Given Farnell promised them for end-June, I really don't expect them to deliver next week (no email, no nothing), I bothered to go through my credit card statements. The money was never booked. I have no idea why...

It could have to do with the fact that my credit card expired in April (this means, in April it was still valid) and I ordered the 4th of April 2012. Should still have worked, but if for some reason they delayed the transaction, the credit card they had from me was expired. Just a little email to update my details would have sufficed, but I guess with the demand, why bother with a single order, right?

So my bet is: I won't get it. Not from Farnell. The RS Electronics one was booked, but the order was made much later on my new credit card.

Is there indeed anything we can do about the new cadre of Microsoft astroturfers with modpoints? Is it just time to finally give up. I can't imagine that they haven't actually paid their way in.

I am looking for a large-format inkjet with continuous inking that is suitable for printing poster prints and the like. Ideally it would have both Linux and Windows support, preferably through a standard protocol, but this is not an absolute necessity. What IS a necessity is the ability to install a continuous inking system for making these large prints, and being able to change inks. I am biased towards Epson or Canon but I want good advice, not just biased.

I think I know what to do with my Raspberry Pi, when I finally get it.

Limited to 25 posts/day? When did that happen. Lame.

Well, some might have noticed that I got an Ask Slashdot through on the front page. Nice, but really, for some commenters you really need tough skin. Some of the commenters really think you're a complete idiot for just asking something because you don't have the experience and just want to tap into the pool of knowledge present here.

Sure, I could have a bit more precise, that I have a European style house and not the masses of space many in the US have, I also should have specified why I wanted a rackmount at home: basically, neatness and centralizedness (is that even a word?) because tell me what you want: a neat rack has higher WAF than a couple of desktops scattered around the house.

Oddly enough, I'm not sure I found a good answer. Best suggestion was this. I'll try to see whether my electrician can get a full rack, but if he can't, it will be this. Given my geographical location, using eBay for these things is impossible and people selling these new don't seem to want to bother with non-company entities (aka "real people"). So, starting off with the mounted one, extending to an on-roll half rack for future extensions seems a good compromise.

I've been tasked to look into full disk encryption for the company I work for. We're talking just five laptops running Windows XP or Windows 7 that will need it. The other branches are going with TrueCrypt and I do have experience with TrueCrypt. It works fine, but only requires a password. I investigated it and I thought I could "emulate" a two-factor authentication by having a password plus providing a USB stick with a keyfile. Turns out that this is not possible with Truecrypt and full disk encryption.

I did Google around a bit, but I have no real comprehensive overview of "good" products. So, I ask the crowd here: what full disk encryption with two factor authentication do you use. Are you satisfied with it? Pitfalls to avoid.

Copyright is not a natural right, and if it had been instituted in its current form (denial of copying, as opposed to forced copying) two thousand years earlier we'd probably be at least a thousand years behind where we are now.

Those who "follow" me on G+ or Facebook, know that I was surprised to find an ARM based netbook featuring Ubuntu 10.04 LTS in a local supermarket. It was 169€ and I talked a bit with the salesman about it and when I told him I wanted one, he was nice enough to suggest me a returned model for 20% off. Nice... 135.20€ for what is quite something exotic.

Yes, I'm typing this review on it. It's extremely light, and virtually silent (Probably literally silent). The keyboard is small, chiclet style which doesn't allow quick typing. It has no windows button but a "home" button. There is one key that is weird, because it gets a double functionality where I've never seen such a thing on any keyboard. I won't go into details, because it obviously is layout dependent. What is also weird is that the screen folds over the keyboard between two raised "sides". Looks nice when closed, weird when opened.

The screen itself is crisp and clear with the classic 1024x600 resolution. Not much, but surprisingly well used by the software

Classic, also, three USB ports, VGA webcam, RJ45, 802.11n and an external SD card reader. Surprisingly, it also has an internal SD card reader in a little bay. This bay also features two dip switches. One to disable the internal (non-replaceable) battery and one labeled INT/EXT... It's actually interesting what that one does.

There is also a mini-USB port, which I assume, can be used to connect the netbook to a "real" computer. The manual talks about some sync software, but I didn't bother with that.

Now, of course, this machine was used, probably for one evening, but still. I expected it to come with a CD or something to be able to reset it. Well, no, but you can download an SD card image from the Hercules website and it's a matter of dd-ing that image to an SD card. Now, why they omitted that from the instructions and concentrated on creating the "rescue" SD card from within Windows is a complete mystery to me. Now, the question was: how do you boot from the newly created SD card? That's what the INT/EXT dip switch is for: set it to INT and the device boots from the internal device, which is technically also an SD card as I could see in mount:

jorg@jorg-laptop:~$ mount | grep ext4
/dev/mmcblk0p1 on / type ext4 (rw,errors=remount-ro)
jorg@jorg-laptop:~$

I think it's amusing as this means the device has three SD card readers, and no real hard disk.

Set the dip switch on EXT and the device boots from the external SD card reader. That confused me a bit, because I hadn't noticed the SD card reader on the side, and used the one inside the bay where the switches are located. That didn't work. Realizing my mistake, it quickly booted from the rescue SD card and restored the initial state. The system does promise easy hacking on it. Prepare SD card, boot...

The software is a customized Ubuntu LTS 10.04 ARM which uses their own repositories (http://package.ecafe.hercules.com/). The repositories seem to be kept updated for now. At least, there were quite some patches to download.

The interface is the now abandoned Netbook Remix interface and it does actually work well for this form factor. Noteworthy is Chromium being the default browser and the webcam application is from Hercules itself. Probably proprietary, but seems fair enough. As everybody here knows, there is no Adobe Flash for this platform, so they have a YouTube viewing application called "Minitube". Works fine with a caveat: When running it and you switch applications, the video overlays in a half-transparent way over your new Window. I guess a special decoder chip is used. When playing a 720p youtube video -which runs smooth, I must admit- the CPU usage is at 50%.

Oh, yes, CPU... Here is what Linux has to say about it:

jorg@jorg-laptop:~$ uname -a ; cat /proc/cpuinfo ; free -m
Linux jorg-laptop 2.6.35.4-ecafe-v4C #36 PREEMPT Mon Oct 24 17:18:51 CEST 2011 armv7l GNU/Linux
Processor : ARMv7 Processor rev 5 (v7l)
BogoMIPS : 799.53
Features : swp half thumb fastmult vfp edsp thumbee neon vfpv3
CPU implementer : 0x41
CPU architecture: 7
CPU variant : 0x2
CPU part : 0xc08
CPU revision : 5

Hardware : Hercules MX51 eCAFE 20110630
Revision : 51130
Serial : 008ea27ec4c91336
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 406 282 124 0 13 93
-/+ buffers/cache: 175 231

The packaging said that the CPU should be an ARM8, but cpuinfo says it's not. I don't know all that much about ARM versions, so I'll abstain.

I'm a bit torn whether this is strong enough. When I used the system before the restore, I consistently had loads over 4 (which means, 4 processes were waiting for CPU in average). I don't know why it did that, after the restore, it seems gone. The load is now at a consistent 0.55 while I was typing this. It sometimes does feel slow, but then so does my Atom D525/4GB RAM with 120GB SSD as disk. (That one, I really don't get: No idea what it has, except it runs Ubuntu 12.04 Beta) CPU usage is pretty moderate, even when the system features high loads. It does play 720p perfectly well (I should try Big Buck Bunny or similar)

The 512MB might or might not be enough. (Seems to use 100MB for framebuffer though, that's a bit steep) That said, in my EEE PC 701 4G, I never needed more.

For the price, it's a nice toy. I guess, on a vacation, I could do with it.

This is obviously just a quick overview of first impressions. For example, I have no idea what the run times are. The battery applet tells me I have another 2h30 of battery. Of course, I have no idea what the capacity is of the battery and whether that's any good. I mean, ARM CPUs should sip energy, right?

Well, that's it... My first ARM-based computer... Yay!

It seems that slashdot is learning from the users. If ever there was a Troll Tuesday for the front page, it is today. Let's see, we've got a story taking advantage of gender divides, a story taking advantage of Middle East division, several Apple stories, climate change/evolution, and a game console story. Still a few hours to go, so perhaps there is still time for a coding language story, a text editor story, and a distro/desktop story.

I just looked back at a journal post I wrote from almost a decade ago here on /. It mentions all the same issues of arbitration and attempts by Big Biz to screw the Common Man with contract clauses.

I am not surprised that with so much money at stake for corporate America to steal that they have kept such a tight leash on consumer contract arbitration provisions. These keep a consumer from suing in court, requiring instead a forum more favorable to the Corp. Almost all consumer contracts have been changed to preclude class actions.

In my lawsuit against Sony in August over the PSN data breach, I was immediately faced with Sony changing its contract to preclude class actions. The same for my lawsuit against Citibank in their data breach.

An Australian friend put it this way: "Different dog, same leg action."

Enjoy: Prissy women, taking all the fun out of established slashdot memes. They should stay in their kitchens where they belong instead of polluting male bastions like slashdot.

Political correctness can go screw itself.

Yes, I'm angry... Exactly what she wanted, I'm sure.

Michael Kristopeit vs. apk.

Do we still need to add crap at the bottom to prevent it from disappearing?

OK, I know AI is hard (no pun intended) but are there any strategy games out there that don't cheat on any but the lowest levels? Haven't tried Civ V yet, but IV is just another case of easy easy easy IMPOSSIBLE to me... I just can't muster the interest to outsmart a computer program written to cheat against me.

You probably remember the Dell L502x, I bought for 525€ in June last year. Well, during my days off at Christmas I finally got around setting the Windows 7 installation (100GB partition, the rest goes to a real OS) to my tastes After the initial horror of actually installing Windows 7 (Topic only tangentially touched in the second paragraph), most of it went well. I even managed to find out how to make default profiles without using sysprep. I'm running Limited User (Standard User in Win7 lingo), and all works well as generally software is now behaving correctly without rights.

There is one thing, though, that irritated the hell out of me. For this you first have to understand my network infrastructure. I have no consumer end router and a Soekris net5501-70 running OpenBSD does all my routing needs, including DHCP and bind. The works. As I like to limit the spread of bare IP adresses over the system, I basically configure my own bind serving up the "sharks" domain (at my parents it's "jungle"). Everywhere, where it's allowed, I use the names of the machines and this includes DHCP. So, for example the entry for wobbegong (my PostScript printer) looks like this:

host wobbegong { # Wired:
hardware ethernet 00:00:74:91:10:62;
fixed-address wobbegong.sharks;
}

This means that the device with MAC address 00:00:74:91:10:62, receives the IP associated with wobbegong.sharks, which is currently 192.168.2.193. If I want to reorder my private IPs, I just need to adapt the zone file and I'm pretty much done. (This has happened, I used to have the same subnet as my dads network, but I changed it so I can get a VPN running between our networks someday)

Traditionally, I have used fixed IP addresses for all my machines, but once I learned DHCP, I switched to statically assigned IP addresses for all non-guest machines. This is useful in the sense that I don't need to do dynamic DNS internally. For example, I want to take a file from tiger.sharks, while at work? No problem, ssh to jawtheshark.com, ssh from there to tiger.sharks and I can get what I need. It doesn't happen often, but it's damned useful.

Now, what happens when you have two NICs in a device which is very common for laptops: wireless and wired. Well, I do something that most people do not expect, but it works and makes no problems whatsoever. I simply assign the same IP address to both interfaces. It looks like this:

host requiem { # Wired
hardware ethernet 14:fe:b5:b4:d4:6f;
fixed-address requiem.sharks;
}

host requiem { # Wireless
hardware ethernet bc:77:37:c8:c2:fb;
fixed-address requiem.sharks;
}

This is no problem when you're only on wireless, you get an IP address and it works. This is also no problem if you're on wired and have wireless disconnected, because, well, there still is only one single interface used with one IP address. Now what happens if you allow both to connect. Mayhem? Cats and dogs sleeping together?

No, it also works and the reason is that the wireless is slower than the wired interface. At that point something called "Metrics" are used. Basically, the system says "look, I have two NICs, both with the same IP address and I'm simply going to use the quickest one".

Well, I say this works, because it does work on Windows XP, it also works on OS X and it works on Linux. Windows 7, simply refuses to assign the IP to the wired interface. I guess this is pure chance, because I first connected using the wireless interface.

Manually setting the IP or forcing DCHP to give out another IP address works and it then even detects it's basically the same network. In that stupid "Network and Sharing Center": they get grouped.

Okay, I understand, I do something weird. My mistake, I'm stupid. Someone who thinks like me will now say: "No problem, you want to use wired, so disconnect from wireless and let it take the IP address on the wired, it's just Windows 7 acting up and being prissy". That's where the big surprise came.... I did exactly that, disabled the wireless, plugged in wired and.... nothing... It did not want to take the IP address the DHCP server gave it (which was the same as the one on the -now disabled- wireless interface). It stubbornly kept telling me it was an "unknown network".

Seriously? I do understand I do something weird and it's some fringe case (but, hey, seems to be technically 100% legal) However, not accepting the same IP address on a different interface that is NOT active is simply not acceptable.

Seems that due to Windows 7, I will now have to re-engineer my network. Bah, it's only for the occasional game. Probably won't bother too much. Still, in my eyes, this is a bug. A big, big bad bug.

Update 2012-01-06@22:21CET
If you wonder, for now I just set the wireless interface to full dynamic. It gets a different IP and then it works. Well, not 100%. It wouldn't want to be fixed during runtime, I was forced to reboot. Well, not that Windows told me to, but after waiting and waiting and clicking "Diagnose" half a dozen of times, it still wasn't working. Reboot? Instant fix! I retried then with identical IPs and rebooted but that resulted in the same problem. So for now, dynamic wireless and fixed wired.