Uncovering Lisbon's History of Slavery - <AUTHOR> http://www.aaihs.org/uncovering-lisbons-forgotten-history-of-slavery/ <comment><USER2> AFAIK the African slave trade is not a visible topic on Lisbon because it was a very small part of it. While Portugal trafficked millions of people across the Atlantic, very few would be sent to Europe, since the Christian faith didn't see it with good eyes, and there was much more demand for hard labor in the "new world".

<comment><USER3> The article mentions ten percent of their population were slaves in the sixteenth century, and Christianity was not what had an issue with it. Portuguese Brazil was a huge part of the slave trade, and it was the same Christianity as Portugal.

<comment><USER2> I don't want to be a downer but that statistic doesn't seem to be backed by anything. And yes, Portuguese in Brazil were also christian, of course, but there is a certain "what the eyes don't see, the heart can't feel" feeling about it. Public opinion and the church would care much less what happened far away, months away. Many countries would abolish slavery at "home" but tolerate it in the colonies.

<comment><USER3> The article provides one source for the statistic, Wikipedia provides two more. All are from books that I can not access the reference, but one of them does let me read about the Queen's five Brazilian slaves in addition to the many African slaves.

The Church may have been a reason, very different than the Christian faith

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It is quite deceiving to mention so greatly - and more than once - the slaves that where kidnapped by Europeans like they where a representative part of the slave trade, they were factually not. Portugal is without doubt a big culprit in the slave trade, but the African slaves themselves were basically all enslaved by other Africans and then sold to the Europeans. Portugal was also the first country to officially forbid the slave trade.

Portugal is quite at ease with the history of its colonial past and its role in the Atlantic slave trade, there is no denial or attempt to hide the historical facts and the slave trade and the role of slavery in the former colonies (specially Brazil) is well discussed during obligatory schooling.

All this to say I can't really understand why Lisbon should acknowledge its slaves to such great length as this post asks to, because in fact Lisbon had very few ones actually living there (it was not well seen in Catholic Europe to own slaves) and was mostly a point of passage (but then again, so were many Atlantic islands).

If you want to check the historical facts: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_slave_trade](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_slave_trade)

<comment><USER3> >but the African slaves themselves were basically all enslaved by other Africans and then sold to the Europeans

Paying someone else to do the work doesn't change who was responsible.

>Portugal was also the first country to officially forbid the slave trade.

In mainland Portugal, slavery wasn't abolished in Brazil until 1869.

>because in fact Lisbon had very few ones actually living there (it was not well seen in Catholic Europe to own slaves) and was mostly a point of passage (but then again, so were many Atlantic islands).

Catholic Europe didn't have a huge problem with it until the eighteenth century, they just had enough serfs that it generally wasn't necessary. Plus, this is about Protestant Portugal, and your source mentions that in 1550 10% of Lisbon's population was African slaves.

<comment><USER4> > "Paying someone else to do the work doesn't change who was responsible."

Never claimed Europeans weren't responsible (in fact I clearly stated the opposite), I factually stated something wrong in the original article: Europeans were not going around kidnapping natives at large like the article suggests, they were buying them from the other natives that were the ones actually enslaving them.

Can't understand why you are trying so hard to hide that part of history.

> _" In mainland Portugal, slavery wasn't abolished in Brazil until 1869."_

Yes, and this article is about Lisbon. Lisbon, is in mainland Portugal.

> _" Plus, this is about Protestant Portugal"_

Protestant Portugal? What are you talking about? Protestantism was only allowed in Portugal after the mid XIX century (and after that still mostly inexistent). So, basically when slavery was also forbidden by law in there.

<comment><USER3> >Europeans were not going around kidnapping natives at large like the article suggests, they were buying them from the other natives that were the ones actually enslaving them.

Again, paying someone else to do the work doesn't change anything. They were kidnapped and enslaved for the Europeans, there is nothing factually wrong in the article.

I'm not trying to hide history here. By saying it was the Africans who did the kidnapping, you're putting the crime on them. But if they refused, they likely would have been enslaved or killed. Their involvement isn't overly important, and it's usually brought up to try to lessen the extreme horrors of European colonialism.

>Yes, and this article is about Lisbon. Lisbon, is in mainland Portugal

Your comments were about how Portugal was at ease with it's slavery past, and came as part of the "Africans were the kidnappers" spiel. Mainland Portugal was in control of Brazil at the time, part of this time involved the court located in Brazil.

The Protestant Portugal was my mistake. Read about the Thirty Years War recently, I thought the break from the Iberian Union was for religious differences. So many countries fighting for so many reasons.

<comment><USER4> > _" By saying it was the Africans who did the kidnapping, you're putting the > crime on them. But if they refused, they likely would have been enslaved or > killed."_

Way to go and completely distort all historical evidence to try and shift the blame. Let's get something clear, the natives selling other natives were from tribes/kingdoms that had been at war for centuries. Europeans clearly created more demand and are at fault for that. But the natives were very clearly and very well documented NOT coerced (like you are trying to claim), they just continued doing what they already did for at least 15 centuries before.

And also, they continued doing it AFTER the Europeans stopped slavery. Thing is, even today there are millions of slaves in Africa and really we can easily agree it's not the Europeans that own them or trade them in present times.

Source: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Africa](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Africa)

> _" Your comments were about how Portugal was at ease with it's slavery past, > and came as part of the "Africans were the kidnappers" spiel. Mainland > Portugal was in control of Brazil at the time, part of this time involved > the court located in Brazil."_

No, my main comment was that LISBON didn't had the slaving history as the article is trying to put on it and as such, Portugal being the first nation to forbid slavery (even of just in the mainland) goes on to validate my point about LISBON.

<comment><USER3> >But the natives were very clearly and very well documented NOT coerced (like you are trying to claim), they just continued doing what they already did for at least 15 centuries before.

Again, you're looking at things too directly. If they refused, the offer would go out to their rivals. So unless every group of people refused, you were facing slavery or death if you refused.

You keep mentioning Africa's ancient slave legacy, ignoring your own source saying that it isn't clear chattel slavery was practiced in the area, and that war slaves were a common feature in Europe until the eighteenth century.

>validate my point about LISBON.

Yet you ignored the parts that didn't, like the ten percent of the population part.

<comment><USER4> > _" If they refused, the offer would go out to their rivals. "_

Ok, so what? Both you and you rival have something to sell. If I don't buy it from you, I buy it from your rival. Let's face it, the Europeans created a greater demand for a product that the natives were already providing: Slaves. (no disrespect intended by the word product, just an analogy).

> *"ignoring your own source saying that it isn't clear chattel slavery was > practiced in the area"

The moment the natives the sold those slaves, even if they weren't chattel slaves before (which I agree with you, was not clear), they started practicing chattel slavery. That's just the definition of it.

In a nutshell, Europeans didn't turn that people into chattel slaves, they where turned into that by the other natives that enslaved them.

> "Yet you ignored the parts that didn't, like the ten percent of the > population part."

Yes, the 10% that only occurred for a short time compared to the rest of the all Europe and because you keep accounting for people passing by than only spent there some weeks (i.e. the slaves waiting to be sold).

<comment><USER3> >Ok, so what? Both you and you rival have something to sell. If I don't buy it from you, I buy it from your rival.

It's not a one time transaction. If they buy slaves from your rivals, they have more money to spend on arms and a need for more people to sell. So refusing wasn't a safe option, creating a larger demand changed the game dramatically.

>In a nutshell, Europeans didn't turn that people into chattel slaves, they where turned into that by the other natives that enslaved them.

You could sell a debt slave with the thought the new owner would abide by the same rules. Or if slaves were treated as members of your household with an free children and a general path back to freedom, you might expect the buyer does the same. If you don't view people as property, you won't expect what someone buying them will do.

>Yes, the 10% that only occurred for a short time compared to the rest of the all Europe and because you keep accounting for people passing by than only spent there some weeks (i.e. the slaves waiting to be sold).

Source? As given how poorly Portugal looks in the slave trade, the last ship of slaves being Portugese to Brazil, that is hard to believe. And are you really happy with the argument "Portugal shouldn't overly acknowledge the slave trade, they barely kept any in the mainland while profiting off their sale and work for centuries."

<comment><USER4> > _" Portugal shouldn't overly acknowledge the slave trade, they barely kept > any in the mainland while profiting off their sale and work for centuries."_

We are just going around and around in circles.

Again and for the final time: The article and my problem with it, is NOT about Portugal's involvement in the slave trade. I totally admit Portugal was the big motivator of the slave TRADE, yet history let's it very clear that the Natives were the ENSLAVERS and already since at least 1500 years before and have continued to do it UNTIL THE PRESENT, long after the Europeans stopped that.

The article IS about some WRONG idea there is some slave legacy in LISBON - when in fact there is basically none.

<comment><USER3> Capitalizing random words doesn't make them true, nice dodge out of getting that source and ignoring how being the motivator still makes you the kidnapper. Next you'll tell me about how glorious the reconquista was.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Lead and Crime: Another Look - <AUTHOR> http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2016/01/lead-and-crime-another-look? <comment><USER2> I'm not surprised. Any time I see a research paper that suggests a highly complex issue, like crime, can be neatly explained by a single variable, my BS meter goes off.

Could a reduction in lead levels contribute to the drop in crime? Sure, but any effect would likely be drowned out by the multitude of other changes that have happened over the past 60+ years.

I'm not sure what it is, but humans seem to be highly suceptable to simple explanations for the world. If you need some examples, just browse snopes.com

<comment><USER3> >I'm not sure what it is, but humans seem to be highly suceptable to simple explanations for the world.

Most things really are simple; If you see smoke, the simplest explanation happens to be correct: there's fire.

The bias towards simplicity can also be seen as a bias towards parsimony, which is almost always a good thing. We don't immediately recognize this truth because we don't conjure up trivial examples, even though the overwhelming majority of our reasoning is spent on trivial phenomena.

<comment><USER4> Also he's disputing a straw man. No one has claimed that _all_ crime can be explained by a single variable. Only that a variable can have a big effect. Other "simple explanations" for crime could be poverty, broken homes, education, all the traditional explanations. All those are simple explanations and single variables.

<comment><USER3> I understood his claim a bit differently, namely as "Lead is an epiphenomenon, and a single variable with a big effect is likely to be an epiphenomenon".

To be sure, I think the logic goes like this:

\- Lead is positively correlated with crime

\- Reduction in lead-levels is associated with multiple factors that are in turn associated with gentrification

\- Thus, these gentrification factors are the true cause, and lead-levels just happen to correlate with them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Can it really be true that violent crime was declining between 1973-91? There's no question that this is what the NCVS data tells us, but it sure doesn't match what everyone thought was going on at the time. By the early 90s, virtually everyone in America was convinced that (a) crime had been rising relentlessly for decades and (b) it would continue rising. (Remember "superpredators"?) At a purely gut level, a crime decline during this period sure doesn't feel right."

I think this can and may be true. See Pinker's arguments in The Better Angels of our Nature. It seems obvious to me that people's perceptions of crime are influenced to a huge extent by media reporting. People have irrational, unfounded beliefs all the time, so I don't see why they should be indicative of anything.

</comment><comment><USER6> For all the faults of the reporting of crimes, the assumptions being made are not nearly as logically sound as the assumptions seem to assert. Exposure to leaded gas affects brain development, and impulse control. Alcohol for me also affect my impulse control, and I become more aggressive, and in my youth, violent/destructive. But at no point is my moral centre so far off that murder becomes a viable option. So the assumption that violent crime rates matches murder rates proportionally, is throwing another unknown variable into the mix, and attempting to make that appear far more rational than it it.

<comment><USER7> I think most murders are just spur of the moment assaults that go too far, the person dying is not premeditated like an Agatha Christie novel.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Reminds me of [http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious- correlations](http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations)

<comment><USER3> I don't think this is a spurious correlation, so much as an epiphenomenon.</comment></comment>


The PC is interesting again - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/ces/2017/1/4/14167980/microsoft-windows-10-pc-laptops-desktops-interesting-again-ces-2017 <comment><USER2> Yep.

Yesterday was the first time in many years when I decided to check out how much a good gaming PC would cost me today.

The price for a i7 6700K 4.1GHz, 32GB RAM, 500GB SSD and nVidia GTX 1070: €1515 EUR (case and CPU cooler included).

Add a €360 27" Monitor and the total goes to € 1875. Let's round that up to €2000.

A similarly powered iMac (i7, 32GB RAM, 500GB SSD and an inferior Radeon R9 M395X) costs exactly: 4.189,00 €

More than double the price! Granted, the iMac monitor is much better, but the price difference gives you 2000 EUR to splash on monitors and still be up 189EUR ! Or maybe splash it on VR helmets and a new bike ?

And that thing gives me all the games plus VR and the pretty powerful Visual Studio IDE for hacking.

<comment><USER3> > The price for a i7 6700K 4.1GHz, 32GB RAM, 500GB SSD and nVidia GTX 1070: > €1515 EUR (case and CPU cooler included).

That's not a gaming pc. That looks more like a gaming-capable Workstation. Absolutely overkill CPU (games are seldom cpu bound), and too much RAM (games don't care).

I suggest a glance at Logical Increments [0], which is definitely biased towards gaming, to see what you can do at a given price point. Note that just because of the gsync fiasco and the cloud-connected drivers nonsense, I'd gravitate towards an AMD GPU if I had to buy now.

[0] [http://www.logicalincrements.com/](http://www.logicalincrements.com/)

<comment><USER4> If I may, Logical Increments is nice, but sometimes leads astray. I develop a hardware recommender, and this is in my eyes a good gaming PC for 1440p: [https://www.pc-kombo.de/share/OqqYoLX](https://www.pc- kombo.de/share/OqqYoLX). i5-6600K with 16GB DDR4-3000 on a Z170 board, good psu and good cooler. When playing on a lower resolution like the usual 1080p, AMD with a RX 480 would be a good choice, otherwise there is no alternative to the GTX 1070.

Intel just released the Kaby Lake processors which are tiny bit faster (because they are clocked higher), currently integrating this. But does not change much.

<comment> Const-me Agree with the config you recommend except the storage.

Both HDD and SSD are IMO too small.

For HDD, the 1TB is inefficient: €51 for 1TB, €98 for 3TB — that is more than 50% difference in cost/TB (both for WD blue desktop series as listed on computeruniverse.net).

For the SSD, the 256 GB is just too small. Sure that's enough to boot Windows, but not enough to fit more than a couple of modern games, they easily take 50GB/each. I'd rather recommend 480GB these days.

<comment><USER4> You are right. The 1TB HDD is inefficient as price-per-gigabyte is a lot higher than 2 or 3 TB. On the other hand, almost always when I recommend bigger drives I get the feedback that 1TB is more than enough… Depends on the usage.

Regarding the SSD, for Windows a 120GB or even a 60GB SSD would be enough (but those are also slower). 250GB is already a lot of additional space for games – again, it depends on the usage. A couple of games is what is the usual way of thinking for what a SSD should be used, and for that 250GB is just right. But if one wants multiple modern AAA games on it at the same time 480GB sure is more useful.

<comment><USER5> There's another factor, though, which you missed entirely: larger SSDs have muchz much faster write speeds, and also read speeds. The parallel NAND chips provide a sort of intra-device RAID

<comment><USER4> But I did mention that, for the smaller SSDs? It's also true for 250GB vs 512GB, but the main appeal of having an SSD does not get lost by getting a smaller one – latency and faster load times than with a HDD.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> So are suits. [http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html](http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html)

<comment><USER7> Who are "we" in the linked article? What company is Graham talking about? Y Combinator?

<comment><USER8> the startup PG co-founded and that was sold to Yahoo: Viaweb

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Are we in a time machine?

Lenovo released the Yoga, the first convertible that you could put in tent mode or tablet mode, and Microsoft released the Surface, back in _2012_. Intel announced the Ultrabook in _2011_.

Today you have the same things. They've been revised and improved in the areas of screen, battery life, graphics performance, switching from HDD to SSD, but it's all been incremental.

>> 2-IN-1S SUCCEEDED BECAUSE THEY MARRIED THE BEST OF MOBILE WITH THE POWER OF THE PC

Has the author ever used a 2 in 1? They can be marginally useful when sharing a document with someone but they bad tablets and they are mediocre laptops.

<comment><USER10> I've had my Surface Book for over seven months now, and it's _superb_. I use it as a laptop the majority of the time, but a laptop with touch and a pen. And then I use it as a tablet some of the time, but a tablet with a pen as well, and a large tablet at that (which is normally desirable for me, though not always). Not everything is perfect about the device, and it's expensive, but I consider it to be a good investment in my productivity and comfort.

I even switched away from Linux because of the excellence that is the Surface Book.

<comment><USER11> Yep. I have a Surface Book as well. I am reversed from your usage pattern though, I work out of my home most of the time... due to that I use a nice beefy workstation day-to-day... so I use the Surface Book more as a tablet and am happy to do so. I notice my wife who only has the surface book is about 50/50\. She'll use the screen portion in portrait mode as a tablet for reading in whatever room we're in, but otherwise uses it as a laptop for basic work.

The only thing I miss (which my first tablet, the Xoom, had) is mobile data support. Yeah I could probably buy an addon device for that, but I think that would be self-defeating for tablet use.

Anyway, Surface Book is a fine 2-in-1 and demonstrates that proper engineering can make the format work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I agree. As a developer, a desktop PC gives me the most value and peformance. I recently replaced my Asus zenbook laptop with a new desktop PC that I built myself, with an Intel i7 CPU, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD and a great nVidia graphics card, at a price that no laptop could ever compete.

<comment><USER13> Just today I was listening to more grief and complaints about the new MBPs (I develop on an older one now), and I got so tired of it all and said to myself, "the way out of this cycle might be to build a desktop PC and put a Linux distro on it."

I don't take my current rig out of my office very often these days, though if I were living somewhere else I might. But I can get all my work done in my office for sure, so this is looking like a good way out for me. Did you price your components out on NewEgg?

<comment><USER12> Yes, the price of a new MBP is outrageous compared to a custom built desktop PC. I would think companies and startups would see the value of desktop PCs again.

> Did you price your components out on NewEgg?

I bought the components in Norway on komplett.no. The price was about 33% of a new MBP with 15" screen, but I got significantly better specifications.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> When did they stop being interesting?

<comment><USER15> I would actually argue that this is the least interesting that PCs have ever been. The only thing they're doing that's interesting is copying features from more interesting form factors like tablets and cell phones. The PC (laptop/desktop, doesn't matter the OS) is complete.

This years fastest processor is exactly the same speed as last year. This years video card plays the same games as last year. What interesting things do we have? A touchscreen? It's interesting because it turns out PC into a tablet. Folds over on itself? Turns the PC into a tablet.

4K is nice but it's not any more interesting than any other resolution. VR is nice but that doesn't make a PC more interesting, it makes VR interesting. You can do VR without a PC.

PCs are commodity products with little compelling reason to upgrade anymore. VR is the most interesting thing happening, and most people are doing it on their phone instead of on a PC. They sell the Gear VR at Walmart, for crying out loud.

<comment><USER16> I disagree. Good VR needs a good video card, and the recent 1080 from Nvidia is a strong improvement to the previous generation. You will notice a difference.

Have you tried a Vive? GearVR vs Vive is like 2012 Chromebook vs modern MacBook pro. You need a modern desktop to drive the Vive. And I feel like a lot of people who say VR doesn't excite them haven't tried the Vive, it's much more exciting than any other product on the market.

SSDs are getting much faster. 4K monitors are cheaper, and better. If you don't game, modern processors can drive multiple 4K monitors.

Running a Bitcoin full node on a desktop is reasonable, running it on a laptop is noticeably detrimental. You need too much juice. Plus the 100GB hurts a lot more on a laptop, where in a desktop you can get 5TB for $100 during sales. Torrenting, Tor nodes, media centers, all things that don't work as well on laptops as they do on desktops.

As a software developer I can very confidently say that my desktop is much better for development than my laptop. Both the processor and the SSD make a huge difference.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I think this article misses the point of what we are seeing. Input and output devices are changing for the first time in decades. At the same time, cloud computing is disconnecting the computing power from the input and output devices.

You now can select from keyboards, mice, touch, voice, and use local or remote computing power, to get results delivered in real time or async to screens, devices, messages, VR, voice, or IoT devices. And that is not even getting into what robotics can do.

So it is not that the PC is interesting. It is that EVERYTHING is now decoupled, and we can mix and match like never before. It should be interesting to see where people take it.

<comment><USER15> I just wrote a very long and pointless comment trying to express this very idea. It's not that the PC is any more interesting than it has been, it's that a lot of interesting things are happening in tech, and the PC is the way to access them.

It's like saying that cars are interesting again because the city built a new stadium. No, the stadium is interesting. The car is just how you get there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> The only computer that interests me today: [https://www.infoq.com/presentations/power-144-chip](https://www.infoq.com/presentations/power-144-chip)

I know I know

</comment><comment><USER19> That Dell has a nice looking screen, but then they go and ruin it with the carbon-fiber-looking body. I'd also have to be able to run some operating system that isn't Windows (I'll never use Windows again) without having to screw around with drivers or other annoying quirks. Until it's beautiful and comes with a non-junky operating system I'm stuck with Mac.

With that being said, I'm very glad to see other manufacturers are putting effort into catching up after like 8 years of serious sub-par machines. All we need now is for one of them to drop Windows and seriously support a Linux distribution and then we could have a real Apple competitor in 3-5 years.

I'm a big fan of the port decision on the new MacBook Pros, but the cost, the obsession for thinness at the expense of battery life, etc... isn't acceptable and they're learning that this year, hopefully, or they'll be on the ropes in 5 years. Or perhaps they kill the Mac themselves. It's not a problem to make a laptop thinner every year. Just don't sacrifice performance and battery life to do so.

<comment><USER20> > I'd also have to be able to run some operating system that isn't Windows > (I'll never use Windows again) without having to screw around with drivers > or other annoying quirks.

Since like ten years the only time I have to mess with drivers is when I install Windows to someones computer (and I used Arch linux for ~3 years and since last May I'm on FreeBSD). You can go for Ubuntu or Elementary OS if you're looking for a nice desktop.

<comment><USER19> I do laptop only since I live in a small space, but I appreciate the suggestion.

<comment><USER20> I used desktop to mean "desktop environment", not a desktop PC. I, too, use a laptop.

<comment><USER19> Ah. I'm currently using a MacBook that I love and not looking at the moment, so I'll keep your suggestions in mind in the next few years. We'll see how Apple responds.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm not sure PCs are really any different than they ever have been. It's always incremental improvements, year over year. Maybe with Intel essentially stonewalled on Moore's Law improvements, graphics cards pretty well maxed out, and ssds becoming relatively standard, there's not a whole lot of room besides going after different form factors and better efficiency.

<comment><USER22> I suspect the only near-term actually interesting innovation will be docking stations (keyboard/mouse/video screen) for our phones so that we're always carrying around the same PC.

That doesn't seem too far off in the future to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I've never lived without a laptop since 2002, and this year I'm going to get Razer Blade 14".

Laptops are getting desktop like performance with the portability of a small backpack and the weight of under 2kg. Full HD with 14" laptop looks just right.

With the human size not changing at all, I see that there's always a need for a PC.

<comment><USER24> I will be upgrading to this as my main machine as when my current MBP pro dies. It's 4 years old now. I will miss macOS though. I have a Surface Pro 3 and its just horrible to use - both as a tablet and laptop.

edit: A bit more detail: I've done a lot of reseach into gaming laptops in the last month as I'll be starting a job using unity in Feb. The Blade seems to be just a little bit better than ASUS and MSI offerings. I think the Alienware machines just look like cheap junk so didn't really look into them.

They are all priced incredibly closely it really does come down to your preference for style and minor feature variations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Depends on the country.

If you live outside of the US even big manufacturers like Dell give you very limited hardware options.

</comment><comment><USER26> Lots of comments here about custom desktop builds being cheap. But what about the portability you've sacrificed? No big deal, the tremendous savings you just made can go into a cheapo use-it-for-travel laptop and you'll still have money left in the bank.

</comment><comment><USER27> As a passionate core PC gamer (who has dabbled in consoles) for the past 20+ years, I can confidently say that right now is the greatest time it has ever been to be a PC gamer. A non-exhaustive list of reasons why this is true (some of these apply to more than just the PC):

\- There are very few exclusives that matter anymore. The cost of making a AAA game is high enough that publishers can rarely afford to exclude a good part of their market. Of the two consoles that matter, many Xbox exclusives are coming to PC anyways.

\- The quality of the PC versions of most games has gone up. There was a transitional period in the mid 2000s where gaming switched from being PC centric to console centric and the PC versions of many AAA games were awful. This has mostly passed. Even Japanese developers are releasing good stuff on PC now, and that group of developers have long seen the PC as alien.

\- The digital download market is sane. Valve and Steam are a mostly benign monopoly, and Valve being privately held assures me this will remain true for a while. Problems down the line are problems for future Jake, though. Even so, the individual publisher stores are usually not too bad. Ubisoft's uPlay is fine and integrates with Steam pretty well, and EA's Origin has a big leg up on UI design and actually led the pack on refunds. GOG exists for people that want older games or draw a hard line on DRM.

\- There is a range of hardware available for any budget, and the value and reliability of that hardware is the best it's ever been. You can get a $150 GTX 1050 Ti and have modest performance at 1080p on most modern games, or you can drop $650 on a GTX1080 and play most anything at 4K/Ultra, and there are many steps in between. As usual, the sweet spot of performance per dollar is somewhere around the $250 "mainstream" card, but the options exist.

\- The Steam Controller and Steam Link are amazing. They open up a whole range of games that previously could only be played with a mouse and keyboard on your desk into your living room. Many games have native support for the XInput controller standard but the Steam Controller takes it even further. The Link steps in if your PC and TV are too far away for an HDMI cable.

\- There are tons of games now in every niche. Consoles stay mostly to AAA games (which is fine, I love AAA games), but the range of AA and indie games on PC is amazing. If you want a simulator for something like farming, trains, or driving a truck - PC is your destination. How about managing a bloodline through medieval Europe? Tons of stuff that just isn't possible with a controller alone or that wouldn't be financially viable with the cost of console licensing is available, often with much more direct lines of communication to the developer.

\- Digital distribution makes it simple to acquire any game you want at any time, often at a discount over physical stores. I can get a game in a few clicks on Steam and if it's on sale I may save anywhere from 50-90% off retail. I know that the modern consoles have this as well, but it is something I love about PC.

\- eSports are fun and they are centered on the PC. I was initially skeptical, but I do enjoy watching some now, and it is undeniably a large market. But the related idea of streaming (Twitch, et al.) is also really cool. I like watching and interacting with some smaller streamers on Twitch, and it is a new way to be involved with gaming.

Like I said, I don't think there's ever been a better time to be a gamer and especially a PC gamer. With consoles taking a more PC-ish "upgradeable" route, I wonder how the market will change in the next decade.

</comment><comment><USER28> This is effectively a ridiculous lie. I just spent three whole days researching 2-in-1s and tablets and hybrids and laptops, just to understand what the fuck the offerings today actually _mean_. tl;dr, they suck

Start with the premise of Windows 10. It's horrible. Not just the interface, which doesn't give you anything you want or need when you want and need it, forces you to reboot against your will to install updates you can't choose to install, crashes apps regularly with no real understanding of why, hogs resources unnecessarily, spams you with meaningless notifications, and of course, leaks metadata everywhere. Still with no meaningful stock firewall or application security or value-driving base apps or functionality. It's lame, it's annoying, it sucks. It's Windows, Okay?

The thing you're bound to do the most on a computer in 2017 is surf the web, and you need a fucking Supercomputer to load 10 tabs, even though five years ago you needed a machine much less powerful and with much less RAM than the ones today and could load 50-100 tabs without it breaking a sweat.

Next there's the fact that there's really one chipmaker dominating PCs right now: Intel. AMD comes up short performing poorer and making up a tiny part of the market, this is not even close to the good old days when Intel and AMD were in a constant arms race.

Intel has, for the past 8 years, been slogging through a series of combinations of performance "tweaks", which have resulted in sometimes faster, sometimes slower, generally uninspiring computing platforms. Between mobile and PC there's a whole complicated universe of CPUs and GPUs designed to be somewhat impossible to compare due to their constantly almost making the old products obsolete, _but not quite_ , because PC and mobile design changes just enough to make the new products disappointing.

More power? Less battery. More battery? Annoying form factor. Good form factor? Less power and battery. Low heat dissipation? Poorer performance. Otherwise good everything? No modern connectors, or display, or storage. No matter what year it is or what revision it is of the same exact model from the last 3 years, something about it is going to suck.

The Dell XPS 13, which has been given every conceivable blowjob by every reviewer i've found, is an underwhelming and overpriced notebook. It's not the fastest, doesn't have the longest battery, isn't the coolest, isn't the thinnest, yet year after year it's supposedly the best mobile there is. And every year, a machine with comparable specs from two years before is 1/3 the price and still works fine. The whole market is a sales con.

And let me tell the whole god damn industry something: _hinges are not an innovation_. Room dividers from the 15th century had double hinges that let them move 360 degrees, this is not rocket science, and it's certainly nothing to jump around and shout about. Magnets, amazing as they are, have been around forever. If you don't use them in your design it's because you were trying to rush a pointless release of your redundant platform. The industry has been holding back _basic, useful features_ for _years_ just so they can charge you more money the next year for something a kid in metal shop could make in an hour.

I just bought a Lenovo IdeaPad Miix 700 Core m5-6Y54 4GB 128GB (?!), a 1-year old stupid portable, for less than half its old retail price. It's a 2-in-1 with a 4 cell battery, which means it is too heavy to hold as a tablet, so they bundled a tiny keyboard, which of course has no rigid hinges so you can't place it on your lap. The "tiny" 4 gigabytes of RAM, and some weird bug with the touchpad, cause Chrome to crash constantly. And the keyboard stops typing randomly. For all of this inconvenience you get a high-ish resolution display that's good for _drawing on_ , and of course, it provides only a mild amount of heat from the back.

The CPU is an m5, which is an already-obsolete ultra-low-power version of a hybrid between a Pentium and an i5, which inexplicably has more L3 cache than anything but the highest performance CPU models available, yet less clock speed, with the main goals not being performance but less heat and power draw. Just forget that CPU exists since Intel no longer makes it (unless you do want higher L3 cache than other CPUs today). And of course you're stuck with a whopping _two cores_ , because how can we fit any more than two cores on a CPU when we have to use a gigantic 14 nanometer process? Oh, AMD and virtually every smartphone ships 4 to 8 cores in its chips? Don't worry, you can still totally get a high-power, 6-core (!!!), i5 6440 HQ, which has the same cores and L3 as an i7 from last year, and performs the same, and sucks as much power, and doesn't have very good graphics. Unless the manufacturer "turns down the TDP" and makes it run like a slower, earlier CPU, which you can't really change, all to make it slightly less hot. And of course, whatever the performance is, it will slow down quickly and consistently as the machine gets hotter.

The RAM is of course "tiny" by today's standards, but again, don't worry, you can pay a $200 premium for them to put a $30 stick of RAM in the thing to make it barely usable again.

After comparing benchmarks and battery life and processor specs and graphics and form factors and price for two days, I can tell you one thing about the PC (mainly mobile) market: it's more infuriating and confusing than ever, and nothing is worth the money they're asking because somehow it's going to disappoint you.

I'm pretty sure the people downvoting paid full price for a recent PC and are mad that i'm telling it like it is.

<comment><USER29> Downvoted for complaining about downvoting, as is tradition.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> In other news, the suit is back!</comment>


Debian 10 "Buster" Released - <AUTHOR> https://www.debian.org/News/2019/20190706 <comment><USER2> As in all threads on Debian stable, I see criticisms that stable software is stale / too old. That really misses the point: this is not a bug, it's a feature of stable!

Stability doesn't only mean "lack of (big) bugs", it also mean that it's dependable: it won't change under you, and what is inside is well understood (including limitations). This require using mature enough software. In any non-trivial piece of software novelty will brings exciting new features but also regressions in some cases. There's an inherent trade-off between freshness and stability in this sense.

Debian stable is made for stability in the full sense, like a Red Hat. If one prefers something more recent, but with more frequent changes, it's fine. Either use a distro with more frequent releases (e.g.: regular Ubuntu or Fedora) or even a rolling one like Arch, of Debian testing (sort of) or unstable. There's room for all of this, it's just different trade-offs.

Lastly, as I've said elsewhere it's possible to mix and match. One rarely needs the latest in all, and it's possible to use stable as a base to avoid problems, and add fresh versions on top for only the software one care about. With the various languages package managers and flatpack/snapd this is becoming very easy. For some it may be a better trade-off than moving to a rolling distro.

<comment><USER3> This is _particularly_ useful in the context of today's release policies. Between the ease of updating, the (perfectly justified!) "release early, release often" policy and the occasional rewrite frenzy, many open source projects _never_ have a truly stable release. On every release, at least some of the components or new features are, at best, beta-quality. The next release (typically) solves some of the bugs, but introduces new ones -- because it includes a new (and pretty much unfinished) feature, or something got rewritten and so on.

So if you're running an "unstable" system, you get a new set of bugs each time you upgrade, and a new set of workarounds, and so on. Debian's stability means that, at the very least, you get to work around one set of bugs every two years or so.

It's not ideal, but a lot of people prefer it that way, and frankly, I understand where they're coming from. It is a trade-off, just like it's a trade-off to run distros with more frequent releases or a rolling-release distro.

<comment><USER4> While this is true it widens the gap between stable -> unstable. So your only choice is either have really old [1] or really new.

This is why I prefer Archlinux's package selection which is nicely in between new & stable. You get the latest packages but not the alpha/beta or broken RCs.

(Not to start a distro flame war, but it's a reality of using Debian unstable is that it's going to break often.)

[1] a while back the 2yr+ old Gnome 3 package in Debian was way uglier than a new redesign HiDPI/retina-friendly version around 3.10 I believe, but took 2 yrs to show up. Which was around the time Gnome was finally catching up to Apple in the basic attention to detail at the pixel level. Which makes Debian a non-starter for Linux desktop to me, but fine for lower security servers.

<comment><USER3> > While this is true it widens the gap between stable -> unstable. So your > only choice is either have really old [1] or really new.

It does. It's not necessarily something that I consider a _good_ approach in every way, I just understand it. I myself took it for a few years, during the Great Rush to Rewrite Everything between cca. 2012 and 2017. I used to run Gentoo (at home) and Arch (at work) up to that point but I temporarily moved over to Debian (which I hadn't used since 2007 or so) until the storm settled for a bit.

Yeah, it does mean that things that are broken tend to remain broken for two years, but you also don't need a set of new workarounds for two years. I very un-fondly remember that back in 2013 or so when I said no more, my machine was perpetually broken in some way.

(FWIW, I've been back on Arch on my main station for more than two years now, it's gonna be hard to start a flamewar with me by arguing about Arch's package selection :-) ).

I guess it depends a lot on everyone's usage patterns, too, there's a lot of diversity in this space, more than many younger FOSS developers (and UX designers!) realize. Some of the nastier things I do to my station are deeply rooted in my first days of running Unices almost twenty years ago, and while I do my best to make sure that not all old habits die hard, it can be hard to convince people to let go of the good ones.

(Of course, "good ones" is subjective, hence the flamewars. I guess 50% of my habits are good, I just don't know _which_ 50%).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Congratulations to the Debian team on their new release! I will certainly be upgrading to it soon enough. Just for fun, I downloaded the ISO shortly after it went up and recorded my first impressions of using it on the happy path with the default GNOME environment. I would consider myself a technical user, but I use GNOME rarely and am not familiar with it personally.

* I didn't notice anything out of place with the Wayland switch. I haven't tested suspend/resume/hibernate/external monitors yet though. Personally, I won't be using Wayland on my main machine once I update that as I'm a CWM user, and Wayland support probably isn't every going to happen for that.

* My user account wasn't added to the sudo group by default, and using `su` broke something with PATH (/sbin wasn't in PATH after running `su`).

* GNOME apparently does not support configuring multiple wifi adapters, which was a problem since I had intended to use a USB adapter to download the nonfree drivers for my internal adapter, but GNOME did not have a menu to configure them separately.

* The problems that GNOME 3.X has always had continue to be present -- chiefly the UI scale is too large on low-res screens (the machine I was testing with has a 1366x768 display), and graphics performance continues to disappoint (animations stutter very noticeably on the "search" screen for example, this was on a 2nd gen mobile i7).

* The much-touted software center seemed to have several polish issues. The first time I launched it it threw a bunch of inscrutable errors and didn't work until I re-booted the machine. It still threw inscrutable errors, but worked after this. Lists of software would take 60s+ to download (render? not sure what part was slowing it down).

From the perspective of a technical user, I don't care about any of these. They either affect software I don't use, or could be fixed easily enough. However, if the objective is to support non-technical users who don't have the knowledge/time/interest to troubleshoot, I feel that this release falls short.

For reference, the hardware used to test was a ThinkPad X220 with a 2nd gen i7, 12GB RAM, and an SSD.

<comment><USER3> > The problems that GNOME 3.X has always had continue to be present -- chiefly > the UI scale is too large on low-res screens (the machine I was testing with > has a 1366x768 display)

It's not just Gnome that does that. There's an entire generation of designers that's cargo-culting mobile designs at the moment. Breeze, KDE's default theme, is equally space-wasting. They're great if you have a touch screen but it would be really cool if you could turn them off on systems without touch screens, i.e. about 99% of the current Linux installations I'm guessing :-).

If you're willing to fiddle around, there are a few good themes that don't waste so much space.

<comment><USER6> I totally agree with your overall point, but:

> about 99% of the current Linux installations

Not if you include Android!

<comment><USER7> In these contexts people usually mean "GNU/Linux desktop" when they say "Linux". It is not as if we have any meaningful choice of desktop environment on Android-land anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Some interesting bits in the What's New [1] part of the release notes, besides just package updates. Pulling out a few:

* UEFI Secure Boot support

* AppArmor now installed by default, with profiles for various programs

* APT can optionally be sandboxed with seccomp-bpf (but not yet enabled by default)

* nftables replaces iptables as the network filter

* GNOME/Wayland by default

[1] [https://www.debian.org/releases/buster/amd64/release- notes/c...](https://www.debian.org/releases/buster/amd64/release-notes/ch- whats-new.en.html)

</comment><comment><USER9> PostgreSQL 11 and Python 3.7.2 in Debian Stable supported for the next 5 years? Nice!

<comment><USER10> Rust and go as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> From my anecdata, I'm seeing Debian growing into the role that Red Hat used to have in the enterprise, on VPSs, and as a stable build server requiring older gcc and other backports etc., with Ubuntu being the the most used O/S by developers now (more than Mac OS, let alone Windows, at my recent customers). I'm quite ok with it, as it keeps the door open for Devuan to get rid of SystemD as RH looses influence. With their focus on stable, I wonder if Debian could collect maintenance contributions (code or cash) from enterprises.

<comment><USER12> Always interested in why exactly systemd is bad?

There's a lot of negative PR and not much evidence of why people shouldn't use it. Comes across as like the same recommendations of "don't use chrome, use this fork instead", one that's run by a tiny team of people who face very little consequences for messing up.

<comment><USER13> My reasons for avoiding it:

* build system actively makes it difficult to build one component without the others, seemingly for political rather than technical reasons

* build system relies on Python, making bootstrapping more difficult (not quite desirable for "building blocks to build an OS from")

* needless overlap with countless other pre-existing projects including binfmt-support, lxc/runc, and libdbus

* cgroups2 hierarchy model which is unworkable for rootless containers unless they register with systemd via dbus or are running directly as systemd services

* The dependency model has lots of corner cases and gotchas. OpenRC and the LSB headers are much simpler and just as effective.

* Events are done in a hacky way: device events are performed by tucking "SYSTEMD_WANTS=..." away in a udev rule _somewhere_ , IPC and timer events have their own unit types. This model is not extensible, and it obscures the policy rules that can be used to start a particular service.

* All the positive PR and marketing has left a bad taste in my mouth. Why did RedHat fly Lennart across the world dozens of times just to sell this hunk of C to literally anybody that would listen? It was a waste of petrol and shows that systemd did not win on merits alone.

* does not make any attempts at portability, and does not follow any pre-existing standardized interfaces that can be easily emulated on other OSs.

* Reliant on dbus as its primary IPC mechanism, when it does not even need a bus in the first place. JSON over a socket could have been a simpler and cleaner choice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> gjsman-1000 ...and Wayland is the DEFAULT? Things must have gotten better quite quickly.

<comment><USER14> The problem with Wayland right now is that most (tiling) window managers need a very significant effort to be ported from X11.

<comment><USER15> Maybe sircmpwn could comment on this: Could wlroots (originally for Sway) make the transition process easier for other tiling window mangers wanting to port to Wayland?

<comment><USER16> Personally I'm waiting for a tiling Wayland WM that supports NVIDIA.

<comment><USER17> Wait. So I haven't used Wayland at all yet but why would the graphics driver need to have support for a tiling WM? isn't that in a whole different later and shouldn't matter at all?

Does NVIDIAs driver has any special code to make i3 work on X11 but missing code to make sway work on Wayland?

<comment><USER18> It's the other way around: on X11, nVidia implements all the standard APIs, so window managers like i3 don't need driver-specific code.

For Wayland, nVidia only implements the EGLStreams buffer management API, whereas other drivers implement the GBM API. Individual compositors (like sway) need to add support for EGLStreams.

See also [https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Wayland#Requirements](https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Wayland#Requirements)

<comment><USER19> Note that Wayland doesn't have a full driver abstraction layer in userland like X does. Every Wayland compositior is expected to call into the Linux kernel drivers for the graphics card directly. GBM is just a thin wrapper that hides the fact that Linux never standardised the buffer creation interface across different hardware - it assumes that all those driver-specific interfaces wrap essentially the same shared Linux buffer management code, and it doesn't abstract stuff like modesetting at all. NVidia managed to reimplement enough of the Linux modesetting interface that existing code mostly works, but their own buffer management infrastructure is apparently different enough that they couldn't make it look like the one existing Wayland compositors are expecting to use. So they ended up creating their own slightly higher-level API instead.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I run Debian everywhere, it's super stable, had machine that was running production jobs for almost 3 years without downtime (around 1000 days uptime) and it went down because of server power supply failure. Have plenty of machines with 1+ year of uptime.

<comment><USER21> I also run Debian (almost) everywhere. For those who want a rolling release, Debian testing is also surprisingly stable. One of my laptops has been on testing getting continuous updates for about 7 years now and still runs great.

<comment><USER8> Even Debian unstable is reasonably stable for me (despite the name), comparable to other rolling-release distros I think. Really not-ready-to-ship stuff is uploaded to 'experimental' instead. The main precaution I take is having 'apt-listbugs' installed. It checks for any new high-severity bugs in the packages you're upgrading. You can take a look at them before deciding whether to upgrade, which occasionally helps avoid installing something broken.

On servers I prefer Debian stable though. I like my mail server running unattended with only security upgrades, and rolling-release distros tend to introduce config-breaking changes exactly when I have the least time to deal with them.

<comment><USER21> You're describing my setup exactly. Stable for servers, testing for personal machines, with apt-listbugs installed (the install guide recommended this at one point, not sure if it still does). I also ran unstable for about two years and, like you said, it was fine.

Testing is usually only a few weeks behind unstable though, so if your primary motivation is to have relatively recent software and a rolling release so that you never have to stop everything and deal with full system upgrade breakages, then testing is great.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I upgraded a couple days ago from stretch and was happy with the no hassle experience. I got newer nvidea drivers and cuda 10.1 and finally managed to figure out how to get nvenc encoding to work. I installed it fresh on a virtual machine for a server project I am working on and was glad to find all my scripts work as expected (about 100 of them)

</comment><comment><USER23> From Node 4 to Node 10.15. Huge upgrade in JS land.

<comment><USER24> Were they were any people _not_ using alternative repositories for Node?

If I'm deploying node to a server the first thing I do is set the system up to use nodesource's repos.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Great job Debian team, personally I can't wait for the Devuan fork based on this release.

</comment><comment><USER26> I wonder if the timing of this is significant. For people wanting a rock solid, free, stable distro, Debian and CentOS are two of the top choices. Even though RHEL 8 released, CentOS 8 still isn't out. I'm running CentOS 7 on my server, and it's getting long in the tooth. Debian 10 releasing before CentOS 8 will likely result in me giving it a spin.

<comment><USER27> OpenSuSE is great as well. Stable, the Leap release is reasonably fresh with 18 month support window and they have a rolling release.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I'm personally looking more forward to the Devuan "Beowulf" release. Maybe this will happen soon now that Debian "Buster" is released.

</comment><comment><USER29> Hah, we just got rid of our last Jessie box in our $work setup (with the exception of some database boxes that aren't part of the regular upgrade cycle).

I hope this next dist upgrade goes much quicker, due to the automations we've built (config management with Ansible, Continuous Delivery).

</comment><comment><USER30> Congratulations! Hopefully libdrm will start moving soon, so Mesa master will be buildable again.

</comment><comment><USER31> Don't like the speculation 'old software is stable', sounds like cheap marketing. If any software was released X years ago nothing doing this old release "better" or "stable", bugs happens everywhere.

<comment><USER32> That's not the sort of "stable" that is meant by "debian stable". It's "stable" as in "doesn't change". Things shouldn't break randomly every couple of months. You shouldn't wake up one morning and realize that one of your applications needs to be ported to a new API to keep working. If something works today, it should still work in 6 months, while still receiving security fixes. You should be able to reliably narrow down weird bugs without it becoming a heisenbug due to the shifting sands of your underlying software distribution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> So can anybody explain why did they decide to split Python into python3 and python3-pip packages?

Pip is not some random third-party library, it's part of the official installation that you can get from python.org.

</comment><comment><USER34> People that have used both Ubuntu and Debian, what are the cons of using Debian over Ubuntu? Also, which is the best supported desktop environment these days for Debian?

</comment><comment><USER35> Great! Now just waiting for official tarsnap and nginx.org builds so I can upgrade my servers. MariaDB already has Buster builds in their deb repositories.

<comment><USER36> Doesn't the existing Tarsnap package work?

<comment><USER37> Not for me - seems it depends on libssl1.0 and buster ships 1.1

<comment><USER36> Oh, right. Try the experimental packages: [http://mail.tarsnap.com/tarsnap- users/msg01557.html](http://mail.tarsnap.com/tarsnap-users/msg01557.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Does Debian 10 work on the Asus Tinkerboard as-is? Or do i need a special version? I look forward to running it!

<comment><USER39> It'll probably run but hw accel will be a pain. I'd rather go for armbian.

<comment><USER38> I don't need HDMI, I just want to run some network services on it.

Looks like Armbian Buster is alread out: [https://www.armbian.com/tinkerboard/](https://www.armbian.com/tinkerboard/)

<comment><USER39> Lucky for you. The tinkerboard is actually pretty nice gear aside from the god forsaken hw accel.

Keep an eye on the temp though - seems to run hot. I managed to get mine to behave without a fan by adding significant thermal mass. (~pound of copper)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I do hope Debian will run well on emerging privsec-focused hardware like Librem...

<comment><USER8> It looks like everything except bluetooth works out of the box: [https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/Purism/Librem%201...](https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/Purism/Librem%2013)

<comment><USER41> And worth noting that enabling Bluetooth is as simple as installing the firmware-atheros non-free package.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Is there wireguard support?

</comment><comment><USER43> yeah but npm is broken. Software update is broken because something was changed from testing to staging. Seems they didn't even test their first time setup.

</comment><comment><USER44> I notice m68k is not part of the release.

<comment><USER45> Hasn't been for a while. The last release to include official m68k support was 4.0 (etch).

From a practical standpoint, m68k is old to the point that it doesn't seem practical to run any kind of modern Linux system on it anymore. The last new processor in the family (the 68060) was released in 1994, and ran at 75 MHz.

<comment><USER44> Even if not tier 1 or whatever, I still sort of expected it to be there, as the port certainly exists and is still alive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I love how it's 2019 and installing Debian still requires a PhD in forensic psychology to find the download link.

<comment><USER47> 2.4. Installation Media

        2.4.1. CD-ROM/DVD-ROM/BD-ROM
        2.4.2. USB Memory Stick
        2.4.3. Network
        2.4.4. Hard Disk
        2.4.5. Un*x or GNU system
        2.4.6. Supported Storage Systems

[https://www.debian.org/releases/buster/amd64/ch02s04.en.html](https://www.debian.org/releases/buster/amd64/ch02s04.en.html)

I am going to burn a CD-ROM and/or DVD-ROM. It's been a while and feels very retro, I guess I could do this. What is a a BD-ROM?

I am going to use dd to copy the image onto a USB Memory Stick. I've done that.

I am going to do a Network install, no I am not going to do this.

Hard Disk install, this is how I installed it previously. Let me find my notes.

Whether it's CD-ROM, DVD-ROM, USB Memory Stick, or Hard Disk install, the tricky bit is getting the computer to boot the image from that media. And, the tricky part about this is knowing the incantation for GRUB to do this. And, the additional tricky part is the mangled PC EUFI/Secure boot settings. If it's the raspberry pi it's easy: I stick the USB Memory stick in the pi and go. If it's the PC, it's well, as you said: forensics.

I wish that I could download a little install program, and install a fresh OS into one of the many free partitions on the PC, and that the installer would automatically configure GRUB to recognize that new OS without the incantations, and without stomping on other distros.

<comment><USER48> I'm not sure what you mean because I've never had to type anything manually at the grub prompt in an installation use case -- the boot images seem to be configured right, to give you a ramdisk and go into an installer.

But I will say:

> I am going to do a Network install, no I am not going to do this.

For Debian netinst really is the best. Debian has _a lot_ of packages. I haven't kept up with all the full media over the years [first time I did a debian install was '99 or so], but it's always seemed pretty "completist", and contains more than I'll ever use. With netinst you get a base system, it gets you to a shell quickly and you can apt-get exactly what you need without a lot else.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> how long before ubuntu switches over to this? i don't even know if ubuntu has forked from debian or it's pretty much the same, but with different package management?

<comment><AUTHOR> I believe that Ubuntu gets their packages from Debian unstable not stable. So the latest Ubuntu most likely already has very similar packages (if not slightly newer) to this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Will someday debian authors and die hard fans understand that old libc and old Firefox or Gimp are different and one really can mean stable and another can be just outdated?

Is it possible that desktop should be developed in other manner than server?

<comment><USER51> They could implement something like Fedora modules: you have a stable base system, and then you have separate module streams for some software packages, which are updated separately, with multiple versions supported concurrently. For example, you can install the latest Fedora, and then pull the postgresql-9.6 module (or 10, or 11, or all three in parallel), despite 11 being the "official" version.

[https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/modularity/using- module...](https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/modularity/using-modules/)

<comment><USER52> Tangential but this is misunderstood widely, so I cannot resist the urge to explain.

First of all, modules can not be installed in parallel [1].

Secondly, it is not a new technological development at all. Modules in essence are just a fancy version of maintaining multiple overlay repositories on top of your base distribution. Only difference is it adds a more streamlined usage to dnf. You could do the same thing 15 years ago with yum or apt by manually enabling/disabling repositories.

This is the easy part.

Real hard work that goes to modules is actually creating and maintaining those separate modules having separate versions of the same software stack. And that is the thing none of the distributions were willing to do until recently. Heck, maintaining multiple versions of the same library or the same program in a distribution release was a _taboo_. Distribution developers dreaded the idea of doing that and avoided it as possible as they can.

Jury is still out on how well it'll work in practice and how much useful it'll be (in that will maintainers be actually eager to do the hard work of maintaining multiple stacks in parallel, how long will they support each version or how many versions will they maintain in parallel etc.)

I have the best wishes Fedora developers with the modules idea and I hope it'll prove to be successful thus maybe other distributions would be more open to the idea in the future.

[1] > Modularity brings parallel availability, not parallel installability. Only one stream of a given module can be enabled on a system [https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en- US/modularity/architecture...](https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en- US/modularity/architecture/consuming/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> I used to run Debian, but I switched to Fedora a few years ago and haven't looked back. Fedora is always sleek and up-to-date, unlike Debian, which due to its outdated packages always ends up looking like the plain step-sister. I also strongly prefer DNF to apt. With that being said, they both play crucial roles in the Linux ecosystem - Debian being the base for Ubuntu and Mint, and Fedora being the distribution which upstreams the most code.

<comment><USER54> Running Debian testing is generally the practice I recommend on systems which are single-user, like desktops and laptops. It's quite stable and very up to date, except for a couple of months in the run-up to freeze.

Disclaimer: I'm a Debian developer.

<comment><USER55> As a long time Debian user, I think you're doing Debian a disservice giving that advice. Debian testing is stable... except when it's not. Tell people that it's _relatively_ stable, not that it's stable. And please don't tell them to run their daily driver on it unless they know what they're potentially getting into.

My own experience is that things can be broken for months in testing and of course good luck finding any help when that happens. For example, since the freeze for Buster I had broken sound drivers for a couple of months until someone else found that it wasn't actually the drivers but another broken package that as of a month or so ago still wasn't fixed (but the problem had been reported)

That's been my experience with testing for the last 3-4 Debian releases: it works great... except for a handful of annoying bugs that seem to linger almost until release. And _assuming_ you know exactly which package is broken (which can be difficult to narrow down for driver/system level issues), you may or may not get the problem addressed in a timely manner. Then there's also the case of the occasional package that you depend on that disappears from testing for a month or two for any number of reasons.

<comment><USER56> > I had broken sound drivers for a couple of months until someone else found > that it wasn't actually the drivers but another broken package that as of a > month or so ago still wasn't fixed (but the problem had been reported)

I had the _exact_ same problem (the issue ended up be a MIDI program called timidity). The main problem for me was that Debian doesn't give any advice on how to report such issues (the website is firmly planted in the early 90s), and the mailing lists I found all appear to be dead. I wish Debian had a slightly more modern website.

<comment><USER55> That would be the one! I posted a stackoverflow question along with my workaround not knowing the cause. Fortunately, someone else identified timidity as the root cause. Definitely one of the stranger issues I've run into using testing in recent years, but far from the only one.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


I started avoiding the word 'own' - <AUTHOR> https://rosshemsley.co.uk/posts/no-own/ <comment><USER2> > For contrast, to drive or be responsible for a project is to sweat the > details, to keep on top of communicating status, to go the extra mile with > testing and get the work done on time. If you ask someone to own a project, > aren't they within their rights to simply not do anything and forget about > it? After all, they do own it, so why shouldn't they do what they want with > it?!

People don't tend to invest themselves in or take responsibility for projects in which they don't have an ownership stake, including the ability to make decisions independently. This is why we have property rights in real-life. Consensus and cooperation don't scale without bright line boundaries around who has ultimate responsibility for various components.

But having an ownership stake is merely necessary, not sufficient. People don't fully invest in some property unless they're deriving immediate benefit or there's the threat of it being taken away.

The concept of adverse possession in the Common Law is instructive on this point. If someone begins to improve a piece of property while the nominal "owner" sits on his hands, guess who the law recognizes as the owner? I'm simplifying a bit, but my point is that if an owner is neglecting a project people should feel free to take ownership and the rules should reflect this. Ownership really only matters when there's _substantive_ _conflict_ , and such conflict is precisely when you want and need clear boundaries.

Employees proactively supporting each other and proactively picking up the slack isn't disincentivized by ownership. Ownership is perfectly reconcilable with a culture where people feel free to innovate and invest, you just need to make sure the rules are clear and goal oriented.[1]

Avoiding nominal ownership because of fears of conflict and tension doesn't actually resolve the fear and tension. People are social creatures--the fear and tension reflect expectations and anxiety about how others will directly react to their contributions. Lack of ownership makes this worse by removing a clear cut conflict resolution mechanism. If project owners aren't accepting contributions it's either because they're fearful of losing ownership, in which case the solution is to validate their ownership, or they're neglecting their responsibility as owners to improve the project, in which case ownership should transfer to someone willing to take on that responsibility.

> So why not start using "author" instead - which captures exactly the > intended meaning - "I authored this doc, come to me if you want to know more > or have questions".

Who cares about authorship? Authors are only useful for clarifying history-- answering retrospective questions that aren't self-evident from the code. The questions that matter the most are prospective--in which direction is the project going? If I implement feature A in such-and-such manner, will it conflict with feature B? Only someone with meaningful control over future authorship can answer those questions, and that person--if they exist at all-- is by definition the _owner_ , regardless of whether they were, are, or will be an author.

[1] I like the Hacker Ethos, which is he who writes the code gets deference. A corollary is that if a nominal owner is dilitory, then the contributor should be free to take ownership--this often ends up the de facto state of things, anyhow, especially in the open source world. At work I try to apply the rule this way: if someone makes a contribution that provides substantive benefit and it doesn't _imminently_ conflict with existing work ("planned" work doesn't count!) and isn't patently incorrect, then I'll accept it. Case closed. I may think it's the wrong approach, but the fact this person solved a problem while I was working on something else is strong _empirical_ _evidence_ about the best course of action for realizing substantive benefit globally; it can't be dismissed without equally strong _manifest_ reasons.</comment>


The evolution of hard drives  - <AUTHOR> http://www.macworld.com/article/156758/2010/12/harddriveevolution.html?lsrc=rss_news <comment><USER2> It looks like hard disks are going to stay for a couple more years. SSs are fast, but storage costs are still dropping with magnetic disks.

<comment><USER3> I think that depends on the growth of the data people want to store. I don't think the storage needs of many homes grows faster than about 4GB per year (1000 photos or 80 music albums [0]), at least if nobody in that particular home is a video enthusiast or an avid PC gamer. A 160GB SSD or even a 120GB SSD would last such a home many years, probably much longer than the lifetime of the drive.

I recently de-cluttered my parents' PC and can say with authority that their storage needs didn't grow by more than a gigabyte in the last year. I have the suspicion that many of those 1TB drives they build in cheap PCs these days are mostly empty.

[0] Especially photos seem to me to be the one thing that really demands additional storage and that nearly everyone uses. Documents usually only take up a few hundred megabyte.

<comment><USER2> High definition video cameras are proliferating, as well as bandwidth (which creates a demand for digital downloads). I don't think 160GB would work for too long in this scenario.

<comment><USER3> If you record video or download video content. Not everyone does. Just because the iPhone can record 720p footage doesn't mean everyone uses it. (My parents never downloaded a video and never recorded a video.)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How can I retrieve my hotmail account from a hacker - <AUTHOR>

My email was hacked and the person changed my alternate email and my secret question/answer.<p>I cant find any way to contact a Hotmail employee. Anyone here knows how I can get back my account. <comment><USER2> A number of customers have been able to get help from MSN's support line:

1-866-672-4551

May require having (or purchasing) a Windows Live Hotmail Plus account or other paid MSN account. You may also need to call back several times until reaching someone willing/able to help.

</comment><comment><USER3> I google "hijacked hotmail" and all I found was a lot of other people in the same situation. maybe some deep digging on that search might yield some solution.</comment>


Ask HN: Would you love Quora more if it looked like this? - <AUTHOR> http://twitpic.com/30tcsf/full

<comment><USER2> I really like this layout. The added whitespace and clear focus on the content (by having a different background color for the sidebar) is very effective.

I think I'd put a bit more space between the Name+Picture+#ofVotes and the content - perhaps half the space you have between paragraphs? I'm not much of a web designer, though.

One important factor is that there's no Quora branding - I'm sure that would be a prerequisite before they would consider the layout.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yea, I agree. I need to add some more space between user's image and number if votes.

Regarding Branding, they have it on the header. I was just playing with it on Firebug and took screenshot so that part got clipped.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I have seen many of my friends and colleagues use Quora alot. And I like their concept. But some how I don't feel like visiting because of their UI. I wish it was little easier to read / skim. May be it's just me.

I was playing around with their CSS. Wanted to know your opinion / feedback.</comment>


The EARN IT Act: How to Ban End-to-End Encryption Without Banning It - <AUTHOR> https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2020/01/earn-it-act-how-ban-end-end-encryption-without-actually-banning-it <comment><USER2> Previous discussion (now both entries are on the frontpage): [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22202110](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22202110)

</comment><comment><USER3> This kind of insanity- can our legislators please consult someone in technology before they try and rip apart digital privacy because a few bad actors exist. The classic "Will someone think of the children!" pearl clutching also brought us SOPA and PIPA, that thankfully were shot down by internet outrage after the cost was brought to the full attention of the public.

<comment><USER4> I don't think that this sort of effort is the result of legislators not understanding the technology or as a reaction to "a few bad actors". Those things only look true because of the highly disingenuous arguments they're making.

They actively want to prevent effective encryption from being in common use solely because it restricts their ability to spy on you and me, thus limiting their power.

<comment><USER5> I don't have the context on the intentions of these people, but what makes you think this? Isn't it possible they only care about protecting children and the side effects are completely dismissed, rather than it being a power grab? Just curious what evidence makes you believe it's nefarious.

<comment><USER6> Track record? This is not the American federal government's first digital powergrab.

They don't deserve being given the benefit of the doubt.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Solution: make the portions of a company that deal with/offer E2EE and those that don't separate entities.

The bits that are E2EE don't need immunity because they don't make CSAM available online. The other bits get immunity because they don't do E2EE, which is fine, because that's the way it currently is.

I really don't see the point of this.

</comment><comment><USER8> Dupe</comment>


Show HN: Flinto is fast, shareable, installable iOS prototyping - <AUTHOR> https://www.flinto.com

<comment><USER2> Five stars, would prototype again.</comment>


Ask HN: successful career, but want to get an undergrad degree.. what program? - <AUTHOR>

Hi,
I have a successful career in IT and not having an undergrad degree has never been an issue for me.
However, I'd really like to earn a degree.. it's a goal of mine.
I am looking for a program where I will actually learn new things.  Something tech related would be ideal, but I am open to other things if they are interesting to me.
I'm in the Boston area, and I'm open to both online courses as well as attending in person.  I'd actually like the ability to be able to take some courses in person, when possible.
I did attend Northeastern's CPS program <http://cps.neu.edu> but honestly I didn't find anything challenging or interesting about what they offered.  Truthfully, that is the reason why I never obtained a degree previously.  I always felt that I could learn more myself.  Yet, it is a goal that I want to achieve - but I don't want to achieve it just to do it, I want to actually get something out of it and enjoy it.
Any suggestions on programs to look at?  I need something that will allow me to continue working as I take courses.
Thanks in advance for your suggestions. <comment><USER2> You've probably seen this already, but have you considered the Harvard Extension School? I don't know the details, but I do know the extension school offers some classes taught by the same professors that teach regular Harvard classes.

An example of these classes is Prof. Michael Mitzenmacher's algorithm's class, which is both challenging and fun. I think the class is offered online and maybe in person during the summer. ([http://www.extension.harvard.edu/2010-11/courses/21462.jsp?c...](http://www.extension.harvard.edu/2010-11/courses/21462.jsp?caller=dce) )

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah I am aware of the Harvard Extension school. They require an on-campus course up front but it would be a big pain for me to go to Cambridge for that. Not to mention it is a writing course which is something I have already done elsewhere.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> What's your true passion? That's what you should study!</comment>


Show HN: I am creating a campaign to mitigate Covid-19 crisis in Spain - <AUTHOR> I have been thinking a lot why there is such a huge difference between mortality in Germany and Italy and I may have figured it out.
This understanding could be possibly applied in Spain to avoid or at least mitigate similar level crisis that is currently taking place in Italy.
I created a GitHub Pages based website http://www.savespain.eu/ for the campaign. My main motivation for this choice is to promote transparency and collaboration. The GitHub page is located here https://github.com/savespain-covid19/Save-Spain
The main takeaway is that the main difference is most likely in the family structure - many Italians live together with their extended family while Germans do not (or they have by some other means that I am not aware of kept their elderly not infected by the corona virus).
If you think that this thinking is plausible then please support this campaign by either contributing or by sharing. It is especially important to reach Spanish people. I do not know any unfortunately at the moment yet.
The time is running out fast. There are only few days left to act. Lets push this together and save Spain! <comment><USER2> > It is especially important to reach Spanish people.

The page is in english?

> I do not know any [Spanish people] unfortunately at the moment yet.

Not knowing the target audience is a bad start.

> The message must be shared as much as possible and to the highest decision > makers as possible.

Be realistic. The decision makers get 1000 pieces of information all day about the Covid-19 crisis. They will contact experts in their respected field not a website with statistics and advise to deep distance and washing hands. It's hard not be too harsh here but you setting yourself an unrealistic goal.

> It is important to back my generalizations with the actual research as much > as possible.

Sorry, that makes it even less believable.

<comment><AUTHOR> I know, but there is not much time left and you have to start from somewhere. I do not expect to succeed but doing nothing is also not an option for me.

It is hard problem to solve for sure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> What kind of minimal effort to think on that complex social structure and associating it with pandemic?

Before asking support for your campaign, please show that you did your homework in detail.

> There are only few days left to act. Lets push this together and save Spain! > seriously!

</comment><comment><USER4>
        As you can see, there is huge structural
        demographic difference between infected
        people in Italy and in Germany.

I can not see that from the graphs on your page. Can you express it in a numeric way?

<comment> savespain-cov19 In Italy 57.5% infected people are 60 year old or older. 18.3% of people are 80 year old or older. The source for this is here [https://twitter.com/GlennLuk/status/1237904780577722369](https://twitter.com/GlennLuk/status/1237904780577722369)

In Germany according Robert Koch Institute has demographic data about 447 cases of 902 total cases. According to this data only there are only 14% men in the age group 60-79 and only 10% of women in the same age group. There is very small amount of people (difficult to measure from the graph) that are 80 year old or older.

Edit: Also thank you! I edited the page to include this information.

<comment><USER4> One explanation could be different testing habbits. If Germany tested everyone with symptoms and Italy only tested people with severe symptoms. The latter are mainly older people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> savespain-cov19 This is an official account of this campaign, AMA.</comment>


Computer software terms 'unfair' - <AUTHOR> http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7252707.stm

<comment><USER2> Sounds like a business opportunity for someone else.</comment>


Hackers and Founders presents: Heysan and Snipd (Thursday October 16th) - <AUTHOR> http://entrepreneur.meetup.com/1737/calendar/8700459/ asdf <comment><AUTHOR> In light of the impending application deadline at Y Combinator, we invited founders from two Y Combinator start-ups to share their experiences -- from the brainstorm to the branding and beyond. After the presentations, the founders will take your questions.

The presentations and the Q & A will be videotaped and posted online.

Afterward, there will still be plenty of time to do what Hackers and Founders do best -- have a beverage and a chat. Please join us in the hotel bar after the presentations.

Here are all the details. See you there!

Date and Time Thursday, October 16, 2008 6:30 - 7:00 pm - Doors open 7:00 - 9:00 pm - Presentations 9:00 - 11:00 pm - Adjourn to hotel bar

RSVP By October 13, 2008</comment>


Ask HN: I want to add SMS to my service, tips/help/advice? - <AUTHOR>

Lets say you start a GPS/SMS-service so you receive an SMS, do some stuff with the data and sends back what they ask for.
So you have a transaction and thus a way to make money.
How can you charge money for this? Can you contact a telecompany and somehow split the profits? Like, you put a prize of 40c for an SMS then you split it 30c/10c telecompany/me.
Any tips on how to go about this? This must be possible right? <comment><USER2> How to go about this (generating revenue from Premium SMS transactions):

1) Secure a 5 or 6 digit ShortCode from Neustar(the only seller of shortcodes, usshortcodes.com) This will take approximately 1 month and cost $1000/month billed in 3 month intervals. Premium messaging only works with a shortcode, so this is necessary.

2) Secure a contract with an SMS provider. I strongly suggest m-Qube, which is now owned by Verisign. Their service is excellent in every way. Great APIs, superior uptime and performance, superior support, very competitive rates, excellent relationships with the carriers.

3) Draft a 'Program Brief' following the carrier guidelines, that explains your application. These guidelines are very specific (things like how you offer the ability to opt-out, advertise your tariffs, etc.) and your application must conform to them perfectly before the carriers will approve it.

4) Submit the Program Brief for carrier approval. This process takes between 1 to 3 months depending on the nature of the application, particular carrier, etc. The approval process may, and often does, include redoing some of your application to suit the carriers.

5) Assuming all the carriers approve your Program Brief, you can then start charging users when you send them a response. (sending a message is the only event you can charge a premium tariff for).

The carriers each have a specific revenue sharing breakdown that is dependent on volume, price point, etc. In the case of m-Qube, they also take a small cut. Negotiating directly with the carriers is another endeavor entirely that I dont have any expertise in.

</comment><comment><USER3> Unless you're huge you aren't going to connect directly in with the operators. There are too many and the implementation is hell. You connect into a middleman who has direct connections to all the majors.

Search for premium SMS providers. There are quite a few. It's probably not going to be cheap, especially if you want a dedicated short code (they rake you over the coals for that). m-bill.net is one that came up for me and I've heard of them in the past. They have agreements in place internationally, which can be a really good thing. But they don't list prices, which can be a bad sign.

Realistically you're probably looking at $1000 a month minimum. And giving up about half the revenue (I think a lot goes to the carrier, but you can't really find out the exact percentage because the providers work off volume and what not).

</comment><comment><USER4> As for simple sending/receiving SMS messages, we at gtalk2voip.com use Clickatell's SMS service, which is very flexible, offers good technical support and providers a number of APIs including SMTP, SMPP and HTTP (we use SMTP). Among their cons: their rates are quite high unless you pre-pay for 1M messages a month and they don't want to provide you with a complete list of rates associated to mobile phone (DEF) prefixes, so reselling SMSes is close to impossible, cause you have no means to know how to account your own users in real time :-(.

As for selling content over SMS, as far as I know there's no way for a small startup company to get into revenue sharing deals with mobile carriers, besides there are a lot many of them. Yet, there are some companies that provide paid content distribution service, which you can use to resell your mobile service, software or other content you have right for (some junk like ring-tones, pron, etc). They act as a proxy service and they take up to 70% of revenue. They usually have a small coverage of mobile carriers they work with. Also there is a very high rate of returns/chargebacks, as end-user is always right even if he completely abused your service or software :-(. We wanted to use such service to let our customers recharge their balances in our system with a single SMS sent. After I studied this subject (for Europe, have no ideas about US) we abandoned the idea as completely profitless. If you find out anything with better conditions, please let me know.

</comment><comment><USER5> <http://www.textmarks.com/>

is free but they insert ads sometimes (always?)

<comment><USER3> That's not for PSMS though (which is what the OP was talking about, transactions and all that).

<comment><USER5> I haven't used it, but TextMarks does have a system for responding to users' messages:

<http://www.textmarks.com/dev/docs/recv/?ref=devsb>

<comment><USER3> Responding to users still is not PSMS. Whole different game.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Please checkout <http://txtme.savitr.net>. This is a service started by my startup Savitr Wireless (<http://www.savitr.net>)

We have built a SMS Engine / Framework which easily integrates with aggregators / carriers to send and receive SMS messages.

We license out the Framework directly as well as provide API to our hosted service.

</comment><comment><USER7> I recommend Zong.com - They specialise in this and have an API.

</comment><comment><USER8> I've worked with mxtelecom (it was so-so), mblox (better than mxtelecom) and mindmatics (best experience so far). The whole process will be frustrating from the beginning, and it never gets much better. But it's doable, and if your service is compelling, there's a decent amount of money to be made.

</comment><comment><USER9> It's called reverse billing. Lots of information out there, and a lot of providers. Don't use SMS as your primary source of revenue. Use reverse- billing just for a "fun" feature and hope to break even on it.

<comment><USER10> i wouldnt suggest reverse billing, this is messy and complicated. Reverse billing indicates that the recipient pays(This is usually used when requesting content, that is not initiated via SMS i.e from WAP/Internet) However if you are requesting something via SMS the easiest option is for a premium rated SMS number.

Also, reverse billing is usually more difficult to setup premium sms can be bought from any of the WASP's

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Look for WASP... Wireless Application Service providers, they usually have links to all the mobile operators and they charge you a fee.

</comment><comment><USER11> This is called premium sms. There are lots of providers out there offering a service for this.

</comment><comment><USER12> You might want to check out teleflip.com. It's a free sms gateway.</comment>


Crashes, Hangs and Crazy Images by Adding Zero: Fuzzing OpenGL Shader Compilers - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@afd_icl/crashes-hangs-and-crazy-images-by-adding-zero-689d15ce922b <comment><USER2> Exploits in shader compilers will likley be a big avenue for exploiting platforms in the future because basically all desktop systems use Nvidia, and an exploit of the shader compiler can usually get you direct root access.

<comment><USER3> On the Mac it's worse: the drivers are not NVIDIA's (which are relatively high quality) but instead Apple's own and have become horrendously bad in the past few years. I've lost count of the number of just plain broken functionality and hard system crashes I've had to deal with doing graphics programming with Apple drivers, including a random out of bounds memory read (security sensitive? who knows!) that was particularly fun.

As far as I can tell, Apple has set a new record for how quickly you can go from the best OpenGL drivers in the industry to the worst.

<comment><USER4> Well, this is likely due to the refocus on "Metal". Which is just DirectX _de novo_.

It's not only bugs, it's the lack of features. It's out of date, to the point that companies are no longer releasing games. For instance, Frontier has an Elite: Dangerous version for the Mac. It doesn't have the expansions, due to the lack of compute shaders, which are not supported by Apple's crappy OpenGL implementation.

Not that Macs are good gaming machines. But this only compounds the problem.

<comment><USER3> > Which is just DirectX _de novo_.

Except without the market share in high end gaming/graphics that made D3D viable.

I wish they would realize that the people they're hurting with this decision are not their competitors (who are actually probably happy to see them underinvest in good GL drivers) but rather us developers, who do have to develop cross-platform apps for market share reasons and so end up shouldering the costs of needless fragmentation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> i should mention that once I spoke to the head engineer for nvidia graphics cards and somebody asked him what happens if you try to render a texture filled with NaNs (common result of divide by zero). he said it renders with the color "nvidia green".

<comment><USER6> They look black to me...

<comment><USER7> Are you rendering natively or through ANGLE? OpenGL or DirectX? Which kind of NaNs?

<comment><USER6> Native OGL 4.3, on a 970m. Nans are qnans part of a quad texture.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Content-free article, full of "read the next post"

<comment><USER9> I imagine a lot of the specific detail has been omitted to avoid this exploit being used for malicious purposes.

EDIT: Followup post is here: [https://medium.com/@afd_icl/first-stop-amd- bluescreen-via-we...](https://medium.com/@afd_icl/first-stop-amd-bluescreen- via-webgl-and-more-ba3eaf76c5fb#.on6gjmlrz)

<comment><USER8> Much better, thanks for posting

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> In a perfect world the hardware manufacturers would fuzz their own drivers before release, rather than waiting for someone else to do it and then ignoring their bug reports.

</comment><comment><USER11> Wasn't this type of a thing a concern back in 2011?

Microsoft talked about the dangers of this back then. [https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/srd/2011/06/16/webgl- con...](https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/srd/2011/06/16/webgl-considered- harmful/)

</comment><comment><USER12> Now I'm wondering if it's possible to create pathological images that _should_ render vastly differently in the face of small changes. Specifically, anything which responds so nonlinearly to alteration that the small floating point variance mentioned could produce drastically new results.

<comment><USER13> That sounds similar in concept to the CSS Acid tests

[http://origin.arstechnica.com/staff.media/acidtrip.gif](http://origin.arstechnica.com/staff.media/acidtrip.gif)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> That reminds me of that time when I was developing shaders for OpenGL ES on Android and since there were barely any shader debugging tools on that platform, virtually the only debugging tool was debugging 'by eye'.</comment>


Align: An extensible video chat platform that lets you build custom meeting apps - <AUTHOR> https://align.link <comment><USER2> Cool. What are you planning on exposing in the SDK? Will it simplify the process of sending data between the clients? Will you be able to get raw access to the audio and video data to create filters?

What apps are in development or available now to use?

<comment><AUTHOR> The SDK gives developers a functional interface to responding to user interactions in the different touchpoints of a meeting app. These include things like a toolbar button, a sidebar view, and a video overlay. When responding to these interactions, the SDK assists apps to perform a few key side effects, things like mutating a shared state or sending an event to another client. The SDK handles all of the connections and consistency there so developers can focus on the unique value their apps can add.

We're currently working on a way to access raw audio + video, but it will likely not be available in the initial release of the SDK.

Some of the apps that are available right now include

* an agenda to keep your meetings organized

* a handraise app with a built in queue

* an airhorn for blasting people who talk too long

* a minesweeper game you can play while you wait for meetings to start

* A shared youtube watching experience that anybody can pause or fastforward.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I like the idea of an extendable video chat, I think google (and maybe Zoom) is doing it for corporate. It's nice to see this for personal use.

One extension i'd like is a "spacially aware" video chat where you can move around. i.e. you could only clearly hear the x people around you, and have the rest as background buzz. This would mimic real life gatherings more. Is that something that you could do with this platform?

</comment><comment><USER3> Don't be me, keep scrolling. It definitely took me a hot second to realize i should scroll down.

</comment><comment><USER4> Love the design here. Good work.

</comment><comment><USER5> love it

</comment><comment><USER6> cool!</comment>