Recent Comments

Oh by the way, Netflix automatically hitting Play against your will for the next episode of the same series in a forced binge watching session doesn't count as serendipity. :)

It's the one thing the various "cord cutting" alternatives haven't seriously addressed, at all. The ability to veg out and let the streams wash over you, whether a series of Food shows, or endless cartoons, or crime shows out the wazoo, or ancient 60s sitcoms.

Cord cutting still takes work, from the initial setup on through the day to day (and hour to hour) selection of what the hell am I going to download and what the hell am I going to watch / stream now. Then toss in multiple providers and being responsible for all your own hardware, and the sheen fades a bit.

I had every intention of finally getting the family off the satellite TV teat, but stuff like XBMC and MythTV still takes work, and in the end you're still picking and choosing what to to watch every damn time. TV Channels are for a nation bred to be cows, and we're still cows. We want to relax a bit after working in the pasture all day (bad analogy I know).

Besides, the newest whole-home DVR setups from the satcos like Da Hoppa and Genie make things disarmingly easy by comparison.

Meanwhile I never even got MythTV set up the way I wanted, let alone order the HD Homerun tuner card(s) and all the gear required for each separate TV setup. I want it to be easier to go DIY. It's still not, as far as I know.

Sorry for the slightly off topic rambling...

If it was a permanent brick, my apologies.

Keep in mind that it is quite "difficult" to brick a phone nowadays, especially if you are just rooting it. And I am talking about real unrecoverable bricking here. No boot loops, boot failures etc which are incorrectly called bricking. Most of recent phones have bootloaders and/or other recovery systems. I have fixed at least 10 phones so far that people claimed were permanently "bricked".

Just chiming in here
I rooted a phone turning it into a brick permanently.
Am I allowed to whine about that?

Factory non-rooted phones are beneficial for 99% of users. They are too dumb to know what it means and it would just be a security hole.

If you want your phone rooted, do it yourself and stop whingeing. It is not that difficult.

OK, how about nexus + xprivacy.
Rooting nexus is a game, connect USB cable, run software, reboot, done.

Fair enough, but that's simply the next step in a path that includes laptops that no longer carry OS disks in lieu of reinstall media or worse, reinstall partitions. Android and is do the same thing - what's the difference or distinction between an iPhone and iOS?

Yeah, I hear you. I know it's hip to talk badly about Blackberry, but I've got a Bold 9900 and the keyboard is pretty darned awesome. Swipe and predictive text and all that stuff are ok, but I actually do better writing/typing on the BB. Wish I could have that keyboard with my Samsung Note 3, which has better apps.

I've just tried the "chef's suggestion" which is an easy 300MB ISO image. Ran it in VMWare with no problem, but holy crap it's out there. I'm having trouble figuring out the interface. That's fun, actually - I like being challenged and get bored when I'm sitting in front of a KDE desktop that's been built to work like Win95 with more eye candy.

Got to try out that Windowlabs WM too - looks like they had some interesting ideas.

Well, not really just age. Windows machines (at least then) shipped with a full copy of Windows AND driver disks, making a full reinstall relatively painless. You knew you were getting a CPU and an OS to install on it.

Preconfigured (often SSD or ROM based) "appliances" such as Chromebooks and iOS/Android devices don't ship with reinstallation media and go out of their way to disabuse you of the notion that the software is separable from the hardware... Even for techies.

Hey I know it's a lost cause, but has anyone noticed how godawful it is to type on screen keyboards of any size? Autocorrect hurts as often as it helps, and typing in transit of any form is horrific. I'm typing this on the toilet and still correcting 1-2 typos per sentence, on a big phone.

I really hate some of the magical Jobs dictates that others blindly follow, and no keyboards is one. May have to look for a smaller slider.

(To say nothing of the muscle memory ability lost by the dumb dumb dumb removal of physical menu and nav buttons.)

Um, you mean just like a Chrome book? An iPad? An Android device? Apple and MS "app stores"? It's the way things are going; systems locked down by default. Be grateful there are still relatively easy workarounds for most. The tools exist to make it much worse. Our corporate overlords may not be so lenient in the near future. ;)

I think you're missing my point. Code and related technology changes are easy; that's what Google does well. But real forum moderation takes HUMANS, and there's no way a huge free platform like Twitta can pay enough good moderators to use actual good judgment to intelligently and selectively moderate the thousands of messages per second that pass through it in real time. It's a MUCH larger problem than gradually updated Usenet.

Even Google has famously failed (or refused) for over a decade to intelligently moderate the cesspool that us YouTube.

Unpaid volunteer moderators are one way to go, but that brings its own set of cliquey power mad issues a la Wikipedia...

Why? I didn't vote because I'm anonymous and the poll doesn't appear to allow it.

I run XFCE, the main thing I use is it's terminal -- that's the interface to my local machine and several remote servers. If web sites were usable in lynx or there was not so much video content in my day to day life, I wouldn't much bother with a desktop. XFCE is configured to hide it's panels and my 'Desktop' displays only iconified apps while my files live elsewhere. Email is read in re-alpine, my text editor is vim, mplayer is run from a console... so really XFCE or any other DE would have very little to do with my actual usage.

Employment wise, I'm freelance and use a mixture of Windows, OSX and linux (headless) on various client sites.

Great!
Now, can we try that again without the need to install a new OS?

It's like buying a PC then putting Linux on it because Windows doesn't allow admin access.

Google nexus + cm11 + xprivacy

Give me full control over app permissions and su to root just like linux.Is that too much to ask?

Slated for death by imperial firing squad while still for sale.

What makes it different is that the menu home and back buttons are physical.

When this one dies in a few years time I will be looking for another waterproof android phone with real buttons.

Sounds like a perfect way to try out various software. It is all already there, you just need to run it.

And to list them here:
1. Microsoft Kin (May to July 2010)
2. HP Veer 4G (May to August 2011)
3. HTC ChaCha/Status (June - August 2011)
4. Nokia N9 (September 2011 - July 2012 last update)
5. HTC First (April to May 2013)
6. Nokia X (Feb 2014, discontinued announcement in July 2014)

Oh yeah, I'd forgotten that. That makes it easier to give Google the middle finger and put Bodhi on this machine the way I was planning. Hope it boots as fast after the lobotomy ...

Edit: countries/companies

Yeah boy, they're drowning at the moment, that's for darned sure. In this market if you're not fighting to innovate, you're going to be roadkill sooner than later, and buying smaller countries is not an effective, long-term strategy. Right, Sun?

I totally agree. Nice to see a group just having fun, throwing stuff together, and seeing what's useful, what's fun, or what's cool. Compared to stuff like this - which reminds me of when Linux was fun - guys like SUSE and RedHat look old and stuffy. Gotta love an edition named 'cameltoe.'

Announced at the same time as Cisco BGP routers overflowing and causing problems on the Internet...

I was on the ropes about blowing away my ChromeBox drive too. I even bought a second M.2 SSD so I wouldn't mess up the original drive. But, Google offers a really simple backup and restore from USB thumb drive directly from their UEFI.

They saw what the Australian government was doing and decided that it would be fun to tag along for the ride

bwahahahahahahahaha

These guys are funny :P

"We will manage our costs aggressively and drive efficiencies."

Wonderful, except efficiencies isn't a product.

I'm not familiar enough with twitter to know if you are forced to see all responses or tweets directed @ you. Do they offer tweet filtering, can you filter out foul language, or is it left up to the individuals to block or filter certain accounts? I'm not saying everyone is this way, and I'm not directing this towards Zelda in any way, but it seems a lot of people who might be drawn to twitter and other social media are really self absorbed, and thus more likely to be assholes. These assholes then get to broadcast towards others whether those other users deserve it or not.

I'm still on the ropes with this reformat of my Chromebook. On the one hand, this machine does admirably most of what I'd like it to do. On the other hand, it does not do a couple of things I need every day. Weirdly, back in 2000 when it came time to reformat Win98 and put on Linux (SuSE 7.1, if you're curious) I went full steam ahead. This time, the differences in firmware and the whole "developer mode" thing somehow make me a bit more anxious about borking my box. Or maybe I've aged and am now more risk averse.

What will probably tip me over the edge is noticing all the subtle but creepy ways Google "knows me" through my interactions on Youtube, G+, and searching the 'Net. I've got a couple of adverts following me across the WWW right now and it reminds me it might be smart to keep some distance from Google.

That said, its 4 second boot to a usable web browser is pretty awesome.

The poll has been up for five days now. Interesting to see that Windows is indeed in the lead with 21 points, but second place is currently "Console only" with 19 points, far ahead any of the popular Linux desktops: KDE, Gnome, and Unity. Very surprising, to me at least!

I spend a lot of time on Usenet, so I'm as aware as anyone how many jackasses there are on line. But I disagree that Twitter has no responsibility. Code choices affect a site's feel and determine what you can or can't do with it. And that affects how people behave.

There may be no law requiring Twitter to intervene, but good business sense indicates it's in their best interest to keep it a service people like and want to use. No one uses Yahoo messenger anymore, because Yahoo let random spammers contact you and spam you, and people decided to find another way to chat, which - if I recall - Google chat soon provided.

Yeah, I was wondering that too. Here's her profile at the Guardian. Seems to be an outspoken feminist: http://www.theguardian.com/profile/caroline-criado-perez

Seems the bank has proposed a set of new notes in which the Queen would not be present, and CCP opposed the idea. http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/the-womens-blog-with-jane-martinson/2013/jul/04/women-bank-notes-bank-england

Whatever the reason, and whatever her beliefs, she certainly seems to have been attacked pretty viciously.

People are or can be assholes. If you enter a public forum you will find them and vice versa.

Twitter's under no obligation to police its users or protect the sensibilities of people who choose to broadcast themselves to the world on a two way medium. Too freaking bad.

I do appreciate good forum moderation. But I don't believe it's possible at Twitter's size.

Twitter's not a celebrity worship service, as much of its participants seem to act. It's a relatively open broadcast medium with an equally open feedback loop. That's one reason I'm not foolish enough to use it or any other "social media" besides small forums....

(I was as hard hit by her father's death as anyone, and am sorry for her apparent e-naivete.)

Mod parent up!

I thought they were accustomed to having females on there already.

Lol, I never knew he actually named his daughter after Princess Zelda. Still making us laugh posthumously...

They need to release the Pixel 2.

The original was great, but Sandy Bridge is now 3 generations behind.

It's mostly sentimental, not much information in it. However, there are legitimate reasons to why systemd sucks. First of all, it was designed with the wrong goal. It tries to emulate the Windows services framework and fails badly. In the Windows world, a service conforms to a published (and even maybe stable) API. I don't know much about it but I would guess that it contains mechanisms to stop, restart and indicate success/failure. Everything systemd is trying to emulate with signals, polling etc. It doesn't work so well. Sometimes a server has a fatal flaw in it (or its configuration) and has no way of indicating "I'm no longer functional, don't restart me". So systemd tries to restart it and all its dependencies on and on, wasting my time. If it was intended to be a boot-time tool only, it wouldn't get so bloated and get in the way.

Second, it carries on the idea of 'file system is a configuration file' mentality. It did work for the SysV-init because that system was already very simple and was easy to discover. Not so with the systemd, you need to create your 'script' in a particular folder, link to it from the things which depend on it, and then do some more soft linking in order to start its dependent services. It's so complicated and undocumented, makes me wonder whether these guys know how to program at all. I mean, just parse a fucking config file for dependencies, what's so hard about it?

Which brings me to the third point. The alleged "eases developers' job" applies only to RedHat developers, not the guys who write the actual servers being run or the users who want to get out of the distribution's boundaries. The whole thing only works if you use your system in the way your distributor intended for you to do. This of course eases the work of RedHat developers since they don't have to deal with silly things like documentation, stable design etc.

On the computer I had before this one, I had sysv-init. I had reduced the whole thing into inittab + one script since I didn't have anything complicated on it. Of course it booted blazingly fast since it didn't need to read hundreds of mini config files. I couldn't do it starting from systemd. Everything is spread around in so many files (and so many soft links), it's impossible for me to wrap my head around.

I do think that sysv-init could be replaced with something better but systemd isn't it. Something which can read a configuration file and start processes (not services, eww) in parallel would be a way forward. There is a lot more to talk about how systemd fails and I'm sure many people have done a more thorough job elsewhere but this is just my two cents.

I use i3wm, easiest for me to learn but there are many great ones out there such as aweseome, dwm, etc.

now it's
brownlist.com -> server error on "/" application

Pretty much echoes my sentiments regarding SysVinit. It gets the job done with minimal resources, but it's not really appropriate for modern systems where a parallel and dependency driven init process is a major user requirement and resources are no longer an issue - especially on desktop and mobile devices where the user would like as near to instant on as possible. Despite that I find SystemD does what it is supposed to without too much fuss, and is in many ways more capable than sysvinit, I also think it's a bloated mess that was badly designed from the start, and when it comes unstuck fixing it is an absolute nightmare. Don't even get me started on the whole DBus integration/requirement thing; that sounds more like something Microsoft would have cooked up for Windows than the core principles of UNIX, and is one of the main reasons that I'm taking a good look at migrating as many of our Linux servers over to BSD as possible when they are next due for a refresh.

PID1 needs to just do the essentials and be a minimal piece of code that is pretty much as close to "hello world" as you can get to avoid complications and failures, everything else should either be an optional SystemD module or an external program depending on the the user's preference. Want SystemD to handle your logging, fine, tell it to load that module and off you go. Want to run a proper daemon that can listen for remote log entries too, then disable the SystemD module and use RSyslog or whatever you prefer. Some functions of SystemD are already modular, but that needs to go a lot further in my view, and requiring stuff like DBUS integration right there in PID1 is just asking for all sorts of stability problems, but it into a module, then at least there's a chance the system might be able to recover without a kernel panic.

I agree that we can do better than init for machines destined for desktop use: I'm a big Linux fan but I also appreciate the fast start-up time of my chromebook and my Mac, and Linux and BSD are both much slower. On servers though, I'd like to keep init, thank you very much - it's slow but I only reboot every six months or so, and in the meantime the clear, understandable, human-readable init scripts are lovely.

Maybe this is a more useful argument/discussion when we are careful to separate out Linux on the server vs Linux on the desktop?

I agree, the road ahead may be a little bumpy, but the movement forward is better than ending back at where we started. That service startup sequence was a pain in the ass.

What advantages does systemd have exactly? Almost everything new in systemd had already been solved in a a more sane fashion elsewhere. All it's done for me is break stuff that I wouldn't even think to check because... "an init wouldn't do that". More the fool me for thinking systemd was an init system rather than some bloated POS parasite with tentacles reaching every corner of the OS. The icing on the cake is that every critique on basic design or suitable functionality for an init system is met by the developers with a "because fuck you!".

Archlinux made the switch to systemd something like two years ago. At the time, there was much complaining (and I was one of the people bitching), but I have to say now that it does the job. It hasn't caused me issues, and it's not that difficult to learn how to use it. People using other distros don't have to be worried, I think.

This rant will change nothing. Plenty of people have complained about systemd, but its advantages end up winning people over once the change has settled in. As the distros adopt it, we'll see users "revolt", then cool down after a while just like for archlinux Debian adopting systemd pretty much means that it's the way of the future.

Let's not forget also that Linux users are quick to complain about change (see: unity, kde4, gnome3). It's understandable: people don't want their workflow to be affected. I think it won't take too much playing around with systemd for most people to feel confortable with it.

I'm not a big fan of systemd, but I disagree with the idea that sysvinit didn't need replacement.

It required a large amount of boilerplate in the service start/stop script, which was different between distros, making it a lot of work to provide a decent start/stop script for your daemon. The hard work of distro maintainers hid this nuisance from most end users though.

Ordering the service startup sequence by manually assigning priorities to them (S80myservice) instead of using dependencies is a terrible hack. It also prevents services from being started in parallel, which is a pity on today's multi-core systems. It's like building your code using a shell script instead of a Makefile.

There is no consistency in how services are started: inittab can respawn, init.d scripts can query the service status (on some distros!), (x)inetd can start services on demand, but all have different configurations.

I have some doubts systemd is the right solution to these problems, but at least there is movement now. In my opinion, the solution would be to improve systemd or replace it with something better, not going back to sysvinit.

If I plugged in a USB cable upside down on my last HP laptop it rebooted immediately.

I'd be willing to go with this standard even if it had lower throughput, at this point. I bitched and moaned about Apple abandoning USB [The Standard!!!] for Lightning, but then when I started using Lightning I realized how much an improvement in life it is when you can insert the plug without having to think about its orientation. So a reversible orientation USB plug is a good thing. I've personally dealt with, loathed, and laughed at the various kludges already listed here in the comments.

For the record, I miss Firewire though - never understood why they killed it when it seemed to work so damned well.