Posts by Jim 59 2047 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Jun 2009
Unfortunately the Beeb now carries many adverts. For itself and its own products, maybe, but still annoying adverts. On TV every gap between progrmmes is filled with adverts for other programmes and pointless, expensive looking "idents" that seem to serve no purpose except self promotion. On radio, programmes are routinely interrupted right in the middle, as that honeyed voice says, for the 11th time, something about a furure programm you don't wish to listen too.
systemd with faint praise
"But replacing it with a big, black box that basically replaces lots and lots of core functionality with its own ridiculous idea of a service in so many areas (DNS, etc.) just destroyed the concept for me."
Indeed. Systemd is entirely Windowsesque. Here's a tiny example from this morning. The command to list services in Ubuntu 14 is "sudo systemctl list-unit-files". Having a long output, you can pipe that in to "more", "less" or your preferred pager, as is the unix norm.
However, like a suspicious friend, systemctl is unhappy that you might be using another tool without talking to it first. So it gets involved. It does the terminal paging. Yes, there is, right there at the bottom of the systemctl man page. Systemd actually contains code to page user terminals. Only by invoking a third party pager, mind you, but there it is nontheless, systemd sticking its nose into the shell's business, to no advantage whatsoever. An annoyance, but also a small demonstration of the design which so many object to, and for sound reasons.
Well said Jake, but it is precisely systemd's size, complexity and poor architecture that attracts the bugs, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. The systemd project has shown unbelievable naivety in being unaware of this basic fact of software engineering, don't you think?
It reminds me of the Unity debacle. Design a system which, for sound reasons, is disliked by many. Foist it on people. Don't listen to anybody. Carry on for years. What an awful waste.
Trump is wrong to pull out of the Paris agreement, it is a misjudgement. But hit attitude is right. He sticks up for the "common man". The American media (WaPo, CNN, NYT) certainly won't. And meanwhile the billionaires weep, while flying round in private jets and piutting down a personal carbon footprint the size of Neptne (as does Trump, probably).
But yeah he should have stayed in.
systemd-free Devuan Linux hits RC2
systemd-free Debian fork
Fixing a problem on wheezy:
- look in text file. See error message. Take action
Fixing a problem in jessie (systemd):
- your main challenge here is in finding the error messages in the first place. This will usually be more complex a task than either the underlying problem or the remedial actions needed to fix it. Often you will just give up and take a series of guesses as to what the problem might be. Your third or fourth guess will be correct and so after trailing a number of solutions, a fix is at hand. Rather like trouble shooting Windows.
Got no axe to grind, just hate bad engineering.
@Downside Well said to your whole post. Although I dislike the description "pantomime baddy", which is often applied to Kim Jong-un these days. It reminds me of Idi Amin, former president of Uganda, who was sometimes described in similar terms. He even played up to the "evil teddy bear" image, some say, in order to distract from what he really was - a psychopathic, mass-murdering dictator.
Amin, when he wasn't killing up to half a million people, awarded himself a doctorate of law as well as the Victoria Cross. There were even rumours he was a cannibal. Did he deliberately make his own evil cartoonish ? Who knows. Either way, Kim Jong-un seems like a photocopy.
I'd love a dedupe home NAS, so I can save space storing all those mp4 files - oh wait. No. Well then my massive FLAC archive, surely...no, can't dedupe that either. Well what about that massive archive of ISO images, I can, no, hang on,er... mp3, flv, encrypted backups, no, no, and no... jpegs no, gif no...
Backups of said data will still dedupe well.
Don't use a dedupe array as a backup target, tempting as it will seem. Yes, you would save tons of space. But for backups, you actually *want* to have multiple physical copies of the data, Not one physical copy and many logical copies (which is what deduped data is). If those physical blocks die, you could lose not just a single backup, but all generations of that backup within the deduped domain.
I guess another reason that dedupe isn't widespread is that storage is just so cheap now. Even for primary enterprise storage, what you pay for is the speed rather than the capacity. "Big data" might be a better candidate.
Dedupe is still alive? It never seems to have lived up to its promise somehow, not since those heady days of 2008, before Data Domain was gobbled up by EMC.
Dedupe is a Nirvana, in theory. By now it was supposed to be everywhere: even in ZFS and Linux. One of the problems is that encrypted data can't be deduped, and encryption is becoming the norm in some areas. Corporate desktops (or at least laptops) are now usually encrypted. So is data held in the "cloud".
What happens to a 100TB array if somebody dumps 20TB of encrypted data on there? Do the inline ingesters just dumbly thrash themselves to death trying to dedupe/undedpue it, or do they know what they are dealing with and somehow skip those blocks? Compressed data almost as bad, eg. nearly all media files.
It seems that non-compressed, non-encrypted data will soon be restricted, perhaps, to internal corporate office servers. And who wants to buy a fancy DD SSD array system for that mundane stuff?
Back in August, the Pope warned that "chatting on the internet or with smartphones, watching TV soap operas" was not improving the quality of life but was "distracting attention away from what is really important" - like worshiping an all-powerful deity and overseeing a global network of adherents in dresses.
Really? Sub-Hopkins troll bait in The Register now?
Perhaps El Reg should spend more time writing, making phone calls and actually talking to people, and less time reading Twitter, chatting on the Internet, browsing Buzzfeed...
Most of them, especially the children DIDN'T sign up....they were indoctrinated from birth, and never had the chance to reject this evil religion.
And why shouldn't parents indoctrinate their kids? That's what parents are for. My parents "indoctrinated" me with plenty of stuff, most of which turned out to be true and very useful.
Or how many times have I seen a family...mother, father, and x number of offspring sitting around a restaurant table, each with some sort of electronic device in their hands, their heads bowed, pecking away at the screen...and no one is talking to anyone else at the table.
Nice. Very sociable. You might as well sit in cupboard eating crisps.
Yes, the Pope has stated what we all knew, ie. staring at a glowing slab 23 hours a day might not be too healthy, and actually interacting with people such as your family/friends/house mates might be better, especially around meal times. He's not wrong. Slabbing or reading a book at the table has always been bad manners anyway.
Parents will likely agree with the Pope. Some teenagers (who are, of course, even more infallible than his Holiness) may disagree. Parents! Stand firm!
Ah, the good old days when you could buy a computer at newsagent's, switch it on and enjoy. Without being your own systems administrator, installing AV, worrying about drivers, running out of storage (more cassette tapes always available), worrying about encryption, security, phone bills, compatibility with other systems, OS crashes, BIOS problems data backups, wireless strength etc...
If you want to know what your private data looks like at Google or Microsoft or any of the other places that collect it, then picture a giant sand dune. It's in there somewhere, one or two grains.
No problem. It's called data mining and re-identification. And it's all covered by the Google and MS terms and conditions.
Paragraph 4: It used to be the case that people upgraded their PCs every two years or so...
What! You Londoners are so rich.
Most people renew their PC every 6 years, after Windows has slowly strangled it by installing oceans of unwanted guff, killing performance so much the hapless user can hardly log in anymore. The simple solution of reinstalling Windows from disk is no longer possible for home users. They must take the PC to the shop for a "clean up", or buy a new one. Most buy a new one, not wanting to share their pr*n collection with the local laddo.
Agreed. It's fine storing your accounts in the "cloud", so long as you are paying the provider, under a binding contract which will hit them with big penalties after any data breach or data loss. But using a "free" service is something you should only do occasionally for data you care nothing about. Anyone doubting this can read the Google/MS/Dropbox T&Cs.
Sure, use Google docs to write flyer for the local fete. But remember, it is part of Google now, not your flyer. You get what you pay for.
So, when deciding whether to use a web-based or local password manager you have to assess whether your machine or the web company is more likely to be compromised...
Unless you are *paying* the cloud provider to hold your data securely, under a contract with appropriate penalties should there be a security breach, there isn't really any security at all. What I am saying is, the free cloud providers have no interest in your security, and owe you nothing, because you are not paying for the service. Anyone in doubt of that can see the T&Cs.
I am also a Mint 17.2 user. To whom it may concern: it runs fine on my MXI cx61 laptop. Except that the wireless was poor. To fix that I bought one of these mini dongles
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B010AKMF3Y?psc=1&redirect=true&ref_=oh_aui_detailpage_o02_s01
which was also poor until I followed the procedure on the following page
https://sites.google.com/site/easylinuxtipsproject/reserve-7
Rock solid now.
Regarding eggsnow, they have some good stuff. I am tempted by their mini, fanless servers.
I bought a S3 (outright) when it was launched. Updates stopped coming 2 years later. Makers release successive generations of phones but we all know the only real advantage of the new, almost unchanged model is that the older one isn't supported. A bit of a swizz.
A bit like Ford refusing to make spare parts for any model more than 2 years old.
The same is true for an alarming number of large internet companies.
Eg Snapchat. Their business model consists of coaxing large investment groups to bung them every few months so they can go on, well, messing about with computers for a bit. The service is impressive, it just doesn't make any money.
The register makes a bigger profit than Snapchat and Twitter put together.
What does a 150-character message board need 4000 employees for?
Nothing if it is just hosting 10 users and receiving 3 posts a day. But to have a billion people logged in and reading, and 1 million tweeting every minute, requires a monster infrastructure. Which needs a monster datacentre. Which needs a monster company. Which needs a monster HR dept, a monster office, a monster... see where I am going.
Royal mail package deliveries prefer to just put a card through the door. No knock, no delivery, no bell, nothing.
The card says something like "we tried to deliver your parcel but nobody was in. Please call at the depot". A more accurate wording might be "we didn't try to deliver your parcel, here's a card, come and get it". Easier for them I suppose. 20 seconds saved for them. 8 mile round trip for me.
After Burner debuted an updated version of Sega’s most advanced arcade hardware: the X Board. Featuring Sega’s custom “super-scaler” graphics chipset running at 50MHz, the hardware rotation and scaling abilities of the board were quite sensational: up to 256 sprites in each frame, thousands of sprites scaled within a second, and all output at 60 frames per second.
So that's how they did it. I used to watch over people's shoulders while they played this game at Sunderland Polytechnic, or just watch the demo mode, and wonder how the makers could *possibly* move all the graphics around so fast.
"The following things suck:
Watching video over wireless"
Ah, that'd be why Netflix and Amazon Prime have been such disasters.
The protocol you choose to connect your devices has nothing to do with the service provider. I have WD TV Live, Raspi2 Kodi, Sony Bluray all offering these services and all wired. When I change the WD TV Live (say) to wireless instead, it is less reliable and clunky to use. For example, rewinding generally isn't possible. And if any other family member is doing wireless stuff, get ready for disappointment.
Wireless is good but not if you have the choice of wired. Switches are 10 a penny these days. Let the data flow.
Okay the Raspi2 doesn't do Netflix at the mo.
Although I don't like the whiff of PC at the tail end of her reported statement, she has a good general point about internet behaviour. People are much ruder and more aggressive in typing than they are face to face. A bit like they are in cars.
If Linus and this dev met face to face, their interactions would be considered, mild and polite, even if they disagreed strongly. As the world goes forward with people cooperating through their keyboards but never meeting, keyboard rage is a problem. Apart from being unpleasant, it makes people unhappy needlessly and the work also suffers.
I can't see a solution. However, PC censorship isn't the answer.
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