Trying a switch to tal@lemmy.today, at least for a while, due to recent kbin.social stability problems and to help spread load.

  • 0 Posts
  • 80 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: June 13th, 2023
  • tal@kbin.socialtoLinux@lemmy.ml•Ending support for Windows 10 could send 240 million computers to the landfill. Why not install Linux on them?
    261·
    10 months ago

    It depends on the definition of “support ended”. Like, there are various forms of extended support that you can pay for for versions of Windows, and some companies do.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_XP#Support_lifecycle

    Support for the original release of Windows XP (without a service pack) ended on August 30, 2005.[4] Both Windows XP Service Pack 1 and 1a were retired on October 10, 2006,[4] and both Windows 2000 and Windows XP SP2 reached their end of support on July 13, 2010, about 24 months after the launch of Windows XP Service Pack 3.[4] The company stopped general licensing of Windows XP to OEMs and terminated retail sales of the operating system on June 30, 2008, 17 months after the release of Windows Vista.[114] However, an exception was announced on April 3, 2008, for OEMs producing what it defined as “ultra low-cost personal computers”, particularly netbooks, until one year after the availability of Windows 7 on October 22, 2009. Analysts felt that the move was primarily intended to compete against Linux-based netbooks, although Microsoft’s Kevin Hutz stated that the decision was due to apparent market demand for low-end computers with Windows.[115]

    So for those, we’re all definitely a decade past the end of normal support. However, they have their extended support packages that can be purchased, and we aren’t a decade past the end of those…but most users probably aren’t actually getting those:

    On April 14, 2009, Windows XP exited mainstream support and entered the extended support phase; Microsoft continued to provide security updates every month for Windows XP, however, free technical support, warranty claims, and design changes were no longer being offered. Extended support ended on April 8, 2014, over 12 years after the release of Windows XP; normally Microsoft products have a support life cycle of only 10 years.[118] Beyond the final security updates released on April 8, no more security patches or support information are provided for XP free-of-charge; “critical patches” will still be created, and made available only to customers subscribing to a paid “Custom Support” plan.[119] As it is a Windows component, all versions of Internet Explorer for Windows XP also became unsupported.[120]

    In January 2014, it was estimated that more than 95% of the 3 million automated teller machines in the world were still running Windows XP (which largely replaced IBM’s OS/2 as the predominant operating system on ATMs); ATMs have an average lifecycle of between seven and ten years, but some have had lifecycles as long as 15. Plans were being made by several ATM vendors and their customers to migrate to Windows 7-based systems over the course of 2014, while vendors have also considered the possibility of using Linux-based platforms in the future to give them more flexibility for support lifecycles, and the ATM Industry Association (ATMIA) has since endorsed Windows 10 as a further replacement.[121] However, ATMs typically run the embedded variant of Windows XP, which was supported through January 2016.[122] As of May 2017, around 60% of the 220,000 ATMs in India still run Windows XP.[123]

    Furthermore, at least 49% of all computers in China still ran XP at the beginning of 2014. These holdouts were influenced by several factors; prices of genuine copies of later versions of Windows in the country are high, while Ni Guangnan of the Chinese Academy of Sciences warned that Windows 8 could allegedly expose users to surveillance by the United States government,[124] and the Chinese government banned the purchase of Windows 8 products for government use in May 2014 in protest of Microsoft’s inability to provide “guaranteed” support.[125] The government also had concerns that the impending end of support could affect their anti-piracy initiatives with Microsoft, as users would simply pirate newer versions rather than purchasing them legally. As such, government officials formally requested that Microsoft extend the support period for XP for these reasons. While Microsoft did not comply with their requests, a number of major Chinese software developers, such as Lenovo, Kingsoft and Tencent, will provide free support and resources for Chinese users migrating from XP.[126] Several governments, in particular those of the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, elected to negotiate “Custom Support” plans with Microsoft for their continued, internal use of Windows XP; the British government’s deal lasted for a year, and also covered support for Office 2003 (which reached end-of-life the same day) and cost £5.5 million.[127]

    For the typical, individual end user, one probably wants to have been off Windows XP by 2008.

  • tal@kbin.socialtoSelfhosted@lemmy.world•A self-hosted wiki that can integrate with a fediverse instance
    12·
    1 year ago

    Reddit had the ability to have a per-subreddit wiki. I never dug into it on the moderator side, but it was useful for some things like setting up pages with subreddit rules and the like. I think that moderators had some level of control over it, at least to allow non-moderator edits or not, maybe on a per-page basis.

    That could be a useful option for communities; I think that in general, there is more utility for per-community than per-instance wiki spaces, though I know that you admin a server with one major community which you also moderate, so in your case, there may not be much difference.

    I don’t know how amenable django-wiki is to partitioning things up like that, though.

    EDIT: https://www.reddit.com/wiki/wiki/ has a brief summary.

  • tal@kbin.socialtoPrivacy Guides@lemmy.one•How you can be deanonymized through Tor
    16·
    1 year ago

    JavaScript can be used to identify a user through Tor in a number of different ways. This is why Tor Browser comes pre-bundled with the “NoScript” plugin. This plugin can either reduce or disable JavaScript’s ability. When the plugin is set on the “Safest” setting, JavaScript is completely disabled. This level of security is required to completely stay anonymous and secure on Tor.

    There was a point in time when I used NoScript, but years back, I stopped, as it had simply become impractical to browse the web with the degree of breakage that switching off Javascript by default produced.

    I’m not saying that the article is wrong about it being necessary, but I think that from a functionality standpoint, that bar may be a high one. Maybe if you are just browsing a specific site or so, but I think that for general use of the Web, it’s going to be a problem.

  • tal@kbin.socialtoSelfhosted@lemmy.world•This should be a pinned post as it really captures the essence of my experience so far.
    2·
    1 year ago

    I broadly agree that “cloud” has an awful lot of marketing fluff to it, as with many previous buzzwords in information technology.

    However, I also think that there was legitimately a shift from a point in time where one got a physical box assigned to them to the point where VPSes started being a thing to something like AWS. A user really did become increasingly-decoupled from the actual physical hardware.

    With a physical server, I care about the actual physical aspects of the machine.

    With a VPS, I still have “a VPS”. It’s virtualized, yeah, but I don’t normally deal with them dynamically.

    With something like AWS, I’m thinking more in terms of spinning up and spinning down instances when needed.

    I think that it’s reasonable to want to describe that increasing abstraction in some way.

    Is it a fundamental game-changer? In general, I don’t think so. But was there a shift? Yeah, I think so.

    And there might legitimately be some companies for which that is a game-changer, where the cost-efficiencies of being able to scale up dynamically to handle peak load on a service are so important that it permits their service to be viable at all.

  • tal@kbin.socialtoSelfhosted@lemmy.world•Looks like google domains is no more.
    0·
    1 year ago

    I mean, scrolling down that list, those all make sense.

    I’m not arguing that Google should have kept them going.

    But I think that it might be fair to say that Google did start a number of projects and then cancel them – even if sensibly – and that for people who start to rely on them, that’s frustrating.

    In some cases, like with Google Labs stuff, it was very explicit that anything there was experimental and not something that Google was committing to. If one relied on it, well, that’s kind of their fault.

  • tal@kbin.socialtoTechnology@beehaw.org•YouTube will now show a blank homepage if you don’t have watch history on
    4·
    1 year ago

    What’s been your experience with youtube recommendations?

    I’ve never had a YouTube account, so YouTube doesn’t have any persistent data on me as an individual to do recommendations unless it can infer who I am from other data.

    They seem to do a decent job of recommending the next video in a series done in a playlist by an author, which is really the only utility I get out of suggestions that YouTube gives me (outside of search results, which I suppose are themselves a form of recommendation). I’d think that YouTube could do better by just providing an easy way to get from the video to such a list, but…

  • tal@kbin.socialtoGNU/Linux Gaming on Kbin@kbin.social•Baldur's Gate 3 out now and works on Steam Deck and desktop Linux
    2·
    1 year ago

    I haven’t played Baldur’s Gate 3 myself, but one thing that might cause that:

    Linux has two different joystick APIs. By default, at least on my Debian system, both drivers are set to load by default. The older API, joydev, creates a device at /dev/input/js0 (or some similar-such number). The newer one, evdev, will create a device at /dev/input/event0 (or some similar-such number).

    You can use jstest to see devices via the joydev API, and evtest to see devices via the evdev API.

    Some software uses libraries or the like that can talk to both and will expose both to the application. It looks like Baldur’s Gate 3 doesn’t have a Linux-native release, so I assume that WINE (well, Proton) will expose both as two gamepads.

    This wasn’t historically much of a problem, since it was something of a convention in software to not do anything with joysticks unless a gamepad was enabled in the game and the user configured the buttons (which was something of a pain in the neck, but whatever). Part of this was that there wasn’t much of a convention as to which button number did what, which meant that it wasn’t possible for a controller to work reasonably out of the box.

    However, on Windows, the XBox controller kind of became something of a standard, and so software started assuming an XBox layout, and so using a controller out-of-the-box became more-common. There have been better ways to figure out what the layout is, as I understand it, but this kinda kicked software to make the jump to “be enabled by default”.

    Unfortunately, that meant that sometimes software didn’t let one choose which controller to use, or let one manually configure the gamepad, or choose to ignore an attached gamepad, with the idea that the user was just going to dick it up.

    So if you have a gamepad exposed as multiple gamepads, sometimes a software package will just try to be helpful and use input from anything that looks like a gamepad without giving you an option not to do so, which means that you get multiple events if you have multiple “virtual” gamepads being driven by one physical gamepad.

    There may be better ways of addressing this – I mean, there probably should be and maybe is a way of dealing with this in WINE, since there’s no reason I can think of that you’d ever want to use joydev devices in software, like WINE, which can handle the evdev interface for a device. If a device is visible via both APIs, WINE should really only talk to it via evdev; Joydev is just kept around for compatibility with old software that can’t talk to evdev. However, one way of solving the problem with a sledgehammer is just telling your machine not to allow use of the joydev driver. The evdev driver has been around for a long time. I don’t personally know of any Linux game that doesn’t support evdev; if there is, I’d guess that it’s probably a pretty elderly, Linux-native, closed-source (either that or not getting very frequent updates) application. You can just blacklist the joydev driver, keep it from loading, and you’ll only get the evdev device. That means that any software around that can only do the old joydev interface won’t work, but I don’t know of anything today for which that is the case.

    On my Debian Trixie system, I have a file that does that (IIRC, because I ran into the same issue with Fallout 4, also via the WINE layer producing duplicate input, and with Fallout 4 not having the ability to ignore a gamepad at the application layer):

    I created a file, /etc/modprobe.d/joydev-blacklist.conf:

    # Gives duplicate events with evdev
blacklist joydev

    Next boot, your Linux system will not ever load the joydev driver, and you won’t get any /dev/input/jsX devices.

    Arch looks to do things the same way; here’s their documentation for blacklisting a module:

    https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Kernel_module#Blacklisting