uabstraction

Well, this combined with the snoopers charter just motivated me to sign up for an EFF membership. It's not much, but it's something.

It really feels like we're marching towards a brave new world. They can pry my copy of Applied Cryptography from my cold dead hands.

Perhaps freedom from advertisers' influence will have a positive affect on this (I'm not placing any bets though).

If you want to push this to the extreme, check out the MSP430 Launchpad and fiddle around with avr-gcc. Pick up a Bluetooth serial module (can be had on breakout board for ≈$40) and remote control something from any Android phone. Lots of fun to be had.

Just be aware, microcontroller C programming is pretty far out compared to regular systems programming. Lots of tasks involve writing bits to seemingly random memory-mapped registers to change the state of the controller... and forget about including your favorite libraries. You're lucky if the standard library fits on the chip. Its very similar to OS kernel development in that regard.

I think this says more about John Carmack's devine software engineering talent than it does about C++. I've seen some slick looking C++, and I've seen some flat out atrocious C (and vice-versa). Even Carmack decided to switch to C++ for iD Tech 5.

Stallman's greatest strength - his uncompromising, liberty or death approach to computing - is also his greatest weakness. With all due respect, by refusing to use proprietary software under any circumstances, and taking extreme measures to avoid various forms of tracking, he isolates himself into a sunshine and rainbows bubble of free software. Stallman is very good at predicting what the worst case scenarios may look like under various regimes of technological oppression, but he has no idea what the current state of affairs is outside his freedom bubble. He can't see what direction the state of the art is moving in, and has no first hand experience with any of the various evils he dedicates his life to fighting.

Stallman wrote my favorite text editor, and the original version of the C compiler I've fiddled with for the past decade, so I can't complain about the guy. He's a living legend. I just think that the potential negative results of hard-line free software purism don't get enough discussion within the free software community.

If we don't have Network Neutrality, we need to increase competition in consumer Internet access by an order of magnitude. In other words, its either net neutrality, or break up AT&T, TWC, Comcast, and Verizon into at least 40 companies, or riots.

With no NN, and no competition, we're going to end up forcing families who are aleady paying out the ass to choose between letting little Jimmy do the research he needs for his homework assignment, and Daddy sneaking some porn in the middle of the night. No way.

This is like being asked if you want to be shot by a cannon, or 100 guns.

A commercial Linux distro aimed at consumers would be cool, but things aren't so bad as it is. Making the switch will surely require some adaptation and getting used to, but when you get settled, things are pretty smooth, and only getting better. I've been happily running Debian as my primary OS for 8 years now, and I spent a few of those years running Linux exclusively.

The way I see it, Apple excels on the whole overarching synergy thing, while Linux excels on individual component quality. Considering that each component is an independent project, the Linux ecosystem will never be as homogenous as Windows or Mac. That said, it's a trade many of us happily make for the power of choice.

That's the beauty of it though. If you want something slick and powerful, there are options. If you want a $250 piece of shit laptop, there are options. If you want to build a workstation taylored to your workload, there are hundreds of companies making parts you can incorporate into your build.

You have backup plans for your hardware, and your software. If either one starts to reek, you can replace it without losing the other.

Except no one's asking them to "gimp" the available models. People are asking for more options in the high performance space. If Apple doesn't make it, you can't simply go to HP and get it there. You have no choice. It's either run out of memory, or abandon your whole OS and software stack.

Apple is forcing a segment of it's customers to abandon it's ecosystem to continue getting their work done . Their lack of reassuring response insinuates that macOS is a non-scalable toy platform.

I have no horses in this race myself, but if I had hundreds+ invested in Mac software and accessories, with no machines available on the market to handle my workload, I would be pretty bent.

Working in manufacturing (knee and hip implants, powered surgery tool geartrains and housings), attention to detail is what we get paid for, not the backbreaking work of pushing a cycle-start button.

Anybody can push a button, but how soon will they notice that one ±.0002" countersink diameter has drifted out of tolerance on a part with dozens of features? If it's slightly out of tolerance, will they have the integrity to reject the parts, or will they let them slip through the cracks? Will they know which combination of metrology equipment will give the most accurate measurement in a particular scenario?

Good machinists and CNC setup operators seem to be hard to find. In industries with high liability risks, you're better off not scraping the bottom of the barrel.

Seriously. The intelligence community answers to the executive. If they don't like the pardon they can go fuck themselves for that reason alone.

I've just got started with beets. It takes a lot of work to organize a music landfill that has accumulated over 15 years, but it may be the best tool for the job - even if the job will consume man-days.

MusicBrainz Picard never cut it for me.

I'd happily live with the lightning strike probability of being involved in a terrorist attack than the certainty that the government will abuse this data to subvert opposition.

Trading the rights of millions of people to combat terrorism hurts more people than the terrorists could ever hope to touch.

This doesn't even factor in solutions terrorists can use to avoid surveillance, or answer the question of if all this surveillance even reduces terrorism in the first place.

Skip the US. Our surveillance agencies are in bed, and American VPN providers can be strong-armed with an NSL. Use a VPN incorporated and with exit points in a more neutral/second-world country.

First, replace the core GNOME apps you use most frequently with lighter alternatives. Take it easy, do it one at a time. Try rxvt-unicode instead of gnome-terminal. Try Thunar or Dolphin or an mc clone instead of Nautilus.

There's a lot of non-obvious configuration options in the X11 stack. An .Xresources file can select better fonts, tweak hinting so they look fantastic, and change settings and color themes for many X applications. Out of the box, many X applications look like obsolete garbage, but they can be lightweight, functional, and awesome looking at the same time with a little configuration and love.

After getting your core apps sorted, consider an alternate DE/WM. I personally love the gaps fork of i3. XFCE is nice if you still want DE functionality.

I personally dual boot Debian Stretch and Gentoo ~amd64 - sharing a home partition. I keep Debian more or less stock on GNOME, while I rice the hell out of Gentoo with i3 and no systemd.

Check out https://reddit.com/r/unixporn for inspiration and ideas.

Google is terrifyingly good at finding relevant developer documentation. I'm convinced it will be writing software for us in a couple years.

No good. It seems that some genious at the WSJ decided to make accounts mandatory.

Qutebrowser is also worth checking out. I haven't really given it a full blown test drive yet, but it's certainly less bloated than Firefox and Chrome, and has Vim-like keybindings.

Those who do not move do not notice their chains.

You guys don't use -pedantic? :D

To boil this down farther, We are looking for a leader, not a follower. Hillary is a follower.

She has demonstrated over her career that she will vote for whatever is popular, lean on "think of the children" issues, and only vote progressively to catch up with the times. In a time where Congressional approval is so low, the American people couldn't stomach electing the epitome of a career politician who seems to have so many skeletons in her closet the door is about to burst (real or imaginary, the impression is there).

We ended up with Trump, which I am absolutely not thrilled about, but at least this will send the Democrats back to the drawing board to come up with something better than "Less Evil." I just pray to the FSM that the Republican House, Senate, Cabinet, and Supreme Court don't turn our great nation into a chop shop in the next 2 / 4 years. We are in for a bumpy ride.

Darktable is where it's at. I also haven't used Lightroom for more than 5 minutes, but Darktable covers all my RAW developing needs. If you're not shooting for money, it should suffice. (If you ARE shooting professionally, it might(?) fall short, but I only shoot for myself.)

I learned basic 16 bit x86 assembly by making simple COM executables and boot sectors with MASM. I don't know if its still possible run COM on modern Windows (this was in the 32 bit XP days), but getting started with boot sectors using BIOS interrupt service routines for IO should be an interesting project. You should be able to use the assembler output directly in a VM as a disk image this way, or dd it to something and watch it run on bare metal.

This was a very fascinating writeup. Video codecs are still sorcery to me, but I was kind of blown away by how many individual operations are employed in shedding redundancy. I kind of assumed that there was a single flat algorithm being employed, not a dozen or so special case optimizations that by some stroke of magic play so nicely together.

Unlike Homebrew, APT manages the entire system - from bootloader to browser. It is designed to work in multi-user environments where you don't want 40 different users installing 40 different copies of the same program, not updating them, getting viruses from unpatched software, and ruining the well behaving user's day.

Instead, software is installed once under root privelages so regular users can't sabotage each other, and everyone can share the same up-to-date copy.

It is possible to compile and install software per-user (without root) as well, and by setting $PATH you can have your user-installed software mask the version installed on the system. I recommend doing this for software which cannot be obtained through the package manager, or for bleeding edge git HEAD versions of stuff. Otherwise, let the knowledgeable maintainers of your distribution do the work for you.

> just-press-Win-and-start-typing experience is much better.

Despite the non—stop bickering, this has been the killer feature of Gnome 3 since it's inception. Most applications can be launched just by hitting win, the first one or two letters, and enter. The whole DE is streamlined for efficient keyboard driven operation and makes multitasking and launching arbitrary programs lightning fast. It doesn't have as many customization options that some other DEs have, but I highly recommend trying it out.

They're like the BMW turn signals of the free software world. If you spend more than a couple hours a day editing, you use Vim and Emacs.

A free software enthusiast might not reach for Sublime as their first choice, but if its what you're used to, and you paid for it, and you like it, I don't see any reason to abandon it other than trying to be a hipster. Surely you've got enough things to figure out during the transition where learning a new editor is just an extra unneccessary step.

CNC is computer numeric control. It is used in both subtractive and addative manufacturing processes, as well as in general automation (such as an assembly line robot arm).

Edit: "Machining" is specifically subtractive processes, which may or may not employ CNC.