There were rumours about Hyperion:
https://arstechnica.com/the-mu...

I'm not too familiar with Elric, but I agree that Culture would be nice :)

Another advantage of Scratch and similar Free Software projects: they are usually translated, and require minimal language skills. For 8-10 year old kids, it's a great option.

I bought a Tiddlybot/PiBot for my kid, which runs Blockly (https://github.com/google/blockly), and was able to switch the interface language easily (less intimidating).

Do you have an example of a particular function?

A lot of the old "core" functions do not support UTF-8. They support only single-byte encodings (pre-UTF8, ex: deprecated KOI encodings).

To give a silly example, mb_strtoupper() should be used instead of strtoupper(). http://php.net/manual/en/funct...

I pay 10$/month for a data-only plan in Canada that is "pay as you go" up to 35$/month for 5GB (Rogers/Fido/Telus have "iPad plans", but you can use them on any device).

We've moved from displaying remote applications from the xlib level over ssh, to the toolkit level over ssh (as parent described). It's Unix moving forward, finally.

Microsoft's proprietary RDP protocol or alternatives such as VNC work differently (and usually pretty slow, since they work similarly to xlib, passing compressed bitmap images over the wire). If you want a remote desktop and your network link is fast enough, that's fine, but for most cases, toolkit-over-ssh is more secure and efficient.

I agree, but as far as I know, on Debian it does not depend on Java. The Libre Office requirements page says it is only necessary for certain 'Base' features: http://www.libreoffice.org/get...

(I have never seen the popups, or had Java installed on my machine for a long time, so I was curious. Libre Office also runs pretty fast imho.)

NeoOffice basically stripped it from Base, and their download page says: "Base users: if you use Base, we recommend that you use OpenOffice with the Oracle Report Builder extension. The Base features in NeoOffice 2014.6 are much more limited than OpenOffice." (http://www.neooffice.org/neojava/en/macappstore.php)

They should only go with custom code up to a certain extent. The organization should have the freedom to choose its own service provider (including volunteers). I'm probably stating the obvious, but if there is too much custom code they will be forced to spend a lot to rewrite code when volunteers rotate (and most likely will want to roll their own fancier solution), spend a lot of energy/time/money to maintain the code, or have difficulties finding volunteers who want to get involved in such a mess.

I don't know the specifics of your use-case, but CiviCRM is a Free Software contact relationship management software aimed specifically at non-profits. It has a large community of users and developers. While the community mostly operates on non-profit budgets, it includes users such as the FSF, EFF, Wikimedia, sub-orgs of UNESCO, Amnesty International, NY State Senate, etc. I use it for my small local clients, but I'm happy to be able to pool ressources with such organisations.

While turn-key tools can only do so much, you would probably have better chances of customizing that to fit your needs, and in the long term, the organization can turn to specialized service providers if necessary, without restarting from scratch.

Heck, worst case, if your volunteers are PHP-averse and don't feel like spending too much time customizing the application, you can write just a front-end application to it, and use the CiviCRM REST API to store the data. Writing a whole new application just for that seems like a huge waste of ressources, and does not seem sustainable. An event management tool has a ton of small but critical features to think about.

If they think it will be hard to learn an existing generic tool, imagine how hard it will be for new staff/volunteers to use a completely custom tool. Not to mention that if your organisation has an aim of promoting common good, community building, etc, they should also participate in existing Free Software projects :)

Would be nice to have more details about that, and the proportion with IPv4 scans/crap.

Personally, I've been pleasantly surprised when going to the US, that random places (small motels, AirBNB places) had native IPv6. In some cases, they even had weird broken NAT, but working IPv6.

This migration to IPv6 has to happen one day or another. May as well be in front of the curve, with regards to privacy, security, topology and performance.

Didn't know that. Thanks for the tip!

You can also use custom keywords with Bookmarks:
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Usin...

I alias google to "g", so when I want to search, i just type in the location bar: "g these are my search terms".

It's also practical to do Google searches in specific languages. For example, I use "ge" for google-english, "gf" for google-french, etc.

nonsense.. that's a blanket statement that doesn't mean anything, implying that we should only consider absolutely secure solutions that will protect against all attacks. There is no one size fits all. Adding a layer of security that "will thwart MOST prying eyes" is well worth it, just don't expect it to be bullet proof and understand how it works, what it protects from.

If I recall correctly one of the initial aims of "https everywhere" was to protect people using public wifi. Hijacking FB accounts on public wifi became a common attack (and many others). It's a low-hanging fruit that encouraged a lot of websites to enable and fix their SSL for everyone.

Not to mention.. even if the NSA had keys from the major SSL cert vendors: you probably meant: they have the private key of Google/Facebook/etc, since the cert vendor key itself only signs the cert, it does not provide the private key that encrypts the communication.

Even then, don't use Google/FB. A lot of Snowden docs talked about tracking using the IDs from those services, although nothing has indicated that they have private keys of google/fb, it assumed that google/fb traffic was non-SSL. It's also a big leap to assume that they can generate/obtain private keys for other non-cloud services.

oblig xkcd: http://xkcd.org/1172/ ;)

We do have a duopoly (3 if, for businesses, you include FibreNoire), but to be fair, it competes pretty well to other north-american cities. Bell now supports fiber-to-the-home in most central borroughs, and Videotron keeps upgrading their network. (although, of course, you should deal with a reseller for a better deal and less dysfunctional tech support) If only Bell operated as a normal company, and not a marketing dystopia...

I have a 30/10 mbps VDSL/fttn connection using Teksavvy, with IPv6 enabled, for around 60$/month including dry-loop, 300 GB/month cap (unlimited during the night).

However, for hosting, while there may be OVH for cloud stuff, we really lack quality alternatives for traditional hosting. There is some offering, but lots of room for improvement.

I also participate in http://www.reseaulibre.ca/ to 1- create our own decentralised user-operated backbone, 2- fun with networking, 3- have an alternative to bell/videotron.

More reliable than Google-Trends: Debian "popcon", a program that Debian users are offered to install and report their program usage.

http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=gnome-shell (40k installed / 20k votes)
http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=xfwm4 (16k installed, 8k votes)
http://qa.debian.org/popcon-graph.php?packages=kde-window-manager (14k installed, 8k votes)
http://qa.debian.org/popcon-graph.php?packages=xserver-xorg (80k installed, 25k votes)

The stats being what they are, you can't really compare the 40k gnome-shell installs with the 16k xfwm4 (gnome-shell is installed by default, which makes the 16k xfwm more impressive, I guess), but you can make some conclusions.

And yeah, I like gnome-shell / Gnome3. Sometimes after a crash (I run debian-experimental packages), I return to fvwm for a few hours, but I always end back onto gnome-shell. "it works", is pleasant to use, and if necessary, there are ways to customize it.

A few months ago, I had forked and published an extension for hiding the top panel. I was surprised of all the feedback and number of users it got. Better yet, someone else stepped up to maintain it and does a great job.

Seriously.. way too many trolls, and most of the rest don't bother to comment.

If you're doing R&D on a project that you later want to commercialize, and you don't need to physically meet clients (or you have someone else who can represent you).. and no kids/family to take care of, you may as well lower your cost of living as much as possible.

The problem is when your business model assumes you'll be in Malaysia forever, then you're stuck.

I lived in Eastern Europe (BG) for 2 years. I would bill as a canadian company, get paid in Canada, then transfer money back. The cost of living wasn't very different though (circa 2002), when you even things out. Living in "poorer" countries looks appealing at first, but when you look further than the cost of food and beer, the costs of housing, health system, education system, social inequalities / security, etc. you usually don't want to stay there too long.