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Buildings vary a great deal. One World Trade Center has one hell of a lot more window area than roof area. So does the Empire State Building.

looks to me like that one is locked to Sprint. Sprint is completely worthless here.

The nice thing about Sprint/Ting/Republic (but not Boost/Virgin/most-MVNOs) is ability to roam (for free) onto Verizon wherever Sprint coverage is non-existent. Where Sprint sucks, however, is the areas where their coverage is just poor (1 or 0 bars), but the phone is reluctant to roam and you get stuck with a signal that keeps breaking-up. And they severely limit data while roaming.

The phone occasionally gets subjected to being crushed because it just gets in the way. If it's much more breakable than a pocketknife, it WILL get broken.

Look into heavy-duty smartphone cases before you dismiss them. http://www.otterbox.com/en-us/defender-series is a good place to start.

Which is why I decline to visit either.

Wrong. Friend of mine went to the US with his family. They squeezed his equipment then took him in for further investigation which included sticking a finger into his butt hole. The search for terrorists has expanded to searching for drugs. He will never go to the US ever again. Not if the trip was paid for.

As a former US govt employee whose entire personnel file got stolen earlier this year, I'm already screwed. They got my fingerprints already, plus a whole lot more including some pretty specific personal information: dates and places, family member names and birthdates, the works. Thank God I'd just fucking updated it about a few months earlier due to requirements.

Yeah, let me tell you: it does not feel good.

For bonus points, my son had his passport stolen a few months later. It never ends: tough breaks for a guy who basically tried to follow the rules. The government hasn't even had the cojones to officially notify me of the theft - I had to read about it on the BBC, same as the rest of you mopes.

I am however in favor of less tedious bullshit at airports. The TSA is so out of control these days I don't even want to fly anymore. The procedures you go through to ride a train leave you with at least a modicum of dignity.

New security idea: the plutonium anal probe: each passenger is fitted with an anal plug with a unique nuclear signature. Because violating you anally is about the only thing left for the airline "security" industry.

Claimer: I work as a programmer for SolarCity.

I'm in favor of all things solar. And if it ain't from SC, too bad for us.

These things are less than 10% efficient. In general your roof points at the sun more than your windows do. For most buildings, there is a lot more surface area of roof than of windows. I'm always amazed at how much of a solar install is complicated because of wire management and things that are subtly not about the panels themselves - and I imagine doing those things on the roof is easier than in a window.

So, yeah, I'm all for research and finding other solar/wind/whatever solutions - but solar on the roof is here and now. If your power bill is more than $100/month, you're a pretty good candidate for solar. If it's significantly more, then you're a great candidate. If it's less, then you still may be. Look into it.

Is this an important step forward in solar power generation, or does adding windows to the mix constitute a gimmick? How do we get people more interested in solar energy?

I think that the best way to save the planet is to make money doing it. And that's SC's proposition - save you some money, keep ourselves in business, and do that in a way that scales to the whole world. 'Cause if there's no profit in it, it's going to be mighty hard to convince everyone to do it. But if it makes financial sense to everyone involved and it doesn't screw up the planet, maybe we can make some progress.

It is a worthy idea. How many highrise buildings could benefit from this...just imagine if a city could sustain its own energy grid or at least greatly offset energy use

I have always wanted to give my fingerprints away to private organisations and governments. That part about users paying for the priviledge of having their unchangable uniquely identifiable data stored is just icing on the cake. Are these people competing to see who can deliver the worst security ideas?

Editor here: as submitted, this was probably a blatant product pitch, but I worked it a bit and decided to publish because the subject matter of innovative approaches to solar interests me (and because the link goes to National Geographic instead of some corporate site).

Solar is cool.

I was thinking the same thing. TV technology seems to be changing fast, and yet what it delivers isn't all that different than it was in the 70s. How many times do they think I'm going to rebuy a device?

Thanks for the link. Last time I looked at the kyocera the price was still higher than it's worth to me. $20 is more like it. As to whether it will work with my cheap Verizon pay-as-you-go...?? looks to me like that one is locked to Sprint. Sprint is completely worthless here. (See map: http://www.boostmobile.com/coverage/ that's about right in my experience. I'm near Billings MT.)

I find the smartphones harder to hear on -- has to be positioned perfectly or I can't hear the durn thing at all. Maybe it's the aging ears; younger mileage may vary.

I don't think you realise how much banging around happens if you do physical work outdoors (or in a barn). Where the pockets are is also a commonly-used point of leverage. The phone occasionally gets subjected to being crushed because it just gets in the way. If it's much more breakable than a pocketknife, it WILL get broken. Either that, or it won't be carried at all, and then why bother with it?

If you don't live on the phone, most of its time is spent held in the hand next to the ear, not typing on it. Contacts can be imported rather than retyped.

So who will really benefit here? hardware manufacturers? content providers?

I know all it does for me is make me even less likely to ever break down and buy a new TV (something I never did after the switch to digital... well, no point now!)

I'm sporting a Samsung note 3, but to my surprise I'm really tempted by that Kyocera! I really like that form factor, not sure if it's nostalgia or what.

Penis.

Maybe broadcast will change, but my guess is that TimeWarner and other cable/satellite TV systems will keep on working just fine with older TVs.

They may WANT to benefit, but they won't because no one is stupid enough to buy into this crap.

I predict that they will pass this, as the people that benefit the most are the corporations.

QED.

I have a flipphone that cost $12 purchased outright

You can get an Android 4.x+ used-but-working smartphone for $20 off of Amazon. Not a big investment there, either.

I prefer it because I can carry it in my pocket in the barn and not worry about it getting banged or wet -- won't hurt it a bit

A number of smartphones are water resistant. And it's cheap to add a case that'll absorb most any shocks without damage.

And it's FAR easier on both the hand and the ear than the smartphone was.

I find dumb phones don't have the nice noise-canceling that smartphones do. And input a few contacts or type a few text messages, and the smartphone is much easier on the hands.

What I'd really like is a flipphone with a full keyboard, such as used to exist but seem to have vanished

I didn't have any problem finding some on Amazon. And they're still making new (dumb) slider phones:
* http://www.boostmobile.com/shop/phones/kyocera-verve/

In Japanese yen, "four figures" is only around 8 US dollars.

Devuan is starting to look like it's repeating Debian's mistakes. 1)It is trying to support lots of architectures up front. Why not stick with x64 for now, handle the other architectures later?
2)lots of file formats, but the only ISOs are for netboot. That's OK for people with lots of bandwidth. If they built a large (600MB or bigger) ISO I could download it while I sleep (which is the polite thing to do since my bandwidth is limited) and use it for multiple installs. Especially if the ISO included language packs. Installing Debian is a real PITA and takes forever because it always downloads those language packs. That's dumb. 3)take the time to make a liveCD. It isn't that difficult. 4)create an ISO image that can go on a thumbdrive with an NTFS filesystem, using Unetbootin. The 'dd' command is destructive. It's another PITA to reformat the thumbdrive to make it usable after the install. This is part of 'plays well with others'.

Can you name any previous SMART phones that flip open?

Sure. Those are just ones that run Android, I'm using that as a conservative definition of smartphone.

any Japanese smartphones in production with a full physical keypad

Here's one that's been out for a year. Are you using the English site? That only shows a subset of what they have.

Of course the glass brick style is still more popular. But the point here is that the smart flip phone has been done before.

The 5110 does not look like a flip phone to me...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_5110

First is the assumption that this is not supposed to be a smartphone

Nobody said that. The topic is FLIP phones. Can you name any previous SMART phones that flip open?

Really, what these are is a smartphone with physical buttons. This is much more desirable in Japan

Please point me to any Japanese smartphones in production with a full physical keypad, I'd like to have a look. I just checked softbank.jp, and didn't find a single one. What I found there were iPhones, Galaxy S6's, and basically everything a western audience would be familiar with.

The Japanese seem to love their iPhones (HINT: Apple doesn't sell any flip or keypad phones):
"Last October, the iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c also accounted for 76% of smartphone sales in Japan, marking a record high. All three major Japanese carriers including DoCoMo, SoftBank, and KDDI have been offering the iPhone 5s free on contract" http://www.macrumors.com/2014/05/14/apple-smartphone-market-share-japan-36/

I had a glassbrick smartphone (Android) and hated it. Now I have a flipphone that cost $12 purchased outright (yes, twelve dollars). It's dumb as a rock (it can't even do call switching, tho it sorta receives texts if they're short enough). Battery life is so-so, about four hours of talk or a couple weeks of disuse. I prefer it because I can carry it in my pocket in the barn and not worry about it getting banged or wet -- won't hurt it a bit, and it was no big investment to start with. And it's FAR easier on both the hand and the ear than the smartphone was.

What I'd really like is a flipphone with a full keyboard, such as used to exist but seem to have vanished in favor of larger screens. Then having the smartphone features would make sense. With the push-3-times keyboard, it's all too much bother to use, at least typing in English. (Since I don't type Japanese I can't speak to that.) And make the whole phone a little larger so it's not so dang hard to hang onto; my pocket isn't so tiny that it has to be the size of a matchbox, and my big paws aren't so fond of tiny objects.

There's a few problems with this article.

First is the assumption that this is not supposed to be a smartphone, and the underlying concept that the only thing that can be a smartphone is a glass brick. Really, what these are is a smartphone with physical buttons. This is much more desirable in Japan as a number pad is a surprisingly effective way to enter Japanese text. LG is not looking to get the kind of person who would buy the basic call and text only phone with this. LG still makes the old feature phones, as does pretty much every manufacturer. Of course they'd rather you buy the $600 flagship, but they're out in stores if you look.

Second is that old phones are desirable for normal use. The ones paying big money for them are collectors. That one people are paying four figures for? It's gold plated. Really, what most people want is the best of both, functionality of a modern phone with a week long battery life.

Third is the implication that feature phones are making a comeback in Japan. Sure, there was an uptick, but smartphones are still outselling them nearly three to one.

Also, similar phones have been around for a while in Japan. But the interesting part about this new LG one was skipped. This phone is coming to other markets as the Wine Smart, including some in Europe, like the UK.

FTA:

> While they may lack features, these retro phones are simple to use,
> have batteries that last the week and are practically indestructible
> compared to their smartphone equivalents.

> The [LG] handset has a 3.2-inch colour touch screen and runs Android
> Lollipop 5.1, a modern 1.1GHz quad-core Snapdragon 2010 processor and
> 1GB of RAM, supports 4G LTE, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and GPS....

So, let me get this straight: retro, flip-phones are desirable because they are simple, easy to use, and have phenomenal battery life yet LG is intentionally building something complex (Android), slow (Android), and power-hungry (Android, 1.1GHz, quad-core Snapdragon, 1GiB of RAM, 4G LTE, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and GPS)? It will be interesting to see if customers eschew the new LG phone because it doesn't fit their requirements.

Nokia 5110 FTW. Had one for 10 years. If I ever need to seriously use a phone in the future I'll be looking for one like it. Just works. Charge lasts for days. Good interface. Robust. No GPS etc...

StarTac FTW
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_StarTAC

Don't be a fanboy moron. The point being made was relating to which platform is the most secure, not which is best overall.

I had several flip phones over the years, but those years were all in the 2000's. 1990's seems a bit early.

What is your choice of live cd boot distro for this scenario? Ubuntu?

Everything was done in the open, look at the mailing lists to see what transpired. It was all in the open. Systemd is a better solution. Making it init by default is a sane choice. Other init systems still work, but giving devs a single one to ensure works makes their lives easier.

Systemd isn't invasive, its fundamental. Its the cgroups manager which provides an api for cgroups for other things to use. That just makes sense to have init be the cgroups manager.

That is a unique argument that I have not heard. I don't find it to be very persuasive. Journald is better than syslog and other alternatives in many ways. But it is a change, and as such there will always be people who cry "change for no reason!!!" because they don't see or understand the benefit from the change and have to make changes to their existing work flow. There are reasons, and they are documented. The only relevant argument against has been existing tooling needing syslog.

wow what version of windows you are using? last time I used it, it was a win8 luckily configured as a traditional desktop (else I'd be probably still be there figuring stuff out), it was to restart an intranet proxmox instance who apparently needed console access because the disk was encrypted and asked for the password at boot.

Fire up explorer. Where the f. is the address bar? oh at the bottom, OBVIOUSLY. I type the address, nothing happens. Not even an error. I check the address, it is correct.

I see a chrome icon. Let's try that.

Chrome doesn't like the certificate. Good chrome, sit, it's a f.in intranet, sit. Clicking through a couple dialogs sets things straight.

Enter proxmox web interface, click for the console... no java plugin available. Download? activate? well, those kind of plugins are not liked anymore, so they will be installable till version XYZ and later no way....

Chrome, damn you to hell, it's a f.in intranet!

Raised hand: "client, I need to install 200mb of java and 25 of firefox to click on a fucking link and have a fucking terminal window, or i have to spend between 2 and 120 mins on proxmox docs and setting up alternative access from win to the VM. Else I'd boot a live linux from usb, install whatever is needed if it's needed in RAM, and GTFO in 10 mins without touching one bit of your workstation HD. WHAT WILL IT BE?"

The client was already having convulsions at the thought of the java plugin popups returning in his life, so it was an easy sell.

A toast!
I dedicate this story
To all the hundreds of idiots on the internet
Who, throughout these years,
Kept insisting that Microsoft had magically changed!

To all of you, babbling idiots!

*drinks and throws the glass behind his back, hoping to hit some VB code monkey and claiming it was by accident*

I did something similar a couple of months ago, but to Windows instead of BSD. What a refreshing change! My sound card finally works right, it doesn't cancel line-out forever when I plug in a headset. Bluetooth works, and most importantly, the video card works with all the acceleration it has. I'm finally actually using the hardware I paid for. Besides, there are nifty programs I could never use with Linux.

I do miss a couple of things from my unixy setup, but life is too short to try to make my operating system at home perfect.

I still boot into Linux or run it thru a VM occasionally, but that's just for using the tools I made over the years. How I thought I'd be a UNIX guy forever..

Looks interesting and thanks for the link, but Opera fit me like a glove from 2001 til about 2014. Then new management drove my favorite browser like the Costa Concordia along the Italian shoreline. Really looking forward to Vivaldi and just hoping FreeBSD's Linux emulation allows me to run it on FreeBSD, since that's my current OS.

Sadly, Journalistic integrity seems to be of the exclusive domain of the NYT and possibly the Economist. Everything else is shades of grey. I typically don't expect much from any other source. Good journalistic writing is a skill that must be learned and honed. Its not found on any random websites that happen to post news articles.

Getting yelled at for breaking a userspace app and or kernel debugging features is kind of a mark of honor. Alan Cox got reamed for breaking emacs a while back. Not wholly undeserved, but its kind of Linus' role to protect userspace from kernel devs and kernel devs from userspace. Its easy to get tunnel vision and only care about a particular deep logical problem and find a way to fix it, but in such a way as it breaks compatibility. Of course when egos are involved, sometimes people don't put the finest foot forward, but eventually cooler heads prevail and solutions are found. In Kay's case, it was a fight over boot params namespace. I kind of agreed with him on that, but the change they did make really killed kernel debugging, and so while he might have been technically correct, it was the wrong way to do that due to the impact.

When you have a large number of machines, the odds of you hitting the flaws inherent to sysv init and upstart become more frequent. systemd has a large number of "Proper" solutions to things that sysv and upstart work for 98% of the time. It also has a number of things that make administering systems easier, faster ( if you take the time to learn them instead of sticking your head in the sand and complaining about having to learn new things).

What do you mean by " the interrupt for boot" ? If its not getting to grub, or gummiboot that's not a systemd issue. Sounds like the update screwed up things. Rather than systemd. He's probably trying sysvinit style debugging techniques for systemd.

The article pretty much deals with this aspect. Endpoints are easy targets, TOR isn't perfect, etc.

But, if you aren't already a target of the NSA, but are going to do something you don't want them tracing back to you ( like leaking NSA secrets) ,and you know that they are capable of ( because you already work for them and know what their state of the art techniques), then it works great!!!111.

Of if you just want "casual secrecy" Then it works great too.. What is casual secrecy, you might ask? You know when you have a boring life, but want to pretend that your secrets aren't boring, and in the act frustrate the heck out of any one who wants to communicate with you. Its a great way to lose friends.

And dull. No one cares about what I say or do. No one cares about what most people say or do. The NSA is not out to get you. If they are, its already too late and the techniques listed here are worthless.

"most users are unlikely to make a fuss so long as their systems continue to boot and function the way they are supposed to." If systemD dies, then this is likely to be why.

uneventfully?? Just because people are not complaining on boards lists and usenet does not mean that this is uneventful.

At the risk of reigniting the flames I ask whether posts pro systemd could be less repetitive...

http://mobile.datamation.com/open-source/whos-afraid-of-systemd.html

The other wrong with systemd can be easily seen searching for his hashtag on twitter. I was struck by the attitude of Poettering that had been asked by google not to use their time servers in the dev systemd branch for both resource utilization and accuracy reasons. The guy first replied that he had no alternative like pool.ntp.org because he is not a vendor and systemd is not a product. OK, we know that, but that should not interfere with google request., nor should be a problem for the guy on RH payroll that is redesigning core part of linux based systems. Look at the thread yourself, it is fascinating.

Debian is indeed what raised a red flag on systemd for me, because the debian way should have been to bring up a dialog during the installation with sysvinit vs systemd choice. And both would have ended up in a system that is mostly working well. The inability of achieving that means either: political pressure was applied, see also the spotify request that turned out as a joke on debian, or that systemd is too invasive from an architectural POV. I gave my best shot at liking it anyway but i have yet to see any feature of my intetest that a system equipped with runit and traditional tools cannot do better. To me it seems a trick to train new devs to update systems just for the sake of it. Commercial IT philosophy done with open source.

Great, one. Where? A friend of mine who runs Linux as his home OS is now seriously annoyed. A recent upgrade included SystemD. Something borked the video card driver. The interupt for boot isn't working. Nothing could fix the issue. Problem diagnosis was painfil. Liken this to regressing back to Linux of 1995. He solved the problem by regressing back and now has Upstart working. A huge waste of his time. For what? How does SystemD help here? Screwing with the init so users can't diagnose problems? Stuffing up the init order causing fatal boot? This is an end user. Today he has removed the problem - Systemd. Tomorrow he is looking for a new OS or an easy way to get rid of it.

Obviously your sarcasm detector is on the fritz