President Donald Trump told Fox News in an interview that aired Tuesday night the United States doesn’t have talented workers to fill jobs needed domestically, defending the H1-B skilled worker visa program.
Pressed by Fox News’ Laura Ingraham on whether his administration would reduce H1-B visas over concerns it would depress wages for American workers, Trump told Ingraham, “I agree — but you also do have to bring in talent.”
When the Fox host responded, “We have plenty of talented people here,” Trump replied, “No, you don’t, no you don’t … you don’t have certain talents, and people have to learn. You can’t take people off an unemployment line and say, ‘I’m going to put you into a factory where we’re going to make missiles.’”
The president pointed to the September ICE raid of a Georgia Hyundai facility, which saw authorities arrest and deport hundreds of South Korean contractors over their immigration status, as evidence of the country’s need for skilled foreign workers.
“In Georgia, they raided because they wanted illegal immigrants out — they had people from South Korea that made batteries all their life,” Trump said. “You know, making batteries is very complicated. It’s not an easy thing. Very dangerous, a lot of explosions, a lot of problems. They had like 500 or 600 people, early stages, to make batteries and to teach people how to do it. Well, they wanted them to get out of the country. You’re going to need that, Laura.”
The president’s comments come just two weeks after he told reporters traveling with him to South Korea that he was “very much opposed” to the raid carried out by federal officers as part of his administration’s immigration crackdown at US worksites.
Trump signed an executive action in September to impose a $100,000 application fee for H-1B visas. The move marked the latest in a series of efforts from the administration to crack down on immigration and place sharp new limits on the types of foreigners allowed into the country.
The H-1B visa is a work visa that’s valid for three years and can be renewed for another three years. Economists have argued the program allows US companies to maintain competitiveness and grow their business, creating more jobs in the US.
In the first part of the Fox News interview that aired Monday, Trump took a swipe at the nation of France while defending the enrollment of Chinese students at universities in the US.
“I actually think it’s good to have outside countries,” the president said when asked about enrolling Chinese nationals at American universities.
“They’re not the French. They’re the Chinese. They spy on us. They steal our intellectual property,” Ingraham responded.
“Do you think the French are better?” Trump said. Ingraham replied, “Yeah,” to which the president said, “I’m not so sure.”
Whoa, whoa, whoa. Trump's example of why we need immigrant labor is that we don't have people talented enough to work on weapons manufacturing lines? And he wants foreigners to produce our military's weapon systems? What.
What we now know as the “social web” — or Web 2.0 — didn’t arrive until around 2004. But the first inklings of it were emerging a couple of years before. As usual, music was the harbinger.
Last.fm was founded in 2002 by a group of four Austrian and German students from Ravensbourne College of Design and Communication in London. It was fashioned as an internet radio station that allowed a user to build a listening profile and share it with others. The year of its launch, Last.fm won a young talent award at the Europrix, a multimedia awards show based in Vienna. This was how the product was described in a showcase video (embedded below) leading up to the awards ceremony:
“After repeated use, the system builds a listening profile that increasingly reflects the user's preferences. The sum of all profiles is visualized in the ‘Map of Music,’ a presentation of musical connections and genres determined only by the collaborative effort of Last.fm users.”
When the students went up to receive their award, one of them, Thomas Willomitzer, noted the importance of “collaborative filtering” to the Last.fm system. The idea was that the Last.fm algorithm would recommend music you might like, based on your listening history combined with the listening history of other, similar, users. Willomitzer added that this type of algorithm would be familiar to people who used Amazon.com.
Here's a video of the Last.fm founders presenting at Europrix 2002, via Thomas Willomitzer:
Collaborative filtering was a common technique in recommender systems, and its history dated back to before the web — for instance, it was the basis for a 1992 Xerox PARC email system called ‘Tapestry.’ But collaborative filtering really came into its own during the web era, and in particular it was popularised by Amazon. By 2002, Amazon users were familiar with the following message: “Customers who bought items in your Shopping Cart also bought…” There was also a “Your Recommendations” list on the Amazon.com homepage. Both of these features were created using an algorithm that Amazon called “item-to-item collaborative filtering.” As explained in a research paper:
“Rather than matching the user to similar customers, item-to-item collaborative filtering matches each of the user’s purchased and rated items to similar items, then combines those similar items into a recommendation list.”
Amazon collaborative filtering examples; via research paper by Greg Linden, Brent Smith and Jeremy York, published by the IEEE Computer Society in January-February 2003 edition.
The key here is that Amazon’s collaborative filtering was done based on the items people bought or rated, not the profiles of its users. This approach was also crucial to how new social web services like Last.fm would develop. The “map of music” that Last.fm created was all about mapping which songs (or genres) were interconnected — so a certain Bob Dylan song might have a strong connection to a certain Joni Mitchell song, based on listener data, and thus the Mitchell song might come up as a recommendation for people who listened to the Dylan song (and vice versa).
Audioscrobbler
By coincidence, another student in the UK was also working on a recommendation system for music in 2002. Audioscrobbler was started as a computer science project by Richard Jones at the University of Southampton. Jones coined the term “audioscrobbling" (later shortened to “scrobbling”) to describe the process of tracking songs that you listen to in order to make a listening profile, which is then used for recommendations.
Richard Jones profile on University of Southampton website, 20 March 2003.
In an April 2003 interview with his University’s paper, twenty-year old Jones explained how Audioscrobbler worked:
“Users of the system need to download software on to their computer that monitors what artists they listen to. The data is then collated and a pattern emerges by way of a technique known as ‘collaborative filtering.’ The results are then recorded against a username and can be compared with the listening tastes of other members.”
Later, Jones would team up with the Ravensbourne College students and fold his project into Last.fm, but even in 2002 — when they were independent products — it is striking how similar the two systems were. Both used collaborative filtering to create song recommendations, and both aimed to create a kind of social network based around what users listened to.
The key to the emerging social web would be that you discover new content and communities by following other people. For music, the idea was to help you break away from the established broadcast model. At the Europrix event, Last.fm’s Martin Stiksel brought out a 1980s-style transistor radio to illustrate the point. If you want to listen to music on such a device, Stiksel explained, you have to tune the frequency band to find your station. If you don’t like the music playing on that station, you tune the dial to another radio station and try your luck again.
“The inherent problem with broadcast media is that basically, at the end of the day, it's always somebody else selecting the music for you,” said Stiksel. “So there's always a bunch of editors or programmers that picked the music and put them into into a program for you.”
Three Last.fm founders in 2002 with a transister radio, "from the 80s, I believe."
With Last.fm, the stream of music you heard was a mix of manual choice and algorithmic selection. You might start with a song already in your online “record collection” (the term Stiksel kept using), or start from another user’s profile. From then on, songs would be chosen for you based on collaborative filtering. If you played a song through, the Last.fm software automatically added it to your own collection. You could also press a “love” button to add it. But if you didn’t like a certain track, you could press a “hate” button (so it wouldn’t get played again), or click the “skip” button to move to the next song. There was also a “change” button to go to a different user profile.
The early Last.fm user interface was, in truth, a bit cluttered with all these different buttons and various search boxes — but over time it would get more streamlined.
Stiksel explained that the idea for Last.fm came about when the students asked themselves, “how do you look for something that you don't know?” So in the case of music, how to discover new music when you don’t necessarily know what type of music you’re looking for? The answer, he said, was the social component.
“Then we figured out that it's the social aspect of music — the best music you always find when you go to your friend's house and he plays you records. And we’re taking this concept into an online environment here.”
Value of User Data
What both Last.fm and Audioscrobbler stumbled onto in 2002 was the collective value of user data in discovering new content — something that Amazon was also taking advantage of at this time. The problem with music, though, was that licensing from record companies was still highly restrictive. The Last.fm founders somewhat glossed over it during their Europrix presentation, but they did admit that “due to legal issues, we're only allowed to play 30 second samples.” Unless you already owned a piece of music, 30 seconds was all you got.
By the following year, however, Last.fm had begun turning itself into an "online radio" service, by paying licensing fees to the UK collecting societies PRS (Performing Right Society) and MCPS (Mechanical-Copyright Protection Society).
So pre-Web 2.0, the streaming revolution was only just getting started. But with Last.fm and Audioscrobbler, we at least glimpsed the future of the social web.
Last.fm in August 2006. This is the design we now remember, but it took several years to get there. Via Wayback Machine.
If you have a Nest thermostat of the first or second generation, you probably noticed it recently became dumber. Google decided to pull the plug on the servers that operate these devices, turning them into — well — ordinary thermostats. Lucky for us [codykociemba] has been keeping up with various exploits for hacking the thermostat, and he started the NoLongerEvil-Thermostat project.
If you want to smarten up your thermostat again, you’ll need a Linux computer or, with some extra work, a Mac. The thermostat has a DFU-enabled OMAP loader. To access it, you have to plug it into USB and then reboot it. There is a narrow window for the loader to grab it, so you have to be running the software before you reboot or you’ll miss it.
You can control your thermostat again!
After that, the flash is relatively fast, but the Nest will look dead for a brief time. Then the No Longer Evil logo will show, and you are in business. We wish the hack simply replaced the Google software with a local website, but it doesn’t. It redirects all the network traffic to a custom URL. Then you can control your thermostat from the nolongerevil.com website. So we don’t know what will happen if they decide to stop hosting the remote server that powers this.
Then again, don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. If you get another year out of your trusty thermostat, that’s a year you wouldn’t have had otherwise. We do worry a bit about putting an odd device on your network. In theory, the project is open source, but all the important bits are in a binary U-Boot image file, so it would take some work to validate it. To get you started, the command to dump the content is probably: dumpimage -T kernel -p 0 -o kernel uImage. Or, you could watch it with Wireshark for a bit.
We were happy to get some more use out of our Nest.
Back in the innocent days of Windows 98 SE, I nearly switched to Linux on account of how satisfied I was with my Windows experience. This started with the Year of the Linux Desktop in 1999 that started with me purchasing a boxed copy of SuSE Linux and ended with me switching to Windows 2000. After this I continued tinkering with non-Windows OSes including QNX, BeOS, various BSDs, as well as Linux distributions that promised a ‘Windows-like’ desktop experience, such as Lindows.
Now that Windows 2000’s proud legacy has seen itself reduced to a rusting wreck resting on cinderblocks on Microsoft’s dying front lawn, the quiet discomfort that many Windows users have felt since Windows 7 was forcefully End-Of-Life-d has only increased. With it comes the uncomfortable notion that Windows as a viable desktop OS may be nearing its demise. Yet where to from here?
Although the recommendations from the peanut gallery seem to coalesce around Linux or Apple’s MacOS (formerly OS X), there are a few dissenting voices extolling the virtues of FreeBSD over both. There are definitely compelling reasons to pick FreeBSD over Linux, in addition to it being effectively MacOS’s cousin. Best of all is not having to deal with the Chaos Vortex that spawns whenever you dare to utter the question of ‘which Linux distro?’. Within the world of FreeBSD there is just FreeBSD, which makes for a remarkably coherent experience.
Ghosting The Subject
The GhostBSD logo.
Although FreeBSD doesn’t have distributions the way that Linux does due to it being a singular codebase rather than a duct-taped patchwork, you do get a choice as far as difficulty settings go. You can always pick plain FreeBSD with its functional but barebones installer, which dumps you into a command line shell and expects you to jump through some hoops to set up things like a desktop environment. This is generally fine if you’re an advanced user, or just want to set up a headless server system.
In case you’re more into the ‘just add water’ level of a desktop OS installation process, the GhostBSD project provides the ready to go option for a zero fuss installation like you would see with Linux Mint, Manjaro Linux and kin. Although I have done the hard mode path previously with FreeBSD virtual machines, to save myself the time and bother I opted for the GhostBSD experience here.
For this experiment I have two older-but-quite-usable systems at my disposal: one is a 2013-era Ivy Bridge Intel-based gaming laptop that’s a rebranded Clevo W370ET, the other a late-2015 Skylake PC with a Core i7 6700K, GTX 980 Ti and 32 GB of DDR4. To give both the best chance possible I also installed a brand new SATA SSD in both systems to run the OS from.
Down To Bare Metal
GhostBSD offers two images: the official Mate desktop version and the community XFCE version. Since I have always had a soft spot for XFCE, that’s the version I went with. After fetching the image, I used Rufus to create a bootable USB stick and made sure that the target system was set to boot from USB media. First I wanted to focus on the laptop, but this is where I ran into the first issue when the installer froze on me.
After a few hours of trying various things, including trying a known good Manjaro Linux installer which flunked out with a complaint about the USB medium, I figured I might as well give a Windows 10 installer a shot for fun. This actually got me a useful error code: 0x8007025D. While it broadly indicates ‘something’ being wrong along the USB-RAM-HDD/SSD path, it led me to a post about USB 3.0 being a potential issue as it changed some things compared to USB 2.0. The solution? Use a USB 2.0 port instead, obviously.
Creating a new ZFS system partition for the GhostBSD installation. (Credit: Maya Posch)
Long story short, this sort of worked: the GhostBSD installer still froze up once it entered the graphical section, but the Manjaro installer was happy as a clam, so now that laptop runs Manjaro, I guess.
A subsequent attempt to boot the GhostBSD installer on the 6700K system went much better, even while daringly using a USB 3.0 port on the case. Before I knew it GhostBSD was purring along with the XFCE desktop sparkling along at 1080p.
I’m not sure what GhostBSD’s issue was with the laptop. It’s possible that it found the NVidia Optimus configuration disagreeable, but now I have two rather capable gaming systems to directly compare Linux and FreeBSD with. There are no mistakes, just happy little accidents.
Gaming The System
Since any open source software of note that runs on Linux tends to have a native FreeBSD build, the experience here is rather same-ish. Where things can get interesting is with things related to the GPU, especially gaming. These days that of course means getting Steam and ideally the GoG Galaxy client running, which cracks open a pretty big can of proprietary worms.
Playing the Windows GoG version of Firewatch on GhostBSD. (Credit: Maya Posch)
Annoyingly, Valve has only released a Steam client for Windows, MacOS and Linux, with the latter even only officially supporting some versions of Ubuntu Linux. This is no real concern for Manjaro Linux, just with the disclaimer that if anything breaks, you’re SOL and better start praying that it’ll magically start working again.
Unfortunately, for FreeBSD the userland Linux ABI compatibility isn’t quite enough as the Steam DRM means that it goes far beyond basic binary compatibility.
The two available options here are to either try one’s chances with the linuxulator-steam-utils workarounds that tries to stuff the Linux client into a chroot, or to go Wine all the way with the Windows Steam client and add more Windows to your OSS.
Neither approach is ideal, but the main question is whether or not it allows you to play your games. After initially getting the Linux tools setup and ready to bootstrap Steam, I got thrown a curveball by the 32-bit Wine and dependencies not being available, leading to a corresponding issue thread on the GhostBSD forums. After Eric over at the GhostBSD project resolved the build issue for these dependencies, I thought that now I would be able to play some games, but I was initially sorely disappointed.
For some reason I was now getting a ‘permission denied’ error for the chdir command in the lsu-bootstrap script, so after some fruitless debugging I had to give up on this approach and went full Wine. I probably could have figured out what the problem here was, but considering the limitations of the LSU Steam approach and me just wanting to play games instead of debug-the-FOSS-project, it felt like time to move on.
Watery Wine
The Windows Steam client running on GhostBSD. (Credit: Maya Posch)
As it turns out, the low-fuss method to get Steam and GoG Galaxy working is via the the Mizutamari Wine GUI frontend. Simply install it with pkg install mizuma or via the package center, open it from the Games folder in the start menu, then select the desired application’s name and then the Install button. Within minutes I had both Steam and the ‘classic’ GoG Galaxy clients installed and running. The only glitch was that the current GoG Galaxy client didn’t want to work, but that might have been a temporary issue. Since I only ever use the GoG Galaxy 1.x client on Windows, this was fine for me.
After logging into both clients and escaping from Steam’s ‘Big Picture Mode’, I was able to install a few games and play them, which went completely smoothly, except for the elevator scene in Firewatch where I couldn’t look around using the mouse despite it working fine in the menu, but that game is notoriously buggy, so that’s a question mark on the exact cause. Between buggy games, Wine, and the OS, there definitely are sufficient parties to assign blame to.
Similarly, while the Steam client was a bit graphically glitchy with flickering on the Store page, and trying to access the Settings menu resulted in it restarting, I was able to install and play Windows games like Nightmare Kart, so that’s a win in my book. That said, I can’t say that I’m not jealous of just punching in sudo pacman -S steam on the Manjaro rig to get the Steam client up in a minute or so. Someone please convince Gabe to compile the Steam client for FreeBSD, and the CD Projekt folk to compile the Galaxy client for FreeBSD and Linux.
It should be noted here that although it is possible to use alternative frontends for GoG instead of its Galaxy client, you need it for things like cloud saves. Hence me choosing this path to get everything as close to on par with the Windows experience and feature set.
Next Steps
Aside from gaming, there are many possible qualifications for what might make a ‘Windows desktop replacement’. As far as FreeBSD goes, the primary annoyance is having to constantly lean on the Linux or Windows versions of software. This is also true for things like DaVinci Resolve for video editing, where since there’s no official FreeBSD version, you have to stuff the Linux version into a chroot once again to run it via the Linux compatibility layer.
Although following the requisite steps isn’t rocket science for advanced users, it would simply be nice if a native version existed and you could just install the package. Based on my own experiences porting a non-trivial application like the FFmpeg- and SDL-based NymphCast to FreeBSD – among other OSes – such porting isn’t complicated at all, assuming your code doesn’t insist on going around POSIX and doing pretty wild Linux-specific things.
Ranting on software development aside, for my next steps on my FreeBSD/GhostBSD journey I’ll likely be giving approaches like this running of Linux software on FreeBSD another shot, barring finding that native video editors work well enough for my purposes.
Feel free to sound off in the comments on how to improve my experiences so far, as well as warn me and others who are embarking on a similar BSD journey of certain pitfalls.
Solar EV startupAptera Motors continues to inch closer to scaled manufacturing of its flagship vehicle, with a new validation assembly line being installed at its headquarters.
Aptera's current market cap is around $220M, so the funding they think they need at this point to even get to the point of being able to produce vehicles is about 30% of the value of the company. To say this is a risky bet is a huge understatement. Still, I hope they make it.
Ryanair is trying to force users to download its mobile app by eliminating paper boarding passes, starting on November 12.
As announced in February and subsequently delayed from earlier start dates, Europe’s biggest airline is moving to digital-only boarding passes, meaning customers will no longer be able to print physical ones. In order to access their boarding passes, Ryanair flyers will have to download Ryanair’s app.
“Almost 100 percent of passengers have smartphones, and we want to move everybody onto that smartphone technology,” Ryanair CEO Michael O’Leary said recently on The Independent’s daily travel podcast.
Customers are encouraged to check in online via Ryanair’s website or app before getting to the airport. People who don’t check in online before getting to the airport will have to pay the airport a check-in fee. Further explaining the change, O’Leary said, per a Monday report from The Telegraph:
They will still, as they are today, be paying the airport check-in fee [of £55, equal to about $72]. And they know that they have to check in the day before, because we send them SMS messages and two email confirmations, 48 hours before departure and 24 hours before departure.
So anybody who shows up not having checked in before they get to the airport? Either they’re stupid or they just ignored our email instructions.
In a September press release, Ryanair CMO Dara Brady claimed that ditching paper boarding passes would lead to “faster, smarter, and greener” travel.
Ryanair’s September announcement added that “almost 80 percent of Ryanair’s 206M+ passengers already use digital boarding passes. Ryanair’s move to 100 percent digital boarding passes from Nov 12th follows other key tickets industries (like festivals, music, and sport events) which have successfully switched to digital-only ticketing.”
The policy change is also meant to get people to do more with Ryanair’s app, like order food and drinks, view real-time flight information, and receive notifications during delays.
Brady said Ryanair selected the November 12 start date because it’s during what is “traditionally a slightly quieter time for travel following the busy mid-term break period.”
Inconvenience preparing for takeoff
Eliminating paper boarding passes may create numerous inconveniences. To start, not everyone wants Ryanair’s app on their personal device. And many future customers, especially those who don’t fly with Ryanair frequently or who don’t fly much at all, may be unaware of the change, creating confusion during travel, which can already be inherently stressful.
Also, there are places where Ryanair flies that don’t accept digital boarding passes, including some airports in Albania and Morocco. In these instances, Ryanair still requires online check-ins (either via Ryanair’s website or app), and then the airline will provide paper boarding passes.
People who are less technically savvy or who don’t have a smart device or whose device has died won’t be completely out of luck. Ryanair says it will accommodate people without access to a smartphone with “a free of charge boarding pass at the airport” if they’ve checked in online “before arriving at the airport.”
“Nobody’s going to get stranded. Nobody’s going to get left behind,” O’Leary said, per The Telegraph.
Despite this, some travel experts are worried about potential chaos.
“There will be absolute havoc when that takes effect,” Irish travel commentator Eoghan Corry told RSVP Live in January.
Ryanair will be the first airline to do away with paper boarding passes. It already has a history with being on the ground floor of controversial digital-forward policies. Ryanair was the first airline to require people to check in online in advance or else pay a fee, as noted by The Independent.
“There’ll be some teething problems,” O’Leary said of moving to digital-only boarding passes.
Log in
Last.fm circa 2003; via 
Amazon collaborative filtering examples; via research paper by Greg Linden, Brent Smith and Jeremy York, published by the IEEE Computer Society in January-February 2003 edition.
Richard Jones profile on University of Southampton website, 
Audioscrobbler circa 2003; 
Three Last.fm founders in 2002 with a transister radio, "from the 80s, I believe."
Last.fm circa November 2003; 
Last.fm in August 2006. This is the design we now remember, but it took several years to get there. 
