Well, the Register beat us to the punch with a title/subtitle that beats mine by an order of magnitude:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/06/17/critical_barrier_to_interstellar_travel_removed/
"Good: Espresso machine in SPAAAACE. Bad: Full of URINE
Tomorrow's coffee - made out of yesterday's"

Damn, those guys are funny. I know they take a beating sometimes, but I find their journalism and their sense of humor refreshing, given the likes of stodgy American press like ITWorld and the like.

And now, via the bitching, we'll see who likes Linux because of its 'classic Unix goodness' and who wants to see radical innovation. I'm currently not sure which I prefer. A lot of recent changes have kind of annoyed me. Systemd doesn't impress me that much because I liked the original init.d architecture, I understood it, and it works. That said, it's nice when I boot up a Mac and am at a log-in screen in just a few seconds. Can't have it both ways, and part of the problem is expectations - I don't expect my Linux box to boot up quickly, so it doesn't annoy me if it doesn't. If Linux keeps getting radical this way, I might just switch to FreeBSD on the desktop though (PC-BSD is awesome: nice way to get BSD on a desktop, though it's wonky on laptop hardware). BSD has no pretentions of doing this radical sort of stuff, as far as I can tell, making it more suitable for those of us who like *nix the way it is. Or something like that.

Are they potentially hiring tons of coders to improve the software? I understand they've largely fixed the memory leaks problem. I don't happen to use Firefox - I prefer Opera (and am one of the few who do, apparently). What they have not fixed however is the plugin architecture where each time you upgrade the browser you have to worry about even your themes no longer working. That's highly annoying and at least one area where Chrome is doing better work.

Their big problem is that you can't just throw money at a problem - you need vision, inspiration, and good, qualified people. It's obvious they're just aping Chrome at the moment, and it's pathetic. How about innovating and making a better browser? How about diversifying your revenue stream from just sucking at Google's tit via default search? If I were on the Board of Directors, I'd be shaking management's cage - they're swimming dangerously close to the edge of extinction, which is pathetic considering how truly awful IE10 is. If Google eats Firefox's lunch, it's a bad day for all of us, simply because competition over the past decade has led to some remarkable improvements in browsing.

No worries - and you were absolutely right to correct my error.

Incidentally, your post seems to have disappeared, or at least I can't see it. Can you now delete your own, previous posts? I'll have to check into that.

Easy there, A.C. The issue is sloppy editing by yours truly, not cherry picking of facts. I've fixed the summary and will flog myself as penitence for not being more accurate.

Wow - thanks for the post. I just checked out soldkx and discovered some software I'd never heard of, packaged as part of their "back office" product:

Internal information streams with SeedDMS.
Employee management with OrangeHRM.
Customer relations, and leads with Zurmo.
Build and manage a professional site with Typo3.
Invoicing with SiWapp.

Wasn't aware of any of these - will be checking them out! That's what I love about sites like this.

Seems like training alone isn't going to lead to 'faster' if you're wearing heavy equipment. These guys need something made of spun spiderweb silk or something, but made out of teflon. They've already got the Batmobile, sort of.

Interesting, that's the first I'd heard of soldkx. But it's the first I'd heard of kaos, too. I'm an opensuse guy and have been since SUSE 7.1 (2001 or so). I find opensuse usually does nice work with stock KDE, while Kubuntu has some rough edges. But that's my experience/preference, and I admit not everybody is into the somewhat heavy install footprint of opensuse.

just noticed a mistake in my summary - click 7 times to see 10 entries. Hmm. That's what I get for trying to post articles during my day job :) Guess I'll leave it as is - kind of funny.

I'm noting a huge increase in the number of groups, magazines, other miscellaneous publications, and now this. Good for you, BSDs! I run FreeBSD happily and always wished they had greater presence and a higher profile. Hope this is a good start and a step in the right direction for them!

For me though the worst part isn't the fact that you have to pay for it, it's the fact they finally make you download some sketchy downloader program - it's just another hoop. Sun used to do the same with downloaders of openoffice and the like - jump through the hoop, fill out the forms, push the buttons, and here comes the download! No - it's just the downloader and when you get done installing that, only then do you get to start downloading the software you went out looking for in the first place.

It can't just be about Android and iOS - I'm very glad there are some alternatives out there, and WebOS of course was reputed to be a good one. Look it up on www.theregister.co.uk and you'll find a host of reviews and articles written by people who truly took pleasure in the unique aspects of the user interface (the card paradigm, especially) against which iOS and Android compete poorly.

I hope it brings them good luck! It's been depressing watching HP the past couple of years - rife mismanagement, competing strategies, and not to mention the complete gutting of the braintrust that came with purchase of Compaq and thus DEC. Then the last looney of a CEO decides they're going to give up the hardware business and focus on services. WTF?

This makes me think there are still pockets of sanity in the place, which in the past couple of years, would have been hard to believe.

I'm trying to think of which continent would make a difference. Nothing comes to mind. Antarctica, maybe. The trick is to have no online presence at all, which of course is hard.

Seriously, no one gets credit for being quiet and competent. And reading the article made me feel slightly sick that the only thing people are really interested in is either:

For the consumers: entertainment via some shiny new toy, or
For the investors: huge amounts of increased value in their stock portfolio, whatever that takes

Boring!

You're probably better informed than I was. I consider reasonably tech savvy, but I didn't understand - or even suspect - the scale of the surveillance state. Things like intercepts at cross-continent cables, prying open the content of unencrypted data going among data centers, and the like. I was astonished.

I was never on Facebook, post only non-personal stuff to G+ (and am seriously reconsidering Android and Google's ecosystem entirely), and no longer entrust PGP encryption since we now know it's hackable. I'm tempted to go back to POP mail and take all my mail offline. I'm more depressed than ever.

I broke up the paragraphs into smaller chunks - hope that makes it a bit more readable. Great article, by the way - thanks for submitting!

Journalist: "Bloggers: you can't succeed by just repackaging other peoples' news." There are some decent bloggers out there providing new content. But there are hundreds of millions of others just linking to news stories and then commenting on them. Look at the Drudge Report, which is a popular and well-liked blog (probably top-10 in the USA, anyway). No news of its own - just links to other articles, and commentary and insight.

Some day these two groups of Crips and Bloods will realize they each need each other and decide to let bygones be bygones.

There's precious little real journalism and reporting going on out there, and even formerly independent/big newspapers (Washington Post) now have fired their overseas journalist staff and rely on a wire service like AP. That means one AP reporter is having his stuff repeated across many major newspapers. If it sounds like a bad thing, I'd say I agree.

So far, we're seeing pretty even interest across all the topics, and not many write-in options. I'm not sure we're learning a huge amount, here.

That's a good point and a good idea - treat polls the way you would new articles.

That's kind of the way it's working right now - as volunteer editor I can assure you I'm posting almost everything that comes in, thinking anyone who went to all the trouble to post something deserves to have it hit the front page. Later when the number of submissions picks up we can begin filtering. "Too many articles" is currently not one of our problems. Soylent typically has 14-18 submissions in the queue, but the times I've reviewed them I've found a lot of stuff that wasn't really that great.

The volunteer editors here have also gone to great pains to take even barebones submissions and make them into something interesting and newsworthy, when a post needs a little love and care.

Ultimately, that comes down to the users. I sent out an email to every one of my friends I thought would be interested, and hope others do the same. It eventually comes down to word of mouth. Bryan has put in a Twitter thingy that allows articles to be announced via Twitter too, with hashtags and the like. If you like the site, get the word out - we could certainly use more people around here, and given what a great interface this thing has, it's getting easier and better to participate.

I however have to say I prefer "slow/steady" growth of the site, where the place grows organically and interesting people discover it and stay, to a wild-west clusterfuck like Soylent where everyone arrived at once and it turned into a huge mess sorting out how the site work, before it finally seemed to calm down. Slow and steady gives the site a chance to grow naturally and a chance for users/community to grow. "Build it and they will come" or something like that.

I happen to agree with you about the politics. I get really annoyed when I go to tech sites expecting a break/relief from that kind of news, and find it on the tech site too. I hate politics, don't want it on my tech sites, which are kind of like a refuge to me. Exception only if there's a tech angle, like busted Diebold machines, or something like that.