Recent Comments

I cannot root my phone due to warrenty.Android needs better permission control and root option by default.

If you trust the app, you install it, otherwise you don't install it.

And on what do you place your trust? I.e. how do you decide if you can trust an app or not?

I use xprivacy to have control about every permission.

After the 1.0 release I bought one of these: http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/tp-link/tl-wr703n, as it looked like the cheapest way to get a working piratebox - under $30 delivered, plus a 32gb thumbdrive I had lying around to use as storage. I've had it running for probably about a month.

So a few observations:

• Setup instructions are very simple and had me up and running in about 20 minutes.
• Zero maintenance required. Once it's set up, it'll chug along until it runs out of storage space.
• The one I chose runs off 5v microusb, so you can hook it up to any 5v source (including those external mobile phone battery packs)
• The web interface is a bit clunky at times, most obviously when it comes to uploading and organising files. Apparently you can get webDAV working on them, but I haven't tried yet.

It's pretty good fun for the price, and since it's all open source you can mod it till your heart's content.

After the first couple of app installs, I kind of lost interest with the huge list of requested permissions that go with every app. Since you can't selectively toggle the individual items to deny the app access (only to deny the app install completely) the list is kind of useless anyway.

If you trust the app, you install it, otherwise you don't install it. It's not like you aren't going to install the "Facebook" app if you don't fully agree with one of the bullet items on the permission list.

Looks like it would be good for low-latency home networking, too. Why not keep those hops local? Sneaker net rules.

seems like the encryption might be a source of overhead or slowdown? maybe not.

Jesse James was a lad that killed many a man,
He robbed the Glendale train,
He stole from the rich and he gave to the poor,
He'd a hand and a heart and a brain.

Well it was Robert Ford, that dirty little coward,
I wonder how he feels,
For he ate of Jesse's bread and he slept in Jesse's bed,
And he laid poor Jesse in his grave.

(chorus)
Well Jesse had a wife to mourn for his life,
Three children, [now] they were brave,
Well that dirty little coward that shot Mr. [Mister] Howard,
He laid poor Jesse [Has laid Jesse James] in his grave.

Jesse was a man, a friend to the poor,
He'd never rob a mother or a child,
There never was a man with the law in his hand,
That could take Jesse James alive.

Jesse was a man, a friend to the poor,
He'd never see a man suffer pain,
And with his brother Frank he robbed the Chicago bank,
And stopped the Glendale train.

It was on a Saturday night and the moon was shining bright,
They robbed the Glendale train,
And people they did say o'er many miles away
It was those outlaws, they're Frank and Jesse James

(chorus)
Now the people held their breath when they heard of Jesse's death,
And wondered how he ever came to fall
Robert Ford, it was a fact, he shot Jesse in the back
While Jesse hung a picture on the wall

Now Jesse went to rest with his hand on his breast,
The devil will be upon his knee.
He was born one day in the County Clay,
And he came from a solitary race.
(chorus)

Reddit user iamtubbeman initially discovered that these groups combine low-level permissions with higher permissions that could be used for more nefarious purposes. For example, an app that can receive an SMS could silently be updated to also send SMS, costing the user money. Likewise, an app that previously used Wi-Fi to find a user's general location, could acquire GPS access to see the user's precise location.

This would be good for when travelling, camping, concerts. Kudos to the PirateBox crew!

How long, I wonder, before a law is passed to make hiding of metadata illegal.Meanwhile, TOR is a good start.Perhaps this network could use TOR for session initiation

Further to this story, DHS employees only found out about this happening when it was reported in the local paper. The DHS is currently bargaining for renewal of the employee enterprise agreement for which has stalled.

I understand a USB device can pretend to be many different devices, but OSes have to support those features. I don't think a USB device can just say its a network jack and hijack my existing routing that I've set up ( on a SE Linux system). I'm just going to have to assume that some of those tactics are os dependent.

I never knew the X was to do with the Xbox, I first heard of XBMC when people started using it on the Raspberry Pi, and naturally I thought the X meant X11 like many other unix-based graphical things.

Mediocre is right but it's certainly not a new practice. Clevo make a ton of laptop cases which they sell to smaller 'custom' laptop companies. They're largely the same save for branding and specs (though when you're using the same boards how much changes?). It's amazing, really. Alienware Area 51-M is the same as the Sager 5660. Sager rebrands clevo, Dell rebrands Sager.

I didn't know about the RAM. Relying on others to supply parts while not bringing anything new up to the plate sounds like a mediocre-bad idea.

Well, actually Apple and Google interests are different. Google usually releases more open-source
and did Android with more vendors, to get market share. If they were in the position of Apple,
they would probably do the same, who knows.

Which is totally dependent on outside partners to build. If Toshiba winds up getting a great deal to supply someone like Apple with flash, guess who gets squeezed out? I might buy one or two for home use, but I'm not sure I'd go beyond that because of concerns over supply.

So far they have CPU, GPU, RAM and now HD as well. Next is probably AMD motherboard and then we can have a complete AMD computer...

I am in the process of building my own "cloud". I was going debian only with CEPH, openvswitch, qemu-kvm and linux-vserver (I know I should switch to LXC). But I will give a try to alpine thanks to your post!

I finally did register to show my commitement...
Previous of that I was a lurker from the early stages and I tried to follow SN also but I could not stand "the noise" over there...

PS: I'm not english speaker...

I know kung fu.

This is great. The damage of qt getting bought by Nokia is finally being rectified and the greatest threat of qt languishing while Nokia flounders is being mitigated.

PS - suck it, gtk3 :)

As in, during the sentencing phase of a trial, do prosecutors reiterate the crime in the most gruesome possible way they can, trying to influence the jury to react with horror to something they already know the most intimate details of? If so, does it work? Or is this more applicable to the first time the subject hears the story?

I'd like to see followup. This is interesting stuff.

...And then I realize the story was posted two days ago. Oh well, can't hurt to ask.

I'm trained in other fields (geoscience, computer science), but cognitive science is fascinating. To think we can "reprogram" or "newly program" memories in human beings is startling and just goes to show how ambitious modern science and technology is getting. I realize such technologies can be turned to beneficial or nefarious purposes, but what stands out to me is just how fast our quantitative studies of the human brain are progressing and how many different applications we are investigating now. Programmable memories? Wow!

When describing the sins of your coworker to the PHB describe from the painful money draining outage causing perspective.
One contracter screwed up royally then told management that the whole thing can be fixed by doing it properly. After it was screwed up. The line repeated was "don't you agree that doing this is the right solution". The answer is not "yes". The answer is "Yes, I will do that to prevent you from screwing this up again. You are fired. Game over. Bad. Very bad. Leave. Now."

Interesting that they are using the grsecurity LSM.

Well, time to fork again! MS Office can keep their ribbon of crapulence.

I know, and that's exactly what I'm talking about -- the name change.

"Media" means everything. "Entertainment" means a small subset of disposable bullshit. They've painted themselves into a ghetto of irrelevance.

If everything you do with your computer and television is "entertainment", good for you. Some of us want to use them for lots more than that. Of course the product hasn't changed much, yet; that's hardly the point of the subject. And what you call your project is how you think of your project which is what that project will become.

It's like purposely calling one of your children "the dumb one".

It is just a name change. Your post sounds like they are removing features which they are not.Also entertainment centre is more fitting than media centre. I doubt many people are using XBMC to read textbooks or news for example. I don't mean news ticker but properly sitting in front of your TV and reading news on it. There are much better ways for doing that.

The announcement says it's not the final logo. That is a crappy name though.

Microsoft's infatuation with the Kinect was an unfortunate time. By that point in the console generation, they seemed to think they had won over Sony and that the "core gamer" audience would be loyal to them no matter what. As you say, they were really chasing the Wii crowd with that thing. I'd say those kinect ads may also have been targeted at fathers who owned the system and may want something that would allow them to play with their kids.

Most of the Xbox's collection of games is composed of first and third person shooters, action games and sports games, with a significant fraction of those shooters having an M rating. Not to say their games are very mature, they have that tendency that many game companies have of thinking gory = mature, but I'd say it's fair to say most parents wouldn't want a kid under 10 to be playing too many Xbox games.

Microsoft's consoles have a reputation of being "bro" consoles, if anything. The violence is a big part of the appeal for that demographic.

I assumed you were someone speaking out of their ass about gaming being a children's hobby (as I've seen happen many times) so I apologize if I was too harsh.

Well, I'm getting one of these: http://www.oreillyauto.com/site/c/detail/EB00/121G.oap?keyword=121g
since I can't afford one of these: http://www.oreillyauto.com/site/c/detail/EB00/121GMF.oap?keyword=121gmf
So, I was wondering if you have any spare Plutonium lying around? The Libyans of late have been quite unreliable....

Sorry... As a 33 year old addicted to a few computer-based video games myself (Starcraft, Warcraft, SimCity, etc), I did not realize that those "older-age-gamer" stats extended to some console systems as well.

I personally have never owned an Xbox, or know anyone that has, so my only impression of them come from some of the TV advertisements that I have seen such as this one that depicts a number of families playing the games. In these official ads by Microsoft, aside from a few parents, the average age appears to be somewhere in the 10-12 range. Perhaps these family friendly ads full of youngsters where mainly a stab at Nintendo's Wii successes and not at the general population of actual users of the console. Forgive my unfair generalizations.

Uh, going from Media Center to Entertainment Center isn't an expansion. It's a contraction, and a severe one. Media hold a LOT more than entertainment vehicles, from textbooks to video courses to histories to family archives to god damn NEWS.

They are making the project a lot less valuable, flexible, and appealing all around. Not the end of the world, but an unnecessary dumb move. Not that I liked the old name either. :)

I am puzzled by that comment. You do realize the average owner of an Xbox is older than 30... right? Or do you still think gaming is something kids do with their friends in the basement?

Read this: www.theesa.com/facts/

The "little kids" part of your comment is particularly off-base. Most of their marketing is targeting young adults or people in their thirties. Not surprising considering the kind of games they offer.

It looks like something targeted to little kids.

And "Xbox" isn't targeted towards little kids?

In TFA there is a bit more. They want to expand it from "Media Center" to "Entertainment Center", and seems they thought "while we're making changes, let's dump the Xbox part too". While the new name isn't as catchy, at least it is less awkward to say.

The real problem is that logo. It looks like something targeted to little kids. "We arent quite there yet" is very generous.

The lack of ribbon, PDF writer, and ability to leave your paste buffer the hell alone are the killer features of LibreOffice.

Throw away your years of branding and reputation. That's what open source needs, more confusing nonsensical unneeded rebranding to another nonsense word. How many of these projects must we chase down every time we revisit them in a couple of years? Usually there's at least a valid legal reason, but this?

And without RTFA I don't believe that second paragraph. XBMC isn't tied to the Xbox name just because it originated that way. Has MS even hinted at a problem?

Case in point; I'm writing this and have already forgotten the awkward meaningless new project name. :(

And/or he was simply correcting me because I didn't follow TFLink and the article was talking about the Rollapp service to begin with? :)

Ah well, points about MIA LibreOffice Online stand.

Well yeah, it would help if the registered lurkers weren't so quick to downvote a post just because they disagree with it. A single chip-shouldered voter makes us ACs "-1" and logged in users don't see the comment by default, or so I gather. Too much power really. And I've yet to see a worthless troll AC on this site. The jerks seem to have accounts. ;)

No no. I'm not talking about the commercial paid/ad-supported remote desktop service version!

I'm talking about "LibreOffice Online", which has been in development as PART of LibreOffice for years now, since v.3.5. You just install it in your own server (regular old desktop LO) and it has its own web server that let's you use the apps via a browser. No 3rd party required at all! And yet they've let this killer feature just fester, even to the point that a knowledgeable commenter assumes I'm talking about something else. It's tragic.

It's way bigger than that. Sun managed the code in a way that made it hard to contribute. LO is not just a forked code base but a management process that facilitates contributions and improvements. OO.o doesn't share those advantages and will soon fall behind.

Thanks for that explanation. I never knew the difference, or that there even IS a difference. 'Cloud' is a marketing word and means nothing.

I once had this happen too. Turns out the other comment wasn't deleted but I needed to adjust the threshold slider down to -1 to see it again.

Alright, feature request time: it would be nice if you could tell when a post was replying to a deleted comment. The indentation makes it look like I'm raging at the above guy for no reason. :p

My interpretation is that they've got round to releasing 4.2 to the cloud service, but 4.3 is coming.

rollApp (the cloud platform they're using) itself is in beta, so they're probably feeling the water with a version that's been out a while, so that they can tell if any bugs are cloud-related.

Btw, the difference between a web-app and SaaS, is that a web-app is written for a browser (usually in Javascript or PHP), whereas SaaS is written for a traditional platform (in C++ or whatever), then virtualized, and accessed by clients through a VNC-like web interface. The web-app in this context is the thing that is rendering the virtualized display buffer to the browser, the SaaS is the virtualized x86 code execution environment.

'Cloud' is an ill-defined buzzword that can mean anything internet/local-network based.

...Corporate Advertising Consortium Association?

You are possibly right. I can imagine that the main feature of the next version will be the ribbon to make it look like recent MS Office.