Posts by bombastic bob 10841 publicly visible posts • joined 1 May 2015
when you have options, if there is value added to paying for support, go for it. The salary of your own Linux guru vs paying RH for their expertise is one of those choices the bean counters make.
So if you do not need support, use CentOS or Rocky or one of the others. RHEL if you need support.
And maybe RH should start making it more valuable to buy the support... (not by taking away competing distros but by offering more and more services)
I recently installed the latest Rocky Linux and it "worked out of the box", though I ran into a problem caused by one of the pre=installed packages (it was using a hard-coded IP address for something and it happened to match the IP of my intarwebs gateway - fixing that was a bit of a pain but a recursive grep for the IP address in /etc found the files responsible and I changed them, all good). Mostly I need to stay current and informed which is why I installed it in a VM for testing/eval.
Unfortunately no Mate support, though. There are some instructions in various places (that I did not try) to install Mate but it's not officially part of Rocky, which tries to track RHEL as faithfully as they can like CentOS used to. And on the official IRC channel it's a friendly bunch of people.
I also like NVidia. I have no problem with BLOBS because sometimes they are necessary, for regulatory reasons (WiFi drivers) as well as graphics stuff. So long as the driver has the right hooks that enable kernel reconfig and recompile, that is good enough for me. No need to force everyone to unzip their secret compartments for everyone (and their competition) to go fishing in.
At least they ARE supporting Linux, and in NVidia's case, also FreeBSD
(my 2 FreeBSD workstations have NVidia cards and I am happy with them)
It's the new kinder gentler less profane and angry Linus, now. Extreme prejudice, maybe, but no unkind words about the submitter's mother.
Some dry wit and well targeted adjectives might be in order, though...
Intel has to consider the perception of "unlock keys" for their hardware. I think it will cause them to lose sales. I bet AMD is paying very close attention. (they could easily implement this as part of the final assembly and test process and not reveal it exists outside the company, then just sell it with a different model number)
Also worth mentioning, RPi has a feature unlock key for a hardware MPEG decoder last I checked.
self-hosted web pages (I like setting up my own frequently used link pages this way) and embedded systems (that only access 'localhost' let's say for a web-based UI) ABSOLUTELY DO NOT NEED HTTPS or SSL (in general).
For this reason as well, "legacy" (not encrypted) http access MUST remain available.
And can you imagine implementing SSL on an ARDUINO? You _CAN_ implement a config web page (I have done it) using a wifi or ethernet shield... using "legacy" http.
Thank you for the doom and gloom.
As for me, if I had not already established natural immunity by having recovered from the virus in early January of 2020 (2 weeks after a co-worker returned from China and had to go home sick half way through the day) I might consider DELIBERATELY "catching" the Omicron variant because it has been heavily reported that along with its much more infectious nature, it has ALSO evolved into a less deadly version of itself. And as such, it is likely that recovery from THIS version would at least partially inoculate you for the OTHER variants... just like a vaccine based on the first version of the Wuhan Flu (upon which the existing vaccines were based) should at least PARTIALLY protect you from serious infection from the variants.
Remember "Cow Pox"? It is probably the first documented vaccine, which protected people from getting smallpox. A brilliant British physician discoverd this in the late 1700's and by the early 1800's it was being used to eliminate smallpox. Something to consider. The practice of weakening "the cause of the disease" and exposing people to it (there's a name I cannot recall) had already been established but was not widely practiced. This was done with Cow Pox, and then "test" patients exposed to weakened smallpox (and did not catch it), similar to modern day clinical trials and double-blind tests. It really was cutting edge stuff at the time. And it saved lives, DELIBERATELY giving people a weaker version of a disease that caused the immune system to recognize the deadlier one.
But yeah, doom and gloom scares people into letting go of their freedoms and voting for people that manipulate them. Can't have any TRUTH or REAL cures, now can we?
I've been seeing load performance issues with things relying on googleapis all week, and youtube videos that just sit there not playing for several minutes within the last hour.
More may be broken than people are willing to admit...
(then again this is my anecdotal experience out here on the left coast of the USA, so YMMV)
Pluma still runs rings around it. It's built around cairo and GTK 3 so it's probably possible to port it to windows...
So many cool features, too. I like the auto-indent and syntax highlighting, since I use it 99% of the time when editing code. And it's got TABS.
And on my Mate desktop, with "ClassicalOK" theme, it's NOT all 2D FLATTY FLATSO MCFLATFACE!!! And it has REAL scrollbars, not those "chrome-like" Adwaita scrollbars [like the ones I see in Notepad in the screenshots]. And I believe it has an undo buffer that's VERY deep... which, of course, is VERY nice to have at certain times.
Yeah, I just needed to make that point. Why can't Micros~1 just "GET IT" for once???
Micros~1 has another analysis product that's part of 'Office 364' (the name of which I cannot recall) so why do they need 'Excess' any more, right?
I have seen (and played with) Libre's "Base" and it seems kind of primitive but does a lot of what I used to do wtih Excess a couple of decades or so ago...
But as for MySQL and its quirks (example: for embedding a single quote in a text column, MySQL breaks the rules established by the SQL standard) I had a HELL of a time setting it up. And like it has been mentioned in the article, setting up PostgreSQL is pretty simple. In fact i did it last week to create a test database for adding new tables, etc. and a web-based UI to query things. Needed a test database so I did not disturb the production one. And the production one is actually on a USB drive plugged into an RPi 3b+. (it analyzes final testing phase of a piece of equipment that goes through a rigorous test, with various things tracked like serial numbers, any repairs that were done, test results, and so on and a cron-activate script sends a ZIP file of psql output every weeknight to someone to be imported into that Micros~1 thing I could not remember the name of).
dBase - the first and the WORST!
Clipper, at least, was compilable into something that could interface with C. So for some stuff it almost made sense... except it did not do SQL and STILL stored numbers in the tables as FREAKING TEXT.
I'm glad it all just faded away...
First thing I thought of was a chunk of something we sent there...
How about the bottom half of the LEM that was tested by Apollo X ??? Or the top half of a LEM that was launched into orbit to return astronauts to the Apollo command module? Those things were dropped back onto the moon, so maybe just "space junk". That's what I'm thinking.
my very old DLink wifi router (which is ONLY on the LAN) has a checkbox to allow remote admin from outside the LAN, i.e. via the WAN port. Of course it is OFF. I think there's also another one that allows someone on the wifi network to configure it, and I believe THAT one is OFF as well.
(unfortunately they were ON by default, as I recall - it has been many years since i set it up)
and, if I remember correctly, we can indirectly thank the way the Nazis often (robotically) included certain phrases at the beginnings and endings of the messages, apparently longer and more consistent phrases than the usual "Dear sir"
Also if I remember correctly, there were 2 codes used. Code #1 was in the book, and the 2nd code was encoded using the 1st one. but lazy operators might re-use the same code for the 2nd one. And so there you have it... procedural insecurity, ripe for being cracked by brilliant code breakers. (Bletchley Park is such a cool study on ciphers and cracking them)
I recently upgraded to a new ISP (now AT&T) and the modem it uses has a default "alphabet soup" password that is restored on factory reset. It appears to be uniquely assigned, and as it's printed on a sticker on the modem itself, and can ALSO be changed (until the next factory reset), I would think that this might satisfy a reasonable security requirement for NOT using identical default passwords and still provide for recoverability (etc.).
At least, as far as I know, none of the (uniquely) pre-assigned passwords are "admin" "love" "sex" "money" "password" or "god"
(so yeah it is one way to do it)
I wonder if Musk would actually build an Arthur C. Clarke style "spinning wheel" space station on his own... (naw he'd probably ask for gummint money anyway, it's what he does, heh)
But chances are, a SpaceX space station would outperform at a lower cost. My $0.20 worth (was $0.10, formerly $0.02, but inflation again)
Maybe a tire company can build inflatable sections?
ok - you can start an investment firm to buy it maybe? And it will need R&D funds to invest in future product development or you'll end up doing harm to ARM [bad poetry] in the long term.
(large companies like NVidia have deeper pockets, especially when it comes to R&D budgets for new product development)
what would the advantage be for NVidia to do this deal?
S.O.C. bundling of NVidia tech comes to mind. Broadcom does this for the CPUs used by RPi (with videocore), by the way, along with other 'integrated things'. I wonder if it would be more competitive to have an NVidia ARM CPU like this, and more efficiently made when ARM designers are integrated into the process ?
With a lawsuit, perhaps a compromise would prevent future abuse? Or, more likely, it would just enrich the L[aw]YERS as a TOLLBOOTH on the road to success.
one freedom that open source software brings to the enterprise world includes the ability to FIX THINGS YOURSELF.
So any package wrapper that includes all versions of all libraries that are natively compiled and guaranteed to work together needs a SOURCE PACKAGE to build them all together, as well as run them all together. I am not familiar enough with these systems to know whether or not they already do this, but it would be akin to using the 'ports' system on FreeBSD to do 'build from source' on EVERYTHING.
Now if an executable ships as binary with a container, the GPL'd lib sources and binaries would need to be there too, so you can fix things. Making a "source package" for the entire container should actually make GPL compliance easier (and more portable).
regardless of how anyone "feels" (the F word, "Feel") unless laws are being broken, being insubordinate and/or protesting your employer CAN get you fired. And, generally, SHOULD.
Still, lefties running Google vs lefties formerly working AT google, arguing about the meaning of "do no evil" - like a rake fight between technologically challenged religious people, or sumo mud wrestling , or even an old fashioned demolition derby, it's probably going to be "popcorn worthy".
I've noticed a tendency for Micros~1 applications to "spin" - i.e. 100% CPU utilization while waiting for stuff to happen, since the Win-10-nic beta. It seems to be most prominent when run in a VM. I think this has never been properly fixed. Worth noting, Win NT 4 in a VM spins at 100% continuously, and I think 2k does also, but XP and later do not.
Aside from those observations, if the CPU utiliztion is pegged at 100% expect:
a) no clock throttling to lower CPU power requirement
b) lousy 'idle mode' processing
c) background things not being scheduled often enough
d) fan stays on or cycles on/off way too much
conclusion; not good for battery capacity
If I am right, some coder needs to fix his code to do more intelligent thread handling and NOT spin/poll on any shared object without inserting a time delay that guarantees the CPU will briefly enter an 'idle' state.
'Teams' apparently falls in the same trap, if I read the tea leaves correctly.
(good luck getting them to fix it)
it must be a good eay for computing.
If you follow the link to the B&W original pic of the LEO and zoom it in to 300% or so you can see the vacuum tubes in the right-most uncovered panel. The ones on top look like octal types (maybe rectifiers) and most of them look like 7 or 9 pin miniature types.
Tubes/valves eventually got smaller (micro-miniatures) until transistors were reliable and fast enough to replace them.
The only real limiter on speed would have been wire length and the mercury delay line RAM. Tubes could operate at hundreds of megahertz and gigahertz long before transistors. But the size and wire length would limit them. 1 meter of wire and you can no longer exceed 150Mhz, for example (assuming half a wavelength to be your limiter, round-trip logic pulse time basically)
This is getting more and more like "Gravity" every day.
yet another call for some kind of solution, like maybe "space dredges" trawling some kind of net, electromagnetic and/or electrostatic means of collecting the debris, and so on. A focused beam of electrons [if you could sustain it] might put enough charge on tiny nearby objects to drive them towards a collection net, for example. But you'd have to have a way to maintain a huge charge difference between the negatively charged electron beam and a positively charged net dragging behind you, and not have the electrons just turn right around and short circuit the whole mess.
There have been a few FORTRAN to C translator efforts. Some of them are pretty good. But yeah writing FORTRAN-like C code is actually pretty straightforward, turning FORMAT statements into equivalent C format strings and using printf.
The only thing to keep in mind is that FORTRAN functions and subroutines pass parameters by reference, so you'd use a pointer rather than a value to make it 100% equivalent. Reminds me of a bug some IDIOT that preceded me created by altering the value within the subroutine without realizing that it altered it in the calling function too, which caused a serious problem. THEN he didn't save his fixed source code and the only source was the broken version. Months later I had to make a change and used his broken code as there was no other source. Then I had to find out what he did and fix it... and that person's name will remain on my S list indefinitely.
The Cloud centralises computing and allows greater use of greener energy
so why arent we all just using big-iron timeshare systems, then? THAT centralises EVERYTHING, right?
I think you will find that this level of centralisation actually CREATES inefficiencies (such as a SHIT PILE of JAVASCRIPT on the clients to avoid clogging the cloud servers since they bill by the CPU usage) and we're actually experiencing WORSE overall efficiency as a direct result.
Where a non-cloudy "your server" solution may have simpler PHP and minimal scripting and (typically) smaller bandwidth requirements, a CLOUDY one will (no doubt) waste bandwidth with monolithic CDN-fed javascript libraries [that are unfortunately 'common' {in a computing sense} and typically cached on user's browsers, even after you hit F5 on chrome] so that you can minimize CPU instances and related costs.
yeah, it HAS spawned THE MESS, to be "too cloudy" and "too central". 'More of the same' will NOT fix it.
FORTRAN and COBOL (capitalized because that's what you do, it's their names) can be easily learned from a book in a few days. Yes, that's how I learned them. C takes a bit longer, mostly because of pointers and arrays and the various nuances of type casting. Once you "get" that, no problem.
The difference between procedural and structured languages (in general) is why C basically took over as the common denominator for so many OTHER languages, though you COULD say it was really ALGOL wut dun it...
So now you have this "more complicated to learn" structured lingo (Rust) with its promoters trying to take over as the NEW favored lingo, where an easier to learn and slightly more efficient decades-established universal programming language (C) has been learned by pretty much everyone, and it seems we're all expected to JUST CHANGE and "accept it" now...
(I have to wonder if those who promoted Ada "felt" the same way...)
when i deconstructed his sentence it seemed that some of it could have applied to his grandmother, and not Grace Hopper. It seemed a bit ambiguous to me.
I once saluted Capt. Grace Hopper when she was the RTC commander in Orlando, Fl. I was near her office for some reason (3rd class petty officer at the time), she came out, so I gave her a salute thinking "wow a lady captain - she must be the RTC commander". found out later who she was.
well if you use a tiny processor to control the thing, with an external (but on board) wifi or ethernet to talk between CPU and world, the cost of something that can support more sophisticated access (including security) may simply be too high.
(less sinister, more practical, without denying the possibility of "sinister anyway")
Obviously. The whole point is to 1. force users to pay monthly subscriptions, and 2. to collect valuable user data you can sell for profit. The initial product, the light bulb, is just a loss leader.
Sadly I can NOT think of ANY other reasonable excuse for making a "light blub" require a cloud server to operate.
Here is what it COULD do instead, if limited to IPv4 and a small amount of NVRAM (like an AVR processor) to communicate: You just need to listen on the LAN with IPv4 [assuming it is behind a firewall] and assign it a name via mDNS so you can query for and/or activate the right "blub".
for access from outside, you could still do cloudiness, if you really want to.
(this is NOT rocket surgery)
And if your always on PC had an application running with motion sensors and "blub" control, for an automatic house, there's NO need for cloudy-BS to be a "man in the middle"
I don't actually do any crypto mning, but the fact remains that if you're going to JUST make heat with electricity, you might as well get some work out of it in the process. Actually, locating the crypto mining gear in a place where you have to run it MOST of the time (even in summer) to make things comfortable would make a lot of sense.
But if you wanted REAL efficiency you'd have a Cogen setup, with an absorption chiller for summer. Still 300% for a heat pump system is pretty good. But that depends a LOT on what the temperatures are. Higher delta-T means lower efficiency. And mining bitcoin typically creates MONEY. So it's a question of whether the bitcoin mining pays for itself (and you get the 'free' heat out of it), in my view. You know, like COST efficiency.
Simon had the right approach: just ask questions.
(anything else simply sounds arrogant, condescending, smug, and/or elitist, and depending upon the subject matter, might actually be JUST THAT and even DEAD WRONG in the process)
"Mr. Gallilleo, EVERYONE KNOWS that the sun moves across the sky and that the Earth is in the center of the universe. THE most educated people agree, and here YOU are insisting that the SUN is the center of a "solar system" of planets, one of which is the earth, that revolve around it. DID NOT THE BIBLE SAY that the SUN WAS HELD STILL IN THE SKY for Joshua when he asked God to do it?" Now where have we heard THIS sort of thing before... [this is why science has experimentation and peer review, and a good scientist is JUST as excited when he was wrong as when he was right, discovering the truth in the process]
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