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Comment Re:Fedora Repository (Score 2) 361

by croddy (#35559472) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Huge Digital Media Libraries

It would be awesome if there were a FUSE front-end to Fedora Commons.

Well, actually, one does exist, and it actually is awesome, but it's currently trapped in managerial IP strategery hell somewhere in the bowels of the most dysfunctional IT department in academia, so I guess I should say it would be awesome if there were another, distributable one.
GNOME

Submission + - The conflict among Canonical, GNOME, and KDE (gnome.org)

Submitted by
sciurus0
sciurus0 writes: "Dave Neary, a former director of the GNOME foundation and current contributor to the GNOME project, gives his analysis of the factors contributing to the current public conflict among some members of Canonical, GNOME, and KDE."

Comment Re:What percentage use FB again? (Score 5, Informative) 292

by croddy (#35348834) Attached to: Facebook Linked To One In Five Divorces In US

The methodology is worse than that; I ran across this statistic a couple of weeks ago and tracked it down through some hellish chain of blog posts and it turns out that the way this was determined was searching a list of divorce court documents for the word "Facebook" and about 20% matched the string. Any divorce filing containing the string "Facebook" was coded as a divorce linked to Facebook.

The most encouraging thing about this is that it sort of indicates that Facebook has only infiltrated about 20% of marriages.
Privacy

Data Retention Should Last One Year, US Gov't Tells Australia 98

Posted by timothy from the governments-tend-toward-such-things dept.
mask.of.sanity writes "The United States and Australia will enter bilateral talks in an attempt to unify controversial policies that would force internet providers to retain logs on the online habits of citizens. The US has urged Australia to take a moderate approach as it drafts its legislation and said it should not keep logs for longer than a year. Some EU nations keep the logs for as long as five years, although European nations disagree over the need for the plan." And of course, that's also how long we should keep recordings of everyone's phone calls, and copies of their (opened) mail, too.

Comment Re:What?!? (Score 2) 220

by croddy (#35141926) Attached to: US Seeks Veto Powers Over New TLDs

It's mainly a scam to increase revenue for registrars by getting people to buy $TRADEMARK.foo and $TRADEMARK.bar when they only really want to use $TRADEMARK.baz. And the recent proliferation of stupid TLDs has no positive benefits.

Comment Re:What?!? (Score 4, Insightful) 220

by croddy (#35141514) Attached to: US Seeks Veto Powers Over New TLDs

Clearly someone needs to be in charge of new TLDs. I mean, seriously, we've got .jobs, .mobi, .museum, .aero, .info, .biz? For fuck's sake, when will this shit stop? My main concern with the plan here is that there's no way Obama is going to rule over TLD approvals with an iron fist. He's probably going to fucking allow some new TLDs. We need someone with some fucking balls, someone who will go through the whole goddamned queue and stamp DENIED. DENIED. DENIED. DENIED on the entire stack and then shit on it before delivering it back to the applicants.

Seriously. We were fine with .com, .org, .net, .mil, .gov, .edu and a bunch of country codes. If you want a new TLD, it had better be a goddamn country code or I don't want to even hear you fucking talk about it. Take your stupid industry-specific vanity TLD bullshit and do us all a favor and shut your fucking hole. Forever.
Communications

New Facebook Messaging System Announced 240

Posted by Soulskill from the riding-the-wave dept.
Mark Zuckerberg just held a presentation to unveil Facebook's "next generation messaging" system. He repeatedly drove home the idea that "this is not email," nor is it "an email killer." Their plan is to tie together multiple forms of communication — email, texts, social updates, etc. — and blend them into conversations. As users go about their days, interacting with a variety of devices, the communication method automatically updates to whatever is appropriate at the time. If a user receives an email while he's at a desktop, browsing Facebook, it will bring up the message in a Facebook chat window. If the user is browsing on a smartphone, it will bring up the message there, instead. If it's a dumbphone, then a text message can be sent. Another central feature is the idea that conversation histories from multiple sources and different forms of communication can be integrated through Facebook, so that you no longer have to separately root through IM logs, SMS logs, old emails, etc., to see old correspondence. (Users will have the ability to delete these, should they desire.) The last major feature they mentioned is what they call the "social" inbox, which is based on whitelisting. Users will be able to set up primary inboxes which only display communications they definitely want to see, while leaving low-priority messages, spam, and all the other noise typical to email in an inbox they check less frequently. The new system will be rolled out slowly over the next few months.
Facebook

Google Asks Users To Complain Against Facebook 218

Posted by CmdrTaco from the battle-of-the-billions dept.
dkd903 writes "A kind of war has been going on recently between Facebook and Google over a contact export issue. First, Google blocked Facebook access to the Gmail contacts API. To this, Facebook responded back with a new method to get Gmail contacts of a user (the download contacts option). And now Google has slapped back again at Facebook and asks users indirectly to file a data protectionism complaint against Facebook. When a Facebook user clicks on the Download Your Contacts button on the 'Facebook import contact via Gmail' page, the user is then redirected to a new page on Google's server, which looks something like this..." Can I just say that watching this is absolutely hysterical?
X

Ubuntu Dumps X For Unity On Wayland 640

Posted by Soulskill from the no-longer-marks-the-spot dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Canonical and Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth has announced that Ubuntu will move away from the traditional X.org display environment to Wayland — a more modern alternative. The move means there is now little reason for GNOME developers to recommend Ubuntu as an operating system. Shuttleworth said, 'We're confident we’ll be able to retain the ability to run X applications in a compatibility mode, so this is not a transition that needs to reset the world of desktop free software. Nor is it a transition everyone needs to make at the same time: for the same reason we'll keep investing in the 2D experience on Ubuntu despite also believing that Unity, with all its GL dependencies, is the best interface for the desktop. We'll help GNOME and KDE with the transition, there's no reason for them not to be there on day one either.'"

Comment Re:More and more... (Score 1) 617

by sciurus0 (#33793682) Attached to: Take This GUI and Shove It

The config file format shouldn't need to be modified. Obviously they're already machine-readable! The problem is that people write myopic GUI config tools. They should be using something like augeas.

Augeas is a configuration editing tool. It parses configuration files in their native formats and transforms them into a tree. Configuration changes are made by manipulating this tree and saving it back into native config files.

Augeas is:
An API provided by a C library
A command line tool to manipulate configuration from the shell (and shell scripts)
Language bindings to do the same from your favorite scripting language
Canonical tree representations of common configuration files
A domain-specific language to describe configuration file formats

Augeas goals:
Manipulate configuration files safely, safer than the ad-hoc techniques generally used with grep, sed, awk and similar mechanisms in scripting languages
Provide a local configuration API for Linux
Make it easy to integrate new config files into the Augeas tree

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