Absolutely. I can't remember at exactly which version, but I found that after one upgrade to Wine suddenly a crapload of my windows games started to "just work". What's more, they would often run better under Wine than a native windows OS (or in some cases wouldn't install on a modern Windows at all).
Nicely done!
Spectre is pretty much anything with a modern chip, including Intel, AMD, and ARM. Some of the few exemptions were processors that don't do speculative/out-of-order execution. The only more recent hardware I've seen that's immune are the Raspberry Pi (in-order-execution) and some ARM hardware such as various Snapdragon or Cortex-A53/55. Some of the older Atom stuff is also safe because it doesn't do OOE, but Spectre will hit the majority of the rest.
Meltdown was quite certainly an Intel thing according all legit sources. It seem part of Intel's PR machine that somehow managed to group the two together even though they're quite separate vulnerabilities with quite different risk and effect factors.
Yup, and you definitely will issues that come from this. For example, testing.
Remember when a certain tech company's facial-tracking would not recognize people with dark skin. That can be pretty much attributed to a lack of diversity in the testing team.
There was also a recent hubbub about idevices' facial unlock between Asian co-workers. I've not heard that there's been a lot of cases with this, but if it were then it could again be attributable to a lack of diversity in testing.
That isn't to say that you *need* diversity in every group, not that you shouldn't hire the best candidates for a position, but sometimes diversity comes with its own benefits that might not be immediately visible from a more technical viewpoint.
Part of the concept there though is changing the culture to make it more attractive (or rather less unattractive) to females. There are certainly some legitimate and worthy goals in this area, but at the same time - like anything - the concept of "given an inch, they'll take a mile" will apply to some people who simple use it to further their personal agenda. Unfortunately in a lot of cases, there's a concept that "the majority" or "those at the top" are always wrong, which leads to a massive upheaval.
You see this often when governments are overthrown, only to be replaced with another corrupt form of government. Hell, a lot of that is what led to Trump being elected. He managed to get Hillary viewed as a symbol of the "corrupt elite" (which I won't disagree with) while somehow getting people to ignore his own corruption (which is worse).
Not to mention that most decent security products already do "dodgy destinations". One of the common methods is to intercept the DNS calls and re-inject them with an internal IP address, thus blocking attempts to hit the remote baddie but also allowing further capture of data.
Hell, I can (and have) do this with a raspberry pi for a select number of machines.
It wasn't useless, but it was definitely under-used (and hard to make use of). In the face of emerging modern VR, it looks like it's something that MS doesn't really want to sink a lot of money in anymore.
This is sad though, because even though the current VR stuff is great, I've often caught myself thinking that something like Kinect could augment it better. For example, most VR kits involve holding some sort of controller and/or vests, sensors etc to determine body motion. This is something Kinect did pretty good, and would pair nicely in a defined space. My understanding is that the more modern Kinect was also a lot better at seeing finer movements.
So instead of a controller, how about a headset combined with an external sensor like Kinect. The headset maps your in-game motion to what you see, and the Kinect maps motion of your limbs to the in-game character. That means you would have free arm/leg movement, possibly even some hand operations etc. The big problem would be that it likely would degrade when not facing the device, but if there were kinect-like devices built into the perimeter sensors (e.g. with Vive) that would hopefully be good enough to capture the majority of motion in various orientations.
Yeah, Kinect is cool but I really do *hate* the non-standard plug. I have most of my game stuff etc in a separate room with AV routed through an amp and then all the various plugs available on a wall plate with keystone jacks. That is, all the plugs except:
a) The older Gamecube-type controller for my wii (wiimotes are fine, and it otherwise has USB), so that's only for playing the older GC games
b) The sensor bar on the wii, not a huge issue as it's a 2-wire connection that can rather easily be rewired to either use something keystone-friendly or local power
c) That damn oddball Kinect plug
Everything else uses standard keystones for USB, HDMI, ethernet or AV, but I have never been able to find a Kinect keystone. I even considered trying to print something once. Eventually I gave up and just put a pop-out receptacle in behind the TV. But a keystone would have been nice. Sad to hear that even XBone didn't use a proper connector. Given that you can drive monitors and fairly power-hungry devices from USB3 I'm fairly sure it would have been sufficient to juice up the Kinect.
PS4 has an established lineup of games. The Switch is just getting warmed up there.
Games and the gaming experience sell consoles, not just fast processors
For a long time people used FM transmitters to broadcast their MP3 players, etc to the local radio. I wonder if somebody could sell something similar that picks up the digital and re-transmits as analog
Yup. I think that recently happened to Manitoba.
Except that in places like Saskatchewan - where you have a provincial Telco - prices are *much* more reasonable and they still manage to turn a decent profit.
Netflix throttling, youtube throttling, torrent-throttling and various other things have ALREADY been an issue.
Will it happen immediately? No.
Will it start to slowly degrade service and impact customers over time? Absolutely!
RX480, 4GB. I've been using the FOSS drivers for about a year now and they're GREAT. I did have to compile my own kernel in the earlier days but now the ones that come with Ubuntu etc seem to work just fine out of the box.
" Forceful, unconditional kernel operations. When I say "unmount this filesystem," I'm not asking a question. When I say "terminate this process," I expect the process to be removed from memory and the runqueue, regardless of consequences."
Thank you. Nothing is more maddening than doing a "-f" type of operation, particularly an unmount, and having the system bitch at you because "I think something is still using this". I've had major issues not being about to release USB devices that have glitched up because "umount -f" still refuses to actually unmount.
Why even have a fucking force option if it doesn't actually work?
Absolutely. There are some things that are definitely GOOD about systemd. The extensibility/overloading of the service/unit files is a good example of something that works well and is implemented in a way that makes a lot of sense. For example, you can have a service file at
And then modify functionality with units under
It's easy to do, and works nicely with packaging systems so that you can create an addon package to modify or add behavior without editing the file(s) supplied by the original package. The way you can build dependency chains is also quite useful.
There's also some stuff that is lame, like the binary logs and the needed to run journalctl or systemctl to figure out WTF your daemon is doing when it fails, or how the binary log can be corrupted so that you can *never* figure out what happened in some situations.
The biggest problem is the lack of compromise. A lot of people in SystemD-land have a "my way or the highway" attitude, whereas a lot of people in init-land have a "change is bad" mentality.
The use of money is all the advantage there is to having money. -- B. Franklin
