Hey wow, I love this idea, this design philosophy, and this commitment to reuse. It occurs to me it may also solve another complaint I've always had with laptops, that you have to find the machine whose screen, trackpad, keyboard, weight, etc. ALL match your wishlist (with a desktop you buy the display you want, the external keyboard you want, the external mouse/trackball you want). This device lends itself to customization, almost like an ecosystem: hopefully some day they will offer a Dvorak, Workman, and Colemak keyboard variant, or similar customizations. Better yet, open it up to niche customized hardware manufacturers and make it a market. Suddenly it becomes the substrate for an ecosystem of customized components. I love this idea. (For reference, my current approach to hardware reuse is to sytematically only buy used laptops. I save a ton of money too).
We do plan to offer Dvorak, Workman, and Colemak keyboards. In a normal laptop, it would never really be feasible to do this because you'd be sitting on a lot of really niche, expensive inventory. In our case, the input assembly is one of the configurable items in the Framework Laptop DIY Edition, so we only have to stock the variants of that module, rather than full laptops.
This lets us cover languages and layouts that have historically been missing from notebooks.
On behalf of Usenet users everywhere, this is excellent news, and I wouldn't be surprised if Usenetters begin stuffing other useful newsgroups with crap in order to removed from Google as well.
Google's assimilation of Usenet content had promise at first but quickly turned into a dystopia and the general consensus on Usenet is that Google has been a disaster for Usenet.
Google had the most complete archive of comp.lang.c (and the rest of Usenet). That archive is now inaccessible.
Users posting to comp.lang.c through Google Groups were a problem -- especially with the recent bug that caused GG posts to comp.lang.c++ to have the "++" quietly dropped.
If Google made its archive of all Usenet newsgroups available, I'd be fine with them dropping the posting interface. (And some users actually managed to post to comp.lang.c through Google Groups without breaking things.)
<sotto voce> Usenet postings were never meant to be permanent. I was there in its heyday and nobody expected their postings to live beyond the spool expiration lifetime.
Yup. I've met a number of old farts like me who were not thrilled when what we assumed was transient had been archived. I'm not a big fan of the opt-out model of archiving where archivers just assume that they have implied consent to grab anything and everyone from everyone who hasn't explicitly said no.
The problem is that opt-in archival is effectively no archival.
If you looked at how data is lost online, you'd find out that by far the most obvious and immediate cause of data loss was third-party intermediaries shutting down old sites. For example, when Yahoo! decided to burn down Geocities - and shittons of early Internet history - on the basis of saving some hosting and storage costs. A second cause is neglect; say, you move your blog to a new platform, but you don't bother redirecting the old URLs, so now you've just carved a hundred or so new dead links into other people's content. In both of those cases, data wasn't being deliberately removed because it needed to go - it just happened by accident.
Furthermore, we don't usually know when these accidents happen. Yes, occasionally some intermediary announces it in advance, but often times linked sites just die. This is a phenomenon known as link rot, and it can happen for a whole host of accidental reasons. Try going to a 10 year old news article and clicking on any of the links, or going to a decades-old forum thread and looking at any of the images. Count how many of them still work. It's depressingly low.
Now, try to imagine getting consent to archive in advance from people who do not know or care about the problems I've just mentioned. You won't get very far - not because the archiving is harmful to them but because most people do not understand the problem. People don't backup their own shit until after they've already lost heaps of data. Even in situations like the Geocities shutdown, the logistics of actually asking for permission to archive on top of running a bunch of scrapers to actually do the archival is... complicated. You could do it, but the vast majority of data would go unarchived purely due to an inability to locate the owner of the data.
Not everything is deserving of being treated as historical artifacts worthy of retention. A friend has lamented that when he was in college in the late 80s, he used USENET as a way to connect with people and work through some pretty heavy emotional challenges. Retaining his personal struggles is hardly "history" - if anything, the historical value of retaining the struggles of one inconsequential person is far lower than the direct impact a google search has on his life today. So as you said, some things aren't as important as you think - in his case, privacy and respect are a bit more important than a historical record of a teenager seeking people to talk to. Every minute detail of history isn't as important as you think.
You'd be surprised from what is considered history. Nowadays, insights into the lives and emotions of ordinary people are considered invaluable tool in recreating the past: the context in which political, economical, and cultural developments happened. In fact, the spontaneous nature of certain artifacts makes them more valuable, because what we would call "official history" is always editorialized and subject to the influence of only few people and not produced by the entire society it originates from.
It is something that I've thought about - the contradiction between privacy and the need to communicate yourself to the generations to come and the broadcast into the void it requires. If your friend is okay with his privacy in the archives, he might be glad to know that in hundred years, there will be an AI whose PHD will be on the emotional significance of new technologies in the lives of early adopters of the Internet, the case of user John Smith 1988.
I think the biggest difference/problem is that these people are still alive in many cases, whereas the authors of historical letters are not. This is a big difference, I think.
O, yes, I agree. It would be ideal if peoples actions are like state archives (accessible 50 years after the fact). However, I wanted to underline how inconsequential people actually matter in history.
Once you publicly post something, or even post something privately to someone else, it’s not entirely yours anymore, in an important sense it’s theirs.
Yes Usenet used to gave a spool lifetime, but that was clearly variable and there were no guarantees about it. Anybody could set up a mirror and frequently did. Also anyone could copy out content to other media and there was no expectation that they couldn’t do that.
We are all responsible for what we post to other people and in some cases also the effect it has on them. Consider bullying, abuse, criminal conspiracy, the record of receiving a message belongs to the receiver not the sender.
Every single minute detail is exactly equally important, because you, nor I, nor anyone, has any idea what will be important or why it will be important.
When pompeii was discovered we saw into homes 1,000 years ago. Without any regard to privancy for those covered in rock we broadcast their lives around the globe.
I don't think we give a lot of weight to what the original publishing intent was for anything published 100, 200 years ago, why would the change in the future?
Not really, that information gradually gets bit-rot and evaporates away to nothingness as website after website gets old and vanishes.
In the early days of the Internet, I often used to Google/AltaVista/Jeeves my own name. There used to be quite a few hits. Over the years, those old hits have just faded away.
That doesn't necessarily mean they disappeared, although chances are probably better that they did than didn't. Google has increasingly started incorporating recency in how it ranks search results, so if it's more than a few years old it'll fade away from Google results regardless if it's still around or not.
What's inhumane is making every small transgression into some stigma that should follow a person around their whole life. I don't think we fix that by erasing all traces of the transgression, which in many cases may be practically impossible.
It's not obvious to me whether changing the view on transgression and stigma is practically possible.
In my experience it's strongly tied to personal experience: if I committed a transgression in my past I'm going to be more understanding towards others doing the same (still depending on the nature of the transgression and my rationalization of it). It's also worth nothing that what constitutes a transgression changes with the times, and often the public seem to forget/ignore this fact and retroactively apply stigma and resentment.
Even if this were true, it would be better if the archives were not available for some decades after the original posting. I’m OK with my content being analyzed by historians, but the definition of “historian” presumes some professional detachment that is not available short years after the post was made.
I think even leaving aside historians - the idea of making everything posting transient by default would have robbed us of a lot of stored knowledge. I'm feeling quite bitter about the rise of Slack and Discord over mailing lists and Usenet.
The ease in which one can find clues and solutions to decades old technical questions relies on everything being stored.
And more than just technical issues - I'm no historian but I've wasted endless hours following fascinating discussions from the past that suddenly become relevent because of recent events or unforeseen connections. I love how much is preserved by accident. It makes me slightly sad to think that it might be otherwise and that others would wish it otherwise.
And yet I used to regularly find answers on a Usenet or Google groups mirror with Google. Even sometimes in public irc logs. I have yet to find the answer in a public slack or discord log.
> but the definition of “historian” presumes some professional detachment
The idea of everything you've ever posted becoming part of a giant "digital permanent record" used by data brokers, advertisers, credit bureaus, trolls, nosy people, etc. is somewhat unappealing.
It's not much different than a recording of a conversation. I wouldn't implicitly expect the recording to be destroyed, or expect the law to require destruction when the recording was made on equipment I don't control.
I don't think that these are equivalent. This issue is similar to saying that every conversation will be recorded by default, unless you opt out of a recording beforehand.
This would be why pretty much every Usenet post I made from 1996 (or so) onwards had an X-No-Archive header. How many actually honoured it, I cannot say, however.
Yeah, Dejanews was the harbinger of the archiving apocalypse. I added X-No-Archive: Yes to have dejanews throw away my posts the instant I learned about it, and then later on when Google bought dejanews and gave us all a one-time "opt out or be archived forever" chance, I was able to purge all the rest.
When do you consider that heyday to be? I showed up in 1995 and my expectation was always that anything posted there would be permanently on the internet.
So I deployed Kester’s Rule of the Internet: Don’t put things on the internet that you don’t want to be on the internet. That way there won’t be anything you put on the internet that you didn’t want to be there.
It took years but all of my old Usenet posts eventually were removed. The people running archives tended to be real jerks about it - I’m pretty sure a couple of them got off on telling me no with long hand typed explanations, but in the end most of them were running archives on their employer’s equipment and when they switched jobs, got let go, or retired they couldn’t take it with them and nobody else wanted to maintain them so eventually the last copy I could find fell.
The jerk was someone publishing something publicly, voluntarily, then perversely trying to make anyone who might have saved their copies of the thing you gave them, delete them.
I'm amazed anyone gave you the time if day. I can't imagine I'd have even answered. I certainly never signed any kind of copyright agreement when I started posting on BBS's or newsgroups.
Somewhere on one or more old hard drives somewhere I may have a few years of whatever groups I was into at the time, and I tell you now, on this new similar public forum, I will not bother digging out and scanning all my old drives to find anything to remove it, and I will not promise never to add them to any public archive.
Different situation but same overall attitude. I'd send a polite one-line request asking to remove a specific message and I'd get back three or four hand-typed pages where the person was gloating that I was powerless to make them do anything, basically the the same thing I see revenge porn victims going through - though nobody ever tried to charge me to remove a post and nobody went the route of re-posting my messages to spite me.
Maybe so, but those of us who try to restore or emulate old stuff from those long ago times actually have to rely on contemporary information from Usenet because the old documentation no longer exists.
> nobody expected their postings to live beyond the spool expiration lifetime.
I know that a number of posters in groups I used to frequent added the X-No-Archive: yes header to their posts in the early 2000s. The Google and Deja news archive before it did honor that header apparently.
This is about C, not C++. Though I haven’t been there in years, I chuckle to think what would have happened if you made this mistake on that news group.
Pretty sure OP is referring to this part of the comment they were replying to:
> Users posting to comp.lang.c through Google Groups were a problem -- especially with the recent bug that caused GG posts to comp.lang.c++ to have the "++" quietly dropped.
Funny to see this. About a month ago I took a break from my usual environment (Linux Mint Cinnamon) and gave Icewm a try. I decided after a week of usage that it did everything I need in a window manager: fully configurable with hotkeys, multiple virtual desktops, a taskbar, a decent "start" button with a menu system you can edit to your heart's content.
I usually like transparent terminals with a slight shading to them and icewm uses older technology so the newer terminals don't provide transparency. I fixed that by moving to aterm which in turn gave me trouble by not handling unicode.
So icewm is perhaps dated. But it's very lightweight, a bit more mainstream-feeling than openbox etc., and I thought it's a good compromise between a KDE/Mate/Gnome3 and openbox/fluxbox/i3 etc. It's nice for remote machines you remote into where you want some basic GUI functionality but not a full-blown desktop environment.
I moved fro black box to xfce as my WM About a decade ago for the wifi integration. I remain With it on my desktop as I like having the docked apps (pidgin, slack, teams, vlc and volume), and of course inertia. Like the rest of linux it just works and doesn’t get in my way.
However aside from Firefox, and screenshots, everything I launch is via alt-escape which pops upend a new rxvt-Unicode window.
I love using Lynx on medium.com. It strips away all the non-content and leaves the good stuff. In fact, I can't browse medium pages using any other browser.
Reader mode Firefox is my tool for that (on mobile too - never "upgraded" to Fenix).
I often open a news page or something and it's completely blank at first because so many scripts and assets got blocked by uMatrix. Before I actually unblock any domains, I try toggling reader mode on - a lot of times it's enough to let me read the plain HTML text which I actually wanted.
Oh, that's great to hear! Still not going to upgrade unless some extremely critical vulnerability comes out, though. Tab queue and uMatrix are both killer features for me.
The folks who do Fastmail built Topicbox (https://topicbox.com) a few years ago and I don't yet see how Front differs from that product. Basically, it brings the concept of conversation channels to inbox, while providing a permanent record of the chats that your newer employees can read to catch up on what happened before they arrived, or for compliance. I think their implementation is pretty slick.
I've got a Brother MFC L2710DW that both Linux and ChromeOS print to without any trouble at all. Newer Chromebooks with the Google Playstore also give you access to the Brother Print & Scan app, which also works.
Huh, we have a Brother HLL2390DW multifunction laser, and I can't figure out how to set it up on ChromeOS at all. There's no working driver as far as I can tell.
The Print&Scan app is a disaster, largely due to how Android works on Chromebooks. It can only access the totally separate Android filesystem, which isn't visible in the ChromeOS Files app. If you want to export a scan to the ChromeOS files, you have to use the "Share" button and pick the Files app. You can't use the very prominent "Save" button.
Apple is slowly disappearing from my family's hardware portfolio, and recent software changes are accelerating it. Back in 2005 or so I converted my entire CD collection to digital, and managed it happily using Itunes. Somehow in the transition from itunes to Apple Music, Apple refused to recognize any of the tracks I created from my own, legally purchased media.
My wife currently has no way to listen to any of the music we legally own, using her iphone. So guess whose next phone is going to be Android, with an SD card containing 1TB of music we own? The other advantages of iphone are not important to me, and the apps she uses are available on the playstore. For bonus points I can buy her a pretty decent Android phone for a few hundred bucks, instead of a new device costing well over a thousand.
I understand Apple wants to push everyone to monthly paid services. As a customer, I DO NOT want yet another $10/month expenses - I've got a lot of those already. I just want to listen to music I already own.
Has syncing music from iTunes to your iPhone stopped working? It's the first-class way to listen to "the music [you] legally own" on an iPhone, and comes with no ongoing service fees.
> My wife currently has no way to listen to any of the music we legally own, using her iphone.
There are so many ways to do this I can't even list them here.
You can store songs locally on your iPhone, or upload them to a cloud-based service if you've got a full terabyte of them.
But the idea that an iPhone can't play your music files simply isn't true. Also you can buy a pretty decent iPhone for a few hundred bucks too, that will last longer than your Android one. The only iPhone "well over a thousand" is the high-end flagship model.
The problem is that a lot of "the target audience" usually intelligent and prosperous people who used to drop serious cache on apple stuff have stopped buying and are grumbling.
Additionally there's no new game-changing products filling the void.
When apple force switched to music they screwed up all people with local music. Some just threw up their hands and switched, the others muddled through and some recovered, some didn't.
Have a look at serendipity. Certainly doesn't have "tons" of plugins but it's had all the ones I need, and it's dead simple: PHP and either a Mysql or a postgresql database underneath. I've used it for years, happily.
Sorry to see there has been no mention of Zulip so far. I fooled around with Slack a little, and then Zulip. And in my opinion zulip hit that sweet spot between email and chat. I really like the way conversations can be segregated into actual conversations. The trick to using it, I've found, is to set team expectations that posts might not be replied to until later in the day. There is something subtle about slack that sets your expectation for immediate gratification, and that drives the exhausting 'always on' culture.
I imagine you are all relishing that sweet irony/hypocrisy of a tool that facilitates distributed work, not permitting its team to work in a distributed fashion. Culture fail!
Fifteen years ago or more, I was able to work pretty effectively with a team using email and IRC. I know IRC is out of fashion now, but my point is that a lot of the challenge is team culture and expectations, and software doesn't really fix that problem.
I read the GP's comment and wanted to reply, but then I saw your comment. Completely agreed, Zulip is exactly what I've been looking for, and email+XMPP (one on one) was the best communication mode I've ever used, though I have a feeling that Zulip will be very close to that.
We've been using Zulip for a year in my company and we love it, the ability to just follow the topics you want and ignore the ones you don't is great for focus, and the stream view is perfect for catching up on everything. I wrote up some thoughts here:
I think one of the strengths of email is that it forces you to be less-synchronous and take the time to craft a somewhat long, point-by-point reply, rather than just fire off a quick message. That's something I'd like to see Zulip encourage more.
Many years ago the internet allowed anyone to post their own websites, blogs, and comments on forums. Sites like Buzzfeed quickly blurted out "Oh noes, now that anyone can publish, will the publishing industry survive?" As we all know, the publishing industry was forced to change (and because it didn't, it has suffered mightily) but proper news sources still hold their value.
Just because I can make a porn video at home doesn't mean anyone will want to watch it. Pro models, proper lighting equipment, video editing equipment, and production knowledge all have value because the amateur stuff is mostly horrible.
The rare gem will be noticed. There are a few citizen blogs out there that are very much worth watching. The crappo ones faded into obscurity.
In the meantime, just like crappo publishing houses that refused to adapt and were pushed out of business, the pro porn industry will be forced to up its game. A good thing.
> Sites like Buzzfeed quickly blurted out "Oh noes, now that anyone can publish, will the publishing industry survive?"
...
Wait, Buzzfeed, which was founded, as a website, in 2006, was concerned about the rise of blogs, personal websites, and forums, all of which were going into decline by 2006 with the coming of social media? Buzzfeed didn't even employ journalists til 2010 or so.
It's interesting that you use the publishing industry as a good example. I thought that news companies have been experiencing revenue declines for decades, leading to consolidation and increased partisanship in the big players. Personally, I don't pay attention to mainstream news anymore because I don't trust them and they make me anxious.
Are you kidding me? What happened to the news industry I would not describe as "survival" - there used to be ~200k journalists in the United States. Now there are ~20k
> Pro models, proper lighting equipment, video editing equipment, and production knowledge all have value because the amateur stuff is mostly horrible.
Don't forget marketing. Professionals have money to spend on heavy marketing campaigns, amateur don't.
Have you seen the emerging signs that this ‘Pro model’ porn industry is a dangerous and predatory place that almost always puts the mental health of it’s (often very young) women‘s participants at risk? If you are into ‘Pro model’ stuff, have you read about ‘Pro model’ porn actors like James Deen, and other male porn stars, who are raping their female co-actors [1]? That the culture that has emerged is damaging many women’s health to the point that there is now a rise in female porn actor suicides (‘Pro model’ ones) [2]? It seems to me that this male porn actor behavior often comes out of a sick sense of entitlement and sexism, which I believe may be related to childhood neglect. As well as the pressures of America’s corporate culture which places a heavy focus on traditional gender roles - the simplest sign of this being visible in mostly non-existing paid parental leave policies for new parents, compared to say the Netherlands, or Denmark and Sweden.
I believe this sick sense of entitlement can also be found in the people who watch these ‘Pro model’ movies, who I believe are fooled by the shiny veneer, and who remain unable to see the ruthless true nature of this industry that lies beneath it.
I prefer user submitted homemade porn over ‘Pro model’ porn any day. Unfortunately even that is changing now too, as a lot of production costs now go into making ‘Pro model’ porn seem homemade.
Have you seen the Rashida Jones porn industry documentary ‘Hot Girls Wanted‘ [3]?
“In pedophile culture, I often catch men in public checking me out with eyes full of lust, until they see the hair on my legs — at which point, they resort to a theatrical display of disgust. I’ve eavesdropped on groups of college-age guys talking about how they won’t perform oral sex on a woman if her labia are too prominent. One man who had been pursuing sex with me for three years, suddenly changed his mind when I revealed that I do not, and will not, shave off my pubic hair. In other words, many men stop being attracted to me when reminded that I am a woman, and not a young girl.
Surely all of these men, who have a “preference” for the aforementioned qualities in women, aren’t pedophiles by the strict definition of the word. But it seems that a high number of men, likely as a result of deep cultural conditioning, find many of the same things attractive in a woman that a pedophile would find attractive in a girlchild. Small labia, tight vaginas, intact hymens, baby-soft skin, hairless limbs and vulvas, eternal youthfulness, tiny frail bodies… As tumblr user reddressalert wrote, “how do we not recognize that this is essentially a description of a baby or a toddler?”“
> Have you seen the emerging signs that this ‘Pro model’ porn industry is a dangerous and predatory place that almost always puts the mental health of it’s (often very young) women‘s participants at risk?
"Almost always" is a strong claim that requires more than a couple of anecdotes to back up. I am in full agreement that there have been problems in the industry, perhaps even at elevated rates, but your claim is specifically that such problems are widespread and systemic.
> I believe this sick sense of entitlement can also be found in the people who watch these ‘Pro model’ movies, who I believe are fooled by the shiny veneer, and who remain unable to see the ruthless true nature of this industry that lies beneath it.
Again, I think you're assuming a bit too much without backing up this claim.
> Surely all of these men, who have a “preference” for the aforementioned qualities in women, aren’t pedophiles by the strict definition of the word.
I would really not change the rather strict definition of this word.
> As tumblr user reddressalert wrote, “how do we not recognize that this is essentially a description of a baby or a toddler?”“
This is also the description of what the media and society pushes as qualities a women should possess…I don't think you can blame men for that when they have been told for years that this is what they should be looking for.
