jmomo's comments

It should be noted that MIUI is also a rampant GPL violator. They have taken a lot of open source stuff under the GPL, among other licenses, and closed it off or even claimed as their own. This probably isn't shocking given the article.

http://www.thepowerbase.com/2012/11/android-community-demand...

I would strongly recommend tmux over screen to anyone, if it is available on your platform.

Screen's development is basically dead. Tmux is under active development, and the developers are responsive and intelligent.

Tmux is sudo safe, where screen is not.

Tmux lacks screen's ability to connect to serial devices, which is used by some sysadmins and router monkeys like myself, but that's okay.

Tmux also sucks for tee-ing it's output to a log file, which screen does nicely, but this will probably be fixed some day.

/opt is basically for 3rd parties to install software, because they can't be trusted to behave and integrate with the regular filesystem. The last thing you want is Oracle farking around with anything under /usr or /var, because they will fuck up your entire OS for their benefit alone. That is why /opt exists, in my understanding.

/srv is a bit questionable to me. Basically it's another /var. I always used directories like /var/local and /var/share (sambd and nfs shares). However, I am understanding the FHS crew wants to freeze the /var filesystem because it was getting too crazy with all kinds of stuff being placed under /var, and the likelihood of conflicts was getting high.

I have an Ecobee thermostat in my condo, which I am currently in the process of selling. Young people are usually pretty excited about seeing it in action, but older people are actually turned off. My guess is they see it as another complicated VCR that they can't program, and so, it's actually a negative.

Even the Nest, with it's simple dial would probably scare them, because smart things scare stupid people.

When I tell them that it's an Internet enabled thermostat, they must immediately think, "OMG CHINA HAXORS GUNNA STEAL MY THERMOSTAT MHZ" because that's what the scare-monger media has been telling them over the last six months.

I am still toting around a Nexus One, and finally going to get a new phone. I've been looking at both the HTC One and the Samsung S4.

The S4 has the huge advantages of having an SDcard slot (up to 64GB) and a replaceable battery. The HTC One has neither. I wonder how much of the internal flash on the HTC One is available.

The argument of the 16GB model not having a lot of internal flash space is pretty weak when you can get a 32GB SDcard for $20 (or less).

The HCT One does feel kind of nice with its weight and aluminum body, but I'm not sure it would do any better than the S4 in a drop test.

Speaking of drop tests, I've replaced the digitize on my Nexus One twice now, because I like to drop it. The S4 is difficult to replace the front glass, but it is not impossible. I do not know how the HTC One fairs in repairability.

On the CPU side, the S4 is faster, but they are the same CPU in both units as far as I know.

The HTC has a better screen color profile, and the camera does much better low-light/night shots. I have heard the the S4 camera does not do well in low-light conditions, which is really shameful.

HTC has a deal going on right now where they will give you a $100 debit card rebate. That could turn the tide in their direction if you are buying on price alone.

The top concern I have, though, is modability and community support, since I know that neither HTC nor Samsung will support that device once they have my money. I will immediately root it and install something like Cyanogen.

Both phones will likely have pretty good support from the Cyanogenmod project, but I am going to wait until the end of May and then go see what the community says. Whichever hardware has better support in the Cyanogen community will be the one I buy.

That's a lot of address books to steal.

As a former employee of EA (Tiburon) during the EA spouse days, I feel entitled to say it's okay to hate EA.

I worked in the video game industry for about six years. I worked for both major publishers and some startup MMOs. Specifically, I was doing online infrastructure kind of stuff.

The gaming industry wasn't something I was actively trying to get into, and I had worked in telecommunications and manufacturing prior to this. When the big telecom I was working on started losing customers back in 2001, I knew what was about to happen and wisely jumped ship. I just happened to land with a company in Denver Colorado who was producing an MMO game as a startup, and they had no clue about how to actually get their product on the internet, or where/how to buy or manage server infrastructure.

I worked for a major publisher who was booming at the time, making tons of money. I also worked for a number of startups who went ended up going chapter 7, chapter 11, and one got sold out to an Asian firm who immediately told everyone to move to South Korea or get laid off.

When I left the gaming industry, the following things immediately happened:

I made 20% more money, instantly. The gaming industry pays lower than average wages in most cases, across the board. This is a supply and demand problem: there is a huge supply of goobers who want to make video games for a living, and a limited number of employers willing to pay them to do it.

I worked 20-40% less hours. Just about in every department in every company I worked for, people kept sleeping bags under their desks, had no lives outside of work, were present on weekends, and put in 50-80 hour work weeks. I once literally lived and slept in my office for two weeks, except when I went home to shower and check on things for an hour or two per week. That is what pushed me over the edge and when I finally quit.

My psychological health improved. I was happier, less stressed out, and stopped getting angry over little things. When I think back about it, the gaming industry basically gave me PTSD.

My physical health improved. I started putting on muscle weight, I was less tired, and a number of persistent physical issues went away. For example, I had a bad habit of biting my tongue, possibly out of nervousness, which magically went away immediately.

I started working with more talented, competent, people. I didn't realize just how unprofessional and disorganized some of the people I was working with were until I had another reference point again. As I shifted from being a server monkey to programmer, I realized that most of the developer guys had never worked in another industry before, were high-school and college drop-outs, and most of their code was crap. I saw from the inside a huge multi-mullion dollar Atari-funded game studio go down in flames because the developers didn't know that you can't use disk drives as a CPU: they built almost all of their MMO item inventory logic into SQL triggers and events. Let's not even talk about sexism and anti-social behavior.

Employment stability went way up. The gaming industry is very unstable, and companies crash and burn all the time. There is a constant flow of new startups who fail every year without ever having shipped/published a product.

Unsurprisingly, most people don't want to hear this negativity about the industry.

The people who I know still work in the industry don't argue that I'm wrong, but instead argue that it's the price you pay for doing what you want (note: most of these people seem pretty miserable to me). It's not a subject that I will often bring up, less I get a hostile reaction. After all, most of these people are emotionally bought in to the idea that they are the next John Carmack.

The kids who want to get into the gaming industry just ignore me or discount what I have to say. What else are they going to do? They can't even imagine getting a job in some boring industry like finance, government, manufacturing, health care, retail, or any of that nonsense.

And that brings us to the gaming schools. Like I said before, it's a supply and demand thing. There is a huge supply of kids who want to make video games, and not enough employers for them all. It's kind of like little boys who want to grow up and be astronauts, and little girls who want to me marine biologists. The numbers say it ain't gunna happen for most of them.

There is indeed money to be made in the gaming industry, but it's not in working inside of it. It's in selling the dream that all these dumb kids have, thinking they can grow up and make video games for a living.

I don't really have much good to say about working in the gaming industry. I met some cool people there, but as a whole, it's just an immature bunch of kids who have not grown up and gotten real jobs yet.

I have been blocking 3rd party cookies for years.

The only site that has ever had a problem was my local power company (aps.com). However, it was easy to get around because even though their site warned that 3rd party cookies were required, you could just click around it to pay your electrical bill.

I've never had a problem on any other sites that I use in at least five years, though I suspect it's been more than that.

I came for the horror comments about experts-exchange.com and was not disappointed. At least two of you have mentioned it!

I worked in the game industry between 2000 and 2006, mostly on MMO titles.

This is a simple supply and demand problem.

There is a HUGE supply of young males who want to work in the gaming industry, and the customer demand for games of the quality which they can supply is insufficient.

This is why you have so many gaming schools that can't actually take all the potential students who want to join, but very few of the graduates can actually get jobs.

In the last few years, there have been so many great games that I can't possibly play them all. This has been lamented by many in recent times. There are just so many people working on games that there are a ton of great games out there, and some of the really good games get ignored because of the pile-on effect that a few of the great games get.

I should note that Puppy Games titles are awesome and work on Linux.

Not related: Lately I've been playing FTL a lot. It's awesome too.

This is a case of everyone behaving badly and it turning into an ulgy fight. Who's side do you choose?

None of the above. Watch, learn, but stay the hell out of it.

The grey 'n baldy club at the Fed decided to shake their cane at Bitcoin and inadvertently made all the online gaming companies (EA, Valve, Ubisoft, Zynga) crap their pants in unison.

I doubt the authors were smart enough to think of this, and I don't think most people here have really thought of this yet. The online gaming industry is going to be very interested in this once they realize the potential impacts.

In the case of Diablo III, you can sell your in-game virtual gold for real money in their Real Money Auction House, via PayPal. Other games have less official means of exchanging between currencies, but that's at least one official/built-in version that I can think of.

Oh yea, one really important thing to remember here is that because I work in an HPC environment, performance is a serious consideration, and in many cases is the determining factor when it comes to OS selection. The ANCIENT old kernels and software in CentOS are a significant problem in some cases, and a benefit in others.

We are doing a lot of infiniband, 10Gig networking (with full multi-interface throughput for days at a time), huge filesystems, and crazy other stuff that a regular web server would not do.

Notably, almost all of our web servers have gone Ubuntu for ease of management, since the web guy likes Ubuntu.

But we don't use Ubuntu for their commercial support. My experience there, in the past, has not been good. We ultimately support ourselves.

Another HPC guy here.

We don't get support from either Canonical or Red Hat, but I've worked in places that had "support" from both, and I agree with your assessment that support for Ubuntu from Canonical sucks and that support from Red Hat is actually quite good.

Yes, Ubuntu is not afraid to push out completely broken packages like it was Debian experimental. I don't know what to say about that: Test it before deployment on production?

We have a custom package pushing system for our cluster and it's nodes. Users don't have shell access to these things, so it's not a huge deal. I've never had the kinds of problems you mentioned above regarding user input. There are ways of getting around those kinds of things.

We will probably still be using CentOS, Rocks, and SciLinux for awhile since it's 3rd party and community supported, like you said. It's my personal opinion that the fundamental design, process, and community surrounding Debian is superior to Red Hat/CentOS, but sometimes you just gotta use what works.

I'm not paid to fix bugs all day to make it work. I'm just paid to make it work. And sometimes CentOS/SciLinux just works.

I am a network engineer/sysadmin who is employed by a cancer/bio research non profit. We have several supercomputer clusters, one of which was high on the list of the Top50 at one point.

I'm just going to ramble on incoherently for awhile until I stop...

My background was originally with FreeBSD, and then I switched to Debian GNU/Linux back in 97/98. There are still a number of things about FreeBSD that Linux doesn't have, and I wish it did; console scrolling behavior, getuid on directories, the network filtering tools, etc etc.

I am going to bash Red Hat/CentOS here a little bit, but I'm not going to hold back criticism against the deb distributions either.

I am not going to address desktop issues here at all, other than to say that I am typing this now from a Debian unstable, which is my primary home workstation. I'm mostly talking about server/shared-host system usage here.

For me, at home, it's all Debian. At work, we have a mix of Ubuntu LTS, CentOS, Rocks clusters, big Luster filesystems, and some OSX Server. We are in the slow process of installing more Ubuntu, and slowly getting rid of the CentOS. The exceptions is the Rocks clusters and where we use Lustre/Infiniband, mostly because of Scientific Linux (forgot to mention that one) and the ready-to-install distros that fit our research needs. Ubuntu/Debian has been getting better at supporting this area, and we will probably re-evaluate this in the future and switch over if we can.

For the uneducated, you can basically break the big Linux distros into two camps: .deb based (Debian, Ubuntu), and .rpm based (Red Hat, CentOS).

I can't really get around saying this any other way, so let's just get to it: CentOS is Red Hat for people too poor/cheap to pay for Red Hat. If Red Hat was free as in beer, CentOS would not exist. There is really no educated argument against this. The only people who I've ever seen bother to argue against this do so because they don't know anything else and take it as as personal attack, which it should not be.

Red Hat as a company is doing really great things for Linux, and almost always has. They employ a lot of top talent and everyone in the Linux/GNU world benefits from it. A lot of people who are using CentOS should be using Red Hat.

Red Hat and it's children have replaced their package management tools and formats multiple times now. They did this because they sucked and for whatever reason, evolutionary progress never happened within those existing tools. This is a huge negative to me and it's one of the reasons why I started using Debian over FreeBSD in the first place; I saw that Linux was really the future, and that compiling everything all the time was for suckers (sorry all ye Gentooders).

There are some specific software packages that were made to only run on Red Hat. I'm thinking about Oracle, but there are some other big ERP systems and such thing. In these cases, it's either Red Hat or CentOS. Fighting the developers who wrote these big(dumb) software packages to run on just Red Hat isn't worth your time, so just go with am rpm distro and get on with life.

Debian is a huge complicated professional community. I don't just use Debian because of the base distribution itself. I use it because of it's awesome bug tracker, the users and developers who are involved, the mailing lists, the design decisions, the tiny netboot image that I can install from, the huge number of packages and the sanity of the package management system, it's security notification and release system, and the online documentation resources.

This reminds me of the fact that on my home server, I installed it off a Debian CD back in like 2000. Since then, no CD or outside media has ever been involved in upgrading it (even for the transition from i386 to amd64). Debian/Ubuntu upgrades are all over the network and in-place. Contrast this to Red Hat/CentOS where even today, most admins have to back up everything, wipe, and re-install with a CD. I think modern releases FINALLY have the ability to upgrade between major revisions in place, but this has ALWAYS been the case for Debian. "apt-get dist-upgrade" and that's it. Some people will fight me on this, but this happened at work just two weeks ago: Our top CentOS sysadmin upgraded a system using a CD because that's the way he had been doing it for the last ten years. In-place major version upgrades is not well supported under Red Hat, and before a couple of years ago, it wasn't even supported.

Ubuntu came along as an upstart and has created it's own community. Ubuntu is a vehicle/tool for Canonical, so you need to understand that it's not driven by the community like Debian is. That being said, Ubuntu's ease-of-use is why we use it at work, because I don't expect our low-level sysadmins to suddenly become awesome. They need something that was built with ease-of-use in mind, even at the expense of flexibility.

I have been disappointed in a few things about Ubuntu. I've ran into some weird kernel stability problems with Ubuntu that our CentOS hosts never ran into, all on the same hardware. Their insistence to mess with motd in every damn release bugs the hell out of me. The Ubuntu guys spend a lot of time fixing things that ain't broke, so core tools and daemons get replaced every once in awhile and I have to re-learn something for what are dubious benefits.

I was one of those people who was unhappy with Ubuntu in the early days, for taking and taking from Debian and giving nothing back. But I also was very sympathetic to why a lot of Debian contributors went over to their side, because of some of the slow progress and procedural community complexity that Debian has.

Debian has a bad name for itself, in that people associate it with being old. This is true, in the "stable" distribution, and in the past, I've been really frustrated in just how long it took certain core packages (kernel, Samba, Apache, etc) to get from unstable into stable, to the point where a lot of people, myself included just ran unstable on our servers and dealt with the occasional breakages. You learn a whole lot about how things really work when you install a bad version of mdadm and lvm.

I just run Debian unstable on my desktop and servers. Yes, I've had a few buggy accidents, including one time in the last two years where a remote server lost it's networking because of a bug in the ifrename package, but problems like this have been very very sparse.

My personal experience is that higher quality admins use deb-based distributions over rpm distributions. Almost all of the noob/idiot admins that I've ever met were CentOS/Red Hat people. It's not so much that they had chosen rpm distros, so much as it's the only thing they had ever known and didn't seem interested (or maybe capable) in learning anything else. I often find that rpm distro users think RedHat = Linux and in some cases, they are not even aware that anything else exists.

As for CentOS, it's community isn't that great. Again, they are just leaching off Red Hat. You can't make design decisions or anything else, because each release is to take what Red Hat puts out, scratch off the Red Hat label, and re-publish as CentOS.

At one point, Lance Davis disappeared FOR MONTHS and seriously threatened the CentOS project and community. That's pretty much all you need to know about CentOS: http://www.linuxnewstoday.org/linux-news-jul-2009-archives/1... http://www.bit-tech.net/news/bits/2009/07/31/centos-project-...

Final thoughts...

I've heard this quote multiple times: "I've heard a lot of people say that Red Hat is the most popular distro, but I don't think I've ever heard anyone claim it was the best."

With Red Hat, you are a customer. With CentOS, you are a user. With Debian, you are part of the community. With Ubuntu you are using Debian for lusers.

ps: I have good things to say about Arch and Gentoo, but I'm an old fart Debian guy.

Use Ubuntu by default. Use Red Hat only if you have to. Use CentOS because you are too cheap/poor to pay for Red Hat. Use Debian if you are a pro. Use OpenBSD if you want to be secure.

We currently live in a world where most of those in power are old people who don't know wtf teh internets is, nevermind have any conceptual grasp of the changes that drones, nanotech, human modification and augmentation, and similar will cause in our society.

I am shocked, like I think you are, that these judges would have even the slightest clue. This is just uncharacteristic for the kinds of rulings we usually see when anything technology is related.

I expect that near the end of my lifetime, when people my age are in power, if not sooner, a large number of laws and rulings will be overturned and changed in radically legal-altering ways.

But it has always been that way. Even within my lifetime, we no longer think that ulcers are caused by stress, mobile phones/computers became reality, and a non-white person was elected present of my country. These are all pretty radical things.

Another Apple-in-the-enterprise sysadmin here. I confirm the same issues as mentioned above.

Some time in 2007 I went to an Apple event in Scottsdale Arizona. I am a network engineer/system administrator, and my organization was about 50/50 Mac/Windows. We spend somewhere between $200-600K a year on Apple products for employees. I seem to remember that this was shortly before Apple killed off their XServe products, but I could be mistaken about the timing.

There was a break in the presentation, after which I decided I was going to bail. I took my phone, a Blackberry at the time, out of my pocket as I exited the door so that I could check if anything was going on at work.

As I took those first few steps outside, I accidentally dropped my phone.

It wasn't one of those gentle drops. In the process of trying to catch it before it hit the ground, I ended up pushing it with even greater velocity downwards. It hit the concrete pretty hard and a mix of phone, battery cover, and battery went skittering across the concrete walkway.

Three Apple Store employees were sitting outside, also on break. My phone had gone flying right past their feet.

"Oooh!" they said with a wince.

Then one of them said, "Don't worry everyone! It wasn't a IPhone!"

And they laughed.

And that was it. I picked up the parts of my phone, took at a look at the damage, put it back together, and walked away.

There was no offer of help or concern, but they thought it was pretty funny.

Fortunately, the phone survived pretty well off. There really wasn't anything more than minor scratches, despite how I had practically thrown the phone against the concrete.

Ironically, had it been an IPhone (or any modern touchscreen phone), it would have probably been destroyed. I ended up destroying the screen on my Nexus One a year or two later with a much less violent drop.

And, I'm afraid to say, most of my other experiences with Apple store employees here in Arizona has been pretty similar. We regularly have our helpdesk staff go in to pick up parts and do repair runs and I've had to call up our regular Apple rep and comment on bad attitudes, poor service, and outright rejection of service on in-warranty breakages for whatever reason-of-the-day they could make up.

The story linked to is important: You really can make a lasting impression on a customer that they will never forget, positive or negative.

I will never forget the way three Apple Store employees laughed at me as I dropped my phone.