A Lovely 10C Site!

But to my dismay, many young technically-inclined whippersnappers are completely unaware of computer user groups’ existence and their importance in the personal computer’s development. That’s a damned shame. Our current reality may largely be isolated to screens, but these organizations helped countless enthusiasts find community because of them. Computer groups celebrated the industry’s fundamental values: a delight in technology’s capabilities, a willingness to share knowledge, and a tacit understanding that we’re all here to help one another.

And gosh, they were fun

I used to be in some of these groups and it was a great learning experience to meet people in person and share my and other's expertise. I don't see the internet can completely replace the tight knit communities that are created from in person meetups since it's so different concept.

Yesterday afternoon, at 4:30pm Eastern Time, Adobe officially confirmed the issue, explaining that customers who updated to Lightroom 5.4 on iPhone and iPad “may be missing photos and presets,” that those photos and presets are “not recoverable,” and that they “sincerely apologize” to users who have been affected by the issue. Version 5.4.1 has already been released, fixing the issue, but it can do nothing about the lost data.

This is also a great reminder for photographers that you should always back up your images, in multiple places, so you’re never subject to a single point of failure. Mistakes like this happen, even at some of the world’s largest companies (see: canon.image).

THIS is why you need to have physical backups of your work/images/etc. like getting a external hard drive.

They didn’t actually work for the Department of Energy; they worked for a division of Bechtel, a large US defense contractor to the Department of Energy. They wanted to add some custom hardware to an iPod and record data from this custom hardware to the iPod’s disk in a way that couldn’t be easily detected. But it still had to look and work like a normal iPod.

building something like a stealth Geiger counter. Something that DOE agents could use without furtively hiding it. Something that looked innocuous, that played music, and functioned exactly like a normal iPod. You could walk around a city, casually listening to your tunes, while recording evidence of radioactivity—scanning for smuggled or stolen uranium, for instance, or evidence of a dirty bomb development program—with no chance that the press or public would get wind of what was happening. Like all other electronic gadgets, Geiger counters have gotten smaller and cheaper, and I was amused to run across the Radiation Alert Monitor 200, which looks an awful lot like a classic iPod.

Wow, I didn't know this was actually a real project. Go read this!

if there’s anything corporations love more than rewriting software so it lets them make all the money they can dream of, it’s letting other people do that work for them.

optimizing for profit at the expense of any other consideration. chasing short-term gains and ignoring long-term sustainability or justice. squeezing every drop of surplus value out of every person within reach and putting it in the hands of a dozen investors and overpaid executives.

in a word, capitalism.

if post-open source wants to not die the same death, it will need to explicitly and aggressively fight its greatest existential threat.

Sadly, we're heading this direction and a end of an era is upon us. I could even say open source altogether would be dead next at this rate.

Baker writes Mozilla Corporation, as well as reducing the size of its workforce by approximately 250 roles, will change the teams for around 60 other people. The staff reduction involves closing the company's current operations in Taipei, Taiwan, the email adds.

Baker writes the Firefox organization will focus on "core browser growth" and reduce investment in areas such as developer tools, internal tooling, and platform feature development. The email also mentions the organization's recent focus on developing more revenue generating products, such as its new VPN.

Mozilla's road to irrelevance continues as they're laying off 250 more employees amid further restructuring to invest in more revenue-generating projects like their VPN, which ain't going to work I feel. They only have themselves to blame for getting into this scenario.

In other words, we all saw this coming years ago and Mozilla has failed to realize it until it was too late. I had glimmers of hope that their Quantum browser can be the solution but it turns out to be a major flop.

As a result & hate to say this, Firefox is on life support and the last viable true open option would go away. For mobile especially, Chrome has already won that war. Wonder if Onion browsers would move to Chromium?

I say we need someone to build a replacement sooner than later.

UPDATE: Mozilla also has gutted their entire MDN team

Along with calls to find jobs for the people being displaced, web developers on Twitter and discussion sites such as Hacker News quickly reacted with concern about another prominent Mozilla production: the set of online manuals known as the MDN (for Mozilla Developer Network) Web Docs.

Yikes!!! They're REALLY on life support now…

Toshiba has made laptops since 1985 and claims to have been the first to make a mass-market computer in the now-familiar clamshell form factor. By the 1990s the company was producing solid workhorses in the Satellite range and started to make meaningful stretches of mobile work possible with the small, thin and light Portégé range.

Those products saw Toshiba lead the world for laptop market share through the late 1990s and retain that position for much of the 2000s. Even as the PC market consolidated in that decade, Toshiba was often ranked among the top five of all PC vendors despite only ever dabbling in desktops.

As the 2000s rolled along Toshiba devices became bland in comparison to the always-impressive ThinkPad and the MacBook Air, while Dell and HP also improved. Toshiba also never really tried to capture consumers’ imaginations, which didn't help growth.

Toshiba made some of the most durable laptops ever made and this news saddens me. I still have two R705s still running Windows 7 and Linux respectively in my closet and it Just Worked. A true end of an era.

So, take the talk of banning Huawei and ZTE on the networking side, and the rumblings about banning TikTok on the app side, and multiply by everything.
I certainly understand the arguments that certain Chinese companies and technologies may be conducting surveillance on Americans (even though investigations into both Huawei and TikTok haven't shown anything out of the ordinary), but this approach is incredibly short-sighted. First of all, it goes against the basic American stance on openness, especially regarding the internet. That just damages what little moral high ground we had left to stand on regarding the internet.

Second, all this does is justify the Chinese approach. Make no mistake about it, China will turn around and use this to justify its (much worse) practices, by saying "look, even the Americans filter out "foreign" apps and services." Giving the Chinese ammo like that is so incredibly short-sighted.

Third, so much of American technology is still made in China -- including pretty much every electronic gadget and IOT and "smart" device that fills everyone's homes these days. This is going to backfire in so many ways. The trade war and tariffs have already hit parts of the technology industry hard, and this move will certainly lead to retaliation in all sorts of ways -- potentially having a massive impact on American firms being able to make use of factories and technology from China. That will have ripple effects throughout the economy and will likely limit certain innovation possibilities. Indeed, this may even allow Chinese firms to justify abusing technology to do the kinds of surveillance people are now freaked out about.

Fourth, it will allow China to expand its influence elsewhere in the world, showing how the US can't be trusted and plays favorites with its own companies through protectionism.

In short, this is the kind of short-sighted policy that we're all too familiar with from the Trump Administration, but which will do significant damage to the US in the process.

Like I said folks, this [State Department's announcement of their own Great Firewall would simply create up to 10 different internets globally when there would be lots of inequality.

First, as a little bit of background, earlier this year we researched for long periods of time to better understand whether IBM’s planned (and openly announced) layoffs in NC area affect Red Hat (formerly RHAT and then RHT, now IBM). We looked for some rumours online, but came up with too little; almost empty-handed, but that was months ago. Remember that Red Hat has its own operations in NC (the headquarters and founding place); corporate media said IBM planned to lay off in NC and 4 other states, the total being — reportedly — about 5,000 people (IBM is still hiring in India by the way). The tricky thing is, IBM and Red Hat both have NC-based operations and a rather large number of workers there. It’s somewhat of a business hub. But we also know that IBM does not need two HR departments, two marketing departments, etc. Managers are sort of converging in duties, conflicting in terms of roles, overlapping in the workflow sense and so on.

Last year, as we noted here before, I had heard from an IBM acquisition victim (whom I cannot name, but he is a high-profile person) that they always wait 2 years before the guillotine falls. Why 2 years? Go figure. But if one studies the pattern (after IBM acquisitions), then it’s always 2 years. It has now been almost exactly two years since the acquisition was announced (a couple of months from now).

Has IBM begun axing staff of Red Hat? Well, nobody has explored or covered that subject (which we know of…) and it is unlikely that IBM or Red Hat will just spoon-feed this kind of information. It needs to be ‘pulled’, as they won’t ‘push’ out such information. Citing a recent press report, Ryan saw signs of impact for Red Hat. “They said it would “make it difficult to hire more people” with the pandemic raging,” he quoted. “No comment when asked about whether that meant layoffs from Red Hat.”

Welp, this is what happens when a legacy company like IBM acquires a company like Red Hat this happens folks.

Nvidia is said to be the only company that’s involved in concrete discussions with SoftBank for the purchase at this time, and a deal could arrive “in the next few weeks,” although nothing is finalized yet. If the deal does go through, it would be one of the largest deals ever in the computer chip business and would likely draw intense regulatory scrutiny.

SoftBank bought ARM in 2016 for $31 billion, and ARM has only grown in value since then as its designs have become more and more integral to Android and iOS devices alike. Microsoft already makes an ARM-based Surface and a version of Windows designed for ARM; Apple also recently announced that it would be switching its Mac computers over to ARM-based chipsets in the latest boon for the company. As SoftBank looks to pay off its growing pile of debt in order to appease uneasy investors, a sale of ARM at its peak could help bolster the Japanese technology conglomerate’s finances.

ARM might be sold to NVIDIA in yet another monopoly ploy. If successful, it'll reduce the chip players from 5 to 4 folks. NOT GOOD.

But this is more than an anecdotal set of incidents. Since Louis DeJoy, a Trump loyalist and donor, took over as Postmaster General this month, he has moved to cut overtime among postal workers. He also noted in a memo that postal workers should leave mail behind if it would cause delays to routes. Another program would deliver mail early and rolling back sorting, which would delay the mail even further, and this compounds over time. Numerous post offices across the country were also suddenly scheduled to close, although the agency seems to be backing away from that now.

DeJoy has cited financial losses and said that the agency must “make necessary adjustments.” Critics have charged this is an effort to wound the culture and reputation of the Postal Service, and leave it open to privatization. UPS and FedEx have exploited this crisis by raising shipping rates, knowing that their competitor is being undermined from within.

All corruption, all the time. Not enough people int eh US are paying attention to this national emergency.