You mention waste, and actually that's another interesting point. It's no secret that Linux words wonders on older hardware, precisely due to its high level of optimization and low storage space requirement. Therefore, it could be argued that using Linux and other FOSS would quite literally reduce the amount of e-waste produced each year, since people would be able to use the same computer for longer.
Yes, massively. At least with current data, I don't imagine it would even be possible to measure this on a large scale, especially given the variation in what a computer is actually trying to do. I think it's made even harder by the fact that software is often targetted at Windows or OSX rather than Linux, so even benchmarking software is near impossible unless you're writing software which is able to leverage the specific unique features of Linux which make it more opimized.
Oh how interesting. I bet that was rewarding to solve, no more sitting in the dark! haha.
Ah, that's quite interesting. You really do learn something new every day!
May I ask, what exactly is a shared ground connection? I've not heard that term before.
Generally I'm not against w3 schools for quickly checking the syntax of something or how to use a specific method, but I always try stay clear of their larger code examples.
I was learning PHP a couple years back for some hobby side projects I was working on. They provide some code here about how to connect to an SQL database. I ended up using this code for almost a year on some publicly hosted sites.
The code they provided isn't secure, though. It can output database errors to the client, and give away information about your database which a random user shouldn't have access to.
Additionally, the beginning few pages for their SQL insertion examples doesn't mention anywhere that you should be using prepared statements. There is a page slightly further down, but for the average person learning the language, there's no reason for them not to just copy parts the extremely insecure code and use it in their projects.
W3 schools imo is great for quickly checking up on something, but generally it's probably better to avoid their examples and look up the language standards somewhere else.
Yeah, I was super gutted when I found out. Apparently it did use to work in the past when they used to serve the ads from different servers, but not any more, unfortunately. It's not completely pointless to install, though. It provides some great software out the box to monitor internet traffic on your network, and I'm pretty sure that in some cases it can speed up your internet by acting as a self-hosted DNS server.
The reason UBlock works, is because it has direct access to the HTML, CSS and JavaScript sent to you. It can alter the web page directly. UBlock scans all the web pages you load, and automatically removes anything it recognizes as an ad. There's a lot more to it than just that, and it's a really clever tool, but essentially what it does is directly alter the code of the web page. Unfortunately, this isn't really possible to do from another device on your network. I did look into somehow setting up a device which scans all incoming traffic like Ublock does, and then removes adverts similarly, but this isn't really possible since HTTPS traffic is encrypted. Any attempt at removing the encryption would likely result in a heap of issues to using various services, and you'll likely get constant warnings on your browser about a page being insecure e.t.c.
Not sure if you meant pihole or not, but if you did, I thought I'd just mention that a pihole doesn't remove ads on YouTube due to the fact that the ads and the videos are served from the same server. You block the ads, you block the videos. Made me quite sad after I set my one up.
Unless you didn't mean pihole, in which case do enlighten me as to what a pinhole is :))
I've used freedns.afraid.org.
You can run up to 5 domains on there free of charge. On their about-us page, they state that all the money generated from premium users goes back into the company. Their domains are all public, and are "donated" (not sure if that's the word) by many generous people. Their site says they're currently getting around 7 billion dns requests a month.
The website was started by a hobbiest developer who wanted "to create a safe environment where other programmers could share domain names with one another at no cost".
I'm not sure that it really counts as FOSS, but it provides a way for anyone to use a domain free of charge without having to own any server infrastructure themselves.
https://freedns.afraid.org/about-us/
Edit: also just realized this post is 3 years old, sorry for being a bit late to the party! I hope this helps someone else :)
Additionally, many newer games use Denuvo which is known for making your games run slower. Sometimes the pirated copies not only take up less space, but also perform better.
There is a save feature, at least on the instance I'm using. Press the three dots next to the comment, and then hit the star icon :)
That's good to hear!