It was but a flesh wound!

Linux here, works fine for me. Chrome 31. I'd ask "can you try to upgrade to the latest version?", but I wouldn't want to contribute to, you know, Slashdot losing it. :)

The real disturbing moment was when I rewatched the movie a few years after 9/11 and realized just how much it had anticipated correctly.

Does it still count as satire when it's so spot on?

Countries like France and UK, yeah, absolutely. Germany... is slightly more touchy about issues pertaining to surveillance and the general topic of totalitarianism, for some reason.

Iceland overthrew its government when said government wouldn't jail bankers. If Iceland says they ain't going to spy on people because fuck that, I would lean toward cautiously trusting them.

Oh, then this is probably my cue to turn up and point you to Mystcraft. Mystcraft is just as the name implies: a mod for Minecraft that adds Myst-like mechanisms for creating and exploring Ages. Yes, it's just about as fantastic as it sounds. (And by God, don't forget to bring a linking book if you don't want to get forever stranded.)

And to answer the question raised by the article, I just spent my lunch break playing Mystcraft. Today, in 2013, 20 years after the release of Myst. So I'd say, pretty relevant indeed.

I think Mir is a case study in how to correctly identify problems and then going about solving them all wrong.

See, the good thing about Wayland is, it does the right thing in having a limited scope. It aims to do one thing and do it well: provide an API for GUI clients to share buffers with a compositor.

And the problem with Wayland is, of course, that... it has a limited scope. Screen management? Input handling? Buffer allocation? "A modern desktop needs all that!" say the Ubuntu devs, and yeah, that's absolutely correct. "That's a client concern," say the Wayland devs, and guess what? From their point of view, that's correct too. (Although Wayland since started working on an input handling API.)

Now, the important thing to realize is, when the Wayland guys say that something is a client concern, as I understand, they don't necessarily mean the GUI applications, no. They mean the compositor.

Meaning that a whole lot of the stuff desktop shells rely on is, in fact, not provided by Wayland itself.

That's where Weston comes in: it's supposed to be an example (a "reference implementation", to use the designated words) of how to write a compositor. But... not necessarily in a way that meets the higher level needs of desktop shells. Unsurprisingly, both KDE and GNOME will be using their own compositors.

So basically, a whole lot of the desktop integration on top of Wayland will be, as it were, left as an exercise to the reader.

With all that in mind, I think the highest outcome end game is somewhat clear: frame-perfect rendering through the Wayland API of Mir-composited KDE/GNOME/Unity clients.

Or in other words, Mir should probably be a set of APIs to handle all the admittedly important desktop integration -- clipboard, multi-screen layout, input and gestures, systray/notification requests... -- with an optional and replaceable compositor thrown in.

All the points of contention that I know of, mainly that Canonical requires server-side buffer allocation (presumably for mobile ARM platforms) where Wayland does it client-side, could have been resolved with some diplomacy and a mutual willingness to reach a satisfactory compromise.

But instead, it looks like the report card is just going to say, "Doesn't play well with others." As usual. What a sad mess and wasted opportunity.

... Chrome is able to use the KDE password wallet if present, which is protected under a master password. (I assume it can use the GNOME equivalent too). If so, Chrome won't save anything itself, so on that count at least, you're safe.

That said, I would recommend using a service like LastPass anyway, so the problem is taken entirely out of the hands of the browsers.

>Microsoft's spec is supposed to allow people to install their own keys

The Windows 8 certification requirement outright mandates that users are able to upload their own keys. (See here, "Windows 8 System Requirements", page 121, paragraph 17.)

This thankfully gives us a pretty solid standing to complain at hardware makers who don't do it right.

In the long run, I am not sure it will be necessary, though. I've been looking into those issues after getting a laptop with SecureBoot enabled, and sane options are in development. The interesting thing about UEFI is that it comes with an extensive API, and can be configured from inside the currently running OS (check out efibootmgr on Linux for instance). When the dust has settled, installing and launching Linux will probably not be so vastly different from right now. Time will tell.

Interesting. WDDM is one of those thing I REALLY wish we Linux people took a much closer interest into.

What's new in WDDM 1.3 that prevents forward compatibility, then?

What I would like to know is how often we mistakenly take foreign news at face value.

It can be so hard to read the cues from a different culture.I wonder if that has been studied?

Err... What's wrong with the X11 protocol as a remote access scheme?

Just because we're taking it out of the rendering loop in Wayland doesn't mean we can't still use it outside.

Yeah, like, for every honest guy you get 40 thieves!

Yeah, but your version has the unfortunate side-effect of not making a Boeing competitor look bad. Can't have that, you know.

(Seriously, WTF is this summary? Fox News Scare Quotes around 'brilliant'? Really, Slashdot?)

Back when I was still at school, one year, my classroom was one overlooking a deep vale. One of our primary pastimes that year was chucking assorted stuff out the window and see how it'd fly. Mostly (but not limited to) paper planes.

The record winner for that year in terms of distance covered, and by far, was also the simplest model we ever came up with.

It was much like the Ring mentioned above, except even simpler. Where the Ring's profile makes an O, the Box's makes a square U. So you don't even need tape.

Just take a rectangular piece of paper, fold the front over several times to make a thicker leading edge, and fold two vertical wings so the thing will look somewhat like an elongated cube with three missing sides. That's it. Not only it flies, but it flies pretty well, so long as you balanced the 'wings' well enough.

I'm surprised rdiff-backup hasn't been mentioned yet. It's a very nice piece of software, does incremental backups, and is easy to automate.