* Posts by kaseki

14 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Sep 2016

Windows 10's demise nears, but Linux is forever

kaseki

Earlier than Win7

"That's because Mint, with its default Cinnamon interface, looks a lot like Windows 7's Aero frontend."

Heck, I've been running MInt Mate for years fronting an NT4/NT5 look-alike desktop. Perhaps Mint's LibreOffice's diagramming capability is less versatile than I recall with Microsoft's Vizio, but LibreOffice otherwise serves my needs. Windows programs can, for the most part, be run locally under CrossOver Linux.

More importantly, from the Window's immigrant point of view, software updates can take place without rebooting, except for the Linux kernel itself. Even upgrading the Mint version is at least straightforward.

A nice cup of tea rewired the datacenter and got things working again

kaseki

Darjeeling-based Earl Grey is recommended.

Not withstanding the Brit penchant of making dairy-neutralized tannin and calling it tea based on the plant leaves involved, a light, unadulterated, short-steeped Darjeeling Earl Grey will provide access to actual tea flavors. For this I suggest Ronnefeldt Tippy Golden Earl Grey. Drunk in the USA, ordered from the Dominion of Canada, packaged in the Federal Republic of Germany, sourced from East Bengal in the Republic of India (Bharat), this international brand yields an infusion far superior to those based on the Ceylon-derived, bergamotte-drenched, over-fermented leaves widely available.

(This writer is not related to any person, natural or otherwise, associated with Ronnefeldt.)

It's been 230 years since British pirates robbed the US of the metric system

kaseki

Fear those who don't know what they don't know

"Most famously in recent memory was the Mars Climate Orbiter in 1999. The $125 million space probe broke up in the Martian atmosphere after engineers at Lockheed Martin, who built the instrument, used the US Customary System of measurement rather than metric measurements used by others on the project. The probe descended too close to the surface and was lost."

Famously, the space program worked before NASA was gutted of experience under the maxim: "Too male, too pale, too stale."

A 1970s magic trick: Take a card, any card, out of the deck and watch the IBM System/370 plunge into a death spiral

kaseki

Once upon a time ...

Predating the System/370 was the Remington-Rand 1103A (late '50s). Its operator console had a CRT display showing memory addressing as a 2D spot array. The operator could tell at a glance that an endless loop was in progress and kill the job.

Why is the printer spouting nonsense... and who on earth tried to wire this plug?

kaseki

Arc fault interrupting breakers (USA relevant)

In a (much) earlier post, AFCI breakers were described thus (with a bit of paragraph compression):

The main reason is that the US uses wirenuts. Which are utter shit. Other types of joint tend to fail in safer ways, partly because they're enclosed - a loose screw terminal will overheat but tends to disconnect itself before burning down the building because its inside a box. A lot of modern kit uses sprung terminals which (sans overload) are either a good connection or no connection. The US wiring regs are written assuming fire is the primary danger. AFCIs only protect against fire caused by a bad joint. If you're not using wirenuts then AFCIs don't really do anything much. RCDs will both save your life *and* prevent fire. Definitely fit them.

This is not correct. First, wire nuts properly used are at least as effective and reliable as pressure crimps (which they are a different form of), and in any case are limited in use to connections within approved junction boxes and certain conduit bodies.

Second, the emphasis on avoiding fires results from the controlling authority for the USA's National Electrical Code being the National Fire Protection Association.

Third, the AFCI addresses the problem of zip cord extensions routed under rugs where they gradually degrade, as well as old defective wiring in inaccessible locations, and even new cable subjected to someone's poorly positioned nail.

Fourth, most AFCIs sold are combo types that include GFCI functionality.

Zorin OS 15 nods at Ubuntu and welcomes Windows escapees

kaseki

Re: How exactly is it easier than LinuxMint?

With a little experimentation (not requiring terminal commands) one can make Mint look like Windows. My machines now running Mint 18.3 MATE and back into early Ubuntu have been setup to make the desktop look like my NT4 desktop of decades ago -- same (not teal!) background color, same desktop image. I never moved the menu to the top, and don't have a "bounce out" MSOffice-like pseudo toolbar on the right (which MS killed anyway), but the behavior is similar.

What do I miss? I miss the upward flow of accumulated file space used within directories/folders that Explorer shows in its standard window format. I miss easy interface with oddball USB devices for Windows programs run under Crossover Linux (commercial Wine). (Memory, mouse and keyboard all work.) The only reason I have a Win7 build running on a laptop is to upgrade firmware on some photographic hardware.

Windows gets drivers from hardware manufacturers at the time the hardware is offered for sale, whereas Linux gets them when the manufacturer gets around to it. This can impact Mint builds on very new hardware. All my LAN printers, on the other hand, have easily been "installed" due to being older. I just have to supply the IP address because the printers are not allowed to initiate communication with PCs on the PC lan.

From a convenience point of view, the best things about Linux in general, and Mint in my case, is the ease and speed of installation (only one reboot), the ease of updating and upgrading (usually no reboots), and the greatly (!) reduced personal time needed to keep up with security hazards.

Core blimey... When is an AMD CPU core not a CPU core? It's now up to a jury of 12 to decide

kaseki

None of the above

A computer core is a single ferrite toroid used as a single bit of random access memory. This type of memory was in use in the 1950s on such machines as the Remington Rand 1103A. When something went wrong, a "core dump" could be performed, printing out the data in all of the addresses in the core memory, called "core" for short. As memory moved to semiconductor devices, and the size of the memory grew, it was still possible to do a core dump, but eventually impractical to use in print-out form for debugging.

The name core somehow came to be attached to the silicon chip performing the processing functions listed hereinbefore, and I think an 8086 could fairly be called a core, although I don't recall that usage at the time it was introduced.

More to the point here, buying a processor module without performing a minimal evaluation of how it works, and in particular whether its performance is suitable for its intended purpose, is not due diligence. Unless AMD hid the architecture details so the number of FPU and ALU wasn't known by the public, I would find for AMD.

A fine vintage: Wine has run Microsoft Solitaire on Linux for 25 years

kaseki

Re: No mention of Crossover Office?

Hear hear! I use Crossover mainly for supporting Marine Aquarium on Mint. Works up to (and including) 4K at 60 Hz with maximum fishes. Requires a lot less GPU power than I expected when I went to the "big" screen. For installation directions, look up Marine Aquarium (aka Sach's Marine Aquarium) in the Crossover compatibility data base. For code, visit SereneScrene.com. (I have no affiliation.)

We talk to Tron artist Syd Mead: On the other side of the screen, it all looks so easy

kaseki

Let's get Pong's history straight

The video game that became Pong was invented at Sanders Associates (then headquartered in Nashua NH and now part of BAE SYSTEMS) by Ralph Baer and a supporting engineer (forgot his name, but it appears in the article at http://www.ralphbaer.com/video_game_history.htm). I recall seeing it working as a breadboard in a lab at Sanders. Every video game is a refinement of past games, but the originator of the Pong type games should not be buried by history.

A game named Space Wars was running on a PDP-1 at MIT even earlier, but this would be better assigned to the evolutionary path of computer games rather than to video games displayed on home TVs.

Japanese cops arrest their first ransomware-slinging menace – er, a 14-year-old school boy

kaseki

Summer Wars

On a more pleasant aspect of this article: The image used is from Summer Wars, one of the best Japanese animation movies I'm aware of covering both computer hacking and gaming (both personal and governmental) and the mix of ancient and modern in Japanese culture. I highly recommend it to those who enjoy anime. The boy on the left is the protagonist.

Virgin Galactic and Boom unveil Concorde 2.0 tester to restart supersonic travel

kaseki

The entire quote is relevant here: "The devil is in the details -- but so is salvation." ...Adm Rickover

Meet 'Moz://a', AKA Mozilla after it picked a new logo

kaseki

One zilla to rule them all

I'd be more impressed if the zilla they adopted was the one astride the globe formerly used by Netscape.

Oi, Mint 18.1! KEEP UP! Ubuntu LTS love breeds a laggard

kaseki

Re: Linux Noob question

Please visit https://forums.linuxmint.com/ and ask your question in the Newbie forum.

She cannae take it, Captain Kirk! USS Zumwalt breaks down

kaseki

"So called" tumblehome?

It would have been sufficient to just put "tumblehome" in quotes. This naming is not some new 'Merkin English invention. An obsolete Middle English meaning of tumble is in use here, and the term was surely well known to HM naval architects when HMS Victory was laid down.