Posts by John Sanders 1735 publicly visible posts • joined 29 Sep 2006
Is like most Linux vulnerabilities, high in publicity and low in the number of systems that can be compromised with it.
Guess that Linux variety/diversity/fragmentation has some positives when it comes to threat containment.
Waiting for someone to draw a logo and plaster it all over the MSM though. :-|
>> 5 million jobs lost, millions of other ones created dealing with the shit they create.
Nope, you do not need 5 million jobs to maintain expensive machinery running closed down firmwares.
Most of the stuff putting people in the street in the last 20 years destroys way more jobs than it creates.
Wealth is created by human work, if you take humans away from work no wealth is generated.
I'm not saying the industry should not automate or do further automation, what I say is that it will have consequences, and sometimes consequences that are not foreseeable.
It will not break capitalism.
What will happen with the next robotic wave is the same that already happened when all the manufacturing was moved to Asia, lots of more unemployment.
If anything it will break those who are at the bottom of the job market, even more people will become dependent on the state. Which means probably you'll subsidize their entire living with even more taxes, Individuals on a payslip have no defence against state confiscation.
Nothing more, nothing less.
The year of Linux comes the moment you feel confident and learn enough to solve problems with it.
Linux is an engineering ecosystem first, you are expected to get your hands dirty, if you are OK with that you can have a lot of fun and achieve things, otherwise you will get the feeling that everything is sharp or stings, and will pain you to no end.
For me the year of Linux in the desktop came the moment that X.org appeared in 2004 when the graphics stack became just a bit more bearable, prior to X.org the truth is that it was not even remotely usable.
Ever since X.org appeared I began doing more and more on Linux and less and less in Windows to the point in which nowadays I do 99% of my computing stuff in a Linux box. It pains me immensely to do anything in Windows lately (and no it is not for lack of skills).
Linux improves lots in different areas each year sometimes in small increments, and sometimes really large ones, this creates at times a nice snowball effect when the different improvements come together simultaneously, it goes from good enough to excellent when you least expect it thanks to the amplification effect that almost anything can be connected to anything else.
Linux will never be a choice for those who want a 1:1 replacement for Windows, it doesn't need to be, it works really well once you realize that it doesn't need to be like Windows.
If you game in Linux using Nvidia cards the performance is similar or better than in Windows, this is because the proprietary Nvidia driver + OpenGL 4.5 implementation is really good, closed source but good. Also it depends if the game runs as native OpenGL or through a translation layer from DX9/10/11 to OpenGL. Many AAA games run through some such translation layers with poor results.
If you game using ATI, the proprietary drivers for gaming are not as good as in Windows and games will be slightly slower than in Windows.
The Open source driver for ATI is excellent for Desktop usage, for gaming it depends on the game and what OpenGL requires, (some commercial games will not work without OpenGL 4.1 at least) Mesa sits for ATI cards at OGL 4.1 depending on which distribution you run, the majority of Distros currently run OpenGL 3.3 (If you want to compare it with DirectX it would be comparable to DX 9)
Things are less than ideal, but if they improve during this year as much as they have during 2015 things are going to get interesting indeed.
I mostly game on Linux now, I haven't been a heavy gamer for a long time, last year I bought of Steam all I could get for Linux (Borderlands, Witcher 2, Metro, Bioshock Infinite) I have played most of them at 45/60 fps using Nvidia cards in 1080p and they ran way better than on Windows on the same machine, I was so pleased I removed the last Windows install I had on my Living room's computer.
I do not care if the games are old though, but that its me, I understand other people have other expectations, aspirations when it comes to AAA gaming.
I had a helluva ton of fun playing "Not a hero", "Broforce", and "Battleblock Theather" this Christmas (fun 2D platform sidescrollers) on Steam. I do not miss Windows, from now on if a game port does exist on Linux I will buy it, if there is no Linux version I will not play it. Once again that is me.
I get what Valve is trying to do with SteamOS, they are trying to create a console where HW vendors can not charge gaming companies a billion for the rights/tools to develop games, they are trying to create a new market with a level playing field from scratch, it may or may not work, but they are trying, and certainly will take time to get there if it works, I do not see why they could not succeed if they persevere.
On the technical front Linux has issues with its graphics stack, but the problems are perfectly solvable, and many are being addressed, the improvements on most drivers, + Mesa (FOSS OpenGL) have been sort of amazing on 2015, compared to the poor state of what we had before.
Me myself I'm looking forward to xubuntu 16.04 (Mint is based on Ubuntu 16.04 too).
XFCE changes are low pace, it does everything I need dependably (Including rock solid XPRA (remote application support, Think Citrix XenApp/Metaframe/Presentation Server remote control style))
I do not need bells and whistles, my current 14.04.3 LTE runs in all my hardware like a champ, even Steam games run great, that's why I haven't deployed Mint, but I have to say I was impressed by the polish on the latest version of the "Cinnamon desktop". The project leader: "Clement Lefebvre" certainly knows what he's doing and knows how to listen to user feedback.
I got lots of people asking me for the last year about Linux.
Many people have more than one computer lately, so plenty of people is now toying with Ubuntu, Mint, etc on their secondary/old computer.
Of all the non-Linux users that I have helped to run Mint on a second computer, not a single one has removed it, I keep being asked questions about how to run stuff or what program is good in Linux for task "X" from many of them.
There is certainly more interest lately, and while in years past I was getting many "This is rubbish" now I get "Hey it is not bad at all, maybe not as complete, but not bad".
IMHO Linux keeps getting better all the time, in some areas slower than others, at some point it will reach the "good enough" point for what most people do at home.
Also something I have noted of late, plenty of people appreciate Linux recovery CD's and tools to do stuff on Windows, like cloning or recovery, tools like GParted or Clonezilla may not have the 1001 bells and whistles that some commercial software do, but can save you lots of $$$ and on most home-like scenarios do 100% of what's required if these type of tools.
You do realize it is not been made available yet and it is only available for the more technically inclined to play with, and not to make any serious work with it.
Do you?
Judging by your comment it doesn't look like you are aware of this little tiny winy detail.
My prediction is quite different, GEGL is a big jump ahead and will allow for massive improvements to GIMP in little time compared to how long it took to get to a complete GEGL implementation.
Remember this, Photoshop will incorporate some of the features that are to come on the next iterations of GIMP
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmOyQyuiO_E
There is lots and lots and lots of truly innovative stuff floating around for GIMP that could not be incorporated as part of the main software because of the incomplete GEGL engine.
Some of Photoshop latest additions came from other programs you know, for example the inspiration for "Content Aware Fill" came directly from the Resynthesizer plug-in in GIMP.
There are many other features that Photoshop has incorporated over the years from other software too.
But this would be the case should Mozilla was acting in the interest of their users, and not trying to make "an impact on the industry" and "laser focusing on the web".
Mozilla lost the plot a while back.
Their insistence on copying the dumbed down Chrome has driven many people to... Chrome.
Heck even I use Chrome more and more simply because it doesn't eat my CPU for no reason, and if a page does eat CPU shit+esc and I can tell where the problem lies.
One would think that Mozilla would try to copy/fix these issues on Firefox, but what do they come with?
* Useless changes to the UI
* More useless changes to the UI
* Lots and lots of changes to the UI no one asked for, and lots clamoured against (Australis)
* Remove all the functionality they can get away with and which people some times depend on
* Remove back end functionality used by people to regain missing functionality through add-ons.
* And the latest one... get rid of Thunderbird!? because it is not popular or needed...? sorry what?
Now they are thinking on killing SHA1 so if you have an old device lingering around that uses these type of certificate you can not connect because Mozilla wants to prevent you from harm. Setting an exception you crazy? You silly, use a Windows XP computer with IE 6,7,8, because we can not bother to treat our users like intelligent beings and allow them to set an exception or set a setting somewhere to re-enable it in case someone truly needs it.
I used to recommend Firefox, but I can not any more.
Because the government (this or any other) does not have a mind reading machine to figure out who would want to blown up a crowded area next, they have to spy on everybody.
Regardless of privacy or basic rights to privacy, this collecting data business is a slippery slope, once they start there is no stop, this ends with the state regulating and supervising everything for our own good.
All hail political correctness.
Understands the future of enterprise hardware lies on some kind of affordable moderately easy to set-up Mainframe-like server system.
For that one needs to control the hardware, the OS (VMware), the storage and probably large parts of the networking stack, so it all fits nicely together without infringing on IBM's.
I'm probably wrong.
Happy new year everyone!
Don't bother with Pitivi,
Go with kdenlive and save yourself from a lot of trouble, although it has a stepper learning curve kdenlive works well and it is way more flexible, plus it doesn't crash just by looking at it.
Get the latest version from this ppa if you run Ubuntu:
https://launchpad.net/~sunab/+archive/ubuntu/kdenlive-release
""Woman in particular seem to not trust the technology and for good reason.""
Most women hate pointless automatisms and I for one I'm with them.
I want my toaster as simple as possible, my washing machine less cybernetic, and I wish my TV wouldn't assume an HDMI signal means it has to do all sort of "clever" unasked adjustments on the image.
I'm not sure if anybody feels like this, but most automatisms try to be clever just to fail in stupid ways.
Not to mention that nothing is repairable if everything is software driven and you have no access to the source...
I can't stop thinking how obtuse and plain stupid Adobe has been with the whole Flash saga.
They should have open sourced the player minus the DRM parts offered as a plugin.
Had they done that Flash would have been fixed and made part of all browsers, Adobe would be in control of a standard and we would have less headaches.
The internet works on open standards or it doesn't work.
Lately I'm more and more convinced that our beloved elites can not grasp how complex and intertwined today's society is, socially, industrially, culturally etc. Specially politicians.
They are so ignorant and arrogant they think they can hammer rule whatever doesn't conform to their view of how things should be, and the first victim is individual rights.
"I'm removing your privacy, I'm doing this for your own good" Our elites think, and oh they wonder, why people get so upset?
They can not stop and think for a second, they have the urge of continuously spat legislation via totalitarian tic.
There are legal interception laws, use them, make companies and institutions complain with these policies via court of law and always via court of law to remove abuse, getting the data of your communications should be as difficult as any other kind of legal warrant if not more.
I do not expect our elites to understand any of this, like good social-democatic-marxist they think themselves above us poor commoners.
I remain skeptic with regards to the movie being any good, or even moderately good, when I saw "The phantom menace" the first time I was so in Fanboi mode that I though it was awesome.
I went to the theatre a second time and I thought: WTF, this is awful, "Attack of the clones" and "Revenge of the Jedi" I'm still recovering from, I knew they will be bad but still went because you know, StarWars... this time however I'm not in such a masochist mood, could be age.
I'm going to skip this one in cinemas, fool me once...
The detail that I find most amusing is the fact that this is no cloud at all, this is a subscription driven software with online-forced DRM checks.
The applications in the suite are all regular win32 or win64 aplication that runs on your computer. (office 365 does the same) they add some "cloud" (online) storage I'm aware of that, and some other service no one asked for.
Spot on.
The current refugee crisis is not a refugee crisis at all, this is immigration in large scale of economic migrants, the majority (if not all) of these people had refugee status in countries close to Syria.
It is from these countries where they decided to embark on a trip to other Northern European countries like Germany, going through a handful of countries, Croatia, Hungary, etc, sometimes spending a decent amount of money in the process.
Notice that they did discriminate which country they wanted to go to, they did not ask the Hungarian government for asylum, they demanded going to Germany.
The majority of the immigrants since this mess started have been defined by the UN as 78% male of military age, they have been described as fit, wearing good clothes and many using gadgets like iPhones and other expesive gear.
In my opinion these are economic migrants. I understand that our elites and Marxist-indoctrinated governments want to have their feel-good moments, these moments will always be at our expense.
He is a cultural Marxist,
Jobs wasn't a Syrian, his father was, his father wasn't a refugee, Job's father was the son of a rich family, if anything he was an economic migrant, Jobs was born out of wedlock, and had abortion been legal at the time he would have been aborted as the family of the girl didn't wanted her either to marry an Arab nor her being a single mother.
Bansky like all good Marxists uses superficial details to try to make an effect in ypur conscience, he's trying to appeal to your guts, like all good propaganda does exploits people's ignorance.
This is a technique invented by the nazis and perfected by the Marxist soviets.
It is fake compassion.
Not just that,
What do you do with 2 million people? where do you employ them?
The vast majority of them do not speak or read/write in any of the languages of the host countries, this is illiterate people in practical terms.
They'll have to do lesser jobs, but which jobs? Most European countries have large amounts of unemployment, and manufacturing is nowhere to be found in Europe having it all moved to Asia.
Then there is the trend of automating everything, getting rid of people is an ongoing trend for the last 30 years.
The current migrant wave is estimated at ~2 Million, they will be ~5 million by mid 2016 and if nothing is done ~10 by the end of 2016, where is all these people going to live and work?
Politicians will just help themselves to our pockets, wait and see.
This will not end well.
"""Some of the bigoted claims really astonish me. Western governments recently joined forces and were fully responsible in leveling Syria to the ground"""
So it is up to the populace who struggles to meet the month's end to pick up the pieces and pay the bill for millions of hard to assimilate immigrants who will live off welfare.
This is the responsibility of our dear leaders, a marxist-educated-influenced elite who will not have to share their neighbourhoods nor suffer any of the consequences of their enlightenment.
An elite that think the problem is us poor idiots who fail to see their vision for a better future for us without us.
What is the endgame here I ask? Open borders... then what? There is no chance people can assimilate into another culture with opposed views on mostly everything about life in the millions and in less than 3-5 generations.
Meanwhile what? What is the end game?
Bansky is a petty cultural marxist, nothing else.
Marxists love to feel good about themselves, and show how abobe they are over the unenlightened commoners, if the drawing shows anything is the fact that Bansky is an ignorant with a very superficial understanding of neither Steve Jobs origins, immigration or anything other than making beautiful graffiti.
Trying to extract any profound meaning out of Bansky's work is futile, this drawing is no different from the one of the Little girl playing with missiles or Darth Vader holding an umbrella, it has no meaning other than the contrast.
Bansky will keep doing these politically correct drawings as long as the press keeps making echo of them, perhaps we should ask Bansky to put his mouth where his drawings are and donate large quantities of money to housing and providing (why do we have to do that again?) for these immigrants, rather than throw political nonsense on a wall and expecting the taxpayer to pick up the pieces of his enlightenment and supposed moral superiority.
""The world is getting smaller. Cultures are clashing. There is a war of ideas going on at the moment.""
There is no war of ideas, currently there is only one civilization on earth that let people live their lives: Ours, the sooner people get their heads around it the better.
The modern world is a western invention, we made the modern world, make a list of what things do you depend on for your survival, now remove us from the picture, shocking eh?
Have you ever thought that the more a country resembles western civilization the better they do, one simple example: North Korea vs South Korea, communist China before the communist party let people own property and do business to the China of today.
Both China and N.Korea are dictatorship states, one resembles more a western country than the other, clue; in one people starve, in the other they don't.
Check the middle east, other than the countries that export oil, what is their GNP? the status of their health systems, their commerce, their agriculture?
This is what the world is, this is reality.
""Fortunately, for many of us in the west, particularly Europe, we are reaping the benefits of the cultural and religious renaissance that allowed us to recognise our common identities but also our bigotry, our racism and our general need to just get along.""
What bigotry and what racism? where do you see that nowadays? are you confusing prejudice with racism? they are two different things.
If you think that white people are welcomed anywhere because we welcome anybody in Europe you are quite mistaken.
""Freedom and tolerance will win through. It has to.""
For the bad guys to win all that is required is for the good guys not to do anything, freedom and tolerance do not defend themselves nor are the default state of a society, they are privileges we had to fight for over centuries to achieve. All that can be lost in decades.
Dad, I'm trying to buy a moped on installments but no shop would pass my credit check, I do not understand why, I just got my first job and I own to nobody...
Junior, I'm sorry your vtech account was hacked when you were 5 and your identity stolen, your mum and I always wanted to talk to you about it... but we know nothing about IT so...
And you get hacked, fact of life.
Moving on... A computer is hacked and you can (Daft punk's Technologic sounds in the background) wipe, re-install, format, disinfect, update, remove, inspect, tamper, re-configure, install, copy, compile, code, patch, upgrade paste...
What can you do to your IoT toaster, tv, heating, smart metter?
Answer: NOOOOOOOTHING!
And yes, I'm drunk! It's Friday!
You can also take GPL software, use it internally, change it and not share the changes with anybody else and keep it yours in secret forever or as part of your organization.
What you can not do with the GPL is sell a commercial product based or derived of GPL source code for a profit without also making the source code available.
Or
Take GPL software and then distribute the software in modified or non-modified binary form without releasing the source code.
That is all, the fact that most people in the industry is unable to grasp this amazes me.
When people argue that the GPL doesn't give you enough freedom is because they do not agree with the above.
Here is the sweetened (as always) BBC report:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-30183711
Here is what the bbc does not mention:
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/turkey-sumeyye-erdogan-says-men-inheriting-more-women-normal-fair-righteous-1494386
http://theweek.com/speedreads/441173/turkish-president-erdogan-women-arent-equal-men
""Microsoft could demonstrate a functional version of Windows that had the requirement of desktop operating systems from over a decade before: around a hundred files took up 25MB of disk space. The benefits weren't really felt until Windows 8 in 2012""
Yes 25Mb is the kernel plus the minimum operating system components... no programs, no convenience libraries at all, and no drivers. As an academic exercise is quite nice, on a practical sense, it does not matter much, that 25 Mb version of Windows will not be able to run Office for example, and I doubt it could even run something as taken for granted as notepad or the registry editor.
As stated before, no one uses windows because people like windows, people use windows because they have software to do stuff with, and that software only runs in windows.
The purpose of an operating system is to run 3rd party software on it, windows is not the beginning or the end of operating systems, just the more popular commercial platform to run 3rd party software on personal computers. MS as opposed to the rest of the world (who has short attention span syndrome) will never forget that, that's why they are so crafty mean.
The claim that the core of windows now runs on little resources may be of some significance the day a modern windows desktop doesn't require 1.2Gb of ram just to present a desktop and have some fluidity while clicking on the start button (whatever its shape of fashion type of the month) to run the 3rd party app that I need.
"""1,000 of innocent people die annually due to the internal combustion engine, and while working to reduce the numbers, we accept this collateral damage as a consequence of the greater good."""
That argument does not fly, a car is made to transport people and goods, the immense majority of deaths caused by vehicles are mere accidents.
A gun sole purpose is to shoot at things, the immense majority of gun kills is in purpose.
"""Encryption has its place in the greater good, we just need to determine the balance point - the acceptable level of collateral damage for the benefit gained."""
Encryption is not a weapon but a tool, like a car, and encryption does not kill, people with guns, bombs and the intention to kill do.
The fact that they used a form of encryption to cover their tracks / hide their communications is irrelevant.
As someone pointed above, I'm more worried that in the last dozen or so Muslim Jihadi attacks the perpetrators (or the majority of them) were well known to the authorities, not only on this country but abroad too.
Two cases, there are lots and lots more, Google is your friend:
http://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/lee-rigby-report-lets-kill-a-soldier-michael-adebowale-woolwich-murder-mi5-errors-9881657.html
http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/sydney-siege-man-haron-monis-was-not-considered-a-highpriority-threat-finds-report-20150221-13lcpt.html
So yeah banning encryption will somehow fix incompetent "Politically Correct" politicians.
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