Posts by keithzg 92 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Oct 2017
virt-manager isn't entirely as user-friendly as VirtualBox, and I think on Windows you'll still have to run WSL or such to run it, but it gets the job done for managing QEMU VMs in a simple GUI manner. At one point I was steering Windows users at my work to Virt-Viewer for a limited subset of such functionality, but the link in my old notes to Windows downloads seems to be dead?
Whatever distro you're using, just install Wine with the default one. It'll be fine. In fact, the more you stick to just using whatever GUI has been provided to you the happier you'll be. The Windows way of downloading a random executable from somewhere you found by Googling is a terrifyingly bad approach and while I understand people are used to it, it is neither actually simpler at the time (simply more familiar) nor is it simpler in the long run—it is much, much nicer to have your updates all in the same place and fairly guaranteed not to be malware.
And politics of course never reflects the real world or feedback loops with it . . .
Tech Bros certainly have discarded copyleft, but many of their projects are themselves discardable and already showing not to stand the test of time. Meanwhile, for example, who uses OpenOffice anymore? If anyone uses a free office suite it's the fork LibreOffice which very deliberately relicensed copyleft for reasons you could absolutely decribe as political—but if you dismiss them out of hand on those grounds you'll be missing the very practical and historically-informed reasons behind that political move. And those reasons are ones that remain worth considering for any new project (or fork of a project) today.
SailfishOS might be what you're after.
I think folks have also gotten Android apps working via stuff like Anbox in pure Linux phone stacks like postmarketOS, but I can't speak to that. I can say that SailfishOS is pretty slick and I wish I could get away with it as my daily driver (alas I rely on having a better camera than any Sailfish-supporting device has, as well as tap-to-pay with my phone, though I did spend a few months using an Xperia 10 III a few years ago and it was painful to go back to Android).
None of the things described here are democracies; if anything, your worries in regard to the Linux kernel seem fairly related to that project being one man making decisions and also being the figurehead. If it was a democracy one would imagine very different decision-making systems shuddering into motion in reaction to this conflict.
I can perhaps see where you're coming from if we think about how Libre software projects like the Linux kernel have a dimension of governance not really possible for projects tied to the tangible world like nations are. That is to say one of the ways the Linux kernel approaches democratic is that people could fork and maintain changes the existing project won't, which is akin to if a nation had a dictator but also people could portal to alternative universes with ease where different people got to control the entire nation, and rather than citizens voting on their government they could emigrate between those parallel undemocratic worlds.
Yeah I hate to side even a little with the "the wokist communist gay mob is out to get us exceptional white men, I'd have a job at a Fortune 500 company if not for all these [racial slur not heard since 1977]' mob, but pip still hasn't seen a return to having a working search function soooo there's also something to be said about the priorities being wack, even if it is more likely due to insular politics than The Globalists ;)
Eh? Naw, it was a fully native touch experience and even on the potato hardwares I tried it on it was generally nicer to use than Android. Hell, it was doing fluid swipe-based UI stuff before, and still better than, Android. The reasons for its failure are elsewhere.
One reason is just, it's hard to gain much ground against huge market leaders. A lot of other specific issues just came naturally from that.
An unforced error that can entirely be laid at Ubuntu's feet though is that despite some initial chatter at the time Canonical wouldn't come to the table and agree on a common set of QML widgets so that apps could automatically be cross-platform between Plasma, SailfishOS, and Ubuntu Touch. It wasn't (and isn't, as a community project exists that still maintains Ubuntu Touch) *that* hard to modify the same native app to run on each, but that extra bit of work is a non-trivial hurdle, and while SailfishOS has a developer community inherited from its Nokia Maemo heritage and Plasma Mobile benefits from all the work done on KDE applications for desktop (which end up lighter than most Android apps due to shared components and services), Ubuntu was starting from square one for apps, so any additional complications were salt in a wound.
With so many "apps" these days actually just being Electron which is then just actually running individual browser AND webserver instances for each "app", it's honestly pretty nice to run PWAs. And in many instances far nicer than adding another tab, a lot of cases I want a taskbar button etc (and on mobile it's especially nice to have things acting like An App).
Now, granted my own history with Firefox has it always being kinda unusable for me for some reason or another, but it's really hard to give up webapps just to use a different browser. And with Firefox making such bold claims about privacy and sandboxing, surely the attack surface isn't actually that bad? And it's probably worse, and certainly worse for Firefox, if your potential users are using Chrome instead...
Oh whoa I didn't know that! Apparently I've long been using more of Plan 9, and far more meaningfully, than when I just installed the reimplemented and ported bits of it from Linux repos out of idoe curiosity. And I had no idea! Crazy to think how some people's influences on the world can seep in so widely and deeply.
As a Canadian/American dual-citizen, it has been basically my personal religion to steadfastly refuse to learn the Imperial system of measures, and I'm happy to report I've been largely successful. I do "know" Fahrenheit for baking I guess, but also my oven isn't exactly terribly accurate and consistent so those are just extra imaginary numbers anyways (and if I'm cooking a roast or something, you better believe my meat thermometer is set to Celsius).
I was assuming not that they felt obligated, but rather that (from what I recall; I'm not an Apple user myself) the iOS app store allows for customers taking such actions and that that's entirely out of the hands of the developers. In which case they're kinda getting screwed by two big corporations rather than just one.
"The network path was not found" is such a classic Microsoft error message. I'm not sure it even actually ever pops up when a network path *actually* isn't found, I've only ever seen it when an SMB network share is configured to allow open access and Windows is configured to disallow it.
(Also I *swear* this isn't new? I've had to change this setting on Pro installs at work for years, since there's some shares the engineers demand open access to and throw fits if they have to remember credentials for, even if those credentials are centralized and the same for them on every system. But maybe it rolled out some months back and that has bled into my years of using gpedit or a reg command on every Enterprise amd Server install of Windows at the office.)
The point near the end of the article, that this is a guy who doesn't actually need a job to live because he got a big burst of wealth earlier in his career, seems very salient. Very different calculus than if it was an equally dickish but not wealthy low-level engineer, which is often the conflation these executives try to foster.
Personally this is why I tend to run Linux myself. Not that things don't break, but so that I can actually reach under the hood and resolve the problems when things inevitably do break! (Even just the ability to chroot into an existing OS install from a live USB/DVD/etc session, that alone makes a huge difference in how easy it is to resolve serious issues.)
"I'm sorry, as a public company we don't comment on impact to employees"
Err, what does being a public company have to do with that? Maybe I'm missing some U.K. nuance (I'm often a bit surprised by your laws on the other side of the Atlantic, although less so than folks living Stateside since Canada has inherited a lot of British legal tradition) but that sounds like complete bullshit to me.
So is the only way to access the Windows Insider communication and bug-reporting stuff still the Windows 10 app, then? That seems . . . problematic.
I mean for one, you might want to report a problem with an Insider update for Windows, and be having problems reporting it *due to the problem itself*. Being able to report stuff from a phone or tablet (or just another desktop OS) would greatly diminish the possibility that a bug ironically prevented the easy reporting of the bug.
Furthermore, the number of times over the past few years where folks in the Insider program have discovered and reported serious problems with a Windows update and then that update has shipped anyways has made me suspicious that the act of needing to use the Insider Win10 app to view anything has meant that the folks with enough authority to do something about such serious bugs just don't ever actually see those reports. The classic "boss who lives on an iPad" certainly wouldn't be able to, for example.
Not that you're wrong, but in my city there's a bridge that only just opened last year after years and years of delays because the piss-poor engineering was such that portions of the bridge were even falling apart while they were building it, so it had to be dramatically re-imagined. Those engineers certified to know what they're doing . . . well, often they nonetheless don't.
While I definitely agree that license proliferation is a bad thing, I find myself actually being an advocate of a fairly new license: Copyleft-next.
https://spdx.org/licenses/copyleft-next-0.3.0.html
One of the nice things about it is that it's actually nicely short and readable, while nonetheless containing basically the entire stipulations of the GPLv3 license, and adds a 15-year sunset after which code released under its license becomes permissively licensed.
For one, you'd never flash the BIOS on a Chromebook, or really any modern laptop; most laptops use UEFI instead, while Chromebooks use Coreboot.
For two, once you flip on the Developer option, you get the nag screen about security . . . and you can now boot from devices via a "Legacy Boot" option provided by a SeaBIOS instance shipped with the Coreboot firmware to boot other OSes. Every single Chromebook I've ever had, I've dual-booted with a standard Linux distro this way. I've never opened up any of them.
There are also other ways, like packaging a Linux distro up as a ChromeOS image, and I also think many newer Chromebooks ship with a UEFI layer too that can be used in Developer mode? I've never tried either of those two approaches myself though.
You only need to do any sort of screw removal if you want to actually flash your own copy of the firmware. Which matters for people who want 100% Free Software running on their hardware and thus want to flash Libreboot, or have some other very very geeky reason to want to run your own firmware on the board (ex. trying to add stuff so that Windows will deign to run on it), but not so much for anyone else.
My presumption when the pocket dialing was detailed was that he didn't have any lock PIN or pass on his phone, and that he'd previously had such troubles due to entering the wrong password too many times seems like strong evidence for that. I can easily imagine him being like, well screw it, not worth the effort then.
Three things:
1. It is only true in a practical sense that "anyone can just distribute the binaries/apk's". By no means does that make it legal (which is a thing you have to worry about the larger you are in terms of size and scope; a random single person redistributing the binaries has to care less than a small OEM who in turn has to care a lot less than if you're one of the most high-profile Android OEMs in the entire world).
2. Google has tightened up access to Google Play Services recently; previously they did not block it on uncertified devices, whereas recently they have moved towards blocking. See https://www.xda-developers.com/google-blocks-gapps-uncertified-devices-custom-rom-whitelist/ for instance.
3. Huawei is specifically threatened with every American company being barred from doing any business with them as per the Trump administrations Entity List, which is a different situation than just being some random Chinese company.
> These people who are sounding off on Google's internal message boards? Fine, but don't protest your employer and expect no consequences.
That's a bit of a strawman; a lot of such folks do expect consequences, they just believe in their stances enough that they feel the consequences will be worth it.
Conversely, this move by GitLab is an attempt to avoid consequences for actions, and is rather preemptively cowardly.
I'd flip it around a bit: If you only want mindless drones, only hire mindless drones.
As the article points out, GitLab would like to portray itself differently from all that, with an extensive Code Of Conduct that takes many moral stances and tries to position the company as being encouraging of a high level of ethical behaviour. While I disagree with your managerial philosophy as espoused here, I would in fact far rather see a company run explicitly along the grounds you lay out than be cloaked in misleading rhetoric like GitLab is.
I can agree with that as long as they, in turn, do not presuppose the right to determine that others can't themselves express their opinions. And GitLab is very much falling afoul of this with their policy, and worse they're doing so in a transparent attempt to restrict employees' ability to bring pressure on the company as stakeholders therein.
There are a lot of issues I have with your comment, but
> if you don't like a companies position, well no-one is forcing you to work there or use it's products - remember BMW used slave labour in the 1940's
really takes the cake if only because you've managed to contradict yourself not even with a subsequent sentence, but rather with even just a subsequent clause in the same sentence! Impressive, in a way.
While it's true that the bigger issue in the PAL world was cost rather than length, by the time Betamax hit Europe the format wars had probably already been decided by VHS's dominance in America, however; the inertia was likely insurmountable, even if it took a while to fully shake out.
Maybe they just meant they have a history in claiming to provide excellent customer service, and that that claim is pretty rich ;)
In my experience Teksavvy is even better than Shaw for customer support, albeit hamstrung by being a reseller, so sometimes there's nothing they can do either but wait for Shaw or Telus or whatnot to actually fix a physical problem.
Have had mostly good experiences with Shaw's business support, save for a particularly galling instance where they replaced a cable modem with a modem+router combo box after having claimed they wouldn't, and would not swap it back for a purely modem box because they no longer offered such. Luckily their putting that box into passthrough mode has mostly stayed set, only very occasionally knocking my entire office at work off of the internet . . .
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