Even more fun is installing native code plugins, which requires the root password. I went hunting in Chromium's code recently, trying to work out what locations it would load Google's Talk/Hangouts plugin from, in an attempt to trim the list of locations the plugin's files have to be symlinked to when installing it.

Whereas the "old" NPAPI plugins have a bunch of allowed locations, but usually /usr/lib/nsbrowser/plugins is common to most browsers suporting them and Firefox even appears to allow them to be in in your user profile at ~/.mozilla/firefox/*/plugins/ (MDN docs), the path to the PPAPI plugins directory is hard-coded in the source for Chrome browsers, to <directory-containing-chrome-binary>/pepper/ (/usr/lib/chromium-browser/pepper, /opt/google/chrome/pepper, etc), AND the filenames of the (very short) list of supported plugins is similarly hard-coded.

There appears to be a command-line option to load plugins from arbitrary locations for development, whether that would work to load a "released" plugin like Hangouts I couldn't say.

I keep my /etc in a git repository now. Commit changes after each round of system updates and if I change anything major, keep a couple of copies of the repository on different machines. It has saved me from myself at least once when I kept the wrong copy of a config file after an upgrade.

You have to put up with a few apps (cups and wicd are good examples) that needlessly change files in response to hardware events, but in general the strategy has served me well.

Why should any passenger be obligated to not eat peanuts?

They're obligated not to smoke. Why not ban second hand peanut oder?

That depends. Grooming habits vary.

This would have been great for open source if Firefox 3 didn't suck. (There are no less that 19 threads on the Firefox forums containing the phrase "Firefox 3 sucks".) Firefox 2 was small, fast, and reliable. Firefox 3, even now, is less reliable than Firefox 2, slower, and a memory hog. Open source had its chance and blew it.

By degree I am a Computer Scientist, and I also emphatically agree with everything you have said, particularly your handyman analogy.

Part of the problem, which causes me no end of grief, is that when most people go to school to become "Computer Scientists", they are really trying to become handymen. Most universities do not do a particularly good job of discouraging this notion, partially due to economics, and partially due to the fact that there is no distinct classification for "code handyman".

I recently interviewed someone with a Computer Science degree from a very respectable private university who could not even attempt an explanation of what NP-Complete meant. Because of the university in question I feel sure beyond doubt that he must have been exposed to and tested on this information, yet it was blatantly obvious that this person was more concerned with whether or not he could say he "knew Java", or some such. When this person went on to say that he felt that the university had not adequately prepared him for the job market, my head nearly exploded! (and not just because this is a stupid thing to say in an interview). Admittedly, this is an extreme case of this sort of mentality, but I have observed that milder cases seem to predominate the industry known as "Software Engineering".

To make matters worse, the majority of programmers I know are not even familiar with the idea that something can be formally verified as correct, and they will even go so far as to reject the notion that there is such a thing as "correct"!! They will say something to the effect of, "how can you tell if something is correct when there are a thousand different ways to accomplish the goal", as if a plurality of solutions implies that there are no wrong ones.

It is as if all of the mathematics generally required for such a degree mean nothing.

Indeed, OpenSolaris, at the moment, has even less hardware support than Solaris.

Sorry, but what part of "destroys the very security mode. that prevents malware from spreading" when you "break" the BSD "jails" is baloney? That is exactly what is happening when you jailbreak an iPhone. It is no longer secure and can be infected by a Trojan hiding on a Cydia repository. There was a version of Customize 1.3 back in the 1.3 days which was in fact a Trojan.

You can jailbreak if you want but you should be aware that your phone is no longer secure once you do that and any personal information that you store on your device can be compromised. The BSD jails prevent other applications from accessing data that does not belong to them.

What is it with today's obsessions with feelings ? We're getting to the point where you can no longer say "it's bad to stone women", because it might hurt the feelings of muslims.

Welcome to the reality : caution ... reality may not always immediately gratify your feelings, and may in fact hurt them. In case you really can't deal with this : you know the exit ...

Here's Apple, trying to save everybody from lung cancer and all I see are complaints!

If you won't think of the children then Apple have to!

"60% of the population of the Netherlands live below sea level. Are they all stupid too?"

The Dutch don't live in an area plagued by hurricanes, they don't have much alternative due to crowding (which is what drove land reclamation in the first place), and they don't live in a willfully culturally backward and infamously corrupt state.

The US has vast amounts of land. No one "needs" to live in New Orleans, below sea level or otherwise. (Do note that the old French Quarter wasn't wiped out because they didn't fucking build in a flood zone!)

Katrina was a "perfect storm" of the most backward culture and people in the US insisting on staying in their slums so they could die in droves. They had time for crime, violence, and drugs. They had time for sloth and ignorance. They didn't devote appropriate time to prepare, and they suffered the consequences. Katrina flushed some slums, big deal. They'll be rebuilt to humor the stupid, and will get zapped again one day.

Yes, but public hospitals everywhere in the world are generally chronically underfunded. The US doesn't have the problem to the same extent, but that's because they've set up the system so that the poorest third of their population(generally the folks most likely to get sick) can't actually afford to use the service.

Humm I remember now, a little piece of news around the time when Bush was in the office, maybe 6 months before leaving, about him buying a SHITLOAD of real state in that area of Brazil. Maybe the most valuable real state in the world because of the gigantic water reserves there.

http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/article.asp?ID=5324
(no link because slashcode could not be bothered to render my html tags properly, yes, I have an agenda)

Maybe the power outgage was because Bush were trying to overclock his pc to cope with the performance hit of speech recognition software he just installed. He should go POWER PC FTW!

More on-topic, Brazilian hackers are very good but mostly white hats, maybe they were pissed off because of the misinformation of the first news that hit the media but I also recall a series of severe power outages in urugay or paraguay (neighbor countries to Brazil) some days after the first incident. Maybe some /.er from there can give us some insights?

You missed the point. The Firefox developers all sang in unison that the memory leaks and instability were the result of plug-ins and publicly refused to admit that Firefox had issues, despite the fact that people were posting bugzilla examples of the problems with no plugins installed. Sometimes it was a corrupt profile issue or something gone awry with an upgrade in which case a total nuke and reinstall usually fixed it.

We already function quite well with laws restricting people from knowingly lying about a person. How is that any different?