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Comment Open Wifi AP FTW! (Score 2) 18

Why bother requiring authentication for a bit of bandwidth that costs about 0.01 of a cent per person to provide? If anything this will make the internet a less-free place, with a debit card & address traceable from every packet that's sent.

The only good thing is if the grubby mobile phone network operators get in on this, maybe we will see more powerful wifi standards emerging and we will eventually do away with the proprietary UMTS/LTE standards and hopefully we will eventually see the end of having to pay for bandwidth while on the move (everyone simply runs and shares their own AP, kind of like FON)

Comment When you might only be years away from death.. (Score 2) 225

It makes sense to say "feck it!" and live whats left of life to the fullest. Young people would have it in their mind that they are going to be around for another 50-100 years. As I get older myself I find it more and more tempting to try something just to see what happens. When you are young you start off nice and naive and with little to lose so you make risky decisions, spend a couple of decades as a boring risk-averse PHB type who worries about absolutely everything but then after a while you will get tired of that too.

The world is ruled by grey-haired folk who are still a good bit away from retirement, have lots to lose (career, assets, life). Which explains why the world is getting more boring by the day.

Comment Re:I still use GNOME. (Score 1) 376

The more serious problem is that with the obsolescence of GTK+, we may end up not having a good standard GUI toolkit to write applications on Linux anymore. There is much focus on graphics lately with the alternatives to X.org being developed, but Linux still doesn't have a good solution to make graphical apps with resolution independence, proper text rendering, fluid layout and good accessibility. Not that other operating systems are being that much better at any of this.

This is already the case in many ways, hence the popularity of web based apps and native applications that run their own webserver to be accessed via localhost. I actually found GTK+ easier to use than Qt, but there is no windows version for GTK3, not even one in sight so it turned out that I was writing a Linux-only program without realising it! GTK3 itself is not too bad to use, it's just a bit limited and needs work.

The Gnome desktop though, is a whole other story, it seems to be controlled by developers who lost the run of themselves and tried the Steve Jobs approach - "We're giving you a UI change and you're going to like it!"

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