Recent Comments

I don't read /. anymore, Pipedot's where the echoes begin for me. Thank you!

http://xkcd.com/171/ ?

I'd say a bigger problem than putting a computer to a wall is putting it on the floor, which, they're still going to do with this. I have serviced so many floor computers that have fans completely chocked from dust, pet hair, and bug carcasses. That said, it looks snazzy.

I was used to read 6502 asm code on the apple ][ platform...
This is a nice reminder and an intersting read...
keep going!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_law

Fixed.

Wow, it sure is. It cuts both ways though: on one hand, you may conclude "people have been bitching about this forever." On the other hand you can conclude, "it's true and a trend that has been continuing for as long as the industrial revolution. What would that guy from 1871 think if he saw modern teens texting each other with two fingers?" Unless it's a sext: he might like that.

This one is also relevant

URL parsing bug submitted: http://bugs.pipedot.org/view.php?id=27

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_law

They're not outliers. But if there's 10x as much writing going on, there's 10x as much shit. But there's also 10x as much good stuff.

But I think that (xkcd author) Randall Munroe's premise is interesting, at least. Today's average young person is communicating with their peers in written form much more than probably any other. And not by just a small ratio. It's not likely we'll like the form any more than our parents like[d] our music -- but it doesn't change the fact that there's a whole lot of writing going on.

I hope you're right, but I'm skeptical. Check out the average post on Reddit, for example, or Youtube. Maybe those are outliers, but holy crapamoly...

This feature was almost completely unnecessary anyway.

It would be nice to have an image format that resizes, but it would also be nice to have the server do the resizing, not the browser. Of course that would be an easy line of attack for DDOS and breaches to the system, so here we go again ...

Is it? Just this week:
http://xkcd.com/1414/

Maybe it's just changing.

I think increasingly there's some pride in design and this thing isn't really meant to be hidden under a desk/table. You're right about the wires though: thought the same thing about Apple's new "trashcan Mac."

Wow. Much obliged, then! If I have made one A/C happy, then perhaps it was worth it. :)

I still find myself going back to WindowMaker. Not sure why, but it has everything I need, stays the hell out of my way, and doesn't try to be fancy.

A brand new way to dent the wall?

Really? Wouldn't know. I read here first, others second or third via RSS. IF it's a dup I skip it.

Next story please :)

Is this another way of saying 'we just don't know, can't explain it, doesn't fit the current model, we're just perplexed"?

Hey now, there's plenty of choice with Windows 8. As it happens, I am using a machine with Windows 8 on it right now knowing accepting and understanding that I have the full choice of continuing to use this POS operating system ***OR*** shove this screwdriver through an eye.

Boy, that screwdriver is looking really good right now. Really good.

Original as in the god awful interface Mint had the last time I put it on? Big buttons down the left hand side? Like that? :P
A UI so terrible I gave up on Mint, yes even though I could easily have ripped it out and thrown KDE or Gnome on.

I do not have a problem with them copying each other. However, just like in school tests: it is important to copy the good stuff, not the bad stuff

Especially considering the proliferation today of mobile devices. The question is.. will anyone care enough to use it.

The nice thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from

I've noticed the soy drama too :(

I like having all three sites each as their own thing. If a story gets duplicated, probably best to have each site's individual take on it, rather than a straight-up duplicate.

For everyone who is pissed about having to dumpster-dive to find basic settings like enable/disable Javascript and load/don't-load images, my solution is prefbar:

http://prefbar.tuxfamily.org

And if you disable compatibility checking, it will work despite the browser's complaints.

Probably because Firefox continues to make Google its default search engine.

Default ads in my fresh browser? Great way to guarantee I never install Firefox again.

(Actually, I haven't since SeaMonkey and PaleMoon became available.)

Seems a bit gimmicky to me. Is this a real problem that people often face?

And it will look a lot less elegant with a bunch of wires poking out of the top/back.

Somebody over at Soylent called the Internet's news reporting a huge echo chamber. "What news sites do you visit?" someone asked, to which the reply was, "Doesn't matter; they're all reporting the same stuff anyway and hardly anyone is producing original content."

I think Slashdot and the Register are both already reporting this, and now I see Soylent has published it as well. Holy crap, what a lot of work for nothing.

The alternative is of course to follow and scour endless, personal blogs. Who's got the time and energy for that?

Hey, be nice! If you remove Windows, who will Linux devs have to copy from? I'm being snarky, but it's more than half true on the interface/GUI front, at least. Although there's a fair bit of aping of Apple these days too. I find the new KDE5 interface to be full of low contrast pastels and thin, sans serif fonts. Looks like iOS. Come on guys, be original!

I for one will be glad when the "Buttons confuse users" craze comes to an end. It's led to a regression in usefulness in so many tools. Why should we be pandering to the mouth breathers? Power users need tools too, ya know. Remember when you actually had to read the manual because the new toy/tool was capable of so much? It's like that's anathema these days. Isn't the current joke that the Gnome3 interface is slowly being reduced to a blank screen with one big button, and the button is deactivated by default, or something like that?

Who's to say - with the right leadership and a bright idea they may even come back. Their Razr phone was the must-have flipphone before iphones changed the market. They're still kind of a nice phone, actually. It's getting tougher to bounce back, but it's not impossible.

I find it hard to believe the huge candybar formfactor smartphones and the sheet of icons you flip and slide are going to be here for ever. There's got to be something better out there, and someone is going to have to discover/invent/impose it. I'd be happy if it were someone other than Apple just because I'm bored with the status quo. Blackberry seems to be out of ju-ju. So, who's going to be the next nuclear bomb in the market place?

Yeah. Let's remove choice and diversity.

Careful...that sounds about as crazy and Apple-like that they might try it.

Of course, I suspect MS would realize very quickly that the GPL is a very different beast than the BSD license. If they wanted to go this route, they'd either need to GPL a good chunk of it, or else go the same route Apple did and grab a BSD and show it the meaning of rugburn.

The old moto was a force to be reckoned with, now it's just kind of sad. Remember when they were actually a force in the CPU market back in the power-pc days? So goes to tech company circle of life. Let's see who comes next.

The put all of their efforts into the WINE project and release Winux. That'd be pretty sweet actually.

They dug this hole for themselves. Getting out will be rough. Perhaps it is they they jumped onto the linux-on-the-desktop and just give up on Windows.

I'm still annoyed they removed the "Load images by default?" tick-box. You have to screw around in about:config now. It was rather useful for tethering, but apparently buttons confuse users.

Here are a couple of starting points. I'm not a zealot: I use both Linux and FreeBSD and like them for different reasons. The BSDs tend to be more conservative, so instead of systemd you've still got init scripts; it boots more slowly, has less hardware support, so on. The Linux distros evolve more rapidly, but they also sometimes stray into territory (HAL, Udev) that turn out to be a mistake.The absolute classic resource on the question is here, though it's a couple years out of date now.: https://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/rants/bsd4linux/01https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/articles/explaining-bsd/comparing-bsd-and-linux.html

BSD projects maintain the entire "Operating System", not only the kernel. This distinction is only marginally useful: neither BSD nor Linux is useful without applications. The applications used under BSD are frequently the same as the applications used under Linux.As a result of the formalized maintenance of a single CVS source tree, BSD development is clear, and it is possible to access any version of the system by release number or by date. CVS also allows incremental updates to the system: for example, the FreeBSD repository is updated about 100 times a day. Most of these changes are small.

This one seems pretty good: http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/10-things/10-differences-between-linux-and-bsd/

There is an old saying about BSD vs. Linux: "BSD is what you get when a bunch of Unix hackers sit down to try to port a Unix system to the PC. Linux is what you get when a bunch of PC hackers sit down and try to write a Unix system for the PC.

Finally, this quote from Nesbitt http://www.nesbitt.ca/freebsd.html agrees with me:

The FreeBSD documentation is available as a constantly updated, well written web handbook (and on paper as well). The handbook covers each and every aspect of the FreeBSD system in a concise, yet thorough, style. The documentation manages the delicate balance of being both a definitive resource for an experienced administrator, and a valuable learning guide for a Unix neophyte. It is written in a style that does not presuppose much familiarity with Unix systems, and covers such basic Unix topics as permissions, but also covers advanced topics such as kernel configuration and tuning, security and encrypted disk partitions.

I find Linux distros have wildly varying approaches to documentation, and I frequently turn first to Google searches. The FreeBSD is far more authoritative, and because the ports packages and kernel/base system are all maintained together as one integral source tree, everything fits together and seems to me to be more professionally managed. Somehow, and it's hard to describe exactly, everything seems more cohesive. But the documentation is a big deal. It's very easy to get instructions from the source on how to do exotic things like set up a PPP server or a SLIP connection, and beyond. That's useful on some systems, but on others you want Linux for hardware compatibility and faster boot times.

Last time the deal was negotiated (or details were made public), Google was ramping up their payments to firefox to remain the default browser due to increased competition from Yahoo and Microsoft.

Let's say firefox dropped to under 10% market share as a result of this, a substantial drop: Do you think that microsoft or yahoo wouldn't pay a lot of money to be the default search? And do you think google would happily hand over even a small percentage of their search revenue to their competitors? That's the lifeblood of the company, and they take it very seriously.

I wouldn't be surprised if mozilla's revenue dropped next time they renegotiate contracts, but that's okay. They're pulling in over $300m/year revenue and using that to cover a wide range of non-core and unprofitable projects. If worst came to worst, they could spin off all their other efforts and survive on a small fraction of that.

(disclaimer: I don't agree with a lot of their decisions, but I think they'll be fine financially for a long time yet)

I'd designed just such a CPU back in the '90s. The only problem was, programs always raised the interrupt DIYmf, which got into an endless loop.

I know at least the historical reasons that could justify that quote: BSDs are direct descendants of Unix (version 5 & 6 according to this graph), whereas Linux is a Unix-clone started from scratch.

Besides, I remember reading something along the lines about Linus Torvalds writing Linux as a Unix-replacement instead of using the *BSD of the time because there was ongoing lawsuits about *BSD licensing vs. Unix (now settled). Without these, maybe he would never have started Linux in the first place.

Anyway, I believe the quote mostly points to philosophical differences between the mindset of *BSD communities and developers vs. that of the Linux ones, but I don't know much about it.

The old adage, "Linux is for those who hate Microsoft; BSD is for those who love Unix" is probably appropriate.

could someone elaborate a bit about this one?
I'm an old linuxer for the last 15 years (and sysadmin by trade) but I never gave a try to any *BSD flavor nor to any other *nix one... so my question is not a troll but a real question!

I run Arch Linux (with ZFS on my home directory), but I am actually thinking of trying out BSD because I really like FreeBSD. Perhaps PC-BSD is what I should be using on my desktop.

ps -e

Ouch. BSD fails because BSD is not UNIX. Solaris and HP-UX are the real thing. Linux is a fine clone, at least better than any BSD ever hopes to be.

You may want to see if your GCC based projects compile under Clang. I've noticed it often seems to output smaller binaries for the same code, and I tend to find its error output to be less cryptic.

The Slash style moderation system seems to work pretty well even in heated discussions thanks to the MetaMod review process. Wish we had it here.

Netcraft confirmed it! This can only mean one thing! BSD is a zombie OS! Run for your lives!

There are plenty of inux distributions out there. If I'm already running a more "advanced" distribution like archlinux, which gives me complete freedom over my computer, should I really look into FreeBSD?

I've been running PC-BSD as my main OS since October 2013 starting with the PC-BSD 10.0 preview. Before I installed PC-BSD I was distro-hopping around the Linux universe never quite finding something that felt comfortable (Arch was close, still have an Arch install that is not used much).

Basically I came to PC-BSD (and by extention FreeBSD) mainly for zfs and stayed due to the cohesiveness of the whole system and the great community. BSD Now episode #49 gives a quick tour of the PC-BSD GUI tools, a good place to see PC-BSD in action. After watching the podcast I would suggest checking out the PC-BSD Handbook

Humans have a morbid fascination for rubbernecking