For quite a while now, I’ve been annoyed by the system notification
volume going to 100% on my Debian systems, regardless of my attempts to
set it to a lower level. For example, when I open the KDE System
Settings app, change something, then try to close the window, the sound
that accompanies the save/discard/cancel alert is always startlingly
loud.
I think I have finally found a fix: in your /etc/pulse/daemon.conf,
put in a line saying
flat-volumes = no
(You should find an existing comment “; flat-volumes = yes” that
indicates the default.)
You can make this new setting take effect in the current session
immediately without having to logout or reboot, by executing the
following as the currently-logged-in user:
pulseaudio -k
(This kills and restarts the PulseAudio daemon for your user session.)
There are several discussions of the pros and cons of this issue online,
going back some years. For example, here
<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1265267>. Also a mention
about the “flat-volumes” setting in the ever-reliable Arch Linux Wiki
here <https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PulseAudio>.
A pretty sobering read
<https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/05/how-qualcomm-shook-down-the-cel…>:
Qualcomm's first weapon against competitors: patent licensing terms
requiring customers to pay a royalty on every phone sold—not just
phones that contained Qualcomm's wireless chips.
Sound familiar?
Judge Koh draws a direct parallel to licensing behavior that got
Microsoft in legal trouble in the 1990s. Microsoft would offer PC
makers a discount if they agreed to pay Microsoft a licensing fee
for every PC sold—whether or not the PC shipped with a copy of
MS-DOS. This effectively meant that a PC maker had to pay twice if
it shipped a PC running a non-Microsoft operating system.
There’s a lot more--the article reads like a catalogue of gangster-like
tactics. All of which is perfectly all right under the US
interpretation of “Free Enterprise”, of course ...
Also, reading the details of how Qualcomm managed to sabotage Intel’s
efforts to develop 5G chips, it seems to me that Qualcomm is directly
responsible for the situation today where US companies are lagging
behind Chinese ones like Huawei in 5G capability.
If there is anybody else besides me who wondered what happened to Edge
TV, as of the beginning of this month it is no longer on Freeview, it
can now only be viewed as an online stream
<https://www.stuff.co.nz/entertainment/tv-radio/113928839/the-edge-tv-remove…>.
In the last few days of June, there was a promo announcing that it
was going HD, but I don’t recall it mentioning that it was leaving the
broadcast airwaves.
Quote:
MediaWorks chief executive Michael Anderson says the move is in
line with audience trends, which show people primarily consume
music videos online.
While that may be mostly true, personally I would go look for videos on
YouTube after seeing them first on Edge TV.
Apple’s TV+ streaming service is coming soon, followed by Disney’s one
<https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=122666…>.
Note:
Disney+ will break Sky's longtime near-monopoly on Disney content
in these parts. Disney says that, ultimately, Disney+ will be the
exclusive home of its content.
So to get a comparable range of TV content to that you currently have
free-to-air, you are going to have to subscribe to two or three or
maybe more different streaming services. The increasing multitude of
things to pay for isn’t about choice, but about no choice at all.
This week’s “Listening Post” on Al Jazeera (viewable here
<https://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/listeningpost/2019/09/xinjiang-story-c…>)
talks, in the latter part, about this new phenomenon of “open source”
journalism. My understanding is, the meaning of “source” here is not
that of “source code” familiar to software developers, but “source of
information” as understood by journalists.
That means getting information from public sources available to all.
Even a tightly-controlled society like China makes a surprising amount
of information freely available online--more than it really wants to
make available, sometimes. And this information can be pieced together
like a puzzle by perceptive investigators, to point to conclusions
which can be directly at odds with public pronouncements from
Government officials.
'Yahoo announced on Wednesday that it is winding down its long-running
Yahoo Groups site. From a report:
As of October 21, users will no longer be able to post new content to
the site, and on December 14 Yahoo will permanently delete all
previously posted content. "You'll have until that date to save
anything you've uploaded," an announcement post reads. Yahoo Groups,
launched in 2001, is a cross between a platform for mailing lists and
internet forums. Groups can be interacted with on the Yahoo Groups
site itself, or via email. In the 18 years that it existed, numerous
niche communities made a home on the platform. Now, with the site's
planned obsolescence, users are looking for ways to save their Groups
history.'
-- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/19/10/16/1928228
Cheers, Peter
--
Peter Reutemann
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Waikato, NZ
+64 (7) 858-5174
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
'Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University say a Google algorithm
designed help reduce internet congestion is mathematically unfair,
resulting in network management systems that may disadvantage some
traffic over others. From a report:
Several years back, Google began work on a new open source congestion
control algorithm (CCA) designed to improve the way the internet
functions. The result was BBR, short for Bottleneck Bandwidth and RTT
(Round-Trip Time). The goal of the project: to improve how network
packets travel between servers to mitigate congestion on the internet.
CCAs have long been used to help manage congestion -- ideally while
treating all traffic equally. But in a study unveiled last week at the
Internet Measurement Conference in Amsterdam, researchers revealed
that BBR doesn't actually do a very good job of that last part. In
fact, they found that during periods of congestion, BBR connections
would take up 40 percent of the available bandwidth, leaving the
remaining 60 percent to be fought over by the remaining users on the
network.'
-- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/19/10/31/204226
Cheers, Peter
--
Peter Reutemann
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Waikato, NZ
+64 (7) 858-5174
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
Something from the Windows open-source camp rather than Linux:
'This week, the developer of the popular text- and code-editing
software Notepad++ released a new version update. Nothing seemed
particularly strange about it, except maybe the name: Notepad++ v7.8.1
is the "Free Uyghur" edition. In a blog post announcing the updated
version, developer Don Ho writes about the plight of the Uyghur
people, an ethnic minority in China that's faced persecution from the
country's authoritarian government. China operates internment camps
that are used to detain Uyghur people throughout the country's
Xinjiang region.
Since the announcement, the software's GitHub "issues" page has been
bombarded with spam, much of it in the Chinese language. "Stop sending
meaningless political-related issues, it just makes you look like an
idiot," reads one comment. Another one simply reads, "Bye !
Uninstall." There's a litany of curses, and one asks, "What do you
know about China?" Others have moved in to criticize the Chinese
government in response. Ho told The Verge that the software's
dedicated site was also under a distributed-denial-of-service attack,
but that it has been stopped by an anti-DDoS service provided by the
site's host.
Ho writes in the announcement that he anticipated potential pushback,
saying "talking about politics is exactly what software and commercial
companies generally try to avoid," but decided to take the step
anyway. "The problem is," Ho writes in the announcement of the Free
Uyghur edition, "if we don't deal with politics, politics will deal
with us.'
-- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/19/10/31/0037247
Cheers, Peter
--
Peter Reutemann
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Waikato, NZ
+64 (7) 858-5174
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
'Fedora 31 has just rolled out the door. From a report:
Is it an exciting release? No, not really. Sure, enthusiasts will find
themselves thrilled withe inclusion of the GNOME 3.34 desktop
environment (with Qt Wayland by default), Linux 5.3 kernel, and Mesa
9.2, but otherwise, it is fairly boring. You know what? That's not a
bad thing. In 2019, Fedora is simply a mature and stable operating
system that only needs to follow an evolutionary path at this time --
not revolutionary. It stands alone as the world's best desktop Linux
distribution. "Fedora 31 Workstation provides new tools and features
for general users as well as developers with the inclusion of GNOME
3.34. GNOME 3.34 brings significant performance enhancements which
will be especially noticeable on lower-powered hardware. Fedora 31
Workstation also expands the default uses of Wayland, including
allowing Firefox to run natively on Wayland under GNOME instead of the
XWayland backend as with prior releases," says The Fedora Project.'
-- sources: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/19/10/31/168259
Cheers, Peter
--
Peter Reutemann
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Waikato, NZ
+64 (7) 858-5174
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
Western community center has recently had all the computers upgraded.
However there are ten machines but only five working mouse (mice?) I
would find the job easier if there a couple of five port switches
available. If any one feels they can help with either or both of these
please contact me (can travel)
Cheers John..