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Comment Re:netcraft confirms it (Score 0) 26

> You get modded troll for running OpenBSD on a 20 year old Laptop ??? Very odd.

Part of the reason I rarely participate at Slashdot and moved over to SoylentNews; since sometime in the first Bush administration, I've been automatically downvoted by the system for whatever reason.

I guess I pissed off the wrong person with my username.

But to your point: OpenBSD is still great on these older systems, and probably the easiest OS to maintain. I guess technically, I could use a minimalist Linux distribution or Slackware and get the same performance, but it wouldn't be nearly as simple to maintain security patches.

Comment Re:netcraft confirms it (Score 3, Informative) 26

Yeah, I had a laptop in storage since 2 years or so, an old i386 T43p. I pulled it out, ran sysupgrade a few times, and everything works without a problem.

sysupgrade, followed by a pkg_add -Uu, brought the software stack to a reasonable place. Incredibly simple.

Any performance problems come from the fact that it's almost a 20 year old machine at this point. The backlight will die in the LCD panel before I have to worry about the install corrupting.

Comment Re:In related news (Score 0) 128

by Moderator (#60151030) Attached to: How Apple Decides Which Products Are 'Vintage' and 'Obsolete'
I've seen a late 70's F-100 at the service department of the Ford dealership recently. It wasn't turned away because the degree of simplicity lends itself towards being easy to repair.

But, regarding parts, this is similar to how O2 sensors for the 1996 Bronco weren't available for purchase in 2005. Not even a decade later.

Comment Re:Alright smart guy (Score 0) 504

by Moderator (#47961567) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Is iOS 8 a Pig?
Yes, I did purchase the Galaxy Nexus with the Nexus 4 on the horizon. If you remember back to late 2012, the Nexus 4 looked like it would be a downgrade in terms of build quality and an initial lack of LTE. But the fact remains that I purchased a Nexus product new, directly from Google, and it was abandoned less than a year later.

Comment Re:Begun they have... (Score 0) 234

by Moderator (#46179287) Attached to: The Standards Wars and the Sausage Factory

I'm the kind of guy they want. I post AC and don't have a profile, but I do click on ads. I have bought stuff through those click throughs. I support Slashdot by supporting their advertisers because I value the resource Slashdot provides me. Frankly I'm not a fan of the beta, but I think Slashdot's look is dated and clunky, so something new is at least welcome.

If you're the kind of guy they want, that's a shame, because I've been on this site for over half of my life (this is my second username), and I have a fucking STAR beside my name that means that I give MONEY to this site. And I am ready to move on to backslash or whatever the new site ends up being called if Dice Beta becomes the standard layout.

Submission + - Smartphone sales: Apple squeezed, Blackberry squashed, Android 81.3%

Submitted by mrspoonsi
mrspoonsi writes: Engadget reports: Smartphone market share for the third quarter...as you'd imagine, the world is still Android's oyster. Strategy Analytics estimates that the OS has crossed the symbolic 80 percent mark, reaching 81.3 percent of smartphone shipments by the end of September. Not that Google was the only company doing well — Nokia's strong US sales helped Windows Phone grow to 4.1 percent of the market, or nearly double what it had a year ago.

Submission + - How Kentucky Built The Country's Best Obamacare Website

Submitted by Hugh Pickens DOT Com
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: Dylan Scott writes at TPM that Kentucky, with its deeply conservative congressional delegation, might seem like an unlikely place for Obamacare to find success but the state's online health insurance web sites has become one of the best marketplaces since its launch and shown that the marketplace concept can work in practice. Kentucky routinely ranks toward the bottom in overall health, and better health coverage is one step toward reversing that norm. Whatever the federal website seems to have failed to do to ensure its success on the Oct. 1 launch, Kentucky did. It started with the commitment to build the state's own website rather than default to the federal version. On July 17, 2012, a few weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the Affordable Care Act, Democratic Gov. Steve Beshear created the exchange via executive order, over the objections of a Republican-controlled state legislature, which sought other means — including an effort to prevent the exchange from finding office space — to block the site's creation. The recipe for success in Kentucky was: A pared-down website engineered to perform the basic functions well and a concerted effort to test it as frequently as possible to work out glitches before the Oct. 1 launch. Testing was undertaken throughout every step of the process, says Carrie Banahan, kynect's executive director, and it was crucial because it allowed state officials to identify problems early in the process. She laid out the timeline like this: From January 2013 to March, they developed the system; from April to June, they built it; from July to September, they tested it. From a design standpoint, Kentucky made the conscious choice to stick to the basics, rather than seeking to blow users away with a state-of-the-art consumer interface. It “doesn’t have all the bells and whistles that other states tried to incorporate,” like interactive features, says Jennifer Tolbert. “It’s very straightforward in allowing consumers to browse plans without first creating an account.” A big part of that was knowing their demographics: A simpler site would make it easer to access for people without broadband Internet access, and the content was written at a sixth-grade reading level so it would be as easy to understand as possible. "What we've found in Kentucky when we started talking with people was that there was a huge amount of misinformation and misunderstanding. People were very confused," says Beshear . "What I've been telling them is: Look, you don't have to like the president, and you don't have to like me. It's not about the president and it's not about me. It's about you, it's about your family, it's about your children."

Submission + - Open Office/Libreoffice lose over 50% of their marketshare in organizations (neowin.net)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: LibreOffice and OpenOffice remain very popular for users of Linux with many using it on Macs and Windows based PCs as well at home. Organizations are still as addicted as as ever with MS office formats. In 2011 13% of organizations had OpenOffice variants installed on some computers. Today that number has dipped to 5% according to Forrester Research. It is unknown if organizations are leaving due to angry users who do not like change or because of office compatibility issues or MS offering better pricing? The poll included is over 100% as many organizations have multiple versions of offices installed. Also surprising Office 2003 is alive kicking and screaming as almost 1/3 of companies and governments still use it even though EOL for Office 2003 ends with XP on the same date! The good news is online cloud based platforms are gaining traction with Google Docs and Office 365 which are not so tied to Windows on the client. Are we too focused on old school PC install based office suites or should more effort be taken to online and cloud based replacements?

Submission + - Linux RNG may be insecure after all (iacr.org)

Submitted by Okian Warrior
Okian Warrior writes: As a followup to Linus's opinion of people skeptical of the linux random number generator, a new paper analyzes the robustness of /dev/urandom and /dev/urandom.

From the paper: "From a practical side, we also give a precise assessment of the security of the two Linux PRNGs, /dev/random and /dev/urandom. In particular, we show several attacks proving that these PRNGs are not robust according to our definition, and do not accumulate entropy properly. These attacks are due to the vulnerabilities of the entropy estimator and the internal mixing function of the Linux PRNGs. These attacks against the Linux PRNG show that it does not satisfy the "robustness" notion of security, but it remains unclear if these attacks lead to actual exploitable vulnerabilities in practice."

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