What amused me about this story is that it's a truism that you can't believe anything you read in the newspapers. Seems to me there's some justice in the story being fabricated before the journalists got their hands on it.
Remember, ALL THE PREVIOUS ATTEMPTS AT TURNING THE DESKTOP INTO A GADGET ZONE: FAILED
This is the single biggest failing of both Gnome and KDE in their default configurations. I really don't see what the problem is with correlating a computer desktop with a physical assembly of timber (or whatever) with a chair in front of it. A desk is a place where I drop things that I am working on.
What is so hard about that? I don't use it as a place to put a post-it note saying "look in such-and-such a place for this activity".
The developers' approach is totally craniorectal, and no-one should be surprised if nobody takes them seriously.
An interesting contrast: Volkerding does what he does with Slackware with no fuss.
Exactly. And Pat never needs to be defensive, since Slackware is 100% rock-solid and reliable. It never breaks (except when I break it).
Over the years, I have tried most of the more well-known distributions, often for extended periods, but given a choice, my first preference is still always for Slackware.
Instead of going off on his own with Unity and Mir forks, He should have worked with Gnome and Wayland to fix what was broken.
Or just stuck with X11 and fixed what's wrong with that. Even better.
Maybe just the latter. Thing is, I've been working with Linux and various other Unices for over 20 years, and I have never yet had a straight answer as to what is so wrong with X11. Whining that it is "bloated" when it has so many different devices to cope with is just stupid. X11 has a lot to do, so it's a big program. More often, those who insist on bitching about X11 seem to be doing so just because they're bored with it.
This is the worst possible reason to reinvent the wheel. It is pretty much like what has happened to Gnome: a usable and popular environment got hijacked by a bunch of zealots who fucked it up, and now they don't have any users any more. Which probably suits them fine, but it doesn't do the rest of us much good.
I don't want to type either my wallet password or e-mail password all the time...
You're missing my point. I don't have that much of a problem with wallet systems (though in general terms, I prefer to use my brain), but since I don't use konqueror or any other KDE programs that require PIM, there's no point in running an entire service to do just that. Thunderbird remembers all of its relevant passwords. It's just that kmail (or at least the builds that I have tried since the 1990s versions which worked fine) have all made it problematic to set up my multiple email accounts. And rather than persist for hours to make it work (which I assume is possible), I simply abandoned the attempt and continued with an app that has always "just worked" instead.
"There are some features from KDE 1.1 that I am still missing." - yeah like a usable email app:
Actually, that isn't as flamebaity as it appears. I am a comparatively recent convert to KDE (pretty much since Gnome 3, in fact, and currently 4.10 on Slackware), and have made periodic attempts to get kmail working just for the sake of having a "native" mail client. Each attempt has been frustrated, however, and I am really not happy about being forced to run akonadi/wallet when I don't need it for anything else.
The good news is that good ol' Thunderbird still works just fine, and with just a bit of care can be made to fit in quite smoothly with KDE.
Nor are they vigilantes. That implies a supposition (however misguided) that there is some degree of justice involved. Whereas in reality, these creeps are just adolescent hooligans.
What is it with computer crime that gets any police force involved to wildly exaggerate everything to do with it.
Indeed. This guy's (alleged) crime was simply defacing a Government website. Now I'm not saying that's a good thing - for a group calling itself lulzsec, this is so profoundly and tiresomely unfunny, it's not funny. But it certainly is not on the scale of unpleasantness of some of the other so-called hacktivist groups that think it's cool to publish peoples' credit card details.
Probably the worst part of it all is that the taxpayer will have to cough up to support his tenure in some "correctional" institution, whereas some form of useful slave labour in community service might at least do somebody enough good to justify this adolescent's pathetic little life.
Germans will still throw away your CV if there isn't a picture or they don't like it.
My last employers (in South Australia, where even the fucking kangaroos wear lederhosen) didn't, and they were as German as they come. I wish they had thrown away my CV, though. It would have saved me a lot of grief.
Shit, some of us were doing this in the early 80's, on the actual internet, not AOL or some walled garden.
And some of us were doing it in the '60s and '70s in the pub or at the beach. Maybe it's time for a Campaign For Real Life, and let the advertisers try to sell their crap to the void...
If Facebook is our history, then we're even more fucked than I thought. I want no part of it. Although I have a number of friends and relations who occasionally badger me to get a facebook page, I am militantly resisting.
And I got so fucking tired of just about every website being cluttered with those stupid facebook and twitter buttons, I've now added all social media to my Adblock filters. (Apparently there's an Antisocial plugin that does the same thing if you're a Firefox user.) It makes the world a much cleaner place.
Freedom of speech is more important than people's feelings.
And given that Brendan Nelson is a politician who has been handed a cushy sinecure to keep him in caviar and champers for the rest of his life, he should be sufficiently thick-skinned to just suck it up. He gets no sympathy from me.
in the past, the computer industry was dominated by single corporations; first IBM, then Microsoft. Being lone entities, their dominance invited opposition.
And some of us did quite nicely out of that at the time. I was one of a number of sysprogs who made a pretty good living out of working contracts on CDC, Burroughs, Honeywell and Sperry mainframes. Back in the '70s and '80s there was very much an "us and them" mentality: those whose idea was that a computer meant IBM, and us who built up massive CVs working across the field of everything else. I personally found the latter much more exciting. Even as the huge power-guzzlers of the '70s and '80s gave way to the more compact Prime, Data General and Unisys machines in the early '90s you still had to work hard to keep your reputation in the field.
Back then, of course, your data mostly was stored offline. But probably 90% the time, a tape-monkey^W^W computer operator in a larger computer room would never recognise a message from a dubious PID on his console for a rollback tape, and there goes your security.
Mainframe computers have acquired something of a reputation for security, but nevertheless, during the Cold War there was a widespead (and justified) nervousness about data leaking to the wrong people.
Unfortunately, even the explicitly serialized modules don't necessarily start properly.
Systemd is one of the final reasons why I recently dumped Archlinux off my laptop and returned to Slackware after an interval of 3 years. (There are lots of other reasons, but suffice to say that the reason why I liked Arch in the first place was its similarities to Slackware. Those are now pretty much absent.)
The old BSD-style init scripts still rock after 20 years.
But *when* it needs a reboot, it takes 2 hours. That is a bit longish, you know.
Are you serious? Might be time to use one of those new-fangled drives that don't run on clockwork. If your drives are taking that long to fsck, I think you must have something wrong. And it also shouldn't need to be done every time you boot.
Or if you really are somehow flogging your filesystem that hard it might be worth considering a different one. Ext2 can take a long time to fsck, of course, but nowadays there's not much advantage to using a non-journaling filesystem except when mounted read-only (e.g. for my/boot partition).
Alternatively, you could take individual drives down on an occasional basis to fsck them when they're not needed.
In this instance, I might disagree. Given that those calls were (according to TFS) made to Senegal, Mali, Benin and Philippines, that in itself might be construed as suspicious. You could pass the information on to the FBI and tell them you are concerned your account could have been used for terrorist activity. Let them come down on the perps.
My prediction is that E-Ink will become higher resolution, cheaper, and faster.
As a matter of perspective, I would suggest that even non-state-of-the-art devices such as my Sony PRS-T1 offer resolution that is actually better than the majority of printed novels, given that the texture of the (usually crappy) paper introduces inconsistencies in typeface outlines that are absent in the e-ink displays.
I'm not saying anything against paper publications here (although I was a late convert to ebooks) but since I have moved home (hopefully for the last time) I am rationalising what books I really want to see on a shelf and what i might just want to re-read at some point. And I really don't want to have to reinforce my floors again.
You and pretty much everybody else. It's a key indication that these stories are bought and paid for.
No, it just means you (a) have been living in a barrel or (b) are probably not very much interested in reading e-books on a dedicated device, if at all.
I don't own a Kobo device (mine is a Sony PRS-T1, and I'm very happy with it) but if I were in the market right now, I would definitely be giving the Kobo Aura HD serious consideration, if only for the large display.
As soon as I heard of that instance of Amazon removing 1984 from Kindles
...
That's what got me into what I call future-proofing my books. (Incidentally, 1984 is available fron the.au Gutenberg site, or in a more e-reader-friendly form here since it is only the US copyright pirates/trolls that have a problem with that.)
Although my Sony reader is "authorised" to accept Adept DRM epubs, I strip DRM from everything before importing it with Calibre.
Hmmm. Not that I have an axe to grind, but I would contend that the smallest tool needed to do the job is enough. If you already have a VM set up, then by all means go for it, since the crapware(? given that it is useful here) doesn't take up lots of space. But if you don't, then Wine at least never takes up more room than it needs.
You can argue that Kobo's focusing could lead to better results in terms of user experience, but they aren't going to beat Amazon in terms of market share unless they really come up with something consumers think is unique and amazing.
If I could justify getting another e-reader (I already have a Sony PRS-T1 with which I am perfectly happy) I would have a serious look at the Kobo Aura HD. Although I haven't seen it in my hands, it looks very sweet, although of course not as compact as my Sony device.
I think you'll find the typos are actually Amazon inserting a digital fingerprint in every copy downloaded. I noticed it a while back and checked a book against a friends device that had the same book - the typos were not in the same place.
If true, then that is so grossly unprofessional, it's horrifying. Have you taken this up with Amazon? It should certainly be made public knowledge.
OK, I don't normally use Amazon for my ebook downloads (to be truthful, lately I've been using bittorrent to replace books for which I have already paid in dead-tree format, since I have recently moved home and don't want to have to think about reinforcing floors again to take the weight of bookshelves). But I have found that many retail epub files are inexcusably badly formatted. I don't consider myself a CSS guru, but I have learned enough about it over the last couple of years, since my normal practice is now to process any newly-acquired book through Sigil to get it looking presentable. This has also had the additional benefit of getting my regex skills polished better than hitherto ever been seen.;)
It's a minor PITA that the first thing I have to do is rip out the DRM, but ePUBee (which runs happily under WINE on *nix boxes) copes well with Adobe's Adept. And I have more recently discovered Apprentice Alf which offers even more info re DRM removal, apparently including a plugin (which I have not yet tried) for Calibre.
Slashdot Mirror
What amused me about this story is that it's a truism that you can't believe anything you read in the newspapers. Seems to me there's some justice in the story being fabricated before the journalists got their hands on it.
Remember, ALL THE PREVIOUS ATTEMPTS AT TURNING THE DESKTOP INTO A GADGET ZONE: FAILED
This is the single biggest failing of both Gnome and KDE in their default configurations. I really don't see what the problem is with correlating a computer desktop with a physical assembly of timber (or whatever) with a chair in front of it. A desk is a place where I drop things that I am working on.
What is so hard about that? I don't use it as a place to put a post-it note saying "look in such-and-such a place for this activity".
The developers' approach is totally craniorectal, and no-one should be surprised if nobody takes them seriously.
An interesting contrast: Volkerding does what he does with Slackware with no fuss.
Exactly. And Pat never needs to be defensive, since Slackware is 100% rock-solid and reliable. It never breaks (except when I break it).
Over the years, I have tried most of the more well-known distributions, often for extended periods, but given a choice, my first preference is still always for Slackware.
Instead of going off on his own with Unity and Mir forks, He should have worked with Gnome and Wayland to fix what was broken.
Or just stuck with X11 and fixed what's wrong with that. Even better.
Maybe just the latter. Thing is, I've been working with Linux and various other Unices for over 20 years, and I have never yet had a straight answer as to what is so wrong with X11. Whining that it is "bloated" when it has so many different devices to cope with is just stupid. X11 has a lot to do, so it's a big program. More often, those who insist on bitching about X11 seem to be doing so just because they're bored with it.
This is the worst possible reason to reinvent the wheel. It is pretty much like what has happened to Gnome: a usable and popular environment got hijacked by a bunch of zealots who fucked it up, and now they don't have any users any more. Which probably suits them fine, but it doesn't do the rest of us much good.
I don't want to type either my wallet password or e-mail password all the time...
You're missing my point. I don't have that much of a problem with wallet systems (though in general terms, I prefer to use my brain), but since I don't use konqueror or any other KDE programs that require PIM, there's no point in running an entire service to do just that. Thunderbird remembers all of its relevant passwords. It's just that kmail (or at least the builds that I have tried since the 1990s versions which worked fine) have all made it problematic to set up my multiple email accounts. And rather than persist for hours to make it work (which I assume is possible), I simply abandoned the attempt and continued with an app that has always "just worked" instead.
"There are some features from KDE 1.1 that I am still missing." - yeah like a usable email app :
Actually, that isn't as flamebaity as it appears. I am a comparatively recent convert to KDE (pretty much since Gnome 3, in fact, and currently 4.10 on Slackware), and have made periodic attempts to get kmail working just for the sake of having a "native" mail client. Each attempt has been frustrated, however, and I am really not happy about being forced to run akonadi/wallet when I don't need it for anything else.
The good news is that good ol' Thunderbird still works just fine, and with just a bit of care can be made to fit in quite smoothly with KDE.
Nor are they vigilantes. That implies a supposition (however misguided) that there is some degree of justice involved. Whereas in reality, these creeps are just adolescent hooligans.
What is it with computer crime that gets any police force involved to wildly exaggerate everything to do with it.
Indeed. This guy's (alleged) crime was simply defacing a Government website. Now I'm not saying that's a good thing - for a group calling itself lulzsec, this is so profoundly and tiresomely unfunny, it's not funny. But it certainly is not on the scale of unpleasantness of some of the other so-called hacktivist groups that think it's cool to publish peoples' credit card details.
Probably the worst part of it all is that the taxpayer will have to cough up to support his tenure in some "correctional" institution, whereas some form of useful slave labour in community service might at least do somebody enough good to justify this adolescent's pathetic little life.
Germans will still throw away your CV if there isn't a picture or they don't like it.
My last employers (in South Australia, where even the fucking kangaroos wear lederhosen) didn't, and they were as German as they come. I wish they had thrown away my CV, though. It would have saved me a lot of grief.
Shit, some of us were doing this in the early 80's, on the actual internet, not AOL or some walled garden.
And some of us were doing it in the '60s and '70s in the pub or at the beach. Maybe it's time for a Campaign For Real Life, and let the advertisers try to sell their crap to the void...
Heh. I want something like PDQ Bach's epitaph:
Here lies a man with sundry flaws
And numerous sins upon his head.
We buried him here today because,
As far as we can tell, he's dead.
...can dictate how history records their failings
If Facebook is our history, then we're even more fucked than I thought. I want no part of it. Although I have a number of friends and relations who occasionally badger me to get a facebook page, I am militantly resisting.
And I got so fucking tired of just about every website being cluttered with those stupid facebook and twitter buttons, I've now added all social media to my Adblock filters. (Apparently there's an Antisocial plugin that does the same thing if you're a Firefox user.) It makes the world a much cleaner place.
Freedom of speech is more important than people's feelings.
And given that Brendan Nelson is a politician who has been handed a cushy sinecure to keep him in caviar and champers for the rest of his life, he should be sufficiently thick-skinned to just suck it up. He gets no sympathy from me.
What? Kangaroos cannot wear lederhosen?
They do in South Australia. ;-)
Aside from supercomputing, Linux doesn't really have an extreme presence in any one of these catagories.
Well, you're wrong about that too. Linux has an overwhelming presence in hosting and other server situations.
in the past, the computer industry was dominated by single corporations; first IBM, then Microsoft. Being lone entities, their dominance invited opposition.
And some of us did quite nicely out of that at the time. I was one of a number of sysprogs who made a pretty good living out of working contracts on CDC, Burroughs, Honeywell and Sperry mainframes. Back in the '70s and '80s there was very much an "us and them" mentality: those whose idea was that a computer meant IBM, and us who built up massive CVs working across the field of everything else. I personally found the latter much more exciting. Even as the huge power-guzzlers of the '70s and '80s gave way to the more compact Prime, Data General and Unisys machines in the early '90s you still had to work hard to keep your reputation in the field.
Back then, of course, your data mostly was stored offline. But probably 90% the time, a tape-monkey^W^W computer operator in a larger computer room would never recognise a message from a dubious PID on his console for a rollback tape, and there goes your security.
Mainframe computers have acquired something of a reputation for security, but nevertheless, during the Cold War there was a widespead (and justified) nervousness about data leaking to the wrong people.
Unfortunately, even the explicitly serialized modules don't necessarily start properly.
Systemd is one of the final reasons why I recently dumped Archlinux off my laptop and returned to Slackware after an interval of 3 years. (There are lots of other reasons, but suffice to say that the reason why I liked Arch in the first place was its similarities to Slackware. Those are now pretty much absent.)
The old BSD-style init scripts still rock after 20 years.
But *when* it needs a reboot, it takes 2 hours. That is a bit longish, you know.
Are you serious? Might be time to use one of those new-fangled drives that don't run on clockwork. If your drives are taking that long to fsck, I think you must have something wrong. And it also shouldn't need to be done every time you boot.
/boot partition).
Or if you really are somehow flogging your filesystem that hard it might be worth considering a different one. Ext2 can take a long time to fsck, of course, but nowadays there's not much advantage to using a non-journaling filesystem except when mounted read-only (e.g. for my
Alternatively, you could take individual drives down on an occasional basis to fsck them when they're not needed.
Sadly there's no point in bothering.
In this instance, I might disagree. Given that those calls were (according to TFS) made to Senegal, Mali, Benin and Philippines, that in itself might be construed as suspicious. You could pass the information on to the FBI and tell them you are concerned your account could have been used for terrorist activity. Let them come down on the perps.
My prediction is that E-Ink will become higher resolution, cheaper, and faster.
As a matter of perspective, I would suggest that even non-state-of-the-art devices such as my Sony PRS-T1 offer resolution that is actually better than the majority of printed novels, given that the texture of the (usually crappy) paper introduces inconsistencies in typeface outlines that are absent in the e-ink displays.
I'm not saying anything against paper publications here (although I was a late convert to ebooks) but since I have moved home (hopefully for the last time) I am rationalising what books I really want to see on a shelf and what i might just want to re-read at some point. And I really don't want to have to reinforce my floors again.
You and pretty much everybody else. It's a key indication that these stories are bought and paid for.
No, it just means you (a) have been living in a barrel or (b) are probably not very much interested in reading e-books on a dedicated device, if at all.
I don't own a Kobo device (mine is a Sony PRS-T1, and I'm very happy with it) but if I were in the market right now, I would definitely be giving the Kobo Aura HD serious consideration, if only for the large display.
As soon as I heard of that instance of Amazon removing 1984 from Kindles
... That's what got me into what I call future-proofing my books. (Incidentally, 1984 is available fron the .au Gutenberg site, or in a more e-reader-friendly form here since it is only the US copyright pirates/trolls that have a problem with that.)
Although my Sony reader is "authorised" to accept Adept DRM epubs, I strip DRM from everything before importing it with Calibre.
Hmmm. Not that I have an axe to grind, but I would contend that the smallest tool needed to do the job is enough. If you already have a VM set up, then by all means go for it, since the crapware(? given that it is useful here) doesn't take up lots of space. But if you don't, then Wine at least never takes up more room than it needs.
You can argue that Kobo's focusing could lead to better results in terms of user experience, but they aren't going to beat Amazon in terms of market share unless they really come up with something consumers think is unique and amazing.
If I could justify getting another e-reader (I already have a Sony PRS-T1 with which I am perfectly happy) I would have a serious look at the Kobo Aura HD. Although I haven't seen it in my hands, it looks very sweet, although of course not as compact as my Sony device.
I think you'll find the typos are actually Amazon inserting a digital fingerprint in every copy downloaded. I noticed it a while back and checked a book against a friends device that had the same book - the typos were not in the same place.
If true, then that is so grossly unprofessional, it's horrifying. Have you taken this up with Amazon? It should certainly be made public knowledge.
OK, I don't normally use Amazon for my ebook downloads (to be truthful, lately I've been using bittorrent to replace books for which I have already paid in dead-tree format, since I have recently moved home and don't want to have to think about reinforcing floors again to take the weight of bookshelves). But I have found that many retail epub files are inexcusably badly formatted. I don't consider myself a CSS guru, but I have learned enough about it over the last couple of years, since my normal practice is now to process any newly-acquired book through Sigil to get it looking presentable. This has also had the additional benefit of getting my regex skills polished better than hitherto ever been seen.;)
It's a minor PITA that the first thing I have to do is rip out the DRM, but ePUBee (which runs happily under WINE on *nix boxes) copes well with Adobe's Adept. And I have more recently discovered Apprentice Alf which offers even more info re DRM removal, apparently including a plugin (which I have not yet tried) for Calibre.