IT... Computing....

[incognito]

Internet of things, I have to admit that I like that concept, but not when it is connected to the Internets itself, but as a closed network, what I like is when all my devices can connect to each other to become the extension of themselves, I like to be able to interact with my devices in an advanced manner, that's why Android doesn't satisfy me anymore for a portable device, even with the hax and busybox.

[PluMGMK]

More manure out of Redmond:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=n ... C-No-Linux

[Master]

The article was updated, stating that it wasn't quite Microsoft's doing, and linked to this: https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/44694.html

Though truth be told, I wouldn't have been too surprised.

[PluMGMK]

I knew it wasn't adding up... Still, it's a genuine issue.

[incognito]

More manure out of Redmond:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=n ... C-No-Linux

If this was the truth, it would means Microsoft starts to think Linux is a threat for them and a serious concurrent, it would be kinda frighting to think about what it would involve for the future...

The article was updated, stating that it wasn't quite Microsoft's doing, and linked to this: https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/44694.html

Though truth be told, I wouldn't have been too surprised.

In those moments I'm happy to use 8 and 6 years old Hardware.
Also, completely unrelated but a Boston startup has successfully raised the funds to make an awesome micro and pico computer :
http://www.silicon.fr/iot-serveur-linux ... 58151.html
I found the project really good and interesting and I even plan to buy one next year for an heads up display in my helmet connected to my Pip-Boy as a driver.
it is cheap, really small, and extensible with various addons.

[PluMGMK]

Here's something interesting I came across: https://blogs.oracle.com/ksplice/attack ... osmic-rays
Cosmic rays may well cause ordinary people headaches it seems!

BUMP a month and a half later: You know, that bit-flipping thing popped into my head on Monday when our oscilloscope stopped working, but it quickly became clear that the nature of the problem was different.

But anyway, I'm here to describe my rather interesting internet situation. As I mentioned in the You Game last week, my DSL started acting up. Dad fiddled the junction box which was fairly precarious and may have been disrupted by the felines, but it still seemed to be in trouble. I reckoned the router might be overheating.
Anyway, since Dad works for the ISP, he decided on Tuesday to disconnect everything, go into work and check our line. Attenuation turned out to be 61 dB! Seemingly because the line was never really properly repaired after Storm Darwin, way back in 2014. So he got it repaired, but still there were issues.
Seems the router itself was having trouble. Any time Dad connected to the WiFi with his phone the DSL went down. And my mother was having constant interruptions to the online work she was doing on her laptop.
So so far, it seems to have been a complete clusterfail: the cat-disrupted junction-box, the terrible line quality, and the router itself. Then on top of that came another coincidence. The ISP sent us a new router in the post on Thursday! I had been saying that our router was really old and in need of replacement, and they apparently agreed!
So today I got around to setting up the new router. Everything seemed to be going grand, and I was able to set up the port-forwarding without too much bother. Except the port-forwarding wasn't actually being honoured.
A bit of Googling revealed that the ISP "didn't support port forwarding" and that apparently their vendor-specific firmware for this router hardcoded it to listen on ports 80 and 443 even if the user asked it to forward them to a server. So the router is completely unsuitable for someone who runs a self-hosted website.
I put back the old router, and started thinking about the problems it was having. It seemed to give out whenever someone was using the internet via WiFi. So if we could separate the WiFi router from the DSL router, we could salvage the operation. Well, we have two routers, so why not give it a go!
I turned on the new router, connected to one PC and isolated from the rest of the network to avoid conflicts. I logged into it using the PC and changed its IP address, and turned off its DHCP server, so it was no longer in charge of the network.
At this point I reconnected it to the rest of the network, and sure enough, it seemed to be able to bridge the PC I had connected to it, and its WiFi clients, to the rest of the network, which was being run by the old router. It took a bit of rebooting to get every machine on board with this weird setup, but it seems to work!
I do wonder how long it'll last though. Sure, it's just the WiFi that's taking out the DSL on the old router now, but soon it could be the Ethernet too, in which case it'll be game over. Then I guess we'll have to look into getting a third-party router or something…

[Elite Piranha]

I guess this thread could be used as a general thread for anything related to computing, right? (I think at some point it was dedicated to just software).

Does anyone have tried an Intel Optane Memory? I know that some systems have 4 GB of RAM and a lot of GBs in Optane Memory.

[Steo]

All Optane Memory will do is speed up your storage, since it acts as a cache between your RAM and storage. It isn't exactly the same as RAM, but if you just have an NVMe SSD, you won't need Optane at all really. I'd rather just get an NVMe SSD and a decent amount of RAM.

[Elite Piranha]

Thanks for the info!

[Steo]

AMD CPUs and GPUs in general tend to be cheaper. Laptops with good AMD GPUs are harder to come across, but it depends on how much power you really need. There is a laptop that has a Ryzen 4800H and an RX 5600M, but this would be about €1,200, and I'm assuming this is more powerful/expensive than what you need.

[Elite Piranha]

I found out that the GPU is not that important for what I need, so I started focusing on finding a laptop with a decent processor (at least Intel Core i5 or AMD Ryzen 5), an IPS screen and at least 8 GB of RAM. I read that TN panels are better for gaming, but the IPS offer better color accuracy.

[Steo]

TN panels have better response times (less motion blur), but shit viewing angles and shit colours. VA has a much better contrast ratio than IPS, but the viewing angles aren't as good. I don't even know if laptops have VA panels either though, but I know IPS is fairly common.

[Elite Piranha]

I have found a decent amount of computers with IPS screens, however most of the laptops that I find have TN panels or a variant of VA panels (like SVA or WVA), maybe because IPS panels are supposed to be more expensive.

[Steo]

I could never really find laptops with a VA, I guess most seem to prefer IPS on them. Personally I'd rather have a VA since the contrast is a lot better (assuming it's a good VA) and just watch the screen from near the centre. My OLED TV has spoiled me though.

[PluMGMK]

Just made a weird discovery of sorts. I have a QEMU-based Windows 98 VM which I occasionally power up and tinker around with. Normally, I run it with an emulated Pentium 2, but in theory it should be possible to use KVM to run it "natively" on my Core i7, via Intel's Virtualization Extensions. In practive, for some people, that works, but for others, it causes a "Windows protection error" on boot (which presumably would also happen if trying to boot on "bare metal"). I'm in the latter category, so for a laugh I decided to attach GDB to QEMU and figure out what was causing the error.

After a while of getting nowhere, I set a breakpoint at the interrupt vector for int 21h (DOS syscall), to see when it was actually writing that "protection error" message to the screen, and lo and behold, it seemed that setting that the very act of setting the breakpoint actually got rid of the error! Windows 98 booted, and seemed stable, although it definitely felt less smooth than usual – not sure how to explain that either, since it was running on a native rather than emulated CPU!

Anyway, just a weird thing that happened, that someone might be interested in

[Elite Piranha]

Does someone around here have some experience with Thunderbolt 3/USB-C ports and connecting adapters to use devices that have regular USB 3.0 (type A) cables?

[Flat Earth Society]

In my case I don't have experience with this, but I know USB-C can provide a way more power than USB-A, and higher data transfer speed. If you planned to buy a USB-A hub with a USB-C connector, my guess is the hub would be handled pretty well.

Back then I used to be interested about buying a laptop with a Thunderbolt port to use an external GPU, but that's the only use I was considering this for. I ended up losing interest in it anyway so I abandoned the idea. Otherwise, they're commonly used for Apple devices.

[Elite Piranha]

Thanks for sharing your knowledge. I recently noticed that the Macbook Air is so small that it only has two Thunderbolt 3 ports and one for your headphones, so if you have multiple devices that are not compatible with that type of port, you will have to buy some kind of multi-port hub or adapter that helps you connect your other devices. Apple has their own solutions to this, however it seems they're the most expensive, then you have belkin products that have USB-IF certification, and finally you have options from other brands that are significantly cheaper (not sure exactly why).

Buying another Apple product would be the safest option, but I wonder how much are you really risking with the cheaper options.

[Flat Earth Society]

Are you planning to buy a Macbook Air? I personally wouldn't recommend doing that, considering you could get a laptop with both a decent CPU and GPU at around the same price, or even at a lower price if you were going to buy a laptop with only a good CPU, but that's up to you. I looked into it and the cheapest option is really tiny too.

[Elite Piranha]

Are you planning to buy a Macbook Air? I personally wouldn't recommend doing that, considering you could get a laptop with both a decent CPU and GPU at around the same price, or even at a lower price if you were going to buy a laptop with only a good CPU, but that's up to you. I looked into it and the cheapest option is really tiny too.

The thing about the Macbook Air is that the display is supposed to be really good in some aspects (despite it being really small):

• IPS technology (for wide viewing angles)

• 2560x1600 native resolution

• 400 nits of brightness

• Wide color gamut: 98.56% DCI-P3, 99.97% sRGB and 85.91% Adobe RGB 1998 (according to this website)

In terms of the display, you can find other computers with IPS technology, 1000:1 contrast and at least 300 nits of brightness, but the color gamut is often not mentioned in many sites (if mentioned, it is only one of the color spaces). With the Macbook Air it seems that an excellent color accuracy is guaranteed. However, these details could be irrelevant depending what are you going to use the computer for. For example, I have read that refresh rates are important for gaming.