OMG PULSEAUDIO WAS LAME ALSA WAS SO AWESUM WORKED 4 ME. OMG SYStEMD IS LAME CUZ ITS LIKE OSX LAUNCHD SYSV IS MORE HAKABLE. AVAHI SMELLS LIKE POO. LENNART IS A DICK HAHA LETS BEAT HIM!!!111oneone
Lennart is doing good work. You people need to chill the fuck out and jump off the hate wagon.
Seems like we get anti-Lennart posts about twice a year. The guy is personable, an excellent programmer, and has some opinions. Why are so many people threatened by him, I wonder?
I've been online since around 1990. There was a time when my social life suffered because I spent so much of my time online, talking to people about software projects we were working on, etc. I still spend lots of time doing that, but it's my job now, so it's legit. Also, being married and having a child, I have other fun stuff to do. Like wiping butts, or doing chores, or finding a babysitter so my wife and I can go dancing or take a weekend to go surf.
It's all about finding a balance. For instance, I have a home connection, but I purposefully buy slow (cheap!) ADSL access. It's just fast enough for one person in the house to watch a youtube clip while someone else surfs. As a bonus, I support a local small ISP. Sure, I could pay $75 a month for a 15Mb connection, but that's overkill.
I have completely eliminated gaming from my schedule. I used to play a lot of Quake and WoW. I got a subscription to MAKE and took some electronics courses. Now I build stuff rather than railing people from the outer platform on The Longest Yard. Right now I am working on building an autonomous surveillance blimp, because I can.
Learning a musical instrument gave me something to study (I like learning stuff) while simultaneously giving me the ability to give other people some enjoyment in a social setting - now that I don't suck as much as I used to.
And seriously, physical activity. DO IT. Make the time for it. Learn to push yourself (nobody else will). I occasionally fill in on a relative's home construction crew for fun and profit when he's down a man. I've learned a lot (yay) and though my arms are still kind of skinny, I'm not as useless without a keyboard and I've made some good friends. I've also endured a lot of teasing. Sucker for punishment? Yep.
The thing with the Internet is that it tricks you into thinking you're doing all kinds of Awesome Stuff, when really you're usually just sitting there looking at the same shit everyone else is looking at. Or arguing with people who never learned to think or write. Or shopping when you shouldn't. Or sharing personal info because you think you are establishing a personal brand. Or fighting ideological battles with True Believers on the other side of the world.
Or posting on Slashdot to share experiences no one cares about.
Shit!
My point is, if the Internet is taking up too much of your time, DO OTHER STUFF. The Internet should have to compete with other things that you love. You do love other activities, right?
The guy produced an interesting album, then got caught up in a legal battle over cover art. I am not defending his misunderstanding of fair use - he clearly doesn't get it. Still, lot of good work went into the music; it would be sad if the whole project were tainted by the issue.
The legal system will do its job on the cover art issue, but the album is still worth buying. Artists that actually produce notable works deserve encouragement, even when they screw up. They aren't lawyers or copyright wonks.
Before the FUD starts flying, here's the message on the StartSSL page.
Due to an attack on our systems and a security breach that occurred at the 15th of June, issuance of digital certificates and related services have been temporarily suspended as a defensive measure. Our services will be gradually reinstated as the situation allows.
Subscribers and holders of valid certificates are not affected in any form.
Visitors to web sites and other parties relying on valid certificates are not affected.
We apologize for the temporary inconvenience and thank you for your understanding.
I've used their services for years now. Never had a problem, though their web application is truly awful - I've always wondered how fragile it might be. Hope they can pick themselves up and get back to business.
How many of the Sony accounts with @gmail.com addresses in this release use the same password everywhere they go? A lot of people are going to get their Gmail accounts compromised here.
If I was sure that I wouldn't get stomped on for being an evil hacker, I'd write a script to notify the future victims. Oh well.
RIM doesn't have the private keys to decrypt the data you send through their infrastructure.
Not always true.
If your handset is using BES (Blackberry Enterprise Server), then RIM can't easily read your email. Each BES installation has its own private keys.
If your handset is using BIS (Blackberry Internet Service), then your mail can be decrypted by the service provider just fine. Most consumer Blackberry plans are BIS.
Access to BIS messaging is what Saudi Arabia et al. were after. I'm guessing they got it.
in most of the places i know, the younger generation coming into the workplace doesn't want Blackberries.
Here's the funny thing. Around here (Western Canada), all the kids get Blackberries. The reason? They use BBM and PIN-to-PIN so that they can afford to send text messages without paying $15/mo for an unlimited SMS plan on top of their voice plans. Plus they get multi-day battery life.
If you get a real smartphone, you're out of the loop. Nobody will text you much, and your friends will hate getting texts from you because you're costing them money. The Blackberry TV ads all focus on BBM and look like beer commercials (19-year-old chicks in bikinis jumping into lakes. Summer. Fun fun fun fun weekend weekend. Friday comes after Thursday before Saturday)
Several years back I worked on some software for the Blackberry (pre-Pearl). Over the past couple of months I've written software for the Playbook as part of their runup to release. The experience was just as shoddy both times. Just getting started on a project is an exercise in intuition and quite the struggle. Tooling is spread across multiple archives; some of it is/was windows-only; documentation is poor or misleading.
I remember my former CEO standing in my office nearly 7 years ago with myself and a colleague, saying "Hey, I have [some senior RIM guy] on the line... Anything you want to say to him?" Both myself and my colleague looked at each other, then said "Tell him RIM treats developers like crap. We need better tools."
Not the most intelligent thing to say, I guess, but it was a casual conversation and we were both pretty frustrated. Of course, the RIM guy had no response.
RIM's attitude towards developers only works in an environment where they are the only game in town. They aren't anymore, and their enterprise customers' resistance to change is the only reason they haven't already crashed and burned.
If Facebook, Google, Ebay and Paypal gave notice that they would be IPV6 only in 12 months, ISPs would jump. Imagine the rage if Auntie Joy couldn't see baby photos or search for recipes.
You've gotta be completely oblivious, or a troll. Either way, I'm responding only to point that out.
You're cute. Are those the only options I have?
Please, point out more little gems for my further amusement - if you can tear yourself away from your search for a rare 1972 Zombies LP... er, self-worth.
Screw the music industry. Maybe it's time for Google to displace government once and for all.
If Google went and found some backwards, impoverished nation and offered it Google Meritocracy(tm), held a plebiscite, replaced the government, designed a new constitution, and proceeded to make it a shining example of open governance for and by the people, you'd better believe that many small, poor places would be beating a path to their door. And if they demonstrated investment in the people (health care! education! child care! public infrastructure! food supply! money supply!) other, richer nations might start to demand plebiscites.
Imagine the integration! Google would get its own currency, the right to have its own military, and the chance to make some serious waves in the way nations do business with each other. Even if the first country they took over didn't have much in the way of resources, people are the best investment.
Tell people "We are offering free, high quality education. Pick your specialty and go. Once you attain your degree (here or elsewhere) AND a trade certificate, you will gain the right to vote and will pay no personal income tax in your country for the rest of your life. While you are in school, we will provide you with living space if you need it, healthy food, and access to all the tools you need - as long as you are progressing in your studies."
Google the corporation would have to make their governmental services so transparent that no one could accuse them of manipulating their nation for corporate gain. They would make their money on infrastructure services and audits, fraud detection etc.
This would be a multi-generation plan. Maybe we'd end up with something like Orson Scott Card's Free Peoples of Earth, or Star Trek's Federation. As countries joined the GoogleFed and became nothing but administrative units suddenly there would be millions of well-educated and enlightened folk with practical trades in hand, ready to contribute and build.
unlinking, and relinking when necessary, is a good suggestion... thanks!
You're welcome.
(it's also amazing to me that they don't use SSH / SSL.)
Dropbox does use SSL encryption for transfers, which protects against man-in-the-middle attacks during transfer (as long as their certificate provider isn't compromised). Their issue is their badly-thought-out private-token authentication system - SSH public key authentication would solve that for them.
The Dropbox issue is the same as what would occur if someone stole your.ssh directory full of un-encrypted private keys.
With Dropbox, unlinking the 'machine' from your account will disable the attacker's access. With SSH, revoking access on any servers the comprimised public key had access to would do the same.
Of course, SSH allows you to encrypt your private keys (you'd have to enter a password before using them). Dropbox doesn't want to inconvenience you with password dialogs, so they just rely on obscurity. How's that for a security mindset?
They could have hashed their token with some hardware-specific values and system configuration details so that the client could force a re-keying if it found itself on a different host. Still not a solution to the hole - a hacked client could still get access, but we might not be reading this if they had taken that step.
Really, they can't close this hole without encrypting their local settings and asking users for a password when Dropbox starts up.
Dropbox users: unlink and relink your machines from your Dropbox account regularly until some future version of Dropbox starts asking you for a password on startup. You should really stop using Dropbox for anything private if other people regularly have access to your machine, or you run an OS that is virus bait...
Virus writers: You now have a nice, easy target: Dropbox settings may give you access you to gold! Or a pile of pr0n!
It is amazing to me that these proprietary storage clients don't just use SSH for their authentication and transport. Really, guys, this is a solved problem. Reinventing the wheel gets you nothing but bad press.
First, an observation: you must be a Gnome developer, because no one else can be that condescending while telling someone that they're using their computer the wrong way.
Unsupportable, false assumption. I'm not a GNOME developer. I'm just someone who's tired of whiny, invalid complaints about good projects. Also, I use and love GNOME 3. Oh, and GNOME developers are nice people. I've met some - have you?
Second, the behavior you're defending would cause me to put a bullet in the computer if I was stuck with it. On every desktop I've used, I've set up {virtual desktops/spaces/tags/whatever} so that my browser is in #1, shells are in #2, Emacs is in #3, email is in #4... first I do X then I do Y and then I place one teaspoon of sugar in my cup of Earl Grey while ascertaining that the water is precisely at 98.5 degrees for optimal flavor. When I want to check my email...
You have workflows you're heavily invested in. Fine. So do my poor old parents, who still use Windows 98 and resist buying a new machine because they "work differently".
At most, all you can say about GNOME 3 is that it probably won't allow you to work the way you always have. The thing is, it wasn't designed to. That's not arrogance on the part of anyone - GNOME designers, developers, whoever. It's just that they had an idea and wanted to see if they could do things differently. That's fair, and the results are great.
Workspaces in GNOME 3 are meant to be less 'static' than the old ones. I do hear that 'workspace pinning' is coming though, which would address your concern.
something that only geeks with too much time should want to do (and hence can be made difficult),
something that no one should want to do (and hence can be made impossible)
There's no blame to be assigned, only design decisions. The problem is mostly that GNOME 3 demands that users change, and users hate change.
Finally, unlike others, you have a deep understanding of how most users want to do things and sometimes even how they don't want to do them but really should want to do them.
I don't claim to, but I understand that all "users" actually want is for things to mostly stay the same, with bugs fixed and a few esoteric tweaks here and there to make their personal workflows that much more efficient. That's why there are still businesses running pre-Ribbon Office and Windows XP desktops, for instance.
The GNOME 3 people have a vision for a different interaction model. They all believe in that vision. They have taken *their* project and have implemented *their* vision. That's their right. They don't owe you, me, or anyone anything. Not configuration options. Not adjustable themeable panels. Not six different options for mouse focus modes. If they had wanted to make Gnome Shell a picture of Hitler with flashing red eyes, they could have.
See, GNOME 3 is different on purpose. It's a bold, well implemented, and polished UI experiment - a rarity in the open source world. It's the kind of thing that pisses off the inflexible old guard who've invested too much in their own workflows to see value in any other way of doing things, while opening the door to everyone else.
Will people use it? GNOME folk are betting that people will. After using it for a week, I agree with them - and I was a pretty loud-mouthed skeptic before I tried it (which I regret now, and am probably overcompensating for).
If we're ever going to have a "year of the Linux desktop", GNOME 3 is probably our best bet so far.
I hate tools bars! If they are really necessary, PLEASE allow me to hide it/them.
Invalid criticism. Take it up with the application designers who chose to use toolbars as a design element, like 99% of developers out there on just about every platform.
I had to use gconf-edit to set focus on mouse instead of click to focus. Ridiculous!
Not ridiculous. In 2011 click-to-focus is expected behavior, which makes it the correct default. The idea is that power users with weird taste in focus behavior can fire up gconf-edit and tweak away, but no one else has to ignore yet another checkbox.
Adding an extra click to launch an application is NOT intuitive. Its like START/REALLY START?
Invalid criticism. GNOME 2: "Click Applications.Click program icon." GNOME 3: "Click Activities. Click program icon." That's two clicks each. Of course, you could tap the windows key and type a couple of letters of the program name to launch an app in GNOME 3. Who needs the mouse?
Automatically compressing desktop spaces when the last application in that space closes is very frustrating. Start 20 or so apps in various desktops and get everything just how you like them. Then add an extension to Firefox and you need to restart it. And watch your carefully laid out desktops contract. Whine whine whine.
Invalid criticism. Take it up with the Firefox developers. Firstly, installing an extension is a once-in-a-while thing for most people, so they'll almost never hit this. Second of all, shutting an app down when a user wants to go on using it is clearly not very bright. Your issue demonstrates an annoying interaction between GNOME Shell and Firefox, but it's Firefox's design issue to solve. If it really bugs you, use Chromium.
It is obvious and understandable that GNOME 3 is getting a lot of development right now. But it is VERY frustrating to users when significant changes are made to the GNOME configuration data bases and config files. You may carefully set up back ground and theme choices to have your entire desktop fail to load because of an incompatibility with an updated GNOME preference. Lets please settle on configuration choices before final release, pretty please?
Silliness. You are saying that you upgraded to an unreleased development version of gnome with major architectural changes, and your tweaked and customized configuration settings didn't move over right? Call the waahmbulance! Next time start with a clean home directory, and expect instability in unreleased software.
All users may really not want the exact same things showing on the top tool bar. On a smart phone we have limited space, but even there users have choices. On GNOME # desktops everyone has a long, boring, and almost empty tool bar. (and it won't hide! Oh wait, I already said that) Why?
Because most users don't care what's on their bar, as long as they can see important information and do their tasks. Why do you absolutely need to customize it? Yes, the autohide lack is a bit annoying.
You cannot, and MUST not assume that all users will read a howto web site, or take a class on Gnome 3 before trying to shut down their personal system. That is the only way to learn how to do it properly.
The idea here is that if a user wants to physically shut down their machine, they should push the power button. Try it. The hold-down-alt-to-see-the-shutdown-option override might be a bit idealistic, I agree. Still, most of the time, users just want to 'put the machine away for a while', which generally means 'suspend'.
Maybe I just don't get it.
I've been using GNOME since the early 1.X days, and I get it. Keep at it!
No one runs for Prime Minister in Canada. Harper is running as a Member of Parliament, and as the head of his party if he wins his own seat and his party garners the majority of seats and is given permission by the Governor General to form the Government then he (Harper) will be granted the title of Prime Minister. No one runs for PM in Canada.
A thousand times this. It seems that most folks have forgotten that we only vote for local representation here.
The system really was designed for an era when the media and cross-country communications had a long lag time. Now the media portrays a leader-vs-leader personality battle, and people are dumb enough to be swept along with it. If I hear one more man-on-the-street interview with some knob in Vancouver spouting about how he thinks "Ignatieff looks WEAK", I'm going to go volunteer to work cleanup at Fukushima Daiichi.
The only people who should care who Harper, Ignatief or Layton are are those who live in their ridings.
While I think it's good the bill died.. as a canadian I'm a little pissed that we're having another expensive election.
Expensive election? Give me a break. I'm hearing numbers like 200 million dollars to run an election for the whole country.
In 2008 there were 23,677,639 registered voters in Canada. If the number of registered voters remained the same (hint: it has likely increased!), that puts the cost per registered voter at about $8.50.
I don't know about you, but I would pay $8.50 to have a say in my democracy any day.
The media in Canada has gone into "nobody wants an election, waaaah waaah" mode for each of the past four elections. I'm a Canadian, and just about everyone I know wants an election. Everywhere I turn online though, someone is bitching about how nobody wants one.
I know that the media is largely run by conservative businesspeople, but this broad-based attempt at reducing the duties of citizenship to an inconvenience is sickening.
Stop complaining and vote responsibly. It's all we have. We've had lots of elections in the past 7 years, and that's because the government is weak and Canadians are divided. It's a good thing we keep getting to weigh in.
I uploaded the singles from my last 2 bands to P2P and I'll upload this newest one as soon as we get it mastered as we want you to hear us and hopefully come to the shows, by a shirt, hell we'll even put your name in the raffle to win one of our guitars if you buy the CD
Please post a link to your music, so I can download it. I want to hear it just based on your attitude.
It seems like it should be possible to design a closed storage pool that would use depleted fuel rods' decay heat to create circulation through a passive radiator of some sort, delaying or eliminating the need for powered cooling.
Slashdot Mirror
OMG PULSEAUDIO WAS LAME ALSA WAS SO AWESUM WORKED 4 ME. OMG SYStEMD IS LAME CUZ ITS LIKE OSX LAUNCHD SYSV IS MORE HAKABLE. AVAHI SMELLS LIKE POO. LENNART IS A DICK HAHA LETS BEAT HIM!!!111oneone
Lennart is doing good work. You people need to chill the fuck out and jump off the hate wagon.
Seems like we get anti-Lennart posts about twice a year. The guy is personable, an excellent programmer, and has some opinions. Why are so many people threatened by him, I wonder?
I've been online since around 1990. There was a time when my social life suffered because I spent so much of my time online, talking to people about software projects we were working on, etc. I still spend lots of time doing that, but it's my job now, so it's legit. Also, being married and having a child, I have other fun stuff to do. Like wiping butts, or doing chores, or finding a babysitter so my wife and I can go dancing or take a weekend to go surf.
It's all about finding a balance. For instance, I have a home connection, but I purposefully buy slow (cheap!) ADSL access. It's just fast enough for one person in the house to watch a youtube clip while someone else surfs. As a bonus, I support a local small ISP. Sure, I could pay $75 a month for a 15Mb connection, but that's overkill.
I have completely eliminated gaming from my schedule. I used to play a lot of Quake and WoW. I got a subscription to MAKE and took some electronics courses. Now I build stuff rather than railing people from the outer platform on The Longest Yard. Right now I am working on building an autonomous surveillance blimp, because I can.
Learning a musical instrument gave me something to study (I like learning stuff) while simultaneously giving me the ability to give other people some enjoyment in a social setting - now that I don't suck as much as I used to.
And seriously, physical activity. DO IT. Make the time for it. Learn to push yourself (nobody else will). I occasionally fill in on a relative's home construction crew for fun and profit when he's down a man. I've learned a lot (yay) and though my arms are still kind of skinny, I'm not as useless without a keyboard and I've made some good friends. I've also endured a lot of teasing. Sucker for punishment? Yep.
The thing with the Internet is that it tricks you into thinking you're doing all kinds of Awesome Stuff, when really you're usually just sitting there looking at the same shit everyone else is looking at. Or arguing with people who never learned to think or write. Or shopping when you shouldn't. Or sharing personal info because you think you are establishing a personal brand. Or fighting ideological battles with True Believers on the other side of the world.
Or posting on Slashdot to share experiences no one cares about.
Shit!
My point is, if the Internet is taking up too much of your time, DO OTHER STUFF. The Internet should have to compete with other things that you love. You do love other activities, right?
The guy produced an interesting album, then got caught up in a legal battle over cover art. I am not defending his misunderstanding of fair use - he clearly doesn't get it. Still, lot of good work went into the music; it would be sad if the whole project were tainted by the issue.
The legal system will do its job on the cover art issue, but the album is still worth buying. Artists that actually produce notable works deserve encouragement, even when they screw up. They aren't lawyers or copyright wonks.
Before the FUD starts flying, here's the message on the StartSSL page.
Due to an attack on our systems and a security breach that occurred at the 15th of June, issuance of digital certificates and related services have been temporarily suspended as a defensive measure. Our services will be gradually reinstated as the situation allows.
Subscribers and holders of valid certificates are not affected in any form.
Visitors to web sites and other parties relying on valid certificates are not affected.
We apologize for the temporary inconvenience and thank you for your understanding.
I've used their services for years now. Never had a problem, though their web application is truly awful - I've always wondered how fragile it might be. Hope they can pick themselves up and get back to business.
Seriously, whether you like chiptune or not, the FLAC version is $5 and the MP3 even less. Help the man out.
How many of the Sony accounts with @gmail.com addresses in this release use the same password everywhere they go? A lot of people are going to get their Gmail accounts compromised here.
If I was sure that I wouldn't get stomped on for being an evil hacker, I'd write a script to notify the future victims. Oh well.
RIM doesn't have the private keys to decrypt the data you send through their infrastructure.
Not always true.
If your handset is using BES (Blackberry Enterprise Server), then RIM can't easily read your email. Each BES installation has its own private keys.
If your handset is using BIS (Blackberry Internet Service), then your mail can be decrypted by the service provider just fine. Most consumer Blackberry plans are BIS.
Access to BIS messaging is what Saudi Arabia et al. were after. I'm guessing they got it.
in most of the places i know, the younger generation coming into the workplace doesn't want Blackberries.
Here's the funny thing. Around here (Western Canada), all the kids get Blackberries. The reason? They use BBM and PIN-to-PIN so that they can afford to send text messages without paying $15/mo for an unlimited SMS plan on top of their voice plans. Plus they get multi-day battery life.
If you get a real smartphone, you're out of the loop. Nobody will text you much, and your friends will hate getting texts from you because you're costing them money. The Blackberry TV ads all focus on BBM and look like beer commercials (19-year-old chicks in bikinis jumping into lakes. Summer. Fun fun fun fun weekend weekend. Friday comes after Thursday before Saturday)
Several years back I worked on some software for the Blackberry (pre-Pearl). Over the past couple of months I've written software for the Playbook as part of their runup to release. The experience was just as shoddy both times. Just getting started on a project is an exercise in intuition and quite the struggle. Tooling is spread across multiple archives; some of it is/was windows-only; documentation is poor or misleading.
I remember my former CEO standing in my office nearly 7 years ago with myself and a colleague, saying "Hey, I have [some senior RIM guy] on the line... Anything you want to say to him?" Both myself and my colleague looked at each other, then said "Tell him RIM treats developers like crap. We need better tools."
Not the most intelligent thing to say, I guess, but it was a casual conversation and we were both pretty frustrated. Of course, the RIM guy had no response.
RIM's attitude towards developers only works in an environment where they are the only game in town. They aren't anymore, and their enterprise customers' resistance to change is the only reason they haven't already crashed and burned.
If Facebook, Google, Ebay and Paypal gave notice that they would be IPV6 only in 12 months, ISPs would jump. Imagine the rage if Auntie Joy couldn't see baby photos or search for recipes.
Deadlines can be a wonderful motivator.
You've gotta be completely oblivious, or a troll. Either way, I'm responding only to point that out.
You're cute. Are those the only options I have?
Please, point out more little gems for my further amusement - if you can tear yourself away from your search for a rare 1972 Zombies LP... er, self-worth.
"Indy" record stores are basically just venues for the Hipster Olympics' circlejerk event.
Bring on the shaming!
Screw the music industry. Maybe it's time for Google to displace government once and for all.
If Google went and found some backwards, impoverished nation and offered it Google Meritocracy(tm), held a plebiscite, replaced the government, designed a new constitution, and proceeded to make it a shining example of open governance for and by the people, you'd better believe that many small, poor places would be beating a path to their door. And if they demonstrated investment in the people (health care! education! child care! public infrastructure! food supply! money supply!) other, richer nations might start to demand plebiscites.
Imagine the integration! Google would get its own currency, the right to have its own military, and the chance to make some serious waves in the way nations do business with each other. Even if the first country they took over didn't have much in the way of resources, people are the best investment.
Tell people "We are offering free, high quality education. Pick your specialty and go. Once you attain your degree (here or elsewhere) AND a trade certificate, you will gain the right to vote and will pay no personal income tax in your country for the rest of your life. While you are in school, we will provide you with living space if you need it, healthy food, and access to all the tools you need - as long as you are progressing in your studies."
Google the corporation would have to make their governmental services so transparent that no one could accuse them of manipulating their nation for corporate gain. They would make their money on infrastructure services and audits, fraud detection etc.
This would be a multi-generation plan. Maybe we'd end up with something like Orson Scott Card's Free Peoples of Earth, or Star Trek's Federation. As countries joined the GoogleFed and became nothing but administrative units suddenly there would be millions of well-educated and enlightened folk with practical trades in hand, ready to contribute and build.
Totally plausible! Right? RIGHT? :)
A quantum bogosort could be solved with a time complexity of O(n).
That's several spawned universes worth of stumbling, drunken Muni passengers (or dancers), and one hell of an efficient sort.
unlinking, and relinking when necessary, is a good suggestion ... thanks!
You're welcome.
(it's also amazing to me that they don't use SSH / SSL.)
Dropbox does use SSL encryption for transfers, which protects against man-in-the-middle attacks during transfer (as long as their certificate provider isn't compromised). Their issue is their badly-thought-out private-token authentication system - SSH public key authentication would solve that for them.
The Dropbox issue is the same as what would occur if someone stole your .ssh directory full of un-encrypted private keys.
With Dropbox, unlinking the 'machine' from your account will disable the attacker's access. With SSH, revoking access on any servers the comprimised public key had access to would do the same.
Of course, SSH allows you to encrypt your private keys (you'd have to enter a password before using them). Dropbox doesn't want to inconvenience you with password dialogs, so they just rely on obscurity. How's that for a security mindset?
They could have hashed their token with some hardware-specific values and system configuration details so that the client could force a re-keying if it found itself on a different host. Still not a solution to the hole - a hacked client could still get access, but we might not be reading this if they had taken that step.
Really, they can't close this hole without encrypting their local settings and asking users for a password when Dropbox starts up.
Dropbox users: unlink and relink your machines from your Dropbox account regularly until some future version of Dropbox starts asking you for a password on startup. You should really stop using Dropbox for anything private if other people regularly have access to your machine, or you run an OS that is virus bait...
Virus writers: You now have a nice, easy target: Dropbox settings may give you access you to gold! Or a pile of pr0n!
It is amazing to me that these proprietary storage clients don't just use SSH for their authentication and transport. Really, guys, this is a solved problem. Reinventing the wheel gets you nothing but bad press.
First, an observation: you must be a Gnome developer, because no one else can be that condescending while telling someone that they're using their computer the wrong way.
Unsupportable, false assumption. I'm not a GNOME developer. I'm just someone who's tired of whiny, invalid complaints about good projects. Also, I use and love GNOME 3. Oh, and GNOME developers are nice people. I've met some - have you?
Second, the behavior you're defending would cause me to put a bullet in the computer if I was stuck with it. On every desktop I've used, I've set up {virtual desktops/spaces/tags/whatever} so that my browser is in #1, shells are in #2, Emacs is in #3, email is in #4... first I do X then I do Y and then I place one teaspoon of sugar in my cup of Earl Grey while ascertaining that the water is precisely at 98.5 degrees for optimal flavor. When I want to check my email...
You have workflows you're heavily invested in. Fine. So do my poor old parents, who still use Windows 98 and resist buying a new machine because they "work differently".
At most, all you can say about GNOME 3 is that it probably won't allow you to work the way you always have. The thing is, it wasn't designed to. That's not arrogance on the part of anyone - GNOME designers, developers, whoever. It's just that they had an idea and wanted to see if they could do things differently. That's fair, and the results are great.
Workspaces in GNOME 3 are meant to be less 'static' than the old ones. I do hear that 'workspace pinning' is coming though, which would address your concern.
So basically, everything is either
There's no blame to be assigned, only design decisions. The problem is mostly that GNOME 3 demands that users change, and users hate change.
Finally, unlike others, you have a deep understanding of how most users want to do things and sometimes even how they don't want to do them but really should want to do them.
I don't claim to, but I understand that all "users" actually want is for things to mostly stay the same, with bugs fixed and a few esoteric tweaks here and there to make their personal workflows that much more efficient. That's why there are still businesses running pre-Ribbon Office and Windows XP desktops, for instance.
The GNOME 3 people have a vision for a different interaction model. They all believe in that vision. They have taken *their* project and have implemented *their* vision. That's their right. They don't owe you, me, or anyone anything. Not configuration options. Not adjustable themeable panels. Not six different options for mouse focus modes. If they had wanted to make Gnome Shell a picture of Hitler with flashing red eyes, they could have.
See, GNOME 3 is different on purpose. It's a bold, well implemented, and polished UI experiment - a rarity in the open source world. It's the kind of thing that pisses off the inflexible old guard who've invested too much in their own workflows to see value in any other way of doing things, while opening the door to everyone else.
Will people use it? GNOME folk are betting that people will. After using it for a week, I agree with them - and I was a pretty loud-mouthed skeptic before I tried it (which I regret now, and am probably overcompensating for).
If we're ever going to have a "year of the Linux desktop", GNOME 3 is probably our best bet so far.
Idiocy: That way of replying is so bigoted and aggressive that you must be a troll.
Why not throw in "racist" and "unpatriotic" while you're piling it on? Oh, and I'm also a communist!
I responded, point-by-point and in detail, to the grandparent's (really poor) critique of GNOME 3. Not one of my points is incorrect.
All you've done is call me names. Way to sidestep the conversation and beat on the messenger. Who's the troll again?
I hate tools bars! If they are really necessary, PLEASE allow me to hide it/them.
Invalid criticism. Take it up with the application designers who chose to use toolbars as a design element, like 99% of developers out there on just about every platform.
I had to use gconf-edit to set focus on mouse instead of click to focus. Ridiculous!
Not ridiculous. In 2011 click-to-focus is expected behavior, which makes it the correct default. The idea is that power users with weird taste in focus behavior can fire up gconf-edit and tweak away, but no one else has to ignore yet another checkbox.
Adding an extra click to launch an application is NOT intuitive. Its like START/REALLY START?
Invalid criticism. GNOME 2: "Click Applications.Click program icon." GNOME 3: "Click Activities. Click program icon." That's two clicks each. Of course, you could tap the windows key and type a couple of letters of the program name to launch an app in GNOME 3. Who needs the mouse?
Automatically compressing desktop spaces when the last application in that space closes is very frustrating. Start 20 or so apps in various desktops and get everything just how you like them. Then add an extension to Firefox and you need to restart it. And watch your carefully laid out desktops contract. Whine whine whine.
Invalid criticism. Take it up with the Firefox developers. Firstly, installing an extension is a once-in-a-while thing for most people, so they'll almost never hit this. Second of all, shutting an app down when a user wants to go on using it is clearly not very bright. Your issue demonstrates an annoying interaction between GNOME Shell and Firefox, but it's Firefox's design issue to solve. If it really bugs you, use Chromium.
It is obvious and understandable that GNOME 3 is getting a lot of development right now. But it is VERY frustrating to users when significant changes are made to the GNOME configuration data bases and config files. You may carefully set up back ground and theme choices to have your entire desktop fail to load because of an incompatibility with an updated GNOME preference. Lets please settle on configuration choices before final release, pretty please?
Silliness. You are saying that you upgraded to an unreleased development version of gnome with major architectural changes, and your tweaked and customized configuration settings didn't move over right? Call the waahmbulance! Next time start with a clean home directory, and expect instability in unreleased software.
All users may really not want the exact same things showing on the top tool bar. On a smart phone we have limited space, but even there users have choices. On GNOME # desktops everyone has a long, boring, and almost empty tool bar. (and it won't hide! Oh wait, I already said that) Why?
Because most users don't care what's on their bar, as long as they can see important information and do their tasks. Why do you absolutely need to customize it? Yes, the autohide lack is a bit annoying.
You cannot, and MUST not assume that all users will read a howto web site, or take a class on Gnome 3 before trying to shut down their personal system. That is the only way to learn how to do it properly.
The idea here is that if a user wants to physically shut down their machine, they should push the power button. Try it. The hold-down-alt-to-see-the-shutdown-option override might be a bit idealistic, I agree. Still, most of the time, users just want to 'put the machine away for a while', which generally means 'suspend'.
Maybe I just don't get it.
I've been using GNOME since the early 1.X days, and I get it. Keep at it!
No one runs for Prime Minister in Canada. Harper is running as a Member of Parliament, and as the head of his party if he wins his own seat and his party garners the majority of seats and is given permission by the Governor General to form the Government then he (Harper) will be granted the title of Prime Minister. No one runs for PM in Canada.
A thousand times this. It seems that most folks have forgotten that we only vote for local representation here.
The system really was designed for an era when the media and cross-country communications had a long lag time. Now the media portrays a leader-vs-leader personality battle, and people are dumb enough to be swept along with it. If I hear one more man-on-the-street interview with some knob in Vancouver spouting about how he thinks "Ignatieff looks WEAK", I'm going to go volunteer to work cleanup at Fukushima Daiichi.
The only people who should care who Harper, Ignatief or Layton are are those who live in their ridings.
While I think it's good the bill died.. as a canadian I'm a little pissed that we're having another expensive election.
Expensive election? Give me a break. I'm hearing numbers like 200 million dollars to run an election for the whole country.
In 2008 there were 23,677,639 registered voters in Canada. If the number of registered voters remained the same (hint: it has likely increased!), that puts the cost per registered voter at about $8.50.
I don't know about you, but I would pay $8.50 to have a say in my democracy any day.
The media in Canada has gone into "nobody wants an election, waaaah waaah" mode for each of the past four elections. I'm a Canadian, and just about everyone I know wants an election. Everywhere I turn online though, someone is bitching about how nobody wants one.
I know that the media is largely run by conservative businesspeople, but this broad-based attempt at reducing the duties of citizenship to an inconvenience is sickening.
Stop complaining and vote responsibly. It's all we have. We've had lots of elections in the past 7 years, and that's because the government is weak and Canadians are divided. It's a good thing we keep getting to weigh in.
Don't forget to add something that keeps William Shatner from making another album.
But he's so awesome!
I uploaded the singles from my last 2 bands to P2P and I'll upload this newest one as soon as we get it mastered as we want you to hear us and hopefully come to the shows, by a shirt, hell we'll even put your name in the raffle to win one of our guitars if you buy the CD
Please post a link to your music, so I can download it. I want to hear it just based on your attitude.
It seems like it should be possible to design a closed storage pool that would use depleted fuel rods' decay heat to create circulation through a passive radiator of some sort, delaying or eliminating the need for powered cooling.
Has this been done?