They've fixed a few annoyances in Anaconda in F19 Alpha including actually offering MATE as a desktop option (F18 never showed it in Anaconda - you had to know to groupinstall it later on). Still no package version numbers or install time remaining when the packages are being installed though - both blatantly obvious requirements!

The Anaconda interface is still LUDICROUSLY SHOUTY (yes, much of it is fully capitalised and even adds bolding on top of that!) and the custom disk partitioning still needs further work. It has a nasty mixture of size units (yes, it's possible to see K, MB and GB all on the same screen) and the option - if it exists - to "use all remaining space on device" when creating a new partition (which you're surely almost always going to need?) didn't jump out at me.

I'm using tvheadend for a backend (on a beefy desktop PC with TV cards, SSD and TBs of storage) and an Acer Revo 3710 (a "little atom based box") with XBMC on Ubuntu 12.04. No problems with hardware acceleration (uses Nvidia ION 2) once I installed the proprietary nvidia-current driver or sending 5.1 audio to my 5.1 setup (obviously use the Sound section in Ubuntu's system settings to test the audio before doing the same in XBMC's audio settings). It should be noted that everything is connected HDMI (Revo -> receiver-> plasma TV) and I was worried HDMI audio might not work, but it seems to be fine.

My only beef with XBMC on my setup is that it can hang at "exit points" periodically (either stopping a video/live TV stream from playing or trying to exit XBMC completely).

It should be noted here that I don't watch movies on Youtube - it's about the last place I'd think of looking! I tend to watch local or LAN-networked files from a DVD or Blu Ray rip - any streamed video is useless IMHO (it buffers unless your connection is perfect and can't picture search FF/REW or even position jump at decent speeds),

Google Doodles like this do rub me up the wrong way. For a start, the person concerned is often an obscure one (or at least obscure outside the US - the US-centric doodles end up on Google UK, where they probably don't belong). OK, Adams isn't obscure because of Hitchhikers', but an awful lot of Doodle people are.

Secondly, if they're going to choose to celebrate someone's life, do it on a rounded number of years either since their death or birth. Not "161st birthday of <insert_obscure_Hungarian_physicist_here>". In this case, why wasn't the 60th year since Adams' birth celebrated last year, rather than the 61st this year?

And, finally, I must take massive umbrage with the Google tooltip that says "Douglas Adams' 61st birthday". I'm sorry, but once someone dies, they can no longer have birthdays after their death. It should be "61st anniversary of his birth", but I guess that's too long and not so catchy. I now call them "deathdays" when Google does this :-)

Now get off my lawn!

Sorry, I have no sympathy for someone who was responsible for GNOME 3. As for whingeing about incompatibility of distros, just stick with one for bleeding sake! In my case, it's CentOS 6 (though Fedora 18 with MATE looks OK, it's just that Anaconda is so wretched on it) - 10 years of updates (more than Mac OS X), GNOME 2 (the best thing to come out of GNOME), System V initscripts (not the pain that is systemd) and the glory of GRUB 1 (10 times easier to manage than GRUB 2).

It's a rock solid setup that I think is the best "professional" Linux desktop out there today, which is why I use it both at home and work. Yes, I dual boot with Windows, but only to play games of course. Steam on Linux might knock that on the head once they get 1,000+ games rather than 100 or so they have now.

I use Firefox Beta on Android myself, but I do throw in some useful add-ons of course. Now it has click-to-play, Flashblock is less important (yes, I sideload Flash for the sites that need it), but I do install Adblock Plus to keep myself sane. Another obviously useful add-on on an Android tablet is Phony - set it to be "desktop Firefox" and you get the full desktop versions of all sites rather than some half-baked mobile version.

Whilst Firefox isn't any better or worse than Chrome on the desktop, I do think it provides a better browsing experience than Chrome in Android, particularly on a tablet. And, yes, Firefox Sync is handy (but Chrome has something similar anyway). Also note that Safe Browsing that alerts about malware is now standard on Android Firefox - I'm not sure, but I believe no other Android browser has that as standard.

It may be slightly off-topic, but I wonder if some of the red light camera tickets are because traffic lights are set in "dumb" mode a lot of the time? Where I live, for many years the lights wouldn't react to traffic at all and be put on set intervals, which is infuriating because you sit at a red light and there is no change at all, despite no perpendicular traffic for 20-30 seconds. I bet a few drivers get fed up and (safely) jump the red light because of this!

In my home town, they experimented with a smarter program for a while and it was a great success - lights would change to red either when they hit a fixed time on green *or* when there had been a few (maybe 5) seconds since the last vehicle had crossed the sensors (with probably a minimum green time of something like 10 seconds). It was so successful, the idiots in charge of them switched it back to a fixed time on green now and you are waiting - I kid you not - up to a minute on red (especially if someone presses the pedestrian button), with up to half of that minute spent with little or no traffic crossing your path.

Because you have servers you installed 5.X on a few years back and are still in service. Hence, 5.9 is most welcome for those and a lot easier and less risky than trying any sort of upgrade to 6.X. In fact, Red Hat/CentOS specifically warn *against* trying any sort of warm upgrade between major OS releases because of the high likelihood of borkage.

Probably the best way to upgrade to 6.X is to get new boxes, set them up like the old 5.X boxes (import any data from the old boxes obviously) but with 6.X instead of 5.X and test it like crazy until you're happy it can take over the old 5.X box. You might well have to do this as a "big bang" upgrade of your dev, staging and live environments in turn (i.e. all completed in a fairly short period - but long enough to be certain things are working in 6.X) if active development is taking place on the old 5.X setup.

Once 6.X is all bedded in and working, the old 5.X boxes can either be retired or if they're still in warranty, re-purposed for another project using 6.X (i.e. you'd wipe them and put 6.X on them), though be warned that they will fall out of warranty much faster, so I wouldn't recommend anything critical on the re-purposed boxes.

It always perplexed me why the standard XBMC release has taken 12 major versions spread over a decade before the media centre software included any support for TV viewing/recording at all. From what I can see, pretty well every other media centre software supports that, so to miss it out for so long made it hard to recommend XBMC to people who wanted a single setup for all their media needs.

Yes, I know the Live TV/PVR functionality was available as an extra install prior to XBMC 12 and I must give a shout out to Pulse-Eight here, who nicely packaged up XBMC with the Live TV/PVR stuff included for pre-12 versions, though of course I guess they won't be needed for version 12 onwards now.

However, the fact that you had to go outside of xbmc.org for what many might think should be core functionality probably meant that not a lot of people have considered XBMC as a replacement for their DVR until this version 12 release. Personally, I use tvheadend for my backend which is turning out to be quite a slick Web interface (though I wish it had guided wizards to make the setup flow more obvious). I still think Web interfaces are the way to go for initial setup and EPG use - it allows you to use any Net-connected device to manage your PVR setup.

I submitted this flaw to Slashdot in late 2011 (with a one word search term I believe!) and it never appeared in any story. I did post up about the story rejection on OSNews a few months later.

If I could find out how to search for old Slashdot submissions I would do, but I can't see anything in my Slashdot account settings/profile that lets me see all the atempted submissions I made.

A couple of years ago, phones with replaceable batteries (let's ignore Apple phones here for a minute) were actually quite common and if you are going somewhere where you can't mains charge (or charge off another device, which is an obvious trick, but you may need the right cable), then a charged spare battery makes some sense.

Fast forward to now and most new (non-Apple) phones have sealed batteries, which is quite deplorable because it's a trick to make your phone "disposable" at the end of your contract (i.e. it dies or get poor at charging/holding charge just as your contract is about to expire). So the correct tip was "either carry a spare battery or if you phone has a sealed battery, carry a second charged device and a cable to charge between the two". A shame the OP missed that obvious point.

As for the godawful clamp arrangement, I can see the one on the bookself crippling you as you walk past it without a tablet attached. It looks terrible - you may as well glue a tablet case/sleeve to an anglepoise lamp :-)

And as for the third one, what geek has actual workout equipment? I thought the most exercise Slashdot readers get is bending over to get the next Coke can out of the fridge :-)

Er, I use a non-WebKit browser - Firefox Beta - on Android (on my Nexus 7) and I do three things to make it actually nice to surf:

1. Side-load the Flash Player apk - yes, you can officially download it despite not being on Google Play any more.

2. Install the Phony extension and set it to Desktop Firefox mode (because you want desktop versions of sites on tablets, not the mobile versions).

3. Install the Adblock Plus extension.

This gives you the best Android tablet browser experience by some considerable distance (and probably a lot better than any iOS browser can manage).

I can understand tablets replacing e-book readers (and this double-sided one does both normal LCD and e-ink, though quite why a phone needs that rather than a tablet is anyone's guess), but when I looked whether to join the e-book revolution, I was appalled by the price of them! They are often the same and - shockingly - even more expensive than the equivalent hardback book!

  The classic example was the #1 bestseller - Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography. When that was selling like hot cakes, it actually more expensive to buy it as an e-book than the already-expensive hardback. That one example put me off e-books hugely.

Basically, you're saying that *all* games consoles make no sense compared to your smartphone. Tell that that to the massive number of households with game consoles that shell out a fortune for games. There's clearly a market for devices permanently hooked to the TV to play games. They don't need to be portable (though ironically the Ouya is probably the most portable of the lot).

What I'd really like to see is something like CyanogenMod 10 port to it to open up to Google Play. I think the Ouya won't fail because of the idea of it being hooked up to a TV with a controller. It'll fail if they keep it locked down to a proprietary store with no way of playing the games from Google Play (or Amazon App Store if you must). Devs aren't going to magically put all their games on Ouya's store when there's a much bigger market on Google Play.

One minor note - at least XBMC is being developed for the Ouya, but that's mainly because it's being ported to Android anyway and will no doubt officially turn up on Google Play at some point.

We use beefier PowerEdges at work and one major thing I like about them is that - like the t110-2 you linked to - you can order them with no OS! If you're intending to run Linux and don't need hand-holding, installing the OS yourself is a good idea. The only thing to be wary about PowerEdges is that I've never known any of them to be silent.

Now you might get lucky and the t110-2 is quiet or silent, but whenever I see "server" and "Dell" together, it's an excuse to have the noisiest system fans in the universe, since they're expecting you to put them in a server room and not in an office (open plan or otherwise).

I've got a couple of PCs with the Asus P8Z68-V LX running 64-bit CentOS 6.3 and/or Ubuntu 12.04 without any issues at all. Newegg has them for $80 and they support 32GB RAM, SATA 3, USB 3 and have decent onboard graphics (with plenty of slots for beefier cards). I don't see anything in this price range that a) works 100% with Linux and b) has good specs like this MB.

One nice thing - the BIOS is dead easy to upgrade - none of this Windows-only (or DOS-on-a-floppy!) rubbish: there's a built in filestore navigator in the BIOS and it picks up a .ROM file off a USB stick without any problems. And, yes, Asus do BIOS updates even for MBs like these which aren't that new or anywhere near the top of their range.

It should be noted that it's an LGA 1155/Z68 MB, which may or may not work with Ivy Bridge CPUs (I used a "lowly" i7 2600 Sandy Bridge in mine). I'm sure there must be an Asus equivalent to this MB that does.