Hacker News Reader

drill_sargeon US Nuclear Missile Silos Still Use Floppy Disks

Weren't the launch codes set to 0000000 or something because for convenience for decades? So no need to upgrade to larger storage for this.

edit: found it http://gizmodo.com/for-20-years-the-nuclear-launch-code-at-u...

drill_sargeon Earth to Mozilla: Come back home

The moment they start to integrate somekind of ads (yes, I heard the rumor/plans) in Firefox they are dead. It doesn't even matter if they don't track, aren't intrusive or whatever. The users will run away.

drill_sargeon Software eats software development

Who moved to Java? Write once - debug everywhere.

drill_sargeon The Operating System That Can Protect You Even if You Get Hacked

As an attacker I care only about the data and don't give a a shit if it is a real machine or a virtual one. If I can sniff the passwords in your browser or just have a keylogger in one of the VMs I am fine. Not sure if that solves a thing.

edit: I remember there were similar concepts a decade or so ago. where you had your "green" desktop for intranet or whatever and then a seperate "red" desktop which you could switch to and go to the evil internet. hint: no benefit gained

drill_sargeon Glow-in-the-dark roads make debut in Netherlands

how about these: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b2/Leitpfos...

also road paint is mixed with glass fragments and is highly reflective. ok, it does not glow at night by itself, but your car should have lights ;)

drill_sargeon Ask HN: What are the best Linux-based laptops?

If you want some 100% no issues working, just get something with Intel CPu and GPU. Although the free Radeon drivers are pretty good now too. Avoid some kind of integrated GPU+extra discrete chip combination. Otherwise there isn't really anything special to worry about or to buy a special "built for Linux" machine (which I consider marketing bullshit).

drill_sargeon Putin critic Khodorkovsky in Germany after pardon

I don't know why media is circle jerking about this. I am not a fan of Putin and I can see that he wanted simply to get rid of Chodorkowski and that he may or may not got a real fair trial. But in the end Chodorkowski is a criminal who tried to illegally sell/exploit property of the Russian state. I am not saying the other oligarchs surrounding Putin didn't do or tried the same, but Chodorkowski isn't a "Putin critic" for political reasons or somekind of activist. He was part of this whole game of corruption and mob crimes and he lost.

drill_sargeon High Speed Trains are Killing the European Railway Network

The price model of the rail company doesn't make much sense here (germany). I can travel from Berlin to Paris cheaper, than I can from Frankfurt to Munich for example. But then they have special offers for certain regions sometimes, which you can combine with regular tickets for the rest of your route, which makes it cheaper again. Or in combination with a flight ticket. Or traveling in groups with special ticket, or traveling in a certain region with a specific train and so on. It is so complicated and confusing that even the staff at the train station can't always tell you whats the best ticket.

drill_sargeon The Cinematography of "The Incredibles"

I only see low res shadow maps with an awful filter. Joke aside, I find it always fascinating what detail or references are put in movies which nobody notices.

drill_sargeon Cloudflare pledges to double SSL usage on the web in 2014

This is how SSL works if you use Cloudflare. You have to hand them your private key. Also the article doesn't state this, I would guess they mean that everyone on their service should use ssl (maybe they will enable ssl on their free plan or something). I may be wrong, lets see what they will write on their blog.

drill_sargeon Cloudflare pledges to double SSL usage on the web in 2014

>give secret ssl key to cloudflare

meh

drill_sargeon Qualcomm Insider: Apple 64-Bit Chip `Hit Us in the Gut'

It reminds me of AMD Athlon64 period. Everyone claimed 64bit to be responsible for everything. In fact the majority of the performance came from the improvements over the k7 architecture (like integrated memory controller, hyper transport, better prediction, improved pipelines, cache etc.), new instruction sets and so on.

drill_sargeon Fedora 20 released

Download: https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora/linux/releases/20/

More mirrors here, but not all servers are synced with 20 yet: https://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/publiclist/Fedora/20/

No announcement yet, link in title leads to release notes.

drill_sargeon The city of Munich switches to Open Source Software

sorry, meant 10.04

drill_sargeon Debian 7.3 is out

Yes.

To clarify: dist-upgrade upgrades everything, including installing or removing new dependencies. Upgrade upgrades the installed packages, but doesn't add or remove new packages. In theory only using "upgrade" is supposed to be safer (eg more unlikely to break something) but I have not encountered any problems when using dist-upgrade (disclaimer: when you rely on the standard distro repositories; if you use unstable programs/repos or 3rd party repos/PPAs in Ubuntu, it is more likely that dist-upgrade breaks something).

But I do not agree with what ksdkkdddd said. There is not really a use to do upgrade and then dist-upgrade right after it, because upgrade doesn't magically fix something in case dist-upgrade breaks something. It works or it does not. Also if you use apt from the terminal (as you should) and not rely on graphical updaters you always get output on what may prevent upgrading and how to resolve it.

drill_sargeon The city of Munich switches to Open Source Software

It's no custom distro. It's Ubuntu 10.10 LTS. Only thing which they added was WollMux: http://www.wollmux.net/wiki/Hauptseite

Also they switched from OpenOffice to LibreOffice

drill_sargeon Debian 7.3 is out

I'd recommend using Debian testing instead of stable for that. (testing is preferred in most personal use cases if you don't run in a corporate environment/server or similar)

http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/

I am not sure, but you may need the additional firmware files listed on that page.

drill_sargeon Linux laptops: should you avoid buying Windows?

If you get a laptop with mostly Intel (especially gpu) components it is pretty much guaranteed that any major Linux distribution will work out of the box just fine. The thing with preinstalled GNU/Linux is the same with preinstalled Windows: abysmal configuration. Even Dell fked up with their xps13 linux thing.

drill_sargeon SteamOS: It's here

It does not state on what drivers/other stuff they are contributing. It sounds they work together with the vendors to improve the proprietary drivers, I think. That would be zero benefit for GNU/Linux environment. Also current state of Steam OS is just a standard Debian with proprietary components added. And those components are what really matters in this field. I do not expect that Valve make their Steam Client open source, but at least not relying solely on closed stuff for the relevant parts. In the current state this doesn't improve anything or makes somehow the "ecosystem" better.

drill_sargeon SteamOS: It's here

Debian with EULA? Hell no...

drill_sargeon Call of Duty's underlying message is becoming more troubling

Call of Duty isn't even a good shooter. The franchise has become the example of a dull, repetitive and undemanding interactive experience - I don't even say game because most of it are scripted sequences with almost no player interaction or challenge. And the rest of it is uninspired "gun down 10000000 guys walking direct upfront to you who are too dumb to even hurt you". Also this "authenticity" is basically laughable. Because there is none. It is not a authentic war game (like arma) and it is even too dumb, easy and restricted to be a simple straight forward ego shooter (like serious sam). It's the Michael Bay of video games.

drill_sargeon [dead]

I doubt it's a serious project

drill_sargeon Gmail blows up e-mail marketing by caching all images on Google servers

What is e-mail marketing? this is a serious question. As someone who has nothing to do with marketing, advertising and all that stuff for me "e-mail marketing" is just spam. or what is it? newsletters? Does it mean that you buy mail addresses from someone and send your stuff to them and see if someone opens it?

drill_sargeon Cisco's Open Source H.264 Codec

Interesting enough Youtube has removed the HD WebM formats and only offers 360p for WebM and higher quality is mp4 only. Strange decision baring in mind that Google is behind pushing WebM.

drill_sargeon Firefox 26 is released

https://userscripts.org/scripts/show/87011

No need for Flash anymore, works on every video

drill_sargeon Parents Revolt Over Fisher-Price Infant Seat With Face-Level iPad Mount

If it was for a normal toilet and a laptop I would buy

drill_sargeon How Americans Were Deceived About Cell Phone Location Data

I don't think the president has much influence on such a situation, you should look at Keith Alexander, not Obama/Bush/whoever.

drill_sargeon Time Person of the Year 2013

Yes please, make this choice least interesting/controversial as possible to make it even more irrelevant. The interesting question is: would it be someone else if Time wasn't US media?

drill_sargeon Firefox 26 is released

If you are on beta channel and the integrated updater is too slow for you, you can grab 27b1 here: https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/27....

drill_sargeon Firefox 26 is released

Add the Debian repos from Linux Mint Debian Edition (something like deb http://packages.linuxmint.com/ debian main import backport upstream). Use Google for the exact source and how to import the keys for this server. Then install standard Firefox