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.
Hi everyone
The university will be upgrading the mailman server on Monday Sept
2nd, which also hosts the WLUG mailing list. Unfortunately, the email
I received notifying me about the upgrade did not state when or how
long the outage will be, only that the new admin interface will be
available after 5pm (NZ time).
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/
'Someone from the Rust language governance team gave an interesting
talk at this year's Open Source Technology Summit. Josh Triplett (who
is also a principal engineer at Intel), discussed "what Intel is
contributing to bring Rust to full parity with C," in a talk titled
Intel and Rust: the Future of Systems Programming.
An anonymous reader quotes Packt:
Triplett believes that C is now becoming what Assembly was years ago.
"C is the new Assembly," he concludes. Developers are looking for a
high-level language that not only addresses the problems in C that
can't be fixed but also leverage other exciting features that these
languages provide. Such a language that aims to be compelling enough
to make developers move from C should be memory safe, provide
automatic memory management, security, and much more...
"Achieving parity with C is exactly what got me involved in Rust,"
says Triplett. Triplett's first contribution to the Rust programming
language was in the form of the 1444 RFC, which was started in 2015
and got accepted in 2016. This RFC proposed to bring native support
for C-compatible unions in Rust that would be defined via a new
"contextual keyword" union...
He is starting a working group that will focus on achieving full
parity with C. Under this group, he aims to collaborate with both the
Rust community and other Intel developers to develop the
specifications for the remaining features that need to be implemented
in Rust for system programming. This group will also focus on bringing
support for systems programming using the stable releases of Rust, not
just experimental nightly releases of the compiler.
Last week Triplett posted that the FFI/C Parity working group "is in
the process of being launched, and hasn't quite kicked off yet" -- but
he promised to share updates when it does.'
-- source: https://developers.slashdot.org/story/19/08/31/1540225
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/
'Packt's recent story about Rust had the headline "Rust is the future
of systems programming, C is the new Assembly."
But there was an interesting discussion about the story on LWN.net.
One reader suggested letting people write drivers for the Linux kernel
in Rust. ("There's a good chance that encouraging people to submit
their wacky drivers in Rust would improve the quality of the driver,
partly because you can focus attention on the unsafe parts.")
And that comment drew an interesting follow-up:
"I spoke with Greg Kroah-Hartman, and he said he'd be willing to
accept a framework in the kernel for writing drivers in Rust, as long
as 1) for now it wasn't enabled by default (even if you did "make
allyesconfig") so that people don't *need* Rust to build the kernel,
and 2) it shows real benefits beyond writing C, such as safe wrappers
for kernel APIs."'
-- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/19/08/31/2138249
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/
It should be so simple. Windows has a File Save dialog built in.
Developers can call the API, with options to customise it if need
be. Well, two APIs actually: the old Common File Dialog and the
Common Item Dialog introduced in Windows Vista.
But this was not good enough for the Office team and in Office
2010, Microsoft introduced the Backstage as a document management
feature.
...
If you are not so lucky and the location you want does not appear
in the Backstage, you click Browse, and the old Windows Save dialog
appears. In this case, instead of saving you time, the Backstage
has added an extra step.
There is a further wrinkle to the Backstage. In Options, you can
set "Don't show the Backstage when opening or saving files with
keyboard shortcut." As this option implies, this means you do not
see the Backstage when invoking Save with Ctrl-S, but you do if you
go to "File – Save As". However you do not if you go to "File –
Save", even with an unsaved document. Consistency, who needs it?
<https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/08/30/saving_documents_in_microsoft_offi…>
The cost to a business of trying to recover “kidnapped” documents from
backups is often so high that it becomes cheaper to simply pay the
ransom. And insurance companies seem happy to go along with this
<https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/08/how-insurance-compan…>.
And the consequence, of course, is that the crims get even more bold and
more demanding ...
Apologies for cross-posting, but these ebooks may be of interest to you.
Cheers, Peter
-------- Original Message --------
From: "Guy K. Kloss" <guy(a)kloss.nz>
Sent: August 27, 2019 6:01:51 PM GMT+10:00
To: New Zealand Python User Group <nzpug(a)googlegroups.com>
Subject: [nzpug] some CC licensed ebooks (PDF)
Kia ora,
there's a Python book here as well, but I didn't check the quality of
it. But there are a bunch of other books of varying levels of quality.
All licensed in open source (CC-SA) and published (I think) by Stack
Overflow.
https://goalkicker.com/
The odd one might be interesting to the odd one ...
Cheers,
Guy
--
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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/