on a version of Photoshop has existed for a long while. I agree Creative Cloud is a big misstep, but surprisingly to me some artist friends really like it.

<comment><USER20> Yes, I'd agree that it's been common to "skip a version" or similar. Effectively you get Photoshop (or whatever) at a reduced cost.

So you can see the logic behind Creative Cloud: Adobe have both prevented this behaviour, and struck against piracy. They're clearly betting that this will outweigh the reduced sales, and that Photoshop/Illustrator/InDesign are so essential that few people will pass it up. I'm not convinced they're right.

<comment><USER21> Without piracy Adobe would die. It's essentially their noncommercial subscription plan and keeps Photoshop available to students etc. It's a part of Adobe's business model.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I absolutely adore Krita, it really is one of my favourite programs. It's very intuitive in its controls and very good at "getting out of the way" when you're painting.

For example, it has a quick-selection wheel that pops up when you press right mouse button. It's a radial design with the outer layer being your favourite brushes, then your last used colours and in the middle it has a colour- selection triangle. This means that if you're drawing in full-screen mode (hiding all the controls) you hardly ever have to switch back to the menus to tweak stuff (changing brush size is also done by holding shift and dragging), only to switch layers really. (that is my work-flow at least)

And, if anyone is looking for an OSS project to contribute too: Development is very active and open, it's written in C++ Qt/KDE. :)

</comment><comment><USER23> "but because of inadequate support from the company the department decided to replace that."

I read that as "Adobe got greedy"

Well, good for Krita.

Part of PS/AI success is that students use it at Uni (and later on at work, and most of the workflow, even going to printing uses it)

<comment><USER24> Print is something that's really, really hard to do if you're not on Adobe's products. I recently had to prepare a set of playing cards for printing. My workflow was SVG Template + data + script for processing them into finished SVG cards, then using Inkscape to convert them to PDF. It works really nice, but I totally forgot about CMYK. Trying to adapt that pipeline to another colour space _and_ colour profiles to match what the printer accepted proved to be impossible. Ghostscript happily takes a colour profile, only to ignore it (without warning). Converting RGB to CMYK worked, but turned out to be not the best choice because you cannot get pure black that way, ever. And finding anything to replace colours in the finished PDFs turned out to be impossible, too. Except for Illustrator.¹

The whole thing being a side project I really wanted to make it work with free (both meanings) software as much as possible, but some things are pretty damn hard that way. Of ourse, if all you do is web or other screen stuff then there are plenty of options beside Adobe, and lots of them free or free™.

TL;DR: In some lines of work there really is no way around PS/AI/ID because that's what the whole industry is working with and also because the alternatives are lacking in some crucial areas.

_____

¹ By now I found out that SVG 2 supports device colours and Batik has an experimental branch where those are implemented, which means I may just switch from Inkscape to Batik for the next printing run and try that.

<comment><USER25> Is the design of the playing cards open? I am always looking for nice demos for our open source database publishing software, which does handle cmyk + spotcolors etc. ([https://speedata.github.io/publisher/index.html](https://speedata.github.io/publisher/index.html))

<comment><USER26> I almost always use the cards from either [http://svg- cards.sourceforge.net/](http://svg-cards.sourceforge.net/) or [https://code.google.com/p/vectorized-playing- cards/;](https://code.google.com/p/vectorized-playing-cards/;) both are open source.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I used to work at a college and had experience of this firsthand. When Adobe launched the Creative Cloud suite, they switched to a SaaS model in the guise of being able to offer updates more often, along with providing some small features like storage of files in their cloud. Basically, they wanted to charge yearly since users would generally skip a version or two before seeing enough of a motivating feature improvement. (Prior to this Adobe tried x.5 upgrades) The cost of licenses varies depending upon an institution's bargaining ability.

For the "benefit" of getting SaaS we could either pay an extraordinary amount over our previous license in order to get the same number of licenses, or we could get a site license for only a fairly large amount more than our previous license. Mind you that we had little warning about this change, and academic budgets tend not to follow the typical business cycle.

Now the benefit of the site license is that all your users can become dependent upon Adobe, so when they raise the cost in the future you'll be more than obligated to agree.

Upon hearing about this changes, which brought _no real benefit to users_, one local school actually had Adobe's salesperson ejected from campus. :)

In terms of support, CC had a special enterprise edition with its own installer that generated CC packages for deployment. It was not the smoothest deployment for many institutions, it was difficult to maintain, and when I ran into a problem with licensing it took running into a higher level Adobe rep at a conference before I could make progress (our own rep eventually stopped helping). Also, there was some software included in Enterprise CC -- software that could actually benefit from "the cloud" in creating websites -- that would not work out in a mult-user environment unless you wanted your users to erase each other's Adobe cloud hosted websites. Yes, this behavior was documented, but being that it was one of the few useful "cloud" features CC offered, it was pretty disappointing for it to be unusable with our site license.

Entrepreneurs, listen. I know education is a tough nut to crack. But I'm sure it's not just education that is fed up with Adobe. Remember that Quark was once one of the big guys, but their licensing and support was so bad that InDesign took over. Yes, I had teachers complaining about Quark's licensing -- not the cost, but the horrible, broken license server. These kinds of things can destroy your business.

PS: You would not believe how many users ask for Adobe Acrobat just to save Word files as PDFs. Office has (or at least had) a built-in plugin to do this, and OS X supports exporting to PDFs natively via print.

</comment><comment><USER28> Getting a presentation from [http://davidrevoy.com/](http://davidrevoy.com/) sounds like a motivating way to start using the program :-)

<comment><USER29> There's a really nice video course for Krita: [https://krita.org/item/muses/](https://krita.org/item/muses/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Krita has a few unique features. I love the tiling mode to help you draw seamless textures. I love all the brushes out of the box. I do not love the performance on Windows. Maybe Linux is better but both 2.8 and the new beta if you start drawing with big brushes on a big canvas, even with a late model computer setup, it bogs really bad. Now you could argue that a 4K image is gonna take performance. BUT it's the first preset document with like 3-4 brushstrokes and it's starting to lag bad. I would consider my experience with the windows version Alpha at best due to performance issues.

If you like graphics and want to do something to save money on a lot of licenses - look at replacing illustrator with Xara on Windows or Affinity Designer on Mac. Or try to roll back to an earlier Photoshop like CS2. I really really want to love Krita and I'll give it a shot on Linux when I get the chance but sheesh, any classroom wanting to adopt it en masse is definitely trading one evil for another.

I have no desire to buy photoshop cc at this moment in time, I like to purchase licenses. I'll stick with CS6 as absolutely long as possible. But educational pricing on Adobe software has always been pretty good. Time spent in school is impermanent so it fits pretty well with the CC model.

</comment><comment><USER31> It looks nice, never seen it before but I'll try to find the time to have a play with it.

Photoshop, like other well established tools, is nearly impossible to replace. There are whole industries born with it in their hands, and you'd have to pry it from their cold dead bodies.

I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with PS. It does so much more than I could ever imagine, with features I will never know about.

For web development it's a bit suboptimal, but it's still the standard. It's not streamlined - we have pages with standard headers etc, I know there's some support for embedding PS files in other PS files but it's not the promoted way of working. It allows people create graphics that are unsuitable for the web / hard to unpick into layers that you can use (better css support has made things better but I spent over a decade trying to get suitable flat images out of PS files).

These days, no longer working with designers in an agency, I just do everything straight to html/css so that it works without jumping through any hoops.

</comment><comment><USER32> Whoa, today is the first time I've heard about Krita. Visually, seems very powerful, original, and a much more interesting PS replacement than Gimp is.

Gotta download and try it out!

<comment><USER33> It's pretty well known to KDE users ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Krita is great for what it is, but saying 'Goodbye Photoshop, hello Krita' is akin to saying 'Goodbye tractor, hello vespa'. If all you're doing is trying to get from A to B, a vespa certainly may be a better option, but don't think that a vespa can do what a tractor can do.

Even GIMP is far behind what Photoshop can provide. Want a really good look at what the differences are between the two? Look at GIMP's development roadmap: [http://wiki.gimp.org/index.php/Roadmap](http://wiki.gimp.org/index.php/Roadmap)

It's usually a pretty quick view of the delta between the two programs. Krita is missing most if not all of these too. Some of the big features Krita and Gimp are missing:

1.) Non-destructive editing capabilities. Krita and GIMP have masks, which is a start, but neither support smart objects (dynamically sized/edited objects that don't destroy/replace pixel data on resize) or adjustment layers. This is huge. Unless you're a painter, no one in the industry uses destructive editing techniques.

2.) High bit depth. This is another big one. Since most of the crowd on HN are more familiar with code than design, I'll put it in code terms: pretend that you had to do precision work, but a Math.floor() function was called every time you did any arithmetic. When you're doing light adjustments/corrections, blending, color correction, and such, the work can introduce heavy banding when you're working in 8bits per channel. By switching to 16bits per channel you provide way more fidelity on the individual pixel level, eliminating a lot of banding in your final product. Even if you have a monitor that can only display 8bit color, working in 16 can change your end result drastically.

There are some minor features too that bug me. The inability to add a mask to layer groups is a big one for me. Layer effects (while often overused and gaudy) can be really helpful for design work - need to change the color of an icon that's raster art? Just drop a color overlay on it. If you have style swatches, it can be really easy to do fast mockups using this. This in conjunction with Layer Comps (also something missing in Gimp right now) can really help in switching between two or more alts.

These programs are a long way off from being Photoshop. Whenever I see a story like this where Photoshop is replaced by GIMP/Krita, what I see isn't that these things have the capability to replace Photoshop, but rather that the people who replaced it were only using a tiny subset of Photoshop's capabilities, and found something more suited to their usecase.

<comment><USER29> Well, I guess you haven't checked out Krita since 2003. Krita got adjustment layers (which are basically masks with a filter that applies right there in the layer stack) in 2004 (2005, it's a long time, and I can't be arsed to check on the exact date).

16 bit integer, 16 bit float and 32 bit float followed in the same year. OpenEXR has been supported for about a decade. OpenColorIO was added two years ago, so there's the LUT functionality needed for movie and vfx people.

And have you actually tried Krita? I mean, group layers were a 2004 or 2005 addition as well, and you can add transparency masks, local selection masks, filter masks or transformation masks to groups just like you can add them to vector, pixel, clone, filter, fill (color, pattern, other generators) or file (external file added in your layer stack) layers.

Smart objects? There are vector layers, where you can add any svg image or editable vector object.

Layer effects? Well, that's something we're working on. It isn't too difficult, but a lot of work just typing in all that code. Previously, we assumed that people could make do with filter masks and layers, but well, this is one thing where we'll do a clone job, I guess.

Color overlays? Gosh, take a fill layer with a color and the right blending mode. Or do something else -- a HSV colorize filter mask, for instance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I've been really surprised recently by Paint.Net. It actually does a lot of the "basic" photoshop stuff really well. It may be difficult to create graphical masterpiece type stuff but for the basics it's great.

Would be nice to see something like that cross platform with a decent UI. Gimp is cool and I've spent countless hours with it but the interface is simply clunky.

Will definitely check this out.

</comment><comment><USER36> Discovered Krita a while a ago. The brush parameter system is excellent. You can really go nuts with all the settings. Defaults are good too.

</comment><comment><USER37> Never used it before, on first glance it reminds me of Manga Studio (which I love). Anyone ever use both and can offer a comparison?

</comment><comment><USER38> I'm looking for a system that can do calligraphic pens along paths. (I use this for cartoons).

I know Adobe Illustrator can do this. But Inkscape can't. (Yes, it has a calligraphic pen, but it is too direct, i.e., it doesn't allow the paths to be changed using the anchorpoints; it also doesn't allow the calligraphic strokes to be converted to paths).

</comment><comment><USER39> I suspect the cost had more to do with the switch than the product itself but it's a bit mystifying to me while a school focused on art and image editing wouldn't teach Photoshop to their students since there's a 100% chance they will have to work with it on their job.

</comment><comment><USER40> The Krita website is running a tad slow [https://krita.org/download/krita- desktop/](https://krita.org/download/krita-desktop/) however download is possible if you are patient.

Looks like a very interesting tool for creating art/comics.

<comment><USER41> I suspect the current performance of the website might have something to do with Hacker News :)

<comment><USER42> the website is up again!! :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Just to let you know, I confirm that Krita is _very_ unstable in a Mac. The "fatal failure and you lost everything you did" kind of unstable. So far I can not recommend Krita+Mac for anything other than tinkering around.

<comment><USER29> Definitely! Don't use Krita on OSX for real work. It's labeled as _experimental_ for a reason! And that's the guy who did the port talking. Also, there are lots of features missing still. It's there to show that it can be done, but the Mac port of Krita needs funding -- about 30k euros, at least, to make it work well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Krita is not an Photoshop surrogat ... it's not even a surrogat for Gimp.

<comment><USER45> This is a very apt statement. It is not a surrogate for anything. Krita is its own thing. A tool designed very specifically for digital painting, and not trying to clone or replace anything. That it /can/ replace some things is a lucky coincidence.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Anyone knows if we can access the 4 hour long David Revoy presentation? It would have been awesome!

</comment><comment><USER47> Krita doesnt have proper support or Macs yet.

</comment><comment><USER48> Obligatory Pixelmater mention.

</comment><comment><USER49> What a load of bullshit. Photoshop for students is $10 a month. That's $120 a year. Most students at most schools are throwing away probably $1000/year on textbooks (in the US).

Krita doesn't even work on OS X for crying out loud. This is not good for the students. Not good at all.</comment>


Old School BBS: The Chinese Social Networking Phenomenon - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/bbs_china_social_networking.php <comment><USER2> I was hoping it was referring to the real old school BBS:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBS></comment>


Try Push Notifications for Github in Firefox - <AUTHOR> https://github-notifications.herokuapp.com/

<comment><USER2> Really neat. Is there a technical reason why it only allows you to receive notifications from repos that you own?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's a limitation of the Github API. The app sends notifications after receiving a web hook from Github, and you can only add web hooks for repos you own.

<comment><USER3> Yet another reason why Github supporting PubSubHubbub would be amazing, as they have RSS for any repo anyway :)

<comment><AUTHOR> They have some pubsubhubbub support (<http://developer.github.com/v3/repos/hooks/#pubsubhubbub>), but you still need write access to create a web hook on the account.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Your "fork me on github" image is broken. I bet you'd get a lot more watchers if you fix it ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> It looks good to me. What are you seeing? What browser?

<comment><USER4> I see the broken-image image in Chrome, OS X Snow leopard.

<comment><USER5> Fine for me in Chrome 18 on OS X Lion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Looks awesome! Any plans for a chrome extension?

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't have any Chrome plans (I work for Mozilla), but I've heard rumors that the Chrome team is working on their own push notifications.

Eventually I want to get these APIs standardized and in other browsers, not just Firefox and Boot to Gecko.

<comment><USER7> Will this land (eventually) in XULRunner as well ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, it'll be part of the Gecko platform.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Nice work Jeff!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks Julien!</comment></comment>


In search of my grandfather's gold - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20180802-in-search-of-my-grandfathers-gold <comment><USER2> I felt like this ended abruptly, anyone else?

<comment><USER3> At least he didn't give away the secrets of the hand panners. If you know where you'll still find a lot. Almost everywhere in tertiary mountains.</comment></comment>


Pirate Party Ordered to Shut Down Pirate Bay Proxy - <AUTHOR> http://torrentfreak.com/pirate-party-ordered-to-shut-down-pirate-bay-proxy-120414/ <comment><USER2> There is something extremely fishy going on in the Court of The Hague.

BREIN (which is just a local front for the MPAA and RIAA, since NL barely has a movie/recording industry of it's own, and what there is is barely affected by piracy) has for years shopped around in various courts, but has now focused completely on The Hague where it has had a series of favorable results. Some of which, especially the censorship order, are considered extremely debatable within the legal community.

This one really takes the biscuit: the utter refusal of the court to even allow a legal democratic political party to defend itself is completely unprecedented.

In other news: BREIN is now also suing other ISP's (again, in The Hague), and the court has appointed the same judge that was responsible for the previous controversial censorship order. Attempts to have the judge removed from the case have failed.

<comment><USER3> Isn't the Hague just for trying Africans?

[http://www.france24.com/en/20120315-lubanga-kony-icc- african...](http://www.france24.com/en/20120315-lubanga-kony-icc-africans- international-justice-hague-syria-congo)

<comment><USER4> If you looked up Hague, you'll find there are many different types of courts: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hague> Not just 'Africans'.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This morning our pirate censorship battles were the first thing that popped into my mind when I woke up.

I thought how much more effective public outcry would be if we phrased things in terms of _the creation of censorship infrastructure._

I object most to that. Here we see the criminalization of a note on where to find information. For now, it is only applied to illegal information like the Pirate Bay, but it's establishing a precedent that can be used against anything.

<comment><USER6> problem a: it is called the pirate bay.

problem b: it is called the pirate party.

pirates are criminals. naming things like that and not expecting this to be huge problem is short-sighted and I would even say dumb.

if your goal is to reform copyright law and citizen rights/protection then why not call your party freedom party or reform party or more rights for ordinary people party.

"hi, my name is childharasser and I am your boy's new teacher."

<comment><USER5> I agree with you completely. Choosing the name "thepiratebay" was an immature move imo, and it doesn't pay proper creedence to the whole idea of stated rules and enforced rules.

By that I mean that society expects one thing in name, and will often accept something else in practice. Like we know politicians often have affairs, but in public they profess to have the goal of a traditional marriage. If we saw a politician who had public affairs, we'd all wonder what dirty behavior they were hiding, assuming it's much worse than usual.

If the site had a neutral name like "torrent search" we'd know they professed to be a neutral data sharing site, but the underbelly was piracy. If it starts out piracy, which is plainly illegal, we're left with much worse assumptions about what goes on behind the scenes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> 188.8.131.52

I don't know if they're blocking it at the DNS level, or if there is some way of blocking the actual site. But that's the IP address. Why couldn't someone use any generic proxy to visit Pirate Bay?

I just don't see how governments can _actually_ block websites, without confiscating their servers and/or forcing ISPs to monitor and block any attempt to get back online. As long as they've got a server and internet access, it seems to me like the government has failed.

<comment><USER8> TPB is also blocked by IP address in NL.

The dutch pirate party had a specific proxy running which they were ordered to shut down so they're now running a generic proxy.

If you're dutch and haven't donated to the "Piratenpartij" yet, please do so now if you think these issues are important: <http://depiratenpartij.wordpress.com/lidworden/doneren/>

I'm saddened that wrt to the internet and censorship my supposedly progressive[1] country can now be added to the list of China, Iran and many other oppressive regimes.

[1] it hasn't actually been that for quite a while now

<comment><USER4> I'm told that Pirate Parties have no policy on IP censorship because any competent IT person can get a new IP address.

Welcome to joining UK and Australia as censorship countries.

I'm fighting in Australia.

<comment><USER9> We're all fighting in Australia. The problem is it's becoming akin to America in it's ability to ignore the general public and free speech.

Even worse is that they're doing it behind closed doors so we can't do or say little against it. I'll just say it... America, Australia & UK have fallen completely to corporatism. We are no longer a democracy and haven't been for decades. It's only recently started to show it's glaring infections/swelling.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The Pirate Party is the most digitally-advanced political party in the world. If any entrepreneurs want to fight anti-Internet laws (SOPA, Internet filter, etc) or injustice like this article (surveillance, etc), they're the best party to do it: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirate_party>

I'm sorry if it's a bit off-topic.</comment>


PCSX2 PS2 Emulator: Progress report Q3 2019 to Q1 2020 - <AUTHOR> https://pcsx2.net/292-progress-report-q3-2019-to-q1-2020.html <comment><USER3> PCSX2 is a really nice piece of software and often gets overshadowed by more popular emulators, it's really nice to see the devs getting some attention. The feats they've accomplished are substantial - I'd go so far to say that it's the best way to play many PS2 games.

<comment><USER4> From reading this progress report (I'm not an active user of PCSX2), it seems this emulator uses per-game hacks frequently. On the other hand, Dolphin (which I'm a semi-active user and used to follow development) never performs per-game disk patches and only rarely uses per-game emulator-level hacks.

<comment><USER5> It's true but the PS2 is a much more convoluted system to emulate with more moving parts and undocumented behaviour in the timing and interaction between these parts as compared to the relatively simpler Gamecube. This also made the Gamecube easier to develop for IMO (I developed games on both systems)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The PS2 emulation scene is what ended up driving me to IT and eventually software development back when they hosted their forums on NGEmu. Tons of respect to all the contributors for keeping the endeavor alive - <USER2> what they've managed to accomplish.

Unrelated, has anyone ever tried getting PCSX2 to run on ARM chips?

<comment><USER7> There's an Android port but unfortunately it's by some company that's selling it and blatantly violating the GPL.

[https://pcsx2.net/286-the-pcsx2-team-s-statement- regarding-t...](https://pcsx2.net/286-the-pcsx2-team-s-statement-regarding- the-damonps2-emulator.html)

<comment><USER8> I was initially gonna say the GPL permits selling your software, and even says you don't have to release the code to everyone (just those who own your software), but then the developer said they will open source at 80 million downloads? That's a violation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Does anyone know why the Mac port has not been updated since 2012 (but downloads are still being offered)?

<comment><USER10> From my experience with open source projects: nobody in the team owns a Mac.

<comment><USER11> I disagree with that. macOS is basically BSD and it's great for Dev. Most of the devs I work with use it.

<comment><USER12> Apple ditched OpenGL and Vulkan for their own exclusive 3D graphics API. They're a terrible platform to develop for.

<comment><USER13> All major middleware already does Metal, even non gaming stuff like Flutter.

<comment><USER14> Most emulators don't use middleware, because it doesn't afford them anywhere near enough flexibility or performance.

<comment><USER13> As anyone from Flipcode and Gamedevnet days knows, middleware can be as thin as couple of function pointers with shared libraries loaded on demand for the desired 3D API.

The approach taken by AAA game engines, although nowadays it looks more like a bunch of abstract classes/interfaces, depending on the language.

When you look into a game engine, typically 3D API abstractions are like 10% of the whole codebase.

<comment><USER15> The way some emulator use the gpu can be quite different from the way pc games use it.

You can look at this article: [https://dolphin- emu.org/blog/2017/07/30/ubershaders/](https://dolphin- emu.org/blog/2017/07/30/ubershaders/) for an example how console graphics programming differ.

Middleware designed for games don't allow nearly enough flexibility to handle all the possible edge case that can arise. Console gpu (and graphics api) and computer gpu don't map one-to-one and they need all the feature and support from the underlying api that they can get for replicating the console way of doing things, supporting a new graphics backend is a lot of work for this reason. middleware try to abstract common pattern and flows, but every console is quite unique (in some way) middleware are not build for that and often are (a form of) a lowest common denominator for graphics api. Which is fine... for games.

edit: some clarification

<comment><USER13> That doesn't forbade loading shared libraries as function pointers though.

Even if you stay, lets say OpenGL only, there are multiple execution paths with driver and graphics card specific code paths.

3D libraries like OpenGL/Vulkan are only portable up to a certain extent.

When you are coding at the ultimate performance level, you are also going into that rabbit hole of graphic card specific code paths and driver specific extensions.

So, it is hardly different than having your own plugable abstraction layer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I always wondered why most emulators keep OpenGL/DirectX as renderers instead of porting to Vulkan, I imagine because that would be an insanely tall task to tackle?

<comment><USER17> Emulators with Vulkan include RPCS3, Dolphin, Flycast, Yuzu, PPSSPP, Xenia...

<comment><USER16> Nice, I wasn't aware of those using Vulkan, especially Dolphin. Thanks for pointing out.</comment></comment></comment>


HTC and Samsung license Intellectual Ventures patent portfolio, gear up for war - <AUTHOR> http://www.engadget.com/2010/11/23/htc-and-samsung-license-entire-intellectual-ventures-patent-port/ <comment><USER2> Build whatever you want and then just _rent_ the patents you need from old Nate and the gang when trouble comes calling? A few more consolidations and it'll just be a toll that every one who builds anything just has to pay.

Could it go any further wrong?</comment>


China's growth figures fail to add up - <AUTHOR> http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/0ec404fc-8120-11de-92e7-00144feabdc0.html

<comment><USER2> Sun Tzu: Even though you are competent, appear to be incompetent. Though effective, appear to be ineffective. [...] Feign inferiority and encourage his arrogance.

Either that, or provinces tend to over-report growth to make themselves look good so Beijing corrects reported numbers downward.

<comment><USER3> Did Sun Tzu say anything about child labor and leeching contaminants into the local water supply?

<comment><USER4> I don't know, did Benjamin Franklin?

<http://www.epa.gov/superfund/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> "Even state-controlled media reports and editorials have in recent days raised questions over their accuracy.

"The Global Times, controlled by the People's Daily, the Communist party mouthpiece, reported that the public reacted with 'banter and sarcasm' to NBS figures showing average urban wages in China rose 13 per cent in the first half to $2,142.

"It quoted an online poll showing 88 per cent of respondents doubted the official numbers."

When state-controlled media can post stories critical of other state agencies, that's a pretty good indicator of eroding trust.

<comment><USER5> Or possibly emerging freedoms.

<comment><AUTHOR> _possibly emerging freedoms_

I hope so. Things looked that way in 1989.

<comment><USER6> I wouldn't say the protest was without fruit. Much of the economic progress of the 90s owe to the government trying to please an impoverished population. Empty stomach sits at the root of much political changes in history, ideologies ride the hunger waves.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't know much about econmics, but here's an explaination on the Internet for last year's similar news:

'province' is political region, and you can't simply 'add up' those provice GDP figures because many of Chinese companies are inter-provincial. Each provincial officials will try their best to make the figure look large, but the central government has to eliminate duplicate ones.

The real question is why the gap 15,376bn-13,986bn=1390bn is so huge?

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm confused ... so National Government percentage < actual assumed percentage?

If so, what benefit could there be to that? I can understand inflating figures to make oneself sound better, but I don't really get why you would report smaller numbers.

<comment><AUTHOR> As I read the article with my background in sinology, what appears to be reported here is that China has some actual level of economic growth, which I will call X. The central government, desiring to look good to the common people, reports a level of economic growth X+N. One clue that the central government statistics are dubious is that provincial governments report figures that would imply a level of X+N+M (all numbers are positive numbers), yet the central government doesn't aggregate the provincial figures, implying that the provincial governments desire to look good to the central government. Another clue that the central government statistics are dubious is that online discussion of those statistics expresses open doubt, even in a country with much state control of all mass media.

Does this look like a fair summary of the article's claims? They seem plausible to me.

<comment><USER8> Oh right. I feel stupid now, I assumed the provincial figures were accurate, but it makes much more sense that those numbers are doctored to try and please the central governement. Thanks for the explanation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I no longer have the link, but a few years ago I read critiques of Chinese government economic statistics based on a comparison of electricity demand versus gov stats. Quite a discrepancy, as the electricity demand was much lower that the growth stats would predict.

My problem with the stats is that, while I can easily believe the cities are growing at 8%, most Chinese still live in the countryside, and it still quite poor, albeit not as poor as it once was. My uncle-in-law supports his family by farming strawberries on 2 mu of land, roughly an acre or so. That acre's not growing at 8% a year, and they're still using the same fertilizer they always have -- human feces.</comment>


Pottermore Review - <AUTHOR> http://thegeekscompanion.com/home/pottermore.html <comment><USER2> It's more than a few months ago, it's been nearly a year.</comment>


Tell HN: Please stop submitting 'Twitter is down' stories - <AUTHOR>

The 'new' page is filled with them. We know. Let's leave room for interesting news. The only thing that's really interesting about things like Twitter being down is the post-mortem and I doubt we'll get more than a vague 'cascading failure' or similar response from them. <comment><USER2> This is because none of them are making it to the front page. Probably a moderator.

</comment><comment><USER3> Isn't there just one definitive source for such a story anyway? What would be the way to avoid collisions with the HN submission duplicate detector?</comment>


The 'Hot Hand' Debate Gets Flipped on Its Head - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-hot-hand-debate-gets-flipped-on-its-head-1443465711 <comment><USER2> Here's the paper's first paragraph, matching what the article said:

"Jack takes a coin from his pocket and decides that he will flip it 4 times in a row, writing down the outcome of each flip on a scrap of paper. After he is done flipping, he will look at the flips that immediately followed an outcome of heads, and compute the relative frequency of heads on those flips. Because the coin is fair, Jack of course expects this empirical probability of heads to be equal to the true probability of flipping a heads: 0.5. Shockingly, Jack is wrong."

But actually Jack is right. Here are all the possibilities. A "streak" means a head was followed by a head, and a "break" means it was followed by a tail.

              Streaks Breaks
      TTHT    0       1
      TTHH    1       0
      THTT    0       1
      THTH    0       1
      THHT    1       1
      THHH    2       0
      HTTT    0       1
      HTTH    0       1
      HTHT    0       2
      HTHH    1       1
      HHTT    1       1
      HHTH    1       1
      HHHT    2       1
      HHHH    3       0
      total   12      12

The paper's argument later is more complex than the first paragraph implies, putting the sequences in groups with fixed numbers of heads. I don't see the point of that but it doesn't seem to help.

They get into some math, but just counting the cases doesn't seem to support their argument at all. If anyone can explain their argument in a simple way, I'm interested.

If they're really confident in this, they should go to Vegas, find a high- rolling gambler, and start betting on coin flips. After each heads, offer 55/45 odds that the next coin flip will be heads. I'm sure it won't be hard to find takers.

<comment><USER3> See my MC in a post below. I think I understand what they are on about. It's biased against repeating in short runs.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The actual paper: [http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2627354](http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2627354)

<comment><USER4> This seems similar to the Monty Hall problem, which is also quite unintuitive. Perhaps what makes it work is that the person doing the predicting sees the sequence as a whole, and hence, future events are dependent upon historical ones -- and are no longer purely random.

Consider this question, "You're _somewhere_ in the middle of a 4 coin toss, and the last toss came up heads, what's the probability of the next one coming up heads?" I think the paper is saying it's a 40% chance -- you know you're in an finite series, and, you have partial information about that series.

<comment><USER2> That's what I counted, and got a 50% chance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is this a joke or am I the only one who thinks this is a ridiculous article?

</comment><comment><USER3> Very naive Monte Carlo: [https://gist.github.com/arnists/228c4e77b1e2aa6d33f1](https://gist.github.com/arnists/228c4e77b1e2aa6d33f1)

Consistently comes back around p. 50 runs have a span of .25%.

Haven't read the paper yet, but if the PRNG isn't broken, I'd say it invalidates the naive presentation at the start of the article.

EDIT: I think I understand the fallacy the authors present. This holds true for short runs. E(H|H) _will_ be lower in short runs but asymptotically approaches p when number of trials rise.

<comment><USER6> I enumerated the sequences that the article mentioned, and counted how often a tail filled a head, and vice versa, and got 12 instances where a head follows a head, and 10 where a tail followed a head. So there is a difference for just counting up all the possible 4 flip sequences where at least one of the first three is a head. However, doing a randomised test where I generated a random 4 length sequence, rejecting it if none of the first three was a head, then doing the same test showed no real difference.

Code here [https://github.com/gregryork/Flips/tree/master/src/flips](https://github.com/gregryork/Flips/tree/master/src/flips)

<comment><USER3> Take a look at the updated gist. There's an asymptote for P(H|H) when trials grow approaching p.

EDIT: Graph is empirical H|H against run length (output of the last function in a linear graph)

<comment><USER6> I'm not really sure what I am looking at there. Is the X axis the number of trials run, or the length of the run?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think that this is flawed in the sense that most people (including the article's author) might misinterpret it. The paper assumes that we know when a streak ends. So given that we have had a streak of tails and that it's broken what's the probability of heads? That will be biased toward heads. I've only skimmed the paper, but maybe they ultimately mean this is the source of the incorrect bias in the layman's intuition?</comment>


How to Multiply two 3-digit numbers together mentally in just one line  - <AUTHOR>

http://mathema-tricks.blogspot.com/2012/04/multiplying-two-3-digit-numbers.html <comment><AUTHOR> [http://mathema-tricks.blogspot.com/2012/04/multiplying- two-3...](http://mathema-tricks.blogspot.com/2012/04/multiplying-two-3-digit- numbers.html)</comment>


ModSecurity: Allowing GoogleBot - <AUTHOR> http://beginlinux.com/blog/2010/04/modsecurity-allowing-googlebot/

<comment><USER2> So, if I simply fake my user agent to mimick googlebot, I can do whatever I want?</comment>


Just Say Why Not - <AUTHOR>

Just wanted to let everyone know that life is fucking short and I know we're all working hard on our day to day lives. Startup founders, employees with dope jobs, and those of you who even never want to work a day in your life too. Just make it all worth living. You don't want to regret anything.
Be the YES man and just dive into everything head first. You never know what will happen.
Enjoy this shit. It goes by quickly. You guys are all awesome! <comment><USER2> I appreciate the spirit of the message but opportunity cost is something that demands attention. Most of my why's allude to the fact that life is short, I only have so much time, and I better ensure I'm making decisions that don't pull me down bad paths or from paths I'd rather be on.

Dive into things head first, just make sure you're diving into the right things.

<comment><AUTHOR> You know what I mean when I mentioned "Dive into things head first, just make sure you're diving into the right things." Be smart about it and analyze the circumstances but truthfully...sometimes life is about taking a risk for something you really believe in and no one else can see.

I understand your point of of view on diving into things, but just do what makes you happy and fuck everything else.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Thanks for posting this, it's the truth.

And it's exactly why my wife and I are leaving our jobs to cycle around Europe for 10 months. I don't know what will happen, but I'm diving in head first and I can't wait to grab life by the horns and do something real.

Life is WAY too precious to waste it working for the man.

<comment><AUTHOR> No doubt! That's great to hear. Enjoy Europe...it's awesome! It will probably be one of the best experiences you'll have and you're lucky as hell to do that with someone you care about. By the fucking horns man! Haha. Wish you the best.

Cheers</comment></comment>


Working at Google vs Working at Meetup (Updated) - <AUTHOR> https://docs.google.com/View?docid=dg2z5whw_41cb322p

<comment><USER2> "At Google, most revenue comes from advertising, so Google must satisfy advertisers to stay in business"

I don't think that is quite correct--they don't have to satisfy advertisers. They just have to be less unsatisfactory than the alternatives.

I've not heard many advertisers who are actually satisfied with Google. I've heard a lot of complaining about how the price for advertising keeps creeping up but the effectiveness of the advertising does not (with some speculation that the way advertising traffic is allocated at Google is designed to make it always look like bidding higher will be worth it, so as to get customers into a never ending cycle of bidding up).

Many internet businesses need advertising, though, and Google has such a big share of that market, and so the businesses pretty much have no choice about using them.

</comment><comment><USER3> Interesting view of the two, the tea party part made me kind of cringe though.</comment>


The Patent Troll - <AUTHOR> http://www.good.is/post/the-patent-troll/

<comment><USER2> I sometimes think that patent trolls are just the scapegoat for larger issues at hand. Patent trolls are simply acting upon their rights with issued patents. In many cases, the patent trolling is not what is absurd - it is the patents. Patents that really never should have issued.

We have a IP culture in the United States where patents are distributed very freely and with minimal review. This generally isnt a problem because litigation is the "nuclear button" of IP enforcement - it costs 1million+ for both sides even to start. So, as long as everyone just uses patents are trading cards everything is fine. Companies routinely start new enterprises without a prior art search... because they do not expect anyone to actually _litigate_.

When the absurd patents go to litigation, though, it becomes painfully clear how broad and abusive the patents in question were in the first place. Big companies are embarrassed and emptied of their money because they _did_ infringe.

The USPTO must become more selective when issuing patents, and companies must own up to the fact that they are responsible for infringement, no matter who owns the patent or if they are an NPE or not.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a good article!

What does HN think about the term "patent pirates" for these people? Like maritime pirates, they use threats to extort money from people engaged in legitimate businesses, while carrying out no productive activity of their own.

I think that in the next few years, the markets for patents he describes will make the US a substantially worse place to try to carry out innovation or sell an innovative product. They're pretty much inevitable, because the economic value of a patent held by a patent pirate is much greater than the economic value of a patent held by a productive enterprise that is vulnerable to a patent countersuit.

<comment><USER4> I concur with you. _Pirate_ is definitely a more pertinent term. Patent trolls recklessly attack companies in hopes of finding some good loot. What they're doing may not be illegal, but it's ethically murky at best.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> For some reason this article made me make a mental connection between the looters in Atlas Shrugged and patent trolls. Both use government licenses to extort money from productive organizations.

The absurdity of some software patents, which are analogous to patenting a new legal argument or a particular sentence structure no one has used before, means I have to live outside of the law in order to do what I love: writing software.

<comment><USER6> Of course these "productive organizations" often also have portfolios of patents that they use to prevent small businesses entering their market. And they often spin-off separate companies to act as patent trolls. The whole thing is rotten but to many people profit from it for it to change any time soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Remind me - how are folks who invent things supposed to make a living? One answer is "they're not". Another is "salary". Another is "start a company". Of course, combinations are possible.</comment>


Show HN: Birdplane – Low latency live streaming with HD copy and unlimited storage - <AUTHOR> https://birdplaneapp.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hi, one of the developers here. Happy to answer any questions that you might have.</comment>


Buying an IBM Mainframe - <AUTHOR> https://blog.mainframe.dev/2019/05/buying-ibm-mainframe.html <comment><USER2> It's a lot cheaper in to do this in the US and with a long term view, my total outlay was under $3000 for a z800, z114, ds6800 all in with transportation. I also temporarily had two DS8870s but resold them because they were worth a lot more than I paid and I will pick up another for cheaper over the course of this year. Both of my frames have HMCs, the z114 was even IBM banded and "MSQ" maintenance service qualified which means they'd come and set it back up for some not-too-outrageous monthly fee if it were in production use.

The z800/z890 are probably optimal for hobby use even though they are old because they have modest power requirements and are relatively light and not too wide like the z114 which is absolutely massive.

Actually a P/390 (MCA or PCI card), or Multiprise 3000 (deskside hybrid CMOS/PC server thing) would be even easier but those are very very old 31-bit systems at this point. (I also have a R/390 setup and can comment on that if desired)

Now that said, this requires A LOT of dedication to get right. You need to understand at minimum shipping/transport issues, as well as electrical requirements and installation (or be willing to consult someone that can advise you on phase and conversion if necessary).

After that, you definitely need an HMC (a PC used to do things like load the OS) or at least a recovery disk and a lot of patience to set that up in emulation or on other hardware.

And then, you need a FICON (or older ESCON) capable array. Connor Krukosky goes into detail about what it's like without that, and you are extremely limited (basically Linux) in what you can do without FICON. A ds6800 is the easiest way to do that because it is a small rackmount unit, but they are also in demand for that reason. DS8ks are quite cheap all things considered, but serious iron like the frame itself.

And then finally you need some OS media which is also non-trivial to get (although there is or was some "out there" on file sharing).

I am willing to help anyone interested in this kind of thing for fun and preservation of incredible technology and history.

<comment><USER3> Hi kev! Thanks for your comments, you are 100% right. Yes, living in the states make this hobby waaay easier. The surplus auctions help as well, having various goverments with various languages going in Europe does not make it as easy :-).

Was $3000 your outlay for the system + the DS6800? Or just the shipping? That is a great find in that case!

I just want to correct a small thing: You need SEs (the frame mounted laptops), you do not actually need an HMC as far as I know. Do you have any information that tells another story? If so I will update the article.

Thanks again!

<comment><USER4> > Yes, living in the states make this hobby waaay easier.

It's unbelievable how thoroughly Europeans recycle their old computers. I can't find anything.

<comment><USER4> BTW, any other European retro-computing enthusiasts that see this, feel free to exchange your thoughts on how to find the machines that escaped the relentless push towards green tech.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is it just for the fun or is there actually a legit use case for having a mainframe at home apart from accelerating climate change?

<comment><USER6> I think its a great career niche to be fluent in everything Mainframe, they are still used in critical places and will be for the foreseeable future and they are largely overlooked as a opportunity.

So if you want to work in this niche, having your own Mainframe will greatly speed up learning the system.

It probably also looks awesome when you market yourself.

So all in all, 25k USD for kickstarting a potentially very profitable career sounds like a bargain ....

<comment><USER7> If you just want to learn the software, you can set up Hercules mainframe emulator for free. Finding an image of z/OS is left as an exercise to the reader, but won't take you long.

[http://www.hercules-390.org/](http://www.hercules-390.org/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> My interest in doing this (my wife would kill me anyway) kind of evaporated when in almost every paragraph he hit on licensing issues you might have. What a headache for someone who just wants to tinker on the hardware and maybe buy a few parts off ebay for the full experience. I have no doubt software updates, documentation, and everything is locked behind some portal that requires you to have a stupidly expensive support contract to access.

<comment><USER9> My second thought about this was "no wonder IBM is largely dead outside of stodgy corporate IT. Nobody can actually learn to use it without dropping $100,000+ on equipment."

<comment> pickle-wizard Back when I was at IBM one of the hats I wore was AS/400 administrator and programmer.

I miss working with it and would like to buy one for my home lab, but the licensing is a killer. I find used ones on the market, but they usually don't include the license keys or media, and without a support contract can't get them.

I really wish IBM had a hobbyist program. I wouldn't expect it be free, but I wouldn't mind paying a small yearly fee.

<comment><USER10> The irony is that IBM had one of the first Open Source communities: SHARE, dating back to 1955, shared software up to and including a whole OS, SOS (SHARE Operating System), well before Unix or home computers even existed.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHARE_(computing)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHARE_\(computing\))

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's not the same, but if you'd like to have a go at mainframe technologies you can do it with a Pi Zero:

[https://www.rs-online.com/designspark/my-raspberry-pi- thinks...](https://www.rs-online.com/designspark/my-raspberry-pi-thinks-it-s- a-mainframe)

Once you have the basic emulator setup working, check out the Turnkey system below. It's MVS 3.8 so not current Z/OS. If you google around for z/os ADCD, you might find an actual Z/OS CD to try next.

[http://wotho.ethz.ch/tk4-/](http://wotho.ethz.ch/tk4-/)

<comment><USER12> _" MVS 3.8 so not current Z/OS."_

Bit of an understatement, MVS 3.8j was released in 1981.

<comment><USER13> You'd be amazed at how little the underlying ecosystem has changed over the decades. Because it basically keeps compatibility forever, software that was written in the 60's can still run on modern machines. Because of this, learning using 80's software in the mainframe world is not too bad. For example, I keep a book on MVS on my desk from the 80's for reference, and most of the time it suffices for what I need to consult.

<comment><USER12> At a high level, I suppose, but for example...3.8j is 24 bit versus the current z/os 64 bit.

<comment><USER3> Indeed, the 16 MiB virtual memory space is kind of limiting for anything remotely modern :-).

<comment><USER13> It teaches efficiency to learn the basics on such a system, something modern programmers are often lacking

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is what you do when you don't get PlayStation when you are a kid...

</comment><comment><USER15> Dissatisfied with the performance of a home raspi? Buy a mainframe!

</comment><comment><USER16> My current side project idea: build a modern programming language with a nice syntax that compiles (transpiles?) to mainframe COBOL, mostly to get mainframe programmers to stop writing code in SHOUTING ALL CAPS.

<comment><USER16> Note: is anyone interested in using something like this? If so, let me know! I'm curious as to how I can make it useful for people in the field.

<comment><USER17> As I understand it, the field is going in the other direction, namely JVM/CLR COBOL. This means that companies can migrate their COBOL codebases to "commodity hardware", save on mainframe costs, and then progressively refactor into Java/.NET replacing bits of COBOL piecemeal.

The main company I've heard of doing this is MicroFocus, they have all the dev tooling for it for the major IDEs, compilers, etc.

One of the main things that complicates the problem, again as I understand it, is that there is no official COBOL spec. There are several versions from several vendors, but compilers have to account for mainframe hardware bugs, so there are many different targets that have to be supported. Most companies want a different, specific, set of compiler features.

<comment><USER16> Hmm. I'm interested in making a compile-to-COBOL language only because that way a company could incrementally migrate an old COBOL codebase to the new language. In other words, the new code (which compiles to COBOL) and the old code (written in COBOL) would be fully interoperable, sharing the same data types, calling conventions, etc.

<comment><USER17> Yeah, and this makes sense, but there are multiple problems with COBOL on mainframes – the COBOL, and the mainframes.

COBOL and mainframes have quite a different programming and system administration model to what we expect with servers. Lots of concepts are quite different, built up from a world of mainframes and terminals, tapes, batch processing, etc. Concepts like users, operating systems, files, networking, parallelism, programs, databases, are all quite different, and all of these differences cause companies problems in training users, and creating nice new software that works in ways people expect now.

Creating a, for example, JavaScript to COBOL compiler is probably not fully possible. You may be able to transliterate it, but you would essentially be writing a COBOL program in JavaScript syntax – not using Node libraries and writing React components. This reduces many of the benefits.

The alternate approach is that you take your COBOL and compile it to work in the JVM. You get a JAR out that you can run on your regular servers that are already running your other JVM software. There is probably a significant runtime built into that by the compiler that translates some mainframe concepts into modern concepts, but that's fine because you haven't had to rework your COBOL. Then, you can progressively pull out modules, rewrite in Java, and reference those from the old COBOL code. You don't need lots of training in mainframe concepts, you don't need to spend millions of dollars a year on your mainframe, and you can write new code in Java.

The US Department of Defence have taken this approach one step further, and are actually writing a compiler from COBOL to Java. It's not fully automated, but with not too many developer-hours, they can turn significant chunks of COBOL into reasonably good quality Java, over the course of several stages.

Your idea is a good one, and worth experimenting with maybe, but I think the best approach for the migration away from COBOL for large businesses (and only large businesses use it) is the other way around.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Now this is an expensive hobby. I spent this on my last car (a necessity where I live).

It was a great read though and I'd probably buy one as well if I had the money, time, and space. They seem like underrated machines.

</comment><comment><USER19> Are there any sucess virtualizing z/OS on x86_64? This mainframe is quite anemic even by modern desktop standarts.

<comment><USER20> If you do go with virtualization, in addition to Hercules, you can possibly find a copy of the ADCD, which is a full release of the OS on the cheap.

<comment><USER12> _" which is a full release of the OS on the cheap"_

It's a $900/year subscription if you go the legit route, and not "approved" to use with Hercules. You're supposed to pay ~$4k for zPDT to be fully legit. Thus, most hobbyist use is pirated torrents of ADCD on Hercules.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> 1700 watts, all the time. Yikes.

<comment><USER22> That's pretty solid space heater.

<comment><USER23> Very inefficient though. But solid!

<comment><USER24> Actually it's 100% efficient in terms of converting electricity into heat. Anything that consumes electricity is near 100% efficient at generating heat. If you tried really hard you could build a very efficient laser and send heat outside the room, so not 100% would end up in the room. Even then the majority of heat will be dissipated in the room.

<comment><USER23> It's 100% efficient, but you can do better than the 100% without breaking thermodynamic Laws with a heat pump.

<comment><USER24> Right, but it was being compared to a space heater, not a heat pump.

Not to mention heat pumps require somewhere to pump to/from, you can't just put one in your basement, plug it into the wall, and heat up the basement. Also heat pumps work best with mild differences, like say 40F inside and 60F inside if you want to heat.

Heat pumps reduce to space heater efficiency if it's sub-zero Fahrenheit outside I believe.

<comment><USER23> Sub Zero F is seriously cold! But for most climates there is some advantage. 40F is pretty cold. Take somewhere not particularly hot like London - most of the year it will be warmer than that.

Although in the UK most people use gas to heat their homes, because its cheaper. I worked out once that gas and heat pumps cost the same in the end for the amount of energy. Although what I love about heat pumps is how quick they get a place warm compared to radiators.

Granted heat pumps need installation, or you can probably run a tube out the window with one of those adapters.

It's a silly hypothetical discussion, because for the price of this mainframe you could get a heat pump and a set of solar panels and a battery storage, and have some money left over for some Hawaiian shirts to wear once you've heated the place up.

For financial efficiency (environment be damned) a set of crypto miners would be better than either the mainframe or the heat pump.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Is there something that makes these ibm mainframes special like some feature?

Are they simply like a big computer?

<comment><USER26> From what I've heard, redundancy and scalability in a single machine (like, you can hot-swap CPUs on a running machine and have lots of redundant RAM, etc.) and being able to run an OS with backwards compatibility all the way to the fscking 1960s or whatever.

That OS is… something: [https://medium.com/@bellmar/hello-world-on-z- os-a0ef31c1e87f](https://medium.com/@bellmar/hello-world-on-z-os-a0ef31c1e87f)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> This was an insanely cool read.

<comment><USER3> Thanks! Glad you enjoyed it :-)

</comment></comment><comment> pickle-wizard I cringed when he said he bought a DS6800. When I worked at IBM we had about 20 of them and they were shit. Always broke and getting into weird states. No way I'd run one with a support contract.

<comment><USER2> My understanding is a team ported the ESS "Shark" code from AIX to the little Linux 2.x embedded controllers. It looked like Adaptec OEM hardware when I tore mine apart. I can see how that would go poorly versus the proper cabinet sized arrays. They are definitely good enough for home use but I agree not what you want any production workload on. I heard from a 3rd party support company there is some part that is prone to failure but I cannot recall what it was.

<comment> pickle-wizard Yeah I found the root linux password online. There was more than once I had to SSH in and fix the SLIP connection between the controllers when they went into a brain split.

If I recall correctly they were running SuSE Linux with Websphere App for management and DB2 storing all of the configuration information.

I hadn't heard they traced their linage back to the shark. That surprises me a bit because we had several of those and they were very reliable. Though thinking about it that makes sense.

Hopefully the later software fixed the reliability problems. I got rid of all of ours in about 2010 or so. Replaced them DS5000 on the Open Systems side (which had their own set of problems), and DS8000s on the Mainframe side. The DS8000 was pretty rock solid.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> And for some security bits, check out [https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBVy6TfEpKmGdX1OE_xjK...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBVy6TfEpKmGdX1OE_xjK0GKGjSLwxVn_) which as also some general mainframe access info. His twitter feed is [https://twitter.com/mainframed767?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ct...](https://twitter.com/mainframed767?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor)

</comment><comment><USER27> Just wondering:

What kind of problems do you hope to solve? Are there anything in particular you will use it for?

</comment><comment><USER29> He dropped over $23,000 on a mainframe just to "play with and learn how it works"?

Finally he can run a personal Minecraft server.

<comment><USER3> Would you have liked the project more if the price was not disclosed?

<comment><USER29> Oh I love the project. I'm just in awe of spending that much money for something you don't have a clear and present need for.

<comment><USER30> In my parents' generation, it would have been a project car.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Invite your entire Facebook graph into Google Plus - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/blog/weblife/invite-your-entire-facebook-graph-into-google-plus/2124

<comment><USER2> Or, instead, think of this as a way to stop being an attention whore and instead of having 19,000 "friends" that you broadcast every thought and event in your life every day, consider it a way to be more discrete and thoughtful. Beginning with who you feel necessary to include in your "social graph".

<comment><USER3> Not everyone is an attention whore and some have met many people like coworkers, friends, travellers, etc.

<comment><USER2> I agree that not everyone is an attention whore, but if they have enough people that they need to use social networking with that they have to bulk- load them, then they probably are. My contact book is enormous, but I don't need a social network for most of those people. I don't need to update my coworkers on anything outside of work and I doubt businesses are using social networks for their employees to conduct business with. I certainly don't need to do social networking with someone I might have had a meal with while on a trip oversea, either. Keep them in my address book. Drop them a note sometime. Sure. But the number of people a non-attention-whore needs to interact with on a basis frequent enough to justify being part of an actual social networking application surely must be well below the "bulk loading" number?

The step of categorizing your social networking broadcast channels into proper groups has been years overdue. That's a great feature. I'm just saying that maybe people should pause and take a minute to actually do with Google+ what they originally intended to do with Facebook. You know, four or five years ago when the whole world switched over to Facebook, because it was the place you only "friended" people that you actually knew as opposed to "everyone with a pulse" that you friended on MySpace? Seems like everyone let that get away from them (and they frequently complain about how exactly that has happened to them). So instead of rushing back into the same situation, it's a great time to rethink how we're using such a service.

<comment><USER4> If I want to use bulk-import to move contacts to a more discreet sharing service, doesn't that make me the opposite of an attention whore? I doubt that most people with many contacts have acquired them for the specific purpose of seeking attention.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> My Android phone is synchronizing Facebook contacts out of the box.

I got a whole lot of people right now in my address book, with email addresses and even phone numbers that I didn't have before, so I'm not exactly sure what it is doing or who provided this integration, but it is doing something that works.

And then you can export all your contacts to an external SD card.

It's easier IMHO, than going with the Yahoo account route, which I couldn't get working btw.

<comment> mike-cardwell The way Android syncs contacts with services like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Skype etc is quite interesting. The contact data isn't actually added to your phones existing contacts. It is kept seperate, but when you go to view contacts, it takes each of the contact "sources" and displays a view of them as if they have been merged. It does the "merging" based on the name of the contact.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Aw man, I just made a new Yahoo account and tried to do this and then realized Google Plus is not accepting new invites.... oh well.

I recall when Gmail was invite only and a lot of people wanted invites. People were even selling invites on eBay for a while!!! LOL... not for much money but still... it just goes to show that people will do anything for even a tiny bit of money.

So we will see how Plus works out. I am still unsure what to think about it, but either way, it seems cool. I just wish I could get an invite myself!!! :'-(

<comment><USER7> Google tried to recreated that invite scarcity with Wave as well -- didn't work out too well for them there.

Seems like the odds are pretty good that by the time they open it up to everyone, the hype will have died down. I understand the desire to scale up slowly, but this invite-only model is getting annoying.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think the strategy is more a 'Path-y' just start over angle. Too much noise already on FB/Twitter, Google needs to play the signal card.

No wonder they wanted to buy Path!!

</comment><comment><USER9> I got an invite yesterday and gave a try for half an hour. After I had seen that there is no way to import my twitter contacts, I quit it. It's very ironic for a social website to not let people join, to not let its users to connect with other people properly.

<comment><USER10> Not letting people join is how facebook did it.

<comment><USER11> That's not granular enough an explanation. They were strategic about who they let join and when, and that strategy involved admitting entire social groups at once.

<comment><USER10> Absolutely agreed. My point is just that it's not an entirely unintuitive idea in the general case.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: SendNoodz.io – Send MMS of Noodles When Asked for Nudes - <AUTHOR> https://sendnoodz.io/?ref=hn <comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN,

Built this to have a go at interacting with Stripe and Twilio. Didn't realise what a pain recording an iPhone screencap would be.

Resubmitting because the first submission (completely understandably) triggered spam rules and was silently dropped.

Open to any suggestions.</comment>


Uber raises an additional $1.2B at $40B valuation to fund Asia expansion - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2014/12/04/uber-raises-an-additional-1-2-billion-to-fund-asia-expansion/

<comment><USER2> I'm curious what the major expenses for Uber are. Do new investments mostly going to dealing with regulators, or marketing/promos to simultaneously bootstrap a critical mass of drivers and users in a new city?

If it's the latter, there's a silver lining for Lyft: Uber's breaking into new markets for them. Otherwise, it just means Lyft is falling further behind. Network effects make this industry somewhat of a natural monopoly, right?</comment>


Systemd's DefaultTasksMax makes problems for MySQL/RabbitMQ/Docker/lxc/make/ - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/3211 <comment><AUTHOR> The systemd mechanism here was proposed in November 2015. Lennart Poettering acknowledged that it "had the potential to break some daemons".

* [https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/systemd-devel/2015-No...](https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/systemd-devel/2015-November/035006.html)

In conversation with Lennart Poettering, systemd developer Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek's position was to turn the mechanism on and gather statistics about who and what it broke. Lennart Poettering did this about 20 hours later. Within a week, this was in the released version of systemd.

* [https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/systemd-devel/2015-No...](https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/systemd-devel/2015-November/035011.html)

* [https://github.com/systemd/systemd/commit/0af20ea2ee2af2bcf2...](https://github.com/systemd/systemd/commit/0af20ea2ee2af2bcf2258e7a8e1a13181a6a75d6)

* [https://github.com/systemd/systemd/commit/9ded9cd14cc03c6729...](https://github.com/systemd/systemd/commit/9ded9cd14cc03c67291b10a5c42ce5094ba0912f)

* [https://github.com/systemd/systemd/blob/ccddd104fc95e0e76914...](https://github.com/systemd/systemd/blob/ccddd104fc95e0e769142af6e1fe1edec5be70a6/NEWS#L373-393)

Their position has been since that the correct thing to do if one hits this is _not_ to revert Lennart Poettering's change to the DefaultTasksMax and DefaulTasksAccounting settings, but to tweak the service unit files of any and all affected daemons.

The systemd bug report paints this as an Ubuntu problem, in part because the systemd developer who submitted it is also the Ubuntu maintainer for systemd, but there are actually quite a lot of bug reports _across several distributions_ that relate to this. Several people have simply placed TasksMax=infinity in their service unit files; but a few have indeed reverted the DefaultTasksMax setting, as the Ubuntu maintainer also asked for.

The maximum applies to kernel "tasks", not to processes. So whilst one can hit it by forking a lot of processes, one can also hit it with only a few processes that happen to use a lot of threads per process. This is of particular concern to MySQL, MariaDB, Percona, and their ilk, which use a thread per client connection. As Brad Mashall discovered, the effect is that the SQL servers start refusing client connections.

* [https://bugs.launchpad.net/charms/+source/percona-cluster/+b...](https://bugs.launchpad.net/charms/+source/percona-cluster/+bug/1578080)

Someone hit this with a multi-threaded Java program and reported it to Arch.

* [https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/47787](https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/47787)

The issue was clouded by two things: First, it was obscured by _another_ systemd issue that imposes a task limit on every user service spawned by a user's per-user instance of systemd. Second, it was obscured by the complication that GNOME Terminal does not spawn terminal instances directly but rather uses Desktop Bus to spawn them remotely via "DBUS activation", resulting in terminals and the processes in their associated login sessions having the _non_ -login-session task maxima applied.

* [https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/1955](https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/1955)

Others have reproduced this with lots of processes. Dominique Leuenberger reported to OpenSUSE that this affects a lot of xyr builds because of parallel make. Gustavo Romero created a short makefile to use with parallel make (make -j500) that exhibited the problem.

* [https://bugzilla.opensuse.org/show_bug.cgi?id=965564](https://bugzilla.opensuse.org/show_bug.cgi?id=965564)

* [https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ubuntu-meta/+bug/1...](https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ubuntu-meta/+bug/1561658/comments/1)

Marko Mihovilic reported to Arch a similar problem on build machines.

* [https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/47662#comment142757](https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/47662#comment142757)

Jakub Sztandera reported to Arch that LXC encounters this limit. Other people observed there that it has affected Java services such as Freenet. Lennart Poettering reiterated that people should not revert his changes but instead change their individual TasksMax settings.

* [https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/47303](https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/47303)

* [https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=207255](https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=207255)

* [https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/2388](https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/2388)

* [https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/2388#issuecomment-...](https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/2388#issuecomment-173320246)

It affected Docker, and this was reported to RedHat. The Docker people then noticed that all of the people who had CentOS 7, Debian 8, and the like were seeing a message about an unknown systemd service unit directive. Others (including Nathan Cutler, who reported the systemd problem to Ceph) had seen this, and after discussion considered it cosmetic, as it did not in fact prevent services from running on older versions of systemd. The Docker people, however, promptly reverted their fix. The Docker position is now that "people on newer kernels" have to maintain their own specially tweaked versions of systemd service unit files.

* [https://github.com/docker/docker/issues/9868](https://github.com/docker/docker/issues/9868)

* [https://github.com/docker/docker/pull/19391](https://github.com/docker/docker/pull/19391)

* [https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1311750](https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1311750)

* [http://tracker.ceph.com/issues/15583](http://tracker.ceph.com/issues/15583)

* [https://github.com/docker/docker/issues/20036](https://github.com/docker/docker/issues/20036)

It hit Azk, too.

* [https://github.com/azukiapp/azk/issues/634](https://github.com/azukiapp/azk/issues/634)

Sebastian Schmidt hit this with Chrome, where the entire session spawned by xdm was limited to 512 threads in total, and reported it to Debian.

* [https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=602002](https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=602002)

* [https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=823530](https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=823530)

Breno Leitão hit this on Ubuntu, with the SSH server under one set of control groups on one system and under a different set on another, the result of a dependency chain involving PAM and PolicyKit.

* [https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ubuntu-meta/+bug/1...](https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ubuntu-meta/+bug/1561658)</comment>


The case in full for a Personal Data Exchange infrastructure - <AUTHOR> https://www.hatdex.org/digital-dependency/ <comment><AUTHOR> Digital natives are becoming increasingly dependent upon connectivity, the benefits to society of which are obvious. And a digitally-connected society is critical for the development of Smart Cities, the useful deployment of the Internet of Things (IoT), the growth of predictive analytics, and the future of the digital economy itself.

But of course, where connectivity brings convenience it brings challenges, especially in the area of personal data. Here, the challenge is about more than just a privacy concern. Every user signing on to a new Internet service creates for themselves a unique user account every time, surrendering some form of their personal data in the process. As a result, a few hundred, if not a few thousand equivalent accounts are created by each of us in our lifetimes; more and more as IoT expands. Fragmentation will eventually lead to consolidation - but that's also a mess, potentially leading to the creation of illegal data markets, deterrance in app creation, monopolisation of the digital economy, the marginalisation of entire populations of the market, crippling cyber security vulnerability, and subjection of the digital self to costly dispersal and ageing.

We've put together a paper that discusses the challenges of a connected digital economy from a personal data standpoint, and proposes a best practice of individually-owned, private data accounts in the form of 'microserver' containers, as a solution to the challenges we will face in the coming years and decades.</comment>