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  1. Re:Obligatory Discussions on GNOME 3.16 Released · · Score: 2

    I actually found during a recent fresh Jessie install that, while there is still plenty of cruft pulled in, it has been easier to peel away some of the crud (byebye avahi, and pulseaudio, may we never meet again) from GNOME than in the past. FWIW. The biggest problem with it right now is that there are no knobs to tune a lot of really retarded crap to "off" or if their are knobs, you have to hunt for them in obscure tweak tools or buried in a theme or in some pathologically treeified config database or in an "oh-there's-an-app-for-that" style "extension." It was much easier back when you had a chance in heck of finding what you were looking for by grepping /etc for keywords. Ponder that last sentence for a while. Currently the config system is actually harder to use than hail-mary's at the cli used to be.

    Why anyone would want disappearing scrollbars is a mystery to me. Why do they spend time on crap like that when they can't even let you move/disable the hot corner (which remains lurking in the top left to ambush you when you overshoot yourself on the way to the back button.) Instead you have to go find some extension off a site where you have to create an account to get anything, written by some guy who may or may not have the time to lockstep it with changes in the core, but probably not, so it's just going to break crap later if you install it and then some day in the future the time vampire will come by and drain another quart of your life essence fixing it again. Oh yeah, and the fact that it can't seem to fathom that you just may have more than one non-touch pointing device and just might want them set up differently.

    Plus those stupid "toggle" switches are all over on gnome-shell menus where the tried-and-true checkbox would be nicer and more clear.

    But at least the controls let you turn on emacs keybindings now without consulting google to find the gsettings variable. Damned if I will remember where a year from now when I get to reinstall, or that it will matter whether I do because by that time it will either have moved, or disappeared entirely.

  2. Re:You know you thought of Serenity on Massive Exoplanet Evolved In Extreme 4-Star System · · Score: 1

    Actually Contact came to mind. "A triple, no, quadruple system. Oh, it's beautiful."

  3. Re:Good grief... on Bill Nye Disses "Regular" Software Writers' Science Knowledge · · Score: 4, Insightful

    "Computer Systems Engineering" covers it pretty well -- it's a mix of EE and CS so you end up with a ground-up understanding from transistor to circuit to chipset to architecture to OS to software. Of course, these days there are so many competing standards/products that all do the same thing but differently and so many layers of bloat, it's not humanly possible to know every detail, and the more actual work you do the further you fall behind in "knowlege" compared to someone who manages to find a way to just read books/code for a living and never has to put shoulder to wheel (not that we don't need those sorts of people, as they can see the forest rather than the trees.)

  4. Re:But CNN Said... on The Robots That Will Put Coders Out of Work · · Score: 1

    If I were the author, I'd worry less about the programmer and more about how this world will handle the potential mass unemployment situation.

    If I were the author, I'd worry about someone developing a robot that can turn a flimsy premise into a an acedemic paper.

  5. Re:Mozilla's Flash-killer 'Shumway' appears in FF. on BBC Radio Drops WMA For MPEG-DASH · · Score: 2

    Flash is a security nightmare that we recently suggested deserves to rot in an unmarked grave.

    No, you'd better mark that grave prominently. Don't want anyone to unearth it again by accident.

  6. Re:Perhaps it wouldn’t pass today’s .. on 1950s Toy That Included Actual Uranium Ore Goes On Display At Museum · · Score: 1

    Of course, that was before "Jackass" and similar concurrent epidemics of stupid.

  7. Re:Big companies need to leave off our WiFi spectr on Cellphone Start-Ups Handle Calls With Wi-Fi · · Score: 1

    The problem with congestion is mainly due to most of the crap you could buy up until now only haveing a 2.5GHz antenna and even the 5GHz stuff did not support using DFS channels because radar avoidance is tricky stuff to implement. The problem with beacon pollution (too many SSIDs) will be solved by 11u allowing multiple services on the SSID. Eventually you'll be looking at having a single AP in every room, even for living-room setups, but some of them will be built into computers and appliances because they will also have an 11ad node on there for short range (e.g. "wire free" from cable box to TV) uses. The radios will be turned down low so the signal barely leaves the room, and there will be overlap between cells on different channels.

    For a while in the middle of all this, the "11ac Wave 2" stuff will come out and ruin everything. Then people will either stop using that, or the FCC will roll over and open more bandwidth so it can be something other than crap.

  8. Re:Who's Wi-fi? on Cellphone Start-Ups Handle Calls With Wi-Fi · · Score: 1

    I have a hard time picturing wi-fi being all that good for calls since all a cell phone network is, really, is a specialized wi-fi network designed from the ground up to deal with the cell phone use-case

    Mostly fixed on newer installations and newer clients. Right now the industry is more or less in a holding pattern waiting for older devices to age out and for device producers to stop making crap radios, because if you turn on a lot of the voice quality features (e.g. 11k,11r for seamless roaming and CAC), a lot of clients devices cannot deal. It is getting easier and easier for corporations to design their campus WiFi for phone use because they control which devices the users are using, but for networks that serve any old commodity device a customer walks in with, a few pieces have to fall into place before voice SSIDs are anything but experimental. 11ac is one of those big pieces because it mandates a 5GHz antenna.

  9. Re:One small problem... okay, two: on Cellphone Start-Ups Handle Calls With Wi-Fi · · Score: 1

    There's help on the way for that in the form of a standard called 802.11u (and a couple systems implemented on top of that with buzzword-friendly names.) It allows a hotspot provider to advertise multiple authentication mechanisms, so you would just need one account with a central IDP to get on the hotspot. It's already out in enterprise-level gear bought recently enough; the challenge is now for IDPs to take up the mantle and offer a RadSec service, and for those IDPs to work deals with commodity equipment vendors and managed-cloud-service vendors to get their IDs inlcuded in the published beacons.

    Oh yes, and also waiting on MS Surface tablets to either get fixed to not choke on long beacons, or die a well deserved darwinian market death.

  10. Re:I blame the FDA on Smoking Is Even Deadlier Than Previously Thought · · Score: 1

    Well, on the flip side of this coin we pretty much do a horrible job at prosecuting corporate crime and properly regulating markets. There are arguments both ways but GGP is drastic deadbrained perspective on things.

  11. Re:I blame the FDA on Smoking Is Even Deadlier Than Previously Thought · · Score: 1

    anyone who works at cigarette (which contain arsenic, btw, amongst other things) companies, at least at the executive level, should face manslaughter up to capital murder charges.

    Move to a dystopian tyranny then. False advertising, marketing to the incompetent, meddling with research, concealing known hazards -- these are the things that companies should be liable for. If we charged every producer with murder for the hazards of their product, you would either starve, or have to grow your own food. In a rational society we know that nothing is without risk and the injustice is when we do not insist those risks are divulged to the consumer.

  12. Re:Sample size on Mood-Altering Wearable Thync Releases First Brain Test Data · · Score: 1

    mood scales, interviews, informant measures, etc. Who cares about the psychophysiology measurements they took

    Umm... me? Every time I see a "mood scale" or questionairre used in a study I cringe. These are horribly subjective measures. Stress is a bonafide biological condition and I'm much more convinced by studies that use a biological proxy marker. Not too convinced, given the sample size, but...

  13. Re:Looks like the bug was in credential sharing on Microsoft Fixes Critical Remotely Exploitable Windows Root-Level Design Bug · · Score: 1

    So it would involve some social engineering to get the user to run a malware trojan

    Not even wrong. Any machine joined to a domain can be tricked into believing another machine is the server in that domain, and then that other machine installs a new group policy disabling all the protections set up by the legitimate domain admin. No social engineering required, just a way to successfully deliver forged packets or poison DNS.

  14. Re:Patching is NOT ENOUGH on Microsoft Fixes Critical Remotely Exploitable Windows Root-Level Design Bug · · Score: 1

    Well, considering this is an MITM attack that targets a service that is typically only used on private internal networks (That likely use switches), or computers connected to one over VPN this is a bit less serious.

    You vastly overestimate the competency of corporate LAN departments. When the LAN is not properly hardened, and it very often isn't, all you need is one owned box/printer inside the broadcast domain to own all the AD Windows clients in that broadcast domain.

  15. Re:The XP Killer? on Microsoft Fixes Critical Remotely Exploitable Windows Root-Level Design Bug · · Score: 1

    1) Are members of an 'active domain' (i.e. corporate machines). ...Microsoft's bread and butter...
    2) Are connecting to an exploited domain server. ...no, they just have to be in a place that a fake domain server can forge packets pretending to be from the real one.

    Given the state of ethernet security these days (some vendors even still sell brand spanking new switches without ARP/IP validation features) that is not a hard environment to find.

  16. Re:Well, that makes things better on CrunchBang Linux Halts Development · · Score: 2

    power user features can exist even in user-friendly environments

    Sure they can "exist" but that does not keep the "user-friendliness" from getting underfoot.

    Imagine for a moment that one day you get home, and not only has someone removed all your CD shelves so that safety banisters could be installed on every wall, they have also also baby-proofed your entire apartment so nothing is where you left it, put each of your power tools in its own locked box each with a different key. made all the lights in the place turn on at once when you clap, turned parental controls on your TV on, and entered a one-year contract with a company of tiny elves who will come and rearrange all your furniture every week in new and unusual ways, throw all the food from you fridge out and fill it with bags of pesto, and store the contents of all your wastebaskets in your garage.

    That's the level of difference we are talking here.

  17. Re:What did I miss? on The Search For Neutrons That Leak Into Our World From Other Universes · · Score: 2

    Spitballing here, but the level of neutrons that get blocked by shielding is proportional to the amount of shielding, and the level of neutrons that tunnel out is some sigma of the density of the number of neutrons still travelling in the correct direction to hit the sensor, while the level of neutrons that tunnel back is not related to the amount of shielding at all, so measurements at different levels of shielding should create a solvable system of equations. Assuming there is no shielding present in the parallel universe.

  18. Re:*cough* bullshit *cough* on The "Cool Brick" Can Cool Off an Entire Room Using Nothing But Water · · Score: 1

    Nah he's just allergic to all the mold growing on his cool-bricks. He should have thrown them out when they stopped working due to the lattice getting clogged with calcium.

  19. Re:Perl lets me do what I want on Perl 6 In Time For Next Christmas? · · Score: 2

    You don;t have to worry -- your Perl 5 code is safe, since there is no directive at all being pushed to "replace" Perl 5 with Perl 6. They will exist as sister languages, won't fight each other when installed together, and there is a thriving Perl 5 community actively developing and maintaining Perl 5 for the forseeable future.

  20. Re:Enjoy years of splitting between 5 and 6 on Perl 6 In Time For Next Christmas? · · Score: 1

    Current intergration is through libperl, and future integration will likely be independent of the VM, just a "slang" using the grammar engine and MOP on the backend. Parrot was aimed at being a polyglot VM, but other VMs started to catch up in that regard so Perl 6 began to target those runtimes as well.

  21. Re:Hurrah for performance improvements! on Perl 6 In Time For Next Christmas? · · Score: 1

    This is a tremendous improvement. The best they'd ever managed with Parrot was "abysmally slow." Before that, perl 6 implementations ranged from "diabolically slow" to "the madness-inducing manifestation of the visage of Gn'oguracha, Elder Slug-God of Unspeed."

    Hilarious. And yes it was very, very, very, slow. And yes it continues to speed up. At this point it's OK for scripts that run occasionally, and for some medium-duty stuff if you don't mind spending a bit of time doing some tweaking-you-shouldn't-have to.

  22. Re:Perl is more expressive on Perl 6 In Time For Next Christmas? · · Score: 1

    That's downright weird looking.

    ...if you don't grok closures/anonsubs. If you do, it looks much neater.

  23. Re:Betteridge on Perl 6 In Time For Next Christmas? · · Score: 1

    In other words it is the SystemD of programming languages compared to Perl 5.

    I've found several choices made by systemd relatively deplorable. I find Perl 6's choices rational and convenient, pretty much all of them. So no.

  24. Re:Enjoy years of splitting between 5 and 6 on Perl 6 In Time For Next Christmas? · · Score: 3, Interesting

    To be clear, what I meant to say is, I only have to rewrite those portions I feel like rewriting: you can use Perl 5 from inside a Perl 6 file pretty painlessly these days, as long as you aren't looking for heavy performance or too much complex async. Perl 5 and Perl 6 are considered more "sister languages" than a necessary upgrade, with Perl 5 continued to be maintained and even developed.

  25. Re:Perl is more expressive on Perl 6 In Time For Next Christmas? · · Score: 1

    Languages need to scale to talent, so a codebase maintained by veterans of the language can use advanced constructs, while a codebase meant to be maintained by newbies can stick to the babytalk. Which is where Perl 5's flexibility can be leveraged well. I think you'll find Perl 6 to be a joy to work with, and if you have the privilege of working with a devel team that gets good at it, it will be an awesome experience, plus you can still "talk down" for stuff you need to throw to the public to maintain.