sherr

Probably a lot of slaves as well. One has to consider how a large band of soldiers survives "in country". A lot of pillaging, ravaging and general nastiness. Slaves were a fact of life back then.

Please explain. In what way? Both men, both leaders at the top of revolutionary regimes. What else?

Also on the BBC Booktalk a week or so ago :

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0bvxl31/booktalk-diar...

I like Mantel too but I thought this novel (her first I think) was too long. Better in my mind are "Beyond Black" and "A Year in Ghazzah Street".

For spider intelligence and an absoutely brilliant science-fiction novel, try Adrian Tchaikovsky's "Children of Time"

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25499718-children-of-tim...

This book really made me realise (once again) how strange and wonderful good science-fiction can be.

I didn't know he was a part of the SOE in WW2 and took part in the kidnapping of Kreipe on Crete. If anyone can get to the British Museum in London before July 15th, there's a free exhibition called "Charmed lives in Greece - Ghika, Craxton,Leigh Fermor" [1]. I hope to visit tomorrow.

[1] http://www.britishmuseum.org/whats_on/exhibitions/charmed_li...

Rebuild and scp the whole lot again? Not necessarily a big deal.

HEADLINE: Finalise LXD support

DESCRIPTION: It would be great if Debian finished its LXD (container hypervisor) packaging and got it up to a decently complete level (per Ubuntu).

https://wiki.debian.org/LXD

Eric Cline, the author of the piece, wrote the book "1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed", a book on the bronze age collapse I found very interesting. In the 1980's, the BBC produced a series called "In Search of Troy", written and presented by Michael Wood, the historian. Cline brings this up to date with Manfred Korfmann's findings from the 1990's, expanding the size of Troy with the "lower city" and adding much to our knowledge. I think the BBC series can be found on YouTube and is worth watching still, as it covers a lot of the same ground. I wish Schliemann had been more careful.

The "Latinum" YouTube channel seems good when I looked it over last :

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEekt9eu1g-yEGq6XUlRSIg

I use a credit card for online payment only. I don't like the idea of a debit card stored online because it is a direct link to my bank account. A credit card gives me a bit more protection and I make sure I pay it off every month.

Yes, Thomas Dickey's been maintaining xterm and a lot else for donkey's years now. A lot of people owe him a big "thank you" for all his hard work. Thanks Thomas.

Not only CAD but media (film,video,3D). Years ago, there were quite a few 3D design programs around for film/video production e.g. Softimage, Alias, Wavefront, 3Ds Max etc. On the 2D side, Discreet Logic with Flame etc. Today, all owned by Autodesk.

Dickey's an unsung hero really. I've been impressed and grateful that he keeps old programs like xterm (in particularly) relevant.

It is very refreshing to see MSDN publishing a sentence like :

"The internal Microsoft team has been focussed on Linux support"

I've never been on the Microsoft side of the great computing divide, but this sort of work definitely reduces my (old) antagonism to the company.

Some thoughts :

It wasn't absolutely clear to me what this is. The front page (project page) doesn't have a simple, clear description of the application. Or is it a "platform"?

Documentation page has a list of features - but they are all quite technical, not end-user helpful in general. The "getting started" page says :

"rapid development of robust and highly performant websites with content management functionality."

Wordpress is mentioned a lot so I assume it is a "blogging" platform to a major degree. A demo site might help but first, a better description I think.

A recent translation by Clive James has been much praised. As someone who has not read Dante's classic yet, the James version might be the one I read.

http://www.clivejames.com/poetry/divine

Thank you for such a good description of what you are doing. I am also trying to do mindfulness meditation but am only managing 15 or 20 minutes a day just now. It can be frustrating but occasionally (rarely for me) you notice something (almost) happening that makes it worthwhile. I think persistence is key. Reading this type of post helps me persevere.

I should also mention a good book I read recently about meditation, helping the author Tim Parks overcome increasingly chronic pain. The book is not only very funny in parts, it is also a beautiful description of mindfulness practice :

http://tim-parks.com/non-fiction/teach-us-to-sit-still/

Good article. Its when he mentions GLX_SGI_video_sync that I recall how far ahead of the crowd SGI used to be when it came to graphics and video engineering, including proper SDI video work.

A lot of commentary here and in the article was worrying to me. Directly relevant since I bought a cheap (good value) Lenovo G510 laptop today that came with Win 8.1.

I didn't want to use Windows at all, just boot Clonezilla straightaway, clone the HDD and then install Debian. No go on booting from CD - "not allowed" due to the security setup. Ah, OK .. so it then boots Win 8.1 and I had to go through various Windows setups I wanted to avoid before rebooting and trying again.

It was then I had to figure out the BIOS side of things and saw it was all UEFI. I just turned it off and switched to "legacy" mode (BIOS legacy I assume) and disabled secure boot. Cloned the HDD, booted the Debian Testing CDROM and now have a "Jessie" install on it.

3.11 is in Wheezy backports if wanted.

A while back, I briefly worked for IBM at their R&D office in Winchester, UK. IBM did were building parallel programming tools and programs (transputers), 3D computer visualisations (constructive solid geometry) etc. Proper research. I remember one of the senior engineers (big office) complaining that the new MD of the center didn't think he was "working" if he was sitting back in his chair with his feet up on the table (i.e. thinking). Typing = working!

I'll second the pfsense option. I just bought a great little Alix based firewall running pfsense (2.1) [1]. I wanted something that was open-source and less of a black box (firewall inside a consumer grade router/modem).

One thing I'm now noticing - Android (nexus7) is quite noisy. I need to get wireshark looking at what this constant trafic is from the tablet to Google (and the BBC sometimes).

[1] ALIX 2D3 LX800

Congratulations Joshua. Great reading about your experience learning how to code, sticking at it and getting the job you wanted. Your post was short on details (I assume your book will have more) but still inspirational. Definitely good reading something positive like this at the weekend! Good luck.

If people are interested in this stuff (and I hope a lot are), the Planetary Society [1] do weekly podcasts and events and talk about this and other areas. The Benford's are always good to hear because they're articulate, clever and so enthusiastic (the Economist cartoon has a Benford present as well I think).

A recent event was recorded in Pasadena "Is this the Starship Century?", a 90 min video with some great discussion about spaceships [2]. A book is out as well. It's good to dream, isn't it?

[1] http://www.planetary.org [2] http://www.scpr.org/events/2013/09/25/1153/next-the-starship...

I'm a user of Debian but can see why some people prefer Redhat, and I've used it myself.

Perhaps the main difference is that there is more official vendor support for Redhat i.e. device driver RPM's etc. This could be something like an LSI RAID card perhaps, or a filesystem like Stornext. I know you can often find community built software/drivers for Debian but some organisations and people prefer an "official" source.

I used to think that the Redhat security guides were good [1], but would also go through the NSA guide to securing Redhat [2]. Seems a little ironic nowadays.

Recently, we had Bryan Kennedy's "first 5 minutes" [3], linked from Drew Crawford's guide to "NSA proofing" email [4] (pretty good guide to securing a mail server).

[1] https://access.redhat.com/site/documentation/Red_Hat_Enterpr... [2] http://www.nsa.gov/ia/mitigation_guidance/security_configura... [3] http://plusbryan.com/my-first-5-minutes-on-a-server-or-essen... [4] http://sealedabstract.com/code/nsa-proof-your-e-mail-in-2-ho...

Although Active Directory and Exchange are pretty entrenched. And how's Sharepoint and Lync doing? Microsoft still have quite a foothold in the enterprise, even leaving aside Office.

Thank you. Not only a good real world example of server provisioning with Ansible, something I've been meaning to try, but a pretty well chosen set of services to install and configure. I'm already using Postfix and Dovecot over SSL but will surely learn from the rest of the setup.

I sympathise with the fact that Debian considers itself the "universal operating system" but there are limits and the Debian developers have to consider the impact of their support decisions on their major consumer: the Linux OS. The Linux OS is the first and primary OS they should support. And as Michael says, to stay relevant, Debian needs to meet the needs of a modern and dynamic OS. That's why I want to see systemd supported and considered first-class in Debian, my OS of choice.