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Comment MiSTer cores for Sam Coupe and Amstrad CPC (Score 1) 113

by dowdle (#61891729) Attached to: The Mega65: A Modernization of the Canceled Commodore 65 Computer From 1991
MiSTer has cores for those two as well.
https://github.com/MiSTer-deve... (SAM Coupe)
https://github.com/MiSTer-deve... (Amstrad CPC)

...and Amiga, Atari ST, 486SX... and dozens more... along with consoles and arcade machines.
See the complete list on the top MiSTer wiki page:
https://github.com/MiSTer-deve...

Comment Can MiSTer do Mega65? (Score 1) 113

by dowdle (#61891651) Attached to: The Mega65: A Modernization of the Canceled Commodore 65 Computer From 1991
Speaking of MiSTer, the MiSTer already has a Spectrum Next core... and I'd imagine that it will eventually get a Mega65 core. Of course though, it won't have the cartridge port nor the Commodore keyboard... and its SID chips will be in FPGA-only... but other than that, I'd imagine it give virtually the same experience software wise. That assumes the health of the MiSTer Project continues to be good for some time to come... which seems very likely. I'm loving my MiSTers.

Submission + - Slashdot Alum Samzenpus's Fractured Veil Hits Kickstarter

Submitted by CmdrTaco
CmdrTaco writes: Long time Slashdot readers remember Samzenpus,who posted over 17,000 stories here, sadly crushing my record in the process! What you might NOT know is that he was frequently the Dungeon Master for D&D campaigns played by the original Slashdot crew, and for the last few years he has been applying these skills with fellow Slashdot editorial alum Chris DiBona to a Survival game called Fractured Veil. It's set in a post apocalyptic Hawaii with a huge world based on real map data to explore, as well as careful balance between PVP & PVE. I figured a lot of our old friends would love to help them meet their kickstarter goal and then help us build bases and murder monsters! The game is turning into something pretty great and I'm excited to see it in the wild!
Intel

Could RISC-V Processors Compete With Intel, ARM, and AMD? (venturebeat.com) 112

Posted by EditorDavid from the taking-a-RISC dept.
"As promised, SiFive has unveiled a new computer featuring the company's SiFive FU740 processor based on RISC-V architecture," reports Liliputing: The company, which has been making RISC-V chips for several years, is positioning its new SiFive HiFive Unmatched computer as a professional development board for those interested in working with RISC-V. But unlike the company's other HiFive boards, the new Unmatched model is designed so that it can be easily integrated into a standard PC...

SiFive says the system can support GNU/Linux distributions including Yocto, Debian, and Fedora.
"SiFive is releasing the HiFive Unleashed in an effort to afford developers the ability to build RISC-V based systems, using readily available, off-the-shelf parts," explains Forbes: SiFive says it built the board to address the market need for easily accessible RISC-V hardware to further advance development of new platforms, products, and software using the royalty-free ISA...

A short video demo shows the HiFive Unmatched installed in a common mid-tower PC chassis, running the included Linux distro, with an AMD Radeon graphics card pushing the pixels. In the video, the HiFive Unmatched is compiling an application and is shown browsing the web and opening a PDF. SiFive also notes that video playback is accelerated in hardware with the included version of Linux.
"At the moment, these development PCs are early alternatives, most likely targeted at hobbyists and engineers who may snap them up when they become available in the fourth quarter for $665," notes VentureBeat.

But they add that "While it's still early days, it's not inconceivable that RISC-V processors could someday be alternatives to Intel-based PCs and PC processors." The startup has raised $190 million to date, and former Qualcomm executive Patrick Little recently joined SiFive as CEO. His task will be to establish the company's RISC-V processors as an alternative to ARM. This move comes in the wake of Nvidia's $40 billion acquisition of the world's leading processor architecture.

If Little is also looking to challenge Intel and AMD in PCs, he'll have his work cut out for him. For starters, SiFive is currently focused on Linux-based PCs, not Microsoft Windows PCs. Secondly, SiFive wouldn't build these processors or computers on its own. Its customers — anyone brave enough to take on the PC giants — would have to do that.

"I wouldn't see this as SiFive moving out of the box. It's more like they're expanding their box," said Linley Group senior analyst Aakash Jani. "They're using their core architecture to enable other chip designers to build PCs, or whatever they plan to build."

Comment Re:Yes (Score 2) 236

by dowdle (#57569105) Attached to: 'Open Source Creators: Red Hat Got $34 Billion and You Got $0. Here's Why.'
Just to clarify and quantify... what exactly does Red Hat contribute to?... here's their list: https://community.redhat.com/s... Not only do they contribute by funding development here and there, they have created many projects themselves and sustained them until they successfully made them into an upstream community. I'm not sure where to find that list but it is a subset of the above link. Any of the upstream project web sites that have a "Powered by Red Hat" type logio in the top right is a good indicator. Red Hat over the years also purchased / acquired a few handful of companies... and if those companies already had open source products, they remained open source... and if those companies had some proprietary products, in most all (if not all) cases, even though it took quite a bit of work... over time those proprietary products were opened up... and upstream projects were created for them. Red Hat Directory Server used to be Netscape's proprietary product but is now upstreamed as 389. Quranet's SolidIce management system was all Windows server/technology-based and although it took a couple of years to completely re-write it in Java... it became RHEV and later RHV... and upstreamed as oVirt. The list goes on and on. Then there are the big Enterprise class products Red Hat started from scratch and then over multiple releases adapted to use other's technologies where appropriate (they aren't afraid of not-invented here) like with OpenShift. At first they had their own container like entity that was called a "gear" and mostly namespaces, cgroups and SELinux policies strung together. Then they adopted Docker... and later Kubernetes. When they found issues with the development model of Docker Inc, they started developing completely open alternatives like podman, buildah, skopeo, etc. In any event, their story has always been combined with Free and Open Source software and believing in it. They did have one challenge when they made their own Red Hat Network backend based on Oracle DB... but that was fixed over time and eventually completely open sourced for use with other databases... and even forked to be used as a commercial product by SUSE. And then there was the whole Oracle Enterprise Linux fork of RHEL... and CentOS... (in no specific order)... and their eventual sponsoring of CentOS. And of course, don't forget Fedora. It took them a while to get to Fedora but they did. BTW, a commenter's mention of systemd... Red Hat did not originally agree with the idea of starting systemd... but Lennart P. continued developing it on his own time... and got it into Fedora and it proved itself... and was eventually adopted by RHEL... but it was never a given. Some people think systemd is a cancer others really appreciate the wide range of features it enabled (welcome modern world!)... and still others seek to emulate it on other OSes. One thing is for sure, systemd makes sysadmin easier to teach, learn and do across all of the distros that have adopted it. I'm sure there are many developers who have gotten paid by various companies to write both proprietary as well as open source applications on top of RHEL... and to sysadmin RHEL... and to devops it... and to support it... as an alternative to Red Hat's paid support. It has created all kinds of opportunities outside of RHEL and their various other products. As previously mentioned a whole lot of that work has made its way into the greater Linux and FOSS ecosystems and is enjoyed by pretty the vast majority of Linux users everywhere.

Comment Tried it, it didn't work (Score 1) 372

I test out quite a few Linux distros and even though I'm a systemd fan, I thought I'd give Devuan a try as a KVM virtual machine... something I would expect a lot of Linux users to do considering that KVM has been the native Linux kernel hypervisor since 2007. Anyhoo... no matter that I did, the partitioner would allow me to partition /dev/vda but when making the mount points it couldn't see anything because it was expecting /dev/sda. Wha, wha, what? Doesn't seem ready for prime time.
The Internet

Japanese Olympic Champion Racks Up $5,000 Bill Playing Pokemon Go in Brazil (theverge.com) 113

Posted by msmash from the gotta-buy-a-roaming-plan dept.
An anonymous reader writes: A Japanese Olympics star has blamed Pokemon Go after being hit with a 500,000 yen (about $5,000) bill in roaming charges from his carrier. Artistic gymnast Kohei Uchimura, who won gold at the 2012 Games in London and is the reigning world champion, said he only downloaded the game after arriving in Sao Paulo to train for Rio, but quickly got hooked despite not having arranged a flat rate for data roaming. Uchimura "couldn't believe his eyes" when he saw the bill, according to the Kyodo news agency, with teammate Kenzo Shirai saying "He looked dead at the team meal that day." Even though Pokemon Go isn't particularly heavy on data and there were likely other culprits -- the game only officially came out in Brazil today, though Uchimura may have been playing the Japanese version -- roaming charges can rack up extremely quickly when you use your phone abroad for pretty much anything online.

Comment ROT13 (Score 5, Funny) 635

by Unxmaal (#47788601) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: What Old Technology Can't You Give Up?

Jr'er ab fgenatref gb ybir Lbh xabj gur ehyrf naq fb qb V N shyy pbzzvgzrag'f jung V'z guvaxvat bs Lbh jbhyqa'g trg guvf sebz nal bgure thl V whfg jnaan gryy lbh ubj V'z srryvat Tbggn znxr lbh haqrefgnaq Arire tbaan tvir lbh hc Arire tbaan yrg lbh qbja Arire tbaan eha nebhaq naq qrfreg lbh Arire tbaan znxr lbh pel Arire tbaan fnl tbbqolr Arire tbaan gryy n yvr naq uheg lbh.
Android

Android Needs a Simulator, Not an Emulator 167

Posted by Soulskill from the simulated-grass-is-greener dept.
An anonymous reader writes Jake Wharton, Android Engineer at Square, has written an article about one of the big problems with building apps for Android: developers need a simulator for testing their software, rather than an emulator. He provides an interesting, technical explanation of the difference between them, and why the status quo is not working. Here are the basics of his article: "A simulator is a shim that sits between the Android operating system runtime and the computer's running operating system. It bridges the two into a single unit which behaves closely to how a real device or full emulator would at a fraction of the overhead. The most well known simulator to any Android developer is probably (and ironically) the one that iOS developers use from Apple. The iPhone and iPad simulators allow quick, easy, and lightweight execution of in-development apps. ... There always will be a need for a proper emulator for acceptance testing your application in an environment that behaves exactly like a device. For day-to-day development this is simply not needed. Developer productivity will rise dramatically and the simplicity through which testing can now be done will encourage their use and with any luck improve overall app quality. Android actually already has two simulators which are each powerful in different ways, but nowhere near powerful enough."

Comment Graphical access to your Linux VPS (Score 1) 303

by dowdle (#42245189) Attached to: How To Use a Linux Virtual Private Server

I'm a long time OpenVZ user. I don't know if your "VPS" is a container or a full-blown VM running under KVM or Xen... but if you want graphical access to a desktop environment I'd recommend using xrdp. xrdp is an RDP service for Linux. xrdp uses VNC underneath but it is transparent to the user who uses any RDP client they like. Many distros package xrdp.

I've used xrdp on physical systems, KVM virtual machines, and inside of OpenVZ containers and it seems to work equally well.

If you have a very limited set of packages installed, you'll probably have to install a desktop environment first. Get to know your package manager from the command line... rpm/dpkg or yum/apt-get.

Comment Depends... end user or server? (Score 1) 1134

by dowdle (#40513307) Attached to: Has the Command Line Outstayed Its Welcome?
The command line is still the preferred way to do things in some environments. Period. This is especially true in servers. In fact the next release of Windows Server supposedly has a non-GUI aka command line oriented interface by default. Linux is becoming more like Windows and vice versa. As someone else said, some command line tools offer features that just aren't available from a GUI... and again... vice versa. I say use the best tool for the job... even if it is a command line tool. I still prefer to run package managers from the command line even when there are reasonable GUI front-ends for them. The command line isn't always a failure, it's a feature.
Slashdot.org

Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda Resigns From Slashdot 1521

Posted by CmdrTaco from the steve-got-front-cutsies dept.
After 14 years and over 15,000 stories posted, it's finally time for me to say Good-Bye to Slashdot. I created this place with my best friends in a run down house while still in college. Since then it has grown to be read by more than a million people, and has served Billions and Billions of Pages (yes, in my head I hear the voice). During my tenure I have done my best to keep Slashdot firmly grounded in its origins, but now it's time for someone else to come aboard and find the *future*. Personally I don't have any plans, but if you need to get ahold of me for any reason, you can find me as @cmdrtaco on twitter or Rob Malda on Google+. You could also update my mail address to be malda at cmdrtaco dot net. Hit the link below if you want to read some nostalgic saccharine crap that I need to get out of my system before I sign off for the last time.

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