Posts by pyite

SQL Server on Linux? HELL YES! Linux on Windows 10? Meh

What was wrong with cygwin?

It has been awhile since I had to use Windows, but I remember having a great experience with Cygwin.

Cisco's WebEx Chrome plugin will execute evil code, install malware via secret 'magic URL'

WebEx needs to die already

A few years ago, WebEx had the best compatibility whereas GotoMeeting was always the worst.

Times have sure changed! Now, GotoMeeting works very well on Linux and WebEx fails completely.

Huawei Nova: A pleasant surprise in a 5-inch phone

Re: Headphone volume

Thanks for the suggestion, I'll give it a try! When I use my phone with an FM transmitter to listen in my pre-bluetooth car, I have to turn both the phone and radio to 100% volume for it to be barely listenable while driving.

Anyone know if the Huawei's have this limitation?

Headphone volume

The most irritating Nexus mis-feature is the way they limit the headphone audio. Apparently this was due to a lawsuit involving the Nexus One. It is possible to fix this, but you have to root the phone which I want to avoid if possible.

Do the Huawei phones such as this one and the Mate 8 do the same thing? If not, I think Santa will have to bring me one of these two phones.

Thanks!

Mark

Facebook Fake News won it for Trump? That's a Zombie theory

No real way to solve this

From a business perspective, Facebook has some work to do. There is no legal remedy for fake news, though -- people need to learn how to see through it. I can only imagine what it will be like in the next election.

The simple fact is that Hillary took her base for granted. For example, she never visited Wisconsin and only went to Michigan in the last weeks once she realized how much trouble she was in. Presumably there are plenty of other examples.

This merely brought things within the margin of error, though. The FBI pushed Trump over the finish line and are now personally beholden to him...

Intel is shipping an ARM-based FPGA. Repeat, Intel is shipping an ARM-based FPGA

What is the Linux angle?

The sub-heading is interesting, but there are no details in the article.

Surprise! Leading 4-socket server vendor isn’t Dell or HPE

Re: Why should HPE and Dell care if Huawei supplants them?

I can only speak to one fairly sizable account, but the government is requiring them to cut way back on HP purchases in favor of local vendors like Quanta.

Quad socket servers are terrible, though

NUMA is a 4 letter word for a reason. I can't imagine the pain involved in trying to get consistently good performance from an 8- or 16- socket server. Is there a way other than NUMA?

IBM lifts lid, unleashes Linux-based x86 killer on unsuspecting world

NVidia? How many FPS

If it can give me 120 fps on my 4k monitor in WoW: Legion, I'll take one!

'Second Earth' exoplanet found right under our noses – just four light years away

Solar Flares will be quite a problem

Unfortunately, red dwarfs have one big problem: ridiculously hot solar flares. It is unlikely that water or an atmosphere would survive long.

Re: lets all just die on this ball

That's OK...

By the time we are ready to travel to another planet we will have evolved into a new species so no more Homo Sapiens.

HGST closing SSD plant in Malaysia – report

Re: Odd target

I have no insider info here, but SanDisk also has a relatively new Penang fab -- so clearly WDC must have liked it better than the HGST facility.

Microsoft has open-sourced PowerShell for Linux, Macs. Repeat, Microsoft has open-sourced PowerShell

Re: "On Linux we’re just another shell"

As an extremely long time Microsoft hater (back to the day when they abandoned OS/2), I welcome PowerShell on Linux -- especially that it is open source.

This will be another useful way to make it easier for Windows people to support Linux. It is the evil mirror universe version of my approach to dealing with Windows - which is to use cygwin, bash, and ssh.

The ability to have configurable pipe formats is pretty cool too.

AdBlock Plus blocked in China: 159m forbidden from stripping adverts

At least they can't block a hosts file

This does a reasonable job for me:

http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/

Android's latest patches once again remind us: It's Nexus or bust if you want decent security

Fix the headphone volume mis-feature and I'll buy Nexus again

Google intentionally limits the headphone volume (apparently due to a lawsuit). It is a big problem because if you use an aux connector it requires that everything be turned up to 11 and it still isn't loud enough.

Please make this easy to override without rooting the phone.

Milk IN the teapot: Innovation or abomination?

Where can I get one of those vulture cups?

Title says it all.

Microsoft to rip up P2P Skype, killing native Mac, Linux apps

Re: What are the real alternatives to Skype

What about desktop sharing? For a decade I used to recommend WebEx and Skype, but recently both of them have become useless on Linux.

HP MyRoom seems to work very well on Linux, but I'm not sure of the licensing model.

Re: All you conversations

Skype has some good features, and I have some contacts over the years who still only use Skype so I try to keep it around.

Before the Microsoft acquisition, Skype was the best free multi-platform desktop sharing app. Once Microsoft bought it, they broke desktop sharing on Linux (not a surprise). There is plausible deniability that it was intentional, but I wouldn't be surprised either way.

With the new version, maybe the Linux version will reach feature parity with the others -- but it has a long way to go and I am quite skeptical.

Congrats, Linux users – you're finally officially alpha males... on Skype

Re: 2nd bad thing

> So what is cross platform, doesn't need a browser (or

> a server that might be spying on you), can do text, files,

> voice, video in any combination?

HP MyRoom may be good for some of these, but probably not all.

> It's gone downhill since MS bought it.

Next software that they are going to murder: MineCraft! They already dropped Linux from any new releases. I'm sure the goal is to get the MineCraft hackers off Java/Elipse and on to Visual Studio/.NET eventually.

First thing they did when buying Skype was...

They broke the desktop sharing by limiting the Linux client to an ultra-low resolution (160x100 maybe?) -- and then scaled this up to the window size. It was too blurry to be usable for anything.

The workaround was to keep using the older client -- but after two years they stopped letting the older version connect to their network.

Recently, WebEx discontinued their Linux support (their main advantage over e.g. GoToMeeting... @#$^#$^).

The only two good cross-platform desktop sharing programs -- gone. However, it looks like there is a good one called HP MyRoom... anyone know how well it works?

Linux Mint to go DIY for multimedia

The end of Mint is complete

Mint was the best distro for a decade because it removed the painful aspects of Linux setup. This was the original reason it was created.

The first Mint version I used (Bianca IIRC) was a winner because it shipped with Sun Java and multimedia codecs. It was jaw dropping that you could take a fresh install and simply insert a DVD and play it without hours on Google.

Not long after, they had a menu system that was very Windows-XP-like -- perfect for introducing people to the Linux desktop. I was the most hard core Mint evangelist imagineable.

The ease-of-install aspects have slowly gone away, sadly. Now that Ubuntu re-introduced Gnome 2 and Mint is dropping codecs (having dropped Java years ago), there is no reason to use Mint anymore.

It was a good run, though. Thanks, Clem!! Good luck on your new adventure.

Miguel de Icaza on his journey from open source to Microsoft: 'It's a different company'

Sorry, but Mono is a disaster

Miguel is a great guy, but it is still a fact that nobody should ever use C#, Mono, Silverlight, or PowerShell unless they want to make software that is Windows-only.

Java software can usually be made to run on Linux.

Mono was only successful as propaganda to make Microsoft appear more open. In reality, if you see software that requires .NET or Silverlight it means you have practically no hope of using Linux.

A perfect marriage: YOU and Ubuntu 16.04

Gnome2/Mate-like desktop switcher -- avaiable in unity?

Is there a way in the default Ubuntu desktop to pre-create a 2d set of virtual desktops?

This is the main feature that keeps me going back to Mate... I can have a desktop switcher with 24 desktops in a 6x4 grid.

After running this way for like 20 years (since the fvwm2 days) it is difficult to give it up; which is what Unity, Gnome3 and Cinnamon all want me to do.

High performance object storage: Not just about reskinning Amazon's S3

Scale-out NFS? Tell me more

Is this something we can do with GPL software?

Three-bit quantum gate a step closer to universal quantum computer

quantum memcopy?

Have the boffins found a way to copy qubits yet?

Docker may be the dumbest thing you do today

"Chasing the hype" is the real problem

It is great to understand new technology.

But it is easy (especially for people who aren't as hands-on) to get on the bandwagon too soon.

IBM plugs SanDisk's flashy JBOF rig into its spectrum

Typo

Your article said "Cloudbytes" but it should probably be "Cloudbyte." I can't remember if it has BiCaps or not

Crowd-funded OpenShot 2.0 delivers graphic Linux package

Thanks for the review

I am finally starting to figure out how to do video properly on Linux, so the timing of this review is perfect.

90% of SSL VPNs are ‘hopelessly insecure’, say researchers

IPsec?

Why don't people just use IPsec? It is part of the TCP/IP standard and works much better than SSL VPN's (or, god forbid, the worst of the bunch: L2TP).

NSA data centre brings 300 million daily security scares to its Utah home

2014 seems a little off

I could see it from the window of our office in 2012/2013.

Intel shows budget Android phone powering big-screen Linux

This is the device I've wanted forever

As long as it has the ability to put the desktop part to sleep, unplug, and plug into a new screen without losing my session (obviously TCP/IP connections will drop but that's OK).

PC sales aren't doing so great – but good God, you're buying mountains of Nvidia graphics cards

Of course NVidia is doing well

Their cards are the only ones that support VDPAU.

Nutanix updates its stack, not just to distract you from EMC's big day

You said: " Nutanix reckons users won't always want the whistles and bells of ESX or Hyper-V and therefore offers its own Acropolis hypervisor"

But they are using a QEMU-KVM based hypervisor, aren't they? This is as good as ESX and Hyper-V, and better in many ways.

Though admittedly, I haven't yet looked at the subset of features that they expose.

Remember Netbooks? Windows 10 makes them good again!

How?

The whole point of Netbooks was that you could buy them without Windows. How is this going to help?

You've seen things people wouldn't believe – so tell us your programming horrors

The best coding horror story is still this one about "Mel, the real programmer"

http://www.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/mel.html

AMD to nibble the ankles of Nvidia this summer with 14nm FinFET GPUs

AMD GPL driver status?

Bronek -- what do you think about the state of AMD's GPL driver currently? I love Intel's thorough commitment to open source drivers, and combining this with AMD's hardware would be wonderful.

I have been wanting to try AMD again but I'm holding out until they have a GPL version of VDPAU or equivalent. VA-API is not GPL and not nearly as good.

Thanks!

Mark

ASCII @dventure game NetHack gets first upgrade in ten years

Re: Sweet!

You are ready for slashem. There is a public ssh server where you can try it out:

ssh://slashem:[e-mail]

It is just what you're looking for: NetHack with some fresh content.

Re: NetHack is too primitive-looking these days...

People say the same thing about Minecraft too and yet its market penetration is like 100%.

There is a lot more to it than the default graphics let on.

I was just playing Nethack 4 and slashem yesterday

These are the best games ever. I hadn't played in a couple years so I started playing again a couple weeks ago.

There is a Nethack 4 with more interesting terminal support, give it a try: http://nethack4.org/

I like Slashem more than Nethack these days, but unfortunately it is 100x harder to ascend.

Fujitsu CTO: Analysts might think we're 'crazy', but OpenStack here we come

FWIW

I replaced some Novell Netware servers with Linux in 1997 using NCP at first (later Samba). OpenStack is MUCH further along than Linux was back then, IMO.

Also, I wish the author would expand on the scalability limitations. Are you talking about limitations in the Horizon UI or with the system itself?

Red Hat Enterprise Linux lands on Microsoft Azure cloud – no, we're not pulling your leg

Boring and lame

If they want to have a real .NET core -- make things like WPF work with Mono. I would be willing to pay for that.

Ashley Madison keeps calm, carries on after hackers expose lives of millions of its users

Re: Shirley

Just be careful with umount -- that sort of thing is illegal in many areas.

Perhaps middle-aged blokes SHOULDN'T try 34-hour-long road trips

Left or right to merge?

I used to drive a long way to and from work, so I actually thought about this one. I'm in the U.S. so the sides may be opposite.

On a road with two directions separated by a line, it would be more dangerous to make the lane toward the center (faster lane) merge. I can easily imagine head-on collisions from this.

However, for roads that are one direction only, it is better to force the faster lane to merge into the slower.

Introducing the Asus VivoMini UN42 – a pint-sized PC, literally

Windows-free version?

There is a Windows sticker on this thing. Is it possible to buy one without Windows?

Five lightweight Linux desktop worlds for extreme open-sourcers

WM2 is the ultimate lightweight window manager

The sideways title bar is annoying though, apart from that it's perfect.

Odin (formerly Parallels) bets big on Docker and OpenStack

Finally!!!!!!!!!!!!

I've been waiting for this for a long time.

How do you really know if a storage array will perform for you?

blktrace -- I/O workload capture

Take a look at the Linux utility blktrace, as a $0 alternative to this.

It is written by the same author as the "fio" I/O test software. One of the nifty features is that blktrace can save the I/O pattern using a format that fio can re-play. This is ideal for capturing real life workloads to test against different storage systems.

Debian ships new 'Jessie' release with systemd AND sysvinit

Compare this to how Ubuntu f*cked us all with 10.04 & upstart

I upgraded my Debian system to Jessie and it is working well with systemd in sysvinit-compatible mode.

After what happened with how Ubuntu surprised everyone by going all-Upstart in their 10.04 debacle (Upstart is still not a good idea for a production server), I was expecting the worst. However, it is doing very well so far.

Google gives spit n' polish to world's most expensive Chromebook

If it has upgradeable memory, I'll buy one

The only reason I didn't buy the last model was that 4GB wasn't nearly enough. Did they make the same mistake with this model? 64GB should be easy with modern chipsets.

Should online pirates get the same sentences as offline ones?

Re: The term "pirate" is a propaganda coup

> The same reasoning would lead to burglary being a civil matter

No not at all. Burglary involves taking something away from someone else. Copying a song, book, or using a patented idea doesn't hurt the creator in any way whatsoever.

Taking copyright royalties after they have been paid would be burglary, as would stealing a CD.

> Do you want only giant corporations to have the power to

> track down and seek redress whilst small content producers

> are powerless?

Would this be much different than the current scheme?

I support the concept of intellectual property, but it shouldn't last forever and it isn't the kind of thing that should land people in jail. Copyright fails on both counts. Patents and trademarks are much more sensible.