You just reminded me one of the reasons I've never actually used Linux Mint: Its tendency to hijack your search results for their own profits. And by hijack, I mean just as you describe: Default to their own branded version of Google (and now DuckDuckGo), which is a royal bitch to get rid of. I never got past the stage of playing around with it to actually bother installing it in anything other than a virtual machine. And it's sad too, because otherwise Linux Mint is a very nice distro, always seeming to move forward developing their own improvements and rarely making steps backward that its shitty parent distro makes, while most other distributions just shove a bunch of new versions of shit on the disc and they're done.
Except that when you realize DuckDuckGo is actually Bing in disguise, it regains the social stigma of using a Microsoft product. So you're back at square one.
A "grain"? I think there's a hell of a lot more truth to what he said than most people are willing to admit. More "truth" than I've ever heard from any Christians (and they by far make up the majority), that's for sure. I've always agreed with a lot of the things he said. He said things how it is, while no one else had the balls to do it, out of fear of "upsetting" someone.
That "'superior' desktop experience that nobody will use" you're referring to is still in alpha stage. In other words, it's not even ready yet for everyone to use, and the developers are not even trying to claim that it is. So what your point is, I don't know.
Also, it's funny that you pick on Haiku specifically, because of all the other, smaller alternative "hobby" operating systems out there, Haiku is actually by far the closest to actually being ready to use. As far as functionality and stability go, probably nothing at all compares. Having run it a couple alpha versions ago, it honestly feels more like a beta, so I think the developers are being incredibly cautious with attempting to get more users.
I know for a fact ReactOS is still incredibly buggy and unstable, to the point of still really being unusable for even the most basic day-to-day use. Luckily, the ReactOS developers also don't make any such claims, as their OS is also still labeled alpha.
It already exists... it's called Cinnamon. Or MATE, if you truly want the "original" environment.
The GNOME Project is just brimming with NIH. Even though... they did invent MATE originally, in the form of GNOME 3's predecessor that they tried to kill off. Pure irony.
Ever face a jury trial for speeding? No. Why? Because it's not a criminal offense, but it IS illegal.
No, but I have been forced to go to court over listening to loud music in my car and was sentenced to pay a fine of around a hundred bucks for it. Ironically, a guy who was there for risking his own life (crossing the tracks when according to the police you could clearly hear a train coming and the gates were down and flashing) was ordered a lower fine by about $10-20 than I was.
This country is just full of totally fair justice that makes perfect sense, isn't it?
In my state, marijuana is "decriminalized." I am waiting for the day that it is "legalized," and I have been waiting for years. I never thought I would see even one state legalize it. Hopefully it won't take too much longer for the rest of the states to catch on.
Anyway... in my state there are no stores that are legally allowed to sell marijuana, so you can't get it legally in any way, shape or form. You are breaking the law just by buying it, and not paying taxes (double whammy!). You're not even allowed to grow it yourself to make up for this and avoid the drug dealers, and if you get caught with any amount of plant material or any number of plants it will be confiscated (probably for the police to smoke themselves). Get caught with a pipe, bong or any other kind of "drug paraphernalia" and it will also be taken away. You may not be labeled a criminal, but you will still likely be penalized by the state, in addition to them taking all your shit that they can find either on you, on or in your property, or generally on the scene.
By contrast, Colorado is supposedly going to not only allow the drug to be regulated, taxed and sold in stores like any other legitimate commercial good (to people of a certain age, obviously), but it's even going to allow people to grow up to six cannabis plants and own/possess up to a certain amount of dried plant material/marijuana itself. Chances are, unless you're suspected of drug trafficking or you're doing something really stupid (like driving with a joint in your hand), the police won't take anything away from you, and they might or might not just try to find something else to bust you for instead. That beats the living fuck out of Ohio, in which--honestly--it might as well still just be considered illegal here. I don't know about Washington's exact planned laws, but they're legalizing it too, so no doubt it will be similar.
No matter what, decriminalized, legalized, whatever--this only covers personal use and possession of small amounts; you can't have, say, several ounces on you or dozens of plants, or you'll immediately be suspected of drug trafficking and be slapped with some pretty hefty fines and other penalties, probably including jail time and labeled a felon if you have enough. The real difference is the complete lack of penalty as long as you stay within the limits of the law where it is legalized, as well as the fact that you don't have to go to drug dealers in the black market and buy it illegally just to obtain it.
Y2K was blown so far out of proportion, I thought it was obvious leading up to the time that nothing was going to happen. Just sensationalist garbage passed on as news to make a few extra quick bucks. Same as the world ending in 2012: Pure bullshit. If anything major did happen, then I would have reconsidered my stance long ago... but it didn't. The problems were for the most part all fixed well before the deadline, and once 2000 hit pretty much every clock struck midnight of the correct year.
I'm sorry, but I don't fall for the mass hysteria that the news corporations of the world want you to be a part of to increase their own profits and audience size. People will get shit done if needed, and the more important it is, the more likely it will get done with plenty of time to spare. All the attention these companies brought to the subject by putting it in the spotlight for their own gains no doubt helped a little bit in the process, but I still believe it was unnecessary and overdone to the point of pure profit-driven scare tactics. It would have been fixed either way, and most likely on time no matter what. It became known quite a bit of time in advance.
I thought from the description that this would require clicking *all* Flash, Java or other plug-in applets before they would run. That would be true security (until the dumb masses find and click one they shouldn't). I thought this would be a relief for when I'm using a fresh copy of Firefox; I could possibly go a bit longer before installing Adblock, NoScript and the rest. But no... it only blocks this crap from loading without a click when an "old" version of a plug-in is used. Yay. Talk about pointless. So, AdBlock and NoScript still do it better, and this is no temporary holdover until the real plug-in can be installed.
Actually, this is possibly even worse. Once people find out that they can "block" annoying moving Flash ads that have sound by simply keeping their plug-ins out of date, they'll probably never want to update again. I know I wouldn't. So then when they do click to run a bad applet, they really are screwed.
So now they're branding a whole OS with the Firefox label. Basic marketing theory suggests that they want us to associate the Firefox OS with the Firefox browser, right?
So, according to their marketing team, we should expect the whole OS to be slow, bloated, and lousy at managing tabs and windows. And we should expect it to crash on one out of every four attempts to watch Flash video. Right?
Someone at Mozilla needs a lesson in brand management, quickly.
You must not realize that the whole point of most marketing that companies put out these days is to [i]lie[/i] to potential customers or simply ram something down so hard down their throat that they just bend down and take the rest, right up the asshole.
Plus i really don't like ~60% of the stuff mozilla has done to firefox over the last decade.
You do realize that goes back as far as version 0.1, Phoenix, right? If that's the case, then you surely can't be a Firefox user, unless you're a masochist, and want to use something you hate just to bitch about it and that in your opinion it sucked long before even its first release...
If focusing on this OS slows the Mozilla Corporation’s progress of fucking up Firefox completely and irrecoverably, then let them make it. That is, assuming they haven't already reached the point of total destruction (they're at least getting there).
That said... I think the idea of another Linux-based OS for cell phones is pretty interesting, and it could actually be a worthy alternative to Android if done right. The problem is, of course, as you pointed out, the stiff competition they'll face with Google, Apple and Microsoft (hey, you never know what will happen...). It could provide a "plan B" in case something happens with Android or the way Google acts. And its very existence, if it gets big enough, could help to keep Google's behavior in check, in case they were to ever try pulling a Microsoft like IE6.
I'm lucky in that I've been primarily into console games (traditionally a Nintendo/Sega fan), and there are very few PC games I give a damn about. As for Windows-exclusives, well... the Flight Simulator series, maybe Monster Truck Madness 2... and, uh, I seriously can't think of anything I can't get elsewhere that I absolutely must have. Luckily for the majority of PC games I do care about (and that majority is itself quite small), DOSBox has me covered. And I don't need Windows just to be able to run it.
Due to the time it takes light to travel through space, the images seen from Earth now show what the galaxy looked like when the universe was just 420 million years old, according to a press statement released from NASA.
The universe must have still been wearing diapers at the time.
If you had to lie about a security issue, you should immediately lose all trust and your company should immediately go out of business. Simple as that. Especially sleazy fucking advertising companies, which already tend to be some of the worst culprits.
Worthless, lying, malware-serving companies such as your own are exactly the type I make every attempt to block in every major way possible (cookies, scripting, advertisement images, etc.). Of course, I don't discriminate--I block them all; none of their business is wanted, nor are any of them trustworthy--but its companies like your own that are potentially the most, *ahem*, malicious.
Shit happens. One intrusion through OpenSSH into two out of an entire cluster FreeBSD servers doesn't mean jack shit as to the overall security of using SSH as your authentication method. I'll continue to use SSH, and I'm sure pretty much anyone else who uses it now will see no reason to stop just because an encryption key was used as an entry point to a high-profile server. According to TFA, steps are being taken to prevent this from happening again by deprecating legacy services... and SSH doesn't look to be one of them. Besides... it appears that the SSH key wasn't "cracked" anyway, it just somehow made its way to someone it wasn't supposed to.
The compromise is believed to have occurred due to the leak of an SSH key from a developer who legitimately had access to the machines in question, and was not due to any vulnerability or code exploit within FreeBSD.
Good job FreeBSD, for not only disclosing this but also taking steps to prevent similar security breaches in the future.
I don't know what to think of something like this. On the one hand, it could start out good... but then, anything looks good up against the typical AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint and Verizon. Even a rock in the rectangular shape of a cell phone that you beat your head with repeatedly until you pass out in a crimson puddle sounds more appealing. But then on the other hand, they'll probably subject you to even more ads than their phones do now with free apps, and it would be throughout the entire phone service, so if that's the way it would be I would have to pass. In fact, I would have to see how Google goes when it comes to advertising on their network for over a year before I'd even consider them for cell phone service.
Their ads on the web are irrelevant to me because I don't see them, but it's a given that anything they release will not be open enough to perform such blocking.
And home router manufacturers will continue to make bonded channels the default setting to make sure customers experience what they have printed on the outside of the box.
Yeah... that's the truly bad part.:\
They should allow wide channels, but *never* enable it by default... because the fact is, there will come a time when these 5 GHz routers become mainstream, and eventually so will these routers that are set to use multiple channels by default, and as soon as that happens... their claims on the box effectively become a big fat lie.
If these companies were really trying to improve the experience and bandwidth performance for their customers, they would tell their marketing department to back off and let the customer decide whether wider channels would help or destroy their connections, and they would instead default to a standard-width channel. Even if that channel changes based on what the router sees as being clean/occupied space, it would be better in that fewer channels would get garbled in the process.
Windows 8 can be run off a USB drive. One of linux's great claims over Windows is gone.
Yeah, but you'll need a 32GB USB drive just to get it to work and have enough room for your files once you've installed both Windows and all your programs...
Meanwhile, a typical Linux distribution comes fits nicely in 6-8GB (some take up much less) and come with virtually everything you might need, so relatively few packages need to be installed manually, further cutting on size.
Hell, just look at the news story that hit OSNews and IIRC Slashdot not too long ago, about Windows RT on the Surface taking up almost half of the computer's 32GB total storage capacity. Meanwhile, I sit here from Linux looking at my Windows 8 enterprise evaluation partition which I installed a bunch (but certainly not all) of what would be my typical programs, and I'm looking at about 17GB. Meanwhile, my openSUSE / partition is only taking ~4.9GB... and that's saying something, considering many people (including myself) generally see openSUSE as one of the more bloated distros. Turns out it's mainly bloated in memory use, not disk space.
"Meanwhile, channel 6 is also caught in the crossfire of both the guy running on channel 3 and the guy running on channel 9."
And:
"Keep going up the spectrum until the wavelengths are so short we have to be in the same room without an object blocking the signal between the client and AP to be able to keep a connection?"
Slashdot Mirror
Some of the reasons Smedberg cited include missing plugins for 64-bit version; ...
So now at Mozilla, increased security is a bad thing?
How about DuckDuckGoose?
You just reminded me one of the reasons I've never actually used Linux Mint: Its tendency to hijack your search results for their own profits. And by hijack, I mean just as you describe: Default to their own branded version of Google (and now DuckDuckGo), which is a royal bitch to get rid of. I never got past the stage of playing around with it to actually bother installing it in anything other than a virtual machine. And it's sad too, because otherwise Linux Mint is a very nice distro, always seeming to move forward developing their own improvements and rarely making steps backward that its shitty parent distro makes, while most other distributions just shove a bunch of new versions of shit on the disc and they're done.
Except that when you realize DuckDuckGo is actually Bing in disguise, it regains the social stigma of using a Microsoft product. So you're back at square one.
A "grain"? I think there's a hell of a lot more truth to what he said than most people are willing to admit. More "truth" than I've ever heard from any Christians (and they by far make up the majority), that's for sure. I've always agreed with a lot of the things he said. He said things how it is, while no one else had the balls to do it, out of fear of "upsetting" someone.
They will cover it, but put so much spin on it that it will make Murdoch look like the victim.
So you mean... just like every other story they cover?
That "'superior' desktop experience that nobody will use" you're referring to is still in alpha stage. In other words, it's not even ready yet for everyone to use, and the developers are not even trying to claim that it is. So what your point is, I don't know.
Also, it's funny that you pick on Haiku specifically, because of all the other, smaller alternative "hobby" operating systems out there, Haiku is actually by far the closest to actually being ready to use. As far as functionality and stability go, probably nothing at all compares. Having run it a couple alpha versions ago, it honestly feels more like a beta, so I think the developers are being incredibly cautious with attempting to get more users.
I know for a fact ReactOS is still incredibly buggy and unstable, to the point of still really being unusable for even the most basic day-to-day use. Luckily, the ReactOS developers also don't make any such claims, as their OS is also still labeled alpha.
It already exists... it's called Cinnamon. Or MATE, if you truly want the "original" environment.
The GNOME Project is just brimming with NIH. Even though... they did invent MATE originally, in the form of GNOME 3's predecessor that they tried to kill off. Pure irony.
Ever face a jury trial for speeding? No. Why? Because it's not a criminal offense, but it IS illegal.
No, but I have been forced to go to court over listening to loud music in my car and was sentenced to pay a fine of around a hundred bucks for it. Ironically, a guy who was there for risking his own life (crossing the tracks when according to the police you could clearly hear a train coming and the gates were down and flashing) was ordered a lower fine by about $10-20 than I was.
This country is just full of totally fair justice that makes perfect sense, isn't it?
Sorry, my above comment was directed at the AC who quoted and replied to you below, who said:
Decriminalize - its no longer a crime
Legalize - its no longer a crime
If something is not a crime, then its legal.. Right?
In my state, marijuana is "decriminalized." I am waiting for the day that it is "legalized," and I have been waiting for years. I never thought I would see even one state legalize it. Hopefully it won't take too much longer for the rest of the states to catch on.
Anyway... in my state there are no stores that are legally allowed to sell marijuana, so you can't get it legally in any way, shape or form. You are breaking the law just by buying it, and not paying taxes (double whammy!). You're not even allowed to grow it yourself to make up for this and avoid the drug dealers, and if you get caught with any amount of plant material or any number of plants it will be confiscated (probably for the police to smoke themselves). Get caught with a pipe, bong or any other kind of "drug paraphernalia" and it will also be taken away. You may not be labeled a criminal, but you will still likely be penalized by the state, in addition to them taking all your shit that they can find either on you, on or in your property, or generally on the scene.
By contrast, Colorado is supposedly going to not only allow the drug to be regulated, taxed and sold in stores like any other legitimate commercial good (to people of a certain age, obviously), but it's even going to allow people to grow up to six cannabis plants and own/possess up to a certain amount of dried plant material/marijuana itself. Chances are, unless you're suspected of drug trafficking or you're doing something really stupid (like driving with a joint in your hand), the police won't take anything away from you, and they might or might not just try to find something else to bust you for instead. That beats the living fuck out of Ohio, in which--honestly--it might as well still just be considered illegal here. I don't know about Washington's exact planned laws, but they're legalizing it too, so no doubt it will be similar.
No matter what, decriminalized, legalized, whatever--this only covers personal use and possession of small amounts; you can't have, say, several ounces on you or dozens of plants, or you'll immediately be suspected of drug trafficking and be slapped with some pretty hefty fines and other penalties, probably including jail time and labeled a felon if you have enough. The real difference is the complete lack of penalty as long as you stay within the limits of the law where it is legalized, as well as the fact that you don't have to go to drug dealers in the black market and buy it illegally just to obtain it.
Y2K was blown so far out of proportion, I thought it was obvious leading up to the time that nothing was going to happen. Just sensationalist garbage passed on as news to make a few extra quick bucks. Same as the world ending in 2012: Pure bullshit. If anything major did happen, then I would have reconsidered my stance long ago... but it didn't. The problems were for the most part all fixed well before the deadline, and once 2000 hit pretty much every clock struck midnight of the correct year.
I'm sorry, but I don't fall for the mass hysteria that the news corporations of the world want you to be a part of to increase their own profits and audience size. People will get shit done if needed, and the more important it is, the more likely it will get done with plenty of time to spare. All the attention these companies brought to the subject by putting it in the spotlight for their own gains no doubt helped a little bit in the process, but I still believe it was unnecessary and overdone to the point of pure profit-driven scare tactics. It would have been fixed either way, and most likely on time no matter what. It became known quite a bit of time in advance.
I thought from the description that this would require clicking *all* Flash, Java or other plug-in applets before they would run. That would be true security (until the dumb masses find and click one they shouldn't). I thought this would be a relief for when I'm using a fresh copy of Firefox; I could possibly go a bit longer before installing Adblock, NoScript and the rest. But no... it only blocks this crap from loading without a click when an "old" version of a plug-in is used. Yay. Talk about pointless. So, AdBlock and NoScript still do it better, and this is no temporary holdover until the real plug-in can be installed.
Actually, this is possibly even worse. Once people find out that they can "block" annoying moving Flash ads that have sound by simply keeping their plug-ins out of date, they'll probably never want to update again. I know I wouldn't. So then when they do click to run a bad applet, they really are screwed.
So now they're branding a whole OS with the Firefox label. Basic marketing theory suggests that they want us to associate the Firefox OS with the Firefox browser, right?
So, according to their marketing team, we should expect the whole OS to be slow, bloated, and lousy at managing tabs and windows. And we should expect it to crash on one out of every four attempts to watch Flash video. Right?
Someone at Mozilla needs a lesson in brand management, quickly.
You must not realize that the whole point of most marketing that companies put out these days is to [i]lie[/i] to potential customers or simply ram something down so hard down their throat that they just bend down and take the rest, right up the asshole.
Plus i really don't like ~60% of the stuff mozilla has done to firefox over the last decade.
You do realize that goes back as far as version 0.1, Phoenix, right? If that's the case, then you surely can't be a Firefox user, unless you're a masochist, and want to use something you hate just to bitch about it and that in your opinion it sucked long before even its first release...
If focusing on this OS slows the Mozilla Corporation’s progress of fucking up Firefox completely and irrecoverably, then let them make it. That is, assuming they haven't already reached the point of total destruction (they're at least getting there).
That said... I think the idea of another Linux-based OS for cell phones is pretty interesting, and it could actually be a worthy alternative to Android if done right. The problem is, of course, as you pointed out, the stiff competition they'll face with Google, Apple and Microsoft (hey, you never know what will happen...). It could provide a "plan B" in case something happens with Android or the way Google acts. And its very existence, if it gets big enough, could help to keep Google's behavior in check, in case they were to ever try pulling a Microsoft like IE6.
I'm lucky in that I've been primarily into console games (traditionally a Nintendo/Sega fan), and there are very few PC games I give a damn about. As for Windows-exclusives, well... the Flight Simulator series, maybe Monster Truck Madness 2... and, uh, I seriously can't think of anything I can't get elsewhere that I absolutely must have. Luckily for the majority of PC games I do care about (and that majority is itself quite small), DOSBox has me covered. And I don't need Windows just to be able to run it.
Release an Android version of IE and then I won't see this as a crock of shit and an excuse to get us to buy your Windows operating systems.
Due to the time it takes light to travel through space, the images seen from Earth now show what the galaxy looked like when the universe was just 420 million years old, according to a press statement released from NASA.
The universe must have still been wearing diapers at the time.
If you had to lie about a security issue, you should immediately lose all trust and your company should immediately go out of business. Simple as that. Especially sleazy fucking advertising companies, which already tend to be some of the worst culprits.
Worthless, lying, malware-serving companies such as your own are exactly the type I make every attempt to block in every major way possible (cookies, scripting, advertisement images, etc.). Of course, I don't discriminate--I block them all; none of their business is wanted, nor are any of them trustworthy--but its companies like your own that are potentially the most, *ahem*, malicious.
Shit happens. One intrusion through OpenSSH into two out of an entire cluster FreeBSD servers doesn't mean jack shit as to the overall security of using SSH as your authentication method. I'll continue to use SSH, and I'm sure pretty much anyone else who uses it now will see no reason to stop just because an encryption key was used as an entry point to a high-profile server. According to TFA, steps are being taken to prevent this from happening again by deprecating legacy services... and SSH doesn't look to be one of them. Besides... it appears that the SSH key wasn't "cracked" anyway, it just somehow made its way to someone it wasn't supposed to.
The compromise is believed to have occurred due to the leak of an SSH key from a developer who legitimately had access to the machines in question, and was not due to any vulnerability or code exploit within FreeBSD.
Good job FreeBSD, for not only disclosing this but also taking steps to prevent similar security breaches in the future.
I don't know what to think of something like this. On the one hand, it could start out good... but then, anything looks good up against the typical AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint and Verizon. Even a rock in the rectangular shape of a cell phone that you beat your head with repeatedly until you pass out in a crimson puddle sounds more appealing. But then on the other hand, they'll probably subject you to even more ads than their phones do now with free apps, and it would be throughout the entire phone service, so if that's the way it would be I would have to pass. In fact, I would have to see how Google goes when it comes to advertising on their network for over a year before I'd even consider them for cell phone service.
Their ads on the web are irrelevant to me because I don't see them, but it's a given that anything they release will not be open enough to perform such blocking.
And home router manufacturers will continue to make bonded channels the default setting to make sure customers experience what they have printed on the outside of the box.
Yeah... that's the truly bad part. :\
They should allow wide channels, but *never* enable it by default... because the fact is, there will come a time when these 5 GHz routers become mainstream, and eventually so will these routers that are set to use multiple channels by default, and as soon as that happens... their claims on the box effectively become a big fat lie.
If these companies were really trying to improve the experience and bandwidth performance for their customers, they would tell their marketing department to back off and let the customer decide whether wider channels would help or destroy their connections, and they would instead default to a standard-width channel. Even if that channel changes based on what the router sees as being clean/occupied space, it would be better in that fewer channels would get garbled in the process.
Windows 8 can be run off a USB drive. One of linux's great claims over Windows is gone.
Yeah, but you'll need a 32GB USB drive just to get it to work and have enough room for your files once you've installed both Windows and all your programs...
Meanwhile, a typical Linux distribution comes fits nicely in 6-8GB (some take up much less) and come with virtually everything you might need, so relatively few packages need to be installed manually, further cutting on size.
Hell, just look at the news story that hit OSNews and IIRC Slashdot not too long ago, about Windows RT on the Surface taking up almost half of the computer's 32GB total storage capacity. Meanwhile, I sit here from Linux looking at my Windows 8 enterprise evaluation partition which I installed a bunch (but certainly not all) of what would be my typical programs, and I'm looking at about 17GB. Meanwhile, my openSUSE / partition is only taking ~4.9GB... and that's saying something, considering many people (including myself) generally see openSUSE as one of the more bloated distros. Turns out it's mainly bloated in memory use, not disk space.
Bleh... a few corrections to mistakes I made:
"Meanwhile, channel 6 is also caught in the crossfire of both the guy running on channel 3 and the guy running on channel 9."
And:
"Keep going up the spectrum until the wavelengths are so short we have to be in the same room without an object blocking the signal between the client and AP to be able to keep a connection?"