Posts by demon driver 135 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Feb 2020
"Nor am I aware of anyone still making 486 instruction set processors new" – I never thought that would come to be a criterion for whether Linux should support a processor or not. When I started to become interested Linux, one of the reasons that actually did make it interesting was the fact that it supported a plethora of old and new architectures and processors some of which I hadn't even heard about.
I have a feeling that AI is what's going to make the capitalist market economy finally show its true face to everyone, not just to those billions who already have been and continue to be suffering badly from its inability to humanely distribute resources and goods across the planet, let alone in a peaceful way. Art is only where this starts.
When I made my full (or as much as possible, I still need to keep a Windows machine for some basic photography related things) move to Linux, I started with Ubuntu MATE, knowing I didn't want Gnome, which looked decent enough, but lacked usability. When a major Ubuntu version upgrade broke some things, I took my time and tried a lot of distros, but none convinced me. When I was half ready to give up and go back to Ubuntu MATE, I tried Linux Mint, which I had left out, thinking at its core it was just another kind of Ubuntu flavour anyway. I immediately saw I was mistaken. Mint – no matter which of the three DEs – was the first distro I tried that out of the box 1. didn't hurt my eyes and 2. looked like it would offer decent usability, meaning wouldn't get between me and what I do in any way. And so it's where I stayed and where I'm still happy, and that's at least 50% thanks to "the artsy types" in the project.
That said, I don't applaud every design decision they made, and that includes this new Cinnamon upgrade. On my mixed dark/light desktop setups, the new rounded-corners dialogs which pop up for the usual confirmations look alien and pushy to me, now being bigger and pitch black instead of light. It's one of the rare occasions where I'll be wanting to tweak the settings a bit.
"It seems a little naive to me to think the US will have another presidential election" – indeed, it's a pity that not even the USA as the longest-standing democracy in the world has effective measures against hitleresque seizures of power.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the pond, in Germany, the young democracy of which the Germans are so proud is in danger of being torn apart by a new neo-fascist party (officially classified as right-wing extremist in large parts by domestic intelligence), against which they also have no effective measures even after their early 20th century experience. How difficult can it be to make fascist endeavours a punishable offense along the lines of high treason? What the German established political parties are now doing instead is adopting some neo-fascist policies themselves in a pathetic attempt to draw voters from them.
I get the impression that while he obviously needs help, the more important aspect here is that the world, the people around him and the project in question need help against him. In a better organized world, it would be impossible for people like him to have power over a project of any importance, or even over a single other person.
"Assembly. It's the language the computer understands. Everything else is made for your convenience."
Actually that's not correct. Beside what others already said: binary machine language is the language the computer understands. Assembler, its mnemonics and other stuff that is not machine language already was made exclusively "for our convenience". Some assembler languages (like for some mainframes) actually look like high-level languages compared to machine language. And obviously "our convenience" is the core purpose behind the concept of "programming language"...
The most prominent difference between Torvalds' two example sentences – (1) 'In this pull request, the Xyzzy driver error handling was fixed to avoid a NULL pointer dereference' vs. (2) 'This fixes a NULL pointer dereference in ..' – is not that between passive and active, but that of the subject, actually a question of meaning. In (1), the acting subject implicitly is an unnamed person, a someone who did the fixing, in (2) it is the pull request with its code that does the fixing. Simply transforming (1) into active voice would make it something like 'In this pull request, we fixed the Xyzzy driver error handling to avoid a NULL pointer dereference' – which wouldn't be that much better than the original, either ;-)
"This is a good thing, no?"
No. Only when seen isolated.
"Greenhouse farmers already knew this because they pump terrifying levels of CO2 into greenhouses."
HAHAHA! Because what's good locally must also be good globally. Thank you for this brilliant example of the quality of deniers' arguments. Everybody move on, nothing to see here.
But isn't everything by default true that's in the media? Recently, even a former president of the US prominently stated "I've seen it [being reported] on TV" as the irrefutable proof for a claim that just had been refuted by fact checking with officials of the place where it was claimed to have happened.
Excellent example of trying to push an un- and anti-scientific conspiracy theory by rhetorically distorting a complex fact through one of the stupidest possible oversimplifications, while mixing scientific facts up with what some do "portay" or "think". I don't know who's "portraying" "CO2" (as such) "as bad" and I don't care too much, either – it's still a fact that producing substantially more than what is necessary to keep up the ecology in the lower troposhpere is indeed "bad", and nitpicking on some who may have been abbreviating that too much doesn't help anyone.
So you claim there is no such thing as true or false? There never, ever can be a plausible fact checking? Everything is just "narrative", fact's don't exist?
If that was the case, we could just as well stop listening, stop talking, stop writing, stop communicating. Shut down the media, shut down the internet.
Perens says exactly that. Which is why he's been working on a new contractual concept that doesn't actually say "take this for free and do what you like", but rather "take this for free and do what you like, except if you make more than $5M revenue (or so), or if you want to modify it without giving the modifications back to the public, then you need to pay a small fraction of your revenue (not more than 1%)", with the goal of enabling the developers to be fairly paid. To me, that sounds quite sensible.
I see what you mean, but this isn't exactly about modifying vs. using, and the hammer analogy wasn't very fitting in the first place, which is why I thought up the hammer factory (yeah, nah, not a 100% fitting analogy, either, I know). The thing is that Wordpress isn't just a hammer that was manufactured and now there it is. What we're talking about here includes continued work being put into it in the background for eliminating bugs, fixing upcoming security issues, adding improvements, and churning out new, improved hammers every few weeks. Using Wordpress as a tool to provide services for profit means continuously profiting from that work, without reimbursing the producers for any of it.
Then again, it's absolutely correct to state that the Wordpress makers have said "here, we've made this software, you're free to use it".
And that's the dilemma, because if someone suddenly makes millions off of that ongoing work of others, the idea that those who actually do that work would deserve at least a small piece of that big cake is not completely misguided, either. It's just that I can't see them succeed in enforcing that, I don't think the free and/or open source licences used will facilitate that.
Not a good comparison. It's more like you would demand getting your hammers for free, without paying anything in return. Or an even better analogy would be you would demand someone to build, run and support a whole hammer factory just for you without your giving them something, anything back in return.
On the other hand we could correctly say if someone doesn't want exactly that to happen they shouldn't have gone free and open source to begin with.
But that's exactly the dilemma Perens is trying to address.
I'm not exactly a Linux oldie, it's only been 7 (desktop) to 8 years (server) that I migrated nearly everything I personally do with computers to Linux, but I've looked at Linux desktops earlier, and I do feel Gnome's 3+ approach misguided, too. When I chose my first DE it was MATE, and Xfce on one or two low-end machines. When my primary MATE desktop broke in the first major OS upgrade that came upon me, I had a good look around for alternatives – and then I went to Linux Mint Cinnamon, and was happy ever after. (Even though customizability is not its strength, either, but then again it's good enough for me right out of the box, so I'm perfectly fine with it...)
Isn't it the case that Red Hat Enterprise Linux is just another Linux distribution that mainly just builds and packages existing Linux software from third parties? I don't think Red Hat can stop someone from building and packaging the same software after they get it from the same sources RHEL gets it from, which at least AlmaLinux says is what it does. Incidentally, with the result that in one or two cases AlmaLinux has already released critical patches faster than RHEL.
... there's also this good read from a few days ago: What Microsoft’s Borking of Grub Says About Redmond’s ‘Love’ of Linux by Christine Hall
Oh yeah, cry me a river, Google :-D
What, I'm supposed to be fined for theft of two crates of beer every Friday for years until somewhere in 2016, when I was caught? Even though I implemented changes to my method of acquiring beer in 2017 and bought it legally after that? How unfair!
Indeed, how blatant can a marketing lie be?
Just for (to the best of my knowledge) completeness' sake:
Softmaker Office (needs purchase or subscription, is not FOSS) plus its slightly more limited FreeOffice version (is free as in beer but not FOSS)
Apache OpenOffice (some still use it and there still are reasons to do so, although not a lot)
When KDE was created in 1998, they tried to offer a Windows lookalike desktop for Linux with some consistency across applications, and that was good, even though it deterred many Microsoft sceptics back in the day who would have been more sympathetic with a recreation of the concept that didn't also copy the looks.
Today, KDE suffers from far too many options scattered across illogically and unsystematically organized menus. If I as a software guy and veteran nerd feel overwhelmed and disoriented with a DE, I'm not sure it would be a good suggestion for an average Windows user looking for an alternative.
Cinnamon, even more than Xfce or MATE, is a much easier and more logical transition from Windows, and operating it is much more intuitive for someone who just wants a classic desktop metaphor that looks decent and is easy to operate and walk through.
Linux Mint KDE used to be a flavour until Mint 18.3, by the way. It was droppped because it had "very little in common" with their then-present project, or so they said back then.
Take a look at the Honor Magic V2, which has managed to reduce the thickness of the folded device to little more than a normal phone, setting the standard for upcoming folders. I've tried it out and I actually like the square screen, wouldn't want it to become even bigger. The square-ish screen might not help video much, but it is great for viewing/showing photographs, and of course for multitasking, it can show two apps in full size beside each other, like a music player and a route planner. Even better for some of us, it allows for keyboard input without the screen keyboard obscuring most of what we're entering text into, like a Linux terminal. There's also the option of a quite decent drawing pen. I only have two reservations about that kind of phone – price and their probably lower tendency to withstand abuse, which in combination should be a clear "don't buy" for me as my phones tend to suffer damage in daily use.
Just for the record, while Mint does come with Flatpak support preinstalled, other than Snap on Ubuntu, Flatpak on Mint is strictly optional and easily removed completely from system and software manager, without any danger to surreptitiously get it reinstalled behind one's back through some apt package.
One of the extremely few things I like about Amazon is that they named their JVM/JDK "Corretto". (Even though I had to look up the name because, despite living in a region where Italian restaurant and café culture is prevalent, I had never heard of the combination of coffee and grappa that goes by that name; a combination I quickly learned to appreciate, too.)
I beg to differ. IMHO, neither in usability and ergonomics, nor in functionality, performance, ease and amount of customizability is Firefox the best, and Firefox kept annoying the heck out of me (and many others) over time with repeatedly introducing unrequested and at best useless, but sometimes idiotic UI changes just for change's sake.
On my Windows work PC, Firefox takes ridiculously long to start, one of the reasons I switched to Chrome there early. On my home and side job Linux systems I have more freedom; I moved to Vivaldi on all of them a few years ago after testing it for a few days and deciding that I won't go back – after 15 years of using Firefox. As much as I'd like to support the only browser that's still competing with Chrome, that doesn't make me use a tool that I don't like anymore.
"as it was less resource-hungry than OS/2 and didn't replace the MS-DOS that they were all used to (and still needed for older apps)" – resource-hungry is correct, but OS/2 indeed did "replace MS-DOS", and that was an excellent thing. It ran DOS apps (including Windows 3.x apps) better than DOS (or Windows 3.x) itself, also replacing all those high-memory managers which were en vogue back then, and it ran several DOS and/or Windows sessions in parallel, too...
"The recent statement from Mozilla CEO Mitchell Baker suggests that the organization sees AI as a more interesting place to focus its efforts on than saving the world (again) from a browser monopoly. If Firefox languishes while Mozilla pursues shinier projects, an opportunity — perhaps the final one — for Firefox to regain relevance may be lost." (J. Corbet on LWN)
Limiting choice hardly ever is a "good thing", and while we've learnt to expect nothing else from closed source, the support for a wide range of diverse and even odd hardware architectures is one of the more prominent aspects that drew me to open source and Linux to begin with. Back then, I never would have thought that major Linux distributions would phase out something as mainstream and recent as x86-32 support as early as, say, Ubuntu did, when there still are lots of 32-bit devices around that are perfectly capable of performing typical computing tasks. And there I'm not even thinking of my own remaining x86-32 device, an old Fujitsu-Siemens laptop that's running the last and long-outdated Ubuntu-based Linux Mint version that still came with 32-bit support, because that laptop already was a low-budget machine when I bought it new (although I even went as far as to install a PATA/IDE SSDs, potentially extending its usable life for a short while), rather of the fact that the largest parts of earth remain extremely poor. All of that said, I perfectly understand why distro maintainers might not want to keep x86-32 support up forever...
From my limited experience in trying several DEs in Ubuntu, my impression is that DEs tend to either really look and feel like the spin/flavour, or be post-installed as a metapackage, with the latter often also causing changes to the look and feel of the original DE, in case that was supposed to remain able to be switched to at will. Too much potentially interfering things under the hood.
As I said, Cosgrave is formally correct, I never claimed there were no war crimes committed by IDF, and I never claimed that they shouldn't be called out for what they are if there are any.
There is no such thing as truth in Palestine, though, not in whatever might count as peace and even less in war, and reports around the world are mostly biased. For example, official continental European news channels were eager to cite those hundreds dead in an allegedly Israeli hospital bombing, while it indeed seems excessive for a small car park, and evidence rather points to a terrorist rocket that failed and broke in two above that hospital. But you won't ever hear any Palestinian voice admitting that.
..., his position completely ignores the factual differences between both sides and thus trivialises Hamas' attacks and demonises Israel's defence. While Hamas wantonly and maliciously targets civilians, Israel targets Hamas facilities and hideouts and warns civilians in the area about the bombings. The death of every single person is terrible. However, to ask Israel not to bomb Hamas even though civilians in their vicinity have been warned is to ask Israel to stop defending itself.
So the reactions to Cosgrave's comments are perfectly in order. And it is bewildering how widespread such factually pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel opinions are, based entirely on *not* applying the same standards to both sides, whether out of malice or lack of information.
Antisemitism is not just any racism. Jews are not hated because of their skin tone. Antisemites hate them because they're Jews.
Typical neo-nazi antisemites are also general racists who hate non-white ethnic groups because of their looks, but antisemitism is still a different thing.
It was already a deliberate and telling move to spell the word as 'anti-Semitism'. This is to pretend that antisemitism was directed against all Semites, which would include, among others, Palestinians, whereas the word never meant anything but anti-Jewish, having been coined by a German Jew-hating journalist in an equally pathetic and outrageous attempt to create a kind of science under the name.
I see, thanks for the addendum.
Along those lines I remember that I still must have a copy of the excellent DFSee utility lying around somewhere, which I remember once enabled me to recover a big JFS volume that was spread across disks in at least three parts - and as it seems the project is still alive. Nice.
Thanks for the hint regarding gparted. Do other Linux partitioning applications like gnome-disks have similar issues?
I'm asking because the topic reminds me of my attempts to install Linux on a cheap Chinese x86 tablet that came with an Android plus Windows dual boot setup, and after each attempt to just *look* at the machine's partitioning table after booting up some Linux live system from thumb drive, Android\ was rendered unable to boot up and I had to re-flash the whole system. (It's Linux-only now...)
I kept using OS/2 up to eComStation 2.1 on my personal desktop machine until deep into the noughties, before reluctantly going to Windows. And I even held on to OS/2 (eComStation) on a production internet server for web and mail until 2017 (I had no idea at the time what a great liberation would come through the final move to Linux there – it went so well that I moved my home server from Windows to Linux soon after that, then thought why not try Linux on my desktops and laptops, too, and that was that).
I'm still missing the "quirky" deskop, though. Until today, I still think nothing comes close in usability, configurability and extendability, including all the nice Linux desktops I tried.
My preferred keyboard layout for English-US keyboards is called "English, US International, with accent keys". The 'international' in those keyboard layout designations isn't to suggest that the US variant of either the English language or the English keyboard layout would particularly excel in internationalness, but to indicate that the specific layout adds lots of international special characters, made available through AltGr and/or dead keys :-)
I get that GDPR requires opt-in for collecting personal data. But if I understood this correctly, Fedora does not want to collect *any* personal data. What they want to collect is impersonal data. In that case, my impression is that GDPR does not even apply. Or do I make a mistake there somewhere?
... but that also deletes your Instagram account. You can't do one without the other (source: Slashdot).
That alone should be enough for a sensible data protection law to make Threads illegal, and it might be one of the reasons why they don't try a rollout in the EU yet.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
