By what strange theory does Slackware support systemd? And how is the conversation being "held back"? At least on LQ, I think it's been discussed to death to the point where there's really nothing new to say about it.

I can say one thing for certain: you do not know that anything concerning systemd in Slackware is likely or not. Hell, *I* don't.

Hi gang,

        Thanks for the reports of stale gasoline - I'm convinced. Tonight I'll head out & recycle my old gas. The problem isn't getting things together; it's keeping it all up to date & ready. Your comments hit me in the right place: be prepared.

        I'm associated with a ham radio emergency group; the rule is that the station's equipment must be immediately ready for action. In an emergency, you don't have the luxury of stringing a cable, or figuring out which power supply can work with which rig. If the transceivers aren't wired up, tested, and set to go, they might as well be underwater. Same's true for on-the-air skills. You gotta check into the 2-meter net at least every month, or you'll get rusty and screw up when things get hot.

      And so it is with earthquake readiness. It's not enough to put away a survival stash and let it molder. Gotta keep things fresh - gotta keep my skills sharp.

Best wishes,
-Cliff
        ps to ksmithderm ... sure, I've got Klein bottle hats (and Mobius scarves). They're on m'website.

Background: I live on North Oakland, next to Berkeley, in the Rockridge section. Urban, detached 2 bedroom house about 100 years old.

We bolted down our house, fully reinforced the stemwalls, and installed shearwalls. For our little 2-bedroom bungalow in Oakland, this set us back around $20,000. Earthquake insurance seemed outrageous (around $2,500/year, with very limited benefits). Along with the earthquake retrofit, we set aside a few cases of food & twenty 5-gallon jugs of water. A 2Kw Honda generator. Radio, flashlights, FRS walkie-talkies, etc. Small amount of medical stuff.

Yes, I have onsite and offsite backups (that's easy); the real problem would be connectivity after a quake. There's probably a hundred telephone poles between my house and the central office.

Some challenges: Keeping food & water fresh is a problem - cans get rusty as water condenses on cold surfaces. Some camping food goes bad. MRI rations taste, well, horrible. We should replace water & food annually, and generally forget to. (We discovered diapers in our earthquake stash, left over from when our college kids were infants)

    Storing gasoline for the generator is a problem. I'm told that gasoline gets stale after a few months (is this true, or an urban legend?). It's a pain to lug a 3 gallon gas can around, and it's not something I want under my house. (I store it in a shed, where it's out of sight & out of mind - so I rarely refresh it. Is there a small, 5 or 10 gallon under-ground gasoline storage tank?). I should start and exercise the generator every month; it's more like every two years or so. Our experience in the 1989 quake was that gas stations can't pump after an earthquake (no power).

  Our neighborhood's quake group (the Oakland - Rockridge Shakers) meets every summer, and the earthquake drills have been quite useful - we've had several fun practice sessions, where we hunt for human dummies hidden around the neighborhood, search for downed wires, and practice using walkie-talkies. Afterwards, it's a block party, and we compare notes while sharing lunch.

    My home business, Acme Klein Bottles, lost two glass Klein bottles in last night's quake. Both fell off a shelf and shattered on the floor. Good lesson: keep my glassware stored down low, with holders to prevent boxes from shifting. Since most of my glass Klein bottles are stored under our house; a major local temblor that destroyed the house would also wipe out the business.

I can confirm that Windows 8.1 x86 on 2GB RAM runs great--even on a 5-year old netbook. I loaded Win 8.1 Pro on a 2009-era Dell Inspiron Mini 9 (it had a now-unsupported XP) with an x86-only hyperthreaded Atom processor & IDE SSD--and it flies. I even put a new Intel 802.11ac WiFi-Bluetooth miniPCI card in it. I can't use Metro apps (1024x600 screen doesn't meet Metro's 1024x768 requirement, darn it), but after loading Start8, I don't care. I have a very portable little desktop machine that flies with Office 2010, Firefox, etc.

My only complaints are that Chrome actually performs quite poorly on sites with heavy AJAX (specifically Yahoo Mail), and that Flash is better off left not installed (darn). But Firefox appears to be much better optimized for low-end hardware, so I just use Firefox with no Flash.

In addition, the "monthly updates" are generally security fixes that exists to solve a security hole--where proper interaction with the component shouldn't cause problems before or after the applied fix. They generally solve one security problem within the component (e.g. buffer overflow at xxxxxxxxxxxxxx when called by yyyyyyyyyyyyyyy). That's why they've generally been trouble-free. Microsoft has recently gone on-record stating that Patch Tuesday will now be getting more such non-security feature updates, and they won't be optional.

Generally speaking, old-school Service Packs were both the bundling of hotfixes and new kernel-level features (e.g. USB 3.0, 4K drive sectors, UEFI support, etc.). In the world of Win7 and lower, Patch Tuesday was generally limited to security fixes and parameter changes (e.g. daylight savings time changes). Microsoft would also make available optional updates to Windows components (Internet Explorer, Media Player, etc.) that you could apply as desired.

This model isn't true with Win8.x. They're putting out kernel/feature updates every few months, trying to appear more Agile. A few months back, there was a mini-furor over Update 1 in that you had 30 days to test & apply it to your systems, or get no new updates. There was no beta of the release code that administrators could test ahead of time, as was customary with Service Packs. Some users flipped--specifically companies. Microsoft backed down a teeny bit, but only offered to create a branch for those who wanted to hold off on Update 1--for one extra Patch Tuesday cycle (4-5 weeks).

This is a perfect example of why Microsoft should go back to doing Service Packs and not these seemingly random "feature updates" that have become the norm with Windows 8.x and Office 2013 (non-MSI / "click to install"). There's no standard codebase anymore and feature updates are just being installed willy-nilly, with no real support window for delayed installations. (At least with a SP, you had a year to test & work around a problem before MS pulled the support plug). This is another reason why companies don't want Win8.x--kernel-level updates with only a few days warning. (Articles were still talking about "Windows 8.1 Update 2" as recently as 2 weeks prior to August's Patch Tuesday). I'd hate to be an NT administrator fretting over all my 2012R2 installations right now.

Instead of getting a SP for Windows 8, we now have 8.1. Instead of getting SPs for Windows 8.1, we now have 8.1 Update 1 and 8.1 August Update. We have updates that come through the "Store" app. This is one of the reasons (granted, not the primary one) why the uptake of Windows 8.x is now slower than Vista's uptake some ~2 years post-RTM, and why Windows 7 is gaining market share, at the expense of XP and Vista. Companies don't want this model and the headaches that go along with it.

So, for Win9, just go back to a Service Pack model and make everybody happy. Yes, SPs cost a lot of money to put out, and yes MS ends up looking old-school, but the rigor with testing is (presumed to be) significantly higher than some rushed, "little" update. Windows 8.x is broken, and Microsoft keeps pitching a newer, faster cycle of feature updates, but this just proves they are incapable of properly handling such a model... Microsoft: you are not Apple, and you don't have to try to emulate them.

As for myself, so far my two Win8.1 installations (one x86, one x64) and one of 2012R2 in a VM are not showing problems from these updates... But I have only myself to blame for not waiting a few extra days. Of course, now MS will have to come up with an out-of-band fix (with even less testing) within the next ~3 weeks or will have to have 2 sets of patches for September's Patch Tuesday--one for those who haven't uninstalled these updates and one for those who have. Pure stupidity...

Seriously, Microsoft... Internet Explorer has cost the company & its shareholders BILLIONS (wages, lawsuit settlements, DOJ/EU investigations, royalties, partnerships (e.g. AOL), etc.), yet made it $0 in income. If it wasn't for Bill Gates' inflated ego back in the mid-90s against Netscape, and if Microsoft would have partnered with a company like Netscape (back then) or Mozilla/Google/Opera (now), they would be in even better financial shape than they are in...

Sure, one can argue that MSN made a lot of money because it was the default homepage on IE, but MSN would have made the same amount of money if Microsoft bundled Netscape with Windows & set MSN as the default page--and would have pushed off all the R&D and risks onto a 3rd party. But no--almost 20 years later, we're still dealing with the hangover of those decisions. Business students should be doing case studies on the MS-IE debacle...

So, Microsoft, please deprecate IE!!! Do the world, and especially your shareholders, a favor. Stop at IE11. You've proven that you can deprecate things and support them on newer OSes (e.g. Jet/ACE). And since you'll need an HTML engine in future OSes (e.g. HTML Help, etc.), throw some money at Firefox (or Google, Opera, etc.) and force all "newer" internally developed programs (e.g. Visual Studio) to call this engine--while "older" apps stick with the deprecated engine (which still receives security updates) and/or are moved to the newer one over time... IE and its engine becomes a legacy feature and be done with it.

But, alas, the inflated IE ego syndrome still permeates within Microsoft...

Yeah, the funny thing is my property tax statement itemizes how the taxes I pay each year are divided up.
This past year, my tax statement says that $174.20 of my taxes went toward the library. I saw a 6" Kindle on Amazon for $69. Wi-fi only. So even if I purchased or say my property taxes paid for that Kindle, I'd still have to buy Wi-Fi to use it. That's just so I can use it personally. There's no ability to share that Kindle with anybody. And there is nowhere to physically meet the other people in the community.

Now if you think paying $174.20 is expensive for a library, I paid $2,143 to the local school district. I don't have any kids in school, but I still have to pay for the schools. If you wanted to save money so badly, maybe we should stop paying for public schools and use the money to pay for Kindles instead so kids can learn from those.

Not everybody can afford a Kindle.

My library card didn't cost me a thing to request and I can check out as many books as I can read for free as long as they are returned on time. Heck, I can even check out CD's, DVDs and puzzles for my kid.

Public libraries are great sources for local history, in-person social networking, and meetings on how to become more involved in the local community and volunteering.

Save money on Verizon or save money on things marketers want you to buy? What's the difference--if you're still saving $$$?

Imagine a brave new world where you walk into a Whole Foods and the "VZWAds" app pops-up a coupon for $0.50 off a $4.99 gallon of "365" brand milk, $0.30 off some couscous, and $1 off the pre-made food bar (minimum $15 purchase) for lunch? You needed milk, have no idea how to cook couscous, and you were getting hungry for lunch--but $15 worth of pre-made food is a lot, even at Whole Foods... After using that coupon, and scarfing down your huge lunch, you get another popup that gives you $0.50 off a Starbucks "mocho-choco-latte-cremo-supremo" venti-sized drink--but, HURRY, only if you buy one within the next 30 minutes at the Starbucks right next to Whole Foods! You've never had that type of drink, but the discounted price makes it worth trying! Then, the cloud concludes that you're probably low on cat food, since you last bought 36 cans a few weeks ago, so the app pops up yet another $0.50 coupon, this time for cat food at PetSmart! And all of these places are in the same strip mall...

Just thing of the possibilities!

I agree--I just don't see how this is the case. Sure, one person's Cleartype settings would be different from another's, so are we saying that the exact subpixel rendering is calculated? The article also mentions fonts installed... So, if I add a font, or a font like Arial Unicode gets updated (e.g. install a new version of MS-Office), my CANVAS fingerprint is now different/broken?

The claim of 90% accuracy for PCs is shockingly, quite high... But if tablets & mobile devices have problems with this and PCs don't, something don't smell right. So, is this trick working on a somehow poor implementation of CANVAS--that somehow creates different images on different PCs--but the same image on the same PC? What about a PC running Firefox vs. the same PC running Firefox in a VM (same OS or different OS)?

Uploading is still a fraction of what downloading is... Most home consumers, even those with IoT devices or heavy P2P users, are still net consumers of online information. (Think Netflix, Windows Updates, VPN, remote desktop, etc.) I see it as a gift I didn't care to receive but one that I wouldn't pass up. So, I have to ask, what's the point?

A more valuable gift would be continue the lack of symmetry, and bump existing download & upload speeds by some percentage. Until Netflix becomes P2P, most people wouldn't see much of a benefit from this... (e.g. Netflix streaming still sucks but my uploads to YouTube are 40% faster!)

Dear Strong Bad,
How do you tweet with boxing gloves on?
I mean, you must hit that 160 character limit every time you touch your smartphone and smash all the keys at once with those things.
Seriously, your twitter feed must look like:
"#Strongbad -
Adflkjad-0u91Adflkjad-0u915kl134-0udfk;lgkm;ldf-qpoilmar,madfv[pairg;lkqmer,m/. adfv[0adlm ,adlav[fqegl,mqdeg,.madfv;oja;ldknfadf890uarjo1k109afomaqer, q34t[0er"
Sincerly,
Chicago, IL