I buy a customised white box tower with no OS and the least hardware the whiteboxer will ship. I did this in early 2012 with an Asus motherboard, i7 2600 and as many silent/quiet components (including soundpoofing) as possible. I do think PCs should be decibel rated - there's nothing worse than a noisy PC!
Stuff added in the 3.5 years I've had it: 32GB RAM (109 pounds - bought almost at the bottom of the pricing curve), 128GB SATA 3 SSD, 480GB PCIe SSD, muliple 3TB and 4TB fast HDDs, lowly HD7790 card (I rarely play games), an old combo CD/DVD/HD DVD/Blu Ray drive I keep moving to my latest PC cos it's impossible to get such a combo drive new now, 27" 2560x1440 DGM monitor (same LG panel iMacs use).
Problem is that the tech for my next "twice as good" PC (64GB DDR4 RAM, 8-core CPU, USB 3.1, M.2 SSDs, 8TB HDDs, 30" monitor maybe 4K?) probably needs around 18 months more to mature and come down to sane prices, so I'm going to be not far from 5 years between PC replacements, which is the longest for me to date as far as tower desktops go.
Google picked on Linux first to disable NPAPI support with version 35 on the platform just over a year ago. This immediately disabled all Java applets including browser-based VNC clients used for server management (e.g. HP's iLO, Proxmox etc.). Yes, noVNC is around and the latest Proxmox supports that, but it was poor for Google to do this without any JVM having PPAPI support for its browser plugin.
Bizarrely, Google Chrome on Linux has gone the other way with Flash support. It's been baked into the browser via a sneaky Adobe deal who only supply the latest Linux Flash plugin (17.0.0.188 at the time of writing) as a PPAPI plugin to Google and have left their NPAPI plugin for non-Chrome browsers at version 11.X (equally strangely, they are actually updating it periodically for security issues, even though it's 6 major releases behind).
I could never understand why an Android gaming device would not have access to the Google Play store, so I always thought the Ouya was doomed. Average hardware and a poor controller obviously didn't help either, but why waste time and money creating your own vastly inferior game store?
Aspartame is being replaced in Diet Pepsi by sucralose, which is the worst-tasting sweetener I have ever encountered. Britvic, who license Pepsi in the UK, scrapped all their Robinsons sugared cordials ("squashes") in the UK this year. Simultaneously, they switched the no-added sugar squashes to using sucralose.
I taste-tested the sucralose-based apple & blackcurrant flavoured squash recently and it had a seriously nasty chemical aftertaste. It was so bad, I actually had to gargle with water afterwards to try to get rid of the very unpleasant taste. Needless to say, I'm now boycotting the entire Robinsons squash range after decades of enjoyable consumption of their (sugared) product.
This bricking sounds similar to the first Nexus 10 the Google Play UK store sent me. I could boot it initially, but then the device would spontaneously reboot. Each time, the reboot intervals reduced (and weird graphical glitches started appearing) - within a matter of hours, it was just stuck on the Google logo and never got any further.
It was indeed Google I contacted to return it and they sent me a pre-paid courier wrapper (I had to weigh and measure the Nexus 10 packaging/tablet), but they also charged me for a second Nexus 10 (which they then refunded when the second one was delivered, but it made me uncomfortable to be 656 pounds down for a short period!).
BTW, the courier promptly "lost" my broken first Nexus 10, but I still got the refund for it. The second Nexus 10 has been working fine since, but I've had the odd storage slowdown, prompting me to completely wipe and re-install (it's on CyanogenMod 12 at the moment - I kept the stock ROM for about one day:-) ), which speeded it up. I've no idea, though, if Google (or Asus) will do anything about out-of-warranty bricked N5's/N7's though.
This was probably a US-based test - I'd like to see an EU-based test as well. EU regs insist that standby uses 0.5 watts, so all these consoles would be breaking EU law if they used the standby power in the article.
Your first and last sentences utterly ludicrously claim that tablets are a "fad". Actual facts show that they've been selling in bucket loads every year, although the market is approaching saturation point with them (i.e. those who want a tablet have got one now and they're "good enough" to use for years, unlike the early tablets).
Personally, I find tablets give a much better user experience than mobile phones, simply because of the larger screen dimensions. This makes video viewing and game playing more pleasurable and onscreen keyboards actually usable (I have severe trouble with onscreen keyboards on mobile phones - even turning the screen landscape still makes it an uncomfortable experience).
Smartwatches are a nice idea, but wake me up when battery life is in months or years like any dumbwatch and the price is under $100 for a decent model. This is why smartwatches are indeed currently a fad - only patient people who like charging their watch almost daily and have more money than sense are buying them. I'll stick with my Casio Wave Ceptor - battery life in years, radio controlled time adjustment, countdown alarm, stop watch, second time zone, alarm - all for $50.
The BBC Micro was the best 8-bit micro ever, but the price was very expensive (it was sort of the UK equivalent of Apple I guess, except it was *far* better than the Apple II). I'm not sure about the wisdom of internal floppy drives and cassette tape mechanisms - makes them tougher to replace if anything goes wrong with them. The BBC Micro needed a disk interface chip adding, but once that's done, any sort of external floppy drive could be used.
The BBC Micro had a 2Mhz 6502 - it wasn't until 1987 that the Acorn Archimedes had the ARM 2 processor (ARM 1 was actually part of a TUBE-based add-on for the BBC Micro). I had both machines and loved the two OS'es and their respective BASICs (with a built-in assembler, which was a touch of genius).
It's nice to see that Dell have put Linux as an OS option right next to WIndows (and $101 cheaper than Windows too). A bit strange for them to ship a Linux release that initially has no Thunderbolt support, though I suspect not many people use Thunderbolt-only hardware outside of the Apple ecosystem.
Defaults to an HDD in the config options which is also weird, especially since it appears to have 2 drive bays, so surely you'd want an SSD in there in one of the bays?
The higher res screen is only a $70 bump, so it would appear to be a no-brainer to pick that option. If the final price wasn't so eye-wateringly high (and me being in the UK probably means it'll either not appear on the UK dell site or be a dollar to pound conversion), it would be an attractive high-end Linux laptop.
if [ "$STEAMROOT" != "" -a "$STEAMROOT" != "/" ] then
if [ -d "$STEAMROOT" ]
then...do your evil deletion of $STEAMROOT here
fi fi
Should avoid at least a full deletion traversal of the filestore, but it's still got a risk that $STEAMROOT might be ~username (or/tmp, which is less critical).
I suspect that the majority of households in the UK and US no longer have a vinyl turntable any more now that CDs have been around for 30 years and of those, hardly any would consider buying a turntable any time soon. Even CD players are on a similar downward slide (probably Blu Ray/DVD players keeping them alive more than anything else) with downloads and streaming rapidly becoming the method of choice.
I never bought vinyl myself because unless you take great care with the discs and have a top quality turntable as well, a well mastered CD (i.e. not horribly compressed) is going to generally sound at least as good as vinyl, if not better. Don't forget it's trivial to back up a CD using a PC (into a myriad of formats including ISO, FLAC, mp3, ogg, wav etc.) and much, much harder to do so with a vinyl record (USB turntables can do it, but they're not a massively popular item).
The only advantage I can see with vinyl is the larger artwork, but nowadays that's long been replaced by a downloadable digital PDF booklet (which can be resized bigger than the vinyl artwork:-) ).
Because most Marketplace sellers on Amazon UK charge postage (and often hefty amounts even for small/light items), they often use a bad feature of Amazon's "sort by price" option - it doesn't include postage in the sort - to mark many items as costing a penny. Those items then very annoyingly appear first in multiple pages of "sorted" results and it's only when you click on them that you find the postage is 500 times the so-called cost of the product.
If you ask me, it's karma coming back to bite those sellers on the arse - maybe the third-party software dropped the postage charge by mistake? I do wish Amazon UK would sort prices *inclusive* of postage - this misleading price sort has been going for many, many years. Failing that, at least set price minimums (e.g. 49p without postage and 99p with postage).
I believe Google dropped NPAPI support in Linux for version 35 onwards. This *immediately* broke all Java applets (as far as I know, there's no PPAPI Java plug-in), which wasn't great for sysadmins using Java VNC applets (yes, I know about noVNC, but not all Web UIs have moved to that) or F1 timing on formula1.com as a consumer example.
Never considered a CentOS install (I'd probably recommend 6 rather than 7 myself, but that's just me)? No licensing costs, 100% compatible with RHEL (minus any branding), doesn't run a GUI, has 6 years of support left, *doesn't* use systemd or Grub 2 - what's not to love?
Any other site that does what Freecode did?
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Freecode Freezeup
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· Score: 1
Freecode was useful to simply find out what new/updated software (sometimes not always free, hmmm...) had been recently released regardless of where the code is hosted. Is there any other site that provides such a list in date order? Suggesting Sourceforge as an alternative isn't great (I can't find a list of date-ordered project releases - not individual files, which are in one of their RSS feeds - on the Sourceforge site).
Whilst playing around a little with Eclipse and the Android SDK, I found it much easier to just plug in my Android tablet (or it could be an Android phone or both) and download/run the app on that. You get to check rotation, multi-touch, camera etc. a lot more easily this way and it's just as easy (if not more so) than running the emulator. Of course, there could be Android devs without any Android devices at all, but I suspect that's a tiny minority.
The main use of the emulator is probably just to test different screen dimensions render OK - I personally wouldn't use it during the bulk of development though.
Re:Linux, it's harder than you've been told.
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Linux Sucks (Video)
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· Score: 1
In my experience, it's Windows that doesn't play well with the MBR or provide any sort of menu system for non-Windows OS'es like the way grub does. In fact, the Windows installer is amazingly bad from a dual (or triple etc.) boot kind of way:
It won't touch a partition formatted in anything it doesn't understand (you can't even re-format it in the installer). You actually have to trick the Windows installer by using fdisk in Linux to change the partition ID to something like 7 (NTFS) and then magically the Windows installer will let you format it. Quite surprising how dumb this is, because surely MS would *want* to destroy non-Windows partitions the first chance it gets?
The Windows installer in the latest releases insists on hogging the first partition on the first drive in your system (i.e. it has to be formatted to Windows format), which is utterly appalling.
The Windows installer destroys the MBR (and effectively kills grub) with no attempt analyse it or the various non-Windows OS'es that might be on the rest of your system. This is disgraceful behaviour - most Linux distros will detect existing OS'es (including Windows) and set up grub menu items for them.
Of course, to work around these atrocities, you soon learn that you install Windows first (letting it wreck your MBR and partition setup) and then Linux second. You then get a dual boot grub menu with both Linux and Windows items. If you have to re-install Windows later on, it will destroy the MBR yet again, so you end up having to boot a Live Linux distro and run grub commands to restore the MBR/grub setup.
So, to sum it up, the Windows installer is nasty to anything else that isn't Windows on your system , both on initial install and on any further re-install. So the blame here is 100% with Windows and not grub or Linux.
Er, Google Chrome on desktop Linux can cast a tab with the Google Cast extension extension in the Chrome store, so I've no idea why you claim no Linux browser can do this. If you use CentOS 6 like I do, you can even get Google Chrome running with my script.
The Firefox bug for all this seemed to be swaying backwards and forwards between using the SDK and not using it. Latest updates seem to suggest it *is* using the Chromecast SDK now, which unfortunately means desktop Firefox and Firefox OS may be left out in the cold initially.
People are moaning why desktop Firefox isn't going to cast a tab at the same time as the Android Firefox will. Firstly, I believe they *aren't* using the Chromecast SDK so the chances are good that desktop Firefox will follow not too long after Android Firefox. Secondly, no Android browser can currently cast a tab, so Mozilla are actually heading for a platform first - embarrassingly beating Google to it! - if they concentrate on Android Firefox first for tab casting.
Assuming you don't need RAID on the backup device itself, then a cheap desktop PC (usually from a custom white box builder - most OEM PCs don't come with enough SATA connectors/hard drive bays) with 5 or 6 4TB SATA hard drives does the trick. Sure, it'll cost you a fair amount for the hardware (in the UK, probably around 1,000 pounds or so), but it might be the most flexible solution (e.g. could be located offsite if you're paranoid, though you'd need a fast connection to it - at least 100 Mbits/sec I'd have thought - for that amount of data).
Of course, if you then want to keep multiple archive copies, then you'd have to look at compressing the backups and/or perhaps using backup software that does incrementals (e.g. Amanda on Linux or whatever). Another much pricier alternative is multiple spanning Ultrium 5 tapes in 24-slot autoloader attached to a machine with little local storage (1-2 TB free for holding space), but we're talking 5,000 pounds or so for this solution.
I don't know about you, but I really don't like the redesigned Fedora installer (Anaconda) that's turned up in recent Fedora releases. It's quite SHOUTY (yes, headings in full capitals and bold too!) and the disk partitioning section is frankly awful (very non-obvious, mixed units and it took me ages to work out how to create a partition that used all the remaining space - answer: put a huge value for the size and it'll round it down to what's left).
Fedora with the MATE desktop isn't too bad, but sadly that's the not the desktop that's the default selection. I also seem to remember a couple of releases (18 and 19 I think) that were incredibly show to both show the login screen and the post-login desktop in VirtualBox (20-25 secs for each on an i7 machine with a couple of CPU cores allocated!), though it looks like Fedora 20 fixed this. Many people will install Fedora in a VM first (particularly if they're Windows users) and if it performs poorly there, it won't get installed on the bare metal.
I basically gave up on bare metal Fedora from 15 onwards - no coincidence that the frankly dreadful GNOME 3 came out at the same time. Once I saw how bad it was in a VM, my preferred OS became CentOS 6, whose combo of GNOME 2, GRUB 1 and SysVInit scripts (all of which are much easier to use than their "better" successors) remains probably the peak combo we've seen to date in a mainstream Linux distro.
The RHEL/CentOS kernel does get security and bug fix backports from later kernels, but the reason it runs such an "old" kernel is for stability reasons. Most Windows desktop users never upgrade their OS to a newer major release during the lifetime of their PC (because it costs money and can be a hassle - remember most of the world's desktops are running the OS that was pre-installed when the machine was bought), but apparently most Linux desktop users are constantly chasing the bleeding edge if you're to be believed.
The problem with most Linux distros is that their support window is very narrow - usually less than 18 months and definitely less than the lifetime of a typical desktop PC. This is where CentOS scores heavily against Ubuntu - 10 years of updates to the OS, so *you* decide when to jump to the next major OS release and you're not effectively forced to jump releases half-way through your PC's lifespan.
Also note that it's not the kernel version that's a problem with CentOS, it's the older system libraries (particularly glibc, X11, Gnome etc.) that cause issues, particularly if you want to run closed-source binaries. Google Chrome is probably the highest profile casualty of this, which is why I cooked up a script to install the latest Google Chrome on CentOS 6.
I saw the specs for the Tegra Note a while ago and got a bit bored with them because:
1. It's not a Nexus device, so is already behind with its Android version. Now it may be with the many updates to the Nvidia Shield, we might see speedy updates to the Note as well, but until this actually happens, I'll err on the side of caution.
2. I would prefer an 8" display in the same dimensions and weight as a typical 7" tablet (e.g. reduce the bezel width). 7" displays aren't just quite large enough, IMHO.
3. The screen resolution is 1280x800, not 1280x720, but even so that only matches the 2012 Nexus 7 from 18 months ago and partially explains why its graphics benchmarks are so good.
Having said all that, Currys in the UK are selling it at 129.99 pounds ($215), which is actually a very good price for a decently spec'ed tablet in the UK.
One thing to try to appease Google Play is to change the app, so it's a set of instructions/downloads as follows:
* If Unknown Sources isn't ticked on, the first screen tells the user to go to Setttings/Security and tick on Unknown Sources (maybe that screen could be loaded by the app to make it even easier?).
* Next, the app downloads the apk from the CM site and installs it.
* Ask the user to uncheck Unknown Sources if they had to check it on in the first step.
* Run the downloaded app (exiting the original app at the same time if possible).
Would *this* violate any terms of service of Google Play (written down or otherwise)?
Replace "FF" with "Google Chrome" and you'll see that Google beat Mozilla to the punch:-) Remember that Chrome is on version 29 (5 ahead of Firefox) and now uses more RAM than Firefox! You've also conveniently forgotten the Firefox ESR release (Chrome has *nothing* like it, so is a complete disaster for corporate use). Also, the performance gap has been gradually closing between Chrome and Firefox in the last year or so. For the first time in a couple of years, Firefox recent actually beat Chrome in Tom's Hardware Browser Grand Prix.
The lack of extensions on Android Chrome is utterly appalling, which is why Firefox on Android basically destroys Android Chrome. Now if Mozilla could fix the dodgy graphics issue with Firefox on the Nexus 10 (pages often half-rendering and needing a screen rotation to render them properly!), then I wouldn't have to double-rotate my tablet so often:-)
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I buy a customised white box tower with no OS and the least hardware the whiteboxer will ship. I did this in early 2012 with an Asus motherboard, i7 2600 and as many silent/quiet components (including soundpoofing) as possible. I do think PCs should be decibel rated - there's nothing worse than a noisy PC!
Stuff added in the 3.5 years I've had it: 32GB RAM (109 pounds - bought almost at the bottom of the pricing curve), 128GB SATA 3 SSD, 480GB PCIe SSD, muliple 3TB and 4TB fast HDDs, lowly HD7790 card (I rarely play games), an old combo CD/DVD/HD DVD/Blu Ray drive I keep moving to my latest PC cos it's impossible to get such a combo drive new now, 27" 2560x1440 DGM monitor (same LG panel iMacs use).
Problem is that the tech for my next "twice as good" PC (64GB DDR4 RAM, 8-core CPU, USB 3.1, M.2 SSDs, 8TB HDDs, 30" monitor maybe 4K?) probably needs around 18 months more to mature and come down to sane prices, so I'm going to be not far from 5 years between PC replacements, which is the longest for me to date as far as tower desktops go.
Google picked on Linux first to disable NPAPI support with version 35 on the platform just over a year ago. This immediately disabled all Java applets including browser-based VNC clients used for server management (e.g. HP's iLO, Proxmox etc.). Yes, noVNC is around and the latest Proxmox supports that, but it was poor for Google to do this without any JVM having PPAPI support for its browser plugin.
Bizarrely, Google Chrome on Linux has gone the other way with Flash support. It's been baked into the browser via a sneaky Adobe deal who only supply the latest Linux Flash plugin (17.0.0.188 at the time of writing) as a PPAPI plugin to Google and have left their NPAPI plugin for non-Chrome browsers at version 11.X (equally strangely, they are actually updating it periodically for security issues, even though it's 6 major releases behind).
I could never understand why an Android gaming device would not have access to the Google Play store, so I always thought the Ouya was doomed. Average hardware and a poor controller obviously didn't help either, but why waste time and money creating your own vastly inferior game store?
Aspartame is being replaced in Diet Pepsi by sucralose, which is the worst-tasting sweetener I have ever encountered. Britvic, who license Pepsi in the UK, scrapped all their Robinsons sugared cordials ("squashes") in the UK this year. Simultaneously, they switched the no-added sugar squashes to using sucralose.
I taste-tested the sucralose-based apple & blackcurrant flavoured squash recently and it had a seriously nasty chemical aftertaste. It was so bad, I actually had to gargle with water afterwards to try to get rid of the very unpleasant taste. Needless to say, I'm now boycotting the entire Robinsons squash range after decades of enjoyable consumption of their (sugared) product.
This bricking sounds similar to the first Nexus 10 the Google Play UK store sent me. I could boot it initially, but then the device would spontaneously reboot. Each time, the reboot intervals reduced (and weird graphical glitches started appearing) - within a matter of hours, it was just stuck on the Google logo and never got any further.
It was indeed Google I contacted to return it and they sent me a pre-paid courier wrapper (I had to weigh and measure the Nexus 10 packaging/tablet), but they also charged me for a second Nexus 10 (which they then refunded when the second one was delivered, but it made me uncomfortable to be 656 pounds down for a short period!).
BTW, the courier promptly "lost" my broken first Nexus 10, but I still got the refund for it. The second Nexus 10 has been working fine since, but I've had the odd storage slowdown, prompting me to completely wipe and re-install (it's on CyanogenMod 12 at the moment - I kept the stock ROM for about one day :-) ), which speeded it up. I've no idea, though, if Google (or Asus) will do anything about out-of-warranty bricked N5's/N7's though.
This was probably a US-based test - I'd like to see an EU-based test as well. EU regs insist that standby uses 0.5 watts, so all these consoles would be breaking EU law if they used the standby power in the article.
Your first and last sentences utterly ludicrously claim that tablets are a "fad". Actual facts show that they've been selling in bucket loads every year, although the market is approaching saturation point with them (i.e. those who want a tablet have got one now and they're "good enough" to use for years, unlike the early tablets).
Personally, I find tablets give a much better user experience than mobile phones, simply because of the larger screen dimensions. This makes video viewing and game playing more pleasurable and onscreen keyboards actually usable (I have severe trouble with onscreen keyboards on mobile phones - even turning the screen landscape still makes it an uncomfortable experience).
Smartwatches are a nice idea, but wake me up when battery life is in months or years like any dumbwatch and the price is under $100 for a decent model. This is why smartwatches are indeed currently a fad - only patient people who like charging their watch almost daily and have more money than sense are buying them. I'll stick with my Casio Wave Ceptor - battery life in years, radio controlled time adjustment, countdown alarm, stop watch, second time zone, alarm - all for $50.
The BBC Micro was the best 8-bit micro ever, but the price was very expensive (it was sort of the UK equivalent of Apple I guess, except it was *far* better than the Apple II). I'm not sure about the wisdom of internal floppy drives and cassette tape mechanisms - makes them tougher to replace if anything goes wrong with them. The BBC Micro needed a disk interface chip adding, but once that's done, any sort of external floppy drive could be used.
The BBC Micro had a 2Mhz 6502 - it wasn't until 1987 that the Acorn Archimedes had the ARM 2 processor (ARM 1 was actually part of a TUBE-based add-on for the BBC Micro). I had both machines and loved the two OS'es and their respective BASICs (with a built-in assembler, which was a touch of genius).
It's nice to see that Dell have put Linux as an OS option right next to WIndows (and $101 cheaper than Windows too). A bit strange for them to ship a Linux release that initially has no Thunderbolt support, though I suspect not many people use Thunderbolt-only hardware outside of the Apple ecosystem.
Defaults to an HDD in the config options which is also weird, especially since it appears to have 2 drive bays, so surely you'd want an SSD in there in one of the bays?
The higher res screen is only a $70 bump, so it would appear to be a no-brainer to pick that option. If the final price wasn't so eye-wateringly high (and me being in the UK probably means it'll either not appear on the UK dell site or be a dollar to pound conversion), it would be an attractive high-end Linux laptop.
Something like this might have helped:
if [ "$STEAMROOT" != "" -a "$STEAMROOT" != "/" ] ...do your evil deletion of $STEAMROOT here
then
if [ -d "$STEAMROOT" ]
then
fi
fi
Should avoid at least a full deletion traversal of the filestore, but it's still got a risk that $STEAMROOT might be ~username (or /tmp, which is less critical).
I suspect that the majority of households in the UK and US no longer have a vinyl turntable any more now that CDs have been around for 30 years and of those, hardly any would consider buying a turntable any time soon. Even CD players are on a similar downward slide (probably Blu Ray/DVD players keeping them alive more than anything else) with downloads and streaming rapidly becoming the method of choice.
I never bought vinyl myself because unless you take great care with the discs and have a top quality turntable as well, a well mastered CD (i.e. not horribly compressed) is going to generally sound at least as good as vinyl, if not better. Don't forget it's trivial to back up a CD using a PC (into a myriad of formats including ISO, FLAC, mp3, ogg, wav etc.) and much, much harder to do so with a vinyl record (USB turntables can do it, but they're not a massively popular item).
The only advantage I can see with vinyl is the larger artwork, but nowadays that's long been replaced by a downloadable digital PDF booklet (which can be resized bigger than the vinyl artwork :-) ).
Because most Marketplace sellers on Amazon UK charge postage (and often hefty amounts even for small/light items), they often use a bad feature of Amazon's "sort by price" option - it doesn't include postage in the sort - to mark many items as costing a penny. Those items then very annoyingly appear first in multiple pages of "sorted" results and it's only when you click on them that you find the postage is 500 times the so-called cost of the product.
If you ask me, it's karma coming back to bite those sellers on the arse - maybe the third-party software dropped the postage charge by mistake? I do wish Amazon UK would sort prices *inclusive* of postage - this misleading price sort has been going for many, many years. Failing that, at least set price minimums (e.g. 49p without postage and 99p with postage).
I believe Google dropped NPAPI support in Linux for version 35 onwards. This *immediately* broke all Java applets (as far as I know, there's no PPAPI Java plug-in), which wasn't great for sysadmins using Java VNC applets (yes, I know about noVNC, but not all Web UIs have moved to that) or F1 timing on formula1.com as a consumer example.
Never considered a CentOS install (I'd probably recommend 6 rather than 7 myself, but that's just me)? No licensing costs, 100% compatible with RHEL (minus any branding), doesn't run a GUI, has 6 years of support left, *doesn't* use systemd or Grub 2 - what's not to love?
Freecode was useful to simply find out what new/updated software (sometimes not always free, hmmm...) had been recently released regardless of where the code is hosted. Is there any other site that provides such a list in date order? Suggesting Sourceforge as an alternative isn't great (I can't find a list of date-ordered project releases - not individual files, which are in one of their RSS feeds - on the Sourceforge site).
Whilst playing around a little with Eclipse and the Android SDK, I found it much easier to just plug in my Android tablet (or it could be an Android phone or both) and download/run the app on that. You get to check rotation, multi-touch, camera etc. a lot more easily this way and it's just as easy (if not more so) than running the emulator. Of course, there could be Android devs without any Android devices at all, but I suspect that's a tiny minority.
The main use of the emulator is probably just to test different screen dimensions render OK - I personally wouldn't use it during the bulk of development though.
In my experience, it's Windows that doesn't play well with the MBR or provide any sort of menu system for non-Windows OS'es like the way grub does. In fact, the Windows installer is amazingly bad from a dual (or triple etc.) boot kind of way:
It won't touch a partition formatted in anything it doesn't understand (you can't even re-format it in the installer). You actually have to trick the Windows installer by using fdisk in Linux to change the partition ID to something like 7 (NTFS) and then magically the Windows installer will let you format it. Quite surprising how dumb this is, because surely MS would *want* to destroy non-Windows partitions the first chance it gets?
The Windows installer in the latest releases insists on hogging the first partition on the first drive in your system (i.e. it has to be formatted to Windows format), which is utterly appalling.
The Windows installer destroys the MBR (and effectively kills grub) with no attempt analyse it or the various non-Windows OS'es that might be on the rest of your system. This is disgraceful behaviour - most Linux distros will detect existing OS'es (including Windows) and set up grub menu items for them.
Of course, to work around these atrocities, you soon learn that you install Windows first (letting it wreck your MBR and partition setup) and then Linux second. You then get a dual boot grub menu with both Linux and Windows items.
If you have to re-install Windows later on, it will destroy the MBR yet again, so you end up having to boot a Live Linux distro and run grub commands to restore the MBR/grub setup.
So, to sum it up, the Windows installer is nasty to anything else that isn't Windows on your system , both on initial install and on any further re-install. So the blame here is 100% with Windows and not grub or Linux.
Er, Google Chrome on desktop Linux can cast a tab with the Google Cast extension extension in the Chrome store, so I've no idea why you claim no Linux browser can do this. If you use CentOS 6 like I do, you can even get Google Chrome running with my script.
The Firefox bug for all this seemed to be swaying backwards and forwards between using the SDK and not using it. Latest updates seem to suggest it *is* using the Chromecast SDK now, which unfortunately means desktop Firefox and Firefox OS may be left out in the cold initially.
People are moaning why desktop Firefox isn't going to cast a tab at the same time as the Android Firefox will. Firstly, I believe they *aren't* using the Chromecast SDK so the chances are good that desktop Firefox will follow not too long after Android Firefox. Secondly, no Android browser can currently cast a tab, so Mozilla are actually heading for a platform first - embarrassingly beating Google to it! - if they concentrate on Android Firefox first for tab casting.
Assuming you don't need RAID on the backup device itself, then a cheap desktop PC (usually from a custom white box builder - most OEM PCs don't come with enough SATA connectors/hard drive bays) with 5 or 6 4TB SATA hard drives does the trick. Sure, it'll cost you a fair amount for the hardware (in the UK, probably around 1,000 pounds or so), but it might be the most flexible solution (e.g. could be located offsite if you're paranoid, though you'd need a fast connection to it - at least 100 Mbits/sec I'd have thought - for that amount of data).
Of course, if you then want to keep multiple archive copies, then you'd have to look at compressing the backups and/or perhaps using backup software that does incrementals (e.g. Amanda on Linux or whatever). Another much pricier alternative is multiple spanning Ultrium 5 tapes in 24-slot autoloader attached to a machine with little local storage (1-2 TB free for holding space), but we're talking 5,000 pounds or so for this solution.
I don't know about you, but I really don't like the redesigned Fedora installer (Anaconda) that's turned up in recent Fedora releases. It's quite SHOUTY (yes, headings in full capitals and bold too!) and the disk partitioning section is frankly awful (very non-obvious, mixed units and it took me ages to work out how to create a partition that used all the remaining space - answer: put a huge value for the size and it'll round it down to what's left).
Fedora with the MATE desktop isn't too bad, but sadly that's the not the desktop that's the default selection. I also seem to remember a couple of releases (18 and 19 I think) that were incredibly show to both show the login screen and the post-login desktop in VirtualBox (20-25 secs for each on an i7 machine with a couple of CPU cores allocated!), though it looks like Fedora 20 fixed this. Many people will install Fedora in a VM first (particularly if they're Windows users) and if it performs poorly there, it won't get installed on the bare metal.
I basically gave up on bare metal Fedora from 15 onwards - no coincidence that the frankly dreadful GNOME 3 came out at the same time. Once I saw how bad it was in a VM, my preferred OS became CentOS 6, whose combo of GNOME 2, GRUB 1 and SysVInit scripts (all of which are much easier to use than their "better" successors) remains probably the peak combo we've seen to date in a mainstream Linux distro.
The RHEL/CentOS kernel does get security and bug fix backports from later kernels, but the reason it runs such an "old" kernel is for stability reasons. Most Windows desktop users never upgrade their OS to a newer major release during the lifetime of their PC (because it costs money and can be a hassle - remember most of the world's desktops are running the OS that was pre-installed when the machine was bought), but apparently most Linux desktop users are constantly chasing the bleeding edge if you're to be believed.
The problem with most Linux distros is that their support window is very narrow - usually less than 18 months and definitely less than the lifetime of a typical desktop PC. This is where CentOS scores heavily against Ubuntu - 10 years of updates to the OS, so *you* decide when to jump to the next major OS release and you're not effectively forced to jump releases half-way through your PC's lifespan.
Also note that it's not the kernel version that's a problem with CentOS, it's the older system libraries (particularly glibc, X11, Gnome etc.) that cause issues, particularly if you want to run closed-source binaries. Google Chrome is probably the highest profile casualty of this, which is why I cooked up a script to install the latest Google Chrome on CentOS 6.
I saw the specs for the Tegra Note a while ago and got a bit bored with them because:
1. It's not a Nexus device, so is already behind with its Android version. Now it may be with the many updates to the Nvidia Shield, we might see speedy updates to the Note as well, but until this actually happens, I'll err on the side of caution.
2. I would prefer an 8" display in the same dimensions and weight as a typical 7" tablet (e.g. reduce the bezel width). 7" displays aren't just quite large enough, IMHO.
3. The screen resolution is 1280x800, not 1280x720, but even so that only matches the 2012 Nexus 7 from 18 months ago and partially explains why its graphics benchmarks are so good.
Having said all that, Currys in the UK are selling it at 129.99 pounds ($215), which is actually a very good price for a decently spec'ed tablet in the UK.
One thing to try to appease Google Play is to change the app, so it's a set of instructions/downloads as follows:
* If Unknown Sources isn't ticked on, the first screen tells the user to go to Setttings/Security and tick on Unknown Sources (maybe that screen could be loaded by the app to make it even easier?).
* Next, the app downloads the apk from the CM site and installs it.
* Ask the user to uncheck Unknown Sources if they had to check it on in the first step.
* Run the downloaded app (exiting the original app at the same time if possible).
Would *this* violate any terms of service of Google Play (written down or otherwise)?
Replace "FF" with "Google Chrome" and you'll see that Google beat Mozilla to the punch :-) Remember that Chrome is on version 29 (5 ahead of Firefox) and now uses more RAM than Firefox! You've also conveniently forgotten the Firefox ESR release (Chrome has *nothing* like it, so is a complete disaster for corporate use). Also, the performance gap has been gradually closing between Chrome and Firefox in the last year or so. For the first time in a couple of years, Firefox recent actually beat Chrome in Tom's Hardware Browser Grand Prix.
The lack of extensions on Android Chrome is utterly appalling, which is why Firefox on Android basically destroys Android Chrome. Now if Mozilla could fix the dodgy graphics issue with Firefox on the Nexus 10 (pages often half-rendering and needing a screen rotation to render them properly!), then I wouldn't have to double-rotate my tablet so often :-)