Recent Comments

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.

I hereby vote for the <BarryWhite> tag to become a formal part of an upcoming HTML spec. Too awesome.

Also don't think you can blow it off because it's "only a local exploit". All it takes is a (otherwise fairly harmless if the kernel bug was not there) vulnerability in something else that could give an attacker an avenue to get to a local exploit remotely. It happened to me a few years ago. Fortunately, when the attacker did hit my server (via a buggy PHP application), I had actually patched the kernel vulnerability they tried to exploit so they got nowhere (but left some evidence as to who they were).

Hmmm ... Cameron Diaz/Penelope Cruz: Go ahead, slip it in before you go to work . You may have a point here. Is it too late to go become a sexy chemist?

For Firefox there is also the excellent FoxReplace Addon. It lets you define arbitrary replacements.
Especially in the light of newspeak this is interesting. (For german there's the neusprech.org blog with examples of words used in the public debate.)

<BarryWhite>Our puncture-resistant nanotech laboratory gloves protect you so well, you can do science naked . Yeah, baby.</BarryWhite>

Doesn't seem like it.

We got users who are not in IT?
I guess this is a prof it isn't Slashdot.

Captcha:
What is Richard's name?
... I wonder what's his middle name.

The primary reason for this is that we (SN) don't use a rolling release system, preferring to do bi-monthly releases. The feature gap between the two sites will be considerably less when we do our rollout in June.

Nifty. And so simple,

Even I can use it......:)

1. And I am not in IT
2. I am a truck driver.
3. This is cool.

Links?

It is a real pity I can not easily buy non-drm ebooks. I am not installing ebook drm reader software on my mobile devices. Ever.

For most OSS projects there is an upstream open source project with a community of developers. I would expect that to continue to be open and "supported". Supprt ususually entails mailing list or forums as well as bug fixes, ect.

That project is then packaged by OS distributions. Now, the OS distribution will typically provide support for any of their packages that they provide. But, if you install a third party version of one of those packages, that would typically not be supported.

So was it a misunderstanding between the support of the Open source project and the support on the distribution? That's the only thing that makes sense to me. The Walls treet journal article is behind a paywall, so I can't really read it.

They are not adding DRM to Firefox. They are adding DRM capabilities to Firefox. I think that's an important distinction.

Albeit one that is meaningless in practice.

Mozilla: Committed to you, your privacy and DRM!

There is usually more than one factor contributing to any event. In reality, the CEO probably got a lot of feedback from a lot of directions, the press screwed stuff up, and Red Hat's competitors used the opportunity for FUD. Now the CEO backpedals. It's what they're paid to do (Sort of... In reality, they're really paid for speaking publicly in a way that doesn't blow stuff up in the first place. Actually, if you want to get to the bottom of this "issue", I'd check Red Hat's board for their decision on hiring the CEO in the first place, but we usually don't take root cause analysis quite this far).

Yes, for me Paypal and Ebay are almost conjoined twins, although I have used Paypal to make some end-of-year contributions to foundations and software projects.

Yes, you've phrased it very well. Too bad RIAA executives and their cronies can't see this as clearly. Blinded by the money, perhaps (and the whores and cocaine, I'm sure).

I'm addicted to an ancient DOS shareware game called Conquest, basically a Risk-alike, that I've had on every computer I've owned since 1992. On my current machine, a MBP running OS X 10.8, I run it on the curent version of Dosbox, but on my previous machine running 10.6, I ran it on an old PowerPC version of Dosbox (which I actually liked better than the current version, sigh) and it amused me that I was using an Intel machine to run a PowerPC emulator to run an Intel emulator.

As far as productivity software goes, if I could use either WordPerfect 5 for DOS or WP 3 for Mac on my current machine in a way that would integrate nicely with the rest of the OS (printers, copying and pasting, etc.) I'd be really happy.

Sure. I understand other publishers (Tor, O'Reilly, etc.) and even higher profile game developers have done the same thing, World of Goo I think. (Also Louis CK.) Dump the onerous DRM that punishes paying customers, and let your stuff get popular, treating the "piracy" as more or less free advertising / trialware or at worst a minor annoyance, since approximately 0% would have paid for it.

I meant PayPal. But I guess eBay and PayPal are all part of the same thing.

I'd so like a cryptocurrency to become successful at doing what a currency does (Bitcoin isn't it, it's far too volatile and by its design will end up getting hoarded), perhaps Dogecoin or similar may eventually be it -- because good riddance eBay.

I'm using Chrome with pipelight . The only other issue is that I need to open the chrome dev console and spoof as a Windows Chrome browser agent right before starting the Netflix stream. It has worked amazingly well. I've never had it crash, kill the stream, or anything.

If someone cares to develop some bastardized version of pipelight for elinks, I'd test the hell outta that.

Awesome quote at http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/05/15/game_of_thrones_written_on_brutal_medieval_word_processor_and_os/

Martin the says he uses WordStar 4.0 as his word processor, which elicits laughs from the studio audience, but justifies his choice by saying "I actually like it.""It does everything I want a word processing program to do and it doesn't do anything else. I don't want any help. I hate these modern systems where you type a lower case letter and it becomes a capital. I don't want a capital. If I'd wanted a capital I would have typed a capital!"Martin says he also hates spell check, because the made-up words he uses in his work is often corrected for him.There's a certain symmetry to the choice of WordStar and DOS. Martin's work depicts a brutal time in which the available technology is clunky and unreliable and magic is still in limited use. WordStar and DOS come from a time in which PCs were brutal and digital technology was clunky and unreliable, but Macintoshes were in limited use. ®

That's my conclusion too. And actually, I'm finding ChromeOS isn't as bad as I'd suspected! Or else, they've improved it. There's even a terminal app now (obviously, some kind of framework that lets you run an applet in the browser window or something; I'm actually not sure how it works). That means something like 70% of my use cases are covered! I'd still like access to NFS, Sambas, and AFS filesystems (ie, my NAS). That's about it.

The question of DRM or no DRM is often a false dichotomy. I published the Dictator's Handbook (www.dictatorshandbook.net) in a no-DRM EPUB format and no-DRM MOBI format. Anyone who wanted to could buy a single copy and spaff it all over the internet for pirating and sharing. That's not really happened, and I've sold plenty of books. I think a lot of musicians are finding the same. Not sure about movie publishers.

But obviously vim is better right? ... ... it begins...

Who want you to pay for their work and maybe use DRM to twist your arm... because ultimately I think it is their choice...

That said, I almost always choose the open source and free software option when available and listen to music via radio... because I generally value all of this stuff becoming lingua franca across all economic and accessibility classes...

There is probably a contradiction in here somewhere...

Firefox does not load this module directly. Instead, we wrap it into an open-source sandbox . In our implementation, the CDM will have no access to the user's hard drive or the network. Instead, the sandbox will provide the CDM only with communication mechanism with Firefox for receiving encrypted data and for displaying the results

So they are adding a way to load a module that supports DRM playback. They are not adding DRM to Firefox. They are adding DRM capabilities to Firefox. I think that's an important distinction.

Is FIDOnet still around? At least we owned that one.

I believe it is still present in Russia, but it has almost or totally disappeared from other regions of the world.

I think TFA does do a pretty good job of describing why they are "caving in." You can look at it as taking a fully non-free system (Flash) and converting it into an fully free and standards-based system (HTML5 video tag) + a much smaller non-free library.

Or in other words, the non-free part got smaller and easier to remove.

I have fond memories of mudding using telnet with teachers walking behind me baffled by all of the text and thinking I was Doing Computer Stuff

OK, so they are against it, but feel obliged to keep up with the times and to prevent people from having to reach for an alternative web browser they're going to implement DRM too. Lovely. How about, we just don't visit those DRMed sites? What the F has happened to the Internet we know and love? Is FIDOnet still around? At least we owned that one. This new, corporate-run, DRMed, spy-platform Internet sucks dogballs. Guess it's time to switch to Chrome! Nope. Opera? Hmm. Lynx/w3m/elinks?

Where Did the Carter White House's Solar Panels Go?
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/carter-white-house-solar-panel-array/

[...]

Here is what Carter predicted at the dedication ceremony: "In the year 2000 this solar water heater behind me, which is being dedicated today, will still be here supplying cheap, efficient energy"¦. A generation from now, this solar heater can either be a curiosity, a museum piece, an example of a road not taken or it can be just a small part of one of the greatest and most exciting adventures ever undertaken by the American people."

For some of the solar panels it is the former that has come to pass: one resides at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, one at the Carter Library and, as of this week, one will join the collection of the Solar Science and Technology Museum in Dezhou, China. Huang Ming, chairman of Himin Solar Energy Group Co., the largest manufacturer of such solar hot water heaters in the world, accepted the donation for permanent display there on August 5. After all, companies like his in China now produce some 80 percent of the solar water heaters used in the world today.

[...]

Roguelikes are great to help me meet my productivity goals. My boss only sees symbols on a black background and thinks I'm working on "the codes".

n/t

Looks like it's just a very short term effective downtime measurement. Day-to-day, 5-nines is easy; I do it for my company servers 99% of days.
If these providers have only two clients, then it doesn't matter how reliable they are, they are not "top ten" in anything significant.

MS fans could come up with another equally useless statistic that showed windows in 9 out of the "top ten", I'm sure.

Any rogue/moria/angband love out there?

When I'm feeling "modern", I occasionally play a Freedom/PrBoom (doom clone).

Yes, you're right - VPS. Thanks for the correction! I've heard about lowendbox.com and the price is great. I pay a bit more than that - $12/month - but I'm happy with the hardware, the software, and the service, so no complaints. The one thing I've found VPSes aren't good for is offsite replication/storage. I've got many gigs of photos I'd like to backup with an rsync script, and while a Linux or BSD VPS would make that easy, most packages don't provide nearly enough space, thinking what you are probably going to build is a webserver or something.

Mine also runs a Usenet node (www.dictatorshandbook.net for the dictator.* newsgroups), but I don't use it for much else than that. It's just so cool how much you can do with a good OS on a dedicated box (OK, virtual, but from my point of view you'd never know it), and a fixed IP address.

I don't know. I speculate in my other post below (The Economics are Ridiculous) that it has something to do with the virtual kickback that Google gets from tying you in to all its services and platform. But I don't really know. They do limit most of the Chromebooks to a silly 2GB RAM, but that can't be a big cost. And they engineer the BIOS to suit Chrome/Linux.

But I can't figure out why there are no competing Haswell netbooks in the same price range -- I think it's because the netbook market has been abandoned (unwisely).

Wow, thanks for the correction... that definitely changes things from my perspective... I wonder how they keep the cost down for the Chromebooks, that can't all be a Microsoft tax can it?

Awesome article from Slate, I laughed out loud reading parts of that... the only depressing part was learning I might be older than two of the oldest still used pieces of software out there...

VPS. You mean VPS. :)

I finally got myself a VPS at a cheap good provider last year, and I love it. So much more freedom than an ordinary web host. I kept hitting walls at Hostgator -- oh, can't use this package because it's not just a script and the webhost won't let me install software just for me, no way to try LibreOffice Online, can't get WebDav working, etc. -- and it mostly all goes away when you control your own virtual server. I highly recommend it. My VPS costs less than $8 a month. There are all kinds of great deals often published and discussed at lowendtalk.com / lowendbox.com . (THIS IS NOT SPAM. That's a discussion board and deal site.)

They practically forced me to buy a Chromebook for a relative, because speed and size were criteria. The Haswell Chromebooks are $250 or less. A comparably performing "regular" notebook in that form factor costs at LEAST $500 and probably has worse battery life. (I compared CPU benchmarks of all available sub-4-pounders.)

Yes, I suppose one pays back the difference in the price of fealty to the Google "ecosystem" that then owns everything you do on the machine, but for a casual user (who would have ended up on GMail anyway) it's a hard bargain to resist...

Yes, it's a misconception on your part. The latest sub-$300 Chromebooks (Intel Haswell CPU) are actually significantly MORE powerful than any laptop you can get for under $600 or so. Check it yourself on places like cpubenchmark.net. It's about as fast as an i5.

It's kind of irritating, actually. I didn't want to choose a Chromebook.