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For the past yearish, I've bumped into the multitude of thinkpads we have floating around where I work.

Given that many of them are what I'd call "fast enough" (ie. Pentium IIIs of some sort), I decided to install Mint 17 on one of the A21s in order to see if IBM's hardware was really as great as everyone says it is.

At first, I was going to write this journal to call into question all of the rave reviews of the pre-Lenovo thinkpad keyboard that I've seen on this site, but I then proceeded to actually type more than just the minimum required to get Mint up and running. Once I actually started typing, the formerly mushy keys suddenly felt more like small cushions, and I found that I could actually write with impressive speed and accuracy -- no small feat for a laptop.

Another thing I noticed was that the display was awesome. Rather than the, to put it politely, blurry screen door that is my current (cheap toshiba circa 2013) laptop's display, I was met with beautiful 1600x1200 (as soon as I sorted out the driver problems that plague Rage 128 cards). Given that the ThinkPad is already adequately fast for what I need, I have to say that my current laptop is flat-out pathetic. It's uncomfortable to carry, its display looks like a blurry mess (1600x900 will never live up to its older 4:3 cousin), the s*it Apple-clone mouse is painful to use, and the keyboard (yet another fine example of the "hey! let's copy Apple's terrible design but even worse!" mentality that has taken over the PC industry) is a jarring disaster.

All I would like to leave with you at the end of this mini-rant is the following:

What the hell happened to laptops? Even the models as expensive as this one (the A21p cost $3400 new) still have terrible keyboards, the same size batteries (the Thinkpad's battery is rated around 70 watts) and displays with less density (though I will acknowledge that you can get laptops with 4k displays now... finally!) When you factor in the fact that all of the components in these systems have gotten significantly cheaper (for example the 850 MHz PIII in the thinkpad cost $722), our modern laptops are straddling the border of being a regression compared to what we had 10+ years ago.

Apparently you print it out on a color printer, cut out the pieces, fold them up into a Minecraft-esque Richard Stallman doll, and....uh....stare at it, I guess. But at least everyone will know that you're a GNU purist.

Stallman Cube Craft

This is just in case it doesn't make it out of the submission queue:

As has been broken recently by several other sites, the US Congress has passed a new bill authorizing continued surveillance activities for the coming year. While budget bills of this type usually fly under the radar, this law has some very interesting sections (text formatting partially taken from https://teksyndicate.com/forum/policy-tech/stop-hr4681-aka-stop-1984/190906) :

        SEC. 309. PROCEDURES FOR THE RETENTION OF INCIDENTALLY ACQUIRED COMMUNICATIONS. (a) Definitions.--In this section: (1) Covered communication.--The term ``covered communication'' means any nonpublic telephone or electronic communication acquired without the consent of a person who is a party to the communication, including communications in electronic storage. [...] (b) Procedures for Covered Communications.-- (1) Requirement to adopt.--Not later than 2 years after the date of the enactment of this Act each head of an element of the intelligence community shall adopt procedures approved by the Attorney General for such element that ensure compliance with the requirements of paragraph (3). (2) Coordination and approval.--The procedures required by paragraph (1) shall be-- (A) prepared in coordination with the Director of National Intelligence; and (B) approved by the Attorney General prior to issuance. (3) Procedures.-- (A) Application.--The procedures required by paragraph (1) shall apply to any intelligence collection activity not otherwise authorized by court order (including an order or certification issued by a court established under subsection (a) or (b) of section 103 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (50 U.S.C. 1803)), subpoena, or similar legal process that is reasonably anticipated to result in the acquisition of a covered communication to or from a United States person and shall permit the acquisition, retention, and dissemination of covered communications subject to the limitation in subparagraph (B). (B) Limitation on retention.--A covered communication shall not be retained in excess of 5 years, unless-- (i) the communication has been affirmatively determined, in whole or in part, to constitute foreign intelligence or counterintelligence or is necessary to understand or assess foreign intelligence or counterintelligence; (ii) the communication is reasonably believed to constitute evidence of a crime and is retained by a law enforcement agency; (iii) the communication is enciphered or reasonably believed to have a secret meaning; (iv) all parties to the communication are reasonably believed to be non-United States persons; (v) retention is necessary to protect against an imminent threat to human life, in which case both the nature of the threat and the information to be retained shall be reported to the congressional intelligence committees not later than 30 days after the date such retention is extended under this clause; (vi) retention is necessary for technical assurance or compliance purposes, including a court order or discovery obligation, in which case access to information retained for technical assurance or compliance purposes shall be reported to the congressional intelligence committees on an annual basis; or (vii) retention for a period in excess of 5 years is approved by the head of the element of the intelligence community responsible for such retention, based on a determination that retention is necessary to protect the national security of the United States, in which case the head of such element shall provide to the congressional intelligence committees a written certification describing-- (I) the reasons extended retention is necessary to protect the national security of the United States; (II) the duration for which the head of the element is authorizing retention; (III) the particular information to be retained; and (IV) the measures the element of the intelligence community is taking to protect the privacy interests of United States persons or persons located inside the United States.

IANAL, but the above has serious implications for data collection and communications. As far as I can tell, all communications that take place over encrypted streams (like https), or that has been signed off on by the same people doing the data collection, can be retained indefinitely. All other communications can be retained for five years. While there was a White House petition to stop it (https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/protect-our-privacy-and-please-veto-hr-4681-aka-intelligence-authorization-act-fiscal-year-2015/lln5hN5c), there are fewer than 10,000 signatures at the time of this writing and the bill has been passed.

There's been some interesting discussions on adding more labels to the moderation system. Although opinions on “Disagree” and “Factually Incorrect” may still be varied, nearly everyone supported the addition of a “Spam” label.

As such, I've implemented a "Spam" moderation label on Pipedot. We'll see about the others as more people weigh in.

So I released the first update release for 1.2 series. It's a very small update, it fixes a bug that pissed me off and it adds support for something I wanted to get into 1.2.0.

The bug: There was a problem caused by dunce syndrome where the time for shutdown commands had extra or too few zeroes, caused by a tired coding problem.

The feature: Now the 'epoch status', 'epoch start', 'epoch restart', 'epoch stop', and 'epoch reload' commands can have multiple service names specified at once. That means instead of 'epoch restart aqu4bot;epoch restart aqu4bot_soy', now I can just do 'epoch restart aqu4bot aqu4bot_soy'. Saves a bit of typing if you have a big list of services you want to apply the same action to. The method I used to implement this for 'epoch status' is hideous and is ironic considering the goals of 1.2 Peroxide, but it works and it's not buggy or anything.

Those are literally the only changes in this release.
The 1.x.1 releases tend to be little bitty bugfixes and stuff.

Epoch Init System homepage
Download Epoch 1.2.1 (tar.gz)

So, I've pushed out the final version of the Epoch Init System 1.2.0 "Peroxide". It's mostly a bugfix release and cleans up most of the nasty code in Epoch. Here's the tarball: http://universe2.us/epoch_1.2.0.tar.gz

I probably could have done more to it, but I wanted to just finish and get the release out so I could roll an update for my personal distro with the new version of Epoch in it. Nonetheless, this release should be pretty stable and is a recommended update. It is safe to update 1.0 and 1.1 releases to 1.2.0 without rebooting. Replace the 'epoch' binary with the new version and then run 'epoch reexec'. Check /var/log/system.log and it should tell you that you've been updated to 1.2.0. NOTE: if you do NOT run 'epoch reexec' after replacing the binary, your root filesystem will not be able to be remounted read-only on system shutdown and that could lead to data loss.
There is no good reason I can think of that you would not want to run 'epoch reexec'.

Here is a list of changes:

Changes since 1.1.1:

* Cleaned up a huge amount of code that was just fugly as hell. This is the big change.
* Removed unsigned long abuse caused by my (at the time) severe OCD.
* New service status output format. Looks cleaner.
* Extremely deprecated AlignStatusReports attribute completely removed. I doubt even one person will be affected by this.
* Add three new attributes: StartingStatusFormat, FinishedStatusFormat, and
StatusNames to manually specify an alternate service status output format.

* Specific bugfixes:
        * Don't set a config problem check to WARNING after we already found a FAILURE.
        * Fix overwriting service messages, caused by our old status format.
        * Fix inaccurate reporting of scheduled shutdown times, now report seconds too.

It is my impression that a significant number of the people who frequent this site use some *NIX operating system, whether it's GNU/Linux/Potternix/LinuxWithoutTheGNUinFront, *BSD, or Apple's Shiny Bastardized BSD (tm). As such, it may seem a bit odd that I, someone who enjoys bashing Windows at every opportunity, would allow it to share my computers with *NIX-based OSes. Like a lot of people in the same situation, I use Windows primarily as a gaming OS/general fallback in case Wine can't emulate it well enough.

To be honest, I don't hate windows. Rather, I think that it's a crusty mess that has gone from being a fairly nice OS to a usability and productivity nightmare. I have listed the Windows versions that I have worked with as well as my thoughts on each.

Windows Pre 3.0: I find that these were interesting environments in and of themselves. While they were clunky and primitive compared to later versions, they provided a means by which people could run multiple DOS programs at the same time (since there was barely any Windows software). Interestingly, Windows 1 and 2.x programs can still run on modern versions of Windows with minimal modifications (http://toastytech.com/guis/misc.html).

Windows 3.x: I actually like these versions of Windows! When you run them on stable hardware, they aren't really all that crashy. The instability that you likely experienced in the '90s may have actually been because hardware compatibility was "meh" at best. To me, 3.x actually has a nice GUI, as the button on the top left of each Window acted as a menu for very clearly laid out actions. The only real problems were that it was slow, had an absurd learning curve, and was 16 bit despite being released in an era when the 386 and 486 were really beginning to take over.

Windows 95: For many people this was My First Preemptively Multitasked OS. When you consider the fact that it can run DOS and 32 bit software side by side, '95 was actually pretty impressive. I have heard that there were serious compatibility problems despite this, however '95 is clear to be as being a definite step forward. It marked the introduction of the Explorer graphical shell, Start Menu, Task Bar, and basic window layout that would be a staple of the OS until Microsoft threw it away in 8. Each of these additions were massive leaps forward not only for UI design but also true usability studies. The Start menu provided an intuitive and easy starting point for users unfamiliar with computers at the time. The function over form nature of the OS is also very striking to me, as it lends itself to actually getting things done, which tends to be what computers are supposed to do.

Windows 98: A generally more stable if not heftier version of Windows 95. This was the first OS I ever used (95 was my second). This was also the first version to feature IE as the main desktop UI, which was a major problem at the time but gradually got subdued as the years went on. The fact that people could get mad about integrating software seems peculiar to me now, however at the time users actually exerted control over their systems. Users were in charge, not the OS or the vendor.

Windows 2000: This is by far my favorite Windows OS. It's small, fast, and dead reliable (I have never had a BSOD outside of a driver problem). To me it's a shame that it got eclipsed by XP, as it has a very clean default UI with sensible defaults. This was also the last version of Windows to really respect the user's control over the system.

XP: Where do I begin? I am one of the few people who hate Windows XP with a passion. I think that it has to do first of all because I didn't use it until 2008 when my family got a netbook as a stopgap replacement between a Pentium III running '98, a Core 2 laptop running Vista, and an i7 860 with Windows 7. XP to me was a slow, unreliable OS riddled with usability and design flaws. Compared to the sleek, modern looking Vista, XP seemed like some sort of child's toy. It was also the first version of Windows to have activation. That in and of itself really should've ruined its reputation right there. 2000 has a very similar kernel and feature set, yet it doesn't require you to re-activate and get hassled by Microsoft if you make a hardware change.

Vista: My 2nd favorite Windows. I really don't see where all of the hate for Vista is coming from to be honest. In retrospect, the "Vista Capable" branding campaign was despicable, but that was mostly Intel's fault (http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2008/03/the-vista-capable-debacle-intel-pushes-microsoft-bends/) Also, to be honest, as long as it is given a reasonably good computer (not some POS purchased in 2000), Vista runs quite nicely. There's also the matter of Vista's UI. I still find it to be sleek and nice looking. It pulls off the glass aesthetic in a way that Mac OS had had for a while by that point without going completely overboard. I can tell that it was a well designed if not a little rushed OS that was pretty much completely fixed by SP1.

7: A big round meh to 7. I don't see it as the miracle savior to right Vista's wrongs. Instead, it's more of a point update to Vista, fixing its minor problems like IO speed and such while fixing the brand name. I will say that the new taskbar is a horrible design decision. Instead of keeping it as a low-profile (increasingly important as 16:9 displays were adopted) and including text (for quick identification of each program), Microsoft decided to toss its prior UI research to the wind and wing it. It should also be noted that in Vista, when in classic mode the control panel works almost identically to the 95/98/2000/XP one (in that it flipping works!), while in 7 it has become a terrible web-ified mess.

8: Utter crap. There are no words that can better describe the UI mess that is 8. Rather than making a useful, general purpose desktop OS, Microsoft decided to pander to the tablet market in the wake of PC sales finally stabilizing to where they really should be. Here we have a non-discoverable child's toy masquerading as a serious OS. Tacked on are several useless "apps" that merely waste space in addition to a Windows Store so full of useless s*it that it would make a sewage treatment plant overflow. Gone is the useful start menu, instead replaced by the blatantly misnamed "charms" bar and a start screen for those who are too incompetent to read. Rather than continuing in the pleasant Vista/7 aesthetic or allowing users to revert to the tried and true 9x UI, Windows 8 treats its users to vast swaths of pastel colors. It honestly seems to me as if all of the actual artists and UI designers were replaced with a heap of douchebags masquerading as useful human beings. Windows 8 has no artistic value. The entire UI is simply a paintbucket fill mess.

8.1: I don't know how, but Microsoft manged to make 8 even worse! Now it's slightly more difficult not to get sucked into the hole that is having a Microsoft account.

Technical Preview: Imagine Windows 8 with a terrible, slow, buggy start menu that insists on automatically searching for every term with Bing and the Windows Store. Also add useless search and task view icons to the task bar and you have just pictured Windows Technical Preview. Technical Preview really is designed to be a privacy-free OS from the ground up and I sincerely hope that it doesn't replace 7 in adoption numbers. A clear message needs to be sent to Microsoft that users want competent UI design and privacy above all else.

Keep in mind that these were just my extremely opinionated impressions. I'm willing to hear out what you folks have to say!

A couple weeks ago I was having a conversation about smoking with someone and they posited this argument in favor of smoking being illegal near entrances and exits after I'd pointed out that the danger from second-hand smoke in an open-air environment was so minuscule as to not exist: The smell offends me.

That went up one side of me and down the other and today I say to everyone using being offended as an argument for anything what I said to him: I do not care.

No, that is not me being an asshole. That is me refusing to allow you to mold the world to suit you at my expense. You have no natural, societal, legal, or God given right to not be offended in this life. And neither should you.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness

Those, right there, are your chief three rights. It's quite important to note that you do not have a right to happiness but only to its pursuit. Also, the the end of each is precisely located where you would start infringing on the same for anyone else. Taken together with all the other rights enumerated in the Constitution, there is a further right that is very much implicit but I believe should have been explicit: The right to be an asshole. Beyond Life and Liberty, I would go as far as to say it is our most fundamental right.

You're probably thinking I am an asshole about now. Why would I say something like being an asshole is one of our most fundamental rights? It's simple, really; because anyone at any time can call anyone else an asshole for any old arbitrary reason. If this has any bearing on the rights of the person being accused of being an asshole, then they do not really have those rights and never did in the first place. All their rights are subject to sanction or removal by cultural fiat. No due process whatsoever. Only if you have the right to offend anyone, at any time, without fear of oppression are any of your other rights secure.

Large portions of our political landscape have always been made up of unscrupulous bastards who incessantly try to convince you that offending someone is bad or wrong. See this for what it is: an attempt to get you to place chains of your own making upon yourself. They know they cannot force you to behave according to their approval or disapproval, so they attempt to shame you into doing so by being offended. There is no difference today between the puritanical right and the Social Justice Warrior on the left in this; the tactic itself is as identical as it is reprehensible.

So, convince me of your position by logical or moral argument all you like. Tell me I should do or think something because it offends you though? You can jam that right up your shitter and blow some fucking bubbles with it, you fascist asshole.

The long and short of it is, there won't be one. We're pushing it until January due to me and PJ being occupied too much with holiday and Life stuff.

What you can look forward to:

• Moderation Rework

Not a final version and we haven't touched meta-moderation yet but this will cut down on the echo chamber effect, mod bombing, and lay some groundwork for combating spam as well.

• Input vs Output Wackiness

Currently if you put html entities in and hit preview they get transformed into literal characters. There's also wackiness if you try to put double quotes in a submission title. I hate this, you hate this, and it needed to stop so most of the code for it is already done and being tested on dev.

• RSS/Atom Feeds Moving to SSL

There is really no reason to have http links in the rss feed rather than https links, so they're changing. I'm also doing my best to get them to encode only the necessary characters and display properly but it seems like no two readers display the same.

• A Couple New Themes

Occasionally I get bored and do up a theme instead of actually working. This time around we have the VT100 and the OMG PWNIES themes. These are actually pretty easy to do. Feel free to mod and submit your own. All it takes is a custom stylesheet if you're okay with reusing existing favicons/logos.

• Support for Additional Tags

We're adding standard support for sub/sup/abbr/strike tags. We're also adding support for the custom tags sarc/sarcasm and two forms of a "user" tag.

• Additional Minor Bug Fixes

Bunch of minor bugs, some of which you would have never seen because they were on admin pages.

I think that's all but I'm not sure what the last one that went into our point release after the 14.12 update was.

After installing PC-BSD, I found that the computer (a Shuttle XPC from circa 2005) wouldn't make it past BIOS. Moving past this minor setback, I put the hard drive into a far newer computer (built last year from parts released the year before), and the installation continued.

At this point, I was asked the standard OS install stuff, like what my username is, etc. One change that will likely interest the Mint/Ubuntu users out there is that PC-BSD actually asks you for your root password. Any Debian users reading this will likely snicker, but I like the fact that the PC-BSD devs actually trust my competence enough (for better or for worse) to have complete control over my own computer.

Anyway, moving on from that, I found that the MATE system monitor was consistently reporting very high memory usage, and that the system would eventually grind to a halt after enough usage. In the name of fairness (and to try out ZFS raid on 4 80GB hard drives I had available), I decided to do a fresh reinstall on this machine with all default settings.

Needless to say, it worked. I find that the KDE 4 desktop that comes with PC-BSD by default should be a welcome relief for anyone sick of having GNOME shoved down their throat. The only problem is that desktop effects don't work yet, but I should be able to sort that out in time.

The Good:
1. It's fast. PC-BSD starts and stops far faster than Mint 17 did after being used for a while. I hope that it stays this fast after updates make their rounds though the system.
2. There's plenty of software to be had. I was able to install gcc49, LibreOffice, and Seamonkey (because Chromium and Mozilla's Chrome-alike leave a bitter taste in my mouth) from AppCafe.
3. It's far easier to pick up than FreeBSD due to the integrated package management and inclusion of X and desktop environments by default.
4. There's no SystemD in sight! In Mint, if you type "mount" at the console, you see that systemd actually has its own mount point. It's amazing how refreshing it is not to see that. Additionally, user management is D-free. As far as I'm concerned, the SystemD project can screw Linux as much as it wants. I'm sticking with a sane OS.
5. There's quite a bit of choice. See my discussion on the installation process and multiply that by 10.

The Annoying:
1. To set up SSHD took some manual configuration, but for most people it isn't a problem.
2. AMD graphics support is still in its infancy, but is expected to improve. For those of you with nVidia graphics, expect smooth sailing.

The Bad:
1. It comes with PulseAudio