Posts by drankinatty 201 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Oct 2018
Not with the orang-in-chief and doggy boys running around. They continually demonstrate how they can fsck up a shot-put with a rubber hammer. (and that takes some effort) There should be an award for monumental incompetence of that level...
Very similar to my journey. I've used gimp for 20 years and still have about 50% of it to fully learn. I was surprised with gimp-3 in the RC3 dressing on openSUSE Tumbleweed and had a few issues. The biggest is what all gtk+2 to gtk+3 ports suffer from and that is icon-size and icon-spacing due to the gtk+3 CSS theme model. The problem being that .margin and .padding greatly effect both and many times the apps leaves the CSS to the theme to implement. (therein lies the problem)
If you use default Adwaita or Adwaita-dark (as if you have much of a choice anymore) the icon size and spacing is roughly 150% of what it was with gtk+2. Not really an issue unless using gimp on a laptop where screen real estate is at a premium. If you use any "custom" theme -- good luck. Many themes don't set a default for icon and list .margin and .padding which can cause the size of elements to vary wildly.
In my case, I could only see about 2/3 as much of the toolbox as normal. Attempting to adjust the toolbox windows size (I don't use "Single Window Mode"), caused the toolbox window to crash. So there are still a few growing pains to work though.
LibreOffice went though fits with this where its icons would spill over into the ellipsized (hidden) icon list to the right. When its gtk+3 port first appeared you could only see about 1/2 the icons you were used to seeing in the toolbar. (recall Gtk+3 removed the toolbar widget, as well as the ruler widget) Ultimately, libre arrived at a very workable solution providing a custom set of icons with fixed size and spacing that resolved the toolbar size and spacing issues well. Gimp may have to do something similar rather than relying on some CSS theme to do it. (current gtk themes are "like a box of chocolates" in that regard)
Growing pains. It's will all get sorted. Gimp has always been one amazing tool. Gimp and then Gimp 2 had a very good web-based tutorial. Hopefully they will make sure that is updated for the new features and capabilities of gimp-3. That was an invaluable resource for learning the basics of the tool.
A company can be both "legally fine" and "morally bankrupt" at the same time. A company still running a loss after 38 years is a tax-shelter, not a legitimate ongoing concern. It's a finance gimmick on a spreadsheet producing paper losses for a few and nothing of value for society at large. It's a loophole that needs closing in the tax code.
And finally a sane grown-up enters the room.Thank you.
Time for nonsense is way past over. It was over twenty years ago. We, collectively, and unfortunately, will suffer the consequence of the effect the misinformation campaigns Each of those designed and calculated to infuse doubt into the climate conversions. There was never a "debate". The "debate" was the misinformation injected by the fossil-fuel industry to prevent regulation and keep their profits high - the damage being done to the earth be damned. The "debate" was created by politicians, who knew better, but who put the fossil-industry money in their campaign coffers and would then "wink and nod" at the camera spewing nonsense about scientists disagreeing meaning no warming was happening. The US house and senate a full of them, with Jim Inhofe as the poster-boy and Marsha Blackburn running a close second. Corrupt leaders make corrupt bargains to serve corrupt personal interests. Preventing our planet from becoming uninhabitable isn't among the interests they hold.
I read though these comments and for those attempting to espouse nonsense about warming not occurring or being part of one of the extended natural cycles the earth sees due to perturbations in its orbit over eons, I feel disappointment. Not at the commenter directly, but disappointment that we collectively haven't done a better job at education and reaching out to those ignorant on the grave danger this issue represents to humanity. People basically fall into three-camps around global warming:
(1) those that know and have the integrity to address the issue directly,
(2) those that know, but accept some benefit in exchange for compromising their integrity to contribute to misinformation on the issue, and
(3) those that don't know, but pretend as if they do after hearing no more than a 15 second sound-bite and then the gullible loudly amplify the misinformation 128 characters at a time. (the loud-minority problem)
The unfortunate part is aggregation of wealth within the chemical and fossil-fuel industries and our failure to prevent its corrupting influence in politics sadly means the voices of (2) and (3) above are those that get amplified to the masses contributing to the morass we find ourselves in. For those with any lingering questions, please re-read [Humans brought the heat. Earth says we pay the price](https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/02/heatwaves_future/) along with the linked articles therein. If you can't hold your hands under a 128°F faucet, what will 170°F feel like on the skin in the desert southwest of the U.S. when we reach 2070? Not even 50 years away.
As a parting note addressing the global temperature rising at a rate much faster than anticipated by many models, just as the data in this article sought to use the most conservative set that could be tuned to eliminate uncertainties to the greatest extent practicable, that has led to most estimates on the rate of warming being woefully conservative as well. One of the variables with the biggest impact on rate of rise and state of global warming is how must "committed-warming" the current numbers reflect. (how much of the warming we are seeing was due to emissions already released and adsorbed by the system in the 1970, 1980, 1990, etc.., the affect of which we are just seeing at present)
If this rapid rise we see today is because the "committed-warming" has a much longer look-back time than was thought and what we see manifesting now is a result of the committed-warming from the 70's our goose is cooked. That would be, we have not yet seen the impact from the committed-warming put into the system in the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, 2010s or 2020s yet. So the climate impact due to committed-warming gets worse each year, just like compound-interest on a loan. The only question is whether we are amortizing the impacts over a 10, 20, 30 or 40 year note and what our interest rate is. The committed-warming is that aspect of the problem that means even if we went to a 100% clean and renewable sources of energy tomorrow, we would still experience global average temperature rise for the next hundred years.
The Anthropocene may just be a very brief global period (depending on what they settle on as its beginning), that leads into the 6th great mass extinction. Our window closed for staving off the worst aspects of climate change. What we do now and going forward will determine if the warming we will have will be survivable, and for how many?
As I look at my children, I'm sickened. This is our (collectively, me included) greatest societal failure of the last 50 years that we are passing on to them. The responsibility was ours to act in time to prevent the worst consequences of global warming.And we failed. The 1.5 deg C target was chosen because of the truly horrific consequences of going beyond 1.5 deg C, even incrementally past it. It was chosen as the target temperature that if exceeded ensured the irrecoverable melt of the Greenland ice sheet and the associated 10 meters of sea-level rise resulting in the forced-migration of between 35% and 40% of the worlds population away from crowded coastlines.
I lived it. May 2008, openSUSE 11.0, default desktop KDE 4.0.4a (yes 'a' for alpha). 200+ bugs later, I gave up and went back to KDE3. I've use plasma on Arch, but I'm still not impressed. I use KDE3 on Tumbleweed, and it does everything Plasma does and I can still set the font-size and face for the clock and calendar in systray if I don't like the default. (good luck with that in plasma, like hacking XML files?)
Not to be a naysayer, Plasma has come a long way. It's usable. Konqueror (--profile file-management) will now actually open up the same way you left if last time when you told it to save its settings. That's progress. So 15 years later, we are getting close to having a usable KDE back after the KDE team at the 2007 KDE meeting decided to throw the baby out with the bathwater and discard KDE3 like a worn out pair of shoes.
Between the KDE3/4 failure and the Gnome 2/3 fiasco, you wonder where the LInux-desktop would be today if a more careful and ordered approach to improvement had been taken. It has literally cost 15 years and an ungodly number of man-hours (and women-hours) in bug-reports, patches, bug-reports, patches, toolkit jumps (and thefts) and kicks by proprietary vendors (yes, you Trolltech, et. al.) and hard tireless work of developers and contributors just to get back to where we were in 2008. All because a handful of team-members decided they new how to make things better -- really?
Reminds me of the same level of thoughtfulness that is going into making America better as we speak. Embrace your enemies and screw you allies -- what? Let's pray it takes less time to recover from this ongoing fiasco, but I suspect it won't. You guys (and gals) on the east side of the pond, keep your eyes on us, we will need your help...
Mata v. Avianca, Inc, United States v. Hayes, and United States v. Cohen -- 4 strikes and your out. The patience of US Federal District Court Judges has it's limits. This isn't a hallucination of first impression. Once, maybe twice and the mea culpa may carry the day. Being ID-10-T lawyer number-five begins to strain credulity from the judge's perspective.
"Putin's Girl" as DNI -- what could possibly go wrong? Perhaps our closest allies that make up "Five-Eyes" in intelligence sharing would be wise to hold their cards a bit tighter to the vest until this *bleep*-show is over. Our new Cyber chief likely to be pwned soon, again, what could possibly go wrong. Beam me up Scotty...
Chuckling... and then have to vacuum the registry ever few days...
I'm pretty chuffed on the opendocumentDB extensions to postgres. I used to poo-poo the NoSQL concept, but I've come to see it's worth. The world loves json/bson, and from a simple storage-structure standpoint NoSQL couldn't be easier, Just create a DB and collection and start stashing json documents there. No need to define fields and types, the json takes care of that for you. Even if the fields don't match between documents, as long as there is a common-field to coordinate between the documents, you can do most of what you need to do (even the matching field is optional).
Mongo has the stumbling block that for older hardware, without the latest AVX2 intrinsics, you are stuck trying to find a distro that provides mongodb-4.4, the last version to run on SSE/AVX hardware. MongoDB 8.x is current, so there is a lot of development lost if your hardware doesn't measure up. (that said, mongodb-4.4 works exceedingly well, works with the latest mongosh and latest PHP-mongo library extension)
That doesn't mean I'm a NoSQL convert. I still much prefer the rigid structure and transactions SQL offers. I've used MySQL, then MariaDB and Postgres. All are mature, capable, lightweight and fast. I'll use any, but if I had to choose one that is a favorite, it's Postgres. With the opendocumentDB extensions for M$, that is quite another feather in the Postgres cap.
We will see where this goes, but while it is rare for M$, open-sourcing the extensions was a good thing. I've yet to try Ferret, so we will have to see how easy it makes it to weasel bson into postgres through the new extensions.
I suspect this opinion piece was a mildly cathartic undertaking. Tactful yet pointed. Technical yet political. Satire yet deadly serious. The pen truly is mightier than the sword.
Before the inauguration, in a comment, there was a small request that all those on the east side of the pond keep a close eye on what was about to take place on the other, because all indications were we would be in need of help and it would likely take all of us to navigate though this lowest point since the bombing of Great Britain. Looking back, that was one hell of an understatement. Then as now, isolationism is not the answer. The regulators, the rule-of-law will be tested. All depends on it holding. We shall never surrender.
I'm a bit more concerned with the climate-impact of the coal and gas that will be used to generate the electricity required under "emergency waivers" to current green-energy goals. After just enduring a week in February with temperatures running 25 degrees F above average, and watching winter not start until December and end in January in Texas -- we don't have the luxury of any more "committed warming" lag-time to waste.
Requiring to electricity hungry speculators to pay for and provide their own clean energy seems like a perfectly fair proposition. However, expecting these jokers to do the right-thing and think about anything other than the money they can put in their pockets is nothing but wishful thinking.
Population growth and improving quality of life throughout developing countries and continued reliance on fossil-fuels in the developed world have already blown past the critical 1.5 deg C warming target. The resounding short-sightedness of allowing a few profiteers to gamble for greater wealth while burning our children's world to a crisp seems akin to passing out marshmallows while your house burns down around you. Not the proper course of action...
That is the key -- period. With each minor version update to the kernel things change, defines are added/removed, the API changes accordingly and drivers break. I maintain legacy Nvidia drivers for a couple of distros, and kernel changes break things every time (Okay, 6.11 was an exception). With rust drivers it will be no different.
A define changes, a function call is removed or renamed and the rust driver breaks. I don't fault the kernel devs for taking the position they have. They have decades of C experience. To become proficient in the nuances of any programming language takes years. A monkey can take a syntax manual and tutorial and write "Hello World!", but to write code at the same level a musician plays an instrument takes the same amount of time and practice.
Foisting the maintenance responsibility for Rust drivers on the kernel devs, when, not if, the Rust driver breaks, and the Rust devs are nowhere to be found is a non-starter. How many Rust devs have we seen jump ship? There is no guaranteed the driver author or those with the knowledge of how to fix it will still be part of the project when the time comes. I don't doubt for a minute that the current rust devs have good intentions that will not be the case. But all the good intentions in the world won't fix a broken rust driver if their circumstances change. There is an apt saying about a road being paved with good intention. That poses risk and problem for kernel management.
There are no performance-bonds the rust devs can acquire to ensure and insure performance when the time come. Ultimately it all comes down to trust, and that simply takes time and is not won whining on anti-social media.
Modular as in process 1 spreads out like a spider-web though the system encroaching on every aspect of system startup invoking module after module, service after service and timer after time both at the system-level and user-level in a way that reminds you of another OS from Sir Bill. If that's what he means by "modular" I'll gladly give him that.
And therein is the rub. When it works, I've got no technical complaint about systemd, but when it doesn't, the average user is stuck either having to hunt through an encyclopedia worth of documentation hoping to stumble upon a rabbit trail leading to why -- or many times, is just stuck. I'm not sure that is good for Linux or open-source as a whole as it eliminates "choice". It's become a take-it, or write your own distro proposition in many cases.
On the when it doesn't work from, take the recent little hiccup with loginctl that for some display managers caused logind not to set seat0 causing a litany of obscure issues. It got fixed, but it wasn't as if the user had hope of an easy (or any) work-around. So I'm not sure that "modularity" is something to point to as a benefit. Modularity may mean memory efficiency during init, but that doesn't mean a whole lot when when the added complexity makes it unwieldy and difficult to fix.
The sad part is the 77,248,118 folks in the good ole (past-tense) USA lacked the common sense not to put a felon in the whitehouse. As little Marko discovered if you swim with 5hit, it will stick to you. Every one of the 77,248,118 owns the shame and owns the disgrace we witness today. I wonder, what those who remain who stormed the beaches on D-Day feel when they look at the state of affairs.
The consequence of misinformation from captive news outlets and the unchecked online cesspool should be a lesson to us all, on both sides of the pond, that vigilance is needed to prevent the Putin and Xi camels from getting their noses further under our democratic tent. There are a large minority that have simply lost the ability to spot the snake-oil salesmen. We have watched it for more than a decade now in election after election from the orange buffoon's first term to brexit. Division is demise. We will get through this, but it may take a generation to recover.
Am I missing something here? Is this "Biogas" generated from the same "Biomass" that led to widespread deforestation to produce the "biomass" part? https://www.southernenvironment.org/news/new-study-confirms-harmful-impacts-of-biomass/ I certainly hope I'm ignorant in this regard?
I don't recall the year, but it would have been early in the SUSE 10.x days. SUSE provided just about every desktop under the sun and E16 was included. It was a wonderful traditional Linux desktop with this cool icon-panel widget where you would configure your most used dozen or so apps and then icons would appear in 3x3 or 4x3 or 4x4 floating panel. This counted as ghee-whiz in the early 00 time frame. Everything worked and you really had few issues with E16 - just as a desktop should.
There was much fanfare about the "new" E17, and of course, SUSE packaged it. It could be installed alongside E16 (and every other desktop from blackbox through wmii, alphabetically) Let's just say things didn't go so well. One of the new offerings in E17 was its file-manager type widget. It didn't look too much different from the screenshot shown in this article, however that is where the functionality usually stopped. Attempting to actually use it, resulted in a cascade of issues with navigating the filesystem that were impossible to resolve without a completely X-server restart. The DailyWTF article articulated well the despair felt by both user and developer alike in those early E17 days.
On the up-side, E17 looked really good, graphics were clean, gradients, transitions and window decorations rendered very well, and E17 showed much promise. I did no graphics programming back then, so can't opine on the internals, but let's hope the thousands of commits across 151 files has improved things substantially on both fronts, for developers and users alike.
All pretty new to me as well, but reading the ferretDB docs, ferret looks like the interface layer between you and your NoSQL docs and the DocumentDB extensions to postgres. It also seems ferret provides mongo emulation allowing you to move your collections off mongo and store them in postgres using mongo native libraries to access, update, delete, etc.. the collections, documents, databases, etc..
Take this with a grain of salt, as this is just what I gleaned from a quick read of https://docs.ferretdb.io/ docs. I'm still trying to wrap my head around what the two MS postres extensions that are DocumentDB do and how that interacts with ferret. It will take a much deeper read and likely actually setting up a test collection through ferret and then looking at the storage, schema, etc. from postgres to get a better feel for just exactly what roles the DocumentDB extensions and then ferretDB play on top of postgres to make it all work. The site says all Mongo libraries work with ferretDB and I'm presuming that includes the PHP library as well. Should be interesting to figure out, and I'm always happy to see another open-source player in any area.
You guys (and gals) on the east side of the pond will need to keep a close eye on us during the next four years. While I hope all goes well, if history and this inchoate extension for tik-tok is any indication of how things will play out -- we will need your help... Since when is the US Government in the business of owning social media companies? Maybe the flabby guy with a bad jump on stage that claims to be "dark maga" wants in...
"Session Recording isn't designed for the evidence collection for legal proceedings."
Really? And I'm sure the lawyers see it that way too... So as the poor defendant sits in the witness chair watching a recorded session replayed, can he raise the "Citrix says" objection? Where do these company geniuses come up with the sweeping profound statements that amount to "iskabibble"?
When insurance company CEO's start getting shot -- we will know whether it's the insurance companies or the doctors and hospitals in the US that are really at fault... It's a sad state of affairs. After litigating against all 3 for nearly 20 years before we changed the constitution in Texas to let them all off the hook, I can tell you none of the three have clean hands, though the docs usually want to do the right thing, the hospitals just want to call risk-management to CYA and the insurance companies weigh lives against shareholder-value every day. We call that health-care in the US.
While downlink in Brazil may be cheap and may provide local customers, the reputation of the Brazilian address blocks have landed them on numerous block-lists. It seems as south America builds out its Internet infrastructure, it is all to happy to provide access to the words miscreants. With no more than a wink-and-nod to however the connections are used.
I'd wager somewhere between 20-40% of the distributed brute-force intrusion attempts I've seen in the past year or two originate from LACNIC with Brazil being a significant source. That is in addition to the attempts now coming direct from StarLink IP addresses. Add the middle-kingdom to the mix and collection of online misfits are certain to grow their state sponsored effort may rival the current GRB. I'd also bet the combined sum will be much worse than the sum if its parts. What a wonderful digital world we have created...
If they stayed in what has become the silly-show congress, that's one thing, but now apparently "America First" means putting the "best people", including the kiddie-diddler, a Putin suck-up, a foreigner and a fox-news commentator at the head of the DOJ, DOI, FBI and DOD. Not to mention the "worm ate my brain" guy in charge of HHS and vaccines. (ask Samoa how that went...) What could possibly go wrong in the states?
And you though Boris was an imbecile... unfortunately, he looks swimming by comparison. The race to the bottom continues. Who knew duping supporters out of $20 and $100 recurring payments was the way to win support and dedicated followers. An I thought integrity mattered... Let's all pretend to "Have Fun" to "Make Time Fly" -- it's seems our only hope... because as a majority proved beyond reasonable doubt in the last election, "You just can't fix stupid".
No, open-source is "part of this". For good, bad or indifferent, we are all part of the path forward. whether that be related to preserving a livable planet or ensuring the Budapest Memorandum is respected. There have to be consequences for bad-actors on the global-stage. As history teaches the common-man (and woman) suffer the greatest harm from bad behavior of their leaders. Something extremely prescient to be mindful of as nations choose their leaders. For those without the ability to choose, there is a choice to be made.
I've thought about this a bit over the past few years and one thread seems constant, it's not the languages that are at fault, but rather the way programming is taught. New programmers think learning the language is a race, teachers/professors tasked with teaching it often rely on woefully out of date materials and frankly know little about how to teach programming. Learning C/C++, or any language for that matter, isn't a race, it's a journey, much like learning music and how to play an instrument. Sure a student can pick up an instrument and make it squeak and squawk but it certainly isn't what you would call music. It's only though rigorous practice, practice, practice and dedication to becoming better that the sound starts to improve. Leaning to program, really learning to program, is no different.
Too often students are taught from a "using the language" perspective, how to get a result, with little concern for validating every step to ensure behavior remains defined. The growth of competitive coding sites on the internet that provide preliminary code for challenges with zero validation or bounds checking just adds to the problem. Failure to teach from the perspective of what the language standard requires in order for program behavior to remain defined, or teach how to use the standards at all is yet another failure. Internet coding "courses" that in reality don't teach programming at all, but are rather limited to providing a set of problems to exercise what the student should already know further confuse students about what learning to program is. Substandard code, or tutorials on the internet is another significant problem for new programmers for the same reasons. On the flip side there are excellent coding sites, coding references, and the last draft of the language standards are available for free, but there is nothing to ensure learning programmers find them first.
I don't knock C or C++, nor do I laud Rust as a cure-all. It's not the languages that result in poor code being written or code being unsafe. The marketing push to label all C or C++ as unsafe and Rust the salvation -- is just that. It's not the first marketing push for some "greatest new thing since sliced-bread" we've seen in the programming world over the last 40 years. There is nothing wrong with trying to make it harder write unsafe code, but none of that fixes the problem of how new programmers are taught or left on their own to learn.
It looks worse. The Mintz & Gold firm involvement and the "sucks to be you" weasel-worded letter appears to be a classic delay-while-the-owners-sweep-the-accounts situation. All with plausible-deniability, "we didn't know Digital River was doing that, we were just hired to handle customer invoices..." Spend a few dollars on a law firm on the front-end, leave by the back-door with the spoils. By the time the class-action unwinds the chain of events, the company is denuded and an empty-shell unless they move quickly and file for relief to sequester the accounts. Call me skeptical.
Not to mention all those new nifty in-OS ads that windows 11 foists upon users. With strong selling points like that, it's a wonder more people and not breaking down M$'s door for the update. Here's a shiny new OS -- bundled with an entire new source of aggravations for your daily life. Marketing genius!
Absent the lofty hardware requirement lockout, both revenue and windows 11 market share would likely be double where they are now. Makes you wonder about the perverse incentives flying about that would cause M$ to shoot themselves in the proverbial foot like that. I'm sure that will provide fodder for another article in the future.
So how's that replacement of OpenGL with Vulkan going? We have become numb to the ham-fisted and pea-brained "improvements" to Gtk/Gnome by Gnome. The cancerous part is while Gtk used to be the go-to toolkit for Linux and was widely used back before all of it's sprawling dependencies. libadwaita integration, id-bus and notifications have become the bane of many apps. (and the cause of a recent rash of black-screens and missing system-tray icons of late). Many Linux application adopted Gtk back in the Gtk+2 days, and now without the development resources of RedHat behind them, their applications suffer from changes made by Gnome, for Gnome, that adversely affect many open-source applications. Even GIMP has to bandaid what was the "Gimp Toolkit" just to maintain the ruler widget as that was removed in Gtk+3. Seems like quite a bit of self-serving Gnome progress going on, the wider community be damned.
Something doesn't pass the smell test, (1) because Kaspersky is leaving (2) users have consented to UltraAv being installed? That seems like a legal and logical train-wreck likely to leave consumers holding the bag. What is Kaspersky getting out of the switcheroo? The article seems to have glossed over what agreement gives UltraAV the right to foist it's untested code on users as Kaspersky exits? That will be for the lawyers to figure out. The whole arrangement has the unseemly sense of a flashing red "What Could Possibly Go Wrong?" hovering over it.
Chuckling ... and if they could learn to count in bytes, they could use C and C++ in a memory safe way... It's pretty easy. You allocate X bytes, (or use a specified amount of automatic storage from the stack) and then don't write more than X bytes starting at the beginning address for the region, and don't access memory addresses for that object beyond (address + (X - 1 bytes)). (technically the address + X bytes may be referenced, just not dereferenced as part of the object).
Now that was somewhat in jest, as a language that prevents you from doing the same and tracks the free of heap related memory to prevent the use-after-free does provide a benefit. It frees you from counting, and you don't have to track and ensure your free occurs only once. But the converse is also true, if you can count, and do ensure there is never the use of a pointer after free, then you don't have the problems rust claims to solve to begin with. It's just another new solution in search of a problem to solve.
It will be interesting to see how it all shakes out. There have been a lot of "latest greatest" languages during the past 40 years that promised the world only to wane into obscurity. So who knows... the future has yet to be written.
For those with older laptops and built-in nvidia hardware using the nvidia 390 drivers or newer, or for desktops as well, drivers can be patched and built to restore full graphics driver functionality. Yes, it is a "patch-scramble" for each new minor version change of the Linux kernel, but the drivers are patched and happy through Linux 6.10.8.
The only catch -- many times, unless your distro provides a community supported package that does the work to patch and update -- that may be up to you, e.g. https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/nvidia-390xx-utils. Tis the Linux way - choice - and the choice sometimes ends up in your lap.
I don't know "Public cloud, he suggested, is such a shiny object. VCF is not … or will be once VCF 9 debuts."
I haven't run VMware since ESXi 5 was the thing. Interesting little distro with the pieces moved around, and a friendly way for windows to make use of the resources.
The only thought I was left with after the article's' close was -- "vaporware again" until it debuts...
Humanity's shortsightedness never ceases to astound me. Much like the timber-barons who viewed all the old-growth forests as theirs alone to clear-cut for profit without any thought to the long-term damage they cause, we now have a race to blanket low-earth orbit with throw-away satellites with an equal amount of concern for the consequences. While the timber-barons of 150 years ago may be excused for their shortsightedness based on then existing science, there is no such defense available to those launching today.
It's never a fun thing to be caught in the middle of Geopolitics. I do feel for Kasperskey. There just isn't a workable solution. If your base of operation is in Putin's Russia, you very well may find yourself on the wrong end of sanctions for something you have absolutely no control over. However it isn't something that wasn't foreseeable. Kasperkey is free to make whatever offer it wants, regardless how unworkable it is, and it can beat its drum as loudly as it can claiming how unfairly it is being treated. But, hailing for a nation with government sponsored troll-farms, hacking units, etc.. aimed at destabilizing the western-world, it is more than foreseeable that you may find yourself dealing with economic sanctions.
And no, creating individual exceptions for software companies one-by-one based on some offer of code review isn't a workable solution no matter how you slice it. Do you do it for just Kasperskey, or where do you draw the line. There just aren't any "I'm a good company, create an exception for me" tickets in geopolitics. Yes it sucks, yes it's unfortunate, but when you are based in a country run dictator that keeps invading its western neighbors and committing war-crime after war-crime against them, don't be surprised when you get caught up in geopolitics.
From the days of running xvidtune to create a modeline that would work for the new faster, bigger CRT to today, X remains a beacon of open-source success. Perhaps I'm getting cynical (as well as senile) with my advancing grey hair, but I see the X/Wayland argument in a slightly different light. The most troubling aspect is there shouldn't be an us-against-them splitting into camps over development of either. Competition regarding features and ease of use can be a good thing, or at least it used to be.
What I find most troubling about the whole saga is there seems to be concerted effort to push X out and champion the adoption of Wayland. That shouldn't be how this is approached. (and it speaks very ill of those engaged in the propaganda effort). Freedesktop wants to develop Wayland fine, knock yourself out and show us a better mouse-trap. That doesn't mean X suddenly got stale overnight. I'm writing using it at the moment and quite happy with it. Though I am glad I don't have to compile it from source anymore to fix AMD graphics problems.
So whenever I hear dire claims that Wayland is the next great thing or somehow that X is now bad, I take it with a grain of salt and take hard look at the source of the comments and the possible motivations they may have for offering them. Perhaps even exercising that age-old thing called skepticism which seems something we all need a healthy dose of today. (and also something those involved with open-source have retained quite well)
The take-away for me is heartfelt thanks to Enrico Weigelt for his continued contribution to a great package in the best tradition of contribution that got us to where we are today with open-source and Linux. The selfless act of giving back to the community in whatever way you can.
I think the sentiment here, both in the "foundation as an entity" and the direction Gnome taken during the past decade squarely hits the proverbial nail-on-the-head of at least a significant part of the funding challenge the Gnome foundation now faces. You simply can't piss people off for a decade on one hand, and then extend the other asking for contributions. That never ends well.
I'll give them this, Gnome has definitely emerged as the winner in the race to dumb-down the Linux desktop into windows. That may work for RHEL customers, but it has left a bad taste in the mouth of the rest of the FOSS community -- at least the parts I kick around in. Not good for building a repeating stream of small-dollar donations from community members.
MAGA (Morons and Gullible A-holes) The type that think a "patriot" is the yokel that flies flags from the bed of his (or her) pickup. You know the type...
“If ever a time should come, when vain and aspiring men shall possess the highest seats in Government, our country will stand in need of its experienced patriots to prevent its ruin. ... Power is intoxicating; and Men legally vested with it, too often discover a Disposition to make an ill Use of it & an Unwillingness to part with it. ... " (Samuel Adams letter to James Warren - October 24, 1780 [original spelling])
There is a wealth of additional wisdom and history in that one letter and requires reading multiple times to distill the deep message being conveyed. Well worth a lookup and read.
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