Yes. As a maintainer whom actually cares about feedback and usability, I care that features developed apply to the real world and aren't imagined in an utopian vacuum by own possibly insane biases. Social democracy, not authoritarianism. If code isn't usable by other people in the real world, it's just graffiti while waiting for Godot.
As a maintainer who also cares about feedback and usability, but who doesn't maintain any high-traffic projects, I can just about imagine how frustrating and destructive of motivation it gets to see the same no-thought issues raised over and over and over.
But if you close them NOTABUG or WONTFIX, you get a reputation as that guy who just doesn't want to hear about it, what a bastard.
I think there must be a middle way somewhere, for those projects which attract a lot of interest but few or no co-maintainers. But I'm glad I'm not on the hook for finding that middle way, too.
Oops, hit logout on that throwaway account. Bye-bye, religious flame wars. ;)
Support is what it is, and it's a two-way street.
Most engineers usually don't have customer support or sales experience, and so don't have the experience to triage and communicate pro-socially. (I sold software as a high-school job and also had my own consultancy at 17.) It's important to push outside one's comfort-zone when young (or old) to acquire skills that will be vital later on.
Post the policies, requirments and desires in contributing.md promenently. (I think a CoC is redundant and tyrannical SJWing.) Setting expectations and not making promises is important.
Finally, there is a cost to FOSS on both supply and demand sides. I just had some company fork the repo of a project I fixed, make a pointless PR and then offer no contributions in a grsec-theft-style way.
PS: Subversion has a great talk about defending the community.
Because I want to call my daughter once a week, and publish a Python module that someone else might find useful (which does not mean I want to support them).
This almost assures some quite terrible conclusions in the long-term:
When it becomes technologically possible to interface electronics into our brains, corporations will have almost unprecedented opportunities to do some really terrible things directly when the world becomes socially-pressured to be neurally-connected.
I say "almost" because the manufacturing of consent and desires exist now and it is popularly believed to "apply other people but never me," a direct connection has the potential to make this manipulation cheaper and stimulate the brain in ways a glowing screen looks like banging rocks together.
0. It's self-promoting a panacea "fix" as a product at the wrong level of abstraction.
1. Protocols and standards exist for interoperability.
2. Tries to rebuild everything (supply- and demand-sides) while fixing very little.
Fix what's here and now for the benefit of everyone with a migration path, not for the benefit of a few in a temporary, constrained, arbitrary way divides people similarly to the way Facebook tried to foist another internet onto the third-world.
It's an open-source project with 4 years of research and development behind it. The architecture implemented here is actually inspired by David Clark (Chief Protocol Architect of the internet) and his new design principle, called trust-to-trust design, that aims to fix critical security issues with the current design of the internet.
I agree that rebuilding everything is hard and that's why we reuse not only TCP/IP and everything below TCP/IP in the stack, but we also reuse existing infrastructure in a decentralized way.
We've already built this stack and have been running it in production for 3+ years. Please see our peer-reviewed research papers and our whitepaper at http://blockstack.org/papers for more details. Happy to answer any questions!
How many people even know what the flag of Seychelles looks like, where is this country and what is it's infamous distinction without cheating by looking it up?
I cheated, but is this the "infamous distinction"? -
Today, Seychelles boasts the highest nominal per capita GDP in Africa, excluding the French regions. It is one of only a handful of countries in Africa with high Human Development Index. Despite the country's newfound economic prosperity, poverty remains widespread due to very high level of income inequality, one of the highest in the world, and low wealth distribution.
I use a cheap, no-brand 7x 18650 cell USB battery with a seemingly gimmicky solar panel that actually works from Amazon. It both charges and discharges slowly, but it works good enough for now and it's TSA-compliant to pack in carry-on. It's really poorly designed in that all sides are symmetric and the manual power button lacks an affordance... it does have automatic power-on based on USB draw.
As a similar potential business model, Monoprice seems like a great business for the customer, as cables are/were the highest margin items in electronics store, but I wonder if they're making enough money to be viable: anyone can knock-off cables and compete to the bottom worse than DRAM ($.75 USB cable, where's the profit in that?)
I'm wondering if Anker is potentially investable or if it will at least earn a comfortable living for workers, suppliers and owner/s. Differentiating a-la Zappos but beware of an inherent lack of long-term defensibility and brand-crowded marketplace.
I'll give em a try when I need that next thing that normally would be an Amazon/Newegg/Fry's purchase.
This article is interesting because most people on Earth are resource-constrained. Also, many first-world people still don't have sufficient digital literacy to be aware when/if their technologies are receiving security updates. Finally, scooping up every last consumer of content via maybe important for financial or social venture success if the costs are scalable, but also maybe required by accessibility regulations which benefit the common wealth. I think the point of the article is to realize reality for most people isn't the same as the bubble in high-income metropolitan areas, and that a balance of competing tyrannies is necessary when considering what and whom to build for and support.
