Back in my day, it was hip to comment on /. stories without reading the articles. You kids have us old farts beat... you don't even bother to read the summary before posting.

I've been a Red Hat/RHEL/CentOS/Fedora user for a *very* long time. I've been trying to use Gnome Shell since Gnome3 came out, so I have given it more than a fair shake. This past month I was testing RHEL7 for desktop upgrades at work and found that Gnome Shell is way too much of a distraction. So, at home I switched my desktop to Cinnamon. Holy Cow! I have a usable desktop again. I found Cinnamon in EPEL7 and installed that at work. It is so much more usable on RHEL7. This is what we will be rolling out as the default desktop firm-wide when we upgrade.

So -- a big *Thank You* to the Linux Mint team for making Cinnamon,

When measuring the cost of backups, the cost of the media is often a small footnote. The cost of off-site storage can end up costing way more depending on how frequently they pick up, how long you store the tapes, and how frequently you need to do emergency restores.. Note that you left off the "time" component of the AWS cost structure -- the cost is *per month*. Still, AWS has some serious advantages over tape -- like the cost of robotic tape drives and the housing and maintenance costs that go along with them (if you have that sort of need). Plus, if you are a big enough customer, those 1 cent/GB/mo costs go down quite a bit.

I'm sure you have those filed under "Documentaries", along with your "Gilligan's Island" collection.

Sure, but Xamarin doesn't target the Linux desktop for their development tools or desktop/GUI apps. I have a whole bunch of software engineers that would switch to Xamarin if it meant they could do .NET development (including GUI development) on Linux.

Does this mean that the client-side stuff (WPF) will be missing? .NET is a lot less useful if the GUI components are still missing.

Bullshit. Classically, capitalism has a solitary defining feature: the private acquisition of capital. It is solely about who controls the resources used to produce goods. Lying and cheating are time-honored practices of modern capitalism.

Baseball sized? No, no no,no. I have a much more plausible theory: the Universe is just god's Croquet course.

As an Android user, I really appreciate this sentiment. I would love to control the permissions of my apps, especially the ones that I know are designed to violate my privacy.

As an Android developer, the thought of how this would impact the testing of my apps is troubling. Much of my code depends on being able to do certain things. The simple fact of software development is that "all untested code has bugs". So now I need to test my app with all combinations of requested permissions disabled. That would, even for my simple app requiring only 5 permissions, result in a 32x increase in testing effort. Far more likely scenario: I would make sure that all needed permissions are available and, if not, just refuse to start.

If he wanted your opinion, he'd axe for it.

Two years ago I had no clue that counterfeit chips existed. All I would have known is that there is a chip marked FTDI on the board and the serial drivers worked. What more QC is expected from a board supplier who may be producing a few hundred boards for a niche market and making a few thousand dollars per run?

Pardon the stray comma.

As a "maker" who sells small runs of boards that I have manufactured in China by an assembly house, I trust that they will build the board to spec. But I do not have the wherewithal to manage and secure my supply chain from start to finish. If I specify a part, I trust that the assembly house uses genuine parts. If they do not, I don't know what sort of recourse I have if, two years, later, all of my parts start being bricked. But I certainly see it from FTDI's perspective (and Prolific, another serial chip manufacturer with the same problem). It's a really tough problem. I don't know what the right answer is. Maybe create a standard for USB serial interfaces that everyone can use? I think that already exists (the CDC).

Companies are responsible for protecting their trademark. This is trademark protection, pure and simple. It's the cyber-equivalent of a Cease & Desist, where the companies have the power to enforce the C&D on their own.

One of the things that they are going to get out of this is the names of all the big products that use counterfeit chips. The makers of those products are going to be responsible for fixing the problem.

My guess is that many of these are going to just trace back to PCB manufacturers in China that were buying fake chips to cut costs and boost profit. The product manufacturer may have specified legitimate parts, but fakes were substituted by the contract manufacturer. If that is the case, it will be interesting to see how the Chinese deal with this.