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Comment Re:Has no one heard of Handbrake? (Score 4, Informative) 167

The "big deal" is things beyond simple video content.

  • * Vector animations, that would lose quality if they were rasterized and compressed.
  • * Interactive presentations; where rendering to a normal video and compressing it would strip out the interactive aspects.
  • * Old games; it was easy for people who were learning how to create games to get started with flash, and there is a huge corpus of games out there which represent an interesting segment of indie game development history.

Hopefully things like Shumway will provide a path forward for viewing old content in the future.

Comment Windows is approaching usability (Score 5, Interesting) 376

I keep a Windows laptop around, to both keep up to date with how recent updates are coming along, as well as to play old games.

Windows is approaching the point where it might be workable for day to day use.

For work purposes, I don't need much, A bunch of terminal windows, a ssh client that can handle private keys stored on a Yubikey, and a web browser.
While the terminal emulation of the Bash prompt in the Ubuntu subsystem is still very poor, I could probably manage most of what I need for work from a windows box.

For my most common hobby, I need a few more things. Good NFS performance, a working automounter, an Xserver that supports hardware accelleration, and for the OS to not intercept any function keys for its own use.

The NFS performance of Windows 10 is decent, but alas if you install autofs into the Linux subsystem, it is unable to mount files. The few attempts I've made at mounting a NFS server from inside of the Linux subsystem have all failed. It appears that all mounts need to be done from Windows itself.

There are decent Xserver options for windows, but they (along with most other programs) suffer from Windows intercepting any press of F1 and using it to pop up a useless help screen, rather than passing it to the underlying application.

As far as I can tell, any program that doesn't make the right system call to indicate that it intends to use F1, will never see those keypresses as windows will intercept them.

If the automounter was working, and if there was a way to disable Window's interception of F1, I might actually be able to use it for hobby use as well.

Until then, I mainly use it for old games, and keep any productive work on Linux, BSD, and OSX.

Comment Re:Smartcarding your SSH connection (Score 1) 148

I've considered moving my SSH private key into a YubiKey Neo; but the Neo only appears to support 2048 bit RSA keys.

I could use a larger key on a normal USB drive, but it would be vulnerable to interception when the drive was inserted. The YubiKey would eliminate that threat, but the limited key size causes me some concern.

Do people feel that the reduction in the attack surface by keeping the key secured on a dedicated hardware device outweighs the reduction in key size?

Comment Are you sure of what you are watching? (Score 2) 355

It sounds like you are watching traffic inside of your network, and not the interface between your edge router, and the ISP device.

You could be missing many things; incoming traffic that your edge router drops, retransmissions between your edge router and the ISP device, and firmware/config updates for the ISP device.

We really need more detail.

The Media

After 47 Years, Computerworld Ceases Print Publication 105

harrymcc (1641347) writes "In June 1967, a weekly newspaper called Computerworld launched. Almost exactly 47 years later, it's calling it quits in print form to focus on its website and other digital editions. The move isn't the least bit surprising, but it's also the end of an era--and I can' t think of any computing publication which had a longer run. Over at Technologizer, I shared some thoughts on what Computerworld meant to the world, to its publisher, IDG, and to me."

Comment Re:No Cross Database Joins (Score 1) 245

My guess is that he doesn't understand how sequences work, and expects more than just a monotonic counter.

Specifically, I think he missed this line in the documentation:

To avoid blocking concurrent transactions that obtain numbers from the same sequence, a nextval operation is never rolled back; that is, once a value has been fetched it is considered used, even if the transaction that did the nextval later aborts. This means that aborted transactions might leave unused "holes" in the sequence of assigned values.

Comment Re:ballsy move (Score 1) 285

Still, my suggestion still stands that Brazil could use a few more direct connections to other countries from around the world. A connection from Rio to Johannesberg, to give an example, would IMHO help both cities out and furthermore help the internet as a whole in a number of ways. It certainly wouldn't be fragmentation.

I fully agree, connections are good. I am not sure I would like Rio though, because Johannesberg is so far into South Africa, almost on the east side. What about Cape Town?

And by the way, what about this idea?
Lisabon Natal Cape Town?

Cape Town Natal is 6331 km according to Google Earth.
Cape Town Rio de Janeiro is 6073 km according to Google Earth.

Yeah, almost 300 km longer, but picking Natal would connect Europe and South Africa, probably meaning more traffic.

Comment Re:ballsy move (Score 1) 285

It wouldn't hurt for Brazil to have more physical connections with other Latin American countries as well as other countries relatively near, such as perhaps a direct link to South Africa and Spain/Portugal (aka something across the Atlantic). Unfortunately west Africa isn't exactly an economic hot spot in the world and would be the easiest to reach.

Actually the shortest path from the city Natal in Brazil to Lisabon in Portugal goes through both Cape Verde and the Canary Islands, both of which are pretty close to western Africa, so western Africa could get linked up pretty good if Brazil creates this trans-Atlantic connection. And if you pick Gibraltar instead, then the direct line actually crosses Africa several places.

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