Recent Comments

If for nothing else other than to let me continue watching Homestar Runner, I welcome our new SWF overloards!!!

I really appreciate how much easier on the eyes (and the brain attached thereto) pipedot is than so many other sites.

If the letters/numbers/symbols/this-stuff-I'm-typing-right-here that make up the summaries and comments were just a little larger (without me having to do anything other than load the page), I think I'd like that a little better. The size used in titles and sidebars and such is okay as-is.

Just as SWF is being dropped left and right. Like releasing an open alternative to RealPlayer in 2009.

I reckon there will be legacy Flash games and doodads floating around for a while yet, but it's in its autumn for sure.

LTE runs on licensed spectrum, which costs lots of money. You're the only one using the spectrum, so you can use more powerful transceivers to cover wider areas. WiFi runs on unregulated spectrum, which is free, but potentially noisy. You also can't (legally) have a single WiFi access point cover a very large area as you're power limited.

This is in the USA at least. Other countries may have different laws regarding spectrum.

On the m0n0wall homepage there is a link to a new project (OPNsense) which seems interesting.

Edit: Oh, someone posted about it already.

Is there a technological reason that LTE is more expensive, or is it just that (up to now) the mobile providers can afford to charge a premium?

Oh, I'm sure Microsoft Windows will be fine.

Sincerely,

The NSA

...

Seriously though, from TFA: "m0n0wall has served as the seed for several other well known open source projects, like pfSense, FreeNAS and AskoziaPBX. The newest offspring, OPNsense (https://opnsense.org), aims to continue the open source spirit of m0n0wall while updating the technology to be ready for the future. In my view, it is the perfect way to bring the m0n0wall idea into 2015, and I encourage all current m0n0wall users to check out OPNsense and contribute if they can."

hi, what would a good replacement be? thanks

If you watched the superbowl, you saw the ads featuring wifi calling from tmobile, too.

I received the announcement by email a couple of days ago. Too bad, it was a great distribution and I am still running it on one of my old PCs.

I never used m0n0wall, but I was always glad it was around. It's good to know that others are carrying the torch.

[Un]surprisingly, for the ones I've checked, the pipedot feed interface is better than the main site itself. Thanks!

Having better up time doesn't mean you don't install security patches. Typically, things are set up so there are redundant servers that kick in while the other one has maintenance ( software/hardware) done. But its also possible that they didn't allocate funds for that. I was thinking with more allowed downtime, that would allow for broader network changes to be done. And to be fair, all of that could be avoided if there was another data center set up that we could push traffic to and we had BGP set up. So, really its always a trade off between cost and uptime.

Holy fuck! It's over two times more popular than my second favorite distribution Gentoo! and far more popular than the one I have running on all my boxes: Funtoo!

None of the above

Did you know you can read them on Pipedot?

• AnandTech
• Ars Technica
• Engadget
• ExtremeTech
• Gizmodo
• LWN
• Mr. Money Mustache
• POWER Magazine
• Space Industry News
• TechCrunch

Or browse the full list. Or just at the pretty pictures.

Hi Bryan et. al.

I honestly thought you guys abandonded working on this site based on some posts I read a few months ago. I am quite glad to see that is not the case, and happy to see improvements still rolling in. Gratz on the year, to many more.

Keep up the good work, I'm extremely busy so don't take this the wrong way but: I'll continue to check in from time to time.

Peace,
mrcoolbp

It didn't work as I expected, or maybe it will now :)

That happens to be in the FAQ:

https://code.google.com/p/osmand/wiki/FAQ#Why_does_OsmAnd_require_permission_X

I just downloaded OSMAnd~ from fdroid, what the fuck...

Privacy

• Take pictures and videos
• record audio

Device Access

• Google Play billing service

No thanks.

I agree that the level of details with OSM is much better, there are plenty of POIs on OSM not mapped elsewhere. But I agree with evilviper, the UI of OSMAnd is atrocious, especially the search which is god-awful as well as handpicking desirable POI categories. You can get used to it but that doesn't make it better.

As for inputing address ("carefully" ? what does that even mean

You can't just type an address as a single string into OsmAnd. Instead, it requires you tediously input it as separate fields, one after another, and only works in the proper order, like so:

http://media02.hongkiat.com/offline-gps-maps-osmand/address.jpg

but yes there are improvements to be made to the UI.

That's the under-statement of the decade. Frankly, it boggles my mind that it's possible to make something so awful. Seems like they went out of their way, trying to think of all the ways they could make it more horrible, instead of just copying the UI of Google Maps or similar.

The nice thing is that if your region is not mapped well enough for your taste (for POI, street numbers, etc.), you can just go to openstreetmap.org and fix it.

Yeah, in the same way the "nice thing" about a car breaking down after you get it home from the mechanic, is that you can just go fix it yourself.

Mmmmh, in my region, I have tons of POI, even bicycle paths, hiking paths and street numbers, so I guess it is a YMMV situation. As for inputing address ("carefully" ? what does that even mean, can you type it with a hammer when using Here ?), I usually point on the map the place I wanna go and ask for directions, but yes there are improvements to be made to the UI.

The nice thing is that if your region is not mapped well enough for your taste (for POI, street numbers, etc.), you can just go to openstreetmap.org and fix it. It will be in the next update of the maps. Besides, independently of OsmAnd, I found that Openstreetmap is much more up-to-date than even Google Maps or MapQuest. New constructions, streets, buildings, one-way changes appear within a few days.

I guess there are crazy mappers over here and not in your city.

What I really miss though is the directions using public transportation that Google Maps provides in many big cities with timetables and all the bells and whistles.

OsmAnd is HORRIBLE. Doesn't know street numbers, requires carefully inputting an address across several fields. Has practically no POI. etc.

Nokia's Here is... not horrible. In fact it's very good. (Offline) POI is not as up-to-date as (online) Google Maps or MapQuest, or a select few offline non-free navigation apps like Sygic.

And if you're driving a non-trivial distance, traffic info is invaluable. It's not possible for any open-source, non-tracking app to give you traffic info.

I'll keep using the opensource, fully offline, non-tracking, non-corporate-owned OsmAnd, thank you ...

I can't believe they used geo-ip lookup as part of their safety check up. They wildly missed on where my phone and tablet last logged in from. My ISP often assigns an ip address that was once assumed to be in a different section of the country. If I didn't know that, I might have been unnecessarily freaked out. I mean these are nexus devices that have location sharing turned on, and were connected to wifi. Google knows *exactly* where they were, and it wasn't what they reported because the just used geo ip lookups. Dorks.

Yet Android users still can't deny an app net access in standard Android OS.

Thanks for the link. The numbers are correct. Not my problem though. If management want patches applied and all win boxes restarted every week then that is how it is. There is this story about monkeys which explains why things are the way they are. This monkey was swapped in way after the hosing stopped.

99.8% uptime?!? I mean thats a full 17 HOURS out of the year you can be down! My god, if I could get away with that much downtime I could take over the world!

http://uptime.is/99.8

Does the law also say they have to do it for free or only a nominal fee? Because if they charge more for unlocking than it would cost you to buy a new phone, it won't help you.

I like Samsung hardware, but I can guarantee you I won't be going near a camera-and-microphone enabled smart TV with anything other than a baseball bat and a flamethrower.

I'd advise you to at least also wear clothes in that case. Somebody might be watching.

I play around with a lot of distros too, but I've always defaulted to Slackware for its stability and easy maintenance. Lately I've tried distros with systemd, and never really saw anything wrong with it for my uses, but all the hype and politics surrounding it make me happy to stay with Slackware for the long haul. I prefer to avoid drama in my operating system. If it ends up in Slackware, it will be because Pat Volkerding thinks it's good enough, and that's good enough for me. Hopefully, if that day ever comes, it will be long after the flames have died down and everyone has found something else to bitch about.

On the bright side now we have one more place to call when we lose our keys. Hi Samsung support! Were you watching today when I arrived home and put down my keys?

I have absolute faith in these smart tvs to only send data back to their servers when the button to acticate voice signals is pressed. I also trust Sony to never package malware with their products.

As the Missus just shattered the glass on her iphone (a hand-me-down iphone 3, so not that hard or expensive to get fixed), I fully support stronger glass screen technologies. She's not even sure what happened, but it looks like her iphone got hit by a sniper packing high caliber ammo. Dropped the keys on it from high altitude or something? Considering how expensive this technology is, these gadgets are frighteningly easy to damage/destroy.

They may have made this offer sporadically. I went through the system and checked my settings (and took advantage of the moment to de-authorize a couple of old apps that had wanted permissions).

In general, this was a useful thing, and I felt glad they had set up a convenient way to do this - kudos to Google for beating Microsoft and the bunch to the game. But I'm still leery of it all - traveled to an obscure place in December and then found an obscure video on Youtube about that place. Guess which video showed up in my Google Plus feed this week because someone else had commented on it? Not cool. Don't want my social stuff and my video watching to get linked, but thanks to Google they are indelibly linked. That makes me want to use Youtube.

Also on my Google Plus feed was a post about another, less obscure place I visited on the same trip. That might just be coincidence, but I do NOT like feeling like I'm on the receiving end of an algorithm determining which videos and information should be passed into the interior of my little data bubble. Don't like feeling like I'm being managed.

I think they'd like you to believe this was a technical mistake, like "oops, we shouldn't have activated that API." Rather, it was probably and more likely a strategic/management mistake, as in, "oops, didn't think customers would hate this as vehemently as they did - retreat! We'll ass-rape them some other way!"

I like Samsung hardware, but I can guarantee you I won't be going near a camera-and-microphone enabled smart TV with anything other than a baseball bat and a flamethrower. Who invents this crap up and tries to foist them on the consumer? In the name of "convenience," sure.

I like my TVs dumb, thank you very much. They shouldn't do anything other than display the image some other device sent to them. And then they should bugger off.

Believe it or not, I considered the Typematrix, and I liked the idea of the skins you can throw over the top to access different keyboard layouts (I use Dvorak about 70% of the time). I was impressed by the grid layout - once you get used to it, it's hard to go back). But I was turned off by a bad review by Xah Lee, who I trust when it comes to keyboard stuff. (He's the ergo emacs guy, and he seems to do nothing other than bitch about emacs and review keyboards). I'd still like to try a Typematrix, just out of curiosity. I'm told the build quality has gotten way better. Everything else about that keyboard is pretty darned cool.

Over 100 Production servers, with 8 execs who will be all over my ass if uptime drops below 99.8%. That is the floor for windows servers.

Here in rural Oregon this can be a big problem in winter. But in summer the wood-burning forest fires can be an even bigger problem, and cover a much larger geographic area. So when are they going to ban forest fires?

Samsung uses a proprietary system, but it has an App store and the SDK is available.

Define Reliable. For my desktop and dev server, its perfectly reliable. No ill behavior or crashes. The servers I wouldn't trust it on, are the ones I really want to but I'm not sure how to test it reliably enough yet ( if that makes any sense).

Define Reliable. For my desktop and dev server, its perfectly reliable. No ill behavior or crashes. The servers I wouldn't trust it on, are the ones I really want to but I'm not sure how to test it reliably enough yet ( if that makes any sense).

Some time ago I wrote an app for Samsung TVs. It did not run on the TV itself, but connected and streamed content via DLNA to a couple of Samsung TVs. For testing reasons I had several TVs in my net. One of the c, d, e, and f series. At first I tested with only one TV. During during this stage of my development I had several very strange results in my log files, which at first I could not explain. I expected to see only messages of the TV, which I currently used for testing. But actually even switched off (standby) Samsungs send DLNA messages. Not regularly. On average perhaps one DLNA message every 1-2 days. I am not sure about the exact rate.

I cannot say, if there was more than this stray message, i.e. I cannot say if there was some home phoning. Nevertheless, I was (and am) pissed. When I switch a device off, I expect it to be silent. And no, DLNA on Samsungs does not allow to switch them on via a DLNA command over the net. This would be a good explanation and excuse for this behaviour, but.... nope, can't be done this way.

Can Samsung smart TVs run android apps? Or are they stuck with a handful of proprietary apps that come with the device with no chance of future updates?

I think I will spend the day deleting my google accounts. Perhaps then I will feel safer.

2nd one should read "Republican"

The mindset of a typical Democrat is more in alignment with concepts like "citizen of the world", "all cultures (except our own) are valuable", "they are just like us", "one world government", and "absolutely unlimited immigration".

The mindset of a typical Democrat is more in alignment with concepts like "serve your country", "don't change what isn't broken", "stay safe", "better safe than sorry", and "responsibility for your own life situation".

It's a matter of optimism and pessimism. It's a matter of wanting variety or wanting safety. It's a matter of being a risk taker or being risk-averse.

Both linux and bsd story topics already exist! However, to help further equalize the two: I promoted the bsd topic to the left nav bar.

That's my point. Both sides seem willing to be for it while equally sabotaging their own platform. What I meant was that I don't see why it's the republicans that are against it now rather than both parties being against it.