traspler

The situation is wild. In older Outlook versions they've used IE to render the received mails but used a custom engine when you were writing/editing an email. You could even use Word as an editor so you could generate the HTML using Word as your WYSIWYG IDE. I can understand why that needed some consolidation into one editor and one engine but re-using Word so they wouldn't have to create a new editor wasn't the best decision for the ecosystem.

WYSIWYG editors and rendering engines aren't things I know about so I wonder if there have been difficult engineering issues at that time or if they just went at it from a business standpoint of "people see mail like letters so they are documents for which we have word so let's use that".

//Edit: Looks like they were mainly interested in providing a great WYSIWYG experience using tools users are already familiar with: https://web.archive.org/web/20110311083708/http:/blogs.offic... great quote: "There is no widely-recognized consensus in the industry about what subset of HTML is appropriate for use in e-mail for interoperability. The “Email Standards Project” does not represent a sanctioned standard or an industry consensus in this area. Should such a consensus arise, we will of course work with other e-mail vendors to provide rich support in our products." - I guess their argument could be that there still is no "HTML standard for email" so they don't have to support anything they don't want to?

"Outlook (Windows)" is dead last in the "rankings". That's pretty much the only page on there that matters sadly; Determining which features work on Outlook for Windows and that's the maximum that can go into an HTML EMail.

Sure, I'd love to only send txt mails but that sadly does not align with the expectations/desires of the companies I've worked with.

I don‘t know too much about this but I kind of always assumed that even if there was perfect separation, one way for the NSA to get to the necessary data would be through GCHQ as an agency in Europe which could help and share this data. It might be harder as the laws are different but still. Is it too paranoid to assume that or do I have completely wrong assumptions about cooperation between the Five Eyes.

Shadowsocks and similar tools are mainly about obfuscating your traffic flow so it‘s harder to classify and block by the GFW, right? The Tor Project has the „obfsproxy“ project for that I think, or is that aimed at something else? I always wondered why that did not overtake shadowsocks.

But any of the VPN services out there do that for you without the incredible stigmata of having an IP of a Tor Exit Node and the reduced performance of the Tor Network.

It's commendable that the project states "anonymity is hard to get – solely using Tor doesn’t guarantee it" and "it is strongly advised not to use TorBox if your well-being depends on your anonymity". Other such solutions like to gloss over the fact that "using tor !== anonymity" and even the Tor Browser does a lot more to help with anonymity than just route your traffic through tor.

I'm still not sure where such a solution would be a good choice though. Getting access to the broader, uncensored internet is also not as easy as it seems in countries where this applies, e.g. China, as even getting an entry node that works is not easy so this is not a plug'n'play option anymore for that.

Even as a big company you can do that. E.g Intellectual Ventures [1] offers such protection services.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_Ventures

I do agree that it looks like they should not have engaged him on his level by pouring gas on the flames every time he went off the rails. Remaining on topic would have been the "professional" way to go I guess and just leave him to rant alone. They did take the bugreport though and never questioned that it was valid. All of that still does not excuse the behaviour of the reporter.

I think your assessment that developers should not derive any pride from happy users and are merely there to serve a greater good is a bit far from reality. Maybe they should not worry about things like this but then again these are also just people living their lives. This is not a corporate entity where you engage with a PR representative, these are people, doing what they like to do.

I think it's perfectly fine for a project to have a discussion about what they are calling themselves and what the consequences of that are. I really like the introduction of the linked wiki and I think it leaves it open to anyone to argue their point, from "leave it, it's funny" to "I feel offended and so should you".

I don't think this discussion has reached the point (yet) where it's simply about avoiding offence or getting bullied into a decision.

wow, this is crazy. I would never have imagined this level of a shitshow when you said "annoying"...

But what to do with such a person if you can't/won't ban them from posting? Delete his comments? Don't engage until he tires himself out?

I am also a happy Telegram user and think it offers amazing UX but if you leave WhatsApp due to privacy concerns, Telegram might not be the right solution. All Groups and by default any other conversation you have are only encrypted in transport between your client and their servers. Also their encryption has been called into question a lot at the beginning.

So instead you will just be tracked by Google Analytics ;)

I ran Huginn on my server for a long time until I finally found https://pipedream.com/ never looked back. I did try Node-RED at some point but as much as I liked the canvas, it just didn't work the way I wanted it to for my use-cases.

I've run a Mumble server for my friends group for a while. It worked fine and had a couple of nice features, e.g. that anyone could create a temporary channel and move there with some people and when they all quit the channel would be removed again. This way everyone could organize as they see fit.

But the audio setup and tweaking was a nightmare. It was the biggest problem for every participant to tune and tweak their levels in a way that would work good, it was very, very frustrating.

The chat was also super barebones and of course no way to stream video.

For a first step these labels are okay but I would like for the developers to have to provide more details on the what/why/whatfor for all these points to settle exactly this dispute.

Instead of the brutal patchsets that simply remove all the features that touch anything from google, it would have been amazing if there was a project that aims to make them pluggable, maybe even to end users, not just during compile time. Being able to switch these features off or even chose a different provider for it would be pretty great I think. Sure, some of the features can be replaced with extensions but not with the same integration.

MicroG (re-implementation & stubs of Google Services for Android) tries to do that at least in some areas, e.g. the location provider: https://github.com/microg/UnifiedNlp

I was a bit shocked when I was hit by this a couple of years back (2017) and learned that browsers are adamant about providing autocomplete, going so far as to infer the type from labels or placeholder strings.

The problem was even more frustrating because it seemed like disabling it was the only workaround to prevent a strange mobile Safari issue where the autocomplete bar would push the "next/prev element - Done" bar, on top of the keyboard, up so it would overlap the "position: fixed; bottom: 0;" element on the page (which was the input the user was trying to write into).

The argument that the user would complain to the browser vendor if he couldn't autocomplete is a bit strange to me. I would think the real novice users would begrudgingly accept the inconsistent behaviour and the users that do care about it would complain to the website they were on. But then again I haven't read any user studies regarding this.

I had a Unicomp Spacesaver M about 10 years ago. I absolutely loved the typing experience (I never used an original though) and gaming on it was also fine but I had it connected over PS/2 so afaik, key rollover was not an issue with that.

But other than that I didn't like it very much, it felt and looked very cheaply made and became completely unreliable and died about 2y later.

For me the sound was a big part of the satisfying typing experience but I can get something similar ("good enough") with more modern switches so I'm pretty happy with my keyboard from WASD Keyboards.

I've ran pfSense on older ALIX and the APU boards. On the APU I sadly got nowhere close to my symmetric gigabit speeds. I'm not that knowledgeable on network stacks but from what I heard it's probably BSDs network stack that doesn't cut it on that hardware.

I've read that MikroTik's RouterOS delivers significantly more performance on an APU Board but I've not tried that yet (but plan to).

I do wonder how all the Nintendo leaks do/will/don't impact emulator development. If the core team don't look at it, fine but how can they accept PRs/MRs and make sure nothing from the leak makes it into their codebase via a third party? Or is that just not a problem?

Documentation is a big pain point for many of the big platforms for me. Be it Android or iOS.

On the Android side it seems like there was a huge push for documentation some years ago but due to the sheer size and scope it seems like many things just never got updated and new things got the "Gotta go Fast" treatment. It's always very frustrating reading an official "How-to" article telling you to do one thing and when you click through to the underlying system's documentation you notice that this is no longer how you do it.

On the iOS side I can't understand how anyone figures out how things work. Maybe veterans know enough to decipher 4 word descriptions of a function argument and a random list of exposed function names but I certainly can't. e.g. How anyone figured out how ReplayKit works from the "docs" is beyond me. There is a WWDC video and hopefully some sample code you find in some repos but good luck with that...

I can forgive a lot of peculiarities of a system if I can at least figure out the what & how in the documentation/guides.

There are documentations for rather complex systems that I thought were absolutely amazing, e.g. the MS Hololens. So it is at least possible.

Really happy to see that the project is back (the commit graph flatlined for quite a while) :D Thanks for the great work!

This project will probably never be "done" and will have to play catch up with Google all the time but it's really amazing that people are putting the work in to achieve this! Thanks a lot! I think this project is vital to the future of AOSP based community distributions.

Maybe it's naive to think that even when showing Ads or collecting usage data, there has to come a point of questionable returns. I struggle with accepting that showing Ads and collecting usage data involves nearly 40 different collectors/trackers.

I do get the allure of cross-channel tracking and personalized Ads but maybe good enough could be reached differently.

I don't categorically reject Ads and data collection but the current data hunger is insatiable with little visible benefit to me.

39 Trackers | 91 Third-Party Cookies | Evading Trackers | (Possible) Keystroke & Mouse Monitoring https://themarkup.org/blacklight/?url=arstechnica.com

Many of the X-Pack features are actually available in their "Basic" license and even public source: https://www.elastic.co/what-is/open-x-pack but just not under an actual OSS license.

e.g. "Data Streams" is covered under the Basic license so you can use it for free (I think? As far as I can tell at least). You can find the feature on their subscriptions page: https://www.elastic.co/subscriptions

I find the whole situation with X-Pack, Subscriptions and OSS vs Basic super confusing and the subscription page seems very bad at explaining it all.

I have run a relay/entry node at home for a while, just to figure out how all of this worked and with symmetrical gigabit I have bandwidth to spare.

The network never promoted my node to an entry but it operated as a relay.

One thing I noticed that my IP must have suddenly been in some lists. I can't prove it but on multiple forums my IP was blacklisted an I had issues accessing some services from telco providers. Never had these issues before and never again after I stopped running the relay... maybe I'm just paranoid.

It seems like the included pw managers like LastPass & Dashlane also impact page loading drastically. Is there even an alternative with less impact?

So are all the parts of what will become the Swiss COVID tracing app: https://github.com/DP-3T

I really hope some of the the project management tools and scanning features will trickle down to the cheaper/free tiers some time.

I can understand that not everything has to be free but the current feature split of project management and scanning features among the tiers feels a bit haphazard with some crucial things at the highest prices, making it hard to justify the in-between tiers and impossible to buy the highest.

Ah yes, the "Who can find the open 2y old GitLab issue for our problem" game. There is always one and it always has a couple of "This is an issue for a customer <zendesk link>" comments. At least even very old issues still get responses and seemingly are tracked somehow.

I kind of agree with the "too fast". It seems to me that many features are being created as a PoC to pad out features lists and having something new to market. It will then live on as barely useable and accumulates hundreds/thousands of issues as the devs seem to be spread way too thin over all the PoC, core and new features.