Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory - <AUTHOR> http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/454/mr-daisey-and-the-apple-factory

<comment><USER2> It's interesting to listen to stories like this because they make it truly difficult to access your own feelings. You want to dislike or even hate it but a moment later you realize, in order to do so, you'd have to pass those judgements onto yourself. And so you kind of brush it off or feel like you're somehow doing the right thing by just hearing about it. There is no option other than simply not using electronics, or maybe only buying used electronics claiming the recycling karma offset. And whats kind of crazy is that I love programming. It's not only my job to use these devices, but I love to make them do new things. If I'm to continue to love it I have to live in a mind with forgetful acceptance or forced ignorance. I don't see a 3rd option.

<comment><USER3> _recycling karma_. I went through this phase a few years back in Shanghai. I refused to buy anything new and would call a friend for his old iPod in a drawer when mine died. This worked for a bit but has limitations.

I'm back in China now, after a two year break to the U.S. Ten years in Shanghai was too much for me. I needed some perspective from _home_. Now I'm back, in Chengdu. My rules are simple. In all aspects of my life, where I can, I incrementally raise the labor bar and try to provide more than _just a job_. The IT projects I do, I tell my clients I only do high-end work and pay my talent well. And I do pay them well; generally 50% to 200% over their prior jobs. I also get to cherry pick the best talent and have very satisfied clients. This approach has its limitations and I'll adjust my approach when I reach their limits.

For you, there are two things you can do:

1 - Choose wisely who you give your money to. If you feel you can't easily raise the bar in the electronics you buy because all suppliers are playing the same game, do so in other aspects of your life. For many, there is choice in food and other local things you buy.

2 - Get involved more closely in who your elected representative are. These guys set the global and local trade rules. Let them know at the ballot box what you think.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A point which seems to be missed (and which is, thankfully, made in the podcast) is that these terrible conditions are better than the alternative.

The situation China, in many ways, better than it was in the Western world when we were going through our Industrial Revolution.

It made me think back to a TED talk from Hans Rosling on Population Growth, and the relation to economic status: [http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_on_global_population_g...](http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_on_global_population_growth.html)

Although it seems bad to us now, globilization is, over all, a net positive.

<comment><USER5> > A point which seems to be missed (and which is, thankfully, made in the > podcast) is that these terrible conditions are better than the alternative.

This is often brought up, but strangely "the alternative" is defined as "the way things were before" instead of "better working conditions." The fact is that there is no one "alternative" to these kinds of business situations; there are many different alternatives, some of them better and some of them worse. Conditions can be improved, if people want it. Otherwise, there would still be 12-year-olds working 80 hour weeks in factories in the US and Europe.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hopefully the story is more honest than the title, since Foxconn is less an "Apple factory" than it is the company that pretty much assembles all of the best electronic devices in the world (at least according to <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxconn#Clients>).

<comment><USER7> It's a clever way of framing it. Apple has become this huge and powerful entity and they are very much unlike every other technology company out there.

If you list all the companies or pick another one that's not Apple they will just say noncommittal nice things and try to shift responsibility away from them. "But we have to do this to stay competitive, everyone else does!" "We have even stricter guidelines for our suppliers than our competitors!" "Have you tried looking at this other company?"

Apple is extremely successful, extremely rich and always in the Spotlight. They are the most likely company to actually do something to improve conditions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is incredible storytelling and is very humanist. I'd really recommend listening to it. We use these devices everyday and don't even think about it.

Here's an article from Gizmodo about an undercover journalist: [http://gizmodo.com/5542527/undercover-report-from- foxconns-h...](http://gizmodo.com/5542527/undercover-report-from-foxconns- hell-factory)

[http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/metro/2010-06/02/content_992207...](http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/metro/2010-06/02/content_9922076.htm)

and a direct link to the mp3: <http://podcast.thisamericanlife.org/podcast/454.mp3>

<comment><USER9> There was also this game that showed the story behind such devices: [http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/appsblog/2011/sep/14/ap...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/appsblog/2011/sep/14/apple- phone-story-rejection)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I find Steve Jobs repellent, but he was once committed to manufacturing hardware in the United States.

The minor undercurrent of criticism since his passing has been Apple's manufacturing vendors in Asia. Forgotten is the drag on NeXT by its decision to build a factory in Fremont, CA. It was way overbuilt, and sucked up a lot of the money fronted by Canon and Ross Perot to keep NeXT alive while it was largely unable to sell much of anything.

[http://allaboutstevejobs.com/pics/places/fremont/place/light...](http://allaboutstevejobs.com/pics/places/fremont/place/lightbox- iframe.html)

<comment><USER11> Steve Jobs took it up publicly before he died about how the American government could make manufacturing in the US to be a more attractive option for companies like Apple.

<comment><USER12> I dont buy it.

in the good ole days even before Standard Oil, fierce competition and W-2 (and IRS/SS in that matter), the reason behind owning any business was not to get rich or satisfy the board with higher dividend, but to give people job and ability to keep their families respected.

to me its a simple math: Apple produce stuff in China saving 40% of production costs, then sells its goods in America putting 40% profit margin on it. I smell greed, regardless if people accept to be ripped of or not.

<comment><USER13> > to me its a simple math: Apple produce stuff in China saving 40% of > production costs, then sells its goods in America putting 40% profit margin > on it. I smell greed, regardless if people accept to be ripped of or not.

So, you expect Apple to manufacture in the States, and then sell it to you _without_ a margin (over production costs)... And how exactly are those poor Apple engineers and Apple Store Employees are supposed to make money?

If some day Apple manufactures iDevices in America, then an iPad would cost $799, or Apple would go out of business.

This is not to say I'd like Apple's partner (Foxconn) to enslave chinese workers so I could buy an iPad cheaper... I'd be happy if my iPad would be $549 (instead of $499) AND those workers were receiving more money for their hard work.

<comment><USER14> One of the reasons manufacturing costs are so high in the united states is due to labor costs. Put simply, America cannot beat the cost efficiency of Chinese production. Samsung however decided to put a plant into Austin for production of the A5 chip. (A Korean company building in Texas for a product assembled in China)

[http://www.macrumors.com/2011/12/16/samsungs-new-texas- facto...](http://www.macrumors.com/2011/12/16/samsungs-new-texas-factory- for-a5-chip-production-now-fully-operational/)

On a more cynical note, Apple's shareholders would not be happy if they could be making more profit by making it in China and selling it for $549. Another downsides to having shareholders run your company.

<comment><USER13> Maybe something like 'iPad RED'?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This isn't as exciting, but along the same lines, I once spied on the people repairing my MBP: <http://ecritters.biz/applecarefacility/>

<comment><USER16> It'd be great to see the iSight script if you're up for sharing. I also wonder what was wrong with your MBP, from the photos it looked like there was some initial activity and then a lot of nothing, then a final check and I guess they returned it fixed? Hilarious, thanks for sharing.

<comment><USER15> Here you go: <http://defiant.ecritters.biz/PeriodiciSight.zip>

It depends on a library called CocoaSequenceGrabber. I'm sure you can find it somewhere, but the first Google link seems to be dead. I also have no idea whether it works on recent versions of OS X.

A fan was making a lot of noise. (Not just the usual noise fans make when they spin up; it sounded broken, like it was grinding against something.) They couldn't hear it, and didn't fix it. (Later, I brought it back and asked them to please just replace the fan, regardless of whether they could hear it. They did.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Brilliant and incredibly sad storytelling.

<comment><USER18> This is an understatement and I highly encourage everyone to take the time and listen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> If anyone gets the chance to go see the Mike Daisey monologue excerpted (The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs) I'd highly, highly recommend it whether you love Apple, hate Apple, or are somewhere in between. He's an amazing storyteller.

He's performing in NYC on January 31st.

</comment><comment><USER20> Great storytelling and I have no doubt that it is all true. One thing that bothered me in this monologue was he kept saying things like, "Do you think that THEY don't know?" "Do you think that Apple doesn't know?"

Problem for me being that Apple is a corporation and doesn't have one mind. Does anyone at Apple know? I'm sure people who visit the factories do. Does the information get passed around throughout the organization so that everyone knows? I'm pretty sure it doesn't. Do most people who work at Apple want to be intentionally ignorant? Probably, but I don't think there's some huge conspiracy going on. Most Apple employees are no different than consumers. They have no knowledge of this from Apple internals and don't think about it much.

</comment><comment><USER21> Just to turn this around a bit for a different perspective.

How many US products are made by prison labour? Who has worse conditions: a Foxconn employee paid a low wage and living in a dorm or a US prisoner deprived of liberty, exposed to violence and paid practically nothing? Who will live better and longer, the grandchildren of Foxconn employees or those of US prisoners?

The US has an astonishingly high incarceration rate compared to other countries thanks to government policy. The US economy clearly benefits from the misery caused by this system. Why would any foreigner want to support it?

</comment><comment> johnx123-up Transcript please (Can't listen from office)

<comment><USER22> 'This American Life' is a lot more than just the transcript - the show really has to be listened to. Get the podcast and listen to it while you drive - it's worth it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I actually saw him live recently here in Sydney. I didn't know what to expect. It was well worth it.

</comment><comment><USER24> "There are 20 cafeterias at the Foxconn plant. Now you just need to visualize a cafeteria that holds 10,000 people."

I'm still trying.

This story tells you everything you already know, but makes you really realize it. Like you should play it once a month to remind yourself of what we all conveniently forget.

 _edit_ It's more likely the cafeterias seat only 4,000. I guess that's better.

</comment><comment><USER25> If one of you guys, someday happen to be wealthy; i highly recommend hiring people that work at Foxconn and other corporate farms of misery; they would probably be really, and i mean really the most loyal and thankful workers in the world if you can give them a decent salary for decent amount of hours.

<comment><USER26> They _do_ get a decent salary by local standards, and (so long as they're being paid for it) tend to want all the hours they can get. There was a riot a few years ago in a chinese plant because the plant owners stopped giving so much overtime and the workers were upset that they lost out on the extra work.

If you read Apple's status reports, one of the problems they seem to be battling is that these jobs are _so_ good that workers are willing to pay huge bribes to middlemen in order to get the jobs. The workers are routinely willing to give up _at least a month's salary_ to get these jobs, often more.

(Apple can't ban this practice outright because it's too widespread (and probably serves a useful market purpose), so they try to put a cap on it and make sure workers pay _only_ a month's salary to get the job, no more than that.)

<comment><USER3> They get an _above average_ salary by local standards. I wouldn't call this decent. I'm not calling out Apple's manufacturing partners here, whom are better than most, just making the situation more clear.

edit: As to "huge bribes to middlemen", I live close to a Foxconn factory making Apple products in Chengdu. I've seen recruiters in a suburban (poor) farmer's market with a table setup recruiting people for Apple jobs. Yes, they were clear the jobs were for Foxconn making Apple products. I had my wife talk to one of them. Perhaps other factories at some times have been competitive to the point where employees paid fees to recruiters, but it doesn't appear to be happening where I live as of a few weeks ago.

<comment><USER26> The workers paying the bribes mostly were from well outside the area where the factories were, including nearby countries.

Quote from Apple's Supplier Responsibility report (page 7)

[http://images.apple.com/supplierresponsibility/pdf/Apple_SR_...](http://images.apple.com/supplierresponsibility/pdf/Apple_SR_2011_Progress_Report.pdf)

 _Limiting Recruitment Fees

Some of our suppliers work with third-party labor agencies to hire contract workers from countries such as the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia, and Vietnam. These agencies, in turn, may work through multiple subagencies in the hiring country, the workers' home country, and, in some cases, all the way back to the workers' home village. By the time the worker has paid all fees across these agencies, the total cost can equal many months' wages, forcing workers into debt to gain employment.

Apple views recruitment fee overcharges as debt-bonded labor, or involuntary labor, which is strictly prohibited by our Code. We limit recruitment fees to the equivalent of one month's net wages and require suppliers to reimburse overpaid fees for all foreign contract workers in their facilities, including workers not assigned to Apple projects. To the best of our knowledge, Apple is the only company in the electronics industry that mandates reimbursement of excessive recruitment fees._

Apple forced companies to reimburse more than $3.4 million that year to foreign contract workers, fees of as much as "thousands of dollars per worker".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Apple now gets the Republican treatment.</comment>


Minor Tweaks to the Blog – ReTweeting & Twitter - <AUTHOR> http://www.reynoldsftw.com/2009/09/minor-tweaks-to-the-blog-retweeting-twitter/

<comment> onreact-com There is a better solution then Tweetmeme already. It's the TwetCount plugin by BackType

<http://www.backtype.com/plugins/tweetcount>

I use it on my bog successfully. You can customize colors, retweet text, even choose between several URL shorteners.</comment>


Dear President Reif, Don't Fuck Up the Culture - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@brandontle/dear-president-reif-don-t-fuck-up-the-culture-part-i-7dbfbaaf1ade <comment><USER2> Outside security services working the dorm desks? Sounds like MIT -- probably like a lot of other places -- is headed toward _in loco parentis helicopteri_.

</comment><comment><USER3> I attended Caltech and UCSC. A couple years ago I went back for a visit. I was appalled to see the entire campus totally deserted on a late Friday afternoon.

What's more, every single exterior door on the entire campus had a card-key lock, with no doorbells. I was hoping to visit the Robinson building, where I once was a research assistant for astronomer Jeremy Mould, but I could not get in.

When I visited Ricketts House I figured there would have to be doorbells, as otherwise the students could not find out when visitors had arrived, but no. I hung around waiting until a student passed through.

"Old Scurve?" he asked.

"Yeah?"

"What class?"

"Ex '86."

I was later accosted by three Institute security guards, dressed all in black with combat boots, like Police SWAT teams. They did not believe that I was a Caltech alum. I kept trying to tell them I was "An old Scurve". They did not know what a "Scurve" was.

For a Caltech security guard to not know what a Scurve was is like it would be for a UC Berkeley security guard to not know what a Hippy was.

Lately the Institute is repeatedly hitting me up to donate money.

I'll be happy too - when they remove the cardkey locks on the Student Houses.

<comment><USER2> Okay, but for the rest of us, what's a Scurve?

<comment><USER3> Sorry - a member, or resident of Ricketts House.

Scurvy and Ricketts are both nutritional diseases. However Ricketts House was named for Louis D. Ricketts, who donates the money to build it back in the 1920s or so.

Ricketts - Scurve - Drunkard Blacker - Mole Fleming - Flem - Athlete Dabney - Darbs - Stoner Page - Page Boys - Athlete Lloyd - Lloydies Ruddock - Rudd - Gentleman

The first four are the old houses, all built during the 1920s, the last three are the new houses, built just to the north in the 1960s.

I understand that the book "Electric Kool-Ade Acid Test" tells the tale of how the LSD supply for the entire west coast of the united states turned out to be coming from one single room in Lloyd House.</comment></comment></comment>


Origin of intelligence, mental illness linked to ancient genetic accident - <AUTHOR> http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-12-intelligence-mental-illness-linked-ancient.html

<comment><USER2> An interesting idea, and even more so if true. However, this web reference only gives a whiff of a hint at where to find the real research. That real research is behind the infamous "Nature" paywall. The "Nature" people never let anything out of their paywall, so in general, we'll never see this paper.

Don't even bother reading the link, the title is as much info as you're going to get out of it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Here's the link to the original publication: [http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nn.32...](http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nn.3276.html) You can ask Seth Grant (email@example.com) or Tim Bussey (email@example.com) for a preprint

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Headlines like this make my brain hurt. I mean, seriously, what would even be an alternative hypothesis? That aliens intentionally modified our genes to make us smarter? That is all I can come up with.</comment>


Is 23,148,855,308,184,500 a magic number, or sheer chance? - <AUTHOR> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1133581/is-23-148-855-308-184-500-a-magic-number-or-sheer-chance <comment><USER2> Props to the guy that figured it out on StackOverflow! I still wonder about how that transaction got through without triggering a fraud alert.

<comment><USER3> The bug may have occurred after the payment was accepted if it's a multi stage process.

It's also possible that they first submit a request to check if $X is available, get the confirmation that it's okay, and the submit the actual request for $X. In that case the bug may have been in the way the 2nd request is handled.

I'm not sure why more people wouldn't be affected by this though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The biggest bug is the fact that the program itself didn't look this result over and scream FIX ME!</comment>


De novo origins of multicellularity in response to predation - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-39558-8 <comment><USER2> This has big implications for the Fermi Paradox: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox)

In particular, the jump from unicellular to multicellular life is (was) one of the top leading candidates for the Great Filter. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter)

Importantly, it was one of the filter candidates "behind" us. It will be exciting to see if other potential filter steps can be so conclusively eliminated over time.

<comment><USER3> One of the interesting ones I've heard talk about lately is the "interstellar travel" step - Earth is on the lower end of the size range for rocky planets that can support an atmosphere and magnetic field to shield surface life from radiation. And because of the tyranny of the rocket equation, life developing on larger rocky planets may have a much harder time reaching orbit.

A good demo video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amjuJJwI3iM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amjuJJwI3iM)

On a planet with twice the Earth's mass, it would take a larger-than-Saturn- sized rocket to put a Mercury-sized payload into orbit.

EDIT: And said Mercury-sized payload would have to spend more of its mass on heat shielding than the human Mercury capsule if it's intended to come back down.

<comment><USER4> This wouldn't stop von neumann probes [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self- replicating_spacecraft](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self- replicating_spacecraft)

<comment><USER3> The upmass requirement for bootstrapping that kind of system would be quite large.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Do these cells already have the blueprints for multicellular organization, latent until selection exerts pressure for its manifestation? Is it much easier to reproduce the phenomenona since it's already happened before? Do cells ever go back to the single life?

<comment><USER6> The authors indicate the blueprints were already present but the multicellular expression stopped being optional in their evolved population:

 _The ability of wild-type C. reinhardtii to form palmelloids suggests that the founding population in our experiment already possessed a toolkit for producing multicellular structures. However, while the palmelloid condition is expressed facultatively in wild-type C. reinhardtii, the strains that evolved in our experiment are obligately multicellular._

Maybe I'm not familiar with how this term is used in biology but given the above it seems the "de novo" claim in the paper title is a little sensationalist.

<comment><USER7> That makes it way less interesting. The first time multicellular life happened it took billions of years and simple single cell organisms had to figure it out from scratch.

<comment><USER8> ...or, it's not that different from dividing completely into two, and they just didn't do it for a long time because there weren't enough predation-based species to make it worth doing?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I actually wrote a program which showed behavior that appeared to be "social" after predictors were added to the simulation.

The postulation being organisms have a pressure (from predators) to form groups and eventually societies. Essentially, they'd either survive by evolving to be social, evolve defense mechanisms or die out. Social evolution may actually be the shortest path for non-aggressive species because they simply have to bare one another, as opposed to evolve long claws or something.

Very hard to prove, but our model showed given the options social interactions appeared more likely with basic reward circuitry.

</comment><comment><USER10> So the paper says that filter-feeding predators might have been the reason, if you are bigger than a certain size you become irrelevant to them. But how does the filter predator become so big without multicellularity? I mean: filter predators always have to be bigger than their food, no? So isn't it rather coevolution?

<comment><USER11> Cells can become quite large, the nerve cells in your back run the length of your spine for example, so it's certainly possible for a single cell to trawl through the ocean like a filter feeder and pick on smaller targets. Maybe tendril feeder would be a better description for a single cell though.

There's also caulerpa ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caulerpa](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caulerpa)) can be large but only have a single cell, googling turns up several other surprisingly large single cells.

<comment><USER10> Cells can become large, but can't a single big cell also escape a filter predator that's also a single big cell? There needs to be some reason for why in most cases, both are multicellular.

<comment><USER12> From a mechanics of materials perspective, having a larger size also means being easier to break. Multicellularity seems to be a way to have preferred breaking points that are cheaper and easier for the organism to repair.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Perhaps I'm missing something, but it seems they artificially selected for single-celled organisms that are sticky and clump together (thus making them -- as a group -- too large to be eaten.)

As the 'stickiness' doesn't really pose a disadvantage to the single-celled organism, the trait persists even after the predator is removed.

In short, can a collection of 'stickier-than-normal' single-celled organisms truly be referred to as a multicellular organism? Aren't they stretching the definition of multicellular? Each of the units, after all, reproduces on its own and there is no differentiation.

</comment><comment><USER14> Not biologist, but I wonder whether these model organisms are valid. One might expect that today's single cell organisms may have had multicellular ancestors, but have kept the--I struggle for the word--the required genetic machinery for multicellular form in dormant/unexpressed fashion, but otherwise relatively intact and ready for expression given certain evolutiinary presures. This would be in contrast to the original evolution of multicellular life. Edit: I see others here have expressed this idea already, and more elegantly.

</comment><comment><USER15> Great that I could just read all that info without jumping through hoops or just getting the abstract.

Interesting that the changes were then stable over many generations once the predator was removed.

</comment><comment><USER16> As far as I understand this paper, the experiment did not generate a multicellular species. Perhaps the experiment actually generated an algae colony?

</comment><comment><USER17> I guess this means that thousands of new multicellular "species" are born in the wild each day. Fascinating!</comment>


Fedora 29 - <AUTHOR> https://fedoramagazine.org/announcing-fedora-29/ <comment><USER2> Fedora 29 is the most brilliant release of Linux yet. Gnome 3.30 is brilliant and probably can tempt you away from OSX.

Oh and if that isnt good enough - check out [https://www.protondb.com/explore?page=0&sort=playerCount](https://www.protondb.com/explore?page=0&sort=playerCount) to play windows-only Steam games on Linux

<comment><USER3> So, when my then-girlfriend and I moved in together a long time ago, she brought with her a bottle of vegan Worchestershire sauce. I tried it at one point, next to a bottle of Lea and Perrins, and I concluded that the only way you could possibly consider it a substitute for Worchestershire sauce was if you had completely forgotten what Worchestershire sauce tastes like, and were going off of some really hazy memories of it.*

I think of that bottle of ersatz Worchestershire sauce whenever I hear from Linux advocates who say that some piece of GUI software is as good as a big commercial project in the GUI realm. My experience with Linux window manager solutions is that they look good in screenshots but whenever you go to use them, the fit and finish just isn't there.

* I wouldn't say soy sauce tastes all that much like Worchestershire sauce, but it's a far closer substitute than anything I've seen labelled as vegan Worchestershire.

<comment><USER4> >Worchestershire

Please don't hate me for this, but I'd like to respectfully correct you, with a bit of info on pronunciation that I hope will assist you in future.

I'm a Brit, and in England there's a town called Worcester (usually pronounced "wuster" rather than "war-sester"). It's in a county called Worcestershire (usually pronounced "wuster-shuh", sometimes "wuster-shire", but the "wuster" bit holds).

This county has a famous sauce, inevitably called Worcestershire sauce, that often contains anchovy extracts, hence the availability of vegetarian/vegan versions.

Hope that helps.

<comment><USER5> We have the same problem.

Until you hear a Massachusetts native tell you they're from Wahstur(??) - Worcester, you wouldn't have realized that US English still has a lot of varying accents, even after we've been thoroughly homogenized by mass media.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _This release is particularly exciting because it's the first to include the Fedora Modularity feature across all our different variants. Modularity lets us ship different versions of packages on the same Fedora base. This means you no longer need to make your whole OS upgrade decisions based on individual package versions. For example, you can choose Node.js version 8 or version 10, on either Fedora 28 or Fedora 29. Or you can choose between a version of Kubernetes which matches OpenShift Origin, and a module stream which follows the upstream._

I continue to be bewildered by the idea that this should be a foreign concept, that individual third-party software versions should not be tied directly to OS update releases. Literally no operating system works like this except Linux.

At least Fedora is more prompt about keeping up to day than other distros.

<comment><USER7> This is because packages relie on each other to work. They don't just bundle all their dependencies. So maintainers have to update package based on the dependancies version that are in the repositories.

Every package updating alone (or updating all its dependancies) might make everything break on the system.

So there is a compromise here to get smaller packages, that don't bundle everything but reuse other packages.

If you want packages that bundle everything, then you can use snap / flatpack, they are exactly designed for this.

<comment><USER6> The only reason this is even an issue is because Linux distros insist on clinging to dynamic linking absolutely everything, out of some outdated 90s-era assumptions about disk conservation, and package availability. Because often in those days downloading new packages wasn't an option because you might not even have internet at home, distros just bundled every known bit of software they could think of on the CD (Remember Walnut Creek?).

But it's 2018. Even cell phone 3G is fast enough to deal with Linux deps. Disks are huge outside embedded spaces where the last thing you want to do is install a zillion random Linux deps anyway. Literally every programming language on the planet has tools to manage dependencies per-project, and it's best practice to lock a known good version of any libraries for a program anyway.

Which means the only remaining concern is system-level compatibility issues, which shouldn't be a problem for normal userland software anyway, and if anything should allow for and expect failure. It's not something you should be tying the entire OS release and update cycle to for your entire software ecosystem.

And yet, despite years of Linus screaming "DON'T BREAK USERLAND", distros still are built, and almost have to be built, on the assumption that everything is an interdependent house of cards that could break at any time. And the disk space arguments that consumed Usenet for years on end have become meaningless anyway, because software winds up having to link to specific versions of libs anyway, so most distros have to maintain a bunch of separate version packages anyway.

Like I said: no other OS has this problem to this degree. OS X, Windows, hell even FreeBSD keeps pkg/ports distinct from the core system. I have never on any of these had to wait six months or side load just to get an up-to-date version of my tools. And we all know this: why do you think every damn language has its own package manager now? Why everyone has to maintain a ~/.local/bin, and indeed: why snap/flatpack ever had to exist in the first place.

tl;dr: I know damn well why it is this way, but it's dumb, and while I'm glad someone's finally fixing it, that doesn't make it any less baffling it took this many years to do so.

<comment><USER7> That's very interesting, thanks for the insight!

Do you know any Linux distros that try to solve this issue, outside fedora here?

<comment><USER8> I'm not sure if it would address his needs, but NixOS takes a different approach. The package manager, Nix, can run in a Linux environment or even macOS. GNU Guix is another variant of it.

I've played around with it and really liked it, but it's mostly been false starts when trying to do anything serious. I understand why there's a DSL, but I had trouble groking it enough to build my own stuff.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Anyone remember when IBM was really keen on Linux around fifteen years ago? If they'd only followed through they would have had their own flavour and business to run into the ground.

<comment><USER10> IBM's strategy (until now) has been to encourage a competitive ecosystem of multiple Linux distros. That's why they propped up SLES, Yellow Dog, and Ubuntu at various times.

<comment><USER11> How did IBM prop up Ubuntu?

<comment><USER10> It seems like Ubuntu supported ppc64le long before Red Hat; I assume that was sponsored by IBM.

<comment><USER11> I don't remember the detail but if that were sponsored then I suspect the revenue wouldn't have covered a month of sending out free CDs, let alone doing any propping up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Looking forward to F29 on my Talos II (currently a very satisfied F28 user except for the problems with the provided Firefox package which I must build from source currently), but I'll wait a bit for all the mirrors to catch up.

<comment><USER13> What do you think of the Talos?

<comment><USER12> I really like it. It runs fairly cool and quiet, the hardware works great and the software support is now at the point it can be a daily driver. Plus, it builds Firefox at -j24 in a half hour (I have an 8-core SMT-4 system). If the sticker price on the big T2 makes you shiver, wait for the Blackbird, but Power ISA on the desktop is totally viable again as a workstation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Will Red Hat's acquisition hurt fedora?

<comment><USER15> Ubuntu already put Fedora on life support so at this point if it dies, it certainly won't be because of IBM.

<comment><USER16> I hardly see Fedora in most places (Western and Eastern Europe is mainly Ubuntu), but Fedora seems to be quite strong in the US, relatively speaking. If it has a strong following there, it's probably sustainable.

<comment><USER15> I'm not so sure it's strong anymore. Ubuntu all but owns the set it and forget it desktop market and Arch is effectively the standard for power users. Fedora's market share is just dwindling, because there's no where that it outperforms the competition.

<comment><USER17> _> I'm not so sure it's strong anymore. Ubuntu all but owns the set it and forget it desktop market and Arch is effectively the standard for power users._

In my neck of the woods, neither of these is true. Ubuntu was the standard for a long time and is almost certainly a strong majority of new desktop installs, but I've seen Fedora make something of a resurgence over the last couple years to the point where "all but owns" is too strong a phrase.

I know one person who uses Arch. (I will say this: unlike the Gentoo folks, you can't tell an Arch user.) And it seems...fine. But I think calling it a "standard" for power users is a stretch.

<comment><USER15> Maybe power users wasn't the right term. It's the standard for perfectionists or the detail-obsessed? Interesting that you're seeing a resurgence of Fedora since I can't think of the last time I talked to a Fedora user. I suppose that's the nature of anecdata.

<comment><USER17> You are right now. ;) I went to Fedora (28 on my work laptop, Rawhide on my desktop) largely because it mostly resembles my RHEL/CentOS production environments--dnf rather than yum, but that's a performance improvement more than anything--and is roughly as supported as Debian/Ubuntu for third-party software.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Fedora 29 Release Notes

[https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora/f29/release- note...](https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora/f29/release-notes/)

Unfortunately they are half-empty!

<comment><USER19> Yeah, help wanted on the docs team :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I am at this very moment switching from Fedora 29 ( I was on the early Beta) to Ubuntu because of the acquisition by IBM. It just doesn't sit right with me. Just made the last backup before plugging in the USB with Ubuntu 18.10.

<comment><USER11> I find these knee jerk reactions fascinating. What about IBM do you know that makes you feel this way? What about Red Hat made you happy to continue using Fedora? What about Canonical makes you consider Ubuntu to be better for your purposes?

This feels like the equivalent of switching from cow's milk to almond milk for ethical reasons. There's not an improvement, you're just making a different set of compromises.

<comment><USER21> Yeah, have no dog in the race, but was surprised by all the negativity toward IBM yesterday. I don't have nearly the bad feelings towards them that I do say MS or Oracle. Also they've supported Linux a lot, at least ten years ago, unsure if that continues.

Basically they exited from all the markets I cared about in recent years and became a non-entity, meh.

<comment><USER22> I guess there's just a lot of us around who had exceedingly terrible experience with anything IBM.

<comment><USER21> After a bit of thought remembered the recent episode where they fired their old-timers, that's a negative.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I am always excited to spend 1,2 hours of my life updating Fedora every six month, so I could get its new wallpapers.

</comment><comment><USER24> Anyone else getting 403 Forbidden when trying to download Fedora 29?

[https://mirrors.dotsrc.org/fedora/linux/releases/29/Workstat...](https://mirrors.dotsrc.org/fedora/linux/releases/29/Workstation/x86_64/iso/Fedora- Workstation-Live-x86_64-29-1.2.iso)

</comment><comment><USER25> Maybe I should switch, but I like apt too much. Problems I'm having with Ubuntu 16.04.5 on my laptop now:

\- Keyboard will stop working sometimes after waking up from sleep

\- Shut down randomly turns into a restart

<comment><USER26> I'm staying on 16.04 because I prefer Unity over any other DE. No problems so far, but after it becomes too much of a burden I'll have to switch to Mint with Cinnamon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> RHEL 8 is overdue, i guess it will use this as its base?

<comment><USER28> rhel uses several fedora versions as base. A closed alpha of rhel 8 is already in circulation. So they've used at least a few prior versions already.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> The page for updating 28 -> 29 is not updated, although it is linked to the article.

</comment><comment><USER30> I switched from Fedora 28 to Ubuntu because I could not make my IDE (IntelliJ, Netbeans, maybe Eclipse too) recognize the installed Fedora JDK (no valid JDK found). It seems that this has been a common problem for years.

<comment><USER17> If it couldn't find a JDK, it usually means you didn't install the appropriate `-devel` package. (This is consistent across RHEL derivatives.)

<comment><USER30> It is a problem if the default JDK is useless and the solution requires research on the internet. I had even enough patience to search for more than 15 minutes AFAIR.

I have been using Windows and other Linux distributions including Arch Linux for years and never had problems with the JDK.

<comment><USER17> You didn't install a JDK, though. You installed a _JRE_. (Ubuntu does this too, BTW - openjdk-N-jre versus openjdk-N-jdk.) If you Google "fedora jdk install" I get this page:

[https://openjdk.java.net/install/](https://openjdk.java.net/install/)

Which says pretty clearly: "The java-1.8.0-openjdk package contains just the Java Runtime Environment. If you want to develop Java programs then install the java-1.8.0-openjdk-devel package."

The standard package is to run software, not to compile software. Because most people who manage systems--hi--want to know what can be _built_ on a system (and, more importantly, what can't be). You might not like that, and that's totally fine, but it's consistent and in my experience distros that have trouble with that (CentOS never, Ubuntu rarely, Arch rather often) quickly become ones I don't consider reliable.

<comment><USER31> I think the issue here is the stupid name "OpenJDK" \- everyone who has anything to do with Java development understands JDK to mean "Java Development Kit", and here those sneaky bastards give you a package named "jdk" but containing jre.

Would it hurt them to name the project "OpenJVM" instead?

<comment><USER17> When I wrote that post I was thinking exactly that.

Honestly, were I running Debian/Ubuntu I probably would have at least called it `openjdk-N` and `openjdk-N-dev`, to match the other `-dev` packages, but...yeah. In this way I think CentOS/Fedora are a little more straightforward.

<comment><USER30> In Ubuntu it is called openjdk-11-jre and openjdk-11-jdk. With headless variants.

I am no system admin and the -dev or -devel convention suits the Unix and C world but maybe not the JVM or .net or nodejs worlds with their own standards and package managers.

<comment><USER17> How so? `java` is the JRE. `javac` is the JDK. `mono` (I forget the .NET Core executable name) is the runtime, `mcs` is the development tool. Node or Ruby or Python all have similar splits, too. Yes, they're interpreters, but you generally need the `-dev`/`-devel` package to compile things against your runtime there, too. Their package managers are orthogonal to this (but a failed Ruby build, as an example, will often tell you you need development packages for a library).

It's not about being a system administrator, it's about understanding what the things you're installing actually do. You need development packages to develop against, rather than consume, a package. I don't understand the criticism you're making here.

<comment><USER30> Yes you are right.

But as a Java developer I know and I care about the terms JRE and JDK that are used officially and on Windows and many Linux systems and MacOS. I was not aware of the Fedora package conventions.

And as I already wrote, I had most likely installed jdk-devel because, I guess, it is listed in yum and DNF-dragora. Maybe it was a bug in some Fedora related package tool. DNF-dragora had double entries for Java. Unfortunately I do not remember anymore the details.

Someone replied this to me: "This is a fairly trivial problem to work around, although maybe this should be one of those "sane default" kind of things. Set the environment variable JAVA_HOME=/etc/alternatives/jre or point it at the specific OpenJDK version you want. That's what /etc/alternatives is for."

I guess that is way I tried "alternatives --config java" at the time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> And, just as Fedora's mind share was really starting to take off, specifically with the HN crowd, IBM goes and buys the company.

<comment><USER15> Fedora has been around a _long_ time, so I'm not sure why you think it added mind share. Ubuntu and Arch laser focused on certain audiences and Fedora really couldn't find a home between the two.

<comment><USER33> Fedora is a proving ground for new features in RHEL usually.

<comment><USER34> It's a proving ground for new features in Linux in general. systemd, unified /usr and /bin, ip vs. ifconfig were all things that Fedora was quick to apply, consequences be damned, in the name of staying cutting edge.

It's annoying as all hell sometimes but if you use Fedora you're already used to things that suddenly land in other distributions and cause strife.

Now if only they could switch to ufw from firewalld...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Please tell me the fonts have been fixed.

We've waited years for the 1998 Linux font tendering to have caught up with, at least, Win 2000.

There was dozens of X Font Server patches that never worked.

Then illegal downloads of MS TeueType fonts that were a _little_ better*, but still infuriating.

Then fontconfig examples from hundreds of blogs and forums.

Then forks of forks of some dude's Arch Infinality tweaks that kind of worked, but not really.

Then Google released a bunch of professional Android and Web fonts which got us closer...

Then a bunch of patents expired - finally we'd be on par with Win XP or OSX Tiger.... In 2016.

Last I heard, a bunch of Microsoft 's Open Initiative patents would allow Win 7 level rendering (though MacOS and Win10 have gotten even better).

I gave up a whole ago and just bought a Mac.

<comment><USER35> If they are fixed will you really switch platforms?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How Come There Is No Captcha To Create A User Name On This Site? - <AUTHOR>

I really like the simplicity of the sign up process on HN. But it got me thinking why do I always have to enter a captcha every where else and there is not one for the user name sign up on this site. <comment><USER2> One reason that I can think of is that a spam account here doesn't tend to get very far. Sure--they could spam the New Submissions list, but they'd have trouble getting upvoted and thus polluting the front page.

They could create a bunch of accounts that all upvote an article, but it's easy to detect articles that only get upvoted by low-reputation accounts as clear spam.

I guess the bottom line is that the reputation scores here provide a lot of high-quality signals for spam detection that a normal site wouldn't have.

</comment><comment><USER3> because after signing up you can't do anyting. New users can only watch and comment. Their votes don't count. When a thread will be voted by some new users the thread will be killed and users will be black signed. After some days day can submit something. And the submitted threads are always controlled, killed or downvoted. Fake accounts simply can't spam.</comment>


Forget Streaming: Why You Should Still Buy Blu-Rays - <AUTHOR> https://www.tomsguide.com/opinion/forget-streaming-why-you-should-still-buy-blu-rays <comment><USER2> The fact anyone has to worry about future-proofing video these days is infuriating. If you're activley making your product worse, and forwarding the cost of making it worse to the buyer, you dont deserve a single dollar.

</comment><comment><USER3> The technically superior but morally grey solution to this problem is to buy whichever version of the movie is optimal for the hardware + software you have and when the time comes for you to update your setup to the point your copy of the movie is no longer optimal you pirate a copy of the movie that is.

<comment><USER4> Of course I ripped this 4k video from my DVD officer!

Personally, I wish there was an option to do this completely legally, without any gray area, no DRM, and for a reasonable price. I don't like having physical media (it can get scratched or lost), so I'd much rather have digital if I can. I think the perfect solution here is to use signatures (say, pgp), which would let me prove ownership without complicating my consumption of that media (I could copy it wherever I need to).

But no, the media companies are paranoid about piracy. Don't they realize that if they make their content easier to get for a reasonable price, people will choose to go through legal channels instead of pirating?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> >I recommend that you buy a 4K ultra-high definition (UHD) version of a movie, even if you don't have the hardware to support it yet. The digital version you get from Movies Anywhere matches the resolution of the Blu-ray or DVD you purchase, so buying the 4K version helps future-proof your viewing.

I'm not sure historically speaking that would work out to good advice considering the past and the speed of technology change.

Another consideration is lifestyle change.

I used to own a lot of DVDs. But now I have a family and different obligations and movie time is far less frequent and a bunch of disks and downloads to manage is suddenly not desirable at all.</comment>


Optical Disc Data Rot: Burned CDs going bad - <AUTHOR> https://www.howtogeek.com/682807/the-cds-you-burned-are-going-bad-heres-what-you-need-to-do/ <comment><USER2> Man I used to burn so many cds back in the day. I remember when I was kid and the first cd-recorders came out, they cost something like 2000 dollars and burnt cds at 1x speed. It would take hours to burn a cd and sometimes they would turn out as duds. The blank discs only held 650 MB (which was quite a bit back then) and were also expensive.

There was also a special type of blank disc, the re-writable blank disc which was something like 10 bucks a pop at future shop.

I had a enterprising career in school at one point burning shared music mp3s that I pulled from Napster and selling them to friends.

<comment><USER3> Were you selling Metallica by chance

<comment><USER4> Infinite loop detected: Napster bad, but money good?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> When I record to DVDs, I always add error correction using dvdisaster.[1]

In addition, I sometimes have par2 files[2] on the DVD as well, though it's probably better to just have additional dvdisaster ECC instead.

It's a good idea to periodically go through all your old backups and transfer them to new media, or at least make sure the old media still works and start recovery on them right away if they don't.

[1] - [http://dvdisaster.net/](http://dvdisaster.net/)

[2] - [https://github.com/Parchive/par2cmdline](https://github.com/Parchive/par2cmdline)

<comment><USER6> I had pretty good luck using a program that could be programmed to extract all readable sectors first and then go over and over damaged areas to try and recover the data. I can't recall the name of it but it had a picture of the developers cat on the GUI. (If it is one of the ones you mentioned already I apologize) Bad link on dvd disaster.

<comment><AUTHOR> Archive link: [https://web.archive.org/web/20180428070843/http://dvdisaster...](https://web.archive.org/web/20180428070843/http://dvdisaster.net/en/index.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've been meaning to try M-DISCs [0] after I found out that my BD drive supports burning them. Apparently, they last longer than normal discs because the drives burn "a permanent hole in the material, rather than changing the color of a dye".

I don't use optical discs much anymore, but I still like the idea of archiving things like family pictures on read-only media once in a while.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC)

<comment><USER8> M-DISC is mostly irrelevant these days unless you want to use DVD for some reason.

The biggest benefit of M-DISC for DVDs was that it didn't use an organic dye, as those dyes tend to decay over time. The dominant BD-R recording mechanism (HTL) uses an inorganic recording medium so isn't affected by this problem.

There are differences in how BD-Rs are manufactured that can lead to big differences in longevity [0] but there are regular retail BD-Rs that outperform M-DISC in accelerated aging tests [1]. There are also DVD variants that outperform M-DISC [2].

Also, M-DISC hasn't produced any evidence for their BD-R discs. For their DVDs there were a few scientific studies they could point to that demonstrated their longevity, for BD-R they have no such evidence.

[0]: [https://www.lne.fr/sites/default/files/inline-files/etude- qu...](https://www.lne.fr/sites/default/files/inline-files/etude-qualite- bd-r.pdf)

[1]: [https://www.lne.fr/sites/default/files/inline-files/etude- qu...](https://www.lne.fr/sites/default/files/inline-files/etude-qualite-dvd- bd-nov-2012-lambert.pdf)

[2]: [https://www.lne.fr/sites/default/files/inline- files/syylex-g...](https://www.lne.fr/sites/default/files/inline-files/syylex- glass-dvd-accelerated-aging-report.pdf)

<comment><USER9> So basically I want to buy Panasonic or Sony HTL BDs for archiving and store them somewhere dark and dry?

Unfortunately that data is eight years old and I'm not even sure if Panasonic and Sony even make BD-Rs anymore. Seeing a lot of out of stock Japanese imports on Amazon.de for both of them. I can really only find Verbatim BD-Rs and they didn't really perform that well in the comparisons.

I've actually been interested in BD archiving for a bit but haven't gotten into it yet because of the initial costs. I have about 1.1 TB of data that I'd like to archive for the long-term.

<comment><USER8> They're both definitely making them. If you got to a retail store in Japan, they'll have a HUGE section filled with BD-Rs and if you search Amazon JP you can see that tons of them are in stock.

You can always import them yourself. Tenso and Buyee both work great.

I think it's just that the western market doesn't care for them much, so you don't see anybody bothering to import them for you.

<comment><USER10> x50 HTL BD-R (indicated as "non-organic") for video by SONY is sold on 3355 JPY. Possibly Amazon.co.jp supports international shipping.

[https://www.amazon.co.jp/dp/B01H8A8HH2/](https://www.amazon.co.jp/dp/B01H8A8HH2/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I have friends who I remember always insisting on burning their CDs and DVDs at the maximum speed the discs allowed for, and they all had problems with their discs dying with time, some very soon, some after a year or two. No matter what brand. Conversely, I never burned any of my CDs or DVDs at more than half their advertised maximum speed, and so far I've yet to run into a single disc dying from age. Some of these discs are now 20 years old, and they still read/play fine.

My theory - and this is just a theory as I don't really know what's going on - is that the dyes in CD-Rs and DVD-Rs after laser exposure slowly regress back towards the original transparent state, and that very "fast" dyes combined with a very short exposure time ("up to 52x speed!") emphasizes this problem, while giving the dyes a longer exposure time prevents it by simply burning the dye opaque beyond "recovery".

</comment><comment><USER12> At the beginning of current year I dumped my data which I have written to CDs in years 1997-99. The CD where dark green or blue, one or two were golden. All this disks were written with 1x or 2x speed. Then I had access to the Yamaha CDR102 burner which was SCSI. Burning disks then was a fragile process involving a lot of mumbling prayers. I dumped to harddrive about 100 disks... it was all MP3 and AVI files. One disk had a hole in its reflecting layer the size of cross-section of a matchstick, nevertheless I could read whole disk. I don't think I will throw away these disks. I will just put them in my basement. Who knows how long that 2.5 inch harddrive will be in working conditions :)

<comment><USER13> I remember in 1998 ordering my Yamaha COD and waiting out in the cold Minnesota snow to get it from the UPS driver, then paying 1$/disk. Total cost per GB amortized over the life of the drive was like 2$ since a newer faster model came out 3 months later. Now I get pissed if storage is more than about 0.04$/gb. Times have changed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> A thought occurred to me on a recovery method while reading this article: If you had a disc that was marginal, where it might or might not read correctly depending on the phase of the moon, would it be possible to do something like take multiple raw images of the disc, perhaps using multiple different drives, and collectively use the images so captured to isolate out the bad parts and splice together a valid image file?

Or am I failing to grok the degree to which It's Complicated?

<comment><USER15> Yeah, apparently there's software that does that to get a rip that's identical bit for bit.

[http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/en/index.php/overview/basic- tec...](http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/en/index.php/overview/basic- technology/extraction-technology/)

[http://www.accuraterip.com/](http://www.accuraterip.com/)

<comment><USER16> For audio CDs, there's also CueTools, which can repair slightly damaged rips (I assume it stores some parity information). I have a CD where that appears to have either two slightly different pressings or a bad batch, and one has an audible click at the end of one of the tracks. CueTools detects this error, and lets me fix it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm surprised there's nothing about storage conditions.

Is it the plastic or the metals breaking down? If it's plastic, humidity probably has a bigger impact.

Lower temps are almost always better. Freezer is good. Hard to say if an oxygen absorber is helpful.

Or could sparge your container with nitrogen.

<comment><USER18> I still have some CDs from the early/mid 1980's that play, and I think this is because of two reasons: 1) Not many people owned players back then, so pressing plants weren't under much pressure from high demand, so pressing quality was higher. 2) I stored them in their jewel cases oriented vertically on the shelf, supported by the plastic fingers of the case - so no sagging from being stored horizontally. And this was indoors, away from sunlight.

So far as home-burned CDs, they haven't lasted as well. Mostly because I didn't take as good care of them - I didn't have $18 or more invested in them (typical new music CD price in the 80's & 90's) so they were just tossed in a drawer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> By coincidence, I'd been looking into the problem of bitrot and what options exist. Hard drives are a starting point and last longer than removable discs. If going for optical, M-DISC seems to be by far the best option.

[https://uncentered.saigonist.com/decentralize-your-data- part...](https://uncentered.saigonist.com/decentralize-your-data-part-1.html) [https://uncentered.saigonist.com/decentralize-your-data- part...](https://uncentered.saigonist.com/decentralize-your-data-part-2.html)

</comment><comment><USER20> I still have a few spindles of CD-R's probably topping out at 15 years old now - managed to burn copies of linux for some old machines earlier on in the year though with no errors.

Really doubt I will end up using much more of them at this rate though besides using them as "retro" coasters.

</comment><comment><USER21> I noticed that some CDs/DVDs are already going bad after very few years in the early 2000s, so I put everything on harddisks, recovered broken stuff with ddrescue and was done with writable optical media.

</comment><comment><USER22> Can anyone recommend encoding settings for archiving DVD-Video discs created on a recorder?

I've taken dd images, but can't find a reasonable "archival" h265 profile that doesn't come out larger than the original.

<comment><USER4> I've been meaning to write up a page on how to do this, but basically:

\- Take an ISO rip and never delete it since any additional encoding is a new derivative work of your data.

\- Run it through MakeMKV to get a Matroska file for each title

\- Assuming a video source (e.g. recorded TV shows or camcorder footage) use QTGMC to deinterlace the video from 60 fields per second to 60 frames per second. This will approximate the original look on today's screens by simulating the slight delay in the dimming of a CRT's phosphors after the electron beam excites them.

\- Crop the video if any black bars are present. Many DVDs have 8px of dead area on the left and right edges because they are rooted in the D-1 4:2:2 standard and often have a program area resolution of 702 or 704x480: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-1_(Sony)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-1_\(Sony\))

\- Convert the chroma from SD colorspace to HD colorspace to avoid them looking washed-out on modern displays: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rec._601](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rec._601)

\- Decide how to handle the aspect ratio. People use "anamorphic" to mean "widescreen DVD" but that's kinda a misnomer because all DVDs are anamorphic: its 720x480 pixel resolution is 3:2, halfway between 16:9 and 4:3. Each title sets a flag telling the display to stretch it ±18.6%, depending. You can leave it like this, setting the same DAR flag, but I've come to prefer resizing it myself to a square-pixel resolution since I'm usually cropping it anyway and VapourSynth will do a way better job than most displays can do on the fly. I also dislike the idea of throwing away horizontal pixel data by resizing 4:3 video down from 720x480 to 640x480, so some times I stretch it vertically instead, to 720x540 (or 720x544 with 4px black along the bottom if you want to follow the ATSC 3.0 HEVC recommendations).

\- Encode the video with x265. I have a personal "SD" tuning that I've been working on and would love to share once I can get some example clips together :)

\- Encode the probably-AC3 audio with FDK-AAC. I find it handles voices and other things better than faac thanks to its low-pass step, but for very high- bitrate sources (like concert DVDs) I disable that by using VBR-5: [http://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Fraunhofer_FDK_AA...](http://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Fraunhofer_FDK_AAC)

\- Mux your new streams together into a new MKV, and take a moment to fill in all the metadata fields the container provides. You can even attach a JPEG named "cover.jpg" and have it display as the icon in Explorer!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the writeup! Would BD be much different? Do you recommend converting x264 to x265 for Blu-Ray sources?

<comment><USER4> BDs usually aren't interlaced or overscanned, so the hard part is done for you :)

I do usually re-encode from from AVC to HEVC but with a more usual HD tuning. Not mine, but check out [https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1u9fKNsRcLgc-1oVV5GhB...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1u9fKNsRcLgc-1oVV5GhBgoPGO9vLpcn-x3NUgTmeC-0/edit#gid=0)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> > Sometimes, CD- and DVD-Rs were burned at high speeds with high error rates > that were normally fixed on the fly by error-correcting code. This can make > it more difficult for modern optical disc drives to read them, so try them > on an older drive, if possible.

Does that mean drives were first made with relatively robust ECC, and they just stopped using it for later drives? What would be the motivation to drop that?

</comment><comment><USER24> In my past, I've purchased some high quality CD-Rs used by studios. Not sure if they made a difference though. I didn't see any definitive information with a quick search.

I've long since abandoned using optical as a form of stroage...

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Is there good Linux software for cataloging offline media and identifying duplicates? On Windows/Mac/iOS there is the venerable (since 2000) [http://abemeda.com](http://abemeda.com).

</comment><comment><USER25> I always burned at the slowest possible speed, with all of the error-checking if it was available, on the best media I could find. As a strategy, it largely paid off. More expensive, more time-consuming, less frustrating later.

</comment><comment><USER26> last year I spent a while ripping all my burned disks to redundant harddrives. I had to use isobuster on a couple but having multiple redundant backups helps me sleep better at night.

</comment><comment><USER27> I dont know how my cheap burnt CD's from the early 2000's are still fine but some of my pressed CD's are suffering from Disc rot!

<comment><USER28> How common is Disc Rot for pressed CD's?

<comment><USER29> I regularly buy 2nd hand audio CDs as old as the 80's and never had a bad one

<comment><USER30> Probably survivorship bias as the only old CDs for sale today are in good shape

<comment><USER31> -Still only anecdata, but I've been buying lots of music on CD since the late eighties, the oldest I know of was pressed in late 1983 sometime. (Which is only a year or so after the introduction of the CD anyway)

In sum, some 3,800 CDs. I ripped them all a couple of years ago - I had problems with a handful, but EAC eventually got them all to disk. I examined the troublesome ones, but no (visual) signs of disc rot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Anybody know how BDs fare?

<comment><USER33> Many BD-R's ought to fare quite well wrt. archival, with a better-behaving substrate than CD-R or DVD-R. You may want to look for more detailed info to ensure that this applies to your disks, though,

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> vinyl records are having their revenge.

<comment><USER15> Isn't that trading one failure mode for another? While vinyl records won't rot over time, they do wear down, and thus the sound quality deteriorates each time you play it.

<comment><USER35> In theory, yes. But in practice it's not at any rate that most people should worry about. Plus some records are more durable than others.

One could extend the vinyl argument and say there's no such thing as a storage medium without a failure mode. Cassettes have problems, HDDs can fail, even solid state systems only have a limited life. The best we can do is backup.

<comment><USER34> > The best we can do is backup.

No. The best you can do is use mathematics to compensate. In essence represent the data as a set of equations and generate extra ones that will be useful in case you lose one. They have been doing this for decades in telecom/storage.

<comment><USER35> And as I already said, storage will always be subject to fail.

You can have 10 TB of parity for a 1 MB file but if that data isn't distributed then you're still vulnerable.

So the problem is analog vs digital nor the lack of mathematics in vinyl; it's that ultimately any form of storage media requires a physical device and physical devices are bound to the problems of the physical world.

This, by the way, is also why Amazon has multiple data centres in any given region. Why backups should always be stored off site, and why DR solutions are based in different physical premises.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


YouTube ready to start renting video on-demand movies from major studios? - <AUTHOR> http://www.engadget.com/2011/04/25/youtube-ready-to-start-renting-video-on-demand-movies-from-major/ <comment><USER2> Maybe a bad idea to direct more revenue to major studios -- and thus to the MPAA's legal and lobbying budgets. They, more than the BSA, led to the DMCA which hardware and software makers now wield against the public.</comment>


SteamOS, Linux, and Steam Machines - <AUTHOR> https://steamcommunity.com/app/221410/discussions/0/1696043806550421224/?t=1&cn=ZmxleGlibGVfcmVjcw%3D%3D&refsrc=email&iid=349e1d3fdcdc46d493b14572c866208a&uid=2862984859&nid=244+272699400 <comment><USER2> This is a good update for Linux Gaming fans. There was definitely uncertainty when the Steam Machines page was delisted, some even thinking this was game over for gaming on Linux.

Those who were there at the beginning of the Valve Linux Offensive (circa 2012) will remember Gabe Newell stating that the main driver for investing in Linux is their dependency on Windows as a platform. Valve has never been one for dependencies at the best of times (creating their own engine to replace quake, creating their own sales platform to replace retail) and having a dependency on a platform that explicitly seems to be trying to emulate the iOS/Android approach more and more is absolutely a reason to at the very least have a plan B.

Having Valve come out and say that they're still invested in Linux is important, but what is highlighted in the post is also poignant - in 2012 it seemed the barrier to adoption was interest in the platform and access to a Linux machine. The solution to both of these was to create a high-profile, easily accessible form factor which was Linux by default. It turns out that this may not have actually been the right solution. Linux adoption has risen and the back catalogue of available games has increased incredibly, despite lacklustre sales. The problem now, and perhaps always was the graphics APIs and cost of porting. Valve are actively investing in Vulkan which is absolutely the right thing for them to be doing. The only downside is that it looks like they're neglecting the 'movement' they started with Steam Machines.

I hope to see big things from Valve in the future. If I were them, however, I would invest in creating a truly fantastic desktop experience with seamless transition from Windows, lots of toys to play with, riced desktops etc. Hardware and the console form factor should be secondary to creating a PC desktop experience worthy of the people who created Half Life and steam.

<comment><USER3> _Those who were there at the beginning of the Valve Linux Offensive (circa 2012) will remember Gabe Newell stating that the main driver for investing in Linux is their dependency on Windows as a platform._

I see a problem that is just as big, or probably bigger, here for the (PC) game industry: the near-monopoly of Steam.

I try to buy non-Steam versions of the games I buy, because I dislike Steam's online DRM and their client, but it seems that Steam is the new Windows when it comes to gaming. "Everything" is released on Steam first, and it seems a lot of times only on Steam. Which means that we're one focus shift or stolen password away from not being able to run the games we've bought and paid for.

gog.com has a better offer, IMHO, by being DRM free. Are there any other similar competing services? Humble Bundle seem to be selling Steam keys these days, so they're a subset of Steam.

<comment><USER4> I think people maybe don't realize that, like Windows, Steam got to where it is for a reason. Valve knuckled under and built a digital distribution platform for PC games _during a severe decline in the PC gaming market_ when very few people thought it would work.

And it wasn't exclusive, they sold other people's games on there too. Then they helped kickstart the indie gaming explosion with the Potato Sack. Then they started trying to make Linux a better gaming platform to provide an alternative to being locked in to MS. Then they released a non-exclusive VR platform against a competitor that was exclusive.

Say what you want about Valve having a monopoly and that being bad for the market, because that's generally true, but my opinion is that Valve has demonstrated a sincere interest in doing good things for PC gaming, not just what's good for Valve.

<comment><USER5> As a Linux-only user, there are almost no Linux-compatible games I'm interested in playing on Steam. So, if I have that rare desire to load up a game, I always find myself going back to TF2, which I didn't even pay money for, and at this point am about as entertained by as Solitaire.

None of the big name releases ever seem to be available. I understand this is due to the game studio's decision of not spending the money on porting to a market that they calculate would make up a rounding error in revenue.

I'm sure there are Linux-compatible indie games out there that would be nice to try, but I'm a casual gamer and I don't have time to research and trial and error what might be a good fit for me.

<comment><USER6> How is this Valve's fault? Valve lets pretty much anyone who's willing to pay a (small) up-front fee list their game on their store. If there aren't any good games for Linux, that's because nobody is developing them.

<comment><USER7> There are plenty of AAA games released with Linux support each year - a small fraction of those released with MacOS support, and a much smaller fraction again of those with Windows support but still: they're there.

A large amount of AA and Indie games are also released on Linux (largely, I suspect, because they use middle-ware like Unity which makes multi-platform releases much more straight-forward).

My point being that there are lots of options if you have a hankering to play a quality game on your Linux machine. The problem in this instance, I suspect, is more to do with this line from imjustsaying's post: 'if I have that rare desire to load up a game'.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I feel like Valve has certainly been putting effort into Linux, but not _serious_ effort.

They seem to be going low-moderate risk/investment. Sure there's progress, but then the Wine devs are moving pretty steadily too at the moment.

If Valve wants to really be serious:

\- Offer incentives to Devs to support Linux/Vulkan

\- Release a goddamn new game (HL3 - dreams) and make it Linux exclusive for a time

\- develop and release new features for Linux first (maybe if GoG ever get the Galaxy client over to Linux Valve will get a kick in the pants to act...)

\- Promote SteamOS and (maybe) Steam Machines, like at least some. Show Steam Machines as an 'out-of-the-box Windows gaming replacement, not a console competitor.

\- Fund Linux devs or take a lower cut from Linux releases

\- Convince Adobe to release their suite on Linux! Push for/fund official Unity and Unreal Engine Linux versions

\- Offer the ability to natively launch games through Wine (and either use 'community' environment files or require one exist, or have a link to WineHQ for help)

Be serious Valve, be genuine and get your flat structured 'follow the shiny thing' company focused and determined.

<comment><USER4> > Release a goddamn new game (HL3 - dreams) and make it Linux exclusive for a > time

A move like this would definitely not win Linux any friends, because as it turns out the Linux Desktop really isn't that great and you'd just be causing a huge headache for a lot of people. The gamers would be annoyed at having to deal with Linux's bullshit, the Linux Destkop community would be annoyed at the huge influx of new users who don't think "try another distro" (especially after the third distro), or "write your own driver, it's open source!", are acceptable solutions to their problems.

If Linux wants gamers there's a simple (note: simple != easy) thing they have to do: make their platform attractive to gamers and game developers. So far they can't manage either, the only reason gaming on Linux is even remotely viable is A) Valve coming in and saying "Ok, since there's no such thing as a standardized base system in Linux Desktop land, here's a standardized base system for Steam you can target", and 2) the popularity of Android making engines like Unity and Unreal have Linux support, which allows devs to tack it on without too much extra effort.

<comment><USER8> > _the Linux Desktop really isn 't that great_

That's not true. Stick to the 'user friendly' popular ones (Ubuntu, Mint, etc) and they're very solid now. Sure, edge cases are still a problem, but for gaming - if supported - not really anything more problematic than Windows.

When did you last try Linux?

<comment><USER9> I currently run a Linux desktop (Ubuntu 17.10) on Apple hardware. The list of problems:

The camera fails to work consistently (the driver does not always load)

Audio fails to work consistently (restarting pulse fixes this)

Closing the laptop lid initially sleeps, but then the laptop wakes up a few minutes later for no reason (so I wrote a script to disable all the events that can wake the laptop up, but this in turn causes it to not wake up at all sometimes when I actually want it to)

kde plasmashell will crash if I try to use ffplay, and doesn't reliably recover so I end up needing to restart my session which loses any work I hadn't saved since I can't switch windows

These are all problems I have never experienced with my Windows laptop, nor macOS.

Anecdotes obviously, but I've been trying to go only Linux for the past decade and never felt like I could reliably do so.

<comment><USER10> > I currently run a Linux desktop (Ubuntu 17.10) on Apple hardware.

It's important to buy hardware that is supported and properly documented by the manufacturer. Apple is not one of those that do that.

<comment><USER9> If these were issues I've only encountered on the Apple hardware I would agree. I've encountered issues like these on every computer I've put Linux on, which is every computer I've built or bought since 1996.

<comment><USER11> Be me

Perform vanilla install of Windows 10 on new desktop build

Watch it sporadically work with Logitech 920 webcam

Watch it randomly not load network device at boot

Watch it show me a blank login screen with no ability to pick a user or enter pwd

Watch it "lose" a USB connected Brother laser printer

Watch it ...

I'm pretty sure Windows and Apple get a pass on quality because we're low level conditioned to give Big Corp products a pass

The Ubuntu + i3 setup I've been rolling for years now has not given me any more or less odd ball problems than Win or OSX

OSX on my work laptop reboots every day. I have Firefox and Slack and some stuff installed via homebrew, on a 2017 MacBook from work. Every morning "your computer is recovering from a shutdown". Even if I shut the software. IT hasn't figured it out, Apple can't and won't replace hardware that tests ok

Watch FaceTime just stop doing anything every call I make with it

Oooh and the WiFi issues with Mac that I haven't had with Linux since wpa_supplicant was managed by hand

But Apple has their "just works" rep. I mean it "just loads" then just needs a reload everyday seems more accurate

I'm not saying Linux isn't a quirky chore

I'm saying it doesn't seem any quirkier than the competition going off my daily experiences with all 3

<comment><USER12> I've very rarely had an issue with Windows that wasn't fixed by replacing faulty/failing hardware. While not a hard rule, your issues sound exactly like that's the root cause. Time for a new motherboard or PSU. Most people just never realize it is failing, blame the OS. Everyone who has done deep stints into desktop Linux knows that's definitely not the case over there and Windows does a fantastic job at covering up hardware errors as much as it can, more than people realize.

Starting from my Commodore128 till today, other than that original Commodore, I haven't seen anything else as well-built as Windows. macOS & desktop Linux distros included. I hate to elevate one above the other but my honest opinion starting on desktops in 1986 that Windows is the most rock solid desktop OS out there today. Microsoft has to ensure it's the most battle tested by necessity, given that even back in 2011 it ran 1+ billion[0] devices. There's nothing else even in the same league for desktop operating systems when it comes to exposure, testing & fixes in the QA feedback loop. Even the big player, Ubuntu, doesn't come close.

[0][http://www.businessinsider.com/right-now-there- are-125-billi...](http://www.businessinsider.com/right-now-there- are-125-billion-windows-pcs-worldwide-2011-12)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Valve has been making serious amounts of contributions to Linux graphics in the past few years.

Vulkan, RadeonSi and VR to name a few. They deserve all the recognition they can get for it.

<comment><USER14> They also open sourced GameNetworkingSockets and made it independent of steam for allowing games that use it to be ported to other markets.

[https://github.com/ValveSoftware/GameNetworkingSockets](https://github.com/ValveSoftware/GameNetworkingSockets)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I love how many good games are available for linux in steam! Factorio, Terraria, Silicon Zeroes, ...

It seems that it's even trivial to release Stream games for linux when using any common game engine, and I hope developers will make use of that as much as possible.

Fallout 3 has no linux version in steam unfortunately, but I actually could play it perfectly by running the windows client of steam in wine. Everything just worked (I had to do a memory patch to support 64-bit CPUs, but so do windows users have to so no difference there)

<comment><USER16> I tend to prefer GOG over Steam lately, mostly because of how shady Valve is at certain stuff. The first 2 of the 3 games you mentioned are available DRM- Free on their site.

Playtesting takes time and money and it's entirely possible that just exporting the game for linux won't run perfectly, so I can see why some companies using the common game engines don't do it, I kinda wish they did, though.

Wine runs a lot of Windows games properly.

<comment><USER17> I remember a indie dev saying that he won't port his game to Linux, since, even if it was working, he couldn't do enough testing to guanrantee a stable enough release.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Potentially unpopular opinion: There is no money to be made in consumer desktop operating systems in 2018, so there is little funding for innovation in the consumer desktop operating system space. Until a business model emerges which challenges this, the status quo will remain roughly the status quo.

The two major commercial producers of proprietary operating systems are basically giving away their operating system at this point. Free Linux distributions offer basically the same functionality for most users; the only things preventing migration from one OS to another are existing applications. For non-gamers, that's often moot, because the world exists in a web browser now. Yes, there are other applications causing OS lock-in too, but they're mostly on the business side, not the consumer side.

There _is_ still plenty of money to be made from enterprise operating systems, but the innovation there is in a totally different direction than what consumers would find valuable.

Example: Linux containers are great! But who's spending the R&D money to make them a viable way to distribute games? There's plenty of work being done on containers and graphics chipsets for ML applications, but not for consumer use.

<comment><USER19> > The two major commercial producers of proprietary operating systems are > basically giving away their operating system at this point.

Huh? Windows 10 home and pro aren't free? It's true that Apple doesn't charge for upgrades, but they do charge a significant markup - and they will happily sell you a licence to run Os X on a hackintosh although they'll forbid you from doing it in their licence ("non apple hardware").

> Until a business model emerges which challenges this

Appstores. Windows, and Os X have app stores. Steam is an appstore. Microsoft and Apple bundle a competitor to steam with the Os.

Just because both apple and Ms suck at making/marketing/developing their App stores... Doesn't mean valve don't want to stay in the business...

They can't get in on ios, Xbox, ps4, etc. They could probably make an appstore for Android - but I'm guessing they'll just focus on streaming games from the cloud to Android (esp Android TV).

With hw support for virtualization, Linux could be the universal runtime - allowing the same game to run on Mac, Windows and Linux...

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> When leaving Windows for Linux I kinda gave up on gaming, but not only some but most of my favorite games do work on Linux! For example Kerbal Space Program (which unfortunately get more and more buggy for each update, and is currently unplayable due to space ships spontaneously rip apart spreading parts all over the galaxy)

<comment><USER21> > get more and more buggy

It's probably because they don't pay their developers and fire everyone that expresses any discontent with it... KSP is not a good citizen.

<comment><USER20> It basically goes like this: Company have thin margins and dev's agree to work for slave wages. Company starts to make millions in IP profits. Employees want to increase their salaries. Company says no. Employees quit. Company hires new employees, but doesn't have to increase salaries much due to market prices. The employees could probably get employed at some enterprise IT shop and make CRUD forms all day with decent pay, but what a waste of talent.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I don't understand why no one is talking about Linux on stand-alone VR headsets.

Valve's hardware team has been very busy, designing the Vive in 2016 and the knuckles controller in 2017.

They've said they are working on multiple full length VR games, but that they wanted to be able to design the hardware (knuckles) and the games together a la Nintendo.

This is public knowledge.

It's also known that Oculus is releasing two standalone VR devices in the next couple years.

Valve has a headset, controllers, and a Linux OS. It seems obvious to me where this is all going: a stand-alone Valve VR device running SteamOS.

Of course they're not investing in screen-based games and desktop Linux boxes. They're perfectly positioned to release a medium-defining device in a green field new computing paradigm.

They are at least as well positioned in this fight as Microsoft, Facebook, and Apple. That's the big leagues. Valve makes good money on Steam, but not that kind of money.

And you know Apple and Microsoft aren't going to use Linux. So having Valve means there's a Linux horse in the VR race.

</comment><comment><USER23> I'm really confused if PC gaming is a winner-takes-all market. Most of the people I know (let's be honest, it's probably 90%-95% of your friends) play games (AAA, bigger indies, the "household names") on Windows and only a very fervent minority plays on Linux.

I personally have been using Linux on work computers and personal laptops (almost) exclusively for.. I don't know, 10 years? - but my "gaming pc" is still on Windows and I'm not in the mood for experiments with WINE or grasping at the games that run on Linux.

Does anyone play major games on Windows _and_ Linux? I'm really excited for the idea of Linux gaming, but it's not a thing I'm willing to compromise and fiddling if the games I want to play really work.

<comment><USER24> It's about platform independence. Basically it lets steam tell microsoft, us and our ecosystem can move our PC 'console' to a linux foundation any time.

<comment><USER23> Sure, but that was neither my point nor my question. I'm not interested in what Valve wants to achieve (in this scope) - but if there's a tangible benefit for gamers and not just a hypthetic one :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I value their commitment.

>While it's true Steam Machines aren't exactly flying off the shelves

I hope they didn't expect anything else. Steam already has a limited choice of games and a console that is even more limited is a niche product at best.

To make it succeed, they need a lot of resources to get GPU manufacturers and game publishers on board (also those who took their games off Steam and created their own launchers). They need both of that only to have a chance to attack regular consoles.

</comment><comment><USER26> Look no further than this to understand why Linux doesn't work for most game developers [https://www.gamingonlinux.com/articles/linux-game-sales- stat...](https://www.gamingonlinux.com/articles/linux-game-sales-statistics- from-multiple-developers-part-5.10064)

</comment><comment><USER27> I recently received an invite for the GeForceNOW beta. For the unaware, GeforceNOW is game streaming; they leverage cloud GPUs to render games, then stream the results back to you. My take away is in-line with critical consensus. If you have a sublime Internet connection, it's an awesome service. It's prone to the odd dip in quality, but all-in-all it's a major paradigm shift.

I have been a proponent of gaming on Linux most of my adult life, but I can't help but think that Valve might be missing the boat by sinking resources into gaming on Linux local hardware. Times are a-changin'.

<comment><USER28>
      > I have been a proponent of gaming on Linux most of my adult life, but I can't help but think that Valve might be missing the boat by sinking resources into gaming on Linux local hardware. Times are a-changin'.

No they aren't. There is just now a large amount of hammer-wielding cloud idiots on the scene who think everything local is a nail. There is an entire industry built around computer building, and a very large proportion of the PC gaming crowd see the two as inexorably intertwined. Part of the joy of PC gaming is the satisfaction of building a powerful system and watching it play 3D games really well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> If Linux could play all of my favourite games I would drop Windows in a heartbeat.

There is absolutely no reason for me to have a Windows machine except the games I play that don't work on Linux/Wine.

</comment><comment><USER30> Steam as a platform is completely, utterly atrocious in all regards. Their client is ancient, outdated, and barely usable, there's no content quality filtering, the greenlight program is a failure that only succeeds in bringing complete bottom of the barrel dreg in 99% of cases, even from a developer's point of view the platform is just a major PITA.

But it has the first mover advantage and that is really everything. Even platforms that are infinitely better, have better tools, support, and pricing (such as itch.io that doesn't require a cent to publish your games) are heavily disadvantaged just because it takes extra work for developers and gamers to adopt them. There's no easy way out of this and Valve can continue being lazy and make major slip-ups every year and there's very little others can do to endanger their heavily entrenched position on the gaming market.

As far as PC (or GNU/Linux in particular) gaming is considered, Steam is everything, and it's not going to change any time soon.

<comment><USER31> PC isn't an operating system. Please call it Windows if you mean Windows.

<comment><USER30> I didn't mean windows, I meant PC gaming.

<comment><USER31> Ok I'm sorry, I see it quite often and your comment could be read that way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> There exists a world where the Switch is the Steam Machine. It would have been very well possible if Nvidia had chosen Steam instead of Nintendo as distributor for its Shield.

We'd have an open handheld platform for indie games.

<comment><USER33> >We'd have an open handheld platform for indie games.

Nintendo is the last company in the world that would be interested in this. They're not in the hardware business to sell other peoples software, they're in it to build a platform for their own software.

Nintendo platforms could literally ship with zero third party support and people would still buy them. Heck most casual gamers I know who bought Wii and Switch don't even own third party games at all, just Nintendo.

<comment><USER4> Yep. People have been decrying the end of Nintendo since the Playstation and it hasn't come to pass because Nintendo is actually really freaking good at making games people want to play. They make the hardware to their standards, with a target price they choose, and they make their games to the hardware. It can't push as many triangles as a PS4? Nobody cares, because you can't play BotW on a PS4.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Testing you own sites for SQL Injection and XSS - <AUTHOR>

Hi everyone,
I'm getting a bit paranoid about some of my web apps being open to SQL injection and XSS. I'm using http://htmlpurifier.org/ to scrub inputs where necessary, but when it comes to SQL injection, I only know the absolute basics.
Do you test you apps using any tools? If so, which ones?
Likewise, what SQL injection tests do you run to make sure that you're not open to - at best - any of the more common attacks?
Thanks, Tom. <comment><USER2> <http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Parametrized_SQL_statement>

But no, seriously, you should be using a library or something that sanitizes your SQL queries for you. If you aren't constructing the query string yourself, you should be okay.</comment>