Root Access

Journeyman Geek

12:58 AM

2

Michael Frank

@JourneymanGeek @allquixotic on Groundhog day.

DragonLord

@JourneymanGeek Aww, so cute...

allquixotic

loool

DragonLord

meow

Journeyman Geek

"I RISE AGAIN... AHH TICKLES... FLEE FLEEEEE"

allquixotic

1:05 AM

lol

Journeyman Geek

I'm trying to install this on a local VM (on my desktop, since my home server is out for repair). Its pretty scary that the recommended install method is "run this tarball"

DemCodeLines

1:24 AM

Dell M140, 512MB RAM, Intel Pentium M 1.73Ghz (800MHz). Doing NodeJS development and as a result, installed Linux.

I installed Ubuntu, but Unity ran horrifically slow, to the point where I had to install Midori and XFCE.

But I don't really like the way XFCE looks. Now I'm thinking, should I go back to Unity?

Michael Frank

@DemCodeLines First world problems there mate.

DemCodeLines

Yeah, why can't I just have the look and feel of Unity and performance of XFCE, what the heck?!

allquixotic

@DemCodeLines Why can't I just have the performance of a Ferrari with the MPG of a Prius, what the heck?!

DemCodeLines

I was hoping for a little better when I decided to go with Linux instead of Windows.

Journeyman Geek

@DemCodeLines: unity is just heavy

allquixotic

1:30 AM

You can't expect much at all with a 10 year old craptop, honestly. Modern Linux distros are designed to run on modern hardware - funny, that. XFCE is the option (well, it's either that or LXDE) if you're unwilling or unable to run a modern system.

Journeyman Geek

yup

allquixotic

When my last three phones have had an order of magnitude faster performance than your laptop, several times more RAM, and a fraction of the size, you know you're simply dealing with ancient technology. New software is designed to run on new, not ancient, hardware.

Journeyman Geek

heh

allquixotic

If you want a performant desktop experience with a system from 2003, run a Linux distro from 2003 :P

those were designed to run on systems like yours

DemCodeLines

@allquixotic This is the oldest laptop I have in my house. Had to use this as a backup, so trying to get it to work.

Journeyman Geek

1:32 AM

Well, I vaguely disagree there. You can still run decent, oldschool updated forks atop a modern base ;p

allquixotic

@JourneymanGeek achieving all of the features and all of the eye-candy with none of the performance cost is basically impossible, though -- in order to "pare it down" to run on a potato, you have to sacrifice something - and in some cases you have to sacrifice a lot. And it's much more labor-intensive to micro-optimize for those use cases.

Journeyman Geek

@DemCodeLines: unity isn't the best choice here. in this sort of situation I'd actually go with a minimal install first, and tweak. I used to run openbox with stuff on top when I was running a then 10 year old craptop ;p

allquixotic

When those use cases are vanishingly small (read: 99% of people are running way more powerful systems), there's no point in putting in the hours to make it micro-optimized, vs. adding new features for people who have decently new systems.

Michael Frank

@JourneymanGeek Like Arch! :D

allquixotic

We could either sit and make what we already have efficient enough to run on hideously old systems and not introduce any new features or innovate (and thus lose 99% of our user base out of disinterest in the process), or we can continue to develop new features and functionality for the 99% to have and appreciate. Hmm... hard choice.

(And no, given that much of GNU/Linux is developed on a volunteer basis, there isn't really enough manpower to do both)

(And if you think there should be more manpower, well, patches welcome)

DemCodeLines

1:35 AM

@allquixotic Not looking for eye-candy. I'd be running Windows if I wanted that.

allquixotic

@DemCodeLines Fine, but Unity is still very CPU-intensive even if you take away the compositor. It also does a lot more I/O than an old system is probably used to. Lots of image loading, lots of searching and indexing files, lots of IPC, I think it even has JavaScript thrown in there. It's designed to be flexible, extensible, etc. - things which come at incremental, but significant, performance costs.

There used to be a "Unity 2D" (basically, Unity functionality without the 3d graphics layer for transparency, etc.) - but they stopped developing that

DemCodeLines

I was actually just looking for that. I guess I should revert to Win7 or something.

Journeyman Geek

@MichaelFrank: for nodejs development? Not really

@DemCodeLines: Let me reframe that question

What do you dislike of XFCE?

allquixotic

I'm not really sure that a desktop environment would be all that relevant to NodeJS development, anyway? I mean, what do you need: a text editor; a web browser; and a bunch of terminals - right? Am I missing something? You could run that in fvwm2 (one of the lightest window managers in existence).

Journeyman Geek

Nope, not at all.

lol. I was thinking twm

allquixotic

1:39 AM

Nearly all of your work will be searching StackOverflow and copying, modifying and testing code.

I don't see how desktop environment features/functionality play into that...

DemCodeLines

I don't like that top status bar that acts like a Windows taskbar, I want a little taskbar/launcher that exists in Windows/Unity.

Journeyman Geek

You DO know you can move those right?

allquixotic

or right click and delete...

Journeyman Geek

also for a windows style launcher, lxde is good

allquixotic

ah yeah! LXDE has something that works vaguely like the Windows start menu

ooh, or how about Cinnamon 2D?

DemCodeLines

1:41 AM

I meant something like Unity/Mac OS X.

JohnB

I think you're being too picky for the hardware you've got and the tasks you need to accomplish :)

DemCodeLines

Perhaps.

allquixotic

@JohnB Well said...!!! .... And in other news, whole reason I popped in while at work (yes, at work very late tonight :() -- was just going to say I wrote a script using Selenium to automate my testing activities for the day, and had a chance to play a game of Hearthstone on my phone while it was running... hahaha

And won! :D

JohnB

nice!

DemCodeLines

So what's the consensus then? Do I stick with XFCE? Or go some where else?

allquixotic

1:44 AM

woohoo, it's down to the last 4 submissions out of... 76?

DemCodeLines

@allquixotic suggestions?

allquixotic

@DemCodeLines I think the general wisdom when it comes to Linux desktop environments is to at least try most/all of them and get a sense of what their UI and performance is like, and stop whenever you find one that seems good enough

you may or may not find something that either works like OS X out of the box or can be customized to be so, I'm not sure because I usually try to configure my Linux DE to work like (approx.) Windows 7

DemCodeLines

Installing LUbuntu now, let's see how this turns out.

Journeyman Geek

blah ubuntu

Its not picking up an ipv6 address in virtualbox :/

DemCodeLines

2:43 AM

Lubuntu decided that a desktop was not needed, so it didn't load it altogether.

DragonLord

My printer just keeps jamming trying to autoduplex. Seems to be an issue with the ink coverage.

I've never printed a document with this much ink coverage on plain paper before.

I'm going to duplex manually.

(It's a set of presentation slides [class lecture presentation], printed double-sided with 4-up. I print every set of slides for use while studying.)

This particular presentation uses very dark backgrounds and loads of graphics resulting in very high ink usage.

It doesn't help that the printer is doing rich black (which it does unless you're printing in black-and-white mode).

The ideal solution would be to use premium 24 lb (90 gsm) paper, but we don't have any on hand.

Dammit! Multi-page feed error—the printer fed two sheets at once!

Reprinting the first two sheets.

Never before has a print job given me this much trouble.

Michael Frank

3:04 AM

Sooo.... I'm currently providing tech support for a user in Bangalore. Something seems backwards here...

HackToHell

3:26 AM

lol

user193661

Is there a better way to refer to the question asker, instead of OP?

Michael Frank

@user193661 Maybe by their name?

user193661

For future readers, who may not realize the connection

Journeyman Geek

@user193661: by @name would work I guess

DragonLord

The printer must have been doing close to 300% ink coverage (rich black) causing paper jams and multi-page feed errors when trying to duplex.

Michael Frank

3:31 AM

@user193661 I'd probably just use 'the asker'.

DragonLord

The printer expended some 22% of the high-yield cyan ink cartridge and 18% of the high-yield magenta ink cartridge (both rated for 1100 pages!) at the end of the print job, including failed attempts.

Oddly enough, the black ink still reads 100%.

(The black ink is physically larger and holds much more ink than the color cartridges because most print jobs use significantly more black ink than C/M/Y ink.)

300% ink coverage is way too high. The limit should be closer to 240%. I've never dealt with a print job with content this close to registration black.

allquixotic

3:49 AM

@DragonLord Is it the fault of the person who did the powerpoint slides?

Maybe you could remove the background from them and just print black text on a white background

DragonLord

It's not just rich black. I print presentations duplex 4-up and the rich black on the first page covers about 80-85% of the paper surface.

The later pages use a deep purple background and are not as problematic.

I really don't know for sure, but rich black on this printer is probably somewhere around 250-300%.

Oliver Salzburg

5:25 AM

Morning guys

Journeyman Geek

wee.

ITS ALIVE!

(gigabyte distributor delivered the fixed brix. Which is no longer bricked.)

Oliver Salzburg

A bricked brix?

Sounds reasonable

Journeyman Geek

Yes. It was a brick of a bricked brix.

Oliver Salzburg

:D

Insane

5:54 AM

Is it frowned upon to ask a question in here? God there's this site that I can't remember the name of to save my lifeeeee

Oliver Salzburg

@Insane No, go ahead and ask :)

Insane

Thank god. Right so it's this minimal-design site with a black background, full of .swf's that loop

FOUND IT. Deep within the pages of Google searching for "site with swf black background". It's index.z0r.de if anyone's wondering ;)

Oliver Salzburg

> site with a black background, full of .swf's that loop

That matches like 90% of all websites I visit!

Bob

6:33 AM

@OliverSalzburg under duress*

Insane

7:17 AM

Proud to say I spent this whole time going through flash loops

Journeyman Geek

7:59 AM

for certain values of ~~self respect~~ pride ;p

Oliver Salzburg

1.7M O_O

Bob

What is this?

Oliver Salzburg

CrashPlan Backup overview

Bob

8:14 AM

oh

Blog bot

10:06 AM

How to be awesome, part 1

Alex Warren on September 29, 2015

Is your current job awesome? Or could you be doing better?

Bob

10:46 AM

@allquixotic Ok, screw it. Ordered the G4 :)

Should arrive anytime within the next week.

Bob

11:17 AM

Just got an email

> Windows 10 is here...

uh, yea, did you miss the memo two months ago?

Oliver Salzburg

11:37 AM

Heheh

marcusdoesstuff

just got my first win10 upgrade issue.

it's broken my ODBC data sources.

Journeyman Geek

(possible new ava ;p)

marcusdoesstuff

to replace the beautiful one you have?

Journeyman Geek

@marcusdoesstuff: I tend to cycle between them ;p

Bob

@JourneymanGeek Two of them are not like the others.

Journeyman Geek

11:49 AM

@Bob: That's from windows 8/when @allquixotic had the sad windows face o doom as his ava and we were all doing it ;p

Bob

@JourneymanGeek Ya, I know... I think I gave you that one :P

Journeyman Geek

;p

marcusdoesstuff

I don't seem an avatar on you at all @JourneymanGeek

Journeyman Geek

o0

Bob

@JourneymanGeek tongueface.png

I also have a sathyaemoticon3.png :P (SU logo)

neutralface2.png

marcusdoesstuff

11:59 AM

I've never seen an av on Bob either

Bob

12:12 PM

o.O

@marcusdoesstuff looks like your gravatar is broken

gravatar.com/avatar/…

maybe it's blocked at your workplace

Journeyman Geek

@marcusdoesstuff: then you would be confused by all the animal jokes ;p

Bob

Just for reference:

You can see how I started, which coincidentally was sparked by a chat convo :P

Oct 18 '12 at 21:58, by KronoS

@Bob you should name yourself Microsoft Bob for the next few week ;)

Oct 18 '12 at 22:39, by allquixotic

@Bob lol @ your grav

marcusdoesstuff

12:55 PM

fixed it :)

i had ghostery blocking it :P

oh dear... finding errors that have no results on google.

(to do with ODBC Data Sources)

marcusdoesstuff

1:37 PM

Just put up my first question, that I've answered myself.

0

A: ODBC Data Source Driver Issue

It is likely that I uninstalled the MS database drivers when I uninstalled the older version of Office and the new one must not come with the drivers as standard. The drivers I needed were within the 'Microsoft Access Database Engine 2010 Redistributable' that is currently available at the follo...

Written okay or should I change anything/provide more info?

Bob

@marcusdoesstuff Looks pretty good.

marcusdoesstuff

Thanks (and for the up votes if that was you) :)

bertieb

Oh hey CloudFlare, didn't notice you there.

Is SU 5xx-ing (and/or slow) for anyone else?

Bob

@marcusdoesstuff FYI: support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/2874601 social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/office/en-US/…

bertieb

Ask a silly question...

We are aware of some intermittent connectivity issues to Stack Overflow and all Stack Exchange sites, we are investigating now.

Tweeted by StackStatus on September 29, 2015 at 1:29 PM

Bob

1:46 PM

@bertieb It's not much slower than usual. (read: yes, it is slow :P)

bertieb

Heh :P Someone must be using the tin cans and string for something...

Journeyman Geek

The ~~hamsters~~ unicorns must be tired

marcusdoesstuff

Thanks @Bob. Yes it is 365 software... It is fully offline 2013 office though.

@Bob I might need to experiment with these solutions too as although everything looks fine on the ODBC admin panel, I'm having problems connecting to the database with my python script.

allquixotic

2:13 PM

it's because their stack is Windows :P /troll

Journeyman Geek

;p

Apparently its cloudflare related

allquixotic

@Bob the cats and dogs look conspicuously out of place there...

Journeyman Geek

We have disabled railgun while we look into the issue with @CloudFlare. All sites are online now, though slower for users in remote regions.

Tweeted by StackStatus on September 29, 2015 at 1:51 PM

er

terdon

2:29 PM

@JourneymanGeek Define "remote".

Journeyman Geek

no idea

anywhere where its slower?

Hennes

Hmm, I read that as 'We have acquired a railgun while we look into the issue"

2

Also, poor user who they are looking for :)

marcusdoesstuff

@terdon Anywhere it takes more than a day to reach, on horseback, with your data packets i guess.

terdon

@marcusdoesstuff Yes, but from where?

marcusdoesstuff

Who knows? It's all in the cloud now!

terdon

2:41 PM

New York is remote as far as I'm concerned :)

marcusdoesstuff

It's all remote.

Journeyman Geek

lol

SE's servers are in NJ I think

marcusdoesstuff

It's a bit like asking 'how long's a piece of string?'

Journeyman Geek

with the backups in OR

marcusdoesstuff

3:14 PM

I thought I'd solved this problem with ODBC Data Sources... It stopped showing the error... But I can't connect via PYODBC still. :(

The DSN looks like it's correctly defined already.

Bob

@allquixotic Hm, seems like I'll be missing the water-repellent coating of the Style, but I won't have to try to trim my micro-SIM into a nano-SIM.

Also, are there any flagships still 1920x1080? o.O

Oh, HTC One M9.

allquixotic

@Bob iPhone 6S Plus :D trololololololololol

you're free to roast me for that one, but I'm not wrong

Bob

@allquixotic Wait, they finally switched to 16:9?

@allquixotic I'd actually prefer that res. IMO 2560x1440 is a needless waste of resources.

allquixotic

@Bob yep, it's honest to god 1080p (plus Retina, whatever that does - to my eyes it looks like "normal" 1080p)

Bob

Looks like the G4 benchmarks decently well, but loses out on GPU perf. Not that that affects me much, considering about the most GPU usage I'll get is from the web browser. phonearena.com/news/…

allquixotic

3:24 PM

that would depend on which websites you visit, since some websites will make enough draw calls to keep the GPU very busy (with a hw-accelerated browser like FF or Chrome)

Bob

@allquixotic "Retina" is basically Apple marketing.

There's no consistent definition.

allquixotic

static HTML would be CPU-bound; lots of dynamic crap or HTML Canvas or video would be possibly GPU-bound

Bob

It's a wishy-washy (and trademarked) way of saying "it looks sharp from a certain loosely-defined distance".

Basically translates to "at least X DPI optimal for viewing at Y distance".

allquixotic

@Bob fair enough, which is why I'm not hailing it as anything significant or even visible to my eyes ;p

Bob

@allquixotic It comes down to what distance they expect you to view it at (hence desktop/laptop and phones differ) and the DPI.

allquixotic

3:26 PM

well, by that definition, the Note 5 is a better "Retina" display than the iPhone 6S Plus.

since it's even "sharper" due to more pixels

Bob

Ya.

allquixotic

being an engineer/technologist while owning an iPhone is an interesting experience, to say the least: there are many valid technical things Apple gets right; it's not 100% marketing bluff; BUT you have to apply a reality filter to anything you read about their products, to dispel the Reality Distortion Field :P

Bob

When they first came out with the "Retina" name, IIRC, it was kinda special - most people didn't really care about DPI or res on a phone screen.

allquixotic

granted, Cook has significantly less RDF around him than Jobs did

Bob

Oh, apparently there is a solid definition for "Retina".

allquixotic

3:29 PM

I feel like today's Apple is different from the iPhone 1.0 Apple with Jobs at the helm. It's less revolutionary, but there's also significantly less "magic" in the product, and more of a focus on actual results.

For instance, the A9 is legitimately fast.

Bob

> the iPhone 6 Plus, which renders its display at triple the number of pixels in each direction, before down-sampling to a 1080p resolution

o.O

I... don't see the point of that.

And it's uncited from Wikipedia.

allquixotic

@Bob it sounds similar to VSR

Bob

> With the iPhone 6 Plus, Apple took the unusual route of rendering apps at 3× scale into a backing store of 1,242-by-2,208 “logical” pixels which the GPU then scales down to the device’s native full HD screen resolution of 1,920-by-1,080 pixels.

allquixotic

(where your GPU renders at 4K then downsamples to 1080p)

Bob

Ah.

2208x1242 is reasonable.

That's not triple in each direction, though.

Nowhere near.

Still, doing that at all sounds... stupid, actually.

I don't see the benefits.

Especially when the rendering surface doesn't map to the real display at a power of two.

You will end up with artefacts.

Wait, 3x scale?

What's with everyone saying 3x scale?

Or, worse, 3x in each direction?

Has everyone forgotten how to do maths?

Is this Apple marketing?

What?!

(2208*1242) / (1920*1080) = 1.3225
2208/1920 = 1.15
1242/1080 = 1.15

There's no way to arrive at 3x...

> “Just do what Apple recommends and treat the iPhone 6 Plus as a 414×736@3× device and you’re gonna be fine in all but the most extreme corner cases,” he summed up.

Ohhh 3x the crappy old resolution.

...yep, definitely marketing. Claim 3x and everyone thinks they mean 3x 1920x1080

=> stackoverflow.com/questions/25877444/…

what

@allquixotic AFAICT, "Retina" is actually worse than the competition.

Apps still work within 414x736.

With apparently no way to make pixel-precision adjustments.

That sounds like a really weird design decision.

The only plus side is they completely remove the burden (and ability) from app devs, so they avoid problems like Windows has been having with DPI scaling.

Still, Android seems to have dealt with that just fine...

That seems expensive (GPU resources) and inaccurate :\

Especially in the final downsampling step.

> I'm hoping someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but here's the situation: earlier generation iPhone's had a scaling factor of 1x. iPhone 4, 4S, etc. up to 5S used 2x scaling on UI elements, making it easy for developers and meaning the UI scales perfectly. With the iPhone 6 Plus, the resolution is not a perfect increase in scaling (ie. not 3x, but more like 2.25x). This created problems with developing apps and aliasing on the screen. Basically things might look wrong.

But it seems Apple has gotten around this by rendering the assets for the iPhone 6 Plus at 3x (which exceeds the actual …

bertieb

3:50 PM

I wouldn't normally suggest, and cross-posting aside, I would suggest a VTR for:

0

Q: How to split and join without transcoding AVC/MPEG-TS video files in Windows with ffmpeg?

I am looking also for a Linux solution (in a separate question) I have two recorded video files with the extension .ts. I need to remove some part of the first, split the second, and then merge the first file with the first (split) part of the second file. They both have the same characteristic...

Bob

Hm. Then there's this => paintcodeapp.com/news/ultimate-guide-to-iphone-resolutions

(they apparently develop a product to let you graphically edit images that are defined in Obj-C)

Because of course there's no native SVG support...

bertieb

Not sure if that's better mentioned in 'ask an SU mod', but there ya go

Bob

The real irony: using C# (and Mono) to hack in SVG icons in iOS => stackoverflow.com/questions/20718655/…

Android doesn't seem to support that either => stackoverflow.com/questions/9647770/…

bertieb

Mind you, I might be a little personally invested in that Q, so bias beware.

Bob

Nor WinPhone, but that one does use XAML, which is more-or-less directly compatible, at least.

@bertieb Looks good.

bertieb

4:08 PM

@Bob Ta!

allquixotic

4:40 PM

@Bob SVGs look great, but there are numerous problems with them. They're CPU-intensive compared to raster graphics; there are many potential "gotchas" in implementing a renderer that can lead to security bugs; and it's difficult/impossible to know if the rendering process for an SVG will ever terminate, so do you let it go "a little longer" or kill it because it's hogging CPU? and mutation of SVG elements can be expensive (have to re-render).

not a great idea for a phone, overall

Bob

@allquixotic The security issues can be mitigated by running it within the app's security context.

Raster images can't be mutated in the same way.

End of the day, I'm not sure it's much worse than having to ship three different sizes of every raster image.

allquixotic

would be great to support them, but it's probably not coming to either of the major phone platforms until rendering performance of the browser is more than sufficient for just rasterized sites (I really like the perf of Safari on the 6S+, but it's still a far cry from even a low-end Sandy laptop CPU)

Bob

@allquixotic I'm not talking browsers. I'm talking icons in apps.

allquixotic

let's get rasterized images working well before we worry about SVG :P

ahh

Bob

Browsers are completely different.

Untrusted SVGs, lots of re-rendering, etc..

(speaking of which, pretty sure FF on Android supports SVGs, as does Chrome and probably even Safari on iOS)

App icons are relatively static.

allquixotic

4:43 PM

yeah, when desktop Firefox had a long-standing SVG rendering bug, it makes you wonder

(the one we reported after discovering it here)

Bob

It seems like SVG would've solved Apple's problem better than what they came up with.

Instead, it sounds like they went with weird scaling rules (2x and 3x so far) to make life easier (?) for app devs.

@allquixotic Safari might perform well, but I'm telling you as a webdev that I absolutely hate Safari.

Worse than (modern) IE in many ways.

Then there's iOS's weird state resuming behaviour that makes maintaining a single-page webapp an absolute pain in the arse.

(not strictly my job, but a coworker basically gave up on it after a couple weeks)

Then there's how it actually interprets image EXIF data and rotates them on webpages - without rotating the whole page, mind.

In what world is that a sane decision?!

> quirksmode.org expired on 05/22/2016 and is pending renewal or deletion.

O_O

that... doesn't look right

It expired in the future but is now taken down?

wat.

allquixotic

<sarc> NSL? maybe they wanted to hide the dirty secrets of quirky browser behavior so they can exploit it? ;p

Bob

4

Q: How can I force iOS safari to ignore EXIF rotation?

It seems we have an issue that images on the desktops are displaying correctly upright, but on an iPad they are being rotated to landscape. Upon further investigation it seems that the iPad looks at the rotation information from EXIF data on the image and determining it should be displayed in la...

ios ipad browser exif

That's never been fixed, AFAIK.

I'm not even sure if they consider it a bug.

Despite going contrary to every expectation of a webdev.

Now, that might arguably be correct behaviour... hm.

allquixotic

welp - despite having relatively pedestrian RAM (though LPDDR4!), the GPU in this thing is no slouch: notebookcheck.net/…

> The PowerVR GT7600 is clearly the fastest smartphone GPU on the market as of September 2015. In all of our benchmarks, the GPU is able to beat even the fastest tablet and smartphone GPUs like the PowerVR GXA6850 in the A8x (iPad Air 2), Tegra K1 (Nvidia Shield Tablet) and Adreno 430 (various flagship smartphones). The ARM Mali-T760 MP8 (7420 Octa) in the Galaxy S6 line-up is also no match for the PowerVR GPU.

plays Hearthstone really well ;p

Bob

@allquixotic They'd need it, with all that upscaling and downscaling -_-

allquixotic

4:59 PM

if apps are restricted to as small of a rendering window as you say, though, that means the GPU is only doing shaders, etc. on a very small framebuffer, and textures in VRAM are very small, etc... kind of a smart trick

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