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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.

I was completely unimpressed with mainstream "ergonomic" keyboards, and kept using a standard one, until I stumbled on early demos of the Type Matrix:

* http://www.typematrix.com

I was both trying the new layout, and learning Dvorak. The later was a miserable process taking months, despite promises that almost everyone learns it fast. In the end, my typing speed improved, and I no longer had to stop typing due to wrist strain. Incidentally, I can seamlessly switch between Dvorak (home) and QWERTY (at work), no problem.

But at least the early TypeMatrix prototype wasn't very durable, and I wasn't happy with the $100/ea. price, so after the second one, I looked around for cheaper, simple keyboards that would give me most of the advantages. I wanted something without a num pad (much less distance to mouse), flat and 0.5" high with no incline... I found only one at the time, and it was just a quarter the price. With a nice durable steel backing plate, and key caps that only required a little sanding to reorder to Dvorak, my first couple lasted for quite a few years (unlike the TypeMatrix'eses). These days, they are available for just $10/ea. on Amazon.

* http://www.amazon.com/Gear-Head-Windows-Keyboard-KB1700U/dp/B0041A5OGA/

* http://www.amazon.com/89-Key-Mini-USB-Windows-Keyboard/dp/B0036WTWX0/

I only hope they still build them like they used-to...

a) protectionism is having very high import taxes, like tech import tax in Brazil that drove the price of a PS4 up to $1800.
b) the reason people are against it is because allowing the US economy to self-destructing is a bad idea for everyone.

Why would anyone buy one right now? What is the use case? They want to start small and build up, but how do you start at all if you're selling a worse phone than is out there?

I can not wait for them to fix systemd. I need a reliable init system today.

It's really not a partisan issue. The bill to dramatically increase H1-Bs is endorsed by several members of both parties. People on both sides have opposed H1-Bs to varying degrees. On the Democratic side, at least Pres. Obama and Sen. Durbin spoke out against them (years ago), and those are just the first ones I found.

That said... It's easy for Republicans to oppose H1-Bs (and any other visas) on simple xenophobic terms. Meanwhile, Silicon Valley firms are socially liberal, so they endorse and support Democratic candidates, not Republican ones. And those same firms lobby for cheaper IT labor more than anything else, which means more H1-Bs.

I've never been sure why republicans are the ones against this (maybe old fashioned protectionism?) and why the democrats are against it (maybe they really do hate America?), because it always seemed to me to be opposite of their respective platforms: the republicans always tout their business friendliness and the democrats always seem to portray themselves as the protector of the little-guy. Obviously I'm not so naive to think that party platforms and party policy are the same, but it seems like both parties are going out of their way to be hypocritical on this issue.

I'm mostly just hoping for a day when the bipartisan support for exporting American jobs is replaced by bipartisan support for encouraging businesses to stop the brain drain. First we lost manufacturing and just now starting to bring it back, and now we're exporting (and in this case semi-exporting via remittances) high-tech and service jobs. At point do we just say "let Americans compete in a fair way?"

Let's forget about the security implications of something like this. We for the most part know that if it can be a listening device, it will be. Applies to all technology in this area, whether the information is secure is up to the company.

Let's instead look at who exactly should be afraid: the users of voice activation with their television.

Should we as a community be afraid? I'm not.

I will never spend my money on a television with over-sensationalized, fad technology. The market is pushing speech recognition before it's truly a pragmatic solution for everyday problems. Have there been strides made in the technology? Absolutely. It's developed into a wonderful tool, but it's still not at the point where I can justify speech when I could have pressed a button. I don't think any of this really makes my life easier at this point, especially as the article says, and I quote:

Samsung has issued a statement to clarify how voice activation works. It emphasised that the voice recognition feature is activated using the TV's remote control.

Essentially, I would need to pick up the remote... to use something intended to serve as a replacement for the remote.

In short, I'm not afraid of my television being used for covert surveillance, mostly because I don't see it at a stage where it's practical for either party. It could give some data, or even intelligence to a listening ear, but for the most part I don't consider this a risk in the first place.

Hurd, seriously? There is less development on Hurd today than was being done on Linux was back in 1993.

A lot of the complaints I hear about SystemD are eerily similar to the ones I used to hear about linux in general from Sun/HP Unix/ IRIX guys back in the day. While its not without its flaws, there is too much development behind it to slow it down now. Things that appear to be fatal flaws will get fixed. Reliability will improve. Even segmentation of the various parts may happen ( a useless D reemerge wouldn't be that surprising).

First they came for Fedora, and I said nothing because I didn't use Fedora ...

I'm sorry for your loss.

Crunchbang was removed from the rankings (including historically) when it was marked as 'discontinued'. Here's what it looked like in January: http://web.archive.org/web/20150107170132/http://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=popularity

While it's been gradually declining in popularity it's still ranked 20th over the last 12 months, appearing higher than distros like Xubuntu, Slackware, Gentoo, and a stack of others. I'd guess the decline is due to the 18-month gap since the most recent release.

The message to take from this is: Crunchbang was a fairly popular niche distro, and Distrowatch cannot be relied on for accurate historical rankings.

Congratulations, Bryan. You've done a great job at making |. better than the old site.

The devil is in the details. There is no such as thing as typical hotel customers. 9 out of 10 are special cases for one or another reason. And AIs (robots) are not even close in handling special cases.

Anyway the trend of robots taking the jobs of humans has begun. I wonder if the society will proceed like in the novels of Asimov, and robots become illegal (for non-dangerous jobs).

Customer service works in mysterious ways - there are lots of ways to piss of your customers, but if you're creative (and your accountants and lawyers are willing to let slip the purse strings a bit) there are just as many ways to make your customers happy, too.

Well done, blizzard.

And a very interesting "feature", the RasPi 2 crashes when photographed with a flash:
http://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=99042

It seems like the switchmode power supply chip is somehow xenon flash light sensitive and the voltage fluctuates significantly when illuminated by flash light.

The old RasPis are not affected.

You'd get spam, but hell, that's why there are editors. An interesting idea.

That's a nice looking keyboard. Got to confess I'm tempted by some of those gamer keyboards that light up in green or red. I'm not a gamer, but those things are really well made. As for fancy mice, I moved to Trackballs almost as soon as I started using computers, and have never gone back: http://therandymon.com/index.php?/archives/250-Trackball-Nirvana.html

Recognition systems are getting better. Newer ones use depth scanning to grab a 3d model of the target. Perhaps it could be fooled with a cardboard cutout. More to the point: how do you get someone's face and room number and also avoid all security to get in to and out of the room? A smart workaround would be to have a snapshot of all door unlocks sent to central security for human review.

Systemd on a phone? Ewww

Perhaps it is just really big. Like your mom. *ducks*

Yup. Maybe I shouldn't editorialize in summaries That was supposed to be a subtle dig. It was half all of those things at one point. Or its parents/ grandparents/great grandparents were. Does a single code base evolve or does each big code merger result in a new child of the original? In any case its complicated. Imho, it was never really finished in any of its iterations. Maemeo was close. I think Nokiia would have been more successful not merging with Moblin to create Meego. I'm also confused as to why Samsung didn't just keep Bada going, other than the merge with Meego allowed them to say it had Linux foundation backing? I remember hearing war stories of Intel guys that were working on Meego when Samsung got involved and they were working towards tizen. Basically Samsung did giant code dumps ( from Bada) that completely wiped out code intel engineers had been working on for months. So apparently by all accounts Intel isn't really involved anymore.

I might go far enough to say that code base is cursed. I once really desired its promise in several forms, but now I'd only take a device running it , if it were free.

If you spend most of your day glued to the computer, you shouldn't skimp on your keyboard or mouse. I spent far too many years under the assumption that any cheap generic keyboard or mouse was "good enough" just because they worked. Then I started trying the higher end of the spectrum and now I'll never go back!

Mechanical keyboards simply offer a far superior tactical feel and much better durability. Many manufactures now offer a whole range of models based on "Cherry MX" mechanical switches. These switches come with a variety of haptic effects designated by color: Black, Red, Brown, or Blue. My current favorite keyboard is the Corsair Vengeance K70.

Don't overlook your mouse either. Modern mice have far superior optical tracking than models from just a few years ago and can now work on damn near any surface. I've ditched all of my old mousepads and glitchy mice and no longer have to battle for the mouse cursor. My current favorite mouse is the Logitech G400s.

Well, the parts might simply overlap, like this:

Intel: ++++----
Nokia: --++++--
Samsung: ----++++

(Sorry, I can't find a way to get preformatted text, so please copy/paste into a fixed width editor and adjust the spaces after the colons manually to understand the above)

half Intel, half Nokia, half Samsung. So we got 150% history before adding the Linux foundation.

The parent link would not open a new page (and thus make all other comments on the page disappear). It would merely scroll the current page.

So you just have to put on a mask with the face of the hotel guest residing in the room in order to open it? Or even better, get the mask of some employee (there certainly will be jobs that won't be replaced by robots, say hotel security) and be able to enter every room you want!

Pipedot needs an app. Not a "Pipedot on your cellphone" thing, a mechanism that allows Pipedot to show up on your Share menu and submit stories that way.

I've often thought it is a shame that the Stream / Feed doesn't feed into the Pipe (with just a button-press) where the title, links, and RSS summary text would automatically be inserted into the submission form, then allow user editing/expansion before submission.

In the "Share" menu of my phone's RSS reader there is already GMail. If Pipedot allowed submissions via e-mail address, you'd be all-set with no mobile app coding work needed.

I'm fine with one story per week or two weeks. If nothing happens, nothing happens.

I think that's a bad idea. Sites with infrequent updates quickly lose their bored readership. And without people reading the site daily, discussion would really stagnate.

I'd like to see more stories related to computers and software.

I actually think the site should be leaning more towards the technology side than it is, however my own interests are further towards the low-level science side of things, so for as long as I'm practically the only one submitting stories, it's necessarily going to veer off in that direction.

RSS notifications work as well. Having a personal RSS link for what replies were posted sounds better in the long run.
At least for users who'd post comments that would trigger a lot of comments.
(That or make the emails wait a bit and stack before being sent)

http://crunchbang.org/about/
CrunchBang is a Debian GNU/Linux based distribution offering a great blend of speed, style and substance. Using the nimble Openbox window manager, it is highly customisable and provides a modern, full-featured GNU/Linux system without sacrificing performance.

The primary aim of the CrunchBang project is to produce a stable distribution offering the best possible out-of-the-box Openbox experience. To achieve this goal, CrunchBang pulls many base packages directly from Debian's repositories, which are well-known for providing stable and secure software. Packages from CrunchBang's own repositories are then customised and pinned to the system to produce what is known as the CrunchBang distro.

I guess many companies will just have two versions. One for the Chinese market, and one for the rest of the world. The Chinese market version will not contain any valuable IP in its software.

Given that the last dot release of Firefox was quite some time ago, I guess a dot release of Firefox would be indeed greater news than a non-dot release.

Exactly. Especially it would not open a separate page, but just reposition the page to the parent comment.

Note that this is doable with standard HTML: Start each comment with an anchor containing the article number (like <a name="XYZ" /> if the article number is XYZ) and make the parent link <a href="#XYA">Parent</a> where XYA is the parent's article number.

Yeah, you're making a good point, I just would have used that as your first comment. As far as coverage in the media, just concerning the announcement, articles have come from all over including IT World, Phoronix, and Liliputing. These may not be in your 'top-ten' sites, but there is some buzz out there about the closing, enough to get most of the sites like this one to post a blurb about the story.

'Popular' may not be fully justified, but there's little I can do now to change it anyway. I guess I can try to keep a better look out in the future.

There are certainly many Linux distributions, which I don't know. Even though I use Linux since Kernel 0.9x. However, to call a Linux distribution "popular" I'd require at least some coverage in the media.

These are popular distributions:
http://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=major

Though I don't know what BSD is doing in a list of popular Linux distributions. :-D

Distrowatch Page Ranking:
http://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=popularity

No mention of #!. Last 12 month... 286 Distros, but no #!.

It does no mean that #! is not good. Does not mean there isn't a substantial (what counts as substantial?) community. It just means, this distribution is widely unknown, which IMHO contradicts "popular".

Well said. I still love this site too, and it's very highly usable. Got to say though, submitting stories is a bit of work. That level of effort seemed reasonable ten years ago, but in the age of smart phones and Facebook/Google Plus, etc., it's a bit much - particularly when you're not guaranteed to get much of a robust story going after all that work. That's vaguely discouraging.

I hate to suggest it, because I know it involves a ton of work. But it could be a killer: Pipedot needs an app. Not a "Pipedot on your cellphone" thing, a mechanism that allows Pipedot to show up on your Share menu and submit stories that way. One of the great things about Android is the share menu - makes it easy to go from one medium to the next. If I'm reading my RSS reader and something looks great, I hit the little dotted-triangle, and tons of sharing mechanisms come up, from Twitter to G+ to even Usenet (using the NewsReader app for Android). If Pipedot were on there, I'd be submitting multiple stories per day. Instead I have to wait until I'm at a computer, type it in, format the URL, etc.

So, knowing full well this means a new project, registering on Google Play, and probably lots of other annoyances, coding and making available a little app that allows me to send a story straight from my newsreader to Pipedot would take care of the content problem, which might easily take care of the 'number of people in the community' challenge. I'm not a coder, so I can't help there, but I am willing to contribute in other ways. Imagine the ease of submitting to G+ but with the comment and karma system of |. Match made in heaven?

Otherwise, happy birthday Pipedot!

No that's fair point, although I wouldn't use yourself as a metric. I'm sure there's a ton, not just limited to distributions that I don't know about, but that doesn't mean there isn't a substantial community surrounding it. Especially with so many unique communities widespread, I wouldn't be surprised if I was completely unaware of some of the most favored distributions altogether. I was assuming when I wrote the title that since #! had been featured on /. several times previously, Hacker News, and a few other notable sites that it was better known.

Is this another victim of systemd?

Ohreallyhow interestingnotas farasIcanseeusingSleipnir

....how I should say it without sounding like a troll... but the Popular Distribution 'Crunchbang'is so popular that I never even heard the name before.

Time to pull out the Birthday Cake!

I switched my Linux often enough. Always was able to keep my /home unchanged, so it was always an easy and painless procedure. Means I am not in a hurry. I just wait and see how it turns out. If I get bitten by systemd... bye bye Debian. If not... why should I care then?

Construct a device which legally utilizes HFCS to heat your home and you'll never waste $ on other materials ever again!

This is not a feature, but a request for all potential story submitters:
I like to stumble upon interesting, up-and-coming software projects. When nim-lang or Manjaro Linux go 1.0, I'll post a blurb here because I think those are awesome projects that deserve attention (and users and contributions). Please post blurbs to your favorite projects when they hit big milestones!
(but no Firefox or Linux Kernel point releases, please)