While I think this is a good idea (because copyright is a stupid concept in the digital age), the problem with this proposal is that Europe is also very pro-copyright. Doing something like this would probably piss off Americans, but if it also pisses off your next best ally as well, it’s probably not going to work out.

She better not go from suck to blow…

Google pays the Linux Foundation a LOT of money.

Can we push back the deadline for the apocalypse? Have we talked to the customer to see if this is a possibility?

That’s actually very easy to do and you don’t need any special equipment. Simply use a male-male 3.5mm cable and connect one end from the stereo output of the cassette player and the other end into the microphone jack of any computer you own. Play the cassette - you can test the audio quality by running arecord -f cd - | aplay - - you will have to tune the volume output of the cassette player and the input sensitivity of the microphone.

From there, if you’re paranoid, you could use arecord to save the output to a .wav file and encode it once the recording is done, but I had no problem just using oggenc directly on the piped audio. The final command looked like this: arecord -f cd - | oggenc -q 5 -o file.ogg - (change to -q 10 if you want lossless encoding).

I’m not sure if this is the best quality per se, but I would definitely recommend it over using specialized equipment like cassette-mp3 converters. The problem with those devices is that if they use underpowered hardware, you might experience buffering issues where the encoding hardware can’t keep up with the audio stream or something like that. But doing it on a computer ensures that you will have all the processing power you need to make sure that this doesn’t happen.

Good luck! I found it very easy to do - it took 5-10 minutes of setup.

For me, the most important thing is always simply understanding who has what role in the company. When I have a question, knowing whether I ought to ask my direct manager, other colleagues on the team, a subject matter expert, other management teams, our sysadmins, etc. is the most difficult thing to figure out. It can take months sometimes.

For-profit companies are perpetually locked in a conflict of interest. Inevitably, they will have to decide between what is in the best interest of their users (or other public interests such as the environment for example) with their never-ending obsession to make ever more money. No matter what they say or do publicly, they will always sell out for more profit.

In this case, a bunch of Silicon Valley investors (people who have collectively made trillions over every iteration of IT progress) are forcing “AI” to be the next thing. They have basically decided that they want all tech progress to focus on this area and are forcing every company they invest in to make that happen, regardless of the societal impact.

As a result, you can see clearly that all of these companies (Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Reddit) are basing all their business decisions into trying to make this fantasy become a reality. Even Apple now, the masters of creating a facade of privacy is falling straight into line. And the one thing they all have in common: investors.

And that is why you should always be wary of interacting with big business interests - they will inevitably sell you out someday.

Looks like there’s been plenty of recent updates to me: https://github.com/void-linux/void-packages/commits/master/

And innovative gameplay too. Large companies are too afraid to try new things, and all the games feel like the same rehashed mechanics with a fresh coat of paint… but indie developers are much more willing to try new, interesting concepts.

MOBILE USERS CAN GO FUCK THEMSELVES.

Phew. That felt good.

“Donors” would be my guess

The difference is how you interact with the browser engine. Blink is very easy to embed into a new browser project. I’ve seen it done - if you’re familiar with the tools, you can build a whole new browser built around the Blink engine in a few hours. You can write pretty much whatever you want around it and it doesn’t really change how you interact with the engine, which also makes updates very simple to do.

With Firefox, it’s practically impossible to build a new browser around Gecko. The “forks” that you see are mostly just reskins that change a few settings here and there. They still follow upstream Firefox very closely and cannot diverge too much from it because it would be a huge maintenance burden.

Pale Moon and Waterfox are closer to forks of Firefox than Librewolf for example, but they’ve had to maintain the engine themselves and keep up with standards and from what I’ve read, they’re struggling pretty hard to do so. Not a problem that Blink-based browsers have to deal with because it’s pretty easy and straightforward to update and embed the engine without having to rewrite your whole browser.

Unfortunately, since Google controls the engine, this means that they can control the extensions that are allowed to plug into it. If you don’t have the hooks to properly support an extension (ie. ublock), then you can’t really implement it… unless you want to take on the burden of maintaining that forked engine again.

That said, Webkit is still open source and developed actively (to the best of my knowledge - I could be completely wrong here). Why don’t forks build around Webkit instead of Blink? Not really sure to be honest.

I chuckled a bit while reading this, because what you wrote is exactly where Blink came from. It was a fork of webkit, which in turn was derived from KHTML. Then again, the fact KHTML was discontinued does support your point to an extent too, I guess.

But the point is, Chrome is doing exactly this - providing the engine free as in beer and letting people embed it however they like. And yet, what you’re predicting, ie. not using the original but just using forks instead, doesn’t seem to be happening with Chrome - they still enjoy a massive fraction of the market share. There’s no reason to believe that this couldn’t happen at Mozilla as well. People usually want the original product, and it’s only a small fraction of people that are really interested in using the derivatives.

Ironically, the anti monopoly lawsuit against Google will end this.

People are quick to assume this, and there’s a very good chance that they’re right, but I don’t think we should take it as a given. It’s always possible that there could be some sort of court decision that allows Google to keep funding Mozilla after the “breakup” is complete.

In any case, we don’t yet know what the outcome of the antitrust case will be, so I think it might be best to avoid making statements of certainty like this until we see how things really shake out.

We should definitely take the possibility of this happening very seriously though.

You’re right, but Socraticly speaking, then why are there so many blink-based browsers and so few gecko-based ones? The answer is because blink is easy to embed in a new project and gecko isn’t.

If Mozilla really wants to take back the web (and I honestly don’t think they actually do), then what they should really be doing is making gecko as easy to embed in a new browser as blink is. They don’t do this, and I suspect that they have ulterior motives for doing so, but if they did, I think we would be much closer to breaking chrome’s grasp on the web.

Because let’s face it: Mozilla makes a pretty damn good browser engine. But they don’t really make a compelling browser based off it. Ever noticed how Mozilla has been declining ever since they deprecated XPCOM extensions? It’s because when they provided XPCOM, it enabled users to actually build cool and interesting new features. And now that they’ve taken it away, all innovation in browser development has stagnated (save for the madlads making Vivaldi).

They need to empower others to build the browser that they can’t. That’s what would really resurrect the glory days of Firefox in my opinion.

Website redesigns. Just more whitespace all over the place, less information on the screen, and more trouble trying to get anything done.

Github is especially bad about this. I’m so tired of only being able to fit about 50 lines of code on the screen at a time, or issues with a similar lack of information density. I can understand this paradigm for websites that you only use once every year or so, but for something that most people use regularly every day, it’s such a backwards anti-productivity trend. I hate it… hope it dies someday.

This has always been the whole point behind the Trojan Horse that is systemd. Now that Poettering/Red Hat control the entire userspace across virtually all distros, he/they can use it as a vehicle to force all of them to adopt whatever bullshit he thinks of next.

This is what the Linux ecosystem gave away when they tossed their simple init system to adopt the admittedly convenient solution that is systemd. But in reality, the best solution was always to drop init, and instead replace it with an alternative that was still simple to replace if the need should arise. But now that everyone is stuck on systemd, they’re all at the mercy of Poettering’s Next Stupid Idea.

Convenience comes at a price. systemd is the Google Chrome of Linux userspace. Get out while you can.

Completely agree. He just needs to look within his own borders to see why. The Left Alliance scores the largest bloc of the election; then Macron spurns them and looks to the right for a Prime Minister instead. Are we really supposed to believe him when he says he’s shocked that people are losing faith in the system?

At this point, it’s hard to see how he can be this stupid. The man is a liar and always has been. He understands well that to build trust (no matter with whom - either the Left Alliance in his own country or the Global South, or anyone else), he has to back down and learn to compromise.

But for him, it’s much easier to pretend that he doesn’t know what’s going on, bury his head in the sand, and continue with the status quo - the way he’s paid to do.

Not just the hardware. I far prefer icons from that time as well. I hate the modern trend of flat icons with no details. They look like someone mashed them out after 5 minutes in Krita and then drugged their management into believing that it was a recreation of the Mona Lisa.

Mozilla 2017: Competing with Chrome is hard. What if we break all existing extensions and never let people replace them all?

This is the one that broke my back. Understandable that XPCOM extensions had to go, but leaving nothing to replace them, and then going on to push their trash UI redesigns without giving us any recourse to change them back - that was just unforgivable.

Then again, that was still well before they started pushing spyware in their own browser, so in retrospect, those were very quaint times!