Posts by mykingdomforanos

Must 'completely free' mean 'hard to install'? Newbie gripe sparks some soul-searching among Debian community

Re: Free means somebody is not getting paid

Yeah, my bad, please ignore my intemperate outburst above. I took your irony literally (as I came to suspect after a subsequent reading of your post). I saw "property", "chattel", "slave", etc and assumed this was a version of ye olde IP maximalist critique of free software authors and users.

I don't know what to say about the situation with your student. It's certainly unfortunate and I wouldn't blame you for feeling rather aggrieved. My support and advocacy for free software notwithstanding, given the situation you describe I think most would understand if you felt it was not your responsibility to continue helping those struggling to understand your ex-student's now abandoned code.

Re: Free means somebody is not getting paid

I acknowledge that the post may well have been a missile full of sarcasm that rocketed straight over my head.

Re: Two ways of looking at things.

While I'm not defending unnecessarily counter-intuitive and arcane configuration requirements, nevertheless, regarding software as merely a tool is comparable to regarding citizenship as merely a way to earn a living. It's not as simple as that.

Our software choices have ramifications. Always favouring convenience and neglecting licensing stipulations have often been shortcuts to vendor lock-in and dependency, to lack of transparency, to increased difficulty or even inability to effectively security audit your tools, to loss of ability to make multiple copies of programs, etc. etc. Such things may not be at the top of your priority list, but they are important to others, and it's those people for whom distros such as Debian are tailored. For those for whom such things are irrelevant, there's a long queue of proprietary vendors just waiting to take your money. You have choice :-)

Debian is one of the most deployed server operating systems on the planet. It seems rather odd to criticise the project for not understanding what it is their users want and need. Their desktop offering might offer a few more challenges to the uninitiated (particularly laptop users) than than their server edition, but it's become one of the most successful Linux distros of all time, so I think we should cut them some slack (no pun).

Re: I love the way developers...

No one's shoving anything down your throat. You seem to have missed the whole point of the distro ecosystem, *choice*. If you want to become the meal ticket for commercial software vendors, knock yourself out, but you don't have the right to insist that others do the same. Complaining about the approach Debian takes is like standing outside the HQ of a political party, complaining about their beliefs and manifesto. Walk on. You don't have to join and no one is forcing you to. There are plenty of other political parties for you to join. Can't find one you agree with? Then start your own. No one's stopping you.

"Putting any other so called "Principles" above that seems a very base form of hypocrisy to me."

One is not a hypocrite for failing to behave in a way that supports *your* views about the purpose of software, hypocrisy is claiming to believe in one thing while behaving in a way incompatible with that belief. So there's no hypocrisy here. Just scores of different Linux distros, each catering to different needs, priorities and preferences. AKA *choice*. If you don't like a particular distro, no one's forcing you to use it. I really cannot fathom what it is you're objecting to here.

Re: Free means somebody is not getting paid

Good grief, did you get Sydney Powell to write that bit of hyperbolic, libertarian propaganda? Back to the Houston patent troll firm from whence you no doubt came!

In fact, most free software and open source programmers would rather collaborate to create their own tools than give a penny to the likes of someone with your sense of commercial entitlement.

Learning Linux the Hard(-ish) Way

I completely understand the frustration the user in question experienced, and have often marvelled at how Debian, in years past anyway, made even choosing a flavour of the distro a puzzling and (for me) non-intuitive process. Nevertheless, I think the complainant has gone to the wrong distro for someone new to the Linux desktop.

There are much more beginner friendly distros out there. Some obvious candidates are Mint, Ubuntu, and whatever else is in favour these days. Debian's raison d'etre has always been that the OS and its ecosystem remain free as in speech/licensing/freedom. That philosophy guarantees that there are going to be some compromises and even occasional pain, even with the availability of "non-free" packages.

IMO, Debian is better suited to the experienced and the more philosophically motivated user rather than to someone just moving over from the proprietary world. Debian attracts developers and community members who tend to have software freedom as their overriding priority, whereas there are other distros where the user experience and convenience are given greater emphasis. The whole point of having different distros is that they can be tailored for different audiences with different priorities, needs and levels of expertise. That's not to excuse unnecessarily complex or unintuitive processes, but going to a distro that announces up front that it doesn't want to trade freedom for convenience is probably not the best place to start if you're just moving over from Windows.

Dutch Gateway store was kept udder wraps for centuries until refit dug up computing history

Re: Relegated to the attic...

The above comment has been approved by Trigger's broom.

Sky customer dinged for livestreaming pay-per-view boxing to Facebook

"Industrial scale" crime

It's a disturbing notion, that a guy drinking beer in the evening with his mates in his living room has the ability to commit a criminal offence on an "industrial scale", simply by holding his hand in the air and pointing an ipad at the telly.

A link in the article above leads to another of the author's pieces regarding the relevant legislation, in which the following is written:

'"This is not about private prosecutions, but serious criminal offences” a source familiar with the plans told us. “Nobody’s going to go after a teenager in their bedroom, unless that teenager is operating a serious scale pirate site. Just as with physical goods, nobody goes after the small fry.”

Wording in the new recommendation will make clear that it only applies to “egregious” operations involving infringement at scale. The government said as much in its recommendation that the new maximum is for hard-core operators only.'

But in the article above, we are told:

"Foster is likely to lose even more money should he proceed to contest the case; the Digital Economy Act introduced custodial sentences for "egregious" or industrial-scale piracy, such as movie release groups."

Is the semicolon there to warn us that what follows is a non sequitur? Based on the piece above it seems highly unlikely that Foster is a "hard-core operator" and there's no indication that his behaviour was anything other than one-off, so pointing out the penalties for dedicated criminals seems redundant here.

In fact, the above piece seems to suggest that the filming was done by one of Foster's friends. So perhaps Foster may indeed be able to mount a successful defence in court.

How fast is a piece of string? Boffin shoots ADSL signal down twine

Re: I may have unbelievable news, but salt water is actually a very good conductor

I'll venture to say, Danny 5, that the key thing here is not to take this too seriously lest the joke be ruined :-)

The secret's out

I live round the corner from a Kelly engineer and I'd always assumed the bags of salt you can see in his garage were for his water softener or for clearing the ice off his driveway...

Investigatory Powers Act: You're not being paranoid. UK.gov really is watching you

Re: People's behaviour

I'm unclear Adam 52, are you claiming that because people sometimes want/need help from the police and other emergency services that they therefore should have to tolerate and even be grateful for all and any forms of surveillance and monitoring? If that is what you are claiming, then I'm afraid you are clearly part of the problem IMO, however much good work you do in other respects.

I'm very sorry to hear about your colleague. Was he by any chance the chap who appeared in faux documentaries in which the sensitive and discretion-demanding matter of policing the general public was turned into a voyeuristic form of prime time entertainment and given confrontational, sensationalist and Peelian principles-busting titles like "Road Wars"?

A very Canadian approach: How net neutrality rules reflect a country's true nature

Shurely shome mishtake?

Using Canadians as peacekeepers? Are you serious? When they behave like this?

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/08/world/what-in-the-world/canada-denmark-hans-island-whisky-schnapps.html?_r=0

Farewell Unity, you challenged desktop Linux. Oh well, here's Ubuntu 17.04

Re: Lost: One brown and orange mojo

Ramazan wrote:

"What's wrong with Debian in your opinion?"

Nothing at all, in my opinion. I currently have Debian running on three servers, two on the public Internet, and one acting as a file server on my internal network. If you understood the origins and history of Ubuntu, you'd understand my use of 'irony of ironies'. Hint: I wasn't disrespecting Debian.

"I do search queries from Firefox browser where I set up Bing as the default search engine... Do you say that in Ubuntu people run queries from Ubuntu UI/desktop/taskbar/elsewhere? And search engine choice isn't configurable?"

Look, no offence, but I think you need to do a bit of research into the issue at hand, gain some understanding, before attempting to debate the matter.

Lost: One brown and orange mojo

I still can't quite get over the speed of Ubuntu's fall from grace. One moment the distro was the darling of all things Linux desktop and could do little wrong, the next it was being derided in many circles, with users signalling their displeasure in the harshest way possible, by jumping ship to the likes of Mint, Fedora, Arch and (irony of ironies) Debian.

The distro had become the dominant Linux desktop by some distance when Unity was released. It was a stunning change, fresh and innovative in many ways, but for many brought too many unhelpful and unwanted changes. It came with a new focus on convergence with mobile and an overbearing attitude, both of which clearly rubbed many users up the wrong way. For example, the position of the in-your-face launcher bar couldn't be changed (it was a Linux desktop FFS, not Apple), settings in dialog boxes became so simplified that some became downright unusable (IIRC the available screen lock periods jumped from "After 10 minutes of inactivity" to "After 30"). There were many other small, but often irritating changes that all added up to a frustrating experience and often caused one to attempt to route around the dumbed-down UI completely by going directly to config files, something that rather undermined the very case for having a graphical desktop.

Mark Shuttleworth got exasperated on his blog and rounded on the Unity critics, telling them that the project's research had demonstrated that their designers were right and that the critics were wrong. Informing upset users that their preferences and feelings are objectively incorrect, and that they should just get over their issues, is always a high risk strategy. Predictably, for many users that strategy went down about as well as a fart in a spacesuit and from that point on you could hear the sound of the feet of the disillusioned, exiting the auditorium.

Then came the fiasco with sending search queries to Amazon. Privacy has always been a first class, non-negotiable concern for, well, pretty much every Linux desktop user I'd ever met. At this stage I concluded that those overseeing the development of Ubuntu had rather lost the plot. The "but you can disable it in the UI" arguments failed to wash; a cardinal rule had been broken, a red line crossed. This particular development made me realise, if I hadn't before, that Ubuntu's developers had broken with traditional Linux culture and were off down a path of their own. I wished them luck, remained excited and intrigued with many of the project's goals, but wasn't prepared to compromise my desktop to stay on board.

Flaws found in Linksys routers that could be used to create a botnet

Re: Rule #1 for a more stress-free life:

Captain DaFt wrote:

"Avoid every product, and I mean every product, with "smart" in its name!"

Heh, indeed, it's the new "Internet Enabled". Or perhaps the new "Now with Ruby support".

Your router and firewall is no place for 'consumer-oriented' firmware

Like others have done above, I installed first OpenWrt and then LEDE (an active and up-to-date fork of the former) on my Linksys WRT1900ACS. Despite the often repeated warnings about the potential for bricking the router, the installation was straightforward and went smoothly. With around 4800 available packages and coupled with a Vigor 130 modem (and AAISP!), it's proving to be a reliable, flexible and hopefully secure setup for our VDSL line. It took me a while to adjust to the pared down functionality of BusyBox, but now I wouldn't return to proprietary, consumer-oriented firmware if you paid me.

Stallman's Free Software Foundation says we need a free phone OS

You can prise my general purpose computer from my cold, dead hands

As much as RMS's purist nagging can sometimes become irritating, deity save us from a world in which computing devices are reduced to being little more than proprietary viewports onto the catalogues of the entertainment and content industries. His dogmatism often provides a necessary antidote and counterbalance to those who care *only* about "games, music and videos".

There are other reasons we should cut him some slack too. After all, he did have major hand in creating the world's second-best text editor...

Privacy is theft! Dave Eggers' big-screen takedown of Google and Facebook emerges

Discombobulating grindstones

I've attended a couple of Larry Lessig's talks here in the UK, I've listened to his presentations and panel contributions on YouTube and elsewhere and I've read multiple articles by him. I've never heard or read anything that makes me believe he wants to end individual privacy, that he believes our personal lives and experiences somehow rightfully belong on the servers of big tech.

Perhaps the noise of the axe the author is perennially attempting to grind has caused him to confuse Larry Lessig's views with those of Jeff Jarvis?