today's leftovers
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Further memory protections committed to -current
In a long series of commits, Theo de Raadt (deraadt@) has added support for the immutable memory mappings on which we reported earlier. We see: [...]
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Directory Opus - King of the Dual Panes
It's not exactly a secret that I'm a die hard Amiga zealot. I've previously sung the praise of AmigaOS itself, powerful applications like Amos Pro and Deluxe Paint and the programming tools supplied in a standard AmigaOS installation. This is just scratching the surface: the Amiga is blessed with a large library of excellent software. High quality programs like Lightwave 3D, PageStream, TV Paint, SAS/C and SCALA InfoChannel are some of its big name applications with a proven track record of professional use.
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How I've set up my libvirt based virtual machines (in late 2022)
I moved from VMWare Workstation to using Linux's libvirt and its native virtualization facilities earlier this year, and I've been happy with that move although I still would like to be able to take good snapshots of UEFI based virtual machines. Over time I've wound up with a setup that I'm happy with for the work that I do, one that's similar but not quite the same as my VMWare setup.
I have two groups of VMs. One group is Fedora VMs (and one Windows VM) that I use for testing Fedora upgrades, Windows things, and so on. All of these machines are NAT'd through a somewhat customized NAT setup, and I basically just run them. I make little to no usage of VM snapshots; about my only use is to snapshot them before I do something I consider unusually risky (or that I may want to re-try), and then generally to delete the snapshot later after it worked.
The second group of VMs is VMs used to test various things in our Ubuntu server environment. Our environment expects machines to have real IPs, so all of these vms use 'macvtap' bridged networked (on a second, completely unused port) and have their own IPs. Our standard Ubuntu install setup has a two stage install process, where we first install from ISO image (which sets the machine's IP address, among other things) and then run through a large postinstall step to customize machines. With most of the testing I do, I want to start from scratch in a fresh install (which most closely mimics real servers) rather than try to shuffle around software and setups on an already installed machine.
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Best Ubuntu Laptops You Can Buy in 2022 [Ed: Bordering on Amazon linkspam]
If you’re looking for the best Ubuntu laptop to buy in 2022, then you have many great options to choose from. The laptops we recommend in this article either ship with Ubuntu pre-installed, or they work with the popular Linux distribution without any issues.
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Why is it hard to learn another programming language?
Learning my first programming language was really hard. Learning the second was also hard but probably easier. What about the third or fourth? The Nth? Does each one get easier? Does knowing other languages create new difficulties?
I just read a paper, Here We Go Again: Why Is It Difficult for Developers to Learn Another Programming Language?, that tries to understand the barriers that developers face when picking up another language.
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Microsoft Adds Linux Desktop Management Support to Intune [Ed: Malicious proprietary software from an NSA facilitator; and notice how virtually everything from Microsoft is still secret code]
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Open access is taking over, but academic institutions are paying as much money as ever: what happened?
Gold OA refers to titles that make all articles free to read on the publisher’s Web site upon publication, thanks to the payment of an APC. Diamond OA, discussed previously on Walled Culture, can be thought of as gold OA with a zero APC. Hybrid journals are another clever publisher trick: they include some articles paid for with APCs, but a subscription is required to access the other material. In effect, publishers get to double dip. That’s really not how open access was supposed to work out…
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[Old] The mighty Elsevier academic octopus adds another tentacle
Last year, Walled Culture noted that the academic publisher Elsevier enjoys an astonishing profit margin of 30-40%. Those profits, built on the free labour of academics writing about research that has been largely paid for with public money, has allowed Elsevier to go on a spending spree, buying up companies that complement and extend its core business. SPARC – “a non-profit advocacy organization that supports systems for research and education that are open by default and equitable by design” – has a news item about Elsevier’s acquisition of Interfolio, a leading player in the field of Faculty Information Systems (FIS), which tracks a wide range of faculty data. Here’s why that is troubling: [...]