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User: billstewart

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  1. Is there a light-weight XFCE distro? on Xfce 4.12 Released · · Score: 1

    Yes, XFCE is a nice light-weight window manager. Is there a light-weight distro that uses it? Ubuntu wants 5-10GB of disk, even for Xubuntu and Lubuntu. TinyCore can do a graphical environment with maybe 100MB, but is a bit too minimalist for me - I want something that can keep security update working with no more work than apt-get/yum/etc. I need a window manager, browser, shell, and maybe a C compiler or so, and I want something under 0.5 GB so I can keep a few spares on a desktop and spin up lots of cloud instances as well.

  2. Better Krebs than Weev on How Do You Handle the Discovery of a Web Site Disclosing Private Data? · · Score: 2

    You don't want to end up like Weev, even though they did eventually let him out of jail. And you're apparently not somebody who's got the kind of personality he has, which, while it may make you less likely to end up in jail, isn't necessarily going to get you off the hook either.

  3. Fragmentation is terrible for hardware owners on Who's Afraid of Android Fragmentation? · · Score: 1

    How many Android phones have you had that didn't require you to either wait for your carrier to provide an update (and they never do), or give up and root the machine to install Cyanogenmod or whatever, or you just bought a new shiny phone to replace it? My HTC Aria is so hopelessly vendor-locked I doubt it's worth putting Cyanogen on it (the OTA upgrade from 2.1 to 2.3 never succeeded.) My newer Samsung did get upgraded to 4.4.2, but my Coby tablet running 4.0.4 isn't the version the manufacturer sells today, so I doubt they'll bother with customer satisfaction.

    I haven't been able to Google up a good reference to Android documentation from Google that says how a regular user can upgrade their own Android version, as opposed to "Wait until your vendor ships an upgrade!"

  4. Old PCMCIA doesn't do Cardbus on Ask Slashdot: Old PC File Transfer Problem · · Score: 1

    Yes, folks, not all PCMCIA is the same. The newer ones support Cardbus cards; the older ones don't, and this machine is absolutely an older one. I've got a Pentium-75 laptop that only takes the original-flavored cards.

  5. USB Serial Port Adapter for newer machine on Ask Slashdot: Old PC File Transfer Problem · · Score: 1

    Yes, you'll have to look up your old friend Kermit (or Xmodem/Ymodem/Zmodem, or maybe even UUCP), and it'll have to run for a few days unless you can get it to sync up at higher speeds like 115200, but it's not information you really need much faster than that.

  6. But where's the kaboom? on What Happens When Betelgeuse Explodes? · · Score: 1

    With an article title like this, there's supposed to be an Earth-shattering kaboom! Fortunately, if the article's correct, it seems like we just get a really bright star for a while, but no fatal gamma-ray bursts or anything like that.

  7. What can go wrong? Concrete, that's what on What If We Lost the Sky? · · Score: 1

    The easy way to turn things white is to make roads out of concrete instead of asphalt. The catch is that the process used to make cement in most of the world involves heating calcium carbonate enough to bake out a CO2, leaving calcium oxides / hydroxides, so it's a surprisingly large generator of greenhouse gasses, more than making up for any albedo gains. Oops.

  8. Re:Mossad connection is a red herring on Ars: SSL-Busting Code That Threatened Lenovo Users Found In a Dozen More Apps · · Score: 1

    Israel doesn't have a lot of revenue sources or natural resources, so high-tech products like software are important to them, even more so than growing oranges on Palestinian land. And everybody has to serve in the army, except a few specially exempted groups, so just about everybody with a college education has been in the Army before they got that high-tech job, and a lot of them did computer jobs in the Army as well as marching around with Uzis, because every army these days needs computer technology. That doesn't mean that every high-tech company in Israel, or even every sleazy adware company in Israel, is a front for Mossad.

    Homeland Security has two highly obvious reasons to put out urgent guidance to remove crapware - there's a Congressional partisan squabble that's caught their budget in the crossfire, so they want to get positive press mention rather than the negative mention they'd get if they didn't do that, and the NSA's just gotten caught bugging every computer in the world so Homeland Security needs to talk about anybody else they can being dangerous and scary.

    Besides, if it really was Mossad, they'd have done a much better job.

  9. Dude, we want a UNICORN pony! on Ars: SSL-Busting Code That Threatened Lenovo Users Found In a Dozen More Apps · · Score: 2

    Not just any boring vanilla pony - we want a unicorn pony and rainbows and the whole bit!

    Lenovo probably will fire somebody, for embarrassing them, but it won't change the number of vendors of crapware out there. Lenovo's certainly not going to take the kind of financial hit that Gemalto did when the public found that the GCHQ had pwned all the SIM cards they sold. Maybe one or two adware companies will lose a non-trivial percentage, but there's a market for sleazy advertising and there's a market for having software companies pay to Add Valuable Features to your hardware.

  10. Hey, it's Inman from the Oatmeal on "Exploding Kittens" Blows Up Kickstarter Records · · Score: 1

    It probably took him a while to draw all the cards (though they're mostly cartoon-level drawings, which is a little easier), and they actually did spend a bit of time play-testing and tinkering with it to get a playable-more-than-once game. But dude, it's a card game about Exploding Kittens, and that's consistent with the humor he's well-known for, so he's not going to freak out his core audience, and they'll presumably attract half the people who've played Cards Against Humanity as well.

    And yeah, it presumably took them a lot longer to figure out how to get this produced and printed in volume and fulfilled than to design the game.

  11. I would *hope* he got paid a lot! on How One Climate-Change Skeptic Has Profited From Corporate Interests · · Score: 1

    There are only three good reasons for promoting climate change denialism.

    • - Protecting corporate interests, and
    • - Supporting the political party that protects those corporate interests, and
    • - Annoying people who oppose that political party.

    Protecting corporate interests by promoting bad science is something you shouldn't do at all, but if you're going to do it for them, they should be paying you really well. Supporting that particular political party's protection of their corporate sponsors' interests by promoting bad science is something cynical enough you should also only do if they're paying you well for it. (They pay their other marketers well.) Annoying liberals is something you can do for lolz is something you can do for free if that floats your boat.

    If you're going to do "scientific research" to disprove climate change, and you don't get some outrageously large "research grant", you're getting ripped off, and you should at least go join a union like the Screen Actors' Guild so you can get paid scale and overtime. (SAG union rules presumably say the studio is supposed to pay for costumes, but if you need to spring for a white lab coat and some glassware and blinkenlights to make a demo tape, that's probably ok, even if they use that in production.)

  12. Re:Net Neutrality on AT&T Patents System To "Fast-Lane" File-Sharing Traffic · · Score: 1

    Unfortunately, IP QoS marking is not only largely ignored by most of the carriers (unless you're paying extra to have your port care prioritize incoming packets for your access line), but the standards treat unmarked packets as the lowest priority, and have a way to mark packets as needing better-than-best-effort, but not lower-than-normal. I'd prefer that my incoming BitTorrent traffic get lower priority than my incoming web traffic (especially VOIP and most UDP, but also streaming HTTP/HTTPS like YouTube and TCP in general.) You can mess with that a bit by adjusting how fast your client sends acks and requests and uploads new stuff, but it's not as controllable as TCP.

  13. No, that would fail badly - it's near-pessimal on AT&T Patents System To "Fast-Lane" File-Sharing Traffic · · Score: 1

    (Disclaimer: I'm not speaking on behalf of any carrier, just speculating based on how Internet backbone and P2P technology work.)

    That would fail badly. If Carrier A and Carrier B both did that, it would force most P2P peering connections to go through the network peering points between the carriers, which are just about the scarcest resource in carrier networks other than maybe cross-ocean or other international links. Each carrier would ideally want their own customers to do their P2P with each other, and do so at the nearest location (so users in the Northeast share with each other, users in the West share with each other, not too much crosses the long-haul network, YMMV about whether the US looks like 3 zones, 10, or 100.)

    And if the carrier's doing their own P2P caching, they'd probably want to do some near the backbone peering points (e.g. San Jose, DC, maybe more) and encourage their customers to connect to those instead of running multiple streams across the peering point. Then you get to the engineering tradeoff question about whether you want a P2P cache in every cable head end, or just regionally.

  14. RTFA, it's short and has pictures. on AT&T Patents System To "Fast-Lane" File-Sharing Traffic · · Score: 1

    It's not super deep technical detail, but it's enough to be interesting. They're detecting BitTorrent traffic and pointing it to closer peers, so the traffic doesn't cross the network as many times, and doing file-sharing from some of their own servers. I couldn't tell from the article if the way they encouraged connections to closer peers was by adding delay to more distant peering connections, but that would actually speed up typical performance.

  15. Re: Getting High before flying on Federal Study: Marijuana Use Doesn't Increase Auto Crash Rates · · Score: 1

    The US has made air travel a really hostile process, mostly on purpose. But especially when they started banning taking liquids on the planes, my reaction was "ok, guys, you need to allow us to use marijuana in the smoking lounge instead." (Edibles don't have the same getting-caught risks, but they can last too long unless you're flying cross-country or overseas. Vaporizer sounds about right.)

  16. Linux equivalent to BSD UEFI MBR Compat process on PC-BSD: Set For Serious Growth? · · Score: 1

    Put the CD or DVD into the cup-holder slot. Reboot the machine. Answer the simple questions (which are "What language and time zone do you want?" kind of simple, not "What's your BIOS version and disk geometry?" kind of simple.)

    If I wanted to run Gentoo or Linux From Scratch or A Really Old Slackware Version, I know where to find them. I'm running Linux to get some work done, not to tweak compatibility settings.

  17. Re:SCO anybody?? on Wheel of Time TV Pilot Producers Sue Robert Jordan's Widow For Defamation · · Score: 1

    The dice are just rolling around in your head...

  18. Re:Bandersnatch on Wheel of Time TV Pilot Producers Sue Robert Jordan's Widow For Defamation · · Score: 1

    Frumious as it sounds, it's better than naming your movie production companies "Manetheran" and "Red Eagle" (i.e. straight out of the books), producing an allegedly crappy version of the books, and then suing.

  19. Re:EMI and computers.... on Xenon Flashes Can Make New Raspberry Pi 2 Freeze and Reboot · · Score: 1

    I've actually seen data from my laptop showing up on a TV. It was out of sync, so it was only part of the screen, repeated multiple times and scrolling slowly. This was back in the 90s, probably a 640x480 screen, and probably the radiation was mostly emitted from the external-video-monitor port (VGA or whatever we used back then.)

  20. Re:Carrying a Phone when Walking on Study: Smartphones Just As Good As Fitness Trackers For Counting Steps · · Score: 1

    If I'm running (yeah, like that happens a lot), a phone's annoying, though an armband helps. A well-designed small pedometer wouldn't be as annoying, but the basic $5 waist-band-clip step-counter pedometers fall off.

    For walking, though, I'm normally wearing clothes with pockets, and the phone's not an problem; if I wanted to track motion with it it would be fine. (The basic $5 waist-band-clip step-counter pedometers? Still fall off.)

  21. Re: Informed Stupidity on New Jersey Gov. Christie: Parents Should Have Choice In Vaccinations · · Score: 1

    Informed stupidity may still be stupidity, but the places that have been requiring that "personal belief exemption" parents discuss the issues with a doctor before being allowed to use that excuse have found it's pretty effective. It doesn't stop all the stupidity, but maybe half. (I'd prefer the requirement to be "discuss with a doctor EVERY year" as opposed to just once, but it's a start.)

  22. Re: Allergies on New Jersey Gov. Christie: Parents Should Have Choice In Vaccinations · · Score: 1

    Most of the allergy issues with vaccines are egg allergies (many vaccines are or were grown on egg media), and they usually do have diagnosis from professionals because (unless they're vegans or Hindus), their kid was getting allergic reactions to something and they tracked it down to being eggs.

    There are also kids who have impaired immune systems, typically because of chemotherapy.

  23. Re:Demagoguery, Rick Perry, HPV, Obama on New Jersey Gov. Christie: Parents Should Have Choice In Vaccinations · · Score: 1

    No, Obama wasn't on the fence about vaccinations in 2008 - the right-wing news sources claiming that are disproved by the actual video of the actual talk.

    But it's no wonder that people freaked out about Perry mandating the HPV vaccine (one of the few sensible things he's done.) Not only does it cost over $100, but it requires admitting that your precious snowflake teenager might (gasp!) have sex, which you know is Just Not Possible because Abstinence Only Education says they shouldn't (and teaches them not to trust condoms as well.)

  24. Video problems I've had with Pi GPU HDMI on New Multi-Core Raspberry Pi 2 Launches · · Score: 1

    I haven't done much with the RPi, partly because my TV got packed away during some construction and I haven't dragged it back out after that got finished, and the monitors I have at work use VGA or DisplayPort. But the times I've tried using it with borrowed HDMI monitors, it was really picky about staying in sync. Maybe it's a power problem? One reason I picked the RPi over the BeagleBone Black was it claimed to do 1080p at 60 Hz vs. only 30 on the BBB, but it wasn't handling 60Hz very well even just running simple Raspbian. (Of course, it could also have been the monitor I was using.)

  25. San or Qoppa on New Multi-Core Raspberry Pi 2 Launches · · Score: 1

    If you're going to be archaic and use Greek letters, you've got to decide how archaic you want to be. San alphabetizes between Pi and Qoppa, which comes before Rho. The Greeks got their letters from the Phoenicians, who used more sibilants than the Greeks did, so San eventually got dropped in favor of Sigma, which was pretty much the same sound for them. (They kept Sigma, Xi, and Zeta.) And Qoppa mostly got replaced with Kappa after a while. (There were other letters as well; Digamma looks like an F, and fit into the F/V/W letter space, used for words like woinos (wine, which mostly dropped the digamma by the classical period, but earlier writers like Homer used it.)