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raspberry PIXEL
by rowan schischka 15 Oct '16

15 Oct '16

Rasbian now has its own desktop environment called PIXEL https://www.raspberrypi.org/magpi/introducing-pixel/ Considering I'm already demonstrating android on raspberry pi, we may as well have a look at this new interface if we have time. Can I ask people to bring their old, unused micro SD cards; Iv got one but its already been written to with dd a few times, and I don't know how much life is left in it. -- Kind Regards Rowan Schischka

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elementary?
by Ian Young 15 Oct '16

15 Oct '16

Not a good review from dedoimedo. " Elementary OS 0.4 has some nice goodies, but they all completely over-shadowed by a slew of big bugs, heating issues, inconsistent behavior, poor multimedia support, weak smartphone support, non-existent Samba support, a less-than-ideal responsiveness of its desktop and apps, weird graphic artefacts and glitches, poor contrast, and a few others. This is just too much for an ordinary user to commit to. I'm particularly sad because Freya had started showing promise, but it's all gone now. Then again, Xerus really killed the Ubuntu line, so it comes as no surprise." http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/elementary-0-4-loki.html Anyone know what is this MTP protocol by the way? It sounds a bit surplus to requirements. Perhaps my phone is not smart enough?

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Ian S Was Right About DECnet Phase IV
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 14 Oct '16

14 Oct '16

Remember I said DECnet Phase IV couldn’t have been in existence in 1983? In fact, these documents <http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/dec/decnet/phase_IV/> make it clear it was introduced in 1982.

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Security Economics Of The Internet Of Things
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 10 Oct '16

10 Oct '16

Basically, neither the buyers nor the sellers of these devices care about fixing the security problems, since the victims are usually somebody else. So the only way to solve them is via Government intervention. But this has to be done with international cooperation--no single country can do it. <https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2016/10/security_econom_1.html>

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Why Linus Torvalds Prefers x86 Over ARM
by Peter Reutemann 09 Oct '16

09 Oct '16

'Linus Torvalds answered a question about his favorite chip architecture at the Linaro Connect conference. An anonymous Slashdot reader quotes PCWorld: People are too fixated with the instruction set and the CPU core, Torvalds said. But ultimately "what matters is all the infrastructure around the instruction set, and x86 has all that infrastructure... at a lot of different levels. It's open in a way that no other architecture is... Being compatible just wasn't as big of a deal for the ARM ecosystem as it has been traditionally for the x86 ecosystem... I've been personally pretty disappointed with ARM as a hardware platform, not as an instruction set, though I've had my issues there, too. As a hardware platform, it is still not very pleasant to deal with." You can watch the whole half-hour conversation on YouTube. My favorite part is where Linus candidly acknowledges that "sometimes my grumpiness makes more news than my being nice... 99% of the time I'm a very happy manager, and I mentally pat people on the head all the time. That maybe then highlights the times when things don't work so well a bit more."' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/16/10/09/0755231 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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Persistent Memory At LinuxCon 2016
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 09 Oct '16

09 Oct '16

Seems like there is a lot of interest currently in “persistent memory” architectures (e.g. flash storage that doesn’t sit on the other side of a slow SATA interface). Quite a few different programming models and libraries are being developed to try to find the best approach to making efficient use of this resource <http://phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Persistent-Memory-Linux-2016>. I suppose this is like the early days of disks (and drums, and tapes), when the first primitive filesystems were being developed. Anybody remember core memories? But they were never used this way...

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Looks Like Fedora 25 Will Default To Wayland
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 08 Oct '16

08 Oct '16

Wayland, the complete reworking of the antiquated X11 graphics/windowing architecture along more modern lines, has been many years in the development. Looks like it is finally ready for prime time <http://phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Fedora-25-Wayland-Continues>.

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ISP GMX attempts the nigh impossible: PGP for the masses
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 07 Oct '16

07 Oct '16

Will this <http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/10/06/pgp_email_service_gmx/> finally take secure e-mail mainstream?

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Linux is a new frontier for young developer
by Peter Reutemann 07 Oct '16

07 Oct '16

'When I was 17 years old, I started using Linux because I wanted a desktop that resembled my brother-in-law's Gentoo laptop, which used the KDE environment. Instead, I got the now-nostalgic brown and orange GNOME 2 environment because I'd installed Ubuntu. (Ubuntu has since changed its color palette.) At the time, I couldn't go back to Windows Vista and I didn't ask my in-law for help. So I hunkered down and started learning. But I was scared of other Linux distributions and felt lucky that I could even get Ubuntu on my computer. I started to learn how to make my newly installed system look and feel how I wanted it to. For a year or so, I executed shell scripts with reckless abandon, as root, which downloaded icons and possibly zero-day exploits. GNOME-Look was a staple source for me. I had fun learning about all the free software that one could get through Ubuntu's software center and Synaptic. To be frank, I only cared that it was gratis. I was a kid and could not afford much of anything. But, the fact that a lot of software was free as in beer got me thinking and made me wonder why.' -- source: https://opensource.com/life/16/10/a-linux-journey 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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could it finally be
by Ian Young 07 Oct '16

07 Oct '16

Year of Linux on the Windows desktop? Sorry, just couldn't refrain :/

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