So it's fair to say that Chrony isn't suitable for running on stratum 1 servers, of which there are a few hundred, maybe up to at most a few thousand publically available in the world[1]. For the millions of Linux servers, laptops and desktops that aren't and will never be stratum 1 NTP servers Chrony should be just fine, shouldn't it?
Actually the patch works in Ubuntu too. If you install Ubuntu 13.10 using Chrubuntu (which sets Ubuntu up as a dual-boot with ChromeOS) the patches will be automatically applied.
This is not correct anymore, the touchpad works fine under Ubuntu 13.10 if you install it using the Chrubuntu scripts. The Chrubuntu author has integrated the patches from Chrome dev Beson Leung into the Chrubuntu scripts so that it automatically patches the Ubuntu kernel for you.
If, like me, you want to use 12.04 LTS instead of the latest you can use an Ubuntu 13.10 machine or VM to build the patched modules and then use them with the 13.10 kernel on 12.04, see here for instructions https://plus.google.com/+BensonLeung/posts/EJUSUudzHb3
And just to be clear, I'm talking about the Chrubuntu method of installing a full-fledged Ubuntu installation here as a the only OS or a dual-boot, i.e. not the Ubuntu-using-the-ChromeOS-kernel setup of Crouton.
I'd agree with you on all those points, but it's still worth point out how terrible Australian high schools' computer education is. When I did the HSC in NSW in 2000 the study for the exam was basically just memorising a list of definitions of computer terminology. There was no attempt to asses actual skills. Instead they just ensured students could give a coherent definition of terms like 'Wide Area Network' or explain the difference between a 'minicomputer' and a 'mainframe' (yes, even in 2000 this is how far behind the curriculum was).
So even though I wish they'd actually turn the computing curriculum into something worthwhile instead of whoring it out to self-interested vendors, the Microsoft course might actually be an improvement.
This is spot on. I'd guess that the tendency to redefine Western European countries like France, Germany, Sweden and even the UK (with its NHS and high welfare spending) as 'socialist' comes from the rhetoric of a particular American political party opposed to the introduction of universal healthcare. Or from people opposed to that particular party who want to draw a definite line between the US system and what's done in every other western developed country (including ones outside Europe like Australia, Canada, NZ).
Of course there's no definite, scientific definition for 'socialism' but academcis and political parties in these countries usually define their system as a 'mixed economy' or a 'Social market economy (German: Soziale Marktwirtschaft)'. Which basically means a capitalist based-economy where the majority of GDP remains in private ownership but the government takes a significant amount (33-45%, sometimes more) to fund a welfare state and other programs, and the government has significant power to intervene in markets to ensure fair competition, prevent environmental damage etc.
+1 to this. I've worked as a Linux sysadmin and enjoyed scripting and all that but fiddling around flashing a phone just isn't fun. It's an apprehensive time thinking whether you have the exact right firmware image or whether the phone will be a brick.
I hope one day I can just install new FW on my phone as easy as an 'apt-get install' on a Debian system.
Postage costs in Australia are ridiculous. I'm an Aussie living in the UK, I wanted to send my parents in Sydney a small USB webcam so we could Skype properly (the less said about the in-built webcam and microphone on their laptop the better).
It cost *exactly* the same ($42) to order it from a local online shop located in Paramatta (another Sydney suburb less then 20kms away from my parents) as it did to order from Amazon UK with the shipping address set to my parents' house in Sydney.
What's even more ridiculous is that it wasn't that the webcam was priced particularly high in Australia, it was that Australia Post's standard $13 fee for a small package within the same city was almost as much as Amazon UK's delivery fee to send it 18000km to the other side of the world!
There's a big [citation needed] on that. I don't know about Finland but half of the websites in the UK would be offline by now if that were law, and the German constitutional court would've struck any such law down in a heartbeat just like they did with the data retention laws: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/8545772.stm.
All the UK's police forces keep armed units available and on patrol 24 hours a day[1]. The number of armed police in each force varies, with more rural counties having less and forces that cover a large city having more[2], but the idea that you could go on an almost unstoppable GTA-style rampage in the UK since the police are mostly unarmed is bogus.
Not to mention that if something more serious, like the Kenya shopping mall attack, happened here it's likely be turned over to the SAS, who have well proven they can deal with this kind of thing (see the Iranian embassy siege for e.g.).
It's true that electritcty is only a minority of Germany's total consumption. But one of the goals of the "Energiewende" laws passed by the current government is to increase the share of renewable energy in the *total* energy consumption from 10% in 2011 to 60% in 2050 (the renewables-share in electricity generation should be increased to 80% by 2050).
Whether they can do it or not remains to be seen but it's great that at least one major industrialised nation is making a realistic attempt to use renewable energy for the majority of it's consumption.
LTE Advanced already does that if is has around 67MHz of bandwidth available, and you are the only one using the cell.
This. Correct me if I'm wrong here but I thought the quoted maximum speeds for mobile networks are always *per-tower* not *per-user*, so you could only ever get those speeds in the real world if a virus wipes out 95+% of the local population in your area, leaving you the only one using the tower.
If that was the point you were trying to make why didn't you actually write it, instead of going on with a load of nonsense about users having to worry about which DE toolkit an application was built with?
It's not even a very good one point - given the vast difference between Linux and Windows' *minimum* memory usage there's plenty of room for an Ubuntu box to load the toolkit from another DE without even using up the minimum memory usage for a Windows 7 or 8 box. Not to mention that different Windows applications use multiple different GUI toolkits, so your average Windows box in use will need even more memory to work.
If you want a real world example: I'm running 64-bit Kubuntu 12.04 with bells and whistles like desktop effects turned on. The computer's been up for nearly 2 days, in which time I've run applications using both KDE/QT, GNOME/GTK and Mono.NET GUI toolkits. I have Firefox running currently and memory usage is only 1GB, that's half the *minimum* requirement for 64-bit WIndows 7 or 8.
I wasn't talking about 'Project Portland' (I honestly had never even heard of it). I was referring to the simple fact that you can seamlessly and without problems run a KDE application in Unity or GNOME, and vice-versa run a GNOME (or more correctly GTK) application in KDE. The same goes for the minor DE's, e.g. running KDE apps in XFCE.
You said "users get inducted into a culture of always worrying about which DE and major version a prospective app uses", but this is a problem that doesn't even exist, hasn't for many years and certainly doesn't need some new project on the horizon to solve it.
The point is not that you'd want to run it on a decade old PC but that it uses less system resources, leaving more for applications you want to run. The Firefox slowness was a recognised problem to do with not optimising the build for Linux (Mozilla developer's blog entry http://glandium.org/blog/?p=1975). The "Libreoffice is slow" thing sounds anecdotal and a quick google shows just as many Windows users complaining about it.
Users don't need to worry about which DE a program uses, programs which use another DE's toolkit work seamlessly in whatever DE you happen to be using. It's been this way for many, many years so I can't imagine people are being turned off Linux by it.
" I was comparing a modern Linux distribution to Windows XP because the feature set is comparable"
It's a nonsensical comparison. Ubuntu with Unity is more comparable to Windows 8, in that it's an attempt to merge the desktop and tablet interfaces - whether it's a real success or not remains to be seen but there's nothing even close to it in XP. Kubuntu provides the more traditional Windows 7-style desktop, with all the new features including 3D effects etc.and still needs a minimum of only 384MB RAM. I'm wondering what these critical features missing from Ubuntu are that only make it comparable to XP?
How about comparing like-with-like instead of new software with software from 10 years ago: Ubuntu 12.04 (released 2012): 384MB minimum Windows 7 (released 2009): 1GB minimum for 32-bit, 2GB for 64-bit Windows 8 (released 2012): 1GB minimum for 32-bit, 2GB for 64-bit
Plus the minimum requirement for XP was 64MB, with 128MB recommended (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314865), not 32MB.
That's the kind of answer that should be '+5 informative'. I'll keep using Unison as I only have 2 devices I need to sync between at the moment, but consider this for the future if I get an Ubuntu Tablet or something like that.
Exactly, but Unison doesn't have those problems - it handles where changes have happened on both ends and flags conflicts. I can use my desktop and laptop as much as I want without having to remember which files I modified on which and then simply run Unison to sync my home directory between the two devices.
What does this bittorrent one have as advantages over that?
FFS the plural of 'aircraft' is 'aircraft'. Yeah, yeah grammar Nazi and all that. But it doesn't change the fact that having basic grammatical errors repeated over and over in the summaries makes slashdot look terrible.
The problem is that this doesn't standardise DRM in any way, it just provides a hook in HTML5 for "content providers" (or whoever else) to insert whatever unspecified DRM schemes they want.
I absolutely agree with the idea that they're supposed to work. But the guy you replied to was saying not to throw the baby out with the bath water and dump the whole KDE DE because of problems with Nepomuk, Akonadi and Kmail. You can disable Nepomuk easily in KDE System Settings, ignore Akonadi and use Thunderbird instead of KMail and still take advantage of KDE.
Opening bugs is the best thing to do in most cases with Open Source, but I get the feeling that in the case of Nepomuk and Akonadi especially it's the fundamental design that's the problem. The developers are unlikely to change that for similar reasons to why the GNOME 3 developers won't change their fundamental design decisions despite user complaints.
I was using Mandriva at the time and I can assure the early KDE 4 releases were just as unusable. I can't see how it was the fault of the Kubuntu maintiners, KDE 4.0-4.2 was half-baked, alpha quality software, full stop.
Luckily it's improved out of sight since then, but it's a worry that the KDE developers still don't acknowledge their mistake in releasing those early versions as releases, and not alphas or betas. I really hope they don't make the same mistake with KDE5.
" Look up the hospitals in your area, many of them probably have "Saint" in their name."
Indeed, but I reckon it's the tax money from me and the other 62 million odd people of the UK that keeps it going rather than anything 'Saint George' has done.
Slashdot Mirror
So it's fair to say that Chrony isn't suitable for running on stratum 1 servers, of which there are a few hundred, maybe up to at most a few thousand publically available in the world[1]. For the millions of Linux servers, laptops and desktops that aren't and will never be stratum 1 NTP servers Chrony should be just fine, shouldn't it?
[1] ntp.org currently lists 304 publcically available stratum 1 servers http://support.ntp.org/bin/vie...
Ubuntu doesn't use sysvinit, it uses upstart which is written in C. So you were comparing two 'C' boot sequences.
Actually the patch works in Ubuntu too. If you install Ubuntu 13.10 using Chrubuntu (which sets Ubuntu up as a dual-boot with ChromeOS) the patches will be automatically applied.
Ah, posted the wrong link. The instructions for getting the touchpad to work on 12.04 LTS are here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2190187
This is not correct anymore, the touchpad works fine under Ubuntu 13.10 if you install it using the Chrubuntu scripts. The Chrubuntu author has integrated the patches from Chrome dev Beson Leung into the Chrubuntu scripts so that it automatically patches the Ubuntu kernel for you.
If, like me, you want to use 12.04 LTS instead of the latest you can use an Ubuntu 13.10 machine or VM to build the patched modules and then use them with the 13.10 kernel on 12.04, see here for instructions https://plus.google.com/+BensonLeung/posts/EJUSUudzHb3
And just to be clear, I'm talking about the Chrubuntu method of installing a full-fledged Ubuntu installation here as a the only OS or a dual-boot, i.e. not the Ubuntu-using-the-ChromeOS-kernel setup of Crouton.
I'd agree with you on all those points, but it's still worth point out how terrible Australian high schools' computer education is. When I did the HSC in NSW in 2000 the study for the exam was basically just memorising a list of definitions of computer terminology. There was no attempt to asses actual skills. Instead they just ensured students could give a coherent definition of terms like 'Wide Area Network' or explain the difference between a 'minicomputer' and a 'mainframe' (yes, even in 2000 this is how far behind the curriculum was).
So even though I wish they'd actually turn the computing curriculum into something worthwhile instead of whoring it out to self-interested vendors, the Microsoft course might actually be an improvement.
This is spot on. I'd guess that the tendency to redefine Western European countries like France, Germany, Sweden and even the UK (with its NHS and high welfare spending) as 'socialist' comes from the rhetoric of a particular American political party opposed to the introduction of universal healthcare. Or from people opposed to that particular party who want to draw a definite line between the US system and what's done in every other western developed country (including ones outside Europe like Australia, Canada, NZ).
Of course there's no definite, scientific definition for 'socialism' but academcis and political parties in these countries usually define their system as a 'mixed economy' or a 'Social market economy (German: Soziale Marktwirtschaft)'. Which basically means a capitalist based-economy where the majority of GDP remains in private ownership but the government takes a significant amount (33-45%, sometimes more) to fund a welfare state and other programs, and the government has significant power to intervene in markets to ensure fair competition, prevent environmental damage etc.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_market_economy
http://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/Mixed_economy.html
+1 to this. I've worked as a Linux sysadmin and enjoyed scripting and all that but fiddling around flashing a phone just isn't fun. It's an apprehensive time thinking whether you have the exact right firmware image or whether the phone will be a brick.
I hope one day I can just install new FW on my phone as easy as an 'apt-get install' on a Debian system.
Postage costs in Australia are ridiculous. I'm an Aussie living in the UK, I wanted to send my parents in Sydney a small USB webcam so we could Skype properly (the less said about the in-built webcam and microphone on their laptop the better).
It cost *exactly* the same ($42) to order it from a local online shop located in Paramatta (another Sydney suburb less then 20kms away from my parents) as it did to order from Amazon UK with the shipping address set to my parents' house in Sydney.
What's even more ridiculous is that it wasn't that the webcam was priced particularly high in Australia, it was that Australia Post's standard $13 fee for a small package within the same city was almost as much as Amazon UK's delivery fee to send it 18000km to the other side of the world!
There's a big [citation needed] on that. I don't know about Finland but half of the websites in the UK would be offline by now if that were law, and the German constitutional court would've struck any such law down in a heartbeat just like they did with the data retention laws: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/8545772.stm.
All the UK's police forces keep armed units available and on patrol 24 hours a day[1]. The number of armed police in each force varies, with more rural counties having less and forces that cover a large city having more[2], but the idea that you could go on an almost unstoppable GTA-style rampage in the UK since the police are mostly unarmed is bogus.
Not to mention that if something more serious, like the Kenya shopping mall attack, happened here it's likely be turned over to the SAS, who have well proven they can deal with this kind of thing (see the Iranian embassy siege for e.g.).
[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10260298
[2] http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200910/cmhansrd/cm100305/wmstext/100305m0002.htm
It's true that electritcty is only a minority of Germany's total consumption. But one of the goals of the "Energiewende" laws passed by the current government is to increase the share of renewable energy in the *total* energy consumption from 10% in 2011 to 60% in 2050 (the renewables-share in electricity generation should be increased to 80% by 2050).
Whether they can do it or not remains to be seen but it's great that at least one major industrialised nation is making a realistic attempt to use renewable energy for the majority of it's consumption.
LTE Advanced already does that if is has around 67MHz of bandwidth available, and you are the only one using the cell.
This. Correct me if I'm wrong here but I thought the quoted maximum speeds for mobile networks are always *per-tower* not *per-user*, so you could only ever get those speeds in the real world if a virus wipes out 95+% of the local population in your area, leaving you the only one using the tower.
If that was the point you were trying to make why didn't you actually write it, instead of going on with a load of nonsense about users having to worry about which DE toolkit an application was built with?
It's not even a very good one point - given the vast difference between Linux and Windows' *minimum* memory usage there's plenty of room for an Ubuntu box to load the toolkit from another DE without even using up the minimum memory usage for a Windows 7 or 8 box. Not to mention that different Windows applications use multiple different GUI toolkits, so your average Windows box in use will need even more memory to work.
If you want a real world example: I'm running 64-bit Kubuntu 12.04 with bells and whistles like desktop effects turned on. The computer's been up for nearly 2 days, in which time I've run applications using both KDE/QT, GNOME/GTK and Mono .NET GUI toolkits. I have Firefox running currently and memory usage is only 1GB, that's half the *minimum* requirement for 64-bit WIndows 7 or 8.
I wasn't talking about 'Project Portland' (I honestly had never even heard of it). I was referring to the simple fact that you can seamlessly and without problems run a KDE application in Unity or GNOME, and vice-versa run a GNOME (or more correctly GTK) application in KDE. The same goes for the minor DE's, e.g. running KDE apps in XFCE.
You said "users get inducted into a culture of always worrying about which DE and major version a prospective app uses", but this is a problem that doesn't even exist, hasn't for many years and certainly doesn't need some new project on the horizon to solve it.
The point is not that you'd want to run it on a decade old PC but that it uses less system resources, leaving more for applications you want to run. The Firefox slowness was a recognised problem to do with not optimising the build for Linux (Mozilla developer's blog entry http://glandium.org/blog/?p=1975). The "Libreoffice is slow" thing sounds anecdotal and a quick google shows just as many Windows users complaining about it.
Users don't need to worry about which DE a program uses, programs which use another DE's toolkit work seamlessly in whatever DE you happen to be using. It's been this way for many, many years so I can't imagine people are being turned off Linux by it.
" I was comparing a modern Linux distribution to Windows XP because the feature set is comparable"
It's a nonsensical comparison. Ubuntu with Unity is more comparable to Windows 8, in that it's an attempt to merge the desktop and tablet interfaces - whether it's a real success or not remains to be seen but there's nothing even close to it in XP. Kubuntu provides the more traditional Windows 7-style desktop, with all the new features including 3D effects etc.and still needs a minimum of only 384MB RAM. I'm wondering what these critical features missing from Ubuntu are that only make it comparable to XP?
How about comparing like-with-like instead of new software with software from 10 years ago:
Ubuntu 12.04 (released 2012): 384MB minimum
Windows 7 (released 2009): 1GB minimum for 32-bit, 2GB for 64-bit
Windows 8 (released 2012): 1GB minimum for 32-bit, 2GB for 64-bit
Plus the minimum requirement for XP was 64MB, with 128MB recommended (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314865), not 32MB.
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PrecisePangolin/ReleaseNotes/UbuntuDesktop#System_Requirements
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-8/system-requirements
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows7/products/system-requirements
That's the kind of answer that should be '+5 informative'. I'll keep using Unison as I only have 2 devices I need to sync between at the moment, but consider this for the future if I get an Ubuntu Tablet or something like that.
Exactly, but Unison doesn't have those problems - it handles where changes have happened on both ends and flags conflicts. I can use my desktop and laptop as much as I want without having to remember which files I modified on which and then simply run Unison to sync my home directory between the two devices.
What does this bittorrent one have as advantages over that?
FFS the plural of 'aircraft' is 'aircraft'. Yeah, yeah grammar Nazi and all that. But it doesn't change the fact that having basic grammatical errors repeated over and over in the summaries makes slashdot look terrible.
The problem is that this doesn't standardise DRM in any way, it just provides a hook in HTML5 for "content providers" (or whoever else) to insert whatever unspecified DRM schemes they want.
I absolutely agree with the idea that they're supposed to work. But the guy you replied to was saying not to throw the baby out with the bath water and dump the whole KDE DE because of problems with Nepomuk, Akonadi and Kmail. You can disable Nepomuk easily in KDE System Settings, ignore Akonadi and use Thunderbird instead of KMail and still take advantage of KDE.
Opening bugs is the best thing to do in most cases with Open Source, but I get the feeling that in the case of Nepomuk and Akonadi especially it's the fundamental design that's the problem. The developers are unlikely to change that for similar reasons to why the GNOME 3 developers won't change their fundamental design decisions despite user complaints.
I was using Mandriva at the time and I can assure the early KDE 4 releases were just as unusable. I can't see how it was the fault of the Kubuntu maintiners, KDE 4.0-4.2 was half-baked, alpha quality software, full stop.
Luckily it's improved out of sight since then, but it's a worry that the KDE developers still don't acknowledge their mistake in releasing those early versions as releases, and not alphas or betas. I really hope they don't make the same mistake with KDE5.
" Look up the hospitals in your area, many of them probably have "Saint" in their name."
Indeed, but I reckon it's the tax money from me and the other 62 million odd people of the UK that keeps it going rather than anything 'Saint George' has done.