Chromebook sales surpass Mac, Pinguy OS goes on life support, and AT&T enforces data caps.
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Colour Key: Venn Pedro Mathieu
Year of the Linux Desktop
http://9to5google.com/2016/05/19/idc-chromebook-sales-mac-q1-us-education/
- That is great and all but I have never seen a Chromebook IRL. I can’t even prove they exist.
- They would sell a lot here in Portugal if they didn’t treat us like the third world country we are.
- The only Chromebooks currently available in Portugal are the Acer and Asus ones.
- Oh and that crappy Samsung ARM piece of junk.
- Chrome OS passed Mac OS X during the quarter
- Manufacturers combined sold more than 1.8 million
- Considering you can pick one up for $300 I’m not shocked.
- That and school systems are noming these things up.
Apps
https://chrome.googleblog.com/2016/05/the-google-play-store-coming-to.html
- Something something limited storage.
- Is Google afraid of RemixOS?
- It’s about to be the other way around.
- Now get this working /w Chrome on my Desktop because Skype.
- This would be awesome!
- I’m glad they’re not using ARC, too.
- ARC was a good proof of concept but it didn’t work 89% of the times.
- *presses backspace* Huh, people actually use that method?
- Take away my Ctrl+L and we are going to have words.
- I think this shortcut was Windows only anyway. I haven’t used that in a long long time (about a decade)
- Nope.
- For those who don’t know, it’s Alt + Left arrow
- Total non-issue for me.
- I navigate with the left-side gerbil buttons.
- ^
THAR Vulkan button
http://www.dota2.com/news/updates/22000/
- 131MB update.
- You need to be in the Steam Beta.
- You don’t need to be in the Steam Client beta, they just recommend you do because of the shoddy Vulkan performance with the Steam Overlay.
- Download Vulkan DLC
- Enable with -vulkan
- No noticeable increase in FERPS.
- Getting 116 /w OpenGL 118 /w Vulkan.
- Same here, about 120FPS on all the things
- Mneuro in shatrealm said he was getting a 20FPS decrease with Vulkan
- Phoronix benchmarks, for what they’re worth, also show a similar decrease
- GPU utilization:
- 45% OpenGL
- 70% Vulkan
- The benefits of Vulkan won’t happen overnight, the API needs to mature, the drivers need to improve and developers have to learn how to use it
Pedro strikes again
http://pinguyos.com/2016/05/thinking-about-killing-off-pinguy-os/
- Piece of advice for wannabe distro builders: Just provide a PPA and a shell script to transform a regular Ubuntu LTS to your desktop project.
- I want to reinstall an OS about as much as I want to cut off my pinkie toe.
- I didn’t even use this one.
- Even the slightest thought.
- Your Distro is not Raptor-Buss proof.
- That, and I’m having a hard time finding the value add.
- Not hating, just being honest.
Speed
http://mashable.com/2016/05/18/netflix-internet-speed-test/#LoG61pXyDGqZ
- Netflix says 95Mbps but the reality is closer to 112Mbps
- I noticed that if I keep re-running the test my speed keeps increasing until it caps out at around 187Mbps.
- Alright, I got it up to 110Mbps
- The sample download is a bit too small for the speed to ramp up properly.
- This is a good tool for figuring out what you really get from Qwikster.
- Well, what you ISP allows you to get.
- Want to use this from the command line? npm install –global fast-cli
GG UVERSE
https://www.dslreports.com/shownews/ATT-Begins-Capping-Broadband-Users-Today-137031
- You can pay them an extra $30 to remove the cap.
- If you have UVERSE you might want to check if trueSTREAM is available.
- The USA really needs another player in the ISP game (come on Google)
You spin me
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-stats-q1-2016/
- Great. I’m super thrilled to learn that I have just bought the worst drive currently on the market.
- I’m sure presenting the data like this makes sense to them, specifically.
- It took me a bit of maths to actually get what the hell they were on about.
- It’s still an unfair way to present data because of the wildly varying numbers of drives and their uptimes.
- Basically, stay away from the 2 and 4TB (ALE640) HGSTs and the 4TB (DM000) Seagate drives.
- Oh snapplesauce!
- By random luck I’ve been picking up WD 4TB drives for FrankenNAS.
- I’ve only had one HHD hard-nope.
- They have all been pretty good and dropping mad hints about their demise before the fact.
Skynet begins
https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/05/Google-supercharges-machine-learning-tasks-with-custom-chip.html
- Would be great if people stopped referencing Moore’s law in 2016. It stopped being a thing years ago.
- Surely must be cheaper than a cluster of Nvidia Titan X
- TPU: a custom ASIC built for use with TensorFlow (an open source software library for numerical computation using data flow graphs)
- AlphaGo was powered by TPUs
- They are able to get these critters up and running /w applications within 22 days from first tested silicone.
DRM
https://github.com/LibreVR/Revive/releases/tag/0.5.2
- You want piracy?
- Because this is how you get piracy.
- Oculus, leading the charge in all things VR.
- Including introducing bullshit DRM for the sake of having “exclusives”.
- And now, thanks to said bullshit DRM, they’re also unwittingly leading the charge to VR piracy.
- Good job, numbskulls!
U-What?
https://unitedrpms.github.io/
- This first thing this project needs is someone to de-engrish their webzone.
- I’m glad I wasn’t the only one who noticed.
- Also, many of the packages they currently offer are already available through other, more established and trustworthy repos.
- Isn’t that what Fedy does already?
- Port the Ubuntu Mate Software boutique to Fedora, that would be excellent
Still riding the Fair Use argument
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/05/googles-closing-argument-android-was-built-from-scratch-the-fair-way/
- And I’m still wondering where is that Fair Use when it comes to Youtube?
- If Android is transformative enough to be Fair Use, why is a critique/parody/whatever on Youtube considered guilty until proven innocent?
- I’m all in favor for less restrictive laws for music and film but there is also nothing in common between those and software implementation of an API.
- This is like comparing apples and capybaras.
- If you want to compare Android’s Dalvik vs Oracle JVM with something, Wine vs the actual Windows OS would be more appropriate.
- Go on and be pedantic, strider.
- Google is literally arguing Fair Use, which applies to just about everything that is put out for public consumption.
- Youtube hides behind Safe Harbour.
- They lose and APIs are officially copyrightable. It’s open season on the API!
- And their Fair Use argument has 0 moral precedents because of the whole Youtube thing.
Shout of Out
https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/EasyTAG
- No way I’m ever using that, there is only one true tagger and it’s called Musicbrainz Picard
- It works and now we have tags.
- Only bringing this up since someone asked me to add ze tags.
- I added ze tags!
- Hope it got better, I have bad memories of EasyTAG from 10 years ago
- You can also tag your files in pretty much anything: Audacity, Rhythmbox, Audacious…
Feedback
Flash
http://linuxgamecast.com/bradley/?2kYfJe2
- “Needs”
- They manage to do without on the mobile version
- I don’t know why it would need it. It’s already using HTML5 to play all the videos and gifs after transcoding them to mp4:
Loadin
http://linuxgamecast.com/bradley/?AJ6mAnR
- Hardware support like that is mostly a matter of time.
- Linux on the Asus Transformer Book T100 (the og x86 Transformer) was a pain in the neck back in the day. Now just about everything works.
