The ad is also somewhat in bad taste. I'm not a fan of attack ads, even when they are successfully funny ("I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" was somewhat entertaining). Not a cool move, Sammy.

Wow, agreed! That was really great - thanks for the link.

Ha ha, we're still thinner than LotusNotes though! That thing is bloated indeed :) I suspect we're leaner than Sharepoint, too.

For Apple, that's about the most damning comment they could receive. Being average means they have failed, the 'reality distortion reactor' has stopped spinning, and Apple products are just one of the bunch. What could be worse?

Well done, AC. By the way, for what it's worth, I wouldn't worry about this place overdosing on anime. Anyone who wants a more intense dose of anime in their newsfeed probably knows of better sites than this one.

Seriously, help!!!! I like reading stuff other people submit, too! As long as I'm the one posting, I hope you all like opensuse, FreeBSD, and Android, because that's what you're going to get! :)

The link between anime and geek culture is undisputed. I'm unaware of a similar affection for Joan Rivers or any of the Muppets except perhaps Beaker. As for this being B's personal blog, have a look at the history (http://pipedot.org/pipe/history) and see how many others have contributed.

Well done, my friend. Fixed.

My first impression - blocky, square shape, fabric wristband - is that it looked like a 4th generation ipod nano on a strap. Picture here if you've forgotten what it looks like:
http://epicagear.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/ipod-nano-6th-gen-review.jpg

OK, so if I want to avoid using systemd in my crappy, personal distro with 3 users, that's one thing. But what I really want is for the big guns to stop packaging systemd so I like their product more. Big distinction.

Anybody who wants to use zafiro17nux as their primary distro might not have to deal with systemd, but they're in for a huge world of pain otherwise.

I agree the Moto 360 is the better looking timepiece. But it's been destroyed in the press for using an old SoC and having crappy battery life - two definite nails in its coffin.

Still, it's pretty funny when Motorola's design guys outdo Apple. Somewhere out there, Steve Jobs is tossing and turning in his grave. "Cook, you putz! I'll haunt you, goddammit!"

Except ... Ballmer's gone. This is probably an effort to undo a lot of the mistakes made under Ballmer's watch, like the proliferation of incompatible versions of things with the name Windows splattered over the top, hoping name recognition makes up for crappy design, engineering, and functionality.

Nadella was handed a royal bag of shit, you have to admit. Consolidating the mess is a worthy endeavor but only if he can truly consolidate it from an engineering/code perspective instead of just relying on snappy marketing. Ballmer should be punished to wear a "Plays for Sure" t-shirt at every basketball game he attends, as punishment for the debacle that was seen in that marketing ploy. The t-shirt should be colored poop brown, like a Zune - another debacle. And on the back should be the words "I squirt," like the verb his team came up with for transferring pictures or music from one zune to another.

Good luck, Nadella. Remember, if you light the bag of poop on fire, you'll have to drop it when it burns your hands and then squish it out with your shoe to put out the flames.

That's insightful. Interesting how many stories involve Oracle's involvement being like the kiss of death. I know a good business manager who worked for Oracle at one point and he said even on that front, 'never again.' These high power manager/CEOs forget that their own personalities translate into corporate culture and eventually business practices. And if they're not careful, those practices can come back to haunt them.

I really miss Sun. I even bought StarOffice over OpenOffice to support the company that was making an office suite available for Linux and then going on to support the users. Oracle seems cold and distant and clueless and rather deaf to the concerns of its users.

There is enough pushback to systemd to warrant a fork of a major distribution that excises systemd and the GNOME dependencies, while providing a more traditional and stable server platform that has no hint of desktop support. No time need be wasted managing the hundreds upon hundreds of desktop packages present in the distro tree, no need to include massive numbers of desktop peripheral and graphical drivers (RHEL 6.3 ships with 57 xorg drivers, for instance).

There's also the matter of security. The security concerns for a desktop are vastly different than those for a server -- and server security concerns are vastly different among servers, depending on what each server is doing. However, it's safe to say that protecting against malware delivered by clicking through a malicious Web page is not high on the list of possible threats for a Memcached server.

Opensuse's build service might be similar in that anyone can post, build, and provide packages. But the AUR being its very own repository is neat. I think I like it even more than the suse model. Glad to have learned about it.

Seems to me battery life is the holy grail here, in the short term. In the long term, a long-lasting watch with lousy apps and software still loses the race. But given the truly abyssmal performance of current hardware, selling a smartwatch that lasts a day or two would be considered huge progress.

Meanwhile, Steven J Vaughan Nichols (SJVN - wow that guy has a long name) has chimed in with his list of Top things he'd like Apple to finally get around to fixing, although they probably won't:

http://www.zdnet.com/iphone-6-four-things-we-need-but-may-not-get-7000033442/

I was glad to see one of the items is itunes. Itunes drives me crazy too, and even though it was somehow magical or revolutionary back in the day it came out, it has gotten gummed up since then, and I hate it you almost have to upgrade your hardware at a certain point, if you want to update or sync a more modern iOS device - that's not cool.

I finally took the leap and moved all my music over to a NAS, and manage it using Clementine, which I really like. See ya later, itunes!

You can make it simpler by cutting the cord and having absolutely everything go through XBMC or equivalent. I'm down to a DVD player and XBMC/Roku feeding content from the NAS. My wife has some trouble with it, but my six year old has figured it out. :)

I kind of thought it was a big bowl of sugar and coloring with milk, where the nutrients were unintended side products of the manufacturing process? :)

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.

I wouldn't worry too much about the BSDs. I can't speak for the team, but as a casual observer it sure seems to me the BSD crowd marches to the beat of a different drum. They've chosen the "slow/conservative" way on most occasions (and been pilloried for it!), and in general, chosen not to be on the bleeding edge. Increasingly, I like that. Maybe I'm getting old!

Wow, that's pretty incredible. Maybe the snow is going to bring you good luck?

By the way, I'm astonished to see 'the point of it all' in first place. Maybe work sucks after all!

I modded you up because that's a great link - very informative. I notice though that the argument consists of, for the moment, people talking past each other. That is, I don't see much in Debian's position statement that refutes what the anti-systemd crowd is putting forth as their argument.

Can't wait to see how this plays out. I confess I am for the most part more swayed by the anti-systemd crowd's position, but I like transparency and simplicity in a system, and systemd decreases both.

Yes, that fucking surprised me too. But if you can get around the fucking F word, the rest of the article is really well fucking put together :) I think they've got a pretty dispassionate and technically-well thought out argument.

But that's just my fucking opinion.

Glad to hear about gravatar support and retina quality graphics. I didn't know about either of those. I'll have to go see if I can get my gravatar account working again.

I self-added my new favorite feature. Over at Soylent they had an article about favorite browser plug-ins, and I learned about It's-all-Text for Firefox, which lets you edit any text field using a real text editor. Wow, that has changed my life. So my new favorite feature is being able to type this post in emacs, which is pretty awesome.

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'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.

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.

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.

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.

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'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, the main message here isn't that small projects can succeed. It's that Kickstarter has stopped making any pretense of vetting.

TC: Did you know that the Kickstarter would allow anything because they stopped the vetting process?
ZB: Yeah. I mean that was part of what made me go there in the first place was, I just had a conversation with somebody I think a couple of days before that for work, where they had said, hey, did you hear that Kickstarter has taken down its walls. And I just gave it a try.
So I went to Kickstarter for a day and one of their engineers showed me one of his projects that he posted to get out the message that smaller, not-serious projects can succeed.

The NYT article is good but not revolutionary, concluding that communities ought to be better at self-policing because implementing policies that limit free expression have more downsides than benefits. That's sound advice, I think, but I'm disheartened by the ruckus. I think communities like Reddit have proven they are all but totally unable to self-police, and their echo chamber can be dangerously misinformed. The article mentions the Boston bombers and I think it's a great example of communities totally losing their heads. 4Chan of course was never about self-policing. They are intensely proud of their anarchy and frankly, so am I, sort of.

I don't get it - two people or more complementing each other's knowledge and sharing information. How is that not a conversation? I'm not averse to controversy or differing opinions, but there are other ways to relate and contribute. Conversation is multifaceted.

John Gruber has a long piece up about this at http://daringfireball.net/2014/09/security_tradeoffs, and of course he rushes in to defend Apple, because that's what he usually does.

The single-worst piece I've seen regarding last week's iCloud celebrity photo leak is, by far, this one from David Auerbach at Slate. To see where Auerbach is coming from, let's skip ahead to his conclusion first:

But whether or not any of these problems were directly responsible for the leak, Apple users, from Jennifer Lawrence to corporate executives to laptop musicians to you, should be out for blood, and other companies should use this as a lesson to double- and triple-check their own security stories. Apple will probably survive though. IPhones [sic] are so cool and pretty.

The old "Apple customers are shallow fools drawn to shiny things, and easily swayed by popular opinion" angle.
Here's the problem with Auerbach's piece:

Whether or not this particular vulnerability was used to gather some of the photos - Apple is not commenting, as usual, but the ubiquity and popularity of Apple's products certainly point to the iCloud of being a likely source - its existence is reason enough for users to be deeply upset at their beloved company for not taking security seriously enough. Here are five reasons why you should not trust Apple with your nude photos or, really, with any of your data.

Don't trust Apple "with any of your data" isn't just wrong because it's a hyperbolic overreaction, it's wrong because it's potentially dangerous. What has been mostly overlooked in the reaction to this photo leak scandal, and completely lost in Auerbach's argument, is that backups are a form of security - in the same sense that life insurance is a form of security for your children and spouse.

Oh jeez, that link is NSFW!

I'm not sure if they're targeting obsessive people, or if they're simply unable to create a product that doesn't look so awkward and bulky.

Looks like they could use some assistance, but I'm not sure if it's a marketing person they need or just someone to knock them about the heads and convince them they're not qualified to enter a market as complicated and nuanced as women's fashion. Those models scare me off. The one grimacing almost makes it look like wearing the bracelet is painful or unpleasant, so that makes it a thing to avoid. The bracelet looks a bit ugly, too. This is a job for Apple or Samsung, working in close partnership with Chanel or Donna Karan [sp] or equivalent. They are way, way out of their comfort zone.

Then there's the functionality aspect - is this just functionally the equivalent of the smart watch, which is, itself, struggling? The article makes it clear we'll have to wait until October to find out what it even does!

Hmm - you're right. Since negatively modded things aren't shown at my threshold I didn't even see the post. Just modded it back up: informative.

Mod war - go!

Be glad this is the only problem we're faced with at the moment. Over at Soylent they've got one - or a couple of - jokers that are littering comment threads with obnoxious, "Fuck Soylent" posts reminicent of the "GNAA" - or whatever it was called - thing on Slashdot back in the day.

This is why we can't have nice things.

BTW, I usually find on online forums that the best discussions don't come necessarily out of disagreement but rather out of differing experiences. "I tried that thing, but I like this other one better because ..." or "that reminds me of something I read here" or "if you're interested in that thing you might also be interested in this other thing" and so on.

"Your opinion is wrong" gets boring very fast.

Wow, I wish I could mod this both informative and insightful. Alas, only one mod.

I still wonder if it's the Internet that has 'caused' this, if human nature and peoples' expectations for online interaction, or if this is simply the consequence of a new and younger generation. As for Pipedot, small and steady growth isn't a bad thing. But I highly doubt there's anything magical about Pipecode that prevents asshattery, same as any other site. Set up a perfectly reasonable subreddit and you run the risk of some schmuck taking it over and harrassing other users offline. Usenet newsgroup "protectors/guardians" are infamously boorish. And the list goes on ...

:) Apology accepted, my anonymous friend. I hear you loud and clear about the quality of this submission (although it was interesting to me). But I feel bad that on a site with so few submitted articles, the guy who finally takes the effort to submit something gets it rejected offhand. I won't publish any old thing, but in the short term, it seems like bad manners unless the article really is off topic. When we have the luxury of more submitted articles, the voting mechanism will determine what makes it to the front page and what doesn't. Unfortunately, that's not our problem.

For what it's worth, I see Soylent is having similar trouble, although there are usually well over ten things in their submission queue, while ours echoes in the darkness ...

Seriously ... we'll cross that hypothetical bridge if and when we ever come to it.

The pipe remains almost totally dry, and even the most cursory glance at the history (http://pipedot.org/pipe/history) shows most of the content here was written, edited, and posted by yours truly. So I aint takin no guff from no anonymously cowardish troll, thankyaverymuch. And if you dislike my editorial preferences, well we could use a couple more editors helping around here, now that you mention it.