KMSCON is also highly modular with its only hard dependencies being libxkbcommon, libudev, libpixman, and glibc. The DRM library (libdrm) is optional.
I was going to write that this isn't too bad, but then I saw bloody udev. You may not be interested, but I wanted to try out KDE 4.10, but I wanted to try it before making the move for real. So I installed a whole system in a chroot and enabled the testing repositories in that. To my surprise, X11 would start in the chroot, after things like/proc and/dev were properly bind-mounted. The *only* thing that didn't work was the keyboard and mouse. The reason? Auto-discovery with udev. So all of the complex beast that is Xorg could start, but the minor niggle of the input devices wouldn't work. Disable udev auto discovery in xorg.conf -> all is well! Well except the sound used Alsa instead of Pulseaudio. Seems like only the new stuff in Linux breaks. With every new fancy layer of abstraction, we seem to lose a little stability and gain a few features. Pulse is worth it for me, as I can change between my two sound cards while playing sound, for example to put on headphones when watching a movie and it gets late. It seems to me that distros did auto-mounting of removable devices in 2005 so I don't really know what benefit I get from udev/udisks. And because I have hundreds of snapshots of my block devices, the KDE file manager chokes for seconds every time I start it. Not worth it. Having anti-aliased fonts for the rare time I use the kernel consoles ? You got to be fucking kidding me.. (I used them extensively when setting up X in a chroot, and while I'd love to have a mouse and copy/paste, I don't want to think about the additional breakage that would happen with a "better" console)
Wrong. Less functionality running in the kernel, the better. The kernel is a highly constrained environment, and it is also very security sensitive. Console processing does not belong there.
When everything breaks down, it isn't worth much to have a rock solid kernel if you can't interact with it through a console
gov't would only have to get a private key from one [CA] to be able to decrypt your SSL tracffic.
Correction: if you are one of the diligent people who actually clicks on the SSL information dialogue and checks the certificate chain, then they would have to get the right CA in order to fool you.
Do surveillance agencies have some way of accessing all of this data in spite of it being encrypted in transport?
As the other commenter said, they can probably get it from Google et al.
As for "in flight": It is quite likely (by my own paranoid estimation only) that governments have access to a SSL root CA. OSes and browsers come installed with hundreds of Root CA certificates, and the gov't would only have to get a private key from one of them to be able to decrypt your SSL tracffic. For example, the makers of Stuxnet got themselves a root CA cert for installing applications (it may not have been strictly needed for that). They would also need to do a man-in-the-midlle attack or DNS poisoning, as in placing a box at the ISP or somewhere between you and Google.
Yeah, that's the reason I buy the damn CD in the first place, to get the best quality they will sell me. If I wanted MP3s, I could just go to their MP3 store and save myself the agony of getting things delivered to my flat. I certainly can't hear the difference between a >200 kbit MP3 and a CD, but there is about a 3x difference in file size, so something is missing. Will the MP3 sound as good if I use Dolby Headphone, for example? (I can't test, because I'm on Linux, heh)
FOUR: ANDROID'S DEFAULT CPU GOVERNORS MAKE AN ANNOYING PROBLEM INTOLERABLE
This is very interesting, as almost all desktop computers use ondemand too. My old CPU was a Phenom II quad core at 3400 MHz and it was noticeably slower on "ondemand" for interactive stuff. I ended up writing a script to pin it at performance, and switch to ondemand when the screen saver was on. Now I'm using a Xeon and I haven't noticed any difference. The Xeon only clocks down to 1600 MHz, while the AMD went all the way down to 800 MHz.
I wonder why the "interactive" governor isn't available on my desktop. I would happily trade a little power use on my desktop for better responsiveness. I'm worried the the "turbo" mode for the Intel CPU will not work if all cores are running at nominal speed alt he time, but then again I don't think turbo works (now) without some tweaking anyway. There are also some tunable parameters to ondemand, maybe it's tuned worse for Android and that's why people care more.
So applets will never work again for most people, and the services that require them will be gradually (slowly) phased out. Maybe a narcissistic comment, but my first game was an applet. Now it will never be playable again without great effort. it's kind of sad that with all the computing power we have today, we can't just automatically load old software and have it work.
That said, I've given to Wikipedia before. Not lately though, I got too sick of their ads.
Same here. I think the small banner for a period was good, letting people know that they need money. I would have given again this year, but the half page thing that obstructed the view was just obscene. Now I just try to click on other links than Wikipedia. At least I'm not using their bandwidth
I couldn't find one in the Google store though. Would be interesting if you could bring up a PPP dial-up connection on the phone, but on the other hand I'm happy that nobody have wasted their making it. And I suspect it would require root.
It would be nice if there was shortcut to refer to the local network. E.g. you could do things like LOCAL/64::2 LOCAL/48:fafa::3 in configuration files and scripts
You can't quantify RF interference by a single number. There are a huge number of possibilities for frequencies, modulations, duty cycles etc. To use a human analogy, it's like saying a human can take e.g. 90 units of disease before it dies, and the total exposure to pathogens should be kept below this number.
TV recordings from mythtv are about 4 Mbit/s too (standard def). There are significantly more interruptions on "11n" "Lite" gear (with just one antenna, claimed ~100Mbit/s) compared to Gbit wired. One killer is buffering when skipping back and forward. If it takes a second to buffer a second of video, that's very annoying.
Compressed video streaming isn't a great argument for anything beyond high-quality full speed "n" components though. Raw speed is great when moving big files around, if the CPU and hard drive can keep up.
The problem with NFS and SMB is that they are not safe to use on the public internet. You can set up IPSec for Windows and Linux to protect the traffic, and firewall off anything that's not on IPSec. Getting something like that up on Linux will require some serious quality time with the CLI and a text editor. On Windows you may need some enterprise license.
It is completely transparent once you've set it up, and it's a neat solution to make a "virtual private network" that's not actually a VPN tunnel. The downside is that things like SMB are not tuned to work great on both the internet (~10Mbit, high latency) and on the LAN (1000Mbit, low latency). Its probably better to use protocols not designed for LAN, like SFTP, but you'd be missing out on some features.
Raid is not backup, but sometimes you don't need a backup. I suspect that the OP woudn't be devastated if all the media was lost, and maybe it's not worth it to set up a second set of drives.
By using a filesystem with RAID and snapshot supprt like Btrfs or ZFS, one is protected against disk failure by RAID and most user errors by snapshots.
Amazingly, the *internet* is still the same. ISPs have left almost all IP functionality intact, despite the fact that many people only use Facebook and the web. The thing that has changed is that many new users come and don't care about open/closed. As a user, there is no need to use closed systems.
The article talks about mobile OSes, but those were even more closed and limited before. I really do wish that there was a phone OS that could do more locally, but that's a bad business model
HTTP is used for many purposes besides delivering HTML pages. This is a stupid idea.
Cox probably only injects it when the response has the correct MIME type, so you don't get it in images and binaries. Still, there is a huge amount of XML and HTML that is never intended to be seen by the user: automatic update checks can break, all kinds of mobile applications and other networked applications, aggregator services, etc. Some IM programs use HTTP-like requests.
There was a good analogy above, that this is like playing a recorded message when someone makes a phone call, before transferring it to the correct recipient. As you can imagine, this would screw up faxes and modems quite bad.
Now that I'm done complaining, I should come up with an alternative. The best candidate is email, but the email was down so it wouldn't help much. They surely should put up a big message on the home page, as many people will be going there to look up the phone number for tech support. Apart from that, I think the correct way to handle it is to do nothing. This HTTP injection technique may be appropriate for urgent security problems, but not for announcing an outage.
Or the post office opening your mail and gluing a message to the contents, ransom-note-style, about your mail carrier being out sick.
More like them gluing it on a post card. A letter in an envelope would be more like SSL, which they thankfully don't have the power to snoop on. Doesn't seem that evil actually. It would be better if there was some standard way for the ISP to communicate with their customers. They could make customers provide an up-to-date email address instead of insisting on using the @comcast.com or what ever.
I assume that the AOL SMTP servers require login, and that they modify the "sender" address label to match that who logged in similar to how Google does (ie, "granpajo@aol.com on behalf of rustyshackelford@red-hot-tubgirl-grits.cn")?
The GP was probably talking about sending *to* an AOL account. There would be no intermediate SMTP server, just the computer delivering a message directly to the AOL incoming SMTP server. The only problem would be that AOL probably blacklists a lot of IP addresses for home users for incoming messages.
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KMSCON is also highly modular with its only hard dependencies being libxkbcommon, libudev, libpixman, and glibc. The DRM library (libdrm) is optional.
I was going to write that this isn't too bad, but then I saw bloody udev. You may not be interested, but I wanted to try out KDE 4.10, but I wanted to try it before making the move for real. So I installed a whole system in a chroot and enabled the testing repositories in that. To my surprise, X11 would start in the chroot, after things like /proc and /dev were properly bind-mounted. The *only* thing that didn't work was the keyboard and mouse. The reason? Auto-discovery with udev. So all of the complex beast that is Xorg could start, but the minor niggle of the input devices wouldn't work. Disable udev auto discovery in xorg.conf -> all is well! Well except the sound used Alsa instead of Pulseaudio. Seems like only the new stuff in Linux breaks. With every new fancy layer of abstraction, we seem to lose a little stability and gain a few features. Pulse is worth it for me, as I can change between my two sound cards while playing sound, for example to put on headphones when watching a movie and it gets late. It seems to me that distros did auto-mounting of removable devices in 2005 so I don't really know what benefit I get from udev/udisks. And because I have hundreds of snapshots of my block devices, the KDE file manager chokes for seconds every time I start it. Not worth it. Having anti-aliased fonts for the rare time I use the kernel consoles ? You got to be fucking kidding me.. (I used them extensively when setting up X in a chroot, and while I'd love to have a mouse and copy/paste, I don't want to think about the additional breakage that would happen with a "better" console)
Wrong. Less functionality running in the kernel, the better. The kernel is a highly constrained environment, and it is also very security sensitive. Console processing does not belong there.
When everything breaks down, it isn't worth much to have a rock solid kernel if you can't interact with it through a console
People who put forth the effort to download music are more likly to have an interested in music.
This is a more plausible argument. There are plenty of ways to sample (big label) music legally for free, and easier than Bittorrent.
gov't would only have to get a private key from one [CA] to be able to decrypt your SSL tracffic.
Correction: if you are one of the diligent people who actually clicks on the SSL information dialogue and checks the certificate chain, then they would have to get the right CA in order to fool you.
Do surveillance agencies have some way of accessing all of this data in spite of it being encrypted in transport?
As the other commenter said, they can probably get it from Google et al.
As for "in flight": It is quite likely (by my own paranoid estimation only) that governments have access to a SSL root CA. OSes and browsers come installed with hundreds of Root CA certificates, and the gov't would only have to get a private key from one of them to be able to decrypt your SSL tracffic. For example, the makers of Stuxnet got themselves a root CA cert for installing applications (it may not have been strictly needed for that). They would also need to do a man-in-the-midlle attack or DNS poisoning, as in placing a box at the ISP or somewhere between you and Google.
Yes.
Bah, that's what i get for not phrasing the question properly. Oh well, it's disabled for now
Can I use the IcedTea Web Plugin on Linux, or is that also vulnerable?
Just a correction: turbo mode happens automatically. Here's a good program to see the real frequency.
Yeah, that's the reason I buy the damn CD in the first place, to get the best quality they will sell me. If I wanted MP3s, I could just go to their MP3 store and save myself the agony of getting things delivered to my flat. I certainly can't hear the difference between a >200 kbit MP3 and a CD, but there is about a 3x difference in file size, so something is missing. Will the MP3 sound as good if I use Dolby Headphone, for example? (I can't test, because I'm on Linux, heh)
Actually, this was the reason I bought CDs before. Now that they have less legal rights as well, ( http://apple.slashdot.org/story/12/09/03/153220/bruce-willis-considering-legal-action-against-apple-over-itunes-collection ), it's going to be a while befroe I start doing downloads again. Might as well (almost) move to streaming then...
FOUR: ANDROID'S DEFAULT CPU GOVERNORS MAKE AN ANNOYING PROBLEM INTOLERABLE
This is very interesting, as almost all desktop computers use ondemand too. My old CPU was a Phenom II quad core at 3400 MHz and it was noticeably slower on "ondemand" for interactive stuff. I ended up writing a script to pin it at performance, and switch to ondemand when the screen saver was on. Now I'm using a Xeon and I haven't noticed any difference. The Xeon only clocks down to 1600 MHz, while the AMD went all the way down to 800 MHz.
I wonder why the "interactive" governor isn't available on my desktop. I would happily trade a little power use on my desktop for better responsiveness. I'm worried the the "turbo" mode for the Intel CPU will not work if all cores are running at nominal speed alt he time, but then again I don't think turbo works (now) without some tweaking anyway. There are also some tunable parameters to ondemand, maybe it's tuned worse for Android and that's why people care more.
You don't need a crooked accountant. Just don't ring up cash sales and you're good to go, then write off the missing merchandise as shrink.
Cash sales are a rarity in Norway now, almost every purchase is by card
So applets will never work again for most people, and the services that require them will be gradually (slowly) phased out. Maybe a narcissistic comment, but my first game was an applet. Now it will never be playable again without great effort. it's kind of sad that with all the computing power we have today, we can't just automatically load old software and have it work.
That said, I've given to Wikipedia before. Not lately though, I got too sick of their ads.
Same here. I think the small banner for a period was good, letting people know that they need money. I would have given again this year, but the half page thing that obstructed the view was just obscene. Now I just try to click on other links than Wikipedia. At least I'm not using their bandwidth
Dial-up access... there is an app for that.
I couldn't find one in the Google store though. Would be interesting if you could bring up a PPP dial-up connection on the phone, but on the other hand I'm happy that nobody have wasted their making it. And I suspect it would require root.
It would be nice if there was shortcut to refer to the local network. E.g. you could do things like
LOCAL/64::2
LOCAL/48:fafa::3
in configuration files and scripts
int ip = resolve(hostname); //int ip = 192.168.0.1;
connect(ip);
That's really going to fuck with your deadlines?
Ironically, it's things like storing IP addresses in ints that make it hard to move to v6. (routers have to do it, but not client software)
You can't quantify RF interference by a single number. There are a huge number of possibilities for frequencies, modulations, duty cycles etc. To use a human analogy, it's like saying a human can take e.g. 90 units of disease before it dies, and the total exposure to pathogens should be kept below this number.
TV recordings from mythtv are about 4 Mbit/s too (standard def). There are significantly more interruptions on "11n" "Lite" gear (with just one antenna, claimed ~100Mbit/s) compared to Gbit wired. One killer is buffering when skipping back and forward. If it takes a second to buffer a second of video, that's very annoying.
Compressed video streaming isn't a great argument for anything beyond high-quality full speed "n" components though. Raw speed is great when moving big files around, if the CPU and hard drive can keep up.
The problem with NFS and SMB is that they are not safe to use on the public internet. You can set up IPSec for Windows and Linux to protect the traffic, and firewall off anything that's not on IPSec. Getting something like that up on Linux will require some serious quality time with the CLI and a text editor. On Windows you may need some enterprise license.
It is completely transparent once you've set it up, and it's a neat solution to make a "virtual private network" that's not actually a VPN tunnel. The downside is that things like SMB are not tuned to work great on both the internet (~10Mbit, high latency) and on the LAN (1000Mbit, low latency). Its probably better to use protocols not designed for LAN, like SFTP, but you'd be missing out on some features.
Raid is not backup, but sometimes you don't need a backup. I suspect that the OP woudn't be devastated if all the media was lost, and maybe it's not worth it to set up a second set of drives.
By using a filesystem with RAID and snapshot supprt like Btrfs or ZFS, one is protected against disk failure by RAID and most user errors by snapshots.
Amazingly, the *internet* is still the same. ISPs have left almost all IP functionality intact, despite the fact that many people only use Facebook and the web. The thing that has changed is that many new users come and don't care about open/closed. As a user, there is no need to use closed systems.
The article talks about mobile OSes, but those were even more closed and limited before. I really do wish that there was a phone OS that could do more locally, but that's a bad business model
[What Cox is doing] is a stupid idea.
FTFM
HTTP is used for many purposes besides delivering HTML pages. This is a stupid idea.
Cox probably only injects it when the response has the correct MIME type, so you don't get it in images and binaries. Still, there is a huge amount of XML and HTML that is never intended to be seen by the user: automatic update checks can break, all kinds of mobile applications and other networked applications, aggregator services, etc. Some IM programs use HTTP-like requests.
There was a good analogy above, that this is like playing a recorded message when someone makes a phone call, before transferring it to the correct recipient. As you can imagine, this would screw up faxes and modems quite bad.
Now that I'm done complaining, I should come up with an alternative. The best candidate is email, but the email was down so it wouldn't help much. They surely should put up a big message on the home page, as many people will be going there to look up the phone number for tech support. Apart from that, I think the correct way to handle it is to do nothing. This HTTP injection technique may be appropriate for urgent security problems, but not for announcing an outage.
Or the post office opening your mail and gluing a message to the contents, ransom-note-style, about your mail carrier being out sick.
More like them gluing it on a post card. A letter in an envelope would be more like SSL, which they thankfully don't have the power to snoop on. Doesn't seem that evil actually. It would be better if there was some standard way for the ISP to communicate with their customers. They could make customers provide an up-to-date email address instead of insisting on using the @comcast.com or what ever.
I assume that the AOL SMTP servers require login, and that they modify the "sender" address label to match that who logged in similar to how Google does (ie, "granpajo@aol.com on behalf of rustyshackelford@red-hot-tubgirl-grits.cn")?
The GP was probably talking about sending *to* an AOL account. There would be no intermediate SMTP server, just the computer delivering a message directly to the AOL incoming SMTP server. The only problem would be that AOL probably blacklists a lot of IP addresses for home users for incoming messages.