a) where does it say this? it says the machine will have 16 GB of ram, nothing about possible bonus upgrades one might be able to get (though maybe you followed some links in the article)
b) even if 16 GB is max: whoever it is that "needs" more than 16 GB probably won't go for an ultra light weight (< 1 kg = < 2.2 pounds) 13 inch machine for their use case. Seems like "mobility" is priority number one, not having some multi-tasking maverick
It's not my use case but I know developers commuting with 13" laptops (weight and size) and connecting them to a large monitor in their office and working with VMs and containers. 16 GB is the minimum, 32 GB is the best option.
Wouldn't you want something more powerful for that? Combining 15W cpu, ultralight, small form factor (constrained thermals) with 32GB for VMs and containers seems like a bad fit.
It's fine for running Kubernetes locally and IntelliJ. Chrome tends to be the HUGE offender in my setup. It can chew through so many Gigs just due to open tabs. The processor rarely is my roadblock. It's always memory.
You don't need a strong processor for VMs, just a lot of cores. And AMDs U processors can have upto 8 cores and upto 16 threads on their 15W ULV parts.
I just got an xps 13 and decided to go to with 32 gb
I may not desperately need it now but figured to future proof it for the nominal upgrade price. this laptop is going to last quite a while for me so might as well make it worth it.
I read 4 or 5 books at a time usually. There is no problem if they are in 2 to 3 different languages, and span across multiple genres (historical, biography, non-fiction, fiction), he already lost me at "think about the title, I know it sounds mundane", yep, cause titles are always what the author comes up with, not what the publisher wants...
The only thing I can tell you from experience: Have the self confidence to drop a book, read what interests you, not what is on some "list of books" you have to work through. And take your time reading. I learned it the hard way, but I'd rather drop 10 books, find one extremely insightful, and read it slowly and carefully and twice if I have to than speed read 20 books and remember nothing.
I am extremely doubtful about "hacks" like this ; glad if it works for him, my experience is nothing of the sorts will ever work for me.
strongly seconded. Life is too short to read bad books or drink bad wine. I have this rule that if I'm not excited about the book after 50-100 pages I move on (exception are some rare novels or philosophical works that don't start before page 400 or are so arcane that you won't get them until the 3rd or 4th pass anyway).
The hard part for me is to stay focused and not drift off into multiple genres/topics. If I read about the period of the enlightenment it's easy to get sucked into 20th century authors covering (sometimes regurgitating) the subject. If I find myself drifting off in this manner, I make it a new category on my "to-read list" for a future time to maintain focus.
I think even the publishers suggest a title thats best suited for the content too, and the author still gets the final say. I too am skeptical when it comes to so-called “hacks” in general but I’m happy to try this one out.
I am not yet fortunate enough of having been published, but I think the number of authors in any position to "demand a title" is extremely limited, they are glad about being published at all. If a publisher says "I think this title is more marketable", well, ... but it's of course not the main point I was trying to make. If you find a method that works, great, I think most "methods" are highly individual, if not flawed, and in the end, reading is reading, and that's it.
My opinion about that is deeply influenced by a professor I used to have. Once he spent one lecture just reading a brilliant essay by a British judge. He did not read it, he performed it, slowly, carefully, and it was the best lecture I ever had. And his advice was: "read slowly, or you might as well not read at all, forget the 'hacks', the speed-reading techniques, reading is enjoyment, if you have the right material, be thankful for every second, savor it", and if only I could have taken his advice more seriously at the time. I do now though.
I agree that titles don't describe the exact contents of books, but if I want to learn Python then I'd probably skip a book titled "Intermediate Javascript". If you read the full article you'll know he talked about looking at the index after the title to learn more specifics.
He also directly addresses your other concern regarding dropping a book. His "hacks" seem like a good way to evaluate the merits of finishing a book or just reading parts.
To anyone wondering: public domain? Bach has been dead for how long? Of course there are already some available (recordings, and sheet music of course), a great database is:
https://imslp.org/wiki/Main_Page
I do not want to denounce the efforts made though. Anything which makes these works more accessible is welcome. The Goldberg Variations are beautiful. Most famous recordings probably the two by Glenn Gould. There is even an interview in which they explore the differences between the two, and Gould opens up about some decisions he has made and why.
It's worth listening to, also to explore the Goldberg Variations a little bit in general. It also gives you a sense of Gould's "quirky wit". It's likely it was completely scripted by Gould in advance. There are of course many recordings of the Goldberg Variations, partial list here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldberg_Variations_discograph...
Both of Gould's interpretations aren't in any way "standard interpretations". Fun fact: I was so used to listening to Gould's Bach interpretations back then, I immediately emulated his style when playing Bach, which my piano teacher found really annoying.
Bach's work is in the public domain, which means anyone can make their own recording. But, any recording of Bach's works will still automatically have its own copyright, unless it's intentionally dedicated to the public domain too. The great thing about a public domain recording is that anyone can take it and use in any sort of artistic or even non-artistic endeavour, without having to worry about the usual "Contact the copyright owner, hope they will grant you a license that's not too expensive."
In a lot of jurisdictions, the same goes for the actual sheet music. Even a lot of facsimile editions - literally photos- of the sheet music claim copyright to the "creative work" embedded in making the photo.
The result being that in many jurisdictions, you'll have difficulties finding public domain sheet music of obviously public domain music for which it is clear (the longest living) composer died over 70 years ago.
The easiest way to describe the differences between the 'young' and the 'old' Goldberg variations as played by Glenn Gould are to look at the runtimes. As I get older I find myself liking the ones played by the older Gould better.
If you haven't heard it, Hilary Hahn's Chaconne is also slow compared to a lot of other interpretations, and for me has a lot of the same impact (makes me cry, basically, but stimulates a huge range of emotions in a very short time) as the later Gould recording. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqA3qQMKueA
The ambition of this project (Open Goldberg) was a bit wider. We wanted to make:
- A software score (MuseScore) which has all of the advantages of a canonical digital document vs a picture (which is what IMSLP offers)
- A public domain recording
- A download of the unmixed stems so that people could mix their own (open source model)
- A MIDI version
I would also recommend Tatiana Nikolayeva's (1924–1993) Bach recordings. She is considered to be one of the greatest Bach Interpreters. I am fortunate my current teacher was a student of hers in Russia when she was between the ages of 8-14, and am now studying some Bach with her.
What do you mean by 'maintain' here? Because Arch is trying to stay on the bleeding edge side of things in a reasonable manner and is rolling release, they almost stay 1:1 with upstream, "maintains its own kernel" makes it sound like they would do some heavy patching and do active maintenance with certain kernel versions, et cetera. You can have a look yourself if you want to https://git.archlinux.org/linux.git/commit/?h=v5.7.5-arch1&i...
It may be align with the majority of the kernel, but these patches exist in every version of the kernel that is released by Arch.
What else could that be called aside from maintaining your own kernel?
These changes are extremely small within scope which is the nature of Arch, but they still exist. A more hands-on distro will see many more changes than Arch, naturally. However, as evidenced from the above you can see that Arch does have it's own kernel and I cited Arch as an example because it strives so hard to maintain 1:1 with upstream.
"maintaining your own kernel" in this context means that you're bringing bugfixes (including security) independently from the mainline Linux kernel, which would usually involve cherry-picking commits from the mainline.
Archlinux doesn't do that, and straight merges Linux mainline.
Moderators can of course change the title, I don't think it's misleading and I was not trying to be. I guess 'reports' could be changed into 'finds' and it could be mentioned that it was found 'in its Linux kernel', not sure when the character limit would hit.
'current LTS kernels are not used in older Linux distros' - not sure what your point is with this. They absolutely could have used / can use LTS kernels if they wanted to or they could merge LTS-kernel changes which they apparently don't.
I don't see what the big news here is, it's merely identifying a vulnerability with a proper CVE ID, end of story. The issue itself does not even have a serious security impact so it will likely never be fixed in RHEL.
I am trying not to be too negative, but if I were to summarize the article: TikTok wants positive PR and describes its algorithms as being 'generic' in an attempt to counter allegations that they have an agenda.
That's pretty much all there is to the article.
The algorithm described is 'the most generic way' I can think of and how pretty much everything starts trending or disappears in the void that is the internet. Content shown to some, it's liked, gets shown to more people, positive feedback loop, that's it. If you found this article interesting: honest(!) question: what is it about it I am not getting?
There is no way to know how it works exactly, it's just PR from TikTok, saying "nothing fishy going on, don't worry"
btw: the cover picture is haunting me; good pick with regards to it being about TikTok
Context: many devices (affecting multiple blu ray players and home cinema models by Samsung) are stuck in a reboot loop since around Friday ; it's questionable if the situation can be fixed in any straightforward manner and not yet clear what happened. News outlets are starting to report on the story.
I remember once seeing a commercial for an 'online virtual credit card' website/company? Quick online search tells me there are many providers out there.
As far as I know you can create virtual credit cards on the fly and use them to pay. So you could have one with which you pay your Streaming Subscription, one with which you pay for Cable, et cetera and their pitch was exactly this: You can destroy the virtual credit card and there is no fear of any fees whatsoever, so when you cancel some subscription or something...
I didn't follow up at that time, but made a mental note. Has anyone any experience with such services? It's funny that the 'fear' of cancellations not working and being charged 'unlawfully' was the main pitch in the commercial I've seen. Also funny: Cable and Mobile Phone providers are the same devils in the US than in Europe it seems ...
Typically (in the US) the company that set up the recurring subscription that you pulled out from under them just sends your account to a collections agency. My credit card number changed and the New York Times did that to me.
Yes, with a service like internet you are paying for the previous months service, not the next month so the money is owed even if you cancel the credit card. Netflix bills you for the month upfront, so when you don't pay them simply remove access to the service and you owe nothing.
There are a few options out there and I’ll try to cover the ones I’ve used. Privacy: I’ve used this a few times for disposable cards but they act as a debit card such that withdraw from your bank. There are some goofy limits around making cards but it’s a pretty good service. Citi credit card has one that uses flash for a front end that works great but I believe they’re ending the service soon. Capital One credit card is probably the best out there and uses a chrome extension to generate cards per-website. Stripe seems be testing a solution but for third parties and BoA killed their VCC program last year.
AFAIK in the UK, Virgin Media will open a credit account in your name, which appears on your credit report. So it wouldn't matter what kind of payment you used. Although I think you can opt out of this, maybe.
In the UK you can simply cancel the direct debit (most regular payments in the UK happen using direct debit, not by credit card).
But as far as I understand not paying for a contract may result in damaged credit history, so the mortgage can become more expensive for example; or they may sell your "debt" to some collector company, who may start bothering you (I heard these stories from friends).
So because of these reasons, I decided to try to explicitly cancel the contract instead of just stopping paying them.
Makes sense ; where I come from direct debit is also widely used for such matters. Wouldn't it be awesome if when you stop paying it would simply automatically cancel the contracts within a given time period, no questions asked, no need for any 'credit rating' et cetera ... it sounds like something akin to this would be 'doable' in law? Especially with subscriptions regarding 'digital' services that are renewed on a monthly basis.
> Wouldn't it be awesome if when you stop paying it would simply automatically cancel the contracts within a given time period
It would be awesome, but the very business model of these companies relies on things not being awesome. I can imagine that a significant chunk of their revenue comes from disgruntled customers that have no choice but to pay even if they've been wronged because they don't want the hit on their credit report (even though it can be removed with enough effort).
I actually think that overall the companies probably do lose more money (in both PR/customer goodwill as well as support & debt collection costs) due to these scummy practices but too many people within the company rely on things being the way they are to get paid, so they have no incentive by themselves to improve things.
For example, allowing easy subscriptions/cancellations online would remove the need for a sales and "retentions" team as well as the multiple layers of management above them. Making contracts cancel automatically removes the need for debt collection and all the management around that and so on.
California actually has a law about this now... if you are able to sign up online, you have to be able to cancel online. I know some people who will set their locations to California, and the website will suddenly give them the option to cancel.
I dealt with Virgin's debt collectors twice and they were reasonable and actually offered better customer service than Virgin itself. When I explained them the situation and why I cancelled the payment they immediately dropped the case and I haven't heard of anything since (it's been 2 years since the first case).
Of course, you should always aim to cancel properly, but if the company is intentionally being obtuse and you've made reasonable attempts to cancel "within the rules" then just cancelling the payment is a valid option.
This is absurd and really funny, well meant advice could basically be:
'if they don't make it easy to cancel the service, just stop the payment, wait for the debt collectors, reason with them instead of your provider, they treat you better'
(I am not necessarily recommending that, but ... this speaks volumes)
Please be really careful doing this. Cancelling a payment authority is not the same as cancelling a contract, even if you have a right to do the latter under your terms. If you just stop making payments for something you do owe, you are the one in the wrong, and you can end up with a bad credit history, legal action taken against you, specialists chasing you for the debt in increasingly scary ways, etc.
Credit history and debt collection is fair, but I wonder, how does "legal action" happens considering the customer has already attempted to cancel in good faith?
How do they defend the lawsuit when the customer provides proof that they did a reasonable attempt at canceling within the rules and were stonewalled?
As long as you really have already attempted to cancel in good faith, you should be fine on all counts. The problem is a lot of people will cancel a Direct Debit or use one of these disposable card services and cancel that, and not understand that just revoking payment authority doesn't necessarily end any legal agreement they have. They will still owe the money (and potentially penalties associated with collecting it) if they don't then make some other arrangement to pay rather than terminating the legal contract properly.
I doubt a 'standard' how to do it can be independently developed and implemented. I use a non web-based password manager, a backup strategy that makes sense, and have a secure setup with regard to my threat level.
And with regards to your fear from Google: Short from full-on identify theft I have a controversial solution: E-Mail is something one should pay for.
E-Mail is essential ; the one thing you can use to pretty much sign up for everything, the one thing to use to reset passwords ; the one form of communication which is open, readily accessible to almost everyone, crosses borders, doesn't ask for fees, doesn't need a specific app, et cetera
I once lost my complete password database (if you sense irony here, it was a long time ago, and I was being stupid), including my E-Mail password, no 2FA set up, nothing. I was completely locked out, but: since I paid for the service: I could open a ticket, I could get a human(!) within a short time frame who actively assisted and I could proof my identify via easy means.
I was greeted with empathy, we could work with whatever I knew about the account and related information. There was no ridiculous meaningless questionnaire, no support ticket answered by some volunteer moderators. I was dealing with someone from staff who knew what they were doing, and we worked it out quickly.
Not saying it would have been impossible to restore access to a Gmail Account, but at the very least it would have been incredibly more painful, I am sure of that much.
Not so much about practicality, but I've been getting into puzzles and mazes lately https://www.jamisbuck.org/mazes/ (not yet bought his book, but will)
a) where does it say this? it says the machine will have 16 GB of ram, nothing about possible bonus upgrades one might be able to get (though maybe you followed some links in the article)
b) even if 16 GB is max: whoever it is that "needs" more than 16 GB probably won't go for an ultra light weight (< 1 kg = < 2.2 pounds) 13 inch machine for their use case. Seems like "mobility" is priority number one, not having some multi-tasking maverick