You have to understand my frame of reference. For the past decade I have mostly used FreeBSD and CentOS. I also dabbled with Slackware and Debian.
The new crop of desktop-friendly Linux distros such as Ubuntu, Fedora, and openSUSE are unstable as heck compared to traditional Linux distributions.
I currently use Ubuntu at home on my desktop, and I haven't too many complaints, but it does have more issues than any Linux distro that I have ever used. I understand that is the down side, and the up side is a lot of the basic tasks in Ubuntu is braindead easy and drivers are cake. Ubuntu may have its issues, but at least I don't have to spend hours manually tweaking X config files and researching carefully the values I need to not fry my monitor.
Linux has come a long way, but compared to headless server-oriented distros Ubuntu is unstable. They experiment with trying to make the user experience more streamlined and easy, but under the hood things don't always go to plan. My biggest complaint is that under-the-hood Ubuntu does some things in a very weird way compared to more traditional distros which causes additional headaches and work when doing more advanced tasks and maintenance. Overall, though, I don't bash Ubuntu and I appreciate the big steps distros like Ubuntu, Fedora, and openSUSE have made towards making Linux feel more natural on the desktop.
You may be right. I like the "Rogue State of Mint", because Linux Mint has come out and said that they have no plans on using Unity and will be diverging a bit from the path that Ubuntu is currently taking. The Gnome 2.0 hills dividing them is a nice touch.
Debian is one of the most secure and stable Linux distributions. I haven't used Debian in years, so I don't know if their software is still a bit out-of-date (instead of being bleeding edge, they have been notorious on holding back app versions for the sake of stability). I suspect Debian has a decent install base on servers, but probably not too much on desktop machines... at least not compared to the likes of Ubuntu, Fedora, and openSUSE. These days CentOS seems to be the front-of-the-pack server distribution. I'm not talking about which distributions are better, just their popularity. I feel bad for Debian, because Ubuntu outsources all their heavy lifting to Debian and Debian doesn't get the recognition it deserves. It is funny, though, that Ubuntu is one of the most bleeding-edge and unstable Linux distributions and it is built on top of Debian which is rock solid stable, but behind-the-times.
I didn't take it as that. I think the tongue-in-cheek "The Greek Communist Empire of Ubuntu" is due to its sheer size (and the USSR was massive geographically-speaking). Ubuntu has a massive install base, especially on desktop machines.
Due to extremely different ideals, I suspect the Kingdom of Slackware and the Great Communist Empire of Ubuntu are engaged in a cold war with their respective fingers on the red buttons.
I have been planning to make XFCE my default session in 11.10 since Gnome 2.32 will no longer be an option. Combine that with the news that GDM will be replaced with LightDM, my system will be relatively Gnome-free.
I can't find too much information on LightDM, but I hope it is easily customizable and that it isn't ugly-as-sin or too-basic out of the box. I have been disappointed in 11.04 on the lack of easy customization/configuration of GDM. I know I can always edit the raw conf files, but I'd like a nice GUI to manage it like I would other aspects of the theme.
I have not seen the original British version, but I have read that season 1 of the U.S. remake closely follows season 1 of the original British version. I think season 2 onward is going to diverge from the original British storyline, though. I was surprised that I'd like the show, because I feared it was another Vampire Diaries / Twilight type soap opera drama show aimed at young girls. I was very pleasantly surprised and it has enough humor to offset the serious bits.
I was excited when they started to air TSCC on Thursday nights, but that only lasted a few weeks and it has disappeared from the schedule. They said the ratings weren't very good. The fact that a show like TSCC can't pull good ratings on Syfy confirms to me that the core channel demographic has shifted away from the original market.
Syfy usually has one or two decent shows at any given time, but that is the limit. I do enjoy Eureka, Warehouse 13, Sanctuary, and to my surprise I found that Being Human wasn't all that bad. While I agree that the glory days of Farscape, SG-1, and BSG may be over, there is still some decent programming... but not much. My biggest disappointment is that Syfy no longer airs Dr Who and I do not have BBC America.
Wrestling, ghost shows, and now a cooking show. It is obvious that Syfy has fallen and I don't think science-fiction is a big enough draw to be a premium channel (too much of a niche).
I haven't tried Linux Mint, but I heard if you like Ubuntu that you'll love Mint. If I can't manage to get an alternative desktop environment up and running when Ubuntu 11.10 comes out I may switch to Mint since they say that have no intentions of using Unity. Linux Mint sounds like it is a more stable, less experimental variation of Ubuntu.
I can't speak for everybody else, but my issue with Ubuntu is that it gets more and more rigid with each release. I love Linux because it is very customizable and flexible. Ubuntu is slowly slicing off the choices and is developing the, "we know whats better for you than you do", attitude. I have found oddities when dealing with configuration issues and custom app compilations/installations from source choking on Ubuntu. I think Ubuntu has done some wonderful things for Linux on the desktop, but I do not like the direction they are currently taking. Luckily there are other Linux distributions out there, but I admit few are as newbie-friendly as Ubuntu. It just seems like Ubuntu is losing its Linux identity with its chase to become a serious contender to Mac OS X and Windows.
Both KDE and Gnome have gone off the reservation.
it is time for other window managers to see some light, such as XFCE, LXDE, or Enlightenment. Of those three I'd say XFCE is at the front of the line with version 4.8. However, LXDE is perfect for VNC due to it being very lightweight.
I am not sure what I am going to do when Ubuntu 11.10 comes out and they remove "Ubuntu Classic" as a session option. I know Gnome 2.32 isn't bleeding edge, but it does the job for me and I have few complaints. I tried Unity but as someone who doesn't want to use his desktop computer as if it were a touchscreen mobile device, I immediately set my default session to Ubuntu Classic. I know installing XFCE breaks Unity, but that is my most-likely route in Ubuntu 11.10... either that or switching distros.
I set up an Ubuntu box a couple weeks ago because I wanted to try Linux on the desktop. Most of my prior Linux/BSD experience has been with headless servers running either FreeBSD or CentOS. I haven't tried Linux on the desktop since the late 1990s. Ubuntu in many ways is quite alien to me because it has taken some weird tangents. I downloaded, compiled, and installed PHP from www.php.net and even though there were no errors in the logs Apache would choke on PHP scripts and would often timeout or produce weird results. I ended up removing every trace of PHP from the system and installed various php packages via apt-get and it now works like a champ, even though this route sticks me with an older version of PHP (5.3.5 instead of 5.3.6). I have never have difficulties compiling from source before, but Ubuntu must do things so oddly that it requires patches to PHP that are included in the Ubuntu php packages. I am still wrestling with how to get "hostname --fqdn" to actually display the full "host.hostname.tld" instead of just "host". It is a bunch of little things like those issues that is already turning me off to Ubuntu.
I can see using OpenID for throwaway accounts, but I would never use it for anything serious.
I use different passwords for every site I visit, so if one site gets compromised then my other accounts are still safe. OpenID puts all the eggs in one basket, and that just doesn't sit well with me.
She gutted HP calculator R&D. The HP49G was the last new calculator they designed, I believe, and that was approximately 10 years ago.
I still have my trusty, old HP48GX. I don't have a chance to use it much these days, but it is resting at a place of honor in my home office.
HP made excellent calculators over the decades and it is a shame that a short-sighted CEO ended that legacy.
I don't use the website myself (I am happily married), but I've read that Plenty of Fish (an online dating site) sends you periodic emails reminding you to log in to check out the latest singles and for your convenience includes your password in the email in case you forgot it.
The problem with answers to secret questions is that they are essentially passwords themselves. If the cracker or identity thief can see the answers then they can easily reset your password to what ever they desire. It is because of this that they need to be hashed and treated with the same severity as passwords themselves.
The answers can be normalized (remove punctuation, either lower or upper case the string, remove spaces, and perform any other normalizations you desire). It is not perfect but should only break down in edge cases. As for over-the-phone verification, you got me there. I understand what you are saying about how the support personnel needs to be able to see the answers when talking to the customer on the phone. While it lessens security somewhat, I guess AES-256 encrypting the answers (instead of hashing) would solve that.
It amazes me that a company as large and established as Sony would make such a boneheaded move as storing sensitive information in plaintext.
Passwords and answers to secret questions should always be hashed. Credit card information and other sensitive information should be encrypted (preferably AES-256 or stronger).
From my understanding, the codec by MPEG-LA is superior to WebM, but that WebM is theoretically safer to use than MPEG-LA.
Has MPEG-LA caused any troubles or are people just assuming that one day MPEG-LA may do something dastardly evil?
My guess is "cloud" is used because networking diagrams have historically used a cloud icon for the internet to mean it was nebulous and alien to the network.
I am sorry, but LibreOffice is a horrible name. I thought it was only supposed to be a temporary name when they initially forked.
It is not a very catchy name and it does not roll off the tongue very well. I agree that going back to OpenOffice.org might not be the best thing to do, but they really need a new name.
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You have to understand my frame of reference. For the past decade I have mostly used FreeBSD and CentOS. I also dabbled with Slackware and Debian. The new crop of desktop-friendly Linux distros such as Ubuntu, Fedora, and openSUSE are unstable as heck compared to traditional Linux distributions. I currently use Ubuntu at home on my desktop, and I haven't too many complaints, but it does have more issues than any Linux distro that I have ever used. I understand that is the down side, and the up side is a lot of the basic tasks in Ubuntu is braindead easy and drivers are cake. Ubuntu may have its issues, but at least I don't have to spend hours manually tweaking X config files and researching carefully the values I need to not fry my monitor. Linux has come a long way, but compared to headless server-oriented distros Ubuntu is unstable. They experiment with trying to make the user experience more streamlined and easy, but under the hood things don't always go to plan. My biggest complaint is that under-the-hood Ubuntu does some things in a very weird way compared to more traditional distros which causes additional headaches and work when doing more advanced tasks and maintenance. Overall, though, I don't bash Ubuntu and I appreciate the big steps distros like Ubuntu, Fedora, and openSUSE have made towards making Linux feel more natural on the desktop.
You may be right. I like the "Rogue State of Mint", because Linux Mint has come out and said that they have no plans on using Unity and will be diverging a bit from the path that Ubuntu is currently taking. The Gnome 2.0 hills dividing them is a nice touch.
Debian is one of the most secure and stable Linux distributions. I haven't used Debian in years, so I don't know if their software is still a bit out-of-date (instead of being bleeding edge, they have been notorious on holding back app versions for the sake of stability). I suspect Debian has a decent install base on servers, but probably not too much on desktop machines ... at least not compared to the likes of Ubuntu, Fedora, and openSUSE. These days CentOS seems to be the front-of-the-pack server distribution. I'm not talking about which distributions are better, just their popularity. I feel bad for Debian, because Ubuntu outsources all their heavy lifting to Debian and Debian doesn't get the recognition it deserves. It is funny, though, that Ubuntu is one of the most bleeding-edge and unstable Linux distributions and it is built on top of Debian which is rock solid stable, but behind-the-times.
I didn't take it as that. I think the tongue-in-cheek "The Greek Communist Empire of Ubuntu" is due to its sheer size (and the USSR was massive geographically-speaking). Ubuntu has a massive install base, especially on desktop machines.
Due to extremely different ideals, I suspect the Kingdom of Slackware and the Great Communist Empire of Ubuntu are engaged in a cold war with their respective fingers on the red buttons.
I have been planning to make XFCE my default session in 11.10 since Gnome 2.32 will no longer be an option. Combine that with the news that GDM will be replaced with LightDM, my system will be relatively Gnome-free. I can't find too much information on LightDM, but I hope it is easily customizable and that it isn't ugly-as-sin or too-basic out of the box. I have been disappointed in 11.04 on the lack of easy customization/configuration of GDM. I know I can always edit the raw conf files, but I'd like a nice GUI to manage it like I would other aspects of the theme.
I have not seen the original British version, but I have read that season 1 of the U.S. remake closely follows season 1 of the original British version. I think season 2 onward is going to diverge from the original British storyline, though. I was surprised that I'd like the show, because I feared it was another Vampire Diaries / Twilight type soap opera drama show aimed at young girls. I was very pleasantly surprised and it has enough humor to offset the serious bits.
I was excited when they started to air TSCC on Thursday nights, but that only lasted a few weeks and it has disappeared from the schedule. They said the ratings weren't very good. The fact that a show like TSCC can't pull good ratings on Syfy confirms to me that the core channel demographic has shifted away from the original market.
Syfy usually has one or two decent shows at any given time, but that is the limit. I do enjoy Eureka, Warehouse 13, Sanctuary, and to my surprise I found that Being Human wasn't all that bad. While I agree that the glory days of Farscape, SG-1, and BSG may be over, there is still some decent programming ... but not much. My biggest disappointment is that Syfy no longer airs Dr Who and I do not have BBC America.
Wrestling, ghost shows, and now a cooking show. It is obvious that Syfy has fallen and I don't think science-fiction is a big enough draw to be a premium channel (too much of a niche).
I haven't tried Linux Mint, but I heard if you like Ubuntu that you'll love Mint. If I can't manage to get an alternative desktop environment up and running when Ubuntu 11.10 comes out I may switch to Mint since they say that have no intentions of using Unity. Linux Mint sounds like it is a more stable, less experimental variation of Ubuntu.
I can't speak for everybody else, but my issue with Ubuntu is that it gets more and more rigid with each release. I love Linux because it is very customizable and flexible. Ubuntu is slowly slicing off the choices and is developing the, "we know whats better for you than you do", attitude. I have found oddities when dealing with configuration issues and custom app compilations/installations from source choking on Ubuntu. I think Ubuntu has done some wonderful things for Linux on the desktop, but I do not like the direction they are currently taking. Luckily there are other Linux distributions out there, but I admit few are as newbie-friendly as Ubuntu. It just seems like Ubuntu is losing its Linux identity with its chase to become a serious contender to Mac OS X and Windows.
Both KDE and Gnome have gone off the reservation. it is time for other window managers to see some light, such as XFCE, LXDE, or Enlightenment. Of those three I'd say XFCE is at the front of the line with version 4.8. However, LXDE is perfect for VNC due to it being very lightweight.
I am not sure what I am going to do when Ubuntu 11.10 comes out and they remove "Ubuntu Classic" as a session option. I know Gnome 2.32 isn't bleeding edge, but it does the job for me and I have few complaints. I tried Unity but as someone who doesn't want to use his desktop computer as if it were a touchscreen mobile device, I immediately set my default session to Ubuntu Classic. I know installing XFCE breaks Unity, but that is my most-likely route in Ubuntu 11.10 ... either that or switching distros.
I set up an Ubuntu box a couple weeks ago because I wanted to try Linux on the desktop. Most of my prior Linux/BSD experience has been with headless servers running either FreeBSD or CentOS. I haven't tried Linux on the desktop since the late 1990s. Ubuntu in many ways is quite alien to me because it has taken some weird tangents. I downloaded, compiled, and installed PHP from www.php.net and even though there were no errors in the logs Apache would choke on PHP scripts and would often timeout or produce weird results. I ended up removing every trace of PHP from the system and installed various php packages via apt-get and it now works like a champ, even though this route sticks me with an older version of PHP (5.3.5 instead of 5.3.6). I have never have difficulties compiling from source before, but Ubuntu must do things so oddly that it requires patches to PHP that are included in the Ubuntu php packages. I am still wrestling with how to get "hostname --fqdn" to actually display the full "host.hostname.tld" instead of just "host". It is a bunch of little things like those issues that is already turning me off to Ubuntu.
I can see using OpenID for throwaway accounts, but I would never use it for anything serious. I use different passwords for every site I visit, so if one site gets compromised then my other accounts are still safe. OpenID puts all the eggs in one basket, and that just doesn't sit well with me.
The new HP calculators are no longer designed and manufactured by HP. It has all been outsourced to Taiwan/China and Singapore.
She gutted HP calculator R&D. The HP49G was the last new calculator they designed, I believe, and that was approximately 10 years ago. I still have my trusty, old HP48GX. I don't have a chance to use it much these days, but it is resting at a place of honor in my home office. HP made excellent calculators over the decades and it is a shame that a short-sighted CEO ended that legacy.
I don't use the website myself (I am happily married), but I've read that Plenty of Fish (an online dating site) sends you periodic emails reminding you to log in to check out the latest singles and for your convenience includes your password in the email in case you forgot it.
The problem with answers to secret questions is that they are essentially passwords themselves. If the cracker or identity thief can see the answers then they can easily reset your password to what ever they desire. It is because of this that they need to be hashed and treated with the same severity as passwords themselves. The answers can be normalized (remove punctuation, either lower or upper case the string, remove spaces, and perform any other normalizations you desire). It is not perfect but should only break down in edge cases. As for over-the-phone verification, you got me there. I understand what you are saying about how the support personnel needs to be able to see the answers when talking to the customer on the phone. While it lessens security somewhat, I guess AES-256 encrypting the answers (instead of hashing) would solve that.
You did not lost your identity, you gained additional account holders!
It amazes me that a company as large and established as Sony would make such a boneheaded move as storing sensitive information in plaintext. Passwords and answers to secret questions should always be hashed. Credit card information and other sensitive information should be encrypted (preferably AES-256 or stronger).
From my understanding, the codec by MPEG-LA is superior to WebM, but that WebM is theoretically safer to use than MPEG-LA. Has MPEG-LA caused any troubles or are people just assuming that one day MPEG-LA may do something dastardly evil?
My guess is "cloud" is used because networking diagrams have historically used a cloud icon for the internet to mean it was nebulous and alien to the network.
I am sorry, but LibreOffice is a horrible name. I thought it was only supposed to be a temporary name when they initially forked. It is not a very catchy name and it does not roll off the tongue very well. I agree that going back to OpenOffice.org might not be the best thing to do, but they really need a new name.