elehack

I wish this perspective were more widespread.

Systemd takes the cool stuff that's been getting into Linux under the hood and makes actually usable to everyday users and administrators.

And it's far easier to write a systemd unit than a startup script for any other init system (except DJB's daemontools, perhaps).

The problem I have with this approach - keep everything compatible and portable - is that it holds back development and puts the effort in other parts of the stack to waste.

What is the point of awesome ‘new’ kernel features like cgroups if nothing in userspace really uses them? With systemd, I feel like my computer is actually taking advantage of being a modern Linux system, not just a warmed-over historical UNIX.

With Gnome using systemd, it can take advantage of those capabilities as as well.

If they do not depend on systemd, they have three options:

1. Don't have features that require its capabilities.

2. Have those features conditionally depending on whether systemd is present. This has at least 2 problems: inconsistent experience / feature set and maintenance of less-tested alternate code paths.

3. Implement fallbacks for systemd capabilities. This has more maintenance problems than (2), in addition to the redundant effort re-implementing (subsets of) features systemd provides.

I prefer to see the Gnome leverage systemd and build an excellent platform. With scarce resources, (2) and (3) are a significant drag on the project. 'Choice' is not only hard, it requires time/money, and that time/money comes at the expense of other things that would benefit from it.

I'm not a fan of the lab books — they don't lie flat enough for me — but I do like my gridded notebook (high-quality company swag notebook courtesy of ipHouse). When that notebook fills, I'm not sure what I'll use to replace it.

I also really like Zebra F-301 (and compatible) pens. Inexpensive enough to justify easily buying (and buying again when I lose them), good enough to be worth buying refills for. I keep at least a black one, and often blue, everywhere I am likely to need a pen (home desk, work desk, bag). And the F-301 Compact is often in my pocket when I don't have my bag with me.

The thing I found particularly fascinating about this one is the mining of public data, and the occasional slip, to come up with a defensible, if not plausible, estimate of Google's capacity.

A lot of stuff:

Asimov's Foundation (I only recommend the trilogy, though; Foundation's Edge is good but will make you want to read Foundation and Earth, which does severe damage to the universe. Haven't read the prequels.)

Asimov's short stories

Tolkien

Ben Hur

The Count of Monte Cristo (brilliant revenge story)

A lot of Brandon Sanderson's work (The Stormlight Archive is promising to be fascinating)

Too long a list of other stuff to put here.

They use the standard file open dialog, which in turn supports shell extensions.

Is there a way to receive news updates w/o registering or subscribing via e-mail? I don't see a Twitter feed, or even an RSS feed for the blog.

In the Minneapolis/St. Paul area, there is. There are a lot of Share the Road signs, window stickers, etc., as well as other things that are either intended to raise visibility or have the effect of doing so (e.g. the bright green NiceRide bicycles everywhere). The City of Minneapolis and the Met Council (metropolis-area inter-city council) are heavily invested in biking, and there are additional movements such as Bike Walk Twin Cities which engage in regular outreach, visibility, and education activities.

In general, the Twin Cities are doing an excellent job of addressing bikeability from many angles.

There is one thing that anyone can do to help fix this situation.

Bicycle.

1, increased numbers of cyclists aid awareness among drivers and others. 2, increased demand helps justify building bike lanes, etc.

Yeah, it's a vicious/virtuous circle situation. It's tough until things improve.

But accusing those working on the cycling side of folly only makes it worse.

Does anyone know how feasible it is to use a Firefox OS phone with no data plan? Using GSM for voice calls and SMS, but forcing it to only do data over wifi?

There is also the excellent Diceware: http://world.std.com/~reinhold/diceware.html

Cool concept, but name collision: Sieve has been the name of a server-side mail filtering language for quite some time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sieve_%28mail_filtering_langua...

Yeah, Java's enums are very powerful and useful.

But in the context of a C-style language, I can understand the "what? these are enums. why do they have methods? and subclassing?"

It might be good if they had a different name.

Mildly unrelated, but when I think of the opposite ("imaginative" enums), the first thing that comes to mind is this amusing vignette on the design process of Java's enums: http://blog.des.no/2009/01/no-silly-its-enum/

There's the civil vs. criminal issue, as others have already pointed out.

Also, in the order leading to the Prenda attorneys pleading the 5th, the judge basically said "I have drawn these inferences. Tell me why I'm wrong.", and they declined to do so (pleading the 5th). According to Popehat's coverage, that seems to leave him pretty free to stick with the initial inferences.

IANAL and all that.

Yes, strictly speaking, Turing completeness implies a certain formal equivalence between the two programming languages.

But does this does not an equivalence between systems make, for at least two reasons:

1. Different languages encourage, and make easy, different modes of thought. Lisp promots a certain view of building hte world out of recursive, replaceable pieces.

2. Different systems provide different levels of access to their internals. The vast majority of Emacs is written in Lisp, and can therefore be hooked and rewritten. Its C code is an Emacs interpreter and text editing/rendering engine. Vim provides a great deal of scripting capability and many hooks, but that's still hooks on a system rather than a system that can be freely rewritten on the fly. It feels very different, and can allow different things if Vim is missing the hook you need.

It doesn't speak well that the first item of their FAQ is patently false.

> Q. What is Mozilla doing that is causing concern?

> A. On February 25, 2013, Mozilla announced intentions to block all third-party cookies by default in upcoming releases of its Firefox browser. Only first-party cookies would be allowed.

No, they are not blocking all third-party cookies by default. They are blocking all third-party cookies from non-visited sites. google.com can track, doubleclick.net likely can't.

There is an interesting discussion to be had about tracking, cookie policy, defaults, etc., but making false representations about what is actually being proposed is not a good way to have that discussion.

Modern Yum does track explicit vs. dependency installs, though this is not very visible in the UI. There are ways to query the Yum database for it, though.

Yum also has an option (disabled by default) to remove unneeded auto-installed dependencies when removing packages (set clean_requirements_on_remove=yes in /etc/yum.conf)[1]. This option does not remove manually-installed packages (though the docs are not clear on this point, unfortunately).

1. http://unix.stackexchange.com/a/56056

This EFF article on the state of DMCA and cell phone unlocking does not mention any case law validating the idea that unlocking is actually a violation: https://www.eff.org/is-it-illegal-to-unlock-a-phone

It does cite case law that points in the direction that the DMCA is only triggered when the lock protects a creative work, which cell phone access may not be. Considering how carefully the EFF tracks these things, if there was case law supporting the carriers' (and possibly executive branch's) position, they would mention it.

The carriers claim it is illegal, and there is no longer a DMCA exemption stating that it is not a violation of the DMCA.

That does not make it illegal to unlock a phone. Is there any case law supporting the notion that unlocking a phone actually is a DMCA violation, or just the carriers claiming that it is (possibly in settled lawsuits)?

Logging in to services like Disqus, for one thing.

Is the first group SEOs, or information architects? Good information navigation design will consider searchability and, more importantly, human accessibility (a large part of which will be searchability, but search serves the primary need of people to find information efficiently).

Reason #1: it runs on my platform.

Reason #2: open source, so lock-in is (in theory) a non-problem so long as there are people who find it useful.

> Well, I'd be careful with that. The open source project I contribute to (KDE) has quite a bit of GPL'ed code, but it also has quite a bit of other licenses in use, so it is certainly possible to have arbitrary licenses that make up a given single derivative work.

Yes, so long as those other license are GPL-compatible. 3-clause BSD, MIT, ISC, etc. are all GPL-compatible. The license that Envato is allowing or using for the non-PHP theme assets is not, so the question does become one of whether the theme assets are a derivative work.

It doesn't seem that WordPress wants to make an exception. That is, the license without exceptions is functioning exactly as they intend, and they think ThemeForest is doing something wrong, not should-be-right-but-is-technically-wrong.

nit: firewalld does not replace iptables, it replaces system-config-firewall, a GUI, TUI, and startup script generator around iptables.

iptables is still the underlying tech, we now just have a much better way to manage it.

One thing: Gnome 3.6 is moving farther towards making use of the application menu. Good in general - it was stupid in 3.0 - but it plays very poorly with focus-follows-mouse.

Arch? Don't know if they support SELinux, but they use SystemD and are rolling-release.

For me, the 6-month release cycle is a major reason why I am using Fedora rather than Arch. With a rolling release, I am constantly distracted by monitoring what is new; 6-month releases allow me to batch my curiosity into 1-2 days of heightened but less prolonged distraction.

I've successfully installed the last two Fedora versions by DD'ing the ISO to a USB stick.

Pre-F18, it was worthless to do this for anything but the net install image, as Anaconda wouldn't locate packages on the USB stick. I don't know if the F18 Anaconda fixed this or not, as I used the net install image.

With the exception of reShaper, YouTrack, and the Obj-C environment, I think that's called IntelliJ…