> It's not like the journal format is some state secret. It's documented
> and there are already several journal parsers to choose from.

Please explain http://lwn.net/Articles/468049...

> From the FAQ:

> Will the journal file format be standardized? Where can I find an explanation
> of the on-disk data structures?

> At this point we have no intention to standardize the format and we take the
> liberty to alter it as we see fit. We might document the on-disk format
> eventually, but at this point we donÂ't want any other software to read, write
> or manipulate our journal files directly. The access is granted by a shared
> library and a command line tool. (But then again, itÂ's Free Software, so
> you can always read the source code!)

> What's wrong with harfbuzz?
>
> It's just a font-shaping library, needed to correctly render south-asians scripts.
[...deletia...]
> And ghostscript is needed to be able to print your spreadsheets. If
> you package a program for a distribution, you want it to work out-of-the-box.

Gnumeric used to work out-of-the-box with this stuff as *OPTIONAL*. What I'm complaining about is that it's now *MANDATORY*. Why the change, when it used to work just fine? What's next? Pull in the entirety of GNOME, complete with systemd?

It's not just the init, it's also the applications that are being infected with Lennart-ware, e.g. gnumeric. It's a great spreadsheet, but recently it's been picking up various egregious hard-coded dependancies that simply don't make sense. This occurs mostly via GTK, which seems to pull in a significant chunk of GNOME.

I run a minimalist Gentoo desktop, and I notice when additional dependancies are dragged in. The past year or 2 has seen goffice, ghostscript, harfbuzz, dbus, and various other crap become hard-coded dependancies for gnumeric. It was not necessary a couple of years ago. If I had several million dollars, I'd hire a bunch of progragrammers to port gnumeric from being dependant on GTK to being dependant on FLTK (Fast Light ToolKit) http://www.fltk.org/ Some of the money would go to ongoing maintenance.

Another few million dollars, and I'd like to hire a team to hack and slash away at Firefox. I was around when "Phoenix" was forked as a lightweight alternative to the Mozilla web-browser. I savoured that promise. That promise has been dashed into the ground, with a Firefox that's bigger, heavier, and slower than the original Mozilla ever was. Time for a new fork.

I want GNU-Linu-x, not GNOME-Lenna-x

"Honed" is a term I've coined in honour of Mat Honan and how his info got owned/wiped... http://apple.slashdot.org/stor...

It's one thing for trusting/ignorant people to put their data in the cloud, and get it stolen. What's the reaction going to be when everybody's data is forcibly put in the cloud?

> Sorry, you are wrong here. The chips with pid0 works fine with Linux, so
> there is no reason, the vendor could not make a working Windows driver.

Sorry, *YOU* are wrong here. The current Windows kernel will not mount a device with pid0, period, end of story. If the kernel won't mount a USB device, no driver will run it. You would need specialized bit-banging software to fix it.

The Linux kernel acted similarly, but there is now a patch out for the kernel to allow fixing FTDI devices.

> They are now being coerced into supporting other chips that are not under their control.

I call bull****. They are not being coerced to do anything, except follow the law. If they detect a clone, they have every right to program their driver to throw an error/exception saying that it's an unsupported device. When they deliberately start bricking hardware, that crosses the line.

An example of "doing it right" is MS Windows checking whether it's a valid copy. If it decides it's not, it goes into reduced functionality mode, and gives you time to verify. It does not go around wiping the hard drive and flashing the BIOS to all zeros. And I'm a linux user, so I'm not exactly an MS fanboi.

> In this case, they haven't "destroyed" anything. The hardware is still there,
> with all of the capabilities it used to have, as long as you can find a
> driver for it. They just changed the ID on it, and you can change it back.

OK, so how does Grandma change the ID and install an older driver? Note that changing the ID to 0 means that it is *NOT* treated as a USB device by any standard software. You are looking at specialized programming-to-the-hardware to be able to interact with it, in order to try unbricking it.

One difference I've noticed between Windows and Linux...

* in Linux, plug in a USB key, or hard drive, or other USB device, and if you have the appropriate driver, "it just works". One USB "mass storage device" driver works for all USB keys and hard drives

* in Windows...
--- plug in a brand X USB key the first time, and Windws goes off onto the internet and installs a special driver
--- plug in a brand Y USB key the first time, and Windws goes off onto the internet and installs a special driver
--- plug in a brand Z USB key the first time, and Windws goes off onto the internet and installs a special driver

Come on guys, a USB key is a USB key, is a USB key. If it has some esoteric functionality, OK, otherwise don't clog up the registry and the hard drive with drivers for every USB key model that has ever been inserted into the machine..

I have a USRobotics USR5637 http://www.usr.com/en/products... USB CDC "56K" dialup modem for backup on the rare occasions my broadband goes down. It's a hardware modem that works in Windows, Mac, Linux, DOS, etc. Once I set up the kernel options in linux "it just works", without constantly downloading updates. WTF is Windows always updating?

> ... the PID can be reset. It's not a brick at all. OP is off the rails. FTDI FTW.

Great. Now let's see Joe Lunchbox or your mother ...
a) diagnose the rason that a device stopped working
b) find, download, and successfully appy a corrective patch

Geek Squad, or whoever, will charge money to fix the problem.

> Except the chip wasn't, as you put it, "killed." The chip is still fully functional with a driver that will support it.

WRONG, WRONG, WRONG. The firmware ID in the device is modified so that...
a) it doesn't work with the new driver
b) it doesn't work with the old driver on the current OS
c) it doesn't work with any driver on any other OS

> That FTDI doesn't want to support counterfeited chips with the driver it developed for the real article is reasonable.
>
> Why should FTDI support chips it didn't make?

    When a copy of Microsoft Windows decides that it *MIGHT* be a fake, it goes into reduced functionality mode and gives you 30 days to validate it. It does not wipe your hard drive. If the FTDI driver detected a fake, and merely refused to function, I'd be unhappy, but that would be within their rights. Bricking the device, requiring an estoteric bare-metal binary writer to unbrick it, is crossing the line.

Depending which part of the planet you're in, most of your FB tracking attempts will come from one of the blocks below. Firewall them all to be safe.

31.13.24.0 - 31.13.31.255
31.13.24.0/21
IE-FACEBOOK-20110418
Facebook Ireland Ltd
IE

31.13.64.0 - 31.13.127.255
31.13.64.0/18
IE-FACEBOOK-20110418
Facebook Ireland Ltd
IE

66.220.144.0 - 66.220.159.255
66.220.144.0/20
Facebook, Inc.
THEFA-3

69.63.176.0 - 69.63.191.255
69.63.176.0/20
Facebook, Inc.
THEFA-3

69.171.224.0 - 69.171.255.255
69.171.224.0/19
Facebook, Inc.
THEFA-3

74.119.76.0 - 74.119.79.255
74.119.76.0/22
Facebook, Inc.
THEFA-3

103.4.96.0 - 103.4.99.255
103.4.96.0/22
FACEBOOK-SG

173.252.64.0 - 173.252.127.255
173.252.64.0/18
AS32934
FACEBOOK-INC

204.15.20.0 - 204.15.23.255
204.15.20.0/22
Facebook, Inc.
THEFA-3

See http://www.carbon49.com/2010/0... for some details of of how everybody else is being ripped off to make solar "profitable" in the pronce of Ontario in Canada...

> Ontario Hydro One will buy the clean energy generated from the program
> participants at rates of up to 80 cents/kWh. This is much higher than the
> rates Ontario Hydro One sell their energy to the public at approximately
> 9 cents/kWh. The idea is to provide financial incentives for private
> businesses and communities to invest in renewable energy generation

Yes, that's right. The provincial power utility is paying almost 9 times as much for unreliable solar (and wind) power as it charges the public. Damn well right it's a money-loser. This works like something invented by the "creative accounting" minds at Enron. Imagine 3 neighbours living next door to each other....

Neighbour A) pays 9.3 cents per KWH for his usage

Neighbour B) generates 12% of his usage, and feeds it to his fridge/computers/swimming-pool/whatever. He only has to pay for the remaining 88% of his usage

Neighbour C) generates 12% of his usage and sells it to Ontario Hydro at the super-inflated rate. He then buys back 100% of his usage at the regular retail rate. He effectively pays zero for his electricity, even though he only generates 12% of what he's using.

This is legislated robbery.

Summary has "42th", which should probably read "42nd".

> Busybox replaces GNU coreutils, not GNU bash.

Wrong. It's more than just GNU coreutils. busybox also normally includes the "ash" shell, although you can build a stripped-down version of busybox withouth ash. ash is very similar to bash, but there are some "bash-isms" that it can't handle.