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[#] Thu Jul 09 2020 16:27:31 EDT from LoanShark

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I think they have two teams working at cross-purposes. I believe they already announced a GUI approach for WSL2 that involved some RDP plumbing running over the "VM bus." But this 3D acceleration stuff will provide most of the plumbing they need for a far better and more performant experience. It's just that it appears they're focusing on compute acceleration first; which makes sense. Solve the easy problem first.

I've been saying for a while now that guest OS's need a full-fledged user-mode driver for the host's GPU for a halfway decent user experience. Desktop apps have really outgrown the old, 2D-only XAA/EXA approach. It's good to see this finally taking off outside of niche hypervisors that only support a specific GPU. Microsoft may be the only company in the industry that has both the expertise and the deep pockets to do this well.


For better and for worse.

[#] Thu Jul 09 2020 16:29:02 EDT from LoanShark

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Sorry, what was I saying. GEORGE SOROS IS FUNDING THIS PROJECT SO DON'T USE IT.

[#] Sat Jul 11 2020 16:44:04 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

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Well for now, George can fund a second video card for my system so I can just do PCI passthrough to the guest OS and wire it up to a spare input on my monitor.

[#] Sun Jul 12 2020 10:07:16 EDT from LoanShark

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2020-07-11 16:44 from IGnatius T Foobar
Well for now, George can fund a second video card for my system so I
can just do PCI passthrough to the guest OS and wire it up to a spare

input on my monitor.

Does that actually work in Virtualbox? Asking for a friend...

Wait, I've already got a second card. It's called running a discrete video card on a system with integrated graphics...

[#] Sun Jul 12 2020 15:38:12 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

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I don't know if it works with VirtualBox, but I do know that VirtualBox has PCI passthrough so maybe.

Here's someone doing the same with KVM: [ https://mathiashueber.com/pci-passthrough-ubuntu-2004-virtual-machine/ ]

[#] Wed Jul 22 2020 23:59:02 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

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Microsoft annoyance of the day:

I get a lot of spam from people who bought my name, email address, employer, and job title from ... well, probably from someone who sold the list of all of the badge swipes they got at a trade show or something. Normally they're obvious because they're the only ones who ever put my name in the subject line of an email.

The more brazen of these jerkwads will occasionally send me an actual calendar invite for some spaminar they want me to dial into. This being Outlook, it immediately shows up on my calendar as a tentative. Delete the message? Still tentative. Mark it as spam? Still tentative. Block the sender? Still tentative. I now have to go into the calendar, find the spaminar, and delete it -- and even then, it *still* asks if I want to send a decline to the jerkwad, which is exactly what I was trying not to do in the first place.

Outlook/Exchange calendar handling heuristics are crap. But we knew that.

[#] Mon Aug 03 2020 10:52:33 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

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The "news" this week is that in light of the fact that "TikTok" is now known to be a tool used by the ChiComs to spy on American mobile devices, instead of being banned outright they are going to be forced to divest the software to an American company.

Microsoft.

That hardly counts as an American company that can be trusted not to spy on users. Microsoft is *legendary* for putting spyware all over its software.
There are even reports that the person at TikTok who masterminded its spyware is *from* Microsoft.

Thankfully, this software is completely useless and has no business on anyone's phones.

[#] Fri Aug 21 2020 11:58:33 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

Subject: Netcraft confirms it: Microsoft is dying (hahaha)

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Remember the old days when everyone eagerly anticipated the Netcraft web server survey every month?  We were always pleased to see Apache's dominance over Micro$oft's crappy web server.   When nginx emerged, there was some concern that one would have to combine Apache+nginx to get the true number that competed with Micro$oft.

Not anymore.  Some time last year, Apache and nginx both exceeded Microsoft's share, each on their own.

(If you can't see the graph, go to https://news.netcraft.com/archives/category/web-server-survey/ )

Obviously I don't expect this to continue indefinitely.  nginx is so much better than Apache that I expect it will continue to eat up Apache's share of the web.  But for now, this is fun to look at.



[#] Tue Sep 29 2020 09:46:52 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

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So how about that Office 365? hahaha

For those of you not paying attention, the entire service crashed yesterday.
Now when Microsoft products break, they break for the whole world at the same time! Steve Ballmer used to call that "innovation" haha.

The old adage is still true: the day Microsoft creates a product that doesn't suck would be the day they build a vacuum cleaner.

[#] Fri Oct 02 2020 15:14:16 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

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I think they have two teams working at cross-purposes. I believe they

already announced a GUI approach for WSL2 that involved some RDP
plumbing running over the "VM bus." But this 3D acceleration stuff will


M$'s Craig Loewen made some noise about it on September 22. In his words, "We have a Wayland server running in WSL, and connect to that via an RDP connection from Windows." I'm sure it's more complicated than that, and they're not just running it as a remote desktop, because they've already said that both sides will have shared access to the GPU at native speeds.

In the near future, this means the ability to run Linux and Windows software on the same Windows desktop. They're even doing crazy things like making ext4 filesystems accessible from the Windows side. It could be interesting.

Some pundits, like Eric S. Raymond and Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, are speculating that Microsoft's strategy is to flip the model upside down, eventually running Windows on Linux instead of the other way around. The rationale is that with the majority of their revenue now derived from Azure and 365, the Windows desktop has become less profitable and will eventually become a financial drag on the company.

It's easy to observe that the Windows desktop monopoly is no longer handing them easy dominance of any market they happen to enter. So why keep it going?

[#] Fri Oct 02 2020 18:01:32 EDT from Ragnar Danneskjold

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2020-09-29 09:46 from IGnatius T Foobar

So how about that Office 365? hahaha

For those of you not paying attention, the entire service crashed
yesterday.
Now when Microsoft products break, they break for the whole world at

the same time! Steve Ballmer used to call that "innovation" haha.

The old adage is still true: the day Microsoft creates a product that

doesn't suck would be the day they build a vacuum cleaner.



So, the whole thing didn't die...... I was happily using everything without issue. There were authentication issues, and it was wide spread. But it wasn't system wide.

[#] Sun Oct 04 2020 22:03:22 EDT from LoanShark

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they've already said that both sides will have shared access to the GPU

at native speeds.

That could mean a lot of things. It could mean that the guest OS has proper direct access to the GPU, and uses that for accelerated rendering into an offscreen buffer, which is then served the slow way back to the host OS via an RDP stream over TCP.

We won't know whether this stuff is any good until we test it. I'm too tired of claims about 3D accel that don't pan out.

[#] Mon Oct 05 2020 14:25:48 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

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Agreed, too many disappointments.  Thankfully the use case of "Windows for games and Linux for real work and no I don't want to have two computers" seems to be more common today than it was years ago.  As mentioned earlier, as we continue through the post-PC era, Micros~1 has far less motivation to make integration deliberately difficult.

Entertainingly, the decline of Windows revenue and the ascendance of Azure entrenches Micros~1 even more deeply as a company following directly in IBM's footsteps, from an entrenched monopolist, to the owner of a monopoly on an increasingly less relevant part of the industry, to a services company.  In this form they don't have to go away to get out of the way.  I'm ok with that (but I still want Bill Gates to suffer excruciatingly and die gruesomely).



[#] Wed Oct 07 2020 15:13:43 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

Subject: Microsoft Chrome

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In other news, I got an email from our corporate security folks today, telling me to take Brave off my computer.  Their consternation with Brave seems to be that it is capable of private browsing with Tor, and they saw some Tor traffic on the network, so they had to put it on a list of banned software.

I don't need Tor for that, because I've got a completely separate computer for personal use, one that isn't connected to the corporate network and isn't used for any work-related activities.  I installed Brave because I got tired of having Google up my ass every mouse click and every keystroke.  Brave fits the bill there, as does its close cousin Dissenter.  But now I can't use it.

What surprised me, though, is how little effort Microsoft put into making the new version of Edge look like anything other than a re-skinned version of Chrome.  With a few customizations, it's practically indistinguishable.  It can even run Chrome extensions.   So my new setup is Edge with the following customizations:

  • The "Custom New Tab" extension.  This is a must, because even if you manage to turn off all the MSN propaganda on the new tab page, it still shoves a Bing bar in your face.  With the Custom New Tab extension, I can send new tabs directly to https://www.duckduckgo.com instead.
  • Obviously, I also have the "DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials" extension added on.

With these changes I can pretty much forget the fact that I'm using Edge.  It's behaving like "just another Chromium variant".  It's quite surprising.

Yes, I know that it's probably sending all my telemetry to Microsoft, but it's a Windows machine, so it was doing that anyway.  My personal rig is running the Dissenter browser on Linux.



[#] Wed Oct 07 2020 18:05:34 EDT from darknetuser

Subject: Re: Microsoft Chrome

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Relatedly: I find Firefox with ghacks' custom user.js very satisfying. You get to use an open source browser with most telemetries/data leaks removed. Add an adblocker or a filtering proxy and you are ready to rocks.

[#] Wed Oct 07 2020 19:17:15 EDT from LoanShark

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The new version of Edge might still be capable of Windows Defender Application Guard, which is an interesting value-add over Chrome

[#] Thu Oct 08 2020 17:21:17 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

Subject: Re: Microsoft Chrome

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Day 2 with my customized Edge build.

Half the time I am thinking to myself "what the f%^& am I doing running a Microsoft browser?"

The other half of the time, I forget that I'm not using Chrome.  It *is* Chrome.  It isn't really Edge, it's Microsoft Chrome.  It's Chrome with all of the Google tethers replaced with Microsoft tethers.

Kind of ironic that it doesn't matter anymore.  Google is as big a corporate douchebag as Microsoft is now, and Microsoft isn't the biggest threat to humanity anymore.  It truly doesn't matter.

If I could go back in time and tell my 1990's self this ... I could say "dude chill, it's going to be ok" ... but there's a possibility that my 1990's self would commit suicide to prevent me from accepting a Microsoft browser decades later.



[#] Thu Oct 08 2020 17:29:29 EDT from LoanShark

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Definitely a nonzero possibility as I recall.

[#] Sun Oct 11 2020 11:44:02 EDT from Ragnar Danneskjold

Subject: Re: Microsoft Chrome

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2020-10-08 17:21 from IGnatius T Foobar
Subject: Re: Microsoft Chrome
Day 2 with my customized Edge build.

Half the time I am thinking to myself "what the f%^& am I doing
running a Microsoft browser?"

The other half of the time, I forget that I'm not using Chrome.  It
*is* Chrome.  It isn't really Edge, it's Microsoft Chrome.  It's
Chrome with all of the Google tethers replaced with Microsoft
tethers.

Kind of ironic that it doesn't matter anymore.  Google is as big a
corporate douchebag as Microsoft is now, and Microsoft isn't the
biggest threat to humanity anymore.  It truly doesn't matter.

If I could go back in time and tell my 1990's self this ... I could
say "dude chill, it's going to be ok" ... but there's a possibility
that my 1990's self would commit suicide to prevent me from accepting
a Microsoft browser decades later.


Next thing you know, you'll be running a Mac. :)

[#] Mon Oct 12 2020 13:05:21 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

Subject: Re: Microsoft Chrome

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With Windows slowly turning into Linux, and Mac slowly turning into iPad, the chances of another Mac ever appearing on my desk get smaller and smaller.

What will probably happen is that I'll have spent my entire life paddling upstream, only for the perfect operating system to become mainstream right around the time I retire/die.



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