Yeah you've been gone a long time. Not just from Sashdot, but apparently there are yet rocks one can hide under!

Turns out that the Slashdot predictions in the 90s about taking over the world pretty much came to pass. The obscure project Linux is now known by everyone, and Linux is pretty much everywhere now for good or bad. Maybe not on the desktop, which is an every shrinking small part of the overall picture. Linux dominates the mobile world, pretty much swept clean the super computing world and the cloud computing landscape, and is still a huge player in the server world. It's not work for free either. Linux development is mostly done by full-time paid employees of quite a few companies that depend on Linux, and make serious money from it. So Linux really has been wildly successful, and makes people working on it a lot of money, and we all benefit. Pretty amazing picture.

Not having root access to my device is not legitimate? Are you serious? How can you think that is appropriate? Perhaps you are an app developer who's been burned. If so, I'm sorry. But two wrongs don't make a right. You're right to make money on your own proprietary app is legitimate. But so is my right to have full control of my own devices. If those come into conflict (I don't think they do), then it can be resolved with existing laws. To justify removing users's freedoms to preserve your income stream is a bit shaky. That is if you are a disgruntled app developer.

In any case, what if I want to develop my own homebrew apps using whatever tools I want or come up with, other than Xcode? Or access the raw hardware sensors directly and do cool things outside the Apple-defined garden? Or the ability for others to do this and for me to be able to run their cool stuff on my phone, tablet, or other device. Or the ability to replace the system software completely?

Right now in the RC toy world companies from China are shaking up the transmitter market by introducing low-cost transmitters that are completely open and hackable. Homebrew firmwares are very popular and do amazing things that the incumbent companies only offer on their most expensive radios. It's a beautiful mix of open hardware and open software. Niche market sure but it illustrates what can happen.

And Android does have some of this going for it, but most phones are, like Apple's phones, rather locked down and must be cracked open, sadly. Though google never tried to make that very difficult thank goodness. Still annoying, but less so than on iPhone, especially with sanctioned, boot-unlockable phones out there, such as the Nexus 5.

In the end it just comes down to personal freedom with my devices. On Android, thanks to root access, I have a number of utilities I use on a regular basis such as an ssh daemon that can give me full access to the file system (good for tweaking obscure settings, performing legitimate backups, etc). Titanium Backup is the killer app for rooted Android phones I think, though I confess Google made it less necessary for most users by syncing apps and data to the cloud (privacy!).

Except that being "legal" isn't enough. iPhones are only able to be freed with a jailbreak because of Apple's bugs that are exploitable to gain root access. This is ridiculous and it's the reason I haven't bought any Apple device in many years. Buying an iPhone to jailbreak is kind of like buying an appliance knowing (and hoping) it has some kind of structural flaw (a chipped corner perhaps, or maybe missing screws) so that one get to device's innards. Except in physical machines I can always open them if I try hard enough. Digital is not the same way. Thus, in order to have true freedom, we need to not only make jailbreaking legal, but also require companies to give you the owner root access if you request it.

And even food is actually used by the US as an economic weapon, especially when it's tied to aid packages, which is very unfortunate.

It's been this way for weeks now, off and on. I figure it must be Dice just screwing around with the site, trying to figure out how to get it working with a CDN, and maybe even with SSL! But failing and then reverting the normal, working, no-SSL site. Then trying again. At least a couple of times a week.

No it certainly doesn't highlight that. As others have mention you seem to fundamentally misunderstand what openstreetmap is. Openstreetmap can enable things that other map providers simply can't, such as quick, crowd-sourced updating of maps in disaster areas, which enables apps to be built quickly for the purposes disaster assistance, emergency planning, as well as routing. In short, OpenStreetMap is a platform, not an app, though they do host apps as well, such as a map viewer and now a route system. Google Maps is a platform too, with routing built on top of that, but few users of Google maps understand the difference (and hence are not likely to need or want to use OpenStreetMap for anything). But Besides that, accurate mapping is something too important to trust solely to proprietary companies who then want to limit access (IE sell access) to what should be public information.

Routing can be based on top of this, and several third-parties do this (osmand is one that worked rather well for me while traveling in a foreign country).

I encourage all slashdotters to update the maps in their neighborhoods. With accurate mapping information, routing based on top of the maps becomes more accurate. It's a win for everyone.

Reminds me of this clip from the classic Father Ted where Father Liam is breaking all of Ted's furniture, claiming the quality is poor.

"These won't last. You could talk them into coming down."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Whitespace code indentation doesn't mean anything about the people you're going to be working with. Sometimes Python is used simply because it's an excellent tool.

As far as I know Python has always had multiline strings. I don't know of any limitations in the multi-line strings that would preclude using them for things like SQL queries. They begin and end with """. I suspect you already knew that though.

Python's indentation mirrors natural indentation anyway (braces would be superfluous), so in most cases, the code just looks normal, natural, and pretty darn close to executable pseudocode. That's why people like Python. You don't have to use or like Python, though. You can always use "Python with Braces!" http://www.pythonb.org/

IRC is just a bad medium for mature discussion to begin with (but forums suck in many other ways, so where does that leave us). The IRC channel for most *any* project is unnecessarily toxic. Just because Araq is on the IRC channel doesn't mean the whole project is polluted by the ramblings of one or two fans/hecklers/wannabe devs.

My view of Nim from the web pages presented in the summary, and the online docs is very different from your IRC-centric view. I've personally been very impressed with the quality of the documentation, tutorials, and papers I've read so far. I don't think I've seen as friendly and readable documentation for any project in a long time. Perhaps quality will drop as Nim becomes more popular and people concentrate on developing. But for a project that has seemingly come out of nowhere, this really impressed me. Not only is Araq apparently a decent programmer, he's also a good writer too.

Thank you to the submitter for submitting this. I had never heard of Nim before today. Adding it to my short list of very interesting new languages to follow.

Ahh interesting. Makes sense, but I disagree about that being the right way to do it. The way you describe is hackish, having to run a client. We need the ability to simply remote log into a machine and run the binary and have it work. This is disappointing, if this is indeed the way they've chosen to go. Shouldn't matter what widget set an app uses; it should work (by some definition of the word "work") whether locally, or on a remote machine.

After it was announced a year or two ago, I have heard nothing about RDP support in Wayland. Is it getting to the point that Wayland will have first-class support for transparently remoting apps with RDP? Anyone know the status on this? There's precious little info about this on the interwebs, and no real information on what the workflow looks like, say with ssh forwarding.

I doubt it will be. Sounds to me that Windows fits you just fine. That being the case, you have little incentive to really try Linux, so I don't think 2015 will be much different for you than any of the previous years. True Linux distros have gotten better and easier--Linux Mint would probably work for you right now out of the box without having to mess with browser plugins or tweaking audio. But you don't seem to have much motivation to try Linux, so much smaller issues are going to be stumbling blocks for you. Which is just fine. Use what works for you.

As for me, my experiences with Windows seem to mirror your experiences with Linux. Just getting Windows installed, patched, all the basic software going, takes hours and hours. And if your hardware isn't quite up to date, chasing down drivers on random scary sites, hardware incompatibilities, etc. Never gives me a good impression of Windows. Windows only appears to work if it came with your computer and if you never do anything to change that computer. Rinse and repeat. Been this way for years. Since Windows has little to offer me, I, like you with Linux, don't spend a lot of time messing around with it.

Okay, so as an exercise to the reader, add that cleanup code to the example. Now do you understand?

In languages without goto or some other kind of construct such as a context manager, every time you want to return from a function you have to clean up all the threads, release memory, release handles, etc. This is error-prone (a prime source of leaks), and is wasteful and leads to difficult-to-read code. Whereas if you have a cleanup section that you can jump to, then every exit from the function goes to one place where the cleanup is properly executed. Hope this makes it clearer. As the article states, this is a very common idiom in C. Every good C programmer does this, and it's all throughout the Linux kernel. Sure if there were good, standard facilities for doing context management or a way of doing atexit handling for individual functions it would not be necessary, and maybe cleaner.

But if you're familiar with the concept, when you see it in the code you understand exactly what's going on.

Well when you post flame bait what do you expect, especially when it's FUD pure and simple. If you've used systemd, or done even a little bit of research you would know that 99% of systemd's suite of services does not run in pid 1. I think at this point pid 1 is rather stable and unchanging. It's the ancillary (and I might add mostly optional) components that are getting the updates lately it seems. I've run put in several updates for systemd since RHEL7 and Centos 7 came out, and *none* of them have required an reboot so far. Kernels update more frequently I might add, which did require a reboot until now. With systemd updates, individual subsystems can restart after an update. Only the little init 1 process would need a reboot to replace, but that's the case for *any* init system. And I'm sure the linux kernel could be modified to restart init 1 some day.

Just heading off the FUD at the pass here.

The sad thing is, the obvious answer the car industry is going to come up with is to encrypt the canbus and use DRM to control access to the bus. This will provide a (false) sense of security, while locking out those pesky people that want to mod their vehicles and add all those cheaper after market parts like remote starts. And in the end this is bad thing for all of us.