Recent Comments

Bryan's talking about the Apple TimeCapsule, a router/NAS combo.

TimeMachine, of course, is the OSX software.

It's the best self hosted open source off site Dropbox-like file synchronization software. Period.

It makes OwnCloud look like the slow, unreliable, and perennially flaky scripted kludge that it is. And it is much more straightforward than git-annex.

Trust me, your friendly anonymous cowardly pal. Seafile is really well made, and it's very easy to use.

It even has group and public file sharing and versioning. (It borrows heavily from git.)

In fairness, Adobe has always been well known for pulling its ideas out of my butt.

Posting a reply would not be classified as a thread-leaving action.

Implemented. Posting a reply will now prevent the colors from changing on the rest of the comments.

Indeed; Snip it. I've never subscribed to cable and don't own a TV.

For the few shows that I have watched, Netflix ships them to me in a little red envelop. Additional benefits are that the bluray quality exceeds the over-the-air broadcast, the episodes contain no advertisements, and I can watch the stuff at my own pace.

Just cut the cord. What's on cable that you need to watch? I can get almost everything I want to watch online either free or a la carte, with the minor exception of HBO since those idiots refuse to take my money. I'm happy to pay $2 for an episode, commercial free, when I want to watch it. I don't see how standard cable can ever hope to win against that.

I'll still stick with Firefox, because, well, I'm a creature of habit. It doesn't feel broke, so I don't wanna fix it. Though actually, if it did make me coffee I might consider switching.

Lucky to have an ad blocker on my own machine, but when I try accessing the site on my mobile, the floating ads on the site make it impossible to read just by taking up screen space, and occasionally cause the whole page the flicker as the ad updates every 2 seconds for some reason.

Add to that that they are now /deleting/ some comments on /.... (personal experience).

I still go there right before SoylentNews or Pipedot, but 2/3 of the time there's some shit like this making me absolutely fed-up with a site that used to be my favourite on the '.net. Geez. Never again.

Uses Amazon S3 as the backend.

This thread just cost us $230. The spousal unit teaches online courses in the summer and would like to untether from his desk. He's got a tablet, but it's not sufficient to the task. We have an old netbook, but ... netbook. He's got a laptop, but it's long in the tooth and short on battery life. He's been eyeballing the MacBook Air 11, but it's pricy and hasn't updated adequately in a very long time. If one is going to spend that many $$, one wants a bit more in terms of screen, power, storage ... all of it.

Realizing all that, he was at the point of deciding whether to spend $$$ on a prior-gen MBP 13, or wait to see what possible updates might be on the horizon for the MBAs, when this thread got started. I poked around, found the Acer C720, looked into whether slapping elementary OS on it was a thing (it is), and floated the idea to him: "So ... it's kinda like the netbook of today, but better and more useable ... you could think about maybe this for $230? It wouldn't be an MBP, but it'd be ... it'd be $230." Sold. It arrives Tuesday. I can't wait to get my grubby, little fingers all over it.

A few questions, though, assuming anyone is still looking at this days-old thread:

• Anyone have the C720 with elementary OS?
• Anyone have above, but with C720P and, if so, is the touch screen well-supported and worth it?
• Anything else I should've told the spousal unit to consider before he squeezed the trigger on the purchase (not too late to change the order), e.g. is 2GB RAM sufficient?

I've been mixing it up, but I'm still not happy with my backup system. On my Mac I've got a combination of TImeMachine doing basically daily backups, and Chronsync which does backups of the whole machine to a separate disk that I keep on the other side of the house. That second USB disk is basically my "go disk" if Al Qaeda busts in with a nuclear warhead and I need to skedaddle with whatever I can in a rucksack. Videos of the kids and so forth though now takes up too much space for a simple USB disk, and I'm a bit tired of having drawers full of external drives that all require managing and that can - any of them - crash hard and die at any given moment, taking their contents with them. So I've got that stuff on a NAS.

I played with SpiderOak a bit because I dig their philosophy and they offered a native client for openSUSE Linux, which is a big sell for me. I've heard people say its UI is awful but I never thought so - works perfectly well for me, and it's perfectly intuitive. Tarsnap looks damned interesting though, and their pricing is great. I was looking at other rsync providers to back up my NAS and it gets expensive super fast!

Finally, for music not only is all my stuff uploaded to Google Music (which I'm not sure is considered a backup, and I'm not sure I can get it back out, either). And I actually do burn the monthly disk of family photos, manuscripts to my books, and a few other things that are truly irreplaceable. Got to plan for an EMP too, right?

Well, anyboy who's looking for breaking news on Pipedot is barking up the wrong tree. These kind of sites - from Pipe to Soy to Slashdot and beyond - simply don't fill that role. Think back to how many times we bitched about old news on Slashdot. I mean, do the math: everything posted here includes a link <i>to some other site where it appeared first</i>. You want breaking scoops, go to a site that pays for a fleet of reporters who are actually out there gathering the scoops and breaking the news. And yes, those guys are paid. This place on the other hand, is a place where people of similar interests can gather to discuss those things, hopefully sharing their collected wisdom and their own links to things of interest.

This thing might not be breaking news, but I don't give a flying you-know-what. It was interesting to me and I thought it would be interesting to others as well. And it was! I am actually thinking of doing one article per week about some interesting project on github or elsewhere, kind of "hey, check out this interesting project!" kind of thing. I've been exposed to all sorts of interesting software by reading Slashdot/equivalent and following the links when someone posts, "oh that's cool but it reminds me of this other thing." That's interesting to me, and if there are things that interest you, well, the Submit button is at the upper right. Use it.

I have been keeping articles on the site because I like this place and has potential. It takes me a bit of time, but I'm happy to do that on the grounds that a tight group of smart, technically minded people who appreciate the site and its interface/credo and are willing to get together to discuss things that interest them - that benefits me too. Any one of these sites can be replaced by an RSS feeder with a healthy number of feeds. What makes it interesting is the people who gather there to discuss the news.

Pipedot just went from 'a place I read interesting comments' to 'a place I find out about security issues that affect me.'

I'm sure I'll hear a lot about this come Monday, but right now this is the only site in my RSS feed that's mentioned it. It feels like a threshold has just been crossed.

and how is that the best desktop distribution? this poll isn't about your preference but about an objectively quantifiably best distribution for a desktop user. and this is hands down ubuntu. you or i may not like it, but:

• most software is packaged for what? (including commercial software)
• most help on the interwebs is for what?
• best out of the box hardware support?
• easiest to use package management (PPAs, ubuntu software centre)
• etc

this really isn't a question where other options come even close (and no, i'm not an ubuntu fanboi, i've been a debian user for the last 13 years.)

Man, that's awful. That had to have been simply devastating for them.

Yes. It even affected me 800+ miles away because I suddenly had my folks, my brother, and their dogs living with me for several months. I mention that not for sympathy, but because you said you said:

I've been avoiding the offsite backup thing because I never thought I had anything so terribly important that it required that sort of protection. [Snip] Then again, I'm also someone who can't imagine the house burning down or flooding

Disaster will happen. It's not a question of if, but a question of when, how, and how bad. ("The how" can be really bizarre as it was in the case of friends and family. Interestingly enough, nearly everyone who had a laptop brought their laptop with them before Katrina struck, and that helped them reconnect with friends and resources very quickly.) I had another friend who had a house fire and had no insurance. (I met him several years after the incident.) He had to start over

To me, as a programmer who writes not only programs but short stories and novels and can't remember what he ate for breakfast (even though it's the same thing every morning), the very thought of permanently losing everything digital scares the hell out of me. My life are those programs, stories, and notes / articles I have stored. I'd rather lose all the rest of my earthly possessions than lose everything on my hard drive. I couldn't get in touch with all of my friends again (scattered across the world) if I lost the names, addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses of everyone I know stored only in hard drives and backups.

Most of today's business couldn't live if they lost what was put on storage. Frankly, it amazes me so many companies trust "the cloud" especially when companies or technologies come and go at a whim. I think cloud storage can be great, but I see it as a way to supplement, not replace my hard drive technologies. I wouldn't use the cloud as my only backup because I don't trust their security. It's another reason I'd like to roll my own backup because I'd be in control of the encryption program -- not them. (It's another thing in my design notes.) Also, the cloud cost a lot of money for the sizes I'm talking about. Well, it's a lot of money for me. Also, I don't think my ISP would like me downloading 200+ GB every week for my usual check in addition to my usual surfing.

I know not everyone places the same emphasis as I do on their bytes and bits. I just mention all of it merely as food for thought.

It could be both, unless that's an xor.

A *BSD option would be a bit weird when the poll is about the "Best desktop Linux distribution".

Interesting. I've definitely never heard of Tarsnap before. From the description, I'm not sure it'd pass the "so simple my grandma uses it" test, but perhaps they're aiming for the more technically savvy user.

Most of my friends and family got hit by Katrina. I happened to live out of state at the time so almost everything I had was ok. (Almost.) Nearly everything they owned was gone: out of print sci-fi games and comic books, priceless heirlooms and wedding albums and family pieces, vehicles and houses.

Man, that's awful. That had to have been simply devastating for them.

I have 12 pages of ideas. Despite all of the ideas, I think it's still possible to make it stupid simple for the noob while also having the crazy advanced settings for the expert. I just don't see that option very often in most programs!

You just might be right. I can think of programs that do some of what you outline, but not everything. If you write such a program, you'd likely have a lot of fans.

Yep, for local backups I'm using a combo of Time Machine (daily) and SuperDuper (weekly). I did not care at all for the frequency with which Time Machine backed up so, after playing around with some other solutions for tweaking its frequency and finding them not suited to my needs, I gave up and used Automator to handle it. I ended up using a similar solution for SuperDuper when it stopped behaving well wrt its inbuilt scheduling feature.

I'd rather more effort on allowing people to use Pseudonyms. Post all the silly stuff you want as "SomeDude" and keep it seperate from your "real name" identity. This, however, conflicts with current Facebook and Google+ policies.

Being able to delete large swaths of posts makes for annoying holes in conversations. For example, I was unaware of a rather infamous reddit troll named "violentacrez", but since he has deleted all his thousands of posts, trying to go back and read anything on the topic is rather difficult. Of course, the information is still out there on sites like thewayback machine, so it fails to delete everything.

I have two NAS devices - both Synology 8 drive units. I keep one at my house and donated the other to my parents. Because 21 terabytes is too much to transfer over the Internet (at least until Google fiber comes here,) I manually sync them every so often.

Apple made a pretty simple backup device called Timemachine. It is a small ARM computer with a large hard drive and it's own WiFi that you place in a closet, plug in, and pretty much forget about it. Unfortunatly, it's only as "remote" as the WiFi or ethernet signal can travel - so huricanes and such are still a problem.

I'm also someone who can't imagine the house burning down or flooding (or what if both??).

Most of my friends and family got hit by Katrina. I happened to live out of state at the time so almost everything I had was ok. (Almost.) Nearly everything they owned was gone: out of print sci-fi games and comic books, priceless heirlooms and wedding albums and family pieces, vehicles and houses.

Back on topic: I back up on hard drive and swap out hard drives between my apartment and a lock box somewhere off site. There is always at least one hard drive off site. I rotate at least once or twice every two weeks.

I've dealt with my personal files and backups of those of a two small businesses. I was so sick of backup programs that failed (and I've broken every single one I tried), I finally designed my own and got as far as a prototype. (I'm a programmer by profession.) Unfortunately, the prototype never made it out of the very early stages. It has enough to keep me happy but not enough to be viable on the Internet. Basically, it syncs some folders and makes a full copy of other folders. Then it double checks them. It makes a note of any failures.

Those of you who do do offsite backups, what sort of data are you protecting/preserving?

I have about 100,000 files / 200 GB that I backup on a regular basis. A lot of it is music and videos, but there are photos of my family, programs I've half written, stories and books I've written, and information I've downloaded from the deep recesses of the Internet (some of which I've had so long that they cannot be found again).

I'd love to write my own backup program. A lot of professional backups claim to do what I want to do now, but the big question is: will it work when disaster strikes? I've seen failures on the most insane things (and sometimes, the restore / backup program wouldn't even tell you about the error; you just had to accidentally encounter it). 256 character limit for file/folder path names. Crapping out on restore when you have over 50,000 files. Taking over an hour to scan your (large) restore drive so you can recover just one file. Telling you a compare failed, but it won't tell you which file has the problem (the bit rot problem). Windows machines that cannot backup files on a Linux shared drive. (Windows doesn't know what to do with two files named "HelloWorld" and "helloworld".

Then there are the other things that I think should be standard: Deduplicating files on the backup and saving space. (Deduplication seems to be more the norm today, but it wasn't when I started this list.) Multiple versions of a file on backup. (I hear Mac is pretty good at this.) Settings that pop up alarms if the number of old copies on your backup drop below a certain number. Copy of the backup / restore program on the backup disk itself. Backup program that isn't locked into a particular operating system. The ability to skip locked files and come back to them later without user intervention or program termination. The ability to perform a compare on every file on a client and test it against the copies on the server without having both online at the same time except for about 60 seconds. (Yes, that is possible.) The ability to detect if the hard drive or CPU is too bogged down so the backup program lightens the load so the user has more control over the computer. Easy to read reports. Easy to use program. Easy to read documentation about the program. Backups that span multiple computers or multiple hard drives. Stopping a backup in the middle and picking up where it left off several hours or days later.

Here's one I have to see: Plug the external hard drive in and only the backup program takes care of everything... Basically, the backup program leaves the user alone unless something like "A folder did not back up without failure at least once every 24 hours" or every 7 days or whatever the setting is. Then it gets in the user's face.

Sorry for the rant. Maybe such a program exist for the small time user, but I haven't seen it yet. The programs in Linux that I've seen aren't very sophiscated and the Windows versions cost a fair bit of money for stuff that I thought should be standard. If I had the time and energy to program it, I would. It's been a dream of mine to get something out there like that, but life gets in the way.

I have 12 pages of ideas. Despite all of the ideas, I think it's still possible to make it stupid simple for the noob while also having the crazy advanced settings for the expert. I just don't see that option very often in most programs!

Ah, that's a clever idea, and seems like it would serve some individuals (i.e., not businesses, but normal people with normal things to back up) well. I think I remember someone else suggesting/using such a method a while back, but had forgotten. This method wouldn't have the kind of reliability that Backblaze or other services would have, but perhaps it's good enough for mortals and it's something I'd definitely consider trying myself, were I to have data I wanted to ensure was backed up offsite ... and friends.

Only the things that would have a huge amount of effort to replace, and have a need. Tax and financial records, copies of legal documents, and some original work I have done. Somewhere around 150 MB total.

tarsnap

I have a storage array in my basement, and a friend with one as well. We use each other as an offsite location. Sure, it won't cover against a huge hundred mile wide disaster, but then I have far bigger problems.

...to answer "my butt" or "right here in my pants", but bravely managed to resist.

Back on topic, I've been avoiding the offsite backup thing because I never thought I had anything so terribly important that it required that sort of protection. Backups, absolutely yes, but offsite? Nope. Then again, I'm also someone who can't imagine the house burning down or flooding (or what if both??). That said, I have briefly looked into Amazon Glacier. Do I really, really need to insure all those photos of my trips and videos of my cats are protected against acts of god/fsm or theft? Those of you who do do offsite backups, what sort of data are you protecting/preserving?

Almost any statement can be improved by appending "right here in my pants!" I'll have to give this add-on a try.

Yeah thanks. It seems I'm not getting any traction with this idea, but I see nothing wrong with selectively picking multiple stories from Slashdot or Soylent for discussion here. It would save a lot of time, and we are really exactly the same kind of audience. And this site is SO much easier to use and better to look at. (I get frustrated every time I try to follow a Soylent discussion, particularly.) I again suggest that Pipedot consider doing that to bulk up the article selection.

Like you, I don't have the time or inclination to do a lot of submissions myself.

Fair enough... but I suspect Mr. Zafiro17 -- who likes his whiskey, by the way -- is posting stories in somewhat of a hurry each morning to keep the content going while story posters remain minimal on Pipedot.

I posted a story on Nintendo from Ars the other day and totally missed summarizing the second page of the article because I only had a minute or two before getting off to work. I am noticing that my story-posting and comment quality may be suffering because I am trying to make a contribution to anything going right now on Pipedot... using the assumption that something is better than nothing at this stage. I am a lurker by nature or necessity on most sites I like, but ... man... something about Pipedot just makes me think it will be good if it can get past the 10,000 member mark (nothing like a Reboot to give something fresh energy). Anyway, I'm in on trying to get the community exchange going while it remains low at this stage, and its not as easy as it looks. Point being -- definitely state when a story topic is way old as you've done, downvote them in the pipe if your timing is right, but feel very free to post good (new) stories too!

great point!

There's a slight difference here. If I order hardware from a European (or wherever) manufacter I trust, the NSA can still intercept and plant back doors. You can't trust ANYTHING in the United States. While I still don't trust Cisco, it seems unlikely the NSA has direct access to the company if they're redirectiong hardware to mod shops. Which is good news in a way.

I do believe it's very significant that even this report purports that the spytech is installed AFTER the fact, and that these were otherwise innocent pieces of hardware being shipped, until they were intercepted by the spooks, and then only for particular "targets".

True or not, it's some small comfort that everything's not completely bugged up before it even leaves the factory.

Look I know we're a small site but isn't this plugin, or one just like it, at LEAST a year old?

I remember reading about it a LONG time ago, probably at Slash you know where.

Insert obligatory XKCD strip about "it's new to 20%" phenomenon.

But really, still, this is way old news. Sorry.

Good comments. Yes, I'm noticing 100+ comments on some articles - an order of magnitude better than Soy and two orders of magnitude better than Pipe. But a heck of a lot of those comments are garbage, almost at the Reddit level of tomfoolery. Long gone are the days when it was a bastion of tough, knowledgeable nerds. They're still in there, but the signal to noise ratio has dropped.

Also, the new banner ads, like the one at the bottom that actually obscures the text, are unforgiveable and truly obnoxious. They're going to look like LinuxToday before too long, and LT is currently, totally unuseable it's been so stuffed with horsecrap on the front page. The content is like an afterthought, a little texty buffer zone that keeps the ad-choked sidebars from collapsing into each other under their own weight.

Eh, They will be the ultimate death of it. But, I think the real death of the site happened when they didn't modernize slashcode in the way that pipedot has. Although, I understand its vastly easier to start from scratch with a small userbase, than it is to transition from the slashdot userbase. Trolls used to be cute, and the whole anonymous posting culture is very cool, but they lost a lot of readership by allowing the obvious offensive trolls through.

Seriously, didn't Huawei get blacklisted from purchases by the American government, largely for doing that exact same thing? Kim Jong Un is about to offer a cellphone to the N. Korean people (running Android, naturally). Anybody want to bet whether or not there's eavesdropping, tracking, and Darth Vader choke-hold technology built into it at the factory?

Meanwhile, Linux users are dealing with "secureboot"crap that - wait for it - keeps a windows install from suffering the dangerous implications of untrusted software. Is this whole world just a big f*cking joke or something?

Ha ha - just tried the Firefox Replace add-on, which is even better. You can replace all mentions of anything with anything else. My websurfing experience just got better.

"....from my butt...
etc. This plug in has tons of add-on potential"

????

If companies desire hardware that they don't make themselves and that is "guaranteed" to be free of eavesdropping/tracking additions, from whom do they buy? The fact that it may be "proven" that the USA is doing such activities in no way proves that other countries aren't?

I wonder what it will mean for "global" websites and web services when different jurisdictions support different internet models, e.g., neutral versus differential pipes, privacy versus retained information, and so on. I do hope geographic borders don't become reflected too greatly in the functioning of the internet...

the article says... because it reduces the environment-caused degradation experienced over time.

Will this potentially mean sunscreen applications that last all day?

Hard to see how Dice's stock price is not just oscillating about an average over the past six months to a year or so. Slashdot seems to have recovered much of its comment volume from immediately after the beta boycott, although it may be down by historical levels. And, Dice just had a recent study get lots of news coverage about the lengthening time it is taking to fill various skilled tech jobs.

Maybe the CEO from Dice just wanted to buy a new house or boat?

10 easy steps to a firmer cloud!!!

They are determined to be the death of a once great, nerdy news site.

IMO, characterizing cryptocurrencies as either "the future" or "a passing nerd fad" is going too far. I expect they'll be with us for a long time, though they'll remain largely a nerd thing.

As for these online wallet services that keep getting hacked, taking the money and running, or otherwise failing... trusting your cryptocurrency to some random website is pretty much exactly like trusting your cash to some guy standing on a street corner with a sign declaring himself a banker. And, lest any object to "some random website", I must point out that "most users of FooCoins use BarExchange, therefore they must be trustworthy" is exactly as stupid as it sounds.

I think it's clear that, at least for now , if you're not enough of a nerd to be able to store your own wallet with enough encryption and redundancy to keep it safe from theft and data loss, you shouldn't be using cryptocurrencies for any sum of money that will hurt to lose. Wait till either they become popular enough that sufficiently-trustworthy-and/or-accountable banks or bank-like entities offer cryptocurrency-denominated accounts, or until some crypto-genius finds a technical solution to the problem of letting an untrustworthy entity keep your money in such a way they (or someone who hacks them) can't spend it.

I downloaded the Firefox extension and it's pretty funny. I notice it only converts that very phrase: "the cloud" with "my butt". So visiting 'talkingcloud.com" delivered only imperfect results. Any mention of "cloud" or "cloud platform" etc. remains unaltered. Still, Google results were hilarious:

"how to incorporate wifi services in my butt"
"click here to download our white paper from my butt"

etc. This plug in has tons of add-on potential.