Posts by Steve Graham 651 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2007
I've always been dubious about Wayland's architecture. It all seems much too tightly-coupled and Linux-specific. And it was designed NOT to work over a network?
Then there's the scenario that Wayland depends on evdev, which depends on udev, which is developed as part of systemd, which wants to eat my operating system.
Xorg still supports basic keyboard and mouse drivers, so I'm currently able to set up systems which are free from udev.
Look, nobody knows what the necessary conditions for life are. We have one example on one planet, and the planet is astonishingly suited to the life upon it.
Well, of course it is! That's evolution.
I know you can make all kinds of arguments about thermodynamics or genetic information storage or whatever, but until we get at least one more data point it's just speculation.
"Even better, it is now only a matter of time before someone writes a browser extension that checks whether the domain you've just connected to is owned by Microsoft and changes the user-agent string to pretend that the client OS is Windows."
I installed exactly this kind of extension yesterday in Vivaldi, my new choice of browser (Mozilla broke sound output in Linux). But not to fix a Microsoft site. It's Google Maps which doesn't work in Vivaldi, unless you pretend to be using Chrome on Windows.
And the Chrome-style extension that allows you to spoof the user agent on a site-by-site basis... written by a company called Google Inc.
Here's a great idea: why don't web developers make sites that comply with web standards instead of coding to browser quirks?
This is one reason why I compile a specific kernel for each machine I use: much less code, reducing the probability of bugs.
Distro kernels take the opposite approach, including code for everything they've ever heard of, in case some user needs it.
Maybe it would be better to have a choice of kernels in your distro, from "average PC" to "kitchen sink included".
I think it might be something to do with the way Hollywood finances its movies. Basically, you have to tour many potential backers with your "idea" or "concept" and get enough of them to commit money.
You can guess that "Remember that great movie (or 60s TV series) you all loved? We're going to do a new version. BUT EVEN BETTER!" will score more than "There's this book you haven't read. But it's really, really great.".
I estimate that at the peak of my coffee habit I was ingesting 7 or 8 grammes of caffeine per day. Even now, I'll occasionally drink a mug from a 3-shot espresso maker, which probably has close to a gramme of caffeine. (300mg in an espresso shot seems about right.)
Never did me any harm. (Twitches.)
I'm only half-way through this morning's second cup, so that might be a factor, but I have a few problems with this article.
- "substances found within caffeine" dosn't make any sense. Caffeine is a specific chemical compound.
- "reduction in inflammation and caffeine is not causal" is a direct quote, yet the rest of the article seems to contradict it.
- "gene clusters known to be associated with ageing and inflammation" - low activity correlated with coffee drinking. This could mean that naturally long-lived people tend to drink coffee.
Anyway, I'm off to read the Stanford press release referenced here. It was also written by a mere journalist, but seems to have more information. The actual Nature Medicine article isn't freely available.
The Atheros wireless drivers in the kernel seem to be written by Atheros (or "Qualcomm Atheros, Inc." in the 2016 files) so you may well have drivers available.
A frequent "gotcha" with wireless is that you need a firmware file. Sometimes you have to pick it out of the Windows driver install disk.
There is a notion in the industry that there are two types of civil servants who deal with defence procurement. There are the incompetent ones who let suppliers get away with anything, er, through being incompetent.
And there are the competent ones who let suppliers get away with anything in the hope of landing well-paying jobs in the private sector.
My sister is a Plusnet & Win10 customer and had this problem about a month ago. Since we were both planning to visit our mother, my sister brought her laptop for me to "debug". But Mum's with TalkTalk on a Hauwei router and everything worked perfectly.
Of course, when she went home, Windows wouldn't connect again. She was told by Plusnet that they were trialling a software upgrade to her Technicolor TG582n and would "put her on the list". It's all been working since then.
(As it happens, I got the exact same model of router from my ISP, Phone Co-Op, but I have no Windows in here.)
/usr
None of my systems use an initramfs. Being standard PCs, you only need to compile in disk and filesystem drivers to get them to boot.
The initramfs concept was invented for non-optimal distro kernels which have to boot on the 1% of obscure hardware platforms*. I see this all the time in Linux, large amounts of bloat to cope with edge cases.
*I can see a need for it for encrypted drives.
"Metallic" superconductivity, the originally-discovered version, has a good explanation in terms of cooper pairs of electrons turning the electrons in a metal into a superfluid which flows through the metal lattice without scattering. This was the sort of thing I was interested in during my physics career, several decades ago.
But it is true to say that nobody has come up with a convincing explanation of what is happening in high-temperature ceramic superconductors. It must be something to do with the nanostructure of the materials.
Why didn't he start the laptop in console mode? He'd still have been working blind, but would miss out the step of opening a terminal window.
(I'd have installed telnetd to being with. You could then log in from the phone using existing username/password and wouldn't have to set up SSH blind. Sure, there's a window of vulnerability until you get the secure connection going, but maybe the risk is low up a Himalaya?)
While I do agree that some of the most recent MINI™ models do look like small SUVs -- I drive a small SUV and when a MINI™ drives past I think "Look at the size of that!" -- I think that Stephenson's own design was much too big as well. For me, part of the spirit of the original Mini was that it was tiny compared to contemporary cars.
And it's certainly possible to get a tiny car safety-certified today. BMW just chose not to.
"Many are highly successful entrepreneurs and businesspeople meaning they establish or invest in UK-based companies, thereby creating thousands of jobs."
Funny how there are no figures given in the article to quantify that "many".
My perception is that the majority are not entrepreneurs; their wealth derives solely from their possessions in rent, interest etc.
I left Plusnet a few months ago (for Co-op Broadband) because of their customer service. Or, to be honest, because of their television adverts crowing about how great their customer service is.
A storm took out an overhead cable. It happens, and it's BT's wire, not Plusnet's. But I was without service for 19 days, having been told twice it was fixed when it wasn't. When I phoned for updates (which was most days) I had to hold on for about 20 minutes before speaking to someone. Except this one time when, after 20 minutes, the call was dropped.
If I sent a message through their support ticket system, it would be promptly answered in three days.
My feeling is that Plusnet has greatly expanded its customer base without expanding the support teams in proportion.
I think the way udev works is that when it starts up, it simulates a hotplug event for all devices it has discovered, as if they had been added.
At that point, firmware gets loaded if needed.
If /lib/firmware is on a device which needs firmware... you can put the blob in the kernel, or on an init ramdisk.
The ublock.org developers forked the original and tried to pass it off as their own creation. They ask for donations to support their "hard work". The correct site for the real Ublock is https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock. You can also install "Ublock Origin" from the Mozilla add-ons site.
See also the Wikipedia article on Ublock Origin.
It's a long time (15 years or so) since I used Windows, but I seem to remember that the system did NOT use the file extension to work out how to execute an executable. I think if you had a binary executable something.exe and renamed it to something.bat it would still work. Or is dementia kicking in?
Their wireless hardware is outstanding too. When my neighbours plugged in their new printer, my laptop could 'see' the AP.
I live in a rural location. My neighbours are 250m away across the fields.
(Unfortunately, they must have opted for a wired connection and disabled the wifi. Otherwise, their printer might have become haunted...)
A few months ago, I tried to build in the processor microcode update in the kernel. (Look, it's my kernel; I can if I want.) The code was there, and had been for many versions back, but I couldn't get it to work.
Then, in a submission to the kernel mailing list, a developer posted some very substantial patches, which should, apparently, make the functionality operate as expected. They should be in 4.6 -- I haven't yet checked the release notes.
The thing is, this was code in many "stable" kernel releases prior which can't ever have been tested: it was just broken. It's made me realise that I've had a somewhat rosy view of kernel quality control. After all, there are about 40,000 source files. Linus checks every change.
"Firefox 53 beta will play embedded YouTube videos with HTML5 video if Flash is not installed."
I think 53 must be a typo for 47, since that's what the referenced release notes are for. ("Typo"? I don't know. The two numbers sum to 100. Perhaps the article was written by software with a bug.)
Anyway, hasn't embedded youtube been working since about release 40?
systemd-free Debian fork
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