Sarah Perez reports via TechCrunch: The CEO of meditation app Insight Timer, Christopher Plowman, is frustrated. He doesn't think the teachers who leverage his app's marketplace to reach their students should have to share 30% of their income with Apple -- its commission on in-app purchases -- and for the past 12 months, Apple had also agreed. After Apple loosened its rules around in-app donations in 2022, Insight Timer took advantage of the option to adjust a digital donations feature that allowed Insight Timers' teachers to collect "tips" from their user profiles and during live events. Apple reviewed the app and approved its release on the App Store. Now the tech giant has changed its mind -- it wants to collect a commission from this content, and Insight Timer had no choice but to comply or have its iOS business shut down, Plowman says. [...]

In section 3.2.1 of Apple's App Review guidelines, the company explains that apps can route around Apple's in-app purchase if the app enables individual users to "give a monetary gift to another individual" and "100% of the funds" go to the receiver of the gift. Insight Timer capitalized on this option to allow its users to tip meditation teachers, healers, musicians, and others who use its app to teach classes on meditation, managing stress, finding happiness or spiritual enlightenment, and more. Insight Timer implemented the feature using Stripe as the payment provider on the back end, as the rule permits. Users can opt to donate funds to the teacher, but they don't have to. Insight Timer's main business is selling premium subscriptions to its app, which offer additional features, like offline listening, journaling, and unlimited access to its courses. Fifty percent of this revenue is shared with the teachers, so they don't have to rely on donations to fund their work. During the time the commission-free donations feature was live, Insight Timer's users donated roughly $100,000 per month to the app's teachers, Plowman says.

Apple appeared to have blessed this use case, as the tech giant went on to approve 47 more updates to Insight Timer's app over the course of a 12-month period. When a question arose, Insight Timer explained that these were donations -- it doesn't take a cut of that revenue -- and Apple would approve the app. Late last year, those approvals stopped. An app reviewer told Insight Timer that these donations were no longer considered monetary gifts -- they were now "digital content." That meant they were also now subject to Apple's commissions. This decision doesn't hurt Insight Timer's bottom line, as the app's main business is subscriptions. Instead, it hurts the community of teachers who generate additional funds via users' donations. Now, with Apple demanding 30% of that revenue, the teachers are getting a 30% pay cut overnight, so to speak.

Plowman says he went back and forth with Apple over this feature, trying to understand why the donations option that Apple had previously allowed -- 47 times! -- was now subject to commission. Apple compromised and said it would allow the donations' link on teachers' profiles to be subject to its commission-free rules, but all other donations -- from live events, from meditations themselves -- had to be commissioned. It wouldn't allow those links to point to the donation link on the teachers' profiles, either. "And I was like, well, what's the point of building an ice cream stand across the road if you won't let the customers cross the road to buy the ice cream?" Plowman argued. In the end, the two parties didn't reach any sort of resolution. Plowman was given until February to comply with Apple's decision, or his business would be shut out of the App Store.

In the behavior of tech companies, the Atlantic's executive editor warns us about "a clear and coherent ideology that is seldom called out for what it is: authoritarian technocracy. As the most powerful companies in Silicon Valley have matured, this ideology has only grown stronger, more self-righteous, more delusional, and — in the face of rising criticism — more aggrieved." The new technocrats are ostentatious in their use of language that appeals to Enlightenment values — reason, progress, freedom — but in fact they are leading an antidemocratic, illiberal movement. Many of them profess unconditional support for free speech, but are vindictive toward those who say things that do not flatter them. They tend to hold eccentric beliefs.... above all, that their power should be unconstrained. The systems they've built or are building — to rewire communications, remake human social networks, insinuate artificial intelligence into daily life, and more — impose these beliefs on the population, which is neither consulted nor, usually, meaningfully informed. All this, and they still attempt to perpetuate the absurd myth that they are the swashbuckling underdogs.
The article calls out Marc Andreessen's Techno-Optimist Manifesto for saying "We believe in adventure... rebelling against the status quo, mapping uncharted territory, conquering dragons, and bringing home the spoils for our community..." (The Atlantic concludes Andreessen's position "serves only to absolve him and the other Silicon Valley giants of any moral or civic duty to do anything but make new things that will enrich them, without consideration of the social costs, or of history.")

The article notes that Andreessen "also identifies a list of enemies and 'zombie ideas' that he calls upon his followers to defeat, among them 'institutions' and 'tradition.'" But the Atlantic makes a broader critique not just of Andreessen but of other Silicon Valley elites. "The world that they have brought into being over the past two decades is unquestionably a world of reckless social engineering, without consequence for its architects, who foist their own abstract theories and luxury beliefs on all of us..." None of this happens without the underlying technocratic philosophy of inevitability — that is, the idea that if you can build something new, you must. "In a properly functioning world, I think this should be a project of governments," [Sam] Altman told my colleague Ross Andersen last year, referring to OpenAI's attempts to develop artificial general intelligence. But Altman was going to keep building it himself anyway. Or, as Zuckerberg put it to The New Yorker many years ago: "Isn't it, like, inevitable that there would be a huge social network of people? ... If we didn't do this someone else would have done it."
The article includes this damning chat log from a 2004 conversation Zuckerberg had with a friend:

Zuckerberg: If you ever need info about anyone at Harvard.
Zuckerberg: Just ask.
Zuckerberg: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
Friend: What? How'd you manage that one?
Zuckerberg: People just submitted it.
Zuckerberg: I don't know why.
Zuckerberg: They "trust me"
Zuckerberg: Dumb fucks.'

But the article also reminds us that in Facebook's early days, "Zuckerberg listed 'revolutions' among his interests." The main dangers of authoritarian technocracy are not at this point political, at least not in the traditional sense. Still, a select few already have authoritarian control, more or less, to establish the digital world's rules and cultural norms, which can be as potent as political power...

[I]n recent years, it has become clear that regulation is needed, not least because the rise of technocracy proves that Silicon Valley's leaders simply will not act in the public's best interest. Much should be done to protect children from the hazards of social media, and to break up monopolies and oligopolies that damage society, and more. At the same time, I believe that regulation alone will not be enough to meaningfully address the cultural rot that the new technocrats are spreading.... We do not have to live in the world the new technocrats are designing for us. We do not have to acquiesce to their growing project of dehumanization and data mining. Each of us has agency.

No more "build it because we can." No more algorithmic feedbags. No more infrastructure designed to make the people less powerful and the powerful more controlling. Every day we vote with our attention; it is precious, and desperately wanted by those who will use it against us for their own profit and political goals. Don't let them.

• The article specifically recommends "challenging existing norms about the use of apps and YouTube in classrooms, the ubiquity of smartphones in adolescent hands, and widespread disregard for individual privacy. People who believe that we all deserve better will need to step up to lead such efforts."
• "Universities should reclaim their proper standing as leaders in developing world-changing technologies for the good of humankind. (Harvard, Stanford, and MIT could invest in creating a consortium for such an effort — their endowments are worth roughly $110 billion combined.)"

Last January the Register reported that the Budgie desktop environment was planning to switch from using GNOME to Enlightenment. But this week Budgie's project lead David Mohammed and packaging guru Sam Lane "passed on news of a rift — and indeed possible divorce — between Budgie and Enlightenment," the Register reported. "And it's caused by Wayland." The development team of the Budgie desktop is changing course and will work with the Xfce developers toward Budgie's Wayland future...

While Enlightenment does have some Wayland support, in the project's own words this is "still considered experimental and not for regular end users." Mohammed told us... "Progress though towards a full implementation currently doesn't fit into the deemed urgent nature to move to Wayland (Red Hat dropping further X11 development, and questions as to any organisation stepping up, etc.)"

So, instead, Budgie is exploring different ways to build a Wayland-only environment. For now, as we mentioned when looking at Ubuntu's 23.10 release, there's a new windowing library, Magpie. Magpie 0.9 is what the project describes as "a soft-fork of GNOME's mutter at version 43" — the term soft fork meaning it's a temporary means to an end, rather than intended to form an on-going independent continuation.

For the future, though, Mohammed told us... "[T]he Budgie team has been evaluating options to move forward. XFCE are doing some really great work in this area with libxfce4windowing — a compatibility layer bridging Wayland and X11, allowing the move in a logical direction without needing a big-bang approach. To date, most of the current codebase has already been reworked and is ready for a Wayland-only approach without impacting further development and enhancements."
Mohammed later told the Register, "It makes sense for the more dynamic smaller projects to work together where there are shared aims."

More students are being exposed to historical narratives through game play -- but what exactly are they being taught? From a report: Analyzing video games is particularly difficult for two reasons. First, their influence is hard to track: Teachers may not even notice that the student asking why the Ottomans didn't colonize America or what happened to Burgundy may have a view of history that was molded by Paradox games. "The student in your class that knows what Prussia is is the student that played Europa Universalis IV," Devereaux said. And second, unlike other cultural mediums, "games are about systems; they're about the mechanics," Devereaux told me. Those systems and mechanics are how video games can "teach" people history. The presence of such mechanics, though, does not mean that players will necessarily understand them. "The major challenge is getting players to recognize and think explicitly about these systems," Marion Kruse, an assistant professor of classics at the University of Cincinnati and a dedicated gamer, told me.

In my experience, Europa Universalis is particularly effective at teaching users about its systems. Playing in Spain in Europa Universalis, you'll learn the power of a good marriage when you see that Spain is actually the result of a personal union between the crowns of Castile and Aragon. If you're unlucky enough to choose a country in the Balkans, you will quickly understand the full force of the Ottoman invasions of Europe. Invade the Soviet Union in Hearts of Iron, Paradox's Second World War simulator, and you'll be reminded why Napoleon and Hitler both failed to subdue Russia: "General Frost." The processes the player engages with teach them claims about how the world works -- what The Atlantic's Ian Bogost has called "procedural rhetoric."

Paradox's titles don't take a single view of history, but each game does provide a framework for understanding a particular historical period, buoyed by a number of procedural claims. Take Europa Universalis. The game essentially simulates the story of Europe's rise from a relative backwater to a continent that dominated the world. That means that no matter what exact course the game takes, it usually results in the consolidation of large, powerful, centralized states in Europe and their rise to global primacy. The game uses a mechanic of "institutions," such as the printing press and the Enlightenment, which appear in a preset order at 50-year intervals, almost always in Europe, before slowly spreading around the world. Without these institutions, new technologies can be adopted only at much greater cost, meaning that over the centuries Europe slowly pulls ahead of the rest of the world technologically. The player is taught that what made Europe exceptional was the adoption of these institutions, which allowed technological growth to flourish and thereby gave European countries the advantage they used to dominate the world.

An anonymous reader shares a report: For years, OpenStack, the open-source, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud {and related projects such as Airship, open-source tools for cloud provisioning, and Zuul, the Ansible-based continuous integration (CI) system} has hovered between what Gartner calls the Trough of Disillusionment and Slope of Enlightenment. Now with Microsoft joining the Open Infrastructure Foundation, it should be clear to anyone that OpenStack and its related technologies have jumped to the Plateau of Productivity. Why? Because together they can advance and profit from using these cloud technologies to further the hybrid cloud and, an OpenStack specialty, 5G. Microsoft is joining the Open Infrastructure Foundation as a Platinum Member. This move makes perfect sense. According to the 2021 OpenStack User Survey, which will be released shortly in Superuser Magazine, 40% of OpenStack users running their deployment in a multi-cloud configuration are already running OpenStack on Azure. Clearly, OpenInfra and Microsoft belong together.

With the 30th birthday of Linux coming up, TechRepublic's Jack Wallen argues that its distros "are so much better today." I remember like it was yesterday. The very first time I booted into the Linux desktop. The distribution in question was Caldera Open Linux 1.0, which installed with kernel 2.0 and the desktop was Fvwm95... It was just unsightly. The colors were decidedly too Microsoftian, and it was all so ... clinical....

The Linux desktop has morphed from an ugly, awkward, and less-than-productive state, to an almost avant-garde work of art, into an elegant, productive and professional environment. All the while, it offered more choices than most users had time to consider. Even today, I could go back to Enlightenment, or opt for the likes of Pantheon, Budgie, KDE, Openbox, Fluxbox, i3, Gala, Windowmaker or numerous other takes on the desktop...

If I were to go back in time and look over the shoulder at a younger me, I would probably see someone who loved the desktop he was using, but wished it could be a bit more productive. I would then whisper into his ear and say, "Give it time."

Heading into the new year, the Atlantic's executive editor penned a scathing warning that vast social networks like Facebook "can harm society just by existing..." Even as Facebook has insisted that it is a value-neutral vessel for the material its users choose to publish, moderation is a lever the company has tried to pull again and again. But there aren't enough moderators speaking enough languages, working enough hours, to stop the biblical flood of shit that Facebook unleashes on the world, because 10 times out of 10, the algorithm is faster and more powerful than a person. At megascale, this algorithmically warped personalized informational environment is extraordinarily difficult to moderate in a meaningful way, and extraordinarily dangerous as a result...

We're still in the infancy of this century's triple digital revolution of the internet, smartphones, and the social web, and we find ourselves in a dangerous and unstable informational environment, powerless to resist forces of manipulation and exploitation that we know are exerted on us but remain mostly invisible. The Doomsday Machine offers a lesson: We should not accept this current arrangement. No single machine should be able to control so many people...

Anyone who is serious about mitigating the damage done to humankind by the social web should, of course, consider quitting Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and any other algorithmically distorted informational environments that manipulate people. But we need to adopt a broader view of what it will take to fix the brokenness of the social web. That will require challenging the logic of today's platforms — and first and foremost challenging the very concept of megascale as a way that humans gather. If megascale is what gives Facebook its power, and what makes it dangerous, collective action against the web as it is today is necessary for change. The web's existing logic tells us that social platforms are free in exchange for a feast of user data; that major networks are necessarily global and centralized; that moderators make the rules. None of that need be the case. We need people who dismantle these notions by building alternatives. And we need enough people to care about these other alternatives to break the spell of venture capital and mass attention that fuels megascale and creates fatalism about the web as it is now.

I still believe the internet is good for humanity, but that's despite the social web, not because of it. We must also find ways to repair the aspects of our society and culture that the social web has badly damaged. This will require intellectual independence, respectful debate, and the same rebellious streak that helped establish Enlightenment values centuries ago.

We may not be able to predict the future, but we do know how it is made: through flashes of rare and genuine invention, sustained by people's time and attention. Right now, too many people are allowing algorithms and tech giants to manipulate them, and reality is slipping from our grasp as a result. This century's Doomsday Machine is here, and humming along.

It does not have to be this way.

Book publishing in 2020 was a story of how much an industry can change and how much it can, or wants to, remain the same. From a report: "A lot of what has happened this year -- if it were a novel, I would say that it had a little too much plot," said Simon & Schuster CEO Jonathan Karp. Three narratives ran through the book world for much of the year: an industry pressed to acknowledge that the status quo was unacceptable, an industry offering comfort and enlightenment during traumatic times, and an industry ever more consolidated around the power of Penguin Random House and Amazon.com. To its benefit and to its dismay, publishing was drawn into the events of the moment. The pandemic halted and threatened to wipe out a decade of growth for independent bookstores, forced the postponement of countless new releases and led to countless others being forgotten. The annual national convention, BookExpo, was called off and may be gone permanently after show organizers Reed Exhibitions announced they were "retiring" it.

The industry had long regarded itself as a facilitator of open expression and high ideals, but in 2020 debates over diversity and #MeToo highlighted blind spots about race and gender and challenged the reputations of everyone from poetry publishers to Oprah Winfrey, from book critics to the late editor of Ernest Hemingway. Employees themselves helped take the lead: They staged protests in support of Black Lives Matters and walked off the job at Hachette Book Group after the publisher announced it had acquired Woody Allen's memoir, which Hachette soon dropped. Through it all, books managed to sell, keeping a steady pace at a time when film and theater, among other industries, faced dire questions about their future.

Slashdot has featured "the 61 books Elon Musk has recommended on Twitter" as well as the 41 books Mark Zuckerberg recommended on Facebook. Both lists were compiled by a slick web site (with Amazon referrer codes) called "Most Recommended Books." But they've also created pages showing books recommended by over 400 other public figures — incuding Bill Gates and the late Steve Jobs — which provide surprisingly revealing glimpses into the minds of two very different men.

Here's some of the highlights...

neutrino38 writes: "France is the country of the Enlightenment, it is the country of innovation [...] We are going to debunk all false ideas. Yes, France is going to take the 5G turning point because it is the turning point of innovation," Macron insisted in front of a hundred French Tech entrepreneurs gathered at the Elysee. "I hear a lot of voices saying that the complexity of contemporary problems should be addressed by returning to the oil lamp! I don't think that the Amish model can solve the challenges of contemporary ecology," the head of state said.

Meanwhile, AT&T's 5G network was found to be slower than 4G, and in China some 5G towers are switched off during the night because of power consumption. Welcome to the future.

It's exactly one half century from that moment in time when men first walked on the moon, writes NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine.

"Today, on the golden anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, NASA looks back with heartfelt gratitude for the Apollo generation's trailblazing courage as we -- the Artemis generation -- prepare to take humanity's next giant leap to Mars." The lethargic lull of scientific fatalism afflicted portions of America then as it sometimes does today. There is nothing inevitable about scientific discovery nor is there a predetermined path of cutting-edge innovation. Long hours of arduous study and experimentation are required merely to glimpse a flicker of enlightenment that can lead to greater heights of human achievement...

The Apollo program hastened ground-breaking technological advancements that continue to bestow benefits to modern civilization today. Flame resistant textiles, water purification systems, cordless tools, more effective dialysis machines and improvements to food preservation and medicine are just some of the innovative wonders generated during that era. Furthermore, NASA's utilization of integrated circuits on silicon chips aboard the lunar module's computer unit helped jumpstart the budding computer industry into the massive enterprise it is today. Perhaps the most enduring legacy of the Apollo missions was their ability to inspire young Americans across the country to join science, technology, engineering and math related fields of study...

After more than 50 years, the benefits of human space exploration to humanity are clear. By proud example, the Apollo program taught us we cannot venture aimlessly into the uncharted territory of future discovery merely hoping to happen upon greater advancement. Technological progress is a deliberate choice made by investing in missions that will expand our limits of understanding and capability...

NASA is preparing to use the lunar surface as a proving ground to perfect our scientific and technological knowledge and utilize international partnerships, as well as the growing commercial space industry.

This time when we go back to the moon we are going to stay...

At a time when several companies have grown new interest in open sourcing part of their offerings, Samsung appears to be going the other way. The company has shut down the Samsung Open-Source Group (Samsung OSG), according to a report. Phoronix, which reported the development, offers some background: Samsung's Open-Source Group had been structured within Samsung Research America. Samsung OSG was formed back in 2012 and has employed dozens of developers over the past number of years. Samsung OSG was akin to Intel OTC (Open-Source Technology Center) albeit with not nearly as many developers nor as many original open-source projects brought up by the Intel software crew. The Samsung OSG stated purpose has been to "enhance key open source projects through upstream contributions and active involvement with open source foundations." Samsung OSG has contributed very heavily to the development of Wayland as well as some X.Org components, Cairo, Enlightenment EFL, the LLVM Clang compiler, GStreamer, FFmpeg, the Linux kernel, and other related code-bases that helped benefit Samsung's open-source/Linux needs across their wide portfolio of products from smart watches to refrigerators.

"There is a kind of programming trap I occasionally fall into that is so damn irritating that it needs a name," writes Eric S. Raymond, in a new blog post: The task is easy to specify and apparently easy to write tests for. The code can be instrumented so that you can see exactly what is going on during every run. You think you have a complete grasp on the theory. It's the kind of thing you think you're normally good at, and ought to be able to polish off in 20 LOC and 45 minutes.

And yet, success eludes you for an insanely long time. Edge cases spring up out of nowhere to mug you. Every fix you try drags you further off into the weeds. You stare at dumps from the instrumentation until you're dizzy and numb, and no enlightenment occurs. Even as you are bashing your head against a wall of incomprehension, consciousness grows that when you find the solution, it will be damningly simple and you will feel utterly moronic, like you should have gotten there days ago.

Welcome to programmer hell. This is your shtoopid problem.... If you ever find yourself staring at your instrumentation results and thinking "It...can't...possibly...be...doing...that", welcome to shtoopidland. Here's your mallet, have fun pounding your own head. (Cue cartoon sound effects.)
Raymond's latest experience in shtoopidland came while working on a Python-translating tool, and left him analyzing why there's some programming conundrums that repel solutions. "You're not defeated by what you don't know so much as by what you think you do know," he concludes. So how do you escape?

"[I]nstrument everything. I mean EVERYTHING, especially the places where you think you are sure what is going on. Your assumptions are your enemy; printf-equivalents are your friend. If you track every state change in the your code down to a sufficient level of detail, you will eventually have that forehead-slapping moment of why didn't-I-see-this-sooner that is the terminal characteristic of a shtoopid problem."

Share your own stories in the comments. Are there any programmers on Slashdot who've experienced their own shtoopid problems?

Designed to run on minimal hardware, Elive is very much a passion project of its leader, Samuel F Baggen. Based on Debian, the first version took a bow in 2005. The second stable version made an appearance in 2010 and it has been a long eight years for the third stable version to become available. The Register: Elive has an impressively low bar to entry, with hardware requirements for the distribution coming in at 256 MB RAM and a 500 MHz CPU, meaning that some very elderly silicon is theoretically going to be able to enjoy the highly polished Enlightenment desktop. "Theoretically" because after The Register took Elive 3.0.0 out for a spin on a relatively low-powered laptop, we'd frankly baulk at running it on anything much slower than a 533MHz Core 2 with at least 512 MB RAM. However, the Enlightenment UI is undeniably an attractive desktop, particularly if a macOS-alike dock is your thing, and runs at an impressive lick even on hardware that lacks graphics acceleration.

At its core, Elive is based on the Debian 8 distribution (aka Jessie), using the 3.16 kernel and version 0.17.6 of the Enlightenment X11 Window Manager. It comes replete with a full set of applications, including the ubiquitous LibreOffice and Gimp, along with a variety of productivity and entertainment tools, some of which are Elive's own. Unlike the previous version of Elive, 3.0.0 removes the requirement of donating to the project in order to install the thing locally (although Baggen was quick to tell The Reg that cost-free alternatives existed, but often with annoying processes).

Engineering professor Vivek Wadha writes: A technological shift is in progress that will change the rules of innovation. A broad range of technologies, such as computing, artificial intelligence, digital medicine, robotics and synthetic biology, are advancing exponentially and converging, making amazing things possible. With the convergence of medicine, artificial intelligence and sensors, we can create digital doctors that monitor our health and help us prevent disease; with the advances in genomics and gene editing, we have the ability to create plants that are drought resistant and that feed the planet; with robots powered by artificial intelligence, we can build digital companions for the elderly. Nanomaterial advances are enabling a new generation of solar and storage technologies that will make energy affordable and available to all.

Creating solutions such as these requires a knowledge of fields such as biology, education, health sciences and human behavior. Tackling today's biggest social and technological challenges requires the ability to think critically about their human context, which is something that humanities graduates happen to be best trained to do. An engineering degree is very valuable, but the sense of empathy that comes from music, arts, literature and psychology provides a big advantage in design. A history major who has studied the Enlightenment or the rise and fall of the Roman Empire gains an insight into the human elements of technology and the importance of its usability. A psychologist is more likely to know how to motivate people and to understand what users want than is an engineer who has only worked in the technology trenches. A musician or artist is king in a world in which you can 3D-print anything that you can imagine.

Slashdot reader bricko shares an article from Scientific American about two "ecomodernists" who argue that the problems of climate change can be addressed through science and technology. In his Breakthrough essay, Steven Pinker spells out a key assumption of ecomodernism. Industrialization "has been good for humanity. It has fed billions, doubled lifespans, slashed extreme poverty, and, by replacing muscle with machinery, made it easier to end slavery, emancipate women, and educate children. It has allowed people to read at night, live where they want, stay warm in winter, see the world, and multiply human contact. Any costs in pollution and habitat loss have to be weighed against these gifts...."

We can solve problems related to climate change, Pinker argues, "if we sustain the benevolent forces of modernity that have allowed us to solve problems so far, including societal prosperity, wisely regulated markets, international governance, and investments in science and technology... Since 1970, when the Environmental Protection Agency was established, the United States has slashed its emissions of five air pollutants by almost two-thirds. Over the same period, the population grew by more than 40 percent, and those people drove twice as many miles and became two and a half times richer. Energy use has leveled off, and even carbon dioxide emissions have turned a corner."
The essay also cites ecomodernist Will Boisvert, who believes climate change will be cataclysmic but not apocalyptic, bringing large upheaval but a small impact on human well-being. "Global warming won't wipe us out or even stall our progress, it will just marginally slow ordinary economic development that will still outpace the negative effects of warming and make life steadily better in the future, under every climate scenario.... Our logistic and technical capacities are burgeoning, and they give us ample means of addressing these problems."

An anonymous reader quotes OpenSource.com: A unique trait of open source is that it's never truly EOL (End of Life). The disc images mostly remain online, and their licenses don't expire, so going back and installing an old version of Linux in a virtual machine and getting a precise picture of what progress Linux has made over the years is relatively simple... Whether you're new to Linux, or whether you're such an old hand that most of these screenshots have been more biographical than historical, it's good to be able to look back at how one of the largest open source projects in the world has developed. More importantly, it's exciting to think of where Linux is headed and how we can all be a part of that, starting now, and for years to come.
The article looks at seven distros -- Slackware 1.01 (1993), Debian 0.91 (1994), Jurix/S.u.S.E. (1996), SUSE 5.1 (1998), Red Hat 6.0 (1999), Mandrake 8.0 (2001), and Fedora 1 (2003). Click through for some of the highlights.

Friday Linux.com published their list of "what might well be the best Linux distributions to be found from the ever-expanding crop of possibilities... according to task." Here's their winners (as chosen by Jack Wallen), along with a short excerpt of his analysis.

• Best distro for sysadmins : Parrot Linux. "Based on Debian and offers nearly every penetration testing tool you could possibly want. You will also find tools for cryptography, cloud, anonymity, digital forensics, programming, and even productivity."
• Best lightweight distribution: LXLE. "Manages to combine a perfect blend of small footprint with large productivity."
• Best desktop distribution: Elementary OS "I'm certain Elementary OS Loki will do the impossible and usurp Linux Mint from the coveted 'best desktop distribution' for 2017."
• Best Linux for IoT: Snappy Ubuntu Core "Can already be found in the likes of various hacker boards (such as the Raspberry Pi) as well as Erle-Copter drones, Dell Edge Gateways, Nextcloud Box, and LimeSDR."
• Best non-enterprise server distribution: CentOS. "Since 2004, CentOS has enjoyed a massive community-driven support system."
• Best enterprise server distribution: SUSE. "Don't be surprised if, by the end of 2017, SUSE further chips away at the current Red Hat market share."

Wallen also chose Gentoo for "Best distribution for those with something to prove," saying "This is for those who know Linux better than most and want a distribution built specifically to their needs... a source-based Linux distribution that starts out as a live instance and requires you to then build everything you need from source." And surprisingly, he didn't mention his own favorite Linux distro, Bodhi Linux, which he describes elsewhere as "a melding of Ubuntu and Enlightenment".

prisoninmate writes: What's Kali Linux 2016.2? Well, it's an updated Live ISO image of the popular GNU/Linux distribution designed for ethical hackers and security professionals who want to harden the security of their networks, which contains the latest software versions and enhancements for those who want to deploy the OS on new systems. It's been quite some time since the last update to the official Kali Linux Live ISOs and new software releases are announced each day, which means that the packages included in the previous Kali Linux images are very old, and bugs and improvements are always implemented in the most recent versions of the respective security tools. Best of all, the new Kali Linux 2016.2 release comes in KDE, MATE, Xfce, LXDE, and Enlightenment E17 flavors.
Their blog also points out that Kali recently appeared in an episode of Mr. Robot.

jones_supa writes: Software developer Pavlo Rudyi has written a blog post about his experiences with the various desktop environments currently supporting Wayland. The results are not a big surprise, but nevertheless it is great to see the continued interest in Wayland and the ongoing work by many different parties in ensuring that Wayland will eventually be able to dominate the Linux desktop. To summarize, Pavlo found Weston to be "good," GNOME is "perfect," KDE is "bad," and Enlightenment is "good." He also created a video from his testing. Have you done any testing? What's your experience?