About that map, a feature I would like is to fade spots which were scanned long time ago because WiFi access points might not last as long as cell towers. This way, as a contributor, I know in which areas to scan and, as a regular user, I know that the data for a specific area might be too old.
That's a good idea. The Stumbler app shows the coverage map (as blue clouds) on your mobile device, so you can see which individual streets are yet to be stumbled. Right now, our database is small and young enough that rescanning old data is not a high priority.
The problem is that anything is "abuse" nowadays. When you have a cohort of people brought up with a daily dose of "you're perfect", "you're a winner", "all of you are the smartest kids in the world", a single tweet of disagreement with them is ABUUUSE!!!
It reminds me of Atheism+'s Block Bot which had people's accounts blocked because, once some enlightened atheist plus added that account to their block list, then all the bots' subscribers added it to their's automatically, triggering Twitter's account blocking feature.
To fight against trolls, maybe Twitter shouldn't have public messages anymore and, instead, only allow users to view messages published by people who they follow and people who these people follow, like Facebook's friends and friends-of-friends. This way, if a troll publishes crap about you, only the people who follow that troll and their followers will see them.
That annoying scroll-to-top happens to me too and I use the latest Firefox version on Ubuntu. I first noticed it several months ago.
Also, some time ago, when you clicked a message to view it's context, Twitter would expand the message list inline. Now it takes you to a new page and when you return you're back to top.
TL;DR: BitTorrent being the reason doesn't sound so interesting for a Vice article.
As a person who helped build a "district ISP network" back in the early 2000s, I can tell you that that reason is just some Vice.com style linkbait.
Romania has great Internet speeds because the authorities tolerated us installing cables all over the darn place. Back then it wasn't uncommon to have almost half a dozen ISPs in a one square mile neighbourhood, all offering 50-100 mbps in the city and 1-2 mbps actual Internet speeds, without any FUP.
We were almost the same age and people didn't care about the low international speeds because we could all share movies and music at 50+ mbps (and 0.5 mbps was more than enough for browsing).
This was happening way before the video chat industry took off. Also, for that kind of stuff you need good sustained upload, but the ISPs are still limiting the upload speed to around 30 mbps even for gigabit connections. This doesn't affect BitTorrent (which can be left open over night).
According to http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/treg/broadband/BB_MDG_Romania_BBCOM... , there was only a broadband penetration rate of 5,5% . Perhaps some of the Vice article are lies, but probably not all of them.. As bittorrent doesn't generate as much money as the webcam industry...
Could be, it's just "believing" that the article isn't a whole lie.
Bikeshed or not, he's not the only one who doesn't like "fn" choice. The shortnaming choices aren't really consistent. IMHO, "fun" would be better.
as box break continue crate else enum extern false fn for if impl in let loop match mod mut priv proc pub ref return self static struct super true trait type unsafe use while
I like fn a lot more than fun. fns are serious business! (and personally I have a hard time dealing with abbreviations that are themselves actual words, fn stands out more)
fwiw, continue and return used to be cont and ret, match used to be alt, crate used to be not a keyword iirc.
fun would have been better:
- ML heritage for named functions (fn was anon)
- muscle memory with the leading part of javascript function
- the other abbreviations take the leading part of the word
Dynamic language notwithstanding, the transition was badly designed, in terms of being supportable by automation and providing a cost/benefit motivation for upgrade. With something like that, pretty good = disastrously inadequate.
I feel like it has been for the past year, it is exhausting. I think there is a real term for it but at first I was in shock, and now I'm tired of hearing it, being lumped in the same category with folks doing some nasty evil stuff. I just want to play with my trains, shoot friends in CoD and explore wild fantasy worlds. I don't support the harassment or abuse of any person, I feel sorry for these people who are under attack. I don't have an answer on how to stop it, or improve the landscape. Is it even possible to stop some people from being vile? How do you say 'No, you can't think those things, you can't talk like that.' and have an impact on someone who feels completely secure and self-righteous from their position?
I don't want to feel guilt for being a man who likes video games.
You shouldn't feel guilty for playing games, but if your sense of identity consists entirely of the fact that you play games, you should maybe address that. If you're identifying yourself as "A Gamer", then you're seriously telling me that you have no characteristics which are more defining to your sense of self, to your personality, to you as a human being, than the fact that you play video games? That's messed up, and people who do it are messed up.
It is, I believe, a growing recognition of that messed-up-edness that's leading to the rise of articles about the "death of the gamer", because normal human beings (like yourself) who may have previously said "oh, I like to play video games; I guess that makes me a gamer" are now saying "oh no actually these people are all horrible and I like to play games but I am not like them; please do not get confused!".
I heard an interview with Ed Begley, Jr. where they talked for twenty minutes about his eco-friendly lifestyle. His house has super-insulated windows, walls, and doors, recycles rainwater, generates power from solar cells and a wind turbine, and has a stationary bike that generates electricity for the kitchen. His yard is planted with drought-tolerant garden of California-native plants. He rides a hybrid-electric bike whenever he can.
Toward the end of the interview, the interviewer, seeming overwhelmed, asked, "Well that's great for you rich guys, but what about us ordinary folk?" (I'm paraphrasing both sides of the conversation here.) Begley said, "You think we started with solar panels in the 1970's? We didn't have any money. I started with rolls of insulation in my attic. Saved me thousands of dollars. Start with something small and inexpensive."
You don't have to be an activist, but if you don't like the way things are, pick one thing that can help. You're right that picking fights with strangers probably won't help. Maybe you have a friend who's a dick online. You and a couple friends can ask him to tone it down. Maybe decide to only offer helpful criticism to newbies for a week and reserving taunting for friends. Pick something small and make the world a little better.
I feel exactly the same way, I login, I play wow for sometimes 5 hours a week, maybe 15, I play, I challenge myself, I do my best, I try to be as non-toxic as I can and then I get out... but now I'm a misogynistic mass consumer with no soul and no culture who should feel bad.
It's a kneejerk response to the massive backlash that ensued out of the recent Zoe Quinn scandal and the debate on journalistic ethics in video game media that erupted as a result. It's actually been boiling for a long time, but Quinn was the last straw.
Censorship and silence didn't work, as the Streisand effect snowballed this into something far larger than it would have been otherwise. Now this is an attempt to divert attention away.
It's a curious thing, gaming journalism. It is perhaps the most puerile form of "journalism" there is. It would be insulting to even call it journalism, it's blogging, plain and simple. Video game media is also the only one I know of that insults its target demographic so frequently, in an attempt to look socially progressive.
I find it suspicious that a scandal involving some blogger's personal sex life, and $10/mo Patreon sponsorships, is the source of the outrage. There is a lot of money floating around in game journalism, but "gamers" seem only outraged about small amounts of money going to women and anyone Redditors think is a "social justice warrior", seemingly especially when the people are fairly obscure and make nearly no money. How much sense does it make to target game-journalism corruption by starting with the people not getting a piece of the large corporate marketing budgets that are floating around?
It would be a more interesting exposé if people focused on actual corruption going on in the review/journalism scene. Things like EA's early-access review policies that unofficially hinge access to future titles on what scores a magazine gives. Or the large mount of money going to certain widely watched podcasts without disclosure. There was an exposé of that issue ~2 months ago (written by gaming journalists, no less) but barely anyone cared: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2014-07-16-blurred-lines-a... Or the kind of wining-and-dining, travel reimbursements, etc. that goes on around E3 and other trade shows.
I think it's mostly a culture war that is about game journalism pretty secondarily. Nobody cares about Ubisoft wining-and-dining a writer from The Escapist at E3, because that doesn't play into any preexisting culture war, and none of Ubisoft/Escapist/E3 are seen as "outsiders" to gaming culture.
The recent GamerGate demonstrations do touch on all of these, actually. But it's not a centralized or particularly focused effort, at the end of the day. It's really the messy culmination of all the outrage over corruption in gaming journalism that people kept their mouths shut over, and all of it finally exploding. Multiple subcultures intersect in the whole ordeal.
Actually, the Quinn scandal was instrumental in people opening their eyes about one thing. Namely, that it's not only large corporate media behind this. Even independent media isn't safe or trustworthy, and both is corrupted, but in different ways. Independent media is more likely to foster nepotism, cronyism and lying by omission/censorship, whereas the big shots, having major access to publishers and trade shows, can obviously go further.
It has also caused a lot of people to re-analyze these people's intentions and revisit previous incidents, which in light of new information, no longer seem as clear cut. Just because one is an underdog (and that's quite relatively speaking, anyway) does not make them righteous.
Actually, many people already knew that there's lots of corruption going on at major writers. This is why so many gamers went to indie media, but then they realized that nothing is safe. The outrage is that ultimately, all of it is the same: passive clickbait supposed to milk attention. But now there's nepotism, too. It's the outrage from now knowing that there's no one who represents your side in the media, and that people who are only interested in gaming from a surface level are holding major positions.
Finally at the risk of setting a fire, it wasn't a simple matter of a "blogger's personal sex life". The implications were wider reaching into the aforementioned nepotism.
It's not odd. #GamerGate is the gaming community speaking out against what they perceive as corruption in gaming and games journalism. Game journalists are firing back. Everything else is a sideshow intended to distract from that.
Tell that to people of Eastern Europe, where 10 years ago it was a free-for-all build-your-network without any regulation or state intervention.
At one time I had half a dozen ISPs at my door to choose from, from companies with 100 subscribers to corporations with half a million household customers. Thank you, Capitalism, for offering me a gigabit connection for $16.8 per month (btw, my ISP just reduced their price from $18 per month a couple of months ago).
Seriously, how the hell do some people think that local authorities imposing restrictions/roadblocks on building of new last-mile alternatives is "capitalism"?
The local authorities don't really provide roadblocks in many, many cities. Its FUD. I linked to a tiny ISP lower that provides gigabit to like 200 city blocks.
The problem is lack of desire to invest because its expensive and incumbents exist.
You may be able to get it to work on other systems if you copy / port some of the necessary Apple bits. You'd have to copy the iOS SDKs from Xcode and get ld64 [0] / codesign [1] (both open source) to build on non-Mac machines. Perhaps some resource file prep tools as well. Then you could use libimobiledevice [2] and friends to push apps to the phone and debug them.
Theos [0] has been used with Linux before but I have never personally done so. I don't think anybody has yet ported ld64/codesign to run natively on Linux but it has been possible for some time to run the Mac CLI dev tools under Linux using runtime shims like maloader [1] or its descendant Darling [2].
maloader and Darling won't, they require Linux. LLVM works fine on Windows. I'm guessing the RoboVM front-end is also fairly portable. The effort to port ld64/codesign to Windows would probably be similar to the effort to port them to Linux.
For now you'll need Xcode to use RoboVM which implies Mac OS X running on Mac hardware or in a VM (it can be done although Apple doesn't allow it unless you run the VM on Mac hardware).
