Recent Comments

Mmm, that was nice. She had a very cute nose.

It looks so easy, but must be so complicated. Kudos to the Japanese for pushing this line of tech forward. I'll curse them when the cute little kill-bots with rifles under their skirts come to get me, but in the meantime, this is pretty cool.

swordfish (used by my father, long before the movie)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ebgrr4yLlCk

One clever bit -- distance sensors based on ultrasonic and light sensors, using differences in the time of flight.

From the description, I can't see how this is different from the old Systrace program:

http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=363731

And if you will recall, that ended suddenly, in tears:

http://it.slashdot.org/story/07/08/09/138224/cambridge-researcher-breaks-openbsd-systrace

supercalifragilisticexpialidocious FTW!!

Isn't this the whole point of SELinux, AppArmor and a host of other security policy enforcement systems we already have? It's already enough of a challenge organizing/debugging the interaction between the current layers of enforcement, without adding yet another one.

I was forced to break the habit when I started running FreeBSD systems, which default to csh (and are therefore mostly immune to shellshock: nyah, nyah!). CSH is different in ways that matter. I don't like it as much, but being forced to learn and use it helped break me out of my bash comfort zone. So it's not impossible.

I always find myself using bash out of sheer habit: it's what's installed by default essentially everywhere (except where it's cruel, unfeeling friend, sh, is installed by default). It's old, it's clunky, it's (apparently) sometimes insecure, and yet, it's not so much that I like it, but 15 years of habit is hard to break.

Are we going to cover every point release? We published the announcement for 1.1.1 not long ago. Not sure this is interesting.

I keep going back to it because it's so intriguing and so powerful. And I keep giving up either because the manual is too long, the refcard is not enough, or I just don't have the time to make the sustained effort to learn it properly. Was just looking at "From Bash to Zsh" book, written by the guys behind frombsh2zsh website. Might be worth it!

I've used ZSH a few times and liked it, but at the end of the day I am still using bash for some reason.

Editing a comment does the following:

• Removes any positive moderation
• Resets the edit time of the comment (shows up blue again)

It does not delete the comment or interfere with any of the replies.

That seems strange. Wont that disturb the discussion? What happens to replies?

Hmm okay I have to say I still don't truly get it (it's still alien to me) except for the business part: sometimes one doesn't truly have a choice or simply can't afford the effort (like virtual machines), I think that's entirely valid and of course simple preference is entirely valid as well. GNU/Linux can't force people to use GNU/Linux or develop for GNU/Linux and that's a good thing :)

If I have a script on my Mint/MATE desktop I can open it (usually double-click just like in Windows) and allow it to be run as an executable (it asks). I've never done it except by accident and always said no so maybe it actually doesn't work (that would be surprising though, however just as in WIndows it will need to run with the appropriate permissions for what it's trying to do, Windows used to be a lot more permissive in that deparment and maybe they still are). Both Ubuntu and Mint has or had (in Ubuntu's case, haven't used any of their crazy new stuff) this behavior, maybe other distributions too, maybe only Gnome & Gnome-inspired stuff has it but probably all of them do.

Btw have you tried out Mint? For straight use it's pretty much the same as Windows was when I quit Windows, none of the new Windows nonsense and none of the new Ubuntu nonsense :D (but sadly systemd nonsense soon).

Since I'm not your father or aunt or in college I don't know precisely how bad those snags are, anyway here's my thoughts:

• Maybe those porn sites use silverlight or other super-propriatory stuff (both non-free and with added cost/requirements) which does require lots of hoops and jumping like RealPlayer used to (don't know if that ancient stuff still exists/is used), that sounds like it would require work. Linux can't change things like that, they have no influence on it on their own just like if I made something propriatory and didn't allow others to easily use it without paying up (like XChat did/tried on Windows a few years back).
• Your aunt's phone sounds like it's weird then again so much stuff is crippled these days; when I plug my (admittedly old non-Apple, non-Android, non-smartphone) mobile into the computer with the appropriate USB cable the computer opens up the folder on the phone and then I copypaste the pictures or videos or recordings or music or anything else I've put there. I've also done the same only by moving the microSD card between phone and computer (that was before I bought the USB cable). There's nothing Linux-specific about that, nor anything specific to the phone-maker (it's just a cheap Nokia from a few years ago).
• This could be only me and my machine (most likely is, I really haven't put any effort into this at all) but I have to admit I don't use Youtube since they (or I) managed to break both Flash and HTML5 in Firefox (it stutters, although I haven't tested it recently, other video sites work fine or at least I haven't noticed anything) so if there really is something there I have to watch I'll just download it (one of the FireFox plugins) and watch it locally (the transfer from Google is fast enough to max my frugal connection for the few seconds it lasts). Other LInux users will have to chime in but I suspect it works for most Linux-using people and/or there's an easy fix, it used to work for me for years and I just haven't bothered (and nearly all the good stuff started being removed from YouTube anyway, the stuff I used to watch isn't there any more, I get it elsewhere).
• I find it a tad hard to believe LibreOffice-created .doc files aren't good enough for college (aka high-school) or that .doc files are a requirement for college (aka university). Yeah they're called something else than .doc now aren't they? Still... MS formats are an important priority for LibreOffice, last I heard they had better backwards compability with Office versions than Office itself has. Or for that matter that .rtf or anything else doesn't work either. Even so Microsoft is moving towards Office as a service on the web aren't they? (Just as Adobe did with their suite including Photoshop, I had forgotten that when I wrote the last comment, or maybe that failed? I don't know). Since I don't use it (MS office, Adobe) I can't claim that it works on Linux but either way once again it's not something GNU/Linux can be blamed for.

From memory when I still used Windows I had to do a lot of stuff to figure things out or tweak or fix broken stuff (and defragmentation and reinstallations and blue screens lol!) if it was possible, run updates both from Microsoft and others, not to mention the constant fight to stay reasonably secure (i.e. not NSA stuff, back then one really though they had better things to do). I've done far less of that kind of stuff on Linux, a lot of it simply isn't necessary or even there because it doesn't apply and updates & "normal" security is fast and simple.

TL;DR Using a computer will always involve some work.

Anyway whatever works for them/you is fine by me, thanks for getting specific :)

Well yeah, except their primary use case (literally, it's the first use case listed) is BIG DATA. It's fair to say that if you're routinely pushing and parsing terabytes of structured data, you probably can and should take a day or two to get the database optimized, no?

No. You're simply stuck in a mindset of high-value databases. Try low-value data, on a large scale, instead... Turn up your syslog logging to the maximum amount of debug, then expand that out to hundreds and hundreds of heavily loaded servers, then log it all to a central system, desperately trying to write that to a database for eventual aggregation and reporting... Consider something like an IDS or other monitoring on high-speed data networks, trying to keep track of data usage, in detail, on those gigabit speed lines all-around the clock.

Or just consider the cost of an extra server (with SSDs) versus the cost of hours of a DBA's time... For non-critical data in general, you're going to expand the cluster, rather than spend time and effort to tune things.

Well yeah, except their primary use case (literally, it's the first use case listed) is BIG DATA. It's fair to say that if you're routinely pushing and parsing terabytes of structured data, you probably can and should take a day or two to get the database optimized, no?

That's why an OOB test doesn't really seem to apply here. Mongo is supposed to be enterprise stuff. Anyhow, glad to see PostgreSQL is still in the game, and agreed it's too bad MySQL is still unavoidable.

Holy damn, son. Are you browsing at 0? Somebody screwed up and modded down a reply to the one you're talking about. It's at -1. Try adjusting your filters and try again, son.

Very funny, Dr. Jones. Unfortunately, I see no such comment as the one you quoted. The oldest comment I see in this thread is punctuation-challenged and begins "Wow... alrighty then".

Interesting... Never seen that myself, but then I'm a big user of NoScript. I disable scripts on a site immediately if it does anything annoying at all, like auto-play videos, a floating bar, periodic page refresh, etc.

The short answer to your last point is "editor fail." A lot of sites run JavaScript that insert an attribution link and some text if you copy it from the article. It gets pasted with the rest.

Fixed. Sorry!

Read the first sentence in that comment:

Do the GNOME developers actually use the crap they put out?

Maybe you aren't aware of this, but we call that a "question". And a question should be answered.

Performance out-of-the-box shouldn't be underestimated. Not every database is a huge and mission-critical task deserving hours of your DBA's time to tune. In fact the overwhelming majority of database uses are quite the opposite, just some mundane back-end tasks for storing and collecting data.

If tuned performance was important to people, MySQL would never have caught-on as the M in LAMP... Instead, MySQL got popular because any idiot could install it and it would seem to work at decent speeds right away. You only got a rude awakening much later...

Who wants to run emulated Android on a battery powered handheld?

It isn't emulated, actually. Blackberry has an ARM CPU just like Android, so native apps can be run on the processor without any emulation. BB just has to provide compatible ABI hooks to the OS. This is a reduced version of what WINE does for Windows applications on Linux, but Android being open source means there's no need for reverse engineering, and having far less legacy means it's much easier to develop full compatibility quickly.

"In Wine, the Windows application's compiled x86 code runs at full native speed on the computer's x86 processor, just as it does when running under Windows."

And with the non-native Android applications, it's even easier. They're basically Java applets, interpreted by the Dalvik VM when run on Android. It's not big deal for other OSes to develop their own almost-JRE compatible with Dalvik, and run Android apps as well as Android.

FYI, editing works more like deleting your comment... It will revert any moderation your comment has gotten, and your comment will show up highlighted like it is a "new" comment in the discussion.

Very quick and dirty test. He says right off the bat he's comparing default out of the box performance. There are so many possible tunings and usage scenarios that the only fair way to test is after tuning by experts in each product. While interesting, this test seems to mean nothing?

I wasn't skeptical about this story when first writing it up, but simply thought that sad percentage figure on light extraction for LEDs was an informative tidbit for a story. Other technologies have similar inefficiencies due to reflectivity. My casual knowledge of LEDs made me suspect that the figure (though plausible) might be exaggerated, but I didn't immediately find hard numbers out there. Hitting the WP page on LED light extraction to check, again lacked numbers, but that turned-up the link to the BBC article mentioning nanotech+LEDs from 2007...

The mention of PlaCSH solar cells being developed before, that I've never heard of, made me want to know if anything came of it, and perhaps how close to the promised numbers were products realizing in production. A search for PlaCSH didn't immediately turn-up hits on well-known reputable sites, but instead mostly sites with "UFO" and "alternative energy" in their names (no joke). While this research is from Princeton, funded by DARPA and the NSF, that's still a red flag...

Found this source from a few years ago, claiming only a mere 20% is lost in LED light extraction, not TFA's claimed 62%:

http://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/powersource/4307926/LED-inefficiencies-82-of-lighting-energy-lost-as-heat

And I don't know what's up with the double-link to TFA.

Debian, on the other hand, has just gone back to standardizing on Gnome. It's like they're on a kick to piss you off at all costs these days.

http://www.webupd8.org/2014/09/debian-switches-back-to-gnome-from-xfce.html

Saw this link on OSNews.com.

You guys are joking about considering it, right? This is some kind of performance art?

This thing looks like the definition of DOA. It's BlackBerry Storm 3.0. It's just awful. LOOK WHERE THE SPACE BAR IS! This is going to be effective to type on?

Why does the whole keyboard have to function as a pointing device, mixing up accepted touchscreen user paradigms? Who wants to run emulated Android on a battery powered handheld?

This is all completely apart from the form factor and appearance.

I'm dumbfounded. Or dumb. I don't know.

I'm a Bodhi fan but this really deserves little more than a comment attached to the previous post. Anyone want to see it published? Vote it up.

Elizabeth Montgomery's nose twitch, of course!

Yes, square-ish. I fondly remembered my Nokia X5-01, sturdiest symbian phone that I ever had, with nice real buttons/keyboard. Good times.
(OT): Nice, I can has edit button now!

Put "set editing-mode vi" in /etc/inputrc (a lot of CLI programs use readline and will read that) or "set -o vi" for your current bash shell or bashrc

Thanks! This is great!

a.k.a. Friend

There was a question there? What, pray tell, was it?

Mod this up! It's a good question!

Note that the patch issued yesterday fixes only part of the issue and some vulnerabilities remain, so patch now but be ready to patch again soon ;-)

Also, according to the bug report, the remaining problems also impact zsh. (edit: this has been refuted since then)

Some more detailed info on the general issue can be found at Red Hat's security blog

Oh my ... d$, yw, p, u, it all works !! that's insane (as in vi: press "ESC" and "i" to switch modes)

I never even had heard of that and I've been using it for years. I owe you a beer and probably some new hours of life expectancy too :-)

edit: ... "edit" ? is that an awesome new feature of pipedot for logged-in users?

Are you running [a]term on blackbox, by the way?

That screen shot is quite old... These days I run urxvt on Fluxbox! Completely different...

If Aterm had only gotten utf support I'd still be using it now.

It did. Aterm was merged into, and deprecated in favor of, urxvt / rxvt-unicode:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rxvt-unicode
* http://www.afterstep.org/news.php?show=2008

Works great for me, just like good old aterm plus some new features like anti-aliased and scalable freetype fonts, resize on-the-fly with escape sequences, etc. Seems to be in most repos. I'm glad it's still going, because the clumsiness of xterm is even more frustrating than bash.

Hmm, it seems that editing comments dumps any moderation done to them... Didn't realize I was ruining my karma by fixing typos and trying to clarify my wording and such.

Probably just a question of specialty... I've got a background in EE and telecommunications. I have occasionally thought about what it takes to restore modern services to disaster areas after events hit the news. For instance, it's a shame New Orleans didn't follow the model of Sacramento:

"From 1862 until the mid-1870s Sacramento raised the level of its downtown by building reinforced brick walls on its downtown streets, and filling the resulting street walls with dirt. Thus the previous first floors of buildings became the basements... Most property owners used screw jacks to raise their buildings to the new grade." -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacramento%2C_California#Capital_city

Modems are still finding use for sending and receiving faxes, and those seem to have a few more years of life in them. They're also still useful as out-of-band management for routers... Why cellular modems with RS-232 aren't more popular and widely available, I don't know.

Hmm... Testing Karma.

To quote Samuel L. Jackson from The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996):

"Ready, and... Fuck it! Run for your life!"

It didn't manage to find its audience at the time, but possibly the most quotable film ever.

Geena Davis: I got myself outta Beirut once, I think I can get outta New Jersey.
Sam Jackson: Yeah? Well, don't be so sure. Others have tried and failed. The entire population, in fact!

Android sliders are almost guaranteed to be running some ancient version of the OS - gingerbread even, so they're not a great purchase. They probably have an older and slower chip, too. Too bad, because I do prefer the physical keyboard.

I like my Samsung Note 3 quite a bit, but I agree we need more vendors out there and I would not want to see an Android-iOS duopoly any time soon. I don't even care if Microsoft stays in the game, just happy to see the two juggernauts called upon to look over their shoulders and continuing to innovate.

I've got a Blackberry 9900 Bold, and I'm pretty pleased with it, including the hardware. Getting Android apps to run on the Blackberry was a smart move - and helps consolidate my interest in buying one on these interesting devices. I'm also happy to see some interest in checking out alternative form factors. I'd gladly go back to a flip formfactor just because those old flipphones did a better job of protecting their screens without having to buy bulky 3rd party cases etc.

I'm really enjoying the "iphone 6 bends" fiasco at the moment, by the way. Ha ha!

To sue over rounded edges is ridiculous. There are either curves or edges with varying degrees between. Apple invented none of them. They existed in math and physics prior to Apple's existence.

I've been hoping Blackberry would pull something out of the hat, for a while. There's room for 3 major players in the smart phone market, and I'd sure rather have it be Blackberry than Microsoft. They're unlikely to go away entirely, as QNX powers the computers in many cars.

I've never owned one of their phones, myself, but this one has me considering it. Nice and loud speakers, unlike most phones, would get plenty of use from me. I can definitely see the squarer screen making it a lot easier to read web-pages, PDFs, etc. If Android compatibility really works well enough to run all my many apps, like WiFi Analyzer and VX ConnectBot, the transition would be an easy one. The poor security and lack of updates on Android still remains a problem. And most importantly, it's getting hard just to find a decent Android slider on many carriers, so it wouldn't take much to convince me to try a BB.

[...]because bash goes horribly brain-dead when you attempt line-editing on command lines that wrap-around to the next line. Your bash session becomes practically unusable after you hit that limit (which I do, often)[...]

Hate that too. But for you guys that happen to know/use vi (who doesn't :D) navigation with HJKL and commands, like:
3w - to go to third word from current position
dw - to delete word
c4f. - to replace all text from current position to the fourth ". dot" character (try that with other editing mode!), etc...

Put "set editing-mode vi" in /etc/inputrc (a lot of CLI programs use readline and will read that) or "set -o vi" for your current bash shell or bashrc.
VI mode on command line is a bliss, and "set -o vi" is the first thing I put on my .rc files where I first login on a new server. Bummer that some minimalistic shells like busybox's (only sh there) do not have that :(

I've largely started using xfce instead of Gnome or KDE(Plasma or whatever they just renamed it). I think XFCE has what I want, and I've not had any issues with it yet.

Or, he could write his own DE.

SHAZBOT!