Because if you've paid any attention to the KDE project since 4.0 betas, you'd have realized they don't give a rat's ass about completeness, performance, stability and usability. They just want to change everything all the fucking time until all the users flock to something less flashy and more productive, and then the KDE devs will be free to play Starcraft all day long.
At least that's how it looks like from my perspective, as a developer who has been royally pissed ever since KDE 3.5 was deprecated. I lose gobs of time to bugs and crashes, but am also terrified to update for fear of breakage, as has been the tendency with every minor release of 4.x. I still can't make reliable use of something as fundamental as FTP and SSH kioslaves. You think Quanta's fucked ? I've reverted to a Kate + kioslave workflow and I still run into issues - screw debugging, I can't even tell if my file is going to save properly.
I think the KDE devs need to call for a feature freeze, get what's already in there into a usable and stable condition, long before contemplating superficial topics like merging libs. Necessity trumps vanity.
If, by "Windows machines", you mean PCs, you're absolutely right.
PCs can run things other than Windows, you know. Like Linux, BSD (yuck), Solaris (yuck++), and just about anything else you can shoehorn onto a hard drive. Even Mac OS !
The TSA is protecting fuck-all. They are there to perpetuate the culture of fear that has been so profitable for a few people in positions of excessive power. A patdown isn't going to stop the next 9/11, all you need to hijack a plane is your bare hands and a psychopathic disorder.
These patdowns and scans punish the innocent and do nothing to stop the truly dangerous people of this world.
If you crazy americans liken flatulence to assault, I'm just going to sit in my igloo with a fuckton of popcorn and marshmallows and watch excitedly as your so-called society self-immolates.
If a fart leads to being charged with battery, you might as well kick the fucker in the balls - same offense, why not get your money's worth ?
Bad pr0n and dubious advertising
on
USB 'Dead Drops'
·
· Score: 1
I'm just going to leave this here: INTERNET!
This is not SneakerNet, or data geocaching. This is AttentionWhoreNet. The only things you'll find on these things after a day is club/drug/callgirl spam and kiddie porn. Congrats, you dumb fucking sycophant of an "artist", you fail at thinking.
Besides, Real SneakerNetters (tm) in this day and age use portable hard drives or small NAS boxes. Driving a 16TB NAS to your friend's basement is oh, about 100 gigabit per sec:) Which is about ten thousand times faster than any USB key I've ever seen.
I've built somewhere in excess of a hundred thousand PCs over the last decade, and I agree with you: the big box guys almost universally suck, especially if you're straying beyond the lines of what the average boring consumer wants.
The most important question to ask before starting on such a project is: how much time will it require, and what is the value of that time ? You have no one to fall back upon when you DIY, you _are_ the support guy. If a machine fails, it is your reponsibility to fix it.
The nice thing about shops like Dell and HP is you can call them up and say "I need 20 pieces of X" and a few weeks later you'll have 20 pieces of X on your loading dock. If you go DIY, you're the one who has to worry about sourcing all the parts for those systems, and sourcing can be a bitch. For one, hardware distributors are terrible at stock keeping - backorders are embarrassingly common and can take months to be filled. Two, hardware manufacturers are extremely fickle and like to discontinue products within a few months, in favor of the new hotness. Some manufacturers specially designate a handful of "long term" SKUs, like Asus' CSM label, but even the CSM is only promised for one year. If you're shooting for an 18-month lifecycle, you should probably buy 18 months worth of gear at the same time and "ride it out". Plus, you can put any extras to work doing other stuff, no one says you have to leave them in the storage closet.
The other great pain, as others have pointed out, is RMA. RMAs suck, they are practically designed to piss people off and waste your time so you end up buying a replacement anyway. Can you afford to lose a machine for 6 to 10 weeks while it gets shipped to Singapore and back ? If not, you need to stock spare parts to buffer that waiting period. Service quality varies widely from one manufacturer to the next. If you're building 5 to 10 desktops, get one spare. 10 to 50, I'd get 2-3 spares. Beyond that you can optimize your inventory, i.e. stock more of the cheap and common things like Ram, HD, power supplies, and fewer boards and processors since those are more specific to a given build and also less likely to fail. Don't forget about peripherals, people spill stuff on keyboards all the time, and mice love to die for no apparent reason. LCDs usually aren't a problem, you can buy them cheaply just about anywhere (yes, even Best Buy) and consistency is less of an issue here.
The main thing to bear in mind, whether you build in-house or contract out, is that in most cases the hardware you're getting from big brands is on par with the cheapest bargain-bin parts you'll find in a real computer shop. Foxconn boards, Hitachi hard drives, minimum-spec ram. That $1000 Dell can be built from near-identical parts for a third less, or you can spend the same $1000 on a much better machine. One thing is certain though: you can't possibly do worse.
It's the CIA. They don't give a fuck, they'll just kill anyone that gets too nosey. It is, after all, the "American Way".
Desktop Linux is dead because everyone killed it
on
Desktop Linux Is Dead
·
· Score: 1
I run Linux on my laptop out of convenience/necessity. I use my laptop for two things: network testing, and web development. Linux of course has the richest set of networking tools and capabilities of any OS, lets me do whatever I want with great ease and flexibility. The web dev side of it though, it's ass. The only reason I stick with it is because, half the time, KIO kinda-sorta works, which is better than no KIO at all. I wish it worked all the time, but that is apparently too much to ask of the KDE dev team.
Desktop Linux is dead because Gnome and KDE4 suck.
And then we have the Mac. Since OS X, Unix geeks have been warming up to the platform, because for the first time ever, a snazzy UI has been built atop a Unix core. Actual designers were paid to conceive this interface, and held to some standard of usability and esthetic appeal, unheard of in the Linux world.
Deaktop Linux is dead because OS X does it better.
This relegates KDE and Gnome to the no-budget segment, people who either don't want (me) or can't afford (me too) a Mac. To non-hackers, every Linux GUI will be compared (superficially) to Aero Glass or OS X, which is to say, they always lose.
At the end of the day, even the hackers want something that "Just Works" because we have shit to do that doesn't involve tweaking X configs and restarting FUBARed window managers every hour. The desktop is, above all, a work tool. If it makes my work easier, win! If it makes it painful, fail. Right now Linux desktops are still mostly fail.
Badass, to me anyway, is a "fuck everything" attitude where you're so confident that you don't care what happens, you'll just deal with whatever comes up, keeping your cool throughout. No pretentiousness, no showboating, just a frank ass kicking in the name of personal freedom. It's not about roid-raging up and down the street while holding your crotch. A badass is someone you know not to mess with. A macho is someone you feel compelled to mess with, because they're all bark and no bite.
Duke, in that sense, was badass. He saw aliens, he didn't like them, so he killed them all. Problem solved. Cool maintained. Back to hookers and booze.
Marcus Fenix is a douchebag with a do-rag, not badass. Master Chief ? He's a cyborg carrying out his orders, not badass. Brick ? Roid-rage, not badass. What they need to make is a Machete game: alpha-badass.
Who uses the most IP addresses ? Is it the users or the servers ? 6 billion people on this planet, and roughly 4 billion available IPs.
Maybe we could kill off a third of the world's population and call it a day. Seems easier than migrating to IPV6
Okay but seriously, how many of us have way more IPs than we need ? If I were to set up proxies at just the few ASPs I contract to, I could probably cull a couple thousand IPs right there, and these are small shops. How many government orgs have a/16 they don't even need nor use ? I know there is a ton of waste out there, so what is being done to recover those idle blocks ?
I don't even want to have that many IPs to worry about. Proxies and VPNs make my life easier by providing an extra layer of security and monitoring in front of my nodes, along with almost-free load balancing. If it weren't for SSL, I'd probably cram all my sites behind a single IP, regardless of platform or physical host. Need more capacity ? Add a node to the round-robin, all in private IP space. Most of us have firewall boxes at the first hop anyway, why not use them for NAT and proxying ?
Re:Rational decision by school administration?
on
Ontario School Bans Wi-Fi
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Yes, let's applaud the schools for listening to the dumbest people in the district. Parents will consistently agree to the most idiotic conservative ideas out of mindless protectionism.
The correct response to a popular call to ban Wi-Fi would have been: "Do you have cordless/cell phones at home ? Yes ? Well then GO FUCK YOURSELVES"
What's worse, the unproven potential risk of getting cancer from radio waves ? Or terminal stupidity caused by chickenshit parenting and fearful education ?
I noticed something like this yesterday, where some idiot's rooted blog was trying to drive-by a bunch of PDFs, which were mime-typed as jars so they spawned the Java quickstart kludge. In my case they didn't get anywhere since my debugger fired up, but I on a non-developer workstation they probably could have had a field day.
Cue endless Java and Adobe bashing in 3...2...1...
Dude, I don't even live in the same country, and I'd have modded you down for turning a corporate matter into a personal attack. Comcast is big, and chances are this fellow had no choice but to carry out his orders. If he doesn't do as he is told, a more compliant replacement will be found.
If you hate the company so much, don't take it out on the worker bees, just take your money and go elsewhere. Don't like the alternatives ? Well tough tits, either start your own ISP or STFU. Bitching at a sysadmin will not get you anywhere, at best you will browbeat someone who doesn't deserve your ire, at worst he will mess with your service like any self-respecting BOFH should.
I'm curious as to how long this project has been in development. I remember, way back when I was going through my "pimp my ride" phase, more than once did the thought cross my mind to set up a laser graffiti system for my windshield. I figured if people can draw on walls or even buildings with that stuff, why not my own car ? I actually ordered the gadget and tried it out, but it was shooting through the windshield and was more visible from outside than in. I didn't know shit about light polarization back then so I flogged it on eBay and used a touchscreen instead... but this would have been late 2001 or so.
I'm largely a PC and audio geek, but I figure a laser geek would have succeeded where I failed, so surely someone else must have already created this tech long ago ? With all the (often pointless) tech ricers cram into their cars, and the constant race to have the blingiest bling, even by sheer statistical probability someone would have stumbled upon it out of curiosity.
People do this sort of thing all the time. A year ago it was MIT students (camera + cell phone ZOMG!), then it hit Digg and inspired a flurry of imitators, including these no-talent hacks.
Wake this section when someone launches a private vehicle into orbit, then we'll have stuff that matters.
This seems like a "Please don't nerf NASA, we're on the verge of finding shit" kind of press release. As much as the prospect of expanding our cosmic knowledge is alluring to me, I think right now the world has some far more pressing matters to resolve down here, before we start infecting other planets with the disease that is modern society.
It's the internet, we're all so jaded and cynical that we laugh at anything and everything. And I mean, come on, you have to appreciate the cruel humour here, straight out of a Wile E. Coyote cartoon. We all figured a Segway death would happen, sooner or later.
Bingo! The DNS issue was internal to Facebook's load-balancing cluster. Anyone who's hosted a busy web site should be familiar with this kind of setup. Internal DNS is often uses for such purposes, as it can transparently provide round-robin functionality. Every time you resolve the hostname, you get a different IP (caches notwithstanding), so while the back-end servers need to be conscious of the load-balancing in a generic fashion, the actual distribution of work is trivial, and adding more back-end nodes merely requires a painless addition to a DNS zone file.
Fearing litigious douchebaggery, the farming industry has voluntarily renamed the "Bean pod" to "Bean hammock". Rumours surfaced that Apple was designing a new pointless touchscreen gadget named "iHammock", as well as a smaller and more useless variant "iBean".
The Cupertino-based designer of the "iSue" declined to comment.
Knowing who someone is, does not reduce crime. It merely increases conviction rates.
I don't care if someone has my name, picture, iris scan, birth mark, and sperm sample. If I decide one day to kill a bunch of bankers, ID'ing me won't bring those parasites back from the dead.
I'd even say this will increase crime, because every failure of the system will push toward a new transgression, sometimes violent. Iris scanner won't let me on the bus, so now I get to be late for work ? Every ounce of grief my employer gives me will redirected three-fold at either the bus driver, the person in charge of the scanners, or some random innocent bystander.
You don't make a problem go away by adding more rules. Centuries of puppet democracy should have taught us this by now.
If filmmakers were to counter-unionize and simply refuse work to all SAG members, the SAG loses all power and their members will jump ship in no time at all.
It's not really a union if you have exclusivity with the employers. Then it's just a cartel.
Slashdot Mirror
When they start school.
What ? You didn't seriously think parents here taught their kids anything except fear and lying ?
Because if you've paid any attention to the KDE project since 4.0 betas, you'd have realized they don't give a rat's ass about completeness, performance, stability and usability. They just want to change everything all the fucking time until all the users flock to something less flashy and more productive, and then the KDE devs will be free to play Starcraft all day long.
At least that's how it looks like from my perspective, as a developer who has been royally pissed ever since KDE 3.5 was deprecated. I lose gobs of time to bugs and crashes, but am also terrified to update for fear of breakage, as has been the tendency with every minor release of 4.x. I still can't make reliable use of something as fundamental as FTP and SSH kioslaves. You think Quanta's fucked ? I've reverted to a Kate + kioslave workflow and I still run into issues - screw debugging, I can't even tell if my file is going to save properly.
I think the KDE devs need to call for a feature freeze, get what's already in there into a usable and stable condition, long before contemplating superficial topics like merging libs. Necessity trumps vanity.
If, by "Windows machines", you mean PCs, you're absolutely right.
PCs can run things other than Windows, you know. Like Linux, BSD (yuck), Solaris (yuck++), and just about anything else you can shoehorn onto a hard drive. Even Mac OS !
The TSA is protecting fuck-all. They are there to perpetuate the culture of fear that has been so profitable for a few people in positions of excessive power. A patdown isn't going to stop the next 9/11, all you need to hijack a plane is your bare hands and a psychopathic disorder.
These patdowns and scans punish the innocent and do nothing to stop the truly dangerous people of this world.
If you crazy americans liken flatulence to assault, I'm just going to sit in my igloo with a fuckton of popcorn and marshmallows and watch excitedly as your so-called society self-immolates.
If a fart leads to being charged with battery, you might as well kick the fucker in the balls - same offense, why not get your money's worth ?
I'm just going to leave this here: INTERNET!
This is not SneakerNet, or data geocaching. This is AttentionWhoreNet. The only things you'll find on these things after a day is club/drug/callgirl spam and kiddie porn. Congrats, you dumb fucking sycophant of an "artist", you fail at thinking.
Besides, Real SneakerNetters (tm) in this day and age use portable hard drives or small NAS boxes. Driving a 16TB NAS to your friend's basement is oh, about 100 gigabit per sec :) Which is about ten thousand times faster than any USB key I've ever seen.
I've built somewhere in excess of a hundred thousand PCs over the last decade, and I agree with you: the big box guys almost universally suck, especially if you're straying beyond the lines of what the average boring consumer wants.
The most important question to ask before starting on such a project is: how much time will it require, and what is the value of that time ? You have no one to fall back upon when you DIY, you _are_ the support guy. If a machine fails, it is your reponsibility to fix it.
The nice thing about shops like Dell and HP is you can call them up and say "I need 20 pieces of X" and a few weeks later you'll have 20 pieces of X on your loading dock. If you go DIY, you're the one who has to worry about sourcing all the parts for those systems, and sourcing can be a bitch. For one, hardware distributors are terrible at stock keeping - backorders are embarrassingly common and can take months to be filled. Two, hardware manufacturers are extremely fickle and like to discontinue products within a few months, in favor of the new hotness. Some manufacturers specially designate a handful of "long term" SKUs, like Asus' CSM label, but even the CSM is only promised for one year. If you're shooting for an 18-month lifecycle, you should probably buy 18 months worth of gear at the same time and "ride it out". Plus, you can put any extras to work doing other stuff, no one says you have to leave them in the storage closet.
The other great pain, as others have pointed out, is RMA. RMAs suck, they are practically designed to piss people off and waste your time so you end up buying a replacement anyway. Can you afford to lose a machine for 6 to 10 weeks while it gets shipped to Singapore and back ? If not, you need to stock spare parts to buffer that waiting period. Service quality varies widely from one manufacturer to the next. If you're building 5 to 10 desktops, get one spare. 10 to 50, I'd get 2-3 spares. Beyond that you can optimize your inventory, i.e. stock more of the cheap and common things like Ram, HD, power supplies, and fewer boards and processors since those are more specific to a given build and also less likely to fail. Don't forget about peripherals, people spill stuff on keyboards all the time, and mice love to die for no apparent reason. LCDs usually aren't a problem, you can buy them cheaply just about anywhere (yes, even Best Buy) and consistency is less of an issue here.
The main thing to bear in mind, whether you build in-house or contract out, is that in most cases the hardware you're getting from big brands is on par with the cheapest bargain-bin parts you'll find in a real computer shop. Foxconn boards, Hitachi hard drives, minimum-spec ram. That $1000 Dell can be built from near-identical parts for a third less, or you can spend the same $1000 on a much better machine. One thing is certain though: you can't possibly do worse.
It's the CIA. They don't give a fuck, they'll just kill anyone that gets too nosey. It is, after all, the "American Way".
I run Linux on my laptop out of convenience/necessity. I use my laptop for two things: network testing, and web development. Linux of course has the richest set of networking tools and capabilities of any OS, lets me do whatever I want with great ease and flexibility. The web dev side of it though, it's ass. The only reason I stick with it is because, half the time, KIO kinda-sorta works, which is better than no KIO at all. I wish it worked all the time, but that is apparently too much to ask of the KDE dev team.
Desktop Linux is dead because Gnome and KDE4 suck.
And then we have the Mac. Since OS X, Unix geeks have been warming up to the platform, because for the first time ever, a snazzy UI has been built atop a Unix core. Actual designers were paid to conceive this interface, and held to some standard of usability and esthetic appeal, unheard of in the Linux world.
Deaktop Linux is dead because OS X does it better.
This relegates KDE and Gnome to the no-budget segment, people who either don't want (me) or can't afford (me too) a Mac. To non-hackers, every Linux GUI will be compared (superficially) to Aero Glass or OS X, which is to say, they always lose.
At the end of the day, even the hackers want something that "Just Works" because we have shit to do that doesn't involve tweaking X configs and restarting FUBARed window managers every hour. The desktop is, above all, a work tool. If it makes my work easier, win! If it makes it painful, fail. Right now Linux desktops are still mostly fail.
Machismo is not badassery.
Badass, to me anyway, is a "fuck everything" attitude where you're so confident that you don't care what happens, you'll just deal with whatever comes up, keeping your cool throughout. No pretentiousness, no showboating, just a frank ass kicking in the name of personal freedom. It's not about roid-raging up and down the street while holding your crotch. A badass is someone you know not to mess with. A macho is someone you feel compelled to mess with, because they're all bark and no bite.
Duke, in that sense, was badass. He saw aliens, he didn't like them, so he killed them all. Problem solved. Cool maintained. Back to hookers and booze.
Marcus Fenix is a douchebag with a do-rag, not badass. Master Chief ? He's a cyborg carrying out his orders, not badass. Brick ? Roid-rage, not badass. What they need to make is a Machete game: alpha-badass.
Who uses the most IP addresses ? Is it the users or the servers ? 6 billion people on this planet, and roughly 4 billion available IPs.
Maybe we could kill off a third of the world's population and call it a day. Seems easier than migrating to IPV6
Okay but seriously, how many of us have way more IPs than we need ? If I were to set up proxies at just the few ASPs I contract to, I could probably cull a couple thousand IPs right there, and these are small shops. How many government orgs have a /16 they don't even need nor use ? I know there is a ton of waste out there, so what is being done to recover those idle blocks ?
I don't even want to have that many IPs to worry about. Proxies and VPNs make my life easier by providing an extra layer of security and monitoring in front of my nodes, along with almost-free load balancing. If it weren't for SSL, I'd probably cram all my sites behind a single IP, regardless of platform or physical host. Need more capacity ? Add a node to the round-robin, all in private IP space. Most of us have firewall boxes at the first hop anyway, why not use them for NAT and proxying ?
Yes, let's applaud the schools for listening to the dumbest people in the district. Parents will consistently agree to the most idiotic conservative ideas out of mindless protectionism.
The correct response to a popular call to ban Wi-Fi would have been: "Do you have cordless/cell phones at home ? Yes ? Well then GO FUCK YOURSELVES"
What's worse, the unproven potential risk of getting cancer from radio waves ? Or terminal stupidity caused by chickenshit parenting and fearful education ?
I noticed something like this yesterday, where some idiot's rooted blog was trying to drive-by a bunch of PDFs, which were mime-typed as jars so they spawned the Java quickstart kludge. In my case they didn't get anywhere since my debugger fired up, but I on a non-developer workstation they probably could have had a field day.
Cue endless Java and Adobe bashing in 3...2...1...
Dude, I don't even live in the same country, and I'd have modded you down for turning a corporate matter into a personal attack. Comcast is big, and chances are this fellow had no choice but to carry out his orders. If he doesn't do as he is told, a more compliant replacement will be found.
If you hate the company so much, don't take it out on the worker bees, just take your money and go elsewhere. Don't like the alternatives ? Well tough tits, either start your own ISP or STFU. Bitching at a sysadmin will not get you anywhere, at best you will browbeat someone who doesn't deserve your ire, at worst he will mess with your service like any self-respecting BOFH should.
You're right, we should reap the dead UIDs and auction them off for great justice.
Where are my mod points where I need them ? Sarcasm win!
Delphi.
I'm curious as to how long this project has been in development. I remember, way back when I was going through my "pimp my ride" phase, more than once did the thought cross my mind to set up a laser graffiti system for my windshield. I figured if people can draw on walls or even buildings with that stuff, why not my own car ? I actually ordered the gadget and tried it out, but it was shooting through the windshield and was more visible from outside than in. I didn't know shit about light polarization back then so I flogged it on eBay and used a touchscreen instead... but this would have been late 2001 or so.
I'm largely a PC and audio geek, but I figure a laser geek would have succeeded where I failed, so surely someone else must have already created this tech long ago ? With all the (often pointless) tech ricers cram into their cars, and the constant race to have the blingiest bling, even by sheer statistical probability someone would have stumbled upon it out of curiosity.
Weather balloon != spacecraft
People do this sort of thing all the time. A year ago it was MIT students (camera + cell phone ZOMG!), then it hit Digg and inspired a flurry of imitators, including these no-talent hacks.
Wake this section when someone launches a private vehicle into orbit, then we'll have stuff that matters.
This seems like a "Please don't nerf NASA, we're on the verge of finding shit" kind of press release. As much as the prospect of expanding our cosmic knowledge is alluring to me, I think right now the world has some far more pressing matters to resolve down here, before we start infecting other planets with the disease that is modern society.
It's the internet, we're all so jaded and cynical that we laugh at anything and everything. And I mean, come on, you have to appreciate the cruel humour here, straight out of a Wile E. Coyote cartoon. We all figured a Segway death would happen, sooner or later.
Bingo! The DNS issue was internal to Facebook's load-balancing cluster. Anyone who's hosted a busy web site should be familiar with this kind of setup. Internal DNS is often uses for such purposes, as it can transparently provide round-robin functionality. Every time you resolve the hostname, you get a different IP (caches notwithstanding), so while the back-end servers need to be conscious of the load-balancing in a generic fashion, the actual distribution of work is trivial, and adding more back-end nodes merely requires a painless addition to a DNS zone file.
Fearing litigious douchebaggery, the farming industry has voluntarily renamed the "Bean pod" to "Bean hammock". Rumours surfaced that Apple was designing a new pointless touchscreen gadget named "iHammock", as well as a smaller and more useless variant "iBean".
The Cupertino-based designer of the "iSue" declined to comment.
Knowing who someone is, does not reduce crime. It merely increases conviction rates.
I don't care if someone has my name, picture, iris scan, birth mark, and sperm sample. If I decide one day to kill a bunch of bankers, ID'ing me won't bring those parasites back from the dead.
I'd even say this will increase crime, because every failure of the system will push toward a new transgression, sometimes violent. Iris scanner won't let me on the bus, so now I get to be late for work ? Every ounce of grief my employer gives me will redirected three-fold at either the bus driver, the person in charge of the scanners, or some random innocent bystander.
You don't make a problem go away by adding more rules. Centuries of puppet democracy should have taught us this by now.
The solution ? Lock them out.
If filmmakers were to counter-unionize and simply refuse work to all SAG members, the SAG loses all power and their members will jump ship in no time at all.
It's not really a union if you have exclusivity with the employers. Then it's just a cartel.