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Submission + - Dropbox is dropping Linux after 11 years (dropboxforum.com)

rokahasch writes: Starting today, 10th of August, most users of the Dropbox desktop app on Linux have been receiving notifications that their Dropbox will stop syncing starting November.

Over at the Dropbox forums, Dropbox have declared that the only Linux filesystem supported for storage of the Dropbox sync folder starting the 7th of November, will be on a clean EXT4 fs.

This basically means Dropbox drops Linux support completely, as almost all Linux distributions have other file systems as their standard installation defaults nowadays — not to mention encryption running on top of even an EXT4 file system which won't qualify as a clean EXT4 fs for Dropbox (such as ecryptfs which is the default in for example Ubuntu for encrypted home folders).

The thread is trending heavily on Dropbox' forums with the forum's most views since the thread started earlier today. The cries from a large amount of Linux users have so far remained unanswered from Dropbox, with most users finding the explanation given for this change unconvincing. The explanation given so far is that Dropbox requires a fs with support for Extended attributes/Xattrs. Extended attributes however are supported by all major Linux/Posix complaint file systems.

Dropbox have up until today supported Linux platforms since their services began back in 2007.

Comment Re:Expensive!! (Score 1) 80

Do you develop mobile apps with in-app purchases using the LGPL version? AFAICT the in-app purchase module is not distributed with the LGPL version. I'd love to be proven wrong.

Comment Re:Expensive!! (Score 1) 80

Well, if you can't addor 4,2k per year and a developer it may mean you're an Indie trying to break even and launch something nice. What is good and all, no prejudice. But some resources that would help an indie developer, as the Qt module that allows in-app purchases, aren't available to low-income developers, despite being the people who would mostly benefit from it. That's why if I was Qt I would add a new payment regimen, similar to what's already done by Unreal Engine and Unity 3D: pay after you earn something. "Do you have an idea? Use Qt Commercial and pay us when you break even!". If the indie project doesn't take off no harm was done (as no money to be earned existed anyway). This way Qt would gain traction and be more popular than how much it already is. A model like this:

Indie: Pay 5% of your income after you earn $10,000.00
Commercial: Pay $whatever/year.
Open Source: Pay nothing but publish the source accorging to GPL/LGPL/whatever.

Hope some old troll will listen and act accordingly.

Comment Re:Not just a GUI toolkit (Score 1) 80

1. Native appearance is supported since a long ago in Qt, making a Qt program display in an appeasing way no matter what OS it is run on.
2. No VM.
3. No garbage collector.
4. Compiled code. Native speeds. Performance dependent on compiler. Can use MinGW, GCC, MSVC2010-2013, LLVM/Clang. No JNI.
5. Legacy code. Way easier to port already written code instead of translating it to another language and having to learn everything again and possibly adding new bugs and surely losing time redoing what is already done.
6. Performance. I've seen benchmarks before defending one and another, but according to my experience, garbage collection has a perceivable negative impact in performance and memory usage. For client doftware it may be neligible, but for data crunching applications a compiled language makes more sense. The stack machine approach in Java is somewhat slow, and the Dalvik approach (register-based) is speedier but not as speed as native code. ART, despite its ahead-of-time approach has a median performance gain of about 15% only according to benchmarks I saw. Native code on Android doing the same workload is between 4x to 10x faster.
7. Lower level access. I wrote hardware diagnosis software and used C++/Qt. It was portable to Windows, Linux and UEFI firmware. Frankly doing so in Java would be for all practical purposes impossible.
8. Portability. It's easiers to port a dedicated C++ code to a new platform than porting a JRE to a new platform. Some platforms simply don't (and legally can't) have a JVM.
9. Personal taste.

I'm not saying anything against any language at all. Everything has a purpose, and some languages are best fitted to specific environments/purposes/domains. Doing a database-oriented Fortran code or 3D graphics in COBOL will not highlight these languages' strong points. But if you have the knowledge, experience and the language is a tool fit enough to the need in question, then why not?

Comment Re:When in Rome... (Score 1) 131

About the Streisand effect, as long as the thing is played down, the problem dissolves in internet's white noise. That's why we got notice of this case, while the other thousands of court orders Google complies to in Brazil and around the world everyday take so little to no publicity.
Being exposed in a Youtube video may be very damaging, but having it on Youtube for ad aeternam is worse than having a big pop of publicity at once and people forgetting it in a week or less as the next fad/meme/news enters their field of view. Who cares about Barbra Streisand's house anymore?

Comment Re:When in Rome... (Score 1) 131

I only talk about local judges because that's all I know (and I have a brother that is a state judge). I concede most judges have an inflated ego, and in fact it may even prove to be necessary for the profession (as displaying authority may be a better deterrent than only having authority).
Judges, are people just like soylent green is. They make mistakes, some terrible. In 2005 a judge (Percy Barbosa), while drunken, killed a clerk in a supermarket just for the kicks. He got 15 years of jail time and had to support financially the family of the deceased, but sadly died in 2008 of a heart condition. Justice was served, anyways. Some judges are heroes, fighting the drug cartels and sleeping in their offices surrounded by cops because some death threats from the drug lords.
Who really knows how the judges are monitored by other judges, by the Internal Affairs Comissions (Corregedorias de Justiça) and by the OAB (Ordem dos Advogados do Brasil - Order of Brazilian Lawyers) knows life of most judges is not exactly just flowers. That's it while meeting deadlines to judge cases, being flattered by false people, threatened by criminals and despised by the general population that sees them as pluripotent tyrants, while earning the equivalent to US$100,000.00/y, having to hide his family to avoid kidnappings and shootings and distrusting almost everybody outside a tight circle of family members.
The only person that feels the weight of the crown is the one who wears it.

Comment Re:I'm Brazilian and this is'nt censorship (Score 1) 131

Google is able to remove the video, and it can do it faster than waiting to discover who the guy/gal is and prosecuting him/her and demmanding the person to remove the video.
Let's take some reductio ad absurdum and just imagine the criminal who posted the video died being hanged on a carrot. Should the defamed guy be defamed ad aeternam because the criminal met his/her maker? Isn't more sensible to order Google to remove the offending video, and for Google to comply? Let's just be reasonable, people. Should the guy endure more defamation because of Google's bureaucracy or another internal SNAFU? Should Google do nothing because Google people say "it wasn't me" one each time after another, and just be left the way is is while the guy suffers? How to force Google to do the sane thing, the same kind of sane thing it is used to do every single day in Brazil?
It was a Google's SNAFU. Somebody needs to be armtwisted to obey the law, as expected.

Nothing to see here. Move along.

Comment Re:I'm Brazilian and this is'nt censorship (Score 1) 131

IANAL but IAMTAL, so the problem is another. There's a concept in brazilian law that is Solidary Responsibility. It means in this case that if somebody posts a defamatoty video on youtube he/she is the accountable person for the defamation case, but both him/her and Google are responsible for the video presence. Google, as a common carrier, has no direct responsibility concerning the defamation crime, but google is just able to take the video down as the sender is, so both can be ordered to take it down and must either comply or present a formal response to the judge explaining why they can't. Simply refusing or ignoring is not a sane option.
Ordering Google to disclose the perpetretor's identity is an obvious step, but waiting for it to prosecute him and forcing him to remove the thing would take too much time and cause more damage, so the judge can (and usually will opt by him/herself or by being asked to do so by the lawyer) order the carrier to remove the data. And Google does it by the thousands here in Brazil. The novelty here is Google forgeting to comply to something it usually complies to.

Comment Re:Streinsad Effect? (Score 2) 131

If Google disobeys brazilian laws, Brazil will want Google to take its marbles an get the fsck outta here, of course.
Who must rule Brazil is the elected Brazilian representatives and not a foreign corporation. I believe USA has its own dose of transantional mega corporations messing with USA politics and it's not good for the USA.
We'll not sell out Amazonia to avoid upsetting Bayer.
Wanna play in our sandbox? You have to play by our rules, the same way we have to comply if we want to play in yours.

Comment Re:When in Rome... (Score 5, Informative) 131

I'm the guy who posted comments before yours.

Google complies with brazilian court orders by the thousands every year, and it should be no news. Google complies with court orders from every country it has a headquarter.
Mr. Fabio, a brazilian citizen, Google employee and top executive, may not be able to obey the order by himself, but he's capable to command another Google employee to do so. So ultimately he is the main responsible person.
I don't know how Google Brazil is run, but every company around the world with 10+ employees needs an hierarquical structure where someone at the top delegates to his tenants and it goes down under to the cleaning guy. And people make mistakes, get dismissed and so on. Someone messed up and will have to take the heat. And Mr. Fabio wasn't imprisioned, he just had to go to a police department to answer some questions and to be made aware of the problem and act upon.
If an USA judge issued a court order the police must comply, be the target BillG, the elusive Embraer secretary or whoever. If the secretary is an USA citizen, that's it, if not the diplomacy will take place, as every UN member would expect to act.
Burning flags is not a brazilian national sport. We're pretty orderly (fanfare to the common man playing in the backgound) and working people.
There are no double standards here. Brazil respects international laws pretty much as everyone else. Please remember Flight 1907, when USA pilots downed a Boeing full of brazilian citizens just because some USA senator didn't want to be tracked in brazilian airspace by brazilian airspace authorities. Nobody burned USA flags, the pilots were repatriated to USA and propably nothing wrong happened to them, despite reaping more than one hundred brazilian souls. Because we respect the law.
Brazilian judges aren't pluripotent tyrants in constant tantrum spree. They're accountable and overviewed by the legal system, that can punish the judge and overrule him/her if appropriate, just as every really civilized western country with representatives elected by the people.

Sorry, but nothing to see here. Move along.

Comment Re:give it a try first (Score 2) 235

Rephrasing myself: GNOME 3 and Unity are "oddities" we should ignore just as much as Windows 8 for those who think they're too otherwordly to be used.

The fact is people get used to anything in life, even bad interfaces. Windows 8 will be a sales success by being force fed to computer buyers. GNOME 3 will not have such backing, so its adoption rate will be a lot slower. But the point is that people have choice, and people will eventually find what's best to them. GNOME 3 seems to be despised by a lot of people because of its defaults and lack of choice. So GNOME 3 has plugins. Nice. But people in general settle for the defaults and expect a given set of options. If the defaults are unuseable (to many) and to recover the expected functionality you'll have to thinker so people will run miles from it.
UIs should be unobtrusive, because people use programs to do things. People don't need UIs to stare at them (Windows 8) or fiddle with its innards to get to the basics. The'yre not an end per se, but an enabler to let people get things done. If it stays in the middle of what people want to do people will use something else that lets them do what they want. Dead simple. One can shove years of methinksuishouldbelikethis and other theoretical, dadaistic designers' ideas because people like aesthetics, but don't live by it. Did you use Windows 8's message app? Good aesthetics, almost zero functionality, perfect for a Hollywhood movie but terrible for daily use.
About typing an app's name to open it, KDE SC, Windows, GNOME, OS X, all have it. It's a staple now. KDE even extrapolates it with its idea of "semantic desktop", but WTF Nepomuk (also used by GNOME) is not agreed by all.
In fact, sadly I have to say that functionality/usability-wise, according to my view, it's Windows 7, OS X, KDE on top, GNOME 2 and others at the middle and GNOME 3, UNITY and Windows 8 at the bottom.

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