Recent Comments

I've used openSUSE off and on over the passed decade or so v9.1-12.x. I was once a much bigger fan of theirs. I just ran into too many broken dependencies in their repos, and went elsewhere. I think the use of CentOS at work also contributed to the shift. Maybe I got tired of the bleeding edge. openSUSE isn't bad. I just think it needs some more polishing.

If we could get enough people to stop using their services, we could shift that feeling of helplessness to them. They can't make us pay for internet access like other utilities or health insurance...yet.

I've always wanted to find an excuse to take Suse for a spin, but I've become such a fan of the Debian-style package management system that I've never got around to it...

I concur with the view that internet providers are (or should be) providing dumb pipes for information and, as well, should be viewed as common carriers or whatever the right term is for a public utility. I suspect that the owners of said dumb pipes would still make good money and it would still be a great business. However, as the latest moves take us towards a crazy system where internet providers can introduce fees all over the place, more or less as they like, and it is difficult to hold them accountable without government regulation and enforcement, and it is difficult to abandon use of their services, I generally end up feeling helpless...

Ah, good catch. Corrected. Carry on with your otherwise happy existences :)

This looks awesome - I'll have to see if I can find a way to watch it, since I'm not in the USA and don't have access then to PBS. The fact that you're posting the link as an anonymous cow-herd is not lost on me :)

Comcast is already a crappy ISP. Google "Comcast Sucks" for some fun reading. People hate them with a passion. This is a clever, PHB strategy to avoid having to invest in a better built-out infrastructure. Let's just insert a pricing scheme [which we can then fiddle with endlessly to see just how much screwing the customer is willing to take] instead of actually building out the infrastructure necessary to handle the increased demands of on-demand video etc.

"But that idea will never fly! It's impossible!"

"No worries, we have fired all our tech staff and replaced them with lawyers and lobbyists. We've got this one in the bag."

Fuck this shit. I'm going back to FIDOnet, the last net that was truly owned by the people.

It makes no sense talking about fast lanes, slow lanes, and different types of packets, shaping, throttling, etc. As I mentioned, I'm ALREADY PAYING FOR HIGHER TIERED SPEEDS!!!

Oh-so-much this. I've not had a cable TV service in over a decade and I can't remember the last time I turned on my television to watch an OTA broadcast, but it's been literal years. My conduit to entertainment and news is the internet (and a sizable collection of DVDs). It's safe to say, then, that I'm attached to having fast, unimpeded internet access. That said, I have considered and will again consider giving it all up out of sheer frustration, and possibly to make some sort of statement, if threats and degradations continue.

My ISP is in the packet delivery business. They need to understand that and, not that it likely accomplishes anything, I try to remind them of that whenever I go down to the local office to renew my service. It doesn't matter if the "packets" they are delivering to me are in the form of cable TV signals or via the internet, nor does it matter where those packets originate. Their whole job is to deliver the packets I request in a timely manner and unmolested. That is all. Any ISP who gets this will get my business.

The trouble is I live in the US . There is but one choice for ISP in my neighborhood (as is likely the case with many, if not most, US neighborhoods). Thus far they have behaved well, but I do not like the idea that my unfettered internet access is wholly dependent on their continued good graces. There is no competition in their fiefdom and they damn well know it.

Just ran across this article, "Comcast is destroying the principle that makes a competitive internet possible" , which is proving a useful read. The same author has other relevant articles here and here .

It is rather sad that we let things like this continue to happen. It's even sadder that society won't utter a single cry until they miss the new episode of Honey Boo Boo. I'm already tied to Comcast with a damned iron ball and chain. I'm already paying more money to get a faster tiered connection. I already cancelled my TV 3 years ago because they were charging a MST, I can't just pay for 1 channel, and the only show or channel I cared about was AMC. Screw Honey Boo Boo and the rest of the garbage that litters the cable spectrum. They don't offer channels a-la-carte because of all the deals that make up the packages they shovel at us. So I went with NetFlix, and was happy until recently. Then ISPs started throttling the streaming traffic and whining because nobody wants their services, cable TV or XFinity on Demand.

It makes no sense talking about fast lanes, slow lanes, and different types of packets, shaping, throttling, etc. As I mentioned, I'm ALREADY PAYING FOR HIGHER TIERED SPEEDS!!! I love Pipedot, but if this shit continues, I may very well quit Comcast and home internet completely.

I think the word you're looking for is Urinary.

Hmm ... Here's a (probably) dumb idea, but aren't there Amazon "affiliate" links, or something, where if someone purchases something from ama via said link the affiliate gets a very small portion of the sales? Perhaps |. could have one of those. It likely wouldn't generate loads of revenue, but it'd be unobtrusive (I assume it could be presented unobtrusively, much as somafm does theirs) and possibly offset some of the cost of running the site. Ok, dumb idea concluded.

I definitely care about net neutrality, but I probably don't know the facts. I keep A Guide to the Open Internet handy to point people at, but it was created some time ago and perhaps fails to reflect or address the latest threat.

This payola internet is such an obviously terrible idea. "Nice packets ya got there. Be a shame if anything happened to them." I'm so very disappointed in Netflix caving to Comcast and Verizon. ISPs should be dumb pipes, nothing more, and certainly not content providers. I'm so angry and frustrated with this that I've stopped making sense. I've been angry and frustrated for so long that I'm in danger of no longer being able to care. Perhaps that was the plan all along: keep grinding away at the issue until we all get so tired of fighting we give in to apathy. I really hope I'm alone in this feeling. We need to keep fighting.

The "demo the slow lane" proposal is interesting and has merit. To make a real impression it will take widespread participation and, particularly, the involvement of high-profile players. I hope it gathers sufficient momentum.

[Aside: the same guy who created the infographic linked above, has also created No Way NSA ]

Where were they thrown to? Oh, you meant THRONE!

Interesting that the title does not suggest that the rich are sad, but rather that the materialistic (selfish?) are sad. The book review spends a lot of time trying to equate the two, but without reading the book itself I'm not sure how "materialistic" was defined and whether the book makes the same conflation. While it's tempting so think the rich are unhappy, it seems it's not actually true: richer countries are happier, and richer people within each country are happier.

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/04/money-buys-happiness-and-you-can-never-have-too-much-new-research-says/275380/

(Whether this reflects causation or not is left as an exercise for the reader.)

A man is only worth the sum of his possessions

-Krem

I think the scientists all like Python quite a bit. But Go comes to mind too - isn't that supposed be a language well suited for scientific number crunching and the like?

Fortran 77 is certainly what I think of. I only ever learned two programming languages (Commodore 64 BASIC doesn't count): Pascal and Fortran 77. And at the time I thought Fortran was pretty damned cool. Those two were enough to show me I didn't have the right disposition (or intellect) to be a programmer, and I took another career path. But I do have a bit of nostalgia for that old language. I even remember writing my programs out on graph paper to make sure I had things in the right columns. What was that old deal where any characters beyond column 77 wouldn't be regarded as anything but a comment, or something like that? Fun times in 1991.

I should add that when people think of Fortran, they think of Fortran 77, which is truly a primitive language (one I unfortunately had to deal with...). The recent Fortran standards are a lot more sane and bring it a lot closer to something like python.

I did my undergraduate work entirely in Fortran. Just for reference, I am in my mid-twenties... My supervisor told me that's the language I should use. There are certain fields where a lot of really useful code is in Fortran, so it's at the very least important to be able to read it (although that's clearly not very hard to do). Some people had some convincing numbers to show Fortran programs were more efficient than C programs for number crunching. Given that a lot of our code is just running a set of very simple operations a huge amout of times, Fortran does a great job. The only issue I had with it is the lack of widely available libraries compared to more modern languages. You've got Numerical recipes and a few other non-free libraries, and then the rest are homemade solutions stored somewhere on your supervisor's hard drive...

I switched to C for my graduate work and I was pretty happy with it. I'll gladly save myself some coding time, even if it means my programs might run a little slower. They can run 24/7, I can't program in these conditions. :p

Unfortunately, if you start talking about accessibility uses, then insurance companies get involved and the price skyrockets.

Taking a picture without having to reach for a camera or phone?

Very useful for a parent with a two year old that won't stand still for more than a minute. It takes me forever to get my phone out, unlocked and in camera mode when my daughter is doing something cute or is in one of those, "I'm smiling now, but in 30 seconds I'm going to have a melt down", moods.

recording a video and taking pictures would also be useful if you or someone else is being mugged/attacked, or someone merges into you on the highway, gives you the finger and drives off leaving you with a $2500 repair bill because you were somehow in their way, or if you see someone being abused by the police, or impromptu bird watching. Lots of applications for cameras, but from what I've read about the battery life of Glass you'd be hard pressed to get more than a three minute video so it's not like you can just walk around recording everything. You also still have to talk or gesture to take a photo with it and there is a light to indicate it's recording.

The problem is people aren't doing any research and just assuming the device is recording nonstop. Then giving a knee jerk, "I'm a punch you in the face", attitude without thinking about the many relevant useful reasons to use the device, that really shouldn't concern anyone else anyway. At least no more so than a person walking around with a cell phone in their hand. I'd be on the victims side pretty quick if I was at the mall and someone just out of nowhere ran up and punched some kid holding a phone. *We* don't get to decided what other people are allowed to do in a public space and run around punching people when we don't like what they're doing... that's up to law enforcement.

You've got a good point. Google and devs need to get cracking then to show these alternative uses - your examples are compelling. Currently, the "killer apps" that are being shown and discussed largely involve taking and viewing pictures, which is exactly why people concerned about those things are expressing their concern. Sure, give me a Glass-app that can look at my steak and give a good estimate of whether it's been well-cooked. Give me an app that shows if my friends are nearby. Give me a bearing and distance for the GPS location of my kids. Those things are useful to me. Taking a picture without having to reach for a camera or phone? Not so much.

The Slashdot beta has been good for something then, it's given someone an itch to scratch :-)

The Pipedot design I think is better than the current (non-beta) Slashdot and of course miles ahead of the beta. It's clean, the information you want to read is all easy to see and all that good stuff - and we get out of it code for a discussion site that's not the monumental pain in the ass that is Slash.

Thanks for opening up the source. I might never use it on one of my own sites but at least I know there's this option should I ever need to go that route.

Have you considered learning how to develop an app yourself? Like you said, there's a a lot that needs to be done, and if you've got an interest in a particular area, a bit of learning and you could make some money.

Why is it happening now? I suspect that its due to having easy access to funding (through crowd sourcing) makes it so that small teams feel that they can deliver on their gadget.

I'd also wager it's because it's an interesting, new platform with lots of room for growth (and lots of room for improvement, as well!). There's probably good money to be made in this new space for innovation.

The joy of retrocomputing is that the computers are straightforward, and it's easy to make new add-ons for them (low bus speeds mean you only need a breadboard and whatever kind of connector the computer uses), and while you can do that kind of thing with an Arduino, the nice thing about the old machine is the built in keyboard, BASIC interpreter, and it will drive a TV screen.

Also the classic games. I'm a member of a Spanish retrocomputing organization (http://www.retroaccion.org) and we hold a couple of regular events each year, one in Bilbao (at Euskal Encounter), and the other in November at the University of Zaragoza as part of the week of engineering and architecture. The November one is particularly interesting since the local schools bring their classes for visits, and we have a room set aside for classic gaming with a couple of arcade cabinets and about 20 or so classic computers and consoles. The teachers have trouble dragging the kids away from the games - and these kids all grew up with the XBox 360, PS4, Wii, modern PC gaming etc. It really goes to prove the old adage that it's everything about playability and less about flashy graphics.

I also run a stand at Play Expo in Manchester (England) each October, mostly with Sinclair Spectrums, and it's great to see parents teaching kids to play Manic Miner and Chuckie Egg. Since it's a whole weekend event I often see the kids coming back for repeat visits and trying to beat their old high scores. The thing is these older computers are completely open, very tinkerable, and a lot of fun.

I've designed an ethernet card for the ZX Spectrum, and we've also run tournaments (with prizes!) at Euskal Encounter with a 4 player LAN game (a tank driving capture the flag team game) which was a lot of fun. Here's a video of the event:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fEvuENABZY

They're not going to have many support costs at all if they make it a distro that users don't like. I've been a SUSE guy since 2001 and I have no regrets at all not jumping onto the Ubuntu bandwagon. The only thing I really envy is apt-get (still, to this day).

s/deside/design/

It was pretty hard even for me to figure out what word I was trying to type only yesterday. Maybe I had a cold :-)

On the contrary, Google glass has a whole host of accessibility uses.

Think of someone who's hearing impaired. Google glass can easily be used to write captions for them so they no longer have to try and read the lips of someone who won't look at them, or if someone behind them is yelling at them for some reason. They can go to a movie and have captions for the movie displayed on the device rather than having to ware the stupid mirror glasses that see the caption device at the back of the theater, only available for some theaters and only for some movies.

Like wise the device can be used for someone who's visually impaired by describing important surrounding events, maybe like when a blind person approaches a stoplight or intersection, it can tell them if it's safe to cross or if they should stop. OCR can be used to read signs and describe the text to someone who can't read it.

There's a whole host of things this device *could* be used for, even in a non-accessibility sense. Unfortunately a few of vocal people are so concerned that someone might be filming them *in a public place* they'll probably have the device killed before it can even be used for anything to improve the vast majority of lives.

That's still going to oblige them to deal with the problem that it's between your eyes and the person you're talking to. It's offputting for most of the world, and it's a good way currently to get punched in the face. Google Glass belongs over the ear or something, which would make it useless in other ways. Someday it will be a contact lens and you'll never have a clue who is filming you and who isn't. Fuck the future - it's going to suck.

They've got to do some more innovating then. I like watches. I also surf. So give me a smart watch that somehow does something interesting with my smartphone and gives me a tide indicator (there are all sorts of tide watches for people like me, and there are tide apps too). But that doesn't exist. As far as I can tell, the Gear and other smart watches haven't found much to do other than show me the time, weather, and how many emails/twitter posts I've received. I don't need that. I'm not aware of smart watches having calculator functionality or other things. They're just not that useful.

On the other hand, my next potential gadget is the Jawbone, which looks like a neat health tracker. I'm interested in wearables, just haven't yet found any wearables worth wearing. There's potential here but the app developers are going to have to get beyond Twitter updates on your wrist - boring!

I moved to Mint way back when Unity first appeared. Just don't like it.

Still, I regularly check out other distros, and gave the new Ubuntu a spin today.

Guess what? I'm back into Mint again.

For me part of what I like about Linux is the feeling that I'm in control, and can tweak stuff to suit my specific needs. I really don't get that feeling with Ubuntu.

Instead it just feels like Linux dressed up to look like OS X. Given that I really don't like Apple's way of doing things that doesn't work for me.

Full of fun, Seems to be, The ideal

(vaguely disconcerting piano run filling the gap before the singer's next line)

Grumble grumble... if you want to ask people to rank a list numerically you really need to tell them which end of the scale is "high" and which is "low".

I assumed that "1" was the best, but I'll bet others thought that "8" was the top ranking.

Of course, I'm also pissed off that it wouldn't let me rank Facebook as "99".

...are just an extension of a watch, but better. If you wear a watch (like me) then you might think it's great. If you hate watches...well..um...why would you think you'd like a smartwatch?

I've got a Pebble. I bike to work, my phone safely secured in my bag. If my phone rings, my Pebble tells me if I need to take it, or if it can wait. While driving long distances I stream music on my phone, my Pebble can skip/pause/etc music, all far safer than fumbling with a touchscreen. At work I can discretely check notifications and politely excuse myself from a meeting if I need to take a call. I also work part time at a gym, if I'm coaching a class and want the music to turn down so I can speak, well, guess what, music control is on my wrist. Hell, I can even buy a drink at Starbucks or pay for lunch by scanning a barcode displayed on my watch. Welcome to the future, it's here, and it's fucking awesome.

Now sure, if you don't fit any of those use cases, then don't buy into it. The great part about all of this is you only pay for what you want. If a company wants to waste money developing something you won't use, well, why the fuck do you care?

As a comedic preacher once said: "Money is sin! So sin all your money to me!"

So, to save you all, I'll make the great sacrifice of taking all the (nontax) burden of your material goods.

I've been programming for around 20 years, and I have difficulty remembering large parts of my life. Stuff with kids, other important events just don't exist for me. My wife tells me all about things we did, that I have no clue about.

I can, however, remember with painstaking detail obsolete API's, technical issues and little annoyances that I ran into 15 years ago writing software in languages that don't even exist anymore.

There are quite a few wearable fitness gadgets (see http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/fitness-gadgets/, http://www.sporttechie.com/2014/03/11/bsx-insight-new-fitness-wearable-provides-athletes-with-real-time-training-feedback/ ), so it seems like the trend for these kind of gadgets is bubbling up.

Why is it happening now? I suspect that its due to having easy access to funding (through crowd sourcing) makes it so that small teams feel that they can deliver on their gadget. Now that the 'cloud' is accepted by so many people, everyone can just send their data to the cloud to be processed (which means they don't have to develop desktop applications which need to run on multiple platforms, or worry about the algorithm being disassembled from the application). They can jump from idea, to prototype, integrate it with their 'cloud', develop iOS and Android apps, then be ready for final production run.

If you include peripherals like Bluetooth headsets, then "wearable computing" is a boom. Of course, there a lot more misses than hits, just like in any other industry, sport, lottery, or lightning storm.

Cell phones started out as mostly single-purpose devices, and they evolved into handheld computers that can do almost anything. I think wearable computing will probably succeed better as single-purpose devices like the FitBit. Google Glass tries to do too much too soon. It might gain traction faster if it were just the equivalent of a Bluetooth headset for your eyes.

They think that removing options will reduce support costs and increase user adoption. This is the same mentality that Apple and Gnome have.

I think its a terrible idea, and a waste of time and effort. If you are creating something new from scratch, then by all means limit the number of ways of doing things. But don't do it to a project that's already in the wild.

While I switched off Ubuntu years before Unity existed for trivial reasons ( didn't like my DVD drive), these kinds of changes keep me from switching back, despite the widespread adoption.

What exactly is "materialism"?
- philosophical: everything is made of matter (and energy, by E=mc²) - in other words: there is no such thing as a soul.
- common: a tendency to collect property/money.

It seems they confuse both meanings, especially in a sentence like "the perceived shift towards more materialistic values in the west".

Both meanings are unrelated. I am a materialist in the first sense (for the moment, that is until there is scientific proof of the existence of something else - which would surprise me even if the possibility is not zero), but not in the second. I also know enough religious (so not materialist in the first meaning) people who are materialists in the second meaning.

Well I think pipedot may be rushed at some points but you could quickly improve on what was described as a 'mess'. Changing the slashcode code base will be a different endeavor and I seriously doubt the security standards of these old software components.

So maybe some people in the web department should but a bit more weight behind the |. development :)

To the argument with the commercial package support, you can basically extract any deb package and adapt it to a custom package format, if there are shared library dependencies you can add them to the package if your distro doesn't provide the old versions. I have run Archlinux for quite a few years (until they forced systemd on me and abandoned BSD's KISS principle) and I needed a lot from printers to other specialized hardware monitors and stuff and it was always possible to make it run. It requires a tiny bit extra work, but Arch's PKGBUILD model lets you do that in 5 minutes in the usual case.

I love the look here too, very clean presentation. Keep up the good work. FYI though, SN is already demoing our JS comment code on our dev server dev.soylentnews.org (select "improved threaded" style)

I remain puzzled why Canonical seems to care to fix UI elements to particular places in the first place? I am not sure what they gain from this?

The motivation is simple zealotry on the part of their UI priesthood. They know what is the Only True Way in every detail, and by god, that is all you will get. Some might theink there must be a rational motivation: that rigidity and removal of customizability reduces the code complexity and footprint. This is a false attribution. Do not underestimate the religious fervor of deside wonks with the bit in their teeth.

Texas is probably going to be a desert in another few decades. They are already experiencing extreme water stress of the sort that changes ecosystems. Not too late to repent, Texas! I'm kidding about repenting, but the climate change thing is real - whether you agree it's man-made or not. Humans have been utterly unable to make any difference in the rapidly expanding Sahara desert, the drying of the Gobi, the water stress of California and beyond. Ultimately, this race of apes is going to have to evolve or perish. Urk, we don't know how to evolve! We just like buying and consuming more stuff!

Read Robert D. Kaplan's The Coming Anarchy if you want a glimpse of what resource scarcity and population pressure will lead us to. Hint: looks more like Lagos, Nigeria and less like Beverly Hills, Hollywood. Have a nice generation!

Wow, man - Pipecode comes with a built-in snark filter ;) That's some impressive programming! Take that, lameness filter - we've got you beat!

That's true, alhtough I have had some difficulties in the past getting this to work properly. Sometimes some configuration files can conflict, and of course when you pull the DE or WM from upstream, it might not look as good or be as functional out of the game as one that comes packaged with the distribution.

I did get Awesome WM to work on XFCE the other day and it was lovely.

Grr...the preview removed my </snark> tag from the end of the first paragraph. It was totally there before when I clicked preview, but the &lt; and &gt; tags got turned into < and > in the comment block. Also, double-quoting "the rich" in the subject also got removed, but I noticed and fixed that one using single quotes.

I personally prefer the less-colloquial term "the poor," or at the very least "those people." I also prefer them to remain altruistically and emphatically oriented, it makes them more sheep like and exploitable. When you don't care about being run over (gently of course, they need to get run over again next week) it's just making it easy for us rich to get richer.
Of course, as far as I can tell, this isn't actually saying the poor are either of these things, but rather those who are rich, but not super-rich, are.