Other networks have adopted SSL much earlier and I simply refuse to believe that Quakenet's problem is CPU related.
I'm not saying that a network should require all of its users to use SSL, but I do think that it's should be up to the user to decide whether or not her or they wants to encrypt the connection between themselves and the IRC server and let it be up to the channel operator to decide whether or not she's willing to accept clients, that connect over insecure connections, in her channel.
It's purely because it hasn't been prioritised until recently, but it sounds like it's getting some attention now :-)
CPU load is not the primary issue. SSL on IRC networks for client connections cannot assert that the communication is secure (for example, that all clients in a channel actually bothered to verify the SSL certificate properly). This issue will remain until client verification techniques such as DANE and DNSSEC are widely adopted on for IRC usage.
It's not true that this is up to the clients authors alone to do this work, and it's not fair for the users to tell them that you are awaiting client adoption of various technology, when the current Quakenet ircd implementation is currently incapable of even accepting SSL connections. Or at least it was, last time I checked.
Also, the DANE support in Irssi was announced in September last year and I have only heard of one network where some of its servers have adopted to this technology. Even though there is only one client that currently supports DANE+DNSSEC verification, we still need the (big) networks to start preparing for the support of it, and help us reaching the point where we can secure our user connections even better :-)
Having SSL on IRC, even without DANE+DNSSEC, is still better than having no SSL at all.
I blame the reference (server) implementation leaving so much to be desired. Primarily stability.
I tried running a silc server alongside my ircd for a while, but it never even reached a weeks worth of uptime without crashing (no matter if debian package, self compiled stable or devel, or some minor messing with the source).
Perhaps if a non-C/C++ implementation comes along..
No, it wasn't that. There used to be (maybe still is, I didn't check) a core group of reliable servers. I remember having a client idling on them for weeks without reconnections.
What was missing, I think, was lack of client development and adoption. There was default CLI client which was a weird fork of Irssi, then there was plugin for Irssi, and not much else.
There were of course few small client projects, but few of them got past early alpha stage.
Yes. Lego, computers, electronic bits and kits to make, chemistry set, things to take apart, piles of technical books plus my father was a major clone PC importer and manufacturer for over a decade and our house was literally up to the ceiling with PC parts and software.
However, with none of that I think I'd have done the same thing.
It's not all that bad now and wasn't when I was at school (in the UK). During my time, we had the Acorn BBC Micro to start with, then the Archimedes. These were both programmers dream machines and code we did, usually plugged into large Lego machines. After that it diverged into "office studies" as RM dumped millions of PC clones but there was still Quick Basic and Turbo Pascal available that was taught at a lot of schools either as a mainstream subject or through "computer clubs".
Now there was a gap for me but I have children now and they are learning how to write HTML and basic JavaScript. They are using software to produce video productions and stop-frame animations, they are even getting instruction from parents on how to write python. They have Windows desktops, iPads and a few Linux netbooks. They have it pretty good.
And this is a London primary school with an Ofsted "needs improvement" rating.
Well, I'm glad about that. I guess I was the 'lost generation' - sure, it was BBC Micros and Acorns at primary, but we basically used them for Chuckie Egg and Lander respectively - no code. By the time I got to secondary, it was the 'Office Studies' era.
If it hadn't have been, I might have skipped the 7 year continental philosophy grad school detour. Ah well...
As for Linux in schools, my feeling would be that there should be a room or two of Linux boxes, and the rest should be Windows - simply because 90% of computer usage in schools, according to some statistics I just made up, consists of doing your homework double quick at breaktime or other mundane uses where it would be better if kids were working with an OS they recognise from home. People who want to do CS/code type subjects should be taught Linux, and it should be available to 'computer clubs' etc.
At school I had much the same type of machines which I could program on, though in my final year as they moved to windows, pretty much any possibility of programming was taken away due to the system.
I visited a school the other day, all they seemed to have were windows machines, which presumably are pretty locked down. Fortunately we brought Raspberry Pis to the school and kids seem to love it and learnt a bit of python on them.
I don't wish to hijack this thread but tying the Raspberry Pi to education is terrible if you ask me.
I agreed about the Raspberry Pi being the best device for education right from day one. That was until my father bought my daughter one for her birthday and I ended up being the resident "fix it guru" for it.
The thing teaches you merely how to jump through funny shaped hoops to get something working rather than anything realistic or helpful. Most of it is google-fu and copy and paste. When you do finally get there it's a baron land of absolutely unrealistic, undocumented crud that can't self-serve. Plus it barely works and browns out to start with resulting in USB-hub jiggery-pokery (and that only happens because I actually understand how USB works).
For ref, I have 20 years' of Unix and Linux experience (right down to writing kernel drivers) and it was painful getting it off the ground so I'm not approaching it blind.
Being critical (constructively!) of this results in the RPI forum thread being deleted which in itself an affront and a general recommendation against the things.
Could it be that you were exited about fiddling with rpi yourself? I don't have children but I guess it's difficult to deliberately not help them (too much) solving problems which are inherently interesting to you (grumpy neckbeardism can't hide that fact, you obviously still care about this).
I think rpi (culture/ecosystem) is still absolutely the best thing, it's literally the perfect AppleII/C64 for today. Today is also more complex and more stuff is possible but there is also Unix which at least tries to be simple.
I've given one of my rpis to my 13 year old neighbour and he is regularly meddling with it. It's likely that he is also constantly failing but that's what is needed in order to learn, it certainly was the case for me when I started (I'm still failing after many years, that's a reality).
Where you could make a difference is just by saying you'll be there to answer some questions ... now and then. Encouragement and enthusiasm!
Not particularly excited. After spending a number of years with embedded systems, my tolerance has faded a little. We tried the "follow the instructions" and no help thing to start with. Unfortunately we were blessed with only a composite video cable which is to be fair, a flipping nightmare of reading inconclusive LED states and fumbling around in the dark with no video output. That is where the documentation stops and years of prior experience of embedded systems and knowing what to search for kicks in. Each step came with its own pile of crud to deal with. Each hoop jumped through chips a little bit of interest away. The inevitable question that gets asked is:
"Dad: is this what your job is about?"
It's not and never has been.
The perfect Apple 2 / C64 (or in my case, BBC Model B) was the one that you opened the box, plugged it in and it worked the moment you turned it on without fail, every time and never poked you in the eye unless you told it to.
I still think the (partial inspiration for the Pi) i.e. the BBC Micro is still a better starting point than the Pi itself. Well documented, relatively simple, very powerful, forgiving and the ability to write high level (basic) or low level code (assembly) from the get go from the books that came with it, can play games on it and if you screw anything up, just restart it.
True we aren't at Apple II level, open hardware would be great but as I said the whole culture surrounding it as well as the documentation which exists is really good. It's still a very cool project which succeed to get this ball rolling, obviously there is room for improvement.
I won a grant to build, donate, and maintain Raspberry Pi computers to rural schools in South Africa (about 7). It was a large project. Absolute nightmare. In the end I just started buying second hand computers and installing XUbuntu (much higher performance, much lower cost). I donated the Raspberry Pis to a university engineering department and managed to buy double the expected number in second hand computers for rural schools, feel much better about it. Raspberry Pi is simply a gimmick for those that love that kind of thing (which is fine), but it should NOT be marketed as a way to get kids to learn programming, or as a replacement for a computer. It's simply too expensive, and does not cater to the educational needs of those struggling to learn programming/IT.
I'm interested to hear in the problems you had and how getting 2nd hand computers turn out to be lower cost than the Pi. Do you have a write-up of your experience somewhere? Couldn't find anything on your HN profile.
Yes the RPI could use a bit of improvement. It needs better X performance and a restart switch. But the RPI is the best small computer out there with the most support. Give it a few iterations and improvements and it could really be useful at home.
My problem is that in 1982 you could really impress your kids with simple programs. Now my child wouldn't be impressed unless you create an 3D princess game. The hurdle to catch a child's imagination is 10x higher.
sounds like it fits perfectly into education then. It's much like a lot of the working world as well. A lesson in grit perhaps? A lesson in our tenuous grasp in technology. At least it's something that can be held in your hands and not a group's invented agreement about how something should be (grammar) or subjective watered down recounts of reality (social studies).
It's primitive tribalism. People should learn "computing" as part of a school education as over life things are going to change and they're going to need to adapt.
The problem is that neither windows nor OSX teach computing or computing culture. They teach the feudal model. The increasingly walled gardens. The "When in danger, when in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout" Currently Linux is the place where you can get your hands dirty and has the Wild West spirit that the 80s,90s and the internet had. We should teach the kids to spit in the face of authority and when obeying it to do it so reluctantly. And currently we are doing the exact opposite in all areas of human knowlege.
However they're just the foundations on which you teach. Programming languages, tools and software packages are the important bits. Which OS doesn't matter really. Neither does any red vs blue pill selection.
Most of my knowledge is applicable to any platform as it's fairly generic. I avoid specialisation for this reason.
I can sit down on any machine and be productive straight away regardless of if it's open source or a feudal empire. That's what we should be teaching.
I've had similar experiences with everything Samsung I've used apart from their SSDs. They just don't seem to put much engineering effort into their products.
Acer knock out some good machines. I miss their Timeline series. I got 12 hours out of one of them once and it was super-cheap.
I thought that when I bought my Bravia EX but it's a pain in the ass. iPlayer is poorly maintained and it barely plays anything on a good day, the thing is impossibly slow for the first minute when you turn it on and it's the fussiest thing I've ever seen when it comes to media playback. The TV bit is pretty good but I didn't really buy it for that as there is literally nothing on TV in the UK. Oh and it randomly decides to inform the watchers that it's going to turns itself off even though every option in it is set to not automatically turn off.
It's no Triniton to make a comparison.
I've had zero experience with other smart TVs so this might be the best user experience out there -- please feel free to confirm this or not as I was thinking about getting rid of it.
To be honest, I can only compare it to Samsung because that's all my parents and my friends have. My GF's parents have a Sony.
I found Samsungs menus and control scheme to be unbearable and the owners often struggle with it too.
I usually play media directly from my PC via UPNP and that works. The built-in Youtube app is okay for the occasional video, too. Other than that I only play DVDs and Blurays and the media libraries of german TV channels (they are usually not available via built-in apps to the same extend) via a connected Rapsberry Pi.
A big plus is that my TV is able to put out DD 5.1 it receives via HDMI on it's optical output.
The picture qualities beats every other (LED) TV I have seen. It even came with halfway decent factory settings. Don't ask me how much time I spent trying to adjust the colours on my parents TV. But they grew to like the candy colours...
>I found Samsungs menus and control scheme to be unbearable and the owners often struggle with it too.
I have my doubts about Apple succeeding in the TV business. But maybe they will, just like in phones. Not necessarily because they're so good, but because everyone else is so bad.
I still remember the remote control of my last Sony VCR. It let you record up to 8 different programs, you put them into "slots". Horrible. Quite the opposite of how TiVo does it.
But the real absurdity of the Sony remote came when entering start/stop times for recording. The remote had a number pad (most remotes did, to allow changing channels). But the number pad couldn't be used to enter start/stop times. Instead you had to push up/down arrows, and IIRC separately for each "digit" of time. An utter fuster-cluck when it came to usability.
Which EX is it (particularly the second last digit that indicates the model generation)? The first ones to get iPlayer actually use the MHEG system to deliver it so it is possibly less well supported by the BBC as that version of iPlayer only used on that year's Sony TVs and for Freesat and Freeview. I have a KDL-yyxXz23 which is used the next version of iPlayer which seems to work pretty well to me. The Amazon/Lovefilm service also works pretty well. Even newer Sony's get Netflix too I believe.
The Sony will wake up/turn on to the input it was turned off on so you could always supplement it with a recent internet TV box of some sort (Apple TV/Roku/Recent Sony Blu-ray/Recent Samsung Blu-ray...) whichever appeals to you.
I haven't evaluated recent models or competitors recently although I did buy an LG Blu-ray player/Freeview HD HDD recorder with internet features that not only probably had privacy leaks but also the usability was pretty catestrophic.
Disclaimer: I used to work in Sony TV Product Planning in Europe and did some of the business development for the internet services in Europe.
They can start by starting again. EL is a stinking shitpile of horribleness and always has been. It's the result of the P&P team who obviously wrote the whole thing in a silo whilst the rest of the industry did something wholly different, and better.
Use of EL in a product is usually reason enough to step away from the company.
