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Unfortunately, making one unified decision is not really possible for a collection of community projects. I would love to see a set of standards built that distros could conform to, so you could test against that standard instead of a distro, but I can't see that happening anytime soon.

Having used commercial software on Linux in the manufacturing sector, support is usually only provided for a few main distros anyway (Debian, Red Hat and SuSE in my case). If you can get the binary to run on another distro, then that's great, but you are not going to get anything close to the same level of support as the officially sanctioned distros. For most applications I actually don't see that as a major problem, although RMS would certainly have something to say about the restriction of choice; it's still Linux, and in a commercial setting you are probably choosing the best OS/distro for your required apps anyway, rather than the other way around.<br><br>

Another problem was the issue of libraries, particularly when they were more obscure on one distro but bundled with another. A poke around in the dependencies for the various packages revealled that the typical solution here was either to statically link any such libraries across the board, or in a few cases to do so selectively from distro to distro, dynamically linking to the distro provided versions where available and statically linking the rest. Worst case scenario would be to just statically link the entire lot, which is an approach I've seen used for several Linux games - commercial or otherwise.<br><br>

So, it's not as if the problems don't have solutions, although they are not necessarily ideal, which leave me thinking it's more to do with the low return on the time and effort required. Unless you are working off the back of one of the major Linux desktop migrations that pop-up from time to time and making the binaries available to all, you have a much smaller userbase, split across multiple distros that are potentially different enough to be treated like different OSs from a compilation and support perspective. Each distro you support gets you more users, but adds to the cost of developing, compiling and testing the code, plus supporting it when you are done, and for many apps, particularly the more complication ones the numbers almost certainly just don't add up. So perhaps the real question is "what can the Linux community do to make the numbers add up?"

Some random twitter personality claims there was a secret predetermined warrent cannary, which was activated recently. But its so super secret that only a few people are in the know, and they can't tell us what it was for reasons unexplainable. Eithere they're afraid of a rubber hose style differential cryptoanalysis, or they need to have their medication levels checked.

As someone that has been using Linux about 15+ years, I see the biggest problems like this:

Giving up OSS sound system.
Other *NIX system still uses OSS in one way or another and many programs are able to output sound. First Linux went all Alsa and you had many problems with cracking sound. Playing sound from many sources was nearly impossible so you had to use Arts, Esd etc (Yes, arts and esd was also needed at the time of OSS, but some development could have got rid of that dependency as *BSD did). All the drivers had to be rewritten. To complicate things even more they decided to slap Pu-pu-ppu-ppul-puls audio system to the already broken architecture. OSS was all about what UNIX should be: working with files (simple and elegant). Even to this date, when a Linux user wants Skype to work properly I might have to fight a lot getting the sound to work properly. Many times a growing noise appears which do not appear with other OS.

Broken desktops.
Early we had two competing desktop systems: KDE and Gnome (because of license issue). Every single time I tried Gnome, I had terrible crashes also it was quite sluggish. Opening a folder with pictures took forever as the thumbnails were created each time. It was also lagging terrible behind KDE in many other ways. Still it was the first choice in many distors meaning a new user got a really bad taste of Linux. KDE was still usable, but there was a small chance your distro was running KDE as default.

Then came KDE4 which completely destroyed the only really powerful and usable desktop at that time. Gnome had grown up at that time to be somehow usable. But Gnome also decided to mess up their desktop, which resulted into many new broken desktops got created (Unity, for example).

Now we still have some usable DE like Xfce, but they are still lagging behind what we have and they are not impressing on users coming from other OS.

Many more factors.
I do not intend to write a long article so I just conclude here that there are many more factors preventing Linux to be used in every computer.

Has anyone told Randall about this, over at XKCD?

I couldn't trust my life in this thing either. Call me a control freak, but I couldn't just sit there with no input or control mechanisms incase anything went wrong. I just find it hard to believe they could program for every possible scenario.

The only way I could see this working is in a controlled area or roadway where all the vehicles were driverless and could communicate with each other to avoid accidents.

but they *do* take up a lot of space.

So does a peak plant, but these seem much more flexible.

From what I've read flow batteries have some very nice features, if you can get the price down, but they *do* take up a lot of space.

Definitely like the idea of being able to use relatively abundant, low cost materials in a system that can be indefinitely charged and discharged... wow!

Almost missed that this was a multi-choice poll. Maybe some text to make that clearer would be helpful, like a "Choose any" on the line after the title.

So the deeper question is "what makes it not attractive to release a commercial linux version of most software?". Besides the obvious smallest userbase, the large number of distros makes support a very complex topic. Even among the top few, there are some quite big differences.

It's not that Linux is lacking software, quite the opposite in fact, it's lacking viable alternatives to commercial software for which there is currently nothing that can come close in terms of capabilities and/or is as convenient to use for which the vendor hasn't released a native version, or simply won't do so.

If I could my solution for good food would be quite simple, to live in East Asia: China (including Hong Kong and Macau), Singapore, Taiwan, the Philippines, South Korea, or Japan. It's not that I'm horrible at cooking, it's that so many people are so much better, skilled, and experienced and in addition in my opinion these countries have an accessible food culture beyond any other places. I read a philippine food magazine today and it reminded me of how much I miss it.

Oh, that's nice, thank you.

Could we also get a setting for the font size of articles and comments? While I can read the current size - and I think is plenty big enough for the interface (menus etc.) - a slightly larger font for the actual content feels a bit more comfortable.

In addition I did shrink the width of the right column a bit, since I felt it takes up too much space in comparison to the articles/comments section. So I guess I'll keep using the extension for now. ;)

Any system which is designed to give you plausible deniability is guaranteed to give you no plausibible deniability at all.

You show them one thing, they say "yeah, yeah, you're running something which permits you to have multiple views - now show us the other one", and get out a bigger wrench.

I watched it again, and you are right. It looks like the tether keeps it on the treadmill.

Getting over the obstacles? No hassle? Did you not see its tether go taught? Without that tether it would have fallen asimo over tit.

However, more importantly, it's a planar biped.

Planar bipeds are not interesting. Everyone in the robots community, apart from students who work on planar bipeds, will be cringing at this "advance". The little robot in the icon at the corner of the summary is more interesting, from a robotics perspective.

I agree, SG:U felt as if written by soap opera writers. We can do without all the drama and teenager problems in science fiction. I hope they leave the annoying Eli character out of the new movies.

No doubt. :)

SG:U was the biggest shit that they ever produced. I would have been okay with it under a different brand, but not "Stargate". The Startrek Voyager and Battlestar Gallactica merge that they called SG:U is a total insult to the Stargate brand.

And he can tell us Stargate(as prounounced in he hundreds of hours of existing content) is actually pronounced "pyramid thign" from the chiense roots.

stlth is a project that supposedly gives you deniable containers on Linux. Hopefully it uses plain dm-crypt for inner containers because LUKS has a distinctive header. FreeOTFE can create inner containers on LUKS volumes, but only runs on Windows

This is an alternative, compatible implementation of truecrypt. I'm surprised it is not more widely known and supported.

https://github.com/bwalex/tc-play

Also, cryptsetup-LUKS can now mount truecrypt containers.

From what I read, the alleged "plausible deniability" of "hidden" containers was pretty weak anyway.

So, they have finally figured out that content is worth more than gold and have decided to capitalise on Stargate. Oh well, there it really goes down the drain.

Which is really a pity as SG:U actually was looking much better towards the end ... and SG:SG1 just had a new cast infusion (while we are here, thanks for killing Farscape guys :-( ) which would have allowed SG:SG1 to continue for another 5 years. Lots of places they could have gone but no sciffy decided to shut it down. Shame, shame, shame.

Shall we kill another Firefly while we're at it?

Is Cyberdino Systems behind this?

Everybody, it's been nice to know you.

I'll probably see them because I liked the film and I loved the series, but I'd much rather see them either continue SG: Universe or do a new series. Anytime Hollywood does a "reboot" it's really saying to fans "we know you like this, and it won't matter how shitty it is; you'll still pay." Stupid Hollywood.

It's very impressive seeing it get over those obstacles at that speed with no hassle.

What LUKS doesn't give you is HIDDEN, deniable containers.

I haven't seen anything to substantiate that claim. He can speculate all he likes, but I won't believe it until there are a lot more details.

http://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=14/05/30/1318243

German dude says there's a vulnerability.

Still hardly a reason to dump rather than fix the project...

Discovery had a better, more indepth article i only saw after-the-fact: http://news.discovery.com/tech/robotics/velociraptor-inspires-fast-running-robot-140531.htm

TrueCrypt mainly catered to Windows users.

I would say it catered to multiplatform users just as much. With TC I could have files in containers on a NAS and still be able to use them from any machine. And while I like the OSI direction, featureset comes first.

LUKS encrypted file systems have been natively supported in most Linux distros for 5+ years. These encrypted file systems can be easily created on the command line or with a GUI tool like "gnome-disks". If you, for example, insert a thumb drive formated as a LUKS, the desktop environment pops up a password dialog to automatically mount the file system for you.

TrueCrypt mainly catered to Windows users. Also, the TrueCrypt license was incompatible with both the free-software and the Open Source Initiative philosophies.

So, the world as pilotless Disney monorail? I can dig it.

I hope they use JonnyCab from the original Total Recall in these Googlebots.

What if you compare against what a doctor says? As much as we'd like to pretend Doctors know everything: They do not. Comparing against a source such as a peer reviewed scientific journal is going to be quite accurate..but do you look up every single answer in a book before giving one? I certainly don't, and I'm pretty sure most doctors do not either.

They make plenty of mistakes with medication and other things... So really that would be a much more fair comparison.

I envision the two converging in the distant future. Think a massive network of tracks instead of roads. The vehicle only needs to make a decision at junctions, and then has a limited number of paths. You only need to really be worried about what is on the track in front of you, and that is much simpler to do in a safe and redundant manner.

Isn't it supposed to be something noticeable by its absence, BEFORE a secret warrant turns up?

Not necessarily. I would define it as any sort of signal that a warrant was involved. Since they didn't have any scheme predefined, so they may be doing the best they can. It is still entirely speculation, though.

I think perhaps people are misapplying that term in this case (not Pipedot specifically, everywhere).

Isn't it supposed to be something noticeable by its absence, BEFORE a secret warrant turns up? At best what we have here is a warning or sad cry for help, after the fact. There should be a different catchy term for this. Maybe "dead canary".

It would, however, be nice if there were at least SOME competition in the sorta-trustworthy, sorta-authoritative, crap-free general interest information marketplace.

But you know, there just isn't. :(

WP owns that space the way that Google owns search or Facebook owns social networking. (Interestingly WP is the only one of those three that I use.)

Public transportation is better in EVERY respect. It's a pity there's a place for these toys. It's one of the failures of contemporary infrastructure (the lack of it).

I assume these cars will have several safety mechanisms in place to make sure something like that happens only once in a while...

These kind of cars can be used by people who lack a driver's license, or are intoxicated. Since it is not possible to take control of the car, there is no reason to put any requirements on any of the passengers. Perhaps self driving cars with manual controls will have a locked mode, or something, to also allow this.

exactly. or plowing through the boardwalk. will the inevitable electrical or camera fault fail-safe by jamming on the brakes on the highway?

...and all i can think about is that scene from austin powers, the 60-point turn...now imagine sitting through that with no steering wheel. no thanks :)

I remember the days when Wikipedia was "not to be used as a reference". People still pay lip service to this principle, but increasingly I see myself and others using Wikipedia as the first go-to-place to quickly get up to speed on something unfamiliar. One can progress to more "authoritative" texts, of course, but in so many cases the Wikipedia summaries are sufficient. I actually think the new mantra could be "you can use Wikipedia for a reference and you will only be penalized for doing so if it is shown that a given Wikipedia summary was wrong."

Best comment there:

"sls "¢ May 29, 2014 11:05 AM
"WARNING: Using TrueCrypt is Not Secure As it may contain unfixed security issues"
Did nobody else pick up on this?"

That might help those in the latest generation who have not really learned to cook. I wonder if 3D printed food will become a fad or whether this will, in contrast, make "all natural" food even more "good", in the minds of consumers?

in a 2008 aluminum Macbook for more than a year now and it works well. I understand that Intel put some extra work into validating the SandForce controller, but Seagate may have picked up a decent foundation for moving forwards.

From a statistical viewpoint, I can imagine a time when autonomous vehicles are actually safer to use (for avoiding accidents) than running the roads with a large conglomerate of human drivers with various attributes of skill, fatigue, and sobriety. What is perhaps more of a concern to me is if the vehicles can be hacked and used to create accidents intentionally, for whatever purpose.

But this is an interesting story...

I still wonder whether the philosophies of privacy versus power and the distribution of autonomy in society is workable or whether Animal Farm/1984/Brave New World scenarios are inevitable after any post-revolution period of time. TrueCrypt was a tool for those interested in securing some privacy for data? I can imagine many legitimate personal, political and business use cases, as well as, more nefarious intentions. Nonetheless, I hope that we can devise a system/laws that allow such tools to have an accessible, operational and audited presence in the Computer Age. Basically, I feel it is important that power (for privacy or anything else) be distributed and this is a basic principle of democracy. Many of the possible explanations for TrueCrypt's demise appear linked to the lack of enough money to justify continued development though, which begs the question of how an interested community could best fund key programs like OpenSSH, TrueCrypt, etc, and how they might handle key developers moving on?