Three years? You got double the expected life if the smart TV had some kind of Android in it. Android seems to require new hardware every one and a half to two years. If you're fortunate, you get updates within the first year, and security fixes for the next 1/2, then you are SOL.
Even if it was one of those Roku TVs, you could still have trouble. I heard one (one of the first) had an issue where it could not steam more than one show consecutively without the Roku requiring a reboot. Oh, and it would also reboot randomly. Roku branded LG, if anyone is curious.
Perhaps the TV makers could get together and make a TV card expansion slot, with a promise to support the slot for 5 to 7 years. Then again, that would make the cost go up. TV makers benefit financially when require us to get a new TV every 4 to 6 years.
There's the boot economic theory that says rich men can save money on expensive boots, but if the companies collude to make crappy boots, what happens then?
From what I understand, StarDock bought the rights to the name 'Star Control' and 'Star Control II' in one of those asset liquidation sales of the old Accolade IP. Accolade was the publisher of the original Star Control, and had ownership rights to the name. Toys for Bob (the company that Paul & Fred founded), retained all the other rights - which is how the Ur-Quan Masters re-release of Star Control 2 came about. Stardock appears to have believed (incorrectly, IMHO) that name "Star Control" meant the whole game, characters included. When they got wind that TfB was making a sequel to UQM, they sued. IIRC, they may have also used a DMCA request to try to have the Ur Quan Masters taken down at the same time (as I recall, TfB quashed that pretty quickly). IMHO, it looks like StarDock was trying to use the legal system to wrestle ownership of the Star Control characters away from Toys for Bob.
As a final aside, Toys for Bob has been around for quite a while making games for other companies. I see that they've created Spyro, Skylanders, and various licensed titles. Activision appears to have an ownership stake in TfB. StarDock may have just bitten off way more than they can chew. Activision has pretty good lawyers - re:Bnetd and other lawsuits. They're not the Nazgul yet, but they're well on their way. While I hate to see things go to court, it appears that Activision is completely justified stomping the crap out of StarDock. I wonder if they'll be better stewards of StarDock's (gaming) IP than StarDock was?
Full Disclosure: I was a big fan of StarDock's Impulse gaming platform, and dumped about $150 into at one point. At which point, it was sold to GameStop, which promptly ran it into the ground (it took 2 years, but still - they could've been a contender!). Thankfully, I was able to get about 1/3 of the money back as GameStop credit. They may have also thrown a couple of steam keys my way as well. So, yeah, not the biggest fan of StarDock. Oh, and StarDock is the publisher/developer of the Master of Magic clone, War of Magic (Elemental). That didn't go so well for them, either.
No no no, the renewals are 180 days if you have Volume Licensed copies, Like Enterprise and Windows 10 LTSB. Then you have to check in with your local KMS (Key Management Server) within that time frame or you get the scary "Not Genuine" and "You might be a victim of software counterfeiting" messages.
Right now, for Retail and OEM Windows installs, the license for Windows lasts as long as your computer HWID stays the same. However, changing enough of your hardware generates a new HWID and you have to call up MS and beg for a new license. Which right now they do, but I'm sure that'll stop at some point.
Don't forgot, their new Java licensing scheme: Per physical core on the server side, and also by named user on the client side. $10 each. Yes, even if all the users use the workstation in shifts, they want to be paid 3 times or more. Combine that with the rapid deprecation of features (JavaFX, Java Web Start), and the Chrome catching version numbering scheme, and you have a recipe for disaster if you choose Java for any projects today. In fact, if you've done any development in Java, now might be the time to investigate alternative cross-platform technologies, like.NET.
I cannot believe I just recommended.NET over Java. What's the world coming to? So, for clarification, is there any possibility that MS could pull an Oracle with.NET?
I really didn't know that PS+ was half the price of Gold, and I forgot that the Gold games are 4/mo not 2/mo. Thank you for correcting me. Keep up the good work!
Nah, there's a dedicated server that Epic controls. The kids that are playing are clients of those servers. Normally MS & Sony (and now N) charge for the privilege of playing on their servers. From what I gather, Epic is paying those costs to keep kids playing.
If they ever stop making money, whatever update they are about to release would then require Nintendo Online to play.
While I am mostly against fees for Online play in general, I do understand that the infrastructure (servers, what-not) has to be maintained somehow. MS charges $120/year for Gold and the PS4 Online charges are similar. The N is charging 1/3 that for up to 8 accounts ($35/yr). Gold gives[1] you (theoretically) 1 AAA game for the One and 1 AAA[2] for the 360. The N gives you 20 NES games (that re-authorize monthly) and online save storage.
[1] The XB1 games are only licensed. Once you drop your gold, they will no longer play - "This title is no longer licensed for your system" - or some such. The 360 games are yours to keep, but as with the XB1 titles, none of the online features will work.
[2] Xbox AAA includes ports of titles from other consoles, like Sega's "Wonder Boy in Monster Land" (Sega Master System, 1988) port for this month. A 30 year old game.
"Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker" was recently (2-3 months ago) released on Switch and 3DS. It's a 3D puzzle based game. IIRC, the Switch version has some Mario Odyssey inspired levels.
the AMD K5 was AMD's first processor and released in 1996
I know I had an AMD 386DX/40. Intel was pretty expensive back then, and I couldn't have purchased the processor for what I paid for the whole full tower unit. Okay, so it was the Am386. You likely recall the K5 release name because they renamed the 586 the Pentium and the 686 the Pentium Pro, and they sued AMD and Cyrix for using the numbers 486 and 586. Ultimately Intel lost. However, to shield itself from lawsuits, AMD had no choice but to name their processor the K5. Also, Cyrix (now Via) named their processors the 5x86 and the 6x86.
I have a fondness for ol' wrestler Lou Albano as Mario. The live-action segments were pretty terrible, showing Mario and Luigi's home life. I still remember when Madonna was the guest star of the live action segment and she was pretty shamelessly trying to sleep with both of them. Even when I was 12 I knew that was pretty damned inappropriate.
That's cool. I must admit I'm now curious about that episode.
I liked the UNICEF Smurf promo [youtube.com], made with permission of Peyo's estate. Now why couldn't they have THAT in the live-action movie?
That's really quite disturbing. What's more disturbing is that they didn't have to doctor the standard Smurf footage all that much to do it. As for the live-action Smurfs - yeah - that's one of those things you either don't watch, or just watch once and say, "That was absolutely terrible. *poof* I wish they'd make a live-action Smurf movie. And while I'm wishing, a sequel to the Matrix would be nice, too."
I see [Disney Gummi Bears] currently available on DVD on Amazon.
I've seen those. Those Super Mario episodes (The Super Mario Bros Super Show) must have been extremely low budget. Usually, there would be a pretty bad live action segment followed by a terrible cartoon. To be fair, most Saturday morning cartoons were terrible - maybe as an incentive to get kids outside? Anyway, the to give TSMBSS mass-market appeal, the cartoon segment has a rap intro. When the credits rolled, it featured the live-action Mario (a sort-of-Italian white guy) rapping and 'dancing' while the credits rolled. You just have to see it
As for the Zelda cartoon - no rap intro, just narration. It is obvious one of the writers was a huge fan of Steve Martin, and tried to transfer some of Steve's stage persona to Link. Link doesn't pull it off - at all. He comes off as a whiny entitled punk seeking a kiss from Zelda. The entitled part might be why is isn't getting any. Maybe they should've gone with the Rodney Dangerfield "I get no respect" line instead?
OT: Good Saturday morning cartoons
Mighty Orbots - Saturday morning sentai-type Japanese animation (small team, combining robots, etc). Single 1/2 season, 13 episodes (includes ending). Only aired for about six months. Production halted by a lawsuit from Tonka (GoBots). Not widely available.
Gummi Bears (Disney's Adventures of the) - Since this is from the 80s, it's likely locked in Disney's vault
Thundarr the Barbarian - futuristic fantasy. Like Conan, but set in the future. A princess/sorcerer and a Mok (a Wookie) are his companions.
The Littles - may as well call it the MacGuyvers. They could build anything out of cardboard, rubber bands and buttons. Including aircraft.
Muppet Babies - every episode was different, but the better ones were movie themed versions where the muppets would act out various roles. Idea for it came from the movie "The Muppets Take Manhattan"
Smurfs - little blue dudes from a magical forest. I preferred the original narration intro over the shortened doom & gloom intro.
Fat Albert - This taught kids the dangers of urban life, and is still somewhat relevant today. Some of the stereotypes are not-so-nice, and we've recently discovered that the main star was into helpless women, and therefore you'll likely never see this show anywhere.
My Ethernet port now shows up in ifconfig as the very reasonable "em0".
em0? Do you mean en0? IIRC, it stands for Ethernet Network #0. IRIX uses (used) the same network naming scheme as well.
Pedantry aside, I sort of understand why the do the funky name scheme. The idea is that the name is based on the location of the slot, so PCI/PCIx slot #0, so that's where the p0 comes from. The s19 is a unique identifier based on some properties your card has. This way your cards don't bounce around the network names. However, some problems arise due to wireless cards identifying themselves on bus -209, so you get wireless names like wlx32559s18 and so on.
ArchLinux has come up with a way to deal with this, so long as you stay away from the standard eth0 (I use en numbers myself). It should work in the other Linux versions, also, but I've not tried it. Here's the link. That said, even back in the ifconfig days, I used something on a CentOS server these lines to give a specific eth-number affinity for a specific Ethernet port by mac address.
I understand why you've switched to BSD (FreeBSD?), I've used it in the past, back in the late 90s. My suggestion is to track stable, and dedicate some time to the mailing list to understanding what they are doing what they are doing. But don't upgrade stable (build world) without reading the release notes. There was a big deal when one of the stable bumps (like 3.8 to 3.11) broke world if you didn't stop off at 3.9 first. Also, build your own kernel. The kernel config for BSD, IIRC, is a giant text file. You flip the bits that you want, recompile, reboot and you are good to go.
Here now, I believe you've forgotten about the 0th octet? chmod 777
is really chmod 0777
The first three bits are:
SUID bit (4xxx) - Set UID on file. Runs with permission level of owner, use on executable files, beware, however, for if they are owned as root, they run as root. If you see a S, it means the SUID bit is set, but you cannot use it - the file's not executable. In Linux/Unix, does nothing for directories.
SGID bit (2xxx) - Set GID on file. Runs the executable with group ownership of the assigned group. Same with dirs.
Sticky Bit (1xxx) - Set sticky on a directory (see/tmp), prevents other users from truncating your temp files. On my Linux servers, the/tmp directory permissions are always 1777.
Nope, from what I gather the Mac drives were [zoned] CAV (constant angular velocity), and the PC drives were CLV (constant linear velocity).
I remember some CD ROM burners back in the day with these properties as well (Plextor comes to mind). That was important because it could more accurately write the main data channel, plus some p & q channels that SecuROM or SafeDisc used as copy projection measures (look up CloneCD / ClonyXXL, Alcohol 120%, DiscJuggler, and 1:1 copy).
DOS user here: One of the tools I was introduced to in college, was SMAX. Smax.com was a TSR (terminate & stay resident) that would run in the background, allowing you to use your disk with up to 21 sectors per track (SPT). This in turn got you fairly close to 1.7MiB per floppy, instead of 1.44 MiB per floppy. The program needed for format your disk for this was fdformat. A trick was that you could make sure that you copied smax.com to the disk first, then you could load it in case you forgot your utils disk. All three 720k disks of F19 Stealth Fighter could be made to fit on one fdformatted floppy. I thought I packed the EXE with LZEXE; but it may have used OVL (overlay?) files, so I might not have been able to that.
Tip: For floppy drives, Teac made the most reliable readers. Added USB bonus is they are twice as fast as the floppy controller on the motherboard. They were the gold standard, especially their dual 5.25" QD and 3.5" HD disk unit.
In my (admitted limited) sampling of disks, the absolute worst were those that came from the software and games purchased. There was a reason there was a page in each box that said BACK UP YOUR DISKS! Those things must have been rated for 25 reads or less. After that was the no-name brand disks. You could hole punch or fdformat those, but they wouldn't hold up. I had the best luck with 3M and Sony media. Imation disks were a crapshoot - some great, some not-so-great. Those Sony disks - so long as they weren't smax disks, are still readable with a Windows 8.1 PC today - but they are much easier to mount and image with Linux. Windows 10 dumped the floppy controller support, and also the joystick port support, I believe. Don't know about RS232 support, though.
Squashfs generation is comparable to that of tar.gz files. Not only does it do gzip compression natively, it can compress the inodes in the directory tree and also do fs level de-duplication. Squashfs is compatible with any kernel from 2009+ (maybe before), and newer kernels also have the ability to use lzo and xz compressors. It's intended to be used anywhere that you would use tar.gz or cpio, with the added benefit that you can mount it loopback and extract a file that you need without the overhead of sequentially scanning through the tape archive. I've heard the windows version of 7zip can access a squashfs archive as well (as of 16.04 it must be a gzip compressed sqfs image). Squashfs natively detects sparse files - unless you tell it not to.
The only thing I'm not sure how well unsquashfs handles the extraction of sparse files. Linux tar is totally unsuitable when dealing with sparse files, as it requires the full amount of space to extract a sparse file. For Linux tar, there's a workaround for sparse files, and that is to install BSD tar, which seems to extract as sparse files correctly.
You need to have a look at the Asus-merlin project as well. It's a custom firmware for Asus routers. It includes a persistant JFFS partition and a raft of other cool features. I've had three, and the only complaint that I have is that, under load, they can get up to 50 C. The lower memory 520gU was the only one that I encountered a lock up issue with (when downloading several files from a CDN with Download-them-all) and video streaming, and that was only 1-2x per year. All of the others have been extremely stable, even with heavy downloads and video streaming.
Sorry, those bootloaders are cryptographically signed with keys in either Verizon's or AT&T's possession. These keys preclude the installation of any custom ROMs. Short of an AT&T dev being careless with the crypto-keys, it's not going to happen. In my experience, Samsung phones are pretty beefy. They have to be to run the TouchWiz OS layer on top of Android OS.
If you have an older Samsung phone - for instance the Galaxy S3 - and you have the ability to install a Custom ROM (Cyanogen, Slim, Oxygen), they will work fairly well. The S3 can even run Marshmallow (6.0), where the Note 3 is stuck on Lollipop (5.0.1). The Note3 didn't even get even 5.1.1! The S3's only problem is the stock camera occasionally crashes (and requires reboot to fix). There's some 3rd party cameras out there that work better. Overall, the S3 with Cyanogen is much, much snappier than with TouchWiz.
I still don't understand all the hate toward systemd.
I think I can break some of this down for you...
Linux has had a number of de-facto standard implementations for things through the years: (working from memory)
- For sound we had some various odds and ends, then focus started to go toward ALSA, then later we had JACK, and PulseAudio. Now it seems most major distros use PulseAudio.
And who 'spearheaded' PolypAudio - err, PulseAudio? Lennart Poettering. I was really excited about PA, until it utterly destroyed my sound for a couple of years. I couldn't make it work in Gentoo, and after about 8 months of pain, I switched to Ubuntu. That was also painful, but at least there were users there to help me transition from Gentoo and fix my audio issues. Audio was so bad, I had to switch back to Windows for anything audio related, whether it was games, audio, or video. The quality was especially bad for video capture. The kicker is I still today need to use the alsamixer to unmute channels from time to time. PA doesn't seem to have any way to do this.
- For our displays we've had the X window system for ages. Now we're starting to move toward Wayland and there's still some of the old grey/neckbeards that are simply afraid of change and digging their heels in on X.
I can understand this, too. The Wayland folks say, "The code is old and broken, we need to rewrite it." Wiser folks than I have blogged about this. Let me give you some examples of projects that foundered or died because of rewriting:
Netscape 6.0 - released extremely late, ended up destroying the company
MacOS 8 (Copland rewrite) - was slated as an update for System 7 - then MacOS 8 - then tossed (Apple bought NeXT instead). The MacOS 8 & 9 that were released were incremental updates to System 7
Gnome 3
KDE 4
I'm sure others can think of more
In addition to that, they've deprecated useful features like X11 forwarding, and they just dusted off their hands and said, "Not my problem. That functionality should be handled by an application." It seems short-sighted to remove a working feature that a portion of people use, just because they don't believe it has value. From what I've read, adding it back in will be a non-trivial task.
Your big complaint is that it was once free-as-in-speech *and* free-as-in-beer. Tell me, how is software that you pay no money for and have access to all source code somehow not both definitions of free? Are you not still free to pick a distribution that uses sysvinit? upstart? openrc? Assuming you have the knowledge, ability, and time, couldn't you roll your own distro with all those features you want *and* pick which init system you wanted? Couldn't you get the source of systemd and rip out those things you don't like?
Sure, just like you could assemble your own car or build your own house. By yourself. Oh, and could you pay inspectors $MEGA_CURRENCY to go over it with a fine toothed comb to make sure it won't come down on your head in the middle of the night, or when explode when you flush all toilets simultaneously, or fall apart at 88 mph?
Looking at it another way, one of the biggest complaints about Linux adoption was the fragmentation across different distributions. Now Linux is starting to approach a standard for user space, which would make cross-distro development easier. Isn't that a good thing?
I agree that some standardization is a good thing. But we need not remove *all* choice. That puts us in the same boat as MS.
Also, one last note on L. P. He favors breaking compatibility with POSIX and BSD to speed development. So, if he feels that way about POSIX, the standard that makes Linux, well, Linux, who's to say he won't radically change direction again?
Don't worry, they've already warned us, updates are going to be all or nothing affairs. There will be a "November Patch Set for Windows 7", with no choice as to which patches you want fixed. Do you want the privilege escalation exploit fixed, but not the GDI+ update because it causes display bug in your custom business app? Too bad. You should've picked Windows Enterprise (and dedicated a part of your life to patch testing). Don't even get me started on the Telemetry/CEIP or no updates.
Prepare for "Your Windows is Unprotected! Please insert your credit card here to get the latest updates" (okay, they've not done the last one - YET - give them time).
On a side note, if my computer tells me it's insecure, I'm not putting my credit card anywhere near it.
The patents in question, if they are proved valid, have far reaching applications. This will be bigger than the SCO Caldera Unix thing ever was.
The patents include: [web-copy-pasted From Ars article above]
Nos. 9,143,801 and 8,964,849, relating to "significance maps" for coding video data;
No. 8,116,739, describing methods of displaying messages;
No. 8,886,212, describing tracking location of mobile devices;
No. 8,688,439, relating to speech decoding and compression;
No.7,440,561, describing integrating wireless phones into a PBX network;
No. 8,554,218, describing call routing methods; and
No. 7,372,961, a method of generating a cryptographicpublic key.
So, how does this impact all of us?
First, they've already signed a cross licensing deal with Cisco. Cisco's paying them a license fee as well. What does Cisco get out of it? That last patent is against OpenSSL, specifically on the generation of X.509 certificates and certain cryptographic methods. (How? I thought that business methods weren't patent-able?). So, that includes certificate based VPNs, self-signed HTTPS certificates, and things like that found on the router. Since the method of generation appears to be patented, even work-alike implementations, e.g. LibreSSL, are probably in danger of lawsuits. So, for free, Cisco gets to single-handedly raise the cost of home and small business router appliances, and quite-possibly squeeze some of the smaller ones out of business. Not to mention punishing open firmware router implementations at the same time, such as SmoothWall, DD-WRT, and OpenWRT.
If history serves as any guide, Microsoft will be the next to pony up (Just like they did with SCO Unix). Microsoft would benefit greatly from this agreement. They'll get to squeeze the phone market and the Open Source ecosystem all at the same time. They'll probably cross-license with RIM, and make sure that WinMo is covered. Then they'd go to the phone manufacturers and sell it for less than they'd have to pay RIM for each phone with the infringing OpenSSL bits and Android installed. Google has already shown they've no interest in shielding their partners from patent litigation. RIM and Microsoft will likely start small, with Alcatel and Blu, and work their way up to HTC and Samsung. Similarly, MS will probably ask RIM to provide Linux licenses (which they will pay for their Azure instances), so they can attempt to force Google and Amazon to do the same.
It's not quite the end of the world though. Linux and open source have beaten overly broad patents before. We may be entering a period of long technological stagnation, while we wait to see what happens with all this.
Bah! I've got you one better. I'm looking at a IBM 6400, a LINE printer. Instead of a traveling head, like the serial matrix printer, it prints a line at time, and the speeds are measured in lines per minute. Takes that crazy big US fanfold (14 7/8" by 11"). It is still going strong 22 years after it was purchased. It's absolutely fantastic, but it's cabinet is all dinged and scratched up. Back cabinet door had to be removed because it wouldn't shut. Has its own closet now, so we can quiet it down. Has not had a driver since Windows 3.11 WFW, but works fine with ESC/P graphics with either Linux, MacOS X (oh yeah, it's just macOS now), or Windows. Except with Windows, you might have trouble with margins. Microsoft, tractor fed printers do not need margins! I eventually found an Epson DFX-5000+ driver that worked without margins (yes, even supported in Windows 10, no less), but I suppose the DFX-8500 or DFX-9000 drivers would have worked as well. Odd to use a serial matrix driver on a line printer, but it works great. Besides the usual printer maintenance (rollers, ink in the print heads and what have you), this thing will probably be going 50 years from now, and will likely only die because no one's making parts for it anymore. There's a Genicom 5100 next to it, but it looks pristine compared to the 6400 (it wasn't partially dropped off the back of the moving truck, so I'm told).
Slashdot Mirror
Three years? You got double the expected life if the smart TV had some kind of Android in it. Android seems to require new hardware every one and a half to two years. If you're fortunate, you get updates within the first year, and security fixes for the next 1/2, then you are SOL.
Even if it was one of those Roku TVs, you could still have trouble. I heard one (one of the first) had an issue where it could not steam more than one show consecutively without the Roku requiring a reboot. Oh, and it would also reboot randomly. Roku branded LG, if anyone is curious.
Perhaps the TV makers could get together and make a TV card expansion slot, with a promise to support the slot for 5 to 7 years. Then again, that would make the cost go up. TV makers benefit financially when require us to get a new TV every 4 to 6 years.
There's the boot economic theory that says rich men can save money on expensive boots, but if the companies collude to make crappy boots, what happens then?
From what I understand, StarDock bought the rights to the name 'Star Control' and 'Star Control II' in one of those asset liquidation sales of the old Accolade IP. Accolade was the publisher of the original Star Control, and had ownership rights to the name. Toys for Bob (the company that Paul & Fred founded), retained all the other rights - which is how the Ur-Quan Masters re-release of Star Control 2 came about. Stardock appears to have believed (incorrectly, IMHO) that name "Star Control" meant the whole game, characters included. When they got wind that TfB was making a sequel to UQM, they sued. IIRC, they may have also used a DMCA request to try to have the Ur Quan Masters taken down at the same time (as I recall, TfB quashed that pretty quickly). IMHO, it looks like StarDock was trying to use the legal system to wrestle ownership of the Star Control characters away from Toys for Bob.
As a final aside, Toys for Bob has been around for quite a while making games for other companies. I see that they've created Spyro, Skylanders, and various licensed titles. Activision appears to have an ownership stake in TfB. StarDock may have just bitten off way more than they can chew. Activision has pretty good lawyers - re:Bnetd and other lawsuits. They're not the Nazgul yet, but they're well on their way. While I hate to see things go to court, it appears that Activision is completely justified stomping the crap out of StarDock. I wonder if they'll be better stewards of StarDock's (gaming) IP than StarDock was?
Full Disclosure: I was a big fan of StarDock's Impulse gaming platform, and dumped about $150 into at one point. At which point, it was sold to GameStop, which promptly ran it into the ground (it took 2 years, but still - they could've been a contender!). Thankfully, I was able to get about 1/3 of the money back as GameStop credit. They may have also thrown a couple of steam keys my way as well. So, yeah, not the biggest fan of StarDock. Oh, and StarDock is the publisher/developer of the Master of Magic clone, War of Magic (Elemental). That didn't go so well for them, either.
No no no, the renewals are 180 days if you have Volume Licensed copies, Like Enterprise and Windows 10 LTSB. Then you have to check in with your local KMS (Key Management Server) within that time frame or you get the scary "Not Genuine" and "You might be a victim of software counterfeiting" messages.
Right now, for Retail and OEM Windows installs, the license for Windows lasts as long as your computer HWID stays the same. However, changing enough of your hardware generates a new HWID and you have to call up MS and beg for a new license. Which right now they do, but I'm sure that'll stop at some point.
So what you are saying is, "Now is not the time to get into app development", right?
Don't forgot, their new Java licensing scheme: Per physical core on the server side, and also by named user on the client side. $10 each. Yes, even if all the users use the workstation in shifts, they want to be paid 3 times or more. Combine that with the rapid deprecation of features (JavaFX, Java Web Start), and the Chrome catching version numbering scheme, and you have a recipe for disaster if you choose Java for any projects today. In fact, if you've done any development in Java, now might be the time to investigate alternative cross-platform technologies, like .NET.
.NET over Java. What's the world coming to? So, for clarification, is there any possibility that MS could pull an Oracle with .NET?
I cannot believe I just recommended
I really didn't know that PS+ was half the price of Gold, and I forgot that the Gold games are 4/mo not 2/mo. Thank you for correcting me. Keep up the good work!
Nah, there's a dedicated server that Epic controls. The kids that are playing are clients of those servers. Normally MS & Sony (and now N) charge for the privilege of playing on their servers. From what I gather, Epic is paying those costs to keep kids playing.
If they ever stop making money, whatever update they are about to release would then require Nintendo Online to play.
I'm willing to bet Epic makes more money off skins than they would if they received a portion of the Nintendo Online subscription proceeds.
I have heard that Fortnite is free (I'm guessing that Epic is paying the N for the servers so that kids don't have to).
While I am mostly against fees for Online play in general, I do understand that the infrastructure (servers, what-not) has to be maintained somehow. MS charges $120/year for Gold and the PS4 Online charges are similar. The N is charging 1/3 that for up to 8 accounts ($35/yr). Gold gives[1] you (theoretically) 1 AAA game for the One and 1 AAA[2] for the 360. The N gives you 20 NES games (that re-authorize monthly) and online save storage.
[1] The XB1 games are only licensed. Once you drop your gold, they will no longer play - "This title is no longer licensed for your system" - or some such. The 360 games are yours to keep, but as with the XB1 titles, none of the online features will work.
[2] Xbox AAA includes ports of titles from other consoles, like Sega's "Wonder Boy in Monster Land" (Sega Master System, 1988) port for this month. A 30 year old game.
"Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker" was recently (2-3 months ago) released on Switch and 3DS.
It's a 3D puzzle based game. IIRC, the Switch version has some Mario Odyssey inspired levels.
the AMD K5 was AMD's first processor and released in 1996
I know I had an AMD 386DX/40. Intel was pretty expensive back then, and I couldn't have purchased the processor for what I paid for the whole full tower unit. Okay, so it was the Am386. You likely recall the K5 release name because they renamed the 586 the Pentium and the 686 the Pentium Pro, and they sued AMD and Cyrix for using the numbers 486 and 586. Ultimately Intel lost. However, to shield itself from lawsuits, AMD had no choice but to name their processor the K5. Also, Cyrix (now Via) named their processors the 5x86 and the 6x86.
I have a fondness for ol' wrestler Lou Albano as Mario. The live-action segments were pretty terrible, showing Mario and Luigi's home life. I still remember when Madonna was the guest star of the live action segment and she was pretty shamelessly trying to sleep with both of them. Even when I was 12 I knew that was pretty damned inappropriate.
That's cool. I must admit I'm now curious about that episode.
I liked the UNICEF Smurf promo [youtube.com], made with permission of Peyo's estate. Now why couldn't they have THAT in the live-action movie?
That's really quite disturbing. What's more disturbing is that they didn't have to doctor the standard Smurf footage all that much to do it. As for the live-action Smurfs - yeah - that's one of those things you either don't watch, or just watch once and say, "That was absolutely terrible. *poof* I wish they'd make a live-action Smurf movie. And while I'm wishing, a sequel to the Matrix would be nice, too."
I see [Disney Gummi Bears] currently available on DVD on Amazon.
Great, thanks!
I've seen those. Those Super Mario episodes (The Super Mario Bros Super Show) must have been extremely low budget. Usually, there would be a pretty bad live action segment followed by a terrible cartoon. To be fair, most Saturday morning cartoons were terrible - maybe as an incentive to get kids outside? Anyway, the to give TSMBSS mass-market appeal, the cartoon segment has a rap intro. When the credits rolled, it featured the live-action Mario (a sort-of-Italian white guy) rapping and 'dancing' while the credits rolled. You just have to see it
As for the Zelda cartoon - no rap intro, just narration. It is obvious one of the writers was a huge fan of Steve Martin, and tried to transfer some of Steve's stage persona to Link. Link doesn't pull it off - at all. He comes off as a whiny entitled punk seeking a kiss from Zelda. The entitled part might be why is isn't getting any. Maybe they should've gone with the Rodney Dangerfield "I get no respect" line instead?
Mighty Orbots - Saturday morning sentai-type Japanese animation (small team, combining robots, etc). Single 1/2 season, 13 episodes (includes ending). Only aired for about six months. Production halted by a lawsuit from Tonka (GoBots). Not widely available.
Gummi Bears (Disney's Adventures of the) - Since this is from the 80s, it's likely locked in Disney's vault
Thundarr the Barbarian - futuristic fantasy. Like Conan, but set in the future. A princess/sorcerer and a Mok (a Wookie) are his companions.
The Littles - may as well call it the MacGuyvers. They could build anything out of cardboard, rubber bands and buttons. Including aircraft.
Muppet Babies - every episode was different, but the better ones were movie themed versions where the muppets would act out various roles. Idea for it came from the movie "The Muppets Take Manhattan"
Smurfs - little blue dudes from a magical forest. I preferred the original narration intro over the shortened doom & gloom intro.
Fat Albert - This taught kids the dangers of urban life, and is still somewhat relevant today. Some of the stereotypes are not-so-nice, and we've recently discovered that the main star was into helpless women, and therefore you'll likely never see this show anywhere.
My Ethernet port now shows up in ifconfig as the very reasonable "em0".
em0? Do you mean en0? IIRC, it stands for Ethernet Network #0. IRIX uses (used) the same network naming scheme as well.
Pedantry aside, I sort of understand why the do the funky name scheme. The idea is that the name is based on the location of the slot, so PCI/PCIx slot #0, so that's where the p0 comes from. The s19 is a unique identifier based on some properties your card has. This way your cards don't bounce around the network names. However, some problems arise due to wireless cards identifying themselves on bus -209, so you get wireless names like wlx32559s18 and so on.
ArchLinux has come up with a way to deal with this, so long as you stay away from the standard eth0 (I use en numbers myself). It should work in the other Linux versions, also, but I've not tried it. Here's the link. That said, even back in the ifconfig days, I used something on a CentOS server these lines to give a specific eth-number affinity for a specific Ethernet port by mac address.
I understand why you've switched to BSD (FreeBSD?), I've used it in the past, back in the late 90s. My suggestion is to track stable, and dedicate some time to the mailing list to understanding what they are doing what they are doing. But don't upgrade stable (build world) without reading the release notes. There was a big deal when one of the stable bumps (like 3.8 to 3.11) broke world if you didn't stop off at 3.9 first. Also, build your own kernel. The kernel config for BSD, IIRC, is a giant text file. You flip the bits that you want, recompile, reboot and you are good to go.
Here now, I believe you've forgotten about the 0th octet?
chmod 777
is really
chmod 0777
The first three bits are:
SUID bit (4xxx) - Set UID on file. Runs with permission level of owner, use on executable files, beware, however, for if they are owned as root, they run as root. If you see a S, it means the SUID bit is set, but you cannot use it - the file's not executable. In Linux/Unix, does nothing for directories.
SGID bit (2xxx) - Set GID on file. Runs the executable with group ownership of the assigned group. Same with dirs.
Sticky Bit (1xxx) - Set sticky on a directory (see /tmp), prevents other users from truncating your temp files. On my Linux servers, the /tmp directory permissions are always 1777.
Nope, from what I gather the Mac drives were [zoned] CAV (constant angular velocity), and the PC drives were CLV (constant linear velocity).
I remember some CD ROM burners back in the day with these properties as well (Plextor comes to mind). That was important because it could more accurately write the main data channel, plus some p & q channels that SecuROM or SafeDisc used as copy projection measures (look up CloneCD / ClonyXXL, Alcohol 120%, DiscJuggler, and 1:1 copy).
DOS user here: One of the tools I was introduced to in college, was SMAX. Smax.com was a TSR (terminate & stay resident) that would run in the background, allowing you to use your disk with up to 21 sectors per track (SPT). This in turn got you fairly close to 1.7MiB per floppy, instead of 1.44 MiB per floppy. The program needed for format your disk for this was fdformat. A trick was that you could make sure that you copied smax.com to the disk first, then you could load it in case you forgot your utils disk. All three 720k disks of F19 Stealth Fighter could be made to fit on one fdformatted floppy. I thought I packed the EXE with LZEXE; but it may have used OVL (overlay?) files, so I might not have been able to that.
Tip: For floppy drives, Teac made the most reliable readers. Added USB bonus is they are twice as fast as the floppy controller on the motherboard. They were the gold standard, especially their dual 5.25" QD and 3.5" HD disk unit.
In my (admitted limited) sampling of disks, the absolute worst were those that came from the software and games purchased. There was a reason there was a page in each box that said BACK UP YOUR DISKS! Those things must have been rated for 25 reads or less. After that was the no-name brand disks. You could hole punch or fdformat those, but they wouldn't hold up. I had the best luck with 3M and Sony media. Imation disks were a crapshoot - some great, some not-so-great. Those Sony disks - so long as they weren't smax disks, are still readable with a Windows 8.1 PC today - but they are much easier to mount and image with Linux. Windows 10 dumped the floppy controller support, and also the joystick port support, I believe. Don't know about RS232 support, though.
You might want to look into Squashfs. The archive command for a single directory (or file) is:
mksquashfs source_dir target_image.sqfs
If you want to do multiple directories or files, no problem:
mksquashfs source_dir1 source_dir2 souce_file1 source_file2 target_image.sqfs
Squashfs generation is comparable to that of tar.gz files. Not only does it do gzip compression natively, it can compress the inodes in the directory tree and also do fs level de-duplication. Squashfs is compatible with any kernel from 2009+ (maybe before), and newer kernels also have the ability to use lzo and xz compressors. It's intended to be used anywhere that you would use tar.gz or cpio, with the added benefit that you can mount it loopback and extract a file that you need without the overhead of sequentially scanning through the tape archive. I've heard the windows version of 7zip can access a squashfs archive as well (as of 16.04 it must be a gzip compressed sqfs image). Squashfs natively detects sparse files - unless you tell it not to.
The only thing I'm not sure how well unsquashfs handles the extraction of sparse files. Linux tar is totally unsuitable when dealing with sparse files, as it requires the full amount of space to extract a sparse file. For Linux tar, there's a workaround for sparse files, and that is to install BSD tar, which seems to extract as sparse files correctly.
You need to have a look at the Asus-merlin project as well. It's a custom firmware for Asus routers. It includes a persistant JFFS partition and a raft of other cool features. I've had three, and the only complaint that I have is that, under load, they can get up to 50 C. The lower memory 520gU was the only one that I encountered a lock up issue with (when downloading several files from a CDN with Download-them-all) and video streaming, and that was only 1-2x per year. All of the others have been extremely stable, even with heavy downloads and video streaming.
Sorry, those bootloaders are cryptographically signed with keys in either Verizon's or AT&T's possession. These keys preclude the installation of any custom ROMs. Short of an AT&T dev being careless with the crypto-keys, it's not going to happen. In my experience, Samsung phones are pretty beefy. They have to be to run the TouchWiz OS layer on top of Android OS.
If you have an older Samsung phone - for instance the Galaxy S3 - and you have the ability to install a Custom ROM (Cyanogen, Slim, Oxygen), they will work fairly well. The S3 can even run Marshmallow (6.0), where the Note 3 is stuck on Lollipop (5.0.1). The Note3 didn't even get even 5.1.1! The S3's only problem is the stock camera occasionally crashes (and requires reboot to fix). There's some 3rd party cameras out there that work better. Overall, the S3 with Cyanogen is much, much snappier than with TouchWiz.
I still don't understand all the hate toward systemd.
I think I can break some of this down for you...
Linux has had a number of de-facto standard implementations for things through the years: (working from memory) - For sound we had some various odds and ends, then focus started to go toward ALSA, then later we had JACK, and PulseAudio. Now it seems most major distros use PulseAudio.
And who 'spearheaded' PolypAudio - err, PulseAudio? Lennart Poettering. I was really excited about PA, until it utterly destroyed my sound for a couple of years. I couldn't make it work in Gentoo, and after about 8 months of pain, I switched to Ubuntu. That was also painful, but at least there were users there to help me transition from Gentoo and fix my audio issues. Audio was so bad, I had to switch back to Windows for anything audio related, whether it was games, audio, or video. The quality was especially bad for video capture. The kicker is I still today need to use the alsamixer to unmute channels from time to time. PA doesn't seem to have any way to do this.
- For our displays we've had the X window system for ages. Now we're starting to move toward Wayland and there's still some of the old grey/neckbeards that are simply afraid of change and digging their heels in on X.
I can understand this, too. The Wayland folks say, "The code is old and broken, we need to rewrite it." Wiser folks than I have blogged about this. Let me give you some examples of projects that foundered or died because of rewriting:
In addition to that, they've deprecated useful features like X11 forwarding, and they just dusted off their hands and said, "Not my problem. That functionality should be handled by an application." It seems short-sighted to remove a working feature that a portion of people use, just because they don't believe it has value. From what I've read, adding it back in will be a non-trivial task.
Your big complaint is that it was once free-as-in-speech *and* free-as-in-beer. Tell me, how is software that you pay no money for and have access to all source code somehow not both definitions of free? Are you not still free to pick a distribution that uses sysvinit? upstart? openrc? Assuming you have the knowledge, ability, and time, couldn't you roll your own distro with all those features you want *and* pick which init system you wanted? Couldn't you get the source of systemd and rip out those things you don't like?
Sure, just like you could assemble your own car or build your own house. By yourself. Oh, and could you pay inspectors $MEGA_CURRENCY to go over it with a fine toothed comb to make sure it won't come down on your head in the middle of the night, or when explode when you flush all toilets simultaneously, or fall apart at 88 mph?
Looking at it another way, one of the biggest complaints about Linux adoption was the fragmentation across different distributions. Now Linux is starting to approach a standard for user space, which would make cross-distro development easier. Isn't that a good thing?
I agree that some standardization is a good thing. But we need not remove *all* choice. That puts us in the same boat as MS.
Also, one last note on L. P. He favors breaking compatibility with POSIX and BSD to speed development. So, if he feels that way about POSIX, the standard that makes Linux, well, Linux, who's to say he won't radically change direction again?
Don't worry, they've already warned us, updates are going to be all or nothing affairs. There will be a "November Patch Set for Windows 7", with no choice as to which patches you want fixed. Do you want the privilege escalation exploit fixed, but not the GDI+ update because it causes display bug in your custom business app? Too bad. You should've picked Windows Enterprise (and dedicated a part of your life to patch testing). Don't even get me started on the Telemetry/CEIP or no updates.
Prepare for "Your Windows is Unprotected! Please insert your credit card here to get the latest updates" (okay, they've not done the last one - YET - give them time).
On a side note, if my computer tells me it's insecure, I'm not putting my credit card anywhere near it.
The patents in question, if they are proved valid, have far reaching applications. This will be bigger than the SCO Caldera Unix thing ever was.
So, how does this impact all of us?
First, they've already signed a cross licensing deal with Cisco. Cisco's paying them a license fee as well. What does Cisco get out of it? That last patent is against OpenSSL, specifically on the generation of X.509 certificates and certain cryptographic methods. (How? I thought that business methods weren't patent-able?). So, that includes certificate based VPNs, self-signed HTTPS certificates, and things like that found on the router. Since the method of generation appears to be patented, even work-alike implementations, e.g. LibreSSL, are probably in danger of lawsuits. So, for free, Cisco gets to single-handedly raise the cost of home and small business router appliances, and quite-possibly squeeze some of the smaller ones out of business. Not to mention punishing open firmware router implementations at the same time, such as SmoothWall, DD-WRT, and OpenWRT.
If history serves as any guide, Microsoft will be the next to pony up (Just like they did with SCO Unix). Microsoft would benefit greatly from this agreement. They'll get to squeeze the phone market and the Open Source ecosystem all at the same time. They'll probably cross-license with RIM, and make sure that WinMo is covered. Then they'd go to the phone manufacturers and sell it for less than they'd have to pay RIM for each phone with the infringing OpenSSL bits and Android installed. Google has already shown they've no interest in shielding their partners from patent litigation. RIM and Microsoft will likely start small, with Alcatel and Blu, and work their way up to HTC and Samsung. Similarly, MS will probably ask RIM to provide Linux licenses (which they will pay for their Azure instances), so they can attempt to force Google and Amazon to do the same.
It's not quite the end of the world though. Linux and open source have beaten overly broad patents before. We may be entering a period of long technological stagnation, while we wait to see what happens with all this.
Bah! I've got you one better. I'm looking at a IBM 6400, a LINE printer. Instead of a traveling head, like the serial matrix printer, it prints a line at time, and the speeds are measured in lines per minute. Takes that crazy big US fanfold (14 7/8" by 11"). It is still going strong 22 years after it was purchased. It's absolutely fantastic, but it's cabinet is all dinged and scratched up. Back cabinet door had to be removed because it wouldn't shut. Has its own closet now, so we can quiet it down. Has not had a driver since Windows 3.11 WFW, but works fine with ESC/P graphics with either Linux, MacOS X (oh yeah, it's just macOS now), or Windows. Except with Windows, you might have trouble with margins. Microsoft, tractor fed printers do not need margins! I eventually found an Epson DFX-5000+ driver that worked without margins (yes, even supported in Windows 10, no less), but I suppose the DFX-8500 or DFX-9000 drivers would have worked as well. Odd to use a serial matrix driver on a line printer, but it works great. Besides the usual printer maintenance (rollers, ink in the print heads and what have you), this thing will probably be going 50 years from now, and will likely only die because no one's making parts for it anymore. There's a Genicom 5100 next to it, but it looks pristine compared to the 6400 (it wasn't partially dropped off the back of the moving truck, so I'm told).