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So yeah. RIP, the slashdot that I once cared about :-(

(That, and even the community has dropped in quality recently; witness how every ubuntu story is full of people who are too dumb to apt-get install a different WM to replace unity -_- Back in my day, customising your OS to fit your needs was the norm, nay, the entire point of using linux - people would be shunned away from the site for being noobs if they dare complain about how hard it is to compile their own desktop environment from source...)

I wish slashdot editors would append this hint to the end of every ubuntu-related story. As it is, 50% of the replies are just "I don't like one of the default settings, I'm going to switch distro"... (The other 50% being complaints about the choice of animal in the behind-the-scenes codename)

There was once a saying that the worst thing Microsoft has done to the computing industry is lowering the user's expectations of quality - now I think we're seeing a similar effect from Apple: to a modern computer user, it is inconceivable that an OS would give them freedom to change the vendor-supplied defaults :-(

If you want lxde, what's wrong with "apt-get install lxde"? This is linux, not OSX, you are allowed to make your own decisions and ignore the distro's default settings :P

If "apt-get install [alternate desktop of choice]" is too hard for you, you are not a power user.

Seriously, kids these days. Back in my day*, linux was about having multiple choices for everything - not just the power users, but the regular users would all customise their desktops in whatever way suited them, and we liked it. (Well, most of us did. Those who came from the windows or mac worlds curled up into a ball and cried when presented with multiple valid options to choose from, and insisted that somebody else choose "the best" to be preinstalled for them. And thus, Ubuntu was born to give them what they asked for)

* I'm barely out of my teens, but I'm old enough to remember when "power user" meant "someone who'd customise their desktop by hacking the C code"; Then it got degraded into "someone who could compile from source without modification"; then "someone who'd install packages from outside the distro's repository"; then "someone who'd install packages from the repository to replace the defaults"... and now apparently "power user" means "someone who can install ubuntu and doesn't change the default settings". This makes me sad :-(

Reading the motivations, it seems we should also be thankful to microsoft for this -- part of the motivation for their devs to work on it is that linux is slowly getting better on the desktop*, but the other part is that windows is rapidly getting worse :P

* or slowly getting worse, if you use ubuntu and don't know how to install an alternative window manager; but Metro is still ahead of Unity in that respect

This is pretty much the reason *for* Wayland -- whether you use Xorg or Wayland you have support for all the excess eyecandy (not that you have to use it), but Xorg is an exponentially growing pile of add-ons while Wayland has the features planned from day one, plus it's even smaller than that, because it lets the kernel do the heavy lifting of driver support.

I'm planning to too, when I find somewhere else with tech news and at least semi-clueful discussions -- any suggestions?

Watching the video now, it appears to be "dump ALL the radio signals to disk, for later analysis", so you can then use software to pick out audio / text / morse code / etc signals

New project idea: compiler written in postscript that renders the binary :-O

To be fair, the summary says it officially doesn't get support, which to me brings images of the CEO phoning up some newspapers and saying "We don't support open source work. That is all, *click*"...

Nope; 7/8/9 had 3D elements (eg the character models, and battles), but the bulk of the explorable world was made of unique 2D backgrounds - 6 and earlier were repetitive 2D sprites, 10 and later are repetitive 3D textures. Though come to think of it, replacing the low-res 3D character models with nice 2D sprites would be an improvement too...

Personally I don't want "PS3 graphics" if that means looking like the modern games -- the whole reason I think FF 7/8/9 are so beautiful is that the worlds are largely hand-drawn 2D; all I really want changed in a remake is to have those same drawings re-scanned at a higher res :-P

True, current google is more up to date than a 2010 OSM dump. But current OSM is more up to date than a 2010 google dump. Not sure how that makes either better than the other...

My hobby is adding the locations of trash cans to openstreetmap, because everything larger or more significant is already on there...

Because "Everyone knows that X is true" and "X is true" are loosely correlated at best.