The OP makes a good point? I'm not so sure of that.

In the last month, there have been 11 stories tagged with the "Australia" label. Second from the top, the stories have been about: the Pirate Party being registered, monitoring body temperature of firefighters, potential cure for aids discovered, major telescope threatened by bushfire, spy agency seeking permission to hack third-party computers, R18+ classification for video games, insulin's structure being cracked, orbital pictures of bushfires, drones used for bushfire forecasting, and the world's oldest fossils found. Most, if not all, are quite valid news for nerds stories.

There have been 30 stories specifically tagged as "usa", in that same time period. Granted, some stories are a little bizarrely tagged as "usa". Not sure why a story about unemployed chinese graduates is labelled such. Regardless, it's easy to see that Slashdot has a much larger USA bias.

And you know what, that's fine. It's good to read about things happening in the USA, just as much as it is for Americans to read about what's happening in the rest of the world. Including Australia. Stop acting insular. Enjoy learning anything and everything about the world around you. This is what, to me, truly defines being a nerd.

1. Your cynicism is getting the better of you. This is a valid news for nerds story, about how data analysis successfully predicted the majority of a list meant to be kept secret. The story would have been interesting, had it come from any part of the world.

2. The Triple J station is known for playing many alternative and unknown artists. It's a government funded station, but editorially independent from government by law. Your list of known songs/singers/artists are likely influenced by your regional tastes, and also commercial interests of the stations you listen to. These would not match up with an alternative music station.

2a. Have a listen to Thrift Shop, the song that made #1. I'm not generally one for hip-hop, but I liked it. Great lyrics, has some good things to say about fashion labels and stylistic expectations. Interestingly enough, the song is independent of commercial labels, and has had great success in US/Canada/Australia/New Zealand.

He (or she) redefines the standard.

Now all we need are electronic scales that can receive updated firmware via the internet.

I use and know both JavaScript and Perl. I am in full agreement with you.

They don't even need to target a distribution. Statically link the binaries, release them as a tar.gz, under the provisio that they are not officially supported, but issues can be reported in some forum. Let the distributions do the work of packaging it. The world (of warcraft) is your oyster, or whatever other mollusc takes your fancy.

Been a long time fan of Sluggy Freelance. Even bought the megatome hardcovers (and waiting patiently for the next one). I sometimes wonder how easy it would be for a new reader to get into it, as there's a large amount of back story. Definitely worth the effort though. Quality web comic!

E17 is aimed at the kind of person who likes to configure and tweak their system. I don't think it's trying to progress The Linux Desktop for the masses. It's just trying to do its own thing, and explore its own style of window management/desktop environment.

These things are always subjective, so it's understandable if you don't like E17. I can assure you though, it does fill the needs for a segment of Linux users out there, and they think it's an excellent step forward for their personal Linux Desktop.

E17 conforms well enough to the freedesktop.org standards. Even though it's not really a standards body, freedesktop.org is readily used by modern window managers, and is becoming a defacto standard. E17 does still store its config in the $HOME/.e directory though, instead of $HOME/.config/e . Can't wait until all unix utils use the .config directory, clearing out the dotfile clutter in the home dir.

Games run perfectly well under E17. I have dozens of games, bought via Humble Bundle, and every one I've tried has worked fine with E17 (barring game bugs, of course). I had a problem once, with keyboard only games not getting focus when they run fullscreen. It's working fine now.

I use E17 on my work computer. Have done so for years. Any instability in my working environment has generally come from me, not the window manager. I think it's only ever crashed once in that time, and even then, I could press F1 to recover (as instructed by the crash dialog), and the window manager restarted itself with all windows intact.

The parent post was trolling. Probably best not to feed the troll.

Nope. Hasn't needed ESD for years. It works perfectly fine with ALSA or Pulseaudio.

Meh. It's not an issue. The package was designed for Ubuntu, not Debian.

When Valve release a Debian version of their client, installing it will be a matter of click on link and select the install option.

Sounds like a great idea for speaker cables. You can stretch the cable to whatever distance you need!

Is it oxygen-free? I hate how oxygen ruins the timbre of my cables. ;-)

Oh, I forgot to mention, another annoyance with installing Steam under Debian, is that it requires libc6 >= 2.15 . Debian testing and unstable only have 2.13. Experimental has libc6 2.16 though, so you can either install that, or download the ubuntu libc6 and copy the lib files to where steam keeps its library binaries. I ended up doing the latter.

I'm running Steam on a 64-bit Debian system. I had to enable multi-architecture for i386, and manually install the 32 bit version of the glx libraries for the driver I'm using. Other 32 bit drivers needed were automatically installed with a simple "dpkg -i steam.deb" / "apt-get -f install" combo. Also, specifically for debian, I had to modify the steam package and rename a few dependencies by hand.

All good and running TF2 beta beautifully. Also, Cogs was another game that worked. Many other games on the "Linux" list aren't installable just yet. I believe that Valve have to properly link them in their system first.

The good news is that E17 is not only pretty, it is very configurable. Which means, it can be very usable, or extremely tough, to use. It all depends on how its configured. Every keystroke, every mouse click (and mouse/key combos), even the behaviour when you move the mouse to the edge of the screen, it can all be tweaked to behave in a large variety of ways. I maintain that E17 is one of the nicest WM systems to use, especially if you prefer to use the keyboard for most actions. That makes it better for getting work done.

Apparently it will be possible to achieve network transparency with Wayland, through a program external to the core of the system.

I disagree that X is showing its age badly. I think it is showing its age gracefully. Through its extensible design, it has been able to step up and cope with the demands of the modern desktop. Wayland will be more efficient, of that there is no doubt. I wonder if Wayland will cope with future demands anywhere near as well as what X has.