I’m a big fan of MWL’s tech books. (Can’t speak to his fiction as my brand of ADHD doesn’t really let me consume much fiction).

But I think he has struck a chord with the tech community on this one. Those of us that do sysadmin things, personally or professionally, are getting increasingly frustrated with getting pushed around by big tech. It’s nice to have a bit of a guide on how to grab back some of the infrastructure.

I figured no one made money off the in-app purchase because so few vendors even give the option anymore.

I make a living off software development myself, and I love the "pay to remove ads" model. I play a game a while with ads to decide if I like it, then I pay a couple of bucks. It's like a demo to me. And ads drive me nuts.

The things you are saying here sound like your attitude is in the right place, but did you actually read the TOS your legal team sent out?

Yes I did. Agree that we could make some improvements

As the CEO, if you think you could have made some improvements, then I wonder how this contract got sent out to valued partners? Can you share with us your plan for fixing this state of affairs going forward?

Making those improvements before sending it out would have been smart I think.

Some of us care a great deal about license agreements for different reasons.

I'm really interested in hearing more of what people have to say about this.

It seems I often hear/read the general thought on security is that you should use open systems (ie: Cyanogenmod w/o GApps + Debian), but the author makes a good point that without Cyanogenmod on a device that is well supported, Android is going to be missing security updates.

I'm excited to try out the maildir support. I've been looking forward to this coming out.

I don't really understand the Thunderbird to IceDove flow, I wonder when these features will make it to Debian unstable/testing?

Yeah, I've done it, and it is harsh. Easier to do a clean Jesse install and manually set things up. Basically you would want the dotfiles from /etc/skel on a crunchbang install, and then several of the custom scripts (I think from /usr/bin) like conky-wonky, cb-printers, etc. A bunch start with cb-.

I've just rebuilt my #! laptop last week. I can't remember what I did to break it now, but I did. Anyway, I installed vanilla #! Waldorf, updated sources to Jessie, commented out Waldorf sources and dist-upgraded.

No really major dramas. Run cb-printers before the upgrade to Jessie. Icons do screw up a bit, but easily fixed by installing some similar Gnome 3 icon themes. I'm using cb-waldorf-xoraxiom and "Grey-Icons" at the moment. Everything else seems to work fine.

I really like the #! Openbox experience and have yet to find anything quite like it. I did try Archbang during this re-build process, but wasn't convinced on first viewing. I know I could just install Debian and Openbox myself, but then have to spend a lot of extra time setting up menus, conky etc.

I'll miss #!, as I've really enjoyed it over the last three years. I've no reason to install anything else right now, but in six months I suppose I'll go elsewhere.

I dist-upgraded to Jessie from my working Waldorf system (using now). It was a little faffy, but not too bad.

One problem I've got is black internal borders on some of my menus (e.g. network-manager panel menu), but it doesn't affect me much and I really can't be bothered to read the docs to sort it out. Any ideas?

This was the good thing about Crunchbang: a lightweight debian install that looked good and needed hardly any configuration to work well.

Heh, yeah I've done this since.

I installed base Jessie from netinstall image with no desktop, then manually installed slim and openbox, and started from there.

It's much cleaner this way

I had a feeling this was coming, based on the fact Corenominal is mostly running Jessie with Gnome in some of his recent posts, and the lack of development around the Jessie based version.

I think Corenominal is a stand-up guy in general, and great for the GNU/Linux community. I think he is also leaving the project at the right time, before he has to face the demons of init that are in Jessie, and now that vanilla debian with xfce or lxde is much closer to the user-friendly and complete desktop that #! was so great for.

All that positive stuff said, this kinda sucks. I was really looking forward to the next version. I agree with many others that it isn't pointless yet, there still isn't anything quite as polished while still being super lightweight.

yeah, the point isn't so much to make it readable, but to allow you to write JSON (as a python dev I love the interoperability with JSON) and then use the capabilities of the DataPower to do stuff with it.

I expect many people were doing this by hand since JSON has replaced XML in a lot of peoples minds, and IBM has created a way to standardize it to make it easier to work with other teams.

That doesn't make this mess any saner, if the point was to apply XML tools to JSON, why not convert to an existing XML dialect with equivalent expressive power, e.g. XMLRPC's serialisation format (which provides a strict superset of JSON capabilities (if you include the nil extension))?

The obvious problem being that you might not have control over the source of the data. JSONx means you can apply xml tools to json sources, period.

I'm not sure what you're trying to say. The source of the data is irrelevant, XMLRPC w/ nil (and other pre-existing formats I'm sure) are strict supersets of JSON, any JSON document can be converted back and forth between XMLRPC and JSON without data loss. So XMLRPC (or something else with similar capabilities) would give you exactly the same ability to apply XML tools to "JSON sources".

I worked on the Datapower team soon after IBM acquired the product. Its a very cool device.

But I read the headline and threw up in my mouth a little.

This sounds smart. And I'm pretty pragmatic. I don't think Google and Apple and Microsoft are really trying to ruin my privacy.

But something about this makes me uncomfortable. The fact that when this appeared on the front page of HN it was with posts from Google and Dropbox about how they support this.

Google that Assange is releasing a book about, and Dropbox that went a day where it didn't matter what password you entered and has former Secretary Rice on their board.

I have a feeling this organization might help keep things like the recent celebrity iCloud break happening, but as someone else said, real security is not easy. And false security is worse than no security.