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Comment Re:im sure its a riveting discussion (Score 1) 349

editorial authority: guise linux its...its just not ready for the desktop. its got graphics driver issues...
community: the ones preventing nearly 200 steam games from running on it?

Yes, those. The open source drivers perform badly, and don't have fixes/workarounds for broken games. The proprietary drivers do, but often break against kernel and userland software versions. Neither is particularly pleasant with weird display setups (niche resolutions or refresh rates.)

That's ignoring that driver support often lags, there's tons of hardware out there that's either not supported yet, not supported well, or never will be supported.

editorial authority nonono guys its worse than that see theres audio problems too, the audio has problems
community: you mean with the countless instructibles articles on home theater via the pi?

If you need to resort to "instructibles" [sic], you've already lost. Locked audio devices, 30 layers of abstraction with their own quirks (and latency, lol latency), and on and on.

editorial authority: guys i wish it were that simple but you see X has the issues too, its wayland isnt ready.
community: you...you know those two things are completely different right? xorgs been stable for a decade....

I should never have to run xrandr myself. Or add a modeline. X can't even manage a locking screensaver.

editorial authority: the font is ugly.
community:...pick...another one?

That's hardly the only problem. High DPI displays look like shit, default rendering settings (often) look like shit, and there's the mayhem of trying to get Qt, GTK, and misc window toolkit apps using the same widgets, fonts, font sizes, etc. Some distros do an *okay* job of that, but none comes anywhere close to OSX or Windows. There's a long way to go.

editorial authority: its fragmented...the desktops....theyre all fragmented.
community:....what?

No, I suspect the community is pretty aware of this one. It comes up on Slashdot literally all the time. For example I could theoretically save a file to a remote site over SSH in Konqueror by saving it to a fish:// url. For Firefox (if this is even possible) I guess it would be smb:// because kioslaves and gnome-vfs are completely separate and incompatible. Or the completely different print/open dialogs between Qt apps and GTK ones. Or how I need basically two full desktop environments at all times, because neither ecosystem has a monopoly on good apps.

editorial authority: and i heard linux torval yelling at people too.

Hey, you're right: nobody cares.

Every one of these points is addressed (with links to bugs and sources) in TFA.

Comment Re:Stupid (Score 1) 396

This is a dumb idea. A very dumb idea.

Since we're assuming MITM, what happens when I inject javascript into the page? Even assuming the browser prevents me from leaking the PROT header, I can still have it make arbitrary requests using your session.

What happens when I just block the original response, pretend your session died, and serve up a bogus login page that gives me your credentials?

Comment Re:Stuck between a rock and noplace (Score 4, Informative) 68

The paper explains it.

It is to support old servers (ancient Cisco gear comes to mind) that can't properly negotiate newer TLS versions. Unfortunately those failed negotations don't fail, er, gracefully -- it just kills the connection. Browsers (Chrome, Firefox, probably others) retry using SSLv3. Why? There's a lot of old gear out there.

Comment Er, what? (Score 5, Insightful) 191

though it might be as simple as including a Micro-USB-to-Type-C adapter with every new smartphone

This is genius.

"This new connector, whose only value is that it's reversible, doesn't work on the billions of existing devices. Why don't we include a non-reversible adapter?"

Hell, for extra convenience, just leave the adapter on the cable all the time.

Comment Re:Job Hopping (Score 2) 282

You're externalizing blame.

If you have a problem with 'hoppers' have you looked into why you're failing to retain people?

Small companies are especially bad for that: fewer employees means fewer paths for personal/professional advancement: there's nowhere 'up' to move, and wearing a half-dozen hats might seem like variety at first, but you'll be wearing those same hats forever. It's too bad that they have less room to take the hits from people leaving and new people coming up to speed, but it's also unreasonable to expect people to stick around past the point they gain anything from the exchange. People *should* be moving on when they feel they're stagnating.

Comment Re:so how fast is fast..? (Score 1) 117

I have an x230 that I put a Corsair SSD in. It's running Ubuntu 13.10, so I guess it's running a 3.11.something kernel. On resume I can see the kernel block for 10+s (by the timestamps in dmesg) waiting for my SSD to get its act together. Screen is on, lockscreen is displayed ... but I can't enter a password because the entire system is waiting on the disk.

It sounds like I will benefit from this.

Comment Re:Killing two birds with one stone? (Score 1) 408

Wrong. Whole Foods accepts bitcoin.

No Whole Foods here.

Less than 50 listed for all of North America, that's hardly a counter-argument.

Overstock.com, Amazon, CVS, Target, Victoria's Secret, Zappos, the list keeps growing.

Of course most of these stores actually use a payment processor that immediately converts the bitcoins to USD for them, but if more and more stores start accepting it, at some point the currency may become so practical that such conversions will no longer need to be made. If a company does business with another company that accepts bitcoin, they may as well take bitcoin from their clients and then use those bitcoins to pay their suppliers. Transaction fees are much lower than those for credit cards, you don't even need any middle men.

Yeah, and if enough people start trying to pay in tulip bulbs, and if they reeeeally believe...

I couldn't believe Victoria's Secret takes bitcoin, and sure enough they don't. They take gift cards.... that can be purchased with bitcoin. Which is exactly what the parent was arguing, "I can exchange BTC for my local currency and then go about my business, but that's about it."

Comment Even if Apple doesn't connect the dots, so what? (Score 1) 214

Things get more interesting with the second category: "non-personal" information, which is any user data that isn't associated with a specific individual. We're talking about details like customers' jobs, real-time location, habits, and the like. That data, the company says, is collected anonymously. Apple has free reign to share, sell, or store it however it damn pleases.

Just because Apple hasn't explicitly tied a name to the information doesn't mean it's anonymous. Even a fragment of the location data is enough to identify most people.

The point is no longer "What $COMPANY does with the data it collects", though that might be unsettling on its own, it's what the NSA (or any other data aggregator) can do with it.

Comment Re:Illusion of privacy (Score 1) 224

You're looking in the wrong place.

The public-key algorithms are only used to auth servers/clients and during the negotiation of a session key for a symmetric algorithm. Thanks to the BEAST and CRIME attacks, and the dismal uptake of TLS 1.2, once you rule out the block ciphers in CBC mode the most secure symmetric cipher that clients/servers can be expected to support is RC4, which now accounts for some huge percentage of HTTPS traffic.

Nobody is suggesting that RSA is broken, but there is speculation that the NSA has broken RC4.

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