Presumably in this model the dev wouldn't push their branch until the merge is actually complete, and there's presumably a convention like prepending `[CONFLICT]` to those commits to discourage people from checking them out directly.
I wonder if there's a name for this phenomenon, where a small group emerge from a userbase, gain control of the platform and start applying their preferences to the detriment of the average user. It strikes me as very similar to the problems stack overflow faces.
Plutocracy? You have to have a decent amount of free time and resources initially to value spending time working on Wikipedia articles enough to gain working knowledge and social connections in the system to advance enough to advance broader agendas, or enforce narrower biases.
Take something like Google Search, a service that is ad-supported but is free to use and produces an enormous amount of value for virtually everyone on the internet. What is their business model in a post-adwords world, where they've been forced to adapt? Presumably they'd have to charge for it, which means that the poorest people on the internet would not have access to this amazing tool that we take utterly for granted now. No one likes (poorly targeted, invasive) ads, but is that world preferable?
Exactly. There are also huge problems associated with paying for many of these free services.
If it were a pay-per-search model then I'd have to make a mental decision every time I do a search. This would impose massive cognitive overhead and present a deadweight loss.
If it were a subscription model, building a competitive search engine would suddenly become much harder. Right now, I can freely experiment between different search engines to find the right one for a given query. If I need a subscription, then it would much more firmly entrench the dominant player.
People spend a lot of time railing against advertising without considering how many great services have been supported by it for hundreds of years.
People also spend a lot of time defending internet advertising without considering the deluge of trash it's unleashed on the web, how it smothered the troves of information people put up there for free, because it costs almost nothing to share and benefits all[0]. The first ones that said "fuck everybody else" were the advertisers.
> how many great services have been supported by it for hundreds of years
... wait are you trolling?
Ad-blockers grew out of a need. It's been "only" a few decades, and before that advertisement wasn't quite the same thing, was it?
Nobody felt they needed an always on filter to protect their focus and attention from a constant 24/7 barrage of shitinformation screaming at you. Because advertisement hasn't always been doing that. Yes it's been lying a lot, maybe a lot more, maybe it always has, and I hate it for that as well, but that's a different discussion. That's not the discussion we're having today. We could have had that discussion but advertisement decided it wanted everything and right now it is paying people to flood the web with clickbait, listicles and other bullshit.
[0] at some point (more than 10 years ago), you started to have to be clever and use smart queries to filter and step around the shit advertising. but for years now Google basically stopped returning anything as results that deep. the pages still exist but they won't let you dig deep into the index any more because the 99.9999% shit finally tipped over into rounding error. for a while they called you "robot" if you tried and give you a captcha because robots were mining the trash for different (less noble) purposes. you still get these captcha's some times but they seem to be stale filter triggers from threats long gone. most of the time you just get zero results for 2-3 word queries that used to return hundreds in an era the Internet was 1% of today's size. actually no most of the time you get results that have nothing to do with the query. you just get zero when you insist. and no verbatim mode doesn't help here.
Google search is not only ad-supported, it is also ad-supporting. it is carefully designed to collect and track your every click to feed their advertising business.
I suppose google search business model in a post-adwords world could also be "we have enough cash to run this service until everyone currently alive is dead".
In the event of google search disappearing, affected people would use other search engines and it would make room for better search engines to emerge which is hardly possible right now as google owns the market.
> I suppose google search business model in a post-adwords world could also be "we have enough cash to run this service until everyone currently alive is dead".
But they only have this money because of AdWords. That means that, in this world, Google would still exist, but no-one could come enter the search space to compete with it—and surely that's not a desireable outcome.
The insistence that Linux be called GNU/Linux when even Linus calls it Linux is exactly the kind of behaviour that alienates people who would otherwise align with them.
There is also no requirement that a Linux distribution includes any GNU software at all, should we refer to them as e.g Busybox/Linux?
> The insistence that Linux be called GNU/Linux when even Linus calls it Linux is exactly the kind of behaviour that alienates people who would otherwise align with them.
I don't agree with this actually, that's why I didn't even mention this. I believe GNU was indispensable to the wider Linux phenomenon. It's a matter of being fair and technically precise.
Linux is not called GNU/Linux, but most of the distros need be because the three major components are the GNU userland, the Linux kernel and the distro's utilites and customisations.
Unfortunately some vendors are more concerned about not admitting mistake.
Now, technically if they don't use the admin password they are probably OK. But (A) most people don't change their password. Heck, I work in IT Security and I still have admin passwords on some of my devices! (B) It's always good practice to change passwords ... just in case.
What exactly do you expect from an ISP that can be hacked by teens? I find it more unbelievable that TalkTalk still have customers: "95,000 subs left after hack – 94,000 joined in last six months", "firm reveals £22m profit jump" [0].
Granted, it's difficult to say how much better other ISPs are. But come on.
Absolute unbridled nonsense.