Ask me if you have any questions, things you want to debate or just need to confirm your batshit assumption about me.

Reply here, or if you prefer formal debate I suggest debate.net or similar.

I already asked Mashiki, but for some reason he declined... Come at me.

Got Ubuntu working in a VM by setting it to UEFI mode and opting not to install updates during initial setup. Once it was going I set about getting it updated... But where is the updater?

You can configure updates in the system settings, but not actually start them. There doesn't seem to be a start menu or app draw, just a few random quick launch icons, including some Amazon spam. Eventually resorted to searching.

Mouse wheel is just as broken as Mint. Window controls on the wrong side and oddly placed in full screen mode, menus hidden by default. Apparently the window control position is now hard coded because... Fuck you I guess. Lost interest at that point, going back to Mint.

So, mouse wheel input is fucked in Linux.

There is no way to configure how much the wheel scrolls by. It's fixed. And it's incredibly slow in many apps, and inconsistent between apps because it's up to each one what it does with a single scroll "tick".

Some people have asked on forums and Stack Exchange how to fix it. Turns out, you can't. You can hack around with imwheel, but it translates the wheel into key presses and breaks some apps and is ignored by others. There is libinput, but when I tried it configuration changes had no effect in Cinnamon.

How can something so basic be so broken? It's actually better if you have a trackpad because at least that is configurable.

Chrome is more or less usable if you install an extension to speed up scrolling. Scrolling is not as smooth as Windows, but that could be cause it is running in a VM.

Found some instructions here: http://www.localizingjapan.com/blog/2014/07/29/japanese-input-on-linux-mint-17-qiana-cinnamon/

They are out of date though. Basically you need to install IBus and you chosen IME (I used mozc) and then add it to the list in the IBus preferences. It says "Japanese" in there by default, but that apparently doesn't do anything and you have to install the IME. I would have thought that the basic Japanese entry would have at least let you enter kana... Oh well.

Anyway, it now actually works better than Windows. The mode keys on the keyboard work, which is something that Windows can't handle apparently. At least not if your OS language is English, in which case you have to hack the registry just to get a working Japanese keyboard layout.

Speaking of layouts, I use a custom one on Windows that has extra alt keys for symbols like degrees, Pi, plus/minus and so on. Maybe I can do that under Linux too.

I'm trying to switch away from Windows 8.1 because Windows 10 is just too much. Decided to start with Linux Mint in a VM.

Installation was smooth and easy. Went for Cinnamon because it's the recommended one. Coped with having a Japanese keyboard and English (not American) locale. Installation was very quick. On first boot a window appeared with some info, one of which was drivers. That offered to install an Intel microcode update so I went for it.

Set screen resolution. Mouse wheel seems laggy, need to look for mouse options later. First thing is updates. The update icon is in the tray area it seems. At first it wasn't doing anything... The output window said that updates were inhibited for some reason. I refreshed it a few times and it found some updates. Selected a local mirror.

Updates installed quickly and relatively easily. Only hitch was when it asked about some Gnome config file that had apparently been changed and did I want to overwrite with the one from the update. I have no idea, the diff output didn't really help so I just went with the updated file. Looked like it was just resetting some default apps.

After that it says my system is up to date (no reboot, much better than Windows) but there are two updates marked as level 5 red security updates... So not up to date? For some reason I have to manually select them, because why wouldn't I want level 5 red security updates..

I seem to be getting asked for my password a lot. Isn't once when I open the update app enough? Reminds me of the bad old days of Windows Vista with UAC prompts every 5 seconds for fairly common tasks.

The font rendering in the little "details" terminal window is crap. Linux has historically had bad font rendering... But most of it looks good. The high DPI support is a bit limited (only 1x or 2x scaling, nothing in-between) but it does at least seem to work reliably in my limited testing. No support for monitors with different scaling settings though (e.g. you have a laptop with 4k display and plug in a 2k external monitor), and lots of stuff seems to use bitmap graphics that look bad zoomed in.

Installed open-vm-tools, not sure if it actually did anything. Clipboard sharing doesn't seem to work.

Trying to get Japanese input to work is a real pain. I installed it as an input language, but it seems that I need to manually start Ibus. Found some instructions but they were out of date. The Ubuntu wiki says load it and press CTRL+space to activate, but it doesn't work. Tried changing it to CTRL+space in the prefs, didn't work. The IME switching key and the kana/roma switching keys don't work. Found a forum post that detailed how to make the daemon auto-start and suggested a restart may be required to make it work. Still did not work.

Gave up with the IME for now, but I need to get it working.

The mouse wheel is very slow. Should be easy to fix... But apparently it needs some hacking around with the command line. Can't be bothered right now... I mean, it's a basic preference. Pick this up later.

Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned SourceForge

I enjoyed the heck out of this site long ago. I'm sad that it has come to this.

So 104 people were killed by police in the USA during August, 2014. To my eyes, that's an absolutely enormous figure. As a Brit, I compare it to the 1 person killed over 3 years by the UK police. Yes, they're two different countries, yes there's a lot more people in the US, yes they have different cultures, yadda yadda yadda; people are dying here.

Let's do some maths:

• Population of the USA: 319 million (source: http://tinyurl.com/bpotuf9)
• Percentage chance for a person to be shot in August is then: (104 x 100%) / 319,000,000 = 0.000033%

That's a scarily huge percentage, given that it's normalised by population. Bear in mind that police in the USA are not ... shy ... at shooting at suspects, and neither are they 100% accurate. Some of the casualties are in fact bystanders.

Now let's consider extrapolating for the period of time that most shootings occur (i.e.: suspect between the ages of 15 and 40), and see how that changes things:

• Chance to be shot over 25 year period = (104 x 12 x 25 x 100%) / 319,000,000 = 0.0097%
• Rounding that, since this is an extrapolation, we get 0.01%

Now that's an amazingly large percentage chance of being shot dead by a policeman. Let's do the same thing for the UK:

• Population of the UK: 65 million (source: http://tinyurl.com/kzsalbe)
• Percentage chance for a person to be shot over last 3 years is then: (1 x 100%) / 65,000,000 = 0.0000015%
• Therefore percentage chance for a person to be shot in August 2014 is 0.0000015 / 12 / 3 = 0.0000000427%
• Therefore percentage chance to be shot over 25 year period is 0.0000000427 x 12 x 25 = 0.0000128%

Compare 0.01% and 0.00001% and remember these are normalised by population. Yeah.

I haven't posted a journal here in almost three years, because I couldn't find the button to start a new entry. ...yeah, it turns out that it's at the bottom of the page.

So... hi, Slashdot. I used to be really active here, but now I mostly lurk and read. I've missed you.

I've lurked at /. without posting for ages, mostly because I just don't have the time to interact like I used to.

But I've been clicking through the old RSS feed more and more lately, and when I saw the PAX Plague thread today, I came over to comment, since I'm kind of affected by the whole damn thing. I thought I'd take a look around since I haven't been here in awhile, and I saw that there are freaking ACHIEVEMENTS associated with our accounts. It's silly, and I'm sure it's been here forever, but I thought it was awesome and I was delighted when I read it.

I didn't realize how much I missed Slashdot until I spent some time here today, and I bet that anyone who joined in the last 2 years doesn't even give a shit about my stupid comments or anything, but it felt good to come back here, and feel safely among my people again.

So, with some trepidation given the media focus surrounding the new 3GS and pointing out how expensive it is over time, I decided to "donate" my iphone 2G to my fiancée and go for a 3GS. Since it's another 2 year contract, I figured I'd go for the top-of-the-range and wait it out again. To my (pleasant) surprise, my needs are relatively cheap...

Initial costs are a bit steep at $415 including tax, shipping. But the monthly charges are $56 (including the data-plan) for my particular needs. I don't use the phone much for talking (450 minutes a month is overkill for me) and I rarely text people (an average of 25/month is (again) overkill, and this corresponds with the '200' dollar amount I'd otherwise have to pay for in bulk). What I *do* use on the phone is the data service. A *lot*. And that's built in as unlimited - it breaks down as $32 for the Nation 450 w/rollover, and $24 for the unlimited data plan.

That comes to a total of $1759 over two years. ($415 + 24 * $56), and I can comfortably afford that. That's also a *lot* less expensive than the $3000+ (over 2 years) that people have been bandying around. It's worth looking at the options, and seeing what suits you before coming to a decision...

Simon

Yes.

On behalf of the show and myself, I'd like to thank the Off the Hook listeners among you.

For one thing, so many of you are coming through with an awesome show of support during the current WBAI fundraiser, allowing us to thunder past our pledge goals like a crazed herd of sweaty community-radio-supporting buffalo. Some of us had to leave the studio partway through last night's broadcast and help out the volunteers taking pledges in the phone bank, it was that busy. :-)

Even if you aren't among those willing or able to pledge, thank you for listening. Were it not for you, we would all just be a bunch of strange people closed up in a soundproof room talking to ourselves, which wouldn't be nearly as fun.

Among other things on last night's Off the Hook, we had the privilege of speaking with Michelle Kempner, wife of James Powderly. There wasn't all that much new info to report, but it's well worth a listen to anyone interested in the story. You can listen to the segment here or the entire show here.

Updates on James and his situation will be posted to his Free Art & Technology blog.

Off the Hook will be off the air for the next couple of weeks, making way for WBAI's coverage of the Democratic and Republican national conventions. The show will return on September 10.

Not sure if anyone got any pictures or video of me during the closing ceremonies at The Last HOPE, but I just so happened to be wearing my beloved Slashdot 10th Anniversary t-shirt during it.

This clip of the closing ceremonies is worth watching because A) I'm covered by some guys big head in the shot, and 2) Emmanuel finally answers the burning question "is this really The Last HOPE?"

You are on a generic city street.
There are pedestrians here.
There is a car here.

> STEAL CAR

You force open the door of the car, pull out the protesting owner,
and sit in his place. The victim gesticulates angrily at you from
outside the car.

You are in a car. There is a rap song playing on the stereo.
There are pedestrians here.
There is an angry car-theft victim here.

> DRIV CAR

I don't know how to DRIV.

> DRIVE CAR

You put your foot on the gas pedal, and the car moves forward.

You are in a moving car. There is rap music playing on the stereo.

There is traffic here.
There are pedestrians here.

> CHANGE STATION

You change the radio station.

You are in a moving car. There is country/western music playing on
the stereo.

There is traffic here.
There are pedestrians here.

> KILL PEDESTRIANS

What would you like to kill the pedestrians with?

> KILL PEDESTRIANS WITH CAR

You deliberately drive over some of the pedestrians. Their horrific
screams of panic and anguish drown out the radio. Their broken
bodies fly off in various amusing directions. Other pedestrians flee
in terror at the carnage-laden sight, while still others ignore the
situation entirely.

You are in a moving car. There is country/western music playing on
the stereo.

There is traffic here.
There are pedestrians here.

> CHANGE STATION

You change the radio station.

You are in a moving car. There is talk radio loaded with subtle
social commentary playing on the stereo.

There is traffic here.
There are pedestrians here.

> _