May 2016 - wlug - list.wlug.org.nz

Fwd: Bruce Gilbert suggested a new Meetup for WLUG - Waikato Linux Users Group
by Peter Reutemann 25 May '16

25 May '16

What do you guys think of the topic below for the next meeting? Personally, I'm just a Linux user, so not really qualified to discuss the topic. However, I'd be still keen to hear about. Cheers, Peter ---------- Forwarded message ---------- This Meetup will be announced to the group if 3 people say they're going. Or you can announce it now. Bruce Gilbert suggested a new Meetup. What: Talk about Linux/Unix philosophy & 'systemd'. When: This Meetup needs a date Where: This Meetup needs a location 'systemd', which has replaced SYSTEMV 'init' in nearly ALL current Linux distributions, seems to go against the fundamental philosophy of Linux/Unix. It has a 'finger-in-all-pies' approach & is, I believe, unnecessarily complex? Click here to check out this Meetup: http://www.meetup.com/WaikatoLinuxUsersGroup/events/231330392/

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Norton Bans kernel.org
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 24 May '16

24 May '16

The screenshot from the original report <http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/05/24/norton_bans_kernel_dot_org/> shows “Computer Threats: 4” from the kernel.org site. Though it seems, since the report, Norton have fixed it to show no threats any more.

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Meetings tonight?
by Chris McClimans 24 May '16

24 May '16

Meetup.com doesn't show anything scheduled

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Supercomputing Is Hard, Reproducibility Is Harder
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 23 May '16

23 May '16

<http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/05/23/the_underbelly_of_simulation_scienc…> Their next step, to make the work easier for other researchers to replicate their results, was a replication study on other packages... That's where things got painful, they write: to get where they expected to get needed “three years of dedicated work that encountered a dozen ways that things can go wrong, conquered one after another, to arrive finally at (approximately) the same findings and a whole new understanding of what it means to do “reproducible research” in computational fluid dynamics.”

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Oracle v. Google draws to a close, jury sent home until next week
by Peter Reutemann 19 May '16

19 May '16

"Presentation of evidence in the Oracle v. Google trial ended today, and US District Judge William Alsup has sent the jury home for a long weekend. On Monday, the jury members will come back to hear closing arguments and begin their deliberations." More information on the trial can be found here: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/05/oracle-v-google-draws-to-a-close… Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Ongoing Collapse In PC Sales
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 18 May '16

18 May '16

PC unit shipments are down by a third on volumes of just a few years ago, while revenues have shrunk even more <http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/05/18/pcmarket2016q1/>. Not sure if that includes tablets: not that it would probably help, nowadays...

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200GB MicroSD for $120nzd
by Chris McClimans 18 May '16

18 May '16

Not bad: http://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-Ultra-200GB-Micro-SDSDQUAN-200G-G4A/dp/B00V62… and they get cheaper as you get smaller, less than half that for 128GB. -chris

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Google Dorking
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 17 May '16

17 May '16

Fun search terms for finding documents that should never have been made public: <http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/05/google-dorking-when-pii-and-exploit…>.

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Raspberry Pi Zero gains camera support, keeps the $5 price
by Peter Reutemann 17 May '16

17 May '16

"When the Raspberry Pi Foundation launched the credit-card sized Zero, it stressed that the DIY computing board would not be as capable as the rest of the Pi family. But if there's one thing we've learned about the Raspberry Pi, it's that there's always room for improvement. Today, the Zero has received its first major hardware upgrade since its hugely successful launch in November: a camera connector. The new addition works very nicely with the two new Sony imaging modules announced last month and the board retains its $5 (£4) price." -- source: http://www.engadget.com/2016/05/16/raspberry-pi-zero-camera-module/ Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Open-Source VPU-Side Bootloader For Raspberry π
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 17 May '16

17 May '16

The Raspberry π has been open-source from the beginning in every respect except one: the earliest stages of booting are actually managed by the “VPU” graphics chip, not by the ARM CPU. And the bootloader has been a proprietary firmware blob with no source code available. What made it worse was that the VPU has control over the CPU, not the other way round. Now it looks like that may be changing <http://phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Raspberry-Pi-Bootloader>.

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