Recent Comments

My 5 button (Philips) mouse works out of the box, and has with Ubuntu since I first installed it (with this particular mouse) back in 2008.

It's true, slackware's installer is pretty user unfriendly. I consider it a bit like a firewall - if you can't make it past the installer, you don't belong on the other side.

I am happy to see this site still progressing. After the negative reactions at SN for sharing information with Pipedot, I am less interested to be a part of the SN community and my interest for this site has clearly been growing.

I hope we get enough of people commenting here also. The stories coming here are OK.

I'm happy for you. But what OS are you using it on, and how did you configure it? I looked it up at their site and it doesn't mention any support for Linux, so i assume you're using it on Windows using their driver.

Good point. I wonder how you'd categorize words into normal, advanced, and super though? Probably a thought that went through the head of the game's original designer.

I'm always amazed at the longevity of games like this that have remained popular, essentially unchanged, for decades.

I started to use Linux long time ago (at that time I was a hobbyist and PhD student in engineering but now I'm a sysadmin by trade) because I wanted to understand every bit of my system and to be able to follow every execution path on it. Today it's becoming increasly difficult even impossible. I used redhat 4 then mandrake then debian (potato). It was fun, it ported values I do agree with, it fitted my needs. I started with one box in my attic up to 22 boxes in my garage before moving to the datacenter. Now I'm unhappy with the direction debian is heading. I loved squeeze but wheezy is not my cup of tea. I tried gentoo for awhile but on the production servers I manage I don't want to compile anything (not even installing the compiler...). I'm now trying alpine (discovered from the weekly distro post ;) ).
The major problem I see with systemd is that rebooting for some application upgrade is not an option but on kernel change (if the "new" fix is for an problem I encounter, not just for the sake of it). Also the involved "new" complexity is another major pain. I liked stable system and by stable I don't just mean "with no random crashes" but with no changes for the sake of change.
I suppose I will need to take (loose?) a lot of time trying to find another distro (even not linux) fiting my needs while still being fun to administer and being understandable at low level...
They are improvements in the landscape but also a lot of regressions :(

From the Scrabble Rules:

1 Point - A, E, I, L, N, O, R, S, T and U.
4 Points - F, H, V, W and Y.
8 Points - J and X.
Blank tiles have no point value.

So he got 1 extra point for the extra vowel. Sucks that he didn't have a real Y, as the blank as a Y is still worth no points.

One of the things I don't like about scrabble is that it doesn't reward fancy words (like "CHLORODYNE") but instead rewards placement of rare letters on special tiles. So you can place 10 character fancy words all night and still get beat by someone placing "OX", where the X is on a tripple letter score square.

Oh shit :-(

Time to move back to Freebsd

This looks like another attempt by EA to get people signed up on Origin.

I never played Diablo 3. Probably never will. I've gotten beyond the point where bypassing stupid game.auth is fun. I have money to buy games now. I buy on average a game a week. But not if online registration or computer snooping is required.

The main problem appears to be that it is not living up to that minimum expectation.

SIMS has a long history of bugs from memory leaks through to game stopping save bugs.

Perhaps EA needs to release a game for which stabilty form and function are key.

... is the answer to the question:

> When's the last time you heard someone advocate moving immediately to Slackware or Gentoo?

That was when Debian decided to go for systemd. I switched to Gentoo. Debian remains on weak machines on which I do not want to compile every program, but I pinned systemd so that it should not ever get installed.

By the way, I had switched to Debian when Arch went systemd. What a joke that was: "don't worry, I promiss the regular init scripts will be maintained, you need not oppose systemd as default, do not be afraid, let us do" said one lead Arch developper. Less than 3 months later, he announced traditional init scripts would not be maintained any more. And he now works at RedHat! Really funny...

I considered and still consider moving to *BSD. But 20 years of Linux (15 years as main/only system) are a bit difficult to wipe. Dual booting is a bit annoying because *BSD and Linux do not support really well a common filesystem. Maybe running Linux in a VM on a BSD like some people run Windows in a VM on Linux, for the few applications requiring Linux. But I have the feeling that virtualisation software is not as well developped on *BSD as on Linux.

What worries me too is that, as someone else already pointed it, systemd seems like a shiny symptom of the tendancies of the last 5 or 10 years. Bloat, complexification, over-automatisation, hiding more and more stuff from the users (and from admins now), novelty for novelty, bad documentation (and never up-to-date because everything is changing too quickly), corporatisation (most pieces of software have been taken over by big corporations(RedHat, Canonical, Google, Apple, Oracle, Intel...), there is not much left to hobbyists, students, universities researchers). Basically all the things that I could complain about under Windows during the 90's and early 2000's and that made me enjoy and switch to the refreshing Linux. And I am afraid those tendancies would slowly contaminate the BSDs, starting with FreeBSD/PC-BCD.

However, I *do* like installers. Slack has a lot of nice points, and I even installed it once. But I moved back to Debian fairly quickly...and Debian has bought into systemd. Gentoo also doesn't have an installer, though it at least has a package manager. BSD doesn't support even reading ext4 systems on large disks, so that's out of consideration.

But I'm heard exactly ZERO reasons why *I* should like systemd.

...and it's called Slackware. Started in 1993, with no signs of wavering.

It's been amusing watching the rest of the Linux world light itself aflame though. At this point, I'd be more likely to recommend someone leaving Windows to jump onto FreeBSD than one of the big Linux distros. Including pulseaudio by default for no good reason was a bad enough move they all seemed to rush to to do without thinking much about it first (hey, sound in Linux can be complicated sometimes due to hardware incompatibilities...let's add a totally more complex abstraction layer on top of the existing complex system and hope it makes things better!), but systemd makes that look like small potatoes (at least Pulseaudio is worthwhile software for SOME usage scenarios...).

Somewhere along the last few years, everyone seemed to forget the "if it's not broke, don't fix it" golden rule. Innovating new tools is great and all, but creation solutions without problems and then making them default across the board really doesn't help matters. It'd have been nice if they'd forked into a new line of distros at least (hell, call it Linux NT for all I care :-P), rather than really alienate people who in many cases just started learning their way around one system only to have it entirely ripped away from them and replaced by a new system upon a system upgrade (worse so for those on Ubuntu that went from sysvinit to upstart to systemd all in the space of <2 years). This sort of disorganized race to follow whatever wacky decisions come down from mostly whatever Redhat does really resembles mass insanity from the sidelines...

My razer deathadder, a 5 button mouse, is working just fine. :)

This post comes to you from opensuse 13.1, so I'm not a lost cause yet, but ... you've got a good point. I'd add: in all this spinning of change-for-change's-sake, a lot of useful stuff has fallen off the wheel.

My best example is this weekend's point of frustration: I've got a trackball with two extra buttons. How to configure them? Google it and you'll quckly find out the answer is currently: there is no way. Oh wait, you can install btnx. No, that is now deprecated. Or you can install some other 3rd party daemon thing that comes with no documentation. C'mon, guys!

The worst is, for an opensuse user, is there used to be a slick utility called sax2 that did phenomenal work configuring X11 for you back when it was X11. The move to x.org broke that and they never updated it. There /is/ something called sax3 now but it segfaults as soon as it starts.

That means, despite all the eyecandy, the version of opensuse I used back in 2004 was more useful to me in practical purposes. I'd argue the move from KDE3 to KDE4 is the same story: yes, better in terms of flash and maybe in terms of potential, but KDE3 as a desktop basically gave me better options and got me working faster.

C'mon people: 5 button mouse, make it work.

It's a symptom of the sickness of the Linux kernel/system developers' philosophy. There has been no innovation in the Linux kernel for ages and Linux itself has never done anything new. Filesystems? Done much better in other Unices. Multiprocessing? Done to death since the 60s. Different task schedulers? Ditto. There is nothing new in Linux itself, it's just an effort to clone Unix.

Being such an effort, it was completed a long time ago. All there is left to do is to change the interfaces (how many times iptables interface has changed?), change the internal structures, change change change, for no good reason. This is what happens when you mess with a working program just for the fun of it. You eventually break it so bad that you enter a road impossible to turn from.

The sickness has permeated into the very core of the kernel: device management. We have had tons of the same stuff which performed equally badly over 20 years. We had kudzu, then HAL, then udev, and now systemd-udev.

This "sake for the sake of change" sickness has a cause: people think that they could automate the complicated tasks of installing an operating system, installing services, modifying hardware etc. It's not gonna happen. It's the year 2014 and I'm still having troubles with my sound card. The fucking sound card! I'm not even mentioning that I'm using the third driver for my graphics card and that's not working properly either.

In order to make that impossible dream come true, they are screwing around, changing interfaces. This causes the "change for the sake of change".

Even if we can stop the systemd madness now, RedHat will find something else to "automate" and "make friendly to idiot sysadmins who can't read a fine manual". In another ten years we could be boycotting something else like "stop the networkd madness".

I really think that the whole Linux thing should be abandoned. Stop giving away code for free and decepting managers saying that it's as good as the ones real engineers (with a focus in mind) designed. Solaris could hotswap CPUs, now it's gone. Tru64 could do massive multiprocessing even back in the 90s, now also gone. All gone into the toilet bowl of "we don't need to pay that much, a clusterfuck of PCs are just as good and here is an operating system for that". Even small attempts at creating a proper desktop system was killed by the free shit. I remember QNX, but there were others too. I'm not even talking about where we could be in mobile computing if this Linux-dumping didn't happen.

Shot themselves in the foot in the last step. As a relative Linux newbie still coming to terms with the basic accessibility and utility of init scripts, I am highly susceptible to joining the cause against the Windows Registrying of Linux.

And yet, as with most arguments, the first side to resort to profanity or violence has already lost. Schmucks.

Glad you kept "journal", cuz I destest the word "blog" !!

First journal comment, y'know, to see if it works and doesn't blow up or anything.

I've been using spideroak and like it - discovered it because it used to come in the opensuse repository and I was looking for a backup solution (not necessarily cloud based).

They're more expensive than most, but your stuff is encrypted on the cloud. You could still be compromised via a brute force password attack probably, so the original PICNIC problem remains a weak point.

Me, I do my serious backing up to a local NAS. Want my data? You're going to have to make it past my dog, and odds are against you.

That fork bug really if funny. The deformed babies with wolverine claws on the other hand, freaky. Notice however that all the moms lifting up their babies are all skinny and sexy? Not sure if that's a programming glitch or just wishful thinking. Most women who have recently given birth ... not quite that sexy.

http://www.the-mia.com/Leafield-s-R-D-centre-opens-its-doors

Oxfordshire's Leafield Technical Centre is now home to several race car and other high tech companies. Beautiful buildings in a lovely rural setting.

"The site was originally taken on by Marconi, on behalf of the Post Office, in the early part of the twentieth century and came to play a hugely influential role in British telecommunications during the two world wars. Subsequently it became a BT training facility, before being sold in 1993 to TWR and the Arrows F1 team. The facility was bought by MCT in 2003 and was home, briefly, to the Super Aguri F1 team."

I'd love to see IBM ship some hot new tech

well, they gave it a try a few years ago with the millipede memory, but as far as I know, although promising technology at the time, it went nowhere for the moment.

Unfortunately the article is low on details.

The embedded video has more details. There is also an older and more technical video on MIT website:

http://video.mit.edu/watch/tr10-racetrack-memory-545/

It's based on Debian rather than Ubuntu so you get a dated version of the Gnome 2 desktop

From the article and screenshots, it looks like Gnome 3, but I could be mistaken since I never used it. It just doesn't look like ol' Gnome 2 to me ;-)

Anyway, extremely interesting review, thanks !!

Appreciated! I had the SMF forum hooked up to SFS at one point, but we finally just went to "closed registration" and a note saying, 'email us and convince us you're not a bot.' Any legitimate user gets connected with a single email. Bots don't make it through the system.

Unfortunately the article is low on details.

I get that it is yet another technology aiming at nonvolatile memory. But how does it compare to all the other technologies, like MRAM, FRAM, FeRAM, ...

In short: Why should I assume that this is the future of nonvolatile memory, and not one of the other candidates?

Or at least give us the relevant data points, so we can dig up the same data for other contenders and do the comparison ourselves.
What is the read speed? Write speed? Durability of the stored information? How much energy does it cost to write a bit? To read a bit? Is it random access, or is it just erasable blocks like in Flash?

... because Testing is so last century..

For anything other than making a giant doll house, how could one not be disappointed?

I'd love to see IBM ship some hot new tech. Seems like it's been a long time.

Oldest drive I've use: IBM 10Meg hard drive. Used it as an end table. It was short of 3' tall and weighed about 100 pounds.

I like the fork bug.

From your site:

Opened up the board, and in less than 24 hours, dozens of spammer robots autoregistered and started spewing their usual crap.

All the popular cms's have antispam features built in.
I use a combination of automatically looking up posters on http://www.stopforumspam.com/ (using a drupal module) and blocking IP addresses based on a simple honeytrap. This is very effective, even with anonymous posting there are maybe one or two spam posts a week.
There is similar code that just uses php.

https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1738.txt
Uniform Resource Locators (URL)

...
Thus, only alphanumerics, the special characters "$-_.+!*'(),", and reserved characters used for their reserved purposes may be used unencoded within a URL.
...

You're on a tech news site, AC, maybe not the place for Ms. Piggy and Joan Rivers.

What parsing bug? The apostrophe is not a legal character in URLs. The correct URL is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law

Well, for pen testing I prefer a piece of paper. Although if you specifically want to test a permanent marker, a Linux CD might come in handy. ;-)

I like p8r, it has a vertical infinite sign in it ;-)

Translation: Best run polls ideas past the boss before posting :)

Indeed, leaking those nude pictures to the world is even more security in the backup sense: Now if your hard disk is crashed, you can just download them from Pirate Bay!

Great idea. In the spirit of i19n then: p8r? Or does that look too much like "hater"? Might be appropriate nonetheless? How about |5r?

This makes sense as a project for a place like the UK, which is an island(s), limited territory, and unabashedly gorgeous. It seems, psychologically, like an achievable goal, and that makes it enticing and even exciting. It would be more daunting for a place like the USA just because it's such an immense territory. I'd love to contribute though - it's interesting and useful in a way that GoogleEarth isn't, and actually gives you a chance to experience the flavor of a place, not just its geoform.

It would be interesting to do other islands as well, maybe places like Iceland or parts of the South Pacific. Imagine doing something like Australia though: huge expanses and many sections geographically nondescript. That's a lot of work. Same goes for some urban blights like Lagos - miles and miles and miles of the same.

That graph comparing Dreadnoughtus to a Boeing 737 and an African elephant is the only image you need to see. What a beast. And yet, an evolutionary dead-end given its mass and the ability of its frame to support such a massive creature.

Finding such a thing is every child-archeologist/paleontologist's dream. This guy got to live it!

For me it was a learning experience to see how many different software tools have been developed for the purpose of brute forcing a poorly defended system. Holy crap. In the same way I've seen both sides of forum spam. I run http://gotonicaragua.com and battling forum bot-spam has been a problem since day one. But as sysadmin on that machine I also get tons of email offering the services of guys who have developed and run custom blog-posting and forum-posting software whose purpose obviously is to deliver exactly what I hate. Interesting to see both sides of the equation.

This penetration testing stuff is powerful stuff. Interesting to me to see just how well-developed it is.

I might not run this on my box constantly, but it's handy as a live distro for pen testing or hacking competitions :)

I'm kind of surprised Apple isn't taking more flak for coming out with a bigger phone now. As usual, the poo-pooh any use case other than the one they provide for (noone would ever use a phone bigger than ours, it was extensively tested, etc.). But then when a competitor produces it and shows there's a market ready for it, they scramble to catch up and then get praised for their new product like it's something revolutionary.

Samsung has some phablets that are absolutely huge. The Galaxy Max I think it's called, for example: it takes two SIM cards and is bigger than even the Note. Nice phone though, and for web surfing it's close to ideal. I still like my Nexus 7 tablet though, and especially for writing with a bluetooth keyboard or for using as an ebook reader. For those two purposes, I find even phablets a bit too small.

... or their CLI browser (lynx, links, w3m, etc.) :) No, I kind of agree with you. More useful is talking about this stuff on tech sites so the technically-oriented people who read those sites but work at more consumer-oriented sites get the idea and push for authorization to implement it on places like vogue or facebook or victoriassecret or whatever. That would be a real huge success.

I'm optimistic. The last time the world rallied to do this - stop SOPA, I think it was - it made a pretty big splash.

Fixed, thanks.

I think it would be useless on tech sites, because the campaign is focused on increasing awareness, while visitors on such sites are usually well aware of the net neutrality issue.Plus, a spinning widget like that would probably be lost among other similar widgets on an average nerd's noscript- adblock- requestpolicy- toting browser. :-)

While wiktionary seems to think that discussion is a synonym for conversation, I happen to disagree.

Two people mentioning how nice the weather is today is a conversation. It's not a discussion in my book.

But I agree that a discussion does not have to be about differing opinions.

I had a C64 with EEPROM cartridge which would load and start Turbo Tape as soon as I press F1 button. Loading a game after that would take 1-2 min max... If the tape was in the right position...