Welcome to the DebugPoint Weekly roundup #22.09, where you can find all the happenings from this week, mainly from the Linux and open-source space. This week saw some major anniversaries from some distros and some application updates. Also, we saw major releases and announcements from desktop environments.
Here's what happened this week.
Obviously this is a problem. There are very, very few Tech Publications that do not derive the majority of their revenue through advertising for the very companies that they are supposed to be covering.
Can you trust a phone review site that advertises for Apple, Samsung, or any other smartphone maker?
No. Of course not.
And, even if that publication does not currently advertise for one of those companies… there’s always the possibility they might in the future. Which means they are going to always have a thought — in the back of their mind, at the very least — about keeping that company happy with that. Making it possible to run their ads in the future.
Take it from someone who’s been in this business (on both the publishing side — magazines, podcasts, and shows — as well as the corporate advertising side)…
Anyone telling you that this isn’t impacting nearly every major publication — in a big way — is lying to you.
There is only one possible way to solve the problem.
One way to make a publication trustworthy… to make the quality (and honesty) of the content improve.
A publication must drop advertising — entirely — and move to another model for generating operating revenue.
There’s no choice in the matter. That’s the only way.
In the past decade, Linux laptops have grown in popularity, as have the emergence and activity of companies specializing in Linux hardware. Among these companies is TuxedoComputers, a German company that builds Linux devices of various categories. Today, in this article, we will thoroughly review one of the most prominent laptops of TuxedoComputers, the Pulse 15 Gen 2, after three weeks of use as my daily laptop.
It's time once again for The Weekender. This is our departure into the world of hedonism, random topic excursions, whimsy and (hopefully) knowledge. Thanks for listening and, if you happen to get a chance, feel free to call us or e-mail and send us some feedback. Tell us how we're doing. We'd love to hear from you.
Some of the most common Linux support questions involve package management tasks such as updating, installing and removing software. And regarding removing software, one of the most frequently asked questions is: how can I completely remove an application? This is because simply uninstalling a program doesn't remove it's dependencies and/or configuration files.
Dan Lorenc is Founder & CEO of Chainguard, the platform to secure your software supply chain. Chainguard supports many popular open source projects such as Sigstore, SLSA, and Tekton.
Ovais Tariq is Cofounder & CEO of Tigris Data, the open source developer data platform.
Linux kernel release 6.0: https://lkml.org/lkml/2022/10/2/255
Release of the Stellarium 1.0: https://stellarium.org/release/2022/10/01/stellarium-1.0.html
Release of IceWM 3.0.0 with tab support: https://github.com/ice-wm/icewm/releases/tag/3.0.0
COSMIC custom environment will use Iced instead of GTK https://twitter.com/mmstick https://iced.rs/
Release of OpenSSH 9.1: https://lists.mindrot.org/pipermail/openssh-unix-dev/2022-October/040438.html
ALP prototype, replaces SUSE Enterprise Linux: https://www.suse.com/c/the-first-prototype-of-adaptable-linux-platform-is-live/
Release of Wireshark 4.0: https://www.wireshark.org/news/20221004.html
Redcore Linux 2201 release: https://redcorelinux.org/news/redcore-linux-hardened-2201-rastaban-stable
RetroArch 1.11: https://www.libretro.com/index.php/retroarch-1-11-0-release
Canonical launches free extended updates service for Ubuntu: https://ubuntu.com//blog/ubuntu-pro-beta-release
KaOS 2022.10: https://kaosx.us/news/2022/kaos10/
Parrot 5.1 Released: https://parrotsec.org/blog/2022-09-24-parrot-5.1-release-notes/
KDE 6 branch soon: https://blog.broulik.de/2022/10/physical-akademy-2022-in-barcelona/
The portability laptops grant users is always evolving. Modern laptops can run for well over eight hours, use the same, fast NVMe storage as their desktop counterparts, and mobile processors are both incredibly efficient and powerful. The tradeoff for this portability comes in features and storage, with most laptops only supporting one or two hard drives. Thunderbolt and USB 3.1 have brought incredible transfer speeds to portable storage, however most portable drives are still SATA solid state drives and even spinning disks.
The latest SATA revision still operates at a theoretical maximum speed to 600 Mbps or .6 Gbps, while USB 3.1 and Thunderbolt speeds begin at 5 Gbps. To begin to saturate a 5 Gbps, 10 Gbps, 20 Gbps, or higher connection, a faster storage medium is needed – enter NVMe. Faster, lighter, and more power efficient than its SATA counterparts, NVMe is incredibly fast storage. While it took some time for NVMe to USB adapters to hit the consumer market, there are now plenty of options available, with prices ranging from $15 to $50 and up.
Specific to my needs, I needed a portable drive with faster speeds to house virtual machines and do HD video editing while away from home. These aren’t tasks I regularly do away from my workstation, so keeping these things on a separate drive makes more sense than taking up space on the single drive of my Thinkpad T15.
I am happy to release the final kernel 6.0. Thanks a lot to Skateman and Musa for testing the alphas and release candidates.
First launched in 2008, Spotify is a digital music streaming service with a freemium business model. You can listen to a huge library of music and podcasts for no charge if you are prepared to have shuffle play (with limited skips), interrupted listening and lower audio bitrate. Alternatively, there’s the option of Spotify Premium. In the UK, a subscription costs €£9.99 per month for an individual account. This gives you streaming music at 320 kbps, the ability to download music, and full functionality.
Spotify provide a semi-official app for the service which uses Chromium Embedded Framework (think bloated memory footprint). But third-party clients are available for Spotify Premium users. Spotify blocks API access to their audio for non-premium members.
This article recommends our favourite text-based Spotify clients. Here’s our verdict summarized in a legendary Linuxlinks-style chart.
Bitcoin is the first-ever digital currency, also known as cryptocurrency. Bitcoin is becoming more and more popular due to the increasing internet user base around the world. The increased popularity of Bitcoin gave rise to several different Bitcoin Wallets, which are available for different platforms like Windows, Mac, Android, and Ubuntu.
In today’s installment of things you already know, unless you don’t, I’m visiting the stupendously useful tee(1) command. I use it daily, yet I see plenty of scripts that brute force alternatives to it. It’s one of the most common superfluous uses of cat(1) I see.
New Relic might be best known as a DevOps monitoring tool, but it can also help improve observability into your Kubernetes clusters. Follow this tutorial to get started.
While there are alternatives to Notepad++ on Linux, such as gedit, Sublime Text, GNU Emacs, and others, it isn’t easy to replace the many benefits Notepad++ has. Notepad++ possesses valuable features such as syntax highlighting, macro recording, full support for many programming languages including HTML, text autocompletion, and much more.
Ultimately, this issue arises when your image is improperly converted from one color space to another; in my case, Adobe RGB is usually the culprit. Most decent photo editing tools (like Photoshop) will include the appropriate ICC color profile in the saved image, so everything will appear normal at first. The mangling occurs when you upload that image to a site that's not equipped to deal with non-sRGB images, which proceeds to directly dump those Adobe RGB values into a new file, now devoid of color profile metadata, all while neglecting to perform a proper conversion between color spaces.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Grafana on Rocky Linux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, Grafana is a great open-source data visualization and monitoring tool. It supports multiple data sources like Prometheus, Graphite, InfluxDB, Elasticsearc, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Zabbix, etc.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the Grafana analytics and visualization tools on Rocky Linux. 9.
Promtail is the normal log-shipping client for the Grafana Loki log aggregation system. Like all log shipping programs, Promtail needs to keep track of what logs it has and hasn't sent to Loki, which it does by keeping track of its positions in each log file or log source. In order to handle being stopped and restarted, and also system crashes (or Promtail crashes), it normally saves these positions in a file. Exactly what a position is depends on the specific log source that Promtail is using. When the log source is a file, Promtail only uses and saves a byte offset, but when Promtail is reading from the systemd journal, it uses the journal cursor. Every entry in the systemd journal has a unique identifier, the cursor, and so if the journal hasn't been truncated you can always resume reading from that entry by using its cursor.
The purpose of this post is to demonstrate a first approach to the analysis of multiwavelength kinetic data, like those obtained using stopped-flow data. To practice, we will use data that were acquired during the stopped flow practicals of the MetBio summer school from the FrenchBIC. During the practicals, the student monitored the reaction of myoglobin (in its Fe(III) state) with azide, which yields a fast and strong change in the absorbance spectrum of the protein, which was monitored using a diode array. The data is publicly available on zenodo.
So you decided to build a brand new system using all the latest and coolest tech, so you buy a Ryzen 7000 series Zen 4 CPU, like the Ryzen 7700X that I picked, with a new mother board and DDR5 memory and all that jazz. But for now, you don't yet have a fitting GPU for that system (as the new ones will only come out in November), so you are booting a Debian system using the new build-in video card of the new CPUs (Zen 4 generation has a simple AMD GPU build-in into every CPU now - great stuff for debugging and mostly-headless systems) and you get ... nothing on the screen.
Wine, the open-source tool to run Windows application on Linux and macOS, got a new development update recently.
The new Wine 7.19 adds support for storing DOS attributes on disk, updates bundled vkd3d to version 1.5, and add support for MPEG-4 audio format.
As usual, there are various bug-fixes for applications include OpenMPT, Cubase 12, Sonic Adventure DX (2004), AIMP 3, and HP Prime Virtual Calculator Emulator.
Between 2022-10-09 and 2022-10-16 there were 175 new games validated for the Steam Deck. We use numerous metrics such as popularity, positive ratings, and more sources to make our selection of the Best Steam Deck Games for that period. Here’s a quick pick of the most interesting ones, separated in Verified and Playable ratings:
The Star64 is a single-board computer with a StarFive JH7100 processor featuring four 1.5 GHz SiFive FU740 CPU cores and Imagination BXE-4-32 graphics. When Pine64 first unveiled the board this summer, the company said that efforts were underway to port GNU/Linux distributions including Debian and Fedora to run on the hardware.
Now Pine64 notes that developer Icenowy Zheng has made great strides in getting the Debian-based AOSC Linux to run on the board.
[...]
In other recent tech news from around the web, a company that makes a Game Boy cartridge reader for PCs has confirmed that the accessory works with Valve’s Steam Deck handheld gaming PC using the default Linux-based Steam OS software, Apple may be planning to launch an iPad dock that lets you use the company’s tablets as smart home displays, and Google’s Pixel Watch might not be the best choice for folks who want a smartwatch that doesn’t also serve as a fitness tracker – because so far there’s no way to disable the watch’s heart rate monitor.
Akademy 2022 was held in Barcelona from the 1st to the 7th of October. As usual, the weekend of Saturday 1st of October and Sunday 2nd of October was dedicated to talks, panels and presentations. Community members and guests laid out for attendees what had been going on within KDE's projects (and adjacent projects), the state of the art, and where things were headed.
Two weeks ago I attended Akademy in Barcelona, KDE’s annual conference. Let me tell you, it was great to finally, finally, finally see people in person again! It was so nice to meet up with old friends, and put faces to names for new ones!
Four years ago I gave a perhaps arrogantly ambitious talk at Akademy 2018 entitled “Konquering the World – a 7-Step Plan to KDE World Domination“. In it, I described how the at-the-time new Usability & Productivity goal supported a deeper end goal of getting KDE Plasma pre-installed on commercially available hardware–that being the only way I believe we can introduce a truly huge number of new people to KDE’s friendly and powerful flavor of free software.
I love the GNOME desktop, and I use it as my daily Linux desktop environment. I find with GNOME, I can focus on the stuff I need to get done, but I still have flexibility to make the desktop look and act the way I want.
The GNOME Project recently released GNOME 43, the latest version of the GNOME desktop. I met with GNOME developer Emmanuele Bassi to ask a few questions about this latest release...
This article introduces the first release of ‘Lash#Cat9’, a different kind of command-line shell.
[...]
Cat9 serves as the practical complement to the article on ‘The day of a new command-line interface: shell‘. That article also covers the design/architectural considerations on a system level, as well as more generic advancements to displacing the terminal emulator.
The rest of the article will work through the major features and how they came about.
A guiding principle is the role of the textual shell as a frontend instead of a clunky programming environment. The shell presents a user-facing, interactive interface to make other complex tools more approachable or to glue them together into a more advanced weapon. Cat9 is entirely written in Lua, so scripting in it is a given, but also relatively uninteresting as a feature — there are better languages around for systems programming, and better UI paradigms for automating work flows.
ArchLabs Release 2022.10.15 is now available.
Nothing new, just mainly a refresh release with updates to correct recent installation errors.
WoofQ has two scripts '0pre-oe' and '0pre-oe-add' to import packages from OpenEmbedded. As well as importing the binary packages, the package database in Puppy-format is created.
The dependencies-field in the Puppy-format db may not have all the dependencies. In particular, OE recipes may contain an "RDEPENDS" variable, which lists run-time dependencies; these need to be included in the deps list.
This problem has come up when an SFS from another Puppy-derivative is attempted to be used in EasyOS.
Linux distributions have differing paths to the shared libraries. For example, Slackware has /usr/lib64, Debian has /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu. EasyOS Dunfell-series has all libraries in /usr/lib, with /usr/lib64 and /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu symlinks to /usr/lib
The EasyOS PKGget package manager (PPM) can handle installing packages from these other distros. For example, you install a DEB package, the package manager takes care of relocating the contents of /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu to /usr/lib
However, SFSs are a problem. If one of those, say from FatDog, which has the Slackware folder layout, then a folder /usr/lib64 in the SFS will be on top of the symlink /usr/lib64 in easy.sfs.
Forum member don570 has created a Audacity SFS for EasyOS, ported from FatDog.
SparkyLinux has released three updated ISO images, 2022.10, of its GameOver, Multimedia, and Rescue semi-rolling editions.
One thing is sure: the activity of SparkyLinux developers this month has been impressive. Today, barely a week after delivering updated versions of their main rolling release distro, they welcome us with three more updated versions.
But before we go any further, let’s briefly explain to our readers in a few words what SparkyLinux is. It is a Debian-based lightweight desktop Linux distribution that aims to be easy on system resources and can breathe new life into aging computers.
The Juno tablet is a 10.1-inch Linux tablet that ships with Manjaro Linux or Mobian, and is powered by an Intel Celeron N5100 quad-core Jasper Lake mobile processor.
The Linux tablet comes with a 1920Ãâ1200 resolution IPS touchscreen display, 8GB LPDDR4 soldered on the main board, and a choice between a 256GB, 512GB, or 1TB SSD. Customers can select one of the three Linux distributions with Mobian, as well as Manjaro Linux with either Phosh or Plasma mobile environments.
Product Post here at SparkFun Electronics! We have a slightly smaller week again so we can prepare for some additional big releases that we have on the horizon (you might even see one or two next week)! We start this Friday off with a new BreadBoard Mates starter kit for their TIMI-96 module.
Navit is an open-source free car navigation system for Android and Windows devices that support offline maps. It comes with a vector maps with many formats for routing and rendering.
[...]
Navit is written in the C programming language and it is released under the GPL-2.0 (Only) License.
Here, we introduce you Floccus, which is a handy tool to sync and backup your bookmark collections from different browser and devices. Furthermore, it is completely free and open source.
The tech giant brings open source Apache Iceberg table format support to its BigLake data lake as it extends BigQuery support for unstructured data and Apache Spark.
As we find ourselves increasingly surrounded by smart devices that collect and process information from their environment, it's more important now than ever that we have a simple solution to build verifiably secure systems for embedded hardware. If the devices around us can't be mathematically proven to keep data secure, then the personally-identifiable data they collect—such as images of people and recordings of their voices—could be accessible to malicious software.
Unfortunately, system security is often treated as a software feature that can be added to existing systems or solved with an extra piece of ASIC hardware— this generally is not good enough. Our team in Google Research has set out to solve this problem by building a provably secure platform that's optimized for embedded devices that run ML applications. This is an ongoing project with plenty left to do, but we're excited to share some early details and invite others to collaborate on the platform so we can all build intelligent ambient systems that have security built-in by default.
Google has announced the existence of yet another new operating system, called KataOS, aimed at the creation of secure embedded systems.
it “suddenly” and without consent it also exists on this server i2.wp.com, the “cool” wordpress CDN, that is supposed to speed up loading time of a blog… well… not this blog eh?
https://i2.wp.com/dwaves.de/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/S21_Ultra_Sample_Test_Photo_RawTherapie_post_processed_20220525_sky.jpg
if the user would have wanted that, instead of going self-hosting, the user could have just spared all the hazzle and used wordpress.org.
so even when the author-user deletes that image from the user’s blog… (just tested) it will be still there on https://i2.wp.com/dwaves.de/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/S21_Ultra_Sample_Test_Photo_RawTherapie_post_processed_20220525_sky.jpg
update: 3 weeks later… picture is gone.
“great” isn’t it? so much for “control over one’s data”.
“This is happening because you’re using Jetpack’s built-in Image CDN that relies on WordPress.com. If you like to disable that feature go to your Dashboard > Jetpack > Settings > Performance and toggle off the Enable site accelerator option under the Performance & speed section. You can read more about this feature here:
https://jetpack.com/support/site-accelerator/” (src)
no – this blog is NOT using jetpack site accelerator.
also the option described is not available on self hosted wordpress.
#wtf?
wordpress – a giant content “sucking up ur content and storing it forever” machine?
time for alternatives.
GIMP has had a developer website for at least 2 decades (the Internet Archive traces back an early page in 2001), yet mostly unmaintained ever since 2009, which is a shame.
Since then, documentation for developers was scattered on the general website, the source repository itself and 2 wikis (developer and GUI wiki). As you may know, the developer wiki encountered problems recently. As for the GUI wiki, it is still there, though we plan to merge both wikis into our new developer website.
Rather than having duplicate documents all over the place, we want to consolidate developer documentation into a single point of entry.
I’ve released man-db 2.11.0 (announcement, NEWS), and uploaded it to Debian unstable.
The biggest chunk of work here was fixing some extremely long-standing issues with how the database is built. Despite being in the package name, man-db’s database is much less important than it used to be: most uses of man(1) haven’t required it in a long time, and both hardware and software improvements mean that even some searches can be done by brute force without needing prior indexing. However, the database is still needed for the whatis(1) and apropos(1) commands.
The database has a simple format - no relational structure here, it’s just a simple key-value database using old-fashioned DBM-like interfaces and composing a few fields to form values - but there are a number of subtleties involved. The issues tend to amount to this: what does a manual page name mean? At first glance it might seem simple, because you have file names that look something like /usr/share/man/man1/ls.1.gz and that’s obviously ls(1). Some pages are symlinks to other pages (which we track separately because it makes it easier to figure out which entries to update when the contents of the file system change), and sometimes multiple pages are even hard links to the same file.
Confidence intervals are commonly misinterpreted as there being, after observing the data, a 95% probability that the true parameter lies within the confidence interval. The usual explanation why this is incorrect is that the true parameter is not random, and so is either inside or outside the confidence interval. This explanation holds in the ‘relative likelihood’ interpretation of probability associated with frequentist statistics.
However, as I have discussed previously, in the ‘subjective’ interpretation of probability associated with Bayesian statistics, we can assign a probability to the true parameter lying within a given interval. To do so implies that we are thinking of a particular likelihood function for the data, and a prior that would allow us to assign a probability to the true parameter lying within the interval before observing any data.
It is increasingly common for data to be collected adaptively, where experimental costs are reduced progressively by assigning promising treatments more frequently. However, adaptivity also poses great challenges on post-experiment inference, since observations are dependent, and standard estimates can be skewed and heavy-tailed. We propose a treatment-effect estimator that is consistent and asymptotically normal, allowing for constructing frequentist confidence intervals and testing hypotheses.
Last week, we were very excited to host our first Shiny in Production conference! Attendees gathered in The Catalyst in Newcastle for two days of workshops and talks focusing on all things related to Shiny, building dashboards, and cool things you can do in R.
This post will focus on common statistical tests in R to understand and validate the relationship between two variables.
There must be tons of similar tutorials around, you may be thinking. So why?
The primary (and selfish) goal of the post is to create a guide that is practical enough for myself to refer to from time to time. This post is edited from my own notes from learning statistics and R, and have been applied to a data example/scenario that I am familiar with. This means that the examples should be easily generalisable and mostly consistent with my usual coding approach (mostly ‘tidy’ and using pipes). Along the way, this will hopefully benefit others who are learning statistics and R too.
Extract patterns in R, R’s str extract() function can be used to extract matching patterns from strings. It is part of the stringr package.
It’s hard to find a textbook series garnering more effusive praise than The Little Schemer, The Little Prover, The Little Typer & co. The Little Typer introduces dependent type theory and is the first of the series I’ve read. I
Last week, I attended BrumPropHack - a hackathon in Birmingham which looked at problems with retrofitting homes to make them more energy efficient.
There were some great talks about the scale of the problem - both in terms of the number of properties which need improving and the cost of retrofitting. A bunch of teams showed off some impressive demos which aimed to tackle the issues.
Memory requirements of today’s workstations typically jump substantially – from several to many megabytes—whenever there’s a new software release. When demand surpasses capacity, it’s time to buy add-on memory. When the system has no more extensibility, it’s time to buy a new, more powerful workstation. Do increased performance and functionality keep pace with the increased demand for resources? Mostly the answer is no. About 25 years ago, an interactive text editor could be designed with as little as 8,000 bytes of storage. (Modern program editors request 100 times that much!) An operating system had to manage with 8,000 bytes, and a compiler had to fit into 32 Kbytes, whereas their modern descendants require megabytes. Has all this inflated software become any faster? On the contrary. Were it not for a thousand times faster hardware, modern software would be utterly unusable.
The R community had a recent scare with the isoband package risking archival on CRAN. The reason why this incident made waves is that isoband is a ggplot2 dependency and when a package gets removed from CRAN all other packages that depend on it get removed as well (see CRAN policy). If isoband fell, ggplot2 would be at risk. And this would cascade with the removal of even more packages.
The R Consortium recently caught up with Alyssa Columbus of R-Ladies Irvine (also on MeetUp and Twitter) to discuss the group’s progress during the pandemic. Alyssa discussed the group’s efforts to remain active and provide networking opportunities for its members. The group has also formed strong collaborative ties with other R user groups in Southern California.
I’m iffy on the language used to describe people, our creativity, and our interactions online. Everything is measured by engagement, for the production of content, and extracting value. And it’s hollowing out the web from the inside.
Today I realized I'm annoyed by the word "stethoscope". "Scope" is Greek for "look at". The telescope is for looking at far things (Ãâá¿â ûõ). The microscope is for looking at small things (üùúÃÂÃÅÃâ). The endoscope is for looking inside things (á¼âýôÿý). The periscope is for looking around things (Ãâ¬ÃµÃÂï). The stethoscope is for looking at chests (ÃÆÃâá¿â øÿÃâ).
It could probably go without saying, but I read a lot of books.
Good books, bad books, big books, small books, books I agree with, books I don't, books with pictures, books for kids... you get the idea. I love to read, and while I'm no stranger to the world of eBooks, nothing beats the experience of curling up in front of the fire with a stack of dead trees.
But, as I'm sure you can imagine, buying physical books can be both financially and physically unsustainable. The damn things are expensive, and as much as I love to line my bookshelves with the wisdom of the ages, it's hard to feel particularly good about the arboreal waste it represents.
While I can and do support my local library (both physically and digitally), I am a sucker for marginalia. I like to fully own my books, and fill them with my thoughts and notes. It's how I retain what I read, which was a hard-won habit that I don't want to lose any time soon. So, what is a guy to do?
Well, when it comes to fiction, I've learned to be flexible. The library is my friend, and the Libby app in particular allows me to borrow books directly on my Kindle. But what about non-fiction? The types of books that generate a ton of notes, highlights, and bookmarks? That's where used books have become my saving grace.
At the end of July, a Jack in the Box in Chula Vista, Calif., got a new employee. He stood there for a couple of weeks while other workers swirled around him, jockeying between flattop and fryer, filling up paper sleeves with the tacos that the fast-food brand sells every year by the hundred million.
Thomas Kinkade, the self-proclaimed "Painter of Light," produced over 1,000 paintings in his life. His company claimed that his paintings hung in "one out of every twenty American homes." Nevertheless, art critics generally wrote Kinkade off – describing his artwork as kitsch, naive imitation, gratuitous, or lacking more profound thought.
One thing I miss about the blogging days is the ability to comment on current events short notice. It's much harder with video than in writing. This is why on my YouTube channel, we now have a weekly Science News episode.
BASH? PowerShell? It all traces back to 1963. And the work of an amazing Frenchman, CTTS, and Multics.
We all know that the first text-based computer Shell dates back to the early 1960s (RUNCOM written for the Compatible Time Sharing System… followed by a new Shell, designed by the same man, for Multics).
Most people prefer Bucket A, despite both buckets having the same expected utility. This is because we tend to choose the less ambiguous option when it comes to quantifiable vs. unquantifiable risk. Our tendency towards ambiguity aversion, even when the expected utility is greater, is called the Ellsberg paradox.
In one of the most intensive uses yet of the University of Florida’s HiPerGator supercomputer, UF engineers have faithfully reproduced the turbulence and complexity of hot air rising along a wall — a previously impossible simulation with applications in home fire safety and heating and cooling.
Researchers at MIT have taken a different approach. They developed an algorithm and software system that can automatically design a nanoscale material that can conduct heat in a specific manner, such as channeling heat in only one direction.
Because these materials are measured in nanometers (a human hair is about 80,000 nanometers wide) they could be used in computer chips that can dissipate heat on their own due to the material’s geometry.
The researchers developed their system by taking computational techniques that have been traditionally used to develop large structures, and adapting them to create nanoscale materials with defined thermal properties.
The capitalist economic system has major failures. It generates extreme, socially divisive inequalities of wealth and income. It consistently fails to achieve full employment. Many of its jobs are boring, dangerous and/or mind-numbing. Every four to seven years, it suffers a mysterious downdraft in which millions of people lose jobs and incomes, businesses collapse, falling tax revenues undermine public services, and so on. If these failures were widely perceived as the inherent failures of the capitalist system, the desirability and thus sustainability of capitalism itself might vanish.
Scientists have always been fascinated by the question of human origins: When and where did modern humans—Homo sapiens—first appear? What distinguishes us from other members of the genus Homo and enabled us to develop such unprecedented culture and society?
Indeed, hardly any question fascinates humanity as much as our own roots. For thousands of years, clerics, scholars and philosophers have been racking their brains about where we come from, who are we and where are we going. The French painter Paul Gauguin was so captivated by that line of inquiry that he even dedicated a painting so named in the 19th century. The work, which deals with both the meaning and the transience of life, remains his most famous.
We have come a lot closer to answering these big questions thanks in part to the work of the paleogeneticist Svante Pääbo. He achieved what others had long thought impossible: he decoded the genome of Neandertals, a relative of modern humans who went extinct around 30,000 years ago. The Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm honored him this year with the Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology for his contribution to the study of human evolution.
I've been pinging him about making a Keyboardio Trackball from time to time over the past couple of years, but I bounced off every time. Hearing this, that the factory wants them to make one, then seeing the support quickly pile up made me very happy, and very enthusiastic. Not much sleep was had, I kept turning in my bed, recalling all things trackball.
This is a post about my ideas about how a perfect trackball would look and function. It's not necessarily the best trackball to build as a product, but perhaps it can serve as inspiration of sorts, or at least, a different point of view.
I apologise for the lack of sizeable updates in the past few months. Unfortunately the T700 project has not been smooth sailing, primarily due to Shenzhen and other Chinese cities under major lockdowns.
I’ve received a prototype and the board is working well. Board production has also finished and the boards are ready to ship once we are satisfied software issues are cleared up. There are two primary issues with the board which are explained below.
Exercise can boost your mental and cognitive health — but not all forms and intensities of exercise affect the brain equally. In fact, according to a new Dartmouth study, the effects of exercise are much more nuanced. It found that specific intensities of exercise over a long period of time are associated with different aspects of memory and mental health. The findings were recently published in the journal Scientific Reports and provide insight into how exercise could be optimized.
Losing your sense of smell is one of the more recognized symptoms of an infection. After noticing this trend, people began to ask: could the reviews themselves be a reliable indicator of a surge in the virus?
That theory was put under the microscope, and has taken on new relevance amid concern at the lack of official data tracking infections across the U.S. heading into another winter.
Over the course of the pandemic, social media sleuths, epidemiologists and health nerds alike began noticing an interesting trend in the review section for Yankee candles on Amazon.
Whenever there was an influx of negative reviews citing no smell, there was usually a spike in COVID cases to go along with it.
The 150,000 residents of Jackson, Mississippi remain without access to clean drinking water this week following the collapse of the water and sewage system under the pressure of heavy flooding late last month.
While water service has returned to homes and businesses throughout the state’s capital, the city remains under a boil-water advisory that was issued in July, with reports that water remains foul and undrinkable. Residents once again queued in long lines at distribution centers throughout the city Tuesday, picking up bottled water to use for cooking and basic hygiene. Approximately 600 National Guard soldiers have been deployed to the city by Republican Governor Tate Reeves to oversee the distribution.
While tens of thousands have been forced to rely on bottled water or use buckets to collect water from wells in the wealthiest country in the world, Jackson sits on and draws its water from the Ross Barnett Reservoir, the largest source of drinking water in the state.
Mismatched numbers, wrong photos, disappearing names, fingerprinting errors – Aadhaar is in full flow in AP's Anantapur district. At the receiving end are BPL card holders who have been denied rations for months
Microsoft and the US Army are continuing to explore how to make mixed reality an aid rather than a hindrance for soldiers after tests showed that soldiers taking them into battle felt sick and were more vulnerable to enemy forces.
A report from the Pentagon, obtained by Bloomberg, reveals Microsoft's HoloLens is causing headaches, eyestrain and nausea among soldiers testing it in the field.
With so many reports of lost luggage over the summer, many travelers have gotten savvier and have taken matters into their own hands, by tracking their checked luggage. Lufthansa is now allegedly saying that this isn’t allowed, and that sets an interesting precedent.
[...]
Lufthansa has become the first major airline to ban AirTags from checked bags. Or more accurately, Lufthansa is using the standard policy for checking personal electronic devices, which requires that they be powered off, and that renders AirTags useless.
Personally I don’t think Lufthansa’s motives here are pure, though I am curious to see how the industry responds to AirTags in general, because it seems like maybe they should technically be banned, based on current regulations.
As railroad workers prepare for a confrontation against the corporations, the government and the union bureaucracies that falsely claim to “represent” them, they must learn from and grapple with their own history.
[...]
Debs later said he regretted leaving school, but it was natural for youth to be drawn to work on the trains, which embodied all the technology and excitement of the age, a “Type of the modern—emblem of motion and power—pulse of the continent,” as Walt Whitman put it.[1] Debs soon entered the ranks of organized labor, joining in 1875 the two-year-old Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen. His leadership talents were recognized, and he rose quickly in the Brotherhood’s ranks, by 1880 becoming Grand Secretary and Treasurer and the editor of its journal, Firemen’s Magazine.
Meanwhile, the national railroad industry grew by leaps and bounds. Some 30,000 miles of track were laid by 1860, with four trunk lines linking the Midwest to the East and realigning it economically away from what had been its traditional orientation to the South via the steamboat and barge commerce of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. The rail network thus unified the North economically and facilitated its victory in the Civil War in 1865, when Debs was 10 years old—a Second American Revolution that destroyed chattel slavery and gave birth to a whole new capitalist society.
In this video I show you how to secure an admin login page for your wordpress login, cpanel, Django, or any other website framework that has an admin login page.
Australian FinTech companies collect your bank customer registration number and your password to access your bank accounts; and they keep that access even if you no longer use their services. Cyber security expert Manal al-Sharif explores privacy rorts.
Their star may be fading as stock market darlings, but the FinTech companies continue to challenge the big banks, using aggressive data-collecting techniques that not only flouts privacy principles, but seem highly unethical. And the big banks look the other way.
Mandiant recently reported that about 26 percent of the time, actors gain initial access through the exploitation of public-facing applications, which underscores how critical it is for organizations to maintain an up-to-date inventory of assets and vulnerabilities; this is true for both public and private sector entities—as no one is immune—including the federal government.
Back in 1984, the Association for Computing Machinery presented Ken Thompson with a “Turing Award” for his many contributions to the world of computing.
Ken worked on Multics, co-created UNIX, created multiple programming languages (Bon and B — which directly led to C), co-created the Plan 9 operating system, and on and on. The man certainly has earned a few computing awards.
But we’re not here today to talk about those contributions to computing.
No, sir. We’re here to talk… about his acceptance speech. Because it is absolutely amazing… and it revealed an absolutely fascinating computer virus that Thompson had created years earlier… for the C compiler.
[...]
Ken modified cc (the C compiler on UNIX systems) so that — only when it was compiling UNIX’s “login” program — it would inject a small “backdoor” (into “login”) that would allow him to log in as any user on the system if he used a predefined “password”.
When the new Federal Government took power in May this year, it promised several new initiatives; it has delivered on some of them and looks set to keep on providing what it promised.
But one innovation which it did not promise, but has nonetheless delivered is a global first: passports that cannot be used to establish one's identity.
This revolutionary initiative appears to emerged as part of a deal cut by Labor with Australian telco Singtel Optus, the company that suffered a calamitous data breach which it announced on 22 September.
Judging by the available evidence, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese appears to have modified his firm assertion, made initially on 28 September and repeated two days later, that Optus would have to pay for all passports which had been exposed as part of the breach.
Most visitors to Horizon Worlds generally don’t return after first month; ‘an empty world is a sad world’
This is a wild and hopeful story: grad students at Northeastern successfully pushed back against invasive digital surveillance in their workplace, through solidarity, fearlessness, and the bright light of publicity. It's a tale of hand-to-hand, victorious combat with the "shitty technology adoption curve."
What's the "shitty tech adoption curve?" It's the process by which oppressive technologies are normalized and spread. If you want to do something awful with tech – say, spy on people with a camera 24/7 – you need to start with the people who have the least social capital, the people whose objections are easily silenced or overridden.
An analysis of AusTender, the federal government’s contract tendering website, reveals that the Australian Trade and Investment Commission (Austrade) delivered 76 grants worth $3.7 million to manufacturing and technology companies associated with the defence industry to either attend or support the 2021 Land Forces Conference.
While most of these contracts went to Australian companies, some went to subsidiaries of foreign multinational weapons makers such as SAAB and Boeing.
In 2021, the company behind Land Forces ACNC was the recipient of $2 million in government grants, or 20% of its revenue.
The Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet has been ordered to hand over the Gaetjens Report into the Sports Rorts Affair after a two and a half year fight by Rex Patrick against fake Cabinet confidentiality.
Wei-Jun Cai, an expert in marine chemistry at the University of Delaware, is sounding new alarm bells about the changing chemistry of the western region of the Arctic Ocean, where he and an international team of collaborators have found acidity levels increasing three to four times faster than ocean waters elsewhere.
They also identified a strong correlation between the accelerated rate of melting ice in the region and the rate of ocean acidification, a perilous combination that threatens the survival of plants, shellfish, coral reefs and other marine life and biological processes throughout the planet’s ecosystem.
Cold fusion could save the world. It’d be a basically unlimited, clean, source of energy. It sounds great. There’s just one problem: it’s not working. Indeed, most physicists think it can’t work even in theory. And yet, the research is making a comeback. So, what’s going on? What do we know about cold fusion? Is it the real deal, or is it pseudoscience? What’s cold fusion to begin with? That’s what we’ll talk about today.
If you push two small atomic nuclei together, they will form a heavier one. This nuclear fusion releases an enormous amount of energy. There’s just one problem: Atomic nuclei all have a positive electric charge, so they repel each other. And they do so very strongly. The closer they are, the stronger the repulsion. It’s called the Coulomb barrier, and it prevents fusion until you get the nuclei so close together that the strong nuclear force takes over. Then the nuclei merge, and boom.
“Flight shaming” is a social movement that originated in Sweden a few years ago. Its aim is to discourage people from flying because it’s bad for the environment. But let’s be honest, we’re not going to give up flying just because some Swedes think we should. I mean, we already shop at IKEA, isn’t that Swedish enough?
But seriously, maybe the flight shamers have a point. If aliens come to visit us one day, how are we supposed to explain this mess? Maybe we should indeed try to do something about airplane emissions. What are airlines doing anyway, isn’t it their job? What are the technological options, and will any of them give you a plausible excuse if flight shamers come for you? That’s what we’ll talk about today.
That effluent flows downhill perhaps isn't too surprising, but do you think the converse is true, or is it really the case that nice guys finish last?
How do multinationals like Microsoft get away with paying so little tax? They deliberately wipe out their profits in high-tax countries such as Australia. Callum Foote reports on the global tax avoidance structure of the tech giant.
A new report has revealed how the tech giant Microsoft avoids paying tax on more than $5 billion of income in Australia alone; albeit while raking in billions in revenue from contracts with Australian governments. The report was compiled by the Centre for International Corporate Tax Accountability and Research (CICTAR), an alliance of unions and civil society organisations aiming to provide better information about the tax arrangements of multinationals.
Qantas boss Alan Joyce sent the airline’s share price into orbit today on forecasts of a $1.3bn profit this half year. What’s the scam?
The scam is RANS, DANS, TANS, RDAC, IAS, IFAM and JobKeeper – a dazzling array of at least six sorts of public subsidies – which helped get this private enterprise through the pandemic. As Qantas directors are now helping themselves to pay rises once again, all this government largesse has been forked out with nothing demanded in return; no customer service obligations, no obligations to employees – nothing in terms of reform.
As Labor faces pressure to abandon them, the stage three tax cuts have been given a boost by one of the new Teal independents.
As reported by The Australian Financial Review, Kylea Tink (North Sydney) told a forum hosted by investment bank Citi that not all beneficiaries of the cuts are wealthy.
“Right here, right now, it is unfair to put people in that income bracket of around that $120,000 to $140,000 mark as rich,” Tink said. “They are not rich. There’s been significant creep through our taxation levels and we need to be aware of that.” Tink, whose harbourside seat is one of Australia’s richest, made similar comments to Sky News last week.
The Morrison government legislated the tax cuts with the support of the Albanese-led opposition. Labor, which failed at the 2019 election with an ambitious redistributive agenda, feared being wedged on the issue. Now Labor is coming under pressure to reverse the cuts, scheduled for 2024, and bank the estimated $243 billion savings over 10 years.
In his latest essay, Professor Hudson digs deeper into Germany’s suicidal economic/financial policies; their effect on the already falling euro – and hints at some possibilities for fast integrating Eurasia and the Global South as a whole to try to break the Hegemon’s stranglehold.
The reaction to the sabotage of three of the four Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines in four places on Monday, September 26, has focused on speculations about who did it and whether NATO will make a serious attempt to discover the answer. Yet instead of panic, there has been a great sigh of diplomatic relief, even calm. Disabling these pipelines ends the uncertainty and worries on the part of US/NATO diplomats that nearly reached a crisis proportion the previous week, when large demonstrations took place in Germany calling for the sanctions to end and to commission Nord Stream 2 to resolve the energy shortage.
The German public was coming to understand what it will mean if their steel companies, fertilizer companies, glass companies and toilet-paper companies were shutting down. These companies were forecasting that they would have to go out of business entirely – or shift operations to the United States – if Germany did not withdraw from the trade and currency sanctions against Russia and permit Russian gas and oil imports to resume, and presumably to fall back from their astronomical eight to tenfold price increase.
Yet State Department hawk Victoria Nuland already had stated in January that “one way or another Nord Stream 2 will not move forward” if Russia responded to the accelerating Ukrainian military attacks on the Russian-speaking eastern oblasts. President Biden backed up U.S. insistence on February 7, promising that “there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it. … I promise you, we will be able to do it.”
The 10th anniversary of Julia Gillard’s so-called misogyny speech is a reminder of what might have been. Chiefly, the loss of a potentially great Australian leader.
The speech resonated around Australia and the world. The Macquarie Dictionary even redefined the word misogyny on the back of it. But beyond the commemorative songs, seminars, studies and symposiums lies the story of the squandered opportunities of the most recent former Labor government.
Maybe things will work out better for Anthony Albanese. After all, he had a front-row seat when Labor burned its two leading lights and opened the door for nine years of generally poor Coalition government. Meanwhile the Gillard story is a reminder of how Labor often wins the culture wars and loses the political ones.
The Russian authorities have added Meta - which owns Facebook and Instagram - to a list of terrorist and extremist organisations, the country's Interfax agency reports.
This was how the mid-17th century Buddhist-Hindu kingdom of Cambodia referred to its monarch, Reameathipadei, when he converted to Islam and took the title Sultan Ibrahim.
Although disapproving, the court respected the king’s decision – even after his death. “It is remarkable that Reameathipadei was given a Buddhist funeral and that his Muslim regalia were retained by a Buddhist-Brahmanic court,” writes Dutch scholar of Islam, Carool Kersten, in his study of contemporary indigenous and European accounts of the event.
History also records that the 15th century ruler of the then new Muslim state of Malacca, Sultan Muhammad Shah, became Shri Maharaja Muhammad after taking the prestigious title of his Buddhist-Hindu predecessors.
A pluralist ethos marks southeast Asia’s past and present, reflecting a civilisational maturity that shames those who speak of ancient India’s spiritual ‘legacy’ overseas in making the self-laudatory vishwa guru claim while stoking an ugly communal divide at home.
The years since the late 1700s have been marked by waves of struggle for a more democratic, egalitarian society that have repeatedly been rolled back by power elites. From 18th century political revolutions, to 19th century labor struggles, to civil rights struggles, to the cultural uprisings of the 1960s, people’s movements have made gains.
Since Twitter seems to be about to dive back into being the hosting platform of choice for neo-nazis, I don't want there to be any gap in my Fediverse access; I've set up a new Mastodon account at @roguelazer@tenforward.social2. Hopefully it'll be another great community, like mastodon.technology was.
The judicial proceedings against Julian Assange give a faux legality to the state persecution of the most important and courageous journalist of our generation.
As with the Machinists’ victory in Towson, Maryland, the Oklahoma vote could quickly embolden Apple workers who have been privately discussing organizing elsewhere. The fact that the effort prevailed in a deep-red state, whose unionization rate is only around half the US average, underscores the campaign’s potential to spread nationwide.
Patrick Hart, a leader in the Oklahoma City campaign, said he’s now eager to advise other Apple stores on how to organize. “I want this to become a labor movement,” he said. “We’re going to be that catalyst for people.”
With two stores unionizing, Apple will have a tougher time maintaining the status quo, said Epstein Becker & Green attorney Steven Swirsky. “If I lost one, it could concern me,” Swirsky, who advises companies on how to avoid unionization, said prior to the vote. “If you lose more than one, then it starts to become hard to explain away.”
What Kennedy meant was that antitrust laws don't exist to protect small businesses per se – rather, they exist to promote "efficiency," which is best understood as "prices going down." So long as prices are going down, antitrust is working as intended – irrespective of the ruined lives and places that are sacrificed to low prices and the corruption begat by concentrated power.
The question of what antitrust should do is certainly up for fair debate. I understand the "efficiency" argument, even though I thoroughly disagree with it. What isn't (or shouldn't be) up for debate is what purpose antitrust was created to serve. That is a historical fact, easily verified by looking at contemporaneous primary source documents from the recent past.
But for 40 years, we've accepted an alternate history of antitrust law, an unhinged conspiratorial account that pretended that the lawmakers who drafted and fought for antitrust law and who told us over and over why they did so were speaking in code – that we can't rely on their plain language and must instead fall back on gnostic interpretations where every word can mean its opposite.
Finally, that age of mystic nonsense is coming to a close. The new antitrust enforcers not only reject the ahistorical gibberish that pretends to explain antitrust's origins, they embrace the intent of antitrust's framers: to prevent the accumulation of commercial – and thus political – power into the hands of "autocrats of trade," be they Rockefellers and Carnegies, or Kochs and Seids.
Last week, the ongoing Senate hearings into Bill C-11 featured an appearance from the Canadian Association of Film Distributors and Exporters, who spelled out its expectations for Bill C-11, particularly the contributions from streaming services such as Netflix, Disney+, and Amazon Prime. While much of the Bill C-11 debate has focused on the regulation of user content, the bill’s supposed intent is to bring large streaming services into the Canadian broadcasting system. Fuelled by the government’s dubious claim that the bill could generated a billion dollars per year (even government officials now admit that the number is an estimate based not based on actual data), the Canadian sector came sporting demands wildly out of touch with international standards. Indeed, when compared to European regulation, which is often touted as the global leader, Canada would strongly discourage market entry for streaming services and likely result in reduced libraries of content in order to meet the government and CRTC’s regulatory requirements.
The big number for the Canadian sector is 30 percent: mandated contributions of 30 percent of Canadian revenues to support Canadian content funding and mandated discoverability requirements in which 30 percent of what is recommended or pops up in search is Canadian content.
Maple Diffusion is the second Stable-Diffusion-on-a-phone implementation I'm aware of (first place goes to Matt Waller), but it should be the fastest.
On the very first day of the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage’s hearings on the Online News Act last month, News Media Canada, the lead lobbyist for Bill C-18, was asked about a poll it commissioned this year which found 79% support requiring Google and Facebook to share revenue with Canadian news outlets. When Bloc MP Martin Champoux asked whether respondents were well informed, President and CEO Paul Deegen assured him “they were very well informed”. Deegan had a different response yesterday to another poll – this one commissioned by Google – as he took issue with the poll and warned that Google must provide “an honest presentation of the facts.” I have never thought any of these corporate-commissioned polls were of significant value and I’m not going to start now, whether it is News Media Canada or Google that is doing the commissioning. However, I think what makes the Google poll notable is the response to it, rather than the actual data.
First, the data. The poll finds that most Canadians are not familiar with the Online News Act – ie. not well informed – with only 8% of respondents saying they were very familiar with the bill and 67% either having only heard of it or only heard of it when taking the survey. When asked about issues that matter, the two issues cited as most important were not treating misinformation as news under the Act and ensuring that eligible news outlets follow journalistic standards. The poll continues with some of Google’s concerns: the power of the CRTC, payments for links, disincentives to demote misinformation, and eligibility of foreign news companies for the system. The majority of respondents unsurprisingly express concern about those issues, which then leads to 59% supporting reforms to the bill.
I've seen a lot of comments on Twitter that seem to completely misunderstand the process of getting a decent result with AI generators like Stable Diffusion and DALL-E 2. People seem to assume that it's just "push button, recieve bacon" without any real creativity in the equation. As someone who has done a lot of this experimentation in the past few months, I'd like to challenge that assertion and show you what the process for getting a decent result actually involves.
First, you need to start off with a vision for what you want. I'm going to pull my fictional world Malto, specifically an area named Kanar. It is a very green area, lots of bamboo and the local architecture takes advantage of it. The area is fairly wealthy because they take advantage of their weird soil composition in order to produce the plants that help them make an alcoholic beverage that the nobles all over the world can't get enough of.
I have noticed this for several years but not known whether or how to put it into words. After thinking about it more than usual in the past weeks, this is my attempt to describe my feelings.
When significant changes occur in my life it feels like they are occurring around me without my agency. They don't have an impact on my feelings or emotions, they are just things that happen.
I am having a problem with my current kernel. I'd like to downgrade. And I prefer to use Manjaro's graphical tools.
The basic process is to manually boot into the old kernel using GRUB, and then disable the newer kernel.
@dredmorbius@toot.cat and @babelcarp@social.tchncs.de were talking about journalism. It started with reading the news online and being tracked, with tracking being better if you subscribe (since now they have your payment info and perhaps your location, too), and therefore a cultural tax on the one side, and musings of micropayments and the unwillingness to subscribe to every newspaper because in our online world we see a lot of links to multiple newspapers on the other side.
I know the feeling. A cultural tax would be great, if everybody agreed to it, across borders. Fat chance. Too many people are making money as intermediaries!
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.