Just today I received my mini-ITX system with an AMD A8-7600. It is an upgrade for a 7 year old AMD Athlon 64. I wanted something with relative low power, small form factor and silent. I don't want a noisy midi-tower in my livingroom anymore. I use it for development work, but also for watching HD Video and browsing in my own time. Ofcourse there is just a new generation of AMD apu's announced, where the rumors first claimed it would only be a 100Mhz increase, but the marketing speak claims many more improvements. I do hope it is a good improvement over the 7 year old system, and I hope I can even get more years out of this one. There is the SSD and normal sata disk, together with a NAS.
Seeing cororate interest in Open Source / Free Software grow bigger, I am slowly moving towards the camp of the Idealists, like RMS.
Just looking at Linux, the kernel. It's great that it is being used in Android, and that it has a billion users there. But Android is not free in the practical sense for the enduser. They can never update their device to a newer version, because the hardwaredrivers are tied to the kernelversion. "Just buy a new device", Google and the manufacturers say. Just what GNU was all about in the beginning, "just buy a new printer".
Similar corporate interests are happening at Red Hat, which is pulling all the sheets in their direction. Their ideal is to have every Linux distro be similar, like RH. And we are "happy" to just take their software and use it, because it is so pragmatic.
The good thing about Free Software is, you can always fork it. But the barrier to do so is quite high, so there needs to be a lot of frustration for that to happen. We will see what will happen to GNOME3, Mate and Cinnamon. I wish the later 2 projects the best.
Just today I had a runin with Systemd. It would log to syslog when restarting the mpd service went fine, but would not log to syslog when there was an error. Just great... Ofcourse there is journalctl, but by that time I had just started/usr/bin/mpd manually to see the error output. It really is our way or no highway.
This seems to be the start of the corporatization of Linux. RedHat is pulling hard on the sheets to get into control. They want to become the Cathedral of Linux. It started with the destruction of Gnome, which lost maybe half of its users. And now this Systemd. I wonder what will be next. There is more to come. They are maybe trying to pull a Google, like Android, where the enduser has hardly any control, with Google Play services and proprietary drivers. Just in a different way, pulling in everything that makes traditional Linux.
And I don't see much alternatives. I pondered switching to Gentoo, but I have my doubts about the practicality of a source-based distro. For starters, I would need to set up infrastructure to push binary builds from my desktop to my laptop, since I only use the laptop on the train. I also don't think I would be happy on BSB or Slackware. So I will just bear it for a while.
We had lots of trouble with WordPress bot-logins from Russia and Ukraine, so I decided to block those ip-ranges. Turns out one such block was also partly being used by customers in my own country. I received some vague mails about some things not working correctly. So I removed that ip-block, and sent back some vague replies that it was a firewall that was too strict.
There might be other blocks listed as from Russia and Ukraine, that are actually being used elsewhere.
Anyway, with the advent of ipv6, the whole idea of ip-blocks might change.
Beavis: "I have high standards in relationships. I have at least 3 requirements: - She must be a woman - She must at least have one breast - She may not be my mother"
We're all aware that bots are all around us. Anyone with a website has probably more bot-generated traffic than human-generated traffic. I wonder what will happen with cars. In 10 years we will not just have the occasional Google car filming the neighbourhood. There will probably a whole industry of robot-cars without humans. Designed to look like cars, like a mini-car, but without seats, without stearingwheel and dashboard, etc. It will be designed just for the robot. I cannot oversee just for what they will be used, but I reckon it's not just for Google-cars. You could have a courier-botcar deliver a package, cheaper that a car with a human inside. Or maybe even cheaper than a bike-courier. There will be new uses invented for cars. 20 years from now the landscape and the roads might look very different from today.
Bitrot does happen. When a disk has a bad block and detects that, it will try to read the data from it and put it on a block from the reserve-pool. However, the data might be bad and corrupt, so you lose data. Disks do have a Reed-Solomon (aka par-files) index, so it can repair some damage, but it doesn't always succeed.
Anyway, what I do for important things, is have par2 blocks that go along with the data. All my photo-archives have par2 files attached to them.
I reckon you could even automate it. To have a script that traverses all directories and tries to repair the data if it's broken. If it fails, you get notified.
It's just politics. None of the politicians came across as serious when the first revelations of Snowden came out. Only the SP wanted to ask questions to Snowden directly, but he definitely won't fly to Holland:). When it comes to this situation, there's no real party you can trust.
Maybe I'm naive or ignorant, but what can a normal user do about e-mail? Most e-mail from ISP's runs over port 25, and it all gets logged by logboxes and tappers. I don't think the default for an MTA is port 465 or 587, but still 25. If I'm wrong. please correct me. What should be done here, can someone inform me. Is there something a user, admin or mta-developer should do here? I read my mail over imaps and pop3s, and store it on my own-hosted imap server. But what to do about smtp-traffic?
I think it's an interesting OS to watch for. I can see similarities with the web. The web seemed to turn into a proprietary format. Firefox stumbled on, but it seemed like an uphill battle that would never succeed. However they did succeed, by just keeping to their goals. The web now is more open then 10 years ago, where you couldn't even access the website of your bank with Firefox.
Now with this OS, it might turn out the same. It's all somewhat closed platforms. Apple uses Obj-C, Android a Java variant. Other platforms use Qt. Now Firefox comes along and uses a platform that is already open, html5/css/js, and uses it for apps.
I just hope the other underdogs follow suit, and use the same API, like Ubuntu, Jolla, Tizen. We'' lees what the future brings. I think they can do it, and provide a common platform for the future.
Hmm, I expect you have a good reason to not have an online presence. If you wanted that, you'd have it. So advising to create that presence seems like an unwanted idea.
I would just put it in my resume, with a well worded sentence that you don't have an online presence. I would expect HR to check your online presence, so it's good to write it in advance.
And this would be a possible roadmap for X12: X12 Development
Reading that list also makes a big argument against X11, and it seems to me that Wayland will be the place where lots of things will be better.
> They aren't even bothering to go after the US market. They're focusing on smaller, less competitive markets like China, Europe, and North Africa.
The US is the smaller market compared to China.
You can even blame Nokia, for throwing away their business in Asia and Africa with Symbian, just to try to capture the smaller US market with Windows Phone. And they even hardly succeed with that.
I expect Jolla to sell quite good in China, and hopefully somewhat in Europe too.
> If Blackberry and Microsoft with their $Billions can't compete with Google and Apple, how can a tiny project like this?
If everyone said that, we would not have Google or Apple. They too started as tiny projects. I wish them well, and hope to see them succeed. The Nokia N9 sold well in China. It has allready been in the news that Jolla has good relationships with Chinese and European carriers. They will sell, probably some millions. Who knows where things are going.
I always used to feel that Debian was a bit behind the curve in regards to included packages. 10 years ago there was really visible progress, like anti-aliased fonts in GTK or the X compositor, so I went with other distro's that were more bleeding-edge. The install and configuration also was a bit hardcore (it still somewhat is, where is my DrakX?).
Nowadays I feel it's just the right spot. No over-engineered crap like systemd or journald. You can easily disable pulseaudio. And everything and the kitchen-sink is available in the repositories. And for just Firefox or Chrome you can easily add packages. There's no real need for bleeding-edge anymore. Linux is mature and stable.
There have been more posts on Slashdot in the last 14 years on Slashdot about this topic. What I recall of them, is that people have been tested with blind and double-blind tests. And about ten years ago you could hear a difference between lossless audio and low-bitrate mp3's. The latter has less high and low, and mostly a certain "Hiss" sound through it. The preference was with the lossless audio then. What struck me in later tests, was that people seemed to favour mp3's above lossless audio. I reckon it has to do with getting used to the Hiss-sound in mp3's, and therefore having it as a preference. A big factor in music taste is how much you are used to hearing similar music and sounds, and the hiss-sound does make a usual sound.
To be fair, I do think that mp3's in a high bitrate like 320 kbit are almost as good as lossless audio. Even though I prefer the lossless audio, just to be sure.
Claws-mail is the successor of the old Sylpheed-claws. It really is a nice and simple mailclient, which in the meantime does almost everything. Imaps, RSS, filtering, whatever. And with good usability, the buttons are all at the right place. I even use the Windows version at work.
There are some thing Thunderbird is particularly bad at in my opinion. Like sorting threaded mails. I know there are extensions, but they suck. I also don't like the autodetection of mailserver settings. You cannot save something in a non-working state, while sometimes I just want to do that.
Everyone seems to suggest that the main reason for staying home is to not spread the illness. I'd say a better reason would be because it's just healthy for you.
When you have the flue, your body fights that by upping your body temperature. Your body won't really like it, but the flue will definitely not like it. Then the weakened flue virus can be easier cleaned up.
But you have to support your body to keep at something like 39 degrees Celcius. Put the room thermostat higher, or just crawl in bed with lots of blankets. Anything to stay warm. Staying at an office all day long, with minimal room temperature, often next to a windy door or window is not a good idea and won't really improve your situation. Your body will have to work real hard to get at a high temperature and to get rid of the virus.
Anyway, I was just sick this week. Today is my first good day again:).
Has anyone used this OS yet, and can share some thoughts on it?
I'm a bit worried that it's a low cost (and probably relative slow) phone, while at the same time HTML5 can be a pretty heavy load.
I myself am not very fond of Android, and I will not buy anything from Apple or Microsoft. IMO The market can use another platform, especially when it is a portable platform with portable apps.
Slashdot Mirror
Also make sure to check out Tota11y:
http://khan.github.io/tota11y/?ref=hn
Just today I received my mini-ITX system with an AMD A8-7600. It is an upgrade for a 7 year old AMD Athlon 64.
I wanted something with relative low power, small form factor and silent. I don't want a noisy midi-tower in my livingroom anymore.
I use it for development work, but also for watching HD Video and browsing in my own time.
Ofcourse there is just a new generation of AMD apu's announced, where the rumors first claimed it would only be a 100Mhz increase, but the marketing speak claims many more improvements.
I do hope it is a good improvement over the 7 year old system, and I hope I can even get more years out of this one.
There is the SSD and normal sata disk, together with a NAS.
Seeing cororate interest in Open Source / Free Software grow bigger, I am slowly moving towards the camp of the Idealists, like RMS.
Just looking at Linux, the kernel. It's great that it is being used in Android, and that it has a billion users there. But Android is not free in the practical sense for the enduser. They can never update their device to a newer version, because the hardwaredrivers are tied to the kernelversion. "Just buy a new device", Google and the manufacturers say. Just what GNU was all about in the beginning, "just buy a new printer".
Similar corporate interests are happening at Red Hat, which is pulling all the sheets in their direction. Their ideal is to have every Linux distro be similar, like RH. And we are "happy" to just take their software and use it, because it is so pragmatic.
The good thing about Free Software is, you can always fork it. But the barrier to do so is quite high, so there needs to be a lot of frustration for that to happen.
We will see what will happen to GNOME3, Mate and Cinnamon. I wish the later 2 projects the best.
Just today I had a runin with Systemd. It would log to syslog when restarting the mpd service went fine, but would not log to syslog when there was an error. Just great... /usr/bin/mpd manually to see the error output.
Ofcourse there is journalctl, but by that time I had just started
It really is our way or no highway.
This seems to be the start of the corporatization of Linux. RedHat is pulling hard on the sheets to get into control. They want to become the Cathedral of Linux. It started with the destruction of Gnome, which lost maybe half of its users. And now this Systemd. I wonder what will be next. There is more to come.
They are maybe trying to pull a Google, like Android, where the enduser has hardly any control, with Google Play services and proprietary drivers. Just in a different way, pulling in everything that makes traditional Linux.
And I don't see much alternatives. I pondered switching to Gentoo, but I have my doubts about the practicality of a source-based distro. For starters, I would need to set up infrastructure to push binary builds from my desktop to my laptop, since I only use the laptop on the train.
I also don't think I would be happy on BSB or Slackware. So I will just bear it for a while.
We had lots of trouble with WordPress bot-logins from Russia and Ukraine, so I decided to block those ip-ranges.
Turns out one such block was also partly being used by customers in my own country. I received some vague mails about some things not working correctly. So I removed that ip-block, and sent back some vague replies that it was a firewall that was too strict.
There might be other blocks listed as from Russia and Ukraine, that are actually being used elsewhere.
Anyway, with the advent of ipv6, the whole idea of ip-blocks might change.
Beavis:
"I have high standards in relationships. I have at least 3 requirements:
- She must be a woman
- She must at least have one breast
- She may not be my mother"
We're all aware that bots are all around us. Anyone with a website has probably more bot-generated traffic than human-generated traffic.
I wonder what will happen with cars. In 10 years we will not just have the occasional Google car filming the neighbourhood.
There will probably a whole industry of robot-cars without humans. Designed to look like cars, like a mini-car, but without seats, without stearingwheel and dashboard, etc.
It will be designed just for the robot. I cannot oversee just for what they will be used, but I reckon it's not just for Google-cars.
You could have a courier-botcar deliver a package, cheaper that a car with a human inside. Or maybe even cheaper than a bike-courier.
There will be new uses invented for cars. 20 years from now the landscape and the roads might look very different from today.
Bitrot does happen.
When a disk has a bad block and detects that, it will try to read the data from it and put it on a block from the reserve-pool. However, the data might be bad and corrupt, so you lose data.
Disks do have a Reed-Solomon (aka par-files) index, so it can repair some damage, but it doesn't always succeed.
Anyway, what I do for important things, is have par2 blocks that go along with the data. All my photo-archives have par2 files attached to them.
I reckon you could even automate it. To have a script that traverses all directories and tries to repair the data if it's broken. If it fails, you get notified.
It's just politics. None of the politicians came across as serious when the first revelations of Snowden came out. Only the SP wanted to ask questions to Snowden directly, but he definitely won't fly to Holland :).
When it comes to this situation, there's no real party you can trust.
I know GPG. But I do not know anyone who is using it. I haven't seen a gpg-signature in years, except my own :).
Maybe I'm naive or ignorant, but what can a normal user do about e-mail?
Most e-mail from ISP's runs over port 25, and it all gets logged by logboxes and tappers. I don't think the default for an MTA is port 465 or 587, but still 25. If I'm wrong. please correct me.
What should be done here, can someone inform me. Is there something a user, admin or mta-developer should do here?
I read my mail over imaps and pop3s, and store it on my own-hosted imap server. But what to do about smtp-traffic?
The best description on Slashdot I read about the MS-Nokia deal is:
Microsoft rides Nokia like a cowboy rides a horse untill it dies. Then they hop over to the next horse.
I think it's an interesting OS to watch for. I can see similarities with the web. The web seemed to turn into a proprietary format. Firefox stumbled on, but it seemed like an uphill battle that would never succeed. However they did succeed, by just keeping to their goals. The web now is more open then 10 years ago, where you couldn't even access the website of your bank with Firefox.
Now with this OS, it might turn out the same. It's all somewhat closed platforms. Apple uses Obj-C, Android a Java variant. Other platforms use Qt. Now Firefox comes along and uses a platform that is already open, html5/css/js, and uses it for apps.
I just hope the other underdogs follow suit, and use the same API, like Ubuntu, Jolla, Tizen.
We'' lees what the future brings. I think they can do it, and provide a common platform for the future.
Hmm, I expect you have a good reason to not have an online presence. If you wanted that, you'd have it. So advising to create that presence seems like an unwanted idea.
I would just put it in my resume, with a well worded sentence that you don't have an online presence. I would expect HR to check your online presence, so it's good to write it in advance.
> if the number of people you decribe are less than 5000 a year in the USA, it is a small enough number that it doesnt even register.
Are you talking about terrorism here? How many died last year from that?
And how many died from attacks because of their gender?
And this would be a possible roadmap for X12:
X12 Development
Reading that list also makes a big argument against X11, and it seems to me that Wayland will be the place where lots of things will be better.
> They aren't even bothering to go after the US market. They're focusing on smaller, less competitive markets like China, Europe, and North Africa.
The US is the smaller market compared to China.
You can even blame Nokia, for throwing away their business in Asia and Africa with Symbian, just to try to capture the smaller US market with Windows Phone. And they even hardly succeed with that.
I expect Jolla to sell quite good in China, and hopefully somewhat in Europe too.
> If Blackberry and Microsoft with their $Billions can't compete with Google and Apple, how can a tiny project like this?
If everyone said that, we would not have Google or Apple. They too started as tiny projects. I wish them well, and hope to see them succeed.
The Nokia N9 sold well in China. It has allready been in the news that Jolla has good relationships with Chinese and European carriers. They will sell, probably some millions. Who knows where things are going.
I always used to feel that Debian was a bit behind the curve in regards to included packages. 10 years ago there was really visible progress, like anti-aliased fonts in GTK or the X compositor, so I went with other distro's that were more bleeding-edge. The install and configuration also was a bit hardcore (it still somewhat is, where is my DrakX?).
Nowadays I feel it's just the right spot. No over-engineered crap like systemd or journald. You can easily disable pulseaudio. And everything and the kitchen-sink is available in the repositories. And for just Firefox or Chrome you can easily add packages. There's no real need for bleeding-edge anymore. Linux is mature and stable.
The statistics that the AMS-IX gives out do not show any rise in network traffic, maybe even a slowdown.
Stats
For a Dutch provider, you would at least suspect a slight increase in traffic on the Dutch Internet Exchange.
There have been more posts on Slashdot in the last 14 years on Slashdot about this topic. What I recall of them, is that people have been tested with blind and double-blind tests. And about ten years ago you could hear a difference between lossless audio and low-bitrate mp3's. The latter has less high and low, and mostly a certain "Hiss" sound through it. The preference was with the lossless audio then.
What struck me in later tests, was that people seemed to favour mp3's above lossless audio. I reckon it has to do with getting used to the Hiss-sound in mp3's, and therefore having it as a preference. A big factor in music taste is how much you are used to hearing similar music and sounds, and the hiss-sound does make a usual sound.
To be fair, I do think that mp3's in a high bitrate like 320 kbit are almost as good as lossless audio. Even though I prefer the lossless audio, just to be sure.
Claws-mail is the successor of the old Sylpheed-claws. It really is a nice and simple mailclient, which in the meantime does almost everything. Imaps, RSS, filtering, whatever. And with good usability, the buttons are all at the right place.
I even use the Windows version at work.
There are some thing Thunderbird is particularly bad at in my opinion. Like sorting threaded mails. I know there are extensions, but they suck.
I also don't like the autodetection of mailserver settings. You cannot save something in a non-working state, while sometimes I just want to do that.
Everyone seems to suggest that the main reason for staying home is to not spread the illness. I'd say a better reason would be because it's just healthy for you.
When you have the flue, your body fights that by upping your body temperature. Your body won't really like it, but the flue will definitely not like it. Then the weakened flue virus can be easier cleaned up.
But you have to support your body to keep at something like 39 degrees Celcius. Put the room thermostat higher, or just crawl in bed with lots of blankets. Anything to stay warm.
Staying at an office all day long, with minimal room temperature, often next to a windy door or window is not a good idea and won't really improve your situation. Your body will have to work real hard to get at a high temperature and to get rid of the virus.
Anyway, I was just sick this week. Today is my first good day again :).
Has anyone used this OS yet, and can share some thoughts on it?
I'm a bit worried that it's a low cost (and probably relative slow) phone, while at the same time HTML5 can be a pretty heavy load.
I myself am not very fond of Android, and I will not buy anything from Apple or Microsoft. IMO The market can use another platform, especially when it is a portable platform with portable apps.
Ehm, isn't there xmove that lets you move X11 apps from one X11 server to another?