I think what impressed me most was Skyrim working pretty much out-of-the box. It needed a little prodding to set the amount of VRAM up correctly, but apart from that it Just Worked. It was the first game where I'd not even bothered trying to run it via Windows at all.
Windows hobbled on for a bit longer, occasionally curling up into a ball because I dared to put two PCIe cards in back in slightly different slots, or add a new disk for the ZFS array to use. Then, when it finally self-destructed entirely, I realised that I didn't need it anymore because all the windows games I had were working well enough under WINE. Last year I was persuaded to try Wolfenstein: New Order, and Old Blood - again, they worked out of the box which was impressive. Not sure I'll be so lucky with New Colossus.
Games aside, it's also been very handy for running an ancient version of SONAR I've been using since about 2002. That also had the advantage of allowing me to keep using a USB MIDI interface which Windows 7 had no support for.
Biggest disappointment was Fallout 4, which did not work out of the box and still isn't working as far as I know, though it's getting very close. FO3 and New Vegas are working happily though, even as it gets more and more difficult to run them under Windows itself.
Obviously your mileage may vary. If you have more space and more money to throw at hardware than I do, getting a second machine - or indeed a games console - would achieve the same results with less hassle, and less cat-fighting over the boot block than a dual-boot system. Faffing around with PCIe passthroughs to get a virtual windows instance is another possible approach, but I'd have to buy another licence for an operating system I actively dislike. Besides SONAR, all my day-to-day software is linux-based, so for me, Wine is a really good way of stringing it all together.
What on earth are you talking about? You clearly DO NOT use Firefox at all. None of what you described has been a thing in Firefox for years. Memory leaks in the Firefox 4 days were a major issue but they're barely even on the radar today.
Actually, I've seen it bloat up to 3GB quite a lot lately on Windows at work. No idea what's causing it. Prior to v56 it was generally using about 500MB tops, but now it regularly goes over 2GB after an hour or so of casual use. And this is a bit of a problem because the work laptops only have 8GB and our dev environment wants most of that.
This is going back a while now, but IIRC WP8 only supported Managed C++, which was a restricted enough subset that it ruled out most of the existing codebase including the commercial AES version of SQLite which we needed to use for data protection reasons. For the bulk of the code we might have been able to port it but it would then have made it harder to compile on linux and android...
WindowsCE SUCKED and Apple and Blackberry already killed it.
CE certainly sucked, but many large companies did and still do depend on it. Plus it had the advantage of at least partial source code compatibility with Desktop windows. Simply saying it's shit and they should rewrite their 8+ year codebase for some fly-by-night replacement was not a viable solution.
As for Blackberry and Apple replacing it? Sadly, that's a rose-tinted view. The Blackberry OS was even worse than CE, permanently stuck on Java 1.2 or somesuch and at once point incapable of allocating more than 128K in a single chunk, at least when we were attempting to do our port of the software.
As for Apple, they had literally no provision for industrial handheld software. Either you had to try and put your proprietary, bespoke software - that was intended for internal use by a warehouse company or local authority's parking department - into the same app store that had fart apps and that $999 picture of a ruby, or else you had to try and use their enterprise arrangement and bypass the app store entirely.
The Enterprise arrangement was only open to businesses with over 500 employees, which was rather unfortunate because such companies didn't write applications in-house. They bought them from one of hundreds of small specialist firms who developed industrial handheld software and generally had less than two dozen employees. Which meant they didn't qualify to get their software blessed by Jobs.
Again, given a choice between a shit product and NO product, companies tend to stick with the shit product.
So much this. Enterprise and line-of-business stuff was mostly Windows Mobile or CE, and it was a cut-down version of the Win32 API, mostly C++ code.
Then Microsoft came out with Windows Phone, which had NO compatibility, NO migration path, no nothing. It's all very well to replace an obsolete system with something better, and to be fair, CE was pretty shit with its 32MB process limit. But the simple fact is that the supposed replacement was not fit for purpose. It was like trying to replace a tank with a trailbike.
Windows Phone, at least in its initial incarnations, had no support for C++, or even C# if memory serves. There was literally not one piece of source code from our 400KLOC project that could be re-used, and we'd be looking at maybe 2-3 years to do a rewrite. During which time Windows Phone changed the API completely again between 7 and 8, ditching compatibility a second time. The result, you can see today. Microsoft alienated its entire mobile developer base not once, but twice and then wondered why nobody was writing applications for it. For the companies that didn't exit the market entirely, it was easier to port code from Windows Mobile to Android than it was to port it to Windows Phone. On Android you could at least compile the logic with the NDK, even if the UI had to be redone.
Windows Mobile has the last laugh, mind - my local supermarket is still running it. Presumably they're getting spare devices off ebay.
However, the legislation was drafted by politicians and thus has an "unless you really want to" clause, which is why we've just had a snap election called by the PM at her party's convenience because she liked what she was hearing in the opinion polls.
As I understood it, the key difference is that the PM has get it approved, and the opposition party duly did so. If they had said 'no', it wouldn't have happened.
I can guarantee you it's not 33.000 R/W cycles - the only tech that would allow that is SLC, and practically nobody sells SSD based on SLC anymore. A few manufacturers sell highly overpriced SLC-based SD and microSD cards. Hell, nowadays you'll struggle to even find MLC-based SSDs (~10.000 rewrite cycles AT BEST). Every SSD manufacturer today uses TLC, which means 1000 R/W cycles per cell.
You're still talking about flash technology, as far as I can see... the point of Optane is that it's using this new phase-change stuff. Supposedly it would have a thousand times the write endurance, and be a thousand times faster than NAND flash (though I don't think they ever said whether it was SLC/MLC/TLC they were comparing to). It doesn't look like either promise has come true, though.
Buy a laser pickup turntable. There's no physical contact with the grooves, so no degradation just from playing your record.
Last I heard, they don't work on coloured vinyl because it's translucent. Which is a bit unfortunate, since a lot of the 'Now for the first time on vinyl!' reissues are doing just that.
Doesn't anyone look at tags anymore? You know, the metadata? Or didn't anyone think to um, bypass the whole conversion to actual sound waves and back to digital stream.
When it was taped off-air by your father in 1972 and you're trying to figure out what it is, the tags aren't exactly going to be helpful. That said, it would be nice to just play the MP3 or WAV off local storage instead of having to stick a tablet it next to the speaker.
When this sort of thing works, it can be really, really useful. For example, Michael Garrison's "In the regions of sunreturn", which I'd been trying to identify for nearly 20 years. Probably taped off a record borrowed in the early 1980s. The cassette wasn't labelled properly, and the album was completely instrumental. It took an awful lot of attempts with SoundHound to identify, and was made worse by the fact that the synthesizers used became fashionable in techno and I think some hip-hop stuff later, giving many false positives. But I can't think of any other way to find out what it was, short of sticking a clip on youtube and hoping I get a takedown.
Maybe they too would like to be a part of the mosaic that is Europe
Seems unlikely given that they rather bizarrely voted to leave. Why Bizarre? Well, they've got an arse-load of money from the EU and they've voted to end that and hand over power to the Tories who historically like to shit all over Wales. But whatever.
If you look at the maps, it seems to be largely the impoverished areas of the UK that wanted to leave. Wales certainly fits that bill, having been built on industries such as coal and steel which have declined. AFAIK the fact that they are in such a mess is why they are getting money from the EU (or the EU rebate?) in the first place. I had to smile when the local paper ran a headline lamenting how 'Brexit will cost Wales £500m'. Should have thought of that first. Though to be fair the vote was something like 60/40 in my area so I suspect a fair few people did.
As for why they wanted to leave? The people I know who voted leave cited arguments along the lines of 'EU is undemocratic', 'The EU wants to build some kind of corporate-owned superstate, we want something more socialist', 'If we stay in the EU we'll be subjected to TTIP' (apparently not considering that the trade agreements we'll have to arrange post-Brexit will have us over a barrel where TTIP is concerned). However, there was also an argument about the EU preventing state subsidies, and that it was the reason - or at least the excuse - why the government wouldn't step in to save the Port Talbot steelworks. And that if we did leave, they would at least be forced to make up a different excuse in future.
This, by the way, was the considered opinion of colleagues in a tech company - pretty smart people who could recognise that they didn't really have enough information to truly understand the vast implications of leaving. It's certainly not a cross-section of Wales, which can be somewhat xenophobic, even internally. And as mentioned, has a relatively poor economy. As such, someone trotting out the 'EU migrants took your jobs!' and similar lines could likely get quite a following. Even without that there's a number of disgruntled people with little to lose who wanted to send a message of some kind to The Powers That Be.
But only if you were using your disks with single side devices and you also had to make a notch or you couldn't write anything. I was using double side drives and doing this would have erased the data.
That may have been for 5.25" disks... I think you also had to cut a hole in the case for the optical revolution sensor. I've seen it done, but it was very messy, e.g. the bottom of the disk cut open to remove the actual disk so the sensor hole could be cut without damaging the disk.
What the grandparent post is probably thinking of is 3.5" disks, which had an optical sensor and a hole to tell the drive if it was low density (720k) or high density (1.44M). The theory went that they were economising by making the low density disks from rejected high density ones. Either way, you could drill a hole in the things (which risks swarf ending up inside the disk and damaing the heads) or later on, get custom hole-punches to easily and safely cut out the notch in the disk casing.
I keep reading here and there that they're stopping Nokia and Windows Phone, and what do you know... The entirety of the 12 people using Windows phone will be thrilled. That's for sure. As for the rest...
It's not Windows. Looks like it might be running S30+, which is either a stripped down version of Series 30 without J2ME support, or something different and strange.
I must be getting in early as there is no whining so far about GIMP being far inferior to Photoshop.
What real world work can be done in Photoshop but not GIMP?
Vectors. I'm not sure to what extent Photoshop can do them because I don't use it much, but I do receive PSD files with speech bubbles and such that aren't there once GIMP has imported it.
I think Photoshop can also do significantly more advanced layer effects than GIMP currently has - the nondestructive editing features may cover that, but it's maybe a decade away at the current rate of progress.
The most aggravating thing for me at the moment is the layer masking capability - GIMP can do it AFAIK but it can't import the masking in from a PSD file. Which is not altogether surprising given that PSD is proprietary and effectively undocumented.
A lot has been said about Krita as a substitute for GIMP, and although it seems to have made astonishing progress recently, it's aimed almost exclusively at digital painting. Last I saw (2.9) it fails miserably if you attempt to use it for pixel art, cel-shading and other comic-related tasks that I currently use GIMP for. I will certainly keep an eye on it, though as it shows a lot of promise.
I worked for the company that used to provide this service (and a lot fo other 800, 866 and 900 numbers) for the NJ and NYC areas.
It was fascinating equipment. Ancient but robust. It was a constantly turning magnetic drum that had the recording on it about 6 inches tall with a little oil reservoir on top that had to be filled every few months.
If you want something approaching steampunk, the UK had a speaking clock system using 1930s technology:
We use Lync (well, formerly known as Lync, now re branded as Skype for Business) for our work IM system
The server is constantly locking up/dumping connections and just generally feels quite unreliable...
We frequently get this weird glitch where the voice has some high-frequency ring modulation, giving it this weird crystalline dalek sound to it. The strength varies a lot so it's usually just an annoyance, but sometimes it's totally garbled and you go into a conference call to hear this weird alien chipmunk sound instead of intelligible speech.
It has also done this thing where it gets delayed and then tries to catch up by speeding through the buffer creatingthisweirdrushofbarelyintelligiblespeech until it catches up again.
What is it I can do with ZFS in Linux that is so important? What is it I can't do without ZFS?
It does a lot, but the features I'm interested in are the protection against bit-rot. Specifically, if you set up a mirrored pair of disks in a ZFS pool, it will checksum everything on both sides of the mirror. When the array is checked (scrubbed), it verifies the checksums. If there is a mismatch because the data has glitched on the media, the checksum won't be valid on one disk, but it will be valid on the other disk so it can repair it. If there's a mismatch in a more conventional mirrored pair, the controller wouldn't really have a way to know which one is correct.
This capability is also in BTRFS, but much has been written about how BTRFS is still experimental. Also, last time I looked, BTRFS was only available for Linux - with ZFS it would be possible to migrate to FreeBSD if Linux does jump the shark.
The other thing is that the scrubbing process is done in the background. My main data pool is a pair of 4TB disks, which was EXT4 to begin with, then BTRFS and now ZFS. The system is a desktop which is powered down at night. Every 180 boots it would run FSCK, which took something like 2 hours to run on EXT4, during which the system was unusable. With BTRFS and ZFS, the scrubbing takes place while the pool is mounted. So yes, you can do this with BTRFS as well, but ZFS is the more proven option of the two.
As 7z must be able to read and write arbitrary files to do its job, there is _nothing_ the permission system can do, not even MAC like SELinux would help. All those people blaming the "OS" really do not understand what they are talking about.
An excellent point. A granular permission system similar to Android's would help in many cases, e.g. preventing a text editor from performing a DDOS attack, but it cannot stop a file manager or archiver from attacking the user's files.
And Linux is just as bad. So what if the OS protects itself from the users? The OS has literally zero value; if it gets wiped, it's 30 minutes work to rebuild it from scratch, less if you made an image. It's the _data_ that is on the machine, completely unprotected by all those clever permission schemes, that will be lost if any compromised software is allowed to run. If you run "rm -rf/", you remove precisely all the files anyone cares about.
Depends what you're trying to do. If the aim is destroy the user's data, hold it hostage or sift through it for credentials or other useful info, yes, you're screwed.
But you can't spam email or run a phishing server on a standard port because opening a listener on any port below 1024 requires root. Installing system-level malware requires root. You could set up some kind of user-level autorun but the implementation will likely depend on the shell they're using, Unity, Gnome, KDE, XFCE.
So, when installing a new machine, how do you choose to open zip files? Winzip has that irritating registration screen, Windows native zip opening lacks features, 7zip sucks too, so what do people use these days that's free and downloadable?
I doubt there are many implementations of 7zip out there. Chances are anything which can open a.7z file does so by using 7zip's SDK. It's public domain, so there's no reason not to unless you're working in a language that can't link to C libraries.
It's a way to legally get music at full quality without the lossy compression you get in streams or MP3s. You also get a booklet with the words to the songs and neat artwork free as part of the bundle. It doesn't need an internet connection to work, can't be remotely deleted and it's easy to make your own if you're in a band.
What do millennial and younger crowd love about vinyl? why do think it is regaining in popularity? Please post.
The physical aspect of it. Large cover art, booklets and the like. I see it as a reaction to MP3 and similar digital formats which exist purely electronically. MP3s and such are way more convenient to listen to, but they just don't look as good on the shelf.
Many trends act like a pendulum. Mobile phones were large, became unusably tiny and are now in their 'large' phase again. Centrally managed computers gave way to PCs so the users were in control and now things are heading into the cloud and back to the mainframe model again. I don't see why the tension between physical media and digital downloads should be different.
This is exactly why I run an autobackup of all my files to separate backup files every single night. The most I would ever lose is 24 hours of data. This is 2016, folks. Ransomware shouldn't even be a blip on anyone radar by now.
Given that modern ransomware actively seeks out file shares and removable disks to prevent this kind of easy recovery, I'm curious to know what backup mechanism you're using. And also how far back that backup goes. Another strategy these things use (or could potentially use) is to encrypt things slowly over a long period of time so the backups are chewed up as well unless you're regularly taking snapshots onto read-only media or some kind of versioned filesystem.
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I think what impressed me most was Skyrim working pretty much out-of-the box. It needed a little prodding to set the amount of VRAM up correctly, but apart from that it Just Worked. It was the first game where I'd not even bothered trying to run it via Windows at all.
Windows hobbled on for a bit longer, occasionally curling up into a ball because I dared to put two PCIe cards in back in slightly different slots, or add a new disk for the ZFS array to use. Then, when it finally self-destructed entirely, I realised that I didn't need it anymore because all the windows games I had were working well enough under WINE. Last year I was persuaded to try Wolfenstein: New Order, and Old Blood - again, they worked out of the box which was impressive. Not sure I'll be so lucky with New Colossus.
Games aside, it's also been very handy for running an ancient version of SONAR I've been using since about 2002. That also had the advantage of allowing me to keep using a USB MIDI interface which Windows 7 had no support for.
Biggest disappointment was Fallout 4, which did not work out of the box and still isn't working as far as I know, though it's getting very close. FO3 and New Vegas are working happily though, even as it gets more and more difficult to run them under Windows itself.
Obviously your mileage may vary. If you have more space and more money to throw at hardware than I do, getting a second machine - or indeed a games console - would achieve the same results with less hassle, and less cat-fighting over the boot block than a dual-boot system. Faffing around with PCIe passthroughs to get a virtual windows instance is another possible approach, but I'd have to buy another licence for an operating system I actively dislike. Besides SONAR, all my day-to-day software is linux-based, so for me, Wine is a really good way of stringing it all together.
What on earth are you talking about? You clearly DO NOT use Firefox at all. None of what you described has been a thing in Firefox for years. Memory leaks in the Firefox 4 days were a major issue but they're barely even on the radar today.
Actually, I've seen it bloat up to 3GB quite a lot lately on Windows at work. No idea what's causing it. Prior to v56 it was generally using about 500MB tops, but now it regularly goes over 2GB after an hour or so of casual use. And this is a bit of a problem because the work laptops only have 8GB and our dev environment wants most of that.
This is going back a while now, but IIRC WP8 only supported Managed C++, which was a restricted enough subset that it ruled out most of the existing codebase including the commercial AES version of SQLite which we needed to use for data protection reasons. For the bulk of the code we might have been able to port it but it would then have made it harder to compile on linux and android...
WindowsCE SUCKED and Apple and Blackberry already killed it.
CE certainly sucked, but many large companies did and still do depend on it. Plus it had the advantage of at least partial source code compatibility with Desktop windows. Simply saying it's shit and they should rewrite their 8+ year codebase for some fly-by-night replacement was not a viable solution.
As for Blackberry and Apple replacing it? Sadly, that's a rose-tinted view. The Blackberry OS was even worse than CE, permanently stuck on Java 1.2 or somesuch and at once point incapable of allocating more than 128K in a single chunk, at least when we were attempting to do our port of the software.
As for Apple, they had literally no provision for industrial handheld software. Either you had to try and put your proprietary, bespoke software - that was intended for internal use by a warehouse company or local authority's parking department - into the same app store that had fart apps and that $999 picture of a ruby, or else you had to try and use their enterprise arrangement and bypass the app store entirely.
The Enterprise arrangement was only open to businesses with over 500 employees, which was rather unfortunate because such companies didn't write applications in-house. They bought them from one of hundreds of small specialist firms who developed industrial handheld software and generally had less than two dozen employees. Which meant they didn't qualify to get their software blessed by Jobs.
Again, given a choice between a shit product and NO product, companies tend to stick with the shit product.
So much this. Enterprise and line-of-business stuff was mostly Windows Mobile or CE, and it was a cut-down version of the Win32 API, mostly C++ code.
Then Microsoft came out with Windows Phone, which had NO compatibility, NO migration path, no nothing. It's all very well to replace an obsolete system with something better, and to be fair, CE was pretty shit with its 32MB process limit. But the simple fact is that the supposed replacement was not fit for purpose. It was like trying to replace a tank with a trailbike.
Windows Phone, at least in its initial incarnations, had no support for C++, or even C# if memory serves. There was literally not one piece of source code from our 400KLOC project that could be re-used, and we'd be looking at maybe 2-3 years to do a rewrite. During which time Windows Phone changed the API completely again between 7 and 8, ditching compatibility a second time. The result, you can see today. Microsoft alienated its entire mobile developer base not once, but twice and then wondered why nobody was writing applications for it. For the companies that didn't exit the market entirely, it was easier to port code from Windows Mobile to Android than it was to port it to Windows Phone. On Android you could at least compile the logic with the NDK, even if the UI had to be redone.
Windows Mobile has the last laugh, mind - my local supermarket is still running it. Presumably they're getting spare devices off ebay.
However, the legislation was drafted by politicians and thus has an "unless you really want to" clause, which is why we've just had a snap election called by the PM at her party's convenience because she liked what she was hearing in the opinion polls.
As I understood it, the key difference is that the PM has get it approved, and the opposition party duly did so. If they had said 'no', it wouldn't have happened.
I can guarantee you it's not 33.000 R/W cycles - the only tech that would allow that is SLC, and practically nobody sells SSD based on SLC anymore. A few manufacturers sell highly overpriced SLC-based SD and microSD cards. Hell, nowadays you'll struggle to even find MLC-based SSDs (~10.000 rewrite cycles AT BEST). Every SSD manufacturer today uses TLC, which means 1000 R/W cycles per cell.
You're still talking about flash technology, as far as I can see... the point of Optane is that it's using this new phase-change stuff. Supposedly it would have a thousand times the write endurance, and be a thousand times faster than NAND flash (though I don't think they ever said whether it was SLC/MLC/TLC they were comparing to). It doesn't look like either promise has come true, though.
Buy a laser pickup turntable. There's no physical contact with the grooves, so no degradation just from playing your record.
Last I heard, they don't work on coloured vinyl because it's translucent. Which is a bit unfortunate, since a lot of the 'Now for the first time on vinyl!' reissues are doing just that.
Doesn't anyone look at tags anymore? You know, the metadata? Or didn't anyone think to um, bypass the whole conversion to actual sound waves and back to digital stream.
When it was taped off-air by your father in 1972 and you're trying to figure out what it is, the tags aren't exactly going to be helpful. That said, it would be nice to just play the MP3 or WAV off local storage instead of having to stick a tablet it next to the speaker.
When this sort of thing works, it can be really, really useful. For example, Michael Garrison's "In the regions of sunreturn", which I'd been trying to identify for nearly 20 years. Probably taped off a record borrowed in the early 1980s. The cassette wasn't labelled properly, and the album was completely instrumental. It took an awful lot of attempts with SoundHound to identify, and was made worse by the fact that the synthesizers used became fashionable in techno and I think some hip-hop stuff later, giving many false positives. But I can't think of any other way to find out what it was, short of sticking a clip on youtube and hoping I get a takedown.
Maybe they too would like to be a part of the mosaic that is Europe
Seems unlikely given that they rather bizarrely voted to leave. Why Bizarre? Well, they've got an arse-load of money from the EU and they've voted to end that and hand over power to the Tories who historically like to shit all over Wales. But whatever.
If you look at the maps, it seems to be largely the impoverished areas of the UK that wanted to leave. Wales certainly fits that bill, having been built on industries such as coal and steel which have declined. AFAIK the fact that they are in such a mess is why they are getting money from the EU (or the EU rebate?) in the first place. I had to smile when the local paper ran a headline lamenting how 'Brexit will cost Wales £500m'. Should have thought of that first. Though to be fair the vote was something like 60/40 in my area so I suspect a fair few people did.
As for why they wanted to leave? The people I know who voted leave cited arguments along the lines of 'EU is undemocratic', 'The EU wants to build some kind of corporate-owned superstate, we want something more socialist', 'If we stay in the EU we'll be subjected to TTIP' (apparently not considering that the trade agreements we'll have to arrange post-Brexit will have us over a barrel where TTIP is concerned). However, there was also an argument about the EU preventing state subsidies, and that it was the reason - or at least the excuse - why the government wouldn't step in to save the Port Talbot steelworks. And that if we did leave, they would at least be forced to make up a different excuse in future.
This, by the way, was the considered opinion of colleagues in a tech company - pretty smart people who could recognise that they didn't really have enough information to truly understand the vast implications of leaving. It's certainly not a cross-section of Wales, which can be somewhat xenophobic, even internally. And as mentioned, has a relatively poor economy. As such, someone trotting out the 'EU migrants took your jobs!' and similar lines could likely get quite a following. Even without that there's a number of disgruntled people with little to lose who wanted to send a message of some kind to The Powers That Be.
But only if you were using your disks with single side devices and you also had to make a notch or you couldn't write anything. I was using double side drives and doing this would have erased the data.
That may have been for 5.25" disks... I think you also had to cut a hole in the case for the optical revolution sensor. I've seen it done, but it was very messy, e.g. the bottom of the disk cut open to remove the actual disk so the sensor hole could be cut without damaging the disk.
What the grandparent post is probably thinking of is 3.5" disks, which had an optical sensor and a hole to tell the drive if it was low density (720k) or high density (1.44M). The theory went that they were economising by making the low density disks from rejected high density ones. Either way, you could drill a hole in the things (which risks swarf ending up inside the disk and damaing the heads) or later on, get custom hole-punches to easily and safely cut out the notch in the disk casing.
I keep reading here and there that they're stopping Nokia and Windows Phone, and what do you know... The entirety of the 12 people using Windows phone will be thrilled. That's for sure. As for the rest...
It's not Windows. Looks like it might be running S30+, which is either a stripped down version of Series 30 without J2ME support, or something different and strange.
*cough*
My bad - last I heard the documentation was under NDA, the terms of which were that you weren't allowed to use it for a rival product.
I must be getting in early as there is no whining so far about GIMP being far inferior to Photoshop.
What real world work can be done in Photoshop but not GIMP?
Vectors. I'm not sure to what extent Photoshop can do them because I don't use it much, but I do receive PSD files with speech bubbles and such that aren't there once GIMP has imported it.
I think Photoshop can also do significantly more advanced layer effects than GIMP currently has - the nondestructive editing features may cover that, but it's maybe a decade away at the current rate of progress.
The most aggravating thing for me at the moment is the layer masking capability - GIMP can do it AFAIK but it can't import the masking in from a PSD file. Which is not altogether surprising given that PSD is proprietary and effectively undocumented.
A lot has been said about Krita as a substitute for GIMP, and although it seems to have made astonishing progress recently, it's aimed almost exclusively at digital painting. Last I saw (2.9) it fails miserably if you attempt to use it for pixel art, cel-shading and other comic-related tasks that I currently use GIMP for. I will certainly keep an eye on it, though as it shows a lot of promise.
I worked for the company that used to provide this service (and a lot fo other 800, 866 and 900 numbers) for the NJ and NYC areas.
It was fascinating equipment. Ancient but robust. It was a constantly turning magnetic drum that had the recording on it about 6 inches tall with a little oil reservoir on top that had to be filled every few months.
If you want something approaching steampunk, the UK had a speaking clock system using 1930s technology:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
The Australian system was installed in the 1950s and is more compact and easier to see working, but the basic mechanism is the same:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
In the 60's spy spoof films starring James Coburn, one of the bad guy organizations was the ubiquitous Phone Company
I've not see the Flint films, but 'The President's Analyst' (which was also James Coburn) did exactly this.
We use Lync (well, formerly known as Lync, now re branded as Skype for Business) for our work IM system
The server is constantly locking up /dumping connections and just generally feels quite unreliable...
We frequently get this weird glitch where the voice has some high-frequency ring modulation, giving it this weird crystalline dalek sound to it. The strength varies a lot so it's usually just an annoyance, but sometimes it's totally garbled and you go into a conference call to hear this weird alien chipmunk sound instead of intelligible speech.
It has also done this thing where it gets delayed and then tries to catch up by speeding through the buffer creatingthisweirdrushofbarelyintelligiblespeech until it catches up again.
What is it I can do with ZFS in Linux that is so important?
What is it I can't do without ZFS?
It does a lot, but the features I'm interested in are the protection against bit-rot. Specifically, if you set up a mirrored pair of disks in a ZFS pool, it will checksum everything on both sides of the mirror.
When the array is checked (scrubbed), it verifies the checksums. If there is a mismatch because the data has glitched on the media, the checksum won't be valid on one disk, but it will be valid on the other disk so it can repair it. If there's a mismatch in a more conventional mirrored pair, the controller wouldn't really have a way to know which one is correct.
This capability is also in BTRFS, but much has been written about how BTRFS is still experimental. Also, last time I looked, BTRFS was only available for Linux - with ZFS it would be possible to migrate to FreeBSD if Linux does jump the shark.
The other thing is that the scrubbing process is done in the background. My main data pool is a pair of 4TB disks, which was EXT4 to begin with, then BTRFS and now ZFS. The system is a desktop which is powered down at night. Every 180 boots it would run FSCK, which took something like 2 hours to run on EXT4, during which the system was unusable. With BTRFS and ZFS, the scrubbing takes place while the pool is mounted. So yes, you can do this with BTRFS as well, but ZFS is the more proven option of the two.
As 7z must be able to read and write arbitrary files to do its job, there is _nothing_ the permission system can do, not even MAC like SELinux would help. All those people blaming the "OS" really do not understand what they are talking about.
An excellent point. A granular permission system similar to Android's would help in many cases, e.g. preventing a text editor from performing a DDOS attack, but it cannot stop a file manager or archiver from attacking the user's files.
And Linux is just as bad. So what if the OS protects itself from the users? The OS has literally zero value; if it gets wiped, it's 30 minutes work to rebuild it from scratch, less if you made an image. It's the _data_ that is on the machine, completely unprotected by all those clever permission schemes, that will be lost if any compromised software is allowed to run. If you run "rm -rf /", you remove precisely all the files anyone cares about.
Depends what you're trying to do. If the aim is destroy the user's data, hold it hostage or sift through it for credentials or other useful info, yes, you're screwed.
But you can't spam email or run a phishing server on a standard port because opening a listener on any port below 1024 requires root. Installing system-level malware requires root. You could set up some kind of user-level autorun but the implementation will likely depend on the shell they're using, Unity, Gnome, KDE, XFCE.
So, when installing a new machine, how do you choose to open zip files? Winzip has that irritating registration screen, Windows native zip opening lacks features, 7zip sucks too, so what do people use these days that's free and downloadable?
I doubt there are many implementations of 7zip out there. Chances are anything which can open a .7z file does so by using 7zip's SDK. It's public domain, so there's no reason not to unless you're working in a language that can't link to C libraries.
What's a CD?
Am I going to have to change my sig?
It's a way to legally get music at full quality without the lossy compression you get in streams or MP3s. You also get a booklet with the words to the songs and neat artwork free as part of the bundle. It doesn't need an internet connection to work, can't be remotely deleted and it's easy to make your own if you're in a band.
Googled this one - a Canadian Prog-Rock band from the 70s? What the Fuck?
In the 1980s they were a more conventional 1980s rock outfit. This was from 'Moving Pictures', 1981 and probably their most successful album ever.
What do millennial and younger crowd love about vinyl? why do think it is regaining in popularity? Please post.
The physical aspect of it. Large cover art, booklets and the like. I see it as a reaction to MP3 and similar digital formats which exist purely electronically. MP3s and such are way more convenient to listen to, but they just don't look as good on the shelf.
Many trends act like a pendulum. Mobile phones were large, became unusably tiny and are now in their 'large' phase again. Centrally managed computers gave way to PCs so the users were in control and now things are heading into the cloud and back to the mainframe model again. I don't see why the tension between physical media and digital downloads should be different.
This is exactly why I run an autobackup of all my files to separate backup files every single night. The most I would ever lose is 24 hours of data.
This is 2016, folks. Ransomware shouldn't even be a blip on anyone radar by now.
Given that modern ransomware actively seeks out file shares and removable disks to prevent this kind of easy recovery, I'm curious to know what backup mechanism you're using. And also how far back that backup goes. Another strategy these things use (or could potentially use) is to encrypt things slowly over a long period of time so the backups are chewed up as well unless you're regularly taking snapshots onto read-only media or some kind of versioned filesystem.