I can relate. I run VMWare with SUSE8 and SUSE 8.2 virtual machines, partly out of nostalgia, partly because it's neat.

SUSE 8.0 still used Gnome 1.X and I find it much more useful than Gnome 3 (actually I even like it better than Gnome 2, but I know that puts me in the minority). Interestingly, old distros (these are from 2001 and 2002 respectively) are surprisingly useful already and do almost all of what I use a computer for these days, including browsing the web (not all sites, obviously, and yes I'm aware of the security implications).

That's an acronym common in the industry which stands for "by the way I farted."

All I can say is, there's a reason chapter 8 (Dealing with uprisings, protests and demonstrations) and chapter 9 (dealing with the media, journalists, and the Internet) are back to back in the Dictator's Handbook. See for yourself at http://www.dictatorshandbook.net/. Autocrats defensively strike to criticise the media when their actions make them vulnerable, and Twitter - being one of the better sources of information during the demonstrations and the whole bulldozer thing (which wasn't a bulldozer, if anyone noticed) - makes an easy target.

I agree Twitter is a menace, but only because their servers crash too often to be considered a standard form of communication. Give me SMTP or NNTP anyday.

But back to Erdogan, good luck buddy - you're going to need it. Check out chapter 7 (managing the military) before you go much further: you're going to need it!

If anyone else had said "you have to fight for your privacy or you will lose it," it would have sounded like folksy advice. Coming from Schmidt, it sounds more like a threat or a challenge.

"You know, your girlfriend is hot. You should keep her happy or someone else might sweep her away. I'm just saying, you know, I wouldn't but someone might, it's just that she's really, really hot, I mean smoking. I mean, damn, you know? Just treat her right, that's all I'm saying. Yeah."

Not that Twitter doesn't have the right to do this, but it's not cool. This is good for big money and bad for the consumer, and that's exactly why it got posted at the Dictator's Handbook forum: it's a Dick Move.

I use Twitter begrudgingly, but this really turns me off. Maybe I'm a grumpy old bastard but I remember an Internet that wasn't just some huge info-gathering and sales pitch scheme. This new internet sucks and I wish I could turn it off but I'm addicted to it :)

"We should be grateful" the summary says.

Well I for one am grateful that we seem to have hit the Slashdot trifecta: (1) Obvious, blatant slashvertisement intended to showcase some product noone's ever heard of, (2) link to a site behind a paywall, and (3) Web 2.0 product that somehow involves social and tracking and profile building, something I would want no part of.

Do I win? And if so, do I get my money back?

This is about the wisest thing I've seen written about the subject in a while, but your comment about Eternal September betrays your age/generation and I think this is a generational thing. I was generally into Google until recently, but I notice a trend of them removing or deprecating open protocols in favor of new closed protocols or services that don't interoperate. Maybe that's how you make money in this round of "Internet Monopoly Game" but it means I'll be using Google less. I'm already forced to have an account for use with the Play store, but otherwise I've paid for alternatives:

1. Fruux for calendaring and contacts (CalDAV, CardDAV)
2. Fastmail for IMAP email
3. Until today, Jabber for chat - that's going to be a problem or maybe I just won't chat anymore
4. And I maintain a blog for when I want to write, and a Coppermine photo album for photos I want to share (giving me the power to remove photos when I'm done with them; they don't stay in anyone's database).

But constantly having to avoid the quicksand in this ever-changing map of traps is quickly becoming a hassle.

I'm generally an openSUSE/PCBSD/Bodhi guy, but I just wiped the computer clean last week and thought I'd take the opportunity to install something new, for fun. I installed Mageia 2, not realizing it was about to be replaced.

Conclusion: good distro! It installed cleanly/easily, had a good-looking KDE4 desktop with sensible defaults, and was intuitive and easy to use. The DVD came with a lot of software on it, but once I initialized the repositories I was able to find every package i need except one.

To the haters out there asking 'what's the point' I'd say it's a distro that's kind of a sure thing if you give it to a friend to install. They've done sensible, methodical, professional work and it shows. It's avoided going insane like Ubuntu, has tools that make configuration pretty straight forward, and was easy to use. "But it's no different than any other distro!" I'd say these days there's not a huge amount of software being written for Linux so increasingly all the distros are starting to look the same. It's not that different from Ubuntu but Ubuntu is not really that different from Fedora or openSUSE or Crunchbang or whatever.

They're also building a pretty good quality, constructive and helpful community - that counts a lot. Their forums are useful and full of helpful people, all there for a reason.

Good distro, would install again. A+

Wow, way to go, scientists. What were the other targets for research: the duodenum? the uvula? the "taint" (http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=taint)? the clitoris?

Hey, this interests me - I've got a BB for work and I like it, and I never understood all the BB hate. I can almost type out a message without looking on that physical keyboard, and can't with my Android. So I clicked on the article ... ... which doesn't really say what the summary does. In fact, it looks more like a creative press release with a statement by a guy who is predicting insatiable demand, not identifying it.

I'm unimpressed. But I'm still hoping for BB to come back to life. I think they make great phones, and the touch keyboard is over rated, I really think so.

When I wrote my book http://dictatorshandbook.net/ I was using LaTeX on a Linux box, so in addition to regular (less-periodic) backups of the entire computer I put in place a system for backing up just the manuscript directory, as often as I wanted (usually at the end of a night of editing and writing). A USB key, a WebDAV directory, and an email account were all I needed, and here's the little Bash script I wrote to make it all work: http://www.therandymon.com/content/view/236/98/ This is one of the things I love about Linux as a writing environment.

I use SpiderOak for my config and dot files, but still rely on burning the occasional DVD or CD-R for my other stuff, and I store the disks offsite. I know that's old-fashioned in the new, hip world of cloud storage, but I live in a place with slow internet and don't have the bandwidth for fancier stuff. And the DVD burning works, boo-yah.

I did something somewhat similar in Nicaragua in 2001. Built a SUSE 7.1 machine that had previously been running Win95. I had one hell of a time of it, too. Good memories. I wrote about it at http://therandymon.com/content/view/68/98/

Annoyingly, even poorer countries are increasingly uninterested in repurposing old machines these days. They want donors to provide - through NGO projects, etc. - new hardware running whatever is the latest. Not an easy sell.

Several exist. On Linux check out Curn (a java app with no GUI) or Rawdog (a Python app, I think; maybe PHP). I use both and like them. Rawdog produces my personal feed at http://www.therandymon.com/rawdogger.html and I can access it from any device on any OS. I stayed with the stock CSS, but you can customize it any way you like. Have fun!

There are a lot of developers that provide a "free" app whose revenue comes from allowing advertisements to appear somewhere on the screen. Assuming these adblockers would also block those ads, anyone using them would be cutting the revenue of those kind devs who released their apps for free. And if that's the case, then I think what Google is doing is justifiable.

This hypothesis was made on the basis of zero research and two cups of coffee :)

I can understand the disappointment, but why do so many nerds feel like they're absolutely screwed as a result? There are a huge number of alternatives. Any iOS or Android device has more RSS-reader apps than you can shake a stick at (I use RSSDemon and like it). Firefox has their "live bookmarks," the Opera browser handles RSS feeds expertly, Linux users have akregator and a couple of others. If you're a nerd with a website, install rawdog and create your own reader (I made one at http://www.therandymon.com/rawdogger.html with the feeds I like to read) or try something like CURN (http://therandymon.com/content/view/188/98/, a small java app you can run on your own machine and that can either create an HTML feed for you or email the results anywhere you want them.

I love RSS and use it extensively, on many platforms. I never quite got Google Reader but for me it wasn't as good as a dedicated app. The fact that GoogleReader is going down the tubes doesn't mean the end of civilization, people: there are a lot of alternatives. Maybe nothing quite the same (yet!) but soon. And anyway, if it was so good, there's a niche open now for an enterprising geek to whip up something similar and make some money. Hopefully that geek will create something that doesn't include all that social-networky horsecrap.