I'm a foreigner living in Germany, and can tell you this is true. 'Everyone' uses Firefox.
They also really like these 2-click-social-media-buttons, because it apparently gives better privacy (load the tracking/tweeting/liking script upon the click of a button, and when clicking again run the like/tweet function) http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Fuer-mehr-Datenschutz....
Which seems like security theatre to me. Why not just load the script on the first click, and then run the tweet function immediately after?
As a German, not everybody uses Firefox. Chrome is quite popular as well, many people just don't change these things very often and got Firefox before Chrome was a thing. Took long enough to get them off Internet Explorer ;)
> then run the tweet function immediately after?
The site should not be able to do so, because if that worked shady sites simply would trigger "like" or "tweet" for visitors to generate spam. Loading the original widget is the only way that is accepted by the social networks.
I'm a programmer, and know very little about art (sadly).
The picture in the background here is very beautiful. Someone who makes that kind of thing, how do they do it? How do they chose colours, and how would they go about making the shapes actually appear on a screen?
While I can't speak on how the designer of this particular piece created the shapes you see, in Sketch I would create a shape (the flower petal) and then do "rotate copies". Do that a couple of times with the different size shapes and give each layer a different opacity (ability to see through the shape). Making it a black background with high opacity and layering them on top of each other provides for the cool effects.
Then place a rectangle background with a gradient on it that transitions from purple to green like in the graphic.
It looks like a small handful of semi-transparent shapes (they look like leaves to me) with different colors that are overlayed on each other. Since they're different semi-transparent colors, the colors blend to form a new shade where they have overlapped. Repeat this a few times with logic that rotates the leaf around the axis a little below the bottom center of the screen, and there you have it.
Yep. It's just a more gradated version of the iOS Photos app icon. It's pretty easy to see what makes the simpler version look the way it does, when you blow it up[1]: there are just eight translucent roundrects with gradients, and everything else emerges from how they overlap.
(And from the fact that the gradients form a complete hue continuum. Look at the small triangles in the middle to see the destination colors, and see how they match the source colors of their neighbours.)
What happens if someone built a service based on it? Should they never trust browsers keeping alive even the shitty (in comparison to free and standardised HTTP/2) features? What's great about the web is that now 20 year old services still are working in the latest runtimes (browsers).
It is always risky to build a service based on something that is not yet standardized. SPDY was in progress to be standardized, but the process ended up with parts of it in HTTP2, making SPDY unnecessary, as I understand things.
It would be the right thing for Google to remove SPDY at this point, otherwise it would be running a nonstandard protocol that other browsers do not, which can lead to fragmentation - as we saw just recently with an API that sadly Google has not removed despite it being nonstandard (FileSystem in the WhatsApp "Web" app).
edit: To clarify, I mean what Google is doing with SPDY sounds like the right thing. I don't mean it should remove it right now, I meant it was the right thing to do, right now, to announce it would be removed after a reasonable delay (and 1 year sounds reasonable).
> SPDY was in progress to be standardized, but the process ended up with parts of it in HTTP2, making SPDY unnecessary, as I understand things.
The "progress to be standardized" for SPDY was SPDY being chosen as the basis for HTTP/2; as I understand for a while SPDY has been being updated in parallel to the HTTP/2 development work to continue to reflect the state of HTTP/2 + new things the Google SPDY team wants to get into the standard, but its been clear for a long time that the intent was that SPDY as a separate protocol would be unnecessary once HTTP/2 was ready for use.
Agreed, Google did the right thing to remove Gears.
My concern is because, overall, Google has a bad track record in this area: FileSystem is still enabled, WebSQL is still enabled, PNaCl is still enabled edit: and H.264 was never removed despite announcing the intent to do so.
Eh? What is the spec competitor to PNaCl? asm.js is a cute trick but it still lacks threads which is easily one of the biggest features of PNaCl. So what actual viable alternatives are there to PNaCl?
We can discuss alternatives to PNaCl, but that isn't really the issue. Even if you have something you believe has no peer at the moment, that doesn't mean you can ship it without regards for the the standards process. It's still wrong for all the usual reasons.
Of course, not having a good alternative might mean that the other parties in the standards process should take another look at it. But again, that's a totally separate issue from whether it is ok to just ignore the standards process and ship whatever you want, which is what Google is doing here.
> that doesn't mean you can ship it without regards for the the standards process. It's still wrong for all the usual reasons.
What Google is doing with PNaCl is the standards process. Standards start life by being not-standards that someone shipped and enough people liked to make it into a standard.
There is nothing wrong here, nothing whatsoever. This is exactly how the process should work. Design-by-committee standards suck. Standards that won through raw competition? Those are all the good ones.
While I agree with you that competition is crucial, and without experimentation we will get nowhere, it is worth remembering that IE6 and all of its specific behaviors "won" through "raw competition".
Often things win not through fair competition. For example, WebSQL "won" on mobile because WebKit won on mobile, and WebKit happened to have WebSQL. If WebKit had had, say, the Audio Data API (which it did not), then the Audio Data API would have "won". Neither of those APIs won or would have won on its own merits, but because it was backed by the 800 pound gorilla in the space. (I chose Audio Data as an example because it is not in the same space as WebSQL, i.e. not competing with it, and was a nice API, that failed).
And the problem is that PNaCl will fragment the web, and already has. That's a serious problem - for everyone but Google.
> it is worth remembering that IE6 and all of its specific behaviors "won" through "raw competition".
It is worth noting that the findings in the antitrust actions in the US over Microsoft's illegal and anti-competitive behavior in establishing IE's dominance indicate that that claim is, at best, misleading.
I would argue the opposite, in fact - that it shows what happens with pure unrestrained competition. Which leads to monopolies and other forms of competition suppression, ironically, of course.
Regardless, we don't need to agree on that point. There are plenty of other examples in tech (and outside) of things winning through "raw competition" that are just not that good.
But again, that's a totally separate issue from whether it is ok to just ignore the standards process and ship whatever you want, which is what Google is doing here.
But isn't that exactly what happened with SPDY? They shipped it unilaterally first, then later on it got standardized as HTTP2.
SPDY initially began inside Google. But rather quickly it got enthusiastic interest from multiple outside parties, and a standardization process began. We can see the (successful) end of that process now. Yes, it's true that many standards begin that way.
PNaCl also began inside Google. Discussions regarding it, and the PPAPI on which it depends, were a combination of opposition (e.g. because PPAPI duplicates existing web APIs, and because it's a plugin API, which browsers are trying to move away from) to ignoring. Google continued to work on it, enabled it on the Chrome Web Store, and despite any change in the response of the community over a period of years, enabled it for web content. Over a year has passed since then, and it seems clear that (1) no browser outside Google thinks PNaCl is a good idea, and (2) no significant interest has been shown from non-browser vendors either (Google itself is the main user of PNaCl).
Also, to make things even worse, during all that time, PNaCl has not been brought to any standards body.
Another large difference is that, in practice, SPDY didn't pose a compatibility threat to the web. It has clear fallbacks so that content still works without browser support for it. And while it is possible bugs could still cause breakage, it didn't happen in practice. So moving forward somewhat quickly with SPDY was still arguably a responsible thing to do.
Whereas, PNaCl is already showing fragmentation problems, with several Google properties using PNaCl and consequently only working in Chrome.
There is therefore every reason for Google to disable PNaCl, because it is nonstandard and bad for the web to keep it on. Unless Google simply does not care about standardization here.
WebSQL is nicer to use, but requiring every browser to be bug-for-bug compatible with SQLite 3.0.17 (or whatever it was) forever and ever is not nice for browser developers.
I think that's a reasonable timeline, actually - sorry if what I wrote was confusing to imply "right now". I meant to say "It would be the right thing for Google to announce the timeline to remove SPDY at this point in time."
A year head's up gives people plenty of time to update their sites, and sounds fair and reasonable.
Nothing is being lost with regards to SPDY. Old versions were never supported; if you wanted to use SPDY you had to commit to keeping the server updated.
So effectively they have just announced a long term support edition of SPDY. What an odd time to complain about the lack of long term support.
Reading this, and other recent events, gives me the realisation that we need the successor of UNIX. Nowadays, everything runs UNIX. My iPhone, Android, my Mac, my Ubuntu laptop, my Debian or BSD server, even my e-reader runs some Linux.
On recent systems like iOS & Android applications run pretty isolated. You can't read and write the whole file system (afaik), and you need to have the user tap "yes" to use many system API's (like microphone, camera, etc).
Using UNIX for a desktop computer, you don't really utilise the user system. Everything I run is either as my own user, or as root (when adding/remove packages or doing system updates). Otherwise, it's a singe user system. So any program I run can read all permanent data stored by other programs in my home directory. In effect, all programs have 100% access (except for changing system settings, but why would they care when there is only one user to own?
When I encrypt my drive, I encrypt it all but also unlock it all when logging in. It's inherent to the system that my whole home dir is open when using (except for things I encrypt manually, like GPG mail or other user land things). Defaults matter. That's why Ross's documents were readable to the American government.
I think we need a new OS to take over after UNIX. One that is built up of sandboxed modules. Where each program gets it's own file system, where they can do whatever they want. That file system is, if I wish, encrypted until I chose to open it. It could be encrypted with a public key system, so I can have many FS's opened with one key, or derive keys from a master key.
These small systems could even be virtual machines, I can't say anything about the eventual overhead that would bring.
In short, UNIX is bad because the file system is bound to my user, and anything my user runs has 100% access to everything else I run. The user system is nice, but not practical. If it was, Ross would be a free man.
They say it's "React-like", but afaik it doesn't do the cool things with a virtual dom? What's cool about React is how it doesn't write to the DOM all the time, only when there is a diff. Does Riot do that? If not, thanks but it doesn't compete with React.
What mining does in Bitcoin is to generate consensus, so that everyone agrees on the financial history, which === keeping track of what public key owns what amount.
The actual hashes are pretty worthless, but that's the service mining is providing. Personally, I think it's kinda worthless to build a bunch of skyscraper on perfectly fine land just to fill with people working for some bank, just to keep my $ secure. For my intents and purposes, having a bank company (with employees, offices, leaders who get compensated like kings, etc) is a bigger waste that I can't wait to get rid of. Same with my VISA debit card, employing thousands just to let me access my money. Also charging a 3% fee on every transaction.
If only there was some kind of network of computer programs that could replace those people...
consensus means all members of a party agree upon something. Not just 50%+1, majority rule.
This has to do with bitcoins, exchanges (the 3% fee people mentioned before). And people that are about to stuff their money into a futile idea. And don't pretend your comment is contributing in any way.
People doing bitcoins now, people starting the exchanges, online wallets etc, take the exact same positions as bankers have/had now. Pretending they know it all so well and right. And soon they too will take from you just as bankers. This exchange is not going to bring any change to bitcoins, it's just the winklevoss brothers trying to make the news again, and hope they finally have a product own besides a shitload of lawsuit money.
“I'm quite openly against [proof of work] mining as the future of digital currencies based on the amount of energy it wastes, and damage it does to the environment – without giving anything back apart from making the fiat rich richer.”
Does replacing Bitcoin's logo with the picture of a cute dog now make you some sort of authority on distributed consensus algorithms?
> And i share this point of view.
And just like him, you don't even understand PoW.
> consensus means all members of a party agree upon something. Not just 50%+1, majority rule.
Actually, consensus means "majority opinion". And I don't know where you got the 50%+1 expression from anyway, or why you think it matters . What are you referring to, exactly? Would you say there isn't consensus for the validity of the theory of evolution, just because initially, or even today, someone disagreed?
Not sure which bookstore accepts bitcoins, but you might want to invest in a dictionary. :o) Or amazon coins, dogecoins, aurora coin, blackcoin, coinye's, dark coins, etc etc.
Consensus, from the old latin, consentīre, to feel together, agree.
Something everybody in 'a party' can agree with.
"An attacker that controls more than 50% of the network's computing power can, for the time that he is in control, exclude and modify the ordering of transactions."
That's 50% plus one, and that's certainly not a consensus, that's majority ruling. Perhaps you don't know as much about bitcoins as you think you did/do. And if you read the link you'll notice some more issues.
And those are mainly technical issues, not even the unfair investment in power, hardware. Simple example, electricity in my country is so expensive, if you'd find a bitcoin, it would hardly cover the costs of the electricity that i spend on it.
Consensus and majority ruling are not the same. We, you and me, probably won't come to a consensus about this. But if one of us was significantly stronger then the other, you could do a majority (in muscle power) ruling and claim your way is the only way to go, and everybody should stick to that (and yes there will be very unhappy people in that situation, the other half).
The quoting of the opinion of the dogecoin author, merely is to indicate there are more people that think like me. Even authors of crypto currencies with funny dog logos. So no it doesn't make him an authority; though i think its safe to assume he is somewhat more knowledgeable about crypto currency than the average greedy miner that just buys a few GPU's and starts mining in hope of (highly speculative, e.g. previously referred to, paintings.) fortune.
Why do you think there are so many different crypto currencies. They all are greedy and want to harvest as much in the early stages of their mining, maximum returns on investments. Or sit in that place where banks are at in our current position. (what the Winklevoss brothers now want to be).
And if i don't seem to understand, in your eyes, what proof of work is, then please elaborate. Tell please try to enlighten me about the actual work that is getting done with bitcoins (or other crypto currencies)? What is this work exactly, because as far as i have understood over the years, it's a useless hash. Art like; Art that gets created on resources, we ruin our planet for.
Only thing they managed so far in my opinion is to create a somewhat, (its not,) anonymous payment system that allows the selling and buying of things that are generally illegal. (if those things should be illegal is a different discussion).
So to get back to evolution theory, there certainly isn't a consensus on this around the world. Else why are there still people that frantically fight that idea, and claim there is a creator? People are killing each other every day over this? Trying to do a majority ruling.
> Not sure which bookstore accepts bitcoins, but you might want to invest in a dictionary. :o) Or amazon coins, dogecoins, aurora coin, blackcoin, coinye's, dark coins, etc etc.
I won't fight over a stupid dictionary definition, but in case you want to know: The one I used I took it from one. Now what? Do you have any algorithm so that we can achieve consensus on this, or I'll have to accept what you say as a doctrine? The fact that you insist so much on a definition makes it clear that your argument is pretty weak, you have no clue how to attack Bitcoin anymore. You just have an irrational hate against it and want it to go away.
And I don't consider any of those coins "investments". They are redundant, they don't do any significant thing that Bitcoin doesn't, and Bitcoin has a much larger network effect, which is one of the most important things for a protocol and a currency.
> That's 50% plus one
Since you keep saying that, let me explain that simple majority isn't 50% plus one, it's >50%. For example, if we have 9 participants, the majority would be 5, not 5.5.
> Why do you think there are so many different crypto currencies. They all are greedy and want to harvest as much in the early stages of their mining, maximum returns on investments.
Yes, people are greedy. Some try to innovate, some just copy/paste the code, like your beloved dogecoin. But what's your point anyway?
> And if i don't seem to understand, in your eyes, what proof of work is, then please elaborate.
It's an algorithm for achieving distributed consensus, and the cost is those hashes. If you think distributed consensus is worthless, that's a separate issue and you should discuss it as such.
> Only thing they managed so far in my opinion is to create a somewhat, (its not,) anonymous payment system that allows the selling and buying of things that are generally illegal.
Cash is much better for illegal activities. Do you know who said this? The FBI. But your hate is too strong to accept this.
> So to get back to evolution theory, there certainly isn't a consensus on this around the world.
I'm talking about the scientific community, obviously. What do I care what preachers or soldiers say about a scientific issue?
> Have a good and happy mining weekend :)
What makes you think I mine? I don't mine Bitcoin, just like I don't mine gold.
Wouldn't Paypal be the first proprietary mover of sending money over IP, and Bitcoin being like SMTP/POP/IMAP/whatever? Or maybe I misunderstood something
A torrent index that I can view thru an emacs mode would be the most useful. If the data format is just a text tile with each torrent taking one line would be amazing. It would be long, but it's just text so memory consumption is negligible. Kinda same style as Org-mode, I imagine.
You could just search like usual, open a magnet with Return, click 'c' for it's comments. When opening the file, the mode would check for seeders/leechers and display it inline.
That's an interesting idea, and I'm sure people familiar with emacs would find it very useful. BitCannon has a pretty simple API (at least I think) so feel free to tinker around and make alternative clients for it!
I think Duplicity (http://duplicity.nongnu.org) is what you're looking for. For Ubuntu I know there's a nice GUI that anyone who can use a computer can set up. For other platforms I think cli is the only way, but someone could just write a QT/Cocoa wrapper around it.
They also really like these 2-click-social-media-buttons, because it apparently gives better privacy (load the tracking/tweeting/liking script upon the click of a button, and when clicking again run the like/tweet function) http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Fuer-mehr-Datenschutz....
Which seems like security theatre to me. Why not just load the script on the first click, and then run the tweet function immediately after?