Recent Comments

Yes. Exactly. His was a good answer.

When you are showered by gamma/cosmic rays, or high energy particles, does it matter where they come from?

Your first paragraph theorizes maybe the market wasn't there, and your last paragraph says maybe Google created a forced market through massive advertising.

I don't think either of those (oversimplified) things is close to true. Google hardly advertises, for one thing.

Again, I say the market was always there but companies abandoned it due to collusion between Intel and MS. Atom chips, really? Can't run cheaper Windows on a screen larger than 10", really??.

In 2006 or so gmail was a pretty straight-forward thing that did everything you were used to doing but better, more cleanly, and more easily. They've pissed around with the UI ever since then and generally made it into a beast that's less likeable by those who value their email.

You can get the old Gmail interface back quite easily. Just disable javascript and reload the page.

Click the link that says:

"To use Gmail's basic HTML view, which does not require JavaScript, click here."

Then in the new yellow bar across the top, click:

"Set basic HTML as default view"

All done. Good old plain Gmail, wherever you log-in from, permanently.

And yet manufacturers are too stupid yo give it to them

As slim as the margins were, and as high as the return rate was, I'm not so sure it's stupid at all. If they have to price them so they only just barely turn a profit on the line, then it's not worth it for them to make the products you want.

One can't get a tablet or phone with a real keyboard, except maybe those overpriced or crippled MS things.

Most Blackberry phones still have real keyboards, and now they can run Android apps, too. I admit, looking for Android slider phones is depressing and unrewarding.

But I suppose keeping my old phone is for the best, as Google just keeps making it harder and harder to make a phone call on Android. Several additional unintuitive steps needed to add a recent number to the contact list, much more difficult to switch between recent calls, the dialer, and your contacts, and absolutely NO WAY to EDIT your contacts from the dialer... You can create one there, but if you make a mistake, you must switch to a different program entirely. This is a complete regression. [/rant]

I don't get it. The entire market is being handed to Google.

Actually, at least Acer's Chromebooks are just older models of cheap Windows laptops they previously sold. Maybe the Windows tax makes a huge difference in low-end hardware, or maybe Google's mega advertising for a tiny number of products gets them exposure they wouldn't have as low-end Windows laptops.

I wouldn't call laptop keyboards "great". Ever. Anybody ever found one that isn't terrible for programming?

The keyboard I prefer to use on my desktop is smaller than many laptop keyboards:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0036WTWX0/89-Key-Mini-Keyboard

Only thing I really regret is that it only has one CTRL key, but altwin:ctrl_win takes care of that under X11 just fine.

But it would be necessary for the wrist-wrest to be 0.5" lower than the keyboard, which I haven't seen any laptop ever do. That might make the difference between comfortable easy typing, and horrible laptop keyboards...

I also prefer a trackball for faster pointing, which is a similarly good fit for laptops, though sadly haven't seen them on portables since the 486 days. Their pointless and unnecessary demise makes it clear that whatever laptop manufacturers are looking for, it isn't good input devices.

A simple interface that does what you expect without throwing throwing around this year's version of eye candy gimmicks?

I suspect you're a lot younger than me. Lots of stuff in current FLOSS distributions flummox me. Nautilus? Why? What's wrong with mount? Unity? Never seen it. :-O You don't like the standard $window_manager? Install your own, ffs! I read today people were concerned about the wallpaper in the latest Ubuntu. Ho.Ly. ....

Install a minimal distribution, then tweak it to hell and back! Feature!!! I don't understand why anyone complains about this stuff. If you can find real breakage or bugs, that's important. But it looks funny to you? Do you know how to fire up the config GUI (or even hack a text config file)? Is this a daunting challenge for you?

If so, you need to hire me, and I'll be rich! :-)

P.S. I'm brand, spankin' new to Pipedot, this's my first post, don't expect me to know what I'm doing here. Looks good so far. I've high hopes.

Zomgs I can find nothing to say about it, where is my bling, my swipey swishing crap? Seriously if you can find nothing to say about it then it's probably doing it's job. I imagine you wouldn't have much to say when reviewing a fork or a hammer either cause they do the job.

Are there any Linux reviewers that can match that level of detail and writing quality?

Yes, unfortunately I'm too busy working for minimum wage to waste time on that shit.

...I do not think it means what you think it means.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_(disambiguation)

I used to really like the OS X reviews. But, maybe its me, but I miss the HFS+ bashing that used to come with each one. Just not the same without them.

Case in point. Those silly autocorrect typos don't happen when I have a real KB available.

People want netbooks, they CRAVE netbooks. A compact, very cheap PC with adequate performance and a real keyboard

And yet manufacturers are too stupid yo give it to them, all because MS licensing crippled the format.

Thus we have giant phones and tablets with accessories and Google controlled "chromebooks" all desperately reaching to satisfy a market need that's been there all along. It's sad. One can't get a tablet or phone with a real keyboard, except maybe those overpriced or crippled MS things.

I don't get it. The entire market is being handed to Google.

Those OSX reviews are defiantly nicely written. That recent Yosemite review was the first of those articles that I actually saw (I don't have a Mac, so I normally don't follow OSX too closely), but it seems Ars has extensively reviewed the past several releases as well. I'm a little envious.

But should one day for whatever reasons Window Maker not be available anymore, LXDE is probably quite on top of the alternatives I would try.

simple, intuitive, and stays the heck out of your way so you can work.

Perfect.

Two desktop environments, which I probably never will use: GNOME and KDE = bloat. At least for me. I installed KDE for my wife and she is happy with it.

A simple interface that does what you expect without throwing throwing around this year's version of eye candy gimmicks? Sounds like a pretty good feature to me.

I don't know if it's a troll, but it is terribly written. Seems he had real trouble padding it up to 500 words.

I really envy Mac users and their Ars Technica OSX reviews. Are there any Linux reviewers that can match that level of detail and writing quality?

I wonder if browser vendors could form their own hammer against ICANN.

If Mozilla, Apple, Microsoft, Google (and why not Opera too) teamed up and decided to have their browsers fail to resolve .stupidnonsense domains, maybe ICANN would cut the crap already.

An extreme and ugly measure, but I'd probably take that over the runaway ICANN gravy-train we have now.

I really doubt most users are installing windows or a more traditional linux distro. School districts near me are buying them. Cheap, easy to manage internet portals with google docs.

I'm a non-programmer, but I hear you on the keyboard issue and you're right - laptop keyboards are a recipe for RSI problems. My HP Chromebook 14 has chiclet keys - easily the worst keyboard style ever. It's better than my HP laptop at work though, which is a very similar build but with slippery, flat, smooth keys. It's like, does anyone at HP actually use these machines to see if they're nice to use?

If you want to plug in peripherals and don't care about portability, there are Chromebox desktops too - I think Acer make them and I recall Bryan saying he had bought one. They look cool to me.

I bought my Chromebook to run Bodhilinux on, since my netbook gave up the ghost (sniff, sniff, loved that machine). But ChromeOS is working basically well enough that I've never gotten around to it. Maybe I should give it a try this weekend - doesn't seem that hard, and the hardware itself is pretty darned good.

"It is simply a front end to partclone". Ugg. I'll be skipping this one. Partclone / Clonezilla are both dumber than Ghost was 20 years ago, and require restoring to identically sized partitions. If you want to image your drive, the CloneZilla CD has that market pretty-well sewn-up, and I don't see why to bother with anything else. At the very least, I'd want more advanced features, like something based on FSArchiver, which is the more capable successor to partclone.

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

But that's still something you only want for cloning systems like in a lab. It's terribly inefficient for routine backups. You want something that'll do super-fast incremental backups, with deduplication to save disk space and allow numerous backups to coexist for restoring from long previous backups.

I personally found BackupPC unexpectedly impressive. Most all the benefits of rsync, on any Unix or Windows system, even those without rsync installed, wrapped-up in a slick user-interface. Interesting features like the ability to give non-admin users the rights to easily restore old versions of files automatically via the web UI, and a great scheduler with blackout time-blocks, which avoids the need to set exact times ala cron. Instead it is much more flexible to changes (eg. if one system suddenly has a lot more data to backup), and a dogged determination to backup all the systems you told it to, even if it runs out of time or something fails one night (or repeatedly).

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

Should work great for small companies, or even families with several computers around. For my own more modest, uniform and boring home needs, I find rsync with --link-dest= (like "rsnapshot" does) to an occasionally-on external USB drive a slightly better fit for the time-being. Restoration just requires booting-up with systemrescuecd, recreating the partitions (format & mount to /mnt), running the rsync command in reverse, (rsync -a /dev /mnt/dev, chroot /mnt) then a couple attempts to remember just the right grub incantation... Most often just:

root (hd0,0)
setup (hd0)

And done.

Thanks! Good to see a Friday distro

Programmer here: I wouldn't call laptop keyboards "great". Ever. Anybody ever found one that isn't terrible for programming?

Other thought: maybe people are getting Chromebooks for the hardware and installing other stuff on them.

Also, apparently Chromebooks are pretty full-featured. That last feature the article mentions almost makes me want one... and the price is killer.

The keyboard is still a sticking point for me, though. I don't think I'd be able to get much done without a separate keyboard and mouse... which sort of defeats the portability of the whole "laptop" form factor thing. Anyone seen anything that's not too painful to use? And maybe a mouse that's not a touchpad?

I'm so grabbing that. Thanks!

This comment submitted from a Chromebook running linux.

Hammer or not. IMHO the main problem of the ICANN is that there is no viable alternative.
That's why I find http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namecoin Namecoin so interesting. Though I must admit, that I didn't try any *coins myself, yet.

I definitely will give it a try.

Any self-respecting bureaucracy, if left unchecked, spends its time recommending added bureaucracy, patting itself on the back, and giving itself increases in salary. It's almost laughingly predictable. Let it go on for too long and you get the United Nations. The solution is oversight and reductions in budget. Bring down the hammer of thor, now!

Perhaps a name change is on the cards. The current system is preferable to some of the alternatives. Can you imagine a DNS administrated by China or the middle east?

I'm glad for the post. Half the reason I read sites like this one are the recommendations for projects and solutions I'd been previously unaware of. Glad for the tip.

So load the backup on another machine of any ZFS-supported-OS. Perhaps for added benefit use one that isn't the originating platform. Since you seem to be sourced from FreeBSD, why not use one of the opensolaris variants? Import the disks, run a ZFS scrub(this is by definition how you're supposed to verify data)...and feel safe :)

For more familiarity Linux has a native ZFS implemenation now as well.

It truly would be great if certain commercial operating systems adopted ZFS. Their filesystems often seem dinosaur-like in comparison..because they are.

Whoops, sorry for double post. It's NOT an all in one solution (like, say, Citadel or Exchange). It builds on several common services such as Dovecot. But I hear you.

Think you missed my point? SoGO is a particularly decent web mail daemon you run on YOUR server. Like SquirrelMail or Roundcube or Horde but much better.

It's nice for those times you don't have a full client handy. It's a normal FOSS project, not some clingy 3rd party service. But if you don't need it, cool.

I skimmed through the project page and decided: Overkill for my needs. Agreed, far more powerful than what I have now, but far more powerful means also far more complicated... means higher security risks.
I don't need calendaring or messaging data. A pure email solution via IMAP is perfect for me. Access under Linux: Claws Mail. Under Android: K-9 Mail. Under Windows... erm... don't need mail to start my games.

But I bookmarked the project page. Should I ever need groupware features, I now know it exists. However, should I ever install it, it most likely will be for other people. For me... I deeply distrust such universal-all-in-one-super-duper-everything gadgets. Open source or not.

Think you missed my point? SoGO is a particularly decent web mail daemon you run on YOUR server. Like SquirrelMail or Roundcube or Horde but much better.

It's nice for those times you don't have a full client handy. It's a normal FOSS project, not some clingy 3rd party service. But if you don't need it, cool.

At least Google allows refunds in a short window. And you can filter reviews by device, but that only works if you have a popular one.

But I wouldn't be too concerned. In order to sell a game enough to get a profit, it will need to be widely playable.

None the biologists I know actually think they have everything figured out about whatever their system is. Real scientific facts from the past remain facts today, but the explanation for how or why were incomplete. Biology is a noisy system with lots of redundancy and the tools to study were and still are imprecise.

Would it be possible to make edits visible all the time? Maybe a setting one could flip on and off? Or is it too computationally expensive?

Thanks, not necessary. I have my own dedicated server. When I use a free mail service, I never use their web interface, but let them forward all incoming mail to this server. On this server I run http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dovecot_%28software%29 dovecot, which make my email available via IMAP on my desktops at home. For most people this configuration would be overkill, but I host several git repositories on this server and use it to store backups. The email handling is just a nice additional feature.

Check out soGo. Self hosted webmail that acts pretty much identically to Thunderbird.

You left out, "formally declare their own premier product 'not compatible' with their own operating system".

Every version of Office sold through 2006 (e.g. Excel 2003) is officially "not compatible" with Windows.

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/compatibility/CompatCenter/Home

Change file formats every couple version.

That's not what I would call 'leave it alone' ;-)

If you leave it alone... how do you convince people to buy a new version

Change file formats every couple version.

Simply refuse to sell older versions to anyone, anymore.

Tighten the licensing restrictions and DRM, to ensure you can only ever install it one one single computer, ever.

Include tricks in newer version of the OS, that will gradually slow and bog-down older versions of the software for no particular reason.

etc.

If they bring console level graphics to tablets, I hope Google Play will give some indication as to the performance that can be expected. It would stink to buy a game at console prices only to learn it wont run properly on your android device.

For bonus points, patent the new format and license it; include code prescriptions like "format table like StarOffice 7 did" without really saying more than that. Finally, bribe the bejeezus out of the standards body so it becomes a new standard. Ka-Ching! Sound familiar?

28 years. Don't forget the way back... when you don't find anything usable there. ;-)

Manned interstellar flights? At speeds above 0.3c, which is for all its worth far too slow to get anywhere, the space dust turns into deadly and hard to shield radiation

I'd sign-up for a flight to Alpha Centauri AB at 0.3c...

14 years in a capsule won't be fun, but still doable, and with amazing new worlds all to myself, at the other end of the trip.

Wow, that's a doozy. Fixed, but there's no way or any reason to delete comments, so this will stay. Like a badge of editor shame :)

Time to change the document format. The more excruciatingly subtle the incompatibilities the better.

If you leave it alone... how do you convince people to buy a new version, when they are totally happy with the old one?