Recent Comments

I started making the profile page more summary-like. Example: http://bryan.pipedot.org/profile/

Looks good, but you definitely need to make the "Recent Comments" section a LOT larger (only 10?!).

Good thing and the way it should have happened in the Linux world, with DEs and all Redhat/Poettering stuff.

Umm, what? Go read the court filing yourself: http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Intermexcomplaint.pdf

Thanks for the link. It was not in the story.

Because she had to be able to receive calls from clients after-hours. She was a salesman after all. Leaving her phone somewhere (or shutting it off) would have been far more disruptive than just removing the app in-question. I don't see why you think that would be fine with everyone (she would have gotten fired even more quickly).

I have a pretty black/white view of employment and time. Either you are on the job or you're not. If you're on the job and using company equipment then that's fair. If you're not on the job, leave the equipment behind. If you think that you need to answer calls on the company phone at any hour, then you're always on the job. I don't think that's a reasonable position to take. If the company wants 24 hour response, they should hire enough people to cover the hours.

But there are plenty of technical solutions as well. You don't want to be on the job 24 hours, but still want calls? Use call forwarding to your own phone. Or just get voicemail alerts. Or hand out your personal number. This isn't rocket science.

I thought I remembered something like that, but I guess he has not updated his website
http://www.turbofuzz.com/jkh/
or resume'
http://www.turbofuzz.com/jkh/resume/jkres4.html#4

Not sure, considering this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CI5xnkLk8IA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykttGA7YgdQ

I do try to submit good stories to the pipedot, not duplicating /. or SN if possible. Thanks for the sharepoint story; good timing to see that.

:)

Your kudos makes it sound far too much like I'm dying...

Do you know something I don't?

SAP are trying this. Moving code creation into the hands of business. The result is terrible.

He left Apple in september 2013.

"Starting with Firefox 42, developers will also have to get their extensions reviewed and signed by Mozilla before they can be deployed. ""

I had a situation at work where some software used two years ago was needed today to redo some work. No problem, as I have a folder with the software. Pulled it out, installed the plugin on Chrome..NO! NO PLUGIN FOR YOU!. Okay. This is in a dev environment so is firewalled from the internet. After a few tries I gave up on Chrome. It just can't be used to install plugins locally. No, I am not screwing around with unpacking and repacking extensions.

I pulled up Firefox, installed the plugin, and was good to go. Work was done. Reports were filed. Everyone is happy.

After Firefox 42 this will not be possible. If I had Firefox 42 in the dev environment right now, and no previous versions of the browsers, I would be screwed.

Now, what happens if I am testing for compatibility in a future version of Firefox or Chrome? What then? At what point do we admit that locking out local installs of plugins is a bad thing?

I agree with you. From Pipedot's earliest days, I thought it was important to keep this place focused on tech, and avoid a lot of the crap that seems to be invading other sites.

You've done some awesome work here over the past year (even longer than that!) The fact that Pipedot has had such high quality subject matter is attributable largely to your hard work and perseverance. Many thanks for it. You just have to glance at the history of the pipe to see who has kept this place alive. Thanks for all the good reads.

Perfect answer. You sir, get a cookie. :)

Small keyboards look cute, but I still prefer having dedicated buttons for all the functions. Laptops need a "Function" button because they are small, but desktop keyboards shouldn't have any size limits if you aren't traveling with them.

There was no link to any content for that blurb.

Umm, what? Go read the court filing yourself: http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Intermexcomplaint.pdf

Why not just leave the device at work/home/on the moon while you're not working?

Because she had to be able to receive calls from clients after-hours. She was a salesman after all. Leaving her phone somewhere (or shutting it off) would have been far more disruptive than just removing the app in-question. I don't see why you think that would be fine with everyone (she would have gotten fired even more quickly).

The article "explains" the MS Privacy Policy from the most MS-friendly angle possible. It claims that some data sent to MS is "necessary for the operation of Windows" but does not explain how. It glosses over the fact that once this large trove of data (kept for how long? forever?) is collected, it will be handed over to others "when required by law or to respond to legal process". It does not obligate MS to fight fishing expeditions by loose-cannon prosecutors, divorce attorneys, or friendly inquiries from not only 3-letter agencies but also Officer Friendly. It allows MS to pass on data to other software companies. Now, they have almost certainly always done this, the difference with W10 is the volume and breadth of data that they will possess.

We need a good article that covers not only the MS Privacy Policy, but also details what data is actually sent to MS and why. This is not that article.

There was no link to any content for that blurb. How do you figure she's got any case? Why not just leave the device at work/home/on the moon while you're not working?

So... the guy that works at Apple is forking FreeBSD so that it looks more like NeXT/Apple's OS has looked for more than 20 years.

I'm not shocked.

Get a tiny dumbphone (or feature phone, or whatever you want to call it) -- you know, one back from when "smaller is cooler".
You're reachable by phone. Any app you need to use you most likely need a user account for anyway, so there it's easy to make an "office" account.

So your dumb phone is your "office" phone, and your smart phone is your private phone. Anything you need to do for work on the smart phone uses a "work" account. The dumb phone is small enough so that it doesn't take any noticeable space.

Only downside is having to mute two phones whenever that pops up.

How does one future-proof his/her life and career?

duh, dont choose a career that is formulaic. design is the last thing to be automated, especially software. when machines can design their own software, they will be more than just machines.

Make the future happen.

I completely gave up and quit Slashdot, then later SoylentNews, because of poor story selection. Before giving-up on discussion sites all together, I tried Pipedot, and found higher standards. If it had gone differently, I wouldn't be here, and over the past year, Pipedot might have been very much dead.

The reasons why are many... You can mod-down users spouting trash, but not front-page stories (or their editors). It has cascading effects, as well... When a story is trash, nearly all the comments on it will be ripping it apart, while anything about the subject gets lost in the noise. And the kinds of stories a site gets greatly influences the community of readers and contributors... It was the technical focus that gave Slashdot its audience and high-quality contributors, while it was likely the politics and other trash that have driven its decline.

While the site has some good features, it's got plenty of bad ones, too. Replies are still sent as a link in a bare-bones e-mail. Some things you can do under stories you can't do under direct comment links (like moderation). There's no nice user-summary page that shows your comments, moderation, reply counts, and submissions. Instead that info is spread across multiple info pages, harder to get at and therefor less useful. Pipedot works, and quite well, mostly because it's still small. Things like the RSS Comments Feed are great, but would be nearly worthless on a bigger site.

Use Confluence. It is like Sharepoint from a technical point of view with the significant difference being that it does not suck monkey balls.

The problem isn't with the wysiwyg editor. It's pipedot bug #51:

http://bugs.pipedot.org/view.php?id=51

You can also see this thread:

https://pipedot.org/comment/9XH9

Sounds like she's a suer. Turn the damn device off on your own time and/or don't carry it with you. It's company issued...

I'd say she's got a good case.

Intermex forced Arias and other employees to install Xora on their smartphones and told them they needed to keep their phones on all day, every day.
http://morallowground.com/2015/05/13/myrna-arias-claims-intermex-fired-her-for-deleting-gps-tracker-on-work-phone/

Vox Media (parent company of The Verge and other trendy tech news sites) has always been Microsoft friendly which leads me to believe they are getting significant kickbacks to put everything Microsoft in a favorable light. the bottom line is that they are both sociopathic corporations with no respect for the truth. no need to read their mindless drivel.

Here's your app:
* https://towelroot.com/

Yes, Opera had tabs first, but they behaved nothing like the tabs Firefox created.

"Opera's tabs behave like 'mini windows' within the browser meaning you can drag them out of the browser, drag them back in and also minimise them and restore them within the browser"
http://www.wikivs.com/wiki/Firefox_vs_Opera#Tabbed_Browsing

What's more, I don't think Opera invented that at all, since applications like Microsoft Office managed multiple open documents the same way (just without the ever-present tab bar), long before Opera:
* http://www.studmed.ru/docs/static/2/f/0/a/7/2f0a7d1d089.png

Since my desktop manages multiple browser windows just fine, I saw absolutely no benefit to Opera's tabs. Opera also cycled through tabs in most-recent-viewed order. So open a handful of new tabs (in the background) from a page, visit the first one and close it, and you go back to the last page you viewed, not all the new tabs you just opened. Again, absolutely no better than how my desktop window manager handles multiple browser windows.

When Mozilla (later Firefox) came out with tabs that when closed took you left-to-right or right-to-left (not through your history) in 2001-2002, Opera copied the feature in 2003.

The old-fashioned tab bar at the bottom:
* http://www.estudiologos.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/Opera_6.0.png

While the new (Firefox-style) tabs were at the top:
* http://g1.idg.pl/ftp/pc/opera72.jpg

Back in Opera 6.0, at start-up, you could choose between single-window mode (classic tabs), or multiple-windows "SDI/MDI mode". Then for Opera 7.0, they offered tabs in the SDI mode as well:

"New MDI/SDI combination gives users the best of two worlds by allowing surfing in both MDI or SDI, with tabs (or even a combination) without restarting Opera"
http://www.opera.com/docs/changelogs/windows/700/

And the tabs on the SDI interface windows behaved like Firefox's tabs (no overlapping windows, cycling left-to-right, etc.), not like Opera's MDI tabs always did.

And incidentally, Opera wasn't even the first web browser with tabs, either. It was beaten by NetCaptor by about 3 years.

I'm not sure I agree with you. As I remember it, Opera had tabbed browsing since the earliest days I used it, maybe 2001? Firefox added it after Opera, and IE added it many years after that. Opera had the "speed dial" feature first, Firefox added it afterwards.

Might be the early-onset alzheimers, but I am almost certain Opera was the innovator here. You mention a 'second, entirely different method of adding tabs.' I don't remember that, or don't know what you mean.

Vivaldi is where I'm putting my hope. After Opera 12 the management team changed, and the new team decided to just copy Chrome badly and strip out whatever innovative features Opera ever had. Pathetic.

Used to be where I could install a Linux distro, add mutt, slrn, and opera, and be good to go.

I just carry an OTG Adapter. I've got extra keyboards around anywhere I'm likely to work. If I happen to be somewhere offsite, they are one of those things that everyone has spares of.

Isn't it a desirable state of things, not to be reachable from work outside of work hours?

Forgot to add this:

http://blog.darknedgy.net/technology/2015/08/26/0/

Others are watching this project with suspicion, too. Check out this excellent rebuttal on the DarknEdgy blog, which suggests, among other criticisms, that the Mach microkernel is an anachronism.

It's an infrared image of a colon polyp ... I think. Of course, give them credit for choosing something non-dramatic instead of the alternative, some scare picture of houses under water or something.

This is the problem with almost all portable keyboards, they are unsuitable for any real work as the keys I want to use that normally require zero modifier keys, now require one. Its a retraining of typing to fit the particular key layout. No thanks.

So, what I am hearing is that the chances of picking up a Galaxy 4 Active (physical buttons!!!) clone, say as a Galaxy 8 Active, are zero to none and that I should buy a spare Active 4 now.

I've got the Note 3 and love it, too, and yes, the microSIM and removable battery are important. I was able to get a huge microSD card and put my entire itunes collection on it; I now have my entire music library on the phone. Looks like the new one wouldn't let me do that.

Samsung is struggling for marketshare and revenue these days - hard to explain why they'd take an anti-consumer move like this unless it helped them reduce price so significantly it facilitates them in some other way.

Bring back the hottie! She brought meaning to my dreary working day :)

Kidding.

A rogue app from the store can root a phone but the average user cannot download an app to get root access to their own device.

This looks like a clever design, and if the keys are as good as they are said to be, I'm tempted. I'm currently rocking one of these: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16875982435 Nice enough keyboard, and for the $30 I paid for it, I can't complain. A bit too big to pair with a smartphone though; I use it almost exclusively for taking notes in meetings on a tablet. For a smartphone, something like this LG product might be just right, and hopefully durable as well.

I own both the Note 2 and the Note 4, which I am very happy with.

The previous generations of the note was the ultimate phone that had everything that apple devices didn't have - stylus, removable battery (so you can bring spare batteries on longer trips), extensible storage, relatively open for custom ROM installation, and yes, even cheap plastic. Now Samsung is turning away from everything that made their devices special, with the notable exception of the Stylus. Sorry, but the lack of removable battery and no SD card slot is an absolute deal breaker.

As I am quite happy with my Note 4 this is not too much of a deal for me right now, but when it evenutally breaks I will probably have to look elsewhere for a good phone. I am not looking forward to that.

Fixed. I thought it was a bit of a toss-up at the time, but I guess we're just as well-off without it.

If you'll forgive me, I just have to take a moment to point out how absolutely HORRIBLE the image for this article is... I can't remember seeing anything worse. It looks like a negative photo of a mushroom cloud. Or perhaps somebody broke a bottle of jam on the floor a car wash? It's just plain AWFUL.

Am I wrong? Is somebody here able to glean some useful information from that image?

Anybody else got a better description of our acid-fueled cloud-watching photograph?

I don't think the article picture fits with the entire theme / skin / looks of the site.

I agree. At my last employer I was issued a company cellphone. I maintained total separation of personal and professional lives, and that meant carrying two cellphones around, which I truly disliked.

Now I carry just one phone, but that means my personal and professional number is the same, and I've lost the ability to shut off the work phone on weekends. I dislike that too.

My company toyed with the Good app for ipad and Android. It was basically company email and limited document storage. It wasn't great as an app, but it did help maintain that mental separation between personal and private. Not sure what the solution is here. But I do know that when my office gave up on Blackberries, they mandated Windows phones for us (Nokia Lumia), and that was truly a lousy device and OS. At least now I get to choose the device I like, which is a Samsung Note.

This is a no-win situation all the way around. Where I work my employer wants to deploy a pile of remote control software which I don't want on my personal phone. That means that the employer has to supply a phone for me. I refuse to use my employer's phone to make personal calls and data connections - that's just inappropriate - which means that I need to carry my personal phone. I don't care to maintain information on both and I don't want to carry multiple devices so I leave my employer's phone at work and seldom use it - which means that other employees cannot call me outside of hours.

Meh.

Sounds like she's a suer. Turn the damn device off on your own time and/or don't carry it with you. It's company issued...

I've used my own laptop & phone for years and years. No problem.

And really most of the best browser UI ideas started with opera.

Opera had some good ideas, but they usually managed to do them entirely the wrong way. Meanwhile, Firefox might have borrowed some rough concepts, but they fixed them in the process, so they were actually useful. Look back to when Firefox added tabbed browsing, and shortly after, Opera soon after added a second, entirely different method of tabs you could choose to use instead...

Some goes for the notification bar. It was taken from IE, but it didn't do much of anything useful there. After that, IE copied back the improved design from Firefox.

Unfortunately, their more recent changes (wholesale copying Chrome's UI) have been downhill all the way.

Plus, after Google banished all ad-blockers from the Play Store, Firefox became the only Android browser to take a stand and keep their ad blocking features, while all others cowered and dropped the feature. Ironically, mobile is where ad blocking is the most beneficial, and now it's the hardest place to do it. It's also one of just a few that allow you to change the built-in search engine to something other than Google.

Actually, they say all the El Nino rain will barely help. El Nino mostly brings rain to Southern California, which only has about 1/3rd the surface-water infrastructure as Northern California. Hence the aqueducts that span the state. What California really needs is lots of snowpack in the Sierra Nevada mountains. If El Nino makes this a warmer winter, resulting in less snowpack, California will be worse-off, not better.

http://ca.gov/drought/topstory/top-story-45.html