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Latest Comments by F.Ultra
GTA modders behind re3 and reVC fire back in court
18 November 2021 at 10:45 pm UTC Likes: 2

Quoting: ElectroDDStore the project on EU servers.
There was a recent ruling saying that fixing bugs was not a case of copyright infrinment.
Reverse ingeneering is protected under a law in itself to allow interoperability of software on hardware and under this law you can even break DRM to a certain extent.
At least, that's what I understand...

Not applicable here. Fixing bugs are you creating patches for the game, this is not what re3 did. Neither did they re the code to see how to work around a DRM or make it work on new hardware, they re:d the code to use as the base for their own code and that is the problem that opened them up for this lawsuit.

And before anyone says that they did no such thing, there are entire series on YouTube where the lead re3/reVC developer show how you use a disassembler to convert the gta binaries to source code and how you then clean up that code to get it into a workable state.

The EU law is there to allow you to patch and modify the existing software to make it work, not to create a distributable version of said software. Before that law both things where seen as violating copyright, now only the latter is.

APT 2.3.12 package manager released, will no longer let you break everything
18 November 2021 at 10:27 pm UTC Likes: 4

Is is just me that are worried that they have removed this in apt when LTT was using apt-get? Or do those two share codebase?

Anywho, I think that a much more important lesson to learn here for the distro devs are completely ignored. And that IMHO is that the Pop-Shop only told Linus that it refused to install Steam and not why and how to report it.

In the best of worlds (and this should be fixable) the GUI should first tell him that the
QuoteThere is a problem with the package where a needed dependency is not present, either this installation is in a broken state or there is a temporary problem with this specific package that we at Pop!_OS needs to fix.

Your list of packages have not been updated for quite a while and performing an update to possible get a newer version of said package could make the problem go away so should I update the list of packages for your now?

And there should also be a button in the GUI when this happens with "click here to report this as a problem on our GitHub or send a mail to this mail address if you don't have a github account".

Honestly I think that far too little time is spent on making these shops user friendly and they have just become some QD wrapper around apt/yum/pacman.

Another example is DistroTube testing out Ubuntu 21.10 and this happens: https://youtu.be/QsuI-nLqwhg?t=686 notice the insane error message that actually tells him that it refused to install it again since the installation is in progress but it's so obtusely written that DT doesn't see it, not to mention that the store doesn't put up any progress bar what so ever.

Or that the Gnome "Software" (great name guys) just shows an empy page with zero progress bar while it syncs the list of packages so it looks either empty or broken when used the first time.

THIS is the problem, not that LTT happened to hose his desktop due to a one in a million bug.

NVIDIA takes on AMD FSR with their new open source Image Scaling
18 November 2021 at 10:09 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: Eike
Quoting: F.UltraThey seem to run some edge-enhancement on the DLSS image and that can make some thing look better while in reality wildly distort the image. The technique was commonly used on low bitrate DVDs (and still used on some BR:s because why not) where it often resulted in ghosting)

IMHO this could only be done by the player, not by anything on the DVD...?

No it was done during the mastering process. I forgot to mention that what they usually did was to first apply a quite powerful filter to remove all fine details, spots and grain so that they could reduce the bitrate and then they applied edge-enhancement after to sharpen up the picture to fool your brain into thinking that there where more details on not less.

"Good" examples are the old DVD releases of Apollo 13 and Tombstone, if you have either on DVD then check them out. You will see small halos on characters left and right and if you study a still frame you will see that they have filtered out much of the details.

NVIDIA takes on AMD FSR with their new open source Image Scaling
17 November 2021 at 7:17 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: AnanaceWait, for that comparison image, are Nvidia saying that a lower resolution image upscaled with DLSS gives a better resulting 4k quality than a native 4k render?

They seem to run some edge-enhancement on the DLSS image and that can make some thing look better while in reality wildly distort the image. The technique was commonly used on low bitrate DVDs (and still used on some BR:s because why not) where it often resulted in ghosting), but it works excellent on things that are blocky/line-based by nature such as text which is what we see in the example image from nVidia.

System76 patches APT for Pop!_OS to prevent users breaking their systems
16 November 2021 at 11:44 pm UTC

Quoting: Anza
Quoting: denyasisIf I may add to you list, there is also a prejudice (or preference?) against warnings.
We tend to ignore them for a variety of reasons ( it won't happen to me, it doesn't apply to me, I've done it before and nothing bad happened then, this is just for liability, they are too cautious... Etc)

I'll admit I'm guilty of that myself, borking my install more times than I can count because I wanted to try something different or new.

It's totally possible to bork install even when reading all the output. I think I did just that with Arch at some point. I don't remember borking the installation to point where I would actually reinstall with Gentoo though. Though with Gentoo installation is almost installing everything from scratch anyway, so understanding how system is built is kind of thing you have to learn or switch to another distribution.

With Windows though I just reboot in case of problems, I don't have wish to learn it deeper.

Of course but then it's usually down to actual issues with the packages. With Arch I can imagine that you could e.g install a new version of libxx that is not abi/api compatible with some binary that are needed but that package have not been updated yet so congrats you now hosed something.

System76 patches APT for Pop!_OS to prevent users breaking their systems
14 November 2021 at 4:53 pm UTC

Quoting: Lightkey
Quoting: F.Ultra
Quoting: LightkeyHe claimed that a normal user would have reported the bug instead and that a normal user indeed reported the bug on GitHub, which then turned out to be a well-versed developer himself.

Which if you dig deeper you'll see that the reddit poster quote mined to find that well-versed developer, in reality the bug had been reported to the Pop!_OS github by many people including both normal users and devs like the one the reddit post highlighted.

This is not to say that the Pop!_OS maintainer could be a bit more PR friendly in his approach here.
Thanks, so that is what he meant by taken out of context (and why he deleted the tweets).

Edit: Went back to reddit and can't confirm that it was the reddit poster that specifically searched for that developer, nor that others reported it, unless you mean as comments in the GitHub issue opened by the one who the Pop!_OS developer linked to in his Twitter thread himself.

I was going by the words of the Pop maintainer (Jeremy) and he does not seam to have been completely honest if that is the case... I did check out the original poster of the issue and while he have 49 repos on Github he does so not as a programmer but as a Biochemist using R as a statistical tool, but I do see how he can be seen as a bit more experienced with things like Github than a normal user.

What bothers me a bit is that the System76 support page requires you to register before you can issue a ticket and that should be a big no no.

Valve answers the question: should developers do native Linux support or Proton?
14 November 2021 at 12:56 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: Shmerl
Quoting: slembckeHah! I used to think GDB was just the worst, but it's my go-to debugger now. With a few dozen lines of scripting you can at least soften the annoying parts (can't just click in an IDE to set breakpoints, etc), while greatly amplifying the parts where it excels.

I know you can script it. But I feel like scripting to improve out of the box debugger experience shows it has a long way to go to feel comfortable. And that's not a good thing if no one is trying to address that properly.

I don't think criticism of those who are used to MSVC debugger level of comfort is invalid. So I'm not even sure why it's still not addressed. Do gdb developers have such mentality? I.e. script it if you feel like it's not good enough already and we aren't going to improve the debugger itself? If so, it's a bad mentality.

Doesn't any of the 20 odd GDB frontends solve this? http://sourceware.org/gdb/wiki/GDB%20Front%20Ends

System76 patches APT for Pop!_OS to prevent users breaking their systems
14 November 2021 at 12:46 pm UTC Likes: 1

I've been thinking about this whole affair some more and have now changed my mind slightly. What I think that we saw here in the LTT video was prejudice and ignorant behaviour from a Windows user.

The Linux terminal are so powerful and honestly so easy to use that many of us Linux users prefer to do work here and when helping others we tend to show examples from the terminal since it's way easier than having to guide them through a locale and DE dependent GUI.

The problem however is that this have somehow been translated into "you have to use the terminal to get things done in Linux".

Another prejudice which I honestly don't really know where it comes from is the notion that "stuff never works in Linux", I've mostly heard this from Windows people like Linus and both him and Luke have said it numerous times on their WAN show when talking about their Linux Challenge. In particular it came up in this very video in where Linus tries to install Steam and the GUI complaints with a warning and refuses to install.

Now we all know that this was due to a bug in the Steam package by the Pop!_OS maintainers, yes they blame Launchpad here but there are automatic ways to detect errors like this so this should never have been put into the repo to begin with. But as any computer user have ever known, besides when it happens on a system where he or she is not a fan of, all software have bugs and computers have never been 100% reliable. If any claims otherwise then ask them if they have ever restarted to fix something.

And it's here where those two prejudices comes to play, when encountering this problem Linus does not see it as a real problem but one of "Linux always does this" and he says as much when he claims that "People always tell me that Linux works and then things like this happens and the exact same thing happened when I tried Ubuntu some years ago". Which of course is not true since Ubuntu never had this exact problem with it's Steam package ever but I digress.

So the "Linux always does this" prejudice leads him to the conclusion that the displayed Warning is just Linux being an asshole and he have to search out another way to really make it work at which time the second prejudice kicks in which is "so I have to use the terminal to make things work in Linux".

How do we get people out of these prejudices? Because that is what we have to do, solving any of this in a technical way is not sufficient (since it basically really are solved), e.g Pop!_OS will now refuse to uninstall essential packages even with the do as I say! prompt unless a special file is present on the filesystem but we all know that this will only lead to the "next Linus" to put that file there because "that is what you have to do to have Linux work".

System76 patches APT for Pop!_OS to prevent users breaking their systems
14 November 2021 at 12:28 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: LightkeyHe claimed that a normal user would have reported the bug instead and that a normal user indeed reported the bug on GitHub, which then turned out to be a well-versed developer himself.

Which if you dig deeper you'll see that the reddit poster quote mined to find that well-versed developer, in reality the bug had been reported to the Pop!_OS github by many people including both normal users and devs like the one the reddit post highlighted.

This is not to say that the Pop!_OS maintainer could be a bit more PR friendly in his approach here.

Valve answers the question: should developers do native Linux support or Proton?
13 November 2021 at 10:53 pm UTC Likes: 4

Here's to hoping that they don't bring on the 100% Windows gaming experience :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ReHafyiDTR0