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It always amazes me the number of people who I've worked with who only use the touchpad on their laptops all day - in my last job it was about 90% of the office. On top of the post's complaints, they're also not at all ergonomic and uncomfortable to use for long periods (not that normal mice are fantastically ergonomic either, but at least using something to the side rather than directly in front of you)

To a degree, it's just what you're used to I guess. I can't control the old trackpoint laptop mice at all accurately, but some of my friends swear by them and can't bear touchpads. But then I've never owned a laptop with one, while they grew up with them.

One suggestion for the author that might make their "click and drag" problems easier - I can double tap (without fully clicking down the touchpad) then keep the second tap held down to have the same effect as moving a mouse with left click held down. I think this is a Gnome/Cinnamon option though, touchpad support and features can vary wildly on Linux, so it's worth looking into different options there (eg libinput vs synaptics).

Ultimately you either need to get used to it, adjust your habits/software, or plug in a mouse. It's easy enough to see why Mac users like the touchpad, since the OS and most of the programs are designed to play well with a touchpad. But it's not surprising that a 30 year old terminal emulator doesn't work so great with them.

Not sure how much they care about it getting widespread adoption, or if they're just looking to fill a need that is lacking on Linux.

Kind surprising to see them only releasing it on Linux though, considering it's built with Python and Gtk it should be easy enough to build on Windows/Mac. Gtk is notoriously not great on other platforms though, and I assume if it's a team of Linux users building it, they don't want to go to the effort of building it for other platforms, let alone building multiple UI stacks so that it looks good on every OS.

On the plus side, it's open source, so I'm sure they wouldn't object to someone trying to build it for Windows/Mac, submitting a PR, or at least reporting the specific issues that prevent it from working on other OSs. A brief scan through their GitHub requests makes it look like they're not against supporting other OSs, they just aren't interested in putting time into it.

Video editing software has always been somewhat lacking on Linux. None of the big proprietary ones like Premiere or Final Cut are available on Linux, and the open source options are mostly either missing features, buggy, hard to use, or ancient and unsupported.

This certainly looks quite professional and polished, but I can't speak for the features and usability compared to other options.

This problem doesn't seem to be limited to free services or smaller companies. Mailing list stuff sent via Mailchimp often gets caught by my spam filter, and many Mailchimp IPs are on various blacklists used by spam filter software.

Not really surprising when some companies surely are using services like Mailchimp to send spam - depending on your definition of spam.

Sad to see the XPS 13 line going the same way as Apple and removing the USB A ports. On the plus side, it's at least possible to connect two monitors to the USB C ports now (the 2017 version I have has only one USB C port), but it's less overall ports now since the power jack is also replaced by USB C. The body seems the same size as previously, so the excuse of "more thinness" doesn't really apply.

That said, the XPS 13 has been the best experience I've had with Linux on a laptop. The bundled Ubuntu install works out of the box, but even on other distros it's not difficult to set up, and I've not encountered any driver issues, which have been common on every other laptop I've installed Linux on. It helps that it's a great quality laptop in general - anecdotally in my office, we see far more hardware issues with the latest Macbooks than with XPSs.So I'd recommend it for anyone who wants a Linux or Windows laptop, or is considering switching away from Mac without compromising on hardware quality.

"2K" is usually used to describe 2560x1440 or similar monitors. I find these ideal personally. I don't notice much difference much from higher resolution than that, gaming at 4K requires high end hardware, and scaling between different resolution monitors is a pain.

1440p seems like a good sweet spot between the two. But yes, 2K is a silly name for it.

I am a bit confused about the versions they say are safe. I'm running Bind 9.11 and their tester says there are no issues, and it supports all the necessary EDNS behaviour.

I think the point is that those versions mentioned will remove support for the bad behaviour, but it's not clear what you do need to do to prepare. I guess the only steps you can take are to run the tests and update to the latest version available.

Same experience with the zooming. Thanks for the tip on holding shift, but it's realllly slow too.

I also can't drag the map around or click on any items on the map. Really inferior experience so far.

Did you find a way to switch back to the Mapbox maps?

I expect most DDG users would stop using it. Apple may be the "least bad" of the big players when it comes to privacy, but I have no trust in them and no interest in using their services.

It would probably make a lot of sense for Apple though, and I'm sure they'd convince more Apple loyalists to switch to DDG from Google by putting their name on it.

To be fair, considering how much actual programming I did in a 3 year Bachelor's degree, 6 months of learning programming could be plenty significant.

Which isn't to say the non-programming stuff in my degree was irrelevant, but you don't need to spend 4 years full time studying to learn relevant skills for a junior web developer job, and you could easily learn them in less time outside of a degree.

>YouTube Originals was a big-swing idea that had to find out, definitively, if the immense online entity's user base would A) pay for something and B) be interested in scripted longform storytelling. Well, YouTube found out definitively that the answer was a resounding no.

It's not so much that the audience isn't interested in paying for long form storytelling (or at least myself), but maybe just not interested in paying YouTube for it. YouTube is a place for short videos, I go there when I want to watch tech reviews, recipes, or something silly. When I want longform storytelling, I go to Netflix or something else that I pay for.

I'm not sure what the solution is, but YouTube hasn't done a good job of advertising or raising awareness of Premium content at all. The most I see is a few thumbnails of things that I need to pay to watch on the homescreen. I would be happy to be proved wrong, but I have low expectations of drama or any longform content on YouTube - I expect it to be low budget and badly acted, so I may as well just go elsewhere.

Perhaps ad blockers are a double whammy against YouTube Premium. I don't see ads on YouTube anyway, so I don't need to pay to get rid of them. And maybe they're advertising Premium content on there, but I've not seen them anyway. I'm kind of surprised that YouTube doesn't put more effort into subverting adblockers, it surely wouldn't be that difficult to inject the ads into the video streams and make them unblockable.

Still, it wouldn't take much for them to draw more attention to Premium videos, whether it's from ads, creating more social media buzz around them, or just putting a larger section on the home page that at least gives me a description of the content that I'm missing. As always, YouTube relies too much on their algorithm of placing more of the same content in front of you. When the experience is designed to just keep you clicking on though the recommendations of videos like the ones you just watched, it's no wonder that they're not getting eyes on original content. And yet it should be so easy for them.

I suspect it already is in use in Lambda, an AWS rep mentioned something about them using a custom JVM internally for Lambdas when they gave a talk at our company recently, so this is probably that.

As for the default on AMIs, it probably will go that way when OpenJDK 8 support ends next year. They'll have the option of distributing RedHat's OpenJDK build with their patches, or packaging their own. It'll probably be similar to the `mysql` package actually providing MariaDB, and no one will really notice.

I am intrigued if there will be noticable performance improvements. They do mention performance enhancements on the page, but I believe this is more about dealing with Oracle's licensing changes and maintaining support for the LTS releases. But there's plenty of incentive for them to make it better performing than alternatives too.

I expect my company will switch to this because we're already on Amazon Linux 2, and have been struggling to make a decision on how to update the JDK with future releases. But if there are performance improvements, that might push some more AWS users to switch to Amazon Linux over Ubuntu and other distros in EC2.

As of the latest version of Java, OpenJDK is equivalent to Oracle JDK, and they'll release new versions every 6 month. However, there won't be any security updates or bug fixes to OpenJDK versions from Oracle after 6 months. There's a few groups that plan on maintaining patches beyond that period, but most options involve paying someone (including Oracle).

It's mostly just about enterprise distribution, rather than any differences in the JDK. Updating major versions every 6 months is risky, not having security updates is more risky, and no one likes paying money for something that they've been getting for free.

So far this seems like the simplest and cheapest way of getting long term security/bugfix updates for the JDK, especially if you're already running Amazon Linux. We've been evaluating the options in my team recently and hadn't come to a decision beyond "update to Java 11 and see how it goes after that". This pretty much solves our problems.

I would have preferred to see Amazon partnering with Red Hat or other open source groups on maintaining one well supported OpenJDK, but at least as it's all open source, patches should make their way to all versions.

> Cheaters suck in games, and they can ruin it for many others, but there has to be another way other than forcing your paying users to jump through this many hoops. And if there isn't, then i'm happy to be doomed to playing against/with hackers and cheaters rather than not being able to play at all.

Back in my day, we just played on community servers with moderators who'd just ban cheaters!

I know that's not really a solution with the scale of today's online games, but cheating isn't a new problem. It's only become a problem of today's world of matchmaking systems, global public servers, and the removal of community hosted servers. Still, I feel like just hiring a few more people to manually check suspected cheaters would reduce the need for such heavy handed anti-cheat.

On the other hand, Valve run 2 of the most popular online games (CS:GO and Dota 2), which both have Linux clients, and don't have the same level of intrusive anti-cheat compared to EAC and BattlEye.

Yes, for the most part. All of their work on Proton (their fork of Wine) is open source, they're working with Codeweavers (the largest contributors to Wine) closely, and contributing as much as they can back to upstream Wine.

Part of what makes SteamPlay work so well is actually outside of Wine though - a lone developer started a project called DXVK a year or so ago, which is a separate translation layer for converting DX11 to Vulkan, and runs alongside Wine. Valve hired this developer and sponsored a few similar projects, and integrated them into SteamPlay.

It also seems like Wine is slow and quite opinionated on merging in changes. For a while now, most people who used Wine for gaming would use forks and patches to improve performance. Some of it got merged into upstream Wine eventually, some things get rejected as it works differently to the usual Wine way of doing things. So Steam has used some of these patches and their own work for Proton, but some of it may not be suitable to be merged into mainline Wine.

Or indeed more problems. I remember trying to get the original Doom working online with a group of friends at a LAN a few years ago. It was much easier to get it working on Linux via Wine than it was under Windows 7+ due to some old networking layer.

Wine was already mostly at that point a couple of years ago. It used to involve a lot of manual fiddling, but in the later days of DX9, the majority of games worked out of the box.

DX11 is where things went wrong again, and mainline Wine has been quite slow to implement DX10+ features. There have been some great projects like DXVK which have made DX11 games playable in Wine, as well as a lot of work going on in different branches and patches of Wine to improve certain functionality. Fortunately Proton brings all of these together, and has all of this configuration dealt with for you.

After a period of stagnation and not being able to play any games released in the last few years, we're back to the point where brand new AAA games can run with Wine/Proton with solid framerates - I was very surprised to see Monster Hunter World running well in Proton within a few days of release.

DRM and anti-cheat remains the biggest blocker though. Some Denuvo games run, but many don't. Anything using BattlEye or Easy Anti-Cheat won't work, or if you're lucky, the anti-cheat might let you in, but then ban you for a false positive. I hope these can be solved at some point, but the nature of Wine works and how anti-cheat identifies tampering means they'll probably never play nice together.

Agreed. It feels like this is two separate stories really.

Maybe Larry Page is a recluse, an eccentric, a technical thinker, a background figure, or however you want to describe him. I can understand why someone who started out writing a search engine in their garage might not be the type who feels comfortable doing public speaking in front of the Senate.

But we should disconnect the man from the company. Google certainly does need to be held to account, and does need to answer these questions, both to the public and to governments. At best, it's an organizational failure of Google to not allocate someone from upper management on this - it should really be Pichai, who is really the day-to-day boss at Google. At worst it's a deliberate act of the company to avoid questioning.

The attention shouldn't be directed at one man not showing up to answer questions, but the huge company who doesn't feel that it's necessary to send any of it's senior management to answer these questions.

Edit: Seems that Google did offer to send a senior legal executive, and the senate refused them. Point still stands that we need to separate the company from the man, but perhaps the senate is just as focused on the "big names" as the media.

Does Windows still give you the popup with a choice of browsers to install in the EU? I remember seeing it some years ago, but since then I've only used Windows a few times with a business version in a VM, so not sure if that's still present.

Seems like if they were forced to do that, there's no way they would get away with this, but I'm not sure if that ruling still applies.

I started out doing that, but I've found myself using !g less and less recently. There are two main things I find myself needing it for: Location based queries, Google will always prioritize UK based results, and often London based results for me. The other is technical searches, I'm not sure how much this is due to Google having better search algorithms for this, or just that it has the data to know that I'm a programmer, but it it's more likely to know that I'm talking about coding with a term like Python or Ruby which could mean something else.

I hope DDG can keep improving, and I do feel like it's a worthy alternative now. I do wonder how they can keep making money with no advertising or paid services, but if they were to be bought out by a big player, I think they would quickly lose much of their user base.

I still feel like it's a high amount when it's the only option. I'd happily pay £10/month to split between the channels I'm subscribed to, or £2/month to a few good channels. I don't feel like I get any more value out of YouTube compared to e.g Netflix or Spotify, so I don't want to spend more than I spend on those, but I do feel like it's worth contributing some money towards the creators.

I guess your point stands about it being a donation, more for dedicated fans that want to support their favourite creators. But I feel like there are plenty of people with similar opinions to mine and the parent poster - I'd happily pay a similar price to a Netflix/Spotify subscription to YouTube, if the money was going towards creators of good content. But I'm not as interested in giving £5/month to specific channels.

Of course, almost all decent creators have Patreons these days, so I should probably go and put my money where my mouth is...

Of which 7GB is taken up by the OS and system apps.

I was kinda exaggerating, then I checked my phone and there's actually 15GB used by the OS.

I always found the chatbot idea odd, it felt like a step backwards in terms of interaction. We started out with very basic input methods to computers, like punch cards. Then we moved onto a command line interface where you could type in words. Then we eventually got GUIs, graphics, websites, all sorts of complex and nuanced ways to interact with a computer.

To go back to interfacing with a program using written language seemed like an odd step. It's never been the most efficient way of doing something, and it requires very advanced technology to accurately understand what people are trying to say, in whatever slang, shorthand, or bad spelling/grammar they use.

Besides, it's not really dead, the tech just moved to "voice assistants" rather than "chatbots" - really just spoken word rather than written word. And I'm not convinced that's the "revolution" most people are expecting either. I'll stick to clicking buttons and typing things into my terminal.

I have to wonder what questionable things LA Times are doing, if the only way they can comply with GDPR is to block an entire continent from reading news articles on their site.

+1 for the Dell XPS 13. I'm running Arch Linux on one for work and I've had 0 hardware/driver issues, which is rare for a laptop.

Interestingly, Virgin Media now advertises slightly faster speeds than it did before this came into effect. Where it's fastest package was previously 350Mbps, it now advertises the same package as giving "Average download speeds of 362Mbps". "Average" still leaves a wide range of speeds, and as far as I can tell they don't quote different speeds for different locations.

I don't think quoting the average speed of all users in the country for each package is going to give much more of an accurate picture than maximum speeds. Especially since the abundance of FTTC here means your speeds are much more dependant on local infrastructure.

And yet BT is pretty much the definition of anti-competitive now anyway, and it's that monopoly which is killing progress today.

Not much really. He churns out a lot of articles, some of them can be a bit clickbaity, and lacking in much information. He does sometimes post articles that are purely based on rumours. But I think he fills a good niche for technical but easy to read Linux/open source news.

In this case he hasn't really done much more than summarise the official release notes, so OP may as well have linked to those.

Sadly, the more common practice seems to be adding the entire IP blocks of known server/cloud providers to blacklists.

The most obvious example I've seen is when the car (or indeed driver) has the choice to endanger the passenger or a pedestrian.

For example, if a kid runs out into the road in front of the car, it can drive into the kid, likely with no injuries to the passengers. Or it can swerve and drive off of the road, or into another lane, likely saving the kid but putting the passengers at much greater risk.

As you say, in this or any similar situation the human reaction is probably going to be to instinctively brake or swerve without a chance to consider options or consequences. I feel like a computer will have a few cycles to spare to make decisions like that.