Muppetry
Absolute imbeciles - do they actually think we're falling for Vladolf's nonsense at this point? They should be embarrased. Peskov is the new Comical Ali.
45 posts • joined 24 Apr 2020
Modern UIs feel like they've gone backwards in the last 20 years. The Linux desktop I had back in 2003 (early KDE) was very pretty: easily themeable, nice 3D effects, usable and powerful. Now we've all just spent 20 years constantly reinventing wheels, changing things, changing them back again, then making a square wheel and reinventing that. The overall effect is that we've gone nowhere, or backwards. So much wasted effort on this nonsense, and a complete lack of genuinely fresh and better ideas.
After deciding to avoid any Chinese-made phones, I basically had to go with Samsung (made in Korea, India or Vietnam). I've been on the A-series models for a couple of years now, and can't really complain. Excellent value for money, still some Samsung crapware (though less than there used to be), regular software updates (I am running the Feb 2022 Android security patchlevel), and a camera system that has made several iPhone owners jealous. There are some niggles, but overall these are excellent phones for a sensible price.
Yeah, Samsung is better than it used to be, but still lots of unremovable junk. I have a Galaxy A, because it's an excellent phone and because it's not made in China, but I still wish I could have one with 'pure Android' on it. At least I would only have to sell my soul to Google, not Samsung too...
My Samsung A52, running Android 12, still has a 4.19 kernel. I've yet to see a phone running anything newer than 5.4, but I don't doubt that they're out there. Luckily, Samsung is quite good at rolling out monthly Android security updates for all supported phones. Many others are not so lucky.
I just go to photos.google.com, download a great stack of them (which arrives as a ZIP file), then delete the same stack from the web interface. Job done. They go into trash then get auto-deleted after 30 days. But photos in trash don't seem to count towards your quota, which immediately goes up when you press delete!
I worked for these clowns back in the day (circa 2005). Serious culture problem, really grim atmosphere inside those shiny offices in Cambridge. Was very glad to escape, as just another sysadmin from the "burn them out like matches" disposable team. Lynch may be reaping what he sowed...
The kernel has existed for (almost) 31 years, but the -stable series as we now know it has not, I believe! Of course, on the regular Linux -rc releases, it seems there are frequently far more than 999 patches.
But, turning to the broader question, is this huge patch bomb a good or a bad thing? Have the kernel maintainers become highly proactive and super-productive, to find and fix this many issues in a fairly new 'stable' kernel? Or is this an indication that we have a quality control issue?
Either switch to a top-class ISP that offers static IP (such as A&A, worth the extra cost), or buy a virtual cloud server (£2/month) and use that as a 'hub & spoke' WireGuard VPN host. We do something similar on our commercial networks, and a single minimum-spec cloud server happily handles a stack of simultaneous WireGuard networks with 100 clients, without even panting.
So much this! We had it in the office the other day, when our relatively expensive Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) mesh system just decided to start flaking out. Even a power cycle of both APs didn't help; suddenly, the supposedly better 5GHz network just became mostly unusable; the 2.4GHz network still runs fine. Wi-Fi is such a wonderful technology in theory, but so infuriatingly "random" in practice.
I bought a pair of these from Argos, for me and the wife (cashback offer, phone not wife!), and no complaints so far. Apart from the Upday News app - can *anyone* tell me how to disable its newsflash updates? I've tried everything! So yes, Samsungs still have cr*pware pre-loaded, but much less than the bad old days.
Hardware-wise, the phone is excellent. Beautiful, butter-smooth screen, fast and smooth, never skips a beat, and takes good pics with zero effort. It'll beat most 2018/19 flagships for 1/3 of the price. And the software is bang up to date: I got the June 2021 Android security patch update ... in June 2021. Incredible! This device should also be flagged to receive Android 12 early next year.
Also - I've not tried the face recognition, but the in-screen fingerprint doodad works perfectly for me. Very handy, in fact (no pun intended)!
The PW4000 is a very old design, going back to the 1980s. The 777 variant of it is early 90s, like the aircraft itself. So this is not a cutting-edge engine. Plenty of newer engines have excellent records, including the Trent XWB and the newer GE90s, etc. So overall I don't believe there's any systemic issue with cutting-edge engine tech, at least not yet...
RR have had their own problems, especially with the Trent 1000. And there was the Trent 900 (A380) "she go boom" issue in Singapore a decade ago, which very nearly imperilled the aircraft - major damage. Generally I like RR and the XWB (A350) seems to be doing pretty well. But they need to get back into narrowbodies!
We've donated a stack of Raspberry Pi 400s to my son's school. That's everything a primary (or even secondary) level child should need. For under £100, a fully functioning computer kit with a whole basket of funky pre-installed software (and much more available with a few clicks), that can connect to any monitor or TV - something even most poorer households will have. No need for Windows and its malware nightmares, no need to be shipping out fragile, vulnerable laptops, and no need to be importing far eastern junk. The Pi's are designed *and* built right here in Brexitannia!
Oh yes, we've had exactly this issue with some 32GB cheap laptops used at remote sites, which were an 'unfortunate' purchase by the director, trying to save a few quid. Windows 10 simply is not usable in so little space: the updates constantly fill the drive and kill the machine, no matter how much you try to disable them. Microsoft always wins. We had to give up and replace the machines as they were not readily upgradeable.
Their software is a nightmare, particularly the Linux client. We are pretty heavy users of their business subscription, and when Dropbox decides to have an arbitrary meltdown, it sometimes takes literally /days/ to re-index the 200,000 or so files in our repository. It clearly cannot cope with what it's designed to do - after all, we're using less than 10% of our total space allocation!
I've been using Mint for many years, even though I'm notionally a power user. It does the job nicely: it's Ubuntu with a prettier skin and some handy extras. Although I generally preferred Cinnamon, it still has annoying issues - particularly the file manager (Nemo), which slows down over time and struggles with big directories full of photos. So now I've switched to the XFCE edition, which I would highly recommend. XFCE has everything most people need in a desktop, without the frills and the bloat. It looks decent enough these days, and is snappier than most of the others. So it's Mint XFCE for me, at least until Debian 11 arrives later this year, perhaps...
For me, it all began with the mighty Am386. My first PC had the 40MHz version of that, which Intel couldn't match at the time (1992). Later, I had a tasty Athlon XP and Athlon64, before reluctantly reverting to Intel in the Core2 era. But now, the Ryzens are looking very tasty, and are pretty sure to be in my next machine.
We have Virgin's 500Mbps mega VOOM service in our main office, and it's famously unreliable. If we can go a week without an outage, I'll call it a win. Luckily the shared building has another WiFi network we can use as a fallback. We're now going to add a BT fibre line as our own secondary link, and sort out some sort of failover. But ironically, given the nightmares that BT have caused us at our remote sites, their network actually seems far more resilient than Virgin's. My BT link at home has had one brief known outage in 2 years, and I've never experienced a slowdown either. It just flies along, day and night, quite happily.
I thought that, but using the new ASUS 802.11ax twin-pack mesh routers, it really is a massive performance leap. I've benchmarked the 'mesh' link (between Gigabit wired computers connected to each mesh node), and consistently recorded 940Mbps (using netperf3), so that's actually hitting the theoretical 'real world' maximum of GigE. If you use 'jumbo' frames you can get it a bit higher. So the claim of multi-gigabit 802.11ax mesh backhaul speeds might actually be true. Whatever it is, even with 'traditional' WiFi client devices, we're getting excellent coverage and performance all over the house and garden. I've been making some 12-way Jitsi Meet video calls without a hitch, from the other side of the house to the nearest mesh node. I mean, it's not Blenheim Palace, but still, the system really works dramatically better than our old single WiFi5 router.
Dunno - I have one of the new ASUS mesh WiFi products, with twin 802.11ax routers, and it works brilliantly. It genuinely has solved the coverage problems, and the whole house and garden now gets reliable coverage, without a hitch. I've measured the 'backhaul' mesh link at over 900Mbps, using netperf3, so the Gigabit Ethernet serving the wired devices actually becomes the limiting factor, which would have been improbably with any previous WiFi product.
We already have partial WiFi6, via one of the higher-end ASUS mesh router products. It works very well, even though for now, the clients (i.e. phones, etc) are connected using traditional WiFi5/4, since none supports 802.11ax yet. But I've measured the WiFi6 mesh connection speed, between the twin boxes, and repeatedly recorded an impressive 940Mbps using netperf3 (with the boxes around 8m apart, in neighbouring rooms). This was between two hard-wired computers, one plugged into each node. This actually suggests that the GigE connections (which top out around that level, minus the overhead) are the limiting factor, and the mesh link really could be achieving gigabit-plus speeds (it claims up to 4.8Gbps on the box).
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