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User: m.dillon

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  1. Re:fvwm is what I use, anyway on Removing Libsystemd0 From a Live-running Debian System · · Score: 1

    Wow, someone other than me who uses fvwm (fvwm2 that is). For the same reason as well. I've tried many other window managers and they all have glitzy graphics and look pretty cool... and also all fall flat on their face if I have a lot of open windows. Spread over 4 virtual x 2 real screens. Dozens and dozens of open windows, usually a mix of xterms, firefox, and xpdf.

    Fvwm? I configure a bunch of button bars and a couple of background clocks stuck to my screens. And, of course, a color-gradient title bar:

    ButtonStyle 3 Vector 13 26x29@1 34x21@1 50x35@1 70x21@1 79x29@1 63x48@0 79x65@1 70x75@0 50x61@0 34x75@0 26x65@0 44x48@1 26x29@0

    Yah, it definitely takes some messing around with the configuration file but what I love most about fvwm2? It's ultra stable and so is the config file. I don't care if its old, it does everything I need it to and it does it fast.

    -Matt

  2. Can't help you much with the hardware, but on Ask Slashdot: Panic Button a Very Young Child Can Use · · Score: 1

    But I can suggest that the best technology for this sort of thing is a stand-alone cellular modem, preferentially one that is on the same network as your cell phone. Wire the button into that and have it send a text message to your phone and to your gmail address.

    There are certainly cellular modems that work over a serial link and I assume there are devices you can buy off the shelf that will integrate the whole thing into a panic button type of interface. But I haven't researched all-in-one solutions so I can't point you at one. We use cellular modem / texting for alarms and alerts for telemetry systems (replacing satellite paging systems which died out many years ago).

    The message will flow through the fewest number of networks possible to reach its destination (typically just the telco's own network) and texting protocols are quite robust on the telco side. It's the most reliable solution possible. If you run the message through your home router it is likely traversing four or five completely different networks to reach its destination and that just isn't as reliable.

    But frankly, still not at the level of quality needed for a serious medical condition.

    -Matt

  3. Consumable photos verses memories on What Happened To the Photography Industry In 2014? · · Score: 1

    The way I see people using smartphone cameras these days is almost entirely for consumable pictures... pictures you take and gawk at for a few seconds, maybe post, and then are forgotten in the pile of tens of thousands of similar pictures. Only a very few are good enough to be memories and with the extremely narrow sweet spot of a smartphone camera or even a modern point-and-shoot, it is relatively difficult to create something that distinguishes itself. The medium and high-end DSLR camera vendors shouldn't try to go after that market.

    But there is a market. Any vacation or long trip that you might want to create a memory with. You don't have to be a professional photographer. But if you want to create something memorable from that sort of trip and make a little (or big) book about it, a smartphone or point-and-shoot camera ain't gonna do it. You won't get something like this with a smartphone:

    http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/~...

    For anyone with an interest in travel, or even modestly-sized vacations closer to home, bringing along a decent camera (something bigger than a point and shoot) is what gives you that permanency after you've returned home.

    Probably the younger crowd doesn't understand so much because you simply haven't taken enough pictures in your lives yet (even with a smartphone and social media). But you will understand once you get to the point where you are overflowing with crap in your photo archive to the point where you don't even bother to look at it any more.

    -Matt

  4. Re:It's not all about the numbers on What Happened To the Photography Industry In 2014? · · Score: 2

    The GPS works quite well on the 6D, but the WIFI is basically unusable. There is no background upload option like the WIFI grip had and there is no way to connect to anything on the internet other than Canon's canned services (no way to upload to an FTP server for example). The pad-based remote control works only 'ok'... reviewing pictures on the pad works relatively well but it's a waste of time to try to do it while out in the field, so there isn't much of a point to it.

    I'm not dissing the 6D, I have one... it's a great camera. But the WIFI feature is so bad it might as well not be there.

    -Matt

  5. Sound similar to what AT&T tried to do on BT Unveils 1000Mbps Capable G.fast Broadband Rollout For the United Kingdom · · Score: 1

    AT&Ts U-Verse runs fiber to a corner box in the neighborhood and then dual-DSL over existing copper lines to homes. It's been a dismal failure. When they initially rolled it out they thought they could situate the corner boxes relatively far away from the homes but the copper had so much noise and cross talk it just didn't work, so they've had to move the boxes closer. And even then they barely get 20 MBits downlink and a really horrid uplink. Comcast is twice as fast at a minimum.

    Sounds like BT hit the same problem. The only real solution is, as they said, make the copper portion of the run as short as possible (ultimately remove it entirely but that means a lot of retrenching).

    -Matt

  6. Re:Salary versus cost of living in each city on By the Numbers: The Highest-Paying States For Tech Professionals · · Score: 2

    Well, not necessarily true. You are ignoring the costs to maintain the home, a myrid of utilities you have to pay every month that renters often don't, insurance, and property taxes. I'm a home owner but I don't think there is such a huge gap between owning and renting. A lot of older owners are faced with having to sell their homes after retirement and moving somewhere cheaper when they would rather stay where they are. It's more like a safety net and less like a nest-egg, frankly.

    That said, I prefer to own.

    -Matt

  7. Might be difficult on Ask Slashdot: Where Can You Get a Good 3-Button Mouse Today? · · Score: 1

    Mice are so mass-market these days that it is hard to find one that actually performs properly. I've gone through a lot of mice over the years, always preferring the hardwired mice over the wireless (dead battery == unhappy), but in the last round I simply couldn't find a wired mouse that worked well. Everything being sold was wireless.

    Of late, many of the mice I've tried have simply been too big and bulky, stretching my fingers and generally uncomfortable.

    I wound up going with a Microsoft Sculpt 1569 wireless mouse (w/ Nano Transceiver). The Logitech M325 wireless also works but its middle-button-scroll wheel isn't ratcheted. These small mice are nice, my thumb and two right fingers hang over the edge and stay relaxed.

    Also I recommend buying a non-rechargable alkaline AA for it, which will last 6 months. The rechargable NiMH batteries usually only last 1-2 months before they have to be replaced/recharged due to nominal leakage, which is too annoying (though I suppose one could buy low-leakage NiMHs).

    The middle button scroll wheel isn't a problem. Most of them can also be clicked left and right which IS a problem because it's trivial to accidently click left or click right when you are just trying to push down on it as a middle button. So I disable the mouse-wheel left/right action entirely via:

    xinput set-button-map Mouse1 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 0 0 10 11

    For the transceiver I find that (obviously) the closer it is to the mouse the better. The best solution is to buy a keyboard that has a USB extension on its right or left side and plug the transceiver into that. Then the transceiver is right next to the mouse with no extra cabling. The Razer (mechanical) gaming keyboards are my favorite... very heavy so they don't move around and have the same feel as the old IBM mechnical keyboards had. 80 WPM is a breeze on them.

    -Matt

  8. The thing I remember about EISA? on User Plea Means EISA Support Not Removed From Linux · · Score: 1

    I remember that every time I changed a card out the machine took 30 minutes to reconfigure itself, because some doochebag of a programmer wrote the #$%#$% configurator that all the vendors used. An operation that could have been done in 5 seconds if written properly. That was the first ... and last EISA machine I ever bought.

    -Matt

  9. Mmmmm on OpenBSD Releases a Portable Version of OpenNTPD · · Score: 1

    DragonFly has had its own ntp-only client for years, dntpd. Not sure why this is suddenly becoming a topic now.

    In terms of portability, every operating system has different sysctls or system calls for manipulating the clock. There is no single standard for setting the frequency drift correction, step, or slide operations to correct the time. And part of the problem is that most of these APIs are deficient in one way or another and make it difficult for the ntp client to run the corrections without generating feedback which messes up further corrections.

    Beyond that, the code is fairly straight-forward.

    -Matt

  10. Re:Good for the EFF on EFF: Apple's Dev Agreement Means No EFF Mobile App For iOS · · Score: 2

    You know, Apple has given out over $25B (billion, with a B) to its iOS developers since its inception. You don't have to like all the terms, frankly, but in the real world being too altruistic isn't going to do you any favors. Apple puts a premium on the security of its devices and has to continuously juggle the sensibilities of dozens large companies.

    History is littered with open-source programmers with so little business sense they wind up living in a RV park their whole lives and retiring with zero savings. Or worse.

    -Matt

  11. Re:Principles vs Practicality on EFF: Apple's Dev Agreement Means No EFF Mobile App For iOS · · Score: 1

    This isn't really correct. HTML5 apps aren't even remotely as smooth as a native iOS app, particularly when it comes to scrolling and window moves. I have a few on my ipad. Developers will use them in a pinch but pretty much just until they are able to get a native app approved.

    -Matt

  12. Seems a bit silly on Ask Slashdot: High-Performance Laptop That Doesn't Overheat? · · Score: 1

    And a waste of time and money. Are these supposed to be game machines or business machines? Come on....

    -Matt

  13. Re:One word ... on What Language Will the World Speak In 2115? · · Score: 1

    Thumbs up. Can't get much more accurate than that.

    -Matt

  14. Lots of moving parts on How We'll Program 1000 Cores - and Get Linus Ranting, Again · · Score: 4, Informative

    There are lots of moving parts here. Just adding cores doesn't work unless you can balance it out with sufficient cache and main memory bandwidth to go along with the cores. Otherwise the cores just aren't useful for anything but the simplest of algorithms.

    The second big problem is locking. Locks which worked just fine under high concurrent loads on single-socket systems will fail completely on multi-socket systems just from the cache coherency bus bandwidth the collisions cause. For example, on an 8-thread (4 core) single-chip Intel chip having all 8 threads contending on a single spin lock does not add a whole lot of overhead to the serialization mechanic. A 10ns code sequence might serialize to 20ns. But try to do the same thing on a 48-core opteron system and suddenly serialization becomes 1000x less efficient. A 10ns code sequence can serialize to 10us or worse. That is how bad it can get.

    Even shared locks using simple increment/decrement atomic ops can implode on a system with a lot of cores. Exclusive locks? Forget it.

    The only real solution is to redesign algorithms, particularly the handling of shared resources in the kernel, to avoid lock contention as much as possible (even entirely). Which is what we did with our networking stack on DragonFly and numerous other software caches.

    Some things we just can't segregate, such as the name cache. Shared locks only modestly improve performance but it's still a whole lot better than what you get with an exclusive lock.

    The namecache is important because for something like a bulk build where we have 48 cores all running gcc at the same time winds up sharing an enormous number of resources. Not just the shell invocations (where the VM pages are shared massively and there are 300 /bin/sh processes running or sitting due to all the Makefile recursion), but also the namecache positive AND negative hits due to the #include path searches.

    Other things, particularly with shared resources, can be solved by making the indexing structures per-cpu but all pointing to the same shared data resource. In DragonFly doing that for seemingly simple things like an interface's assigned IP/MASKs can improve performance by leaps and bounds. For route tables and ARP tables, going per-cpu is almost mandatory if one wants to be able to handle millions of packets per second.

    Even something like the fork/exec/exit path requires an almost lockless implementation to perform well on concurrent execs (e.g. such as /bin/sh in a large parallel make). Before I rewrote those algorithms our 48-core opteron was limited to around 6000 execs per second. After rewriting it's more like 40,000+ execs per second.

    So when one starts working with a lot of cores for general purpose computing, pretty much the ENTIRE operating system core has to be reworked verses what worked well with only 12 cores will fall on its face with more.

    -Matt

  15. Re:Don't like'm for near-sidedness on Ask Slashdot: Are Progressive Glasses a Mistake For Computer Users? · · Score: 1

    Sorry, meant to say 'do not get any eye strain'.

    -Matt

  16. Don't like'm for near-sidedness on Ask Slashdot: Are Progressive Glasses a Mistake For Computer Users? · · Score: 1

    I've been near-sided all my life, and as I get older my vision has slowly become even more near-sided. I've tried progressives but frankly my prescription is already strong enough that I have to go with plastic multi-layered lens and the distortion at the edges is noticeable with just the normal lenses. Progressives? Total fail.

    What I do instead is simply ask my doctor to soften the prescription a bit. So my distance viewing isn't quite as good (and I couldn't read small text on a T.V. screen from 10 feet away either)... but my viewing of a computer screen is still in very good focus and, most importantly, I do get any eye strain.

    And I'm looking at a screen 60+ hours a week (and have been since I was 14).

    -Matt

  17. Don't get a USB printer, get a networked printer on Ask Slashdot: Best Options For a Standalone Offline Printing Station? · · Score: 1

    Get a printer that runs over WIFI. For example, the Canon MX922. Then it doesn't matter where the computer OR the printer is in the house... it can just be any of the computers in the house. There might be better compatibility with linux drivers with an HP printer though (if running linux). MACs need the appropriate driver. Windows just has it typically.

    I've had nothing but trouble connecting USB printers to any open-source OS. It just isn't reliable. I wound up using my windows game box as the print server but the nice thing about a WIFI printer is that any computer in the house can talk to it directly as long as it understands what kind of printer it is and has the appropriate driver.

    -Matt

  18. Re:Here's One Idea: on Ask Slashdot: What Should We Do About the DDoS Problem? · · Score: 4, Informative

    Unfortunately all this will accomplish is that you will lock yourself out of legitimate sites, because a lot of the DDOSing out there uses spoofed IP addresses. So now all the DDOSer has to do is spoof, say, google.com's primary IPs and you lock yourself out of google when you block the IPs.

    Until network providers start validating source IPs from their non-transit customers and require their transit customers to validate source IPs for non-transit packets, there's basically no solution that will work.

    -Matt

  19. Generally speaking on Dish Pulls Fox News, Fox Business Network As Talks Break Down · · Score: 1

    Generally speaking, major owners of multiple networks such as Fox often try to force distributors (cable networks, dish, etc) to bundle all of their networks. Kind of an all-or-nothing approach. Otherwise networks like Fox News just wouldn't get distributed at all. It doesn't have a large enough following.

    This is slowly changing as peoples viewing habits change. People are watching less T.V. these days and that is shifting the cost model such that the 'junk' channels are now more of a drag on profits vs the relatively few channels that people still really care about.

    -Matt

  20. Re:Traffic Furniture on Waze Causing Anger Among LA Residents · · Score: 3, Informative

    Yes, this works extremely well in Berkeley too. There are neighborhoods on both sides of Ashby (hwy 13) and along various other routes, but the streets are relatively quiet because traffic furniture either prevents entry from Ashby or directs the flow such that there's no point using them for the commute. And they don't inconvenience the residents either. For a resident or for local travel, entering and exiting only adds a few seconds. For a commuter, trying to use residential streets just doesn't work.

    The barriers seem to be favored over speed bumps. Over the years the speed bumps have been made softer (15 mph bumps now instead of 5 or 10 mph bumps), and are generally concentrated only in areas that simply cannot be blocked off for fire and other safety reasons.

    -Matt

  21. Re:lowering price? on Samsung SSD 850 EVO 32-Layer 3D V-NAND-Based SSD Tested · · Score: 1

    No, actually for flash it does NOT have to be extremely good. Flash memory production can handle lots of bad bits due to process errors. The controller firmware will simply map-out the bad bits, simple as that. If 1% of the flash cells are lost due to process errors, it just isn't a problem.

    The same cannot be said for cpu and ram logic.

    -Matt

  22. Re:You can pry my wallet from my... on The Cashless Society? It's Already Coming · · Score: 0

    Hey mythosaz... I think you will find that trying to save every single one of the many billions of people in the world from all the nasty carrots which get wiggled in front of their faces by big companies every day is a losing proposition. You'll just burn yourself out without making any impact. My recommendation... worry a bit more about yourself and a bit less about everyone else.

    Plenty of people can handle a credit card no-problem. Plenty of people cannot. And the same could be said for a thousand other little bits and pieces of life. That's just the way the world works.

    -Matt

  23. Not really useful on How the Rollout of 5G Will Change Everything · · Score: 1

    except perhaps it will push down data-plan costs a little. But right now, people are capped by their data plans so having all those gigabits is basically worthless.

    -Matt

  24. Re:It DOES have permission on Uber's Android App Caught Reporting Data Back Without Permission · · Score: 4, Insightful

    No, in fact the vast majority of people who run an IOS app on an Apple device who see a permission request pop up that they don't like, say 'No', and the app continues to run just fine.

    Even better, the apps on IOS tend not to request absurd permissions in the first place because they know those pop-ups will annoy their customers enough to either say 'no' anyway or not use the app in the first place. Its a black blotch for an IOS app to request permissions that it does not need, and Apple customers call them on it in the reviews.

    Whereas with android, everything is quiet and silent and people run apps without really understanding what data they are giving away, EVEN if they have read the manifest... so app writers can get away with almost anything and consumer privacy on android is poorer for it.

    -Matt

  25. Re:Have you ever used Android? on Uber's Android App Caught Reporting Data Back Without Permission · · Score: 1

    Google changed the way the permissions are described in order to combine non-invasive permissions and invasive permissions under the same label. Even a person reading the permissions off doesn't really have a clue about how much access the app actually has to their data.

    In anycase, this is why I stopped using Android phones and went with iOS. Apps can't play these sorts of games on iOS.

    -Matt