Posts by rcxb1 183 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Jul 2021
> How exactly is Wisconsin gonna force Foxconn to pay up if they say "Fuck you and the horse you rode in on."?
File a lawsuit.
Win.
Seize all the Foxconn products coming into the state and sell them at auction to (partially) pay the fine.
When Foxconn customers aren't getting their product shipments, you'll immediately have Foxconn's full attention and they'll quickly work out an agreement to pay-up.
I'm not sure they had too much of a future, anyhow. VMWare charges big money for features just slightly more polished than their quickly-developing open source competitors... They got entrenched by being first out of the gate, and have better support for old legacy OSes, but every year that matters a little bit less. Dell obviously thinks cashing-out is the better strategy.
> Before PulseAudio became the standard, many distros used ESD, the Enlightened Sound Daemon, which came out of the Enlightenment project, best known for its desktop.
Also ARTS (KDE).
> You can play, or record, sound without a sound server, but if you don't have one, the current program that is playing sound owns the audio device: it has complete and exclusive control over it, meaning that the operating system can't mix sources.
Not really true. Long before PulseAudio came along, nearly all sound cards allowed multiple simultaneous streams. Those that didn't were supported by "dmix" in ALSA, which is automatically loaded for the default sound device these days, though sadly not for additional devices (like the USB headset you plugged-in), still requiring a bit of a configuration mess.
PulseAudio is a culprit here, too. It locks the sound device (even while nothing is being played) so those apps trying to output to ALSA can't access the sound card. PipeWire is supposed to fix all this, natively compatible with applications outputting to ALSA and PulseAudio, simultaneously. Here's hoping.
> making mandatory to pay workers the same may they be US workers or H-2B workers? That would solve the problem, wouldn't it?
No, that will just result in employers putting effort into finding ways around it. For example, come up with some reason the US workers are all doing a slightly different job description than the non-US workers who are paid less.
Pretty common with H1-B visa hires... Lay-off your US worker and hire an H1-B visa holder, but it's not replacing the job position (which is strictly illegal under the H1-B program) because the new position required one extra certification the half-priced foreigner had. Nobody ever gets prosecuted for doing this despite the obvious illegality.
One of the reasons Trump got elected was his (empty) promise to end the H1-B system, while no other candidates expressed any intention of reforming the system, and in fact were looking to expand it. Tech companies love the H1-B program, and they happen to contribute a lot of money to political candidates...
The visually impaired usually do not have any particular difficulty typing. Do you use speech-to-text for all your day-to-day tasks? Why would you expect the visually impaired to do so? It is just as poor a choice for them as it is for you.
You've obviously given very little thought to the challenges people with disabilities face. I don't understand why you still feel the need to continue to argue the subject.
GNOME, KDE and others implemented the Windows 7 interface circa 1999, a decade before Win7 was released.
Having your main menu in the top or bottom left corner just makes sense... that positioning makes it an infinitely large target in two dimensions... Impossible to go past it with your mouse.
CentOS wasn't the first or only during its time. Scientific Linux hung around the longest and had rebuilds of RHEL out before CentOS did.
Alma and Rocky aren't the only ones left standing, either. VzLinux, MIRACLE LINUX and Oracle Linux are around, too.
It might be good that CentOS got pushed off the cliff. They were taking a very long time after RHEL to release their rebuilds. Now we've got multiple entities moving much more quickly than CentOS ever did.
Dell does the same thing with their DRAC licensing... if you need the graphical virtual console, virtual media, or dedicated NIC.
If you don't need those, the free license is fine. IPMI serial-over-LAN works perfectly well with Unix/Linux and even Windows Emergency Management Services (EMS) if you enable/configure those.
I hated the idea of included hardware you can't use without a license, too, but it's oh-so-easy to cheat the license, so home-lab types get extra capabilities for free from the old equipment they pick up.
> GlobalFoundries on Tuesday reported records for revenue, gross margin, operating margin, and net income
That's not difficult once you've decided not to even try to develop the next-generation fab tech, and just start profit-taking on all the past R&D, with no hope of being competitive in the future.
https://www.theregister.com/2018/08/27/globalfoundries_scuttles_7nm/
From the Press Release El Reg is working from:
"Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 will be generally available in the coming weeks via the Red Hat Customer Portal and major cloud provider marketplaces."
https://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/red-hat-defines-new-epicenter-innovation-red-hat-enterprise-linux-9
Who is to say whether "coming weeks" means two or twenty...
I made it 5 minutes into that video. He claims Asia and the Middle East is more important to the US than Europe post 2000, because of the rise of China? What nonsense.
Europe has a bigger economy than even the US... The US has strategic military bases all over Europe, and performs joint military operations with European allies. Most European countries are healthy, liberal democracies, like the US. Hillary Clinton as secretary of state said in no uncertain terms that Europe is the US' most important ally. None of this is true of China. Japan, South Korea and Taiwan are important US allies, but Japan is on a bit of a decline, and the rise of China isn't going to make them too much more important to the US.
And the middle east? EVs are developing quickly, so oil is becoming less important in the US and elsewhere. The US is a net exporter of energy at this point. The US does not need the middle east very much, and would be fine with just a couple allies in the region. Iran is dying to sell its oil to everyone. Saudi Arabia remains a steady ally.
> the channels to Starlink must be pretty narrow for doppler shift to be a problem.
It's common in modern digital signaling method for doppler shift at mere car speeds to be a problem. Even multipath interference off moving objects can be a problem:
https://www.tvtechnology.com/opinion/receiving-atsc-30
> there is absolutely no reason the existing dish shouldn't function exactly as it does at home
If there was no difference at all where you operate your dish, why would Starlink be severely limiting their sales by having wait lists for some areas and not others?
Move your dish from a rural area to a dense city and you'll quickly find the limits of the capacity of those satellites overhead. Once you want to talk to the internet, the location and capacities of the ground stations needs to be taken into account as well. You're also only talking about a change in longitude. Changes in longitude will alter how many satellites are overhead.
Two things about the US cause situations like this to look strange to outsiders:
1) The US is huge. It's equivalent to the EU, rather than a single country. It is difficult to change things across the whole US. How much effort would it be to get consistent and unified standards across all EU countries with no exceptions?
2) The US is often the first to develop a working system. Once it is in place, it becomes difficult to change. Those who do not have a working and well-entrenched system come along after can take a look at what did/didn't work well and implement an improved system for themselves. This goes for everything from health care, to metric, to other issues like electrical power systems, broadcast TV standards, etc.
I don't see anything particularly scary about it.
Where this "Grumpy Old Man Putin" theory falls down is that he's in a position to install his own successor. That's how he got the job, after all. Putin can easily secure his legacy by finding just one young person who has a similar world view, and installing him securely in the top job, before his own time runs out. Starting the war in Ukraine does not help him in this regard at all, even if all had gone perfectly.
> Businesses will use old hardware until it smokes when turned on.
Most businesses throw out equipment in perfect working order the very moment the support contract expires. Lots of great cheap hardware on eBay because of it.
Where companies are running ancient hardware, they are doing it to keep their hard-to-replace ancient software going... They don't want to deploy the latest OS on it.
A bleeding-edge distro isn't a good fit for your equipment. They dropped IA32 support long ago, for example. And there are plenty of alternatives. RHEL8 will be supported until 2029. RHEL9 will be supported several years longer, and as it is currently in beta it is unlikely to adopt these BIOS deprecation changes from Fedora. Come 2030+ it might be time to retire your ancient equipment, or relegate it to legacy/contemporary OSes.
> may be time to stop using solid wooden wheels and try something a little more modern like metal rims surrounded by pneumatic rubber tires
Ironically, we're going the other way. Wooden wheels had high fuel/energy efficiency. Those "low rolling resistance" tires used in hybrids and other highly efficient cars are just rolling us part-way back from pneumatic tires towards wood.
> Because of environmental regulations in its home state of California, the SDSC has been unable to scale up the portion of its emergency power delivered by generators.
Sounds like an ideal application for redox-flow batteries. You don't have a tank of diesel fuel on-site, instead you have a tank of electrolyte. No air pollution on-site, no refuelling trucks and though not silent due to pumping electrolyte, runs much quieter than generators.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_battery
> In China they have strict lockdowns [...] In Brazil they have a zero effs given policy and any number of cases is OK.
Who says Brazil is OK?
According to the CDC, risk of contracting COVID in Brazil is HIGH:
https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/travel/notices/covid-3/coronavirus-brazil
https://covid19.who.int/region/amro/country/br
While COVID risk in China is LOW:
https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/travel/notices/covid-1/coronavirus-china
https://covid19.who.int/region/wpro/country/cn
I think China's efforts would be better used to ensure 99% vaccination rates, but there has been a stark difference between the death tolls in China versus Brazil.
> the USSR collapsed and the Russian Federation took up the UN seat vacated by the larger entity without debate or vote.
Russia continues to have the second largest inventory of nuclear weapons. That's basically the measure of who gets to be on the UN security council. In addition, the UN is designed as a place for countries who disagree to work out their differences. Without Russia in a prominent position, the UN would be rather pointless, might as well call it "NATO."
That would be a bigger blow to the EU than to Russia. Russia will sell more to Asia, and the desperate EU nations buying any non-Russian fuel they can find will drive-up global energy prices, increasing the price Russia can charge Asia for their energy exports.
The US under Obama was anxious to ship large volumes of LNG to EU ports/terminals, but the EU was happy to remain dependant on Russia, despite how blatantly Russia was wielding their power. Had they mandated a mix with more non-Russian sources before now, the infrastructure to accept imports would already be built-out. Instead, Russia can shut down EU industry at will, and the EU needs years to develop the alternative supplies.
> People have been conditioned over the last 2 years that home = good, people and outside = bad.
Bicycle sales shattered records during the pandemic. Outside was highly promoted as the place to go. Crowded, indoor public spaces are a very different matter. That means people are less inclined to take the bus/train/plane, and instead to drive, alone. Many people are doing such travelling, and it has been driving up fuel prices as a result. They were at record highs even before the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Seems like this might be FUD directed at Intel. Intel has had a big fab in Chandler, Arizona for years; they've usually stayed ahead of TSMC in fab technology; and now that they're seriously planning on opening up their fabs to 3rd party chips, they're soon to come into direct competition with TSMC.
"Those American fabs are too expensive, and they don't have people who know what they are doing, unlike us at TSMC."
If you're interested in trying beta software anyhow, why not use CentOS-9 Stream? It's been out for some time, will stay more up-to-date than RHEL, and a couple steps ahead of Alma. Plus, bugreports supposedly go upstream to RHEL (my bugreports against CentOS stable in the past languished, neglected for years) more likely to improve upstream RHEL releases.
Of course this is likely good practice for Alma folks on the new major release, but I don't see why end users should be interested. Now, if they enabled more hardware support and Alma9 beta would boot on my old PC where CentOS9 panics, that would be something to write about...
Me too. CentOS wasn't just a repack of RHEL, it had a "plus" repo with more drivers added in (RHEL is aggressive about removing support for older SAS & RAID cards for example). And special interest groups making their own derivatives, such as 32-bit x86 versions of CentOS7.
With Gregory Kurtzer (who started CentOS) now founding RockyL, and specifically stating they want to get those interest groups going, it's a hopeful sign that they will be providing much more than RHEL or Alma.
How many years of articles about Win10 remaining more popular than Win11 do we have to look forward to?
Seems like we only just recently finished with all the articles about Win7 remaining more popular than Win10...
See: "Windows 11 growth at a standstill amid stringent hardware requirements" Thu 31 Mar 2022 // 11:19 UTC
> Countries have the sovereign right to do whatever they want into their own borders.
That's not an absolute by any stretch. Iran, North Korea, Rwanda, Sudan and Bosnia come to mind.
Competing opinions abound:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereignty#Views
> it looks like most people around here are content to sit on their fat arses and do as little work as possible.
As one of your down-voters, allow me to say I similarly would not have wasted even an extra hour helping others save face. However, your particular ability to be a verbally abusive, self-important git to everyone in spittle range, also means I wouldn't hesitate to fire you on the spot, no matter how well you handled the technical side of the matter.
> Very few people do things like running X over the network any more,
I'd like to see some numbers on that.
> and the way we can tell this is that all the modern fancy stuff, like OpenGL and compositing, mostly doesn't work over a network connection.
$ ssh -X $host "glxgears"
Works fine here.
Which applications need GL to function? Seems only the DEs themselves insist on GL to start-up. Programs people might want to run are all happy without it.
After Cisco bought Linksys, they took their VoIP phones in a rather locked-in and proprietary direction. I hope that's not the case here, as Polycom phones are easily the top brand, supported far and wide. (FWIW, Grandstream devices are flashy and inexpensive, but not impressively reliable; while Yealink devices have seemed a little bit more boring).
Still, as with any merger, HP is going to expect to earn their money back in short order, so I would expect prices to increase, and redundancies for some who make and support the devices. Not a good prospect for their future.
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