There's software for auto-detection of necessary libraries (cmake is probably the best, since it's more portable than autoconf).

If you've the source tree, then you should require one single platform-dependent package containing cmake, gnu make, curl or wget, grep, cut and associated libraries, along with a text file containing a list of dependencies, where to get them and where to put them.

Your build system then scans for everything needed. If you've got it, it uses it. If you don't, it fetches the source, builds it and installs it.

This is not rocket science. Gentoo has been doing something similar for a very long time, so has Perl, so has Cygwin and Cygwin-based packages like OSGEO4W.

Yes, it's slow. Yes, it means the browser maintainer has to have a text editor. Yes, it's going to be as painful and agonizing as installing X11R4 or GateD. I did both. On a 386SX-16. Uphill. Both ways. In the snow. If you can't write your code properly to begin with, get off my lawn!

No problem. Since they require that, you get contractor rates. Plus per diem for the travel. The petrol and wear-and-tear on your car to Germany will be tax-deductable. The remainder of expenses can be billed to the vendor. You send them the estimate in advance, then when they refuse (which they will, because it'll be a hell of a lot more than the cost of a Windows license and probably not too far from the cost of the computer in its entirety if you choose the right places to stay), sue the bastards for breech of contract.

Would you win? Probably not, but the cost of the lawsuit would be a hell of a lot more than the cost of your expenses sheet. That would put them in an interesting position. If they win, they lose. Hey, corporations have been doing this for centuries, it's about time geeks had a go. It seems to be a very profitable racket.

Depends. If you can charge interest on the refund, this could be fun.

No, because there is a difference between looking for the perfect castle and realizing that maybe having a wall isn't so stupid and closing the door and night isn't a bad idea, either.

Making brute force attacks difficult is not a question of perfect code. It's a question of not allowing unlimited tries at unlimited speed (online) or not storing unsalted password hashes (offline). It's not a matter of protecting your server from compromise. A serious defense strategy always includes the assumption that several layers of your protection fail and you should still not suffer a total defeat.

You see, this is the point. Whether or not they are is not a matter of hope like rain and sunshine. It's something you actively control.

No, but there are good and stupid solutions, and it's time we stop using the stupid ones. It's a feature of this anarchy we love so much, because if software was a car... well, at least in the western world you can't legally sell a car without brakes anymore.

I don't know why the researchers were so surprised by this.

I don't either - the speed of evolution is directly proportional to generation time and pressure. The former is one of the reasons why fruit flies are so popular for genetics research - from egg to ready to lay more eggs is about three weeks.

Which opens the door to DOS attacks on target accounts, but there are several smart ways to work around that (send an unlock link to the e-mail address for that user, for example).

There are two kinds of security people in the business world. Those with a real interest in advancing the field and making computing more secure, and those working for large consulting and IT "Security" companies. I am exaggerating some, of course, and there are great people in those companies as well, but unfortunately the business concept of too many of them is based on solving problems in such ways that you can sell the solution to many other customers, not on finding a solution that takes care of the actual problem.

It's the same with consulting companies and the insource/outsourcing cycles. There are good arguments for both of them, but if you've watched the business world for a decade or two you understand that they are hyped in cycles so the same consultants who sold outsourcing to a company last period can sell insourcing to the same company next period or after the next CTO change.

Me and other security experts have been saying such things for years.

Basically, our password handling systems and policies are completely broken. It's not just what xkcd pointed out - it's worse. Those policies are based on making brute-force attacks more difficult. But to sum up a complex topic in a soundbite: If your system allows for brute-force attacks, your system is fatally broken.

Do they allow packages to be ranamed? Then changing only 5 bits woudl rectify the situation.

If they just leave the code as-is, but change the name from "ownCloud" to "pwnCloud", then the actual functionality of the package would be clear to everyone.

Except the minimum wage hasn't actually increased anywhere but Seattle, Washington(and even there it's still being phased in), and more-over, one of the big principles that undercuts this argument is: "once you can automate away a job, is there any wage at which you wouldn't?"

No, there isn't any wage at which you wouldn't - and it's been happening right under our noses for thirty-forty odd years now. Most people don't notice it because "automation takes away jobs" is virtually always assumed to mean "low education, low or no skill, rote and/or repetitive" jobs.

But the microprocessor revolution changed all that. The skilled master machinist has been replaced by an unskilled worker who loads and unloads a CAM machine. The draftsmen that, under the direction of an engineer, created and maintained the drawings the machinist worked from has been replaced by a CAD program used directly by the engineer. The engineer himself has been partly replaced by electrons too... instead of spending weeks with slipstick working out a stress calculation, now sets it up in a day or two on the appropriate software, clicks the mouse, and it's finished before he gets back from freshening his coffee.

And that's just one example, consider the business my wife works at... Thirty years ago, and at a tenth the size they had a full time accountant and two full time bookkeepers (plus data entry clerks and file clerks) - now they have an (almost) full time accountant, the bookkeepers (along with the data entry clerks and the filing clerks) having been replaced by a POS system.

When it's skilled, or especially when it's white collar, we call it "productivity improvement"... but we should call a spade a spade. It's automation.

They weren't able to do it back then, either.

Any large order had an almost 100% chance of having an arithmetic error. It was always unfathomable to me how more than a century after the invention of the cash register, a multi-billion dollar company could predicate all of their income on high school students' scribbling. Not to mention having to wait in line while all these errors were tediously generated by the staff then checked over by irate customers.

It was a great thing when McDonalds finally dragged themselves into the 19th century.

I would imagine it's down to too few people being on it still.

Not just too few people... it's also feature incomplete.
 

How long do you suppose people will wait before just not bothering with it?

It's already started... Ello has failed to learn the lesson of G+ and odds are, it will suffer the same fate. Gatekeeping at launch is just shooting yourself in the foot - people want to try your system, and if you lock them out... they aren't coming back. First impressions matter, and a barred door with a sign saying "only kewl kids allowed" makes a powerful first impression. In addition, G+, and Diaspora, and now Ello can't seem to grasp that to most people, personal privacy is just one of the many factors that they weigh. On top of the network effect there's also the features the system supports (chat, pages/groups, games, etc...), and all of the would be pretenders have fallen short on that front. (Or added them too late to make a difference.)

On top of that... Ello is going to have to come up with some pretty impressive optional features in order to induce people to pay for them - things the users can't get elsewhere while *also* providing a complete set of the features users have come to expect. That's a very tall order.

There's no doubt that like G+, Ello might be able to eke out a meager living on the fringes... but as a Facebook killer, or even serious competitor, it's already dead.

Yup. But the fossil record tends to be rather sketchy, and has little concern for what we consider our "needs".

Well, I don't think that quite matches the scientific concept of "species". By your definition, almost all species who were alive 50,000 years ago would be considered extinct, but hardly any biologists would agree with that. It's true that no humans alive today have 100% Neanderthal genes, but it's also nearly certain that there are no living humans with 100% Cro-Magnon genes, either. What happened would be considered a mixing of several human sub-species after migrations of one or more African groups into Eurasia. The Cro-Magnon sub-species disappeared, too, and modern human Caucasian and Asian sub-species are the results of that mixing. This sort of thing happens in species all the time, when conditions allow such genetic mixing, and the result is rarely considered a new species.

The fact is that modern humans are all one species. We can and do interbreed when groups mingle, and there are no groups of modern humans that are genetically incompatible. If sub-species "disappear" by genetic mixing, that is usually not called an extinction event. It's just the routine and normal mingling of subspecies.

An interesting contrast is that most North American duck species are known to hybridize occasionally, and the offspring are usually fertile. Does this mean they're really all one species? No, because they all mingle a lot, but interbreeding is rare. They have "behavioral" species-separation features, mostly based on female mate choice. The females are mostly all mottled brown (protective coloring), and the males often approach females of other species (because they can't tell them apart either ;-). But the females usually only accept males that have the "right" color markings; the others are ugly to them. This suffices to keep the species separate, though there is probably a very low level of genetic interchange between many of the species.

But humans aren't like this. Even if we do generally prefer mates in our own subspecies, most of us do find many members of other subspecies physically attractive, and we'll mate with them given the opportunity. This means that we really are all the same species. We now have good evidence that the Neandertals were merely another subspecies, because when they had the opportunity, they did interbreed with those slender, dark-skinned folks who migrated into their territory. They did so often enough to produce a new subspecies that's physically distinct from either of the earlier two (or three or more).

Could you please, please, try it before saying that it is just like [insert failed google product here] or [insert very successful google product that you don't like here]. I know this is quite a culture shift for Slashdot, but sometimes it's too much.

Why? Given Google's track record at UI and UX (generally pretty poor), their track record of 'fixing' what isn't broken (pretty good, I.E. they do it more often than not), their track record of benign neglect of their products (pretty good in the same sense as previous)... etc. etc., we have every reason in the world to be skeptical. We've been burned so many times before.

You cheerlead, I'll go with the odds.