Keep in mind that gnote is very, very young. It's come a long way in a short time. I don't think we have too long to wait before it hits feature parity with Tomboy.
1. Right click network icon in taskbar, select "Edit Connections" 2. Select your connection, click "Edit" 3. Select "IPV4" settings tab. Change the combo box from DHCP to manual, and enter your static IP info.
The end. All mouse-driven, all GUI, all easy. Adjust away.
OSS improves fast. Any idea of "how things are with the Linux desktop" are pretty much invalidated after a year. I've been able to do the above process more or less for at least 3 ubuntu releases now.
I hired some guy with a truck to drop me off out on those salt flats once, just for the hell of it. Incredible lightning shows kept me up most nights. Spectacular place. You could walk in any direction and feel like you weren't moving. It was utterly featureless, aside from the geometric pattern on the ground. I was pretty glad that the truck actually came back a couple of days later.
On one hand, I'd be sorry to hear that the flats were being mined. On the other, Bolivians need something like this; I hope their government acts wisely and on behalf of all of their people.
One two three, spread out the cape One two three, twirl round the floor One two three, left foot you swing One two three, then start to sing One two three, loud as you please One two three, counting with ease One two three, doing the batty bat!
Batty batty bat batty batty bat batty batty bat One two three count! Batty batty bat batty batty bat batty batty bat Dance with me doing the batty bat!
On one hand, if your manager has some technical knowledge, he's more likely to go to bat for you when upper management gets unreasonable with their demands. Ideally, he'd be able to understand the technical reasons for, say, a production delay - and translate that to management-ese for HIS boss. Having a manager who is hands-off enough to let you do your job, but still really interested in the workings of the things you're creating - heaven! Imagine a boss who sees in your work a particuliarly elegant solution to a problem, recognizes it for what it is, and commends you for it - without you having to explain it! These kinds of managers DO exist.
On the other hand, if you get a manager with an inflated opinion of his own (sparse) technical knowledge, you have a problem. This kind of guy ends up making long, irrelevent speeches in design meetings, imposing work methods that don't make sense for a project, and constantly second-guessing his subordinates' technical abilities. In the very worst cases, he will listen to an idea from you, give you ten reasons why your idea sucks, then quietly suggest it to everyone else in the office to make himself look good. Then, while you're off on vacation, he'll make a Grand Announcement that turns your suggestion into Policy, and when you get back everyone will be talking about how brilliant your boss is. It's threat management - you were a threat, he managed you! Sure bosses are allowed to do this, but it's a grand way of destroying employee relations.
Managers don't have to know everything, but they should have an in-depth understanding of the work their employees do. They need to acknowledge the limits of their practical technical abilities and defer to their employees when they are unsure. On the flip side, employees really need to respect managerial efforts to assist them on the technical side.
If your manager doesn't "get it", it's your responsibility to help him understand, and his responsibility to listen. Just keep in mind that your manager might actually be right!
All three apps you mention are hardly shining examples of why anyone should take the risk and code with mono.
Never said they were or held them up as such, and I wouldn't encourage anyone to build a product with Mono.
They are examples of popular applications that have been accepted by distros as best-of-breed, and in the case of Tomboy included as part of the GNOME Desktop.
My point is that it's a slippery slope. If developers can rely on Mono being present in GNOME or being distributed with a distro, they'll write more apps in Mono - particuliarly if they're familiar with C# and are coming from a Windows environment. What happens a few years down the road when Microsoft grabs the patent rug under our feet and gives it a yank?
It's gotta be (at least partially) about Mono. Novell's legal folks were doing a major patent review on it last I heard. I guess the "It'll all be okay! Trust us!" approach to handling potential legal action from Microsoft ended up not holding water with the sharks.
It's bad enough that Tomboy is in GNOME and F-Spot (Novell again) is so damned nice. Users are already demanding these applications, because the alternatives suck. Developers love C# 'cause it's so nice to build with. The first few hits are free.
The whole Mono patent issue really strikes me as a Novell play for market share - they work a deal with Microsoft, write gorgeous apps in C# that everyone wants, encourage competing distros to integrate those apps, then laugh as Microsoft takes out their competition in court. Or something. IANAL, obviously. Hopefully I'm just being paranoid.
I like having two buttons on my touchpad. I like my Thinkpad-style pointing stick. I like my smartcard reader. I like my fingerprint reader. I *really* like my docking station. Being able to swap my DVD writer out for a second battery on long flights is awesome. There's in-hardware theft tracking too. Oh, and I have an ambient-light sensor to automatically adjust screen brightness, just like the Mac. No glowing keyboard, but I tend to work in well-lit rooms.
Current-generation Dell laptops have a slick, understated aesthetic. They don't scream LOOK AT ME I AM MISUNDERSTOOD BUT SECRETLY BRILLIANT AND SEXY AND OWN AN IPOD AND LIKE EMO JUST LIKE EVERYONE ELSE, but they are really nice. There's no flashing-blue-light-overload (I'm looking at you, HP), no shiny scratch-magnet surfaces, and no glowing corporate logo on the hood.
A judicious use of the sugar cube technique to remove the extra logos would make Dell hardware a good choice for people who don't identify with meaningless, corporate, glowing-fruit branding.
"A google for "cookie exploits", "cookie migration" and even a browse of IE "domain" bugs shows this to be true."
I was speaking of the way cookies are meant to function, as per RFC 2109, 'HTTP State Management Mechanism'. Buggy clients 'historically' get fixed (slowly, if they were written by Microsoft). The only cross-client behaviours developers can count on are those set forth in the RFC.
"Really? Some years ago I noticed that the FriendsReunited.co.uk website set a cookie after I'd logged in, along the lines of "confirmeduser=23959".
What happened if I modified the cookie? Yep, you guessed it... ability to modify somebody elses details."
I submit that any web developer stupid enough to handle authentication in that way needs to do a lot more than be a little more careful. Whoever wrote that site did not understand their own medium. Rule number one - treat any data from the client as tainted. Session cookies should never contain references to 'real' account numbers, and should usually be hashed with something unique to a particular client, like an IP address. It's pretty straightforward to defeat session hijacking for all practical purposes, if you know what you're doing.
"If the medium is stateless there is no solution. You mean 'as a lazy developer, cookies work most of the time'?"
Oh, come on, no need to be uncivil - of course there are solutions to maintaining state during a session. Cookies can store session IDs, URLs can have them attached... If you don't like either of those methods, there's always clock skew analysis or dynamic vhosts.
"I'm guessing you claim cookies to be 'good' because your development environment/web-server is not configured to allow anything else? Why not just append a '&sessionid=[big binary data]' to all your page links? I'm guessing that, despite being a 'web developer' you are not given the ability to do so"
You guessed wrong, and your inadequacies are showing:) Flaming egos damage credibility - but thanks for the laugh, anyway.
I think you make some really interesting points. From one aspect, you are tracking users by depositing information on their computer. While you claim this information could not be used to identify them elsewhere, it's certainly a concern with less careful web developers at the cookie helm.
Cookies cannot be accessed by sites that did not put them there in the first place. The carefulness of web developers has nothing to do with anything.
Advertising companies that embed ads in the web pages you surf can read values from a cookie that they set, and they can do this on any page that embeds their ads. It's the same thing as hitting the advertising company's web site whenever you see an ad - of course they can set and read that cookie, and all they're storing is an id number and some frequency cap values (if you block cookies, it might be assumed you haven't seen a popup - so you see more popups!)
As a web developer, I know that cookies are a good solution to the problem of maintaining state in a stateless medium. It's too bad that they've garnered so much attention as a tool of unscrupulous advertisers - it's hard to write a decent web application without them. The paranoia surrounding cookies is largely unfounded.
There *are* other methods of tracking session IDs, though, and the smart advertising companies are using them.
Yeah. In GNOME I can 'mount' remote sftp (ssh) locations just like any other drive. This kind of thing seems to be a pretty standard feature in modern Linux desktop environments.
Basically, each requirement must be accompanied by a plain english, non-technical statement of the criteria that, once verifiably met, indicates fulfillment of the requirement.
Requirement: "Web interface for sales staff to assemble reports."
Acceptance criteria: "A member of the sales staff can browse to an internal web site and assemble reports using data sources X, Y, and Z."
When a customer has signed off on a proper requirements document that includes acceptance criteria, they agree to accept easily verifiable X as proof that requirement Y was met - they can't change their mind without admitting it anymore.
We don't hate Americans. Far from it.
We hate bigoted, ultra-nationalist, Fox-News-Is-Fair-And-Balanced, With-Us-Or-Against-Us, Social-Programs-Are-For-Commies, Canada-Doesn't-Matter-Because-They-Don't-Do-What-W e-Say embarrassments to humanity like yourself.
Real, upstanding, proud citizens of the USA who carry themselves with humility, share their many gifts with their neighbours, and accept our many differences with grace are much loved here. I mean, we're family, right? I wouldn't discard my brother because he doesn't agree with me. In most places I've visited in the States, the people are great.
Yes, you're powerful. Yes, you could roll up here one night and take us out. But you aren't our judge, just as we aren't yours. When you speak about your neighbours in the future, do so with the respect most of us would still give you.
I am running GNOME 2.10. It is not bloated. My system has a pretty standard 512MB of RAM, and it NEVER SWAPS. My girlfriend uses GNOME 2.10 on a Pentium II 400 with 128MB of RAM. It's actually fairly snappy on there, even running Firefox and Evolution. She loves it - there was such a difference in performance compared to her old fragmented Windows installation, she thought I upgraded her hardware.
KDE people say GNOME is bloated and ugly. GNOME people say the same about KDE. Baaah! Baaaaaaah! Sheep are you all! The Bloat argument is hereby CANCELLED OUT, and I never want to hear it again. There's this saying some famous guy said about checking for logs in your own eye before pointing out a mote in some other guy's eye.
For once I'd love to see a rational feature-by-feature, project-goal-by-project-goal discussion between the two sides. There seems to be a huge chasm between the KDE and GNOME camps, and it's just not helpful. Pretty scary, actually - we all have a lot of ground to cover and there is no room for this kind of crap.
It's not in either party's interest for the other to fail; the laughter of Microsoft would be our only reward. I'll happily cheer KDE on just as readily as I'll root for GNOME.
We evolved a lifecycle that fit our company and our needs. You're free to do the same, and that's what I would recommend to anyone who is serious about writing software.
Just don't discount the value of _having_ a lifecycle. I never said there was One True Way, I just presented our shop's journey as an example.
If it sounds like we're in chains, you're dead wrong. We've never had more freedom. The hard part is deciding you're actually willing to do what is necessary to get it when you work in an environment that needs, but does not understand, software development.
That's EXACTLY it. At our shop, we got sick of being blamed for "taking too long on projects" - so we got together, got up to speed on Personal Software Process and Team Software Process, and started a development lifecycle and process improvement team.
There are a number of interesting benefits to this. The best one so far is that we maintain a 'responsibility trace' right from individual stakeholders in Management, to each requirement, to each design element... we can actually tell who in management has a stake in a particuliar _block of code_.
The other neat thing is, the execs can make changes all they want. We really don't care. Because we're on a fixed 3-week development cycle (all the way through the cycle each 3 weeks, culminating in a release) we can either say "sure, we'll do that in the next build" or "scratch the current cycle and we'll do that now". In the latter case, we only lose a maximum of 3 weeks work. Not bad at all, and if management complains, well, we can show them WHY we lost 3 weeks. They shut up pretty quick.
Unfortunately, convincing management that the paperwork we end up doing to improve and maintain our process is a Good Thing, is difficult. If we aren't coding, we must not be working, right? Wrong. Now we have nice graphs showing number of defects in our software falling through the floor, time spent fixing defects falling through the floor, developer productivity skyrocketing... It's fantastic.
Bottom line: Management in some places doesn't WANT responsibility. They want to hand down directives from above, and we are the magical little gnomes who make their projects at 1/4 their salary, if we're lucky. If they go sour on a gnome for whatever reason, they want to be able to fire with impunity. Process is the way to make them eat their own crap whether they like it or not. They WILL end up liking it, and you get your life back.
Gentoo has always allowed you to downgrade packages to any previous version. The revdep-rebuild script will even attempt to fix any broken dynamic linkage that might result.
emerge =packagename-old.version && revdep-rebuild
will do the trick, and then you'll need to edit
/etc/portage/package.mask
to mask versions newer than the old one you installed.
I bet you're having fun with BSD if you missed such an obvious feature of Portage:D
Slashdot Mirror
If we are talking about replacing tomboy with gnote, we need to have some data migration that is more automatic that 'open terminal, cp .tomboy .gnote'.
Your wish is granted: See the Gnote developer's blog.
Keep in mind that gnote is very, very young. It's come a long way in a short time. I don't think we have too long to wait before it hits feature parity with Tomboy.
Yet another search engine?
Redundant. Redundant.
I don't want to be nuked. Why is the USA allowed to have nukes?
Grandparent made a good point. The US is pretty hypocritical. "WE HAVE NUKES, BUT THEY ARE NOT FOR YOU!"
"...an imaginary evil, crabby, and mischievous creature described as a grotesquely disfigured or gnome-like phantom..."
What is it with you KDE fanbois and your personal attacks? We likes our desktop clean, simple, and brown.
We also likes fisshesss, yes we does.
Ubuntu:
1. Right click network icon in taskbar, select "Edit Connections"
2. Select your connection, click "Edit"
3. Select "IPV4" settings tab. Change the combo box from DHCP to manual, and enter your static IP info.
The end. All mouse-driven, all GUI, all easy. Adjust away.
OSS improves fast. Any idea of "how things are with the Linux desktop" are pretty much invalidated after a year. I've been able to do the above process more or less for at least 3 ubuntu releases now.
I hired some guy with a truck to drop me off out on those salt flats once, just for the hell of it. Incredible lightning shows kept me up most nights. Spectacular place. You could walk in any direction and feel like you weren't moving. It was utterly featureless, aside from the geometric pattern on the ground. I was pretty glad that the truck actually came back a couple of days later.
On one hand, I'd be sorry to hear that the flats were being mined. On the other, Bolivians need something like this; I hope their government acts wisely and on behalf of all of their people.
I'll be watching these events with interest.
One two three, spread out the cape
One two three, twirl round the floor
One two three, left foot you swing
One two three, then start to sing
One two three, loud as you please
One two three, counting with ease
One two three, doing the batty bat!
Batty batty bat batty batty bat batty batty bat
One two three count!
Batty batty bat batty batty bat batty batty bat
Dance with me doing the batty bat!
Ah ah ah!
This can really go two ways.
On one hand, if your manager has some technical knowledge, he's more likely to go to bat for you when upper management gets unreasonable with their demands. Ideally, he'd be able to understand the technical reasons for, say, a production delay - and translate that to management-ese for HIS boss. Having a manager who is hands-off enough to let you do your job, but still really interested in the workings of the things you're creating - heaven! Imagine a boss who sees in your work a particuliarly elegant solution to a problem, recognizes it for what it is, and commends you for it - without you having to explain it! These kinds of managers DO exist.
On the other hand, if you get a manager with an inflated opinion of his own (sparse) technical knowledge, you have a problem. This kind of guy ends up making long, irrelevent speeches in design meetings, imposing work methods that don't make sense for a project, and constantly second-guessing his subordinates' technical abilities. In the very worst cases, he will listen to an idea from you, give you ten reasons why your idea sucks, then quietly suggest it to everyone else in the office to make himself look good. Then, while you're off on vacation, he'll make a Grand Announcement that turns your suggestion into Policy, and when you get back everyone will be talking about how brilliant your boss is. It's threat management - you were a threat, he managed you! Sure bosses are allowed to do this, but it's a grand way of destroying employee relations.
Managers don't have to know everything, but they should have an in-depth understanding of the work their employees do. They need to acknowledge the limits of their practical technical abilities and defer to their employees when they are unsure. On the flip side, employees really need to respect managerial efforts to assist them on the technical side.
If your manager doesn't "get it", it's your responsibility to help him understand, and his responsibility to listen. Just keep in mind that your manager might actually be right!
Never said they were or held them up as such, and I wouldn't encourage anyone to build a product with Mono.
They are examples of popular applications that have been accepted by distros as best-of-breed, and in the case of Tomboy included as part of the GNOME Desktop.
My point is that it's a slippery slope. If developers can rely on Mono being present in GNOME or being distributed with a distro, they'll write more apps in Mono - particuliarly if they're familiar with C# and are coming from a Windows environment. What happens a few years down the road when Microsoft grabs the patent rug under our feet and gives it a yank?
Read Seth Nickell's thoughts on the issue, particuliarly the section entitled "The Horror Story". It's happening.
It's bad enough that Tomboy is in GNOME and F-Spot (Novell again) is so damned nice. Users are already demanding these applications, because the alternatives suck. Developers love C# 'cause it's so nice to build with. The first few hits are free.
The whole Mono patent issue really strikes me as a Novell play for market share - they work a deal with Microsoft, write gorgeous apps in C# that everyone wants, encourage competing distros to integrate those apps, then laugh as Microsoft takes out their competition in court. Or something. IANAL, obviously. Hopefully I'm just being paranoid.
I like having two buttons on my touchpad. I like my Thinkpad-style pointing stick. I like my smartcard reader. I like my fingerprint reader. I *really* like my docking station. Being able to swap my DVD writer out for a second battery on long flights is awesome. There's in-hardware theft tracking too. Oh, and I have an ambient-light sensor to automatically adjust screen brightness, just like the Mac. No glowing keyboard, but I tend to work in well-lit rooms.
Current-generation Dell laptops have a slick, understated aesthetic. They don't scream LOOK AT ME I AM MISUNDERSTOOD BUT SECRETLY BRILLIANT AND SEXY AND OWN AN IPOD AND LIKE EMO JUST LIKE EVERYONE ELSE, but they are really nice. There's no flashing-blue-light-overload (I'm looking at you, HP), no shiny scratch-magnet surfaces, and no glowing corporate logo on the hood.
A judicious use of the sugar cube technique to remove the extra logos would make Dell hardware a good choice for people who don't identify with meaningless, corporate, glowing-fruit branding.
Just add some softcore wallpaper to that styling brown case... Brilliant!
That is the funniest thing I've read on Slashdot in weeks.
"A google for "cookie exploits", "cookie migration" and even a browse of IE "domain" bugs shows this to be true."
I was speaking of the way cookies are meant to function, as per RFC 2109, 'HTTP State Management Mechanism'. Buggy clients 'historically' get fixed (slowly, if they were written by Microsoft). The only cross-client behaviours developers can count on are those set forth in the RFC.
"Really? Some years ago I noticed that the FriendsReunited.co.uk website set a cookie after I'd logged in, along the lines of "confirmeduser=23959". What happened if I modified the cookie? Yep, you guessed it... ability to modify somebody elses details."
I submit that any web developer stupid enough to handle authentication in that way needs to do a lot more than be a little more careful. Whoever wrote that site did not understand their own medium. Rule number one - treat any data from the client as tainted. Session cookies should never contain references to 'real' account numbers, and should usually be hashed with something unique to a particular client, like an IP address. It's pretty straightforward to defeat session hijacking for all practical purposes, if you know what you're doing.
"If the medium is stateless there is no solution. You mean 'as a lazy developer, cookies work most of the time'?"
Oh, come on, no need to be uncivil - of course there are solutions to maintaining state during a session. Cookies can store session IDs, URLs can have them attached... If you don't like either of those methods, there's always clock skew analysis or dynamic vhosts.
"I'm guessing you claim cookies to be 'good' because your development environment/web-server is not configured to allow anything else? Why not just append a '&sessionid=[big binary data]' to all your page links? I'm guessing that, despite being a 'web developer' you are not given the ability to do so"
You guessed wrong, and your inadequacies are showing :) Flaming egos damage credibility - but thanks for the laugh, anyway.
I think you make some really interesting points. From one aspect, you are tracking users by depositing information on their computer. While you claim this information could not be used to identify them elsewhere, it's certainly a concern with less careful web developers at the cookie helm.
Cookies cannot be accessed by sites that did not put them there in the first place. The carefulness of web developers has nothing to do with anything.
Advertising companies that embed ads in the web pages you surf can read values from a cookie that they set, and they can do this on any page that embeds their ads. It's the same thing as hitting the advertising company's web site whenever you see an ad - of course they can set and read that cookie, and all they're storing is an id number and some frequency cap values (if you block cookies, it might be assumed you haven't seen a popup - so you see more popups!)
As a web developer, I know that cookies are a good solution to the problem of maintaining state in a stateless medium. It's too bad that they've garnered so much attention as a tool of unscrupulous advertisers - it's hard to write a decent web application without them. The paranoia surrounding cookies is largely unfounded.
There *are* other methods of tracking session IDs, though, and the smart advertising companies are using them.
Yeah. In GNOME I can 'mount' remote sftp (ssh) locations just like any other drive. This kind of thing seems to be a pretty standard feature in modern Linux desktop environments.
Requirement: "Web interface for sales staff to assemble reports."
Acceptance criteria: "A member of the sales staff can browse to an internal web site and assemble reports using data sources X, Y, and Z."
When a customer has signed off on a proper requirements document that includes acceptance criteria, they agree to accept easily verifiable X as proof that requirement Y was met - they can't change their mind without admitting it anymore.
This works on management, too. :)
...if Skype would release a GTK version of their client, so it wouldn't clash so horribly with my GNOME desktop.
Real, upstanding, proud citizens of the USA who carry themselves with humility, share their many gifts with their neighbours, and accept our many differences with grace are much loved here. I mean, we're family, right? I wouldn't discard my brother because he doesn't agree with me. In most places I've visited in the States, the people are great.
Yes, you're powerful. Yes, you could roll up here one night and take us out. But you aren't our judge, just as we aren't yours. When you speak about your neighbours in the future, do so with the respect most of us would still give you.
==
How America looks from up here
This entire thread is such garbage.
I am running GNOME 2.10. It is not bloated. My system has a pretty standard 512MB of RAM, and it NEVER SWAPS. My girlfriend uses GNOME 2.10 on a Pentium II 400 with 128MB of RAM. It's actually fairly snappy on there, even running Firefox and Evolution. She loves it - there was such a difference in performance compared to her old fragmented Windows installation, she thought I upgraded her hardware.
KDE people say GNOME is bloated and ugly. GNOME people say the same about KDE. Baaah! Baaaaaaah! Sheep are you all! The Bloat argument is hereby CANCELLED OUT, and I never want to hear it again. There's this saying some famous guy said about checking for logs in your own eye before pointing out a mote in some other guy's eye.
For once I'd love to see a rational feature-by-feature, project-goal-by-project-goal discussion between the two sides. There seems to be a huge chasm between the KDE and GNOME camps, and it's just not helpful. Pretty scary, actually - we all have a lot of ground to cover and there is no room for this kind of crap.
It's not in either party's interest for the other to fail; the laughter of Microsoft would be our only reward. I'll happily cheer KDE on just as readily as I'll root for GNOME.
...I'd be thinking "Wow! No more unreliable tracking cookies! Now my ads will always be targeted to individuals!"
Don't shoot me...
As a web developer, I was thinking more along the lines of "Yay! No more session cookies!"
We evolved a lifecycle that fit our company and our needs. You're free to do the same, and that's what I would recommend to anyone who is serious about writing software.
Just don't discount the value of _having_ a lifecycle. I never said there was One True Way, I just presented our shop's journey as an example.
If it sounds like we're in chains, you're dead wrong. We've never had more freedom. The hard part is deciding you're actually willing to do what is necessary to get it when you work in an environment that needs, but does not understand, software development.
That's EXACTLY it. At our shop, we got sick of being blamed for "taking too long on projects" - so we got together, got up to speed on Personal Software Process and Team Software Process, and started a development lifecycle and process improvement team.
There are a number of interesting benefits to this. The best one so far is that we maintain a 'responsibility trace' right from individual stakeholders in Management, to each requirement, to each design element... we can actually tell who in management has a stake in a particuliar _block of code_.
The other neat thing is, the execs can make changes all they want. We really don't care. Because we're on a fixed 3-week development cycle (all the way through the cycle each 3 weeks, culminating in a release) we can either say "sure, we'll do that in the next build" or "scratch the current cycle and we'll do that now". In the latter case, we only lose a maximum of 3 weeks work. Not bad at all, and if management complains, well, we can show them WHY we lost 3 weeks. They shut up pretty quick.
Unfortunately, convincing management that the paperwork we end up doing to improve and maintain our process is a Good Thing, is difficult. If we aren't coding, we must not be working, right? Wrong. Now we have nice graphs showing number of defects in our software falling through the floor, time spent fixing defects falling through the floor, developer productivity skyrocketing... It's fantastic.
Bottom line: Management in some places doesn't WANT responsibility. They want to hand down directives from above, and we are the magical little gnomes who make their projects at 1/4 their salary, if we're lucky. If they go sour on a gnome for whatever reason, they want to be able to fire with impunity. Process is the way to make them eat their own crap whether they like it or not. They WILL end up liking it, and you get your life back.
...why isn't this being presented as a Google Reviews service, reviewing anything and everything? Now THAT would become a cultural phenomenon.
Gentoo has always allowed you to downgrade packages to any previous version. The revdep-rebuild script will even attempt to fix any broken dynamic linkage that might result.
will do the trick, and then you'll need to edit to mask versions newer than the old one you installed.I bet you're having fun with BSD if you missed such an obvious feature of Portage :D