Why is everybody here in slashdot expecting pizza? Whenever I worked overtime, the manager would either get us Subway or Chipotle. Pizza may be very cheap and easy to order; but, if your manager is willing to go the extra mile and take each persons' individual order; then it is so much better! Most managers can't do too much in an overtime night so they tend not to mind getting each person's order.

Sadly it doesn't. Why? Because it appears to be running Linux.

Oh, this default is even worse than most people could have imagined!

For example, lets say you go to a party and a "friend" of yours takes a picture of you doing something that looks rather scandalous because you are drunk. And then, your friend uploads the pic to Facebook and tags your name to it. You realize you have been tagged in the photo and you don't want other people to see it. So you untag yourself and send a message to your friend to delete it. However, your friend either doesn't go on Facebook very often or doesn't check Facebook messages so the photo is still up there and there is nothing you can really do about it except pray that nobody else stumbles upon it.

And then suddenly Facebook decides to make everybody's photos Public to anybody. Now this bad photo of you is available to everybody and there is nothing you can do about it except call your other friends in order to get the cell phone number of the guy that took your picture.

Yeah, this default sucks real bad.

There is a stupid loophole that still exists where one of your friends can use an app which can access just about any kind of information about you and give it to a 3rd party without you knowing about it. Even if you make a customized setting where certain friends don't get to know certain kinds of information about you, a Facebook app could bypass your own setting and get that information ignoring your "friends" privacy settings.

So remember to go to your privacy settings, then "Applications and Websites", then "What your friends can share about you" and uncheck whatever you don't want strangers to know about you.

They posted the malformed link just to prevent censorship via the slashdot effect.

I had an Achros 605 and a Nokia N810. I would say that as an end user, the N810 was much better.

First of all Archos mislead me into thinking all I had to do for my 605 was just download a plugin to play h.264 movies. However, it turned out, you had to actually pay for that plug-in (yeah, I should have done the research, but I didn't think they would charge me so much). Also, I managed to crash the 605 easily by skipping through songs "too many times". It really sucks to have your whole MP3/MP4 device reboot on you just because you wanted to skip to the good part of a song. I know this article is about the Archos 5 and 7, but my experience with the 605 is bad enough that I am right now recommending people to not trust Archos.

The N810 is so far much better. I can still find a few bugs here and there but nothing so far that can completely crash the whole system (even when using "unsupported applications"). The fact that they encouraged open development on day 1 has allowed a huge 3rd party library of applications since the day I got my N810. On top of that, they give me a simple terminal shell so I can run console applications without have to do crazy GTK or Qt porting.

tl;dr: The N810 is a better system for end users anyway.

When I was at Anime Boston 2009, there were many people that brought their own computer to use the free Wifi, but almost everybody used Windows. The only Mac users I saw was a cosplayer trying to be Watari and the guy that did the anime quiz show. I saw one guy with a XO-1 laptop with Sugar; but thats was the only Linux person I saw there. On top of that, right before a presenter would show some powerpoint presentation, I could see a bunch of crapware on their desktop and think "augh!".

I'll probably help out in the booth but we need to make an anime gnome-theme or something to convince the non-techy people to make the switch or perhaps talk about how easy it is to use SMPlayer + codecs on Linux vs. Windows. I was thinking about making a workshop on the technical side of anime watching (what are codecs, mkv vs. mp4, etc.), but I would need to get somebody to co-panel it with me.

This is basically the same story that was posted some time ago or am I missing something?

For about 3 years now, my parents has been using Ubuntu on their PC. So far, no "real" problems. Every now and then, my Dad needs something that only works on Windows; but I usually just run it under Windows using Virtualbox on his behalf and it works just fine (he needs something Windows only about once a year so its OK that he waits for me to handle it).

However, the biggest problem that most people ever realize about Ubuntu is that MOST DOWNLOADED APPLICATIONS WILL NOT WORK!!!! The most common complaint is that I ever get happens when my Dad follows the instructions on some website which tells him to download an .exe file and double click on it, but then nothing happens (I don't install WINE). 99% of the time, it is just some malware that he shouldn't be installing anyway. I keep telling him that anything he downloads will not "run"; but sadly its hard to explain to non-technical people the difference between downloading and opening a document (like a simple PDF file) and running an application. I tell my parents to never download anything that ends with ".exe" but when people pass the age of 50, then tend not to remember anything that specific.

All my Dad ever does is read e-mail, and check stocks. All my Mom does is play Kpatience. So far its been working out fairly well.

I think it supports Linux and MacOS X only because the three main developers (Ken Thompson, Rob Pike, Robert Griesemer) seem to only have those two OSs between the three of them. I know Rob Pike is a Mac user and Ken Thompson loves Unix; I am guessing Robert Griesemer likes Unix as well.
Its hard to support an OS when its not your primary computing platform.

Perhaps we should abbreviate the "Go Programming Language" to "GPL"? That way, we can google for "GPL" and find Go code all over the place.

I read somewhere that the OSX had ASLR, but only for the PowerPC, not for x86. I can't remember if it was part of the PPC architecture or Apple just being lazy in porting ASLR. Can somebody point me to an article more about this (or explain more about what is so special about PPC)?

I am pretty sure that adding your own runtime violates the developer agreement. The article didn't say if this "app" ever got approved but I highly doubt it would (this would also raise concern about the lack of Java on the iPhone).

Also, using C# is not THAT much better than the native objective-c. According to the article, it seems that "mono-touch" is really just C# bindings for cocoa-touch and I have had very bad experience using C# bindings for just about any kind of C code (allocated memory not getting garbage collected, bindings/function names being outdated, unmanged heap space limits, etc.). It sounds fun to play around with but I definitely wouldn't invest a large amount of time/money on it yet.

Before you get your hopes up, I would like to direct your attention to what is called the Sonic Cycle.