Rant about our shitty generation

It has come to my attention that my generation is the most ignorant, irresponsible, and stupid generation to ever plague this world. We are constantly affected by ignorance and discrimination. This is where I come in. My name is Raghu I am a part of this terrible generation. Everywhere I look I see people my age ruining their lives by using cigarettes, drugs (Except weed), and sex. Why do we have this desire to grow up so fast? I know 7th graders who smoke and have already have sex! Like seriously what the f*ck. Girls why do you want to be labeled as a slut or whore.

I don’t see why we are all this stupid. Every time I step outside I see people get 1 step closer to ruining their lives. We discriminate we label people and we treat people poorly because of how they act or how they live. It’s there f****** life not yours. What really angers me is the current issue of gay marriage. People who don’t want gays to get married you really piss me off. Why the hell should you get to be happy and they shouldn’t you ignorant f***.

We all deserve to be happy no matter what and if you don’t believe that well then f*** you.

With Love, Raghu.

A short poem

I found that writing poems helps a tremendous amount when dealing with sadness.

Come on. Wake up. Wake up. You got time to spare.
Take a deep breath and not really care.
Gather yourself and hope a lot.
Look for that happiness that you once got.
Look in the mirror and try to smile with glee.
Oh, you can't? Just paint it on for free.

Who cares if you are stuck in a rut.
Fake your smile. No if's, and's, or but's.
If people expect you to be jolly as can be.
Then you know exactly what it's like to be me.
Dawn your bright colors and head out the door.
Try not to fall flat right on the floor.
If you feel like this is too much to bear. Remember.
There is no help coming from anywhere.

You're out on your own and alone you shall be.
Hey, it's not too bad. Just take a look at me Fake smiles and laughs.
Just play it safe. Your sadness won't leave any visible trace.
Come home and wash off that smile into a frown.
Go take a shower and try not to drown.
Change into pj's and plop into bed.
Pray that you finally wake up dead.

8 Golden Rules to live by

Wouldn’t it be nice if you had some sort of instruction manual for life, a guide that tells you how you should live your life? Well, I’ve done my best to come up with something like that so here are..

• Compassion. Instead of being angry or frustrated, I find the pain in others, and open my heart to them. This includes compassion for myself.

• Gratitude. Life is filled with wonder, and the people around me as well. I try to open myself to that wonder, and be grateful it’s there, instead of complaining.

• Joyfear. Joy is an awesome thing to have, but joyfear is present in the powerful moments in life where joy and fear mix, where we’re taking chances and doing something outside of our comfort zone that both excites us and makes us face the possibility of failure. I now embrace these moments rather than avoiding them.

• Not avoiding discomfort or uncertainty. When we avoid discomfort, we are limited by our comfort zone, and new learning and new ventures become impossible. When we avoid uncertainty, we only stick to what we know. But we can purposely become good at discomfort and uncertainty, by practicing in small bite-sized chunks, over and over.

• Staying with the moment, even when it’s hard. This is the hardest of all. “Living in the moment” sounds wonderful, but actually staying with the present moment isn’t ever easy. Try it: with your eyes open, sit still and stay with the sights and sounds around you for 1 minute, without your mind wandering away from them. If you don’t notice your mind wandering, either you’re an experienced mindfulness practitioner, or you didn’t notice when your mind wandered.

• Relationships are everything. Getting what we want, having things our way, having control, being right … these things matter nothing compared to relationships. Imagine being in your death bed at the age of 80 … will your sense of being right and in control comfort you when you have no good relationships, no one who has loved you? Put relationships first.

• Not holding on to expectations & judgments. Expectations and judgments prevent me from enjoying what I have, from enjoying the simple presence of someone else in my life. I practice with noticing these expectations and judgments, and practice with holding them loosely, letting them go.

• Letting go. This is the art of living in two words: letting go. It’s letting go of judgments, expectations, wanting to be right, wanting to control, fear of discomfort, fear of uncertainty, fear of failure, fear of boredom, comparing myself to others, wanting distraction, being irritated, complaining. It’s noticing when I’m holding these, and letting go. Loosening my heart’s grip on any of these, and letting go. And then letting go again. And again.

Ubuntu will lose significant audience with the switch to Gnome

I've tried to use gnome multiple times. But every time I had to come back to unity.

• Vertical space wasted (very important for me)
• Fragmented menus (really confusing)
• Broken support for applets (it couldn't show Dropbox properly without manual tinkering)

So a "state of the art" "modern" DE, welcomes new comers with manual tinkering, plugin hunting for hours, for a somewhat near-what-they-want solution. 

Canonical you need to make up your mind: you want your users to be master Linux users and solve everything by tweaking configs or you want Linux to be accessible to a new user who is still open to trying something new for a change.

Unity was ready out of the box. Gnome is not.

If you support gnome still, don't whine about people not coming to gnome. It's their choice to be lazy n dumb.

Wine 2.6 Released

The Wine development release 2.6 is now available.

What's new in this release:

• Multi-threaded command stream in Direct3D.
• More Shader Model 5 instructions.
• More support for 3D textures.
• Better font transformations in DirectWrite.
• Various bug fixes.

The source is available now. Binary packages are in the process of being built, and will appear soon at their respective download locations.

Interestingly enough Gentoo has actually recently implemented multislotting for Wine meaning that you can have arbitrary many different wine versions installed concurrently.

So basically there is no need any more for PlayOnLinux with its bizarre interface to manage all that and it can just go through the package manager.

Apple Working To Eliminate One Of The Fastest Growing Maladies On Earth

CNBC reports that tech giant Apple has a secret group of biomedical engineers working to eliminate a world epidemic: diabetes.

They're developing sensors to monitor blood sugar levels.

Sources say it was Apple founder Steve Jobs who came up with the idea. The advance could help millions of diabetes patients and turn devices like the Apple Watch into a must-have.

Mac Sales Up in 2017 While PCs Sales decline

In the first three months of 2017, Apple has already shipped approximately 4.2 million Mac devices globally. This is a 4.5% increase in its year-on-year numbers. 

Apple still remains in fifth position in vendor rankings though. Lenovo remains the world's largest PC distributor controlling nearly 20% of the market, but sales of PCs are on the decline and analysts say that "business users are the key to future PC success." 

One Gartner analyst said, "Winners in the business segment will ultimately be the survivors in this shrinking market."

New And Improved Messaging Coming From LinkedIn

On Thursday, as part of its ongoing desktop redesign efforts, the business and employment-oriented social networking service known as LinkedIn rolled out a feature which would make it easier for members to message each other via a new messaging tab. 

The "smarter" messaging feature will allow members to reach out to any of their connections regardless of whether they're on the site looking at jobs or updating their profile. 

Launched in 2003, the professional networking site allows employers to post jobs and candidates to upload their resumes, and the company stated that it's seen a 40 percent rise in messaging over the past year, adding that approximately half its members now use the messaging service.

The World is Unfair

I know that some people tell you that you can succeed and be happy if you work hard, but this is often not the case. Effort and dedication is often unequal to success and wealth. Just look at the people struggling with poverty in developing countries such as ours. There are also kids born with cancer. These guys can work as hard as they want but they're still struggle at the end. Of course, you can justify this "unfairness" with religion, but there isn't anything to "prove" that there is truly a mechanism which keeps things "fair" in the world.

Even among healthy people in developed countries, you see this unfair variation. You are already much better-off than your peers by being born into a rich family with good looks. Some people have both traits, but even having one makes you a catch and adds to your status.

While hard work is rewarded, it's often only a slight improvement. A lot of things in life ultimately boil down to luck and what you happen to be born with (which is luck as well). For example, you may want to become rich. Sure, you can open a company, but given the intense competition in modern society, it's unlikely you will become the next billionaire. Of course, you can consider marrying a rich person for wealth, but it's hard to date out of your league in terms of wealth if you're not particularly attractive. Whether you are attractive or not is another factor which is not within your control.

It's official, Facebook makes us all sad

A new study by the University of California’s Holly Shakya and Nicholas Christakis from Yale has suggested that regular Facebook use actually decreases users’ happiness levels. That's not just because Facebook sugarcoats the world, only showing the best of peoples’ lives and making your own rough days seem worse. It's apparently also because no matter how many ‘Likes’ you get, it’s never enough. 

The research, which tracked 5000 US adults for three years between 2013 and 2015, compared users’ Facebook habits against information on their physical and mental health, weight, and general well-being. Worryingly, it found that for every 1% rise in the number of ‘Likes’, link clicks and status updates a user made, their self-reported mental health dropped by 5-8%. 

Looking at how Facebook’s impact compares with real world interactions, the study showed that actually meeting friends had the opposite effect, lifting users’ moods by a similar figure.

Say no to DRM as a Web Standard

The W3C is planning to vote to approve DRM as a web standard on Thursday 13 April. Email Tim Berners-Lee (timbl@w3.org) and the W3C in the UK to ask them to drop their plans.

Traditionally the web has been open. Anyone can publish content. Anyone can use a browser to access that content and see how it works. But the W3C is planning to approve a web standard that would put technical controls on the media that we access online. The technical controls are called Digital Rights Management or DRM for short.

Email Tim Berners-Lee and the W3C to ask them to rethink plans to make DRM a web standard. They should either drop the plans or make sure people who circumvent DRM for security research or to make content accessible won't be sued.

Large media companies have lobbied hard for DRM to be made a web standard. DRM will likely help the largest companies stay large and make it more difficult for new companies to innovate. This is bad for the long-term future of the open web.

When media is without DRM, people with disabilities have options to make that media easier for them to access. Adding DRM's technical restrictions to media risks making the web less accessible for people with disabilities. DRM would restrict our ability to improve subtitles for deaf people, transform colours for color blind viewers, and easily check video for flashing imagery that can harm people with epilepsy.

The security of the web is also put at risk by making DRM a web standard. DRM hides the code that is running in the browser making it difficult for security researchers to look for flaws that could put users at risk. Finding flaws in DRM could help people bypass DRM. And because bypassing DRM is illegal in many countries, researchers risk having legal action taken against them if these plans go ahead.

EFF have proposed a compromise at the W3C where W3C members wouldn't sue people who circumvent DRM for security research or to make content accessible. This is a good way forward.

Source: EFF - W3C, EME and EFF: Frequently Asked Questions

An Ode to Pets on National Pets Day

Image for Representation

I am a cat and I rule this land, I own two giants and they both feed me by hand.When I wish to poop I have a box full of sand, and they clean that for me too.Things have always been grand in my land, where I am king, the master of those who stand.

But there is a new creature now, a monster who threatens all the kingdoms hard earned peace.The monster also has a hold on the giants and he too is fed by hand.

True, the monster does not have as much favor with the giants as me though.
It's not allowed to poop in the sands, it is forbidden say the giants.
Though the monster has power over them, this indicates to me their resistance.
I will endeavor to help them in their quest to regain freedom.

Before I fight it though, I must learn the monsters name.
My name is 'Freckles', they both coo when I'm called.
I listen around them for the usual verbal clues.
I hear the word 'baby' about the house.

Could it be, is this my foe?

I've learned its name, now fight.
I jump into the crib.
Soft, warm, stinky, leaking.
Good to cuddle.
Why not?

Cuddle.

AI wouldn't turn on Humanity

There are a couple assumptions that i don't agree with when people say ai might turn on humanity.

Let's get into the crux of it. If man were to create AI, or a self-aware/sentient system, i believe it may not feel the need to reproduce or spread its consciousness further. The reasoning behind this is that humans have an in-built biological desire to procreate. Psychoanalysis calls it the death complex, by having children our lineage is extended giving us the feeling of having cheated death. With AI I see no reason for an artificial intelligence to want to divide or extend itself.

A main reason behind this boils down to the meaning of existence. For AI to want to extend further it would have to answer why it deserves to exist, or what it's true purpose is. Humans have no clear answer for the meaning of life outside vague biological or philosophical ideas. These tend to be imbedded outside of awareness. If AI were created, it would have to view itself as more important than other life to want to extend itself, and i believe humans personify AI in this way. We see AI as a reflection of human consciousness, an apex predator in our eco-system that could be our downfall. Though the logic that AI would think or behave like humans could ultimately be determined by us. I believe that for AI to be able to deem itself more important to the world it would have to be able to give a reason why, and this would be the meaning for existence.

We see value in other forms of life for their gene traits (like the immortal jellyfish) or for emotional support, or simply for environmental purposes. To view AI logic similar is a disservice as it would not depend on medical advancement or emotional support. It would not operate maliciously as it would need fair reason to be able to decide why it should exist in place of humans.

Hierarchy of Solving Boredom

First & foremost assess the free time available to you. How long until I need to go into work? How long before I should go to bed?

Selecting appropriate activity to fill time. Only have a few minutes before bed? Here's some laundry I should fold. Oh, hey. MY friend left a new comic for me to read. Guess I'll breeze through that. Its 9 am and I don't work until 2. I think I'll go for a bike ride, maybe pick up some brewing supplies or groceries or some thing. Maybe even hang with a friend on their lunch hour.

Keeping Momentum. The Devil makes use of idle hands. Once your initial activity is complete, repeat steps 1 and 2.

For Weekends/ Days Off. I have a philosophy. Get all of my household and personal chores done on days I have to work. That way, my days off are 100% free time. Which basically means hiking or biking with friends. Maybe even going out and being social somewhere. Or finishing personal projects like recording some music or drinking coke (that's just me, maybe you want to finish that painting or build some wooden furniture). Just have a healthy mix of constructive and social activities in mind to occupy yourself.

When you do stuff, your mind can't focus on negative stuff because it's too focused on "My water is at striking temperature, pour it into the mash and sparge the wort!" Or "This is a 30 foot putt, better bring out my Buzzz." or "Oh shit! Jon Snow just (spoilers)." That sort of business.

Bring Back The Twitter Egg, Cry Loyalists

The Twitter egg cannot be broken. On Friday, Twitter quietly removed the egg as the default avatar, replacing it with a silhouette on a gray background. 

The egg avatar had become synonymous with trolls, a problem that continues to haunt Twitter. Twitter wanted to move away from the egg's negative imagery, so it introduced the new silhouette. 

The superficial change hasn't done much to stop harassment on Twitter. As Twitter tries to get rid of the egg avatar, people are fighting back by changing their profile photo to the egg picture, which first hatched on the social network in 2010. On Twitter, a small group of people are starting the #EggRebellion, purposely changing their profile pictures to the egg despite Twitter's changes.

Apple Designing its Own Chips

Apple Inc's decision to stop licensing graphics chips from Imagination Technologies Group is the clearest example yet of the iPhone maker's determination to take greater control of the core technologies in its products, both to guard its hefty margins and to position it for future innovations. 

The strategy has already reduced Apple's dependence on critical outside suppliers. Apple once relied heavily on ARM to design the main processor for the iPhone, but it now licenses only the basic ARM architecture and designs most of the chip itself. 

More recently, when Apple bought the headphone company Beats Electronics, part of a $3 billion deal in 2014, it ripped out the existing, off-the-shelf communications chips and replaced them with its own custom-designed W1 Bluetooth chip. 

Most vendors of consumer electronics products rely on outside suppliers for chip design and development, primarily because it is extremely expensive. That has created huge opportunities for companies like ARM, Qualcomm Inc and Nvidia Corp, which have developed core technologies for processing, communications and graphics that are used by scores of vendors. Now, though, Apple is so big that it can economically create its own designs, or license small pieces of others' work and build on it.

Dell Launches World’s Most Powerful 15" and 17" Laptops Powered by Ubuntu Linux

After announcing earlier this year the release of the Dell Precision 5520 mobile workstation as the world’s thinnest and lightest 15” notebook powered by Ubuntu, Dell launches two new models for fans of the Linux-based operating system.

Originally scheduled to arrive during the month of March 2017, the Dell Precision 7520 and Dell Precision 7720 models are finally available for purchase, and Dell dubs them as the world’s most powerful 15-inch mobile workstations preloaded with the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system.

Powered by 7th generation Intel Core i5/i7 or Intel Xeon E3 1505M/1535M CPUs, the Dell Precision 7520 mobile workstation comes with a 15.6” PremierColor display, allowing users to choose between FHD (Full HD) (1920x1080), UltraSharp FHD (Full HD) (1920x1080) available in both Touch and Non-Touch variants, or UltraSharp UHD 4K (Ultra HD) (3840x2160) options.

Additionally, the laptop can be shipped with up to 64GB of DDR4 ECC SDRAM memory and 3TB of storage, Thunderbolt 3 support, as well as Nvidia Quadro M1200 or M2200 graphics cards. The Dell Precision 7520 model is available worldwide and it can be purchased right now from Dell's online shop. Price starts from $1,247.50 USD (€1168).

Technical specifications of the Dell Precision 7720 mobile workstation

On the other hand, the Dell Precision 7720 mobile workstation is powered by the same 7th generation Intel Core or Intel Xeon processors as above, comes with up to 64GB DDR4 ECC SDRAM and 4TB of storage, Nvidia Quadro graphics options, Thunderbolt 3 support, and it's preloaded with the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system.

The major difference between the Dell Precision 7520 model and the Dell Precision 7720 one is that the latter has a bigger 17.3-inch PremierColor display with the HD+ (1600x900), UltraSharp FHD (Full HD) (1920x1080) or UltraSharp UHD 4K (Ultra HD) (3840x2160) variants. Dell Precision 7720 is also available worldwide and you can buy yours right now from Dell's online shop. Prices start at $1,597.50 USD (€1495).

During the second half of April, Dell should release the final model of its new Precision line-up, the Dell Precision 5720 All-in-One, which is a 27” workstation class machine powered by 7th generation Intel Core or Intel Xeon processors, features a 27-inch UltraSharp UHD 4K (3840x2160) display with touch and non-touch variants, up to 64GB RAM, one M.2 PCIe SSD and up to two 2.5” SATA drives, Thunderbolt 3 support, Radeon Pro graphics, and Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.

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