I did something somewhat similar in Nicaragua in 2001. Built a SUSE 7.1 machine that had previously been running Win95. I had one hell of a time of it, too. Good memories. I wrote about it at http://therandymon.com/content/view/68/98/
Annoyingly, even poorer countries are increasingly uninterested in repurposing old machines these days. They want donors to provide - through NGO projects, etc. - new hardware running whatever is the latest. Not an easy sell.
Several exist. On Linux check out Curn (a java app with no GUI) or Rawdog (a Python app, I think; maybe PHP). I use both and like them. Rawdog produces my personal feed at http://www.therandymon.com/rawdogger.html and I can access it from any device on any OS. I stayed with the stock CSS, but you can customize it any way you like. Have fun!
There are a lot of developers that provide a "free" app whose revenue comes from allowing advertisements to appear somewhere on the screen. Assuming these adblockers would also block those ads, anyone using them would be cutting the revenue of those kind devs who released their apps for free. And if that's the case, then I think what Google is doing is justifiable.
This hypothesis was made on the basis of zero research and two cups of coffee:)
I can understand the disappointment, but why do so many nerds feel like they're absolutely screwed as a result? There are a huge number of alternatives. Any iOS or Android device has more RSS-reader apps than you can shake a stick at (I use RSSDemon and like it). Firefox has their "live bookmarks," the Opera browser handles RSS feeds expertly, Linux users have akregator and a couple of others. If you're a nerd with a website, install rawdog and create your own reader (I made one at http://www.therandymon.com/rawdogger.html with the feeds I like to read) or try something like CURN (http://therandymon.com/content/view/188/98/, a small java app you can run on your own machine and that can either create an HTML feed for you or email the results anywhere you want them.
I love RSS and use it extensively, on many platforms. I never quite got Google Reader but for me it wasn't as good as a dedicated app. The fact that GoogleReader is going down the tubes doesn't mean the end of civilization, people: there are a lot of alternatives. Maybe nothing quite the same (yet!) but soon. And anyway, if it was so good, there's a niche open now for an enterprising geek to whip up something similar and make some money. Hopefully that geek will create something that doesn't include all that social-networky horsecrap.
Looks like this CEO just admitted to the world he's poorly informed, prone to making important decisions on shockingly little research, and somewhat ignorant to boot.
Semi-serious. I think Slashdot's got one of the best content/comment/moderation systems around - certainly better than Reddit, way better than the ashes of Digg, and more useful than Usenet.
Build a FOSS database with whatever improvements you design, as the underpinnings for a new Slashdot not owned by some mega-corporation intent on shoveling crap articles at us, like "how to get employed by RedHat" or video interviews about random horse crap?
Great - copy/paste fail. That's a link to the Swedish journalist picture of Syria that got a prize. Here's the link for SSHGuard for the Google impaired.
I'll probably have to go learn about key-based security. But meanwhile, I'm really happy with sshguard. It defends against brute force attacks by monitoring logs and aplying increasingly (exponentially) tougher time-outs as attacks from IP addresses continue. It's reduced my log from 100s of entries per day to about 15. http://www.rferl.org/content/world-press-photo-winners/24903576.html
They've got it in FreeBSD ports, which makes it easy to install into an existing firewall.
Wow, this sucks. But I'm not happy with OSNews either. I don't know what EMC looks for when hiring. But I know what I'm looking for: a new tech site.
Anybody want to help me build the new slashdot? I'm serious. Contact me at the address listed in my website. I don't think we need huge corporate sponsorship, we just need a bunch of interested nerd who value good comments and interesting articles.
I'm not usually a vocabulary Nazi, but this time the title is way off. It's not a paradox (seemingly contradictory phenomena without rational explanation).
The word is HYPOCRISY. And Assange is the biggest hypocrite to walk the face of the earth in the 21st century. This isn't some unexplainable phenomenon. It's simply Assange roundly failing to practice what he preaches, the self-indulgent douche bag.
The horse crap in this one is so deep I can barely see the light. Does anybody else remember that paper on sociology that turned out to be a joke composed of mostly made-up words, but the sociology community accepted it and praised it in some journal? It was the Sokal Affair (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair) and the article was "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," an article that sounds about as interesting as this one.
I wouldn't count on it. Remember that at lunch and during breaks is when the kids will be hoping to use their Chromebooks to update their Twitter feed, check out Facebook, and Google for porn.
You thought they'd put away the Chromebooks and sit nicely at the table to eat their sandwiches while studying their geometry lessons?
I'd otherwise have agreed with you, but I'm starting to see change. A guy I know who works for the US government (probably the organization you'd expect to leap on board new tech trends *last*) reports his new CIO is aggressively investigating Google products, google hosted email, and so on.
If that's true, there's hope. Face it: Microsoft was a real innovator in the early 90s. Maybe even the late 90s. And for a while there, Microsoft software was useful in ways other software was not.
That age ended long ago, and increasingly Microsoft finds itself struggling to catch up. They have no mojo with the "young" generation, and since Windows/Office has produced no software worth writing home about. Google now has enough brand name recognition even the most easily scared/reticent CIOs can suggest Google products without fear of getting "the blank stare."
Good times for everyone. Bad times for Ballmer (who should've gotten his ass thrown out the Microsoft door - or is it a window - many, many years ago). That guy is sinking the Microsoft ship.
This interests me. I've got an old/regular ironkey and like it. But I'm intentionally going to not click on the single most blatant slashvertisement I've ever seen on this site.
Christ, every time Slashdot gets sold it gets worse.
a) This isn't really 'hacking.' I find some of the stuff they do o HackaDay way more interesting than this. There, they're combining existing tools and systems in ways never before envisioned. There's real creativity there. This guy is basically doing something that's been done a lot already (every Xmas, in some towns) but on a much larger scale. Boring!
b) As an engineer, if you're debugging in front of millions of people, you F'ed up! You design your system, prototype it, test it, scale it, then build it. If you're debugging on "go day," you are a colossal failure.
c) How the hell did people decide to chip in millions of dollars for this stunt? Sure, it will look cool. But aren't there more interesting/clever uses for that kind of funding? Oh well, that's America.
Finally, I'm thinking this would be WAY more interesting if someone truly cracks into the guy's software, and on "go day," instead of the image of flags waving in the breeze, the image projected is something unspeakably horrifying.
I'll dislike them less when they start making better software. I've disliked them for 3 reasons:
1. sucky business practice, monopoly abuser 2. crappy software 3. bundling/linking of crappy software
They've only really worked on #1, and even there, not intentionally. They'd do the same if the market permitted them, but now that their reputation, brand appreciation, and "mojo" are sunk, they have less of a monopoly to abuse. The other two points remain.
Funny I should read this article just before ssh'ing into a server to write a little clean-up script. Guess what I used? Perl.
It might be fading, there may be newer languages doing more magnificent things. But today Perl is all I needed to do what I needed to do, and that script will now run nightly until the server falls into the sun... so goodbye and thanks for all the fish.
Anybody who uses these powerful and complex applications. Both apps are capable of highly complicated things, and somewhere out there are talented people who know how to do them. I'm not one of them, but I'm getting there. From custom syntax highlighting to macros, scripts, and more (hell, you can use emacs to read email and/or Usenet, etc.).
As for you, you can keep using whatever other software you like.
I'll let the "forking android" conversation run its course. From the point of a casual tablet user, this is progress. There are lots of times it's a hassle to have some info in one app, and some in another, and only be permitted to have one open at a time. This may be confusing or cause the world to stop spinning or whatever, but to me it's useful.
Man, I totally agree with you. I've used Kmail since KDE2 and despite its flaws, I generally liked it better than the alternatives (and I've tried many). It's always annoyed me that while there are several GTK email clients, the KDE desktop really only has kmail, and they royally screwed the pooch with all this akonadi crap.
I just discovered an alternative. It's like watching a star form in the distance out of clouds and ether. It's Trojita (http://trojita.flaska.net/screenshots.html) and it's written by some Czech, mostly by himself. Now the project is picking up steam and is being folded into KDE.
It's still basic - no address book, and a lot of other stuff missing. But it doesn't require Akonadi or Nepomuk or any of that other stuff, and it is damned fast. Give it a look. I'm having fun experimenting with it and i'd be tempted to kick in some money if it helps the project advance in a way that makes sense.
Dedoimedo would also be more useful if his reviews were more constructive and less hyperbolic. His stuff is funny and fun to read, but it's offensive to developers and not that helpful.
There's much to be said about well-formed criticism, and very few know how to do it well. Certainly not Dedoimedo (thanks for the laughs anyway, buddy).
I theory, I agree that it's useful to submit a patch rather than complaining. But it seems a big part of his complaint comes from the fact that F18 and the installer are now based on Gnome3, which is dislikes.
It's impossible to write a "patch" that removes Gnome3 and replaces it with something else. It's called "deleting and installing Mint instead" etc. and a lot of people are doing it.
Me, I'm still a big fan of KDE3, back when developers assumed users were smart nerds instead of cretinous apes with only one finger on each hand... I love Windowmaker too, and the more the "modern" GUIs go off the deep end, the more I cling to the old ones.
You forgot a big one (although your list is great and somewhat frightening). Use their Google DNS server and they have access to every site you browse to in the course of the day. Another one: give them access to your calendar and to-do list and they can do even more fine-grained profiling of what ads to show you that may be more closely aligned with your shopping habits.
It scares me, and I own a Google Nexus 7 tablet, which I love. I'm trying to mitigate the risk by surfing the web with Opera, searching using DuckDuckGo, storing my email at Fastmail.fm, my calendar at Fruux.com, and my to-do list on toodledo.
But it shouldn't be so damned hard. I'm sick of monetizing crap and all the frenzy around advertizements. I almost miss the days of Usenet, text web browsers, and dial up. The user was still winning back in those days.
Slashdot Mirror
I did something somewhat similar in Nicaragua in 2001. Built a SUSE 7.1 machine that had previously been running Win95. I had one hell of a time of it, too. Good memories. I wrote about it at http://therandymon.com/content/view/68/98/
Annoyingly, even poorer countries are increasingly uninterested in repurposing old machines these days. They want donors to provide - through NGO projects, etc. - new hardware running whatever is the latest. Not an easy sell.
Several exist. On Linux check out Curn (a java app with no GUI) or Rawdog (a Python app, I think; maybe PHP). I use both and like them. Rawdog produces my personal feed at http://www.therandymon.com/rawdogger.html and I can access it from any device on any OS. I stayed with the stock CSS, but you can customize it any way you like. Have fun!
There are a lot of developers that provide a "free" app whose revenue comes from allowing advertisements to appear somewhere on the screen. Assuming these adblockers would also block those ads, anyone using them would be cutting the revenue of those kind devs who released their apps for free. And if that's the case, then I think what Google is doing is justifiable.
This hypothesis was made on the basis of zero research and two cups of coffee :)
I can understand the disappointment, but why do so many nerds feel like they're absolutely screwed as a result? There are a huge number of alternatives. Any iOS or Android device has more RSS-reader apps than you can shake a stick at (I use RSSDemon and like it). Firefox has their "live bookmarks," the Opera browser handles RSS feeds expertly, Linux users have akregator and a couple of others. If you're a nerd with a website, install rawdog and create your own reader (I made one at http://www.therandymon.com/rawdogger.html with the feeds I like to read) or try something like CURN (http://therandymon.com/content/view/188/98/, a small java app you can run on your own machine and that can either create an HTML feed for you or email the results anywhere you want them.
I love RSS and use it extensively, on many platforms. I never quite got Google Reader but for me it wasn't as good as a dedicated app. The fact that GoogleReader is going down the tubes doesn't mean the end of civilization, people: there are a lot of alternatives. Maybe nothing quite the same (yet!) but soon. And anyway, if it was so good, there's a niche open now for an enterprising geek to whip up something similar and make some money. Hopefully that geek will create something that doesn't include all that social-networky horsecrap.
Looks like this CEO just admitted to the world he's poorly informed, prone to making important decisions on shockingly little research, and somewhat ignorant to boot.
This is his problem, not ours.
Semi-serious. I think Slashdot's got one of the best content/comment/moderation systems around - certainly better than Reddit, way better than the ashes of Digg, and more useful than Usenet.
Build a FOSS database with whatever improvements you design, as the underpinnings for a new Slashdot not owned by some mega-corporation intent on shoveling crap articles at us, like "how to get employed by RedHat" or video interviews about random horse crap?
Great - copy/paste fail. That's a link to the Swedish journalist picture of Syria that got a prize. Here's the link for SSHGuard for the Google impaired.
http://www.sshguard.net/
Glad copy/paste fail didn't betray any other links I've hit while surfing-the-net-and-drinking-whiskey simultaneously.
I'll probably have to go learn about key-based security. But meanwhile, I'm really happy with sshguard. It defends against brute force attacks by monitoring logs and aplying increasingly (exponentially) tougher time-outs as attacks from IP addresses continue. It's reduced my log from 100s of entries per day to about 15. http://www.rferl.org/content/world-press-photo-winners/24903576.html
They've got it in FreeBSD ports, which makes it easy to install into an existing firewall.
Wow, this sucks. But I'm not happy with OSNews either. I don't know what EMC looks for when hiring. But I know what I'm looking for: a new tech site.
Anybody want to help me build the new slashdot? I'm serious. Contact me at the address listed in my website. I don't think we need huge corporate sponsorship, we just need a bunch of interested nerd who value good comments and interesting articles.
Ready to fork this sucker?
I'm not usually a vocabulary Nazi, but this time the title is way off. It's not a paradox (seemingly contradictory phenomena without rational explanation).
The word is HYPOCRISY. And Assange is the biggest hypocrite to walk the face of the earth in the 21st century. This isn't some unexplainable phenomenon. It's simply Assange roundly failing to practice what he preaches, the self-indulgent douche bag.
The horse crap in this one is so deep I can barely see the light. Does anybody else remember that paper on sociology that turned out to be a joke composed of mostly made-up words, but the sociology community accepted it and praised it in some journal? It was the Sokal Affair (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair) and the article was "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," an article that sounds about as interesting as this one.
I wouldn't count on it. Remember that at lunch and during breaks is when the kids will be hoping to use their Chromebooks to update their Twitter feed, check out Facebook, and Google for porn.
You thought they'd put away the Chromebooks and sit nicely at the table to eat their sandwiches while studying their geometry lessons?
I'd otherwise have agreed with you, but I'm starting to see change. A guy I know who works for the US government (probably the organization you'd expect to leap on board new tech trends *last*) reports his new CIO is aggressively investigating Google products, google hosted email, and so on.
If that's true, there's hope. Face it: Microsoft was a real innovator in the early 90s. Maybe even the late 90s. And for a while there, Microsoft software was useful in ways other software was not.
That age ended long ago, and increasingly Microsoft finds itself struggling to catch up. They have no mojo with the "young" generation, and since Windows/Office has produced no software worth writing home about. Google now has enough brand name recognition even the most easily scared/reticent CIOs can suggest Google products without fear of getting "the blank stare."
Good times for everyone. Bad times for Ballmer (who should've gotten his ass thrown out the Microsoft door - or is it a window - many, many years ago). That guy is sinking the Microsoft ship.
This interests me. I've got an old/regular ironkey and like it. But I'm intentionally going to not click on the single most blatant slashvertisement I've ever seen on this site.
Christ, every time Slashdot gets sold it gets worse.
I dunno.
a) This isn't really 'hacking.' I find some of the stuff they do o HackaDay way more interesting than this. There, they're combining existing tools and systems in ways never before envisioned. There's real creativity there. This guy is basically doing something that's been done a lot already (every Xmas, in some towns) but on a much larger scale. Boring!
b) As an engineer, if you're debugging in front of millions of people, you F'ed up! You design your system, prototype it, test it, scale it, then build it. If you're debugging on "go day," you are a colossal failure.
c) How the hell did people decide to chip in millions of dollars for this stunt? Sure, it will look cool. But aren't there more interesting/clever uses for that kind of funding? Oh well, that's America.
Finally, I'm thinking this would be WAY more interesting if someone truly cracks into the guy's software, and on "go day," instead of the image of flags waving in the breeze, the image projected is something unspeakably horrifying.
I'll dislike them less when they start making better software. I've disliked them for 3 reasons:
1. sucky business practice, monopoly abuser
2. crappy software
3. bundling/linking of crappy software
They've only really worked on #1, and even there, not intentionally. They'd do the same if the market permitted them, but now that their reputation, brand appreciation, and "mojo" are sunk, they have less of a monopoly to abuse. The other two points remain.
Funny I should read this article just before ssh'ing into a server to write a little clean-up script. Guess what I used? Perl.
It might be fading, there may be newer languages doing more magnificent things. But today Perl is all I needed to do what I needed to do, and that script will now run nightly until the server falls into the sun ... so goodbye and thanks for all the fish.
Is this serious?
YES.
Is there a "vi community"?
YES.
Who the hell cares enough to even bother?
Anybody who uses these powerful and complex applications. Both apps are capable of highly complicated things, and somewhere out there are talented people who know how to do them. I'm not one of them, but I'm getting there. From custom syntax highlighting to macros, scripts, and more (hell, you can use emacs to read email and/or Usenet, etc.).
As for you, you can keep using whatever other software you like.
I'll let the "forking android" conversation run its course. From the point of a casual tablet user, this is progress. There are lots of times it's a hassle to have some info in one app, and some in another, and only be permitted to have one open at a time. This may be confusing or cause the world to stop spinning or whatever, but to me it's useful.
Man, I totally agree with you. I've used Kmail since KDE2 and despite its flaws, I generally liked it better than the alternatives (and I've tried many). It's always annoyed me that while there are several GTK email clients, the KDE desktop really only has kmail, and they royally screwed the pooch with all this akonadi crap.
I just discovered an alternative. It's like watching a star form in the distance out of clouds and ether. It's Trojita (http://trojita.flaska.net/screenshots.html) and it's written by some Czech, mostly by himself. Now the project is picking up steam and is being folded into KDE.
It's still basic - no address book, and a lot of other stuff missing. But it doesn't require Akonadi or Nepomuk or any of that other stuff, and it is damned fast. Give it a look. I'm having fun experimenting with it and i'd be tempted to kick in some money if it helps the project advance in a way that makes sense.
How did a poster who didn't read the article get "Insightful"?
Go read the article. You'll see screenshots of iOS 6.1 displaying weirdness, and a link to a Google Nexus 7 with issues too.
So no, this is not just some Windows 8 whiner. Here's the link again. Click it this time!
http://www.informationweek.com/byte/personal-tech/25-years-from-today-a-time-for-bugs/240146640
Dedoimedo would also be more useful if his reviews were more constructive and less hyperbolic. His stuff is funny and fun to read, but it's offensive to developers and not that helpful.
There's much to be said about well-formed criticism, and very few know how to do it well. Certainly not Dedoimedo (thanks for the laughs anyway, buddy).
I theory, I agree that it's useful to submit a patch rather than complaining. But it seems a big part of his complaint comes from the fact that F18 and the installer are now based on Gnome3, which is dislikes.
It's impossible to write a "patch" that removes Gnome3 and replaces it with something else. It's called "deleting and installing Mint instead" etc. and a lot of people are doing it.
Me, I'm still a big fan of KDE3, back when developers assumed users were smart nerds instead of cretinous apes with only one finger on each hand ... I love Windowmaker too, and the more the "modern" GUIs go off the deep end, the more I cling to the old ones.
If she seems a little tired, it's because she's spending afternoons while you're at work, gaming with me.
You forgot a big one (although your list is great and somewhat frightening). Use their Google DNS server and they have access to every site you browse to in the course of the day. Another one: give them access to your calendar and to-do list and they can do even more fine-grained profiling of what ads to show you that may be more closely aligned with your shopping habits.
It scares me, and I own a Google Nexus 7 tablet, which I love. I'm trying to mitigate the risk by surfing the web with Opera, searching using DuckDuckGo, storing my email at Fastmail.fm, my calendar at Fruux.com, and my to-do list on toodledo.
But it shouldn't be so damned hard. I'm sick of monetizing crap and all the frenzy around advertizements. I almost miss the days of Usenet, text web browsers, and dial up. The user was still winning back in those days.