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Comment Re:Municipal broadband is on its way, then (Score 1) 397

I put off owning a smartphone due to crazy pricing until a little while ago.

There are now a couple of carriers that offer plans with unlimited data/email/texting + limited minutes for a price comparable to other
carriers' unlimited talk minutes + limited everything else ($30..ish, maybe a bit more). If you need more minutes, you pay 10-20-30
extra bucks, depending.

Android phone, no contract. Just shop around a bit and you'll find them.

Security

Submission + - Congress Steps Into Carrier IQ Tracking Controvers

An anonymous reader writes: After days of hearing about the controversial software by Carrier IQ which allows its customers to track users' cell phone locations and activity, congress has finally decided to step in the matter. Sen. Al Franken, a Minnesota Democrat, penned a letter to Carrier IQ CEO Larry Lenhart asking for specific information about the type of data collected by the company's software. Franken also went on to suggest that Carrier IQ's policies might violate federal law, including the Electronic Communications Privacy Act and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. The issue was originally reported by Trevor Eckhart, who followed up with a video this week that demonstrated the technology.

Comment Re:Slackware (Score 1) 798

Aww.. let's be fair here.

Slackware is a fantastic distro. If, as a novice, you want to tinker and fail and tinker some more and gain experience with the inner workings of Linux, Slackware
is a great choice. If you're a pro, Slack is stable as hell and you already know what to do. Does it work 'out of the box' for absolute beginners who just want to point
and click? Not yet (though it's getting better).

I don't see it as cool/leet/etc. It is, IMO, honest. Like a box of Lego - you have the stuff, now try to do something cool with it.

Then again, I love figuring out how stuff works. Slackware + Fluxbox = hours upon hours of frustration, high blood pressure, cold sweats, and finally the reward of understanding how all of it goes together. :)

Comment I'm all set! (Score 5, Funny) 249

My front yard has three years' worth of overgrowth (one of the bushes has an old saw stuck in it), the lamppost
bulbs flicker, and there are real spiders and crickets and spider-crickets everywhere. Plus, I have a derelict car in
the driveway and the front porch is littered with beer cans and errant cigarette butts. Perfect.

Who wants some candy?

Unix

Submission + - Dennis Ritchie, creator of C and developer of UNIX (google.com)

Claudix writes: Rob Pike, co-creator of Inferno OS that worked with Ritchie in the past, has confirmed it. The creator of C and developer of UNIX has died at age of 70. This man is completely unknown by the general public but all of we know that Ritchie's programming language and OS made Linux, Macintosh, Android, web technology and a big etcetera possible. RIP.
Unix

Submission + - DMR Dead at 70 (boingboing.net)

An anonymous reader writes: Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie, a true legend among the original computer programmers, died sometime earlier this week at his home. Ritchie was the R in the original K+R programming manuals. He left us with the legacy of the C language and the Unix operating system. It would be beyond imagination to think any other individual could transcend technology the way DMR did, and shared with us all. Godbless.
Oracle

Oracle To Bring Dtrace To Linux 155

mvar writes "Dtrace co-author Adam Leventhal writes on his blog about Dtrace for Linux: 'Yesterday (October 4, 2011) Oracle made the surprising announcement that they would be porting some key Solaris features, DTrace and Zones, to Oracle Enterprise Linux. As one of the original authors, the news about DTrace was particularly interesting to me, so I started digging. Even among Oracle employees, there's uncertainty about what was announced. Ed Screven gave us just a couple of bullet points in his keynote; Sergio Leunissen, the product manager for OEL, didn't have further details in his OpenWorld talk beyond it being a beta of limited functionality; and the entire Solaris team seemed completely taken by surprise. Leunissen stated that only the kernel components of DTrace are part of the port. It's unclear whether that means just fbt or includes sdt and the related providers. It sounds certain, though, that it won't pass the DTrace test suite which is the deciding criterion between a DTrace port and some sort of work in progress.'"

Submission + - How 'Star Wars' got made (theatlantic.com)

El Puerco Loco writes: 'The Atlantic' magazine revisits their revealing 1979 profile of George Lucas. Link to original 1979 article is at the end. (http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1979/03/the-man-who-made-star-wars/6228/1/?single_page=true)
Government

United States Loses S&P AAA Credit Rating 1239

oxide7 writes with this excerpt from the International Business Times: "The United States lost its top-notch AAA credit rating from Standard & Poor's on Friday in an unprecedented reversal of fortune for the world's largest economy. S&P cut the long-term U.S. credit rating by one notch to AA-plus on concerns about the government's budget deficits and rising debt burden. The move is likely to raise borrowing costs eventually for the American government, companies and consumers."

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