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User: shellbeach

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  1. Re:So...anyone want to suggest replacements? on Google Is Shutting Down Picasa In Favor of Photos (engadget.com) · · Score: 1

    Picassa was always a joke for anyone who took a lot of photos.

    The thing I liked about Picasa was that it was über-fast when indexing and browsing your collection.

    I tend to use darktable for all my photo management, but it's cumbersome if you just want to browse your collection. I'd love to know of any open-source equivalent that's as fast as Picasa ...

  2. Re:what? on Pwn2Own 2016 Won't Attack Firefox (Because It's Too Easy) (eweek.com) · · Score: 1

    This is where most open-source users whine and complain about features, design flaws, and bugs while devs and fanboys tell them "If you don't like it, fork it and do it YOUR way." as if that were a trivial thing just anyone can do in their spare time...

    Sure, but at least with OSS you have the option to fork the project.

    If that's not something you appreciate, why would you use OSS? It's not like anyone forced you to.

  3. Re:what? on Pwn2Own 2016 Won't Attack Firefox (Because It's Too Easy) (eweek.com) · · Score: 3, Insightful

    A true open source project is driven by the community, not by the maintainer alone

    Wait, you just make up definitions on the fly, post as AC, and get modded up for it? A true open source project is a project whose code is freely available. That's all.

    As for community contribution, firefox looks reasonably healthy to me: https://github.com/mozilla/kit...

    Compare that to Pale Moon, which you praise: https://github.com/MoonchildPr... ...

    Pale Moon has fewer contributors and a much higher volume of commits coming from a single dev. Not that this is bad -- they're both true open source projects, and different projects have different numbers of contributors.

    Maybe instead of whinging, you could learn to code and contribute too?

  4. Re: Harsh crowd on Interviews: Ask Author and Programmer Andy Nicholls About R · · Score: 1

    As a statistician: someone not trained in statistics using statistical methods when they don't understand the concepts in that mathematically dense paper from 1963 is a dangerous thing. If you want me to be your statistics consultant, pay me my consulting rate. I don't generally costly for free, on the r-help mailing list or elsewhere.

    If you don't understand that 1963 paper, you need a statistics consultant. Don't expect someone to do your statistical work for free.

    I think you just beautifully proved the OP's point.

  5. Re:Future of R, now that programmers use it? on Interviews: Ask Author and Programmer Andy Nicholls About R · · Score: 1

    I actually program exclusively in R and fine it OK once you learn the quirks.

    I dunno -- there's an awful lot that's cumbersome about R and constantly does my head in. My pet bugbears:

    No native hash/dictionary construct (there is the third-party hash library, but that's not great for portability).
    It's not possible to define functions at the end of your code, making code difficult to read (or requiring you to source a separate script that contains your functions, but again, portability suffers).
    Variable scoping is ... odd (many people have written previously about R quirks in this regard)
    R is so sloooowwwww ...

    I still use R quite a bit and suffer through writing code for it because of the incredible power of the modules. But ... I kinda feel dirty every time :(

  6. Note how nobody has said how.

    Well, I imagine rm -rf libtelemetry.so would do the trick ... :)

    Seriously, though, it's pretty clear that Clear Linux is designed for server deploys, in situations where I'd guess the telemetry service might catch issues in order to make an admin's task easier. It's touted by Intel as a feature of the distro, after all, so they obviously think some people will find it useful. They also note that the telemetry service is open source, so I imagine you could vet the code if really wanted to.

    Would I want a telemetry service running on my linux box? Hell, no! But I'm also not the target market for this distro.

  7. Re:Wrong point to address. on Intel's Clear Linux Distribution Offers Fast Out-Of-The-Box Performance (phoronix.com) · · Score: 1

    That's what Canonical (Ubuntu) and a few others think, and it's wrong.

    At least Ubuntu is finally changing their stance on this, not before time. (All online search functions will be off by default in 16.04, the way they always should have been.)

  8. Additionally, randomly picking France or some other 'Western' country that is the size of Minnesota and has 1/8th the US population is simple cherry-picking. If you take all of Europe from Portugal to Moscow, which is far more equivalent to the size, population, and geographic disparities of the US, as well as income and education variations, the murder rates are far closer despite firearm ownership being so much less so as to be statistically none in comparison.

    I'm not sure you want to be using Russia as your benchmark of a civilized society. If you look at homicide rates in the OECD you'll see that the USA has a homicide rate three times or more higher than almost everyone else.

    Even if you believe this is solely a "people problem", do you not think there might be a danger in giving a naturally homicidal population free access to weapons that make homicide easy?

  9. Re:Free speech on Donald Trump: America Should Consider "Closing the Internet Up In Some Way" (dailydot.com) · · Score: 2, Insightful

    You cannot win a war of ideas with guns.

    Sure you can. You give both sides guns, set them against each other and see who the last person standing is. Their ideas are the ones that win.

    That's kinda what Trump is going for, right?

  10. Re:Looking forward to anything really great on Ask Slashdot: How Will You Be Programming In a Decade? (cheney.net) · · Score: 1

    It's wishful thinking, but I personally hope that in 10 years we're writing our "Hello World" with a stack that involves DNA and proteins, customized virii, phages and new-fangled bacteriocides. I'd love for clusters to be microscopic, not covering racks in a data center or virtualized/containerized. It's probably 20 years out not 10. but if I was fresh out of school I'd be hacking in Biotech, not just in tech.

    If that's your dream, I hope you're OK with the incredibly low baud speed of DNA-based systems. We're talking ~1-5kb per minute (based on RNA polymerase speeds) and whilst you might possibly tweak that up an order of magnitude you're not going to get much more. Bring in complex structures like phages, and it'll slow to a crawl; and you've got the added issue that a phage can only carry ~40 kb of data.

    Electrons are way, way faster.

  11. Re:Hopefully I'm done with Perl on Perl 6 Gets Beta Compiler, Modules and an Advent Calendar (thenewstack.io) · · Score: 2

    It's remarkable that two languages which are fairly semantically similar (you can do most of the same things in about the same way) have such converse philosophies: Perl has "There's More Than One Way to Do It" and Python has "There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it."

    Not that remarkable -- there's more than one way to think about code, after all :) I think most people will always fall into one camp or the other, and it's probably a good thing that the choice is available.

  12. Re:Calling out Perl detractors in a release? on Perl 6 Gets Beta Compiler, Modules and an Advent Calendar (thenewstack.io) · · Score: 1

    I recently got hired (july) and found out I was to learn perl to maintain their current infrastructure.

    I'm 25% done with rewriting the infrastructure - and should be free of perl and autoit by this time next year.

    Hang on ... you were hired to maintain code in a language you didn't know, and have responded by -- instead of learning the language and maintaining a mature code base -- by rewriting everything? And you're doing it all in Windows ...

    This all seems ... inefficient.

  13. Re:I've found the Perl 6 community to be dreadful. on Perl 6 Gets Beta Compiler, Modules and an Advent Calendar (thenewstack.io) · · Score: 1

    I gave up on Perl around version 4 but still dabbled with it...and then version 5 came out, and my response was a resounding, "Hell no!"

    I watched perl go from a very cool, somewhat terse language to a complete clusterfuck of unimaginable proportions. When carp started crashing in response to a bad bug I realized that perl was only going to cause me more heartaches, headaches, and wasted hours of trying to track the problem to the offending line.

    I think you must have had a couple of unusually bad experiences very early on. Perl 5 is in my experience (and god knows how many lines of Perl code I've written by now) a very mature and stable language. I can't recall an experience in which an error wasn't simple and straightforward to debug thanks to a clear error message pointing me to the exact issue in the code.

  14. Re:Calling out Perl detractors in a release? on Perl 6 Gets Beta Compiler, Modules and an Advent Calendar (thenewstack.io) · · Score: 1

    That's always a sign of a healthy and thriving development language.

    Could you point me to exactly where detractors are "called out" in the release? I can see no reference to detractors, or indeed any external commentary -- good or bad -- in the release announcement.

  15. Re: Hate emojis ... on The Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year 2015 Is an Emoji (oxforddictionaries.com) · · Score: 1

    So, I guess the Chinese and Japanese have been wrong all this time, then?

    Actually, yes. The amount of time wasted learning Kanji in Japanese schooling is nuts, IMO. And the affect on literacy is similarly appalling -- you can't even read a newspaper without completing secondary school, because of the need to memorise all those characters.

    I'm a big fan of Japan switching over completely to hiragana. One simple phonetic alphabet for everything, anyone with a couple of years of primary school ed. can read, what's not to like? Kanji is seriously holding Japan back.

    Just my two yen.

  16. Re:Hate emojis ... on The Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year 2015 Is an Emoji (oxforddictionaries.com) · · Score: 1

    Android has come with emojis as a system resource since 4.1

    My phone has been stuck on 4.0.4 for years and will be stuck there forever, you insensitive so-and-so. Android - ya want a new windshield wiper, ya gotta buy a new model car.

    http://forum.xda-developers.co...

    Fixed that for you. Android -- ya want a new windshield wiper, ya gotta install it yourself. But at least it's open and free.

  17. Re:Hate emojis ... on The Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year 2015 Is an Emoji (oxforddictionaries.com) · · Score: 1

    The vast majority of this crap is just enabling third parties to track your fucking email and texts as everyone has to download the stupid things.

    Android has come with emojis as a system resource since 4.1 (and I assume iOS has had them built-in for similarly as long). You don't download them (and certainly not each time ... that would be incredibly weird). You can be reassured that no bandwidth has been wasted by the world (at least, not as far as emojis are concerned). (And using them as trackers? Seriously? Most apps easily have the permissions to track their users without ever having to resort to emoji-based methods, even if emoji-tracking was even possible ...)

    That said, I think that emojis are ugly, stupid and are dumbing down communication. The OED has lost any remaining credibility if it's adding emoji as words (god help us all), and it can get off my lawn.

  18. Re:Exclude hosts from Windows Defender on Snowden Says It's Your Duty To Use an Ad Blocker (for Security) · · Score: 1

    Finally, iOS and Android don't even let the user edit the file at all unless the user wipes and roots the device and voids its warranty.

    You say that like it's a bad thing ...

    I'd be interested to know if you have any stats on the actual performance hit of using a large hosts file. Personally, I find it an excellent way to block ads (and other odious sites) at the source. It's not my only adblocker, but it's a damn effective one (and there are good online sources for up-to-date lists that you can periodically update from).

  19. Re:Let's just skip right to 1984 on UK PM Wants To Speed Up Controversial Internet Bill After Paris Attacks (thestack.com) · · Score: 1

    Unfortunately, Labour is even more in favour of a police state. Only the Liberal Democrats seem somewhate more reasonable.

    Do you mean Labour under Corbyn?? Corbyn's been strongly against any form of police state in his comments to date. I suggest you take a look at

    http://jeremycorbyn.org.uk/cat...

  20. No kidding on Averaging Inanimate Objects Together Produces a Very Human Face · · Score: 4, Insightful

    You'd think this might say more about the algorithm than the images themselves, but when noise was used, no human face emerged at all.

    Wait, so, when images that looked more like faces were used, the average looked more like a human face? Just crazy.

    It's cute, but I'm not sure it's particularly profound.

  21. Also, I disabled Chrome.

    Uh, yes, but it doesn't work that way. I'm pretty sure that Dolphin uses webview to display webpages on android (I think almost every browser except Firefox and Opera do -- most 3rd party browsers just write a simple GUI wrapper for webview) ... and all versions of Android starting from KitKat include the v8 javascript engine as part of webview:

    https://developer.chrome.com/m...

    More concerningly, if you're using KitKat, webview won't be updated without a system update (it got moved to an APK in lollipop). So that exploit is probably good forever ... :( (For lollipop and above I'd assume that the exploit will get fixed in webview the same time as it gets fixed in chrome.)

  22. Re:What Android user doesn't? on Chrome V8 JavaScript Exploit Leaves All Android Devices Ripe For Attack (hothardware.com) · · Score: 1

    I'm slightly surprised at that, as last time I looked a lot of Android users were still on 2.x, which ships with Android Browser, not Chrome.

    I suspect you haven't looked for a little while. Google's dashboards suggest that only 4% of users are still on 2.x (poor things!):

    http://developer.android.com/a...

    You also probably need to combine the counts of "Chrome for Android" and "Chrome" in those stats the parent posted to get the total chrome market share for Android.

  23. Re:Windows 10 Spyware on Mozilla Has 'No Plans' To Offer Firefox Without Pocket (venturebeat.com) · · Score: 1

    As for the Coward that posted a link to Debian? Sorry but I don't support an OS that goes against its own charter to force shit down its users throats, if I wanted that shit I'd take Windows 10.

    ???? You're going to need to explain that one. Are you referring to the adoption of systemd? (That seems a very long way from Microsoft's current actions with Windows 10, but hey, maybe you hate linux but have a soft spot for sysvinit ...)

    Thanks for the link to Pale Moon, though. Looks good!

  24. Re: color_xterm on Ask Slashdot: What Terminal Emulator Do You Use? · · Score: 1

    *shrug* ... I have 8192 lines of scroll back and generally more than 10 terminals open at once, and I really can't say I get anywhere near a gig of ram usage. Even if I did, what's a gig these days? It's a bit pathetic that a few terminals take up so much, but I'm not going to lose sleep over it except when I need every last drop of memory (which is thankfully rare).

    But thanks for the oblique link to ROXterm from your spreadsheet -- that's the first terminal I've found that does side tabs! Amazing ...!!

  25. Re:But the real question is.. on SteamOS Gaming Performance Lags Well Behind Windows (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 1

    Windows is free nowadays.

    Only free as in beer, though ...