- wlug - list.wlug.org.nz

Empire of the Gates
by Ian Young 20 Feb '15

20 Feb '15

Better snap back to reality. On Arstechnica I see the following data as of 11/2014. OS share worldwide -- Windows allsorts 91.28%, OS X 7.27, all others [weeps] 1.45. Windows breakdown XP 13.57%, Vista 2.65, Win 7 56.41, Win 8 6.55, Win 8.1 12.1. http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/01/you-can-offer-people-windows-10-for-… All hail his Billness. Though the figures for systems other than desktops must show a different story, and in phone and tablet world Windows is pretty well a joke apart from some misguided corporate purchases. (I stand to be corrected on that). Meanwhile back in the day, I had GEOS installed and it was passable. Even ran it within OS/2, freaky or what? Speaking of OS/2 last time I looked there were still some zealots keeping it working after a fashion. -quote- Unfortunately, OS/2 had a crucial flaw in its design: a Synchronous Input Queue (SIQ). What this meant was that all messages to the GUI window server went through a single tollbooth. If any OS/2 native GUI app ever stopped servicing its window messages, the entire GUI would get stuck and the system froze. OK, technically the operating system was still running. Background tasks continued to execute just fine. You just couldn’t see them or interact with them or do anything, because the entire GUI was hung. Some enterprising OS/2 fan wrote an application that polled the joystick port and was supposed to unstick things when the user pressed a button. It rarely worked. Ironically, if you never ran native OS/2 applications and just ran DOS and Windows apps in a VM, the operating system was much more stable. -quote- http://arstechnica.com/business/2013/11/half-an-operating-system-the-triump… And now we return to our normal programme and wonder whether Linux v4 is soon to arrive. 19 million lines in the kernel and counting. http://linuxgizmos.com/is-linux-heading-toward-the-big-4-0/

2 1

Raspberry π 2 Ships Half Million In First Two Weeks
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 20 Feb '15

20 Feb '15

The next-generation Raspberry π seems to be doing rather well right out of the starting gate <http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2395948/raspberry-pi-2-sales-top-5…>. Meantime, while total sales of both old- and new-generation π models have wildly exceeded expectations, there is some dispute over the Foundation’s claim that it has become the best-selling British PC maker ever <http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/02/18/raspberry_pi_5_million_sold/>.

5 14

A History Of Photoshop
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 19 Feb '15

19 Feb '15

Quite a few articles around to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Photoshop 1.0, but this one at The Register <http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/02/19/feature_25_years_of_adobe_photoshop/> seems to offer the most background detail. And some nice (or not-so-nice) examples of its use...

2 1

Microsoft's First Azure Hosted Service Is Powered By Linux
by Peter Reutemann 19 Feb '15

19 Feb '15

"Canonical, through John Zannos, VP Cloud Alliances, has proudly announced that the first ever Microsoft Azure hosted service will be powered by Ubuntu Linux. This piece of news comes from the Strata + Hadoop World Conference, which takes place this week in California. The fact of the matter is that the news came from Microsoft who announced the preview of Azure HDInsight (an Apache Hadoop-based hosted service) on Ubuntu clusters yesterday at the said event. This is definitely great news for Canonical, as their operating system is getting recognized for being extremely reliable when handling Big Data. Ubuntu is now the leading cloud and scale-out Linux-based operating system." -- source: http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/15/02/19/1830232 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Waikato, NZ http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ Ph. +64 (7) 858-5174

1 0

Arduino Ructions
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 19 Feb '15

19 Feb '15

Seems like the Arduino founders have split to go their separate ways <https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150217/10345530055/is-arduino-heading-t…>. The unfortunate thing is that there are now lawsuits to try to decide who has exclusive rights to the “Arduino” name. Whatever happens, it seems likely there will continue to be more than one company making products that are “Arduino” in every way, if not in name. This is nothing new in open-source software, though it may be a first for open-source hardware.

1 0

Seymour Cray’s Only Surviving Talk
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 19 Feb '15

19 Feb '15

Seymour Cray, who was practically “Mister Supercomputer” through the 1960s, 70s and 80s, gives a talk at Los Alamos discussing the pending introduction of the legendary Cray-1 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtOA1vuoDgQ>. The date given in the title is 1976, but he repeatedly makes remarks in the talk that point to the year actually being 1974. He says the new machine will be installed at LANL the following year (actually it went in in 1976).

1 0

How to rool the world by Bill G
by Ian Young 19 Feb '15

19 Feb '15

Become the main supplier of an OS for PCs while IBM snoozes, replete with profits from existing business. Adopt the 386 processor while IBM messes about with the 286 perhaps because of sunk investment in that CPU. Make deals with the hardware makers they can't refuse and shut out any competition. Introduce the first GUI to become widely used on the machines soon to become predominant in desktop computing. Leave the superior OS/2 in the dust, and get IBM to sell Windows. Excel. Actually first came to fame on the Mac iirc, and rapidly drove out just about all other spreadsheets in its Windows guise. On its coattails came all the other applications we know today as MS Office, effectively wiping out all competitors. Get networking in the box with Windows and crush Netware and eventually Novell with it. And so it went until perhaps MS became like IBM in the 1980s and failed to see the next big thing on several occasions, or at least failed to achieve the same level of dominance as in the past in new fields. 2 cents is the suggested donation, I'll pass the hat around.

2 1

Re: [wlug] PC-BSD: Set For Serious Growth?
by Chris O'Halloran 19 Feb '15

19 Feb '15

On Tue, 17 Feb 2015 21:40:02 +1300, Peter Reutemann wrote: > 'Luke Wolf, a KDE developer, argues that PC-BSD might become a > serious > -- source: http://bsd.slashdot.org/story/15/02/16/2355236 > > NB: Mentioning "Linux + Year of the Desktop" is always bait for a > flamewar. But... Did anyone ever use PC-BSD as their primary OS > (work/home)? Willing to share some insight? > > Cheers, Peter Perhaps people have to consider why they use Linux on the desktop at all (and why others than don't at present would). I think its people with a technical interest that use Linux on the desktop, either because they are familiar with it on servers, are passionate about the 'freeness' of it or the ease (including cost) with which they can set up a development environment. I think the big players like Apple and Microsoft would have to make some serious stuff-ups for the rest of population to go through the hassle of switching OSes on their current desktops. While many of the FOSS applications (GIMP/LibreOffice/Firefox) run just fine on Windows (and possible Mac too I don't know), they also reduce the imperative to shift entirely to Linux or BSD. And the only thing I see that really could shift the corporate environment is a server based Office(Document/Spreadsheet/Mail) solution that was so compelling, that eventually system administrators started to wonder if there was any point in sticking exclusively to an MS Desktop. Cloud computing, Smart TVs and the advent of Android and iPhone have certainly helped computer *users* become more comfortable with alternative OS and user interfaces. -- Chris

2 1

FreeBSD-Current Random Number Generator Broken
by Peter Reutemann 18 Feb '15

18 Feb '15

'The FreeBSD random number has been discovered to be generating possibly predictable SSH keys and SSL certificates for months. Time to regenerate your keys and certs if using FreeBSD-Current. A message to the freebsd-current mailing list reads in part: "If you are running a current kernel r273872 or later, please upgrade your kernel to r278907 or later immediately and regenerate keys. I discovered an issue where the new framework code was not calling randomdev_init_reader, which means that read_random(9) was not returning good random data. read_random(9) is used by arc4random(9) which is the primary method that arc4random(3) is seeded from."' -- source: http://it.slashdot.org/story/15/02/18/2026258 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Waikato, NZ http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ Ph. +64 (7) 858-5174

2 1

Google Chrome Will Adopt HTTP/2 In the Coming Weeks, Drop SPDY Support
by Peter Reutemann 18 Feb '15

18 Feb '15

''Google today announced it will add HTTP/2, the second major version of Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), to Google Chrome. The company plans to gradually roll out support to the latest version of its browser, Chrome 40, "in the upcoming weeks." At the same time, Google says it will remove support for SPDY in early 2016. SPDY, which is not an acronym but just a short version for the word "speedy," is a protocol developed primarily at Google to improve browsing by forcing SSL encryption for all sites and speeding up page loads. Chrome will also lose support for the TLS extension NPN in favor of ALPN. -- source: http://tech.slashdot.org/story/15/02/09/2320244 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Waikato, NZ http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ Ph. +64 (7) 858-5174

2 1