Recent Comments

Easy there, A.C. The issue is sloppy editing by yours truly, not cherry picking of facts. I've fixed the summary and will flog myself as penitence for not being more accurate.

Glad to help! I stayed away from Suse mostly because of the MS chumminess, but it does seem to have retained its fan base and seems a bit more exciting than Redhat.

I had very high hopes for Mint but they don't lavish much attention on KDE and their upgrade policy is medieval. There are several nice little obscure distros -- PCLinuxOS, Mageia, Sabayon, Chakra -- but after trying most of them I ended up with Kubuntu because it worked better.

Just to be clear, he was anti-gay-marriage , not anti-gay . there is a huge, ignorant, difference.

Pipedot will do the community no service propagating slanted or cherry-picked facts; Particularly when slandering a living persons name...

The new Firefox OS is actually pretty neat, development wise. Instead of having to learn custom languages and tool kits, they use standards-based web technologies. Anyone familiar with current web development will immediately go: "Hey, I know this!" when looking at how to make an app for their new phone. Or, at least that's how I felt when I thumbed through it.

You know, for a nice change of pace. Firefox has turned into everything they SAID they hated about the Netscape suite - bloated and creaky and unstable. (Fittingly, the Seamonkey suite sings by comparison).

They abandoned Thunderbird (more or less).

They wasted resources on yet another mobile phone platform, their own. Meanwhile their Android Firefox sucks eggs and can't render properly.

They've done nothing but chase Google's money for years and years. I don't care who their CEO is. Their choice of a bigot was just the latest bad decision from an org with no soul.

Wow - thanks for the post. I just checked out soldkx and discovered some software I'd never heard of, packaged as part of their "back office" product:

Internal information streams with SeedDMS.
Employee management with OrangeHRM.
Customer relations, and leads with Zurmo.
Build and manage a professional site with Typo3.
Invoicing with SiWapp.

Wasn't aware of any of these - will be checking them out! That's what I love about sites like this.

Seems like training alone isn't going to lead to 'faster' if you're wearing heavy equipment. These guys need something made of spun spiderweb silk or something, but made out of teflon. They've already got the Batmobile, sort of.

Interesting, that's the first I'd heard of soldkx. But it's the first I'd heard of kaos, too. I'm an opensuse guy and have been since SUSE 7.1 (2001 or so). I find opensuse usually does nice work with stock KDE, while Kubuntu has some rough edges. But that's my experience/preference, and I admit not everybody is into the somewhat heavy install footprint of opensuse.

just noticed a mistake in my summary - click 7 times to see 10 entries. Hmm. That's what I get for trying to post articles during my day job :) Guess I'll leave it as is - kind of funny.

So if we were to cite the daft song harder, better, faster, stronger - they're hoping to get stronger. The kevlar would give them harder. Faster maybe with some extra training to handle increased body speeds, I wonder what that might look like. And better, that question is best left up to the troops.

This is in very early development and some critical required supporting technologies for it have not yet been created. In fact, a significant part of this is merely research to improve kevlar. The thing that suppossedly makes this suit "Iron man" like is a "powered exoskeleton", which has yet to be developed and I can't find any details about that.

Wow, deslided is awesome, I'll have to remember that one.

I'll have to check out The Witcher. I've been a bit too absorbed with Skyrim (via Wine and PlayOnLinux) and am ready for a new RPG.

...for her pleasure.

http://deslide.clusterfake.net/?o=html_table&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.pcworld.com%2Farticle%2F2363780%2Flinux-gaming-rising-7-big-name-pc-games-that-now-call-linux-home.html

This sounds similar to SolydK/SolydXK perhaps?

I went through looking for decent KDE-based distributions and against my inclinations ended up liking Kubuntu most of all. I didn't want to give any extra eyeballs to Canonical but it's really the most useful one I tried. All the others were either flaky or lacking in sufficient user base to make them sustainable.

Irrelevant to what, exactly? I don't see any other substantive discussion. Which was exactly my point. He's a rich manager. There's no story without the sex angle.

iGlass

I'm noting a huge increase in the number of groups, magazines, other miscellaneous publications, and now this. Good for you, BSDs! I run FreeBSD happily and always wished they had greater presence and a higher profile. Hope this is a good start and a step in the right direction for them!

For me though the worst part isn't the fact that you have to pay for it, it's the fact they finally make you download some sketchy downloader program - it's just another hoop. Sun used to do the same with downloaders of openoffice and the like - jump through the hoop, fill out the forms, push the buttons, and here comes the download! No - it's just the downloader and when you get done installing that, only then do you get to start downloading the software you went out looking for in the first place.

It can't just be about Android and iOS - I'm very glad there are some alternatives out there, and WebOS of course was reputed to be a good one. Look it up on www.theregister.co.uk and you'll find a host of reviews and articles written by people who truly took pleasure in the unique aspects of the user interface (the card paradigm, especially) against which iOS and Android compete poorly.

I hope it brings them good luck! It's been depressing watching HP the past couple of years - rife mismanagement, competing strategies, and not to mention the complete gutting of the braintrust that came with purchase of Compaq and thus DEC. Then the last looney of a CEO decides they're going to give up the hardware business and focus on services. WTF?

This makes me think there are still pockets of sanity in the place, which in the past couple of years, would have been hard to believe.

You must not have your Gawker reality distortion filter on.

That is a cool bar chart, which Baekdal found but didn't create himself (it wasn't in the NYT report either).

I remember thinking that the bar on the extreme right, representing the habits of people age 75 and older, would have been representative of the entire US population twenty years ago, when the web was just being rolled out into the mainstream.

The subject matter is arguably tasteless but it is kind of interesting, there's something about gays being media tycoons, maybe it's a combination of artistic taste and ruthlessness. Off the top of my head we have Jann Wenner (Rolling Stone), David Geffen, and the woman who founded AllThingsD/Recode.net.

Apollo Computer was the original "engineering workstation" company that got started around 1980 and was an early market leader, but which lost the race to Sun. Apollo had serious technical talent but they made at least two mistakes: they developed their own operating system, and their system program language was Pascal.

It's actually about par for the course for installing any trial version of a pricey commerical software product. It's never free with no strings attached. They want your email address so they can follow up with non-ending streams of marketing, etc.

Perhaps it's because his sexuality is irrelevant? As is everybody's?

Hah, hah, it seems Gawker and I are of like minds on the subject -- they say NYT desperately wanted to "out" Cook in the piece but couldn't bring themselves to do it.

The New York Times Really, Really Wants to Out Tim Cook

"It's silly, because the world has known Apple's chief executive is gay for years now, but the New York Times is practically gnawing its own arm off in the process of writing about Tim Cook's personal life. They clearly want to mention the sexuality of capitalism's most powerful man-so why won't they?"

And while you certainly CAN polish a turd (Jobs was nothing if not that), it's much harder to polish an ordinary brick, even if in this strained analogy Cook is the capstone or cornerstone brick of the enterprise.

Gah. Analogies make me gag a but. :)

Plus some projects, like TrueCrypt.ch , are set to continue forward with TrueCrypt - even if the original developers are no longer taking part.

I never said it was sound logic. I think the rationale is less attention would be paid to them, but I think the opposite would happen.

I'm trying to think of which continent would make a difference. Nothing comes to mind. Antarctica, maybe. The trick is to have no online presence at all, which of course is hard.

Seriously, no one gets credit for being quiet and competent. And reading the article made me feel slightly sick that the only thing people are really interested in is either:

For the consumers: entertainment via some shiny new toy, or
For the investors: huge amounts of increased value in their stock portfolio, whatever that takes

Boring!

Sorry, but his closeted status is the ONLY interesting thing about the guy. He's an apparently competent and boring manager, period.

People keep wanting him to be a showman / asshole like his predecessor. It's good that he's not.

May the cult of Apple die a nice slow slide into overpriced obscurity.

I'm not exactly sure the point of the Times' ballwashing exercise.

I always thought that their incompetence was protecting me.

There may also be some offline changes as well. I know at least one person who is seriously considering moving to a different continent and this is a contributing factor in that.

Pseudoanonymity is very slightly better than nothing, if only in a warm fuzzies way.

I was modestly paranoid before, but the revelations did slightly shock me.

Well, the question posed is unusual, "which of these would you miss the most". A desert island question. As a smartphone encompasses everything in the other categories and adds telecom and portability and porn, it's a no brainer choice.

So some big hunks of salt are required here.

This news is several days old and also not true any more, as posted on several "other" news sites.

Quoting:
"Amazon / AWS sent out the following email:
Dear Amazon S3 Customer,
Amazon S3 now supports server side encryption with customer-provided keys (SSE-C), a new encryption option for Amazon S3. When using SSE-C, Amazon S3 encrypts your objects with the custom encryption keys that you provide. Since Amazon S3 performs the encryption for you, you get the benefits of using your encryption keys without the cost of writing or executing your own encryption code.
Until now, in order to use your own encryption keys, you needed to encrypt your data client-side prior to uploading them to Amazon S3. With SSE-C, you now have the option to securely store your data using keys that you manage, without having to build client-side encryption infrastructure.
To use SSE-C, simply include your custom encryption key in your upload request, and Amazon S3 encrypts the object using that key and securely stores the encrypted data at rest. Similarly, to retrieve an encrypted object, provide your custom encryption key, and Amazon S3 decrypts the object as part of the retrieval. Amazon S3 doesn't store your encryption key anywhere; the key is immediately discarded after S3 completes your requests.
You can learn how to use SSE-C today by visiting "Using SSE with Customer-provided Keys" in the Amazon S3 Developer Guide.
Sincerely,
The Amazon S3 Team"

You're probably better informed than I was. I consider reasonably tech savvy, but I didn't understand - or even suspect - the scale of the surveillance state. Things like intercepts at cross-continent cables, prying open the content of unencrypted data going among data centers, and the like. I was astonished.

I was never on Facebook, post only non-personal stuff to G+ (and am seriously reconsidering Android and Google's ecosystem entirely), and no longer entrust PGP encryption since we now know it's hackable. I'm tempted to go back to POP mail and take all my mail offline. I'm more depressed than ever.

(1) The Snowden revelations informed the public at large what is going on. We (formers readers of /. and I suppose current readers of |. as well) knew already in general what was going on, Snowden merely confirmed what we knew and provided more details.

(2) If we start to self-censor, they win.

That survey graph is, to me, the greatest tell-tell of the article. The young age groups value smart phones (48%) and computer (18%) sources while nearly skipping more traditional media like tv (13%) and print (0%)

If that trend continues, old school media will definitely need to look into some refactoring.

I broke up the paragraphs into smaller chunks - hope that makes it a bit more readable. Great article, by the way - thanks for submitting!

Journalist: "Bloggers: you can't succeed by just repackaging other peoples' news." There are some decent bloggers out there providing new content. But there are hundreds of millions of others just linking to news stories and then commenting on them. Look at the Drudge Report, which is a popular and well-liked blog (probably top-10 in the USA, anyway). No news of its own - just links to other articles, and commentary and insight.

Some day these two groups of Crips and Bloods will realize they each need each other and decide to let bygones be bygones.

There's precious little real journalism and reporting going on out there, and even formerly independent/big newspapers (Washington Post) now have fired their overseas journalist staff and rely on a wire service like AP. That means one AP reporter is having his stuff repeated across many major newspapers. If it sounds like a bad thing, I'd say I agree.

yeah, it's old media formatting :)

this is almost a wall of text, a little formatting could go far in readability ...just a consideration...

"Continual decline in digital traffic"? Seriously?? They have made their paywall more and more obnoxious and harder to avert. Now one gets "summaries" and warnings after as few as 5 page views.

The NY Times is very actively and blatantly literally driving away readers and potential readers. It very clearly wants to be an also-ran as a local or global news source. They don't want my eyeballs? Fuck 'em. There are hundreds and hundreds of great sources for local and global journalism.

This is a case study of watching old media drive itself determinedly and proudly into the ground as fast as it can.

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One thing I don't want to see....Politics. I hated it when Slashdot went that route in support of the John Kerry presidential campaign (I dropped my subscription), and I hate that SoylentNews is going that direction. If I want politics, I'll read Drudge.

I could also do without the "smartphone" flavor of the month articles as well. That's all I see at Ars/Engadget/OSNews anymore. I get that people are well entrenched in their iPhone/Android camps, but to me that's lowbrow non-news on par with, "Where do you think Lebron James is going to sign this summer?"