Recent Comments

Id like to remind them that as a trusted poster, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their two tone comment caves.

When I have it enabled (Chrome, Win7) I can't see the comment input field. I disabled WYSIWYG in the options and can see it again. Not sure what the problem was.

If they spend more on hardware (and cut profit margins), then what? Then theyre only on a level playing field with Sony and Microsoft. Thats not enough to dig them out of their hole. Im supposing Im in the minority, but graphics got good enough in the PS3 gen, and the Wii-U is a little better than that. I see "next gen" videos, and it looks mostly the same to me.

Nintendo really needs third party support, but its not clear how to get companies to do it. Ive got Ninja Gaiden and Tekken on the Wii-U, but my other non Nintendo options are pretty darn limited in what interests me. I think Bayonetta 2 could have been the life perserver for the system, but its not due til around next Christmas which may be too late.

Not related to the article, but I totally disagree with their critisizms about the controller (aside from the no multiplayer issue which is rediculous). Id put the Wii-U controller as my second favorite of all time behind the Wavebird. I want Fatal Frame with this controller so bad. Which reminds me I have to offer up sacrifices in hopes it wont be region locked / Japan only.

Nice, I especially like the blockquote.

I hate typing blockquote

Wonder if they took into account recent news and/or did some basic research before investing in their solution:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/05/12/hackable_solar_systems_spurt_free_money/
http://www.solar-log.ro/fileadmin/BENUTZERDATEN/Downloads/Firmware/ReleaseNotes_3.1.1-66-20140414-EN.pdf

I for one welcome our new bicolored comment overlords.

This is a very useful feature.

Funny, I just received my new Chromebook yesterday - an HP 14. Ive only played with it a few hours but am pretty darned impressed. That said, Ill probably wind up wiping it and installing Linux. Im a Usenet fan and there are no workable Usenet Chrome apps, I do a ton of work at the console and it doesnt have a great terminal app that I can see, and it doesnt seem to have a good text editor. But I admit Im not exactly the target user group for a Chromebook. Other than that, if you are willing to stay within Chromes use cases, its pretty nice, and the HP machine is surprisingly good hardware for $200. Keyboard is decent (better than my HP laptop at work, actually), fast on and off, quick wireless, etc. Im more impressed than I thought Id be.
If I wipe it, Im installing BodhiLinux, which is a Ubuntu core with E17 (Enlightenment) on the desktop. Its a lovely distro, and E17 is way more usable and configurable/tweakable than either Gnome3 or Unity.

Its from: http://ckeditor.com/

Pretty nifty.

Is this a from scratch solution or are you borrowing code from somewhere else?

I find that a PC with emulator software does a far better job. The experience is not as good as using the old hardware but at least I can play all of the games and I don't lose all of my games when the console dies.

For comparison, my own house has a 7.685 kW photovoltaic system.

Noticeably fewer security guards, though.

Total bonus. Always choose the tech solution that locks out other family members - makes you more "fun" to have around, ha ha ha.

Total bonus. Always choose the tech solution that locks out other family members - makes you more "fun" to have around, ha ha ha.

Total bonus. Always choose the tech solution that locks out other family members - makes you more "fun" to have around, ha ha ha.

There is a second page to that article which has two contradicting points: stop making hardware and make better hardware.

Between those two options, I would choose to make better hardware. I don't want the console wars to turn into a two-horse race, and no other players are big enough to go head-to-head with Microsoft and Sony.

I might end up buying a Wii U to replace an aging Wii just so the family can keep playing all the Nintendo games we own. But I really hope something better is coming down the road soon.

No worries. I actually thought about posting this story a few days before Friday and hesitated for the same reason (is it germane to Pipedot). Then again, I'm trying to mix up my story postings to see which ones actually generate some conversation and I am trying to not just repeat what is on slashdot and soylent as well, so I figure that justifies thinking outside the box a little bit.

Right now my main motivation is to participate in Pipedot as I hope to see it grow... maybe I will get sufficiently hooked on having all my story submissions pushed to the front page that I will have withdrawal symptoms once the community gets big enough to be choosy.

On topic: I think Michael Sam is going to surprise people with how well he plays in the NFL and teams are going to look back and possibly wish they had taken the initiative ahead of the Rams. Regardless, I am glad one team did draft him because he will get his chance. Now if only someone would bring back Tebow... (just kidding). And, in my opinion, the possible germane-ness of the topic for pipedot was that it is a high profile example of where concerns over human difference can unfairly deny someone a chance to succeed in their preferred profession (like older programmers as I suggest in the original submission).

One of the comments on the ArsTechnica site suggests that with the large cash pile Nintendo has on hand, they have some luxury in taking their time to identify their forward path. But I agree with the tone of the article and your own suggestion: Blackberry provides a compelling example of what can happen if a company takes a long time to react.

huh? Did it change or was I drunk?

I recently got an ASUS ChromeBox to play with and was quite impressed. It satisfies a growing number of use cases and may finally enable the elusive "year of the Linux desktop."

• Instant On
• Zero software maintenance (apps synced cross device, no antivirus needed, nearly invisible upgrades)
• Zero hardware maintenance (no hardware upgrades needed, nothing stored on disk)

ChromeOS is still missing one crucial feature: Access to local network filesystems (cifs or nfs) - If they add this, they will win.

Three hours and 5 mins; but still pretty quick :P

Some sales numbers for Nintento:

• Wii: 7 million
• Wii U: 4 million
• 3DS: 15 million
• GameCube: 7 million

To answer this generic is almost impossible, what are we talking about, desktop/server/embedded...?

Arch was the best choice for the desktop until they shoved systemd down your throat and completely abandoned the BSD parts. Viable alternatives are Gentoo (with openrc) and OpenBSD. The latter is actually much better on the desktop than most people would think.

For the average Amazon AWS server an Ubuntu LTS is very comfortable these days and you can luckily avoid RHEL/CentOS completely.

A router should be OpenBSD for me, everything else is just a security nightmare in comparison.

I just use apt-get, yum, or pacman to install it. I don't grasp what the problem is.

"Possibly most important: expecting someone to look for an answer to a question they don't even know exists! This is a very common problem in advanced technical user circles, nobody remembers their own learning curve, and starts to think that highly specialized technical knowledge is somehow something that people should know."

Everyone has to start somewhere, and in the Unix(-alike) world, people who started a while back are justifiably notorious for treating people who started more recently like shit.

Yeah, editor fail. Sorry about that. I balked at first, thinking, "is this subject matter really germane to pipedot?" Then it got a couple of upvotes and I figured, "hell with it - let's publish and see what happens." In a better world, we'd have a bigger community upvoting and downvoting new article submissions. In the real world, I try to get stuff published as soon as possible, figuring anyone who took the trouble to post an article deserves to see it in print.

I'm within days of receiving a new HP Chromebook I ordered. But it's only going to run ChromeOS for about 1 millisecond before I wipe it and install a real Linux distro. No hard feelings to Chrome - I'm just not its target audience. I made a list of things I do on a computer and Chrome doesn't do any of them. My folks, on the other hand ... they've got an aging Mac and I'm thinking it's high time I start thinking about its replacement. Chrome is an option, potentially.

the correct link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puppet_%28software%29

;-)

Logically, wealth is an expression of your current belongings. Materialism is a philosophy or at least an approach, and it's based on wanting more things. By wanting you are implicitly starting from a point of dissatisfaction, and if that's how you spend every day, you are living a dissatisfied life.

Does anyone here use something like puppet (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puppet_%28software%29) to manage bulk configurations? Sounds like a similar idea but much more built out for use in an administrator's toolbox.

Ha ha - I just reviewed and published this article, and if I'm reading the logs correctly, I hit "go" less than 60 seconds after Rocks submitted it. Instantaneous gratification! (No charge) ;)

Interesting article - thanks for posting it. I'm not much of a gamer but agree the world has changed and Nintendo has some catching up to do. Nintendo "was" gaming for a whole generation of kids. But they risk becoming the Blackberry of consoles if they don't shake it a bit.

I've been using it for years to help make Sid/Sidux/Aptosid/Siduction more stable and friendly. It's there and it works. I don't know why distro's aren't "officially" adopting it. (I believe it started as a semi-offical part of Sidux, then became independent when they decided not to "support" it).

Totally have to agree with you.

This could be great for the NFL *if* Sam gets along well in his career. If he hits any roadblocks or anyone mistreats him, because he's gay or not, it'll boil down to he's gay. I don't want to discount that there are going to be bigots and dickheads who will harass him because he's gay, but really it's not going to matter if that's the real reason or not.

By drafting him the Rams may have delayed people screaming the NFL is discriminatory, for now, but there's no doubt the first time Sam fails to preform or talks about his difficulties adjusting there's going to be ten times the commotion. That said, hopefully I'm wrong and we can take this as an all round victory.

/*

And what if Sam turns out to be a bit of a diva, giving interviews in the press about the problems that gays face in football and society?

*/

How about we stick to interviewing him about his football plays and the game? I don't see the media mentioning sexual orientation when they interview straight players. Nobody straight gets asked if they feel comfortable getting changed or showering in front of 40 other dudes whose testosterone levels are off the charts.

If gays wanted true equality, they'd put a stop to any questioning that brings up their sexuality. They would want to be treated the same way as straight people, by being judged by their merits alone, without sexual orientation clouding said judgement. Instead, most keep the gay card visible when they are judged on their skills or merits, so they can scream "discrimination!" when things don't go their way.

So let's stick to judging Sam's football abilities. How fast can he run 40 yards? How many tackles did he have? How many fumble recoveries? Pick a bunch of stats, compare them to the his team or the NFL average, and you'll get a true measure of a player. Leave the sexual orientation out of it.

I have to mostly agree with you on this. I have a Samsung Smart TV in my recroom, I love it, it's great with Netflix built in along with plex and other media server functionality built in. The thing that sucks the most about it though is when you're searching for something, you can't just type in what you want. You have to use the crappy remote to pick letters to spell things, which takes forever and is pron to errors. I've also had issues with my smart tv crashing and having to be unplugged to restart it.

On the other hand I have an older flat screen TV in my bedroom with an Ubuntu laptop in the closet and HDMI cable running through the wall to the TV and a wireless keyboard and mouse on my night stand. It pretty much does just as much as my Smart TV, with the added convenience of being able to play video games and use the keyboard for typing. My wife's laptop is coming up for renewal in the next year so my next TV will likely be a "dumb" TV and I'll setup her old laptop as the media center for the recroom TV. Now if I only had money for a large enough "dumb" TV. The largest disadvantage to this setup, maybe a bonus, is between my wife and I, I'm the only one who seems capable of controlling a laptop driven TV.

When I went shopping for a new TV at the start of the year, I deliberately only considered 'dumb' TVs. The plan was to add the 'smartness' by using a spare computer I had. The computer does much more, and all the smart TV user interfaces have either had truly awful user interfaces or not supported something I wanted (meaning the computer would be needed anyway). The other issue is that it's likely that in a few years time a smart TV will be pretty out of date in what it supports - you'll have a perfectly good display but with this useless lump of 'smart' (complete with terrible user interface and security vulnerabilities). The computer however can stay up to date much more easily.

I just install a minimal system, and as soon as I am booted and running, as the occasion arises and I find I need package X, I just use apt-get, yum, or pacman to install it. I don't grasp what the problem is. All that stuff is always online and a few keystrokes away.

I don't use Nvidia or AMD video crap, so the whole cluster foxtrot of getting that garbage working is not anything that affects me. I am perfectly happy with my Intel video which has excellent drivers built into every distro and Just Works.

I just have text docs which list the steps and commands needed to go from a fresh install to ready machine. Scripts?

The other owners owe the Rams big time. The NFL would've looked plenty bad if Sam had gone undrafted.

Sam was rated as a 4th to 6th round talent (the draft has 7 rounds). In the past, players who had won the award that Sam got (SEC defensive player of the year) have usually been drafted within the first two rounds, but strangely enough, many of them haven't been particularly successful in the NFL - that factored into the '4th to 6th round' projection, along with the fact that Sam is not considered to be a prototypical NFL defensive lineman or linebacker in terms of size, speed, atheleticism, etc.

Still, had he not come out he probably would've been drafted by some team before the 7th round. Why was he not? Because football squads are large, and there's a certain macho mindset that can't be completely controlled, just as in the military which struggles with gay and sexual harassment/assault issues. If the entire coaching staff and 95 percent of the players were fine with having a gay teammate, that 5 percent could still create plenty of trouble that could detract from the team's effort to make the playoffs and then win a championship. And what if Sam turns out to be a bit of a diva, giving interviews in the press about the problems that gays face in football and society? That was too much of a risk for every team in the league except one.

I submitted the story early Friday, but as with the real draft of Sam, it took until the latest possible moment for the story to be promoted. Cheers

He was drafted by the Rams. Yesterday.

Or even better, my Toshiba TV can play files served by DLNA server over the WiFi. No need to mess with the USB sticks. And it does not have cameras, microphones etc.

I block it's Internet access at the firewall though... just in case...

There is a middle ground. I have a Samsung TV that has a USB input and can decode any media file I've thrown at it. It's not a smart TV by any definition - no Web browsing, no apps - but it has a great picture and plays my downloaded shows without a glitch. Sometimes you need to think about your real needs and not the razzle dazzle the manufacturers offer

The /. discussion of this Ars article is actually pretty good. Old school good in fact.

We WANT this potential. Allowing freedom means allowing malware if we're not careful.Otherwise our devices are walled garden iPablum that are allowed to run software only after approval by the company in charge, if they deign to consider it at all.

Nothing wrong with a curated app store of course, as long as it's not the only choice.

This makes me glad I still have an "old-fangled" CRT television.

I've tended to find PBS Front-line to be rather insightful on many other issues, so I'm definitely looking forward to what they do with this.

I, too, would like to see ISPs declared common carriers (if that's the correct term). Unsurprisingly, AT&T has a nice load of specious reasoning as to why this would ruin everything . Additionally, despite increasing condemnation of the "fast lane" proposal from FCC commissioners and senators (I'm proud to see "my" Wyden in there), it appears this is headed for a vote no matter what.

On the other end of things, Cogent is hopefully discovering its balls as it's taken the stance that it's Comcast who should pay for connectivity , and web host NeoCities has decided to demo the slow lane in protest of the "fast lane" proposal:

"Since the FCC seems to have no problem with this idea, I've (through correspondence) gotten access to the FCC's internal IP block, and throttled all connections from the FCC to 28.8kbps modem speeds on the Neocities.org front site, and I'm not removing it until the FCC pays us for the bandwidth they've been wasting instead of doing their jobs protecting us from the 'keep America's internet slow and expensive forever' lobby,"

Brb, makin' popcorn

really? Zypper is great. I have zypper envy in the RHEL/Fedora world. It wil probabably be until fedora 22 before yum is caught up with the dependency solving capabilities of zypper.

Looks like you were using it during the Novell years; not their best releases. I've been really happy with 12.3 and apparently 13.1 is pretty good too. My favorite distro - maybe of all time - dates back to 2003: SUSE 8.1. Awesomeness.

The Novell years weren't great for SUSE. Under Attachmate, things have improved in important ways.