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  1. Re:Just started using it on CrunchBang Linux Halts Development · · Score: 2

    It isn't much more than a metapackage, anyway. Gnome, KDE, LXDE, and XFCE are all metapackages and Debian live images. There is a point to Crunchbang living on in some form because most of the desktop is different to LXDE (they both have Openbox). And it probably will live, but with a different name.

  2. Re:My FreeBSD Report: Four Months In on Systemd Getting UEFI Boot Loader · · Score: 1
    There is a standard for starting a service when you log in:

    The autostart specification defines a method for automatically starting applications during the startup of a desktop environment after the user has logged in and after mounting a removable medium.

    http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/autostart-spec/ Obviously, desktops could still do with a better way of starting services and making sure they stay running. Because that wouldn't be at all useful on servers or anything.

  3. Re:Jesus, we're fucked. on Americans Support Mandatory Labeling of Food That Contains DNA · · Score: 1

    I have a vague memory of the DHMO project being about the presentation of science in the media, rather than public ignorance. It showed how people will get the wrong idea if you portray a scientific issue badly. Ironically, this story has been hideously portrayed in the media. We're told that 80% of Americans support labeling of food containing DNA, which is much the same as 80% of Americans supporting food labeling, which is an obviously good idea, so you wonder what the other 20% were thinking. But oh, no, let's make fun of these people who fell for a ludicrous scam without actually explaining what was ludicrous about it.

  4. To save you the click on Gender and Tenure Diversity In GitHub Teams Relate To Higher Productivity · · Score: 1

    By "tenure" they mean experience. They don't say why they didn't call it "experience".

  5. Re:Better way? on Extra Leap Second To Be Added To Clocks On June 30 · · Score: 1

    The trouble is, the Internet is standardized on UTC. You can keep your system clock to TAI and use the "right" time zone files, but you have to deal with the offset between your clock and NTP, and the complexity of NTP broadcasting the leap second as it happens. (Or forego the convenience of NTP altogether, of course.)

    There should be an RFC to decree that for networking purposes, we'll ignore this and future leap seconds and keep "Internet UTC" as a fixed offset from TAI. People who care about strict UTC (and it would, apparently, cost millions of dollars to fix critical military systems) can use libraries or time zones to get it. The rest of us will know our system clocks keep ticking away with minimal breakage.

    What will probably happen is that we follow the leap second again, things break again, and any impetus to fix the underlying cause dies away by the time the next leap second comes around. And eventually UTC will be defined as consistent atomic time and the people who wanted UTC for what it was originally designed for will have to learn to call it something else.

  6. Re:Advance to Go on Designing the Best Board Game · · Score: 1

    Monopoly is certainly best as an out-of-the-box game. You can't do much at all if you leave everything in the box.

  7. Re:And that's what's wrong today on We Are All Confident Idiots · · Score: 1

    I'm distracted from the whole argument by this idea that two standard deviations above the mean isn't that great. In fact, it puts you well within the top 4% of the population (assuming a gaussian distribution). Is that how smart they are or how smart they think they are?

  8. Re:Basic misunderstandings and self-contradictions on Linux Sucks (Video) · · Score: 1

    There's an even more basic misunderstanding if he thinks Linux is somehow responsible for an OpenBSD project.

  9. Re:Because it works. on Why Do Projects Continue To Support Old Python Releases? · · Score: 1

    Help on built-in function encode:

    encode(...)
        S.encode(encoding='utf-8', errors='strict') -> bytes

        Encode S using the codec registered for encoding. Default encoding
        is 'utf-8'. errors may be given to set a different error
        handling scheme. Default is 'strict' meaning that encoding errors raise
        a UnicodeEncodeError. Other possible values are 'ignore', 'replace' and
        'xmlcharrefreplace' as well as any other name registered with
        codecs.register_error that can handle UnicodeEncodeErrors.

  10. Re:Because it works. on Why Do Projects Continue To Support Old Python Releases? · · Score: 1

    foo == "constant" will not throw an exception. It does not coerce anything. If foo is not a string, it will return false.

    The bytes type does have isalpha(). At least in 3.2.3. It really does.

    You can't search bytes for 'A' without thinking about encodings because encodings matter. You can search bytes for b'A'.

    They have added isalpha() to bytes. They do assume it is ASCII if it's in the ASCII range.

    If you want to compare bytes with str, you can do the encoding if you know what you want. The language will refuse the temptation to guess.

    You can turn a quoted string into a bytes object: by decoding it.

    If the source is UTF-8, it won't have errors. Errors are, by definition, not UTF-8. The parser will refuse the temptation to guess what encoding you meant.

  11. Re:whitespace on Interviews: Guido van Rossum Answers Your Questions · · Score: 1

    This is a Python article! Of course somebody has to complain about whitespace! When did you ever know a Python article to not start an argument about whitespace?

  12. Re:Radioactive ooze! on New Radioactive Water Leak At Fukushima: 300 Tons and Growing · · Score: 1

    Nuclear still looks good compared to water: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_accidents#Fatalities

  13. Re:delayed update to servers.. on Too Perfect a Mirror · · Score: 1

    I believe a properly administered git mirror will do everything the GP wanted, except for testing the backups (which isn't git's problem) and the "2-sided crypto-hash compare" because, in my amateurishness, I don't know what that is. I do know that git does cryptographic hash checks on pull and push. I don't know exactly what checks are done when. I didn't know that "git clone" didn't do those checks until today and it seems that the KDE folks didn't either â" but, hey, we all do now. (From the update, "git clone --mirror" is what failed, but I believe the "--mirror" part is incidental. Should have been "git pull --all --force" as far as I know in my amateurishness.)

    I see other folks are less keen on discussing these issues than making condescending remarks about how to do backups. The update to the article goes in to a fair amount of detail about what they didn't do and why. It's almost as if they did think about these things.

  14. Re:Not git related on Too Perfect a Mirror · · Score: 1

    What is this "git --mirror"? It's in the summary but not the original article. There are different git commands that have the --mirror option and they work differently.

    My simple experiment, with an old version of git, shows that "git clone" succeeds whether or not you specify --mirror, that "git pull" doesn't have a --mirror option (maybe because I'm out of date but http://linux.die.net/man/1/git-pull doesn't show it either) and "git push" fails (hangs, in fact) if it tries to push a corrupt blob.

    A discussion about whether you should use the safe method for backups wouldn't be very interesting because of course you should. The issue here is that they didn't know they weren't doing integrity checks and they may not be the only ones.

    Cloning new repositories rather than pulling to existing ones sounds risky to me. If that's what they were doing I don't know why. A forced pull ("git pull --force") will keep old branches and a reflog and so on. It will also, as it happens, abort if an integrity check fails. So this seems like good practice. But I haven't seen any discussions of good practice in backing up git repositories and I'll excuse anybody not knowing the clone operations didn't do the integrity checks. (Especially if they also saved tarballs, whatever the problems with those may have been.)

  15. Re:But it is SUPPOSED to on Too Perfect a Mirror · · Score: 1

    I vouch for the parent. I checked the man pages and I don't see this behaviour documented. Those who think reading the documentation would have made the lack of integrity checks clear can easily point to the place it's documented. Then we can discuss whether a competent admin should have found it.

    (Note: I read the latest article, and they did have backups. So any posts about them trusting one tool and not having backups are irrelevant.)

  16. Re:Tail your proxy on Tracking the Web Trackers · · Score: 2

    Yes, you can override the no-cache headers in Squid. Use a refresh pattern and ignore or override the headers the server sends to defeat the cache:

    http://www.squid-cache.org/Doc/config/refresh_pattern/

  17. Re:IP6 addresses are a pain on Worldwide IPv6 Adoption: Where Do We Stand Today? · · Score: 1

    MAC address

  18. Wegener was right but not perfect on When Continental Drift Was Considered Pseudoscience · · Score: 1

    Wegener knew the continents were moving, and collected a huge amount of evidence. Wegener didn't know why they were moving, but neither did anybody else. Wegener also failed to produce a cure for cancer and was hopeless at averting the Second World War. He did make the mistake of producing half-baked arguments for why the continents were moving, and getting his figures wrong on the rate of drift.

    Geologists rejected his model because they decided to argue with Wegener, instead of continental drift. They proved Wegener was wrong and somehow thought that the whole problem of continental drift had gone away. They also applied special pleading, because they didn't know why the continents were rising (or they would have eroded away by now) or where the land bridges came from. According to the scientific method, they should have considered continental drift based on the evidence and the evidence should have been overwhelming. This is a classic example of human weakness in the face of a disruptive new idea.

  19. Re:Affirmative action on Is There an Institutional Bias Against Black Tech Entrepreneurs? · · Score: 1

    I think it's very rare in Silicon Valley that an otherwise deserving businessman loses out because they're black. Rather, the deficiency is in the lack of deserving minority businessman in the first place. That's a social and cultural issue, and may not even be a problem. Not every culture needs to have equal representation in all fields; that's one of the ways in which cultures are different.

    From over here, it certainly looks like a problem if Americans whose families have been in America for generations are still pushed into different societies and cultures according to skin color. Who says "African American" has to be the culture with quaint differences from Americans with the opportunity to succeed?

  20. Re:Wrong. on Leaked Cable Shows Heavy US Influence On Swedish Copyright Policy · · Score: 1

    "Harmony with international trends" is a particularly insidious phrase, isn't it? Not harmony with international reality. Most countries don't have laws like this. But they're thinking about it, or will be when we send the boys round, so you'd better do what we say if you know what's good for you.

  21. Re:Here's an idea. on Social Media a Threat To Undercover Cops · · Score: 1

    Thing is, if I were running a clandestine organization, I'd want my recruits to stay off social networking sites. I don't want the authorities to find our network mirrored on Facebook. So my ideal recruit would have the social networking trail of . . . an undercover policeman.

  22. Re:Libraries? on The End of Paper Books · · Score: 1

    Libraries may close or may go fully digital. They'll be allowed to do this because nobody will care about paper books. The books might go into storage somewhere (even in the basement) or they might be trashed. The Library of Congress will still be there, and so will the city zoo, with lions.

  23. Re:No big secret here on Wikileaks Cables Say No Bloodshed Inside Tiananmen Square · · Score: 1

    I don't even see a cable saying the contact didn't see bloodshed. What two of them (with slightly different wording) say is "THERE WAS NO MASS FIRING INTO THE CROWD OF STUDENTS AT THE MONUMENT". These are edited by the Telegraph, but if they edited out a clearer refutation of bloodshed . . . why? "No mass firing" in the square is consistent with what I thought we thought we knew. Nothing about people not being run over by tanks or other vehicles in a part of the square this diplomat may or may not have been watching.

  24. The third way on The Case Against GUIs, Revisited · · Score: 1

    That's the other thing about the CLI vs GUI debate. It doesn't only ignore the fact that you can use both together, but that some applications are neither CLI nor GUI. Yes, they have GUI versions, but emacs and vim are fundamentally not GUI applications. They are, let's speak it, full screen text mode.

    Full screen text mode is not a CLI. There are editors that run in a pure command line. The most famous is ed. When vi was invented, it was a big step up from ed, but it wasn't a full replacement because it required full screen text mode.

    Full screen text mode is certainly not a class of GUI. It doesn't require graphics. It may borrow concepts from a GUI, like pointers, menus, even windows, but it isn't graphical because it doesn't require the operating system to have graphics capabilities.

    Full screen text mode is what we were using before GUIs took off. For certain tasks, it can be as usable as a GUI. It does, however become redundant when you have a GUI, hence vim and emacs get upgraded to GUI applications. The CLI, then, is the survivor, and full screen text mode gets written out of history.

  25. Re:Ethical? on Is Setting Up an Offshore IT Help Desk Ethical? · · Score: 1

    America's bloodiest war was with itself.